Immigrant-background Children Composing Multilingual Multimodal Identity Texts as a Culturally Sustaining Humanizing Practice in Canada

• In Event: Unforgetting Newcomer Experiences, Knowledges, and Identities: Humanizing and Future-making Pedagogies across Canada and the U.S

Abstract

Amid rising global migration, 2024 records Canada's highest immigration level in five decades (Statistics Canada, 2025). The perceptible cultural and linguistic diversity generated by immigration is evident in schools; however, Canadian classrooms remain seeped in White middle-class monolingual practices (Cummins, 2023). To humanize, value, and celebrate immigrant- and refugee-background children’s presence, voices and experiences, we look closely at student-created multimodal multilingual texts as ways of sustaining their knowledges, creating belonging, and future making.

This presentation is rooted in concepts of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP; Ladson-Billings et al., 2024; Paris, 2021), multimodality (Kendrick, 2016; Kress, 2017), materiality (Burnett et al., 2012), and learner identities (Norton, 2013). Drawing on students’ cultural resources, CSP emphasizes not only making relevant students’ identities, but sustaining them to foster “linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling” (Paris, 2012, p. 95). Relatedly, multimodal and material perspectives emphasize the plurality and relationality of meaning-making beyond languaged and lettered representation (e.g., through drawings, speech, photos, sounds, objects), which become especially important for children learning to represent their understandings in emergent ways
We examine students’ creative work across two provinces in Canada, taking a multiple case study approach (Yin, 2018). Authors 1 highlights data from a year-long design research study, with Grade 2/3 children and their teacher, exploring communicative repertoires of emergent bilinguals and how these might be valued towards transforming pedagogical practices. Data for this presentation include visual examples with accompanying multilingual narratives, documents and artifacts, classroom observations and informal conversations with the children and their teacher. Author 2 examines how G7/8 Chinese Canadian learners view and enact their multicultural and multilingual backgrounds to create visual identity texts (Cummins & Early, 2011). Data includes research journals, informal conversations and interviews with participating learners, and artefacts. We harness participant-friendly arts-based and multimodal approaches to gather children’s voices and use reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2020) and critical visual analysis (Rose, 2016) to share our interpretations.

Findings reveal that languages and cultures offer both affordances and potential challenges for immigrant students to construct their learner identities, but arts-based and multimodal methods offer innovative and humanizing ways to listen for and honour children’s communicative repertoires, without dependence on their emerging skills in the dominant language. Additionally, their multilingual creations act as countertexts so that these racialized and marginalized students become experts, sharing their complex lifeworlds, challenging deficit mainstream narratives, and navigating hierarchical and raciolinguicized power dynamics. Instead of being defined by their trauma or “underachievement” viewed through the deficit lens of a colonial monolingual systems of curriculum and assessment, their creations showcase children’s brilliance and joy (Muhammad, 2022).

When educators unforget the colonized past and commit to just futures, a focus on children’s present interests, experiences, knowledges, and ways of being sensitizes that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility” (hooks, 1994). Instead of controlling, managing, and teaching to the labels often placed on minoritized students, humanizing practices support educators to learn from minoritized children as they participate in their future making.

Authors

• Harini Rajagopal, University of British Columbia

• Xiaoxiao Du, University of Manitoba