Narrating Global Literacies: Crossing Borders of Exclusion During a Time of Crisis

Abstract

Although research endeavors on global-centric teaching and learning are increasing, there is much yet to understand on how classroom spaces can legitimize students’ capacities as globally literate members of society. In this article, we focus on the relational dimension of global literacies and examine how elementary students involved in a transnational partnership constructed relationality into online story exchanges with each other. We focus on four practices—communicating across language differences, sharing everyday worlds, pursuing connections, and embracing vulnerability.

The routes of crossing boundaries are more numerous than the highways we have allowed to divide us.

—Gergen, 2009, p. 371

Although we live in an interconnected world, schooling in the United States rarely operates as a global enterprise. Instead, schools tend to function from insular agendas that promote little teaching and learning of the “outside” world. However, schools are inextricably embedded within the macrocultures of wider society (Pike, 2000), despite efforts in drawing these lines of separation. These professed divides will become exponentially problematic if schools continue to ignore this reality, especially for students who lose out on promising opportunities to invest in an ever-changing world.

One way of taking down a school’s walls to enter into the world involves rearranging the pedagogical architecture to include global literacies. As Choo (2018) describes,

Today, the notion of literacy must account not merely for social processes but also for global processes. The global turn in literacy studies affirms the cultural and linguistic diversity of students and acknowledges the need to empower them with a plurality of literacies . . . (p. 7)

From this vantage point, literacies serve as tools for examining and shaping the global flows of knowledge and events that individuals confront each day. This perspective also makes clear that individuals cannot distance themselves from these courses of action if they wish to fundamentally transform society. In this light, global literacies must entail nurturing a desire of living out respect, responsibility, interconnected awareness, and action that contribute to a better world.

In this article, we look to the concept of global literacies to further understand its role and consider how teachers and students can live out global literacies in schooling spaces. Specifically, we focus on the relationality of this work. As we posit in this article, global literacies are constitutive of the interpersonal spaces one inhabits; therefore, it becomes important to recognize how these relational spaces are formed. From our view, global literacies are informed by the networks of relations an individual constantly negotiates with others. To understand these processes, we draw from transnational story exchanges written by elementary children, some of whom were permanent U.S. citizens and some of whom were displaced Syrian citizens living in Turkey, to examine how they asserted themselves into these exchanges to foster relational ties with one another. Our goal in doing so is not to accentuate instantiations of personal transformation but to illustrate how students narrated outcomes such as shared connectedness and responsiveness, which in turn support one’s ability to cross borders that normally might silo one from another.

Theorizing Global Literacies

“Global literacy” is a broadly conceived term found in a variety of contexts such as entrepreneurial policies (e.g., global financial literacies), cross-national sustainable development projects (e.g., United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization [UNESCO]), international partnership programming (e.g., world literacy foundations), and equal rights campaigns for marginalized people groups. In fact, notions of global literacy can be traced back to early reform movements such as Enlightenment through increased printing productions and the emergence of social salons, among other societal efforts that widened participation in public spheres of influence. Yet, despite its long-standing transcendence and its present-day appearance in diverse fields of work, the utilization of global literacy is still marginally embraced in U.S. schools. For example, students are rarely positioned to analyze global systems or conceive of global frames in their learning. In addition, schools seldom build transnational alliances that, in particular, speak to transnational interests (Comber, 2016). We believe, however, that there are powerful affordances for schools to fashion a global-centric blueprint for learning that should include global-focused curriculum and collaborations. Such investments, for instance, could support students in thinking critically about the world and increase their capacities to develop compassion, understanding, and engagement strategies for contributing to the larger world. More than ever, it is necessary for literacy researchers and educators to explore evolving notions of “globalness” and “literacies” and examine how these embodied understandings can have the potential to shift the composition of everyday teaching and learning.

What Does “Global” Have to Do With It?

Although there may be no universal agreements for what “global” means, what is clear is that globalization has tightened the geographical distance between information pathways, economic resources, cultural development, and political discourses of varying public thresholds. As noted by Meredith et al. (2001), these altered spaces present important opportunities for individuals to engage and reflect on self, social, and community configurations. As Schuerfholz-Lehr, (2007) connotes, these shifts in introspection can move an individual from understanding globalization as a place on the globe to “a place within the mind’s eye” (p. 182). In other words, the lens with which one views globalness influences how one understands their own life experiences and how those are constituted in relation to others. This disposition captures an important insight about the relational role of globalness in that it involves working out a process of feelings and discourses in exploring how one connects to another.

An understanding of globalness also sheds light on inherent paradoxes of living in a global village. For example, interconnectedness does not always signify unity or untroubled interrelations. Rather, inequality and instability may be heightened as deterritorialization of workplace arenas, social activities, and cultural heritages produce new global players and new forms of regulation. Therefore, embracing a global-minded perspective entails recognizing that what is prosperous for one may be inseparably linked to conflict for another. This means that understanding the co-construction process of person–person relations is always imbued in power relations.

Another dimension of globalness entails acquiring a deeper understanding on how local–global interactions work. After all, global and localized practices always occur in tandem. This signifies a need to know that living in a global village comprises living in one’s own language, culture, and social realities that are both directly and tangentially tied to interconnections of broader, institutional frameworks. In other words, one cannot ignore that socio-spatial interplay always exists within local–global borders.

What Does “Literacy” Have to Do With It?

As dimensions of globalness have expanded, conceptualizations of literacy have also increased over time. A growing consensus of recent research shows the need to view literacy as pluralistic, dynamic, and intimately connected to everyday facets of human life (Morrell, 2008; Street, 2013; Stroud & Prinsloo, 2015). In this vein, literacy has also become synonymous as a means for constructing and confronting systems of democracy and citizenship (Meredith et al., 2001; Shannon, 2007). The Literacy Research Association (n.d.; www.literacyresearchassociation.org), for instance, recognizes literacy as developing across one’s life span as one engages a multicultural, multilingual world. Being literate from this point of view counteracts models of literacy learning, which promote repertoires of deficiency, remediation, and cultural inadequacy, all of which fail to consider the polycultural and hybrid nature of human activity (Gutiérrez et al., 2009). Growing scholarship, instead, is positioning literacy as hinged on the demands of multiple and diverse practices and as necessary for the development of a sociopolitical consciousness (Morrell, 2017).

