There are two keynote speakers at the conference, and a panel discussion about the conference theme with participating researchers from each of the Nordic countries.
Cathy Burnett is Professor Emerita at Sheffield Hallam University. Her work is underpinned by a sociomaterial sensitivity and a commitment to literacy education that fosters creativity and criticality, is empowering, equitable and engaging, and which interrogates the premises on which literacy learners and educators are judged. Much of her research has explored relationships between literacy, technology, children and classrooms, and ideas about affect, (im)materiality, ephemerality and enchantment. Building on a recent interest in the effects of research and data practices in education, she led the ground-breaking Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education project supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council [ES/W000571/1]. Her co-authored and co-edited books include Undoing the Digital: Literacy and Sociomaterialism, New Media in the Classroom: Rethinking Primary Literacy, and Unsettling Literacies: Directions for Literacy Research in Precarious Times. She is a past president of the United Kingdom Literacy Association.
Helle Pia Laursen is an associate professor at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. Her research focuses on language and literacy education from a linguistic mobility perspective and includes a 10-year longitudinal study of literacy and linguistic diversity in five classrooms. Informed by an approach to language and literacy learning as social meaning-making, her work has contributed to an understanding of the complexity of people’s linguistic and semiotic repertoires – something that cannot be reduced to countable languages and linear competence development. Her research has also offered important insights into how children and young people’s literacy is a narratively organised identity resource that plays a crucial role in their development over time of a self-understanding as readers and writers. In her recent work, this approach has been accompanied by greater attention to the spatial and performative dimensions of language learning and teaching, showing how various semiotic and material resources play an active part in creating the learning space.
The participants will debate the conference theme from their research perspective and in dialogue with what they have heard at the conference.
Professor Marte Blikstad-Balas, Oslo University. Research interests: reading and writing, digitalization, classroom research, didactics.
Professor Jeppe Bundsgaard, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. Research interests: didactics, critical literacy research, writing, technology comprehension, ecolinguistics.
Dr Hermína Gunnþórsdóttir, Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Akureyri Iceland. Research interests: inclusive education, multicultural and multilingual education, social justice in education.
Heidi Höglund, Ed.D., Associate Professor, Åbo Akademi University. Keywords: literature education, arts-based literature teaching, post qualitative inquiry.
