The Multimodal Making of a Nonperson: Marking and Marginalizing English Learners in Peer Interactions
Abstract:
Though educators and researchers of various stripes have long recognized that English learners’ experiences in schools are inequitable in many ways, relatively few studies have examined the very practices whereby inequity is built from the ground up in ELs’ school-time interactions. In this presentation, I use an ethnographically informed approach to multimodal discourse analysis to show how Saul and Alvaro, two Latino English learners in a racially and linguistically diverse second-grade classroom in California, were routinely rendered either invisible or hypervisible in academic and social interactions with their peers. Throughout the school year, more than half of Alvaro’s and Saul’s peers pushed the two boys into marginal spaces and marked identity categories through an array of interactional practices. I will focus particularly on two covert practices—over-helping and silencing—in order to foreground the sometimes subtle yet still impactful verbal and embodied actions that helped peers position Saul and Alvaro as linguistically, interactionally, and intellectually deficient Others. I discuss implications for researchers and educators, emphasizing that particularly in the current sociopolitical climate of legitimized violence against minoritized groups across the globe, it is critical that we understand the social and interactional practices whereby Othering is accomplished if we are to create the inclusive educational spaces sorely needed by students and society.
Bio:
Meghan Corella is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at UBC. Her research focuses on how relations of power are reinforced and reconfigured through everyday interactions among children, with a particular focus on young children from linguistically, racially, and culturally minoritized groups.