Literacy and Identity Development of Indigenous Rukai Children

This study examines the development of literacy and identity for young Indigenous Taiwanese children using ethnographic methods and the theories of multiple literacies, Indigenous knowledge, and identity construction, and it provides insights into the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge and literacies to create hybrid literacy spaces. Focused-upon participants included four 6-year-old Rukai-tribe children—two who lived in a city and two who lived in a village—and their families and teachers. We found that all children learned literacies in culturally meaningful contexts that involved stories and hybrid literacy practices, Indigenous foods, religious activities, traditional life skills, Indigenous language, and multiple forms of text. The two city children developed Rukai knowledge and literacies through performance-based contexts, whereas the village children learned through authentic contexts (e.g., observing farming and hunting). The literacy and identity of the two city children may be undermined due to limited access to Rukai resources, stemming from racism, classism, and linguicism.

Hybrid Literacy and Its Implementation: Challenges and Opportunities

This study aims to illustrate the challenges and opportunities of implementing hybrid literacy at Junior High School level in Surabaya. Drawing from amalgamation of interviews with ten teachers who are responsible and concerned with the literacy programme in their schools, classroom observations and documents analysis, the findings indicate that the potential implementation of hybrid literacy within the schools in Surabaya tend to be disrupted by several aspects, all of which are surrounding social and cultural aspect. Social aspect such as students’ social condition and school facilities are being the principal challenges in implementing hybrid literacy, whilst cultural aspect such as the school orientation to a particular type of literacy is also prominent to inhibit the implementation of hybrid literacy practices. This study, to some extent, is able to portray the dynamic challenges of hybrid literacy application in the school literacy programmes within the city as well as the potential sources which positively help facilitate the implementation of the future literacy programme, hybrid literacy. Although this study can be used as a reflection of the actor’s lens involved in the literacy programme in Surabaya, the data is limited to three schools. The future study, therefore, should anticipate involving more schools and participants (teachers and students) to get richer data findings in regard with the challenges and opportunities of the implementation of the programme. Keywords: Hybrid Literacy, implementation, challenges, opportunity

TV-school hybrid literacy practices as sites for making another logic possible: voicing contrasts that promote gender and sexuality trans-experiences

Considering the relationship between media and sense-making in Brazil, the purpose of this article is to examine an interventionist collaborative ethnography in a specific literacy context – history classes in a Brazilian state school, in which the classroom teacher, two researchers, and 5th grade students conjointly try to decenter commonsense views of gender and sexuality. By making ample recourse to media texts and to radical hybridity, they work towards promoting classroom literacy practices which “de-ground” certainties by shaking them through border-crossing (Mignolo 2000) and triggering the negotiation of new perspectives for social life. By dramatizing cemented social voices and engaging in what we have termed trans-experiences, participants show that social matrices and solidified meanings do not simply impose themselves on individuals but live through microsociological encounters. This movement is made visible through a microanalytical approach that, capturing tenuous voicing contrasts indexed by register use, reveals a delicate, but significant, performative flux.

Polylingual and polycultural learning ecologies: Mediating emergent academic literacies for dual language learners

In this article, we examine the affordances of polylingual and polycultural learning ecologies in expanding the linguistic repertoires of children, particularly young Dual Language Learners. In contrast to settings that promote the development of English and academic language at the expense of maintaining and developing home language, we argue that the social organization of learning should privilege participation in dynamic, hybrid literacy practices. Children are often more likely to experiment with English and academic genres, while also taking on powerful identities as learners and language users, when formal and informal modes of communication are leveraged, multimodality and language-crossing encouraged and the use of both home and academic vernaculars promoted within a context that values social relationships and the playful imagination. We argue that children’s literacy practices develop in particular social and ‘located’ relationships, and we examine one such after-school setting designed with these principles in mind, the long-standing UC Links/Las Redes partnership, where home languages and intercultural experiences are unmarked and necessarily integral to participating in the shared practices of the community. We highlight the affordance of one common practice of the community, children s communication with the mythical cyber wizard, El Maga (sic), and the ways this practice strategically draws on students full linguistic toolkits in order to invite them to integrate modes and genres of communication that challenge the divide between everyday and school-based literacies, stretching children beyond their current levels of literacy development.