This study explores how young children use literacy and numeracy in play as they represent themselves in their multilingual worlds. Education policies continue to rely on constricted definitions of achievement and monolingual norms, narrowing the kinds of learning experiences available in schools, especially for children living in multilingual and/or low-socio-economic communities. Drawing from a variety of data sources, including field notes, video/audio recordings, photographs, ethnographic interviews, and children’s artifacts, this study examines children’s literacy and numeracy practices in a play-based after-school program. In addition, ethnographic interviews and participant observations were conducted in the children’s classroom and with family members in order to inform understandings of after-school interactions. Analysis of the data revealed how children drew from their translingual resources as they created representations in their play. This included (1) how children collaborated and negotiated decisions about representation, making choices about when and how to collaborate, and shifting and/or combing languages and modes of representation based on intent and awareness of audience; and, (2) how children used spatial understanding and translanguaging to represent themselves within their play and community, sometimes prompting discussions surrounding mathematical perspectives and audience. This dissertation concludes by discussing how these findings inform theory, hold implications for policy and practice, affect educators’ use of play as a tool for teaching and learning.

This is a study of adolescent Latino students as writers, grappling with the complexities of memoir writing alongside their writing partners. The context is a middle school writers workshop classroom where I simultaneously taught as I conducted research on these new peer and student-teacher writing conferences.

Sociocultural theory provides a framework for understanding how writing conferences are spaces where students and teacher co-construct social and cultural models for writing in a writers workshop. This study is also informed by an interdisciplinary exploration into the significance of relationships in classroom settings. It examines adolescents’ need for belonging and explores the naming and reframing of emergent bilinguals, who are the subjects of this study. In addition, it includes autoethnographic reflections on pedagogical shifts in my teaching, which emerge as I push myself to take risks, allow myself to make mistakes, and in the process, grow to trust my students in writing partnerships and myself as a writing teacher.

Data include verbatim transcriptions of peer and student-teacher writing conferences, corresponding student writing samples, and field notes, all stemming from a memoir writers workshop unit. Following the interpretivist qualitative research model, analytic inductive reasoning yields findings that reflect how Latino adolescents and their teacher authentically engage with each other to shape the conferences over time, transforming both writing processes and writing products.

This ten-month ethnographic study examines how four Latina immigrant mothers and their young children employed literacy practices within and beyond a two-generation program. Two-generation programs generally serve marginalized families by instructing them on school-based language and literacy practices. This study approaches literacy from sociocultural (i.e., what people do with literacy) and multimodal perspectives (i.e., print, visual, oral, media, and online literacies). The study examines a) the kinds of school-based literacy practices--or aspects of them--that mothers took up in out-of-school contexts; b) the kinds of out-of-school-literacy practices--or aspects of them--that mothers brought to the school site; and c) the continuities and discontinuities of literacy practices across contexts. Data was collected through observations, ethnographic interviews, document analysis, and video. Findings reveal that in out-of-school contexts, some of the school-based literacy practices learned at Nuestra Comunidad were replicated, and/or modified, while others were not taken up. The varying ways that mothers took up school-based literacy practices was most often influenced by participants' cultural values related to language and literacy and their purposes or goals for engaging in particular literacy activities. The study also found that when mothers employed out-of-school literacy practices at Nuestra Comunidad they were met with resistance due to conflicting ideologies regarding appropriate language and literacy activities and curricula. Mothers still brought in their out-of-school literacy practices in clandestine manners or had to modify their practices. When focusing on marginalized groups, traditional family literacy research has either a) privileged school-based literacy practices and their replication in the home setting; or b) emphasized the cultural and linguistic wealth of marginalized families' home literacy practices but highlighted the differences between these practices and those employed and valued in school (Auerbach, 1989; Gadsden, 1998, 2001). This study looks beyond the simple replication of literacy practices from school to home and vice versa. Rather, this research provides insight into the rich literacy practices that Latino families engage in throughout the many contexts of their lives by highlighting the complex ways in which literacy practices move across spaces.

This dissertation is a an ethnographic study of Black and Latina/o youth communication at Willow High School, an urban secondary school in a Southern Californian neighborhood I call Tajuata. Drawing on tools from the Ethnography of Communication tradition I explored how Black and Latina/o youth engaged in transcultural communicative activities with one another. That is, I sought to capture the language practices that these youth deployed within and across racial, ethnic, linguistic, and social boundaries in their English Language Arts classrooms. The ways in which these diverse youth used language to communicate are highlighted to consider how sociocultural language and literacy researchers can re-imagine what counts as language for Black and Latina/o youth in urban schooling contexts, and how educators can build on the linguistic virtuosity of these youth in school.

Through the 2010-2011 academic year I observed four English Language Arts courses taught by three different teachers. Through participant observation methods and audio recordings of classroom interactions I documented the linguistic repertoires of Black and Latina/o youth in their English Language Arts classrooms. The following questions guided my study: (1) What are the regularities and variances in the linguistic repertoires of Black and Latina/o youth at Willow High School? (2) How are the linguistic repertoires of Willow High School youth taken up? Are they taken up in ways that expand or constrict their linguistic repertoires? And (3), What language ideologies are explicitly and implicitly indexed through Black and Latina/o youths' communicative activities?

I used ethnographic research tools to understand the everyday communicative practices, or the expanding linguistic repertoires of Black and Latina/o youth in four English Language Arts classrooms at Willow High School. Specifically I drew on the Ethnography of Communication methodological tradition that calls for supplementing traditional ethnographic fieldwork with audio or video recordings of naturally occurring talk of participants. I also drew on Cultural Historical Activity Theoretical (CHAT) perspectives which complement an Ethnography of Communication method, since language is viewed as the premier tool for mediating learning and development.

This study examines how a video game project that focuses on students' lived experiences and cultural practices teach critical literacies and computational thinking. Specifically, this research looked at how the pedagogy, processes, and student products demonstrated culturally relevant pedagogy practices, critical literacy, and computational thinking. This design-based research study utilizes critical literacy, sociocultural learning theory, and culturally relevant pedagogy in the framing, structure, design, and instruction of the class. This study took place in a 10th grade Computer Science elective course in a Los Angeles public high school. Data were collected with: field notes, audio and video recordings, small group interviews, and student-produced artifacts. Data were analyzed using grounded theory and a multimodal social semiotics approach. Findings suggest that locally based, historicized content relevant to students' lives and their communities resonated with them through critical literacy development. Similarly, culturally relevant pedagogies that fostered and nurtured students' choice in the selection of personally meaningful topics while producing a multimodal composition to an authentic audience supported development of voice and agency in their work. Findings also showed the affordances of combining critical literacy and computational thinking in producing a critical computational literacy framework. The research showed students' seamlessly use their computational thinking to design and produce a multimodal serious video game with personally meaningful messages that explicitly pushed against dominant narratives of marginalized populations and their communities.