Joy Amid Ruin

More-than-human Literacies for Survival

Authors

  • Aleksandra Waliszewska University of Victoria

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.20360/langandlit29761

Keywords:

more-than-human literacies, autobiographical narrative inquiry, posthuman, climate education

Abstract

In this paper, I reflect on the past decade as an educator and graduate student to highlight the joy that accompanied my shifting understanding of literacy. I conducted an autobiographical narrative inquiry and used selections from blog entries and graduate coursework in order to reflect on my “moments of turning”. I begin with a logocentric understanding of literacy as a white settler in two Indigenous communities, but over time embrace a multimodal, embodied, emergent, place-based, and more-than-human conception of literacies within a context of the climate and nature emergency. This conception learns from and with Indigenous ways of knowing rooted in ecology, relationships, and the land. I argue that this understanding of literacies brings joy and opens possibilities in a precarious world.

Author Biography

Aleksandra Waliszewska, University of Victoria

Aleks Waliszewska is an educator, parent and master’s candidate at the University of Victoria in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction. Her thesis focuses on more-than-human literacies in an elementary outdoor program. She has learned with Gwich’in, Nuxalk, independent school, and public school communities. Aleks completed a collaborative project funded by the inaugural Climate Education Fellowship Program in 2024 and has been serving on the Board of Directors of EPIC, a nature-based program, since 2023. Aleks feels a responsibility to explore learning models based on cooperation, decolonization, social justice, ecological accountability, and entanglement.

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Published

2025-06-13

How to Cite

Waliszewska, A. (2025). Joy Amid Ruin: More-than-human Literacies for Survival. Language and Literacy, 27(3), 175–193. https://doi.org/10.20360/langandlit29761

Issue

Vol. 27 No. 3 (2025): Special Issue: Language and Literacies as Joyful Possibilities

Section

Articles

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