Playful Digital Authoring: Multilingual Identity Enactments Among Adolescent Girls With Refugee Backgrounds

• In Event: 16.028 - Examining Identity to Enhance Learning Opportunities Among Resettled Refugee Youth

Abstract

Purpose: For youth with refugee backgrounds, digital spaces provide fluid and dynamic opportunities to negotiate complex identities following resettlement (Gilhooly & Lee, 2014; Siddiquee & Kagan, 2006; Author, 2015). This paper presents findings from a qualitative study that took place in an urban community center in the western United States, focusing on better understanding how teenage girls who were resettled as refugees from Thailand enacted multilingual and multiliterate identities in digital spaces. The paper specifically focuses on how these identities were shaped by playful literacy practices (Gee, 2003; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain, 1998; Ito et al., 2009). Findings illustrate dynamic possibilities for learning that exist in social media through negotiations of resettled students’ complex identities and contexts.
Theoretical perspectives: Identity in this paper is considered as a digital authoring process, which represents intersections of identity enactments, complex power relations, and tools, such as language and digital media (Bakhtin, 1981; Holland, et al., 1998; Lewis, Enciso, and Moje, 2009).
Methods: This eight-month qualitative study was based in an afterschool program for refugee-background youth the Intermountain West. Participants included nine 13-17 year old Karen, Burmese Muslim, and Po Karen girls.
Data sources: Data collection included participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and digital screen recordings. Data sources included field notes, interview transcripts, and documents, which were analyzed through theme analysis (Saldaña, 2009) and multimodal analysis (Jewitt, 2009).
Findings: In addition to literacy practices in Karen and Burmese, the participants engaged in playful literacy practices in English in social media spaces like Facebook and YouTube. Tete, a Karen high school junior, frequently used creative combinations of symbols to produce meaning in English. For example she wrote, “I play basketball \ / \ /! + |~| |~|!|\/| $0 |~|4pp ¥,” which represented “with him so happy” in a Facebook status update to tell her friends that she had an opportunity to spend time with a boy she admired. The girls also used play to communicate meaning in English through invented spelling. Rainbow, a Burmese Muslim eighth grade student, described that Facebook was a setting where she learned “a lot of English.” She wrote words such as bing (being), listing (listening), nah (now), and forress (forest) to communicate meaning when she did not know the correct spelling. She described that her playful spelling on Facebook contrasted her experiences in school where significant importance was placed on spelling accuracy, which decreased her confidence and motivation for writing. Social media spaces, however, provided Rainbow an opportunity to develop an identity as a writer in English through language and literacy play. Social media settings allowed the girls to author themselves as multilingual and multiliterate knowledge holders by actively producing meaning in English as part of their repertoire of multilingual practices.
Significance: This paper calls on educators of multilingual students to provide opportunities for engaging in creative meaning making. Playful meaning making can create possibilities that affirm complex identities and support learning through confidence gained through creative exploration.

Author

• Delila Omerbasic, Tulane University