Decolonizing Literacies: Disrupting, Reclaiming, and Remembering Relationship in Literacy Education

This volume examines the ways in literacy has been used as a weapon and a means for settler colonialism, challenging colonized definitions of literacy and centring relationships as key to broadening understandings.

It begins by confronting the multiple ways that settler colonialism has used literacy and definitions of literacy as a gatekeeper to participation in society. In response to settler colonialism’s violent acts of extraction, displacement, and replacement enacted upon the land, the resources, the people, and understandings of literacy, the editors propose a unique approach to decolonizing understandings of literacy through a triangulation of disruption, reclamation, and remembering relationships. This is enacted and explored through a range of diverse chapter contributions, written in the form of stories, poems, artworks, theatres, and essays, allowing the authentic voices of the authors to shine through, and opening up the English Language Arts as a space for engagement and interpretation with diverse, racialized understandings of literacy.

Disrupting Eurocentric, colonized understandings that narrowly define literacy as reading and writing the colonial word, and advancing the movement to decolonize education, it will be of key interest to scholars, researchers, and educators with interest in literacy education, decolonizing education, anti-racist education, inclusive education, land-based literacy, and arts-based literacy.

Towani Duchscher is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Towani Duchscher is a Black, mixed-race educator, dancer, and poet. Duchscher holds a doctorate in the specialization of Curriculum and Learning. Her research attends to how lessons of racism and marginalization are embodied and perpetuated through the explicit, implicit, and null curriculums in schools. Her research interests include decolonization, arts-based research, hidden curriculum, education for decolonization, and anti-racist education. She has authored publications in peer-reviewed journals including Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry and Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies.

Dr. Kimberly Lenters is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Language and Literacy Education at the University of Calgary where her research focuses on the social material worlds of children’s literacy development. Kim’s work has consistently focused on those students whose literacy practices are seen to be out-of-step (and therefore, generally unwelcome) in classroom spaces. Most recently, Kim’s work has focused on the relationship between play and literacy in spaces beyond the preschool and Kindergarten setting. In addition to several chapters in edited volumes, her work has been published in journals such as Reading Teacher, Literacy, English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Journal of Literacy Research, and Research in the Teaching of English (2019). She is also the co-editor of the volume, Affect and Embodiment in Critical Literacy: Assembling Theory and Practice (2020).