Panel: Life Writing: A Literacy for Our Times
Copanelists: Cynthia Chambers 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 form 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.
Erika Hasebe-Ludt is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Lethbridge, where she teaches courses in teacher education in the areas of language arts (English as a first and additional language), literacy, and culture; curriculum studies; and international/transnational education. Her publications include the co-edited anthology Curriculum Intertext: Language/Culture/Pedagogy (with Wanda Hurren; Peter Lang, 2003), and various articles and chapters in interdisciplinary educational journals and collections, such as the co-authored chapter (with Cynthia Chambers, Carl Leggo, and Antoinette Oberg) “Embracing the World with All Our Relations: Métissage as an Artful Braiding” in Being with A/r/tography (edited by Carl Leggo, Stephanie Springgay, Rita L. Irwin, and Peter Gouzouasis; Sense Publishers 2008).
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.