Timescales and Time Warps: Three Cases of Children in Immigrant Families

• In Event: 32.083 - Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: 32.083-1 - Conceptualizing Time: The Case of Immigrant Students

Abstract

Purposes: Challenging linear conceptions of time, how children make sense of their worlds reflects ongoing movements as meanings twist, curve, and bow in response to experiences across time.
Theoretical Framework: To explain long-term meaning-making processes, Lemke (2001) proposes a model that describes how people routinely and simultaneously function within multiple timescales - challenging conventional notions of time as linear, cumulative and invariably moving forward. Lemke suggests that we experience time in recursive and non-linear ways as they draw upon past experiences and project hopes into the future. We refer to this space of meaning construction as a time warp. A time warp is defined as a “hypothetical discontinuity or distortion occurring in the flow of time” (The Free Dictionary, accessed 3/27/2016). This is precisely the type of space we envision as the site of meaning construction and identity negotiation.
Methodology: Our analysis of data involved looking across data sets (interviews, photographs, students’ writing, drawings) to reveal themes and motifs that appeared and reappeared over time in the data set. This grounded re-analysis of the data required knowing the children, following them across time, and letting them show us what mattered to them.
Findings: While our full paper will feature three case studies, we present data from two cases in this proposal. Felipe’s use of time warping highlights the challenges he faced with writing from grade two through seven. An avid and advanced reader, Felipe struggled with what it meant to be/not be a writer. Our analysis of Felipe as a writer opens with him watching his mother write letters. Parental desires for Felipe to be proficient with writing shaped Felipe. In school, the narrative cited by Felipe’s teachers referenced his inability to translate his ideas from Spanish to English. Thus Felipe routinely voiced negative views about himself as a writer and avoided writing tasks. Yet, rather than rejecting writing, as a seventh grader, Felipe frequently accessed his family’s stance on writing, time warping, as he strived to become a writer.
In the second case study, we introduce Carlos, a second generation immigrant student, and consider how he (re)constructed understandings of his “native” country and his Mexican American identity. Through our analysis of his interview responses, drawings, and home photographs, we explore how his affiliation with Mexico ebbs and flows over the course of six years. Initially, Carlos’s understandings of Mexico were mediated by his mother’s reflections; however, a closer analysis of Carlos’s representational artifacts revealed that his construction of Mexico was wrought through networks that included his parents’ childhood stories, his father’s enthusiasm for the Mexican soccer team Club América, and his grandparents’ visits to the U.S. Moreover, we found that certain artifacts such as Carlos’s striped soccer shoes, the Mexican and American flags, and the Club América logo reappeared in different forms throughout the study as identity markers.
Significance: The time warp lens reveals that both Felipé and Carlos engage in sense making that is recursive, and that identity both mediates and is mediated by understandings over time.

Authors

• Catherine F. Compton-Lilly, University of South Carolina

• Laura Hamman, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Stephanie Shedrow, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay