Elementary School Language and Literacy Education for Civic Engagement: An Evolving Playbook for Postmodern Times

• Main Author: Heather Lotherington
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada 2017-08-01
• Series: Language and Literacy: A Canadian Educational e-journal
• Subjects: elementary literacy; ludic learning; multimodality; pluralingualism; problem-based learning; superdiversity
• Online Access: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/langandlit/index.php/langandlit/article/view/29348

This paper argues for the need to postmodernize literacy education for civic engagement in an emerging new world order where humans are globally-connected in an invisible digital dimension, yet physically dispersed in greater degrees of complexity. The paper summarizes a university-school collaborative learning community’s evolving playbook on experimental multimodal and plurilingual language and literacy education, and illustrates project-based learning, inclusion of children’s linguistic and cultural knowledge in classroom learning, immersive ludic activities, collaborative problem-solving, and agentive participation in an elementary school classroom project.