Play as Literacy and Humanizing Multilingual Children, Youth, and Families From Refugee Backgrounds: Our Stories and Ways of Knowing

• In Event: Amplifying Voices and Experiences: Representations of Languages, Literacies, and Identities Among Refugee-Background Children and Families

Abstract

This qualitative case study is part of a larger ethnographic investigation of literacy practices in an afterschool program -- located within a culturally and linguistically diverse urban community context -- that provides learning support to recently resettled children and youth from refugee backgrounds. In order to foreground plurality, difference, and the imaginary, I draw on Medina, Perry, and Wohlwend’s (2022) framework on aspects of play in formal and informal educational and community settings, which is situated within postcolonial and humanizing approaches that center storying (e.g., Author 2, 2020; Dillard, 2012; Medina & Costa, 2021; Patel, 2015; St. Pierre, 2018) and honor various ways of knowing, such as the artistic, creative, and embodied ways of knowing (e.g., Author 2, 2021; Bernal et al., 2017; Campano et al., 2015; Ohito, 2020). Specifically, I asked, “In what ways do multilingual children and youth from refugee backgrounds make meaning of and navigate literacies through play? And subsequently, how might play relate to literacy and humanizing these people?”
In this work, I draw on my own transnational and multilingual experiences, as well as refugee background; additionally, I take up literacies as a social practice where people make meaning of and with things (Campano, Ghiso, & Welch, 2016; Jocson & Dixon-Román, 2021; Medina & Perry, 2013; Medina & Wohlwend, 2014; Perry & Medina, 2015; Pahl & Rowsell, 2019; Perry, 2021; Price-Dennis & Muhammad, 2021; Zaidi & Rowsell, 2017). Situated within this social practice, I come to understand play as embodied and improvised (Leander & Boldt, 2013; Lewis & Tierney, 2013). Data sources included observations, fieldnotes, impromptu interviews with children, as well as their artwork and writing. Findings from this study illuminate the ways in which multilingual children and youth from refugee backgrounds made meaning of and navigated literacies through play. Specifically, they (re)created and (re)imagined memories and lived experiences, as well as constructed new, diverse, and unexpected social, embodied, and creative imaginaries. An example includes two boys, both in the second grade, running from one wall in the room across to the parallel wall in order to demonstrate how big “Africa trains” are. Afterwards, they told stories about riding the train in their homeland. In doing so, the boys (re)created and (re)imagined memories and lived experiences. More examples – such as instances when children played soccer or engaged in spur of the moment games they collaboratively invented with peers, as well their participation in “talk play show[s]” involving talking with toys – illuminate the ways in which children and youth constructed new, diverse, and unexpected social, embodied, and creative imaginaries. These literacy practices taking place among children and youth, as well as those among caregivers in families, center around storying and showcase their artistic, creative, and embodied ways of knowing – affording opportunities for articulating forms of discimination such as xenophobia, racism, and/or Islamophobia.

Author

• Nermin Vehabovic, Elon University
  Presenting Author