Exploring Real and Imagined Homelands: Bilingual Children’s Engagement in Transnational Storytelling Using Virtual Reality

• In Event: Transnational Perspectives in Bilingual Education: Honoring Community Knowledge and Fostering Equity

Abstract

Purpose: This study examines the experiences of bilingual children who participated in an after-school program designed to enable them to explore and share their transnational stories and identities using virtual reality (VR). Developed over the past two years through an action–reflection cycle (McNiff & Whitehead, 2011), the program followed a cyclical process in which the researcher observes, reflects, acts, modifies, and moves in new directions. During the program, bilingual children engaged in an array of learning activities, such as reading children’s literature that focuses on transnational migration, virtually visiting parental homelands using VR, and designing a VR museum representing their migration stories and identities. The goal was to emphasize the exploration and sharing of the bilingual children’s transnational stories and identities.
Framing of the Study: The current study and the design of the focal after-school program were informed by the transnational framework (Basch et al., 1994), which explains the phenomenon in which children from immigrant families forge and maintain their connections with their homelands and their parental homeland. I draw on the concept of transnational literacies (Author, 2022)—namely, the ways children from immigrant families read, write, communicate, and make meanings that are shaped by “the movement of people, media, language, and goods between distinct nation states” (Jiménez et al., 2009, p.17). The concept of transnational funds of knowledge (Author et al., 2019), or their linguistic, cultural, and experiential knowledge grounded in transnational connections, also informed the study. The integration of VR is informed by the literature focused on immersive multimodal communication practices (Hutchinson, 2018; Mills et al., 2020).
Methods and Data Sources: Adopting an ethnographic case study approach (Dyson & Genishi, 2005), I engaged in an in-depth examination of 6 bilingual children (grades 2-3) from immigrant families in an after-school program in Michigan. The children spoke Chinese, Korean, or Nepali in addition to English at home, and they were encouraged to leverage their full linguistic repertoire (García et al., 2017) during the program. All of them were born in the U.S., and they had varying transnational connections. The program was facilitated by an Asian American teacher that speaks Chinese, Cantonese, Vietnamese, and English at home. Ethnographic data, such as interviews, observations, recordings of sessions, and child-generated VR artifacts were collected and analyzed.
Findings and Significance: Bilingual children in the study traversed linguistic, cultural, and geographic borders using VR, sharing their transnational and intergenerational knowledge while exploring their real and imagined home(lands). They expressed their complex identities and stories in sensory-rich, immersive, and multimodal ways, and their flexible language practices were observed. The findings challenge deficit discourses surrounding bilingual children and their knowledge, and the study urges educators to create storytelling spaces in which children can leverage their existing bilingual and transnational knowledge and represent their identities in meaningful and culturally sustaining ways. The research contributes to the body of knowledge around bilingual education, technology, and transnational mobility, and it demonstrates how immersive technology, combined with culturally sustaining and translanguaging classroom, can support bilingual children’s transnational storytelling.

Author

• Jungmin Kwon, Michigan State University