Search

This online ethnographic study illuminates how Korean immigrant mothers of children with disabilities use their capitals to communicate, build community, and share resources in an online space. Employing the construct of community cultural wealth (CCW), we analyzed posts and comments by the mothers in an online forum on a transnational website. Findings revealed that the mothers actively (1) leverage their linguistic capital for sharing information and experience; (2) support each other through building a social network; and (3) cultivate aspirational capital through sharing feelings and empathy. This study counters the deficit-oriented paradigm on immigrant mothers of children with disabilities and reframes mothers as advocates who build community to collaboratively navigate their parenting journeys. This study also calls attention to the transnational network of capitals that immigrant mothers collaboratively build and encourages researchers and professionals to inquire into ways to better support immigrant mothers and their children.

Siblings play crucial roles in each other's cognitive and language development because they observe, imitate, and receive guidance and support from each other during their interactions. In this research, we examined trilingual siblings (ages 6 and 9) from an immigrant family with a rarely explored cultural background (American-born children of Korean Chinese parents) and their multilingual interactions with a researcher. Employing cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and Vygotsky's notion of mediation (Vygotsky, 1978), we particularly focused on the roles that the older multilingual sibling took on during interactions and what mediations of meaning-making took place that created learning opportunities. Our analysis was based on the interaction data between the siblings. Findings revealed that the older sibling played a unique role as a linguistic and cultural mediator, assisting meaning-maintaining processes in multilingual interactions by providing interlingual and intralingual interpretation and transferring linguistic and cultural knowledge. Given the current educational landscape that prioritizes learning English, and the complexities of maintaining three languages for trilingual children, this study adds to the literature highlighting the unique roles multilingual children can play in expanding others' languages, literacies, and cultures, as well as facilitating multilingual communicative events.

A transnational turn on language and literacy urges increased attention on the flexible languaging practices of immigrant children who cross the boundaries of languages, cultures, nations, and beyond. This study examines how immigrant children and parents from transnational immigrant families engaged in translanguaging in museums during their temporal visits to their parental homeland, South Korea. Audio recordings of parent-child interactions, fieldnotes from six different museums, and artifacts and documents relevant to the visits were collected as part of a larger multi-sited ethnographic study. The findings illuminate the Korean immigrant parents' extensive knowledge of their history and culture, as well as their unique ways of engaging their children in meaning-making processes utilizing their multilingual repertoires and multimodal tools. The study also highlights the children's active agency in learning about their heritage by making full use of their communicative repertoires in a strategic manner. Through the concerted efforts of parent-child translanguaging, the children were able to engage in transformative learning opportunities that bridged multiple generations and extended transnational connections. Results from the study show the importance of creating a space that allows immigrant children to engage in translanguaging practices that are transnational knowledge-rich and multimodal tool-supported.

Immigrant youth accumulate expansive linguistic, cultural, and experiential knowledge through their border-crossing experiences. These transnational funds of knowledge accompany immigrant youth as they enter various literacy development contexts, including community-based heritage language (HL) schools. This ethnographic case study focuses on a 15-year-old Korean American female student and the ways she sustains her HL by maintaining her transnational connections. This study also highlights how the focal youth passes down her multilingual and transnational expertise to younger generations by fostering the children's HL literacy and teaching them culture through her transnational experiences. The study demonstrates the importance of recognizing immigrant youth's transnational experiences as curricular resources and creating opportunities for them to mentor and teach young children as youth-educators. Additionally, this study shows that youth should be involved in designing culturally sustaining HL curriculum to help support the HL and literacy learning of children and youth from immigrant families.

Despite the increasing body of scholarship on multilingual children, little insight has been provided about what researchers need to consider when documenting and exploring young children's multilingual experiences. In this essay, I engage in a reflective account of designing and employing child-centered interview activities (i.e., drawing, mind mapping, and self-portraits) and discuss opportunities, dilemmas, and challenges I encountered during the process. More specifically, I emphasize three actions that researchers, in and outside of the education research community, need to take in order to make research "with" multilingual children more child-centered and linguistically responsive: (1) positioning children as multilingual and transnational experts; (2) building on children's multilingual repertoires; and (3) valuing multiple means of expression and centering children's agency. This article makes a meaningful contribution to the field of education by discussing ways to centralize young children's voices and experiences.

This paper explores how immersion and engagement with different cultures in the home environment impacts Korean children's intercultural learning. More specific attention is given to the experience of nine Korean children whose families have voluntarily served as homestay host families and hosted foreign guests for more than seven years. This qualitative inquiry is drawn from data including participant observations, semi-structured interviews with children and their parents, and the collection of artefacts and documents. Four themes were identified regarding the impact of homestay hosting experiences on the focal children: (1) experiencing intercultural encounters in the home environment; (2) building close, long-lasting intercultural relationships; (3) recognising preconceived prejudices and undoing cultural stereotypes; and (4) challenging a singular and oversimplified representation of cultures. Given the modern, global context in which children engage in frequent contacts with individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, the findings demonstrate the necessity of fostering intercultural learning among school-aged children and suggest homestay programmes are a potential means for developing students' intercultural learning in a local context.

This multi-sited ethnographic case study documents a second-generation Korean immigrant child who engages in regular border-crossing experiences between the U.S. and South Korea, his father's country of origin. Pairing a transnationalism framework with the concept of funds of knowledge, this study examined how border-crossing experiences and transnational engagement shapes the focal immigrant child's funds of knowledge and what he does with his transnational funds of knowledge. With the illustrative examples gathered across cultural boundaries and geographic borders, I discuss how transnational mobility constructed and expanded the focal child's depth of historical knowledge and the ways he transmits and mobilizes his historical knowledge beyond local-global spaces through transcultural play. This article emphasizes the need to create an educational space that makes immigrant children's agency in learning and transnational resources more visible. Furthermore, it offers new guidelines for documenting the connectivity and flow of young immigrant children's knowledge and experiences in the context of transnational migration.

