![[PDF]](/pb-assets/Icons/adobe-pdf-icon-1498649896243.png){kind=icon}
Abstract
As literacy scholars, we continually engage with the ongoing politics of imagination in everyday life across silenced histories and uncertain futures. In this article, I draw on sociocultural theories and philosophies of imagination as well as narrative and global discourse theories to argue that literacy research, in the context of social inequality, depends on our capacity to imagine otherwise and to tell and listen to stories without colonizing what is unknown and unfamiliar. I illustrate the consequences of (im)mobilizing imagination, and the effort to speak and be heard despite inequalities, by telling stories from my family’s history and by analyzing youth conarrations of their cross-cultural lives.
For me, the question ‘Who should speak?’ is less crucial than ‘Who will listen?’
Spivak (1990, p. 59)Gathering
I begin this article by quoting my presidential address to foreground the specific time in U.S. history when, following the 2016 presidential campaign, many of us felt weary and disoriented, wondering where to turn in the face of increasing, volatile social divisions.
This year, more than ever, we have gathered at the annual conference in anticipation of renewing friendships among colleagues we know and trust—just as young people and children, seek reassurance that all will be well in the face of change. And yet, all is not well; and has not been well for decades. Youth are angry and scared, and many do not know where to turn for justice or solace. Schooling has been and is becoming a source of pain and even shock as youth continue to be bullied or worse, harmed, and killed by adults, who are emboldened by a resurgence in misogynistic and White nationalist rhetoric and violence. Now, here we are, in this present moment, in Nashville, glad to be together. Still, we look around and wonder what has not been said, what we might say, who we might trust, and what we might ever understand about one another’s perspectives and lives. As author Junot Díaz (2016) wrote, we can aim for radical hope.
Radical hope, an idea developed by philosopher Jonathan Lear (2006), is not merely a form of optimism but rather a commitment to principled actions “directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is (p. 103)…It demands flexibility, openness, and…imaginative excellence” (p. 117). I understand such actions as ultimately dependent on our capacity to imagine beyond the readymade narratives of who we are; who we have been; and who we might become in our communities, schools, and global societies. Stories are central to the work of reimagining past, present, and future relations. Stories unsettle the present by proposing alternatives to what is habitual and normalized, as they propel us into past and future landscapes, into the subjunctive mode of “what if” and “what might be” (Bruner, 1987; Herman, 2009). Stories are also the beginning point for understanding imagination as social practice.
Philosophers and scholars have long sought to understand how, when, and with whom imagination matters and how hope and change are actually enacted. Along with these scholars, I bring a critical sociocultural analysis of imagination that extends philosophical considerations to face-to-face interactions among youth and adults as they disrupt discourses and dividing lines of belonging and exclusion. I present a brief overview of imagination in philosophy and literature from the standpoints of critical, queer, and cosmopolitan theorists, then consider these ideas in relation to sociocultural theories of imagination in everyday life. Drawing on these insights, I turn to a family story from the 1920s and 1930s set in three places: Toledo, OH; Laredo, TX; and Zacatecas, Mexico. Through this telling, my family’s past is brought forward into present conditions for Latinx youth and families who are fighting to be seen and heard in school and society. I follow this story with an overview of narrative and global discourse theories that have informed my understanding of two episodes of multiethnic and multiracial youth cross-cultural storytelling. Through these episodes, I describe youth’s specific discursive moves and show how they take risks with everyday imagination and storytelling to shape local spaces for speaking and being heard.
Imagining Futures
Among the most renowned philosophers of education, Greene (1995) linked freedom to the “release of imagination”—a way of seeing beyond the confines of predetermined, isolating, and oppressive ways of moving and being in the world. Greene’s concept of imagination is based in a metaphor of sight, of being “wide awake.” She suggests that seeing small narrows our vision to the systems and technologies of schooling that remain indifferent to histories and interests of teachers and children who navigate injustices day in and day out while trying to retain their dignity and sense of purpose. In contrast, seeing large means being aware of contexts, particularities, and connections (1995, p. 12). Imagination is both a portal and an action through which we might “see things as if they could be otherwise” (p. 16). Imagination is not a character trait or quality, but a transformative experience, that heightens our awareness of our own and one another’s humanity.
Cosmopolitan theorists Hansen (2010), Silverstone (2007), and Chouliaraki (2006, 2011) asked how it may be possible to reach across worlds, to see ourselves in relation to others, whereby we “retain loyalty to the known and openness to the new” (Hansen, 2010, p. 8). Imagination, for cosmopolitan theorists, involves “imaginative mobility” (Chouliaraki, 2011, p. 375), a tenuous, always unattainable goal aimed at gaining “a proper distance” (Silverstone, 2007), between knowledge and ignorance, dominance and equity, by which “we neither zoom too close up to assume that they are like “us” nor zoom too far out, reducing them to dots on the map” (Chouliaraki, 2011, p. 43). Similarly, literary and cultural critic, hooks (1991) argued that readers’ dominant orientations and movements into literary landscapes of minoritized people must include an ongoing recognition of our colonized imaginations through which the unfamiliar is seen and interpreted through the familiar; a practice that underwrites inequality in literary selection, interpretation, and social relations. Across these philosophies, a future based on an ethic of equity and freedom depends on our capacity to “see” histories of domination and exclusion, move flexibly toward engagement, and away from an impulse to colonize nondominant narratives.
Imagining Possible Selves
Queer and postcolonial theorists, in particular Anzaldúa (1987), Butler (1990), and Spivak (1990), understood everyday performances of self as acts of boundary crossing and imagination. That is, who we are is constructed, moment by moment among others who draw on dominant social narratives and practices to recognize belonging and, likewise, who we are may be subject to disruption and reconstruction. By living between worlds, as queer and women of color, where belonging is always subject to surveillance, it is possible to see how the self is performed and performing against prescribed, dominant, and reductive categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, language, and nationality.
Postcolonial scholar, Appadurai (1996), brought yet another view of performative selves by recognizing the role of media, global, and translocal practices in the production of social imaginaries. Thus, in addition to local, individual experiences of imagining and remaking identity boundaries, we are engaged with material, images, language, and ideas imposed and imported through global transnational markets that are reformed across time to reconstitute places and relationships in new places. All of these scholars claim the value of epistemologies emerging from nonwestern, in-between spaces. These spaces, tied to but not beholden to a predefined gaze, open new insights about how identities, social structures, and dominance are embodied, mobilized, and made real.
