Envisioning a Bilingual Writer's Workshop: Reclaiming Language, Culture, and Agency in Biliteracy Instruction

• In Event: 31.090 - Radicalizing Writer's Workshop: Disrupting Monolingual Language Ideologies Through Multimodal and Multilingual Practices

Abstract

for students marginalized by American schooling, school must consider, respect, and utilize students’ home literacies, languages, and cultures (Dutro, 2009, Moll et al., 1992). Nonetheless, for Latinx students, especially those from low-income backgrounds and who speak home languages other than English, school often devalues and even explicitly negates their home and community experiences (Valenzuela, 1999; Yosso, 2005). In contrast to their counterparts in wealthy schools with less testing demands, poor students are allowed little space in school to explore different genres of writing, and little time to engage with personally relevant topics (McCarthey, 2008). Despite the wealth of literature about the empowering opportunities that the writer’s workshop (WW) provides, there is a fundamental gap in research around bilingual writer’s workshops (BWW) specifically. This conceptual paper builds into that gap by imagining what culturally sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2017), personally relevant, and transformative WW could look like in bilingual contexts. We focus on the factors that constrict student voice, as well as analyzing possibilities for opening spaces for student agency through writing. We also illuminate the ways a BWW would differ purposefully from “mainstream” models.

We review the existing empirical and theoretical literature around the writing experiences of students so often “left behind” from agentic writing approaches by a hyper focus on standardized testing -- namely students of color, poor students, and emergent bilinguals. Drawing on Chicana feminist and critical literacies frameworks our analysis identifies some essential elements of a transformative/agentic BWW. Such frameworks expose the dialectical relationship between writing, identity, agency, and voice that make the act of writing a possibility for empowering self-authorship (Anzaldúa, 1987, 2015) and for the transformation of one's reality (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1987; Ada, 1995). In addition, we focus on biliteracy scholarship to identify workshop characteristics that specifically support emergent bilingual students’ access to, and development of, their full linguistic repertories in speaking, reading, and writing. Finally, we pay attention to the centering of students’ funds of knowledge (Moll et. al, 1992) and making space for subaltern literacies as promising elements of a humanizing bilingual workshop model.

De la Luz Reyes (1992) asserts that emergent bilinguals succeed when literacy instruction explicitly considers their linguistic and cultural contexts, and that failing to do so creates a, “narrow, ethnocentric definition of literacy designed for mainstream students as a model for all learners” (p. 443). In bilingual classrooms, teachers report having to make difficult pedagogical choices, often favoring the form and content of standardized tests, even when they know these practices to be in direct opposition to students’ language needs (Palmer & Snodgrass-Rangel, 2011). This paper illuminates ways in which a WW can be intentionally designed for minoritized bilingual learners to develop biliteracy, and offers educators theoretical foundations to implement it in culturally sustaining ways. Grounding our work in the existing literature, we imagine new instructional possibilities that allow Latinx students’ stories, skills, languages, and lives to matter, in school and beyond.

Authors

• Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon, Arizona State University

• Rosalyn Harvey-Torres, The University of Texas at Austin