Résumés
Abstract
Literacy is an essential component of any elementary-school classroom. To address shifting understandings of literacy and how to teach it, Alberta has developed a new language-arts curriculum. This curriculum, however, was developed in a context where schools have a long history of not serving Indigenous children well, including not meeting their needs through literacy programs (Hare, 2011). Alberta Education, through the English Language Arts and Literature (ELAL) curriculum, claims to better address those needs. The purpose of this research is to examine how the ELAL curriculum and its implementation aligns with the field of language and literacy, and in particular, Indigenous literacy scholarship, namely Peltier’s (2016/2017) Wholistic Anishinaabe Pedagogy and Reese’s (2018) Critical Indigenous Literacy. Data included both an analysis of the curriculum and semi-structured interviews with literacy instructors/scholars and in-service teachers. There were several key findings: English only processes, sparce attention to feelings throughout the curriculum, an absence of critical literacy, and inappropriate text selection. This paper is significant, as it shows the complexities and promise of being a non-Indigenous literacy scholar, thinking deeply about places of resonance and tension in literacy in ways that Indigenous scholars are already writing about.
Keywords:
- Indigenous Literacy,
- Language Curriculum Analysis
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Parties annexes
Biographical notes
Katie Brubacher is an assistant professor in elementary education, specializing in language and literacy, who joined the Faculty of Education after almost twenty years of teaching children in Kto-12 schools. Her research interests include translanguaging, the sociality of emotion, students of refugee backgrounds, raciolinguistics, working with children as researchers, school and community-based humanizing research, multimodal literacy practices, identity, belonging, multiliteracies, emerging print literacy, curriculum and policy analysis, and teacher education for multilingual children. As a member of the Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada (LLRC) executive, she works closely with researchers and educators across the country, organizing annual conferences and facilitating the dissemination of research-based practices on language and literacy. She is currently looking at the connection between laughter, belonging, and translanguaging with racialized children of refugee backgrounds, who teachers perceive as traumatized. Katie has also worked as both an instructor and researcher in teacher education to coauthor a book entitled, Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolingustic Ideologies in Teacher Education.
Jacqueline Filipek is an associate professor at The King’s University in Edmonton, Alberta, where she has worked since 2018 in the Faculty of Education. Her doctorate from the University of Alberta focused on understanding meaning making across and within digital and analog learning experiences in elementary school. Jacqueline is an editor for the national journal, Language and Literacy, and enjoys working with authors and researchers from all around the world who study literacy in many diverse contexts. As a member of the Northern Alberta Reading Specialists’ Council, she engages in literacy advocacy work and professional development alongside educators, administrators, and scholars. In addition to her teaching at The King’s University, she also teaches language arts curriculum courses for the Aboriginal TeacherEducation Program (ATEP) at the University of Alberta. Her general teaching and areas of research involve curriculum and instruction in language arts, reading, children’s literature, and educational technology. In addition to her current work on the Alberta Language Arts and Literature curriculum with Katie, Jacqueline is also exploring place stories to understand children’s need for places and ways to make classrooms and schools better environments for students.
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