12663 CE: Exploring Multiliteracies and Digital Media Making with Transnational Youth: A Dialogue Between In-School and Out-of School Critical Literacies Curricula
Organizers: Cati de los Rios, Arturo Molina, Alexandra Thomas
Immigrant students’ schooling experiences continue to be negatively affected by the pervasive anti-migrant climate of the 21st century (Santa Ana & Gonzalez, 2011). Empirical studies of cultural diversity in literacy education have shown that the experiences of immigrant students are marked by a disjuncture between the cultural and linguistic resources in their community and those resources that are valued for learning in schools (Pacheco, 2012). Immigrant youth navigate the terrain between their diverse linguistic and cultural experiences in and out of school using a dynamic set of meaning making practices, such as linguistic, visual, audio, spatial, gestural, and multimodal (Filipiak & Miller, 2014).
These practices often intersect with digital literacies that youth have acquired in informal learning environments and social networks as well as formal schooling (Alvermann et al., 2012; Pew 2013; Vasudaven, 2008). This diverse panel of youth, educators, and researchers from California and Georgia will explore how engaging immigrant youth in their repertoire of multimodal literacies can create authentic, accessible, and supportive learning. Specifically, this panel puts youth, practitioners, and researchers from two different communities in conversation to discuss how they have become youth researchers, critical media makers, and community advocates. Both communities aim to not only develop critical literacies, but also cultivate knowledge and skill sets that would help communities better address their material conditions within a daunting anti-migrant hegemony (Gonzales, 2013).
The first project explores how a high school Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies course with students from immigrant backgrounds was designed to leverage and facilitate the movement of representational resources across home, school and civic spaces. Part of this curriculum includes a community social justice posada advocating for comprehensive immigration reform that is organized alongside day laborers from a local day labor center. These panelist will examine how students’ producing a video on immigration allows them to bring the voices from their community in dialogue with voices from civic institutions and public discourses on immigration.
The second project is an ongoing critical media-making workshop series for immigrant youth through a community based organization. In these workshops, an inquiry group of immigrant youth engage in critical discussion about their lives, school, community while collaboratively and individually creating multimodal compositions to share with a variety of audiences on these topics. These panelists will describe how collaboratively planned and facilitated critical media-making workshops disrupt the teacher/student and traditional/nontraditional “literacies” paradigm often perpetuated in educative spaces.
This panel will address questions posed in the “Digital Media and Youth Civic Engagement” strand, such as: how do digital media projects promote critical civic engagement as well as academic literacies? What does it look like when youth and adults collaboratively plan and facilitate media-making workshops? During this panel, the project teams will share media created from their projects, discuss the affordances of their curriculum, pedagogy, and learning environments; as well as invite session participants in sharing their experiences and knowledge. This dialogue will add to our collective understanding of how multimodal and digital literacies are developed, enacted, and contribute to more inclusive educative experiences for immigrant youth.