Monday May 16th, 1:30-3:00 – Group 2b

1:30-3:00

Mastin Prinsloo (in Room 201, upstairs)

Bonny Norton
Language Teachers as Language Planners: Grassroots Literacy in Uganda

In recent research, scholars have argued persuasively that much research on language policy needs to include studies on the everyday contexts in which policies are interpreted and negotiated (Blommaert, 2008; Hornberger & Vaish, 2008; King, 2004; Ramanathan and Morgan, 2007; Shohamy, 2007). IN this paper, we present research findings from two schools in eastern Uganda in which four Primary teachers struggled with the expectations of Uganda’s new multilingual language policy, which seeks to promote literacy in both the mother tongue and English, despite limited material resources and large class sizes. Despite the formal context of schooling, the conditions under which teachers and learners seek to achieve multilingual literacy in Uganda approximates what Blommaert (2008) calls “grassroots literacy”: “It is writing performed by people who are not fully inserted into elite economies of information, language, and literacy” (2008, p.7).

Kimberley Meredith
Multiliteracies and Imagined Identities: Designing Democratic Learning Communities

This paper will document secondary school students’ construction and use of multilingual, multimodal identity texts to simultaneously acquire academic knowledge and negotiate identities in democratic learning communities. In collaboration with the classroom teacher, students participate in the production and interpretation of multimodal identity texts, such as using digital technologies to communicate and represent their lives and local contexts through their preferred modalities (kinesthetic, visual, multi-lingual). A critical analysis of how students interpret and respond to their peers’ identity texts will provide insights into how meanings shift at a local level.

Lisa Starr
Bridging Cultural Understanding through New Literacies

Canadian schools are as ethnically, racially, linguistically, and religiously diverse of any school population in the world (Chambers, 2003). What experiences do we draw upon to meet the challenges of teaching in a culturally rich setting? IN the role of teacher,  you are the educator and the educated; “one’s cultural understanding grows from his or her perception of cultural differences – from defensive to adaptive to integrative?” (MurakamiRamalho, 2008, p.84). How are new literacies being utilized to support the formation of intercultural understanding, awareness, and learning?