"What Immigrant Students Can Teach Us About New Media Literacy" (Lam)

"In educational research, the notion of cultural capital has been used to refer to the skills and dispositions of children of middle- and upper-class families, which helps them gain advantages in schools and other institutions that privilege particular verbal skills and social dispositions (Lareau, 2003). However, immigrant youth have digital cultural capital that schools often overlook but could be well-suited for a global society and information age. The linguistic skills, social ties, informational sources, and perspectives that the youth develop through their digital networks with diverse geographical communities are forms of cultural capital that could help them navigate an interdependent and fast-changing world."

I could, once again, take issue with the methodology of this study; the focus is on immigrant students from China who are, arguably, a particularly affluent minority.  I would presume they have much more access to technologies than do other immigrant populations, and I would also speculate that the people in their countries of origin with whom they're using technology to communicate have more access as well.  Furthermore, Lam marvels at the mix of languages and dialects these students are fluent in, citing Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, but as far as I know, Mandarin and Cantonese share a written language, and Lam makes no mention of linguistic minorities.  She does, however, cite similar findings among migrant youth of "Colombian, Indian, Korean, Mexican, and Trinidadian heritage;" perhaps issues of access considered, such groups are still using technology to their advantage.

At its core, this article makes an important point.  Many of our immigrant students are fluent in a vast array of digital technologies and media, which they use bi-lingually, and this fluency is overlooked as a resource by educators.  This wealth of untapped resources maps perfectly over LM Rosenblatt's 1988 work.  Once again, we are failing to consider, value, or utilize our students' experiential linguistic reservoirs, and I think Lam's point about cultural capital is especially salient.  We assume that our more privileged, dominant-group students come into the classroom with greater capital without considering what our other students bring.  Meanwhile, the students who Lam follows are not only using "multiple languages in their online activities as they accessed information and managed diverse sets of interpersonal relationships across geographical boundaries" but also obtaining "news from both U.S. web sites and web sites based in their native countries or other parts of the world. Such exposure to a plurality of news and information sources seemed to have broadened and diversified the youths’ perspectives on current events and issues."  This, I think, is incredibly relevant to the classroom--not only is following current events interest-driven for these students (score!) but their grasp of multiple languages is a huge and immediately visible asset in helping them develop their critical thinking skills.  The project described at the end of the article is perhaps the best classroom use of digital technologies that I've ever heard of.  It's FINALLY an example of something that you couldn't do just as successfully without technology, largely because it's not trying to map digital practices onto existing curricula (see, literature circles) but rather, an inquiry-based unit made possible BY technology.  I'm sure you all read it but I'm just going to stick it here so I don't forget about it. Fin.

Note to self: civically-oriented media production curriculum focused on immigrant communities.

The goal of the curriculum is to teach immigrant students and their high school classmates multimedia storytelling for effective civic participation. The 10-week social studies curriculum focuses on how immigration policy affects young people, particularly as the project occurs during the presidential election campaign. A major assignment that students undertake is to create a video documentary that analyzes immigration policy and how it affects the experiences of people in their community. The students share their policy analyses, interviews with community members, in-progress narratives, and the final documentary online with peers to disseminate their ideas and gather feedback on the effectiveness of their presentation. The curriculum is aligned to state and national standards on social studies research and writing, civics, language arts, and new media and technological literacy. It also aims to leverage students’ language skills, digital networks, and information resources in the process of learning.

For example, since most students in the class are children of immigrants who speak another language in their homes, we encourage students to use their native or heritage language to interview people in their community who are recent immigrants. We communicate to them that multilingual skills are an important asset to reporters, researchers, and media producers. Students also use their online networks to recruit people for interviews. If they have peers or relatives who live in or have moved back to an immigrant-sending country, students can do online interviews to gather their ideas and experiences about the story they’re working on. In conducting research for the policy issue they’re investigating, students gather and analyze documents from policy think tanks, government bureaus, and diverse media sources. Students are expected to analyze policy arguments from various mainstream and non-mainstream sources, including broadcast and online media that serve immigrant and ethnic communities. By using blogs and social networking sites, students gather feedback and critiques from peers on stories that they develop. This curriculum is just one way to envision how we could draw from the digital assets of immigrant students in teaching and learning.