Sociocultural Theory and Imagination
Imagining unfamiliar experiences, as described by cosmopolitan theorists, is an active, attentive practice, always vulnerable to already settled assumptions and unexamined relations of power. Vygotsky (1978) and contemporary sociocultural theorists (Cole, 1996; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; C. Lee, 2007; Moll, 2013; Stetsenko, 2007; Wertsch, 1991) were also interested in how new experiences, relations, and concepts are created despite a continuous pull toward the habitual past and taken for granted future. Vygotsky (1930/2004) understood cultural change as the product of imagination by which he meant that we make sense of the world from moment to moment and across larger time scales through continuous reference to and transformation of available cultural material in anticipation of an undetermined future. In this analysis, imagination is not simply the sudden realization of an idea or image out of nowhere but rather involves combinatorial action with available cultural, historical material formed and reformed over time. According to Vygotsky’s (1930/2004, 1978) theory of learning and social change, imagination is a constant in cultural life. “…absolutely everything around us, the entire world of human culture…is the product of human imagination and of creation based on imagination” (1930/2004, pp. 9–10).
In a recent exploration of the meaning of imagination in sociocultural theory, Pelaprat and Cole (2011) considered what it means to “combine” and rework images from the past, in the present, in anticipation of a future. They begin their analysis with a report on microsecond saccadic eye movements during which the brain rapidly registers and resolves gaps in perception, filling in images, in order to stabilize meaning with a single image. They argue that gaps in perception are a pervasive but typically nondisruptive part of making meaning because they are usually resolved, moment by moment, through habit and memory. However, when unfamiliar or ambiguous images are presented, perception falters, and cultural knowledge must be consciously referenced creating a discoordination between the habitual practice of “closing the gap” and the search for meaningful cultural knowledge that might reduce uncertainty (Pelaprat & Cole, 2011). As the everyday is displaced, gaps in meaning are opened, inviting resolution. In the resolution, we may improvise on what seems settled and known, creating a new way of inhabiting a perspective or event, and thus displacing or disinhabiting familiar forms of participation in cultural life (Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998).
Playing With Futures
Stories create gaps in time and space that invite an almost infinite range of cultural material (e.g., images, sounds, actions, relationships, and beliefs) and evaluations (e.g., realistic, misguided, authentic, inauthentic, literary, and didactic). In a sense, stories are play spaces, where the immediate world is “released” and a potential world is foregrounded (cf. Herman, 2009). Play in this view, “is not simply a reproduction of what [one] has experienced, but a creative reworking of the impressions [one] has acquired. [A person] combines them and uses them to construct a new reality” (Vygotsky, 1930/2004, p. 11). Playing, as Vygotsky argued, entails a displacement of the “field of vision,” so that meaning about the world predominates over the actual (Holland et al., 1998, p. 140; Vygotsky, 1978). In seeing beyond what is immediately recognizable or literal, we may embody new positions and reflect on how the world is, while we also project into and plan for how we might embody proximal and distal possible futures.
Gutiérrez (2008) and Gutiérrez, Baquedano-Lopez, Alvarez, and Chiu (1999) have called this projection into the possible “social dreaming.” Gutiérrez (2008) described a group of young adults, all Mexican American, attending a 3-week summer program created for youth whose families were migrant laborers. Through their participation in the program, youth were invited to study their intellectual heritage as they also expanded their visions for shaping and contributing to their own and others’ educations. Near the last day of their studies, the adult facilitators of the program took the youth on a walk across campus, stopping at different buildings and dramatizing the young peoples’ words and discussions through embodied images of dreamers, lifting and reaching without boundaries in the midst of a space that did not, historically, welcome or expect them. Through dramatic embodiment, story, and metaphor, a space was made and sustained that invited youth to reenvision their past and see themselves in the present through the eyes of their future selves—dreaming and contributing on their terms.
Everyday Imagination: A Literacy Research Association Story
Let me provide a current example of the ways we transform material, through action and social relationships, with movement across time. Shortly before the beginning of the conference, attendees received an e-mail message about the new Guidebook app which was planned to replace a hard copy of the conference program.
We were faced with an uncertainty—a disruption of the expected past, present, and future continuity. How was this change going to work? As LRA President-Elect Rebecca Rogers noted in her conference welcome message, we were working through an apprenticeship model. Thus, in a present moment, during conference registration, we learned with the help of LRA staff and nearby friends, to download Guidebook, by referencing past experiences with app downloads and conferences, and recalling previous program formats. Using past conference experiences, we also projected forward to the problem of finding the right time and rooms we needed for our schedule. Some of us experienced frustration, while others expressed relief because LRA would not contribute to deforestation. Having achieved a sense of resolution about how to use the new program, the present moment passes and we take action, knowing our past, present, and future integration systems may need more work.
Our experiences with new technology represent an act of everyday imagining: We notice a change or ambiguity in the present; we reference past experiences, materials, and emotions; and project likely scenarios and needs in the future, then act in the present to resolve uncertainty. This happens seamlessly in most cases, usually with the help of people we know and trust (Pelaprat & Cole, 2011). Such new shifts in materials and processes are common and keep life interesting, even if they are disconcerting at the time.
Gaps, Imagination, and Social Power Relations
This scenario, however, assumes a shared sense of equality in our histories and relationships within and beyond LRA. Conference attenders may find that this gap in procedures makes them vulnerable to evaluation about who they have been and what their future might hold. A gap in time that opens uncertain futures has social and political consequences. In the example of social dreaming, a gap in time was extended to allow a suspension of usual relationships between nondominant people and dominant places, so that new voices could enter and present possible futures.
A dramatic displacement of the everyday is especially memorable and significant for imagining futures. However, we also construct futures in fleeting moments among peers. In these moments, in classrooms, at home, during conferences, when uncertainties about belonging are signaled, we use language and all manner of interactional resources to gauge what can and cannot be spoken and what may or may not be heard. As we shape stories in dialogue across time and spaces, we borrow from and invent linguistic, artistic, and narrative forms in order to name, interpret, and transform past events, present moments, and possible futures (Bakhtin, 1981; Bruner, 1987; Herman, 2009). As stories are told and evaluated, our sense of ourselves and our relationships with others are transformed (cf. Dyson & Genishi, 1994; Genishi & Dyson, 2009; Georgakopoulou, 2006; Wortham & Reyes, 2015), as are the spaces in which stories are made (De Certeau, 1984; Maira & Soep, 2005; Medina, 2010). I argue that the politics of storytelling and evaluation in everyday life must also be understood as the politics of imagination in globalized communities and classrooms. I ask, how gaps in time and space might be sustained when different histories and futures are invoked, in order to imagine more equal futures? With what linguistic, semiotic, and material resources might it be possible to speak and be heard?
