Mama Adobea Nii Owoo

SHE/HER


Ghana – Canada


University of Toronto

Mama Adobea Nii Owoo’s research lies at the intersection of Language Planning and Policy, Southern multilingualisms, decolonizing pedagogies and teacher education. Currently, Mama is completing a PhD in Language and Literacies Education at OISE/UT, where her dissertation research has won multiple awards including the TIRF’s 2020 Russell N. Campbell prize. She is using a southern theoretical lens, film and qualitative methodologies to investigate how Language Planning and Policy processes shape the African educational experience. Mama’s interests which are primarily medium of instruction policy for minoritized language learners, teacher education for multilingual English learners, African literacies, is inspired by the linguistic and cultural complexities, and ideological, historical and contemporary challenges that accompany the literacy teaching, and language learning needs of students of Black/African heritage. Mama is also the founder of the Afroliteracies Foundation, a Ghana based think-tank and accelerator for languages in education.

Presentation Clip

Websites

Publications

Adjetey-Nii Owoo, M. A. (2022). Southern Visions of Language policy: Re-visioning

Mother Tongue based Bilingual Ed in Ghana. In Makoni, S., Kaiper-Marquez, A., & Mokwena, L. (Eds.). (2022). The Routledge Handbook of Language and the Global South/s (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003007074

Adjetey-Nii Owoo, M. A. (2022). Mobilizing pedagogical agency for Mother Tongue-

based Bilingual Education (MTBE) in Ghana: An Analytic-Autoethnography. In Gagne, A., Kalan, A., & Herath, S. (Eds.) (2022). Critical action research challenging neoliberal language and literacies education: Auto and duoethnographies of global experiences. New York: Peter Lang. https://www.doi.org/10.3726/b19227

Bale, J., Rajendram, S., Brubacher, K. Adjetey–Nii Owoo, M. A.., Burton, J., Wong, W.,

Larson, E. J., Zhang, Y., Gagné, A., & Kerekes, J. (Under review). More than “Just Good Teaching”: Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Racism in Teacher Education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Gagné, A., Bale, J., Kerekes, J., Rajendram, S., Nii Owoo, M.A., Brubacher, K., Burton, J.,

Larson, E., Wong, W., & Zhang Y. (2022) Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Racism in Canadian Teacher Education. (In Press) OLBI Journal

Kerekes, J., Rajendram, S., Adjetey-Nii Owoo, M.A., & Zhang, Y. (2021). Teachers’ Takes

on Supporting Multilingual Learners in K–12 Classrooms in Ontario. TESL Canada Journal, 38(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v38i1.136

Nii Owoo, M. A. (2019 January). Sign Language needs Policy Protection in Ghana in The Conversation Canada.


Nii Owoo, M. A. (2017). Bilingual learning spaces: Lessons from using WhatsApp videos

in a Ghanaian rural context. In Smith, B. K., Borge, M., Mercier, E., and Lim, K. Y. (Eds.). (2017). Proceedings from CSCL 2017: The 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) 2017, Volume 2 (859-860). Philadelphia, PA: International Society of the Learning Sciences. https://repository.isls.org/handle/1/306

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