Empowering Language Learners in a Changing World through Pedagogies of Multiliteracies

“Vander Tavares has done it again! Taking a social justice perspective in language education, Tavares and the authors advance linguistic justice reforms through critically reflecting on how pedagogies of multiliteracies can empower language learners, teachers, and teacher educators in the unequal world of late modernity.”

-Sender Dovchin, Professor, Curtin University, Australia

“This book is an important and timely contribution to the field of language education, particularly in relation to empowering pedagogies of multiliteracies. It will be a useful and helpful resource for language educators, students, and those interested in language-related learning and teaching more broadly."

-Paul Meighan, McGill University, Canada

This book presents conceptual and empirical studies on how pedagogies of multiliteracies can empower language learners, teachers, and teacher educators in an increasingly globalized yet unequal world, with a focus on social justice in language education. The chapters offer critical and innovative pedagogical insights that contribute to re-envisioning language and literacy education in the 21st century in a number of educational contexts, including post-secondary, community, refugee, science, language, and teacher education. From a raciolinguistic critique of monoglossic education in the United States to drama-based pedagogies for refugee learners in Iceland, this book contextualizes language learner empowerment by identifying and confronting ideologies of race, gender, nationality, and language. Creative multimodal and multisensorial pedagogies are enacted through learner-designed plurilingual portfolios, infographics, picturebooks, identity texts, performance, and museum-based learning. This book diversifies and enriches current approaches to language education based on pedagogies of multiliteracies that cultivate learner agency, identity, and critical reflection, and it will be of interest to readers with backgrounds in second/foreign language education, TESOL/ESL, sociology of education, and applied linguistics.

Vander Tavares is an Associate Professor at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. He focuses on language and teacher education, and internationalization of higher education. He is the co-editor of Language Teacher Identity: Confronting Ideologies of Language, Race, and Ethnicity and Critical and Creative Engagements with Diversity in Nordic Education.