Text Production as Process: The Language, Literacy, and Identity Opportunities in a Bilingual Elementary Classroom

• In Event: Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: Tales, Talk, and Intertextuality With Young Children

Abstract

Children’s text production in classrooms involves complex identity negotiations that can draw on local knowledge, recast under-/mis-representation of multicultural and multilingual communities, and create situated opportunities for teaching language and literacy. Through a critical collaborative inquiry of teaching and learning as texts, we investigate the text/identity/curriculum work enacted in a joint university-school research project with third-grade children in Québec through inquiry into children’s rights. Findings show that production pedagogy creates micromoments for identity (re)creation and improvisations which in turn lead to new inquiries and text production. This nuanced and complex view of identity/text/curriculum work helps complicate the theorizing of students’ text production as mere linear, static processes of affirmation and reflection of their multicultural and multiliterate identities.

Authors

• Sunny Man Chu Lau, Bishop's University

• Maria Jose Botelho, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Marsha Liaw, University of Massachusetts Amherst