“If the Book Demonstrates That . . . Massive Success for Us”: Arts-Rich Translanguaging Projects With Vietnamese-Australian Parents (Poster 21)

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Sunday 11:40 a.m.
  In Poster Session: Language, Literacies, and Representations

Abstract

This paper draws on an arts-rich translanguaging project with Vietnamese-Australian parents of young children, in partnership with a community Vietnamese language education advocacy group (VLE), a non-profit community publisher of children’s books, and university researchers. The group collaborated to create a translanguaging picturebook that represented their myriad and shared linguistic and cultural knowledge and identities. Led by experienced teaching artists, with input from language scholars, the workshop process and final product highlighted the importance of translanguaging in supporting the families’ full linguistic repertoires leading to feelings of resourcefulness rather than “brokenness”. Through an analytic lens of “distributed language” this ethnographic arts-led case study uncovered the emergent, embodied and dynamic nature of “language”, “learning”, and “identity development” among these parents.

Authors

• Julie Choi, University of Melbourne

• Liz Murray, Bay Area Writing Project