23rd Symposium in Language Education

Literacy Development within Multicultural and Multimodal Discourses

Friday, November 11, 2011


Presented by the Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education, Indiana University

Title: Tracing Trajectories of Indigenous Literacies in the Americas

Serafin Coronel-Molina, Assistant Professor

Recent studies examined Indigenous and mestizo communities that engage in social practices of transculturated, Amerindian literacies, often to resist efforts by powerful groups to oppress them. By drawing on data from studies conducted in Peru (Salomon, 2004), Mexico (Wahrhaftig, 2006), the United States (Cowan, 2007), and transnationally, Coronel-Molina’s autoethnography (1999), we trace two trajectories of Indigenous literacies from the early modern/colonial period to the postmodern/postcolonial present. One traces the domination of alphabetic-text literacy driven by the ideology of its superiority; the other traces the coexistence of Amerindian literacies driven by the ideology of border gnoseology.

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Title: Either I’m Nobody or a Nation: Re-Conceptualizing Relation and the Di-verse through Reading, Writing, and Literacy of 21st Century Students

Erin Moira Lemrow, Ph.D. candidate

21st Century multiracial, multiethnic, and transnational students are redefining what it means to be American. In the process, they offer new ways of situating reading, writing, teaching and learning in classrooms spaces. What would happen if, instead of treating ‘diversity’ as an addition to the regular, dominant, canonical and euro-centric curriculum, it was made central? Using auto-ethnography and the feminist narrative traditions in literary studies and anthropology as well as practitioner-inquiry, I approach student narrative and multimodal work in a college skills class. My work reveals a more human, cosmopolitan, and “pervasive” (Nieto, 2010) multiculturalism.

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Title: Participation in First-Year College Writing through Networked Peer Review

Tara Kelley, Ph.D. student

While most experienced writers participate readily in peer support and critique, most developing writers struggle. Networked Peer Reviews uses networked technology to position students in Peer Review Conversations (PRCs). Students post rough draft and comments on wikis in response to carefully-worded prompts; initial self-reflection generates critique that invites commentary. Prompts are continually adapted to the discourse context to enhance “writing about writing” and productive disciplinary engagement. Analysis of class interaction, specific conversations, and student papers from the focal class are presented.

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Read the Handout >>

23rd SLED Symposium Team
  • Ying-Sin Chen (Co-Chair, 23rd SLED Organizing Committee)
  • Yi Chin Hsieh (Co-Chair, 23rd SLED Organizing Committee)
  • Hsiao-Chun Sandra Huang (Committee member)
  • Jaehan Park (Committee member)

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