About Us
Roadmap of Our Projects
Pilot Project: Emmanuelle Le Pichon & Jim Cummins conducted research in one school in Toronto, Canada – this springboarded everything!
New MITACS and Binogi Project: Enhancing math readiness for English Language Learners with Binogi, a multilingual digital application
SSHRC & MITACS Grants: More researchers joined the project and we started expanding beyond Ontario.
- SSHRC: Plurilingual Pedagogies and Digital Technologies to Support Learning
- MITACS: Filling the Learning Gaps
- MITACS: Expanding Web-Based Educational Opportunities Project
Today we are a research team of 15 + graduate students and professors, creating language friendly resources for math and science classrooms, offering workshops in schools and community centers for parents, and disseminating our learnings with everyone we can!
Our Activities
Framework
Why is it important?
Language Friendly Pedagogy creates learning environments where all students’ linguistic resources are welcomed, visible, and actively used. It recognizes that languages are not barriers but assets that support identity, belonging, and academic success. By validating students’ entire repertoires, schools reduce linguistic exclusion, mitigate (neo)colonial dynamics, and foster more equitable participation for multilingual learners.
Student’s perspective
Students feel seen and valued. Their home languages are not something to hide; they are part of who they are.They can use all their languages to learn. Translanguaging, drawing, and switching between languages help them understand complex ideas.They become more confident. When their teachers invite their languages into the classroom, they participate more and take more intellectual risks.They feel connected to others. Sharing words, stories, or texts from their own languages strengthens friendships and builds a sense of community.School feels safer. When teachers respect their linguistic background, the students experience less shame, less correction, and more support.
Researcher’s perspective
Language Friendly Pedagogy contributes to academic gains by leveraging students’ full linguistic repertoires for meaning-making. It supports identity affirmation, which is strongly associated with motivation, engagement, and long-term achievement. It disrupts deficit-based ideologies that view multilingualism as a problem, replacing them with asset-based approaches aligned with linguistic justice. It promotes equitable learning environments by acknowledging the sociopolitical realities of language hierarchies and their connection to (neo)colonial histories. It creates opportunities for collaborative knowledge-building among students, families, and teachers, expanding the epistemic space of the classroom.
Why is it important?
Reciprocal Knowledge recognizes that learning is not unidirectional, students, teachers, families, and communities all hold valuable knowledge shaped by their languages, histories, and lived experiences. In multilingual and multicultural contexts, reciprocity disrupts traditional hierarchies of knowledge that privilege dominant languages or epistemologies. It opens the classroom to co-construction of meaning, strengthens relationships, and creates spaces where diverse ways of knowing can inform teaching and learning. Ultimately, it is essential for building equitable, culturally and linguistically sustaining education.
Student’s perspective
Students are not just receiving knowledge; They are also contributing it. What they know, from their home language, culture, or community, matters in the classroom. Their experiences count. When teachers ask about their ways of learning or invite their education history, they feel valued and respected. As a consequence, they learn more deeply. Sharing what they know and learning from others helps them see connections across subjects and languages. They also feel empowered. They are not positioned as a passive learner but as students who bring insight, curiosity, and expertise. They feel part of a community. Reciprocity helps them learn with and from each other, not just next to each other.
Researcher’s perspective
From a researcher’s perspective, Reciprocal Knowledge enables the co‑construction of meaning, positioning learners and educators as collaborators who actively shape understanding rather than reproducing predetermined content. It aligns closely with sociocultural and critical pedagogies, which emphasize that learning is relational and embedded in social, linguistic, and cultural practices. By acknowledging students and families as legitimate knowledge holders, reciprocity challenges traditional power asymmetries in classrooms and expands what counts as valuable knowledge, particularly in multilingual settings. This broadening of epistemic space strengthens educational equity and contributes to more inclusive learning environments. Research further shows that reciprocal engagement fosters trust, participation, and cognitive engagement, key predictors of academic success and long‑term learner agency (see also Le Pichon, Naji, Hassan and Wattar, 2024).
Why is it important?
Critical Intercultural Education extends beyond celebrating diversity; it interrogates how centering linguistic and historical power relations shape learning. It invites students and educators to analyze how inequalities are produced and reproduced through curriculum, language policies, and everyday interactions. This approach promotes critical consciousness, fosters inclusive learning spaces, and equips learners to engage ethically across differences. Ultimately, it supports the development of more just educational systems by challenging deficit discourses and centering diverse epistemologies.
Student’s perspective
They learn to understand differences, not just notice them, and begin to explore why certain languages or cultures are valued more in school and what that means for people. They see themselves reflected in the curriculum, where their cultural and linguistic experiences are acknowledged as meaningful sources of knowledge. They feel empowered to question unfairness, asking why rules, materials, or practices operate as they do and imagining more equitable alternatives. They build stronger relationships by reflecting on their own assumptions and learning from others’ experiences, which helps them communicate more openly and respectfully. Through this process, they develop a critical voice, becoming aware of social issues and feeling equipped to contribute thoughtfully to positive change.
Researcher’s perspective
Critical Intercultural Education foregrounds the ways that social, linguistic, and cultural power relations shape learning, inviting educators and students to engage critically with both diversity and inequality. It emphasizes reflexivity, examining one’s own positionality, assumptions, and biases, as central to pedagogical practice. By challenging dominant narratives and expanding whose knowledge is formally recognized, it opens space for marginalized voices, epistemologies, and linguistic practices within the classroom. This approach contributes to educational equity by addressing the structural roots of exclusion rather than focusing solely on interpersonal “tolerance” or celebration of cultural differences. Research also shows that critical intercultural practices enhance students’ critical thinking, empathy, and engagement in society, supporting their development as ethical, socially aware individuals preparing them to participate confidently and cooperatively in diverse settings, contributing to collective problem‑solving.
Contributors
