LLED Research Seminar with Dr. Kathryn Accurso and Suthathip (Joy) Khamratana

What’s race gotta do with it?: Exploring an antiracist language teaching framework with K-8 teacher candidates
Dr. Kathryn Accurso

In this presentation, I explore elementary teacher candidates’ reactions to mandatory professional learning around antiracist pedagogies for English language teaching. It is still a relatively recent development that folks training to be elementary generalist teachers in North America experience any mandatory language teaching coursework. Broadly speaking, this coursework aims to support multilingual children’s development of English literacies across the curriculum. In this policy context, critical language education scholars are attempting to design coursework that supports new teachers’ ability to design language-focused curriculum and their awareness of the racialized and racializing aspects of dominating literacy practices valued in schools. One pedagogical advancement supporting these efforts in Canada and the United States is Accurso and Mizell’s (2020) framework for antiracist genre pedagogy. Drawing on elementary teacher candidates’ reflections and discussions from courses in the U.S. and Canada where antiracist genre pedagogy was part of the syllabus, I reflect on themes in understanding, uptake, and resistance to this framework. I then situate these reflections within broader conversations around the conceptualization and practice of antiracism in English language and literacies education (e.g., Baker-Bell, 2020; Inoue, 2020; Motha, 2014; Kubota, 2021).

Kathryn Accurso is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in Language in LLED where she focuses on reimagining K-12 disciplinary literacies instruction for multilingual contexts. She works with pre- and in-service teachers to recognize, affirm, and build on students’ rich language and literacy practices in disciplinary contexts and to critically reflect on their (language) ideologies and the teaching practices they lead to.

Raising Thai Teachers’ Critical Consciousness for Equity and Social Change in Literacy Education: A Research Proposal
Suthathip (Joy) Khamratana

Ethnic minority students living by the northeastern border of Thailand are likely to be disadvantaged from an upward socio-economic mobility due to their insufficient literacy skills. The linguistic capital these students bring into classrooms is incompatible with the English language and the Standardized Thai language which carry a privileged status in education in Thailand. In this sense, teachers are regarded as ‘cultural agents’ with potentials to bridge the gaps between students’ academic achievement and real-life experiences. This proposed study employs participatory action research (PAR) to investigate how two Thai elementary school teachers develop critical consciousness for creating more equitable literacy education for ethnic minority students. The proposed conceptual framework integrates the following two concepts: critical pedagogy and funds of knowledge. The developmental stages of critical consciousness proposed by Freire (2005) are also used as a tool to examine how the teachers develop and transform their critical consciousness in implementing the proposed conceptual framework into their English and Thai literacy classes. The thematic analysis of qualitative data is employed to present the findings. The PAR project aims to equip the teachers with an intellectual curiosity and a sustainable change for equity in literacy education in the Thai borderland school.

Suthathip Khamratana or Joy is a visiting PhD student from the English Language Studies Program at Thammasat University, Thailand. Her goal in joining the LLED program is to broaden her knowledge for developing her research proposal. Her area of research interests include critical pedagogy, critical applied linguistics, politics of language, and discourse analysis.

We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated within the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).