Defining Imagination as Critical Social Practice
As outlined earlier, a sociocultural theory of imagination may provide some direction for understanding what is possible as we aim for radical hope. I propose the following working definition of imagination as a social practice: Imagination entails the effort to manage gaps in time between what is, what has been, and what might become within contexts of unequal histories and expectations for speaking and being heard. With this definition in mind, I want to illustrate and extend these ideas about uncertainty, inequality, and possible futures through three stories. The first story is from my family history, and the second and third are from my research with a multiethnic, multiracial, and multilingual group of middle school students as they took the risk of imagining otherwise.
Stories Lost
Expatriation and Lost Histories
My grandmother, Clara Tecla Christian, was born in New Orleans and grew up in Laredo, TX. Her family had immigrated to Louisiana from the Alsace, and so she was part of a multilingual family speaking French, German, Spanish, and English. She met my grandfather in Laredo: Antonio Enciso, a Mexican national from Zacatecas. They married in 1920, then moved to Toledo, OH. When they were married, the 1907 Expatriation Act was still legal (cf. Luhan, 2014). The 1907 Expatriation Act followed earlier “antiforeign” marriage laws by designating women as the property of their husbands and, therefore, allegiant to his nationality and subject to his citizenship rights (Figure 1).
By law, when she married Antonio Enciso, Clara Christian’s U.S. citizenship was revoked and replaced with Mexican citizenship. In 1922 and 1930, after the passage of and amendments to the Cable Act, most women who were expatriated (Asian women were excluded until 1931) were able to file for their U.S. citizenship, even if their husbands were not citizens or “not eligible for citizenship.” In 1930, my grandmother declared her request for naturalization and swore her refusal of allegiance to Mexico. Her renaturalization papers indicate her race as American, a nomination that points to a process of racialization at work through nationalism. This was also a time of intense anti-Mexican racism, fueled by state- and county-level programs of “repatriation” that authorized brutal policing and forced deportation of more than 2 million Mexican Americans, 60% of whom were U.S. citizens (cf. Gross, 2015). Like millions of families today, my grandparents had to make choices under the threat of division and isolation in the face of unrelenting poverty. They had to participate in the procedures that would offer a future, based on survival, with the hopes of eventually being recognized as fully human.
Acting on his campaign rhetoric, President-Elect Trump announced his plan to deport 3 million Mexican and Central American nationals, most of whom he had described as criminals (cf. M. Y. H. Lee, 2015). Dehumanizing policies and rhetoric such as these are intended to embolden thousands of people to act—to impose a future through the mobilization of the machinery and economies of deportation: detention centers, transportation infrastructure, and fast track legal proceedings. In this imagined future, presented through a narrative based in fear, the declared goal of “3 million” might seem like an accomplishment instead of a repeated violation of human and civil rights. I understand such denials of rights and humanity as refusals of histories that result in lost futures. Rights and identities are lost in the present through a projected fear-based future that relies on erasures and racism. For millions of people today, as in the past, the space and time to imagine a future is violated.
Repatriation and Lost Futures
Another family story, also set in 1930, took place when my father, Francis Enciso, was about 5 years old. A census taker recorded the data about my family’s nationalities and the languages spoken in their home (Figure 2).
In response to the question, “English speaking?,” “Yes” was recorded and then scratched out, leaving a gap without resolution; suggesting that the use of both languages, likely heard during the census interaction, could not be registered as meaningful. From the standpoint of the census data collection procedure, it was unimaginable to be or become Spanish and English bilingual. Instead of imagining a productive relationship between Spanish, English, and other languages, languages had to be partitioned or otherwise subject to erasure.
Therefore, my father and his siblings, like hundreds of thousands of children of his era—and continuing to this day—were deemed deficient in both languages. The space between English and Spanish and the history that brought them together were not comprehended—not imagined—and therefore erased. During that year, adults in the family decided to stop speaking Spanish with my dad, so he would be able to attend the Catholic, English-dominant school rather than be relegated to the poorly funded Spanish speaking school designated for Mexican children in Toledo. All that remained of Spanish, while we were growing up, was the clear inflection of Mexican Spanish when my dad recited the alphabet, or numbers, or shouted “Dame un beso!” to unsuspecting “Hispanic” telemarketers.
A few months before he died, in a moment of reflection and vulnerability, my dad told me that he wished he had been able to speak Spanish. Spanish held lost stories and possible futures, animated by the particular sounds and memories of unfolding life among his family and friends. These losses and erasures of the past with foreclosures of possible futures reverberate across generations. I did not know this history until I was an adult. No book or family conversation helped me see the meaning of being third-generation Mexican American in Ohio. I had no frame of reference to understand Mexican and U.S. relations—from school or home; and neither did my dad. Now I stand between this silenced history and the construction of a racial identity as a White woman with unrealized possible futures. I have not had to confront racism or linguicism on a daily basis. Therefore, I can easily be blind to the ways academia and schooling exclude and harm youth and adults who experience racism (Enciso, 2004, 2007). But learning this history and staying close to the continuing losses and struggles of Mejicanos and Latinxs means I can be more deliberate about working with youth and community members to create spaces for speaking and being heard.
Incommensurable Histories and Futures
Professor Chris Lebron (2016), a scholar of African American Studies and philosophy, explained, in a recent New York Times essay, how the present and future are distorted by silences. He referenced James Baldwin who believed that,
in refusing to deal honestly with the fact that their prosperity depends entirely on history of Black exploitation, rape, murder and pillage, Whites imbue their identity with an innocence that allows them to see the future as open and free and their minutes and days as pregnant with possibility and power. What happens in these instances is indeed a warping of time. The laws of the universe are experienced without friction for White Americans because a willful denial of the past leaves them with no sense that their present is insecure or that their future is in question. It will always be O.K. in exactly 1 minute, day, or year from now. But this is not many Blacks’ experience of time. (emphasis mine)
Neither is time without “friction” in the experiences of LGBT, indigenous, new immigrants, people with disabilities, people whose religions are maligned, or those who are cash poor. All are subject to cycles of erasures that excuse violence against us in the past, while overlooking the ongoing projection of marginalization, silencing, and expendable lives into the future.
