Examining translocal discourses: Mobility, literacies and cultural practices

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Examining translocal discourses Mobility,
literacies and cultural practices
Carmen L. Medina Assistant Professor
SLED November 14, 2009
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• Alternative Title
• The story of how the very long journey of
  publishing an article can actually become a
  positive experience.
• Dont give up!

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New Challenges for Researchers (Blommaert Van
der Donkt, 2002)

• world systems, flows, scales, networks, the
  global economy, etc. are crucial to understanding
  the work researchers do in interpreting cultural
  dynamics and identity politics where it becomes
  important to arrive at an understanding of local
  sociocultural processes in which connections
  between the local and global (or at least
  translocal) are empirically sustained, not just
  posited, as part of a larger attempt at
  understanding such processes as situatedhence,
  possibly influenced bylarger ones (p. 138).

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Translocality (Based on Appadurai, 1996 1999)

• is defines ad not just in relation to places,
  but instead is an abstract (yet daily manifest)
  space occupied by the sum of linkages and
  connections between places (media, travel, labor,
  import/export, etc.). The notion of locality is
  included within the term in order to suggest a
  situatedness, but a situatedness which is never
  static. Translocality can be theorized as a mode,
  one which pertains not to how peoples and
  cultures exist in places, but rather how they
  move through them (Mandaville, 2006, para. 2).

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Translocality in literacy practices

• Street (2003) any encounter between local and
  global results new hybrid literacies that are
  neither local nor global.
• Lewis and del Valle (2008) describe a third wave
  of research on literacy practices and identity as
  hybrid, meta-discursive and spatial.
• Guerra, Moje, Orellana among others in (Lewis,
  Enciso Moje, 2007) Leander (2001).

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Learning as movement (Gutierrez, 2008)

• what it means to learn in familiar, new, and
  overlapping contexts, in rapidly shifting
  practices and communities, to understand how the
  social organization of these environments
  facilitates or interferes with cognitive work,
  including how people are made smart by the use of
  artifacts and participation in particular social
  groups and settings... (p. 150)

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New Challenges for Literacy Researchers

• To find frameworks to understand how the
  epistemic knowledge produced as people move
  around and across communities affords the
  possibility of rethinking literacy practices
  situated within the context of students complex
  cultural understandings, negotiations and
  productions in the emergent space between global
  and local discourses and the new identities that
  are formed within these spaces?

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Texts that do not travel well

• Blommaerts (2008) argument on texts and
  constrained mobility, texts are often only
  locally meaningful and valuable. As soon they
  move to other geographical and/or social spaces,
  they lose voice (p. 7). These issues related to
  texts, voice and social spaces have implications
  on school participation of students from
  non-mainstream backgrounds and how we perceive
  the complex dynamics between local and global
  literacies.

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Exploring translocal literacies in immigrant
children literary discourses
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• Story 4 El chupacabra/The goat sucker
• Stanza 1 Emerging stories from media
• Juan Juan
• 80. pero como se llama 80. but how do you call
  it
• 81. verdad que también en las 81. it is true
  that also in the
• noticias donde está el Primer Impacto Primer
  Impacto news show
• 82. también salió un hombre que 82. they also
  showed a man who was
• lo había chupado el vampiro. sucked by the
  vampire.
• Yolanda Yolanda
• 83. No era la 83. No it was the
• Diego Diego
• 84. El Chupacabra 84. The goatsucker
• Yolanda Yolanda
• 85. Andale! 85. Come on!
• Stanza 2 Resituating the story as personal
  experience and media
• Carmen Carmen
• 86. Pero también ustedes 86. But do you also
• conocen al chupacabra? know the chupacabra?
• Diego Diego

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• Juan Juan
• 88. y el hombre se puso todo morado 88. and the
  man turned all purple
• 89. y ya tenía colmillos. 89. and had canine
  teeth.
• Yolanda Yolanda
• 90. Dice mi papá 90. My dad says
• 91. que allá en la de donde nosotros somos 91.
  that there where we are from
• allá anduvo el chupacabra y there was the
  chupacabra and
• 92. anduvo matando animales. 92. it was killing
  animals.
• Diego Diego
• 93. También en el Salvador andaba 93. It was
  also in El Salvador
• Yolanda Yolanda
• 94. y en las noticias dice una señora 94. and in
  the news a woman said
• que mataba a los pollos that it was killing
  chickens
• 95. y los ponía así en orden. 95. and it was
  putting them like this in order.

