Abstract
This exploratory case study investigated how 15 third-grade children from disenfranchised backgrounds revealed their practices, beliefs, and identities surrounding stories, language, and literacies throughout a 10-week afterschool storying project. During this project, translingual children explored diverse picturebooks and composed numerous personal stories in a Story Studio, drawing on their rich linguistic resources and utilizing a variety of verbal and visual modes. They subsequently chose one of their stories to be included in a jointly created, professionally published picturebook and spent time further editing, revising, and illustrating it for publication. I utilized qualitative methods to explore the Story Studio children’s translingual and transmodal interactions across data that included audio recordings, field notes, child-created artifacts, and parent-completed questionnaires.
A multidimensional approach grounded in humanizing and culturally sustaining pedagogies, critical literacies, and socioecological theories and coupled with inductive, constant comparative analytic methods provided detailed insights into the multiplexity and fluidity of children’s storying, languaging, and literacy practices and positionings, with findings indicating they were constantly negotiating (a) whose stories mattered, (b) whose languaging mattered, and (c) whose literacies mattered. Ultimately, all negotiations materialized as one common underlying theme: negotiating who mattered. The findings from this study contribute to the field of literacy learning by (a) elucidating the significance of pluralistic, dynamic, additive approaches to storying, languaging, and doing literacy as well as the sobering consequences of singular, prescriptivist, deficit approaches; (b) showcasing multiple counternarratives about children who have been historically and systematically marginalized; (c) highlighting implications for picturebook publishers, practitioners, and teacher educators surrounding interactions, activities, and approaches that appear to support children, both emotionally and academically; and (d) suggesting future directions for research and practice.