Dr. Michelle Honeyford and Mohammed, CANU student

Through funds provided by the University of Manitoba/Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Research Grants Program, Faculty of Education researchers were able to design, implement and research a literacy club for Grade 5-6 students from October 2011 – March 2012. The students who participated in the study were part of a larger afterschool program at the University of Manitoba called CANU. CANU provides athletic, nutrition, and literacy learning opportunities to disadvantaged youth and encourages them to plan for post-secondary education.

The Faculty of Education’s Literacy Club was designed and run by Dr. Michelle Honeyford and two graduate students in the Faculty of Education, Karen Boyd, a doctoral candidate in Language and Literacy, and Allison Moore, a master’s student in visual arts education. Together the researchers worked with U of M student volunteers and thirty-two middle years students who represented the linguistic, cultural, and ethnic diversity of their schools. This diversity brought to the program a broad range of interests, life experiences, and learning goals.

The design of the program was informed by theories of visual literacy, inquiry, informal learning and participatory culture. Through multiple mediums including digital photography and video, online writing, art and texts, as well as interviews and video of CANU program activities, they challenged the diverse group of CANU students to represent themselves as learners and reflect on their learning in the afterschool program. The researchers invited the students to use their home languages, and cultural and ethnic identities in their projects.

Dr. Honeyford explained that, “The development of the Literacy Club was based on research that shows that the best way to achieve the greatest amount of learning in a diverse group is to invite the students to draw on their cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity as assets for literacy learning. The research also shows that making it possible for students to utilize multiple literacies and new technologies to create texts to be published or performed for real audiences is an asset. We also know that learning new technologies is most successful when it is motivated by a real purpose, and when there are opportunities to learn socially—from peers and more-expert others. We designed the Literacy Club with that in mind.”

Each week, CANU students and university volunteers were presented with an online quest, inviting them to consider questions about learning and themselves as learners and to represent their ideas through digital photographs, videos, and writing. The program utilized the Faculty of Education’s computer lab, drama room, art room, and classrooms, as well as the other spaces of the CANU program—the athletic center and nutrition lab, and the larger university campus.

Karen Boyd explains that the, “Preliminary results of the research indicate that when we expanded the ways students can participate, students took greater ownership of their experiences and the representations of those experiences. In addition, their interpretation of their learning and experiences appeared in a variety of playful and authentic ways. Through digital photography the students connected the diverse learning spaces in the CANU program, which provided them with opportunities to reflect on their learning and embody it. We noticed that they were able to consider, with others, what learning looks and feels like in different contexts, spaces, and social experiences.”

The Literacy Club is an ongoing study that continues to examine the students’ learning using multiple forms of communication while considering the implications of identity, spatiality, and design. Dr. Honeyford hopes that the examination will help her and her team assess the learning of a group of diverse learners through new and multiliteracies. To do so, the research team will be asking the questions, “What happens when digital photography and video are used as modalities to represent and reflect on learning in a multi-component afterschool program? How are participation and learning shaped through the social, cultural, material, modal, and spatial aspects of the program? How do students shape what happens and how? What can be learned about using 21st Century literacy pedagogies that merge new media, informal learning, and identity texts? And how do more “traditional” notions of reading and writing fit in such a program?”

The research was funded through the University of Manitoba/Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Research Grants Program ($5,508) to Dr. Michelle Honeyford.

For more information about the Faculty of Education’s participation in the CANU Program see the Education Blog News stories:
“The Best Thing to Ever Happen in My Life” and From Volunteer to Teacher

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