Transforming Language and Literacy Education

Kelleen Toohey, Professor Emerita, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC has been teaching and writing about the education of children whose languages have been minoritized in Canada, especially English language learners. Her book, Learning English at school: Identity, socio-material relations and classroom practice (2nd edition) is in press with Multilingual Matters. Her recent work has explored the affordances of digital making for language and literacy learning.Suzanne Smythe, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University is an adult literacy researcher and educator who works closely with community-based agencies and educators to understand the implications of new technologies for literacies and learning. She is particularly interested in the potential of technologies to inscribe old and new modes of control and exploitation. She is currently exploring the potential of participatory technology design to intervene in such assemblages and to forge new ways to think and do techno-literacies. Diane Dagenais, Professor, Simon Fraser University, works in French second language and minority language education. Her research has documented the literacy practices of multilingual children in families, communities and schools. Her recent studies examine encounters between multilingual youth and digital tools for video and story production. Her work is published in a range of French and English language education journals.Magali Forte is a PhD student in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC, CANADA) and a K-12 teacher in Vancouver. She adopts a sociomaterial perspective to examine the ways in which multilingual and multimodal processes of identity construction unfold through entanglements of humans and nonhumans in second language education settings.

"This book unsettles the reader through stories, questions, wonderings, and wanderings; it takes us through a series of encounters into the not-yet-known. The authors invite us to explore, as educators, the emergence of our own capacity to affect and be affected by others—where those others are both human and more-than-human. The multiple and emergent educational encounters that the authors offer us are embodied, and they are grounded in place; and they take us, through new materialist and posthumanist experimentation, into inspiring new ways of knowing-in-being. Together these papers engage in a Baradian ethico-onto-epistemological exploration of pedagogical becomings. They are beautifully written and make a vital and timely contribution to educational thought and practice."Bronwyn Davies Emeritus Professor Western Sydney University"Calling for radical hope, this volume opens potentials for language and literacies research that reaches beyond critique alone and into more just, speculative futures. Toward such futures, the authors develop orientations to language and literacies research that value the ‘more than’ of experience that affects this sense of radical hope." Christian Ehret, McGill University

• Introduction by Kelleen Toohey, Suzanne Smythe, Diane Dagenais and Magali Forte (co-editors)Chapter 1: Making and unmaking literacy desirings: Pedagogical matters of concern from Writers’ Studio by Tara Gutshall Rucker and Candace R. KubyChapter 2: Practising place-thought and engaging in critical place inquiry in a public park: Listening, letting go, and unsettling our writing pedagogies by Michelle A. Honeyford and Jennifer WattChapter 3: Becoming posthuman – Bodies, affect, earth at the school garden by Saskia Van ViegenChapter 4: Lekta and literacy in early childhood education – Entwinements of idealism and materialism by Liselott Mariett OlssonChapter 5: Rethinking causality through children’s literacies by Jacqueline BarreiroChapter 6: A rhizomatic case analysis of instructional coaching as becoming by Brandon Sherman, Mari Haneda and Annela TeemantChapter 7: ‘This documentary actually makes Welland look good’: Exploring posthumanism in a high school documentary film project by Amélie Lemieux and Jennifer RowsellChapter 8: Affect theory as a lens on teacher thinking in adult language classrooms by Monica WaterhouseChapter 9: The problem and potential of representation: Being and becoming by Margaret MacDonald, Cher Hill and Nathalie SinclairChapter 10: Exploring affect in stop frame animation by Gabriele Budach, Dimitri Efremov, Daniela Loghin and Gohar Sharoyan