Becoming Global Meaning Makers: The Making and Remaking of Literacy Education Expertise and Practice in Belize
ISBN: 978-1-80117-933-1, eISBN: 978-1-80117-932-4
Publication date: 23 August 2022
Abstract
A collaborative autoethnography (CAE) conducted by six Belizean educators in a US-based PhD program in Language, Literacy, and Culture Education and one of their faculty members is presented in a creative, dialogic format in this chapter. The group of educators embarked on this reflective self-study to explore how their programmatic language and literacy education knowledge was taken up, remixed, rejected, indigenized, or transformed into local Belizean pedagogies and curricula. Using CAE methods of narrative data generation and dialogic analysis and reflection, the educator-researchers examined the degree to which their program met the expectations of Tierney's (2018) global meaning making endeavor. They found that being vulnerable learners and building their own disciplinary confidence and competence enabled them to take up the new ideas they were encountering, and that new learning led to transformative shifts in their pedagogical philosophies that included culturally relevant and proactive pedagogies. They also innovated and remixed pedagogies in their teaching contexts while wobbling with how to create sustainable changes. This work indicates that Western, US-based universities and programs can, with intentional macro- and micro-curriculum design and ongoing critical reflection, facilitate cross-cultural, international language and literacy programs that enact decolonizing and emancipatory curricula and practices.
Keywords
Citation
Caliz, O., Lawrence, R., Murillo, R., Neal, D., Sanders, J., Tyndall-Howell, Y. and Williams, D. (2022), "Becoming Global Meaning Makers: The Making and Remaking of Literacy Education Expertise and Practice in Belize", Assaf, L.C., Sowa, P. and Zammit, K. (Ed.) Global Meaning Making (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 39), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 25-39. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720220000039003
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2022 Odelia Caliz, Ray Lawrence, Rashid Murillo, Denise Neal, Jennifer Sanders, Yvonne Tyndall-Howell and Deborah Williams. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited