Children in Immigrant Families Becoming Literate

A Window into Identity Construction, Transnationality, and Schooling

Catherine Compton-Lilly, Stephanie Shedrow, Dana Hagerman, Laura Hamman-Ortiz, Yao-Kai Chi, Jieun Kim, Sun Young Lee, Kristin Papoi, Erin Quast, Brooke Ward Taira, Bingjie Zheng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000568806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This original book offers a meaningful window into the lived experiences of children from immigrant families, providing a holistic, profound portrait of their literacy practices as situated within social, cultural, and political frames. Drawing on reports from five years of an ongoing longitudinal research project involving students from immigrant families across their elementary school years, each chapter explores a unique set of questions about the students' experiences and offers a rich data set of observations, interviews, and student-created artifacts. Authors apply different sociocultural, sociomaterial, and sociopolitical frameworks to better understand the dimensions of the children's experiences. The multitude of approaches applied demonstrates how viewing the same data through distinct lenses is a powerful way to uncover the differences and comparative uses of these theories. Through such varied lenses, it becomes apparent how the complexities of lived experiences inform and improve our understanding of teaching and learning, and how our understanding of multifaceted literacy practices affects students' social worlds and identities.

Children in Immigrant Families Becoming Literate is a much-needed resource for scholars, professors, researchers, and graduate students in language and literacy education, English education, and teacher education.

1 A Theoretical Tapestry of Sociocultural and Sociomaterial Perspectives

DOI: 10.4324/9781003242154-2

Each chapter in this volume explores a different set of questions about the experiences of children from immigrant families. To address these questions, members of the research team drew on a vast range of theoretical frames. Chapters 3 through 6 draw on theories that attend to social and cultural aspects of people’s experiences. As described below, sociocultural theory references a family of theories that addresses people’s social and cultural experiences, which include literacy learning and practices. While these theories address different aspects of sociocultural experience, they share a commitment to treating literacy practices as situated within large social, cultural, and political frames.

Chapter 7 draws on postqualitative and new materialist frameworks that trouble premises central to sociocultural approaches. Specifically, this assemblage of perspectives disrupts traditional notions of agency, free will, causality, and the nature of knowledge (Murris, 2021). Postqualitative scholars move away from documenting what people know about the world to attending to the constant and complex emergence of the world. To do this, they attend not only to human activity, culture, and social aspects of knowing but also to interactions among matter (things), material spaces, people, and ideas that occur within networked and inseparable assemblages of experience (Mills, 2016).

While not all of the theories presented in this book can be described as sociocultural, all of the theories – sociocultural, sociopolitical, and sociomaterial – share an interest in social dimensions of children’s experiences. In this chapter, we first describe sociocultural theory as comprised of a vast set of theories that address a range of social and cultural experiences including literacy as a social practice, multiliteracies, and critical literacies (Perry, 2012). We then discuss each of the sociocultural theories presented in this text. We do this to provide readers with a map of this text and allow them to consider the affordances and foci of each theory.

We maintain that viewing the same data through multiple lenses is a powerful way to explore differences and commonalities across these theories. This tapestry of researchers and ideas is the magic of this book. It is truly a text that evolved out of who we were/are as scholars, our teaching experiences, the courses we took, the books we read, the conferences we attended, the ideas and people we encountered, and our work with a small group of families. At the time, most members of the research team were completing their doctoral studies and shared an interest in various aspects of children’s experiences and their educational trajectories. Thus, these chapters draw on a range of theoretical frames. Table 1.1 presents the focus and research questions that emerged during our conversations about children and are explored in this text as well as the respective theoretical frame that informed our analyses.

Table 1.1 Chapter Foci, Questions Asked, and Theoretical Constructs Accessed

	Chapter Focus	Questions Asked	Theoretical Framework
Chapters 3–7	All of the chapters in this volume explore various social aspects of children’s experiences as they move through elementary school.
Chapter 3	This chapter explores how being a “good reader” was constructed by children across space and time. We document how student identities are subject to the effects of sociopolitical contexts.	How do children in immigrant families experience reading instruction in American classrooms? How do they come to see themselves as readers and writers?	Apple’s discussion of neoliberal educational agendas (e.g., 2006) Measurement of learning Leveled texts Production and business models of education
Chapter 4	In Chapter 4, we examine what aspects of writing are valued in children’s classrooms and how forms of writing capital shape and reshape how children view themselves as writers.	What counts as writing capital for students in immigrant families? What aspects of being a writer are valued at school?	Bourdieu’s theorization of capital and field (e.g., Bourdieu, 1986) Field Economic capital Social capital Cultural capital
Chapter 5	Chapter 5 explores the dynamic multilingual practices of children from immigrant families and reveals the rich range of multilingual resources that children bring to classrooms as they move through elementary school	How do language and literacy travel across, within, and through multilingual spaces, including home and school? What happens when children bring multilingual and multiliterate practices to classrooms?	Translanguaging and Multiliteracies Theories (e.g., García, 2009; García & Kleifgen, 2018) Multilingual repertoires Strategic use of resources Metalinguistic awareness
Chapter 6	In Chapter 6, we explore the experiences of one immigrant learner across time as he engages with literacy in syncretic sites of collaboration and contestation.	How do James’ literacy practices intersect with culture and sociolinguistic practices across syncretic spaces and time? What negotiations are observed for one child?	Volk’s theorization of syncretic literacies (e.g., Volk, 2007) Literacy as active creation Children as agential Literacy as transformative Literacy as mediating learning
Chapter 7	Chapter 7 examines how two children engage with assemblages of materials, meanings, objects, people, practices, and ideas as they engage in continual processes of becoming.	How do Gabby and Adam become within assemblages that include things, people, texts, and ideas?	Fenwick and Landri’s discussion of sociomaterial assemblages (e.g., Fenwick and Landri, 2012) Intra-action Materiality Assemblage

While some scholars might challenge the theoretical breadth of this text – arguing that drawing on multiple theories is eclectic and invites epistemological tensions – we maintain that by drawing on different theories and examining children’s experiences through different lenses this text begins to examine the complexities that are lived experience and inform learning. We maintain that no single theory can capture the complexities of being human and that together they present a powerful tapestry that speaks to many of the issues that affect learning and schooling for children. While there are definitely differences in what the theories center, how they conceptualize literacy, and what contextual considerations matter, the theories that we have collectively applied to our longitudinal data set share a commitment to children living in immigrant families and each contributes important insights into their experiences.

Sociocultural Theories

Literacy scholars who draw on sociocultural perspectives recognize that literacy and language practices are never independent of the social world and always shaped by the social relationships and the contexts in which they were learned and are used. Specifically, sociocultural lenses highlight how literacy and language practices are always connected to what Perry (2012) calls “other stuff” (p. 52), including cultural models, power, discourses, politics, values, and attitudes.

Historically, sociocultural approaches are often traced back to Vygotsky (1978, 1986), who maintained that cognitive understandings of the world were deeply rooted in people’s social and cultural experiences (Perry, 2012). These ideas were in stark contrast to the dominant ideas of the time, including the assumption that development preceded learning and that children needed to attain particular levels of cognitive development before complex learning would occur (Scott & Palincsar, 2013). In contrast, Vygotsky argued that “properly organized learning results in mental development and sets in motion a variety of developmental processes that would be impossible apart from learning” (Scott & Palincsar, 2013, p. 2).

In addition to recognizing social dimensions of learning, Vygotsky emphasized the importance of social and historical factors including how human thought became different from that of other life forms, how symbolic tools are developed and passed on across generations, how children appropriate and integrate semiotic tools – including language – into their ways of knowing, and how social mediation facilitated learning. While Vygotsky focused specifically on how children learn new information through supportive interactions with others, scholars building on this premise have applied Vygotsky’s ideas to a vast range of educational contexts, communities, situations, and issues.

Historically, sociocultural theories are rooted in a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, and literary theories; due to these multiple roots, there is “no single sociocultural theory” (Perry, 2012, p. 50). Despite literacy and language scholars sometimes treating “sociocultural perspectives as unified or interchangeable” (Perry, 2012, p. 51), sociocultural theories are best thought of as a set of theories that share – to varying degrees – commitments to particular theoretical claims. These include:

• Learning always occurs within particular contexts. Learning involves particular people and local expectations and can occur in both formal and informal contexts (Street, 1995; Hull & Schultz, 2002).
• Learning is a social process. Learning occurs through interaction with others rather than as an individual accomplishment occurring within a child’s mind (Street, 1995; Barton & Hamilton, 1998).
• Learning is grounded in the shared histories of people. Historical experiences and precedents have preceded us and our ideas; we learn with other people’s words, and these words have historically served other people’s interests (Bakhtin, 1994).
• Literacy is not just about reading and writing. Literacy learning involves multiple types of literacy practices that are useful across multiple contexts (Barton, Hamilton, Ivanič, & Ivanič, 2000). People use a range of semiotic tools and modalities to “mediate and regulate our relationships with others and with ourselves” (Lantolf, 2000, p. 1).
• Literacy learning and literacy practices are not separate from people’s identities. Literacy is among the tools that we use to enact particular identities (Ferdman, 1990; Gee, 2000).
• Literacy learning and literacy practices are ideological. Becoming literate in official spaces (e.g., schools, religious institutions, businesses) involves particular ways of understanding the world and particular understandings of the role of written text (Street, 1995). Children not only learn how to read, but they also learn the messages that are conveyed through texts. For example, they learn about gender, race, class, and how those differences matter.
• Literacy learning and literacy practices are situated within contexts that involve power. Some literacies are highly valued, while others are less valued. Some literacy practices provide access to power while other literacy practices can be marginalizing.

Sociocultural premises have bee...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Authors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 A Theoretical Tapestry of Sociocultural and Sociomaterial Perspectives
• 2 A Longitudinal Methodology
• 3 Neoliberal Messages and Being a “Good” Reader: The Cases of Carlos, Felipe, and Elina
• 4 Capital, Field, and Emergent Bilingual Writers
• 5 Becoming and Being Multilingual across Time
• 6 Syncretic Literacy and Language Practices: The Case of James
• 7 Sociomateriality and Becoming: Things and Doings across Time
• 8 Conclusions
• Appendix A Introducing the Children
• Index