Transnational Youth in the Digital Age: Exploring Multiliterate Repertoires in a Raza Studies Course

• In Event: "With Conscious Purposes and Plans": Possibilities and Promises of Ethnic Studies and Education

Abstract

Objectives and Research Questions
Schools’ rapidly changing demographic compositions urge us to envisage the ways school curricula can support epistemological diversity for an increasingly multilingual and racialized world. Empirical studies in literacy education have shown that the experiences of im/migrant students are marked by a disjuncture between the cultural and linguistic resources in their community and those resources that are valued in schools (Pacheco, 2012). Ethnic Studies high school courses can be fecund soil for critical thinking and the rich literacy development for Latin@ transnational youth (de los Rios, 2013). This paper examines a unit in a Chican@-Latin@ Studies course that employed Photovoice (Wang, 1997) to explore im/migrant and multilingual students’ complex racialized identities. This study’s primary research question was: How do Latin@ emergent bilingual youth develop, engage, and sustain literacies in a Chican@-Latin@ Studies course?

Theory:
Im/migrant young people often traverse the terrain between their diverse linguistic and cultural experiences in and out of school using a dynamic set of meaning-making repertoires (e.g. multilingual, visual, audio, spatial, gestural) (Filipiak & Miller, 2014). Drawing from New Literacy Studies (New London Group, 1996; Street 1984, 1997), translanguaging literacies (Garcia, 2009; Garcia & Leiva, 2014) and Mignolo’s (2000) concept of “border-thinking,” these frameworks posit a cultural and linguistic borderland at the edge of home and school practices that students navigate in the face of major social, linguistic and cultural tensions affecting their K-12 experiences.

Methods:
The mode of inquiry is ethnographic (LeCompte & Schensul, 2012) and positioned under a critical paradigm (Carspecken, 1996). Data derives from a 10-month visual ethnographic classroom study (Pink, 1997) in California where most of the students were emergent bilingual learners and from transnational families. Data sources include semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and students’ multimodal artifacts to ensure triangulation. Specifically, I draw on students’ Photovoice projects (Wang, 1997) to illuminate the ways in which students identified, represented, and enhanced their understanding of how immigration has been racialized in their lives and localized communities.

Findings:
Findings demonstrate robust digital, racial, and translanguaging literacy skills and students’ ability to critically read and re-write their understandings of “hegemony,” “immigration,” and “neocolonialism” in a 21st century context. Furthermore, findings convey how students engaging in a photovoice project on immigration allowed them to bring the voices from their community in dialogue with voices from civic institutions and public discourses on immigration. Ultimately, this multimodal project leveraged and facilitated the movement of representational resources across home, school, and civic spaces.

Scholarly Significance:
This paper contributes to the limited body of literature on critical pedagogies of race and Ethnic Studies at the secondary level (de los Rios, Lopez, Morrell, 2015) and concludes that Ethnic Studies classrooms can contribute to equitable pathways to connected and digital learning. This study also adds to the burgeoning empirical scholarship on translanguaging practices at the secondary level, highlighting pedagogical processes of sustaining Latin@ students’ hybrid linguistic repertoires, cultural practices, histories, knowledges, and identities.

Author

• Cati V. de los Rios, Teachers College, Columbia University