Places of equity: Exploring place-based literacies in a young refugee-background child’s life

• In Event: Elevating Refugee-Background Communities’ Ways of Knowing, Doing, Being, and Becoming: Canadian and U.S. Perspectives

Abstract

That one in four people in Canada is a newcomer (Statistics Canada, 2021) stresses the urgency for educators to engage with the complex lived experiences of newcomer families and children for systematic repair and renewal. Towards this pedagogical space, this presentation offers the storied experiences of Anh, a young refugee-background child from Vietnam, with emphasis on place and place-based pedagogies towards asset-oriented perspectives on meaning-making.

There is a reciprocal relationship between place and humans; people create places and places “make” people. Places have long been considered as interconnections embracing networks of relationships between people, between humans and environments, and between actions and emotions. I draw from place-based pedagogies (Greenwood, 2013; Häggström & Schmidt, 2020; McInerey et al., 2011), attending to situated social relations, locations, and material environments as powerful forces that shape and are shaped by learners. Additionally, I attune to multiliteracies (Kalantzis & Cope, 2023) – cultural and linguistic diversity and multimodality – and understandings of identities and emergent bilinguals (Darvin & Norton, 2015; García, 2009), to recognize children’s fluid multimodal meaning-making encounters in place.

Anh was one of the eight children categorized as English Language Learners (ELLs) in his classroom and participated in a year-long study exploring the multilingual and multimodal communicative repertoires of emergent bilinguals and how these might be valued towards pedagogical transformation. Using educational design research (McKenney & Reeves, 2019), I collaborated with the children and teacher in their Grade 2/3 classroom in Western Canada. I also visited Anh’s home for six months and draw from these home and classroom visits for this presentation.

Here I explore Anh’s significant experiences and relationships with a few places in his life – his classroom, the school, and his home. These stories move from small classroom places like his desk and the cushion in the reading nook; to the playgrounds during recess, and the English-support resource room; to socio-locations like his home and his neighborhood. These places contained and created relationships and emotions tied to the negotiation of his identities and to his stories of learning (e.g., Compton-Lilly et al., 2022). Importantly, as he transitioned through each place and space, from the classroom to outside, to home and community, I story that he became increasingly more joyful and creative in his language and literacy practices, included his extensive communicative repertoires, and created belonging for himself.

Classroom practices, assessment, and teacher education often perpetuate deficit views of historically marginalized children and their families based on white normative outlooks. Anh’s stories situated in place present different stories, and different emotions and relationships to learning with intersectional inequities and innovative possibilities. Threading understandings of critical place-based pedagogies and literacies with social justice, this work emphasizes the importance of place for considering the day-to-day experiences within home and communities as powerful spaces of thriving for children like Anh who are often constrained in English-only normative classrooms. Implications for educators center around attending to refugee-background children’s experiences of place as equitable pedagogical repair, and considering how places matter for children’s ways of being.

Author

• Harini Rajagopal, University of British Columbia