Co-constructing Translanguaging Spaces for Equity and Justice Through Multilingual Family Storytelling

• In Event: Dismantling Barriers and Centering Multilingual Families Through Humanizing, Critical Partnerships

Abstract

Objectives

One way of centering multilingual families (MLFs) and framing educators as collaborators may be through the co-construction of multilingual stories (Kim & Song, 2019), as this positioning places value on MLFs’ translanguaging expertise (Hancock, 2020; García & Li, 2015) in school-valued literacy practices. The current study inquires how MLFs can build partnership and leadership while creating family-authored multilingual stories across four Midwestern school districts in the United States using in-person and virtual translanguaging communal spaces.



Perspectives

The study frames translanguaging as the “norm” communicative practice (García, 2009, 2011) and frames MLFs as language architects (Flores, 2016, 2020), who harness their communicative repertoires to creatively construct, convey, and transform understanding. This conception of MLFs builds on the seminal work of Moll et al. (1992) that sought to reframe the assets of previously marginalized and minoritized students within educational spaces. More recently, scholars have framed community translanguaging projects as spaces to promote both equitable educational spaces and literacy development (Kim & Song, 2019). These projects seek to dismantle historical and structural barriers that significantly stymie translanguaging pedagogies, particularly in formal educational spaces, including language separation policies (Martínez-Álvarez, 2017; Moriarty, 2017), deficit views of translanguaging (Probyn, 2015), concerns related to assessment (Garza & Arreguín-Anderson, 2018), and many others.



Methods

This qualitative study (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2018) employed ethnographic methods (Blommaert & Jie, 2010) to explore how MLFs created, illustrated, and shared multilingual family stories collaboratively during afterschool workshops. Participants were MLFs, PK12 teachers, coaches, and researchers. We examined how multilingual families utilized their translanguaging repertoires (Tian & King, 2023) to collaboratively construct multilingual stories and how teachers developed and enacted authentic cariño mindsets (Bartolomé, 2008) to support multilingual family-led story making process.

From October 2021 through May 2022, we collected data sources across three phases of the workshops: recruitment, preparation, and implementation and production. The data sources included video and transcription of 16 planning meetings; emails with teachers; field notes, transcription, and artifacts from 14 workshops; interviews with MLF; surveys from MLFs and teachers; and 19 completed MLF stories and the accompanying video dissemination. We utilized both in-vivo and deductive coding (Miles et at., 2014) across data sources in an iterative fashion.









Conclusions

We identified three themes across the data collected: 1) MLFs manifesting translanguaging knowledge and repertoires; 2) Teachers and researchers developing authentic, caring relationships with parents and children; and 3) MLFs enacting leadership in developing their biliteracy through their own stories/histories. We noticed that many families incorporated transmodal representations of story moments to the story mapping process and that teachers needed support to position MLFs as experts of their own stories, language, and culture.



Significance

Developing trust and confidence with families is a multi-step process that begins in the planning stages of all projects and is dependent on teachers, researchers, and school leaders recognizing and leveraging the assets that multilingual families always carry with them. This project shares a framework on working with MLFs to dismantle historical relationships of inequity and to begin to build toward new understandings and possibilities.

Authors

• Nicole King, University of Rhode Island

• Kim Hyunsook Song, University of Missouri - St. Louis