Harini Rajagopal

Dr. Harini Rajagopal

Assistant Professor

she / her / hers

Biography

வணக்கம்! I am a listener of stories and enjoy working on collaborative and creative pedagogical designs. I am grateful to live and work on the traditional, unceded, ancestral territories of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm people.

Rooted in antiracist perspectives, my work focuses on collaborating with children, families, and educators to mindfully welcome their artistic, multimodal, and multilingual stories and communicative repertoires as powerful resources within educational spaces. I listen for multiple languages, photography, arts, joy and playfulness, and pay attention to the realities of class, cultural, and systemic inequities. 

I engage with relationships and process, decolonizing and reflexive methodologies, feminist ethics of care, and use participant-friendly methods that value multiliterate and imaginative practices as resources for co-creating justice-oriented pedagogies and spaces of critical love, creativity, and hope for humans and more-than-humans.

Broadly my interests include languages and literacies in the early years, multiliteracies, family literacies, critical and culturally sustaining pedagogies, childhood studies, arts-based research, decolonizing methodologies, and teacher education.

Selected Publications

Rajagopal, H. (2025)

Remixing images, words, and ideas: Young emergent bilinguals composing remixed countertexts as a creative, relational, and decolonizing practice. Language Awareness, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2025.2546594

Rajagopal, H. and Anderson, J. (2025)

“There's nothing to read here…the newspaper is cho cá, for the fish!”: A Young Refugee-Background Child Brokering Languages, Literacies, and Cultures as a Caring Multiliterate Practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 60: e70018, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.70018

Rajagopal, H. (2024)

“Can I speak that यहाँ पे (here)?”: Emergent bilinguals navigating intersectional inequalities with relational multimodal multilingual practices in elementary school. International Multilingual Research Journal, 19 (2), 153-172. https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2024.2420158

Rajagopal, H. & Shank Lauwo, M. (2024)

Mapping literacies, mapping selves: Multimodal autobiographical storytelling, critical multilingual awareness and antiracism in teacher education. TESL Canada Journal, 41, (1), 27–53. https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v41i1/1398

Schnellert, L., Rajagopal, H., Miller, M. (2024)

“Different Spots in Their Learning Journey”: Striving to Develop Equity-Oriented Teacher Education Pedagogy. In: Burke, J., Cacciattolo, M., Toe, D. (eds) Inclusion and Social Justice in Teacher Education (pp. 317-336). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-67612-3_17

Rajagopal, H., & Kendrick, M. (2023)

Looking Closely at Words and Worlds: Emergent Bilinguals Making Meaning Through Drawing and Talking. Language Arts, 101 (2), 94-107. DOI: https://doi.org/10.58680/la202332684

Shank Lauwo, M., Accurso, K., & Rajagopal, H. (2022).

Plurilingualism, equity, and preservice teacher identity: Centring (linguistic) diversity in teacher education. TESL Canada Journal, 38(2), 114–139. https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v38i2.1359

Anderson, J., Anderson, A. & Rajagopal, H. (2017)

Promoting first language development and maintenance and capitalizing on “funds of knowledge” in family literacy programs. In N. Kucirkova C. Snow, V. Grover & C. McBride (Eds.). The Routledge International Handbook of Early Literacy Education (pp. 351-361). Routledge.

Kim, J., Friedrich, N., McLellan, S., Prendergast, T., Rajagopal, H., & Teichert, L. (2016)

Looking back, looking ahead: Reflections on the intersection of language, culture, and learning in early childhood. In. J. Anderson, A. Anderson, J. Hare, & M. McTavish (Eds.) Language, learning, and culture in early childhood: Home, school, and community contexts. (pp. 255-264). Routledge.