Harini Rajagopal

Harini Rajagopal serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Language & Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Education. Her scholarly work centers on antiracist and decolonizing approaches to education, focusing on integrating diverse communicative repertoires—including multiple languages, photography, and arts—into mainstream classrooms while addressing systemic inequities.

Her research spans arts-based research, multiliteracy and multimodality, bilingual/multilingual education, literacy education, decolonizing pedagogies, critical literacies, teacher education, and race and antiracism. She employs feminist ethics of care and reflexive methodologies to develop caring, justice-oriented pedagogies that value multiliterate practices as resources for all students' learning. Her collaborative work with children and teachers emphasizes relational approaches to navigating cultural and linguistic diversity.

Analysis of her recent publications (2021-2025) reveals consistent focus on emergent bilinguals and refugee-background children using multimodal and arts-based strategies to address intersectional inequalities. Key trends include decolonizing practices in teacher education, critical multilingual awareness, and antiracist frameworks that center student agency through drawing, storytelling, and language brokering. Her work consistently bridges theoretical rigor with practical classroom applications.

Dr. Rajagopal actively contributes to teacher education through collaborative research that promotes equity-oriented pedagogy. Her projects often involve co-designing culturally sustaining curricula with educators, emphasizing participant-friendly methods that honor diverse linguistic repertoires. She works on the traditional, unceded territories of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm people, grounding her practice in Indigenous land acknowledgments and ethical research partnerships.