Learning Music Literacies Across Transnational School Settings

Abstract

This article examines an adolescent’s music literacy education across Caribbean and U.S. schools using qualitative research methods and theories of multimodality, transnationalism, and global cultural flows. Findings include that the youth’s music literacy practices continuously shifted in response to the cultural practices and values of the physical geographies in which he alternatively lived; however, transnational movements combined with extended physical sojourning contributed to the youth’s development of progressively generative perspectives about the potential of U.S. contexts for building his music literacies and a correspondent constraining view on Caribbean geographies for his music literacy development. Amid an abundance of research on the significance of online worlds to transnational youths’ identity and literacy development, this article contributes insights into how formal literacy education physically experienced within and across nations shapes the nature of literacy learning.

All across the world, borders separating nations are being newly erected, fortified, and vigilantly policed (Stornaiuolo, Smith, & Phillips, 2017). Deteriorating sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and other circumstances, experienced as both national and global phenomena, have strengthened some nations’ perspectives that buttressing themselves against the tumults in other societies will reduce and help redress their own national concerns. Physical border crossing has become an increasingly perilous or unattainable experience for many people in present times, a situation that starkly contrasts the ways human societies have historically functioned (Levitt, 2001). Another response of nations to concerns about their viability in precarious times has been to reinforce education policies and practices that focus on students’ acquisition of advanced reading and other literacy skills, particularly in mathematics, science, and technology, with the arts viewed as supplementary to achieving these goals. For example, the Institue for Education Sciences (IES) identifies arts education as one of three “understudied”, “special topics” for which funding may be granted to produce research that makes “causal claims” about arts’ education promotion of academic and social competencies in students (Institute for Education Sciences, National Center for Education Research, 2017). The increasing divide between the resources allocated to the arts and other literacy subjects can be understood as another thickened and deepened boundary.

The youth presented in this study is affected by these constructions of borders across nations and literacy learning. This article examines how an adolescent, Cameron (all names are pseudonyms), participated in formal school settings across French St. Martin and Dutch St. Maarten in the Caribbean, and New York in the United States, to build his music literacy practices. Leander, Phillips, and Taylor (2010), in their extensive review of research on mobilities of peoples and their learning trajectories, call for more research on how “individuals create their own trajectories or pathways” (p. 336) of learning across physical and virtual landscapes with their attendant educational tools, opportunities, and constraints. Furthermore, Leander et al. (2010) acknowledge that youths’ physical participation in, and learning across, global spaces offer generative opportunities for acquiring such understandings.

Yet, virtual landscapes and digital literacies have drawn most attention in studies of the literacy practices and mobilities of transnational peoples (Lam & Warriner, 2012). Given the present era, when many nations have allotted increasing attention and resources toward people-proofing borders, it is increasingly urgent to generate knowledge about the possibilities, challenges, processes, and outcomes of literacy learning across physical borders. Accordingly, this inquiry prioritizes physical border crossing across national geographies for the purpose of formal literacy education while acknowledging the supportive role of digital literacies. The article investigates two research questions, “In what ways did Cameron’s experiences of music literacy education within schools across three nations shape his music literacy practices and development?” and “How, if at all, were Cameron’s perspectives on music literacy development influenced by his experiences of music education within schools across three nations?

Theoretical Frameworks

This article draws from the theory of literacy as social practice and related ideas of multimodal literacies/multiliteracies (e.g., New London Group [NLG], 1996; Street, 1984) to define and analyze Cameron’s musical activities as music literacies. It employs concepts within theories of transnationalism and globalization (Appadurai, 2013; DeJaeghere & Vu, 2015) to explore how formal literacy education across national borders shaped Cameron’s development of, and perspectives on, music literacies.

Multimodal Literacy Practices

The groundbreaking theoretical turn toward literacy as social practice (Scribner & Cole, 1978; Street, 1984) critiqued the idea of an autonomous perspective on literacy (Street, 1984) that is print- and text centric, and conceptualizes literacy as a discrete set of cognitive skills that can be universally taught and applied across all learners and contexts. A viewpoint on literacy as social practice privileges the social, linguistic, and cultural identities and features of learners and communities; their goals for engaging with literacy; the ideologies (values and beliefs systems) that undergird their literacy practices; and the technologies available to them for making meaning (Scribner & Cole, 1978; Street, 1984).

A perspective on literacy as social practice further proposes that meaning, learning, and communication occur through a range of semiotic modes that include oral, aural, visual, gestural, spatial, linguistic, and multimodal tools, with multimodality referring to various combinations of different semiotic modes (Hull & Nelson, 2005; Kress, 2010; Leander & Boldt, 2013; NLG, 1996). The New London Group, or NLG (1996), used the term multiliteracies to refer to the multiplicity of literacies possible given this expansive semiotic view. Accordingly, the musical activities of Cameron, the focal youth in this inquiry, are defined as music literacies. Multimodality manifests in Cameron’s music literacies, for instance, in the combination of singing, playing different musical instruments, the print reading of music that accompanies that work, and dance routines that involve gestural and spatial relations. Indeed, Albers and Harste (2007) argued for redefining literacy and what counts as being literate in ways that align with conceptual thinking in the related fields of the arts, new literacies, and multimodality. Such shifts in stances and practices surrounding literacy, argue Albers and Harste (2007) and others (e.g., Miller & McVee, 2012), can expand learning opportunities for reading, interpreting, and composing in literacy classrooms.

Of importance to this inquiry are recent calls for greater theoretical and methodological attention to the ideological and sociopolitical factors that enable or constrain youths’ multimodal literacy practices within and across different social contexts, including spaces governed by the nation-state (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017). Stornaiuolo et al. (2017) describe the present times as representing the “paradox of mobility [that] invites close analysis of how people’s literacy practices can be differentially valued and recognized, in turn reproducing, exacerbating, or challenging existing social inequities” (p. 70). The focus of this analysis, Cameron’s music literacy learning in school, thus, demands attention to the role of educational institutions and their agents—which represent the nation-state—in the evolution of his music literacy practices and beliefs.

