Supporting Multilingual Students’ Agency and Identities Through Equity-Oriented, Critical Consciousness, and Community-Focused Multiliteracies

This chapter presents a practitioner's reflection on ways to engage multilingual students with multiple literacies in college classrooms. Due to the changes in people’s lives and work in the twenty-first century brought about by the rapid development of technology and travel, the idea of multiliteracies is especially relevant to educators today in order to prepare students to use linguistic, digital, and other kinds of literacy in different educational and professional contexts (Sang, Journal of Education and Practice 8:16–19, 2017). Another imperative of current multilingual pedagogy is to further support and to develop multilingual students’ agency and identities to face and to address the social, racial, and other complexities of today’s world. In this chapter, I overview the theoretical underpinnings of multiliteracies (Gee, Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning, Cambridge University Press, 2004; New London Group, Harvard Educational Review 66:60–92, 1996), critical pedagogy, as proposed by Paulo Freire, and a few other related theoretical frameworks and present several assignments used with multilingual students in US college settings to highlight the value of a pedagogy grounded in equity-oriented multiliteracies in supporting multilingual students’ agency and identity development. The first series of assignments is situated within an art museum and the use of students’ home cultures and languages, while the second represents a community outreach project with the use of drama. The chapter ends with ideas and reflections on the use of similar projects with prospective language teachers, which can encourage this group of students to use multiliteracies and service assignments with their own students.