Amir Michalovich will be defending his PhD dissertation proposal at 1:00 pm on Tuesday, March 24th (online).
Here is the link for any guest to join the online session:
https://ca.bbcollab.com/guest/6c0a5c56ee444eaa82cf020296cd0dc0
All are welcome to attend.
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Maureen Kendrick, Dr. Margaret Early, and Dr. Bonny Norton.
Title: Participatory Video with Youth from Refugee Backgrounds in a Vancouver Secondary School: Bridging Imagined Communities and Educational Possibilities.
Abstract:
As Canada is increasingly committed to refugee resettlement, there is a growing urgency to understand how refugee-background youth can be better integrated into provincial education systems, considering their high rate of disappearance from schools. These youth face language, literacy, and educational challenges due to the forced nature of their migration and to varied difficult experiences. This proposed qualitative multiple case study of refugee-background youth as diverse cases in one secondary school in Vancouver addresses this problem by situating youth as co-investigators of their own lives through participatory video, i.e., a form of digital multimodal composition (video production) led by research participants, exploring real-world issues of their choice. The youth will also present their videos to stakeholders they identify as important.
Audio and computer-screen recordings of production sessions, interviews with youth and teachers, fieldnotes, artifacts, as well as a focus group with teachers will be analyzed to explore the following research questions: (1) How do refugee-background youth utilize different modes (including different languages) to represent and communicate issues of concern and interest?; (2) How do refugee-background youth interactionally navigate the processes of digital multimodal composition?; and (3) To what extent does digital multimodal composition facilitate refugee-background youth’s media literacy and open possibilities for them to see themselves as members of different communities in society?
The study answers a call in language and literacy education scholarship to examine migrant youth’s literacy practices in multiple modes and languages, harnessing participatory video’s emphasis on student-led inquiry and 21st-century forms of communication. It posits that engaging in participatory video production advances knowledge about how to foster refugee-background youth’s integration by facilitating their language and literacy practices, highlighting their challenges as well as their intellectual and cultural resources, making those visible to the youth themselves and to various stakeholders, and opening possibilities for youth to imagine themselves as members of different communities.
This event will take place on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.