Graduate Course Descriptions

Instructor:
Dr. Derek Gladwin

Course Description:
How might we live, learn, and research more ecologically? This course invites researchers, educators, citizens, and leaders to explore literacy and language through an ecological lens—connecting theory, practice, and lived experience. More broadly, it encourages participants to consider what it means to be ecological in everyday practices across disciplines and contexts. Grounded in systems perspectives, complexity, and relational and affective ways of knowing and being, the course challenges dominant Western models of education and research, including individualism, reductionism, and linear thinking. Instead, it centres dynamic, interconnected approaches to how literacy and learning create meaning in our research and in our lives – exploring what being ecological might mean on a planet facing uncertain futures. Organized around action-oriented circular themes—such as Becoming, Composting, Futuring, Listening, Unsettling, and Storying—the course positions literacy as an adaptive, responsive process that can benefit all disciplines. By encouraging the unlearning of dominant systems of knowledge and cultivating relational, regenerative ways of being, the course equips students to envision and contribute to possible ecological futures rooted in connection, repair, and meaningful change.

Instructor:
Dr. Sandra Zappa-Hollman

Course Description:
This special-topics course is an introduction to language/literacy socialization, a theoretical perspective that foregrounds the role of interactionally-mediated activities in socializing newcomers into their respective new communities. Through readings, mini lectures, discussions and a series of in-class and take-home application tasks, you will gain an understanding of the theoretical foundations and methodological issues in language/literacy socialization research across a variety of formal and informal contexts (e.g., home, school, university, the workplace, virtual communities, among others). We examine how language practices connect with cultural knowledge and ideologies, including social roles, identities, and norms, across both local interactions and broader societal contexts (e.g., educational systems and institutional practices; media and pop culture; migration and diaspora experiences; gender norms and relations; language policies). By understanding these complex, unpredictable, multidirectional processes, you will gain insights useful for supporting diverse learners in educational settings and fostering inclusive language and literacy practices, as well as identify the potential relevance of language socialization research to your work. 

Instructor:
Dr. Teresa Dobson

Course Description:

This doctoral seminar examines major and emerging theories in language and literacy education research. Organized in a true seminar format, the course emphasizes collaborative inquiry, critical discussion, and student-led engagement with theoretical traditions relevant to participants’ proposed programs of study and research interests. Students will take primary responsibility for leading weekly seminars and facilitating discussion of selected theoretical frameworks and related scholarship. Formal didactic instruction will be limited, with the course prioritizing dialogue, critique, and the development of theoretically informed research perspectives. This course is restricted to first-year doctoral students in Language and Literacy Education.

Instructor:
Dr. Amber Moore

Course Description:
Students will investigate key literary theories and research studies related to literature for children and adolescents. The focus will be on the use of literary theoretical perspectives that have been used to critically analyze the literary works and to inform the teaching of literary works in schools and other learning contexts. Topics include the application of reader-response theory, semiotic perspectives, materialism/cultural studies, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theories, critical disabilities, ecocriticism, and methods of spatial analysis in the study of children’s and adolescent literature.

Instructor:
Dr. Maureen Kendrick

Course Description:
Twenty-first Century literacy practices require the ability to “read” and “write” complex texts comprised of multiple modes including linguistic, visual, audial, and gestural. Pedagogical designs must now take into consideration how a range of modalities might contribute to meaning-making alongside and interrelated with, rather than subordinate to, language. In this view, multimodal meaning-making practices in the diverse backgrounds of students must be considered for their educational potential rather than as incidental background to linguistic practices. This interest is broad-based, extends across international borders and linguistic communities. It is driven by more than three decades of research in education, in linguistics and semiotics, and in fields as diverse as internet and communication studies and has led those within the field of language and literacy education to rethink how meaning is made in contemporary classrooms and the world beyond.

Topics for this seminar include: literacy and multimodality as social practices; perspectives from New Literacy Studies, multiliteracies, and new literacies; multimodal storytelling; gaming and multimodal learning; rethinking “the basics” in literacy education; multimodality and “funds of knowledge”; multimodality, multilingualism, identity texts, and pedagogical practices; multimodality and ethnography; and visual interpretation and analysis.

Instructor:
Dr. Ron Darvin

Course Description:  
Recognizing generative AI (GenAI) as a disruptive technology that reshapes language and literacy practices, this course explores how issues of identity, authorship, and voice emerge as L2 learners negotiate the affordances and constraints of these tools and engage in interactive co-construction with GenAI. Drawing on theories of sociomateriality, it examines how power operates in human-AI interactions, and how agency is distributed across the entanglements of bodies, artifacts, and discourse.  While GenAI tools can scaffold language production, they can also encode ideologies of race, gender, and social class, reinscribe standard language norms, and reproduce global hierarchies of knowledge. As a black box that operates through a statistical model of language, GenAI conceals how information is generated and distributed, and how users are algorithmically classified, positioning learners in often invisible ways. In the economy of big data, the marginalization of low-resource languages contributes to the erasure of minoritized ways of knowing, and the homogenization of voice in generated texts. By investigating the material, discursive and ideological dimensions of GenAI, this course casts a light on how this technology enables or constrains learning, reshapes authorial identity, and produces new modes of exclusion. As L2 teachers and learners negotiate diverse dispositions towards these tools, this course underscores the need for critical digital literacies that resist the outsourcing of thinking, foster iterative and counterdiscursive prompting, and interrogate how GenAI can amplify or constrain learner agency. It examines how GenAI tools can be used agentively and reflexively, in ways that challenge epistemic injustice and contribute to the decolonization of GenAItechnologies and L2 education. 