As members of a literacy research community, we teach, we research, and we strive to make literacy worthwhile and relevant, but we do so with flawed understanding of one another’s pasts and with insufficient reach toward an equitable or just future. We all seek frameworks and directions for change, for futures without fear. But change and uncertainty can be overwhelming. Gaps and openings to possible futures are easily shutdown. The power we might believe we have to change our futures is constantly in question.
Discourses and Possible Futures
In her analysis of “the silenced dialogue,” published nearly 30 years ago, Delpit (1988) pointed out that Black and white-dominant middle-class teachers brought very different cultural and social histories as well as different visions of children’s futures to their teaching and, therefore, different actions in the present. These differences based in unspoken histories within white-dominant spaces are difficult for white-dominant teachers to see or resolve, though they appear daily through the eyes of Black teachers. Institutionalized racial hierarchies, then and now, create unequal power relations for speaking and being heard.
From a discourse perspective, to speak or to have a voice involves “using all linguistic and semiotic means…to make oneself understood by others” (Blommaert, 2008a, p. 427). To be heard means making oneself understood in the presence of implicit and explicit “codes, customs, rules, expectations and so forth” that “…authorize and rationalize who and what is included or excluded” (Blommaert, 2005, p. 74). As Blommaert (2008a) indicates, marshaling all of ones' linguistic and semiotic means’ demands a mighty effort that creates a disproportionate burden for marginalized youth and adults to explain themselves and their lives.
I ask again, then, how might gaps for imagining be sustained, when different histories are invoked? With what linguistic and semiotic resources might it be possible to speak and be heard? The next two stories, featuring youth storytelling, illustrate their efforts to manage gaps in time between their histories and possible futures as global peers.
Eid and Halloween: Seeing and Being Otherwise
The story of Eid and Halloween was told in January 2009 as part of a 3-year ethnography of literary reading and storytelling among immigrant and nonimmigrant youth (Enciso, 2011; Enciso, Volz, Price-Dennis, & Durriyah, 2010). I worked with teachers to create a deliberate space for listening to middle-school youth tell stories while they ate lunch in the school library, a space we called “story club,” which I understand to exist in an “intraschool” or liminal space between official and unofficial regulations of schooling. Regular participants, from a sixth-grade English as a Second Language (ESL) class and sixth- to seventh-grade class for youth experiencing emotional challenges, included Chris, Tomás, Habiba, Sara, and Tucker. Lee, Paul, and Aaqilah participated in several sessions between January and May 2009.
Habiba, Sara, and Aaqilah identified as Muslim, with different histories of migration and training in Islamic faith practices. All of the girls knew several languages including Somali and some Arabic and arrived in the United States at about age 6. Lee and Paul identified as White and Appalachian, and Chris identified primarily as African American with family relations who were White, Appalachian, and Puerto Rican. All of these boys used English variants in conversation at home and school. Tucker identified as Cambodian American and spoke Khmer at home. He liked to call himself American Born Cambodian, after reading the book American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) many times over. Tomás was born in the United States and identified as Mexican transnational, making trips to Mexico several times a year. His dominant home language was Spanish; however, like all of the kids in story club, he readily engaged in English-dominant conversation.
The school was located in a Midwest urban community where European, White Appalachian, and African American residents historically settled and worked in light industry and manufacturing but who are now employed in part-time low-wage food service, hotel, and cleaning jobs. The region is also a refugee resettlement area in the Midwest, first for Cambodian families and more recently Somali and Somali-Bantu, as well as a new home for Mexican, Central American, and Dominican adults and children.
During the first year of story club, we met in the library at lunchtime because this was the only space and time for immigrant and nonimmigrant youth to meet and talk about their everyday lives. Their language arts classes were divided based on children’s English-language proficiency; thus, they were always in separate rooms rather than reading and discussing stories together. This fact actually baffled the English-dominant kids, one of whom asked if the ESL room was the place where you could learn lots of languages.
As a teacher–researcher, I worked with graduate students to mediate the space between the kids, their teachers, and the curriculum, so we could bring this group of children together and begin to discover which stories they knew from their histories and which stories they might want to tell together. Eventually, story club itself became a mediating space among youth, as we gathered untold stories and documented how we imagined and interpreted one another’s stories and our emerging shared world.
During our first few meetings, youth not only introduced stories about their lives, they also moved toward and questioned unfamiliar images, language, and everyday experiences including stories about walking to school, avoiding bullies, and watching movies. In February, as everyone finished their lunches, Chris, sitting across the table from Habiba, asked her about her first Halloween. Chris also suggested that maybe “they” (Habiba and Sara) do something else. Soon Chris, Sara, Habiba, and Tomás (Paul was also present but did not speak during this episode) began to figure out the connections between the U.S. celebration of the pagan holiday, Halloween, and Eid al Fitr, the Muslim holy day ending Ramadan, as they pursued the possibilities of tricking adults into giving kids candies and other treats.
(Directly addressing Habiba): Where was your first Halloween? Was it here?1
Yeah. In {this state}.
In America? Or? Do they celebrate Halloween at (pause)?
I have something else.
What’s it called?
Eid.
Eid or Ramadan
Some people tell it and they say “Happy Eid.” And they give you money.
Aww. I want to go over there.
Here, Chris indicated his sense that Eid is celebrated somewhere beyond the shared community where he and Sara live. Sara does not indicate otherwise, but she seems to be describing events that, I assume, are part of her life in their local community. Chris also learned that gifts of money are part of the celebration.
You’ll have to learn that phrase.
Happy Eid.
Happy Eid. Happy what?
Happy Eid.
But it’s gotta be in Arabic.
Eid? Eid?
How do you say it in Arabic?
Oh. I know where to go. I know somewhere.
Eid Mubarak.
That’s the way you say it in Somali, too. The same.
Sara and Habiba made clear to Chris and Tomás that Eid is a culturally specific event, dependent on knowledge and language shared among the girls and their communities. And yet, realizing the possible (monetary) benefits of Eid celebrations, the boys persisted in trying to understand how its distinctive features work, including how the date might overlap with Halloween.
