Mi teléfono es mi mejor maestro: Latina Immigrant Mothers’ Use of Smartphones as Literacy Tools

• In Event: Identity, Agency, and Voice: Immigrant Resilient Practices Across Diverse Contexts

Abstract

This paper examines how four Latina immigrant mothers and their preschool-aged children employ literacy practices via Smartphones within and beyond a two-generation program called “Nuestra Comunidad.” Two-generation programs provide intergenerational interventions; mothers take ESL, parenting, and family literacy classes while children attend early childhood courses. Drawing on a sociocultural framework (Vygotsky, 1978) and placing multimodal literacies (Jewitt and Kress, 2003; Street, 2003) at the center of the study, this research captures the range of literacy practices that Latino families employed throughout their lives via Smartphones.
The research questions were: What kinds of literacy practices with Smartphones do Latino immigrant families engage in at school and in out-of-school settings? How do these practices move across contexts? Four Latino immigrant families were elected to participate in this ten-month ethnographic study. Mothers and children are the only family members allowed to matriculate in the program; thus, I focused on mothers’ and children’s literacy practices during in-school observations. Other family members were observed in out-of-school settings. The inclusion criteria for the study were: 1) Families were first-time participants in the program; 2) Mothers had at least one child in the program between the ages of two and six. Observations at school took place bi-weekly; families were observed out-of-school once every other week for approximately 3-4 hours. Data was collected through observations, ethnographic interviews, and video. Literacy artifacts were also collected. Grounded theory (Glaser, 1978) was used to generate theory from the data.
The study revealed an array of Smartphone literacy practices flowed between contexts in continuous and discontinuous ways. The school espoused its own prescriptive literacy practices, which were print-based. Mothers resisted and used Smartphones in their classrooms to gain access to dictionaries and ESL programs in a hidden manner because they wanted to learn as much as possible and knew that decontextualized ESL exercises were not facilitating their learning as much as online resources. In out-of-school contexts—mothers used Smartphones as literacy tools to text and used apps such as Facebook to connect to loved ones and seek information. They also used Smartphones to look up words to communicate with others (e.g., bank tellers, pharmacists).
In the U.S., online literacy is arguably becoming more popular than print. It is imperative to connect out-of-school multimodal literacy practices to in-school practices because students are already doing so. As evidenced in this research, students use technology to empower themselves to take education into their own hands rather than depend on teachers as the sole sources of knowledge. These abilities and attitudes trickle down from mother to child. Teaching children to take technology into their own hands by actively transporting literacy practices across settings provides a means of showing children that they are active agents who do not mindlessly pass on cultural, linguistic, and literacy practices; rather, they can choose how to apply what they learned in school to out-of-school contexts and vice versa.

Author

• Karisa Jessica Peer, University of California - Los Angeles