Youth Podcasting as Sonic Heteroglossia: Exploring Translingual Youths’ Multi-Voiced Poetics of Resistance

• In Event: Toward Literacies of Agency: Centering Transnational and Transfronterizx Communities and Their Knowledges

Abstract

Purpose & Significance
During Donald Trump’s 2015-16 Presidential campaign, there was no greater talking point than the physical expansion of the US-Mexico border wall. Rising discourses about “the wall” caused acute stress and mounting anxiety for immigrant-origin students under Trump’s candidacy and later presidential administration (Gándara & Ee, 2022). Limited research explores in-school writing and digital composing activities that helped to foster spaces of belonging for racialized bi/multilingual students during this time. Situated in a secondary Chicanx/Latinx Literature course, this study asks “How did a podcast writing unit foster a form of sonic heteroglossia?”

Theoretical Framework
Anchored in Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of linguistic and discursive plurality, heteroglossia, as an analytic framework, this study uses translanguaging (García, 2009) to discuss the multivoiced literacies of bi/multilingual youth. Bakhtin’s intertextual understanding of heteroglossia situates the presence of other’s words in one’s own utterances, or rather the “the ways that talk in the here-and-now draws meaning from past instances of talk” (Bailey, 2007, p. 272).

Methods & Data Sources
Drawing from a larger ethnographic study at a California high school during 2016-17, this paper reports on a three-week classroom unit with Mexican, Central American and African American youth. The students classified as “English learners” were Spanish-English speakers and immigrants or the children of immigrants. Data sources include (a) participant observation, (b) semi-structured interviews with focal students, (c) one focus group with each podcast group, and (d) written transcripts and digital recordings of focal students’ podcasts. Data analysis drew from both inductive and deductive approaches.

Findings
The writing of podcasts involved creative linguistic choices, careful design, critical translingual and transnational literacies, and technical competencies. The first finding demonstrates how students’ podcasts weren’t simply displaying a heteroglossic discourse, but rather enacting a sonic process of sociopolitical transformation, releasing students from the constraints of an aural standardized Spanish or English monolingualism or a static additive bilingualism (García, 2009) to share stories of resistance and agency. The second finding shows how students borrowed from translingual mentor texts and popular music, where their own translingual “authoring of the self” (Bakhtin, 1981) was always an answering back and answering forward to other addressees. The multivoicedness of the podcasts served as pedagogical material to their legion of classmate listeners as it opposed the singlevoicedness of dominant and harmful narratives of Latinx immigrant youth and communities.

Conclusion
This research adds to the small but growing body of scholarship on the interrelationship between multimodal composing and the development of empowered literate identities for racialized immigrant, transnational, and bi/multilingual students.

Authors

• Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Berkeley

• Isaac Alejandro Felix, University of California - Berkeley

• Yared Portillo, University of California - Berkeley