Antoinette Gagné

Strategies to Engage and Transform Teacher Learners in an Online Course

The demand for online courses for teacher learners (TLs) across all disciplines continues to increase, as does the diversity of those who enroll in these courses. This diversity constitutes both a benefit and a challenge for online learning where active engagement and the creation of community are of utmost importance. Modeling strategies that reflect what works well with language learners and that can be adapted for students of different ages, levels and goals is also important when working with teachers online.

Honouring the contributions of Jim Cummins to language and intercultural education internationally

This special issue of Intercultural Education, edited with Clea Schmidt, is a result of the Celebrating Linguistic Diversity conference organised by the Toronto District School Board and the Centre for Educational Research on Languages and Literacies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto from 30th April 2014 to 2nd May 2014. The conference was attended by 150 speakers and more than 1000 participants from around the world. Many of the papers and workshops reflected some aspect of the work of Jim Cummins. The collage of book covers below will likely evoke memories of the significant learning many educators experience when engaging with one or more of the 100 publications Jim has written over four decades (Figure 1). Jim Cummins has changed the way most of the world thinks about the education of language minority students across contexts and helped us to understand how his theories might be operationalized in classrooms and schools.

Leadership education for English language learners as transformative pedagogy

This qualitative case study investigates the transformative power of a leadership course designed for immigrant secondary school students learning English as an additional language with a social justice orientation. Course projects allowed the students to get involved in tutoring, present at a conference on intercultural education, deliver equity presentations and role model presentation skills for their peers by discussing topics such as Canadian culture, showcase their talents from their L1 cultures and give advice on how to integrate into the school and to lead activities to create school spirit by sharing music from their culture, running a ‘thank your teacher’ campaign, or taking the lead with an international humanitarian cause. The teacher’s plans and notes, course assignments, video footage of students presenting a conference workshop and monthly feedback forms were the data that allowed us to understand how transformative pedagogy was enacted by the teacher and experienced by the students in one Canadian secondary school with a very diverse student population.

Testing Teacher Proficiency: developing a framework for a communicative language proficiency test

ABSTRACT Increasingly in Canada, concern is being expressed about the lack of proficiency of some French as a first and second language teachers. Flewelling, Gagne and Lewin are developing a communicative proficiency test designed to determine the competency levels of test takers in all language skill areas. The test could be used to assist faculties of education, board of education administrators and others to establish the level of proficiency in any language possessed by applicants to courses, for teaching positions or in other areas where language competency is of importance.