Transnationalism, Globalization, and Cultural Flows

The intersections among and impacts of local, global, and national policies on the mobility of people’s literacy practices, or their transliteracies, are central ideas in the work of Stornaiuolo and her colleagues (2017). Transnationalism and globalization are related but distinct concepts. Both are “concerned with movement of people, capital and ideas across borders” (DeJaeghere & Vu, 2015, p. 269), and people who cross national borders are referred to as transnational (Levitt, 2001). However, DeJaeghere and Vu (2015) describe globalization as a “dominant” perspective (preferred over transnationalism) that has been used to prioritize functionalist (rather than individualized or social) goals. Functionalist goals include “global agendas, policies, standards, and practices” (DeJaeghere & Vu, 2015, p. 269) in relation, for instance, to financial market and education reforms. Some scholars of globalization, according to DeJaeghere and Vu (2015), have drawn from critical studies, sociology, and other related fields to critique the reigning perspective on globalization as a narrow view that does not adequately illuminate the nature of flows (of people, cultures, practices) across nations and how people and nations respond to and are shaped by these flows.

This article draws upon the work of a luminary scholar of globalization who has indeed foregrounded the nature and roles of flows in living across multiple nations and the influences and impacts of these flows on individuals, communities, and nation-states (Appadurai, 2013). Appadurai (2013) explores a provoking question about what constitutes circulatory flows and transformations/hybridities of culture in a globalized world marked by inequitable distributions and uneven flows. Appadurai (2013) theorized that certain forms of culture (such as particular performance genres) that do not have well-established global circulatory pathways experience “bumps and blocks” (p. 68) as they seek to create new circulatory pathways amid existing networks. This creates a dual structure in which new and established cultural forms do not mutually transform one another but instead “are forced to co-exist in uneven and uneasy combinations” (Appadurai, 2013, p. 67). Nations and their institutions, as powerful cultural agents in a globalized world of flows, may not be as accommodating of unfamiliar cultural forms being introduced to them by their transnational citizens. Thus, it is the “incessant effort” of human imagination and agency to produce a transformed local culture (Appadurai, 2013, p. 68).

Appadurai (2013), thus, views local instantiations of culture as “temporary negotiations between various globally circulating forms that are not subordinate instances of the global, but . . . the main evidence of its reality” (p. 69). He calls on scholars who study globalization and culture “to move decisively beyond existing models of . . . hybridity . . . and the like which have largely been about mixture at the level of content” (Appadurai, 2013, p. 67). Appadurai (2013) proposes an enhanced agenda in which scholars probe into the cohabitation of forms, such as the genre of material culture itself and the nation, as it is at this nexus that mutual transformation occurs. Thus, hybridity, in keeping with Appadurai’s (2013) thinking, can be understood in two ways. One definition refers to evidence of a commingling of different material and cultural practices and knowledge culled from different national contexts within a particular cultural form. An alternative understanding of hybridity, less easily achieved but highly significant, is the emergence of a cultural form that represents a reconstitution of knowledge, relationships, practices, values, and the like among nations and their people who share in a given cultural form. Studying the multimodal literacy practices of people who are transnational allows analysis of whether, and in what ways, hybridity manifests, and consideration of potential explanations, as well as alternative possibilities, for their transnationally informed multimodal literacies.

Research on the Music Literacy Practices of Caribbean-Affiliated Transnational Youths

Studies of youth musicians with ties to the Caribbean (Alim, 2011; Flores, 2004; Glissant, 1989; Jansen & Westphal, 2017; Wahab, 2016) are united by two primary themes. The first theme is evidence of hybridity in these musicians’ practices, for which Appadurai (2013) provides two related, but distinctive, definitions. The second theme across this body of work is that sociopolitical perspectives often manifest in and from transnational youths’ engagements with music literacies. Given these primary themes in the research, the present analysis attends to the nature of hybridity in Cameron’s music literacy practices and whether and how sociopolitical perspectives manifest in or from Cameron’s transnational experiences with music literacies. This current study contributes to the extant research by exploring whether and how these themes, and other new understandings, derive from studying a youth receiving formal music literacy education in schools across different national geographies. Existing research has primarily explored transnational youths’ music literacy practices in nonschool contexts and through their engagements with the Internet and social media.

In relation to hybridity, Jansen and Westphal (2017) theorize pop culture artist Rihanna as a transnational musician given her Barbadian–U.S. national affiliations and her continuous physical mobility to perform for international audiences. Jansen and Westphal (2017) further analyze the multivocality in Rihanna’s music, finding evidence of different Caribbean English dialects. Thus, Jansen and Westphal’s (2017) conceptualization of hybridity appears to fit within the practice of commingling at the level of content (Appadurai, 2013). Attention to sociopolitics is also evident in this study with Jansen and Westphal’s (2017) proposition that Rihanna and other transnational musicians may employ their multilingual repertoires to display their multinational identities as well as locate themselves within particular musical genres. In a larger study of hybridity, Alim (2011) found how youths from African, Asian, Caribbean, and other global geographies permeated hip-hop with their own cultural references, linguistic varieties, and social and political perspectives. Alim (2011) emphasized how engaging in multimodal hip-hop literacy processes of listening, writing lyrics, and designing and enacting performances can facilitate critical sociopolitical consciousness in youths whose racial, ethnic, linguistic, social class, and immigrant backgrounds position them at the margins of their societies.

Some scholars have examined hybridity in the intermingling of musical styles associated with different nations and cultures, for example, salsa (Flores, 2004) and reggaeton (Glissant, 1989). Glissant (1989) theorized reggaeton as hybridity of musical forms of the Caribbean and more broadly the African diaspora, with the African diaspora referring to the spread of people across the world whose historical origins are in African contexts and cultures (Glissant, 1989). Writing decades before Appadurai’s (2013) call for explorations of an hybridity that involves transformation of cultural forms, Glissant (1989) argued that musical creativity and sharing across the Caribbean and other geographies could move music “towards newly adapted forms” (p. 111) that reflect the globalization of the world. Insisting on the necessity of physical movement and sojourning (extended residence) of people for innovating new cultural forms, Glissant (1989) asserted “you must ‘do things’ in your country in order to be able to sing about it” (p. 112).

Delgado (2016) recently described contemporary Cuban transnational music as an admixture of rumba, funk, soul, and Miami bass. Yet, Delgado (2016) critiqued this move toward fusion of genres given that Cuban music carries the themes of racial, social class, and other inequities that continue to plague that cultural community. This sociopolitical commentary aligns with Appadurai’s (2013) concern with investigating possibilities for transformation both of material culture and the nation-state. As Delgado’s (2016) analysis suggests, the nation-state’s relationships with cultural forms are largely invisible in research on Caribbean-affiliated musicians. One example is found in Wahab’s (2016) sociopolitical analysis of how Canada has sought to censor Jamaican dance hall music that contains homophobic language. Without sanctioning homophobic discourse, Wahab (2016) considered how what he calls transnational politics has resulted in the “Jamaicanization” of homophobia, a privileging of White liberalism, and the marginalization of a particular transnational community. Wahab’s (2016) work represents the de-romanticization of studies of transnational literacies, inviting critical analysis of which literacies count, for whom, and what they can mean in different sociopolitical geographies (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017).

Method

This analysis presses into the phenomenon of the ways in which people and their music literacies are affected by the cultural practices, beliefs, and values of educational institutions and actors who represent the nation-state. The article derives from an ongoing qualitative study (Skerrett, 2012, 2015, 2016a, 2016b) that is designed to understand young people’s experiences of, and perspectives on, transnational life, with literacy at its conceptual center. Literacy defined from a multiliteracies perspective (NLG, 1996) facilitates examination of participants’ wide-ranging experiences with literacies in school and out-of-school settings within and across national contexts. As a U.S.-based transnational researcher, I also engage in physical transnational movements to follow and study alongside participants as they engage with their literacies. The goal of this research is to theorize, from discoveries about transnational youths’ experiences with literacy, research directions, and instructional implications that can advance fulfilling literacy learning opportunities for all youths, in and outside school, and within and across different national geographies.

Setting and Participants

The Northeast and Southwest United States, and French St. Martin and Dutch St. Maarten in the Caribbean, serve as focal geographies for the study. St. Maarten is an understudied transnational nation. The island’s 40,000-plus population represents more than 120 nationalities and 54% migrants and immigrants from other Caribbean countries (Central Intelligence Agency, 2015; CEPAL, 2002). The youths in this study live, with some attending school, across different regions of the United States, Mexico, Canada, Southeast and East Asia, and Caribbean nation-states. To date, 19 youths (ranging from ages 14 to 22) are participants in the study; each has ties to at least one of the focal geographies of the study. Participants also include at least one informant, such as a parent/guardian or teacher, of each youth participant.

Focal participant

Cameron identifies as a Black male of Caribbean origin and straddles a middle- to upper-middle-class background. Cameron was 17 years old when he entered the study in 2013. He was born in Dutch St. Maarten but raised in French St. Martin. Cameron is fluent in English and French and claims English as his home language. I selected Cameron as an information-rich case given the focus of this analysis on how mobility and sojourning across physical geographies shape the nature of literacy learning (Leander et al., 2010). Cameron’s music literacy education across transnational school settings seemed particularly productive for understanding this phenomenon.

Researcher

I am a professor at a university in the Southwest United States whose teaching and research focus on the literacy learning of diverse youths in school and outside-school contexts. I identify as a Black woman of Caribbean origin.

Data Collection

Interviews, observations, and documents and artifacts are the primary data sources for this study (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013). Each participant engages in biannual, in-depth, semistructured interviews with me. For participants for whom the Southwest United States (where I live and work) is not one of their homes, interviews occur during my physical trips to St. Maarten, St. Martin, and the Northeast United States. When participants are away from a particular geography during my visits, I use technologies such as Skype, Whatsapp, email, and Facebook messaging to conduct interviews. I also use these technologies to contact participants periodically, about three times a year, to collect information on their current life situations. These interactions serve as a type of informal interview. In interviews, the youths are asked a range of ethnographic questions (Spradley, 1979). Broad descriptive questions invite them to describe social and educational experiences that have been significant for them. Structured literacy-focused questions encourage the youths to talk specifically about their experiences with literacy, and I explain to all youth participants the multiliteracies definition of literacy that frames the study. Participants, thus, share about a range of literacy experiences in school and outside-school contexts within and across nations. All interview data are fully transcribed.

I also conduct biannual observations of the youths in different literacy contexts (such as at school, at home, or hanging out at a mall). These observations typically occur during my research trips. When physical observations are not possible, I request that participants provide me with access to their personal online spaces that they keep updated with their current life events and literacy practices. Cameron, for instance, owns a Facebook page and YouTube channel and regularly updates them with information about his music activities and video recordings of his music performances. My observation notes vary in form depending on the observation context—typed on a laptop or written in a notebook during a classroom observation or jottings in a notebook during a virtual observation. These notes are usually expanded within 4 hr postobservation (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011).

Collecting artifacts and documents is the third means of data collection. Twice yearly (during my research visits or through digital communications), I ask participants to provide me with products that reflect their literacy practices. Data of this nature include stories participants write, books they are reading, and photographs or video recordings of themselves engaged in literacy events or taken during short trips or extended stays in different countries. I make digital copies of these artifacts when their materiality lends themselves to that method, for example, taking photographs of a book cover or a participant’s written composition, or downloading digital photographs and video recordings onto my laptop for later analysis. In cases where it is not possible to make copies of or keep artifacts and documents, I write descriptive notes to capture their contents and contexts.

