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The paper aims to provide a decolonial critique of dominant global agendas concerning teacher professionalism and to propose new understanding based on the perceptions of a sample of teachers based in Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Rwanda and Tanzania. The paper commences by setting out dominant conceptions of teacher professionalism as they appear in the global literature. The paper then uses Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2013) three dimensions of coloniality, namely, the coloniality of power, of knowledge and of being, as a framework for considering the colonial legacy on teacher professionalism and setting out the teachers’ ideas concerning the barriers and affordances to their professionalism. This provides a basis for outlining the teachers’ perspectives on how teacher professionalism may be conceptualised, which is discussed in relation to global conceptions. The main arguments advanced in the paper are that a decolonial lens is helpful for contextualising the perspectives of teachers in the global South; the lived experiences and material conditions of these teachers are often neglected in dominant discourses; it is important to situate the perspectives of teachers in an understanding of local contexts and realities; and, that in contrast to deficit discourses that predominate in the global literature, there is much that can be learned about teacher professionalism from teachers in the global South.

This article conceptualizes the notion of magic(al)ing in relation to post-pandemic ways of thinking about data production and analyses. Revisiting old data produced pre-COVID-19 and engaging with ...

The project featured in this article experiments with mapping methods as part of a research-creation approach to exploring spaces, times, and movements within materialisations of self. Bringing together adults and children across two cities during lockdown, the project problematises a stance on ‘learning loss’ during the pandemic and instead focuses on the potential of the experiential blurriness of analogue and digital spaces. Rather than seeking to control and structure online learning – thereby denying and limiting its possibilities, explorations, and senses of self – three researchers set out on a speculative approach that acknowledges the dynamic complexity of physical and virtual ways of knowing and being. The article discusses the affordances and challenges that the methodology offers and concludes with the broader implications of this research for reimagined post-pandemic pedagogies. In the end, we advocate for mapping as a way of generously creating spaces and activating meaning-making in diverse learning contexts.

With a rise in participatory media, there has been a hopefulness about how networked media spurs on youth leadership and civic engagement, offering opportunities and power to marginalized voices and communities that are historically under-represented. As more communities began to use these networks, and as organizations and institutions began to harness digital media and creative practices for the explicit purpose of empowerment, arguments around the technological determinism and the politics of hopeful futurity began to emerge. In this special issue, international researchers foreground their interpretations of the notion of civic literacies within digital ecologies. Asyoung people play on the terrain of global mediascapes (Appadurai, 1996), they contribute and shift them, offering us new ways to imagine our lives, creating and transforming what is possible through the contribution of their own narratives, perspectives, and stories. This is especially true in March 2020 when so many young people took to social media to share their COVID-19 anxieties in a time of uncertainty. The special issue goes some way in confronting tensions and urgencies such as racism and political uncertainties of the contemporary moment.

In this article, we present a research study with a group of newcomer and refugee learners who have resettled in the Niagara region in Canada to create new lives. Over the course of four months, we came to know the stories of fifteen adult language learners, and we witnessed their steady induction, acceptance and enjoyment of multimodal activities. Combining the notions of translanguaging and affective flows with multimodal assessment, we draw out artifactual and interview data to illuminate ways of reframing assessment making it more meaningful and agentive. We push for broader perspectives of language education and a reconceptualization of ways to teach and assess English language learners.

In this article, we propose ‘literacies of immanence’ as a term for sensory-laden, embodied multimodal practices that happen when researchers get out of the way to allow for modal diversity in meaning making. The learning encounters that we observed during our research combined senses with a kaleidoscope of modes that were hard to describe through more traditional multimodal methods. Literacies of immanence is the most fitting phrase for these practices because they were fluid, open, and they did not rely on written and spoken texts. Researching in a primary and secondary special school that are part of an academy trust in the southwest of England, the research team engaged in research-creation propositions (Truman, 2021) where we watched and built on multimodal meaning making supplementing it with story-making activities. Writing and sharing fieldnotes and filming interactions, we abandoned original plans and instead shaped methods and theoretical framings around the population of learners we met. Fieldnotes were shared on a blog and filmmaking helped us to describe and draw out multimodal, immanent literacies and their epiphanic qualities. This article features fieldnotes along with images of multimodal-sensory encounters and ways that they helped us relate to the learners, their teachers and Head Teacher as well as each other as researchers. The article is of relevance to researchers looking for ways to capture visible and invisible modal practices at work across settings and a movement away from a definite or true-false rendering of multimodality to one that allows for divergent ways of being with modes.

