Transforming Language and Literacy Education: New Materialism, Posthumanism, and Ontoethics

The field of languages and literacies education is undergoing rapid transformation. Scholarship that draws upon feminist, post-colonial, new material and posthuman ontologies is transcending disciplinary boundaries and disrupting traditional binaries between human and nonhuman, the natural and the cultural, the material and the discursive.

In Transforming Language and Literacy Education, editors Kelleen Toohey, Suzanne Smythe, Diane Dagenais and Magali Forte bring together accessible, conceptually rich stories from internationally diverse authors to guide new practices, new conversations and new thinking among scholars and educators at the forefront of languages and literacies learning. The book addresses these concepts for diverse groups of learners including young children, youth and adults in formal educational and community-based settings. Challenging and disruptive, this is a unique and important contribution to language and literacy education.

Kelleen Toohey, Professor Emerita, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC has been teaching and writing about the education of children whose languages have been minoritized in Canada, especially English language learners. Her book, Learning English at school: Identity, socio-material relations and classroom practice (2nd edition) is in press with Multilingual Matters. Her recent work has explored the affordances of digital making for language and literacy learning.

Suzanne Smythe, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University is an adult literacy researcher and educator who works closely with community-based agencies and educators to understand the implications of new technologies for literacies and learning. She is particularly interested in the potential of technologies to inscribe old and new modes of control and exploitation. She is currently exploring the potential of participatory technology design to intervene in such assemblages and to forge new ways to think and do techno-literacies.

Diane Dagenais, Professor, Simon Fraser University, works in French second language and minority language education. Her research has documented the literacy practices of multilingual children in families, communities and schools. Her recent studies examine encounters between multilingual youth and digital tools for video and story production. Her work is published in a range of French and English language education journals.

Magali Forte is a PhD student in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC, CANADA) and a K-12 teacher in Vancouver. She adopts a sociomaterial perspective to examine the ways in which multilingual and multimodal processes of identity construction unfold through entanglements of humans and nonhumans in second language education settings.