Emergent Discourses: Student Exploration of Cultural Identities (original) (raw)

Legitimizing and resistance identities in immigrant students’ school essays: Towards a culturally sustaining pedagogy

The aim of this paper is to show that the ambivalent identities projected by immigrant students could serve the goals of a culturally sustaining pedagogy which seeks to perpetuate cultural pluralism at school. In our view, language teaching should not limit itself to correcting their lexicogrammatical "errors", but could also concentrate on the content of immigrant student essays, so as to bring their identities to the surface. To this end, we investigate the ways young immigrants living in Greece position themselves towards the dominant assimilationist discourse in Greek society. We discuss immigrant students' ambivalent identities showing their wish to legitimize themselves as members of the host community and simultaneously to resist its monoculturalist pressures. We finally argue for the exploitation of immigrant students' texts involving their experiences and identities: such texts could enhance all students' critical language awareness and could foster multiculturalism and multilingualism at school.

Composing practices of multiracial emergent adult college students: Expressions of identity

2018

This qualitative multiple case study research design examined the ways in which multiracial emergent adult college students engaged in identity work in and out of formal educational contexts. Through case studies of nine students at three higher education institutions (an open-admissions community college, a Historically Black University, and a four-year, public Predominantly White Institution with more selective entrance requirements), I sought to understand how participants used composing practices to express, negotiate, establish, explore and/or refute racial and other identities, thus adding to the literature on multiracial college students’ experiences in a variety of campus contexts. The focus on composing practices in formal educational contexts revealed some of the ways that educators and academic assignments assisted and encouraged as well as hindered and suppressed these students in engaging in racial (and other) identity work through writing; the examination of composing ...

Identity Production in Figured Worlds: How Some Multiracial Students Become Racial Atravesados/as

Using Holland et al.'s (Identity and agency in cultural worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998) theory of identity and their concept of figured worlds, this article provides an overview of how twenty-five undergraduates of color came to produce a Multiracial identity. Using Critical Race Theory methodology with ethnographic interviewing as the primary method, I specifically focus on the ways in which Multiracial figured worlds operate within a racial borderland (Anzaldúa in Borderlands: La Frontera-The New Mestiza, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987), an alternate, marginal world where improvisational play (Holland et al. in Identity and agency in cultural worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998) and facultad became critical elements of survival. Participants exercised their agency by perforating monoracial storylines and developed a complex process of identity production that informed their behaviors by a multifaceted negotiation of positionalities. I end by focusing on implications for urban education that can be drawn from this study.

Translingualism: Breaking the Language Policies and Politics in Composition Pedagogy and Protecting Cultural Identities of International Students

Translingualism: Breaking the Language Policies and Politics in Composition Pedagogy and Protecting Cultural Identities of International Students, 2020

This thesis explores the debates and conversations relating to a translingual pedagogical approach that helps preserve the cultural and ethnic identities of international students who take college composition courses in universities across the United States of America. Since the domination of English in teaching, learning, and research in the United States of America is prevalent, this thesis explores a much talked pedagogical approach–a translingual approach–in college composition that intends to protect the cultural and ethnic identities of international students studying in universities across the country. The translingual orientation in composition pedagogy is constantly adding new conversations to teaching of writing to the multilingual or international students in US academia. Beginning with descriptions of what has been done by the English monolingual pedagogical approach, the thesis further discusses some crucial issues such as preserving of cultural and ethnic identities of international students, efforts to establish a standard in English language policy in composition classes and its resistance, scholarly conversations about establishing a feasible translingual approach, and debates for and against a translingual pedagogy. It also replicates the most advocated strategy–the translation assignment–to bring a translingual approach to teaching writing. In doing so, this thesis adds new insights to ongoing conversations on the nature of the translingual pedagogical approach in composition classes.

READING—FROM HATING TO LOVING: High School Students' Identities Honored Through Culturally Relevant Literature

Language is a universal phenomenon that is the foundation of human relationships to each other, ourselves, and the world around us—the avenue by which people create connections between what is personally and collectively experienced and the meaning made by reflecting upon said experiences; however, in a society in which the discourse of the powerful and privileged silences and delegitimizes all other discourse varieties, this essential meaning-making process is thwarted. This research details and analyzes the meaningful inclusion of community and cultural discourse varieties found within culturally relevant literature, and the impact that its inclusion had on historically underserved students from a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American community whose previous relationships with reading were overwhelmingly negative.

Dilemmas of Identity: Oral and Written Literacies in the Making of a Basic Writing Student

Anthropology <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> Education Quarterly, 1993

This article is a case study of an African American w o m n student returning to a basic-skills program in an inner-city community college. The student participates in a one-on-one writing conference in order to prepare a written essay. During a life-histoy telling by the student, the topic of her first paid job emerges. The task of transposing the telling into writing presents issues that are not covered in composition theory but that challenge accepted notions of schooled literacy. My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-Amencan woman in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and to wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society.

“ Identity Intersections ” as a method of investigating the cultural identity of students . A case study through the course of literature

2014

The present research involves a case study carried out with eleven year-old schoolchildren in the course of their curriculum, and in the context of the scientific dialogue for defining cultural identity in multicultural societies. The aim of the research is that pupils, through the medium of graphic representation under the title “Identity Intersections”, associated with the method of analyzing subject matter, “Cultural Imagology”, recognize and determine first of all their own cultural identity, and secondly that of the “heroes” in a multicultural literary oeuvre. The findings, among other things, showed that there still exists a definite number of criteria that be it consciously or unconsciously are considered “objective” in connection with cultural identity, since and because literature can constitute a means of examining and amending aspects of national or local stereotypes.