Book Launch: Critical Action Research Challenging Neoliberal Language and Literacies Education

You're kindly invited to our next virtual Plurilingual Lab Speaker Series event with the book launch of:

Critical Action Research Challenging Neoliberal Language and Literacies Education

In this panel presentation, the co-editors and chapter contributors will discuss their work.

Presentation 1: Critical action research challenging neoliberal language and literacies education: Auto and duoethnographies of global experiences.

by Antoinette Gagné, Amir Kalan, and Sreemali Herath

This book is a collection of auto, duo and multi-ethnographies written by frontline language teachers and teacher educators in different parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America. These ethnographic accounts report how the authors mobilized different forms of action research to resist against neoliberal educational models and the profit-oriented principles by which they are run. The teachers involved in these projects write about a variety of ways in which they engaged with activist and critical research projects that highlight current socio-political movements, invite marginalized students’ communities into the process of teaching and learning, use language education as a means of identity negotiation, fight back institutional restrictions, and show how we can teach language for peace and happiness. The writers also explain how they have created an inquiry community to meet and support each other and used auto, duo or multi-ethnography as insiders to bring attention to their embodied knowledge of the challenges involved in contemporary neoliberal educational settings.

Dr. Antoinette Gagné has been a professor at the University of Toronto since 1989. Her research has focused on teacher education for diversity and inclusion in various contexts as well as the experiences of newcomers and their families in Canadian schools and university-level plurilingual students.

Dr. Amir Kalan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His research interests include critical literacy, multiliteracies, second language writing, intercultural rhetoric, multilingual text generation, and multimodal and digital writing. He is interested in learning about the experiences of minoritized and racialized students in multicultural and multilingual contexts and non-Western forms of language and literacy education.

Dr. Sreemali Herath is an Assistant Professor attached to the Faculty of Education of the University of Manitoba. Her research interests include post-conflict reconciliation, arts-based approaches to identity research, critical approaches to teacher education, refugee narratives of their journeys, supporting plurilingual graduate students and the preparation of teachers to teach English as an additional language. She has been an active member of NCARE since its inception.

Presentation 2: Helping English language learners negotiate their legitimate academic English user identities: A critical conversation between a language learner and her teacher

by Marlon Valencia

In this duoethnography, an international language learner and her instructor engage in a critical discussion of their experiences in an EAP reading and writing course taught at a Canadian post- secondary institution. The course was originally based on a view of literacy that privileged traditional print- based text. This approach to teaching reading and writing often goes unchallenged as representing the best return on learners’ investment under the current neoliberal model of education, which views English language teaching as a valuable commodity (Holborow, 2014). With the intention of enriching his course, the instructor adopted an alternative view of EAP aimed at embracing writing as a creative and imaginative process in which learners could explore and invest in their diverse identities. The chapter provides insights on how this enriched EAP model helped an English language learner negotiate her legitimate academic English user identity as opposed to devoting class time only to essay writing, which is the traditional approach most readily available in the international EAP market.

Dr. Valencia is an Assistant Professor in The Department of English at Glendon College, York University in Canada. He is the ESL Program Director and Coordinator for the Certificate of Teaching English as an International Language. He has presented and published his work in numerous international scholarly meetings, journals, and edited volumes. His research interests include: multiliteracies, visual ethnography, language policy, experiential learning; as well as the intersection between creativity, imagination and teachers’ or language learners’ identities.

Presentation 3: A duoethnography of critical action research: Resisting the neoliberal order of EAP teaching

by Heejin Song and John McGaughey

This presentation illustrates how two English for academic purposes (EAP) instructors negotiated their practice in light of macro-level neoliberal ideologies and the institution’s internationalization efforts with their aspirations for critically-oriented humanitarian teaching practices. Weaved in a dialogic, reflective, and inquiry-invoking manner, the duoethnographic narratives of the two professionals focus on critical moments encountered in the process of action research planning and teaching in EAP courses that ignited them to engage in critically-oriented pedagogical approaches. Through critical action research that was introduced by NCARE, the two practitioners continuously questioned the way curricula were structured which led them to implementing critical multicultural education and multiliteracies pedagogy as a means of resistance to the neoliberalization of EAP teaching in their courses. This duoethnography highlights that EAP teaching is in constant negotiation with the neoliberal order that demarcates the hierarchy of onto-epistemologies in English language teaching. Albeit, we contend that there is also space for EAP teacher practitioners to resist the racist discourses through instructional design coupled with critically-oriented pedagogies. Furthermore, our study implies that continued dialogue among critical action researchers serves to inform and transform pedagogical endeavors by constantly visiting and revisiting the collaborative planning of critical action.

Dr. Heejin Song is an assistant professor at the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics (DLLL), York University, Canada. Her teaching and research interests include EAP, critical action research, multiliteracies pedagogy, critical pedagogy, intercultural education, and multicultural education for social justice.

Dr. John McGaughey is a Lead Instructor at the International Foundation Program at the University of Toronto where he teaches content and language integrated learning (CLIL) EAP classes. His recent teaching and research centers around the research-informed teaching of EAP reading and writing, anti-racist approaches to teaching EAP, and critical multicultural education. His research interests include Vygotskian sociocultural theory in understanding second language teaching/learning, teacher and learner identity and the first-year international ELL student experience; teacher and learner translanguaging and language policy and planning.

