Literacy Across the Community

Research, Praxis, and Trends

Laurie A Henry, Norman A Stahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000290059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume explores and evaluates community-based literacy programs, examining how they bridge gaps in literacy development, promote dialogue, and connect families, communities, and schools. Highlighting the diversity of existing literary initiatives across populations, this book brings together innovative and emerging scholarship on the relationship between P20 schools and community-based literacy programming. This volume not only identifies trends in research and practice, but it also addresses the challenges affecting these community-based programs and presents the best practices that emerge from them.

Collaborating with leading scholars to provide national and international perspectives, and offering a clear, birds-eye view of the state of community literacy praxis, chapters cover programming in a multitude of settings and for a wide range of learners, from early childhood to incarcerated youths and adults, and including immigrants, refugees, and indigenous communities. Topics include identity and empowerment, language and literacy development across the lifespan, rural and urban environments, and partnership programs. The breadth of community literacy programming gathered in a single volume represents a unique array of models and topics, and has relevance for researchers, scholars, graduate students, pre-service educators, and community educators in literacy.

Part I

Language and Literacy Development

1

The Language and Literacy Practices of Emergent Bilinguals in a Community-Based Writing Program

Stephanie Abraham, Kate E. Kedley, and Kate Seltzer

Rowan University

Using a translanguaging framework, we examined the language and literacy practices of racialized, emergent bilingual children in a bilingual (English/Spanish), community-based writing program in urban Philadelphia. Located in South Philly’s Italian Market, the program’s target audience was emergent bilingual, Latinx children who were 7–17 years old. The center offered an afternoon academy program, week-day evening and Saturday morning workshops, and summer writing camps. When we began research at the center in 2015, we noted that despite its bilingual name, the center operated primarily in English. For instance, teachers and volunteers spoke overwhelmingly in English to the children, and the focal texts of lessons and the children’s writing pieces were produced only in English. We were concerned about the apparent lack of bilingualism, and specifically the lack of active use of Spanish at the center. To address this, we approached the center’s director about offering bilingual writing workshops on Saturdays where we would model a critical, translanguaging pedagogy. This chapter reports the findings from these workshops.

Making a Translanguaging Community Space

Specifically, we used a translanguaging framework to better understand and analyze the language and literacy practices of the emergent bilinguals in this study (García & Kleyn, 2016). We define translanguaging as both an ideological stance and a descriptive framework that accounts for the authentic linguistic practices of bi-/multilinguals. A translanguaging framework posits that people use a wide-ranging, complex, linguistic repertoire while speaking, writing, reading, and thinking. A translanguaging lens does not view languages as separate, societally defined “named languages” (Otheguy et al., 2015), such as English or Spanish, but instead considers languaging to be a set of practices deployed by people as they seek to meet the communicative needs of a given situation (Creese & Blackledge, 2015).

Furthermore, to prompt some change to what we perceived were monolingual language and literacy practices at this center, we embraced Li Wei’s (2011) suggestion of intentionally creating a translanguaging space. Li Wei argued that a translanguaging space must be actively and intentionally made, a place where languages would not be bound, fixed, or co-existent with each other. Rather, in the translanguaging space, boundaries between languages dissolve and opportunities are opened for something new with and around language and literacy.

Finally, we embraced literacy as a dynamic, multimodal, social semiotic practice (Mills, 2015) that people do in their everyday lives. This expanded definition of literacy is meant to complicate, expand, and redefine literacy so that more ways of being literate are included, as we recognize that all people are literate in multidimensional ways (Dyson, 2016). Moreover, as we were positioned in a community-based space, we wanted to recognize and include the community literacy practices that intersected with the center. Those community-based literacy practices were rich and complex and evident in the stores, restaurants, art, and businesses surrounding the center. Throughout each workshop, we prompted the children to build upon these community literacy practices in their writing.

A Community-Engaged Methodology

We frame this study as an ethnographically grounded, community-engaged, case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Kinloch et al., 2016). Data for this chapter were collected between September 2015 and May 2019 across four different workshops. We developed and facilitated each writing workshop around a specific topic that we chose given what we knew about the context and the participants. Each workshop lasted approximately eight weeks and met for two hours on consecutive Saturdays. The participants in each workshop ranged in number from five to more than 16 children, as well as in age, from 6 to 12 years old. Each child who participated was an emergent bilingual in English and Spanish with familial connections to Latin America, predominantly to Mexico, specifically to the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala; however, other transnational connections were evident, including familial connections to Honduras, El Salvador, and Colombia.

We focused on answering the question: How does a translanguaging pedagogy amplify and include the expansive linguistic repertoire of emergent bilingual children? The data sources included audio and video recordings of the workshops, students’ written products, and participatory observations. We analyzed the data in two passes. First, we used ethnographic thick description (Geertz, 1973) in the form of a detailed, written narrative on each of the four workshops to display our overall findings. Second, we employed a critical discourse analysis (Rogers, 2011) of one salient child-created text from each of those workshops and included that analysis as part of the thick descriptions of each workshop.

