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Abstract
This ethnographic investigation of a multiethnic, multilingual classroom examines the ways in which immigrant students’ goals for community and belonging were mediated by their vibrant cultural and linguistic practices. Findings demonstrate how youth formed a community of practice through brokering acts, resource pooling, and linguistic play across national, cultural, and linguistic differences. As such, immigrant students were agentive transcultural navigators whose practices broach new understandings of social life and learning, and present a pedagogy of possibility. It is argued that immigrant classrooms in contact zones must be reenvisioned – from reductive spaces where educational goals are to acculturate the immigrant into a fading US homogeneous mainstream – to cutting edge spaces of twenty-first-century learning.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Fred Erickson and Marjorie Orellana for their unflagging encouragement of my work and critical feedback on the initial development of this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided provocative and detailed revision suggestions. Thanks also to Betsy Gilliland who pushed me towards precision at the end of the writing marathon when I was tired. But most of all, a big mil gracias/ ممنونم/ obrigado/
to the youth and adults of Room #47, who let me learn and have fun with them.
Notes
1. All names have been changed to protect my participants’ anonymity.
2. I have lightly edited the interview transcriptions in order to increase intelligibility and to concurrently retain the personality of the speaker’s voice.
3. Interviews in Spanish were transcribed and translated by a native speaker of Colombian Spanish. Here, a student who is also from Colombia’s use of Spanish points to other issues of literacy and language and prior schooling.