This presentation will focus on addressing educators who have been acutely and globally impacted by demographic shifts in their classrooms. Both pre-and in-service educators have been witness to increased sentiments of disempowerment and marginalization of newcomer students and have felt the widening chasm between curricula and practices. In this session I describe how a grassroots initiative conducted through a series of studies with educators in Western Canada examined the potential that culturally and ethnically diverse newcomer adolescent students bring to the classroom. The studies included workshops, multimodal and multilingual initiatives, with a heavy emphasis on an arts-based framework and walking methodologies. It led to the opportunity for educators to center, affirm, and develop the potentiality of these students as they enter the classroom in terms of their intersecting language, culture, and religion and how this can be used proactively in an educational setting. This intersectionality, as it has come to be known, involves students’ language, race, gender, sexuality, and religion, and it tends to overlap interdependent systems of discrimination and disadvantage (Núñez, 2014). Pre- and in-service educators’ efforts to help newcomer students to integrate and socialize into classrooms and society has become a challenge. They witness their students cast into various situations where they frequently confront racialization and the inevitable face-to-face reality of power imbalances as they negotiate their multiple and overlapping identities (Compton-Lilly, et al., 2017; Núñez, 2014). These form a fundamental component of the racism and imbalances that are often felt by this demographic, and have the potential to lead to individual denigration and inequalities in society and among power hierarchies (Kubota, 2021). As Creese (2019) suggests, the intersectionality of race and identity are an important component in examining how newcomer students succeed. I discuss an intervention that involves critically engaged literacy workshops (CELWs), a research methodology (Ørngreen & Levinsen, 2017) that pre-/in-service educators can use to explore participants’ lived experiences through a multimodal and multilingual framework (Zaidi & Sah, 2024). CELWs include experimenting with focus groups, walking narratives and sharing stories that all work toward acknowledging newcomer students’ intersectional identities as they develop their language and literacy development (Storvang et al., 2018). I showcase how this research will provide an excellent opportunity for pre-/in-service educators to experiment with and implement curricular changes and models that help shape their newcomer students' linguistic, cultural, and literacy trajectories.

Compton-Lilly, C., Papoi, K., Venegas, P., Hamman, L., & Schwabenbauer, B. (2017). Intersectional identity negotiation: The case of young immigrant children. Journal of Literacy Research, 49, 115–140. Creese, G. (2019). “Where are you from?” Racialization, belonging and identity among second-generation African-Canadians. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(9), 1476-1494. Kubota, R. (2021). Critical antiracist pedagogy in ELT. ELT Journal, 75(3), 237–246. Núñez, A. (2014). Employing multilevel intersectionality in educational research: Latino identities, contexts, and college access. Educational Researcher, 43(2), 85 –92. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X17724740. Ørngreen, R., & Levinsen, K. (2017). Workshops as a research methodology. The Electronic Journal of eLearning, 15(1), 70-81. Zaidi, R., & Sah, P. K. (2024). Multilingual and multimodal literacy interventions to explore youth’s intersectional identities and racialized experiences: A scoping review. SAGE Open.