Intérêts de recherche :
multilingual and plurilingual education;
multimodal literacies;
digital literacies;
innovative pedagogies
Éducation bilingue/multilingue et en langue minoritaire :
- Éducation multilingue
- Language and literacy education in multicultural societies
- Language policy issues
- Epistemologies and pedagogies
Language and technology:
- Digitalisation et usage langagier en milieu multiculturel
- Digital literacies
Second language acquisition (SLA) and pedagogy:
- Multiple language acquisition, maintenance, shift
- Multilitéracies
Research projects Active research grants: SSHRC small research grant 2014: Lifelogging new communication practices: A pilot project (Heather Lotherington, $1,000.)
2013: Posthuman Literacies: Exploring the Cognitive, Cultural and Social Upload and Download of Reading and Writing the Digital World (Karen Krasny & Heather Lotherington, $1500.) York University, Faculty of Education, Minor Research and Development Grant 2014: Lifelogging new communication practices: An international pilot project (Heather Lotherington, $1,000.)
Recently completed research grants Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) 2008-2012 Heather Lotherington, principal researcher; Jennifer Jenson, co-applicant Researching new literacies in the multicultural classroom: Developing a ludic approach to linguistic challenges in elementary education. York University ($125,788) SSHRC small research grant 2011: How does Twitter create community? Mapping discourse in a research community through Tweets ($1,000.) 2008-2012 Heather Lotherington, Principal Researcher; Jennifer Jenson, Co-applicant; Jim Cummins, Cheryl Paige, Collaborators Researching new literacies in the multicultural classroom: Developing a ludic approach to linguistic challenges in elementary education. York University ($125,788) 2013 SSHRC small research grant, York University: Posthuman Literacies: Exploring the Cognitive, Cultural and Social Upload and Download of Reading and Writing the Digital World (Karen Krasny & Heather Lotherington, $1500.) 2011 SSHRC small research grant, York University: How does Twitter create community? Mapping discourse in a research community through Tweets ($1,000.)
awards: Selected as People for Education’s inaugural Researcher of the Month, January-May 2012: http://www.peopleforeducation.ca/research/ask-a-researcher/ January/13-April/13 Visiting Professor Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication Department of Education and Professional Studies School of Social Science and Public Policy King’s College, University of London Researching new literacies in the multicultural classroom: Developing a ludic approach to linguistic challenges in elementary education Emergent Multiliteracies in theory and practice: Multiculural literacy development at elementary school A study of classroom use of educational games and simulations for literacy skills development: Qualitative substudy Senior Scholars’ Seminar on Digital Literacies Revising the EQAO: An exploration of contemporary teenagers’ digital literacies. Learning to read Chinese Gifted bilingual writers: An exploration of children’s home language practicesRewriting Goldilocks: Emergent transliteracies
Publications: 2013, June. When bilingualism goes bad: Countering misrepresentations of social multilingualism with a research-based model for the linguistically welcoming classroom. Paper to be presented at Language and Super-diversity: Explorations and interrogations, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. 2013, May. Lotherington, H., O’Meara, M.P., Jensen, K.E. How to build your own world: Creating community on Twitter. Paper to be presented at Social media: Implications for the university. York University, Toronto, Canada. 2013, April. Getting your name in academic print: How, where, why. Invited workshop at 12th annual Graduate Students in Education Conference: Inclusion Insights, York University, Toronto. 2013, March. Researching language-in- education: Policy and practice. Invited panel discussant at Responding to contemporary multilingual realities, recasting research methodologies, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. 2013, February. . Literacy, mediation, and complexity. Paper presented at the Research Workshop on Language and Literacy, King’s College, London. http://www.academia.edu/3056297/Literacy_mediation_and_complexity 2013. Lotherington, H., Paige, C., & Holland-Spencer, M. Using a professional learning community to support multimodal literacies. What works? Research into Practice. Toronto: Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat. (monograph) 2012. Lotherington, H., & Sinitskaya Ronda, N. Revisiting communicative competence in the multimedia ELT classroom. In Jia Li & N. Edwards (Eds.) Video digital media in the TESOL classroom (pp. 9-32). TESOL. 2012. Lotherington, H. & Sinitskaya Ronda, N. Classroom multiliteracies: Uncharted challenges in language assessment. In C. Leung & B.V. Street (Eds.), English – a changing medium for education (pp. 104-128). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 2012, November. Krasny, K. & Lotherington, H. Posthuman literacies: A theoretical investigation into the cognitive, cultural and social effects of reading and writing the world in a digital age. Paper presented at the Literacy Research Association 62nd Annual Conference, San Diego, CA. 2012, August. The world in our classrooms: Using language diversity as possibility in the urban classroom. Paper accepted on invitation for presentation at Sociolinguistics Symposium 19, Berlin. 