Sociotechnical structures, materialist semiotics, and online language learning

Based on a study of the digital literacy practices of immigrant Filipino students in Vancouver, this paper focuses on how learners with unequal access to resources engage with different tools to locate information and find opportunities for language learning online. Data was collected through interviews and observations of participants as they used YouTube, Google Search, and Google Translate to decode unfamiliar words and find resources for learning. Framed through a materialist semiotic lens, this study examined how the students negotiated their resources on these platforms to achieve different intentions. Findings show that the way learners navigate these spaces can vary based on the devices they use (laptop vs. mobile phone), the user interface (browser vs. app), and the orientation they choose (landscape vs. portrait). The material dimensions of the screen determine the arrangement of semiotic forms, and varying configurations of devices, interfaces, and orientations shape the information made available to the learner and the digital literacy practices of scrolling, clicking, and shifting tabs. Recognizing how the online environment of a platform can shift across these layers of mediation, this paper conceptualizes the linguistic and semiotic forms that constitute design as sociotechnical structures which provide various learning affordances and constraints

Transnational Identity and Migrant Language Learners: The Promise of Digital Storytelling

As technology enables migrant learners to maintain multi-stranded connections with their countries of origin and settlement, they engage with the world with transnational identities that negotiate a complex network of values, ideologies, and cultures. How teachers and peers recognize that migrants come with specific histories, knowledges and competencies shapes migrant learners’ investment in learning. By building on their transnational literacies, the language learning classroom can be a Third Space which acknowledges and affirms their fluid, multidimensional identities. Digital storytelling, by allowing them to share their personal histories, their stories of migration and assimilation, and the material conditions of their lived experiences, holds great potential for enabling migrant learners to be fully invested in their transnational identities and to claim their right to speak

La clase social y las alfabetizaciones digitales desiguales de la juventud / Social class and unequal digital literacies of youth

Este trabajo reconoce la importancia de la tecnología para alcanzar la participación agentiva en la economía del conocimiento y apunta a examinar hasta qué punto las diferencias de clase social entre los jóvenes determinan sus alfabetizaciones digitales. A partir de un estudio de caso de adolescentes pertenecientes a posiciones sociales diferentes, el presente artículo debate acerca de cómo las diferencias materiales y relacionales de los entornos del hogar, manifestadas a través de las configuraciones espaciales, la implicación parental y las redes de pares, pueden contribuir a desarrollar diversas prácticas y predisposiciones hacia la tecnología. Al demostrar cómo las desigualdades en el uso digital pueden conducir a la acumulación desigual del capital social y cultural, este artículo concluye con las implicancias educativas de la tercera brecha digital

Mediating identities : Language, media, and Filipinos in Canada

News about the nation-state and its citizens is an important component of the discourse of nationhood, and its representations of migrant groups can refract relations of power, constructing subject positions that may locate them in the periphery of this imagined community. These mediated identities construct public perception, and by internalizing them, migrant learners can invest in their learning and pursue life trajectories in ways that reflect this positioning. To demonstrate how language and images in the news can position minorities, this paper provides a critical discourse analysis of reports from several major Canadian newspapers that provide accounts of Filipino immigrants, Canada’s fourth largest, but significantly under-researched, visible minority. Recognizing the power of media to promote specific ways of thinking, this paper recommends a critical pedagogy that develops a sharper awareness of how media operates and how migration serves the needs of the nation-state. It seeks to provide a framework through which migrant learners can examine and challenge the very discourses that position them.Education, Faculty ofLanguage and Literacy Education (LLED), Department ofUnreviewedGraduat

Engaging Education for Public Good

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. How can education make a positive contribution in and out of the university? Faculty of Education Public Scholars Initiative (PSI) students Ron Darvin and Sereana Naepi and five of their PSI colleagues have seven minutes each to explain their research in this area.Education, Faculty ofGraduate and Postdoctoral StudiesUnreviewedFacultyPostdoctora