SuperBilingüe: Advocacy and Emergent Bilinguals in a Community-Based Writing Center

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Abstract

In this paper, we examine how a community-based writing center advocated for bilingualism and biliteracy in urban Philadelphia. Located in South Philly’s Italian Market, the center targeted Latinx children from 7 to 17 through an afternoon academy, evening and Saturday workshops, and summer writing camps. The child attendees and their families predominantly had familiar connections to Mexico, specifically to the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala; however, numerous other transnational connections were evident, including familiar origins in Honduras, El Salvador, and Colombia.

We used a spatiolinguistic framework informed by Soja’s (2013) notions of spatial justice to address the social, material, linguistic, and spatial enactments at the center. Attending to spatiality is meant to move the framing of language and literacy events beyond the linguistic to account for both discursive and material space. Especially highlighting how spaces are created and recreated to constitute agency or lack of agency. Complementing spatiality with the notion of translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014) further disrupted problematic positivist stances and practices surroundings language, including the evaluation of language proficiency, language correctness, standard language, and even the naming of distinct languages. Finally, noting how space and translanguaging intersect with racialized bodies illuminated how the language and literacy practices of racialized multilingual speakers are invalidated, erased, and even corrected in many educational spaces (Flores & Rosa, 2015).

Ethnographically-grounded, from the Fall 2017 to Spring 2019, we collected data through participant observations, naturalistic interviews, and the collection of written artifacts produced by the children. Our findings indicate this out of school bilingual space was more easily created due to the flexibility of pedagogical practices and language use. Specifically, noting the freedom that the center had from the accountability narratives of high-stakes testing and standards-based learning which dominate pedagogical practices in US schools and classrooms. As well, we still noted monolingual ideologies held on the part of teachers and volunteers that at times shifted the center away from the bilingual goals to a monolingual English site. Contrasting this to the language practices and ideologies of the children who advocated for their own bilingualism by expressing their desire to be bilingual so that they could help other people and better communicate with their families. 

Authors

• Stephanie Lynn Abraham, Rowan University

• Kate E Kedley, Rowan University