2012, May. Lotherington, H., & Saint-Onge, K. Language as sanctuary: A life unequally narrated. Paper to be presented at Narrative Matters, American University of Paris. 2011. Lotherington, H. Pedagogy of multiliteracies: Rewriting Goldilocks. New York, NY: Routledge. 2011. Digital Narratives, cultural inclusion and educational possibility: Going new places with old stories in elementary school (pp. 254-276). In R. Page & B. Thomas (Eds.), New narratives: Stories and storytelling in the digital age. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 2011. Lotherington, H. & Jenson, J. Teaching multimodal and digital literacy in L2 settings: New literacies, new basics, new pedagogies. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 31 (226-246). 2011. Fisher, S., Jenson, J., Lindo, L.M. & Lotherington, H. Thinking through Design: Indirect Professional Development. In M. Koehler & P. Mishra (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2011 (pp. 2439-2444). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
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Researching new literacies in the multicultural classroom: Developing a ludic approach to linguistic challenges in elementary education
Principal Investigator: Heather Lotherington, Faculty of Education
Co-researcher: Jennifer Jenson, Faculty of Education
Collaborators: Cheryl Paige, Joyce Public School; Jim Cummins, OISE/University of Toronto.
Funding Agency: Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research Grant
Duration of project: 2008-2011
Description: This project asks and answers: “How can we teach socially responsive, immersive literacies in the contemporary multicultural, multilingual classroom?” The study dynamically reconceptualizes literacy as agentive, culturally and linguistically embedded, digitally playful, and socially and academically empowering for children in elementary school. Our pedagogical interventions draw on new possibilities for the construction of knowledge in a digitized word: blogging, remixing, social networking, podcasting, videocasting, vlogging, gaming, each a site of active multiliterate production for a potentially global audience, through which Canadians now and in the future will participate in a global “knowledge economy”. The project collaboratively creates the practical means to redesign emergent literacy instruction for teachers, inform policy makers and contribute to theory. The learning community formed in this project creates and documents a pedagogical process to co-develop innovative new literacies pedagogies that engage and inspire contemporary children through immersive, playful digital approaches that include rather than exclude their community-based linguistic, cultural and social knowledge, as constructed both locally and digitally. The project utilizes exploratory guided action research to focus on collaboratively building new literacies pedagogies in the context of the classroom, accommodating curricular imperatives, children’s social literacies, and the particular interests of teachers while stretching their participation in multiliterate production. By capitalizing on innovative digital possibilities for immersive learning, we address the complex urban reality of the linguistically heterogeneous classroom, which, in Ontario, has been increasingly pushed towards conservative monoliterate practices by curricular pressures and testing influences.
Emergent Multiliteracies in theory and practice: Multiculural literacy development at elementary school
Principal Investigator: Heather Lotherington, Faculty of Education
Collaborators: Cheryl Paige; Sandra Chow, Joyce Public School
Funding Agency: Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research Grant
Duration of project: 2005-2008
Description: Emergent Multiliteracies in Theory and Practice extends the collaborative research conducted at the school given the pseudonym Main Street School~ In Rewriting Goldilocks. This study, funded by SSHRC, will extend our teaching, creating and documenting elementary school children’s rewriting of traditional stories into narratives that include cultural reinterpretations and multilingual versions in ever-experimental digital shapes. More detailed information on the above-summarized research project can befound on the following web page : www.yorku.ca/heatherl
Publications: Lotherington, H. (in press). Learning narratives through a multiliteracies approach: Radically rewritten traditional tales at Joyce Public School. In D. Booth, C. Jupiter & S. Stagg Peterson (Eds.) A place for children’s literature in new literacies classrooms. Portage and Main. Lotherington, H. (in press). Digital Narratives, cultural inclusion and educational possibility: Going new places with old stories in elementary school. In R. Page & B. Thomas (Eds.), New narratives: Theory and practice. University of Nebraska Press. Lotherington, H. (2008). Digital epistemologies and classroom multiliteracies. In T. Hansson (Ed.) Handbook of digital information technologies: Innovations and ethical issues (pp. 263-282). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Lotherington, H., Sotoudeh, S., Holland, M. & Zentena, M. (2008). Teaching emergent multiliteracies at Joyce Public School: Three narratives of multilingual story-telling in the primary grades. Canadian Modern Language Review, 65 (1), 125-145. Lotherington, H. (2007). Rewriting traditional tales as multilingual narratives at elementary school: Problems and progress. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 10 (2), 241-256.
