Biography
Monica Shank Lauwo is a PhD candidate in Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. She is the founder and director of Cheche Community Library, a multilingual learning centre in Northern Tanzania. As an educator, teacher educator, and researcher, she is centrally interested in ways in which language and literacy can be mobilized to disrupt inequitable systems of power, and to support antiracist, decolonial struggles. Her work in diverse contexts in Tanzania, Kenya, and Canada has explored possibilities for multilingual pedagogies that centre learners’ full linguistic, cultural, and semiotic repertoires. Her current doctoral work examines possibilities for centring linguistic diversity and antiracism in preservice teacher education.
Research
Translanguaging, multiliteracies, critical literacy, identity, language ideologies, teacher education