Leveraging Linguistic and Cultural Frames for Social-Spatial Understandings With Transnational Youth (Poster 9)

• In Event: Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Relevant Social Studies: Research and Practice With and for Multilingual Youth

Abstract

Our poster reports on a design study that introduced digital spatial storytelling practices to culturally and linguistically diverse students to support their social-spatial understandings about their communities. We invited 31 bi/multilingual immigrant students in an A.P. Research course at a Title One public, charter high school to learn about social inquiry across scales (Broffenbruener, 1979), from their families’ and communities’ experiences, to city, national, and global scales, and to draw on their cultural and linguistic knowledge and experiences to examine sociocultural and sociopolitical factors impacting their communities. Our analysis focuses on two of our designed activities, family oral history interviews and the exploration of large scale demographic data maps, as means of supporting critical perspectives towards places that recognize the consequences and potential (in)justices of our geographies (Schmidt, 2013; Soja, 2009).
We draw on trans-perspectives (i.e., translanguaging and transnational ways of being; see Garcia & Li, 2014 and Skerrett, 2015 respectively) to help us examine flows across languages, cultural practices, and nation-state borders and critical geography frames that emphasize “the intersections of space, place, power, and identity” (Helfenbein, 2021, p. 4)
We collected data, including video recorded classroom instruction, field notes, memos, student artifacts, and focus group interviews across 14 weeks of researcher-led instruction in Fall 2021. For this analysis, we reviewed students’ (n=30) recorded oral histories with family members about their migration experiences, data maps they created with the tool Social Explorer based on the oral histories, recorded follow-up conversations with family members about their data maps, and written reflections for each task. We noted when and how students drew on linguistic and cultural frames of reference to/in expressions of their social-spatial understandings.
Students’ family migration stories both reinforced and challenged familiar narratives about immigration like social mobility, meritocracy, and seeking educational and economic opportunities and advancement. For example, Beatriz, in her oral history reflection, described how her family left Nicaragua, “to escape discrimination, wars,” to pursue “a better life with more opportunities in the United States.” Other students, informed by their interviews and the data stories they generated, shared difficulties family members encountered regarding language use: “they had to learn the language themselves” (Fatima); there was also a clear language barrier for my mother” (Alejandro); racial discrimination: “some family members are attacked because of their race” (Alecia); and documentation; “I learned the difficulties of being an illegal immigrant to the United States, with getting a license and even a job” (Alejandro). Inviting and weaving student and family voices into the classroom space via students’ social-spatial inquiry activities created opportunities to expand and strengthen understandings of intergenerational family narratives and complicate dominant meritocratic narratives of migration.
Our study illustrates how social-spatial understandings are agentically constructed through experience and language, and how educators can embrace the transnational fluidity that is part of students’ lives. We discuss how inviting students to draw on their linguistic and cultural frames can be leveraged for social studies learning about complex global issues in nuanced ways.

Authors

• Matthew R. Deroo, Florida International University

• Jennifer Beth Kahn, University of Miami

• Daryl B. Axelrod, Columbia University