Writing Toward a Decolonial Option: A Bilingual Student’s Multimodal Composing as a Site of Translingual Activism and Justice

• Published in: Written communication 2023-01, Vol.40 (1), p.59-89
• Main Author: Lee, Eunjeong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Activism; Bilingual Students; Bilingualism; Classrooms; Code Switching (Language); College Students; Colonialism; Decolonization; Ethnography; Hispanic American Students; Justice; Language Usage; Latin American cultural groups; Learning Modalities; Literacy; Multimodality; Racialization; Racism; Social Bias; Social Justice; Sociolinguistics; Student Experience; Student writing; Writing (Composition)
• ISSN: 0741-0883; 1552-8472
• DOI: 10.1177/07410883221134640

Drawing on discussions of (de)coloniality and translanguaging, this article reports findings from a classroom-based ethnographic study, focusing on how a self-identified Latina bilingual student resists colonial constructs of language and literacies in her multimodal project. Based on an analysis of the student’s multimodal composition, other classroom writings, and a semistructured interview, I examine how she creatively and critically draws on her entire language and literacy repertoire in her multimodal composing. More specifically, I demonstrate how she draws from and builds on her lived experiences of linguistic injustices and racialization and transforms such experiences into embodied knowledge making and sharing through her multimodal composing. I argue that students’ engagement with multimodality can and should be cultivated, sustained, and amplified as a site of translingual activism and justice with decolonial potential, and I suggest, further, that such a shift requires a change in approaching, reading, and valuing students’ multimodal meaning making.