Amélie Lemieux, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Education, in the department of didactics (teaching and learning). She completed a SSHRC Bombardier-funded PhD in Literacy and Education at McGill University and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brock University’s Centre for Research in Multiliteracies. Her research interests include: reading research, literature teaching, and multimodality, all informed by phenomenological and posthumanist perspectives. A bronze Lieutenant-Governor’s Medal Recipient of Quebec for youth, she received SSHRC and FRQSC funding to investigate adolescents’ digital literacy practices and meaning-making processes.
She authored and co-authored two research books and her research has been published in such journals as Literacy, the Journal of Literacy Research, Professional Development in Education, Discourse, Studies in the Education of Adults.
Session Description
Policymakers and provincial governments have a responsibility to prioritise equitable, diverse, inclusive, and accessible (EDIA) approaches that leverage both intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991, 2021) and transdisciplinarity in literacies research. Supported by a federally-funded knowledge synthesis grant that surveyed the scope of EDIA in Canadian schools, this article focuses on youth marginalisation to address literacies learning. The authors address five concepts from a three-phase literature review to examine inclusive practices that respect, acknowledge and address EDIA in K-12 education. Across reviewed studies, there is an underlying trajectory outlining methodological challenges in implementing EDIA practices. We advance anti-racist and abolitionist approaches by addressing five areas: 1) making learning more accessible by adopting culturally-responsive pedagogy informed by local cultures, languages, and values, 2) pursuing sustainable professional development in culturally-inclusive teaching practices, 3) creating safer school environments that nurture community-driven relationships between parents, students and their teachers, 4) reforming educational policies to concretely address structural racism, discrimination, and misrepresentation of socially marginalized students by disrupting what is conceptualised and accepted as ideal culturally-responsive pedagogy, and 5) prioritising community perspectives and input curriculum decisions to support underrepresented students. Ultimately, this article echoes this issue’s orientations as it explores transdisciplinary practices composing an evolving understanding of literacies.