Canadian Literacy Curricula in Macau, China: Students’ Lived Curriculum

Abstract

This ethnographic case study documents students’ lived experience at a Canadian offshore school in Macau through students’ multimodal artifacts, interviews, and teacher-student interactions in English and Mandarin literacy classes. Undergirded by the theory of cosmopolitan literacies, this study revealed the opportunities at mcs for difference negotiation and fluid identity formation that were enabled by mcs’s curricular emphasis on celebrating multiculturalism and multimodality. However, interview and observation data showed that literacy practices in the English literacy classes also centered around pen to paper meaning-making. This study identified human and nonhuman actors that enabled and constrained students’ literacy and identity options in the unique cross-border education context in Macau, such as mcs’s multicultural reality, school’s curricular emphasis on celebrating multiculturalism and multimodality, individual teachers’ preferences in literacy practices, and the expectations of the standardized Alberta test. The paper discusses the pedagogical potentials of cosmopolitan literacies to expand transnational education students’ literacy and identity options.