Dr. Margaret Mackey is awarded SSHRC Insight Grant

Dr. Margaret Mackey has been awarded $131,000 by the Insight Grant program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Over the next four years, she will explore how children's developing literacy is affected by the landscapes in which they find themselves. One important question will involve children who seldom or never go outdoors alone (an increasing number), for whom the most significant landscape in their lives may be a fictional one - from a game, or a virtual world, for example. The project will invite participants to create digital maps of these settings, and to overlay them with references drawn from childhood texts and real-life experiences.