Xuemei Li

Memorial University of Newfoundland · Faculty of Education

Community-based arts practice is programming that informs and fosters essential components of wellbeing and belonging including resilience, community attachment via interpersonal connection and exchange as preventive to mental health stressors. Our Art Hive in a centre-city high school with immigrant and refugee youth in St. John’s, Newfoundland, w...

Since 2015, we have been researching various applications of the Art Hive framework in community settings in Newfoundland and Labrador. Between 2015 and 2017 our projects included newcomer programming with immigrant and refugee youth within a local high school in the form of weekly ‘pop up’ art hive sessions. Our focus was on belonging and inclusio...

Published in: Morning Watch: Educational and Social Analysis Special Issue, 46(1-2). Last year, our interdisciplinary team created a pop-up Art Hive with newcomer youth that was hosted in partnership with a local high school (see Lewis, McLeod & Li, 2018). The Open Studio Project was a collaborative research effort between the Faculty of Educatio...

This article extracts eight points for discussion from many years of research in newcomer academic support and social integration in Newfoundland and Labrador. These points include: transportation to school for newcomer students; resources and support for ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers; coordination of the ESL program; workload and stu...

The province's five-year action plan to attract more immigrants into the province (Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, n.d.) indicates an increase in the number of newcomer students in our education system. Most of these students come from war-torn regions with diverse linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds. Many of them had been li...

Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) may not be a familiar term for many people in Newfoundland and Labrador, and TESL professionals in the province are a very small group. One can easily count the numbers of ESL teachers in the K-12 school system, the government sponsored Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program, and the...

The Open Studio is a publicly accessible art-making space grounded in ideals of collaborative community development, Adlerian theory, social justice, and feminist thoughts. Our project involved visual art-making and exploring high school immigrant students’ experiences of inclusion and belonging. The purpose was to help immigrant and refugee youth...

This paper explores a process-genre approach to teaching academic writing skills to advanced English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students. The 'reading-to-writing' tasks and procedures were designed to examine the feasibility of the approach for a doctoral English-for-academic-purposes (EAP) program in the academic years. Data for this action resea...

This study investigates the needs of newcomer youth in Newfoundland and Labrador, and the services provided to them in the provincial capital, St. John’s, through the lens of service providers. We employ Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model (1999, 2005) as the conceptual framework to explore how various ecological systems interact with one another...

The author discusses genre and rhetoric issues in second language academic writing through personal narrative of writing in Chinese (first language) and English (foreign/second language) and analysis of current writing instructions in China's high schools and universities. The goal is to lead up to discussions of the cross-cultural differences in r...

A narrative approach was adopted to explore the experiences of 13 women who pursued academic careers. Analysis of the personal reflective narratives uncovered themes common to the participants, also the authors of this study, which focused on striving to have work-life balance, personal and professional costs associated with being unwell, and the i...

This article addresses the complex academic and social adjustment issues of newcomer youth of refugee background at a high school in Newfoundland and Labrador, a province where the newcomer population is small but the percentage of refugees in relation to all newcomers is high. Data for this qualitative study include documents from educational auth...

This study explored the issues around parental support for newcomer children’s transition to school in a smaller urban centre in Atlantic Canada where newcomer support is relatively limited. Data were drawn from semistructured interviews with 11 newcomer parents, five children, and one settlement worker. The findings revealed newcomer parents’ diff...

Reflecting, sharing, and producing knowledge about the process of writing and collaboration in a writing group is the focus of this qualitative project, in which we explore a complex weaving of knowledge, subjectivity, and representation. In this group are eight women faculty, all of whom are individually working on writing projects in their own ar...

This study looks into the changing voice of Chinese Post-­‐80s' students in English academic writing. Data were collected qualitatively through interviews with four Chinese Post-­‐80s overseas graduate students and through an examination of their English essays with a focus on discursive features. Findings indicate that Chinese Post-­‐ 80s' voice i...

This qualitative study engaged five international graduate students from four different countries (the U.S., Colombia, Cape Verde Island, and Spain) who were studying at a Chinese university in Shanghai. The researcher investigated their personal and academic lives in China, their interaction with local people and integration into the local context...

Feminist postmodernism criticizes dominant assumptions of rational ways of knowing and how science creates ‘truth-effects’ through language . In this qualitative self-study project, we show how the arts support participation and collaboration in creating understanding. By questioning ways of representation, knowledge construction and collaboration,...

For many academics, the challenge of traversing the competitive discourse demands of conducting research and publishing journal articles while navigating teaching and administrative loads often leads to anxiety and stress. Becoming an academic is often an implicit process where one is left alone to find one’s way. Located in Canada, the Faculty of...

Our faculty writing group in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada began in 2009 and over the past three years it has grown into a successfully publishing community of practice. When we have presented papers on the writing group at conferences, we have found that the first question asked tends to be: How did you ge...

This narrative delineates my journey of becoming a researcher. While the trigger involved defense of my dignity, the real reasons that led me to doing research were for better teaching, and for query of the self. In the article, I integrate my language learning and teaching experiences with discussions of the native speaker fallacy, communicative l...

In this discussion, the author highlights the relationship between language and identity by discussing notions such as language as a symbolic resource (Heller, 199512. Heller , M. 1995 . “ Code-switching and the politics of language ” . In One speaker, two languages: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on code-switching , Edited by: Milroy , L. and Muy...

Studies investigating cultural influences on second-language writing have been mainly product-oriented. Moreover, research on writing processes has mostly focused on the strategies of writing and learning to write. Writing processes where we can see the evolution of the writer's identity and beliefs have been less adequately addressed. Therefore, t...

This study focuses on a multicultural ESL classroom with the purpose of exploring the creation of new individual and cultural identities and the formation of interculture. Through on-site observations and interviews with second-language learners and their teacher, the study presents findings about the dynamics, quandaries, complexity, and diversity...

This research explores the identity reconstruction of graduate students in additional language (AL) contexts. It addresses not only the issue of language proficiency in self-representation, but also more complicated factors that influence self-positioning and perceived social positioning in an additional culture, as well as ways of establishing the...