Other Projects

Learning Opportunities


In 2010, I was invited to work with my colleagues Dr. Rachel Heydon (UWO) and Dr. Luigi Iannacci (Trent) on a SSHRC funded study of literacy learning opportunities in full day kindergarten classrooms in Ontario. From October to December and May to June, I conducted weekly classroom observations in an urban kindergarten. Two papers have been produced from this study so far.

Moffatt, L. Heydon, R., & Iannacci, L. (2017) Helping Out, Signing Up and Sitting Down: The Cultural Production of Reading and Readers in Three Kindergarten Classrooms, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy.

Heydon, R, Moffatt, L, & Iannacci, L (2015) ‘Every day he has a dream to tell’: classroom literacy curriculum in a full-day kindergarten. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 47(2), 171-202.


Start with a Seedling

In 2014, I invited three local Kindergarten teachers to engage in an Intergenerational experiment. I would gather volunteers to come into their classrooms and together we would design a year of gardening and food related activities. This program was based loosely on the very successful Landed Learning program at the University of British Columbia. As a researcher, I know educators often have fears about losing instructional time, or not being able to "cover the curriculum". In this way, I felt it was important to study how participation in a program like this might support students and teachers in meeting provincial curriculum expectations.

The first paper documenting this project is Moffatt, L. (2016) Start with a Seedling: Uncovering the Kindergarten Language and Literacy Curriculum One Leaf at a Time, Language & Literacy, 18, (3), 89-105 

Early in our time together the local CBC radio interviewed me about the project. Later they came out to see us when we took a field trip to a local community garden.


Ecolinguistics

Following on my recent literature review, Moffatt, L. (2015) Surveying the field: Literacy education research for environmental sustainability. Literacy and Social Responsibility, 8, 1, 3-16. I am now working on a literature review of applied linguistics research that addresses issues of environmental sustainability.

Moffatt, L. Ecolinguistics: Research in Applied Linguistics and Environmental Sustainability (in preparation).


I Hope it Still Counts

Moffatt, L. (2014) I hope it still counts as reading: The Cultural production of reading(s), social relations and values in a research interview. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 10(2), 1-16.

This was the first publication from my PhD Dissertation Reading and Rethinking:The Cultural Production of Reading and Readers in Interviews with Parents and Teachers. Below you can hear an interview about the piece from the Journal of Language and Literacy Education.