Panel: Life Writing: A Literacy for Our Times
Copanelists: Erika Hasebe-Ludt and Carl Leggo
This session focuses on a collaborative life writing project which attends to the lived and local experiences of educators and students in Canadian cosmopolitan educational contexts. The three researchers claim that life writing can create dialogues between and across different educational sites and discourses, in transnational cosmopolitan contexts, and thus translate lives and cultures with the aim to better understand each other’s worlds. They will discuss their interdisciplinary approach to life writing as 1) a way to reconceptualize literacy curriculum in cosmopolitan contexts, 2) a method to research and document life writing as one of the new literacies in such contexts, and 3) a vehicle for change towards effective and transformative new literacy practices. The presenters will illustrate and explicate their research approach through a textual métissage (derived from the Latin mixticius, meaning the mixing of strands in the weaving of text/iles) in which they will braid issues and topics that arise out of their individual and collaborative life writing. They take métissage as a site for writing and surviving in the interval between different cultures and languages, particularly in colonial contexts; a way of merging and blurring genres, texts, and identities; and an active literary stance, political strategy, and pedagogical praxis (Lionett 1989). Like Hannah Arendt, they believe “It is the multiplicity of particularities that makes critical understanding possible” (Disch 1996, 160) The presenters will engage the audience in a discussion of the effects of this métissage, and of the content and implications of their work.
Cynthia Chambers teaches curriculum studies, language and literacy, and Aboriginal/Indigenous studies at the University of Lethbridge to both undergraduate pre-service teachers and graduate students. Her essays, memoirs, and stories are published in edited collections as well as in the Canadian Journal of Education, JCT: Interdisciplinary Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Educational Insights, and English Quarterly. She works with scholars at Red Crow Community College on the curriculum and pedagogy of place, particularly in Blackfoot territory, and is part of a research team in the Canadian north that uses autobiography and life histories to research Aboriginal literacies of place, human relations, and the material world (such as clothing and tools).
Cynthia Chambers, Erika Hasebe-Ludt, and Carl Leggo are collaborating on a book, Autobiography as an Ethos for Our Times (Peter Lang), and a four-year research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, “Rewriting Literacy Curriculum in Canadian Cosmopolitan Schools,” which investigates life writing as part of multiple literacies in urban areas such as Vancouver and Calgary.