Monica Waterhouse

We Don't Believe Media Anymore: Mapping Critical Literacies in an Adult Immigrant Language Classroom.

This article maps critical literacies conceptually and empirically in the context of adult immigrant language classrooms. It begins by describing Deleuze and Guattaris cartographic approach. Then it traces critical literacies situated conceptually within a Freirean paradigm before mapping them differently through the Deleuzian-informed Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT). MLT frames critical literacies as reading intensively, that is, disruptively. This alternative conceptualization is then mobilized empirically in relation to the problems and politics produced in the qualitative study of one language classroom. In this classroom, reading a newspaper article provoked a series of transformative events or becomings, a concept created by Deleuze and Guattari and which is central to MLT. A research cartography is presented as a series of vignettes weaving data and concepts. This empirical mapping of media literacies and reading intensively offers insights into the politics of becoming in adult immigrant language classrooms and opens conceptual lines of flight between critical literacies and reading intensively.

Deleuzian Experimentations in Canadian Immigrant Language Education: Research, Practice, and Policy

Undertaking Deleuzean experimentations in educational research requires a transformation of what it is to do research. After describing one such becoming, this article considers the potentialities of Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT), which draws on concepts created by Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, for thinking differently about policy and practice in a federally-funded adult immigrant language program in Canada. A rhizoanalytic cartography of vignettes selected from a qualitative study conducted in two immigrant language classrooms focuses on teacher and student perceptions of being and becoming-Canadian in a multicultural context. Viewed through the lens of MLT, this rhizoanalysis suggests that there is much more going on in the program than its mandate to ‘orient newcomers to the Canadian way of life’ might imply. The article goes on to discuss potential lines of flight in adult immigrant language programs for the transformation of policy and practice.

Capitalism, Immigration, Language and Literacy: Mapping a Politicized Reading of a Policy Assemblage.

Immigration for Australia and Canada is critical to sustain economic growth. Each country’s immigration policy stems from its vision of a nation that includes the role of language and literacy and a program of economic outcomes. While the authors acknowledge that economic integration through employment dominates immigration policies in Canada and Australia, the goal of this article is to critically examine and map how language and literacies in an immigration policy are positioned in relation to economic outcomes in neo-liberal times. Questions flowing from the article’s objective are: what does immigration produce, and what is its effect on how language and literacies are legitimated? The questions explore how capitalism decodes immigration, language and literacy, and in turn how immigration, language and literacies reterritorialize/reconfigure in the context of human and economic capital. These questions are taken up in an assemblage that includes Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on capitalism and deploys multiple literacies theory to read capitalism, immigration, language and literacy in the context of immigration policies prevailing in Australia and Canada. These two countries offer an interesting entry point for rhizomatic analysis since Canada’s government has, in recent years, been actively investigating Australia’s policies and their effectiveness in the successful integration of newcomers. Mapping a politicized reading of the immigration–language–literacy policy assemblage and questioning how this assemblage reconfigures is important as global migration intensifies around the world.

Affective Disruptions of the Immigrant Experience: Becomings in Official Language Education Research in Canada

ABSTRACT Our purpose is to use a Deleuzian-informed conceptual and theoretical framework to disrupt predominant representations of the immigrant experience in Canadian official language education and to open up to the affective potential of an immigrant life to become otherwise. Employing a rhizoanalytic research approach that acknowledges wonder as an analytic practice (MacLure, 2013), we map interview data from two qualitative studies with immigrant language learners to show (a) how affective relations involving an adolescent French second language student disrupt received understandings of motivation; and (b) how reading a poem in an adult English second language classroom disrupts anticipated, affective responses to a lesson. Our rhizoanalysis underscores the complexity and unpredictability of the becomings of an immigrant life in the context of meeting the primary objective of teaching Canada’s official languages. It also suggests how second language research itself might be conceived differently and become otherwise.

This Land is Our Land? Multiple Literacies and Becoming-Citizen in an Adult ESL Classroom

Unprecedented levels of global migration have produced pluralistic nations where citizenship education can pose a complex challenge. In these contexts, government-funded language instruction programs for new immigrants have become important sites, where politically charged debates around citizenship and how to teach it play out. This article considers the intersections of citizenship education, power, multiple literacies, and curriculum in a Canadian adult immigrant language program mandated to facilitate the integration of newcomers. Deleuze & Guattaris conceptual repertoire, along with the Deleuzian-informed Multiple Literacies Theory, frame an analysis of qualitative data focusing on a singular classroom event: the singing of a folk song. This research follows lines of power: state power as pouvoir operating through the order-word ‘multiculturalism’, and lifes affective power as puissance operating through reading texts disruptively in the classroom. These molar lines and lines of flight run between nation-state citizenship as an integrative outcome premised on sameness, and the concept of ‘becoming-citizen’ as an untimely process premised on difference. Considering the implications of this analysis for classroom practice, ‘rhizocurriculum’ is posited as a way to reimagine citizenship in ways that can account for the revolutionary, transformative effects of difference.

On "Becoming" Technologically Literate: A Multiple Literacies Theory Perspective

This article uses a multiple literacies theory framework to explore the processes of ‘becoming’ technologically literate through a year-long ethnographic study of two Master of Education pre-service second language teachers, a Latina woman and an African American woman, who learned how to use computer technology to teach Spanish at a large Midwestern university. The case studies of these two women are analyzed to gain insights into how teacher education programs can support racial minority pre-service teachers in ‘becoming’ technologically literate. First, the authors provide an overview of the multiple literacies theory developed by Masny. Second, the stories of the two pre-service teachers are presented. Finally, curricular and pedagogical recommendations for second language education Master of Education programs are provided.

Rhizocurricular Processes of Dis-Identification and Becoming-Citizen

This quotation from critical literacy scholar Allan Luke poignantly describes the nexus of citizenship, literacies, and subjectivity and serves as our entry point into a curricular landscape. Turning to the conceptual repertoire of Deleuze and Guattari, we are interested in describing what potential lines of escape may already be disrupting the assemblage of citizenship and literacies education in the 21st century.

Agencement, Second Language Education, and Becoming: A Deleuzian Take on Citizenship.

ABSTRACT This article makes novel use of the Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of becoming and agencement to frame qualitative research on how youth from second language immigrant families conceptualize citizenship. Even though our work here is primarily conceptual, we refer to aspects of a previously published study to concretely illustrate these concepts for the reader. The study in question found that the participants exhibited a mixture of conceptualizations of citizenship, some of which aligned with dominant trends in citizenship education. Other conceptualizations presented dimensions of citizenship that were unexpected and intensive. In our discussion, we use two Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts to deepen our understanding of the complex relationships between competing discourses on citizenship in the context of second language education. We argue, in short, that becoming and agencement help “disturb” the once axiomatic linkage between citizenship education and the nation-state and challenge clichéd notions of “global citizenship.”