Co-Designing a Critical Literacy Tool for English Learners' Use at Home: Disrupting Intersectional Inequality

• In Event: Deconstructing Intersectional Racism in Language and Literacy Education: What’s in It for the Newcomer Student?

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This paper reports on a project that used co-design to privilege the intersectional identities of refugee-background girls (15-16) in Australia who are learning to read the word and the world more critically (Freire & Macedo, 1987). The co-design phase involved a series of workshops to produce a bespoke critical literacy/reading tool for use out of school. Critical literacy is an essential skill for ELL students in today’s “’post-truth’ digital media culture, an environment that is defined by …information oversaturation” (Williams, 2018. p, 53) where racism can proliferate. However, armed with critical literacy skills, the researchers postulate that ELLs can navigate this space more productively.
Theoretical framework
Janks (2010) utilizes a synthesis model of critical literacy – especially Diversity and Design –to focus on the girls’ selection of “meaning making” resources to create the tool. This paper advances understandings of diversity amongst refugee-background youth settling in culturally complex societies, “typified by difference and their dynamic intersections” (Jones & Dovidio, 2017, p. 45).
Methods
Critical case study (CCS) (Carspecken, 1996) and co-design (Barab & Squire, 2004) approaches disrupt traditional methods of researcher-centric investigative work. CCS is concerned with advocacy and transformation of social practices for more equitable situations that uses research to assist with emancipatory goals (Thomas, 1993, p.4). In co-design research, the focus is on “working with participants to design a specific procedure or intervention for a population similar to that of the recruited sample” (Barab & Squire, 2004). The intervention consisted of enhancing the girls’ critical literacy knowledge, and the co-production of a unique critical literacy reading tool based on their intersectional understandings of what it means to “read the world”.
Data sources
The participants consisted of six refugee-background girls who employed a variety of languages (Persian, Swahili, Arabic, Mandinka/Mandingo and English), adhered to different religious traditions (Muslim, Christian, none), identified in heterogeneous gendered ways, had experienced varied migration pathways, and had varying academic abilities.
Results
Findings illuminate the dynamic intersections of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, language use, and migration experiences when refugee-background young people are asked to co-create resources to support their own learning. Findings show the need for more nuanced knowledge about how ELL students’ multiple and complex identities intersect. It also highlights their interest in critical literacy as a vehicle to understand the kinds of inequalities they experience because of these intersections.
Scientific
An enduring racial stereotype of refugee-background ELL students is that they cannot perform critical literacy and critical design work, and that their education needs to centre on simplified instruction in functional English literacy acquisition. This view imposes limited racial identities and does not account for the variety of funds of identities (Esteban-Guitart, 2012) available to them and their teachers. This paper shows how critical literacy education can harness the productive power of ELLs’ intersectional identities, reconfiguring greater possibilities for their literacy learning.

Author

• Jennifer Helen Alford, Griffith University