Linguistic Navigators: Exploring the Role of Space, Place, and Language in Multilingual Students' Experiences in a Public Middle School

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Examinations of the Everyday: Case Studies of Embodied Sociocultural and Sociolinguistic Spaces in School

Abstract

This paper examines the sociolinguistic landscape of a public middle school in the Midwest through analyzing the cotidian experiences of three multilingual students. Building on Low’s (2014) conception of the person as a mobile spatial field--“a spatiotemporal unit with feelings, thoughts, preferences, and intentions as well as out-of-awareness cultural beliefs and practices” (p. 35)--we found that the three students in our study utilized their linguistic repertoire to accomplish a variety of goals in myriad school settings: Students used language to create new spaces of connection, to ensure their privacy, to “hide” (Author, forthcoming), and to mark difference. However, the linguistic landscape of the school is also one that students in turn help to produce (Low, 2014), and we describe the ways in which our three focal students, despite their skilled multilingualism, nonetheless upheld English as the “official” language of schooling.

We report on a multiple case study in which each student constituted a case (Stake, 2013), and for which explored the ways in which multilingual students interact with their physical and interpersonal surroundings within the space of the school. The study took place in a racially and linguistically diverse public middle school in a Midwestern city that also serves as a refugee resettlement community. Seventy-seven percent of the students in this school receive free or reduced lunch, and 13% of students are formally enrolled in the English Language Learner (ELL) program. The data included field notes and images generated from day-long shadowings of each participant. We utilized ethnographic methods to analyze these data, focusing on emergent themes and “rich points” (Agar, 1980; Emerson, Fritz, & Shaw, 2011).

Our findings suggest that our focal participants were dynamic, thoughtful users of language who deployed their multilingual knowledge when it served their purposes. Valeria, a sixth grade student, used her fluent knowledge of Spanish to help classmates translate texts, and to lead her group to victory during a science game. Roberto, an eighth grade student, used polite, formal language with his peers and teachers as a sign of respeto, which Valdés (1996) defines as “a set of attitudes toward individuals and/or the roles that they occupy,” and additionally “involves demonstrating personal regard for the individual who happens to occupy that role" (p. 130). Finally, Imani, a sixth grade student, stayed mostly silent throughout the school day, which allowed him to “hide” in plain sight and to opt out of activities that his peers were otherwise required to complete. We forward these skills as linguistic tactics, forms of skillful resistance that build on de Certeau’s (2002) notion of “tactics” as a way of “making do” in non-ideal circumstances as well as a “struggle for life” enacted by the oppressed amid dehumanizing institutions and systems. In these ways, our participants demonstrated their agile ability to navigate around obstacles posed by a majority-monolingual environment. These findings suggest professional learning opportunities for educators in drawing out and leveraging students' full linguistic and cultural repertoires for academic learning and establishing cultures of inclusion and belonging.

Authors

• Jessica Masterson, Washington State University - Vancouver

• Tricia Gray, University of Nebraska - Lincoln