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This article describes the types of portfolios teachers can use in their classroom along with teacher-tested advice for ways to implement portfolio assessment. Portfolio assessment provides teachers and students with a documented chronology of the learning that is taking place. By periodically reviewing their portfolios, students become enlightened about their progress and empowered when they can see for themselves the progression of their learning. This knowledge enables students, with the guidance of their teacher, to set and work toward future learning goals. We have included relevant research that supports portfolio assessment along with comments from our students. These comments dramatically document the power portfolios have to enlighten and motivate students to learn.

This paper was presented as part of the Carl Leggo keynote address at the third annual CSSE pre-conference for the Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada. The paper explores the possibility of deconstructing “presence” in reflexive writing. The author examines Leggo’s “writing as compos(t)ing” as an example of arts-informed reflexive writing that problematizes the desire for presence, and argues that Leggo’s “clown” poetry interrogates notions of transparency in reflexive writing. Reflexive writing traces the presence of the writer in/through the text. It is a form of writing that celebrates the power of personal story to illuminate the intersections between self and society. The desire for presence, however, is never innocent and never without complication. In tracing that presence - in writing reflexively - the writer inscribes silence and absence while simultaneously making her/himself visible.

This paper is a critical examination of the state of Canadian literacy education and research and its effects on young children. Its purpose is to appraise the ways in which disability is currently being produced and practiced in early school curricula and to argue for a theoretically rich curricula which begins from children’s strengths. To accomplish these goals, this paper commences with a brief appraisal of curriculum studies’ lack of attention to issues of dis/ability, considers major movements in literacy curricula, then contends that an innovation in literacy curricula the authors term, “the biomedical approach”, is pathologizing entire school populations and inflicting upon them reductionistic literacy curricula. This paper illustrates the biomedical approach through a narrative of a public school and the experiences of its early years staff and students.

In this paper, we develop the understanding that in context of expanding notions of the literary engagement, consciousness is understood as a process that both participates in the acts of reading and response, and at the same time, is potentially transformed by those acts. Yet, uninterrogated understandings of consciousness – what it is, what it does, what it feels like - continue to shape the way we structure our experiences with literature in the classroom in predominantly implicit ways. In the context of an enactivist understanding of cognition, consciousness emerges as an orienting feature that brings together the cultural and biological aspects of the literary experience.

Participants in an online doctoral seminar participated in the use of a writing strategy to explore the sociocultural contexts of their lived experience. Creating literary texts in three forms was an effective strategy in mediating participants' understanding. Each form provided a new lens through which to interpret experience. Participants functioned as an interpretive community. The final papers, autobiographical narratives, illuminated the complex relations among prediscursive experience, reflection on experience, distancing, and the iterative transformational quality of time. The online format embodied a virtual interpretive location which allowed participants to revisit texts and postings over time.

As a poet and language educator, I am often asked, Is this a good poem?, as if I carry some kind of standard measuring device for assessing the value of poems. But, perhaps the important question is not, Is this a good poem?, but instead, What is a poem good for? So, in this paper, I offer five reasons why poetry is important for living. Of course, there are many more reasons that could be discussed, but my goal is to contribute to an ongoing dialogue among language educators about the value of living poetry in our personal and professional lives.

This paper examines ideological and institutional contexts for liberal arts education at an art and design university as a means for understanding how critical writing is constructed by students and faculty as an interference to other creative practices students pursue as part of their art and design education. Observations of the form of assessment in art and design education known as critique, provides the basis for a reflection on how the pedagogy of critique, transposed to the liberal arts classroom, might serve to resist student resistance to learning to write critically.

This paper reports on a three-year project in which we infused arts-based media and digital learning into a mandatory language and literacy course for secondary pre-service teachers at a major Canadian university. Our underlying model favours dynamic, critical and transformative learning across modes, genres and social spaces in the secondary curriculum. We found prospective teachers to be committed to engaging in new media as a way to expand notions of literacy, author new genres of communication, and to be more engaging and inclusive of all students, yet they often remained sceptical of uncritical approaches.