Dr. Amélie Lemieux talks to us about authenticity and vulnerability, posthumanism, and the broad scope of literacies. Dr. Lemieux’s research interests include Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility policies as it relates to reading research, literature teaching, and multimodality, all informed by phenomenological and posthumanist perspectives. Her most recent project includes investigating adolescents’ digital literacy practices as ways to leverage social justice. I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Lemieux speak at the University of South Florida’s David C. Anchin Center for the Advancement of Teaching Speaker Series in Tampa, Florida. At her invited talk, Amélie shared her ongoing InstaPoetry project, sharing insights from project development to preliminary results. Our conversation for this episode was recorded the day after her talk. Dr. Amélie Lemieux is an Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Education in the department of didactics (teaching and learning).
To cite this episode: Persohn, L. (Host). (2024, Mar 12). A conversation with Amélie Lemieux (Season 4, No. 9) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/1984-8530-6AAF-904B-12BE-Q
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux talks to us about authenticity and vulnerability, posthumanism, and the broad scope of literacies. Dr. Lemieux’s research interests include Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility policies as it relates to reading research, literature teaching, and multimodality, all informed by phenomenological and posthumanist perspectives. Her most recent project includes investigating adolescents’ digital literacy practices as ways to leverage social justice. I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Lemieux speak at the University of South Florida’s David C. Anchin Center for the Advancement of Teaching Speaker Series in Tampa, Florida. At her invited talk, Amélie shared her ongoing InstaPoetry project, sharing insights from project development to preliminary results. Our conversation for this episode was recorded the day after her talk. Dr. Amélie Lemieux is an Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Education in the department of didactics (teaching and learning).
To cite this episode: Persohn, L. (Host). (2024, Mar 12). A conversation with Amélie Lemieux (Season 4, No. 9) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/1984-8530-6AAF-904B-12BE-Q
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
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Lindsay Persohn:The work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom Caffeine is here to help.
Lindsay Persohn:In each episode, I talk with a top education researcher or expert educator about what they have learned from their research and experiences. In this episode, dr Amelie Lemieux talks to us about authenticity and vulnerability, post-humanism and the broad scope of literacies. Dr Lemieux is known for her work in the areas of multi-literacies, literature teaching and secondary education. Her most recent project includes investigating adolescents' digital literacy practices as ways to leverage social justice. I had the pleasure of hearing Dr Lemieux speak at the University of South Florida's David C Anchin Center for the Advancement of Teaching speaker series in Tampa, florida. At her invited talk, amelie shared her ongoing Insta-Poetry project, sharing insights from project development to preliminary results. Our conversation for this episode was recorded the day after her talk, on November 8, 2023. Dr Amelie Lemieux is an assistant professor at the University of Montreal's Faculty of Education in the Department of Didactics, teaching and Learning. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode.
Lindsay Persohn:So pour a cup of your favorite drink and join me. Your host Lindsay. Persaud For Classroom Caffeine research to energize your teaching practice, Amelie. Thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Thank you for welcoming me.
Lindsay Persohn:Today's show is a little bit different. We are here together, live and in person. Typically, when you hear a Classroom Caffeine episode, the guest and I are meeting via Zoom, but Amelie is here in town, in Tampa Florida, with me today, and so we decided to record a live conversation. So, amelie, from your own experiences and education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Yeah, that's a very good question. I think in my experience, you know, being a professor, a teacher, a researcher, and seeing all those roles and responsibilities being intertwined, I think I've come to terms with the idea that not every idea will touch everyone, but there's hope, in continuously thinking that it might and just hanging on to that hope and, you know, trying to do the best work that we can do for kids and teachers, with hope, authenticity and vulnerability, and that's what I'm aiming to do. So that's probably the first nugget of wisdom that I cultivated over the years. And the second one could be to know when is enough.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:You know in education, because we give so much of ourselves, not only in academia but in school settings. You know teachers like when is it? Like, am I doing enough grading? Am I caring enough about the kids? Am I doing enough planning? And for us, researchers, like you know, am I teaching? You know enough, Am I doing enough research? The research that I'm doing, good enough? So knowing the guidelines and the boundaries of when is enough for me and to me it's not when you read all the things or not, when you stop thinking, but when you feel that probably you did your best in speaking to the things. You're qualified to speak with the tools that you have, with authenticity and respect, so knowing your own limits, in order to serve the public good.
Lindsay Persohn:So I want to ask you a follow up question.
Lindsay Persohn:And I can connect with both of those ideas you've already shared with us.
Lindsay Persohn:When do you think you really started thinking so much about when is enough?
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:When I gave too much. Yeah, when I gave. I think I reached a point during the doctorate, maybe the third year, and then the second year of the professoriate Like I just came to a point where I was, you know, I was taking a plane probably 10 times a year, which is absolutely insane. Then that was during my PhD, like the final years. And then entering the job market. You know, doing interviews not only in Canada and in the States, having this sort of you know bilingual career where I produce in French, produce in English, right in French, right in English, navigating those two worlds because they're quite different, even epistemologically speaking. You know different theories, adapting, adjusting to languages, cultures, doing interviews in different US States versus different provinces. So I gave a lot during my last years of my PhD and then during my postdoc. Postdoc was a breeze. I loved working with Jen Raozo she's such a positive mentor and so was my PhD supervisor as well. And then I started my job in Nova Scotia at Mount St Vincent University amazing people there.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:But I felt like I had something to prove and I think most of us have this feeling starting off in academia and I wanted to do good work for racial and social justice and speak to what I knew, and yeah, and then you come to a point where you know you get reappointment and you get a boost of confidence and you're like, okay, like it's that sort of balance between knowing what is enough and external validation, which I don't seek anymore, or I seek less anyways in this world. And I feel like in teaching education, you know, we're always seeking this sort of you know discourse, to know, like, okay, what am I doing? Like is it good enough? And I feel like I get this validation from myself now more so than in earlier years.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, that's really fantastic to hear. I think that, you know, we don't always have to look to something external to say we've, I don't know, have we ever arrived? I don't think we've ever really reached a destination in particularly in the world of education, right, so we're always learning, always growing, but when you can say my day is done, right. And I think that it is a really challenging balance in education period, I think, in academia and in teaching. Because that actually reminds me of the first idea you mentioned, that you know, not everything will touch everyone that we work with, and that reminds me of something I thought about a lot when I was a classroom teacher.
Lindsay Persohn:I always wanted to ensure that there was something in every school day for every child I worked with. But I think that if you begin to think that everything you do has to reach every person, you end up in that too much is too much kind of mode, right, like you're always sort of scrambling to do it better, to do it faster to, you know, to learn the latest thing, when you don't feel like you've mastered the last latest thing you were working on. And I think you end up on this sort of like hamster wheel kind of mentality that you can never get off of and you never feel fully satisfied, no matter how many hours you put into the work that you're doing, which actually, I think, over time diminishes the total job you know, you know, because you can't, you can't keep that up forever.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. I mean it's what you're saying, you know and you know as teachers or educators or professors, if you're going to be a teacher, you're going to be a teacher, you're going. We can reach someone in a day. Day is made, and I think that could count for any profession. And what's interesting in what I call cognitive reframing is to understand what that might look like in a day. So like if a kid comes to your classroom without having had breakfast and you have a chocolate bar, then you get the chocolate bar, and then that counts as doing the bet that I could that day and putting making sure that the needs are met for that kid to learn in your class.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Things like that, bringing a smile to someone's face or having someone think or reflect, or just having. One of my favorite sentences is I hadn't thought of that. Like when someone tells you this, you're like okay, like you plan to seed and then you let the seed grow and then you see where it's gonna go or if it's gonna go anywhere, but at least you have people think. So what it might look like might be different for everybody and it changes from day to day. So I think there's valuable lessons in that, and the other thing about you know knowing when enough is enough is what I do now, which I find that has worked for me is obviously balance, like being connected to my body a lot because I've been connected to my mind so much like in ways that are probably overzealous and not enough to my body, and so I make sure that I'm aligned in that way.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:And the other thing is to actually count how many strikes of things I can care about in a day. So I have about five, five to seven. I used to have probably 10 to 15, which was too much for me. So what that might look like, is that okay if I have five to seven? I try to balance that out with wellbeing as well. So you know, a meeting is one, teaching a class can count from one or two, depending on how much prep I have. So that's, we're already at three.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:A yoga class is one, cooking is one, then meeting with a student is another one, and then say, driving to work and going back is another. So I'm already at seven, right With that. And that to me is a full day where I'm at full capacity and I know if I overbook myself and I go to 10, the next morning and the next day I'm gonna pay for it. Obviously I'm gonna like. There's this constant thing where I have a fuel tank and if I run it on empty I'm not like, the next morning I'm gonna have to recuperate and make sure that I'm good for the day, and the day after, instead of having my regular seven, I might have three strikes, you know, like three things I could do. So I know that about myself very much and I just have to, you know, do that self-discipline and ultimately that leads to self-love.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, that's really smart. I love that idea of thinking about the things that you do and really quantifying the quality of them, right, because I think that it can be really easy to lose yourself in the day to day and I know, maybe particularly this week, I've been feeling that. You know that probably not just this week, but this week in particular. I was thinking on my way to meet with you this morning. I don't think I've actually accomplished anything on my to-do list because there have been so many other things going on this week and it's Thursday, right, so it does make it very tricky. I think teaching is one of those things that we need to really hold onto and do a very good job of, right, and I think but then again, where's that balance between am I putting, you know, five hours into preparing for a three hour class? Am I putting 10 hours into preparing for a three hour class?
