Exploring Migrant Youth Identities Through Relationship

• In Event: AERA Graduate Student Research in Progress Roundtable Session Two
  In Roundtable Session: Understanding Student Relationships and Experiences in School: The Role of Identity, Praise, Motivation, and Memory (Table 17)

Abstract

Multilingual, migrant students of color in the United States deploy distinct literacies and forms of cultural wealth rooted in their transnational hybrid experiences (Gutierrez, 2008; Yosso, 2005). This study is ethnographic case study of two adolescent youth from migrant farmworker families at a summer school in Maine that asks: How do migrant students navigate and express their identities and relationships with peers, educators, and families through their language and literacy practices? This study applies a transnational lens to literacy (Gutierrez, 2008; Kwon, 2020; Ghiso, 2016; Skerrett, 2018) in order to visibilize and understand how migrant youth create relationships and how this interacts with their identities in schools. This project is an ethnographic case study which seeks to tell stories of the lives of migrant youth which allows for rich data generation that helps to elucidate and tell stories of the focal participants. Seeking honest and meaningful stories (Leggo & Sameshima, 2014), it engage in multiple creative, imaginative, fictional, and narrative modes of inquiry with the participants. Understanding the experience of relationships in youths' lives and telling these stories can contribute to cultivating an orientation to multiplicity in migrant students and their teachers. Ultimately, an orientation towards multiplicity and questioning can make space for multilingual migrant youth to make sense of their persistent dance with knowing and not-knowing as they navigate the multiple interactions that inform their becoming.

Author

• Christine Rheem, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author