Monica Shank Lauwo

Monica Shank Lauwo is a PhD student in Language and Literacy Education at UBC, under the supervision of Dr. Bonny Norton and Dr. Marlene Asselin. She is the Founding Director of Cheche Community Library, a multilingual learning centre in Northern Tanzania embracing learners’ linguistic and cultural resources as the foundations of learning and knowledge production. Her work explores ways in which translanguaging and multimodality can be used to foster creativity and critical literacy and to reconfigure oppressive power relations. She is interested in children’s creative writing, and ways in which children’s multilingual, multimodal knowledge production can challenge hegemonic languages and knowledge systems. She also explores identity negotiation amongst multilingual learners. Her work has also examined intersections between political ideology, language, gender, and schooling, through intergenerational life histories work with rural women in Tanzania.

Research interests

Translanguaging, critical literacy, creative writing, identity, multilingual education, multimodality, language attitudes, East Africa