The same day as Halloween?
No.
Oh man!
What day is it on?
We have Eid each year.
…
What day? What day? Which days?
I have no idea.
Sara realized that Eid does not fall on the same date each year, but she may not have known how to explain that it is determined by the lunar calendar. Without a clear answer, the boys returned to their line of questioning about the money distributed during Eid.
Do they give you American money?
Yeah.
No.
One o’ y’all said “Yeah.” And one o’ y’all said “No.”
How much do they give you? Like a hundred dollars? Two dollars? Fifty cents?
Sometimes I get five dollars.
One time on Eid I made a hundred bucks. Just from one family.
Oh yeah. I gotta go there. Just from one family?
Some people who are cheap and everything. They just give you candy.
Sara has no control over how much money is given to her during Eid celebrations but conveys from a child’s point of view, the reality that adults’ generosity is unpredictable. Meanwhile, in service of an implicit, unfolding plan to gain money during Eid, Tomás pieced together several realities of the multiethnic communities in which he participates.
I know where to go. There’s this gas station where this ARa..Aragi..Arabic
…
My uncle has Arabic friends who work at this gas station. I can go over there and say and tell them “Eid.”
Sara, however, recognizes the value of Arabic in this scenario.
If they talk to you in Arabic, whatcha gonna do?
(Quietly) Pee myself.
While Chris realized he may not be ready for an actual multilingual encounter, Tomás continued to see his community in terms of its shared assets.
(Pointing toward Sara.) I’ll bring you along.
Chris, Sara, Habiba, and Tomás invented a hypothetical street scene in which they were coactors putting their intercultural capital to work. I celebrate this hopeful moment among children. Released, temporarily, from anti-immigrant media hype and mundane work sheets, they could see the world from an in-between space, crossing into one another’s worlds, imagining one another’s cultural knowledge as assets in a shared possible future. As Vygotsky (1930/2004) wrote, they began to see otherwise, through “…a creative reworking of…impressions” that contribute to “a new reality” (p. 11).
Seeing Otherwise Through Play and Co-narration
The group’s words and street scene were co-developed through small stories, a multivoiced story form shaped through a “trajectory of interactions” (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2011, p. 40). This kind of storytelling, described initially by Ochs and Capps (2001) as co-narration, allows for problem-solving and questioning, much like the talk among friends or relatives telling and evaluating one another’s lives as they share a meal, with all the power dynamics and asides that go along with talking about everyday life among people who more or less know one another and meet up regularly. Through co-narration, participants navigate the codes, rules, and norms of what is valued and heard, using all available resources (Blommaert, 2007, 2008a, 2008b) within gaps in meaning to co-create images and possibilities for one another’s locations in their stories. Co-narration, like play, invites tellers to set the everyday into the background, so that a possible, deliberately co-constructed world may come into view.
Cross-Cultural Storytelling: Sustaining Gaps in Imagination
In much the same way that literature introduces a new landscape and storyline for becoming a social actor in a possible world, storytelling as co-narration disrupts the everyday, releasing tellers from the here and now, so another world may come into view. In the case of cross-cultural storytelling, however, unfamiliar worlds have to be explained. Such stories may be told, but as Spivak (1990) asks, who will listen? In the following event, which took place in May, 4 months after the Eid and Halloween event, three girls narrated jinni stories. Jinnis are spirits in the Muslim tradition, whose meaning and form were introduced by the girls in previous story club sessions. Three boys and I (all non-Muslim) try to understand what the girls are referencing and what jinnis mean in their lives. I show how the girls’ stories were told and heard; and how being heard depended on the ways gaps in imagination were opened and sustained through the mobilization of linguistic and semiotic resources and intercultural practices of imagination.
Creating and moving flexibly in and out of worlds
As the session began, Habiba, Aquilah, Sara, and I were the first to sit down and Habiba started talking about a horror movie with a killer cell phone: if you answer the call, you could die. This movie reference led to the three girls discussing, primarily in Somali, a related event in which a girl they knew was overwhelmed by a jinni who entered her through a cell phone. Aaqilah turned to me and said, “You know jinnis? They’re like ghosts.” “Not ghosts,” Habiba said, “Like masks, you know, Shaitain.”2
As Lee, Chris, and Tucker entered the table area in the library and began eating their lunches, Aaqilah made a bid to tell a story about a jinni in her life; a bid that was immediately interrupted by me and then quickly picked up again by her friends:
My dad catch one. My dad catch one of them.
How do you catch one?
You have to read it out of a person’s body, but dance around them and, and then they get dizzy, and they do stuff, and, I can’t say. [It’s so loud and confusing, you might.
(turning to Pat) Yeah. [You gotta, you gotta read, uh, Qur’an.
[You know Qur’an? You gotta read that. And then you will catch them. And then you will=
Chris, sitting across the table from Aaqilah, asked “You will catch what?” I explained vaguely, “Catch them.” But Aaqilah clarified, “It’s a ghost, actually. They dance at your house.” Sara added, “It’s not really dancing. It’s kind of dancing?” Meanwhile, Lee was dancing in his seat.
Aaqilah’s story of her dad catching a jinni required a frame of reference for those of us who had not experienced these events. Some of us at the table had heard Sara and Habiba’s small stories about jinnis, but they were usually interrupted with someone else’s story about a horror movie. In this session, however, the girls persisted and conarrated the meaning of jinnis even though the girls were by no means in agreement about the specific form or meaning of jinnis in their lives. These events, like any supernatural encounter, were difficult to verify (Minks, 2007). The girls took a risk in making cultural beliefs and practices visible in front of others. They could be seen as unreliable or even unacceptable narrators outside of a familiar context of family and friends where the girls’ references were usually heard and elaborated.
Story club, in contrast, was a space where Aaqilah’s references, such as “one” or “catching them,” and Sara’s explanation, “read it out of a person’s body” created gaps and disorientations that needed further cultural material. The practice of co-narration supported a trajectory of small storytelling and development of images, so that the girls’ cultural references could be reworked and retold before being foreclosed by a colonizing imagination (hooks, 1991).
Narrative Backgrounding
As the girls backtracked to explain what it means to read it [jinnis] out of a person’s body, they initiated a process described in narrative theory as narrative backgrounding (Minks, 2007). Through narrative backgrounding, tellers provide critical information related to the deeper worldview informing and framing a story. In this way, a teller mediates and transports culturally historically formed meaning across contexts; thus, contributing to the potential for cultural continuity in new spaces.
