Mode-Switching: Immigrant Students Blend Semiotic Resources to Author Their Experiences

• In Event: Activist Literacies: Theorizing Literacy in and Across Communities of Practice

Abstract

It has become increasingly common for educational practitioners and researchers to conceptualize students’ literacy practices and knowledge more broadly, documenting ways that youth engage with literacy as connected to their identities, community legacies, and cultural and linguistic “funds of knowledge” (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) through multiple modes (Kress, 2003) such as visuals (Burmark, 2008). Despite these scholarly shifts in considering literacy as multiple and “ideological” (Street, 1995), the current schooling reality for many students, and in particular for immigrant and multilingual youth and learners labeled “at risk”, typically involves remedial instruction (Menken, 2008) and excludes out-of-school practices and new literacies (Hull & Schultz, 2002). When these do form a part of the curriculum, multimodal, multilingual literacies are often characterized as a vehicle for transitioning students into more conventional academic modes. Two examples with direct implications for our study are when visual texts such as comics are seen as a means of getting students to read “real” books, or when use of a native language is used to transition students into English acquisition. Such cursory inclusions, while aiming to draw on students’ resources, ultimately reify conventional hierarchies of knowledge.

This paper takes us a point of departure what Author 2 (2007), drawing on realist theories of identity, has referred to as the “epistemic privilege” of immigrant students. We report on a practitioner research study of a summer school program for English Language Learners that is part of a wider university-school collaboration with a culturally and linguistically diverse district. We facilitated literacy engagements in several elementary, middle, and secondary classroom communities—explicitly inviting students to employ their cultural legacies, native languages, and epistemologies. In particular, we emphasized visual texts and multiple languages/cultures as rich sources of knowledge. Data collection included fieldnotes of class sessions, student work, audio-recording of youth’s oral texts, interviews with program educators and students, and document review of curriculum materials. Analysis proceeded using the constant comparative method (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). The paper presentation emphasizes one key finding: how immigrant students crisscross semiotic resources in order to resist assimilationist narratives and represent the complexity of their experiences, in the process challenging what counts as literacy and as knowledge.

Authors

• Maria Paula Ghiso, Teachers College, Columbia University

• David Eric Low, The University of Pennsylvania