This ethnographic case study focused on a transnational education programme in an inner city in Mainland China that used both Chinese high school curriculum and Canadian provincial curriculum from New Brunswick. The goal of the study was to capture the desires and power relations that shaped literacy and identity options in the school's hybrid curriculum. Findings revealed the affordances of the programme in expanding students' cultural and linguistic knowledge and capabilities in two languages and the constraints to their literacy and identity options. Notable constraints included the compartmentalization of English and Chinese curricula, standardized literacy tests, and the school policies that limited teachers' incorporation of new media literacies and critical literacy. The study contributes to extant knowledge of transformative transnational literacy education that could help educators provide pedagogical opportunities for students to construct fluid and multi‐layered identities that connect to their complex, multilingual literacy practices.

Households with school‐aged children worldwide were affected by school closures caused by COVID‐19. Using a sociomaterial orientation and collective biography methodology, this study examined the household curricula of diverse families in Ontario, Canada with children in pre‐school through Grade 12. It found two distinct curricular phases to the pandemic, each with its own networked constituents, movements, and effects. Phase I involved learning at home during the lockdown in Spring and Summer 2020; Phase II involved online and face‐to‐face learning in the Fall of 2020. The constituents involved in curriculum making in Phase I were expansive and unexpected. Multiple timescales, modes, languages, and knowledge disciplines assembled to (re)configure households as learning spaces that produced novel opportunities for children's knowing, doing, and being. The makeup and movements of the Phase II assemblages were more of a return to the normalized boundaries of implemented school curricula that demarcated subject areas, languages, learning/play, learning/assessment, and body/mind. Concerned with questions of equity in/through curriculum, this study suggests a curriculum paradigm that foregrounds learners' and teachers' engagement with sociomaterial lifeworlds and their ethical relationship building with the more‐than‐human and the world.

Recent decades have witnessed rapid growth of K-12 transnational education programs, but little is known about how human/nonhuman assemblages impact K-12 transnational literacy curricula and how sociomaterial assemblages affect (de)colonizing literacy practices. This study of English and Mandarin literacy curricula at a Canadian transnational education program in postcolonial Hong Kong was informed by posthumanism and theories on decolonizing curriculum. The study combined ethnographic data collection tools (curriculum documents, interviews, classroom observations) and a diffractive methodology of reading, thinking, and writing with multiple data sources and theories to explore how sociomaterial relations between humans and nonhumans shaped the (de)colonization of literacy curricula. Findings show a generative sociomaterial assemblage in the transnational education program that enabled encounters of local-global curricula, local-global languages, and academic-multimedia literacies. New forms of imperialism and colonialism also joined the assemblage and normalized binaries of L1/L2, local/global, and academic/multimedia literacies, thus constraining students’ meaning making across languages, places, and semiotic resources. The article proposes literacy curriculum and pedagogies that could foster students’ ethical relationship building with humans and nonhumans in globalized schooling contexts.

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