In this storytelling event, the narrative background Aaqilah, Sara, and Habiba co-constructed explained the relationships among actors and religious practices, while it also provided the basic structure for a jinn story: a jinni overtakes a person’s body, an adult or spiritual figure intervenes by reading a sacred text, and the victim is healed by the words and actions of their community.
As their interaction continued, the girls confirmed the reality of jinnis, and their alignment with one another, while Chris expressed his frustration with being excluded from their worlds.
I saw one in real life.
[I think everybody saw it.
[I saw it.
I haven’t!
Habiba quickly explained the problem of seeing across the lines between them: “Because you didn’t live here with us!” Here, Habiba demonstrates that the gap in time and space created through co-narration includes a negotiation of the power to define the boundaries between different worlds.
In classrooms, overlapping talk and multivoiced viewpoints are difficult to sustain, due to histories of power relations that contribute to silencing, distracting behavior as youth manage parallel events, and inadequate framing of a story’s cultural specificity (Blommaert, 2008a; Campano, 2007; Dávila, 2015; Enciso, 2011). In the space/time of story club, however, youth could persist with their efforts to define boundaries and be heard.
Following Chris and Habiba’s exclamations, Aaqilah mobilized multiple linguistic and semiotic resources to emphasize the key events in her experience with jinnis, including details about her red eyes, her dad’s viewpoint, a description of her emotional state, her brother’s voice, and her own reaction—all in the space of a few lines of storytelling.
[It does! My eyes got re:: ed! My dad thought I was dying.
[I think
It was so scary. He was right there. My brother was like “Show it to me! Show it to me=
[The only thing, the only thing I [think] ever about–
= [I was like, “It’s right there!”
Second Stories
In an effort to be heard, the girls provided narrative backgrounds, multiple semiotic resources, and related jinni stories using the same jinni story structure. These follow-up stories, called second stories in narrative theory (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2011), support or refute a previous telling, but either way, a co-teller implicitly recognizes and engages with the original story. In the gaps between past, present, and future that open up through storytelling, second stories and narrative backgrounding contribute to the moment-to-moment reworking of cultural material. Within these interactions, the codes and rules of everyday social relations sometimes recede into the background, so that new ways of being understood by others, of being otherwise, may become possible.
In the following excerpt, in relation with Aaqilah’s story involving her father’s presence, the girls debated the role of grown-ups in preventing a jinni’s ability to overwhelm a child. Sara followed this debate with a small story from her own experience involving her grandpa and cousin.
They couldn’t get into a grown-up because=
=grown-up know how, what to do with them=
Right.
=some grown-ups. My dad do.
=They just have to dance around and make them dizzy to come out of them.
(unclear) just freaky.
(to Pat) If you’re with a grown-up, they cannot get inside you. Because they [know that, that—
[It once happened=
(To Pat) [It did. A lot. That’s how my grandma died.
[= It happened to my cousin, he was small and my grandma was him, my grandpa was him, was with him a:: nd it just came through both of them.
Although Sara’s second story challenges the claim that jinnis don’t get into grown-ups, she supports Aaqilah and Habiba’s claims that jinnis are a compelling concern in their lives. Listening to the girls’ stories, Chris confers high praise by declaring, “You guys are just full of stories.” And the girls agree that they are indeed storytellers. They could “tell stories like for 24 hours.”
Wow. That’s complicated.
You guys are just full of stories!
I know. For real. A lots. We got a lots.
Because people (unclear)
We could tell stories [like in for 24 hours.
[About people (unclear). About wars.
Really?
Yeah. [We could tell stories about wars.
Then, Tucker noticed that the girls’ stories were mostly about other people’s experiences, suggesting he had not heard Aaqilah’s account as a story of her own experience. He asked, “Has there ever been a spirit taking over your bodies?” Tucker’s question might be heard as a challenge to the girls’ beliefs, but the girls took up the question in terms of their unique connections with jinnis. In response to Tucker’s question, Aaqilah finally told her story as her peers paused and listened.
(Shakes heads no)
[No, but it happened to my cousins.
It was trying to happen to you?
[It’s trying to control your mind ().
[Yeah, but I had my brother with me. And I was like, I was crazy. I was like “Ahhh! Get away! Get away!” And then they take me home. And my eyes was re:: ed. I got si:: ck. And then they take me home. And they read the Qur’an. And they heal me.
As Aaqilah finished her story, Chris waved his arm over his head to get the floor, “Uh. Can I ask a question? Do y’all really believe that?”
Chris’s question addressed the girls’ deep cultural experience, in a tone of genuine curiosity and interest, built over a dozen storytelling sessions. This is the kind of question that many adults are afraid to ask, in part because we view religious experiences as private and out-of-bounds. For the members of story club, such stories and questions drew them to the edge of one another’s worlds where they might understand what it means to live in a community where deeply held, distinct beliefs can coexist. In response to Chris’s question, Sara hesitated, looking down and across at Aaqilah and Habiba as she continued to watch Chris’s face. Aaqilah and Habiba responded emphatically:
(To Chris) Ye:: ah, [of course we do.
(To Chris) [We believe it very well!
Then Habiba opened a gap for seeing and being otherwise. She projected the boys out of the present, into her past, and toward a possible shared future:
(To Chris) If you go to um Africa, and sleep there tonight you will see them. I swear you will. You gonna freak out.
She invited the boys to cross into her world, under a dark night sky in a Kenyan refugee camp. Aaqilah further co-narrated this shared past and imagined future as she waved her hand at the library’s overhead lights:
They will drive you crazy because Africa has no lights, not like the library. At night, when you sleep, Africa is dark. And they like, they like the dark.
Through the work of imagination, in a gap between the story club’s present, the members’ storied pasts, and their interrelated futures, across the space between the U.S. Midwest and East Africa, Aaqilah and Habiba invited us to switch off the library’s fluorescent lights, see otherwise and become otherwise. They asked us to enter their world, as global peers freaking out under a midnight sky. The boys, taking up their invitation, asked a series of questions about the darkness and whether or not jinnis can blow out candles. As the jinni stories seemed to end, Chris, to my surprise, initiated a second story by first locating himself relative to those he had just heard:
I believe in the stuff what you just said, but I don’t believe in curses. Because like my family is religious and I’m, and I’m Indian. And we gotta go up to Washington [for a Pow wow] and before we can like get on our reservation or something, the shaman, the shaman has to come out and like, bless them. The people that don’t live on the reservation.