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• Ivonne Nuestras historias no tienen nada que
  ver con Porque el inglés es como lo entiende
  Ms. the teacher y esto es muy diferente. Our
  stories have nothing to do with Because English
  is like how Ms. the teacher understands it and
  this is very different.
• Yolanda Porque mire, nosotros le decimos a estos
  nosotros pero los otros no lo comprenden. Ellos
  puede ser que no han visto esas personas. Look,
  because we tell it among ourselves but the others
  do not understand it. It could be that they
  havent seen these people.
• Juan Ay, y despues dicen que no es verdad. Ay,
  and then they say it is not true.
• Yolanda Que nosotros estamos locos y todo eso.
  That we are crazy and all that.
• Conversation continues
• Ivonne A mi me gustaria enseñrlas . I would
  like to teach it to the...
• Yolanda A los gringos como dicen. To the
  gringos like is said.
• Ivonne Aha
• Carmen Por qué? Why?
• Ivonne Porque como ellos casi no han vivido
  cosas así como en México co que según los
  fantasmas y todo eso no han vivido. Because they
  have not lived things like in Mexico as if the
  ghosts and all that, they have not lived this.
• Juan Porque aquí los fantasmas se mueren. Porque
  aquí celebran el día de Halloween y allá celebran
  el Día de Muertos y siempre van a la tumba a
  dejarles sus gesturesus a los muertitos.
  Because here ghosts die. Because here they
  celebrate Halloween and there they celebrate Día
  de Muertos and they always go to the grave to
  leave their gesture to the little death people.

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• Ivonne Mi mamá siempre dice que hay que tenerle
  mas miedo a los que estan vivos que a los que
  estan muertos. Porque los que estan muertos no te
  pueden hacer nada. Los vivos si. My mom always
  say that we have to be more scare of those alive
  than those dead. Because those who are dead cant
  do anything to you. Those alive they can do
  something to you.
• Diego Asi dice mi abuela. Que mi abuela no le
  tiene miedo a los muertos nada mas que a los
  vivos. My grandmother says that. That my
  grandmother is not afraid of the death only of
  those alive.
• Carmen Y ustedes piensan que ellos a lo mejor
  tienen sus historias? And dont you think that
  perhaps they have their own stories?
• Francisco Si. Yes.
• Yolanda Mi abuelita tiene muchas cosas así
  porque ella se casó con tres hombres y todos sus
  esposos se murieron y ella My grandmother has
  lots of things like that because she got married
  to three men and all of her husbands died and
  she
• Francisco Asi es la Mariana de la Noche.
  Thats how the Mariana de la Noche is.

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Inquiries into Critical and Culturally Responsive
Pedagogies with/for Pre-Service Teachers in
Puerto Rico
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• Video games, this one was also...I believe
  that...it was video games, the daily routine, how
  she organizes her daily routine.  She has a time
  for this and a time for this other, time to play
  either outside or inside the house, how they
  study, how the kids go to school.  Then like it
  is true inquiring about the popular culture when
  I finalized the funds of knowledge () the theme
  of video games, automobiles, car repairing all
  of this is connected too to the kid who watches
  video games about cars.  Like all the images no,
  those literacies are also all the time in the
  home like at the end of the assignment I realized
  that everything is weaving like the popular
  culture to the literacy practices that they have
  in the home because basically the books they read
  are from the internet they also have to read
  magazines that have something to do with the
  video games, how to move from one level to the
  next one or things like that.  

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• ... I thought that literacy had to do only with
  letters... (Ivonne, written reflection April,
  2008)
• ...like how popular culture influences, because
  today to send text messages many times it is done
  using codes and not through sentences and many
  times the children ( ) write a, write something
  and they begin to write for example a letter with
  codes and they tend to omit what makes a complete
  sentence, the verbs, everything that makes up a
  sentence, they tend to omit it.  Like that
  popular culture, the present, influences in
  everyday life including education. (Focus group
  I)

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• ...because you know that the idea exists that if
  you allow the kids to write like in Messenger,
  they will continue to write everything like in
  Messenger.  That was a bit of the concern that
  you brought, that later when they have to write a
  letter eh...
• /(overlappping speech inaudible)/
• /that's a valid concern/
• /they wouldn't have the format/
• /they wouldn't be able to write in the
  conventional way/
• /but professor/
• that is a valid concern because if I, you know, I
  allow my students to write all the time that way,
  then if I ( ) I am going to be worried if later
  in a task I asked them, like, look, write
  something for me, they will write for me that
  way.  I'm going to be worried because then they
  don't know how to change to what you say to an
  addressee.
• Aha
• then what is the then how do you get here to a to
  a happy medium 

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• /I believe/
•  
•  /If you want to call it that /
•  
•  I believe that, that when you are chatting it's
   something you do in leisure time.  While they
  are in school you are not always writing
  everything, if it is the case that we use the
  chalkboard, you don't write, you abbreviate
  things.  What I'm saying is that for me, for
  example, I was always told in school not to
  abbreviate anything
• and /me/
•  
• Like I sometimes say that it is possible that
  affects you when you are writing composing an
  essay but to get to the point of changing
  conventional writing for signs and abbreviations
  I'm not really in agreement with that.