Tribute to Professor Pippa Stein SURESH CANAGARAJAH Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania, United States Ⅲ On August 2008, Professor Pippa Stein’s courageous battle with cancer came to an end Scholars in TESOL are deeply saddened by this premature death of a beloved friend and colleague As an academic, Pippa had a distinguished career at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she devised and taught a range of innovative courses in language teacher education and in applied English language studies With Denise Newfield, she led the Wits Multiliteracies Research Project and, also with Denise, cochaired the local organizing committee of the Fourteenth International Learning Conference, which was held at Wits in June 2007 She led the Johannesburg group of the Three Cities project in which researchers in London, Delhi, and Johannesburg are investigating the teaching of English in high school classrooms Her recent publications include the guest editorship, together with Denise Newfield, of a special issue of English Studies in Africa, which addressed English in education from the perspectives of multiliteracies and multimodality This year, Routledge published Pippa’s doctoral thesis as Multimodal Pedagogies in Diverse Classrooms: Rights, Representations and Resources In 2007 Pippa was awarded the University of the Witwatersrand’s Academic Citizenship award in recognition, in particular, of her role in establishing and organizing the annual Nadine Gordimer lecture, which brought together the university and a nationwide audience to listen to the thinkers and writers Susan Sontag, Carlos Fuentes, and Amartya Sen in successive years What may be less well known to those outside South Africa is that Pippa was also what Nadine Gordimer has described as “a cultural activist.” From the 1970s, when she participated in the productions of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, through the 1980s, when she and Ruth Jacobson were responsible for a book of interviews called Sophiatown Speaks, to 2003, when she wrote Deborah Bell—a collection of essays on the work of this South African artist—Pippa demonstrated a passionate interest in the arts Her creativity enabled her to build bridges between the academic world and that of the performing and visual arts Under Pippa’s guidance, university venues for public lectures and conference presentations were transformed For example, at the opening of the Learning ConferTESOL QUARTERLY Vol 42, No 4, December 2008 689 ence, the vast stage of the auditorium was filled with Ndebele dolls— some almost life size When Pippa and her colleague Professor Hilary Janks succeeded in obtaining some funding from a publishing company, they transformed what had once been a microteaching laboratory into a interesting space for lectures and workshops in which an Africa REN meeting was held last year and which bears the name “The Applied English Language Studies Literacy Research Incubator.” Throughout her life, Pippa was a passionate campaigner for social justice in and beyond education In the 1980s she worked with teachers and learners in township schools on two projects: the Soweto English Language Project and the SPEAK project, sometimes at considerable personal risk She continued to work with children and teachers in poor communities until she became too ill to so Her commitment to high quality teaching and learning is also evident in the textbooks that she coauthored: Level Best, Communicating Today, and English Today In writing about Pippa on the books page of the Sunday Independent newspaper, Maureen Isaacson described her as “passionate and engaged,” and Nadine Gordimer’s obituary in the Mail and Guardian was titled “A love of life and scholarship” and included a photograph that was captioned “Prolific Pippa: author, academic, cultural activist.” (Adapted from tribute delivered by Yvonne Reed at AILA 2008.) 690 TESOL QUARTERLY