Storying Relationships in the Language Classroom

• In Event: Centering Relationality & Expanding Knowledge through Artistic Practice: Transdisciplinary Education Research and Arts Methodologies for Change

Abstract

In this presentation, we engage in narrative inquiry to study the way that English Language Arts teachers, specifically English Language Development teachers, intentionally develop creative multimodal literacy projects for classroom use with multilingual students, particularly Maya-Mam youth from two individual projects. The first was an ethnographically oriented study of multilingualism and Indigenous diaspora within a continuation high school attended primarily by Central American youth, with a majority of students being speakers of Mam. The second was an ethnographic and collaborative design project of language communities and solidarity within a grassroots Mam language and culture class attended by a variety of community members, including K-12 educators and administrators.

We constructed a fictionalized narrative that analyzed the complexity of how teachers oriented toward multilingualism, solidarity, and social justice language practices in and outside their classrooms. This method of speculative renderings (Leavy, 2018) of ethnographic analysis provided an opportunity to center our relational understanding of the teachers’ commitments and pedagogies and imagine these teachers interactions with each other. This speculative narrative inquiry (Toliver, 2021) was based on analysis of classroom artifacts, specifically examples of multimodal literacy: a photovoice video project, a narrative nonfiction book project, and a translation of a children’s book. The analysis of these classroom artifacts was complemented by analysis of interviews and classroom observations to study the intentionality of each teacher toward these students’ multilingual repertoires. Rather than reporting on themes within these data sources, our speculative and fictional story construed these teacher’s practices and the actions that they took, framing them as protagonists of pedagogical projects.

Further, fiction-based analysis (Watson, 2011) highlights the relationships at the center of these pedagogies and ideologies, as well as how teachers navigate divergences and convergences in their pedagogies. Our speculative and fictional rendering responds to a political climate that demands more and more of teachers, demanding sacrifice in the purported service of children, children who are framed as lacking and deficient. We highlight how notions of “best practices” structure hierarchies among teachers, positioning some as being committed to educational equity and excellence, and others as being complicit in educational malpractice. Preliminary findings include the variety of ways that teachers sought to include students’ multilingualism in their curricula, ranging from improvised invitations to structured curricular inclusion of students’ multilingual repertoires (Garcia, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017), as well as how teachers oriented toward their own study of the Mam language. This speculative narrative helps deepen understanding of how teacher’s various translanguaging stances (Garcia, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017) can be leveraged into diverse pedagogies toward a shared goal of deepening students’ multilingual practices.

Authors

• Alex Mejía, San Francisco State University

• Cristina Selena Mendez, University of California - Berkeley