Data related to Cameron

Cameron’s data pool includes biannual interviews of him spanning 2013 to 2016 that occurred in person or through digital means, five in-person interviews with an adult relative of Cameron, and one interview each with Cameron’s performing arts teachers in New York and St. Maarten and the principal of the St. Maarten school he attended. Given this study’s conceptual focus on transnational youths’ formal literacy education within schools across national contexts, from these interview data, I selected those that seemed most likely to generate insights about this phenomenon. These include the following: (a) an in-depth, face-to-face, semistructured interview of Cameron on May 23, 2013, in Dutch St. Maarten, lasting 1 hr 45 min, in which Cameron provided the thickest description of his music education across national borders; (b) a 45-min phone interview on May 22, 2016, of Cameron’s performing arts teacher at the New York high school he attended during 2011 to 2012 and 2014 to 2015; (c) a 50-min phone interview on May 22, 2016, with Cameron’s performing arts teacher at the St. Maarten high school he attended during 2012 to 2013; and (d) an email interview with the principal of this school, with questions emailed on May 17, 2016, and responses received on May 18, 2016.

Most of Cameron’s observation and artifact data derived from video recordings of his music performances that were uploaded to YouTube and the websites of schools he attended. Given Cameron’s high productivity with music literacies, for this analysis, I reviewed eight video recordings that represented his performances associated with his schools across New York and St. Maarten spanning 2013 to 2016. Cameron’s data pool also includes video recordings of two separate live interviews he participated in on major U.S. television networks related to his music literacy education in school, and school websites and other Internet-retrieved informational documents on the schools Cameron attended. These artifacts were directly related to Cameron’s transnational music literacy education and so were included in the present analysis.

Data Analysis

I conducted a thematic analysis of all the data (Miles et al., 2013), integrating multimodal analysis procedures (Hull & Nelson, 2005) for visual data. Data analysis began with reducing the data using the research questions as a guide through a process of iterative reading and progressive focusing (Glaser & Strauss, 2006). I reviewed each piece of data (such as an interview transcript or observation notes on an event) straight through three times. As I identified relevant data I began initial memoing (Miles et al., 2013), taking extensive notes on my initial impressions, thoughts, and questions, some of which included rudimentary theoretical and research-related connections. I continued with this process for written data, employing a separate but related process for multimodal analysis of visual data, described below. I conducted a first cycle of inductive coding of chunks of data ranging from phrases to a full paragraph (Miles et al., 2013), for example, in an interview transcript, to identify specific features of Cameron’s music literacy education within formal school settings across three nations. Initial codes included “performance genres” and “relationships with teachers.” For second-cycle coding, I used pattern coding to group first-cycle codes into categories that reflected significant emerging themes in the data (Miles et al., 2013). One such example was “perspectives on St. Martin, St. Maarten, and New York for building music literacy practices.” I turned next to analyzing the visual data.

Multimodal analysis

In keeping with Hull and Nelson (2005), I selected “manageably multimodal texts” that were not overly complex but that held expressive power and emotional and intellectual impact. I analyzed five multimodal texts: a photograph of Cameron and his peers at his St. Maarten school practicing a performance routine of the “Harlem Shake” dance, a video of the routine they eventually uploaded to YouTube, and three additional videos, none lengthier than 3 min—Cameron and his peers’ performance at a talent show night at his New York school, a national show choir competition in New York City, and a national performing arts competition in St. Maarten.

I conducted a “first pass” (Hull & Nelson, 2005, p. 234), viewing these texts and categorizing them according to their genre and purpose. For example, the photograph and video related to the Harlem Shake was labeled “hip-hop genre”; the three other videos were assigned the genre of “show choir.” These categories, such as “performance genre,” reflected some of my initial inductive codes of the narrative data. Each text was assigned multiple purposes, and I drew on Hull and Nelson’s (2005) conceptual thinking as well as the inductive coding process I used with the narrative data in naming some purposes. For example, the national performing arts competitions were assigned purposes of “expressing craft” and “winning,” which connected to Hull and Nelson’s (2005) concepts of aesthetic and intellectual impact and eliciting emotional responses from audiences. Hull and Nelson (2005) caution that attempting to interrelate all the modes present in a multimodal text can quickly becoming overwhelming. Accordingly, I identified the modes and relationships I would focus on by considering my research questions: key terms in my conceptual framework, such as hybridity (Appadurai, 2013), and semiotic modes most prominent in Cameron’s music literacies. I selected music (as in instrumental sounds), oral language (as in singing and spoken words), and gestures (body movements during performances) as my focal modes.

Moving on to graphically representing each multimodal text, I kept in mind Hull and Nelson’s (2005) emphasis that there is “no one formula for transcribing multimodal texts; the timescale (if there is any at all), segmentation scheme, and so on, must be created in direct relation and response to the modes and questions with which one is concerned” (p. 236). I followed the primary guidelines of creating a segmentation scheme that allowed for appropriate units of analysis in which the combined selected focal modes were evident, while jointly attending to the temporality and cohesiveness of each text. I broke video footage into 10-s segments, pausing to write descriptive narratives about the presence of the selected modes, their interrelations, and salient patterns within and across modes.

Final-stage analysis

I then recoupled all analyzed data to expand and refine the thematic categories and language of the main themes. This process was assisted by analytic memoing and generated case-bound propositions (Miles et al., 2013). One case-bound proposition that included refining of the language of the themes was “Cameron views New York as the most promising context for building a musical future.” Continuing to use analytic memoing, I then considered the case-based findings in relation to the theoretical frameworks of multimodal literacies, transnationalism, and global cultural flows, and the research reviewed on Caribbean-affiliated transnational youths’ music literacy practices. This process allowed me to propose more general assertions about the phenomenon studied (Miles et al., 2013). One example of a general assertion is “uneven global distributions of technologies of literacies impact the mobility and sojourning desires, decisions, and literacy activities of transnational people.”

Limitations

This analysis, though generated from a larger research project (Skerrett, 2012, 2015, 2016a, 2016b), focuses on one individual’s lived experience of transnational mobility, sojourning, and literacy learning. Yet, this dedicated focus was critical for developing the much-needed conceptual understandings of this phenomenon. The focus on one individual is mitigated by a variety of data collected across 3 years from various sources and continuous dialogue with “critical friends,” scholars with expertise in the topic and methodologies of this inquiry.

