Making the Invisible Visible: Designing and Documenting a Space Cultivated for Multilingual and Transnational Children

• In Event: Toward Justice-Driven Qualitative Research Methods With Young Children

Abstract

Purpose: As educational scholars committed to centering the voices of children from nondominant communities, it is not only important for us to document their voices with an active listening stance (Panelists, 2019), but also to create spaces that amplify them. In this social design experiment (Gutiérrez, 2016), we designed a space where migrant children could explore, reflect, and showcase their multilingual and transnational identities using virtual reality (VR) to “imagine and design new forms of learning and schooling to imagine new social futures” (Gutiérrez, 2018, p.88). As redesigning, redefining, and reflecting upon the work are the core practices of child-centered research and social design experiments, here we document the lessons that we learned from our collective navigation of the dilemmas and tensions encountered in our efforts to make the knowledge and expertise of children from nondominant communities more visible.

Theoretical Framework: We draw on a transnationalism framework (Basch et al., 1994) and focus on how young transnational and multilingual children explored, represented, and sustained their real and imagined homelands and dynamic identities in multi-sensory ways (Huchison, 2018). We take an asset-based orientation and a translingual orientation (García, 2009), viewing the children’s linguistic, cultural, and experiential knowledge, derived from their unique transnational lived experiences, as a valuable resource (Author 1 et al., 2019; González et al., 2005) and actively encouraging the children to leverage their full linguistic repertoire.

Methods & Data Sources: Taking a practitioner inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) and engaging in caring reflexivity (Rallis & Rossman, 2010), we examine the opportunities, tensions, and dilemmas that we encountered during the study as we sought to document the children’s experiences and create a space that centers their voices. Our study took place in an elementary school class in South Korea, which had nine transnational and multilingual students who had migrated from countries including China, Russia, Vietnam, and Kyrgyzstan. The study draws on fieldnotes, recordings of classes and meetings, child-centered surveys, teacher interviews, and child-generated VR and multimodal artifacts.

Findings and Significance: In this presentation, we illustrate the dynamic co-construction processes that we navigated while designing a space for young children to leverage their multilingual repertoires and showcase their ways of being. We highlight the dilemmas that arose as we adopted new technologies, integrated translanguaging pedagogy, and challenged deficit-oriented views surrounding the children. The researchers and the collaborating teacher collectively navigated these tensions by taking an active learner stance, honoring children’s agency, inviting a participating teacher as a co-designer, adding child-centered methods, and pushing back against deficit-oriented messages. The collective inquiry process led us to transformative and reciprocal learning opportunities that helped us foreground the children’s voices in the space to encourage a move toward equitable education. This study advances methods on studying young children by sharing what social design experimentation looks like when working with multilingual and transnational children, and it demonstrates how engaging in collective inquiry and viewing the design process as “continuously co-configured” (Engeström, 2011, p. 606) can help researchers foreground the children’s voices and create opportunities.

Authors

• Jungmin Kwon, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author

• Christine Rheem, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author

• Jeong-yeon Park, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author

• Yeonghwi Ryu, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author