KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young (Vay) is a distinguished scholar, Professor, and Director of Black Studies at the University of Waterloo, where he specializes in the intersections of English language and writing, especially sociolinguistics, race and diversity, and communication arts. Dr. Vay’s ground-breaking work on code-meshing and his advocacy for linguistic inclusivity align with the project objectives to develop justice focused frameworks. His keynote will advance the understanding and practices in teaching multilingual learners, aligning with our commitment to fostering an inclusive academic community.
The Importance of Code Meshing and Translingualism: Teaching and Assessing Academic Writing Through the Lens of Multiculturalism
Dr. Vay advocates for the integration of home, heritage, native speech patterns, vernacular languages, and dialects with Standard Academic English, as used in educational and professional settings. The presentation will delve into the theoretical and practical aspects of code-meshing, exploring how this approach can be effectively implemented in first-year academic writing curricula to support the academic success and cultural integration of multilingual students. By addressing the challenges and strategies to advocate for linguistic justice within higher education to foster an inclusive environment for all students, he will consider the implications for teaching and impact of large language models on writing instruction.
Speakers
Dr. Anwar Ahmed
Assistant Professor
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Writing Pedagogy in the Age of AI: Centering Linguistic Citizenship
In his presentation, Dr. Ahmed explored how the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in writing practices challenges pedagogical approaches that frame writing as a critical and relational activity. He argued that AI risks eroding writer–reader relationships, diminishing emotional engagement with texts, weakening writing’s role in relational thinking, and commodifying it by turning it into a disembodied tool of communication. In response, he advocated for a renewed vision of writing pedagogy grounded in the concept of linguistic citizenship, which views language as essential to civic participation and living with difference. Dr. Ahmed proposed reconceptualizing writing as a gift that fosters reciprocity, community, and ethical engagement. Drawing from literature on critical writing pedagogy, Indigenous knowledge, gift economies, and affect theory, he called for practices that resist AI’s artificiality and nurture embodied and relational approaches to writing. Ultimately, this session reframed writing as a dialogic social practice that sustains linguistic citizenship.
Dr. Laura Allen
Assistant Professor
York University
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Reviving Family Literacies: The Role of Kinship in Supporting Scholarly Voice for Multilingual Writers
From family group chats to cultural events in online and offline spaces, multilingual students are already skilled in navigating the rhetorical situations in their communities. Drawing from personal, cultural, and linguistic histories, family literacies offer a ripe foundation for students to navigate the complexities of academic and scholarly writing, particularly in multilingual classrooms. This presentation will discuss pedagogical approaches that invite students to strategically integrate their familial language practices as valid tenets of academic discourse, and not as a means to an end. The goal is to help scholars and educators support multilingual writers as they embrace their unique voices while contributing to scholarly communities.
Dr. Mark Blaauw-Hara
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
University of Toronto, Mississauga
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Integrating Home Languages and Cultures of Students into University Writing and Rhetoric Courses
At least since Ladson-Billings (1995) advanced the concept of culturally relevant pedagogy, educators have sought ways to help students connect their linguistic and cultural identities to coursework. Writing-studies scholars have also explored how multilingual writers draw from multiple languages to compose, even when their final project is in one language (Liu & Chen, 2024; McBride & Jiménez, 2021; Payant, 2020). This presentation will provide models for how writing and rhetoric coursework can encourage multilingual students to apply the theories presented in English-speaking university courses to understand communities, movements, and public figures more critically in their home cultures and languages. Examples will be drawn from first- and second-year academic writing courses as well as a course on protest rhetoric.
Dr. Kerrie Charnley
Assistant Professor of Teaching
University of British Columbia, Okanagan
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Pedagogical and Theoretical Innovations in Teaching Courses for Multilingual Indigenous Students through a Land-Based and Student-Centred Approach
I highlight pedagogical and theoretical innovations in first year writing and literacy education for multilingual Indigenous students through Land (tmixʷ) and strengths-based and student-centred approaches. Indigenous students come from a diversity of communities, whether urban, rural or remote. Indigenous students’ funds of knowledge reflect their cultural and linguistic diversities. I focus on a student cohort in Access Studies and a cohort in the University of British Columbia Okanagan’s four new Salishan language fluency degrees. My pedagogical approach recognizes the interconnection of Land (tmixʷ) and language. Western academic writing forms are challenged to include Indigenous Peoples’ ways of communicating knowledge beyond the written text: Oral Tradition, Land as a source of knowledge and Indigenous Peoples’ forms of site/citation. Students retain and extend identities and belonging to include the academy. Further, I share the ethical framework and process of creating a locally situated, Land-based Indigenous and Salishan writing and pedagogy guide.
Dr. Bong-gi Sohn
Instructor
University of Winnipeg
Pedro dos Santos
Instructor
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
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Voices of Change: Insights from Non-White Faculty in Canadian Higher Education
Recent raciolinguistic critique (Rosa & Flores, 2017) acknowledges that academic literacies continue to force plurilingual and pluricultural students into a white subject position. To challenge an academic writing tradition constructed by the white listening subject (Inoue, 2003), we co-created duoethnographic narratives (Norris & Sawyer, 2012) that explore how we have navigated various affordances and challenges in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment for teaching academic writing to first-year university students. These narratives also provide insight into our complex biographical journeys as racialized faculty in Canadian universities. Our stories illustrate how teaching academic writing involves constant negotiation between students’ and teachers’ lived experiences to make teaching and learning meaningful. By making the teaching and learning process more pluralistic and diverse, while still providing students access to the dominant norms and discourses (Janks, 2004), we conceive of teaching academic literacies as both an ideological construct and a multisemiotic process that involve multiple histories and meaning-making resources.