Findings

Analysis generated three findings, including (a) The nature of Cameron’s music literacy practices continuously shifted in response to the musical cultures, resources, values, and degrees of openness to new cultural forms of the nations and educational institutions and agents with whom he engaged ; (b) The relative openness to new cultural forms of one of Cameron’s educational institutions and its agents assisted his efforts to implement new musical forms in one of his transnational geographies; (c) Transnational movements combined with extended physical sojourning across Caribbean–U.S. geographies and educational institutions contributed to Cameron’s development of progressively generative perspectives about the potential of U.S. contexts for building his music literacies and a correspondent constraining view on Caribbean geographies for his music literacy development. Interview data presented in support of findings are narratively linked to the respective participant throughout the “Findings” section. As noted in the “Method” section, interview data pertaining to Cameron derive from his May 23, 2013, interview. Interview data from his performing arts teachers in New York and St. Maarten and his St. Maarten school principal derive from their individual interviews, which all occurred in May 2016. Less frequently recurring data sources are directly specified as they are linked to claims.

I explore the findings by examining Cameron’s transnational sojourning at three distinctive periods revealed by data analysis: childhood through early adolescence in St. Martin, a yearlong sojourn in New York City, and a yearlong return to St. Martin/St. Maarten in which Cameron enrolled at a school on Dutch St. Maarten. These periods are useful parameters for locating Cameron’s long-term sojourning within the geographical borders of a particular nation at distinctive periods of time. However, these periods and attendant geographical borders should be understood as more slippery and blurred in terms of their transnational character. By this, I mean, for example, that even when Cameron resided long-term in a particular country, he took trips to other parts of the world that shaped his music literacy practices and perspectives in particular ways. Furthermore, Cameron maintained a constant online presence and community around his music literacy practices through YouTube and Facebook.

Childhood and Early Adolescence on St. Martin

Cameron was born into a family of performing artists who held privileged cultural, financial, and political positions that allowed them to live transnationally to expand their artistic repertoires. In addition to his mother, who attended a performing arts high school in New York, Cameron told me

I have a cousin in St. Martin. And her sisters, they all sing in different talent shows here, and they sing also calypso music. My cousin won a lot of calypso crowns [traditional calypso music competitions in the Caribbean where the winner is “crowned” as Calypso King of that year]. I have a cousin . . . they live in New York, and she was on Broadway. And she was in a Tyler Perry movie also, For Colored Girls.

Thus, Cameron’s family valued performing arts literacies of high Euro-American cultural capital (Appadurai, 2013) as well as those of significant Caribbean cultural value (Glissant, 1989). Given the family’s performing arts identity and economic capital, throughout his childhood and early adolescent years on St. Martin, Cameron’s family provided extensive voice and instrument training for him, augmenting the music education he received throughout the school grades that was part of the island’s official curriculum. Cameron explained,

In kindergarten we took music courses and sang songs and stuff . . . [E]very school that I have been to had a time for music . . . And then my dad took me to a music school . . . And that’s when I think I got really attached to music.

By age 14, Cameron began displaying his growing musical literacies at “annual concerts” in St. Martin, where he “played the piano, the drums, and . . . sang.” Cameron’s growing reputation as a talented musician also resulted in an invitation to be “a co-host on the gospel program on the gospel station in St. Martin,” something Cameron did “off and on for about five years,” from the time “they approached me like when I was eight.” Cameron’s multimodal practices (Kress, 2010) with peers on this show involved multivocal performances of Bible stories, where “we had like different parts and we would tell the story.”

During this period on St. Martin, Cameron and his mother took annual trips to New York City. Cameron recalled how, on these visits, he, his mother, and other family members would “go to different shows . . . choir shows . . . plays, musicals . . . and also the churches,” and how, “since my mom was also . . . in high school in New York, she had me visit where she went to school. And they had like a big show and everything.” By early adolescence, Cameron concluded that the music world of New York City “was much bigger than what I saw here in St. Martin,” and he began generating a view of New York as a place to further develop his music literacies. “What I was seeing when I did travel to New York . . . I felt it was open hands to, you know, bigger opportunities . . . a bigger way to showcase [my talents].”

As he neared the end of ninth grade, Cameron decided he wanted to complete secondary education in New York City, deliberations he had begun as early as sixth grade:

I always thought about it . . . from the time I hit middle school . . . So, I brought it to my parents’ attention. I told them that before, but they didn’t really listen to me. Then I brought it up again, and they really sat down and listened.

Cameron and his family selected the performing arts high school his mother had attended for Cameron’s high school education. Hence, Cameron’s case offers evidence for the proposal that physical mobility and sojourning across geographic landscapes matter for literacy learning (Leander et al., 2010).

It is important to acknowledge Cameron’s family’s privileged position in comparison with the more limited economic and political capital of other Caribbean youths that impose limits on their geographic horizons of formal learning opportunities (Stockfelt, 2015; Stornaiuolo et al., 2017). Nevertheless, as an agent within a global world of flows, Cameron’s imagination, agency, and substantial work in pursuing learning the literacies of music across local and global geographies should be recognized and valued (Appadurai, 2013; Leander et al., 2010). The ideological nature of Cameron’s learning must also be critically assessed. Physical mobility and sojourning across different transnational geographies produced in Cameron alternatively generative and constraining perspectives about the potential of Caribbean and U.S. spaces and musical cultures for building his music literacies and future. Analysis indicated that up until early adolescence, Cameron experienced St. Martin as abundant with opportunities to build and showcase his musical talents, but that by sixth grade he had begun to consider whether those learning opportunities had been expended. That Cameron created a binary between St. Martin as finite in possibilities and New York as “open hands” reflects unequal distributions of financial capital and technologies, including technologies of literacies, across world nations (Appadurai, 2013; Stornaiuolo et al., 2017). Cameron’s perspective can also be linked to the role of the media that spreads images and ideas about the potential of different nations for enabling people to achieve their social, economic, educational, and other goals (Appadurai, 2013).

A Sojourn in New York City

Cameron moved to New York City in summer 2011 to attend his mother’s alma mater, a nationally recognized public performing arts secondary school that took great pride in its predominately Black and Latina/o population. Cameron, who had toured this school on previous trips to New York with his mother, now experienced as a student what he had observed as a visitor: The technological infrastructure and curricular resources in its music department were richer than those in his St. Martin schools. He explained,

It was more organized in the States than it was in St. Martin. The classes were more built for like music. They had the stands, the risers, and the classes, the levels for the different singing parts. They also had a band station. We had a music wing, a dance section, and we had a big auditorium. We had a chorus room.

The move to New York allowed Cameron to benefit from advanced technologies for developing his music literacies. This observation strengthened Cameron’s perspective of the more limited learning horizons (Leander et al., 2010) offered by St. Martin.

Cameron recalled how his aunt “took me to my first class . . . [which] was chorus class” and announced to the teacher, “This young man, he is a very good singer.” The year before Cameron arrived, this teacher, Ms. Caroline, had introduced show choir to the school, a multimodal performing arts genre, in Cameron’s words, “where you sing and dance at the same time while portraying a story.” Cameron reported that Ms. Caroline asked him “to audition . . . to sing the U.S. national anthem, and I did. And she was blown away. That’s what she told me. And she immediately put me on to be a part of show choir.” In our interview, Ms. Caroline’s language mirrored Cameron’s in her response that “he blew me away.” Ms. Caroline, who told me she had been “in the music business before becoming a music teacher,” described Cameron’s voice as “mature, different, having that ‘it’ factor, like Whitney Houston.” Important to note is how all people function within the assumptions of a world of global cultural flows in which particular nations’ musical cultures are taken up with greater ease than others (Alim, 2011; Appadurai, 2013; Wahab, 2016). This is evident in Ms. Caroline’s request that Cameron sing the U.S. national anthem on his first day arriving to a U.S. school and his ability to produce an impressive rendition.

When I asked Ms. Caroline whether and in what ways Cameron signaled his Black Caribbean identity and musical life in St. Martin, she answered, “[Eventually] he got a little more open [and] periodically throughout the class he would talk about living in St. Martin. He told me he used to sing in the talent shows and so on.” I probed into whether she noticed Cameron bringing in anything she would characterize as Caribbean musical culture to show choir or whether she invited Cameron to infuse his Caribbean musical styles into show choir. Ms. Caroline answered,

No, no, I didn’t . . . [O]nly sometimes when he would talk I would hear it [a Caribbean accent] a little bit, but when he would sing you would never hear it. And I didn’t do any Caribbean styles at all. Because he could sing all these vocals.

As such, the tutelage Cameron experienced at this performing arts school further expanded his music literacies to include new genres of a distinctive Euro-American character. In the formal world of school, Cameron was not invited to explore, neither did he advocate for, ethnocultural transformation of the musical style of show choir. Cameron’s experience can be understood as an instantiation of how the nation-state, its institutions, and its agents play a significant role in the retention or remaking of performance cultures and inviting or discouraging cultural flows (Appadurai, 2013; Wahab, 2016). Such an analysis promotes understanding of how, in outside-school spaces, youths may be more agentive in generating the hybridity noticeable in their musical literacy practices (Alim, 2011; Jansen & Westphal, 2017), whereas in formal institutions, youths may have to expend great effort to create circulatory pathways toward cohabitation of forms in a nation-state not inviting of their ethnocultural or social literacy practices (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017; Wahab, 2016). Such are the “bumps and blocks” described by Appadurai (2013, p. 68).

Yet, Cameron plunged into the social relations and learning of this new school world, describing how, “in that school, it’s show choir. They were my friends. The people that you are with all the time.” He also developed “a really strong bond” with Ms. Caroline. “She would call me her son, and I would call her my mom.” Their relationship was indeed familial, with Ms. Caroline adding how Cameron once “came to sing to me for my birthday.” The show choir team worked hard and long, first to get ready for a visit by Fox5 News, who had chosen their school’s show choir as one of five national high school show choirs they would highlight, and then to prepare for a national show choir competition at New York’s Lincoln Center. Cameron described the training in ways that signaled Hull and Nelson’s (2005) discussion of performing arts communities being sustained by emotional bonds and a commitment to producing an aesthetically and intellectually impactful multimodal performance:

We worked like three months for that show. We worked hard, really hard, and practiced every day. And when it got closer we practiced from like after school ended at 2:30 and practiced until midnight . . . perfecting everything.

The team’s intensive work paid off at the national competition. They won in their category of entry performers, and out of 150 show choirs, one of Cameron’s peers won best male solo performance. Cameron further reported how “we were recognized by the newspapers, local news channels, also ABC, NBC, and, I think, one of the biggest things, CNN,” which asked Ms. Caroline to select three students (one of whom was Cameron) to be interviewed (artifact: CNN interview). Cameron “was really amazed and . . . really grateful . . . to be blessed with such a talent that I could take it to that place.” In his CNN interview, Cameron spoke about the serious nature of music literacy learning and how pleasure was an important dimension of this kind of literacy education (Skerrett, 2016a).

Anchor:

So, Cameron, is this something you think of for a future? Is this something you do for a hobby? And what are kids doing when they want to get into these big choir shows? Is it just fun or is it something that’s really a gateway to something bigger in life?

Cameron:

Um. I would say it’s fun but I’ll take it seriously too because I see myself being in the music business in the future. And I really love music all around. (CNN interview; website link and date withheld to protect participant’s privacy)

Just as he received high-status performance opportunities in St. Martin due to his musical talents, Cameron and his peers were offered major performance opportunities in New York as a result of their national success. As he told it—events that I independently confirmed with my own fact checking and Ms. Caroline—“After the CNN interview, Ms. Caroline got a call from the Mets baseball team that they want us to come in and perform for the pre-show . . . and the half-time show.” Cameron delivered a solo rendition of the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye.” These performances of Cameron, a youth of Caribbean origin, at multiple localities within the geography of New York, can be understood as temporary, constantly shifting manifestations of the global (Appadurai, 2013) that all contributed to Cameron’s development of U.S.-centric music literacies.

