Building a Multilingual Writing Community Through Collaboration for Social Justice

• In Event: Moving Toward the Public Good: Collaborative Research on the Complexities of Multilingual Writing

Abstract

This study calls attention to the importance of collaborative efforts for linguistically and culturally diverse youth to create equitable educational opportunities by leveraging students’ historical, cultural, and linguistic resources and contemporary lived experiences in digitally-infused literacy curriculum. Focused on a global online community for social change with linguistically and culturally diverse youth and their bilingual teachers, I examine how the adolescents, the teachers, and I as the researcher build a multilingual writing community collaboratively by reinforcing their multiple language and literacy practices through multimodal and multilingual dialogues for the public good. Employing design-based research (Barab & Squire, 2016), I recruited 20 adolescents who might have heightened awareness of borders in two nations, the United States and South Korea. In the United States, Korean-American immigrant youth in a local immigrant community center participated with their volunteer teacher. South Korean students who lived near the border between North and South Korea participated with their Korean English teacher in a public high school. These young people were connected through an educational social network to explore how the unique interactions impact their literacy practices, as a result of meaningful collaboration with stakeholders.
Over one academic year, I worked closely with the stakeholders (e.g., the school principals, community leaders, parents, teachers, and students) for the students’ meaning-making practices for social justice. The students, teachers, and the researcher co-designed curricula across three design cycles, mapping their individual and communal resources and experiences related to change and local/global problems. In the online community, the students engaged in individual and collaborative writing and shared their writing to learn from one another. Multiple data sources were gathered—artifacts, interviews, surveys, analytic memos, field notes, group chats. In total, I collected mobile messenger conversations that totaled 50,597 words, 43 hours of audio recorded interviews, 29 field notes, 40 postcards, 24 lesson plans, 6 videos that students created, two surveys, 180 writing posts online, 4 student essays, and analytics from the online community. Using the qualitative data analysis software Atlas Ti, I categorized data and analyzed them using content analysis (Neuendorf, 2016; Saldaña, 2015). Findings indicate that students who were engaged in cross-cultural communication not only developed their transnational identities but also took up positions as mutual contributors who can chip in for a global writing community for social justice by mobilizing their transnational language and literacies. This paper takes up the conference theme by foregrounding the importance of organizational collaboration to advance research in education. The findings of this study contribute to curriculum and instruction of 21st century skills (e.g., collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving) and empower linguistically and culturally diverse youth with stakeholders.

Author

• Jin Kyeong Jung, Texas Tech University