Migrant Youth, Multimodal Text Making, and Online Authorship

• In Event: Digital Literacies and Mobility in Migrant Communities: Studying Youth Practices and Learning Across Spaces

Abstract

Our world is becoming more profoundly interconnected with the extensive reach of digital and portable devices that principally draw on digital tools for making meaning to global audiences (Appadurai, 1996; Hull, Zacher & Hibbert, 2009; Madianou and Miller, 2012). With this shift in technological orientation is also an observable social turn in the ways that people are engaging with digital environments. Take for example, digitally enabled text making offers increased integration of words, images, sounds, among other modal resources in online, screen-based and mobile interfaces (Hull & Nelson, 2005; Jewitt, 2008; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). In this way, meaning making affordances are amplified for shaping multimodal ensembles that link authorship with design (Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Domingo, Jewitt & Kress, in press).

Yet, while such digitally enabled textual interactions are lived daily experience in most urban cities, pedagogical practices often only marginally engage these changes in the social, semiotic and technological landscape. Although the concern for bridging in-school and out-of-school literacy practices has been perennially revisited in educational research, I aim to demonstrate how opportunities for migrant urban youth movement across these spaces are now more fluid and less bounded than they have previously been discussed. For example, this paper will explore shifting notions of texts in relation to a group of Filipino British urban youth. They associate with one another as members of a hip hop group that includes participants across London and also various parts of Europe, Asia and North America. The group is drawn together by their experiences as migrants to London and also given their affinity for their Filipino heritage. I discuss the distinctive ways in which their text making includes shaping of social, technological and semiotic resources to manage belonging across discourse communities. Findings demonstrate that the youth who were most adept at bridging the discourse divides were keenly strategic in their use of digital tools for social purposes.

Drawing from and extending beyond current studies of language and literacy in global and digital environments (Hull, Stornaiuolo & Sterponi, 2013; Lam & Rosario Ramos, 2009), I will examine instances of urban youth exchanges in digital environments; and, within that, consider the shifting role of language and literacy practices. Data is drawn from a three-year ethnography that traced the movement of the youth, their ideas and their texts across spaces (e.g., performance halls, homes, social media platforms). For this paper, the focus will be on data produced in digital environments such as Ulead, Photoshop, Cubase and YouTube. While these platforms include a range of digital tools for graphic, video and music editing, I refer to them as text making platforms given that the youth engaged the digital tools to design meanings and multimodal texts (Kress & Domingo, 2013). The analytic approach will combine ethnographic, multimodal and sociocultural theories, method and description for accessing digital data and environments. The findings will be used to explore implications for generating curricular design that integrates digital tools as a social technology for working with students of varied participation backgrounds.

Author

• Myrrh Domingo, University of London