Resettled Refugee Youth Leveraging Their Out-of-School Literacy Practices to Accomplish Schoolwork

ABSTRACT

This ethnographic study explores how three resettled refugee teens leveraged their out-of-school literacy practices to accomplish their schoolwork. As teens drew upon their out-of-school literacy practices, such as translanguaging and social media practices to make sense of homework, they created third spaces wherein they strategically merged their literacies to achieve their goals. This research provides implications for how educators can design learning environments that enable teens to do this type of complex work.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the teens and after-school program leaders. Thanks to my colleagues Heather Johnson, Michael Neel, Theresa Dunleavy, and Luis Leyva for critical and encouraging peer reading. Thanks to the American Educational Research Association LSP SIG for organizing a mentoring session and to David Bloome, who read an earlier version of this article within that mentoring session. Thank you to the reviewers and editors, especially Jennifer Vadeboncoeur, for their insightful suggestions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was made possible with support from the American Educational Research Association’s Research in Service to Practice Award and Peabody College’s Small Grants program.