Keynote Speakers

Literacy and multilingualism with African Diaspora Youth: Intersections of Race, Culture and Language

In this talk, Dr. Bigelow will share findings from her research with multilingual and transnational East African youth. This work has focused on how language and literacy development in classroom settings intersect with student and teacher identities. Some of the overarching questions explored in this talk will include the following: How does print literacy influence the acquisition of English? How is status constructed intra-ethnically, based on literacy and gender? How do race, gender and religion shape language learning and schooling experiences? and How do policies (un)constrain educational possibilities for refugee youth from diverse backgrounds?

Planting seeds and nurturing growth: Creating a digital ecosystem for ELT

When the pandemic forced us to pivot at short notice to emergency online teaching, the landscape for ELT in Canada changed - literally overnight here in Alberta. Will language teaching return to the way things were? I hope not. This crisis has highlighted the essential need for digital skills, both for ourselves as teachers and for the students that we are privileged to teach. We have an opportunity now to seize this moment: to guide students as they develop their tech skills, to grow our own digital proficiency, and to work together to create a new digital ecosystem for ELT, one where technology is used not only to enhance teaching and learning but is used to connect students with students, students with teachers, and teachers with other teachers. In this talk, we’ll look at some of the innovations, promising practices, and challenges ahead in online language teaching and learning.

Normalising LGBTQIA2 in ELT is the seed. We also need the water.

For the past few years in particular, the desire for inclusive practices within ELT has become louder and stronger, which on the whole is fantastic, but with few existing inclusive materials combined with a lack of available training, movement towards equality can be sporadic or unintentionally problematic. To help, in Spring 2019, I shared a mock-up coursebook unit that incorporates LGBTQIA2 through a ‘normalisation’ approach (fourc.ca/lgbtq-normalisation). Through this approach, these representations occur regularly alongside heteronormative counterparts without focusing on the content per se but on the language activity itself. This, however, was meant as a sample starting point, not as a finish line. Alone, this approach stops short of directly confronting certain inequalities within our learning environments and more broadly the social status quo our learners are part of. In this talk, we’ll address why normalisation is only the beginning and why it’s important to continue being curious about further inclusive practices. This will move us towards exploring ‘disruption,’ a complementary approach to ELT materials design where we centre LGBTQIA2 content to lay the foundation for raising empathy, building relatable connections between different groups of people, and empowering learners to challenge what they (and we?) take for granted as ‘just the way it is’. This, I argue, ultimately facilitates the underlying purpose of education: to equip us with choices about how to improve the lives of many, not just a few.

Website: http://fourc.ca/

Twitter: @seburnt