Oral Histories and Data Stories: Youths' Identity Development Discovery Through a Research Elective Course

• In Event: Leveraging Transnational Funds of Knowledge for More Equitable Education for Multilingual Learners

Abstract

Objectives
This paper documents the ways in which 11th grade students in an Advanced Placement elective research course learned about various data sources for inquiry to create digital, layered map-based stories about the factors that shape their (and others’) immigrant experiences in their local community.

Theoretical Framework
This paper builds on immigrant youths’ transnational funds of knowledge (González et al., 2005) amidst increasing anti-immigrant sentiment globally from 2015 onward. Specifically, I examine how oral histories and data stories conducted with family and community members and reinforced through census data accessed via SocialExplorer supported the identity development of transnational immigrant youth (Skerrett, 2015) who maintain connections across two or more nation-states. We also employed translanguaging perspectives, and a dynamic view of bilingualism that centers multilingual speakers’ integrated linguistic and semiotic resources for meaning-making (García & Li, 2014; Pennycook, 2017) both in our classroom instruction and across data analysis.

Methods
Data come from a design-based research project (Cobb et al., 2003) that a research team composed of languages and literacies professors co-instructed to 30 immigrant-identifying students in an urban, multilingual, multicultural community in the U.S. South. Ultimately, our project sought to amplify youths’ perspectives for how family migration experiences often transgress bounded notions of nation-state and linguistic imaginaries (Lam & Warriner, 2012).
We led 28 hours of instruction over 14 weeks to 30 immigrant-background students with linguistic flows across seven languages, as well as 10 distinct Spanish dialects. Youth were taught crucial storytelling approaches to analyze data and interrogate history and socio-political ideologies present in multimodal texts- attending to considerations of “race, equity, and power” (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021, p. 82). Data include student conducted oral histories, data stories they created using Social Explorer, and video recordings of students sharing their research in class.

Results
Findings revealed youth employed their full linguistic and semiotic repertoires across named languages to discuss immigration experiences with family members. More importantly, youths’ understandings of research were broadened by pairing oral histories with nationwide census data (ie- economic growth trends via GDP in immigrant-oriented communities, gentrification and housing prices impacting immigrant livelihood in our city’s majority-minority context).. Although previously unstated family knowledge about immigration experiences emerged from many students’ interviews, affirming their transnational identities, their understandings of immigration at the meso and macro level (Douglas Fir Group, 2016) were expanded through the data stories they created using Social Explorer. Specifically, youths' data stories extended the single stories they heard from family or community members to corroborate claims beyond solitary experiences.

Significance
Despite the successes of our research design in expanding students' knowledge of research and complexifying their transnational funds of knowledge, we found youths sharing in class included students making ‘othering’ comments about Spanish variation and accented speech to classmates. Therefore, broader language ideologies and hierarchies for language use among Latinx identifying individuals revealed a need for the research team to attend to these factors. We trust that others might glean from our own successes and shortcomings to better support immigrant youths' criticality.

Authors

• Matthew R. Deroo, University of Miami
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer Beth Kahn, University of Miami
  Presenting Author

• Daryl B. Axelrod, Florida International University
  Presenting Author