Borderlands Biliteracies: An Exploration of Transfronterizx Children's Fotografías

• In Event: Toward Justice-Driven Qualitative Research Methods With Young Children

Abstract

Purpose & Significance: Education on the Texas-Mexico borderlands, where transfronterizx children and youth are, is discursively mainstreamed by media outlets and education reports as having low language and literacy levels, low academic achievement, and high dropout rates compared to the national average (Guerrero & Farrugio, 2012). This is due to a lack of relevant and meaningful curriculum for borderlands youth (de los Rios et al., 2015). To address this, transfronterizx community members such as children (and/or families) need opportunities to share their views and have input on a curriculum that reflects their border epistemologies (Author 1 & Colleague, 2021). The purpose of our presentation is to center on how transfronterizx children image, through photography, their experiences with language and literacies on the borderlands.

Theoretical Framework: Borderlands biliteracies refer to the border-crossing language and literacy knowledge from the perspective of the subaltern–an individual who has experienced marginalization through and by borders (Degollado, et al., 2021). This theory brings attention to the critical perspectives that border-crossers, like transfronterizxs, use to read and write the word and the world (Freire, 1970). We draw on this framework to understand how transfronterizx children communicate through their photographs about what their language and literacies look like on the borderlands.

Methods & Data Sources: This paper draws from a larger multiple case study by Author 1 in 2016 that examined how three transfronterizx children (all 8 years of age) read and write themselves as literate border-crossers. As part of the study, children made photographs with a digital camera and then engaged, with their mothers, in photo-elicitation interviews wherein the researcher asked the child to identify and discuss their multiple literacy and language practices across the different settings of the photographs.

Drawing from visual and participatory methods with children (Author2, 2018; Panel Author, 2019), we explore how the children performed their biliterate identities through photographic encounters, including their choices in the images’ productions and narrations. Attending to the internal narrative (Banks & Zeitlyn, 2015) of their photographs (e.g. where they take the camera, what gets included in their photos, who they ask to collaborate with them in making images) and the external narratives (e.g. what kinds of talk ensue from which images, what images hold affective power), we weave together stories that transfronterizx children tell about their biliterate lives.

Findings & Significance: Transfronterizx children’s agency and identities are part of networked relations with texts, places, and people. The images and stories, as told by the children, were marked by the initiatives they took, investments they made, and their experiences with language and literacies, all entangled within ongoing relations with family members on both sides of the US-Mexican border. Biliteracy learning, for the children, was a relational, interdependent, bilingual, and border-crossing endeavor where school texts like worksheets and test preps, as well as popular texts like YouTube videos, acted as entry points for inquiry with family members. Conversations between children and their mothers within photo-elicitation interviews uncovered the complex negotiations of biliterate identities within transfronterizx families.

Authors

• Idalia Nunez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Tran Templeton, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author