Chris’s first-person story, like Aaqilah, Habiba, and Sara’s jinni stories, followed the structure associated with a religious cleansing or blessing that releases a person, or place, from potential ill will. Unlike previous sessions, when jinn stories were told, the group’s second stories were associated with spiritual beliefs rather than horror movie scenarios. Across 35 min, the girls told nine small stories about jinnis. Through narrative backgrounding and second stories, jinni stories became increasingly more complex and diverse, as the girls engaged in their own process of defining the parameters of jinni actions. As our conarration evolved, Chris and Tucker asked questions that centered the girls’ beliefs in the present: Has this happened to you? Do you really believe that? And then the three boys turned those questions on themselves through their own storytelling. In the final 15 min of our session, Lee and Tucker also told stories from their lives, involving nightmarish events that afflicted their bodies and potentially their souls, with harm averted by spiritual faith and adult intervention. Jinnis were no longer the pretext for retelling the stories of American horror films but rather the site for intersecting experiences of being vulnerable, trusting in adults, faith and ritual, and being cleansed.
Stories Lost and Found: Imagining, Speaking, and Being Heard Across Worlds
Sociocultural theory focuses on what is possible, what might be transformed and redefined among people, in anticipation of an as yet unknown future, a future goodness, as Lear (2006) and Lebron (2016) wrote, that depends on deep knowledge of and engagement with unequal histories. Whether through literature, testimonies, historical documentation or co-narration, storytelling introduces gaps in time and meaning, requiring resolution. Our work as researchers and educators involves managing gaps in imagination, with youth, in the interest of speaking and being heard. Imagining otherwise with youth also means becoming responsible for how we understand and mediate culturally historically formed material, aimed toward possible futures, in the unfolding, transformative contexts of present actions and relationships. The implications of a philosophy and practice of critical imagination and sociocultural theories of literacy and learning are clear. To imagine ourselves among others, to gain a measure of perspective and control over our past, present, and future, and orient to future conditions of equality requires abundant time, space, and attention to diverse story forms, experiences, and meanings.
This means finding the fractures in school time/space where stories can be told and heard, where youth, like Chris, Lee, Sara, Habiba, Aaqilah, Tucker, and Tomás can invite one another to become social actors in one another’s worlds, while retaining the power to establish boundaries for belonging. We had a space in the library and about 40 min to tell stories and eat lunch, and we had Aaqilah’s compelling opening bid in front of us, “My dad catch one!” Aaqilah wanted to tell her story, and so she mobilized multiple semiotic resources, including narrative backgrounds and second stories, co-narrated with her friends.
As Paulo Freire described in a 1985 interview, they came to these events, “full of spontaneity—with their feelings, with their questions, with their creativity, with their risk to create, getting their own words into their own hands in order to do beautiful things with them” (p. 19). To get words into their own hands, to own and act on their own worlds also meant enacting boundaries for one another’s imaginative mobilities. Even as they imagined being transported to another space and time, as when Tomás invited Sara—“I’ll bring you along”—and Habiba initiated a hypothetical sleep over—“If you sleep in Africa you’re gonna freak out,”—their proposed worlds were preceded by necessary conditions for living with differences: “Whatch a gonna do?” and “You don’t live here with us.”
Diverse histories and imagined futures cannot be spoken or heard in the space of a predetermined curriculum nor in the limited time frame and formatting of nightly news and twitter feeds. Youth and adults need time, space, trust, and honesty to mobilize our resources, so we might reveal the deep structures of our beliefs and experiences and find pathways for coexisting across distinct forms of being and believing (Gutiérrez 2016; Paris 2012; Pratt 1991; Stetsenko, 2007, 2008). In the interest of radical hope, we must also envision a future that does not depend on inequality, erasures, or smoothing over ruptures in dominant narratives but depends, instead, on principles of action dedicated to imaginative mobility and listening across stories, lost and found.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Ashley Pérez, Cynthia Lewis, Elizabeth Moje, Carmen Lili Medina, Brian Edmiston, and her colleagues and students at the Ohio State University for their time and consideration of the ideas explored in this address.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1.
Conventional transcription markers are used to indicate the following shifts in dialogue. Although I have developed a more elaborate transcription, indicating shifts in intonation, volume, and overlapping speech, I focus here on story content and therefore, limit the emphasis on discursive shifts.
() = action by and interaction among participants
{} = replaced speech to protect anonymity
[= overlapping or interrupted speech
= = continuing speech turn you
= emphasis on word
:: = extended vowel pronunciation
…= transcription break in continuous talk
2.
Arabic word for Satan. Across online sources, jinnis are represented as distinct beings associated with specific eras and ethos of creation and relationships with humans.
