Composing Agentive Identity With Translingual-Transnational Refugee Youth

• In Event: Transformative Pedagogies and Partnerships: Advocacy for Immigrant and Refugee Youth in U.S. Public Schools

Abstract

Purpose
This narrative inquiry presents the story of Yousif, a Chaldean immigrant to the U.S whose family sought refuge from religious persecution. His story of multilingual development invites us to disrupt pervasive negative portrayals of refugees, particularly those from Middle Eastern contexts. Specifically, it describes how translingual writing created space for Yousif to speak into existence new agentive identities and speak against the social, political, and economic powers that previously silenced him.

Perspectives
This study examines Yousif’s language development using Brandt’s (1998) construct of literacy sponsorship to analyze his language/literacy development. The study complicates Brandt’s conception of sponsorship by considering how Yousif’s literacy development fostered his agency within and beyond school through consideration of three interrelated sociocultural and multilingual approaches toward language/literacy development, namely New Literacy Studies (Gee, 2010), hybridity (Appadurai, 2013; Higgins, 2015) and translanguaging (Canagarajah, 2011; García and Wei, 2014). As other empirical work illustrates, these approaches prioritize emergent bilinguals’ empowered identities and agency as writers and can also lead to positive outcomes for academic development as well as enhancing broader participation within society (DeAngelo et al., 2016; Shapiro et al., 2016).

Methods and Data Sources
Constructed as a narrative inquiry, this study describes the development of Yousif’s agentive identity within and beyond writing through translanguaging (Trahar, 2006). Data collection included lesson plans, instructional materials, and Yousif’s writing along with ongoing, iterative conversations with Yousif. Data collection and analysis was informed by the three commonplace dimensions of narrative inquiry: spaces, temporality, sociality, and place (Montero & Washington, 2011). Discourse analysis was employed to examine Yousif’s writing as well as the field notes and audio recordings from conversations with Yousif as well as the researcher’s personal reflections.

Results
This study illustrates how Yousif’s developed literacy in Arabic, Aramaic, and English out of obligation to his sponsors–his family, church, school, and the political/economic forces at work in Iraq and the U.S. Findings also reveal that Yousif developed his language and literacy despite his sponsors as he developed agency within and beyond school, specifically using writing as a medium to develop his literacy as agency. This analysis considers the writerly decisions Yousif made to talk back to the oppressive culture of power that suppressed his identity and language from his past in Iraq. Given the latitude to make translingual decisions as a writer, Yousif tells a story in English that has never been told, composing a new identity by sharing this once-silenced story.

Scholarly Significance
For educators, Yousif’s narrative provides an asset-based perspective to inform educational opportunities for refugee youth. It illustrates the value of creating opportunities for marginalized youth to find their voices in translingual writing opportunities fostered through multilingual awareness pedagogy. This work expands the purpose of school-based writing beyond achieving high grades by emphasizing the role of agency within writing, particularly narrative as part of identity construction and especially among youth whose voices are often silenced by cultures of power.

Author

• Christina M. Ponzio, Michigan State University