Award for Excellence in Place-based Initiatives

We are deeply thrilled and humbled to receive the 2024 University of Melbourne Excellence Award in the Place-based Initiatives category. Bringing together everything we value and cherish – the arts, translanguaging, picture books, and literacy – through our work brings us such profound joy and fulfillment. Thank you to communities, artists, teachers, students, colleagues, and the university for all your ongoing support!

Citation of our work for this award:

The Arts-Rich Translanguaging Pedagogy Lab team’s place-based initiative harnesses the arts, multilingualism, communities, and families to support language and literacy development of children from marginalised communities. It involves a collaboration between the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Education and Kids’ Own Publishing, a non-profit organisation dedicated to elevating children’s voices through art and storytelling. The partnership led to the creation of the Kids’ Own Languages program, which focuses on working with multilingual children and their families to create arts-rich books that draw on their linguistic and cultural knowledge. The initiative explores how students’ linguistic repertoires can foster literacy development and how arts-rich experiences support embodied ways of knowing.