Panel: Life Writing: A Literacy for Our Times
Copanelists: Cynthia Chambers and Erika Hasebe-Ludt
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.
Carl Leggo is a poet and professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches courses in English language arts education, writing, and narrative research. His poetry, fiction, and scholarly essays have been published in many journals in North America and around the world, including Vitae Scholasticae: The Journal of Educational Biography, English Journal Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, and Men and Masculinities. He is the author of three collections of poems—Growing Up Perpendicular on the Side of a Hill, View from My Mother’s House (both Killick Press), and Come-By-Chance (Breakwater Books)—as well as a book about reading and teaching poetry: Teaching to Wonder: Responding to Poetry in the Secondary Classroom (Pacific Educational P). He is a co-editor (with Stephanie Springgay, Rita L. Irwin, and Peter Gouzouasis) of Being with A/r/tography (Sense Publishers). Current projects include a book titled Creative Expression, Creative Education (co-edited with Robert Kelly) to be published by Detselig Press in 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.