Lindsay Persohn:I think that those things can be tricky to balance, because I think that quite often, if you are a teacher, if you work in the world of education, or if you are a researcher, you have this idea that things have to be like good enough is never good enough, right, things have to be edging on perfection and I think, being able to pull back from that ideal a little bit or, as you said, that sort of cognitive reframing, that sometimes doing things well enough is the best you're going to do right. And so what's the return on investment? If I were to spend two more hours planning for my class, is it going to be that much better? Probably not, because at some point you meet the point of diminishing returns, I think.
Lindsay Persohn:But yeah, it's hard to know where that is. You know you have to step back from it to really look at the situation and think what's good here, what can I leave behind, what am I not getting much return on and how can I instead focus on the most important things so that I'm not, you know, the next day? That sort of it's like an activity hangover. You know where. You're just so drained from the previous day that you have a hard time going into the next day.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Yeah, Absolutely. I love the idea of activity hangover because it's real.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Like it's really real and you know, for teachers and educators and professors, like when we talk about over-preparing for classes, you know, to me the cousin of that is overthinking because what?
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:comes before. Over-preparing is overthinking. What if I'm not good enough? What if, you know, I don't have enough time? What if they're lacking key content? And it's those what-ifs, you know, and when we buy and we're the first clients of that, and when we buy into the idea of the what-ifs, that's when we burn ourselves out. Yeah, we do burn ourselves out and we're like no, no, no, this is good enough. You know the conversations are gonna rise from this. That's gonna be more important and they're gonna learn more from me going in circles and like lecturing or like over-scheduling, and you know, and that comes from a place of anxiety. You know it comes from a place of anxiety and you know, learning to be at peace. The law of detachment, the law of being present in the present moment, keeps you from. You know, overthinking and over-preparing and doing all that, so I'm getting better at staying present and that leads to more authentic, more vulnerable ways of approaching my teaching and my research.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, basically, no, I couldn't agree more with that, and that's something I feel like I've certainly been working on.
Lindsay Persohn:The other thing you mentioned that I connected with is yoga, and I've mentioned that a few times on the show because that is a practice that, unfortunately, I don't get to participate in as often as I'd like these days, but it is something that I do weekly, maybe not daily, but at least weekly. I touch my yoga practice and that does help to stay connected to your body, to be more aware of what's going on and not just living in my head all the time, and it actually helps me to be better mentally prepared for the day. I'm able to focus more and I just feel much more connected to and aware of what's going on. Rather than ignoring an ache or a pain, you can actually work through it and think about it and sometimes, before it becomes a chronic condition, you can, you know, let go of those, whether you know, it's the kind of the physical holding of anxiety, and so, yeah, I find that to be a really important part of my world as well, absolutely, and you're able to be more present.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Also, like even, you know, doing the podcast, they have to be an active listener, being there, like working with ideas, working with people, and I think one of the ways in which good listeners do that is by being present in their body and doing those mind-body connections that some of us not all of us, but some of us take for granted. Yeah, you can't work with your brain all the time if you're not connected to your body, like, those mind-body connections are so, so, so important Because, as you said, it brings about awareness, awareness of your own body, your own limits, what you can do, what you can't do. When you do that for yourself, you can do that for others and it's not a given that you know anybody can access that. But I find great about yoga and what I do. Now I've been doing that more religiously over the past year, probably try to do three, four times a week because it really calms me down and I do hot yoga.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:So, it is a thing that I, like you know, I live up North, so for me it's my way of like connecting to this, like Florida weather or like creating, you know, some sort of artificial space where I can live those moments, but it allows me to, you know, go deeper and stretch deeper in ways that allow me to be more flexible with my body.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:And what that does, literally and metaphorically, is that it allows me to be more flexible with my thinking. And when we talk about my body-mind connections, I think there's ways in which our body teaches things that language cannot teach us Absolutely, and it makes you realize, okay, well, I hadn't thought about it, I hadn't thought about my body this way and I didn't think I could do this and I didn't. So it gives you also confidence. That can, you know, then have repercussions in your work and the ways in which you interact with people and you're present with them. So, yeah, about presence, about awareness and about understanding your own limits, to be able to understand other people's limits and what you can work with and work with people's energies and your own, and that sort of flow.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, and it reminds me that so much of the world and so much of our own experience, both in our own bodies and outside of ourselves, can't really be put into words right. I think we try to describe, or I might even say to sort of textualize, every experience, if that makes sense, although of course I think in our world of literacy we tend to think of texts as being any sort of you know, not just words but gesture and environments and all of those things. But I think that we try to put our ideas into words so often that we forget there are so many things that you can't express in words.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Yeah, that's really interesting because it taps into, you know, the whole non-representational theory of literacy and affect theory and all of that, and I know a lot of my work has touched on that and has embraced or adopted or espoused onto epistemologies that talk about affect and non-representational theory and post-humanism and things like that. And back in the day when I started working on that, you know, with Jennifer Rausel and then by myself, we really tapped into those ideas. In terms of entanglement, you know what it means to affect someone and being affected, seeing those relationalities, seeing how we interact with the world. And I didn't, like you know we talked about bodies, but I don't think I understood it to the extent and the ways in which that yoga practice allows me to understand it now and understanding it in a way that makes my identity present but not predominant, in the ways in which I see what matters and what doesn't, and in ways in which you know we think about entanglements, say, of humans, non-humans more than humans, and you know, like, like this, centering the place of humans, that can be problematic for many reasons.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:You know, when we talk about race and social justice Brad Odie talks about that, for example but the idea, the main idea is that the work and the mission is not about us egos, it's about the greater good. So once we understand that and we understand that everything's interrelated and interconnected, I think it brings more purpose to the mission and the things that we're trying to do Well and it helps you to prioritize right. It helps you to decide when?
