Last week, I attended the play J’Accuse, by Annick Lefebvre, at the Centre du Théâtre D’Aujourd’hui in Montréal.
The play is made up of a series of five monologues by five different (fictional) women. Each monologue is an expression of the character’s inner rage (mixed in with some joy and humour and sadness), and a sense of feeling misunderstood. The play is in French.
Emmanouela is a PhD student in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. Her academic journey entails studies in Modern Languages (MSt) and Language Education (MSc) and she is passionate about studying the ways in which languages and people evolve over time and through social interaction.
You can get in touch with her via email or visit her LinkedIn page! Continue reading
While this post isn’t exactly a response to Dr. Heller’s post from two weeks ago, I feel like her post sets the stage for this one. I suggest that you read hers first, if you haven’t already.
For a long time now, I have found comfort in scholarly argumentation about power imbalances and struggles. A big part of this is about finding a way to articulate, in a rational, logical, structured way, things to which I initially react on an emotional, or a gut level. Continue reading
Monica Heller is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her most recent book, with L. Bell, M. Daveluy, M. McLaughlin and H. Noël, is Sustaining the Nation: the Making and Moving of Language and Nation (2015, Oxford University Press).
A few months ago Mela Sarkar asked me to consider contributing a blog post. I told her I wasn’t sure what I had to say. Then, well, Autumn 2016 happened, and it became obvious that the least I could do was to write what I was thinking, which is that this is, once again, a time when attention to language-as-power is really, really, important. I was moved to write today, because before lunchtime I was drenched in evidence. Continue reading
Didacticiens des langues, Joël Thibeault et Isabelle Gauvin sont professeurs, respectivement à l’Université de Regina et à l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Ils s’intéressent, entre autres, à la prise en compte du répertoire linguistique des élèves, aussi pluriel soit-il, dans l’enseignement de la grammaire du français.
Daniel Mo is a graduate student in the Master of Arts in Second Language Education program at McGill University. His research mainly focuses on second language assessment. He is now working on his thesis investigating the effectiveness of formative assessment at the tertiary level.
I got my first tattoo on August 16th, 2016 to celebrate my one-year anniversary living in Montreal. I chose the pattern twenty-four in Roman numerals since it was also my twenty-fourth birthday just a couple of weeks ago. It has been such an amazingly delightful year that I felt I needed something personal and permanent to remember the good time. The graduate courses at McGill are absolutely enlightening; the friends I have met, mostly teacher-turned scholars, are both intelligent and inspiring; the multicultural social events happening every day are fascinating; the friendly neighbourhood makes it so easy to settle down and build a new nest for myself. This year, I live as an international student pursuing a master degree, which has been the core of my life; however, equally significantly, I live as an Asian gay man in a bilingual city. Continue reading
I have come to know French immersion deeply over the years as a student, teacher, and researcher in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Throughout my life, this instructional program has been a source of tremendous enrichment, as it has been for millions of Canadians before me since its beginnings in 1965. Moreover, the benefits of French immersion have been documented extensively in peer-reviewed research, which include strong French proficiency, positive cultural identity, and social closeness to native French speakers. Nevertheless, writers for the Globe and Mail have repeatedly cast French immersion in an uncharitable light. I would like to respond to two relatively recent and especially erroneous articles: French immersion could do with a dose of reality (Gee, 2016) and There’s just one problem with French immersion… well, several, actually (Wente, 2016). Continue reading
Recently, my colleague Katie MacEntee and I presented a cellphilm (cellphone + video production) workshop at the Visual Sociology Pre-Conference at the International Sociological Association in Vienna, Austria. Our workshop introduced participants to cellphilming as a participatory visual method (MacEntee, Burkholder & Schwab-Cartas, 2016). Cellphilming asks research participants to respond to a research question or prompt by creating a cellphone video. Cellphilming is similar to participatory video where participants guide the process of inquiry, are co-investigators in knowledge production, and are involved in the dissemination of the research.
Dribble, dribble, dribble.
Hey, tu veux jouer?
On cherche un troisième
Qui peut bien shooter.
C’est nous contre eux,
Les trois gars là-bas.
On joue jusqu’à onze.
Check the ball déjà.
Hey, je suis libre,
Passe-le moi down low!
Vas-y vite, écoute-moi,
Run the give-and-go.
Reste sur tes pieds,
Don’t fall for the pump.
Tu peux pas me bloquer –
White men can’t jump.
Man, c’est une faute,
Tu me frappes chaque fois!
Touche-moi encore
Et je dunk sur toi.
Hey, t’as un accent,
Tu viens pas d’ici?
Ok, bienvenue,
Now get back on D.
Donne-moi un pick,
Check mon fadeaway.
Si tu ne m’arrêtes pas,
I’ll hit that shot all day.
Dribble, dribble, dribble.
C’est fini après mon score.
On change les équipes,
Or do you want some more?
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. Continue reading
Belonging, Identity, Language, Diversity Research Group (BILD) 