Mapping Cultural Imaginaries in Immigrant Children's Dramatic Engagements

• In Event: 33.046 - An Exploration of the Dialogical Possibilities for Drama and Performance for Diverse Learners

Abstract

The focus of our study is grounded in ethnographies of globalization in literacy education (Kraidy, 1999; Kearny, 1996; Blommaert, 2008) and critical performance pedagogy (Pineau, 2002; Alexander, Anderson and Gallegos, 2005; Weltsek & Medina, 2007 & 2013a; Perry & Medina, 2011; Medina & Perry, 2013b) to investigate children’s dramatic experiences such as role play and dramatization that make visible engagement with multiple and overlapping local and transcultural networks of knowledge and texts. These ethnographic perspectives acknowledge that people’s (particularly immigrants) engagement in cultural practices are not located in one place but in translocal spaces. We understand performance to be a set of signs as well as a site of action for creating and negotiating these multiple perspectives and cultural repertoires (Medina & Perry, 2013b; Medina & Wohlwend, 2014; Perry & Medina, 2011). In performance, the social actor is simultaneously inscribing and inscribed by social and cultural codes that get created, reproduced, and recontextualized in meaning making.
Our study focuses on the following questions:
• How do immigrant children who live in transcultural spaces use experience and knowing to perform understanding across multiple worlds and contexts?
• What are the implications of a curriculum that foregrounds children’s movement across cultures and between real and imagined worlds?

Ethnographic methods were used to collect data (Erickson, 1990) in a yearlong qualitative study at an urban community center in the Midwest. Children from Latino/a immigrant backgrounds, ages 4-12 years, participated in the church based community center’s weekly kids’ club. In this presentation we share how children explored family artifacts and stories using multiple literacies that included visual arts, video, improvised drama, and writing in role.
Data analysis consisted of a generative and recursive process of coding for recurrent themes (Merriam, 2009) throughout the data collection and embodied analysis of dramatic experiences (Medina & Perry, 2013b) to look at the relationships among participants’ contextualization and recontextualization of transcultural literacies and discourses. The presenters document and make sense of the children’s negotiation of complex local, global and transnational networks of texts, languages and practices children have access to in their everyday lives and examine children’s interpretative practices as they move across translocal landscapes.
The findings of this study can be categorized in two themes that will be explored on this presentation: 1) Sustaining transnational connections through multiple imaginaries across children’s engagement with the complex local, global and transnational networks of texts children have access to in their everyday lives and, 2) constructing deeper meaning across locations through performance pedagogies. The analysis shows how in the complex interactions among artifacts and texts’ traveling, “new places” and “meanings” emerge while social actors re-negotiate the histories and meaning that come from home, communities and other cultural locations.
The data gathered in this study serves to better prepare educators to create learning “outcomes” situated in students’ learning “incomes” or what they bring with them when they come to school (Guerra, 2008) and that makes visible the complex cultural ecologies that shaped and are shaped by Latino/a children.

Authors

• Linda Coggin, Indiana University

• Stacy Peñalva, Indiana University

• Carmen L. Medina, Indiana University - Bloomington