Lisa K. Taylor

Affirming plural belonging: Building on students' family-based cultural and linguistic capital through multiliteracies pedagogy

This article reports on a qualitative case study involving pedagogical innovations grounded in culturally and linguistically inclusive approaches to curriculum. In this project, kindergarten children were supported in collaboratively authoring Dual Language Identity Texts. Our findings suggest that as family and teacher conceptions of literacy were extended beyond traditional monolingual print-based literacy, home literacies associated with complex transnational and transgenerational communities of practice were legitimated through their inclusion within the school curriculum. This process invited family members to take up roles as expert partners in childrens biliteracy development. Further, conditions were fostered for parents to consider and articulate their beliefs and values vis-à-vis their childrens multiliterate practice and participation within these multiple, transnational communities.

Wrestling with Race: The Implications of Integrative Antiracism Education for Immigrant ESL Youth.

This article presents selected fi ndings from a qualitative practitioner study into the learning experiences of 30 immigrant ESL high school students in a 3-day innovative, Freirean-styled, antidiscrimination leadership program. This case study is grounded in a social identity theoretical framework which assumes that linguistic interactions are not neutral nor is the right to be listened to universally accorded, but that these are linked to identity and structured through social power relations (including racism). In this article I fi rst ask how students came to understand race and racism as they used the integrative antiracism analytical framework of the program to examine examples of discrimination from their personal experience. Second, I ask what implications their analysis had for their identity claims as immigrant ESL learners. The research argues for an understanding of racialized power dynamics as integral to social identity construction through English language learning, especially as they intersect with discourses of national identity and cultural citizenship in the case of immigrant ESL learners. The study suggests that integrative antiracism education can support immigrant language learners’ intersectional and multilevel understandings of discrimination. These expanded understandings of discrimination can also facilitate broader possibilities for social identity claims and ethical visions of Canadianness.

Reading desire: from empathy to estrangement, from enlightenment to implication

The imperial hubris, insecurities and indifference of our bloody new millennium pose profound challenges to feminist anti‐racist and anti‐colonial educators. For those of us who turn to literature education to create spaces of sustained moral reflection, there is a particular challenge to think through the kinds of reading practices which might intervene in ‘the slow acculturation of imperialism’ (Spivak, 1996, p. 248). This paper examines the politics of reception in a teacher education course focused on the development of critically reflexive approaches to teaching the burgeoning canon of ‘multicultural youth literature’ slowly gaining entry in schools. Tracing the discursive context and the theoretical commitments of the course pedagogy in postcolonial and transnational feminist theory, feminist reader response and critical multicultural education, this narrative study evaluates the forms of reflexivity made possible within the structured dialogic spaces of the class as students reread their responses to the work of Marjane Satrapi and other Iranian and Arab feminists through a series of ‘lenses’. In arguing the insufficiency of prevalent multicultural and reader response approaches to teaching transnational women’s literature in schools, I argue for a recursive pedagogy that critically historicizes and situates an embodied ethics of reading

Reading Muslim women and Muslim women reading back: transnational feminist reading practices, pedagogy and ethical concerns

This special issue of Intercultural Education traces its origins to a conference panel examining the reception and teaching of Azar Nafisi’s 2003 memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. In mid-2004 when the panel was conceived, Nafisi’s text was the most popular among an explosion of memoirs, novels, nonfiction and children’s literature by and about Muslim and Arab women being enthusiastically marketed and consumed in North America. The papers on this panel focused on how Nafisi’s text was being taken up within an Islamophobic global context in which Muslim women were increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist pity, fear and fascination produced through a complex nexus of societal and imperial aggression. Now in 2007, the surge of writing and cultural production by and about Muslim and Arab women continues—texts which both challenge and perpetuate the currency of Orientalist writing and representation. Within the context of the current global and geo-political landscape and the ‘war on terror,’ competing imaginaries—Western imperialist, Orientalist, imperialist feminist as well as transnational feminist, anti-colonial and Islamic—form a contested terrain of knowledge production upon which the lives, histories and subjectivities of Muslim women are discursively constituted, debated, claimed and consumed through a variety of literary, academic and visual forms of representation. This special issue seeks to critically examine the ways these forms of representation are taken up in various educational sites and also to interrogate and reflect on

Ethical Internationalization, Neo-liberal Restructuring and “Beating the Bounds” of Higher Education

This chapter presents a picture of the implications of neo-liberal re-structuring, framed as “academic capitalism”, to the erosion of the public role of the university and to understandings and practices of higher education. Drawing from experiences in Canada and Ireland, we offer insights from an international collaborative project on ethics and internationalization in higher education, invoking its underlying principles of intelligibility, dissent and solidarity. Reflecting on aspects of education and resistance, and emphasizing the dilemmas of power and complicity, we examine different possibilities for hopeful and ethical academic praxis in times of austerity and glocal crises.

