Experiencing Transnationalism: Engaging Young-Adult Students in Academic Literacy Practices.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Salvadoran students in an alternative high school in Washington, D.C. engaged in communication, economic, and literacy practices with individuals and institutions from their countries of origin, to leverage various resources of importance to their overall sense of well-being. Employing select qualitative methods, I focus on how my research participants interpreted their past and present realities in terms of the above transnational practices to engage classroom based literacy activities. For more than a decade, young people and their families have migrated from Latin American countries at unprecedented levels and over time experienced depressed educational outcomes in the United States. With these shifting demographic trends and the compromised state of education for so many Latino students (immigrant and U.S. born) as a backdrop, this research considers how teachers and students enact transnational classroom contexts and engage youth in literacy activities. Whereas past research has examined the inter-connections between students’ lived experiences and school-based activity, and other work has offered theoretical and empirical insights into the meanings of transnationalism in the day-to-day lives of individuals and communities, few studies have examined the meaning of transnational experiences in the literacy activities of young adult students. In the chapters that follow, I analyze how my research participants experienced transnationalism, interpreted these experiences through transnational frameworks, and then drew from these frameworks to engage reading and writing activities. In addition, I offer a detailed presentation of how the local and national contexts of these students’ lives (in the United States and El Salvador) were influenced by various transnational forces over time. Overall, I found that classroom-based transnational practices were engaging for these students and that they demonstrated analytical thought regarding their school texts and other lived experiences. I also found that these processes of engagement were not monolithic and occurred along a continuum. Thus, working to cultivate classroom contexts by building upon the social context of students’ lives, in this case, a transnational context is one important facet of engaging learning environments with implications for shifting educational outcomes for Latino students and other youth with similar life experiences.