Our Theoretical Framework

     Our theoretical framework was built on a body of research in the field of language and literacy learning that examines how educational practices support young people to create written and multimodal narratives on migration that draw from their experiences and transnational perspectives. A significant theme from the literature is how youth from immigrant backgrounds tell stories that portray the spatiality and temporality of their border-spanning identities. In documenting their physical and sometimes imaginary travels across countries, the youths’ narratives disrupt the linearity of time and space, layering past memories on present experiences, and in so doing create new interpretations of their migration experiences (Abril-Gonzalez, 2020; Dutro & Haberl, 2018; Sepúlveda, 2011). Youths’ stories of familial bonds and tracing or remembering their lives and movements across countries serve to create social and cultural connections in their own identities, while making visible the knowledge they derive from diverse places and communities (Linares, 2021; Sanchez, 2007; Machado & Hartman, 2021; Kwon et al., 2019). These border-crossing stories surface multiple forms of connections (e.g., family ties and migration journey across multiple countries; transnational media and popular culture; attachments to land and locations), and implicit or explicit references to global inequality that the classroom community can mobilize to question and challenge dominant ideologies of meritocracy, assimilation, and linear pathway of migration (Ghiso & Campano, 2013), as well as discrimination, stereotypes, and cultural marginalization of racialized migrants (Gonzalez & Ybarra, 2020).

     The above studies speak to Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of borderlands as physical and metaphorical movements across socially constructed and militarized borders that dehumanize, oppress, and divide people from one another (Anzaldúa, 1998). Using multiple languages and imageries in her writings, Anzaldúa enacts and theorizes storytelling as an art through which border-crossers (nepantleras) merge and connect their multiple lineages across time and space to disrupt “colonialist notions of racial difference, exclusionary boundaries, and binaries (such as other-insider)” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 73). The power to shift, as Anzaldúa argues, to move across geographical and social positions, is a creative force for developing new ways of seeing and understanding oneself and others.

     Our theoretical framework for this curriculum is informed by Anzaldúa’s work and the aforementioned studies to consider how acts of movement across geographical, temporal, and political contexts in storytelling can support youth to draw from their cultural and transnational funds of knowledge (Compton-Lilly et al., 2019) and create new perspectives for understanding migration as a societal and global phenomenon.

     Additionally, we draw from our previous work that theorizes spatiotemporal scales in the narratives that youth told about migration and immigration policies (Lam et al., 2021; Lam & Christiansen, 2022). In a study of video documentaries in a high-school classroom (Lam et al., 2021), we analyzed how students used linguistic and visual resources to represent and contextualize their family’s experience and relate it to policy practices at multiple scales to challenge deportation-based immigration practices. In our present work on analyzing the Migration Storytelling curriculum, we consider how thinking about scales in storytelling allows us to make different contexts visible and create understandings of them (e.g., an understanding of transnational family), and put them in relation to other contexts. By thinking analytically about scale in our classroom curriculum design and research, we can intentionally create space for certain contexts to surface and appear (e.g., students’ family and cultural ties across countries and across geographical regions in the U.S.; societal conditions and immigration policies in different countries).