Co-organizer with Guofang Li, Jan Hare, and Marianne McTavish, a two-day conference held at UBC in May 2019, titled, Supporting Teachers to Work with Culturally, Linguistically, and Racially Diverse Students, Families, and Communities: A Two-Day International Symposium. The conference was sponsored by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and supported by the Department of Language and Literacy Education. Scholars from across Canada and from the United States presented papers and participants included graduate students and faculty members, teacher and educators, and community members. We are proposing an edited volume with Routledge.
Organizer, Symposium titled Working with immigrant and refugee families in family literacy programs: Transnational perspectives for the 20thEuropean Conference on Literacy, July 4, 2017, in Madrid, Spain.
Organizer and chair, Roundtable titled, Rethinking the foundations of resilience and systems change: On the role of systems and educators in and around schools featuring Dr. Paul Downes, Director, Educational Disadvantage Center, Dublin City University, April 18, 2017.
Co-organizer with Theresa Rogers, Suzanne Smythe, and Ron Darvin, a two-day conference held at UBC in May 2016, titled Equity and Digital Literacies: Access, Ethics, and Engagements. The conference was sponsored by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and supported by the Department of Language and Literacy Education. It brought together leading scholars working in this area and included a number of graduate students and community organizations. The organizers served as guest editors of a special issue of Language and Literacy based on the workshop.
Co-organizer with Ann Anderson, Jan Hare, and Marianne McTavish, a two-day conference held at UBC in May 2013, titled The Intersection of Language, Learning and Culture in Early Childhood: Home School and Community Contexts. The conference was sponsored by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and supported by the Faculty of Education and the Department of Language and Literacy Education. It brought together scholars within the disciplines of child and youth studies, education, mathematics, and psychology, working at the intersection of language, learning, and culture. Six graduate students were intimately involved in the planning and organizing committee, participated in the conference as co-authors or by chairing sessions, and coauthoring the final chapter of an edited volume. Visit http://blogs.ubc.ca/intersectionworkshop/ for more information, videos, and updates on this knowledge mobilization project.
Organizer and chair, Seminar titled Responsibility for Learning featuring Professor Emeritus David Olson, University of Toronto, November 2011. Event co-sponsored by the Department of Language and Literacy Education, the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and the Institute for Early Childhood Education and Research.
Organizer and Chair, International Symposium Family literacy: Working with immigrant and refugee families, 17th European Conference on Reading, Mons, Belgium, August 2011.
Co-organized and co-chaired with Marianne McTavish in collaboration with the Institute for Early Childhood Education and Research, a one-day pre-conference for the Canadian Association of Researchers in Early Childhood at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, June 2011. Twenty five researchers working in early Childhood Education from across Canada participated.
Co-organizer with Fiona Morrison a one day conference for 50 facilitators, administrators, school district personnel, researchers, and Ministry of Education officials involved in the Parents As Literacy Supporters (PALS) in Immigrant Communities Project, June 2009.
Organizer and chair, Seminar titled Children’s home and school literacy practices, Professor Eve Gregory, Goldsmiths College, University of London, October 2003.
Co-organizer with Maureen Kendrick, Theresa Rogers, and Suzanne Smythe of the Portraits of Literacy: Critical Issues in Family/Community/School Literacies Conference held at UBC in July 2002. The conference featured leading national and international literacy scholars including Elsa Auerbach, David Barton, David Bloome, Trevor Cairney, Mary Hamilton, Shirley Brice Heath, Mary Maguire, Victoria Purcell-Gates and Allan Quigley. We conceptualized the event so as to integrate three graduate courses into the conference and overall, about 100 graduate students were able to participate. The conference brought together researchers and practitioners from different educational contexts (universities, schools, colleges, and communities). It resulted in a number of publications including an edited volume forthcoming from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, the Conference Proceedings (print and online) and a special themed issue of English Quarterly that we co-edited.
Co-organizer, Annual Meeting of the Western Literacy Group, Vancouver, British Columbia, February 17-18, 1995.