SSHRC Awards Funding to Five Education Graduate Students

Olessya Akimenko

Program/Degree: Languages, Cultures and Literacies, PhD  
Research Title: Troubling discourses of non-native English as an additional language (EAL) teachers: identity and employment prospects in Canada

In my research, I explore multiple stakeholder perspectives to investigate what impact English as an additional language (EAL) teachers' employment experiences in Canada might have on EAL teachers' professional identity negotiations. I also investigate the role, if any, of language background/linguistic repertoires in these employment experiences.

Denise Findlay

Program/Degree: Philosophy of Educational Practice and Theory, PhD 
Research Title: Gathering Our Medicine: Healing and Strengthening Troubled Kinship Relationships 

My research passions have to do with exploring the complex systems of holistic healing and transformation that have ensured our survival as Indigenous peoples through millennia. Specifically cultural rituals and rites of passage. Within the Coast Salish territory in British Columbia, there exists a diversity of ancient place-based rituals that have the potential to provide both an empowering cultural context and conditions essential for individual and collective learning, healing, and transformation. While this cultural knowledge has endured, its practice and value has been impacted by colonial laws that criminalized them. I intend to undertake research that demonstrates how we can best and most sensitively integrate knowledges from both traditional and western forms of healing that can be undertaken within the context of community and family drawing on the placed based wisdom of the people and ultimately restoring care into the hands of the natural kinship village to which our children and youth belong.

Liang Cao

Program/Degree: Languages, Cultures and Literacies, PhD  
Research Title: Exploring Adult Queer (Im)migrants' Language Learning in Canada: A Sociolinguistic Ethnogoraphy

Liang's ethnographic research explores racialized queer immigrants' English learning and settlement experiences in the Metro Vancouver Area. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, queer studies, and migration studies, this project aims to gain deeper understandings of racialized queer immigrants' language learning in both traditional classrooms and non-conventional educational settings (dating app, workplace, etc.) and further propose meaningful changes to immigration and educational policies to better facilitate their settlement in Canada.

Magali Forte

Program/Degree: Languages, Cultures and Literacies, PhD  
Research Title: The role of digital media and online platforms in the sociomaterial identities of multilingual youth

I study the diverse ways in which multilingual youth create stories with ScribJab, an application/website which invites users to write multimodal stories in two languages, to illustrate and record a narration of their stories, and also to read and comment on multilingual stories written by others. I adopt a sociomaterial perspective (looking both at the social discourses and the material conditions entangled in the story creation process), putting to work posthumanist, new materialist and deleuzo-guattarian theories. This leads me to examine identity and relations in a different light, one that de-centres the human being and pays attention to the more-than-human world. Doing so, I also acknowledge and continue to learn about the rich Indigenous perspectives informing my thinking and my work as an educator and as a researcher who lives on unceded, ancestral and occupied traditional lands.

Forte, M. (2021). Identités sociomatérielles et création d'histoires plurilingues et numériques. Revue canadienne des langues vivante, 77(4), 332-352. https://doi.org/10.3138/cmlr-2020-0097

Dagenais, D., Brisson, G., André, G., & Forte, M. (2020). Multiple becomings in digital story creation. Journal of Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(5), 419-432. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1776309

Kevin Barry

Program/Degree: Languages, Cultures and Literacies, PhD  
Research Title: To share, or not to share, that is the question: Counsellor decision-making process to self-disclose client's meaningful impact on them 

Under the supervision of Dr. Heesoon Bai and with support of faculty and Graduate Writing Team members, I received SSHRC funding for a research proposal that seeks to deepen our understanding of, and explore the potential therapeutic efficacy of, a counsellor sharing with a client, the ways in which the client has had a positive meaningful impacted the counsellor’s personal or professional life. Although counsellors are more aware of and open to the positive impact their self-disclosure practices can have on clients and on the therapeutic relationship, counsellor self-disclosure is a complex clinical skill with ethical implications. As a result, counsellors may intentionally or unwittingly shy away from this important clinical intervention, despite its potential for clients to derive favourable outcomes from counsellors sharing the meaningful ways clients impact them. My research is driven by the question: What therapeutic efficacy potential is there if clients were to know the ways in which their counsellors were being impacted and transformed by them?