Searching for treasures: An ode to the public library (by Heather Phipps)

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

–Virginia Woolf

Making knowledge together: Voice, identity, agency, and communal effort (by Dr. Anthony Paré)

Anthony Paré is a professor and head of the Department of Language and Literacy Education in the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. Before moving to UBC, he worked at McGill University for over 30 years, where he served as Chair of the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, Director of the Centre for the Study and Teaching of Writing, and Editor of the McGill Journal of Education. His research examines academic and workplace writing, situated learning, school-to-work transitions, the development of professional literacies, and doctoral education. He is presently studying the writing of the dissertation, with a particular focus on the supervisory dyad and its role in the rhetorical apprenticeship of doctoral students.

The BILDers would love to hear your responses to Anthony’s post. How does it resonate with your experiences with academic writing?

Languages and gender, through the eyes of a three-year-old (by Kathleen Green)

My sister, her partner, and their two kids came to visit me here in Montreal this past weekend. Because I feel the need to try to explain everything in great detail to my 3-year-old nephew, and because I’m just fascinated by everything he says and thinks, these visits inevitably get me thinking about things like belonging, identity, language and diversity. Two of the things I’ve been coming back to since this last visit are how to engage monolingual children with the multilingual reality of their world and how to allow kids to play with concepts like gender, while also preparing them to live in a world that doesn’t always welcome that kind of play.

From an outsider to an insider’s position: opportunities to expand our thinking. (by Patricia Houde)

“Only polyglossia fully frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 61).