About six months ago, I came across a news article featuring a poem that a seven-year-old had creatively composed on his remote learning experience during the time of isolation (Dailydot.com, [...]

Employing a multisited ethnographic stance, this study examined second-generation Korean immigrant children who sustain linkages with their parental homelands to better understand how transnationalism shapes their language and literacy practices by documenting their experiences in and across multiple spaces in North Carolina, the United States, and Seoul, South Korea. Findings suggest that the circulation of care, or the multidirectional and reciprocal exchange of support and care, functioned at the center of the children's multilingual and transnational lives. The children actively engaged in language and literacy interactions through which they forged and extended meaningful ties with their parental homelands and strengthened intergenerational relationships. This study challenges the binary and fixed notions of home/host countries and highlights the need for longitudinal, multisited research on immigrant children's transnational journeys with careful attention to the mobility of their language and literacy across generations and countries.

The study reported in this paper focuses on the narratives of six adult Third Culture Kids (TCKs) who lived in multiple countries during developmental years. It explores their childhood experiences with mobility and the impact that multiple shifts in location, culture, and language have had on their adult lives. The results indicate that they come to terms with their identities, which are closely connected to multiple cultures and countries. Participants reported a desire to maintain nomadic lives, which may have been impacted by the multilingual competence and nuanced cultural understanding they gained through mobile upbringings. They also commonly expressed a desire to build social relationships with other individuals with migrant backgrounds. The results demonstrate the necessity of supporting the growing community of TCKs in maximizing the potential benefits of cross-cultural experiences while helping them navigate the challenges of identity, transition, and relocation.

Drawing on the concept of transnational funds of knowledge, this article examines how a Cantonese-English emergent bilingual engaged in an after-school literacy program that centered on Latinx experiences and Spanish-language resources. Through analysis of classroom observations, informal conversations with the focal student (Erica) and her peers, and student-created artifacts, we argue that a linguistically responsive curriculum enabled Erica to surface transnational knowledges, expand available bilingual identities, and mobilize her multilingual awareness to teach others. Our findings have implications for honoring transnational histories and bilingualism within the constraints of English-medium instruction and beyond bounded notions of cultural relevance.

The primary focus of this paper is twofold: to demarcate the epistemic erasure of societal knowledge and narratives of Asian Americans as braided with other forms of anti‐Asian racism by tracing its historical roots in orientalism, colonialism, and imperialism; and to redress such erasure by foregrounding transnational perspectives and Asian American Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit). By attending to historical and ongoing experiences of migration and racialization, this paper highlights the transculturality of Asian American histories, epistemologies, and communities, along with the multi‐stranded connections that they share with diasporic Asians in other countries. It expands the dominant framing of racialized minorities in the United States that indexes and limits their experiences within the geopolitical boundaries of the nation‐state. By situating Asian Americans within critical historical and transnational contexts, this paper generates a fuller and more complex understanding of the past and present conditions of Asian Americans and anti‐Asian racism. It also deliberately highlights the agency of Asian American youth and their strategies in contesting anti‐Asian racism in schools and society at large. By amplifying Asian American youth voices and agency, this paper not only affirms their wealth of transnational funds of knowledge but also offers crucial interventions challenging the curricular violence that continues to marginalize and misrepresent Asian Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a myriad of linguistic and cultural barriers, immigrant parents of children with disabilities in the United States have adopted a variety of advocacy strategies. Drawing upon the frameworks of Community Cultural Wealth and Ecological Systems Theory, this study explores how Korean immigrant mothers of children with disabilities advocate for their children within the special education system in the United States. Seven Korean immigrant mothers participated in semi-structured focus group interviews. The findings reveal that these mothers use various strategies, such as seeking resources, attending training, and engaging with support networks within the Korean immigrant community. They also proactively acquired knowledge of special education policies and sought assistance from legal advocacy groups. However, they face challenges in accessing information due to linguistic barriers and a lack of clear descriptions of their children's rights and available services. They also identified that their intersecting racial, ethnic, cultural, and gender identities contribute to their experiences of discrimination and disadvantage. The study underscores the importance of providing tailored information, enhancing community support, and addressing systemic barriers to empower immigrant mothers within the special education system. Implications for schools, school psychologists, and families are discussed, along with recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study investigates immigrant mothers' beliefs and practices toward supporting maintenance of their children's heritage language (HL) in the context of transnationalism. The data are primarily drawn from formal and informal interviews and observations of six mothers who immigrated to the United States from Japan and Korea. The findings demonstrate that the immigrant mothers view their children's HL maintenance as a bridge that connects intergenerational families across countries, and as a positive asset that will open up academic and career opportunities for their children in the future. Nevertheless, challenges in maintaining a balance between HL and English were noted. The participants shared three transnational strategies to support HL maintenance, including (1) use of transnational media to teach cultural knowledge and to motivate HL learning, (2) frequent visits to home countries for children to participate in public schooling, and (3) using print and literacy resources in HL that were imported from their home countries. This study calls greater attention to immigrant mothers' transnational knowledge and networks as valuable resources for their children's HL learning. The findings also demonstrate the necessity of examining immigrant children's language learning experiences that traverse across geographical boundaries.