Our contemporary world is increasingly characterized by transnational lives and cross-border connections that span various facets of human life. In light of these developments, schooling needs to be cognizant of shifts in sociocultural, political, economic, and other aspects of life. Schools are expected to prepare students for success and life in the future. Such preparation cannot be oblivious of how forces of globalization, such as increased intercultural contact, continue to contour our daily life. One area where diversity is becoming the norm is the classroom. How might a classroom serve as a space that prepares students for life in a changing and diverse world? What are some resources that could enhance classroom-based teaching and learning?
The aim of this study was threefold. Firstly, it sought to respond to calls (see Agar, 1994; Bauman, 1998; Blommaert, 2010; Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Canagarajah, 2013; Fairclough, 2006; Morrell, 2008; Scollon & Scollon, 2004; Sharifian & Jamarani, 2013) for investigating literacy in contexts characterized by diversity and mobility by spotlighting stories about selves and places that are often marginalized. Secondly, it sought to explore how students’ out-of-classroom experiences serve as rich resources in class-based intercultural literacy activities across geospatial difference. Thirdly, this study attempted to investigate how implicit and explicit sociocultural practices intersect with meaning sharing, seen through language use by students who took part in the Alaska-Kenya, asynchronous, classroom-based, online, intercultural collaboration.
This collaboration which was based on a writing exchange between middle school students in two seemingly different contexts (Nairobi, Kenya; and Aleknagik, Alaska), exemplifies classroom interactions where meaning sharing and meaning making traverse geospatial and cultural boundaries. Students addressed issues that mattered deeply to them by using digital tools, and tapping into their experiences and cultural epistemologies. They took up various roles; ambassadors of self and place, narrators, inquirers, observers, critics, cultural practitioners, and as authentic audience members for each other. Through the concept of supralocalization, this study accounts for how they engaged in pragmatic, audience-oriented strategies.
Notably, the selves and places represented by the students in their online exchange are variously marginalized. On the one hand, the Aleknagik students are Yup’ik and like other Alaskan Natives, their traditional practices are silenced and abnormalized in an Alaskan context characterized by intruding western practices (Ayunerak et al., 2014; Bates & Oleksa, 2008; Oleksa, 2006). On the other hand, the Kenyan students inhabit the cosmopolitan, multiethnic, multicultural city of Nairobi yet, their ways of speaking and out-of-class experiences are peripheralized in classroom spaces. Moreover, Kenyan experiences are peripheralized on a global scale as emanating from a third-world country (McLaren, 1998; Thiong’o, 1986/1991). Further, Alaska-Kenya intercultural interactions were complicated by locally-specific meanings that were not always taken up by a beyond-local interlocutor (that is, frame clashes (Agar, 1994)), and by presuppositions that students brought to those interactions (Gumperz, 1986). This present study, which relies on Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural learning theories and utilizes ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1972), explored these disconnects in communication through a geosemiotic discourse analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) of archival data and post project reflection data.
The study spotlighted the role of education in a pluralistic world by considering complexities of communicating across cultural and geospatial difference, and by making visible communicative strategies. It also exemplified an immersive, student-centered, inclusive-classroom model (Goswami, 1986) that offers opportunities for meaning sharing across difference. It is ironic that in a highly connected world, projects that emphasize connections between people in Kenya and Alaska are rare. Findings from this study have implications for pedagogy, resourcing classrooms, and for extending understandings of transcultural literacy practices in our contemporary globalizing world.