About Us

We are a learning community comprising university researchers based at York University Faculty of Education in Toronto, Canada; and teachers, staff members, and community members based at Joyce Public School in Northwestern Toronto, brought together in pursuit of improved elementary literacy education for an urban, culturally diverse, digitally socialized population.

Our collaborative research project plans, develops, shares, documents and showcases narrative rewriting projects in the primary and junior grades to teach 21st century emergent literacies that actively engage multicultural, and multimodal literacies in complex interplay.

The research is grounded in the challenges that the children of today experience in acquiring literacy across home, school, community and societal contexts in a culturally and linguistically diverse urban setting. The children learn traditional stories from the inside out, becoming writers (through story adaptation), performers (of plays), narrators (of videos and DVDs), programmers (of mini-games and hypertext stories) as well as readers familiar with canonical literature. They learn to develop their voices by incorporating familial, community, pop culture and academic knowledge, and to experience literacy as a critical and creative process.

The heart of the qualitative research project is in the learning process; analysis is ongoing and cumulative, focusing on:

what children and involved teacher-researchers learn from each class project;
what the research collective learns across the narrative projects;
how teachers can use human and technological resources to develop multilingualism and address diverse cultural vantage points in the classroom;
where and how in the story rewriting process we can involve community languages; and
how to plan and develop annual projects of this involved nature.

Emergent Multiliteracies in theory and practice includes:

Principal investigator

Professor Heather Lotherington,
Faculty of Education, York University

Co-investigator

Professor Jennifer Jenson,
Faculty of Education, York University

Contributing schools

Teacher-researchers

Sandra Chow
Marion Davey
My-Linh Hang
Michelle Holland
Leon Lenchner
Catherine McGowan
Anthony Micallef
Helen Monk
Shiva Sotoudeh
Rhea Perreira –Foyle
Farah Rahemtula
Graham Wood
Mike Zentena
Chris Lee
Kris Knutson
Sonia Callea
Andrew Brow
Mike Zentena
Nicole Hoang
Rose Battaglia
Ashleigh Mandlsohn
Lillian Tsim
Syd Wong

Consultants

My-Linh Hang
Mary Ampomah

Research collaborator

Cheryl Paige, Principal,
Joyce Public School

Jim Cummins, CRC, OISE/University of Toronto

Primary research site

Joyce Public School, Toronto

Contributing researchers

Liza Zawadzka, York University
Dr. Jennifer Jenson, York University
Dr. Nick Taylor, York University

Technical assistants

Brian Chandrapal
Richard Huynh
Brent Merriman

Research assistants

Leila (Kati) Asgari
Fang Duan
Dr. Avital Feuer
Robert Wood
Xiaohui Zhu
Stephanie Fisher
Laura Mae Lindo
Mary Pat O'Meara
Lisa Hill
Leslie Wilton
Sean Meades
William Heikoop
Wenfang Wu

Website

Kate MacMillan
Wenfang Wu