Reframing Truths About Migrant and Refugee Children's Language and Literacy Learning

• In Event: Exploring Exemplary Local and International Urban Education Practices

Abstract

This case study examines the multimodal literacy practices of 11 migrant and refugee children recently resettled in western Canada. It seeks to understand how these children multimodally represent their academic and linguistic knowledge and affirm their identities, and how their multimodal practices may help reframe stigmatised truths about their schooling experiences. A thematic analysis of two-dimensional multimodal scrapbooks produced as a culminating project of a Grade 2/3 interdisciplinary unit of study about water and its cycle suggests that, when systems of support are in place, migrant and refugee children thrive as they capitalise on their sociocultural knowledge to connect school literacies with their out-of-school lives, and imagine themselves as active citizens capable of supporting their communities.

Author

• Jonathan Feitosa Ferreira, University of British Columbia
  Presenting Author