Lindsay Persohn:is it when?
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:and how, when is it enough, right?
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and what you can let go of, but you have to continue to pursue.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Exactly.
Lindsay Persohn:So I love how this conversation about yoga and mindfulness leads us right to our second question. So, Emily, what do you want listeners to know about?
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:your work Well link to that and everything we just talked about. It makes me think about how relational truths exist and perspectives and you know, multiple perspectives regarding, say, an object can coexist in ways that can be right and also not right and then it brings about conversations about values and about morals and things that matter, I think, for education. Again, you know, it makes me ask who are we serving for the greater good? And that the mission is not about us. It's more about social and racial justice, at least for me, because it's values that I believe in in education.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:So that's part of the work that I've been doing and that I want to continue to do, even as a queer woman in academia, you know, like an embracing that identity more and writing about it in my positionality statements and why I'm doing the work that I'm doing and for whom, and like things that I don't know and were the things that I feel that I'm vulnerable and that I need to keep on learning, and I feel like I'm more connected to myself and the ideas that I need to convey, when I admit in all humility that I don't know everything and that I'm you know, and that I'm a position of continuously learning.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:And that's where I think the work happens. You know, like I think, in this position of always balancing okay, here are the things that I know and here are the things that I don't, and I'm very aware of what I know and of what I don't know, and I'm also not aware of what I don't know yet and being in that continuum and going back and forth allows me to be present and doing the best that I can with the tools that I have in that present moment.
Lindsay Persohn:It's so smart, I think, to be so aware of where your expertise may lie, and it actually reminds me of you know, along the journey from teacher into academia, realizing that it's okay to say you don't know, right, because I think when I first entered that world I thought, oh, I'm going to be expected to know everything. And so you know, even things like being in a conference, you know at someone's presentation and to hear an experienced researcher, you know someone who I may have only known by name and by work, and then you see them live and in the flesh, and someone asks a question and they say I don't know, I haven't thought about that yet. And I remember hearing that and feeling like, oh, that's licensed for me not to know also, and not in an ignorant kind of way, but just in simply stating I know I can't know everything and it's really naive to think that you can right.
Lindsay Persohn:You know, it's such a weird position to put yourself in a thing. I have to be the master of everything. You just can't it's impossible.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Well, I think it's part of it is lying to yourself and then lying to others, right, and when you're in a position of authenticity and vulnerability, then those sort of what I call lower vibrational postures become so irrelevant and so not in the intent of serving the greater good, right, and so it doesn't become relevant just to be in that posture anymore.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:You know, like, when you go through different phases, like ego death, like you know, like leaving like low vibrational energies and being in mindsets that are not about abundance and that are not about creating knowledge and connecting with people, like when you leave behind those sort of layers that are not productive, you realize, okay, like pretending that I know everything is actually lying to myself and it's not giving the world the most authentic version of myself that helps people grow and being aligned with themselves. And I'm saying this in all humility, like it's not like I'm changing the world or anything, but it's triggering for people too. Like you know, like when you come in and you say like, okay, this is my most authentic self, and for people who are not ready, it can be triggering, absolutely it can be triggering.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. I mean, I would imagine that trying to live as if you know everything there is to know can also be very exhausting. Oh, yeah, right, because it would be like playing a part all day and all night, every day and every night, and I can only imagine how that would erode your soul after a while and eventually make you feel like maybe you don't really know who you are at all.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Yeah, yeah, and when you stay in a state of gratitude, I feel like things like you know playing a part become not part of your ethos. Right, Like you can't go there. You know, like when we have office hours, students come into our office. They probably travel 30 minutes, 45 minutes to come into your office to talk to you about things that they care about.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:I'm grateful that someone is scheduling time to come see me and talk about ideas and concerns that are gonna help them in their mission of being teachers, educators, researchers, people that are gonna help kids and people grow. So when you're in that mindset of gratitude of having someone in front of you and listening to them and exchanging ideas, I find that's way more fulfilling than being in a state of, say, a professor with corrective measures or, you know, like guidelines that are too strict and not flexible thinking. And that's why I think the body-mind connections with flexible thinking come in, because then you embody that and then you can give that to others in ways that make sense. But that comes with a posture of awareness, as you said, and gratitude, Like I'm grateful to be here today and be able to think with you Like how lucky are we to be able to do that, you know, and then that's probably going to reach people, but then or not, you know.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:But my hope is that it will. And then you know people are going to come to work and maybe find some solace in there and they are saying like we're grateful to do the jobs that we're doing and just being in the presence of others and working together and that's.
