Read-Alouds on Immigration: Second Graders Learning About Multiple Meanings of Words

• In Event: Sueños de America/Dreams of America: Discourses on Immigration and Social Justice in K–12 Classrooms

Abstract

This paper explores how a bilingual Mexican teacher drew from students’ lived experiential knowledge during interactive read aloud stories (Sipe, 2008) throughout an Immigration Project. Data is from a larger study on interactive read alouds conducted in a high poverty public elementary school located in Texas. Although there is an extensive body of scholarship on read alouds (Sipe 2008), including studies of read alouds in bilingual classrooms (Peterson & Chamberlain, 2015; Worthy, Durán, Hikida, Pruitt, & Peterson, 2013) there is little research that documents the critical discussions of complex issues related to marginalized groups ( DeNicolo & Franquiz, 2006). More specifically, Ball, Skerrett, and Martinez (2011) suggest a need for more empirical studies that deliberately examine ways teachers effectively leverage Latina/o students’ cultural and linguistic resources. This paper seeks to contribute to a nuanced understanding of how teachers can use interactive read alouds as a way to facilitate critical discussions of complicated social issues such as immigration.
The theoretical framework of Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) and the Continua of Biliteracy (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester, 2003) inform the research project. LatCrit addresses issues of subordination based on immigration status, language, ethnicity, culture, phenotype, identity, and sexuality (Solorzano & Bernal, 2001). The continua of biliteracy provides ways of tracing the developing biliteracy and bilingualism as children interact with texts through oral and written responses in two languages. Qualitative case study was the selected methodology for this study to provide an in-depth description and analysis of the bounded system (Merriam, 2009) within a bilingual classroom. Through purposeful sampling (Merriam, 2009), Mr. Menchaca (pseudonym) was selected due to his teaching and immigrant experiences in Mexico and the U.S.
Data sources included ethnographic fieldnotes (Marshall & Rossman, 2006), student produced written artifacts, transcripts of audio and video-recordings, and semi-structured interviews with the teacher. The data was coded by identifying emerging patterns and themes (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013) related to human rights, citizenship and immigration.
Three themes were prominent through the analysis of data: a) students making text-to-life connections, b) Mr. Menchaca and students sharing transnational memories, and c) nuancing lexical meanings.
The Immigration Project in Mr. Menchaca’s bilingual second grade classroom served as a platform to discuss immigration with culturally relevant children’s literature. The discourse around the interactive read alouds normalized familial immigrant experiences, invited language code switches for meaning making, connected students’ experiential knowledge with language learning, and Mr. Menchaca himself served as a mentor text. Teacher as text was proposed by Jacobs (1998) as teachers’ using personal experiences in a class and voicing their own shortcomings and fears. He contends that by sharing ourselves, and opening up for critical reflection, students have an additional text to read that facilitates understandings of the official curriculum. While Jacobs worked with college students, the work presented in this paper extends recent literature illustrating that children in the early grades can engage with and respond to texts covering complex issues such as immigration. Emergent bilinguals can also benefit from their teachers acting as mentor texts.

Author

• María G Leija, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley