Contact: Audrey Van Alstyne

The Vancouver School Board is a large, urban, and multicultural school district, comprising 110 schools and over 50 000 students. We are among the most diverse public school systems in the nation, and as such, we are committed to providing the highest quality learning experience for all students. Our goal is to enable students from diverse backgrounds to reach their intellectual, social and physical potential in ways that reflect the worth of each individual. Fostering full literacy has always been, and is increasingly, an important aspect of this goal. We feel the research questions being asked by the grant team are absolutely necessary and timely, particularly given that nearly half (48%) of our students speak a language other than English at home – representing at least 160 different languages and dialects – and 10% are French immersion learners. We are looking forward to working as a part of the grant to elucidate ways to best support the literacy development of our students, including how best to harness the power of the many tech and new media materials that become available to them each year.