Language and Identity Research in Digital Times (by Dr. Bonny Norton)

The BILD research group is so thrilled to have Bonny Norton as our guest blogger for this week. Bonny Norton is a Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, UBC. A Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), she was the inaugural recipient of the “Senior Research Leadership Award” of AERA’s Second Language Research SIG, and 2016 co-recipient with Ron Darvin of the TESOL Distinguished Research Award. Her website is: http://www.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/norton/

On a scale of student to teacher, I give myself a 6.5. (by Michaela Salmon)

My MA seems to be finishing not with a bang, but a whimper.

I have been a student for many years now, and I always envisaged the final day; a moment where all exams would be passed, all grades would be given, and I’d leave campus for the last time marching onwards to begin my brilliant career. Instead, as my final months, weeks, and days of being a student draw to a close, I am beginning to realise how for many graduate students the delineation of work and school is far from clear. Instead of one following the other, they blend into each other making it hard to distinguish what we do for money, for the love of it, for knowledge, for interest or for simply attaining a qualification.

Literacies of Dissent: Multilingual Street Art as Public Scholarship (by Casey Burkholder)

I love street art. I love street art because it allows me to view people’s interactions with public space in intentional ways. Street art makes me look around and gets me to reconsider the spaces I usually ignore or take for granted. I search for it as I walk the streets of the places I live.

Problematizing My Identity in the Context of Colonization (by Kristine Sudbeck)

Kristine Sudbeck is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is currently completing her dissertation, which is a critical autoethnography of her experiences learning Ho-Chunk and Omaha– two languages indigenous to what is now considered the United States. Much of her work critically examines the role of equity in schooling experiences, crossing lines of difference on a variety of reified social categories. She also serves as a mentor for graduate students in the Indigenous Roots Teacher Education Program at her university.  

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