Reading Nafisi in the West: Feminist Reading Practices and Ethical Concerns

Iranian women’s memoirs have become increasingly popular in the West. Certainly the most popular of these has been Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. But in a world in which Muslim women are increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist fear and fascination, Reading Lolita in Tehran cannot be read as neutral. We begin this paper by analyzing the ways in which discourses such as “the clash of civilizations” and “global sisterhood” shape the reception of Nafisi’s autobiography. We then examine how the autobiography is being taught, providing both a framework for problematizing current approaches to the text and a case study centred on teaching Reading Lolita in Tehran to a group of preservice teachers. We argue for a continuing interrogation into our own pedagogical practices and desires.

Why Multicultural Literacy? Multicultural Education Inside and Outside Schools

It is widely known that Barack Obama is the first President of African heritage in the United States, that Mahatma Ghandi encouraged non-violent resistance to colonial rule, that the Chinese have practiced medicine for thousands of years, that the Middle East and the Arab world is the “cradle of civilization”, that indigenous peoples around the world have sophisticated knowledge of natural ecosystems, and that the Afro-American musical tradition of blues begot rock and roll. This awareness of the poly-cultural origins of a global intellectual heritage, combined with the tools to locate these origins within broader narratives and patterns of world history and knowledge production, is what we are terming multicultural literacy, an appreciation and understanding that bespeaks a multipolar worldview even if it manifests in an apparently fragmented form. As we describe below, multicultural literacy is something to strive for, a challenge for educators and educational policy makers that can support antiracist values and an anticolonial politics. By identifying the knowledge of the cultural and intellectual contributions of racialized and often minoritized peoples and cultures as a component of what it means to be literate, we set the conditions for a de-hierarchization of knowledge. The awareness of such legacies speaks to a particular stance vis-a-vis what counts as knowledge; it’s one that recognizes our profoundly rhizomatic and dialogic global history of proliferating ways of understanding our world and systematizing these understandings into diverse knowledge traditions and forms of shared consciousness.

Learning with and from Rwandan Survivor-Historians: Testimonial Oral History as Relationship Building in Schools

This chapter examines challenges and promising practices of producing and bringing oral and life histories into the history classroom and especially the introduction of testimony and documentary film in the study of violent pasts. It weaves the voices of four educators and partners in a unique ongoing university–community–school participatory research project foregrounding Rwandan Canadian community knowledge production and expectations concerning the study of the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi at the secondary level. We ground discussions of complex ethical challenges within school-based practice, asking what this means for the historian-survivor/co-creator, student as witness and listener, and teacher as pedagogical facilitator.

What You See Depends Where You Stand: Critical Anticolonial Perspectives on Genocide Education Addressing the 1994 Rwandan Genocide

In this chapter, “What You See Depends Where You Stand: Critical Anticolonial Perspectives on Genocide Education Addressing the 1994 Rwandan Genocide,” traces some of the key tensions and questions at stake in critical, anticolonial research into contemporary practices of genocide education regarding the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis (shortened here to Rwandan genocide education or RGE) in Canadian schools. The discussion emerges from a long series of conversations among and between Rwandese-Canadian community activists/educators, NGO- and local school-based educators, and university-based researchers concerning the politics of knowledge production and representation within institutional initiatives to commemorate and learn from the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In sketching out the central concerns of our collaborative inquiry, this chapter traces a conversation in three voices among Marie-Jolie Rwigema and Sollange Sauter Umwali—two community-based researchers and educators—and Lisa Taylor—a university-based researcher and teacher educator.

An interview with Jamelie Hassan

Jamelie Hassan is a visual artist and activist based in London, Ontario, Canada. Since the 1970s she has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. In 1993 she was presented the ‘Canada 125 Medal’ in recognition of her outstanding service to the community, and in 2001 she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts. She was awarded the Chalmers Art Fellowship in 2006. Her interdisciplinary works incorporate ceramic, painting, video, photography, text and other media and explore personal and public histories and are in numerous public collections. These include the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Museum London; the McIntosh Gallery, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario; the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the National Museum of Arab American Art, Dearborn, Michigan, USA and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt.