"Your Own Narrative?" A Teacher and Multilingual Students Leverage Community Cultural Wealth to Enact Resistance

• In Event: 45.059 - Educational Equity for Bilinguals: Leveraging Agentic Actions to Disrupt "Truths" in the Post-Truth Era

Abstract

This qualitative case study examines how a teacher encouraged her newcomer, high school students to engage in resistance and draw upon their CCW through writing. We analyzed 72 student letters, teacher interviews, and field notes utilizing Yosso’s (2005) framework of community cultural wealth (CCW). We found that the teacher cultivated CCW as she tapped into students’ lived experiences and multilingual repertoire. Students seized the opportunity to resist anti-immigrant discourse by leveraging CCW through counter-stories, experiential knowledge, and moral appeals. This paper contributes to research on CCW and bilingual education by offering a more nuanced understanding of how resistant capital is interwoven with linguistic, navigational and aspirational capital in classroom discourse. We share implications for multilingual literacy practices that sustain CCW.

Authors

• Melinda E. Martin-Beltran, University of Maryland - College Park

• Angélica Montoya-Ávila, University of Maryland - College Park

• Andrés Alberto García, University of Maryland - College Park