Navigating and Responding to Raciolinguistic Ideologies: Refugee and Immigrant Students' Literacy Practices Across Contexts

Abstract

Drawing on critical race theory scholarship and literacy studies with a focus on translingual and transnational, this dissertation argues that the dominant ideology of literacy needs to be understood at the intersections of language and race. In an antiracist and public scholarship framework, this study offers a portrait of literacy practices across contexts by four college students from the diasporic Burmese community in Duwamish (Greater Seattle). Through interview conversations, self-talk reflections, writing samples across contexts, and counterstory artifacts produced for a community exhibit at a local Asian Pacific American museum, this study examines how multilingual students of color practice literacy as they move across home, school, work, community, and digital spaces in different relationships to the White, monolingual English ideology. The findings present that the ways participant collaborators (the term used for students in this study) mentally and socio-emotionally navigate the White monolingual English ideology is entangled with their metacognitive awareness of and relationship to their intersectional identities, of which the most salient are transnational refugee and immigrant identity, racial identity construct, and multilingual college student identity. In experiencing and engaging specifically with the dominant ideology of literacy, participant collaborators show a range of different metacognitive relationships from compliance and internationalization to recognizing raciolinguistic oppression as is and engaging in conscious resistance of the stock stories of the ideology. Participant collaborators hold these multiple competing critical reflections, stock stories and assumptions, ways of knowing and processing as part of their literacy metacognition. This study offers implications for examining the intersections of race, language, and literacy as well as for writing and literacy pedagogy in order to make our pedagogical efforts be more antiracist and translingual.