Volume 26, numéro 2, 2024 Special Issue: Reckoning with our past, interrogating our present, and reimagining our future

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The purpose of the paper is to understand the connection between teacher authority and children’s language use. The data presented here was pulled from two large data sources: a set of case-studies in Grades 4 to 6 classrooms with multilingual children who were new to Canada and learning to read and write for the first time and qualitative research in a teacher education program preparing teacher candidates to educate multilingual students. Findings suggest that children translanguage in liminal spaces outside of the teachers’ authority and that multilingual students that were asked to translanguage in English authority classrooms had negative experiences.

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This article shares findings from the first phase of program evaluation of Antle, a holistic language resource for teaching, learning and assessment. The program evaluation was guided by understandings that appreciate the interconnections of literacies and identities and is situated within a decolonizing framework that recognizes the transformation of Indigenous knowledges as essential. A quantitative and qualitative analysis was conducted. Analysis revealed the educators valued Antle but did not use the resource consistently. Recommendations include providing information to teachers about connections between literacies theories, curriculum outcomes, and program activities, and additional support for implementation. This article serves as an invitation to researchers and educators across Canada to rethink literacy assessment practices.

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Preservice teachers enter teacher education programs with varying reading habits and conceptions of social justice. This specific problem of practice—made visible by personal practical knowledge (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988), is examined using currere (Pinar, 2020) and Simpson and Cremin’s (2022) concept of the additive trio. This conceptual paper asserts the need to simultaneously support preservice teachers’ reading habits, knowledge of children’s literature, and understandings of social justice by allocating preservice curriculum time toward this purpose. It also reveals the hidden curricular labour required to respond to a problem of practice.

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This paper examines how Canada’s Official Languages Act (OLA) reinforces the socio-political constructs of language barriers and linguistic borders. Questions addressed are: in Canada, who do linguistic borders serve, how do linguistic borders function, and what are the effects of linguistic borders? The theoretical framework draws from raciolinguistics and border imperialism. The method, a socio-diagnostic critique, juxtaposes the discursive practices of the OLA with border governance strategies. Results highlight how linguistic border governance creates the conditions for language-based discrimination to thrive. The paper concludes with a call to disinvest from the OLA, and a turning toward the water-language connection.

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Several stakeholders, such as community groups, government officials, parents, guardians, and educators have shown concern about the achievement gap between Nova Scotia learners of African descent and their predominantly White peers. Using the African proverb ‘It takes a village’ as a framework, this study involved parents, extended family members and caregivers of children aged 4 to 6 years to explore the scaffolding strategies employed as well as the experiences of participants when supporting children’s emergent writing skills during COVID-19 pandemic. Survey and focus group sessions demonstrated how participants frequently scaffolded emergent writing using highly effective strategies including Africentric approaches. The importance of ‘It takes a village’ proverb in enhancing literacy developmenthas also been established.

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This research focuses on one teacher’s lived experience as he contributes towards a broader understanding of possibilities and constraints afforded by technologies, materials, and relationality during this recent shift in pandemic pedagogy. The pandemic drastically altered the way curriculum is enacted as there were shifts in the learning environment, the subject matter, and the way teachers and students engaged in literacy practices. To understand this shift, we explore: What are the participating teacher’s perceptions about how multiliteracies are utilized for classroom practice and pedagogy? How did this teacher’s pedagogy continue or change once the pandemic influenced curriculum enactment? This paper focuses on how one grade 6 teacher explored this pandemic pedagogical landscape in his classroom. This experience contributes to learning from the past, navigating the present, and continuing to shape the future of effective instruction in an elementary classroom.