SuperBilingüe: Languages, Literacies, and Emergent Bilinguals in a Community Literacy Center

• In Event: Taking Responsibility as Advocates: Research on Advocacy Work for Equitable Education of Immigrant-Origin Youth

Abstract

In this presentation, we examine how a community literacy center was a site of validation resistance and restoration for Latinx children of South Philadelphia. This community literacy center - one in a network of sites across Philadelphia and southern New Jersey - targeted bilingual, Latinx children from ages seven to eighteen. The center’s central goal was “to teach children to write,” and they offered services such as mentoring, homework help, writing workshops, and summer camps.
During the summer months when school was out of session, the center hosted daily writing camps where the children engaged in writing activities and participated in field trips to playgrounds and city museums. During academy time, children did homework and engaged in various writing activities with volunteers and staff teachers. Importantly, the center is not a grassroots organization or founded by the Latinx community; however, it did host workshops for families which focused on a variety of relevant and urgent issues to the Latinx community, including immigrant rights, applying for foreign passports, and presentations featuring community immigrant rights activists. In this project, we “took responsibility” and wanted to intentionally produce new practices of language and literacy that drew on the children’s entire linguistic repertoire, which was embedded in their temporal and spatial realities. Thus, we wanted to examine how we, as authors and participants, produced, or could potentially produce a translanguaging space.
We used a spatiolinguistic framework informed by Soja’s (2013) 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 allow for human agency. We complemented Soja’s spatialized justice with the notion of translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014) to further disrupt problematic positivist stances and practices surrounding 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 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 translanguaging 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.

Authors

• Stephanie Lynn Abraham, Rowan University

• Kate E Kedley, Rowan University