Text Production as Process: Negotiating Multiliterate Learning & Identities

ABSTRACT

In this secondary research study, we investigate the text/identity/curriculum work enacted in a primary university-school project with third-grade children in Québec who were engaged in inquiry into children’s rights through bilingual text production. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives of language and identity as well as translanguaging, we examined both the product and the process of identity text production. Analysing classroom interactions and children’s bilingual production using discourse analysis, the findings show how teachers’ cross-curricular efforts in creating translanguaging spaces and shifts with students’ emerging bilingualism and critical understanding of children’s rights issues provided spaces for identity and knowledge re/construction, effectuating new curricular opportunities, inquiries, and language/literacy learning. This process-oriented view of identity text production points to the mutually constitutive nature of identity/text/curriculum work, inviting a dynamic, non-linear understanding of text production, and calling for reflexive attention to power relations in classroom interactions for greater possibilities for meaningful identity and knowledge making.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum work
• ethnographic research
• identity texts
• language processes
• multiliteracies
• translanguaging

Notes

1. TL scholars posit that additive bilingualism, a theory associated with identity text production, despite its asset-based orientation, is still promoting a discrete view of first and second language (García, 2009), and that its main focus on supporting students’ mastery of the dominant language might inadvertently reinforce inequitable language hierarchies (Flores & Rosa, 2015). However, numerous scholars have drawn on additive bilingualism (e.g., Canagarajah, 2006; May, 2011; Pulinx et al., 2017) to counter monolingual bias and inequitable societal and school structures that marginalize minoritized students and communities (see full discussions in Cummins, 2017).