Writing for/as Social Justice & Human Rights: The Manitoba Writing Project
The Manitoba Writing Project (MBWP) is a multiphase, multi-year research project. Our priority is to co-create opportunities in Manitoba for supporting leadership and innovation in writing education. The diversity of Manitoba’s urban, rural, and northern K-12 schools and communities provide a rich landscape for the engagement of teachers in issues of equity, access and social justice, as well as opportunities to develop innovative approaches to teaching literacy, particularly place-based, artifactual, and multimodal literacies. In collaboration with Manitoba teachers, our focus is to support the development of educators' own expertise through a model of sustainable, professional education which not only values and builds upon current resources and leadership, but which also engages teachers as researchers in a professional education partnership that brings theory, research and practices into alignment and potentially serves as a locally-contextualized, capacity-building national and international model.
To create spaces for dialogue around writing and the teaching of writing, we organized a two-year series of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional conversations about writing called Passions, Pedagogies and Publics, as well as a Writing for Social Justice and Human Rights Forum. The first Summer Writing Institute was offered in July 2014 and again in August 2015. A Fall Institute was held in 2016. Our third Summer Writing Institute, focused on issues of social and eco-justice, place-based writing and place consciousness, was held in July 2018. The MBWP is affiliated with Writing G/Rounds, a professional practice inquiry group supported by an MTS grant that meets regularly to engage in reading, writing, and dialogue about the teaching of writing. The MBWP is the first Associated International Site of the National Writing Project in Canada. |
Research in Renewing Literacies: A SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant
The Research in Renewing Literacies (RRL) project is an innovative partnership with Manitoba Education and Brandon University designed to study the nature of the relationship between curricular and pedagogical change in English Language Arts. 
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My
research in writing for/as social justice and human rights is informed
by notions of citizenship that situate students’ cultural identities
as resources for learning and seek to better understand how we can
take a critical stance in understanding the roles of identity, power,
and agency in teaching language and literacy in a global, multicultural
world. Ongoing work in this area draws on my dissertation, Writing for Cultural Citizenship: Literacy, Identity, and the Teaching of Latino Immigrant Youth,
an ethnographic case study of the multimodal writing of six
immigrant middle school students in an English as a New Language
class. The study explored students' agency in their digital poetry,
photo essays, and online writing, as they drew on their transcultural
identities to claim their social locations as legitimate positions
from which to participate and work for change. The research suggests
how literacy classrooms can become sites for immigrant youth to
participate in and from, through practices that contribute to creating
a more inclusive and equitable society. Articles about the study
have been published in Pedagogies: An International Journal; Critical Literacies: Theory and Practices; Literacy; and Journal of Literacy Research.
Re-envisioning Teacher Education in Afterschool Spaces
This project explores how teacher candidates develop their understandings about teaching and learning through their participation in an afterschool program for students in Grades 5-10. The afterschool program is a large university-school-community partnership, bringing students from 50 schools and 5 school divisions to the University of Manitoba campuses each week. The innovative CanU Academy program invites teams of teacher candidates to design and lead their own afterschool programs in areas where they have strong interests (e.g., geocaching, art, musical theatre, hip hop, American Sign Language, science, creative writing, Aboriginal teachings, literature, fitness, sewing and textiles). The design of CanU Academy as a "third space" in the teacher education program affords a unique opportunity to study the pedagogical and epistemological practices and beliefs of teacher candidates through their interactions with participating students and one another. The research utilizes participatory methodologies for reflective inquiry and pedagogical documentation, creating a space and community for teacher inquiry and collaborative research in the B.Ed program.
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