Identity positionings of refugee-background youth in a digital multimodal composing school-based project

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

Abstract

Language and literacy educators position refugee-background youth’s identities in ways that can shape their settlement, academic, and professional trajectories (Roxas, 2011; Roy & Roxas, 2011). The alignment or divergence between how youth position themselves and how teachers position their identities can significantly impact youth’s lives (e.g., Cummins, 2021). Positioning can be defined as “the discursive construction of stories and relationships that build meaning and make an individual person’s actions intelligible” (Golden & Pandya, 2019, p. 212). Refugee-background youth may be positioned as deficient or damaged, focusing on their perceived lacks and devaluing their resilience and diverse resources, which diminishes their self-perceptions and educational possibilities. In contrast, asset-based and desire-centered educational positionings recognize and value their unique strengths, resources, and aspirations (Shapiro et al., 2018; Warriner et al., 2020). Attending to how students from refugee backgrounds are discursively positioned or position themselves in settlement-context classrooms is therefore of particular importance (e.g., Karam et al., 2020), as repeated positionings from a deficit perspective can diminish students while incremental positionings from an asset perspective can empower them (Golden & Pandya, 2019).

Digital multimodal composing (henceforth DMC), defined as the use of digital tools to make meaning with multiple modes (e.g., languages, visuals, sounds; Hafner, 2019), has been shown to affirm refugee-background youth’s identities and enable them to position themselves powerfully in the classroom (Author 3, 2023; Author 3 et al., 2022). However, few studies have examined differences between how youth position their identities and how teachers position youth’s identities, along with their future imagined trajectories and storylines, through DMC projects. This qualitative case study contributes to addressing this gap.

Guided by a multimodal (Kress, 2010), sociocultural approach to literacy (Street, 1984) and a discursive and relational understanding of identity as positioning (Golden & Pandya, 2019; Harré & Langenhove, 1991), the study empirically explores how youth positioned their identities through their design choices in video productions (as types of DMC) compared to how their teachers positioned them in focus groups. Situated in a Western Canadian secondary school, three newcomer youth created visioning videos where they described their lives in five years’ time on-camera with a green-screen background (later replaced by images of their choice from their future lives). Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) of audio and video recordings from production sessions and interviews with the youth and their six teachers was conducted. Findings revealed tensions between how students positioned themselves and how teachers positioned them along two dimensions: what it means to be successful and what it means to have grit. Students held high aspirations for professional and socio-economic mobility, while teachers voiced various concerns about the system and societal constraints. By comparing these positionings and their associated tensions, this study offers valuable insights for language and literacy educators. It highlights the significance of employing DMC pedagogies that not only affirm the identities of newcomer youth but work to remedy and repair the educational practices that often constrain their academic, professional, and social mobility.

Author

• Amir Michalovich, University of Manitoba