References
|
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Google Scholar | |
|
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
|
Blommaert, J. (2007). Sociolinguistics and discourse analysis: Orders of indexicality and polycentricity. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2, 115–130. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
|
Blommaert, J. (2008a). Bernstein and poetics revisited: Voice globalisation and education. Discourse & Society, 19, 425–451. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | |
|
Blommaert, J. (2008b). Grassroots literacy: Writing, identity and voice in Central Africa. London, England: Routledge. Google Scholar | |
|
Bruner, J. (1987). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Google Scholar | |
|
Campano, G. (2007). Immigrant students and literacy: Reading, writing and remembering. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Chouliaraki, L. (2006). The spectatorship of suffering. New York, NY: Sage. Google Scholar | |
|
Chouliaraki, L. (2011). Improper distance: A critique of solidarity as irony. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 14, 363–382. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | |
|
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Dávila, D. (2015). #WhoNeedsDiverseBooks: Preservice teachers and religious neutrality with children’s literature. Research in the Teaching of English, 50, 60–83. Google Scholar | ISI | |
|
De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (Randall, S. ). Berkeley: University of California-Berkeley Press. Google Scholar | |
|
De Fina, A., Georgakopoulou, A. (2011). Analyzing narrative: Discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
|
Delpit, L. (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children. Harvard Educational Review, 58, 280–298. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Díaz, J. (2016, 11 21). Under President Trump, radical hope is our best weapon. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/aftermath-sixteen-writers-on-trumps-america Google Scholar | |
|
Dyson, A. H., Genishi, C. (1994). The need for story: Cultural diversity in classroom and community. Champaign–Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Google Scholar | |
|
Enciso, P. (2004). Reading discrimination. In Greene, S., Abt-Perkins, D. (Eds.), Making race visible: Literacy research for cultural understanding (pp. 149–177). New York, NY: Teachers College. Google Scholar | |
|
Enciso, P. (2007). Reframing history in sociocultural theory: Toward an expansive vision. In Lewis, C., Enciso, P., Moje, E. (Eds.), Reframing sociocultural theory in literacy research: Identity, agency & power (pp. 49–74). New York, NY: Routledge. Google Scholar | |
|
Enciso, P. (2011). Storytelling in critical literacy pedagogy: Removing the walls between immigrant and non-immigrant youth. English Teaching: Practice and Critique: Critical literacy revisited: Writing as critique, 10, 21–40. Google Scholar | |
|
Enciso, P., Volz, A., Price-Dennis, D., Durriyah, T. (2010). Story club and configurations of literary insights among immigrant and non-immigrant youth. In Jiménez, R., Rowe, D., Risko, V., Hundley, M. (Eds.), 59th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (pp. 354–366). Oak Creek, WI: National Reading Conference. Google Scholar | |
|
Freire, P. (1985). Reading the world and reading the word: An interview with Paulo Freire. Language Arts, 62, 15–21. Google Scholar | |
|
Genishi, C., Dyson, A. H. (2009). Children, language, and literacy: Diverse learners in diverse times. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Georgakopoulou, A. (2006). Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis. Narrative Inquiry, 16, 122–130. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Google Scholar | |
|
Gross, T. (2015, 9 10). America’s forgotten history of Mexican-American ‘repatriation.’ [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/439114563/americas-forgotten-history-of-mexican-american-repatriation Google Scholar | |
|
Gutiérrez, K. (2008). Developing a sociocritical literacy in the third space. Reading Research Quarterly, 43, 148–164. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Gutiérrez, K. (2016). Designing resilient ecologies: Social design experiments and a new social imagination. Educational Researcher, 45, 187–196. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | |
|
Gutiérrez, K., Baquedano-Lopez, P., Alvarez, H., Chiu, M. (1999). A cultural-historical approach to collaboration: Building a culture of collaboration through hybrid language practices. Theory into Practice, 38, 87–93. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Gutiérrez, K., Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning. Educational Researcher, 35, 19–25. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | |
|
Hansen, D. T. (2010). Cosmopolitanism and education: A view from the ground. Teachers College Record, 112, 1–30. Google Scholar | ISI | |
|
Herman, D. (2009). Basic elements of narrative. West Sussex, England: Wiley-Blackwell. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
|
Holland, D., Lachiotte, W., Skinner, D., Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar | |
|
hooks, b. (1991). Narratives of struggle. In Mariani, P. (Ed.), Critical fictions: The politics of imaginative writing (pp. 53–61). Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Lear, J. (2006). Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Lebron, C. (2016, 11 11). Trump’s racial time machine. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/opinion/trumps-racial-time-machine.html Google Scholar | |
|
Lee, C. (2007). Culture, literacy, and learning: Taking bloom in the midst of the whirlwind. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Lee, M. Y. H. (2015, 7 8). Donald Trump’s false comments connecting Mexican immigrants and crime. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-comments-connecting-mexican-immigrants-and-crime/?utm_term=.f1f8a7372f74 Google Scholar | |
|
Luhan, L. (2014). The expatriation act of 1907: How American women lost their citizenship through marriage in the twentieth century. Retrieved from http://blog.consource.org/post/78215541661/the-expatriation-act-of-1907-how-american-women#_ftn16 Google Scholar | |
|
Maira, S., Soep, E. (Eds.). (2005). Youthscapes: The popular, the national, the global. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
|
Medina, C. (2010). “Reading across communities” in biliteracy practices: Examining translocal discourses and cultural flows in literature discussions. Reading Research Quarterly, 45, 40–60. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Minks, A. (2007). “Goblins like to tell stories”: Miskitu childrens’ narratives of spirit encounters. In Bamberg, M., De Fina, A., Schiffrin, D. (Eds.), Selves and identities in narrative and discourse (pp. 10–40). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
|
Moll, L. (2013). L.S. Vygotsky and education. New York, NY: Routledge. Google Scholar | |
|
Ochs, E., Capps, L. (2001). Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41, 93–97. doi:10.3102/0013189X12441244 Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | |
|
Pelaprat, E., Cole, M. (2011). “Minding the gap”: Imagination, creativity and human cognition. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 45, 397–418. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 91, 3–40. Google Scholar | |
|
Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and morality: On the rise of the mediapolis. Cambridge, England: Polity. Google Scholar | |
|
Spivak, G. (1990). The Post-colonial critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogues. Hove , England: Psychology Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Stetsenko, A. (2007). Being-through-doing: Bakhtin and Vygotsky in dialogue. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 2, 25–37. Google Scholar | |
|
Stetsenko, A. (2008). From relational ontology to transformative activist stance: Expanding Vygotsky’s (CHAT) project. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 3, 465–485. Google Scholar | Crossref | |
|
Vygotsky, L. S. (2004). Imagination and creativity in childhood. Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 42, 7–97 (Original work published 1930 in Soviet Psychology 28: 84–96) Google Scholar | |
|
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (Cole, M., John-Steiner, V., Scribner, S., Souberman, E., Eds. & Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Wortham, S., Reyes, A. (2015). Discourse analysis beyond the speech event. New York, NY: Routledge. Google Scholar | |
|
Yang, G. L. (2006). American born Chinese. New York, NY: First Second Books. Google Scholar |
Author Biography
Patricia E. Enciso is a professor of literacy, literature, and equity studies in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University. Her research focuses on how middle-school youth mobilize cultural repertoires, imagination, and the arts in the production and interpretation of their own and others’ storyworlds. She has served as an executive and board member of the Literacy Research Association since 2011, as the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacies research director (2011–2015) and chair and board member of the NCTE Research Foundation (2002–2005). She is coauthor of Reframing Sociocultural Theory in Literacy Research: Identity, Agency, and Power (2007), coeditor of The Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2010), and coeditor of the (forthcoming) Handbook of Research on Reading: Volume V. Her most recent research is published in English Teaching: Practice and Critique (2016) and the Journal of Literacy Research (2017).
