Lived literacy curriculum in a globalized schooling context: a case study of a Sino-Canadian transnational programme

Abstract

This paper focuses on the lived curriculum from the vantage of the students in a case study of a Sino-Canada transnational education programme in China. The programme consisted of subject area curricula transplanted from Ontario, Canada, and taught in English, as well as subject area curricula from Mainland China that was taught in Mandarin. The study’s methodology capitalized on nine student participants’ creation of multimodal texts that were designed to articulate their identities and experiences within the programme. The paper reflects on the affordances and constraints of multimodal data collection and analysis with the goal of illuminating the participating students’ literacy learning opportunities and identity options as they experienced them in the programme. Key findings include that students experienced the curriculum and the programme in sometimes contradictory ways. The programme seemed to allow students to interact with imagined global others and the curricular learning opportunities seemed to expand students’ literacy and identity options. SCS’s Canadian/Chinese literacy curriculum, however, seemed to be bifurcated along linguistic and cultural lines and did not seem to promote syncretic literacy practices where students were encouraged to create new forms of meaning making.