About this talk

Founded in 2013 at McGill’s Faculty of Education, the BILD (Belonging, Identity, Language and Diversity) group started with about a dozen members, including both faculty and graduate students, at McGill University in Montreal. The founding BILD members shared an interest in researching language issues from a critical sociolinguistics perspective, eschewing both an exclusive focus on teaching/learning English as a second language, and older, more quantitative approaches to researching second language acquisition.

We have since expanded to include over 30 members; some “active” and some “affiliate.” Affiliate members are generally people who have graduated and moved away from Montreal. With the move to more online activity in the last two years, however, our meetings are now mostly virtual and we are able to include active members outside Montreal. Our active membership now includes people from Quebec’s other English-medium universities (Concordia and Bishop’s). 

BILD members have independent research projects, for example, on the ways Quebec residents of all ages interact with the teaching, learning, and use of French, English, and other local languages. Yet we see scholarship as a profoundly social activity. In this talk we will share how we have learned to work in a non-hierarchical and collaborative research community. Collective projects involving BILD members currently include: our blog, ongoing since 2014 at http://bild-lida.ca/blog/ ; our open-access online scholarly journal, J-BILD, launched in 2017 at https://bild-lida.ca/journal/ ; and now also support for the Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy and Planning conference, which BILD members took charge of organizing in 2021 and 2022: https://lpp2022.weebly.com . 

In our blog we strive to make critical sociolinguistics and applied linguistics research accessible and relevant to a lay audience; we have welcomed many guest bloggers over the years, and would encourage the audience for this talk to consider guest blogging for us.

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Nine of the 30-odd members of the group will be present at the webinar. Their research interests are summarized below.

• Jennifer Burton, University of Toronto: spoken word poetry as an affective and critical pedagogy for language teaching
• Béatrice Cale, McGill University: the ways the linguistic landscape reflects the immigrant experience, casting a multilingual lens on the ethnic, historical, global lived reality of these communities
• Rhonda Chung, Concordia University (Montreal): inclusive pedagogies, focusing on perceptual learning and the development of multi-dialectal/plurilingual competencies through an ecological (i.e., land-based) perspective
• John Wayne Dela Cruz, McGill University: plurilingual education, particularly immigrant language learners’ plurilingual practices and identities
• Kate Hardin, McGill University: adult newcomer language education, specializing in the language learning of adults with emergent literacy
• Paul Meighan-Chiblow, McGill University: Indigenous language revitalization, decolonizing language education, and relational technology
• Heather Phipps, University of Regina: multilingual children’s literature, poetry, Indigenous literatures, arts education, creative approaches to pedagogy and qualitative research, walking methodologies, multimodal literacies, multilingualism, social justice, relationality and community building through the arts
• Caroline Riches, McGill University: language teacher identity and L2 teacher education
• Mela Sarkar, McGill University: empowering minoritized speakers through diversification of their communicative repertoires.

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