study of classroom use of educational games and simulations for literacy skills development: Qualitative substudy
Principal Investigator: Ron Owston, Director, Institute for Research on Learning Technologies, York University.
Principal Investigator of substudy, and collaborating researcher: Heather Lotherington, Faculty of Education;
Researcher, substudy and collaborating researcher: Natalia Sinitskaya, PhD candidate, Faculty of Education, York University
Funding Agency: Canadian Council on Learning Duration of project: 2006-2008 Description: As a component of the study on educational game development as a learning activity for advancing student literacy, a qualitative sub study was conducted in order to collect more nuanced, context-rich information. The game development process was studied in depth in two experimental grade four classes through direct observation and student and teacher consultation. The children at both sites created four board games in digital format using a game shell accessed online for Tic-tac-toe, Trivial Pursuit, Snakes and Ladders, and Mother Goose. Though both schools were relatively new and had good technological resources, computer equipment was approached, accessed and utilized quite differently in each class which, in turn affected pedagogical practices and learning experiences.
Publications: Lotherington, H. & Sinitskaya, N. (2007). A Study of Classroom Use of Educational Games and Simulations for Literacy Skills Development: A qualitative sub-study of two schools. Institute for Research on Learning Technologies, Technical Report 2007-4. Lotherington, H. & Sinitskaya Ronda, N. (submitted). Gaming geography: Educational games and literacy development in the grade 4 classroom. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology.
Senior Scholars’ Seminar on Digital Literacies
Principal Investigator: Heather Lotherington, Faculty of Education
Collaborator: Natalia Sinitskaya Ronda, PhD candidate, Faculty of Education, York University
Funding Agency: Seed grant, VP, Research, York University Duration of project: 2007 Description: Linguistic, social, cultural, and aesthetic norms and practices have been rapidly expanded, created and reinvented in digital spaces. The dizzying expansion of digital technologies and network interconnectivity has changed what, how, where, when, and why we communicate. It changes what is considered writing or art or chat or literature. It changes participatory possibilities and communicative roles. It changes the concept of authority, access to information, research possibilities, political participation, voice. From the legal boundaries of who owns what words in cyberspace to recognizing new orthographies, new identities, new contexts for learning, new participatory possibilities, and new poetics, we are all struggling to come to grips with the dimensions of cyberspace communications. This is the seminar topic that engaged a multidisciplinary group of scholars with vested research, pedagogical and performance interests in digital communications in a hybridized face-to-face and password-protected blog discussion over the course of 2007 for this project.
Publications: Lotherington, H. (Ed.) (submitted). Digilit@York. E-learning. Lotherington, H. (submitted). Glocalization, representation and literacy education. E-Learning.
Revising the EQAO: An exploration of contemporary teenagers’ digital literacies. Principal Investigator: Heather Lotherington, Faculty of Education
Collaborators: Deanna Neville-Verardi (Holy Trinity High School) and Natalia Sinitskaya (PhD candidate, Faculty of Education, York University)
Funding Agency: Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Minor Research Grant
Duration of project: 2007
Description: In political trends towards accountability in language and literacy education across North America, exemplified in such government institutions as the Educational quality and accountability office (EQAO/OQRE, 2006) in the province of Ontario, standardized and pseudo-standardized test mechanisms are mandated to assess literacy attainment. Our project explores and overviews the digital literacies of teenagers in the greater Toronto area (GTA), including students at high school, and young adults at university, as well as Ontario resident members of the digital community, Facebook. We will investigate the popularity of contemporary technological platforms that create a cultural base for participatory digital culture that brings together young people, such as wikis, interactive videogames, video logging (e.g., YouTube) and participatory spaces such as MySpace and Facebook, solicit teenagers’ impressions of the EQAO test they wrote and invite them to help us reconstruct updated test questions in tune with their present practices.