Presentation 4: Neoliberalism, transformation, and educational imperatives in tension: A duoethnography of collaboration and contestation in a Tanzanian community library

by Monica Shank Lauwo

In this duoethnography, Monica Shank Lauwo, a Canadian educator and academic, and Upendo Loth Mollel, a Tanzanian educator and young mother, come together to explore the successes, challenges, and contradictions of their collaborative efforts to enact transformative education at Cheche Community Library in northern Tanzania. While a three-year critical action research project at Cheche points to transformative findings relating to power, literacy engagement, and identity, our personal stories point to persistent, gnawing questions and contradictions. Through duoethnographic conversations that we recorded, transcribed, then structured into this chapter, we explore the following questions: While we believe our goals of conscientization, decolonization, and countering neoliberalism are essential in addressing sources of poverty and injustice, how does Cheche contribute directly to day-to-day survival challenges? To what extent do our stated goals and our critical multilingual pedagogies resonate with the local community? To what extent might our respective educational backgrounds be relevant – or inevitably alienating – in a context of rural poverty? Our duoethnographic inquiry reveals how the deep entrenchment of neoliberal ideologies makes the work of transformative education both deeply urgent and highly contested. The braiding together of our contrasting stories and perspectives demonstrates how the vibrancy of our collaboration across various dimensions of difference is a central resource in navigating the ever-emerging contradictions and contestations of transformation-oriented community work.

Monica Shank Lauwo is a PhD candidate in Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. As an educator, teacher educator, and researcher, she is centrally interested in ways in which language and literacy can be mobilized to disrupt inequitable systems of power, and to support antiracist, decolonial struggles. Her research interests include translanguaging, multiliteracies, identity, teacher education, critical literacy, and language ideologies, in East Africa and Canada.

Presentation 5: (Re)Imagining EFL language teacher education through critical action research: An autoethnography

by Andrés Valencia

In this autoethnography, I set out to reimagine English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher education by discussing three pedagogical projects (two murals and an iterative performance) carried out with pre-service student teachers of the Foreign Languages Program at Universidad del Valle (Colombia). As part of a bigger political-pedagogical project, I seek to challenge the written academic text as the highest form of cognitive achievement; the linguistic bias/verbocentrism in communication; and the teacher as the possessor/conveyor of the episteme and techne in the language classroom. The projects follow a Critical Action Research design. They articulate a double-lensed framework examining neoliberalism and mobilizing an anti-colonial participatory politics approach. Findings point that murals, as multimodal symbolic public texts, challenge the primacy of the written argumentative essay, mobilize hypotheses about reading away from reading as a skill, open the concept of dialogue, and enable teachers to become real learners. The iterative performance interrogates identity and gender politics. These projects recast foreign language teacher education away from anthropocentric views, undermining the institutions and cultural production practices that constitute the field: language, communication, reading/writing, and text, advancing ethics based on coexistence and mutuality to fight off neoliberalism as well as new forms of colonization.

Andrés Valencia is an assistant professor at the Escuela de Ciencias del Lenguaje, Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia). As a language teacher educator, his interests lie in the intersections among decolonial theory and practices, queer pedagogies, multiliteracies pedagogy, gender, and ethnic-racial categories in language literacies education.

Presentation 6: Mobilizing pedagogical agency for mother tongue- based bilingual education (MTBE) in Ghana: An autoethnography

by Mama Adobea Adjetey-Nii Owoo

Guided by the principles of critical action research, this autoethnography describes the author’s introduction to and involvement in two teacher inquiry communities, one in the Global North and the other in the Global South, respectively, the Network of Critical Action Researchers in Education (NCARE) and the Afroliteracies Educators’ Network (AEN). Using a timeline of events taken from personal journals, products from collaborative resource development and peer learning meetings, the author describes how her participation in NCARE energized her leadership and reinforced her participation in AEN. As a graduate researcher, the author reflects on her pedagogical agency in collaboratively generating mother tongue- based bilingual resources with teachers to support teaching in their K- 4 contexts in Accra, Ghana. She also reflects on how activating research knowledge and pedagogical agency allowed her to challenge English- oriented neoliberal discourses that have made bilingual pedagogy inequitable for linguistic minorities in primary schooling in Accra.

Mama Adjetey-Nii Owoo is a Ph.D. Candidate in Language and Literacies Education and Comparative International, and Development Education at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). She is the founder and lead researcher of the Afroliteracies Foundation, a Ghanaian based think-tank for indigenous African languages that uses critical action research in language revitalization. Mama's research interests lie at the intersections of language policy, decolonial theory, ethnography, teacher education, and critical action research. Her doctoral research uses ethnographic film to explore how teachers draw on their language experiences to implement Mother tongue based bilingual education policies in Ghana.

When: December 15, 2022 (Thursday)

Time: 12pm-1:30pm (EST, Montreal)

Mode of delivery: synchronous via Zoom