Children's Moments of Becoming in United States and Korean Classrooms: Spatial Production through Multiliteracy Practices
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Yu, Seongryeong
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 08, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Carla Zembal-Saul, Program Head/Chair
Esther Prins, Outside Unit & Field Member
Kimberly Powell, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Allison Henward, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Gail Boldt, Major Field Member
Minsoo Kim-Bossrad, Special Member - Keywords:
- becoming
spatiality
literacy practice
multiliteracy
immigrant children
identity - Abstract:
- With the increasing need to explore new literacy practices taking place in this globalized society, there must also be increased attention in both the literacy and education fields to the children whose appearances, languages, and cultures differ from those of the dominant-monolingual population. The aims of this comparative ethnographic case study are to explore aspects of daily literacy practice to understand immigrant children’s meaning-making, learning, and belonging that are performed and recognized in the classroom. This study involves two Korean children—one in Korea and the other in the United States—and their peer groups, whose lives encompass multiple languages, cultures, and countries. Informed by the conceptual frameworks of multiliteracy and spatiality, this study investigates how children make sense of the world and themselves through their diverse language-literacy practices in varied cultural, linguistic, and geographic contexts. With a poststructural perspective on identity and a particular focus on the moments of becoming inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), I focus on three specific questions: 1) What are aspects of literacy practices that get proposed, acknowledged, and taken up in two different elementary classrooms, 2) How are children’s meaning-making, learning, and belonging performed and recognized with their literacy practices?, and 3) What is the relationship of the meaning-making and identity co-construction across space? Compared to previous approaches that mainly focused on immigrant children's struggles with academic achievement and identity, such as language ability and limited definitions of Koreanness, this study fills a gap by highlighting the children's linguistic repertoires and the process of “becoming” in depending on the spaces they engage with, and their sense of belonging to friends, classroom communities, families, and the countries. In my study, Koreanness works as a starting point to explore the concept of malleability and the fluidity of identity, which I refer to the idea that individuals continuously shape and renew their identities by merging internal and external factors. I employed a comparative ethnographic case study and collected data for one academic year in two public elementary school classrooms located in Seoul, South Korea, and the northeastern United States. Based on the fieldwork, the data collected include participant observations, fieldnotes, mapping, interviews, documents, and photographs. Findings from the research indicate that children play an essential part in developing, sustaining, and broadening their language and literacy in the classroom, portraying accumulated lived experiences (Wohlwend, 2008; Dyson, 2018). Specifically, immigrant children who relocated across different regions recognized the significance of language and skillfully utilized various languages, linguistic characteristics, and modes (Tobin et al., 2009; Suarez-Orozco, 2011; Orellana, 2016). This aspect of literacy represents children’s belonging within and longing for their communities and the dynamics in the classroom throughout their continuous process of becoming. In moments of becoming-multiliterate, children interacted with materiality and class activities assisted by multimodal instruction and popular culture. In addition to the analysis focusing on children’s spatial productions (i.e., how they understand their space), my study suggests that the impact of physical settings, materials, activities, and discourses used in a space (i.e., the classroom) contributed to their identity formation in terms of their social interactions and sense of belonging. My consideration across two spaces demonstrates nuances of how Koreanness or their ethnic identity is produced and the impact on literacy considering how literacy comes to matter in children’s agency in multiliteracy related spaces. Through the comparison of these two different classrooms and the children’s various forms of literacy practices observed in each is intentional, their complex and fluid processes of becoming were continuously presented from the moments of negotiations in each space, which blurred their enculturation (i.e., the traditional understanding of Koreanness). In each moment I considered, I attended to their complex and fluid processes of becoming within the social and material negotiations and actors in each space. When these moments are considered together, they allow me to understand how children used languages, discourses, and textual tools in negotiating their identity. From the analysis of children's literacy practices in transnational spaces, such as classrooms where students bring their transcultural and transnational experiences through the concept of becoming, the classroom as space (i.e., the physical setting, materials, curriculum, and activities) also plays a significant role in children's social interaction and sense of belonging in identity formation portrayed in literacy practices. Ultimately, this consideration allows teachers and researchers alike to understand the inconsistent and multiple spaces take place to play a significant role in masking or unmasking children’s identity and supporting their sense of belonging. By defamiliarizing the familiar, this study offers a more comprehensive and nuanced depiction of the supportive classroom across spaces where children's language and literacy practices are shaped by their lived experiences. By demonstrating how adaptable and dynamic children's literacies, identities, and learning can be, I provide crucial theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical insights that researchers and educators can use to create a welcoming and inclusive environment in the classroom that recognizes the sense of belonging of young immigrant children.