Immigrant Youth’s (Re-)Imagining of Communal Well-Being Through Multivocal, Improvisational Storytelling

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Emancipatory Movements Toward Justice and Joy: The Role of Improvisation in Transformational Learning (Table 28)

Abstract

Because of its proleptic (Cole, 1996) and future-oriented (Enciso, 2019; Ochs, 1994) affordances, storytelling is considered crucial to sense-making (Ochs and Capps 2001) and to engaging in liberatory world-building (Toliver, 2021). Building on storytelling approaches to literacy (Enciso, 2011), this paper examines how through heteroglossic polyphony (Bahktin, 1981) and translanguaging (Garcia & Wei, 2014), immigrant children in an after-school program engage in collaborative and improvisational storytelling to (re-)imagine communal wellbeing.

Theoretically, this paper is also anchored in the “New Sociology and Anthropology of Childhoods” (Bluebond-Langner & Korbin, 2007; James & Prout, 1997), which takes seriously children’s ability to critically evaluate their social realities. Finally, our analysis is rooted in sociocultural theory of learning (Nasir and Hand 2006), which has a long history of studying literacy practices in relation to sociocultural, historical, political, and institutional frameworks of relevance (Street, 1995; Heath, 1983).

The data for this paper comes from community-engaged work that a transdisciplinary research team has been conducting in an area of Southern California that is home to a large and vibrant community of immigrants from southern México (Escala Rabadán & Rivera-Salgado, 2018). In consultation with the community and key institutional partners, we developed an after-school program centering 7-11 years old Latinx youth of immigrant origin. We engaged in a process of curricular design grounded in storytelling and theater-based methodologies that encourage self-exploration and social critique (Boal, 2022; Enciso et al., 2016), and in art-based methodologies that develop children’s agency and critical action in research projects (Johnson et al., 2013; Mitchell, 2008). Our aim was to strengthen children’s bi-literacy skills and emotional wellbeing, understanding the latter as inextricably linked with community wellbeing.

Within this pedagogical framework, improvisation was key in encouraging children’s constructions of a sustainable, healthy community, as well as their pointed critiques of the inequalities affecting their actual communities. More specifically, using ethnographic approaches to video and discourse analysis (Erickson, 2006; Rymes, 2015), we analyze a series of improvisational stories composed by the children in small collaborative groups. Within their small groups, children took turns adding to the story until they all agreed on an ending.

From the perspective of emplotment, the analysis shows children’s accurate understanding of the health inequalities that disproportionately affect many immigrant communities. Building on this initial observation, we pay particular attention to the moments of productive tension within and among the children and adult facilitators, when they disagree on the direction the improvised plot is taking. The analysis reveals how improvisation is key in helping children articulate multiple forms of (in)justice in the stories they assemble, as well as in helping children rehearse various ways of realizing social transformation and communal wellbeing.

Inspired by Enciso (2017) who encourages us to “continually engage with the ongoing politics of imagination in everyday life across silenced histories and uncertain futures” (p. 29), this paper has implications for how improvisational approaches to literacy can mobilize immigrant youth’s critical imagination and create pedagogical spaces in which they can engage in both just critique and joyful world-building.

Authors

• Inmaculada Maria García Sánchez, University of California - Los Angeles

• Amanda Harris, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jackson Gzehoviak, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jocelyn Meza, University of California - Los Angeles

• Kristi Westphaln, University of California - Los Angeles