Victor Lozada, Texas Woman's University and Denton ISD, Denton, TX, USA

I was shopping in the produce section of the grocery store the other day to make a fruit salad. When I got home, I noticed the different places that the fruit came from: the grapes from Argentina, the blueberries from Mexico, the oranges from south Texas, the kiwi from Chile, the bananas from Honduras and realized that my fruit came from similar places as my students. In this article, I will explore technology, student identity, and the racialized ways that language can be produced.

Collecting the Fruit - What Technology Works?

I don’t know about you, but my students are from all over the world, yet we come together in community, whether that be in-person or virtually, in a localized context. Specifically, I teach at a Spanish/English two-way dual language campus that includes children with other linguistic repertoires beyond that. We are a glocalized community much like the produce section of a grocery store. While my fruit salad came from all Spanish-speaking countries, our students are not that simple. Our students come from all over the world with a wide variety of linguistic repertoires and affordances. Technology allows us to interact with them in new and exciting ways.

There are a lot of educational communication apps out there, but I will focus on Seesaw and Zoom as these two are the ones with which I have had the most experience. It has been fun to see how my students can interact with me on Seesaw. Seesaw is an educational app in which students connect with each other and the teacher to complete assignments multimodally. Most assignments that I posted during the pandemic were text based assignments in which students matched responses with a word bank; however, the responses that I received were very different from what I asked for. Many students recorded audio, typed responses, or created a video to respond to the assignments. Each of these modes of response had different affordances, or advantages, that allowed students to express their ideas uniquely (Kress, 2010).

The flexibility of the Seesaw app allowed for each of my students to respond to an assignment in the way that allowed them to communicate best. For some of them, it was through the expected response of either writing or typing words to match with pictures in identifying instruments that we had studied. For some this was not enough. They used their linguistic repertoires to add textual context through commenting on their work (Seesaw allows users to translate on the spot as well), used color to show a more nuanced understand of the typology of the instruments, created audio responses (mostly with a still image) that described their work, and created video responses that showed their facial expressions and gestures. Even though we all came from different places, in our one localized education space, we used the affordances offered by technology to respond to information in a way that would bring us together.

Zoom also has the ability to bring us together. Most of my students loved the opportunities for communication that Zoom offered through a variety of modalities that students could choose to use. When most people see Zoom, they think of the opening credits of the television show The Brady Bunch in which there are individual screens of people shown on either a computer or telephone screen. This is not always the case. Users can keep their video or audio off and have a variety of modes in which they can participate. The chat feature allows users whose linguistic repertoire may not include the ability to quickly produce the language of discourse to translate their thoughts on another website and paste their responses in the language of discourse. These affordances and flexibility with Zoom allows for deeper connection with students on many different levels. Each student can maintain their individuality while creating a glocalized space that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Peeling the Fruit - Student Identity

As shown above, technology offers many affordances that allow students to maintain their individuality while creating an environment in which the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Students have new ways of expressing their identity in these glocalized contexts.

When students come together in community, whether that be in-person or virtually, they are able to explore who they are. Using the Seesaw app, many students that would not participate at high levels in an in-person classroom setting would sometimes leave extended video responses about their work. They could express themselves in ways they never before could. I could see each student’s identity be expressed more fully within this context. These expressions of self were not limited to the language of discourse but would often include a variety of linguistic repertoires.

García and Wei (2014) talk about developing a plurilingual society in which individuals use their linguistic repertoires in a variety of ways for distinct purposes. Giving students the space to explore their linguistic repertoires presents students with the opportunity to develop their identity. Both apps mentioned above allow students to communicate at a group and individual level in which students that share portions of their linguistic repertoires can interact through those shared spaces. When students intermingle in this fashion, we hope that they not only grow and develop into better versions of themselves but also maintain their unique identities.

Mixing the Fruit Together - Keeping Individuality in a Glocalized Context

When we come together in these glocalized spaces, the metaphor of a melting pot has been used. I don’t think that is the best one. Going back to the fruit salad that I was making, I collected all types of fruit from a variety of places, I peeled the fruit to see the sweet, juicy centers, but when I mixed it together, did the fruit lose its essence? No. Each fruit maintained its individuality but came together to be something greater than the sum of its parts. This is what I hope for our students.

These glocalized spaces can create a conflict of ideas. We have seen this acted out in the protests around the United States. Coming together into a plurilingual society (García & Wei, 2014) means that we need to maintain our individuality AND create something that is bigger and better than the sum of its parts. Fighting against the racialized ways in which language can be used should be our goal. This is abolitionist or antiracist teaching.

Love (2020) defines abolitionist teaching as “the practice of working in solidarity with communities of color while drawing on the imagination, creativity, refusal, (re)membering, visionary thinking, healing, rebellious spirit, boldness, determination, and subversiveness of abolitionists to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools” (p. 2). Abolitionist teaching is calling out injustice wherever one might see it. In being teachers that advocate for bilingual and multilingual students, we do this everyday; however, we must remember to keep these ideals at the forefront of our teaching and our students minds. We do this because, sometimes, as our students converse with and in dominant groups, they may “allow the benefits of the dominant class to domesticate themselves, or, as in some cases, turn them into little oppressors,” (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 128) which goes against the ideals of a plurilingual society. Students must maintain their identities in order to make our society a better place.

Enjoying the Finished Product

We teachers often look at and talk about the negative aspects of being forced into this digital world; however, I hope that in exploring these ideas, new spaces opened up for you and your students to use technology as a way to help students form their identity and advocate for an antiracist curriculum. I wonder how these changes in technology will afford us the opportunity to create multimodal and multilingual experiences for our students to express their identity and be more inclusive.

Try the following things to help move you forward:

1. Pick an app and explore it with your students. These can be great tools for multimodal and multilingual expression no matter the mode of instruction.
2. Give students the opportunity to use technology to express themselves and SHARE it. Find a way to digitally display your students’ work such as Seesaw’s blog function or a website to display student work.
3. When students share their expressions, allow the other students to comment. Teach the students how to be respectful in an online environment.

References

Freire, P. & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Bergin & Garvey.

García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism, and education. Palgrave Macmillan.

Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge.

Love, B. L. (2020). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press.