Events and News

This month has been an exciting time for sharing my research across two major conferences: Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) in Darwin International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) in Auckland

We’re absolutely thrilled to receive the 2025-2026 Australia-Korea Foundation grant, which was announced recently! This feels like such a significant moment – not just for the project itself, but for what it represents about cross-cultural storytelling and children’s voices.

Join Julie Choi and Hana Kinoshita Thomson as they share their collaborative journey creating a kimchi picture book. This hands-on session explores creative approaches to developing culturally meaningful stories that resonate across communities.

Yesterday’s online symposium at the University of Wuppertal was a terrific reminder of how much we can learn when different voices come together in one space. The organisers made a smart choice by bringing schoolteachers, graduate students, and researchers into conversation about collaborative approaches to professional development.

After much anticipation and preparation, our ARTP strand has officially kicked off this week in TESOL-TIRF Research Symposium and it’s off to a fantastic start! We’re thrilled to report that 15 people have already viewed the lecture video, and 4 individuals have engaged in vibrant discussions. It’s truly inspiring to witness the power of TESOL in uniting a global community.

We are thrilled to announce our Multilingual Education Teaching Team (A/Prof Julie Choi, Dr Elena Pirovano, Dr Elahe Shakshi Dastgahian, Dr Shu Ohki, Dr Tharanga Koralage, Melissa Slamet) has received the Faculty of Education Teaching Excellence and Innovation Award. This prestigious award is the culmination of a decade of dedication to developing the subject Multilingual Practices in Global Times, which is designed with Arts-Rich Translanguaging Pedagogies principles in mind. Year after year, student feedback has highlighted how transformative this subject has been, underscoring its impact on both personal and academic levels.

How is ARTP helping us rethink assessment and pedagogy in the era of GenAI in higher education? This was the guiding question behind Melissa’s and Julie’s recent presentation at the University of Melbourne’s Assessment and GenAI Symposium on 3 June 2025, where Melissa shared part of my PhD project exploring how a multilingual university student in Australia engages with academic reading and writing using both digital tools and multilingual resources.

Raf and I have been invited to lead a strand on Arts-Rich Translanguaging Pedagogy in the 2025 TESOL-TIRF Symposium which will take place online from June to September 2025 (with one synchronous session in July). Check out the different strands and sign up if you’re interested in any of the strands. https://www.tesol.org/professional-development/publications-and-research/research-and-standards/research/research-symposium/

The work on arts-rich translanguaging bookmaking with Vietnamese-Australian parents was presented in the AERA conference through the i-Poster platform. An article detailing the work will be published soon.

We’re very excited to present our ARTP work through our YouTube Channel ‘ARTP in Action’. Our first interview series explores Dr Julie Choi’s ‘Kimchi is for Everyone’ picture book which illuminates concepts of multilingual literacy, translanguaging, and cultural identity. 

Raf, Julie and Shu had the great opportunity of presenting a webinar for ATESOL NT on ‘Expanding primary EAL learners’ meaning making possibilities through arts-rich translanguaging pedagogy’. We had a fantastic turnout with teachers from the Northern Territory and across the country joining us to explore how to use the arts and translanguaging to support language and literacy learning.

We kicked off the year at Blackburn English Language School with 70 EAL teachers and Multicultural Education Aides (MEAs) exploring how to learn about students’ funds of knowledge and identity through arts-rich translanguaging bookmaking, with a bit of drama, and knowledge from CLIL. It was inspiring to witness teachers’ creativity unfold as they shared their own diverse experiences, multilingual knowledge, and identities. Their stories of language, culture, and identity exemplified ‘linguistically and culturally responsive texts.’ The workshop revealed not only rich insights about our teachers but also highlighted how projects like bookmaking can enhance language and literacy education.

Congratulations to our 2025 MTESOL graduates! It was wonderful to share this great day with our students, many of whom I got to know through the research subject investigating translanguaging. I can’t wait to hear all about where life takes them next.

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!

At a recent webinar for the National Institute of Education Singapore’s English Language & Literature Department, I discussed the crucial transition needed in Critical Multilingual Language Awareness (CMLA) from theoretical frameworks to evidence-based classroom practices. Drawing on insights from my teaching and research, including work from my PhD student Melissa Slamet, I explored how we can develop CMLA effectively in teacher education. The talk centered on addressing the gap identified by Van Gorp & De Costa – the need to move from theoretical understanding to concrete classroom strategies.

In many schools around the world, plurilingual students are positioned through a deficit lens as language and literacy learners and struggle to find their way into a writer’s identity. The importance of creating a translanguaging space to support plurilingual learners is well established in the literature (Durán & Palmer, 2014; Espinosa et al., 2021; García et al., 2017). Schools have much to learn from community organizations and initiatives that create space for learners to bring their full meaning making repertoires to bear. Working from this viewpoint, we will explore a case study of an arts-rich bookmaking experience in and out-of-school settings demonstrating how it opens up multiple entry points into resourceful multilingual writerly identities. 

In many schools around the world, plurilingual students are positioned through a deficit lens as language and literacy learners and struggle to find their way into a writer’s identity. The importance of creating a translanguaging space to support plurilingual learners is well established in the literature (Durán & Palmer, 2014; Espinosa et al., 2021; García et al., 2017). Schools have much to learn from community organizations and initiatives that create space for learners to bring their full meaning making repertoires to bear. Working from this viewpoint, we will explore a case study of an arts-rich bookmaking experience in and out-of-school settings demonstrating how it opens up multiple entry points into resourceful multilingual writerly identities. 

