Meghan Corella

Dr. Meghan Corella

Assistant Professor

she / her / ella


meghan.corella@ubc.ca 604–827–1430 PCN 3129
Research and teaching areas:

Bilingual/multilingual education

Critical literacies/pedagogies

Discourse analysis

Gender, sexuality and queer inclusion

Identity

Language ideologies

Race and antiracism

Biography


I’m an applied linguist and educator who was drawn to the field of language and literacy education because I see it as having enormous and often untapped potential for helping build a more loving, thoughtful, and just society. I have a background in sociocultural linguistics, early childhood education, discourse analysis, ethnographic methods, antiracism, (intersectional) feminism, and Spanish literary and cultural studies. These specializations, along with my life experiences—particularly my own encounters with violence and my identity as a US-born White settler woman with English “native speaker” privilege—continually encourage me to place questions of power at the center of my work as a teacher and researcher. What is power? What does it mean to have—or not have—power? How do discourses about power shape the ways people position themselves and others, and how do these positionings relate to larger social structures and social (in)justices? What forms of power do we—and could we—enact through our language and literacy practices?

I address these and other questions through research on a variety of topics, including academic language practices and ideologies in elementary classrooms, children’s peer gestural socialization practices in classrooms, less visible forms of competence of multilingual kids, and experiences of racialization in school settings at all grade levels. In all of this work, my overall aim is to contribute to social justice by understanding how social structures and relations of power are reinforced and reconfigured through the agentive and nuanced ways people, particularly minoritized children, use linguistic, embodied, and other semiotic resources in interactions.

I teach courses on discourse analysis, power and politics in the practices of children and young people, applied linguistics, child language development, and language and literacy pedagogies for teachers.

If you’re a graduate student with similar questions and interests, I’m currently accepting a limited number of students who share both methodological and topical interests with me; feel free to email me with a concise description of yourself and the reasons for your interest.

Selected Publications


Corella, M. (2023)
“Talk to the hand”: Handling peer conflict through gestural socialization in an elementary classroom. Frontiers in Communication, 8https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1251128
Corella, M. (2022)
“It’s better language”: The social meanings of academic language in an elementary classroom, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 19:2, 75-96.

Kubota, R., Corella, M., Lim, K., & Sah, P. (2021)
“Your English is so good”: Lives of racialized students and instructors of a Canadian University. Ethnicities. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968211055808
Ferrada, J.S., Bucholtz, M. & Corella, M. (2020,).
“Respeta mi idioma”: Latinx youth enacting affective agency. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 19(2), 79-94.
Corella, M. & Choi, J.Y. (2018).
“He needs help”: Marking and marginalizing English learners through peer interactions. In T. Rishel & P. Chamness Miller (Eds.), Stress and Coping of English Learners. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
Corella, M. (2018).
"I Feel Like Really Racist for Laughing": White Laughter and White Public Space in a Multiracial Classroom. In M. Bucholtz, D.I. Casillas, & J.S. Lee (Eds.), Feeling It: Language, Race, and Affect in Latina/o Youth Learning. New York: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Feeling-It-Language-Race-and-Affect-in-Latinx-Youth-Learning/Bucholtz-Casillas-Lee/p/book/9781138296800
Lee, J.S., & Corella, M. (2017).
Immigrant parents’ language brokering practices: A taxonomy of interlingual and intralingual brokering strategies. In R. S. Weisskirch (Ed.), Language brokering in immigrant families: Theories and contexts (pp. 247–269). New York, NY: Routledge.

Corella Morales, M., & Lee, J.S. (2015).
Stories of assessment: Spanish–English bilingual children’s agency and interactional competence in oral language assessments. Linguistics and Education, 29, 32–45.