In terms of our positionalities, we are all faculty in the same department and university. We identify as White Americans, non-immigrants, and are bilingual in English and Spanish, all having learned Spanish as adults. When we began this project, both the director and assistant director of the community center were White American women, one of whom did not speak Spanish; however, mid-way through the project both the director and assistant director moved to other jobs or left the center. Both of the newly hired directors were bilingual/bicultural immigrants, having family origins in Honduras and Colombia. We note this because we attribute some of the initial monolingual tendencies of the center to the racial and linguistic positions of the former directors; however, since the hiring of the new directors, there has been a shift to more of a translanguaging space throughout the center’s practices.

Findings

We begin the findings with a brief ethnographic description of the community center. The initial participatory observations revealed a community space that was bilingual in name, but monolingual in practice. Furthermore, our interviews with the center director, teachers, and volunteers revealed that this space was shaped by traditional and positivist ideas of language and literacy. For instance, the teachers attempted to keep the use of Spanish and English separate, and at times took up deficit stances when evaluating both the children’s and their own proficiencies in Spanish. For instance, some teachers expressed views of “semilingualism” (Escamilla, 2006) while others used the term “not fluent” to describe not only the language practices of the children but their own as well. One teacher described the children as “not speaking English nor Spanish very well,” and several described their own Spanish as not being “good enough” to correct the children’s “errors” in Spanish. These kinds of language and literacy ideologies are common, especially in educational spaces, where language ideologies tend to default to autonomous and monolingual stances (Rosa & Burdick, 2017).

To address this, we designed and offered several writing workshops that modeled a critical, translanguaging pedagogy (García et al., 2017). Since the fall of 2017, we have offered four workshops: Writing Bilingual Family Stories, Crossing Borders with Bilingual Poetry, Bilingual Superheroes, and Language Mapping My Community. In the following sections, we provide a summary and analysis of each of these workshops with sample student-created texts and recommendations for future practice.

Escribiendo Historias Bilingües Familiares/Writing Bilingual Family Stories

In this fall 2017 workshop, there were five participants, all boys who ranged from 9 to 11 years old. They were all emergent bilinguals in Spanish and English; four had familial connections to Mexico, and one was born in El Salvador. In the first workshop session, to model the writing of family stories, we told the children family stories from our backgrounds. We broadly defined a family story as any story that was passed down or told among family members, whether funny, sad, scary or even exaggerated and not completely true. We also read examples of published family stories, such as Calling the Doves/El Canto de Las Palomas by Juan Felipe Herrera (1995) and gave each child a family story interview protocol (in Spanish and English) to take home and use to interview their family members. In the subsequent workshop sessions, each child returned with their completed interview protocols, and we discussed the stories they heard and learned from their family members. Each child chose a story to draft into a narrative from beginning to end using a graphic organizer. The subsequent sessions followed a writer’s workshop model of drafting, revising, and publishing. At the end of the workshop, each child created a final, illustrated version of their family story. Next, we will discuss one family story written by Daniel in more detail (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1Daniel’s Family Story

Transcript of Daniel’s Family Story

Page 1: The Chicken Attack

Page 2: One day mi mama was little. She was visiting her abuela in Mexico because she lived there. Her abuela was making dinner. She making frijoles.

Page 3: Mama was done eating and she ask her abuela if she could go outside “Ok” she said “pero tienes cuidado” she said but mi mama didn’t heard her.

Page 4: When she was outside there was a chicken “una gallena” she said. She try to pet the chicken. The chicken was big and fat. The chicken attack mi mama. She was poke 3 times but escape she ran to the door and lock it.

Each family story was varied in content. Two students wrote about immigrating to the United States, one wrote about his father’s bicycle, and another detailed the stories told about the day of their birth. Daniel’s story was notable because his narrative construed a transnational experience, without telling a traditional migration story. Instead of a “Coming to America” story, his narrative relayed a fond and funny story of his mother visiting her abuela in Mexico. They cooked and ate good food, and then his mother was attacked by a gallina [hen] when she was out in the yard.

Tales of human migration and immigration to the United States and other nations play an important part in conveying the difficult and complex experiences of immigrants. However, we want to point to the significance of Daniel conveying his translanguaging and transnational life through a comical story he titled “The Chicken Attack.” First, his story shows the normalcy of transnational living, crossing the US/Mexico border to visit his abuela, eating good food, and also being “attacked” by a hen. At the same time, his story also shows the translanguaging reality that runs through his life and that of his family, by employing words such as mi mama, abuela, gallena, and frijoles within a story told predominantly in English. Instead of viewing this story as some “Spanish” words in an “English” text, we see Daniel’s work through a translanguaging lens. A translanguaging lens highlights the deployment of Daniel’s full linguistic repertoire in a way of capturing this family story without suppressing any of its interrelated linguistic features.

Cruzando Fronteras con la Poesía Bilingüe/Crossing Borders with Bilingual Poetry

In the Spring 2018 Crossing Borders with Bilingual Poetry workshop, there were 16 participants on the roster, but due to somewhat irregular attendance, the workshop averaged about eight children per se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editor Biographies
• Contributor Biographies
• Foreword Professional Literacies and Helping in the Community: The Limits of Dash-Literacies
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Language and Literacy Development
• Part II Unique Populations
• Part III Unique Settings and Contexts
• Part IV Identity Development and Empowerment
• Part V Partnership Programs
• Index