Calling all Secondary English Teachers!

I am currently in the process of developing a chapter for the Andrews and Lupart (Eds.) text on Understanding and Addressing Student Diversity in Canadian Schools.

I ask, What would happen if we consider diversity as a resource, rather than a deficit?

To illustrate, I share an example that was told to a group of us at a conference in Toronto a few years ago:

The gentleman described himself as a secondary science teacher. He spoke of his concerns with a number of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) students in his class who congregated at the back of the room and were virtually ignored by the rest of the students. As they were nearing the end of a unit on the Circulatory System, he decided to create a new ‘review activity’. He assigned his students the task of creating a ‘children’s book’ on the circulatory system. The basic concepts would need to be clearly stated, and the book would need to include accurate, labelled illustrations. Bonus marks would be assigned to groups who created a ‘dual language book’.

Suddenly, the CLD students had significant cache. Not only were they required to complete the task, but their participation added ‘value’. The final product not only served as an excellent review, but also became an introductory classroom resource for new non-English speaking students in subsequent years.

In my chapter, I would like to highlight the ways in which Secondary English teachers across Canada are addressing diversity in positive ways in a section entitled, “Diverse Voices”. I work from a multiliteracies perspective, so this theoretical orientation will ground my chapter. As you can see, the ideas are not long, but are incredibly inspiring. If you have an idea to share please contact me in one of the following ways:

Email: khibbert@uwo.ca
Twitter: @khibbert

The best ideas will be published and you will be credited with the submission. If I get more submissions than can be published, I will include the others on this blog so that all can benefit.

I have included my chapter ‘outline’ for my book chapter below, for any who are interested:

In the past half century, research in the field of education has exploded, furthering our understanding teaching and learning, and importantly, our understanding of diversity. While much of the focus of the past has been placed on finding and implementing standardized tools and strategies that reliably assess individual student and teacher competence, future oriented scholars are reconsidering how we understand and address diversity. Today’s classrooms challenge us to find ways to acknowledge the complexity that diversity brings and to reconceptualize diversity in ways that reposition it as a resource for learning rather than as a deficit that needs to be fixed or remediated.

A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, introduced by the New London Group (1996) and it starts from the position that there are multiple modes and media through which people communicate and multiple languages through which people communicate. Developed as a framework for action, that sought to emphasize that English is not the only language spoken in classrooms and that print is no longer the dominant ‘text’ consumed by many of our learners. Despite the calls for action, policies and practices continue to limit the ways in which broad conceptualizations of literacy are adopted in Canadian classrooms. For example, standardized assessment practices continue to conceptualize (and assess) literacy through primarily linear print methodologies highly valued by the cultural elite (Asselin, Early & Filepenko, 2005; Burke & Hammet, 2009). A multiliteracies approach acknowledges the power and privilege associated with print literacy, but embraces multiple ways of developing that proficiency; accessing multiple modes and media that expand the communication options adopted and developed along the route to proficiency. It is therefore a more inclusive form of literacy pedagogy.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Dr. Mary Hamilton, Visiting Scholar

We are delighted to have Dr. Mary Hamilton, Professor of Adult Learning and Literacy, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University joining us at the Faculty of Education, The University of Western Ontario for the month of June.
We have scheduled a couple of public talks that you may wish to attend:
Local Literacies in a Global Context: Reflections on Literacy and Learning in a Changing World
Tuesday June 7, 2011, 4:30pm in the Community Room (1139) at the Faculty of Education.

Abstract: In this talk Mary will address literacy and learning as part of situated social practice. She will look back at how theory and research methods used in literacy studies have developed over the last 20 years and the particular contributions of this approach. She will ask how the meanings of literacy and learning are changing in the context of global activities and population movements, new institutional arrangements and values, and the growing significance of digital literacies in everyday life. She will argue that keeping the diversity of local literacies in view acts as an important counterweight to the functional skills based perspective of much contemporary policy.

Walled Gardens and Wide Open Spaces: Academic Writing in its Time and Place
Monday June 20, 2011, 4:30pm in the Community Room (1139), Faculty of Education

Abstract: Many aspects of academics’ working lives are changing rapidly. These include the use of digital communication, collaboration, interdisciplinary work; increased surveillance and control; monitoring of research output and intensifying workloads. In this session I will share data from a small project in the UK, showing how academics adapt their writing practices by using new technologies, spaces and time to create boundaries and manage the contradictory pressures under which they work. Our study reveals the richness of academics’ writing practices. It shows the value of looking at academic writing as a social practice as it reveals processes of change as they unfold. It also shows the significance of such things as the historical context, changing configurations of time and space and changing professional identities. It is significant because it challenges some received wisdom about academic writing.

Dr. Hamilton’s visit is generously supported by Research Western.

Please RSVP to our Graduate Programs and Research Office via Tina Beynen at tbeynen@uwo.ca if you plan to attend.

I will upload a video of Mary’s talks at some point in the future.

A Day of Literacy Conversations

The Multiliteracies and Multilingualism Group At the Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario is hosting a
Day of Literacy Conversations
Friday May 20, 2011

9:00 am

Dr. Bill Green

Visiting Scholar Dr. Bill Green, Professor of Education at Charles Sturt University in NSW, Australia. His visit is sponsored by INSPiRE and Fanshawe College. His principal research interests are in curriculum inquiry and literacy studies, curriculum history, particularly the history and politics of English teaching and the English subjects, doctoral research education, and education for rural-regional sustainability, and he has a wide range of publications across these areas. Along with 11 books and monographs and 5 major research reports, he has produced over 40 book chapters and in excess of 60 journal articles. He has been successful in winning a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery and Linkage grants, among others, and is currently working on a ARC Discovery project on rural teaching, ‘incentives’ and teacher education.

1:00 pm

Dr. Maureen Walsh

Visiting Scholar Dr. Maureen Walsh. Dr. Walsh’s visit is sponsored by our colleague at Brock University’s Centre for Muliteracies, Dr. Jennifer Rowsell. Dr Walsh is Professor of Literacy Education and Assistant Head of the School of Education NSW at ACU. Her position at ACU has included research project management, doctoral supervision, course coordination, course development and lecturing in Literacy Education, English Curriculum and TESOL in undergraduate and postgraduate courses, including diploma and degree courses for Aboriginal and Torres Islander students. She has many recent publications in the area of multimodal literacy.

Visiting Scholar Dr. Jennifer Rowsell. Dr. Rowsell has recently joined Brock University from Rutgers Graduate School as a Canada Research Chair in the Centre for Multiliteracies. She has researched and written in the area of New Literacy Studies – looking at ways of applying New Literacy Studies in teaching and learning; multimodality assessment in grade two classroom contexts. With Kate Pahl, she has extended multimodal work to explore how identities get sedimented in texts – building up instances of practices in schools and homes. With Anne Burke, she has looked at how middle school students read, write and make meaning in web space exploring such topics as reading path; design and redesign; the notions of affordances and constraints of modalities online. Family literacy has also featured in her work conducting parent focus groups in Toronto, Canada and Montgomery, New Jersey.

3:00 wrap up