Enhanced Student Engagement and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: Innovations in the SAGITTARIUS–ORION–Shaw Literature Digitizing Pilot Project

LESLIE SANDERS is university professor at York University. She works in African American and Black Canadian literatures. She is the author of The Development of Black Theater in America (l988), a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes, and the volume editor for two volumes of plays and other performance works. Aside from publications on Hughes, she has published on such Black Canadian writers as a variety of African Canadian writers, particularly on Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, Djanet Sears, and Andrew Moodie. She is webmaster for African Canadian Online (www.yorku.ca/aconline), an information site she developed with classes at York University, and the lead on the SAGITTARIUS-ORION African Canadian Literature project for schools: www.yorku.ca/acc.

LIAM RODRIGUES has worked in alternative schools and alternative programming for twenty years. He was a founding member of East York Alternative School and is currently the curriculum leader of program for SEED, the oldest alternative school in North America. He is an independent academic, who has delivered papers internationally on life writing in education, jazz, and American literature.

KAY LI, one of the founding members of the International Shaw Society, is the Project Leader of the SAGITTARIUS–ORION Digitizing Project on Bernard Shaw funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She studies cross-cultural literary encounters and cultural globalization and is the author of Bernard Shaw and China: Cross-Cultural Encounters (2007), in the University Press of Florida Shaw Series, and Bernard Shaw's Bridges to Chinese Culture, forthcoming in the Palgrave Macmillan Shaw Series. She is adjunct professor in the Department of English at York University, Toronto, and president of Asian Heritage Month–Canadian Foundation for Asian Culture (Central Ontario) Inc. Her other government-funded projects include the Virtual Museum of Asian Canadian Cultural Heritage (VMACCH) and the Asian Heritage Month Festivals.