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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:

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