Toward Critical Multimodality: Chinese American Bilinguals Retelling Chinese Folktales in a Chinese Heritage Community School

• In Event: Exploring Fugitive Literacies With Youth of Color in Out-of-School Spaces

Abstract

Chinese American bilinguals are rarely seen as legitimate individuals who have their own right to use full linguistic repertories across multiple modalities for learning and knowledge producing (Ma & Li, 2016). Specifically in community-based educational spaces, studies mainly focused on the maintenance of Chinese heritage and language from an additive biliteracy lens (García et al., 2007). To combat deficit views, scholars must embrace a holistic biliteracies lens to view Chinese American bilinguals’ language and literacy practices (Huang, 2012). The purpose of this paper is to highlight how Chinese American bilinguals produce transcultural knowledge and navigate biliterate identities through retelling Chinese folktales in two comic writing projects in a Chinese heritage community school.

In this study, we draw on biliteracies (Nuñez, 2023) and critical multimodality (Silvestri et al., 2023) frameworks to explore bilinguals’ biliteracies practices from a critical and holistic lens. Through these theoretical understandings, we look at how translanguaging practices, transcultural knowledge, and interaction of various modes of communication are engaged and reflected as bilinguals negotiating Chinese folktales and their lived realities. Specifically, we aim to understand (1) how does biliteracies inform bilingual teachers to design and implement Chinese folktales learning and writing projects? and (2) how do Chinese American bilinguals internalize and retell Chinese folktales through comic writing and sharing activities?

We employed Action Research in this study, a methodological approach that aims to address practical concerns and develop theories, which contributes to both practitioners and research community (Stringer, 2008). We, as researchers and bilingual teachers, acknowledged the need for biliteracies spaces among Chinese American bilingual students, thus designed and implemented the critical multimodality projects within two Mandarin-English bilingual classrooms. Ten Chinese American bilingual youth were recruited for this study. The data include classroom audio-video recordings, students' and teachers' artifacts, and audio recordings of teachers’ reflective meetings. Our data analysis followed a two-step qualitative coding process that involves concept coding in the first cycle and pattern codes in the second cycle (Miles et al., 2018).

Three preliminary findings have emerged from the initial data analysis. (1) Informed by critical biliteracies lens, bilingual teachers embodied multiple modalities in Chinese folktales project design and implementation to help bilinguals explore transcultural knowledge and their identities; (2) Chinese American bilinguals engaged in translanguaging practices and employed multiple social semiotics in Chinese folktales learning and writing; and (3) through comic writing and sharing, Chinese American bilinguals retold the Chinese folktales in a way that blended with biliterate identities, and their everyday language and culture practices in the western world.

This study demonstrates the affordances of using critical multimodality as deliberate pedagogy for biliteracies development. More importantly, it brought attention to community-based educational spaces (CBES) within marginalized communities of color, which have been established to counter the racial stratification and structural inequality in formal school spaces (Baldridge et al., 2017). More research is necessary to center on how the heterogeneity and flexibility of CBES allow for broader imagining of more justice and anti-oppressive educational futures.

Authors

• Jiadi Zhang, University of Missouri - St. Louis

• Qinchun Li, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign