明星八卦

Through workshops with students, interviews with authors and artists’ illustrations, this project, led by Dr Ian Cushing, is exploring how children’s literature might be used as a vehicle for understanding, describing, exploring and resisting structural language discrimination. 

Our aims are:

• To explore how young readers at KS3 might use contemporary YA fiction as a vehicle for exploring, understanding and interrogating language discrimination.

• To move beyond thinking about language discrimination as individualistic toward an understanding based on structural and intersectional forms of discrimination.

• To combine analysis of literary texts, students’ reader-responses and interviews with YA authors.

• To work with artists who report lived experiences of language discrimination and use students’ responses to literature as prompts for creating art and illustrations.

• To develop, in collaboration with students, teachers, authors and artists, a ‘toolkit’ for identifying where and why language discrimination occurs – and for exploring ways of addressing it – which can be taken up and used by educators in a range of contexts.