Navigating Sameness, Difference, and Intersectional Dynamics in the Worlds of Emergent Bilinguals in Elementary Classrooms

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

Abstract

Objectives:
The stories of two young ELL students are presented to underscore the need for more intersectional listening to the narratives of marginalized learners. Describing their stories through a multilingual photo and drawing project, the cases of Jay and Pari are detailed to reflect how young emergent bilinguals think about language and literacies in school, how pedagogies impact understandings of their capacities, and how looking through an intersectional lens implicates ideological structures beyond ideas of sameness and difference (Cho, Crenshaw & McCall, 2013) in children’s identities.
Perspectives:
This paper is framed within interrelated sociocultural perspectives. The orientation of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015), understandings of identities of identities and emergent bilinguals (Darvin & Norton, 2015), and perspectives on pedagogical translanguaging from an equitable lens (Cenoz & Gorter, 2020; Cummins, 2021). Particular attention is paid to raciolinguistic perspectives (Rosa & Flores, 2017) and ways that social hierarchies and discourses are intersectionally assembled in these narratives, especially through race, language, social class, and gender.
Methods and data:
The study took place in a school in western Canada, and Jay and Pari were two of the eight children categorized as ELL in their class. The researchers worked collaboratively with the children and the classroom teacher as they participated in a year-long study that explored the communicative repertoires of emergent bilinguals and how these might be valued as a means of transforming pedagogical practices. Through an educational design research methodology (McKenney & Reeves, 2019), the researchers documented the intentional process of including multilingual and multimodal strategies to transform practice towards culturally sustaining and equitable classrooms.
Jay and Pari’s intersectional identities in the classroom – including being newcomers marginalized as ELLs, and part of a group of racialized students from low-income families – shifted from a deficit positioning to having the ability to reflect their identities of competence (Manyak, 2004). Jay took up writing in Spanish and digitally editing a photo of his favourite car; Pari made connections with a photo of her “rainbow bear” stuffy, reflecting multiliterate competencies in her Hindi and English narratives. In so doing, they transitioned their racialized experiences and languages from being unrecognized skills to valued resources for enabling connection, communication, and confidence. Throughout the process, they came to re-positioning themselves as experts in their lives, languages, and learning.
Nevertheless, the process was not without complications. The shifting of identities was complicated – students in the class hesitated to use their languages, policed each other with English-only discourses, and the children and their families navigated instances that highlighted their non-normative social class and racialized identities within the school system. These stories blurred the thinking about sameness and difference in children’s experiences by focusing on intersecting axes of power and inequality that influenced their intersectional identities within classroom worlds.
Significance:
Jay and Pari’s stories emphasized what intersectionality does rather than what it is within classrooms, thereby highlighting the need for conscious resistance to structural tensions that constrain minoritized populations and accentuating intentional transformative practices that consider equity and relationality.

Author

• Harini Rajagopal, University of British Columbia