Critically Engaged Pedagogies: Integrating Lived Experiences and Intersectionality in Language and Literacy Education
Oct 31, 2024 — 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.
The Canadian Centre for Studies and Research on Bilingualism and Language Planning (CCERBAL) warmly invites you to its next research forum titled Critically Engaged Pedagogies: Integrating Lived Experiences and Intersectionality in Language and Literacy Education, presented by Rahat Zaidi, research Professor at the University of Calgary.
Abstract
This talk explores innovative approaches to language education in environments characterized by a multiplicity of languages and cultures. Rahat Zaidi focuses on the nuanced lived experiences of racialized students and how they can inform and enhance educational practices by integrating students’ intersectionality into deeper, more inclusive pedagogies.
She emphasizes research that examines how mainstream researchers, policymakers, and language teachers, including pre-service educators, can appreciate holistic, big-picture methodological approaches to language and literacy learning. These approaches encompass students’ past and present experiences, reinforced within various places and spaces.
Central to this methodology are Critically Engaged Language and Literacy Workshops (CELLWs), which engage the arts, walking methodologies, and digital media to authentically represent participants’ interrelationships with their school and community spaces.
CELLWs are highlighted as a crucial avenue for self-reflection, fostering socially just, diverse, and equitable educational practices. They create spaces for meaning-making processes that consider relevant personal experiences and feelings within schools and communities, and advocate for education policies that re-examine how we engage this vulnerable demographic in language and literacy learning.
Rahat Zaidi, PhD
award winning Werklund Research Professor at the University of Calgary
Dr Rahat Zaidi is an award winning Werklund Research Professor at the University of Calgary. As a Sorbonne educated French speaking scholar, she brings a diverse set of professional, personal experiences and academic qualifications that span several regions (South Asia, Europe, both Francophone and Anglophone Canada). Zaidi studies the intimate connection between language, culture and identity, and uses her scholarship to underscore the untapped power within diversity to advance social justice, equity and inclusion in immigrant and transcultural contexts. The acute need for Zaidi’s work is evidenced by Canada’s multilingual, multi-ethnic classroom demographic, which, in part, has been precipitated by global crises that continue to impact refugee communities.
Her research has created opportunities to better understand how literacy and language learning can be made more inclusive for minority students and their families. Her efforts have led to recommendations for province-wide initiatives to support refugee and immigrant families navigating the education system. Dr. Zaidi’s latest literary contributions include Transcultural Pedagogies for Multilingual Classrooms: Responding to Changing Realities in Theory & Practice & Literacy Lives in Transcultural Times. Zaidi’s innovative work and her commitment to community have been recognized by the City of Calgary, the Alberta Teachers’ Association, and by the American Education Researchers Association. AERA Division K Innovations in Research on Equity and Social Justice in Teaching and Teacher Education Award 2021 and the Youth Teams in Education Research Award in 2023.
Recently, she was appointed as the holder of the new OLBI Mobility Research Chair in Bilingualism at the University of Ottawa. Her innovative research, entitled “Building Plurilingual Bridges: Advancing Bilingualism through Critically Engaged Language and Literacy Workshops (CELLWs),” is designed to enrich CCERBAL's mission by exploring new avenues for bilingualism.