The idea of making as a form of activism or, as we refer to it in this paper, craftivism, underpins our ambition to transform pedagogical environments into spaces of possibility through sensory and affective making practices. A craftivist agenda pushes for open teaching and learning with materials so that students can inhabit a what if space which ruptures institutional time and space. Beginning with a theorization of disruptive making and dissensus and then moving on to foreground a materialist stance on making, the paper illustrates how students experience materialities across two very different classroom environments and how these experiences led to greater presence, voice and agency for students. There is an underlying focus in the paper on embodied responses and affective flows. After theorizing craftivism, there are three sections that explore making, teaching and feeling through craftivist, postdigital methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] uracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article addresses key components of posthumanism and maker literacies by reporting on empirical data from two makerspace research sites. Using posthuman methodologies, we suggest practical considerations the relational autonomy of materials through entanglements between humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans in makerspace classroom settings. We propose answers to the following research questions: How do materials manifest their relational autonomy in makerspaces? How could the relational autonomy of materials impact maker literacies pedagogy? With this article, our contribution warrants researchers to think about the unpredictability of maker work through posthuman methodologies, and how maker projects can help speak against the failing student rhetoric in literacy education.

For literacy educators, there is a need to understand students’ pathways into composition and mediate contemporary, multimodal compositional pathways with more academic ones. In an effort to mediate between middle and high school students’ schooling and curricular demands and their everyday interests and investments in media and communicational systems, the author offers educators a way to frame composition that attends to the potential and affordances of multiple modes of expression and representation. Combining affect theory with Arendt's writings on thinking and embodiment, the author presents a research study with adolescents who made stances in selfies, self-portraits, and written artist statements that are indicative of new rhetorical and compositional practices. Stance, as a construct in modern compositions, represents the ways that young people interface with ideas and experiences within the world that materialize in and animate their designs. Stance provides young people with a space to tell the stories they want to tell through media and mediums of their choosing.

This study sought to gather information through a survey of how newcomer parents’ beliefs about technology usage and how they engage with technology as they support their children with twenty-first century literacies. Parent respondents (N = 70) were drawn from two publicly funded schools in the Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada, where the population tends to be immigrant, visible minority, with post-secondary education, but unemployed and low income. Descriptive statistics quantified daily technology activities as being communication-oriented with the majority of parents holding distinct beliefs about the amount and type of their children’s technology usage. Chi-square tests indicated significant associations for demographic characteristics such as the gender, age, education, first language, and ethnicity of the parents as determinants of their beliefs about their children’s technology usage (e.g., social media, mobile phones, television). As well, levels of access and use varied in terms of the number of new technologies and the types of literacy practices that families engage in. Immigrant parents might hold misconceptions about twenty-first century literacies, therefore there should be an attempt to assist them to provide responsive twenty-first century literacy and technology support for their children.

Various multiple-disciplinary terms and concepts (although most commonly “interdisciplinarity,” which is used herein) are used to frame education, scholarship, research, and interactions within and outside academia. In principle, the premise of interdisciplinarity may appear to have many strengths; yet, the extent to which interdisciplinarity is embraced by the current generation of academics, the benefits and risks for doing so, and the barriers and facilitators to achieving interdisciplinarity, represent inherent challenges. Much has been written on the topic of interdisciplinarity, but to our knowledge there have been few attempts to consider and present diverse perspectives from scholars, artists, and scientists in a cohesive manner. As a team of 57 members from the Canadian College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (the College) who self-identify as being engaged or interested in interdisciplinarity, we provide diverse intellectual, cultural, and social perspectives. The goal of this paper is to share our collective wisdom on this topic with the broader community and to stimulate discourse and debate on the merits and challenges associated with interdisciplinarity. Perhaps the clearest message emerging from this exercise is that working across established boundaries of scholarly communities is rewarding, necessary, and is more likely to result in impact. However, there are barriers that limit the ease with which this can occur (e.g., lack of institutional structures and funding to facilitate cross-disciplinary exploration). Occasionally, there can be significant risk associated with doing interdisciplinary work (e.g., lack of adequate measurement or recognition of work by disciplinary peers). Solving many of the world’s complex and pressing problems (e.g., climate change, sustainable agriculture, the burden of chronic disease, and aging populations) demands thinking and working across long-standing, but in some ways restrictive, academic boundaries. Academic institutions and key support structures, especially funding bodies, will play an important role in helping to realize what is readily apparent to all who contributed to this paper—that interdisciplinarity is essential for solving complex problems; it is the new norm. Failure to empower and encourage those doing this research will serve as a great impediment to training, knowledge, and addressing societal issues.

With society being more digitized, knowledge of multimodal literacies has become an asset and indeed a part of how educators view their own acumen and efficacy. This is particularly relevant to teacher candidates and classroom teachers as they have access to a host of technological tools and devices to use in the classroom for representation of content and ideas, support for student engagement, and shaping curriculum and planning around multimodal forms of expression. However, the reality is that multimodal literacies are currently challenging traditional notions of schooling, giving rise to questions regarding the prevailing, print-based models of literacy. In this chapter, the co-authors focus on how to teach teacher candidates to navigate the meaning-making process through a multimodal lens as a way to build their identities and self-efficacy as beginning teachers. When teacher educators model practices that are consistent with multimodal pedagogies using digital media, there is a complement with the contemporary literacy engagement practices of young learners.