This Land is Our Land? Multiple Literacies and Becoming-Citizen in an Adult ESL Classroom

Unprecedented levels of global migration have produced pluralistic nations where citizenship education can pose a complex challenge. In these contexts, government-funded language instruction programs for new immigrants have become important sites, where politically charged debates around citizenship and how to teach it play out. This article considers the intersections of citizenship education, power, multiple literacies, and curriculum in a Canadian adult immigrant language program mandated to facilitate the integration of newcomers. Deleuze & Guattari's conceptual repertoire, along with the Deleuzian-informed Multiple Literacies Theory, frame an analysis of qualitative data focusing on a singular classroom event: the singing of a folk song. This research follows lines of power: state power as pouvoir operating through the order-word 'multiculturalism', and life's affective power as puissance operating through reading texts disruptively in the classroom. These molar lines and lines of flight run between nation-state citizenship as an integrative outcome premised on sameness, and the concept of 'becoming-citizen' as an untimely process premised on difference. Considering the implications of this analysis for classroom practice, 'rhizocurriculum' is posited as a way to reimagine citizenship in ways that can account for the revolutionary, transformative effects of difference.