Lindsay Persohn:I find that to be that sort of posture, to be so helpful in that prioritization right and letting go of the things that really don't matter or that may be matter to someone in some distant space who's maybe never, never met you before, never been in a classroom since they were students themselves.
Lindsay Persohn:You know, I think so often as educators we get hung up on serving someone else's mission and I think that that is a really tough space to live in as well because, again, you can't bring that authenticity to policies you don't believe in, practices that I think can sometimes feel like they're being crammed down your throat, you know, forced on you.
Lindsay Persohn:It's so hard and I thought about this before in the context of teaching and again, that kind of soul-sucking work of doing someone else's business, especially when you know it doesn't serve the children in front of you, that's such a difficult place to be in and in my mind and in my experience and in talking with other teachers, I think that is really what teacher burnout is about. It's not necessarily about the interactions with kids it is. It's that trying to live someone else's mission or not being really even able to find the authenticity in the work that you're doing because you have to be and I say have to with this sort of legal kind of mentality, right, that kind of pressure that you have to be doing something else that you may or may not even believe in in the first place, and you have to let go of the things that you do, and I think that that's really dehumanizing.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Absolutely, absolutely. And it goes back to the pressures that teachers are facing in terms of you know the strikes that they have in a day. So you know right. So they should have, of course, like five to seven, but then the responsibilities of the jobs and the piling up of you know the things that need to get done make it so that it's not five to seven. We're talking like 12 to 15 to 20 in a day on top of personal life. So that becomes very burdensome.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:And there's one thing I should say about you know values and knowing yourself in Namaste. It's all good, you know it's all good and fine, but then there's limits to what teachers can do. So say, for example, you know I worked on a project on maker spaces, many of them and work with teachers. The number of teachers that I work with in terms of doing maker space research. These responsibilities are added on to regular load in spaces that are not necessarily given to you know, like resources, specialists or librarians. So who? Whose responsibility to does a maker space belong to teachers? It's usually teacher, right, right. So they want to innovate, they want to bring in new curriculum content, they want to do it for the kids and make it so that you know like engagement is there but then it comes to the expense of their own teaching load or their own responsibilities. So that's where, to me, like the values and the mission and the public comes.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:In education, I find, and in other fields, like, like, like being a nurse, for instance, like any profession that comes with caring and caring about people, it often comes at a personal expense and that's when you need to know your own limits and what you can do and when to ask. You know, ask for a librarian aid or ask for it. And you know it's not that teachers don't ask, it's because then they're faced with the bureaucratic and structural I call it structural violence of schooling systems where you know we don't have funding and then it becomes, you know, like politics and things like that. So I'm well aware that there's, you know, responsibilities that get add on to, but then it comes back to the strikes we have in a day I find right.
Lindsay Persohn:And it's hard to ask for teachers to do more than they're already doing. Absolutely yeah yeah, because it's already too much. Yeah yeah.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Absolutely.
Lindsay Persohn:So what else would you like listeners to?
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:know about your work. Very good projects. We're in year three of the Insta Poetry Project. This is a collaboration with Georgina Barton at the University of Southern Queensland, david Lukavich at the University of Alberta and Boyd White at McGill University. We are working on adolescents literacy engagement on social media, specifically Instagram. So we asked them to navigate Instagram and then create decolonial poems based on their reading and viewing of decolonial literature, poetry and art, and then we shared those productions on the research media account Insta underscore poetic with a K, if anyone is interested in following the account and see the artworks that are published.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:So this is our year of dissemination. We have a couple of articles coming out in that vein and I'm working also with Christian Eret on a video game project that we have together on affect and well being. So that's ongoing as well. And with my colleague, catherine Gosselin at the University of Montreal, we are working with pre service teachers on their positionality towards equity, racial and social justice in terms of literature teaching and primary grades and secondary grades. So we want them to reflect on their own positionality before going into classrooms and teaching what we call sensitive topics or sensitive content. So you know, it's just conversations that happens in classroom, but we want to equip our teachers to be ready to have conversations with kids of all races and genders. So that's what's going on pretty much right now in terms of my work.
