Research as Teaching: Fostering Translingual Transnational Literacies With a China-U.S. Transnational Youth

• In Event: Working in, With, and for Our Communities: Humanizing Method(ologie)s in Transnational Literacies Research

Abstract

What does it mean to be a “worthy witness” (Paris & Winn, 2014, p. xiii) in humanizing qualitative research with transnational youth and families? As a transnational Chinese woman, I strive to be a “worthy witness” for my research partners by building reciprocal learning relationships with them through a translingual and culturally sustaining research process. Specifically, I seek to witness their growth and (un)learning through methodologies that engage them in reflective creation. In this presentation, I will narrate my research process as a mentor-researcher with 16-year-old Meiyi (pseudonym) using writing workshops and book discussions that employ pedagogies of translanguaging (García & Li Wei, 2015) and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017). Then, I will provide implications of how my research as teaching practices allowed me to learn from and about my research partners’ evolving border-crossing and translingual transnational literacies.

My inquiry is a part of my larger three-year critical ethnographic study exploring the translingual, transnational, multimodal, and intergenerational language and literacy practices of the China-U.S. transnational adolescent girl, Meiyi, and her family. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives on literacy with a transnational and multiliteracies framework and using Portraiture as my methodological guide, I explored Meiyi and her family’s transnational language and literacy practices (1) in multiple geographic locations (e.g., U.S. and China), (2) across various contexts (e.g., home, school, communities, and digital spaces), and (3) through various modalities (e.g., print text reading/writing, photography, talk, drawing, cooking).

In this presentation, with Meiyi as my focal research partner, my inquiry is guided by this question: In what ways do culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies and methods honor sustain, and foster one China-U.S. transnational adolescent girl’s linguistic repertoires, transnational literacies, cultural practices, and critical consciousness? My data corpus includes semi-structured interviews, artifact-elicited interviews, observations, photovoice journaling, literacy artifact creation (multimodal and multigenre writing), document analysis, book discussions, and researcher memos. I analyzed the data guided by Portraiture and kept the data in large chunks to provide context and details for the narrated images (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). Presented in the form of narratives, the “findings” will illuminate the process of how I engaged in research as teaching with Meiyi and detail our interactions as we explored and understood her evolving translingual transnational literacies.

The narratives suggest (1) writing, reading, storying, and drawing translingually about transnational experiences are forms of transnational literacies integral to Meiyi’s daily literacy practices, and (2) Meiyi’s experiences and expressions elicited through linguistically and culturally sustaining pedagogies are intimate, complex, trans-geographic, and multilayered. These narratives need to be elicited through culturally and linguistically sustaining data collection method(ologie)s. Moreover, they require a humble, empathetic, and critical ear from the educator-researcher. My presentation will challenge practitioners, educational researchers, and qualitative methodologists to (re)consider equity-oriented ways they can engage in reciprocal learning processes with their research partners to humanize the research process through witnessing and fostering their translingual transnational literacies development.

Author

• Tairan Qiu, Stanford University