Children in Immigrant Families Becoming Literate by Compton-Lilly, Catherine; Shedrow, Stephanie; Hagerman, Dana;

Short description:

This original book offers a meaningful window into the lived experiences of children from immigrant families, providing a holistic, profound portrait of their literacy practices as situated within social, cultural, and political frames.

Long description:

This original book offers a meaningful window into the lived experiences of children from immigrant families, providing a holistic, profound portrait of their literacy practices as situated within social, cultural, and political frames. Drawing on reports from five years of an ongoing longitudinal research project involving students from immigrant families across their elementary school years, each chapter explores a unique set of questions about the students’ experiences and offers a rich data set of observations, interviews, and student-created artifacts. Authors apply different sociocultural, sociomaterial, and sociopolitical frameworks to better understand the dimensions of the children’s experiences. The multitude of approaches applied demonstrates how viewing the same data through distinct lenses is a powerful way to uncover the differences and comparative uses of these theories. Through such varied lenses, it becomes apparent how the complexities of lived experiences inform and improve our understanding of teaching and learning, and how our understanding of multifaceted literacy practices affects students’ social worlds and identities.

Children in Immigrant Families Becoming Literate is a much-needed resource for scholars, professors, researchers, and graduate students in language and literacy education, English education, and teacher education.

"This timely volume…offer[s] much-needed insights for educators to understand the languages, literacies, cultures, and other assets that children from non-dominant backgrounds bring to their schooling….This volume offers precisely this proleptic lens to help educators see the past, reimagine the future, and act on the present to rewrite the trajectories of long-lasting inequities."

--From the Foreword by Guofang Li, University of British Columbia, Canada

Table of Contents:

Foreword by Guofang Li

Introduction

Chapter 1: A Theoretical Tapestry of Sociocultural and Sociomaterial Perspectives

Chapter 2: A Longitudinal Methodology

Chapter 3: Neoliberal Messages and Being a "Good" Reader: The Cases of Carlos, Felipe, and Elina

Chapter 4: Capital, Field, and Emergent Bilingual Writers

Chapter 5: Being and Becoming Multilingual across Time

Chapter 6: Syncretic Literacy and Language Practices: The Case of James

Chapter 7: Sociomateriality and Becoming: Things and Doings across Time

Chapter 8: Conclusions

Appendix A: Introducing the Children