What Is Global Literacy?

So how does global literacy fit into these advancements of global and literacy discourses? In this article, we are not suggesting that global literacy is the panacea for reshaping the challenges of globalization, but we do believe that it can offer tremendous promise for reimagining education as a global enterprise and help illuminate the porous borders of the classroom, so that students can better exercise their inheritance as global inhabitants and be supported in working across what can often be a range of complex, extensive divisions (e.g., racism, religious discrimination, and nationalism). In this way, global literacies are not just studying the world but are also tantamount to meaningfully engaging it.

Informed by Dwyer’s (2016) characterization of global literacies, we view global literacies as acquiring habits of mind and “ways of knowing, thinking, and acting” (p. 136) that enable individuals to critically connect, communicate, and collaborate across global networks to deepen one’s understanding of and influence on human welfare. We contend that these actions of conceiving, analyzing, and altering globally engaged understandings and interactions are fundamentally constituted through the development of one’s relational agency, which unfolds across time and space of one’s varied social, physical, cultural, psychological, and geographical borders. In effect, we propose that one’s ability to think more deeply about others and prompt change in the world they inhabit (in essence, rendering global literacies) becomes conceivable as individuals bind their experiences and actions to others. For this reason, we see global literacies in line with literacy work that is invested in humanizing another’s story and the need to transcend exclusions of difference. Relationality, in our view, extends meaning to one’s affinities for people and ideas. Yet, as Luke (2003) and others (e.g., Morrell, 2017) draw attention to, schools are still too inward-looking as they fail to “look beyond the confines of local and national boundaries” (Pike, 2000, p. 65). Too often, schools neglect adopting stances of literacy that assume a transformative binding to the world. Herein lies the need for educators to reconceptualize schooling as a means for students to don an activist view of literacy and exercise their rights to be globally literate. As we contend, one important starting place entails viewing the world as consisting of relations and developing the capacity to engage these relations.

Moving Toward Global-Centric Literacy Research

Although the production of global-centric teaching and learning is still significantly downplayed in U.S. schooling, there has been invaluable effort in moving literacy research toward investigating global-centric literacy practices. One body of scholarship concerns transnational/transcultural literacies (Jiménez et al., 2009; Pahl & Roswell, 2006; Skerrett, 2018; Stornaiuolo et al., 2017; Warriner, 2007, 2009), which largely examines the mobility of meaning-making processes and tools ascribed to people’s experiences when moving across global–local interfaces. A number of these studies have particularly focused on how young people foster cultural, linguistic contact with others across geographical borders. Kim (2015), for example, examined youth’s use of discussion forums on Korean anime, finding that they actively embraced languages, cultures, and places beyond their individual physical locations. Related, Skerrett (2018) traced the transnational trajectories produced in one youth’s music literacies to examine the youth’s linguistic and cultural repertoires of practice. In her study, she found this individual to be incredibly agentive in producing a hybridity of social, cultural capital through his music interests and related pursuits.

Other transnational/transcultural studies have focused on literacy practices that are “on the move” and connected to im/migrant communities. Capstick (2019), for instance, examined how language and literacy resources of one migrant were “remitted” and ideologically shaped by practices operating in both the individual’s home country and current country. In a study by de la Piedra and Araujo (2012), they found that upper elementary transfronterizos (border-crosser) students who traveled daily/weekly across the Mexico–U.S. border drew on their transnational literacies to better navigate their educational experiences and develop identities for themselves that could occur on “both sides” of the border. In another study, Ghiso (2016) explored how first graders utilized transnational literacy practices to document their families and communities. She found, for example, children showcased ideological meshing in various physical and relational spaces in their everyday lives and used public spaces such as a laundromat to engage in universal and culturally distinctive affinities. These studies reinforce the fluidity with which young people can move between their multiple worlds and the access to rich cultural transactions they generate in their out-of-school contexts.

Another body of scholarship examines cosmopolitanism (Campano & Ghiso, 2011; Choo, 2018; Delanty, 2006; Hull et al., 2013; Hull & Storniauolo, 2010, 2014; Sánchez & Ensor, 2020), which draws ties to transnational/transcultural literacies in that it focuses on deepening connections between local–global concerns and developing a sense of interconnectedness between community commitments. Scholars in this field of research urge schools to construct ways for students and teachers to develop social agency regarding global flows of knowledge and action toward the goal of advancing a more equitable society. Cosmopolitanism scholarship also raises important questions about the need to disrupt assimilationist ideology in schools and develop opportunities for students to be viewed as invaluable contributors to an evolving, diverse world. Choo (2018), for example, advocates for teachers to use literature to study ethical values and dilemmas through intercultural and diverse understandings. She also warrants the inclusion of pedagogical approaches, such as literature circles, which provide vital spaces for students to exercise cosmopolitan discourses and dispositions. In various studies led by Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010, 2014), they highlight how youth operationalize online spaces and social networking practices to generate global alertness and conditions (e.g., hospitality, proper distance) to foster cosmopolitan citizenry. In their research, they further reveal how youth use micro-moments of online exchanges as commonplace approaches for developing cosmopolitan orientations (e.g., intercultural dialogue, reflexivity, and self-representation) toward others. In our own research (Sánchez & Ensor, 2020), we put forward a framework—cosmopolitan belonging—for understanding how elementary students intertwined global connectedness in the storied experiences they rendered, generated, and performed into action to better understand the social issues they were studying. One major concern often underlining cosmopolitan framings in this body of scholarship is making the curriculum permeable to students’ intellectual and social agility (Campano & Ghiso, 2011).

Other scholars have specifically drawn on the heuristic of global literacies for promoting a commitment of world-mindedness in the classroom. As Yoon et al. (2018) point out in their theoretical construct of critical global literacies, there are no absolute models for building awareness on the complexities of the world, but there is a need to continuously deepen the global and multicultural dimensions of classroom practices. Drawing on cosmopolitanism and critical literacies, they foreground the need to integrate consciousness-raising approaches into classroom projects, text analysis, and social action. They also suggest the need for further research that extends how one can teach critically, conscious citizenship. These goals resonate with Morrell’s (2017) framework of global critical literacies in which he highlights the sine qua non for students to be producers and distributors of multimodal compositions and gain access to a diverse range of literary texts that enable them to be “powerful readers and writers of the word and the world” (p. 459). He contends that

Access to critical literacies is not just a civil right; we must reimagine critical literacies as a human entitlement, and teachers, researchers, policymakers, and advocates across the globe must come together as a community if we are going to make this happen (p. 461).

Overall, these fields of study (e.g., transnational/transcultural literacies, cosmopolitanism, and critical global literacies) note a tremendous need to redraw the borders of schools to invest in ways for students to inhabit new understandings of the world. Many of these studies also draw attention to practices and processes of literacies that move within and across cultural and geographic frontiers. In addition, they largely draw on critical orientations of literacy to foster student agency to engage the world and consciously explore ever-changing, complex social issues. Although not all studies specifically examine the multimodal nature of young people’s engagement in global meaning-making processes, they all seem attentive to the diverse ways young people interpret and/or analyze the materialization of their understandings.

Even with this growing attention toward global-centric literacy research, there is still a vast need to understand how young people become skilled in creating, and not just navigating, relationships within the expansive borders of a globalized community, especially in the contexts of schooling environments. If schools are to play a role in shifting students’ social prospects of their world, then there have to be greater understandings on how schools can support these spheres of influence. In this vein, there are few empirical studies that account for how classroom spaces can legitimize this work in elementary settings, where students tend to be seen as less capable global actors. In addition, there are limited literacy studies, in general, that attend to the enactment of transnational partnerships, which should have the potential to help students build meaningful relationships with others in the wider world. In particular, there is a substantial void of this research in elementary contexts. Our study begins to address some of these research gaps. In this article, we specifically take up the notion of global literacies to focus on how elementary students involved in a transnational school partnership mediated geographically and culturally different contexts to conceive connections with one another. Through this work, we hope to shed light on how young students orchestrate acts of interdependence through their correspondences with one another. In turn, we hope that this can provide helpful insights for conceptualizing how young people can compose the relational dimension of global literacies within the peripheries of the classroom, an understudied yet significant element for advancing this work.

Method

This article stems from one portion of an initiative that took place during the second year of a 2-year study centrally involving two fifth-grade media center classes at a Midwest rural school (referenced as Meadow Elementary). The larger study, which operated from a collaborative, practitioner-based framework (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), consisted of a wide variety of initiatives that involved studies of global issues, partnering with various transnational stakeholders, and social action projects. (We write about work from Year 1 elsewhere. See Sánchez & Ensor, 2020.) For this article, however, we focus on students’ construction of story exchanges, which occurred in an online writing space and involved two fifth-grade classes at Meadow Elementary and students from a multiage Turkish elementary classroom. Our research question, guiding this part of the study, was as follows:

• Research Question (RQ1): How might students use story exchanges to foster relationships with one another?

Context, Participants, and Scope of Study

Meadow Elementary was a small (235 students) rural school. Although the school demographics consisted of economic diversities (e.g., 50% of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch), there was minimal racial diversity (72% White) including no refugee-affiliated families. Tami served as the school’s media specialist, which involved teaching technology integration as a weekly specials area for all grades, kindergarten to Grade 5. Building on an existing research study between Lenny, a university-based collaborator; Tami, as well as the two fifth-grade classes, we initiated this new 2-year study to take place in the fifth graders’ media center class time to integrate greater opportunities for students to engage in inquiry and global learning. What launched our study was a shared interest between Lenny and Tami on addressing troubling framings and issues headlining U.S. mainstream news related to the Syrian refugee crisis, and we wanted to inquire how we could generate new pedagogical spaces for these issues to be discussed in school.

At the time of the study (2015–2017), the U.S. federal government had begun to respond more visibly to concerns of the refugee movement occurring in Syria due to increased devastation that resulted from the start of the 2011 civil war. Overall, these responses communicated national trepidation and disinterest in providing substantial intervention. They also often targeted individuals who were refugees as “problems” and, in many ways, as “safety concerns.” Unfortunately, the narratives in mainstream press coverage minimally addressed the severity of people’s plight, alternative viewpoints of those impacted by the civil war, and the need for increased diplomatic and humanitarian efforts. The ongoing proliferation of these troubling discourses prompted us, the authors, to explore several class-wide inquiries across the larger 2-year study with the fifth-grade classes. This work also led to multiple transnational collaborations and initiatives.

During Year 2, our project largely occurred from October to May and was centralized in the weekly media center class time at Meadow Elementary for both the fifth-grade classes (33 students in total). The classes examined a variety of matters through class-wide inquiries related to the Syrian refugee crisis, including causes for the crisis, various stakeholders’ perspectives and their responses to the refugee movements, and examples of communities and agencies providing aid and support (locally and abroad). We, the authors, led these inquiries and utilized several resources with the students that included online news reports, videos, Newsela (an education news-based website for students), children’s books, maps, and personal testimonies. These efforts helped us expand the required fifth-grade curriculum standards related to migration and immigration from the limited perspective of the United States to a more global view as we also were able to integrate media center standards on digital citizenship.

In addition, during Year 2, we formed a partnership with an elementary school language teacher in Turkey, Süheyla (pseudonym), and some of her students (nine in total) who were displaced from Syria and new to her school. Süheyla worked throughout the day with various groups of students who needed language support (English and/or Turkish). A mutual acquaintance who assisted with the project during Year 1 connected Süheyla to us. After visiting together virtually, Süheyla and we decided to explore how our classes could collaborate during the year. In particular, Süheyla suggested finding ways for our classes to work with her Syrian students, given the Syrian refugee crisis was the center point for our media center studies. Specifically, this involved collaborating with students she worked with for 2 hr a week learning English. The production of story exchanges served as our main point of convergence.

Story Exchanges

From December until the end of the school year, students from both schooling contexts utilized an online platform to engage together in what we developed as story exchanges. We liken these story exchanges to Boje’s (2008) characterization of story spaces, where relational spaces are built and meanings are open for deconstruction. From December to May, students engaged in three story exchange activities that we (the adult facilitators) created to invite students to learn about one another. These stories were viewed and responded to in both schooling contexts. Students could type, draw, upload photos, videos, and save documents with their postings and responses. In addition, similar to Facebook, students could “like” or leave a comment to an individual’s posting.

Underlying our goals of the story exchanges, we, the authors, viewed the exchanges as possibilities for Meadow Elementary students to generate a relational extension to children who were directly impacted by situations the class was studying. However, we wanted to do so without the children’s trauma being placed at the center of the relationship-building activity. For Süheyla, she envisioned that these communications could encourage language learning, community building, and activities for her students, which would move them beyond their normal language curriculum and help them learn about each other as well.

For the first story exchange (SE1), students were invited to draw a headshot of themselves inside an image of a mirror and use words (in any language) to share details about what they wanted their readers to know about them. For the second story exchange (SE2), students read suggested texts (e.g., The Power of One by Ashish Ram, Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson) and crafted poems to explore the concept of kindness. For the third story exchange (SE3), students read and discussed excerpts from Creature Comforts by Barbara Collopy O’Halloran and explored the notion of comfort and its importance in people’s lives. Thereafter, students took photographs of personal comfort items and shared these photos with accompanying reflections on their items’ significance. To facilitate language differences, Süheyla translated and guided discussions with her students’ viewings of Meadow Elementary story exchanges. She also uploaded and wrote translated postings in English from her students to Meadow Elementary. For any drawing representations that her students created, Süheyla met with them to confirm the meanings of their illustrations and provided the students’ intent in separate communications with Meadow Elementary.

Positionality

We acknowledge that varied layers of imbalance (in power and priority) likely existed throughout the story exchange activities. We pause here to specifically and critically reflect on some of the nuances involved in the research relationships. Although the transnational partnership benefited collaborators from both sites, we recognize this component of the project was still largely influenced by the goals and aims of the initiatives already underway at Meadow Elementary. We communicated with Süheyla before and between each of the story exchanges. We extended her opportunities to create and provide feedback on the materials, processes, and outcomes and to offer changes to the ongoing development of our mutual students’ activities. Even so, we recognize the initiative’s roadmap was still likely leading toward the Meadow Elementary context and participants. In addition, English served as the primary vehicle for communication in the story exchange activities. (We return to this point in the “Findings” section.). Although individuals were invited to use any language they wanted, English still imbricated all aspects of this initiative, which certainly impacts non-English-speaking participants. Consent varied as well. For example, students in Süheyla’s class did not have to sign documents, whereas Meadow Elementary students did. In this way, this connoted a different positioning in the materialization of this process for different stakeholders. We also intentionally refrained from making children’s trauma the center point of the relationship-building activities between the students. Students were not directly prevented from including specific experiences in their exchanges, but they were never prompted to include personal challenges. These decisions were intentionally made to minimize students trying to characterize one another from representations of trauma. We also wanted to reduce possibilities of invoking memories that students may have not desired to share. We drew a line, so to speak, between the stories Meadow students examined for the larger project, which included studies of refugee-specific struggles, and those explicitly prompted by the story exchange initiative. We recognize that it was possible these restrictions with the story exchanges may have distorted what students were able to learn from one another, but at the time, we felt it was our best way to guard against taken-for-granted pain narratives.

Data Sources and Analysis

Data for this article focus on the students’ written story exchanges. Because the story exchange platform held a record of all postings, we were able to trace, download, and collect all student uploads, postings, and discussions. This included students’ original story exchanges (72 in total) and all affiliated online interactions that occurred within these story exchanges, which consisted of hundreds of student responses to one another’s posted story exchanges. There was enormous fluctuation in the frequency of responses that students received. For example, some students received one or two responses to a story exchange, whereas a peer may have received 20+ comments for the same story exchange. Data for this article also included a review of audio recordings of Meadow Elementary students’ constructions of their second story exchanges. These recordings were specifically reviewed because we knew that the conversations that led to these students’ compositions provided insights directly tied to the focus of our analysis. For this reason, related selections from those recordings were transcribed and followed suit with our analytical process.

Using an inductive approach to analysis (Thomas, 2003; Thornberg & Charmaz, 2013), we focused on identifying how students actively fostered relational ties through their story exchanges with one another. In particular, we wanted to pay close attention to how students asserted themselves into the writing spaces based upon their provided content. For our analysis, we created data charts that identified the following: (a) Overall Content, which we determined by identifying the subject matter (e.g., references to people, events, items of interest, and time periods in their lives). These topics provided glimpses into matters of interest that were important to the students. (b) Projected Identity, which we indicated as roles or positionings that students explicitly presented about themselves (e.g., I am . . . a brother, Mexican, a niece, a gymnast). We saw these identity statements as important markers for how students identified themselves. (c) Relational Actions, which we indicated as discursive moves that students seemed to make to facilitate links between themselves and others. (See Supplemental Figure 1 for a coding sample.) These codings informed the analysis of each data item and helped us examine students’ use of global literacy practices.

Alongside these data points, we also mapped out our own interpretive comments in relation to these categories, which functioned as conceptual memos (Glaser, 1998). These helped us consider connections between the findings as well as connections to our central interest on the relationality of the story exchanges. Ultimately, these notes helped us identify broader patterns underpinning the data set and led us to classifying particular practices students ascribed that conveyed a sense of social embeddedness in their work. We saw these practices as reflecting important global literacies that enable an individual to frame who they are and form connections with others. The most observed practices included affirming others’ ideas, sharing their everyday worlds, embracing vulnerability, showing compassion, expressing concern for broader world, pursuing connections, asking questions, admitting unfamiliar thinking, communicating across language differences, and valuing opinions. Together, these practices showed a rich picture of students rendering the relational dimension of their story exchanges as they created opportunities to share and learn about one another’s experiences. In this article, we delineate four to illustrate the range of these practices, which underscored common occurrences in the story exchanges.

Limitations

Because the focal point for this article is on how students constructed relationality in their story exchanges, the presentation of the findings focuses on student compositions. For this reason, few student voices are represented beyond the scope of their written words. In addition, it is important to point out that our (authors’) personal connections to the Meadow students likely informed our interpretations of those students’ stories, given that we worked closely and regularly with this group of students over a long period of time. In fact, Author 2 had taught several of the students throughout their entire elementary careers. We were careful to tie our analysis directly to the content explicitly provided in the data, but we recognize it would be impossible to completely remove all background connections from our interpretive findings. From our research standpoint, we do not view this as a shortcoming but do acknowledge it as a point of influence.

Findings

In this section, we illuminate four ways that students drew on global literacy practices to stitch together a sense of connectedness through their production of story exchanges. As we point to, these actions are valuable in-the-making globally literate practices that foster important reflections for how one weaves themselves into the fabric of others’ worlds. Although we recognize that any labor of narrating inter-agentic acts into writing comprises interconnected practices, we present each of the four practices individually to better highlight the telling nature of how students utilized them. Students’ original spellings are preserved within cited examples.

Communicating Across Language Differences

Across the story exchanges, we were often struck by the fact that students resisted the illusory barriers of language from dissuading their interactions. Students never seemed deterred in interacting with stories and follow-up responses that included languages they did not know. In fact, we often observed students designing stories and follow-up comments in ways to support language brokering for their readers. For example, students in Süheyla’s class constantly used their multilingual and pictorial repertoires to share their stories. In many of their story exchanges, drawings were dominantly displayed with labels, individual words, or short phrases accentuating selected details. Sometimes, students incorporated their home language or Turkish language on the pages, whereas at other times students included English translations or used English only to convey an idea. Take, for example, in Supplemental Figure 2, Adlee used multiple languages on his crayon-colored cutout butterfly. On this particular piece, he did not embed translations but used two languages separately to convey his wish for greater kindness in the world. On the body of the butterfly, he placed the butterfly’s central message in his home language, explaining that the butterfly sought to “fly for peace” and “bring happiness to the world.” Adlee also asked his readers, “Would you like my butterfly to be your friend and fly together?” Thereafter, on the wings and antennas, he used two languages to inscribe words (e.g., “I’m sorry.”) and actions (e.g., “I can help you.”) that he hoped individuals would use with each other. As he further explained from the persona of the butterfly, “My wings are for help-play-love and support.” As Adlee’s poem demonstrates, he and his peers drew on valuable communicative resources that tremendously aided how Meadow students’ could access the meaning of their stories. One of the Meadow students noted the importance of these repertoires in a written response to Adlee, commenting, “I wish I write in your language. It looks cool. I think it’s awesome how you learned to write in English. Your butterfly is definitely the kindest butterfly because of all its colors.”

Whereas Süheyla’s students used multiple languages and drawings to construct story exchanges, the students at Meadow Elementary heavily relied on English in their story exchanges. However, we also observed that these students worked to mediate language differences by regularly incorporating emojis into their story exchanges and responses, which they integrated on their own initiative. We did not realize the extent to which emojis were used until our analysis. In fact, we ended up observing this use of signpost in each story exchange apart from two student pieces. In looking closely at the use of emojis, we noticed that they were most often embedded within or at the end of sentences to convey sentence-specific ideas. We primarily observed two main purposes. One involved translating specific words, as in the following sentence example of a student’s story exchange description: “I like elephants because when I was about one or two , my Aunt made me a painting that meant E = elephant and E = [student’s name] .” In this example, the student placed an emoji directly after the English word the student sought to translate pictorially with one-to-one correspondence. At other times, students used emojis to replace a word altogether, as seen in the following student’s comment to another’s poem: “What pops up about kindness in this photo is that the shines brightly and I like that. The also seems .” In this case, the emojis were substituted for the omitted words. As illustrated in both examples, Meadow students quite visibly regarded emojis as a powerful transmediational resource to facilitate meaning for their readers.

To reiterate, we do not mask the fact that the exchanges primarily relied on English for the majority of communications (in terms of directions, accompanying texts, and language of the online platform), nor that English unequivocally held a dominant force in the students’ storytelling (given that the larger audience was English-speaking). However, we do commend both Süheyla’s and Meadow students’ ingenuity in finding ways to break free from what could be perceived as residues of language hostility, which can altogether prevent social bounds of interaction of diverse language speakers. This, to us, attests to a tremendous ability to see beyond constricted viewpoints of language as students consistently identified tools they had at hand to facilitate story explanations and conversational possibilities. It also seemed clear that students readily held their readers in mind while crafting visual and multilingual literacies into their work. We view these understandings and decisions as valuable practices that signaled a clear desire and comfort level to communicate with users of different languages and not just the languages of their peers. In doing so, we see these as important globally literate dispositions and skill sets that enable and equip an individual to establish lines of communication across linguistic differences and widen the habitus of their everyday lifeworlds.

Sharing Their Everyday Worlds

We believe that global literacy has to start with the courage to share one’s own story. In doing so, we believe it creates opportunities for individuals to link their experiences to that of another’s and, thus, generate the potential to procure more informed understandings of a greater world. For this reason, we looked to identify whether, what, and how students articulated details about their social worlds, including their self-perceptions, within their story exchanges. Our analysis pointed to a significant extent in which students wrote about their everyday worlds. (We use the referent of everyday worlds to connote the experiences that an individual encounters on a typical basis.) Because these experiences comprise a large part of what an individual does and who one is, we found it significant in our analysis that students elected to integrate these details of their lives quite willingly and regularly across the story exchanges.

From the outset of SE1, students expressed many descriptions, such as their ages, meaningful celebrations (e.g., birthdays, holidays), pastimes (e.g., playing with siblings, exercising, and playing instruments), personalities (e.g., thoughtful, funny, and shy), major responsibilities (e.g., taking care of horses, watching siblings), important places they lived or spent time, significant people in their lives (specific family members and friends), among several other attributes. Although many of these topics may be considered typical, they provided important signifiers for the worlds in which these young people lived—marking how they felt they fit into their everyday worlds. Their descriptors showed a wonderful sense of relationships, roles, and enjoyments tied to their everyday environments. On average, students disclosed 17 to 18 details in their SE1, for example, that related to their everyday life. This communicated to us a high level of commitment to developing the interpersonal dimension of these new gestures of communication.

Whereas most students in their SE1 focused on presenting a large range of daily life characteristics to introduce themselves, there were a few students who focused on very specific core ideas of their identities. For instance, as seen in Supplemental Figure 3, Oscar (from Meadow Elementary) told his readers that the “first thing” anyone needed to know about him was that “I absolutely LOVE anime.” He then included several details about anime (e.g., explaining what it was, providing a link to his favorite anime, listing several anime shows, and describing a favorite anime book). The majority of his written and drawn descriptions underlined his knowledge about and enthusiasm for anime. It was clear that this literary art form held a multifaceted imprint in his life. His tone in his portrait description also reinforced this, as he gave careful attention to crafting words and wit in ways that ensured his readers could gain a meaningful understanding of anime. He exuded a deliberate sense of introspection that proved he did not unambiguously engage in anime. Rather, anime was centrally tied to who he was, and he seemed to have a clear intent to fashion a way for his readers to more easily understand and interact with him.

In their SE2 and SE3, students continued to utilize their story exchanges to invite others into the territories of their everyday experiences. Although the prompts for SE2 and SE3 were written for students to focus on specific topics (kindness and comfort), students created opportunities to continue introducing new details of their daily lives by integrating these aspects directly into their SE2 and SE3, as well as in their responses to one another. For example, students shared about additional interests (e.g., caring for animals), hobbies (e.g., flying kites, tending to gardens), favorite toys, and games to play (both video and sports). These instances of new knowledge enabled readers to gain personal insights about these parts of their lives, which continued to reinforce students’ strong desires to create new lines of learning about each other. More than anything else, they seemed to root themselves in locales of friends, families, entertainment types, and other everyday experiences that provided fulfillment for them and portrayed a wide sense of self.

There were two specific everyday markers that we were surprised to see practically absent from the students’ story exchanges. One concerned references to specific racial or ethnic distinctions. When provided, they came from non-White Meadow Elementary students, but they only happened in a few instances (e.g., a student self-identifying as Mexican). This finding could be explained through the prevalence of race-evasiveness that occurs in schools, especially in White majority contexts. Perhaps the majority of students did not “see” race or ethnicity as intimately tied to their identities or, at minimum, believed they were not important to discuss in these story exchanges. It also could be reflective of missed opportunities in the operationalization of the story exchanges in which we did not actively engage in race-conscious pedagogy that could have explicitly asked students to reflect on these background experiences. The other identity marker we marginally saw pertained to students’ schoolness. This was an enormous surprise to us because we expected to see school-specific identifiers play a more explicit role in students’ story exchanges, especially because the story exchanges were school-based activities. For instance, only one student (from Meadow) mentioned a favorite school subject (mathematics) and only two students (from Meadow) referenced school-centered labels (e.g., average learner, new kid in school). No student from either schooling site even mentioned their grade level. Although we know schools exponentially mold students’ self-perceptions and social interactions, by and large, it appeared that students positioned themselves as being part of a much wider social conglomerate than the habitus of a schooling environment. This perspective stood out as quite significant because any serious attempt in being globally literate involves having a multidimensional view of one’s self.

Pursuing Connections

In sync with students making their day-to-day details visible to others, our analysis also revealed that students were repeatedly vested in forging connections by teasing out and appreciating commonalities and differences. This practice seemed to serve as an important stepping-stone for learning more about each other. We saw several Meadow students, for example, use their peers’ stories to confirm what they already knew about those individuals. For instance, students responded to peers’ SE1 portraits with comments, such as “This resembles you a lot. Totally captured everything!” and “This kind of does look like you.” These types of statements clearly conveyed peers’ recognition of each other. Other examples emerged through statements of shared experiences. Take, for example, when a student responded to a peer’s story about basketball and revealed, “I think that you do really like basketball. I know that because you always play it at recess.” Or, consider when a student responded to a peer’s story about an important stuffed bear and noted, “I remember you telling me about that.” To us, these kinds of statements showed an interest that students had in building on existing social histories with each other and strengthening these social ties through establishing these kinds of connections.

Underlying other moments of the story exchanges, we observed students exchanging explicit comments of affirmation that indicated a desire to uplift the other. These interactions occurred regularly and with students from both schooling sites. By and large, these statements occurred through specific “I like/love” remarks that tended to focus on story content (e.g., “I like how you have a lot of things about your life. . .”) and design features (e.g., “I love how your picture is colorful. I would have never thought of doing that . . .”). However, these same types of sentiments were echoed through direct statements, such as “Your drawing is so beautiful,” “I think you’re a great artist,” and “The words you put are very kind.” Students seemed very thoughtful and deliberate in constructing these types of affirmative comments, which we view as carrying the potential to bolster a positive sense of self in others. In turn, they represent a means for constructing concern for another.

As one might expect, students also used their expressions of affirmation to form shared interests with each other. For example, students revealed commonalities in pets (e.g., “I like your picture of the dog. My dog looks like that. Her name is Kiara.”), food interests (e.g., “I like bacon, too.”), hobbies (e.g., “I like music and art, too.”), sports (e.g., “I also like kickball and basketball.”), pastimes (e.g., “I like your drawing of kids playing with a jump rope. I used to play jump rope all the time when I was a kid, and I still play it sometimes.”), among other interconnections. These interactions not only confirmed existing commonalities between students but also contributed to ways students could learn new information about one another. For instance, Supplemental Figure 4 contains a story written by Aiza (a student of Süheyla’s) and the Meadow Elementary students’ follow-up responses. In her story, Aiza explained that her family moved multiple times after leaving Syria while looking for work in Turkey. Living where she was at the time of her story exchange, a neighbor girl gifted her a doll that Aiza named Mina, which became her only toy in Turkey. As she described, Mina was her “best friend” whom she took everywhere and “care for her so much.”

As the follow-up responses subsequently show, Aiza’s story sparked various reactions. Some students shared how they similarly owned dolls or other items (e.g., quilt, bear) that also produced comfort. One student admitted he “never really cared for dolls,” but he still appreciated Aiza’s story and thought “it is awesome that you found something that makes you better and comfortable.” Aiza’s story also prompted students to want to learn more about her, such as when and where she received Mina and what Aiza’s age and grade level were. A couple students also responded to the “buckles” detail Aiza mentioned toward the end of her story. For example, one student wanted to know more about what they were, whereas another student shared her own association with this term, explaining, “one time my aunt and uncle who live in China brought me and my siblings some candies that were rapped in a pretty blue buckle like thing.” Because of Aiza’s willingness to share about Mina, students learned many important details about Aiza. It also inspired several new connections from students who revealed a range of autobiographical details that enabled them to gain insights about one another, too. As Supplemental Figure 4 shows, story exchanges did not just invite differences of experiences to occur unilaterally from one school site to another but emerged more communally as students from the same site shared their own unique circumstances and considerations.

Similar to Mina’s story, it was also common to find students asking questions specific to aspects of a student’s story that linked to their own experiences. For instance, a student who wrote a story about his pet asked his readers if they had favorite pets. Or, in seeing a sport symbol on a student’s story exchange, another student asked in a follow-up response whether the student author played soccer. Frequently, we also saw instances of students engaging in question-posing that went beyond the content of a student’s story to find out more information about the other person. Examples of queries included “What language you speak?” “What is your favorite instrument here you live?” “Do you have middle school?” “What’s your life like?” “How many days of school do you get in a week?” “How do you write over there?” “Do you like different things?” and “What are some of your favorite stories?” As one can see from these questions, students were very much interested in developing fuller visions of others.

Altogether, across the story exchanges, students seemed resolute in forming connections with one another and removing an unfamiliarity to those experiences. Story exchanges often sparked a wonderful array of students cross-sharing memories, resulting in what appeared to be a sincere regard to learning about the particulars of others’ experiences. In tandem, students seemed to regularly engage in actions of confirmation, affirmation, and question-posing, all in pursuit of forming deeper connections.

Embracing Vulnerability

We believe vulnerability holds an important essence in fashioning relational ties with others because it removes the anonymity of an individual’s experiences so they can be recognized by another. In many ways, we would argue this type of practice underscored the kind of writing incited by the story exchanges, given that certain levels of private scrutiny are always required when making one’s stories visible. For this reason, the story exchanges seemed to organically operate as ever-evolving spaces for students to share reflections of themselves. It was important, however, that we did not view this as a fixed or assumed practice although the story exchanges showed students took this responsibility seriously. Rather, students opened up the boundaries of their lives in different ways throughout the story exchanges. Here, we highlight two story exchange examples to illustrate this.

In his SE1, Jalen (a Meadow student) introduced himself with the opening line, “If you ever meet me, you’d know I’m strange.” He shortly after explained,

Writing is something I do with a passion. I love jotting down writing so I can empty my imagination (witch is always growing). I do have a diary. . . . Some people say that diaries are a girl thing, blah blah blah. I don’t care. Judge me.

He then goes on to describe his love for reading and video games, detailing why he has those interests.

In the excerpt, one can see that Jalen was being transparent about his interests in writing and keeping a diary. It was clear that those were strong passions he had. In fact, his diary ended up serving as a focal point for a future story exchange in which he disclosed many more details about it. Still, in this excerpt, it was evident that he recognized others might disparage him for his writing interests. Perhaps this is why he candidly addressed those assumptions by foregrounding “strange” in his opening sentence. He then explicitly projected reflexive cues about the gender norms of his interests through the statement, “Some people say that diaries are a girl thing . . .” and emphasized this further with his use of “blah blah blah” that followed after. This seems to suggest that he was quite aware of the stereotypical rhetoric others might hold onto, and perhaps explains why Jalen cleverly used humor to challenge the trivialness of this gendered norm throughout the referenced excerpt. In fact, he even extended a straightforward invitation for his readers to “judge me,” which we see as a powerful call-to-action to overtly interrogate others’ prospective biased perceptions.

Given the nature of Jalen’s comments as well as the amount of writing space he dedicated to these issues, we don’t believe that all these actions could have taken place in the absence of vulnerability, not when the stakes were so high. In his case, this SE1 was written to provide the first details any new peers would learn about him as well as be information that his existing peers would read. Despite the chance of receiving adverse reactions, he still moved forward to divulge these core expressions about himself rather than shy away from them.

While Jalen’s example provides a glimpse of inscribing vulnerability into the content of a story exchange, we know vulnerability also unfolded in the making of some of the story exchanges. This became visible when reviewing audio recordings of students composing their stories. For example, Supplemental Figure 5 displays a cowritten kindness poem by three Meadow students. During the planning and drafting stages of this poem, one of these students shared with his peers how he was often bullied for having a tracheostomy tube. He explained to his group that he was thankful to peers at school who “protected” him from the classmates who would tease him about his breathing device. As he described, “People aren’t often willing to deal with a bully,” so he was “grateful to the students who stuck up for me.” In hearing this story, one of the other student authors (who had just arrived at the school a few weeks prior) added to the conversation that there were students who also “were nice to him and helped him feel welcomed.” He explained some of the ways these students helped him feel more at ease. In this same conversation, the third group mate shared a memory of extending a greeting to the first student at a local fair when she saw him there. Although she did not elaborate on this detail, it seemed to convey a sign of support to the first student after he shared his bullying story. This third student also went on to share examples on how she helped others, such as her sister at an amusement park.

