LLED Research Seminar: Storying the scholarly self – How do we author ourselves as academics?

Sharing snapshots of my scholarly self
Amber Moore

To explore this question about how I am authoring myself as an academic who is (re)starting to build the story of my scholarly narrative in this new faculty position, I will structure my talk by moving through my primary research interest areas. These areas include: (1) literacy education, (especially for teacher candidates, library education students, and adolescent students in English Language Arts); (2) young adult (YA) literature, analysis of youth culture, and popular media produced by/for adolescents (such as fanfiction and teen television); and (3) arts-based research, especially narrative and poetic inquiry (as well as other experimental feminist research, particularly in collaboration with others). Throughout, I will share moments from works in progress as well as forthcoming work where I endeavor to situate, share, and stretch myself so as to better navigate and negotiate academia as a feminist educator and researcher. 

Bio: Amber Moore is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in Library, Literacy, and Teacher Education in LLED, as well as a former secondary English teacher. Some of her latest scholarship can be found in Action in Teacher Education, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Feminist Review, and Research on Diversity in Youth Literature.

Journeying with you, storying our scholarly selves
Harini Rajagopal

வணக்கம்! I am excited to consider this process of authoring ourselves as academics in collaborative, decolonizing, and relational ways. Storying my scholarly self leads me to past, present, and future story journeys and I will use these to map my talk, sharing (visual) connections and directions from research interests. Some of these directions include: (1) listening to and for stories told in multilingual and multimodal ways in early years classrooms; (2) celebrating the communicative repertoires and identities of children, especially those impacted by intersectional inequities; and (3) designing culturally sustaining pedagogies with children, teachers, place, and materials and considering antiracist, anti-oppressive, feminist, and creative methodologies and methods. Through sharing these directions, my contextually negotiated positionalities, and collective processes of thinking, feeling and being, I hope to explore aspects of emergence and hope as we collaboratively author academic stories and journeys. 

Bio: Harini Rajagopal (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in LLED. Harini’s research 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. She is grateful to live and work on the traditional, unceded, ancestral territories of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm people. 

Becoming a Scholar: Enjambed Threads of My Scholarly Self
Jonathan Ferreira

Enjambement is a literary device commonly used in poetry to create a rhythmic flow and add a sense of urgency, surprise, or complexity to the language. In this presentation, I will adopt this literary device as a metaphor to multimodally represent the enjambed (as opposed to end-stopped) threads of my graduate experiences. Using digital collages, I intend to illustrate the complex and rhythmic flow of a graduate student’s scholarly self throughout time and the relationships fostered across various academic identities (e.g., graduate student, researcher, teaching assistant, lecturer, and academic imposter). Ultimately, I will discuss how the intertwined threads of my academic journey have been shaping my scholarly thinking and actions, as well as adding depth and excitement (and, at times, despair) to my ongoing process of becoming a scholar. Bio: Jonathan is a PhD candidate in Language and Literacy Education whose research focuses on expanding the multimodal means through which culturally and linguistically diverse learners can develop their language and literacies learning, critically position themselves, and sustain their cultural and linguistic identities in diverse schooling contexts. In his doctoral research in Canadian secondary classrooms, he examines how teachers and students can co-construct justice-oriented assessment practices that account for the authentic and creative ways youth interweave their identities and disciplinary knowledge in digital multimodal texts.

Framing the Many-Storied (Academic) Self
Andrea Hoff

“The truth is I need pictures, they are like islands, places to get to in a sea of words.” (Charlie Mackesy, 2019, 1)

In this talk, I aim to explore our entanglements as scholars, the ways in which we author our work and how our work authors us in return. I am interested in how we often weave what we are most passionate about into our research but also curious about the modes and maps our authoring creates. For my authoring, the visual plays a vital role in the narratives I craft and the themes that I am drawn to. So too does community, co-creation, and imagination. My work as an artist and a scholar is at times synchronistic, dialogic and at times tensions arise between the multiple selves. I will chart the networks of my own symmetries and resistance in the hopes it may offer us all an opportunity to explore, challenge, and welcome our many-storied (academic) selves.

Bio: Andy Hoff (she/her) is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and scholar. Within the media of drawing, animation, video, sound, and installation her work is situated at the intersection of narrative, technology, and ecology. Her practice works to connect with and reflect on the relationships between living systems and their environments, as well as to explore co-creation in both human and other-than-human contexts. Andrea’s PhD research employs comics-based research (CBR) as a primary way of understanding and examining young people’s feelings and attitudes about the present/future. Enriched through theories of entanglement and interdisciplinary scholarship, her research centres care, youth empowerment, and speculative design within the creation of graphic narratives set in distant and not-so-distant worlds. Andy lives and works next to the Salish Sea on the traditional, ancestral, and never-ceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) Nations. You can find more of her work at https://www.andreahoff.com.