Translanguaging, Transculturation, and Transformational Literacies: Learning From Immigrant Children

• In Event: Roundtable Session 57
  In Roundtable Session: Literacy in Transcultural and Cosmopolitan Times: A Call for Change

Abstract

Purpose
The aim of this paper is to analyze children’s understandings of literacy in multilingual, new immigrant communities. We consider how children’s language and literacy practices both align with and challenge normative ideas.
Theoretical Framework
Framed by both New Literacy Studies (e.g. New London Group, 1996) and the New Childhoods Studies (e.g. Stephens, 1995; Thorne, 1993), we push for renewing what is “new” in both of these fields by bringing them together. Indeed, by taking children's perspectives, viewpoints, and understandings seriously as they engage with varied literacy practices (both digital and text-based, involving different languages and modalities) in multilingual, new immigrant communities, we may come to reframe things that have long been considered “problems” by adults (Gutiérrez and Orellana, 1976). We thus challenge the “adult ideological viewpoint” (Speier, 2012) that treats children as objects of socialization into the world as it is, and ask instead what world(s) we might imagine and construct if we began from children’s understandings. Specifically, we bring a child-centered perspective to new literature on “translanguaging” (Garcia, 2011) by considering how the children of immigrants understand and deploy the elements of their linguistic toolkits as they read and write a variety of texts.
Methods and data sources
We draw on ethnographic data gathered over several years in an afterschool program in central Los Angeles that brings together the children of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, the Philippines, Korea, and Bangladesh, with undergraduate students from even more diverse linguistic, cultural, and social backgrounds. This includes fieldnotes written by the authors and by the undergraduate students. We also analyze videotaped data of children’s engagement in a variety of literacy activities set in the context of a play-based, free-choice afterschool program, and audiotaped interviews of the children and their parents.
Findings
Our work reveals different ways in which young children accepted, resisted, challenged and reworked borders that were important in adult-defined literacy practices. This includes borders between languages (Spanish and English); genres (e.g. fact and fiction); modes (oral and written); text types and styles. We show young children negotiated borders between literacy and numeracy. We detail interactions between children and young adults, considering how ideas about literacy were mediated and challenged. We contrast the perspectives of children and adults (teachers, parents, and young adult undergraduate observers), using these different optics to expand our own understandings of what counts as literacy, and ways of fostering expansive growth.
Implications

We draw implications for pedagogical practices that build on and expand children’s transcultural, multi-modal, and multi-dimensional literacy competencies, and that build on children’s perspectives rather than socializing them into normative, monolingual adult-defined ideas.

Authors

• Janelle Franco, University of California - Los Angeles

• Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, University of California - Los Angeles

• Sarah Jean Johnson, University of California - Los Angeles