Publications: Lotherington, H., Neville-Verardi, D., & Sinitskaya, N. (in press). English in cyberspace: Negotiating hypertext literacies. In L.B. Abraham & L. Williams (Eds.) Electronic discourses for language learning and teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Learning to read Chinese
Principal Investigator: Heather Lotherington, Faculty of Education
Collaborator: Fang Duan, York University
Funding Agency: York University Specific Research Grant
Duration of project: 2006-2007 Description: For a number of years I have created small projects to study myself as a language learner in differing situations, including: immersion majority language contexts and second or foreign language minority contexts; class-based learning and individual tutoring; course-driven and topic-driven study. The Chinese literacy learning experience is a collaborative endeavour to document the teacher’s and learner’s contrapuntal journeys through the learning adventure of Chinese literacy in the FL context of Toronto. Publications: Lotherington, H. (2007). Diary of an edu-tourist in Costa Rica: An autoethnographical account of learning Spanish. TESL Canada Journal, 24 (2), 109-131.
Gifted bilingual writers: An exploration of children’s home language practices Principal Investigator: Heather Lotherington, Faculty of Education
Co-Investigator: Allyson Eamer Funding Agency: Faculty of Education Minor Research and Development Grant
Duration of project: 2005
Description: This case study, co-researched by Heather Lotherington and Allyson Eamer, investigates the language worlds of a small group of gifted 10-year old bilingual and multilingual children – all first or second generation Canadians – who collaboratively coauthored an extraordinary book of fiction in English. Our study investigates their home language practices to trace their patterns of language acquisition, affiliation and use. The families’ home language maintenance or shift patterns contextualize the children’s acquisition of English as essentially additive or subtractive, and provide an interpretive filter for their outstanding achievement in English creative writing. The study qualitatively analyzes interviews with the families of the children, the children themselves and the teachers who designed this special project together with observational data of literacy resources at home and school. More detailed information on the above-summarized research project can be found on the following web page: www.yorku.ca/heatherl Publications: Lotherington, H. & Eamer, A. (2008). The complex multilingual worlds of 10 year old gifted writers. International Journal of Multilingualism, 5 (2), 100-121.
Rewriting Goldilocks: Emergent transliteracies
Principal Investigator: Heather Lotherington, Faculty of Education
Collaborator: Sandra Chow, Joyce Public School
Funding Agency: Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Minor Research Grant
Duration of project: 2003-2004
Description: Rewriting Transliteracies is a study of multiliteracies in an elementary school in the Toronto District School Board, that explores new directions in literacy incorporating multiculturalism, multilingualism and multimodalism. Rewriting Goldilocks is designed to provide children with a better understanding of narratives by guiding them into the story as co-authors, facilitated by technology, rather than teaching them as readers external to the world of the story. The project bridges traditional reading and writing practices and contemporary digital literacies, and makes the story of Goldilocks more inclusive of contemporary social diversity. Our approach to story retelling using digital media is intended to close some of the language, literacy and cultural gaps facing children whose backgrounds are not reflected in the Ontario curriculum. More detailed information on the above-summarized research project can be found on the following web page : www.yorku.ca/heatherl
Publications: Lotherington, H. & Chow, S. (2008). Rewriting Goldilocks in the urban, multicultural elementary school. In F. Shultz (Ed.) Multicultural education (14th ed.) (pp. 143-151). NY, NY: McGraw-Hill. Reprinted from The Reading Teacher, 60 (3), 244-252. Lotherington, H. & Chow, S. (2006). Rewriting Goldilocks in the urban, multicultural elementary school. The Reading Teacher, 60 (3), 244-252. Lotherington, H. (2006). Multiliteracies at Main Street School: Digital texts, multilingual development and inclusive narratives. Contact: Special Research Symposium, 32 (2) 72-85. Lotherington, H. (2005). Writing postmodern fairy tales at Main Street School: Digital narratives and evolving transliteracies. McGill Journal of Education, 40 (1), 109-119.