Lindsay Persohn:A few things, A couple of things a couple of things that back to our earlier conversation.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, just how much a person can do in a day? How many?
Lindsay Persohn:strikes.
Lindsay Persohn:That's right. So what would you say is some of your biggest learning from those projects so far?
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Oh my God, so many different projects with different people in different languages. So to me, it's just. It shows the scope of literacies and literacies work and what we can do in those spaces, and that's a strand that's been constant in my work, and I did my PhD exactly on that topic. I did my PhD on literate engagement and what that might look like for adolescents, and what I'm Coming to know the more I do this work is that literacy engagement comes in different shapes and forms, in different types of modalities. That happens in adolescence digital lives, so, whether it be on with video games, with literature reading, or on social media, or with poetry, like it's all about those parks. You know, though and I talked about this in a recent article that's going to come out in reading research quarterly I call them little sparks, and the little sparks are when you can see those moments of engagement and the nonrepresentational in a classroom, and the nonrepresentational allows us to delve into things that we can't grasp in questionnaires, we can't necessarily grasp in interviews, nor can we grasp it in, you know, like productions.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:More specifically, and we looked at data for so many years in terms of research on reading engagement originally, like we used to, you know, give questionnaires and say are you engaged or not engaged in life doesn't work like that. You know what I mean. Like you know, like if I watch a Netflix TV show, like there's moments that I'm going to be engaged, there's moments that I'm not going to be engaged, and engagement might look like frustration. You know, like and and and. Questionnaires don't look at the depths of what that might look like and how it can be expressed. And sometimes you're engaged but you might not say it, or maybe you don't want to say it, or maybe you don't want to share that, or maybe you don't even understand it or you don't understand it as engagement when you're frustrated.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Frustration is one of the biggest markers or indicators of engagement because you react to something right.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:It's not like there's apathy, right, like you're.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:You know so when you have and this might be good for teachers as well like when you're in your classroom and you're teaching content that you deeply, deeply, deeply care about and you have that one student who you know maybe is having a difficult day but they're asking you questions and they're you know that student is going to ask you questions and ask you questions and ask you questions and it might get on your nerves because you know they're not complying, or you know, like listening, or you think they're not listening, but they're actually very actively listening and they want to understand better, and that's a marker of engagement in ways that might not be positive, but it's still engagement.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:When there's engagement, there is a door there to bring about comprehension and interpretation and reaction and appreciation of the content that you're teaching. So to me, like and I'm not saying that everything is engagement, but I'm saying that there's doors and those doors might look different. There might be like a yellow door, green door, like a glass door, like you know but there's, there's a way, you know, there's always a way to try to have those conversations that are productive.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, and for some kids, I think particularly maybe who have, who aren't historically engaged in the literacies of schooling. Maybe that door looks a little bit more like a roof hatch.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Because it's the only way that you can.
Lindsay Persohn:Can find, find a way in.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Yeah, absolutely. And the literacies of schooling you said it, lindsay like they are, you know they're violent and harmful, like some of them are violent and harmful for some kids. So we have to be flexible again in our thinking and being in the present moment and trying to reach those kids are the best of our abilities.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, and you're bringing about some real questions, I think, maybe bringing to the surface in my mind something that I feel like I've wrestled with for a long time.
Lindsay Persohn:When school measures literacy through multiple choice questionnaires based on some, you know, textoid that kids may or may not have any interest in, and then we, we put a label on them based on their responses to what they may see as a stupid question about a stupid passage, it does do harm and it really it leaves me with a big question about what we can do as researchers, as practitioners, as people you know supporting in schools.
