Acknowledging the Academic and Emotional Risk-Taking of Three Multilingual Students' Participation in Dialogue Journaling

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: Multilingualism Across Contexts and Countries

Abstract

This paper explores a piece of a larger ethnographic study documenting at-school and out-of-school literacy practices of recently-arrived, multilingual, Guatemalan English Language Learners in their first year of U.S. schooling. It explores the ways in which three ninth-graders, within the confines of an all-English school, accessed information, experiences, and knowledge from across their diverse bodies of knowledge and cultural contexts in which they had been living and schooled. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ways in which students engaged in risk-taking in their participation in dialogue journal writing in their literacy-based social studies classroom. This paper specifically examines how students’ participation reflected their willingness to engage in academic risk-taking as well as in personal and emotional risk-taking.

Author

• Rebecca E. Linares, University of Colorado - Boulder