Multilingual Counterpublics: Collective Responses to Precarity in a Latina/o Intergenerational Language and Literacy Inquiry

• In Event: Immigrant Families and Literacies: Collaborative Research and Advocacy in a Diverse Faith Community

Abstract

1. Objectives: This poster explores how Latina/o immigrant families and children participating in an intergenerational language and literacy inquiry community (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) investigated and acted on issues the group identified as important, using community languages, everyday literacy practices and funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll & Amanti, 2005) as resources for joint teaching/learning. Specifically, we focus on how families’ languages and literacies in the context of our classroom reflected their participation in counterpublic discourses (Ansen, 2000) and thus in collective social critique. This work seeks to disrupt the prevalent deficit orientation toward Latina/o immigrant youth and families in public discourse (De Genova, 2005, Ida Buff, 2008; Perea, 1997) and contributes to language and family literacy research on Latina/o immigrants’ critical language and literacy practices.

2. Theoretical framework:
We draw on the construct of publics/counterpublics (Asen, 2000; Warner, 2012) to help us understand dominant immigration discourses and the more expansive notions of citizenship cultivated by members of the Latina/o community through their language and literacy practices. We situate our work within participatory models of family literacy/ESOL programing (Freire, 1970; Auerbach, 1997) whereby schools and communities learn from one another, co-construct curriculum, and work towards more equitable educational opportunities. We root our research on practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) as a framework for theorizing practice.

3. Methods/Data sources:
We employed ethnographic methods in a qualitative practitioner-inquiry study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). Data sources collected were: fieldnotes from participant observation, classroom artifacts and informal interviews.

4. Findings:
We document how the Latina/o families in our class mobilized their culturally-situated language and literacy practices to co-construct a multilingual counterpublic: “alternative discourse norms and practices” (Ansen, 2000, p. 424) that surfaced shared conditions of precarity and collectively advocated for more expansive notions of rights and citizenship. The families engaged in forms of cultural citizenship to enact community solidarity and to challenge, through multilingualism and knowledge gained from their transnational and minoritized experiences, the inequitable discourses within dominant publics. Importantly, we argue that our pedagogy did not create a counterpublic. Instead, our Freirean and socio-contextual approach and our inquiry stance allowed us to privilege the families’ ways of knowing and to contextualize our lessons on the richness of their experiences, thus tapping into and continuing to nourish an existing multilingual counterpublic.


5. Significance: This poster contributes to scholarship and practice in the fields of adult education, family literacy, and community-based practitioner research. One implication is the need for classrooms, across the lifespan, to actively welcome the robust counterpublics of students’ home and communities. This could entail collaborations with neighborhood organizations, and viewing parents and community leaders as partners with critical knowledge about the potential role of education in a participatory democracy. As our data shows, the families in our inquiry group felt relatively safe to situate their insights and questions within a larger dialogue of resistance that countered the deficit characterization of immigrant communities. The challenge is to create spaces to learn from families’ knowledge within various institutions where their insights are typically excluded.

Authors

• Alicia Pantoja, University of Pennsylvania

• Emily Rose Schwab, University of Pennsylvania