Escuchando the Borderlands: Exploring Youths' Translingual Podcasts in a Secondary Ethnic Studies Class

• In Event: 64.085 - Centering Marginalized Voices: Emergent and Experienced Bilinguals as Writers "in the Struggle"

Abstract

This paper examines the critical translingual literacy practices of Latinx emergent bilinguals who created podcasts in a secondary ethnic studies classroom. The podcast unit under study hails from a larger yearlong ethnographic classroom study on Latinx youth literacy practices and drew from weekly participant observation (documented through analytic memos and detailed field notes), student interviews, focus groups, and the analysis of students’ writing products (i.e. podcast transcripts). Drawing from the theoretical contributions of translingual literacy (Canagarajah, 2013) and translanguaging (García, 2009; García & Li Wei, 2014), this paper asks, What resources do bilingual and emergent bilinguals students draw from when composing podcasts about the borderlands? Using a criterion-based sampling approach, I culled four focal students for the purpose of this paper on the basis of gender, formal linguistic classifications, and time living in the U.S. I took an iterative approach to data collection and analysis that combined both inductive and deductive approaches (Maxwell, 2013). I developed deductive codes from existing empirical literature and a previous pilot study in the same Chicanx/Latinx Studies course. I then derived inductive codes from data analysis where data were sorted, indexed, and read through a total of three times. Findings demonstrate how the podcast project built on and expanded youth’s bi/multilingual and semiotic resources, and illuminate how digital technologies and bi/multilingual modes of learning were incorporated into an ethnic studies classroom setting which often orient themselves toward traditional English print literacy. The podcast project emerged as a distinct third pedagogic space (Gutiérrez, 2008) that engaged students’ sociopolitical worlds, politicized funds of knowledge (Gallo & Link, 2015; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992), and situated their critical readings of border rhetorics (Noe, 2009) like corridos, narcocorridos, and Banda songs as the literary soundscapes of their lives at a time of heightened anti-immigrant sentiments. With transformative benefits for academic literacy competencies, the writing involved in the podcasts transcended normative pedagogic arrangements, curricular frameworks, and social relations found in classrooms. This research contributes to the paucity of research that highlights the contours of literacy instruction in high school ethnic studies classrooms (Author B, 2017) as well as culturally responsive approaches to leveraging emergent bilinguals’ semiotic resources for academic literacy.

Author

• Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Davis