Ultimately, as seen in Supplemental Figure 5, each of these students integrated their expressed experiences into their group poem. Although the story exchange prompt did not require students to impart personal stories, students clearly saw a value in inscribing these memories into their writing. To us, the conversation, and consequently the poem, exhibited an openness and honesty that were tied to pivotal moments of their lives. In fact, we would assert that they were living out in-the-moment scripts of vulnerability that enabled them to construct a caring camaraderie through their coauthoring process. We see this as emblematic on how embracing vulnerability can invite opportunities to bring people closer together, especially in the exchange of meaningful life moments.

Discussion

If the end goal for global literacies is to make the world a better place, we believe relationality must have a firm base in this work. From our view, relationships affirm the humanity of this labor. This is why the story exchanges played such an important part in the larger project at Meadow Elementary. Although these students engaged in a variety of initiatives with various stakeholders in the larger project, none of those consisted of developing direct relations with other children, especially those impacted by the very issues they were studying. For this reason, we viewed the story exchanges as a way to provide Meadow students opportunities to develop an ease and appreciation for establishing relational networks with individuals who otherwise were viewed as invisible or unworthy on the national stage. Bear in mind at the time of the project, there was a general aversion to the Syrian Refugee Crisis in which U.S. media outlets actively fabricated deficit viewpoints about the impacted individuals and sought to disconnect U.S. concerns from their human plight. Our hope was that the story exchanges could provide a concrete bridge between individuals who traditionally could be considered “distant” from one another. Ultimately, this underlined the goals for both sites.

In looking closely at the story exchanges from both schools, students seemed to work extensively to build relationships through their writing. Although we highlighted instances of students communicating across language differences, sharing everyday lives, pursuing connections, and embracing vulnerability, we do not view these acts as ends in themselves. Instead, we believe that they carried great merit in students’ willingness and abilities to construct referentiality between their orientations of the world. Specifically, students seemed to embrace new knowledge of those whom they met for the first time as well as their own peers. They also disclosed personal stories, posed genuine wonderings, and seemed to respond from a stance of sensitivity in their writing to each other. These actions appeared helpful in making their writing usable for establishing a genuine link to others. For these reasons, we do not take lightly the fact that students easily and eagerly took advantage of the online spaces to reflect on and transport their life experiences into their story exchanges. They seemed quite attuned to having a vital interest in participating in the transnational borders of these communications.

To be clear, we did not approach story exchanges as taken-for-granted transformative work. We know global literacies are ever-evolving practices that cannot be solely focused on fashioning links to issues for just in-the-moment thinking. Rather, these endeavors are hinged on the hope that individuals will develop informed frames for understanding the world later on in their lives. This is why we were interested in examining how students constructed their story exchanges in concert with others. We hoped their actions could provide important insights on how they rendered this process for the time-being and perhaps undergird future practices to promote. Hence, we were excited to see students enact practices such as those highlighted in this article. We see these as important global literacies which can help individuals redraw the boundaries for how one connects to and communicates with the larger world. Although they may not fundamentally alter the disenfranchisement of others, they are invaluable starting points for engaging the world differently.

Although endeavors such as story exchanges can serve as important opportunities to alter a school’s borders, we want to acknowledge that this work is not always easy. Like so many other educators, we struggled from always keeping the story exchanges from the sidebars of the curriculum. We faced many competing priorities to meet required curricular deadlines and complete projects tied to other classroom spaces in the school. These demands constantly challenged us to rethink how to keep the story exchanges (and related initiatives) tied to the required teaching standards. It also led us to change or eliminate projects that did not promote our new goals. Although these efforts helped, they were not always ideal. This is why we urge schools, as collective entities, to reprioritize curricular mandates so that teachers can more fully enact global literacies in their classrooms. From our perspective, it comes down to schools valuing human relationships as the center point for teaching, learning, and recognizing relationships as necessary and not limited to a school or nation’s borders.

We also recognize that language played a multifaceted role for our story exchange project. As much as we celebrate the Syrian students’ use of multiple linguistic codes and the U.S. students’ efforts to transfer meaning across language differences, English still framed how the U.S. students composed, communicated, and interpreted one another’s stories. It is likely that many linguistic and culturally imbued complexities were overlooked in our interactions with the Syrian students. In addition, with English as the lingua franca, it prevented Süheyla’s students from engaging in the project as independently as the U.S. students, as it required Süheyla to bear the weight of translating both the Syrian and U.S. students’ stories for interaction and consumption. Although this method of language brokering was agreed upon at the beginning of the project, it is important that we do not mask the linguistic privilege the U.S. students experienced in the process. Perhaps global literacies researchers and practitioners can continue to look for ways to address how to stabilize language imbalances in projects that span diverse linguistic settings.

Conclusion

While it is not new to live in a world under constant assault through competing national interests and hostile takeovers, it means that there must be a prevailing demand to push against such divisive divides. This is why educators and researchers alike must find ways to radically change what these spaces look like in schools. Without question, the insular nature of U.S. schooling must be undone. Far too often, students are excluded from studying social issues that greatly impact other geographical communities. Far too often, students are precluded from exercising and developing their capacities to justly engage in these issues as global actors in schools. Far too often, students are limited from creating relational ties to “distant” others. We can no longer afford to ignore the fact that students are systematically excluded from living out global literacies in schools. Undoubtedly, there is extensive work to be done in deepening global steadfastness within a school’s walls. Perhaps, as we point to in this article, we can start by narrating new stories of togetherness to unsettle borders of displacement that otherwise will continue to separate us.

Supplemental Material

sj-zip-1-jlr-10.1177_1086296X211009288 – Supplemental material for Narrating Global Literacies: Crossing Borders of Exclusion During a Time of Crisis

Supplemental material, sj-zip-1-jlr-10.1177_1086296X211009288 for Narrating Global Literacies: Crossing Borders of Exclusion During a Time of Crisis by Lenny Sánchez and Tami Ensor in Journal of Literacy Research