Instructor:
Dr. Marika Kunnas

Course Description:  
This course explores contemporary issues related to race, racialization, racism, antiracism, decolonization, and anticolonialism in additional language education. The central questions of the course are: i) How do processes of racialization and colonialism manifest in language education in contemporary times? ii) How are antiracism, anticolonialism, and decolonization being taken up in additionallanguage education? In this course, we will explore the theoretical foundations of critical race theory and decolonization. This will include learning about and questioning race, racism, antiracism, raciolinguistics, critical language, and race theory, intersectionality, (settler) colonialism, decolonization, anticolonialism, and how these theories relate to additional language education. Beyond theory, we will explore how these critical approaches to language education are being taken up in language research looking at additional language education in a North American and global context (e.g., French/English/Spanish, etc. as an additional language). We will briefly consider the connections between Indigenous language revitalization, official language policies, and official bilingualism in Canada.  

Instructor:
Dr. Joe Dupris

Course Description:
This course surveys historical and contemporary theories of language with particular focus on race, nation, and peoplehood throughout the expansion of western civilization from the ancient Mediterranean to the Pacific Northwest. Students will examine how science, religion, and law have contributed the establishment and reproduction of overarching categories such as “Indian” and “Indigenous” using cultural practices like language and literacy as metrics of racial difference. By the end of the course students will locate themselves in the processes of Indigenous, non-dominant, or other social movements that rely on language as a foundational category. 

Instructor:
Dr. Melissa R. Hunte

Course Description:
Researchers are increasingly recognizing that nuanced and complex human phenomena are best examined through the deliberate integration of diverse paradigmatic lenses, methodologies, data collection, and analytic methods. Mixed methods research offers a flexible yet systematic approach to understanding and addressing such complexities. 

This course introduces mixed methods research to graduate students who anticipate designing or critically evaluating studies that integrate qualitative and quantitative approaches. The course will focus on the philosophical foundations and core mixed methods designs used to address complex research problems in applied and theoretical contexts. It will also examine the logics that connect research problems, purposes, and questions to design choices. By the end of the course, students will be able to critically evaluate published mixed methods research and design a feasible and defensible mixed methods proposal to support their emerging areas of inquiry. 

Instructor:
Dr. Ron Darvin

Course Description:
This course undertakes a critical inquiry into the theories and research that shape the teaching of English as a second or additional language (TESL). It unpacks the politics of English, language ideologies and methods, and advances postmethod perspectives that foreground teacher agency and equity. We examine how curriculum design, assessment and classroom discourse can index or challenge issues of power, coloniality, and globalization. Building on identity, translanguaging, and multimodality, we analyze how multilingual learners mobilize diverse repertoires across online and offline spaces, and how digital tools including generative AI reconfigure participation, investment, and relations of power in classrooms and beyond. Through cases from diverse educational settings, we evaluate how specialized domains like communicative language teaching (CLT), task-based language teaching (TBLT), content and language integrated learning (CLIL), and English for Specific/Academic Purposes (ESP/EAP) negotiate form, meaning, and use. We foreground decolonizing and antiracist pedagogies, and the role of teachers in developing not only communicative competence but also a critical awareness of English as a language of power and inequality.

Instructor:
Dr. Steven Talmy

Course Description:
This doctoral seminar examines issues related to qualitative research methodology in language and literacy education. It provides an in-depth analysis of the theoretical foundations of qualitative research methodology and current issues relevant to conducting research independently and collaboratively. The course provides doctoral students with a strong foundation for assessing others’ research as well as practical models and options for designing, undertaking, interpreting, and writing/representing findings in language and literacy education.

Instructors:
Drs. Sam McCready and Jen Jenson

Course Description:
Note: 5 seats are reserved for LLED students
Hybrid: Online (July 2-20); In person: July 20-24, 2027

Intelligence has always been an artificial construct, and no more so than when being used to refer to what is now broadly defined and organized as “artificial intelligence” (AI). First coined by John McCarthy in the 1950s, AI refers to a machine or algorithm that simulates human intelligence. Machines can, sort of, mimic human intelligence, but not without a whole lot of human input (think meta and training data). In fact, so much human input is used in these “artificially intelligent” systems that Kate Crawford convincingly argues such systems are “neither artificial nor intelligent,” and comments extensively on wider social structures and systems of power that are in flux as AI encroaches upon and disrupts existing political, economic, social, and educational frameworks (Crawford, 2021).

In 2025, few people in industrialized nations will not have heard of generative AI (Gen AI) and its uses for creating content (Chat GPT, Co-Pilot, Gemini, images [Dalle-E], and music [AVIA], for example). In this course, we will explore Gen AI from the form it is in as of June/July 2025: its application/s, uses, biases, and blind spots. Taking an exploratory approach, we will examine how GenAI is used in our everyday realities, whether at home, school, or work, with a view to understanding the affordances and limitations of GenAI for learning and teaching. GenAI is already coming to dominate information and media spaces – our task is to understand what this means now and in the near future.

Positive visions of AI futures for education (or automation, or institutional efficiency) that are often uncritical are at this point well-rehearsed and offer little in the way of a point of entry aimed at better understanding what GenAI does, what it costs, and why it matters. In this course, we will take a critical view, examining the sustainability of AI, including the costs to power a single search, the resources it takes to maintain AI, as well as the human costs of “training” GenAI. Readings will include general and politically nuanced accounts of “AI”, as well as specific readings on its use/s in education, medicine, and business. Students will be invited to explore potential applications, challenges and ethical considerations of using Gen AI in educational contexts, as well as the wider technological, ethical, social, and political implications of Gen AI use.