Belonging to a Chosen Family: Community Literacies and Familial Wealth in a Multigenerational Writing Collaborative

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Fourteen
  In Roundtable Session: The Power of Storytelling: Exploring Representations and (Re)Narrating Experiences Across Racialized and Marginalized Communities (Table 2)

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify, explore, and construct community literacies that reflect the multiracial, multiethnic, and multilingual community wealth of a local community within a multigenerational youth participatory action research (YPAR) collaborative. Ultimately, for youth to sustain multigenerational community language and literacy practices that, “reflect a community’s ways of thinking, being, and doing” (Sánchez & Honeyford, 2021, p. 10) through writing and composing. Findings consider the transactional relationship between community literacies, familial wealth, and community becoming—described by youth co-researchers as “a chosen family”—reflected in youth composing. This work offers localized, place-based pedagogies for sustaining familial knowledge through composing not just multimodal texts, but community, itself.

Authors

• Leah Panther, Mercer University
  Presenting Author

• Andrea Crenshaw, University of West Georgia
  Presenting Author

• Hannah M. Edber, Mercer University
  Presenting Author