A Sojourn in St. Martin and St. Maarten

At the end of that fulfilling school year in New York City, Cameron left New York for what he expected would be a summer stay on St. Martin. Now physically back on St. Martin, Cameron was featured in “a lot of radio interviews. I got a spread in the newspaper . . . [and was on] different TV talk shows.” Cameron also physically reentered musical spaces: “the night life in St. Martin . . . several churches . . . and I sang.” But at summer’s end, Cameron received news that there were problems with his immigration paperwork that would not be resolved in time for him to return to school in the United States that fall. When I asked Cameron how he felt upon receiving this news, his response reflected his solidified perspective that St. Martin lacked the resources to advance his music literacies. “I was like, ‘Really? Do I really have to be back here?’”

Cameron’s family enrolled him in a U.S.-styled high school on Dutch St. Maarten, expecting this transition would be academically easier for Cameron and create alignment with a U.S. curriculum if and when he did return to New York. Cameron’s first observation was that this school, unlike his previous French St. Martin schools, was “just straight academics. Nothing to do with music. Nothing to do with the arts. I was really not comfortable with it.” Yet, the school curriculum was not completely devoid of the arts, as Cameron reported. Analysis of the school’s curriculum identified that out of 24 required credits for graduation, students could take six elective credits that included art, film, and dance, although not music. In an interview with Ms. Tabitha, a teacher who became central to Cameron’s music work at the school, she reported that at the time Cameron came, she “was in charge of the performing arts program for the elementary school” but admitted the high school “didn’t have one at the time.”

Cameron formed a tightly knit friendship group with a girl he discovered “who played the piano and a guy who played the drums, who did musical stuff outside school, like I did. We were always like one. We were always together.” Ms. Tabitha recalled with both seriousness and humor how

every day during his lunch [Cameron] would sit outside with two of his classmates and they would drum and they would sing songs and make music . . . They would sing right outside the principal’s office during their lunchtime and he could have heard them in his office every lunchtime.

In January of that school year, when Cameron’s English teacher gave an assignment “to write an essay as if we were writing a letter to the principal on something you would like to change about this school,” Cameron seized this sociopolitical opportunity and “wrote a letter and compared [this new school] to the school I was in last year and said that they should have like a music class.” Ms. Tabitha recalled this as the turning point for the administration: “That’s when we all gathered and decided to support this program by letting him start his own choir.” In March of that year, a major interscholastic performing arts competition was to take place on Dutch St. Maarten. On behalf of the school administration, Ms. Tabitha spoke with the musical threesome:

You guys are so creative, can I put you guys in charge of creating a middle and high school choir? Therefore, we’ll be able to compete in the competition . . . and [Cameron] was more than happy to take charge of the entire program.

The school and its administration, as institutions and agents of the nation-state, provided significant autonomy and resources for Cameron’s implementation of a new cultural form in the school curriculum (Appadurai, 2013). The principal granted Cameron two 50-min periods each week for his choir class. Ms. Tabitha added, “We gave him a room in the school and a time that would fit everyone’s schedule.” Cameron also influenced the existing elementary performing arts program. Ms. Tabitha reported, “We also started an elementary choir at that time, which Cameron assisted with.” Indicating openness to the possibility of Cameron generating a new cultural form in an educational institution, the principal stated that Cameron was granted “complete creative input and authority.” Cameron’s music literacy knowledge and skills were recognized and highly valued by those in positions of power (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017), with the principal noting, “As to his teaching and training techniques and activities, [Cameron] was a natural, and on par with the better music teachers I have worked with over the years. His arrangements and choreography was top-notch.” Projecting about Cameron’s future, the principal added, “Cameron has the talent for a great future not only as a performer but as a teacher and director.”

Analysis of visual and multimodal artifacts (photographs, video recordings) revealed some evidence of Cameron integrating Caribbean musical culture into his performance designs that, in keeping with theory and research, was likely linked to his physical immersion in this Caribbean geography (Flores, 2004; Glissant, 1989). One such performance that Cameron’s class video recorded and uploaded to YouTube was of the “Harlem Shake,” a popular dance emerging from the United States, with a related trend of youths from all over the world composing their own renditions and posting them to YouTube. Notably, Cameron’s and his peers’ performance displayed a hybridity at the level of content (Appadurai, 2013) that integrated the carnivalesque styles of the Caribbean and hip-hop (Alim, 2011). The most prominent example of this was that a major figure in this performance wore a traditional Caribbean Carnival mask. (See Online supplemental file for multimodal analysis of this photograph.)

Yet, Cameron’s primary intent was to institute show choir as a performing arts genre into this national educational context, requiring that he create pathways to circulate this new cultural form (Appadurai, 2013). In creating these pathways, Cameron drew on his transnational music education community, notably his teacher, Ms. Caroline, in New York.

I learned a lot from my choir director in the U.S. I really learned . . . the specifics about how a choir is formed and what parts they have. I really knew how to go about things with the [St. Maarten school] choir.

With the immediate goal of preparing for the national performing arts competition that was just 2 months away, Cameron selected two songs for his middle/high school choirs that he thought to be “easy songs,” having seen them performed on the popular U.S. show Glee, and also having performed them with his own show choir team in New York.

Cameron was pleased with his classmates, who were quick studies. “I was really surprised to see how . . . the song was being learned really quickly.” But this was show choir. Thus, he “wanted to put in some moves because, you know, show choir is like singing and dancing.” Cameron was sensitive about not adding “too much, because [the students] weren’t used to that at all.” He acknowledged that “it was kind of tough with the moves and everything, but we perfected it as the best we could.” Cameron addressed the challenge of generating cohabitation of an unfamiliar cultural genre and the nation-state and citizens by exercising considerable individual effort, imagination, and agency (Appadurai, 2013). He produced a cultural form of show choir that accommodated the sociopolitical, cultural, and technological affordances and constraints of his educational institution and its agents, and his student-peers (Appadurai, 2013).

