“Everyone Has a Place Here”: Examining Transnational Students’ Identities and Stories in a Hyperlocal Urban Context

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Place, Memory, and Identity: Exploring Students' Ways of Knowing (Table 10)

Abstract

This paper reports on a design study that engaged a class of transnational and immigrant high school youth in multidisciplinary digital storytelling about their local school and home neighborhoods. We asked, How do students’ discourse around immigration in their exploration and making of digital stories about their families and local community speak to their transnational identities, the hyperlocal urban context, and Discourse around immigration? Analysis of students discourse in classroom conversations and in their storytelling suggests they placed value on particular immigrant experiences rooted in their own identities and families’ experiences in the hyperlocal urban context. Students shared various tensions about migration and immigration through particular value-stances, complicating their own immigrant-oriented backgrounds and views on immigration framed as good/bad.

Authors

• Matthew R. Deroo, Florida International University

• Jennifer Beth Kahn, University of Miami

• Daryl B. Axelrod, Columbia University