24 November 1-2:00pm GMT
Cross-curricular and cross-language teacher collaborations for critical literacy and intercultural education.
This event is part of the School of Education’s Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.
Hosted by the Language, Literacies and Education Network (LLEN)
Speaker: Dr Sunny Man Chu Lau, Associate Professor, Bishop’s University, Canada
While Canada has made enormous strides in welcoming multicultural learners, language and literacy education mostly follows a monolingual framework of instruction and assessment, with French and English often taught in silos and in separation from students’ home languages to avoid “interference”. These monolingual approaches put students’ wealth of plurilingual resources to waste, and compartmentalized language teaching also precludes more coordinated collaborations among language teachers for more integrated teaching and learning for cognitively demanding critical engagements. Based on her two government-funded research projects on cross-language and cross-curricular collaborations between English and French teachers, as first or second language, Lau presents how plurilingual and translanguaging approaches can be used to promote language and concept integration and to support critical literacy and intercultural education.
Dr Sunny Man Chu Lau, Associate Professor at Bishop’s University in Quebec, is Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Integrated Plurilingual Teaching and Learning (since July 2021) and the recipient of the 2012 International Society for Language Studies’ Founders’ Emergent Scholars Award. Her recent research projects (SSHRC, FRQSC, and The Higher Education Hub—Estrie) examine the use of plurilingual and translanguaging pedagogies in promoting students’ critical bi/multilingual learning. Disrupting the university-school and theory-practice divides, Dr Lau pioneers participative action research studies on cross-language and cross-curricular teacher collaborations to promote not only mobilization of languages for knowledge-construction but also metalinguistic and metacultural awareness for critical literacies education. She co-edited Plurilingual pedagogies: Critical and Creative Endeavors for Equitable Language in Education (Lau & Van Viegen, 2020) engages critically with the theories and pedagogies related to plurilingualism across educational contexts.