In response to Canada’s growing ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity, educators in French immersion classrooms are increasingly responding with enhanced cross-linguistic initiatives, and dual language books are promising resources in the promotion of multilingualism (Zaidi, 2020; Zaidi & Dooley, 2021). This paper details a research project we completed in a 2019 classroom-based qualitative case study in a French immersion school experiencing an increasing enrollment of linguistically diverse students. The researchers sought to determine if Storybooks Canada, a free digital platform with 40 dual language books in multiple languages, could help promote literacy engagement and strengthen home-school connections. Five teacher participants identified a range of features that make the platform a useful resource for promoting literacy engagement, text comprehension, learner autonomy, meaning-making, and instructional differentiation. These included (i) the multilingual features, (ii) the ability to project stories on a large screen, (iii) the audio component, (iv) the illustrations, and (v) the different levels of text difficulty. While teachers made almost exclusive use of the French language features of the site, for classroom purposes, they supported cross-linguistic uses of the platform in the home context, with a view of strengthening home-school connections.

The voices of Pacific women and girls have too often been excluded from Fiji’s archival history. However, alternative understandings of history, stories that defy and blur accepted polarities and reflect the knowledge and experiences of women and girls, have always co-existed. This article attempts to address the lacuna of Pacific women in the archive by claiming space for women’s voices, and contributing herstories which record and are inspired by Fiji women’s feminist activism. We offer three stories from women whose activism seeks to reveal and challenge dominant historical narratives in Fiji. Their stories celebrate Fiji’s communities as historically and inextricably interwoven, and encourage a renewed sense of belonging to one another. These examples of feminist storytelling as activism emerge from women’s complex and intersecting identities, and from an understanding that oppressions overlap and interconnect. Activist work therefore needs to occur in a variety of spaces and forms, working relationally across marginalised communities and stories, in order to challenge exclusionary understandings, and to build peace. The contribution of alternative stories of practice is a call for the inclusion of diverse voices: we seek to offer feminist, community-centred, and practice-based knowledge from Fiji to the archives.

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