Melissa has been invited to a Faculty of Education Diversity and Inclusion meeting to share her experiences in forming a Translanguaging Community of Practice (TCoP). The invitation was extended by the chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee who has expressed a keen interest in learning more about our innovative collaborations and the insights we’ve gained through this process.

Congratulations to Grace Manuleleua on her great success last week at the confirmation seminar. On a rainy and dreary Melbourne afternoon, Grace lit up the room with her beautiful Samoan dress and shared with us the incredible work she has been doing on her study over the last 8 months to pass this milestone.

Big thanks to our wonderful lecturers Chris, Hesaam, and Shu for joining today. Our very dedicated MTESOL student Billy also came to join us – it was great to be able to use all our mix of languages to introduce our courses to parents and prospective students.

We are thrilled to announce that Ms. Melissa Slamet, A/Prof Julie Choi, Dr Tharanga Kalehe Pandi Koralage, and Dr Rafaela Cleeve Gerkens has won second place for their outstanding poster presentation at AILA 2024. Led by Melissa Slamet, the poster titled “Exploring Educators’ Enactment of Plurilingualism in Language and Literacy Education” illustrates the various ways language and literacy educators can utilize their linguistic resources to enrich their teaching practices and better support their students.

It has been some time since the EAL New Arrivals teachers in Victoria have been able to come together for their conference (were there really 500+ attendees?!). I really gained a sense of the solidarity and identity of these wonderful teachers who believe in their students’ full potential to learn and succeed. Amazing keynote speakers by game-changing young people who themselves experienced English Language Schools when they first arrived in Australia. I personally felt very inspired!

Although Rafaela and Julie were not able to attend AILA in person this year, thanks to Melissa’s organizational efforts, we managed to present our recorded AILA presentation without any glitches. Phew!

Big thanks to Dr Bonita Cabiles for inviting us (Raf & Julie) to give our guest lecture on ‘Expanding meaning-making possibilities through arts-rich translanguaging pedagogy (ARTP). This is our first lecture to bring ‘the Arts’, ‘Translanguaging’ and ‘Content and Language’ pedagogies together and it’s given us so much confidence that we need to do more of this bringing together of teaching approaches for language and literacy development. The students were wonderful and as you can see we all had a great time becoming ‘energetic molecules’. Thank you students for your participation and your insightful questions!

On 30 July 2024, members of EdSAC organized a successful Town Hall event where students were able to ask questions directly to the Dean, academic, and professional staff. As the Academic Co-Lead of the EdSAC, Julie spoke about ‘translanguaging’ and how FoE embraces such strengths-based approaches that recognize students’ full ‘funds of knowledge’ and identity and encourage multilingual students to use their whole funds of knowledge so that we can create more diverse and inclusive opportunities for learning together.

Is fluency a prerequisite for passing on heritage languages to future generations? In the Translanguaging Communities workshop, Associate Professor Julie Choi and Jodie Whitehurst addressed this misconception and discussed how translanguaging can aid in maintaining heritage languages both at home and within the community. A/Prof Julie Choi began the session with a brief presentation on translanguaging, which was followed by interactive activities conducted by Drama in Education expert Jodie Whitehurst.

The ARTP Lab researchers, Associate Professor Julie Choi, Dr Rafaela Cleeve Gerkens, and Dr Shu Ohki presented their research project titled “Multilingual authors ‘standing taller’ in arts-rich translanguaging spaces”. Their inspiring presentation captures the attention of educators and researchers worldwide.

There was a wonderful book reading by one of the parents and her daughter of the Crocodile Unicorn và Đi Chơi book. Emeritus Professor David Nunan who made a generous donation to work on this project facilitated an interview with the parent and engaged the audience in a discussion on arts-rich translanguaging bookmaking projects. This event was organized by ViệtSpeak and the team was there to support it!

Congratulations to Associate Professor Yvette Slaughter, Associate Professor Julie Choi, and Dr Shu Ohki who recently won a Faculty of Education Staff Award for Teaching Excellence and Innovation for their teaching initiative, Embedding Plurilingual Perspectives in Languages and Literacies Education.

Congratulations to Melissa Slamet, whose candidature was confirmed for her PhD research project titled “Exploring Multilingual Students’ Meaning-Making Resources in Academic Literacy Practices.”

The ARTP Lab researchers, Associate Professor Julie Choi and Dr Rafaela Cleeve Gerkens presented their research project titled “My book ideas were spinning in my head”: Arts-rich bookmaking experiences to create and sustain multilingual children’s meaning making flows and authorial voices” at the MGSE (currently, Faculty of Education) research conference, “Education Research: Adapting to a Changing Landscape.”

At the MGSE (currently, Faculty of Education) research conference, “Education Research: Adapting to a Changing Landscape,” held in the Arts West Building, researchers from the ARTP Lab and staff from LALE, including Associate Professor Julie Choi, Dr. Rafaela Cleeve Gerkens, Ms. Melissa Slamet, and Dr. Tharanga Koralage, presented their research project titled “Exploring Educators’ Enactment of Plurilingualism in Language and Literacy Teacher Education.”