Dr. Jérémie Séror
Professor
University of Ottawa
Dr. Guillaume Gentil
Professor
Carleton University
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Supporting Crosslingual Reading and Writing in First-Year Composition Courses
Plurilingual writers, particularly francophone writers in English dominant contexts, must commonly juggle reading and writing across two languages, for example, reading in English but writing in French and then reversing languages. Such crosslingual practices can pose unique challenges for which plurilingual writers are unprepared and which are often overlooked in first-year writing courses. Drawing on SSHRC-funded research data on academic pluriliteracy development, including video recordings of plurilingual writers engaged in crosslingual writing practices, this presentation will identify strategies, resources, and best practices for supporting crosslingual reading and writing in first-year composition courses in the age of AI-mediated communication.
Dr. Sara Humphreys
Associate Teaching Professor
University of Victoria
Dr. Loren Gaudet
Associate Teaching Professor
University of Victoria
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Duck and Swerve: Implementing Inclusive Writing Instruction in a Context of Precarity
In order for undergraduate and graduate students, particularly those from historically excluded groups, to be heard and respected, postsecondary institutions must not only embrace but also resource effective and inclusive forms of academic writing support (Hillocks, 1984; Warner, 2018; Watson, 2018). As Clary-Lemon (2009) and Phelps (2014) note, academic literacy courses in Canada are often defined as “service courses,” and postsecondary institutions typically treat this work as less important than research or teaching in degree programs. This bias often leads to writing courses and writing centres being staffed by precarious workers who receive little training, poor compensation, and punishing workloads (Schell and Stock, 2001; Khan, 2020; Darroch et al, 2019). Our presentation will draw on the cross-sectoral, cross-labour data we gathered from our SSHRC funded project, which highlights how writing support staff, instructors, and administrators have resourced wise and inclusive writing instruction while navigating potentially tenuous institutional support.
Dr. Angelica Galante
Associate Professor
McGill University
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Challenging Linguistic Discrimination in Higher Education: Students’ Bottom-up Strategies for Achieving Linguistic Justice
Despite growing commitments to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives in Canadian higher education (HE), linguistic discrimination remains an under-examined issue. Plurilingual students continue to face significant challenges, including mental health concerns, suicidal ideation, linguistic oppression, and difficulties navigating institutional environments that privilege English monolingual and monocultural norms. This presentation will report findings from an ongoing research project that seeks to advance linguistic justice in HE. It will examine the lived experiences of plurilingual students who encounter linguistic discrimination and explore the bottom-up strategies these students employ to resist and overcome such barriers. The presentation will outline critical actions for HE administrators, staff, and faculty aimed at fostering linguistic justice, advocating for the equitable treatment and recognition of all languages within academic institutions.
Dr. Xiangying Huo
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
University of Toronto, Scarborough
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Celebrating Pluralism and Enacting Linguistic Justice: Antiracist and Decolonial Writing Pedagogies
The deficiency models based on standard English have othered multilingual students leading to linguicism which perpetuates inequality in postsecondary writing classrooms. Laurence (1992) regards “pedagogy as scholarship as struggle” (p. 2231). When race and pedagogy intersect, language teaching is “in dire need of an explicit exploration of race” (Lin, 2006, p. 472) and there is a paucity of research into race and language (e.g., writing) teaching (Kubota, 2016). Employing Critical Race Theory and the raciolinguistic perspective, the presenter explores intersectionality between language and race, and between race and pedagogy, as well as examining seven antiracist and decolonial pedagogies to dismantle hegemonic standard English in writing instruction. These pedagogies, by treating multilingual students’ languages as resources, have dramatically improved learner confidence, critical thinking skills, developed agency, identity, voice, a sense of belonging, and inclusive transformation to combat racism and colonialism to celebrate pluralism and enact linguistic justice as well as social justice.
Jennifer Walsh Marr
Lecturer
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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The “Real Work”: Making University Discourses Accessible
Long seen as a purely pragmatic training ground (Ding & Bruce, 2017; & Hyland & Shaw, 2016) for the “real work” of the academy (Murie & Fitzpatrick, 2009, p. 166), English for Academic Purposes occupies a ‘third space’ in the academy (MacDonald, 2016) with the potential to critically engage with far more than standardized language proficiencies might suggest. This presentation troubles some of the assumptions made in the deficit framing of multilingual international students as well as of the elusive “idealized student” (Leung et al., 1997; Wong & Chiu, 2021). Paralleling principles in Freire’s Critical Pedagogy (1968), I will share strategies and exemplars of making implicit aspects of university discourses more accessible to enhance “non-traditional” (Klinger & Murray, 2012) students’ academic literacies (Lea & Street, 1998). Recognizing that everyone is a novice when encountering new disciplinary discourses (Wingate & Tribble, 2012), my goal is to help students “read their courses” (Johns, 2019), make language visible (Bond, 2020), and help faculty recognize “what people do have and can do with language” (Walsh Marr, 2024, p. 218).
Dr. Christin Wright-Taylor
Manager, Writing Services
Wilfrid Laurier University
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Creating a Translingual Academic Writing Bank for Graduate and Undergraduate Students
The presentation establishes the context of translingual scholarship in a Canadian higher education institution. It establishes the exigency of creating a student-facing resource on Translingual Academic Writing (TAW) by narrating the process by which the TAW statement was written, how the TAW texts were gathered, and the strategies used to adapt the previously utilised content to fit the norms and conventions of “web writing” for a public-facing landing page. The project used Google Analytics to report on the usage rates of the TAW bank, tracking what parts of the web resource were used most, how long users stayed on page, and where users came from. This presentation reflects on the efficacy of the TAW bank and if it achieved the project goals and objectives. The discussion will conclude with an action plan that outlines further development and resourcing of the bank.