On competition day, Cameron and his classmates were jubilated to hear they had won first place in the national high school category, facts I corroborated with online news reports and Ms. Tabitha, who confirmed, “We took home the trophy for the best high school choir on the island.” And, she added, “The elementary program got second place that year.” Cameron’s reaction relative to this multimodal achievement revealed its strong emotional and intellectual impact on him (Hull & Nelson, 2005).

Wow! Everyone put their trust in me and . . . we did it! [T]he school never did anything like that in music, so to just sweep the whole competition with a large amount of awards . . . was really amazing.

Cameron’s politically enforced extended sojourn in St. Martin and St. Maarten is particularly productive in understanding how physical mobility and geographic space (Leander et al., 2010) affect the nature of literacy learning, including ideological perspectives. Cameron’s music literacies developed in notable ways from his physical sojourn in St. Martin and St. Maarten, including becoming a teacher, and not just a learner, of music. This experience could have shifted Cameron’s perspectives toward a more generative stance on the potential of Caribbean spaces to enhance his musical repertoires and future. Furthermore, there was evidence of an uplifting of Cameron’s Caribbean musical cultural forms, including linguistic registers, in his performance repertoires while in St. Martin and St. Maarten. Ms. Caroline, who kept abreast of Cameron’s musical performances on the island, noticed: “When he does his stuff in St. Maarten right now, I notice his accent is very deep [Caribbean]. And when he was in New York, he sounded so, so differently.” Yet, Cameron was less expressive about or cognizant of the benefits he had acquired from this learning experience in a Caribbean space. Notwithstanding the transformative work he had undertaken at his St. Maarten school, and because he credited these achievements to his music literacy education in the United States, throughout his sojourn on St. Martin and St. Maarten, Cameron maintained, and even strengthened, his perspective of New York as “my destiny.” Cameron’s individual agency in determining his preferences of geographies and pathways for literacy learning should be respected (Leander et al., 2010). However, in keeping with scholarship and research, it is also a feasible proposition that Cameron’s perspective was influenced by inequitable global distributions of technological, financial, and other resources, and beliefs spread through global media about the differing potentials inherent in world nations for building people’s futures (Appadurai, 2013; Leander et al., 2010; Stornaiuolo et al., 2017).

Finally, Cameron’s activities of producing show choir on St. Maarten can be viewed as his coproduction with others of a local instantiation of U.S. culture, a set of “temporary negotiations between various globally circulating forms” that “provide evidence of the reality that the local is inherently global” (Appadurai, 2013, p. 69). Indeed, Ms. Tabitha reported, 3 years beyond Cameron’s departure, “we tried the high school choir after Cameron had left but . . . at the high school level we don’t really have a performing arts program anymore.” Deepened understandings of the power of nations, their institutions, and their cultural agents to enervate or encourage the sustainability of particular cultural forms (Appadurai, 2013) can be acquired by considering how the school reconstituted the music education program to reflect a distinctive Caribbean cultural character. Ms. Tabitha commented, “We started looking at more musical instruments [and] implemented a steel pan program . . . into our music program from first grade through eighth grade, and they perform at different events.” The principal added, “We have put in place a steel pan music program and a school steel pan orchestra.” He focused on the educational impact of Cameron’s “work and success” that “convince[d] the school to try and build a better music and performing arts program.” As cultural agents of the nation-state and its institutions, leadership’s decisions about music reinstated cultural borders that promoted the performance genres historically associated with the nation-state (Appadurai, 2013).

Implications for Literacy Research and Instruction

This analysis has offered empirical evidence and conceptual understandings of how physical geographies bear dimensions of place, time, and materiality, as well as cultural, literacy, ideological, and other features that are deeply experienced through physical sojourning, and so contribute to literacy learning in unique ways. Future studies can deepen understandings of this phenomenon, for example, by examining how transnational, or aspiring transnational, youths imagine possible selves and exercise agency in pursuing the literacy experiences they value within and across national borders. Such work is especially important to conduct with youths who, because of their racial, ethnic, linguistic, or socioeconomic status, possess less power in and across world nations (Appadurai, 2013; Stockfelt, 2015). Furthermore, Appadurai (2013) insists that the global is expressed in multiple localities and forms that signify the indelible presence of globalization. This means it is possible to study how and what young people learn as they travel across different localities within a single national geography in which each locality reflects its own manifestations of the global (Skerrett, 2012, 2016b). In addition, future studies may be designed so as to inquire into the nature and outcomes of literacy learning across borders, prioritizing dual attention to learning contexts and pathways that include both physical and virtual geographies (Leander et al., 2010).

Bearing in mind that all youths daily traverse many kinds of borders (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017), literacy instruction that encourages and supports youths in making decisions about whether, how, and for what purposes to draw upon their variously developed literacy repertoires to undertake literacy projects in school could be especially beneficial. Multimodality, integrated across reading and writing instruction in all subject areas, as well as in more conventional domains for multimodal work such as the performing arts, welcomes youths who claim diverse national backgrounds, life experiences, cultures, and languages to draw from a range of semiotic tools and belief systems to produce complex texts (Albers & Harste, 2007). Analysis of such texts will provide opportunities for all students to develop deep knowledge of, and critical perspectives on, a host of issues in their personal lives and in their local and global communities (Ajayi, 2015; Skerrett, 2015). Thus, teachers themselves will need support in learning how to integrate multimodality in literacy instruction and assess students’ multimodal work (Ajayi, 2015; Towndrow, Nelson, & Yusuf, 2013). This area of teacher learning around multimodality is another area for continued literacy inquiry.

Literacy work in school of the kind proposed here also provides a means to develop identities of global citizens in all students (Skerrett, 2015). In a time when nations are relentlessly erecting borders to separate people and their literacies (Institute for Education Sciences, National Center for Education Research, 2017; Stornaiuolo et al., 2017), the arts can broker relationships of trust; meaningful, collaborative literacy work and learning; and mutual appreciation among people of diverse backgrounds. Nations focused on boundary making as a means to strength are paradoxically weakening their citizens’ capacities to achieve these essential competencies for effective participation in an increasingly diverse and globalized world.