Lindsay Persohn:How do we find again back to that? Where where's that limit? How do we in fact work within the confines of schools in real ways, while also pushing back on some of that very limiting and limited thinking about what literacy really is right? It's like to me it's. It's such a big question about how we continue to do good work that leaves space for kids and leave space for their thinking and for their differences in thinking, while also still being allowed to do that work inside of schools, because, you know, everything there has to be measured and quantified and checkmarked, and it's a real tension that I feel like maybe not in those words, but I feel, I feel like I've been thinking about that since I was a classroom teacher.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Yeah, it's a hard one.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:It's a tough one.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:I think if we go back to the very principles PLE, of course the very core idea Ideas of learning is dynamic and relational, because humans are dynamic, dynamic and relational beings Then if we follow that premise, which is a very basic and obvious premise, I think we can be more intelligent and more intentional with the questions that we ask on the tests that we have to do because of standardizing and, you know, those bureaucratic measures of schooling that we have to abide by.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:So if those principles guide the types of questions that we ask, I think that's where we can save some of the humanizing literacy practices that we're trying to do. I don't think we're going to be able to, although it's my wish, but I don't think we're going to be able to get rid of standardized testing anytime soon because of the policies that we're being subjected to. But if we can work with the people who create those tests and if we have active voices and humanizing the types of questions that we ask, I think that you know that could be a door that could be one of the doors that we actually open widely and proudly to make sure that we're not teaching to the test, but we're teaching relational and dynamic students.
Lindsay Persohn:But there in my mind are many, many fundamental challenges there. Right, because the kind of work that we're talking about, the engaging, relational, social kind of work, it's hard to measure. Yeah, it's hard to evaluate on some level. Right, because you bring in all these critical perspectives of well, you know who's whose voice is it, whose ideas are they, what really matters, and that is different for everyone.
Lindsay Persohn:And thinking can be hard to measure. Right, because I feel like particularly and you mentioned, we mentioned policies policies have numerical values built right into them, and so it makes the education system in some ways, I think, default to those kinds of quantifiable sorts of literacies and I'll use air quotes there, because it's such a constrained way of thinking about being literate in this world. There's a fundamental tension and I think if we could get the ear of test makers, policy makers, those decision makers, and help them to understand that literacy isn't just reading and writing. You know that there's so much more to it than that, particularly in the world we live in, I've thought on many occasions that we are in some ways teaching for the past rather than teaching for the future, and that is because of policies and those structures that are so deeply ingrained inside of schools that you can't, we could think without them, but in many ways we're not allowed to.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Absolutely. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me and in ways that you know, teaching to the future should reflect, say, for example, how engagement has evolved over the years and how we have a responsibility as teachers and educators to take the pulse of adolescents lives. And the thing with tests is that if we don't change them every year, if we don't, you know, update them or make them more cognizant of that pulse, then we're not working for the greater good. You know what I mean, right? So there's something very static about reading and writing in the traditional ways in which they were taught, that don't recognize the relational and dynamic ways in which literacy lives. So in that way, I think it's, you know, again, as you said, there's a real tension and challenge and accounting for and wanting to measure things that are even outside of our scope right now, you know, like with I'm thinking about AI literacies right now, you know and things that we can't even see, you know, we can't even see what the tools that we have on the daily and in the ways in which schooling literacies are built and enacted right now in schools.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:So there's a lot of, you know, literacy learning that happens behind the scenes, that are hidden from us, but they still happen, you know and so, but the tests don't account for that because it's not part of the traditional reading and writing and spelling and you know oral literacies that that are being measured.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:But again, like what kind of adults are we building? Right, you know? Are they going to live in a world where they're going to be evaluated for these traditional literacies, or are they going to live in a world in which computers and AI are going to assist them in making the decisions that they're going to make in the workplace and in their daily lives? So I think there's a there's an even bigger disconnect there between adult literacies, lives and the type of adolescents that we're educating, and I think in the years to come, one of the things that literacies should look at is how to make sure that adolescents and young people are still autonomous in their literacy learning, and not so much in the content but in their decision making and then their ethical choices and things that pedagogy brings us in ways that are significant in terms of engagement.
Lindsay Persohn:Right, that idea of being autonomous and a critical thinker. There are so many ways that schooling educates that right out of us, right? It actually reminds me of a conversation that I had with an undergraduate student just last week. We are also working on adolescent literacy project, where we bring college age mentors to work with middle schoolers and late elementary students as a reading mentor, and it's not necessarily for reading intervention per se, but it's about what are you interested in. Let's find a book that let's read together. Let's talk about what you're reading. And the other component to that is with our seventh grade students.
Lindsay Persohn:We are engaging in an inquiry project.
Lindsay Persohn:It's a community engaged inquiry project, and mentors and their mentees went on a field trip together last week to think about how they can situate literacies within the community and also that idea of how we can be activists in our own right and investigate our own questions and connect back to the community in order to shape it the way that we want it to be in the future.
Lindsay Persohn:And so I tell you all of that context to say that one of the mentors in the project is actually an elementary education pre-service teacher and we were talking about their experience out in the community and their developing understanding of what inquiry is. And her share out to the group last week was that inquiry is teaching her that there isn't just one right answer. And if you think about someone in their early twenties who is voicing this to a group of peers, she's probably not the only person in the group who used to believe that there was one right answer. But it totally makes sense, right, because that's likely. What she has been taught throughout her entire education is that there's one right answer it's A, b, c or D.
