Hearing and Seeing Anew: Learning From Language-Minoritized Students' Skillful and Creative Appropriations of Language

• In Event: Reimagining Racialized Language and Literacy Practices and Envisioning Pedagogical Possibilities

Abstract

This paper explores two scholars’ approaches to ethnographic research alongside language-minoritized youth and their classroom teachers. Through individual ethnographic studies and a subsequent comparative case study (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2016), the authors documented how young people across the two settings drew on their translingual sensibilities and translingual ingenuities (Author 1; Author 2) to imagine more equitable and just futures. Drawing on this research, this paper offers concrete suggestions for ways that language and literacy researchers can shift their methodologies to better perceive students’ translingual sensibilities and ingenuities: critical reflection on researchers’ racial, class and gender positionings, interdisciplinarity in theoretical groundings, comparative and multimodal approaches to research design, and an emphasis on longstanding relationships and answerability within those relationships (Patel, 2014).

Authors

• Kate Seltzer, Rowan University

• Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Berkeley