Empathy and Affect in Latina/o Peer Discussions of Language Brokering

• In Event: 75.026 - Beyond Empowerment: Accompaniment and Sociolinguistic Justice Through Youth Research

Abstract

Youth language brokering is defined as the multiple practices in which children, typically of immigrant parents, use their knowledge of two languages to speak, read, write, and help others (Orellana, 2009). Despite a growing body of research (Tse, 1995, 1996; Lee et al., 2011; Orellana, 2009), language brokering and youth brokers have remained largely invisible in the US public sphere, in which minoritized languages and their speakers are often racialized, marginalized, and devalued (Anzaldúa, 1988; Hill, 1998; Urcuioli, 1996; Zentella, 1998).

Working from a “funds of knowledge” approach to the classroom (Moll et al. 1992), this paper examines how students and instructors in a collaborative program jointly examine the linguistic, interactional, and emotional complexity of language brokering in a way that validates, legitimizes, and values students’ “non-academic” linguistic heritage and experiences in the classroom. The purpose of the study is to analyze the role of students’ and instructors’ affective responses in co-constructing multiple understandings of language brokering in the classroom.

Drawing upon video classroom data, this study utilizes the tools of ethnographic interactional analysis (e.g., Duranti, 1997) to analyze emotion, empathy, and affect in Latino students’ peer discussions of language brokering experiences. 140 minutes of ethnographic video data, field notes, and observations collected during a three-day instructional unit on language brokering in a 12th grade AVID classroom were analyzed.

Through group discussion designed to unpack students’ affective statements about language brokering experiences, students demonstrated intense engagement with and awareness of others’ current and changing emotions through discourse and embodied actions. For example, in the following exchange, Inés reaches out to comfort Evely, who reacts to a discussion with Raquel about very different experiences with language brokering:

1. RAQUEL: Because you don't want to do things that are just like,
2. For like, legal documents,
3. You don't want to mess up.
4. Like, what if you say something and it's wrong?
5. And like, with teacher things,
6. You have a paper or whatever, you can kind of,
7. ((Evely looks at Inés, then puts her hand on her own chest.))
8. ((Inés turns toward Evely and puts her hand on Evely's
9. shoulder.))
10. RAQUEL [improvise?]
11. EVELY [She's insulting me!]
12. INÉS [Yeah, she's pushing your buttons].
13. RAQUEL [And you can get your point across].
14. So some brokering spaces,
15. might have more,
16. [leeway].
17. INSTRUCTOR [Legal] – big type of legal consequences.
18. which affect some –
19. being able to affect the engagement of parents
20. in school is big.
21. EVELY I think everything equally important.

Findings highlight the rarely examined emotions involved in language brokering processes. Through recognizing these Latina/o youths’ (and their families’) sociocultural and linguistic expertise, this research actively challenges historical processes of erasure of interpreters’ labor and contributions (Irvine & Gal, 2000). In doing so, it advances understandings of how students' cultures, languages, and heritage can further the goals of racial and sociolinguistic justice through accompaniment, and the important role that students' emotions and emotional labor play in this process.

Author

• Audrey Noelle Lopez, University of California - Santa Barbara