Lindsay Persohn:That's it Right and so.
Lindsay Persohn:I think that, as now a middle-aged adult, I can look back and think about how our own worldview is so impacted by what we're taught and what we aren't. Well right, what we're exposed to and what we aren't. And so if you think about these students who have tracked through a world of education where there is one right answer, it comes directly from the text and somebody else decided what it was. If you grow up in that world, it's not a stretch to think that, oh wow, this idea that there's more than one right answer to a real-world problem is a little bit earth-shattering. Right To what we think we know about what we think we know. To me it was such an impactful statement that she made. It was not just telling of her experience, but I think it was telling of her totality of education.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Absolutely, absolutely and that's very telling of the roles that we have as high school teachers and professors and researchers, in really espousing this idea that there is a transitional role that needs to happen in high school settings and adolescence in understanding the shift between schooling and real-world literacies and what awaits them as adults working in industry or working in universities or working in the public health system. There's many ways of working with people and finding different truths, and that's why one of the things that might help teachers is understanding that role and really trying to convey the message that multiple truths exists, but that's my epistemological posture. Now one might think or say that that's one truth itself.
Lindsay Persohn:I'd like to think about the truth.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:If we're going very meta, but this idea of and as you said it beautifully, it's about community work, it's about activist work, it's about the identities that we want to have in the world and serving for the greater good, and that can only be done if we welcome multiple perspectives.
Lindsay Persohn:Which, again, fundamental tension with. Choose one, it's ABC or D. Yeah, Exactly so. Given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:To hang in there, because I find effort is an expression of interest and if we think about this idea, interest is also an expression of effort. It goes both ways and think about the strengths that you have in a day to make sure that your interest doesn't vanish and that your engagement and your role in responsibility towards students stays pretty much consistent. And sometimes it's not because of will, it's because of our capacity as humans, what we can and why we can do. So, yeah, if there was one last thing I wanna say is to link that engagement piece with our limits and basically our roles of authenticity and vulnerability that we're trying to carry in this literacy world that we're working towards.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, yeah, that's very powerful advice.
Lindsay Persohn:I'm Leah. I wanna thank you so much for spending this time with me today. It was wonderful to hear your presentation last night at the University of South Florida David C Anshan Center for the Advancement of Teaching and I look forward to following your work and learning more about not only your Instapoetry project but the work you're doing with gaming and also with some of your positionality of pre-service teachers. All of those things really strike a chord with me and certainly align with many of my interests as well.
Dr. Amélie Lemieux:Thank you so much for having me on the classroom caffeine podcast, lindsey, much appreciated. I love the work that you do and thank you so much for being in conversation with me and I'm very grateful for that. Thank you, you've given me so much to think about. Thank you.
Lindsay Persohn:Dr Emily Lemieux's research interests include equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility policies as it relates to reading, research, literature, teaching and multi-modality, all informed by phenomenological and post-humanist perspectives. Her work has been published in reading research quarterly, literacy, professional development in education, british Journal of Educational Technology, canadian Journal of Learning and Technology and other venues. A bronze Lieutenant Governor's Medal recipient of Quebec, she received social sciences and humanities research council funding to investigate adolescents, digital literacy practices and meaning making processes as ways to leverage racial and social justice. Dr Lemieux completed a social sciences and humanities research council Bombardier funded PhD in literacy and education at McGill University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Brock University's Center for Research in Multiliteracies. Dr Emily Lemieux is an assistant professor at the University of Montreal's Faculty of Education in the Department of Didactics or Teaching and Learning. You can connect with Dr Lemieux at AMELIE L-E-M-I-E-U-Xcom that's AMELIELEMieuxcom, and follow her most recent research project on Instagram at insta underscore poetic. That's at INS-TA underscore P-O-E-T-I-K.
Lindsay Persohn:For the good of all students. Classroom caffeine aims to energize education, research and practice. If this show gives you things to think about, help us spread the word. Talk to your colleagues and educator friends about what you hear. You can support the show by subscribing, liking and reviewing this podcast through your podcast provider. Visit classroomcaffeinecom where you can subscribe to receive our short monthly newsletter, the espresso shot. On our website, you can also learn more about each guest, find transcripts for our episodes, explore topics using our dropdown menu of tags, request an episode topic or potential guest, support our research through our listener survey or learn more about the research we're doing on our publications page. Connect with us on social media through Instagram, facebook and Twitter. We would love to hear from you. Special thanks to the classroom caffeine team Leah Berger, abaya Veluru, stephanie Branson and Shaba Hojfath. As always, I raise my mug to you teachers. Thanks for joining me. Thank you, thank you.