Tracing Cosmopolitan Sensibilities in Literacy Curricula in a Canadian School in Macau

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Readings of Curriculum as Intellectualism, Multiculturalism, and Collaboration Throughout International Contexts

Abstract

Undergirded by the conceptual framework of cosmopolitan literacies, this paper attends to cosmopolitan sensibilities as specified and enacted in the institutional, programmatic, and classroom literacy curricula of a Canadian offshore school in Macau. The ethnographic case study found that the English and Mandarin literacy teachers’ enabling practices of cosmopolitan literacies were effects of their coherence with the school’s institutional curriculum and its materiality of buttressing multiculturalism and multimodality. Findings also relate incoherent and ambivalent associations that constrained students’ literacy and identity options. The research contributes knowledge to pedagogy, curriculum, and teacher education in the 21st century interconnected schooling contexts.

Author

• Zheng Zhang, Western University