Acceso usuarios
Harini Rajagopal
Sharing multimodal creations of four young racialized multilingual learners from a year-long education design research project, this paper argues that remixing and repurposing are decolonizing practices through which marginalized children create countertexts. Anh, Jordan, Sarah, and Kimi – children categorized as English language learners (ELLs) in a Grade 2/3 Western Canadian classroom – expertly designed countertexts using popular and digital culture, remixed drawings, and storied responses to mentor texts and classroom activities. Framed by perspectives of multiliteracies and culturally sustaining pedagogies, these remixed countertexts highlight non-dominant perspectives and bring young children’s diverse knowledges into the official space of the classroom.Thematic and visual analysis of the children’s oral, written, and visual countertext data highlights languages and literacies as relational practices; remixing as a creative composing process for emergent bilinguals; and remixed countertexts’ potential for supporting decolonial and antiracist reimaginations of emergent bilinguals’ participation and achievement. While individual and original productions are often most valued within Western educational systems, the creative processes that accompany borrowing, copying, and remixing in countertexts can transform language, texts, and practices as they are flexibly re-purposed and re-sourced. A critical appreciation of remixed countertexts encourages educators to resist normative and narrow conceptions of literacy, consider White middle-class subtexts, challenge colonial ideas of composition, and design collaborative, decolonizing, and antiracist pedagogies.
