Museums as sites of belonging,empowerment,and multimodal literacies for immigrant and racialized families

Abstract

This paper explores how museums can serve as transformative spaces for early childhood literacy, identity formation, and belonging, particularly for racialized immigrant children. Moving beyond print-centric definitions of literacy, it positions museums as multimodal environments where young learners engage with language, sound, image, and movement to make meaning. Drawing on a personal vignette of visiting the Royal Ontario Museum with my children, I illustrate how these encounters become acts of literacy, cultural affirmation, and identity negotiation. For children navigating multiple languages and cultures, museums offer spaces of imaginative play and embodied learning that resist deficit narratives and assimilationist expectations. Through a social justice lens, this paper frames museums as pedagogical counterspaces that center the cultural and linguistic assets of marginalized communities. It highlights the power of everyday museum interactions to support intergenerational connection, affirm cultural identities, and foster agency. By recognizing racialized immigrant children as active meaning-makers and co-creators of knowledge, museums can evolve into relational spaces that reflect and respond to the diverse communities they serve. This work calls for a reimagining of early childhood literacy education, one that honors the lived experiences, cultural wealth, and epistemologies of racialized immigrant families.

Introduction

Museums play a significant and evolving role in supporting the literacy learning of young children. This article positions museums as sites of rich, multimodal environments where preschool children can explore language, engage in meaning-making, and participate in literacy practices that extend beyond the written word (Andre et al., 2017). For children from racialized immigrant communities, particularly those who are bi/multilingual or navigating the complexities of resettlement, museums have the potential to become transformative spaces that move beyond traditional notions of language acquisition and print literacy. In this context, museums can affirm identities, center culturally relevant pedagogies, and cultivate a sense of belonging.

Research on museums and children’s literacy often demonstrates that children’s exposure to museum environments can significantly enhance their literacy skills by encouraging interaction with texts, images, objects, and sounds in diverse ways (Giles, 2021). However, this paper argues that museums can offer expansive possibilities for early childhood literacy, beyond skill development to include identity formation, and empowerment. I explain that in early childhood, where literacy is inherently multimodal and rooted in play, gesture, image, and sound, museums provide platforms for young learners to express themselves through multiple semiotic modes (Kress, 2003; Mills and Unsworth, 2017). These environments invite children to make sense of the world through layered, sensory-rich experiences: touching fossils, drawing at activity stations, listening to audio guides, or engaging in dramatic play with peers. For racialized immigrant families, (immigrant families from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds) such encounters can become more than educational, they offer opportunities for imagining new futures, forging social connections, and building identities rooted in strength, culture, and community (Souto-Manning, 2007; 2021a).

Despite these possibilities, the field of early childhood literacy education has often privileged narrow, print-centric definitions of literacy that marginalize the cultural and linguistic resources of racialized immigrant children and their families (Narey, 2017; Rumenapp et al., 2018). Situated within dominant educational paradigms that continue to center whiteness, monolingualism, and Eurocentric knowledge systems, literacy learning in the early years may therefore reinforce exclusionary practices, even in seemingly inclusive spaces such as museums (Souto-Manning et al., 2021). This paper challenges such limited conceptualizations by framing children’s museums as pedagogical counterspaces, sites where immigrant children of colour can read both the word and the world (Freire and Macedo, 1987; Freire and Slover, 1983) through culturally sustaining and multimodal literacy practices (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Rather than treating museums as neutral institutions, this work attends to the politics of literacy learning and the racialized, power-laden dynamics of belonging that shape racialized immigrant families’ experiences in unconventional educational spaces.

Belonging, a foundational component of early childhood well-being, is not merely an emotional state but a political act, one that is often unequally distributed along lines of race, language, and citizenship (Over, 2016; Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol, 2018). For young immigrant children of colour, the denial of belonging through deficit narratives and assimilationist expectations can have profound effects on their self-concept, literacy learning, and racial identity (Souto-Manning, 2021b; Souto-Manning et al., 2021; Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol, 2018). Museums that foreground culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris and Alim, 2017) can act as sites of resistance to these harmful narratives by centering the cultural knowledges, linguistic practices, and lived experiences of marginalized communities.

Through a social justice lens, this paper examines how museums function as literary environments through which racialized immigrant families can not only forge connections to their social worlds but also engage in rich literacy experiences which draws on their cultural strengths which allows them to feel a sense of belonging and empowerment. Drawing on my experiences as an immigrant, racialized mother and early childhood educator learning alongside my young children at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Canada, I explore how museums act as literacy learning spaces offering opportunities for engaging in multimodal literacies. I present a simple yet powerful everyday moment from our visit to illustrate how children’s literacies are enacted through ordinary encounters with environments, materials, peers, and families, encounters that simultaneously reflect and resist educational inequities. The museum encouraged both intra- and intergenerational engagement and fostered a sense of belonging for children and families who may not see their linguistic and cultural identities fully represented in traditional early childhood settings. Drawing from scholarship in critical literacy (Freire and Macedo, 1987; Freire and Slover, 1983; Vasquez, 2017), culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), and multimodal literacy (Kress, 2003; Mills and Unsworth, 2017), this paper underscores the importance of positioning young children as active meaning-makers within their sociocultural contexts. It illuminates how immigrant, racialized children and families use multiple modalities to navigate power structures, construct narratives, and articulate their identities. In doing so, it critiques deficit-oriented views of racialized children’s literacy practices and calls for pedagogies that affirm their lived experiences and cultural knowledges (Souto-Manning et al., 2021).

In situating museums as vital sites for literacy, identity, belonging and empowerment, this paper offers possibilities for museums to learn alongside racialized immigrant children and families. When immigrant children and families of colour engage in meaning-making, they transform the museum into a participatory space, one that must continuously and intentionally adapt to honour the linguistic, cultural, and epistemological diversity of its visitors. Museums’ material affordances, objects, exhibits, soundscapes, interactive installations, allow racialized immigrant families to negotiate their identities through embodied, visual, and oral literacies. These dynamic, responsive interactions between people and place reimagine the museum not as a static repository of knowledge, but as a relational space of community building and mutual transformation. Ultimately, this paper contributes to expanded understandings of early childhood literacy by demonstrating how children’s museums serve as dynamic, liberatory spaces for learning, identity negotiation, and social connection. In advocating for more equitable and inclusive museum practices, this work underscores the need to recognize racialized immigrant children and families as co-creators of knowledge and meaning. It calls for a reimagining of early literacy education, one that values multiple ways of knowing and being, and one that places the brilliance, creativity, and cultural wealth of immigrant communities at the center of pedagogical practice.

I begin by discussing how literacy learning and education in early childhood are rooted in dominant frameworks of whiteness that marginalize children of colour. I then present the theoretical framework through which I conceptualize museums as liberatory counterspaces that support rich multimodal literacy environments. This is followed by a vignette from a museum visit with my children, and I conclude with a discussion of the key insights emerging from this inquiry.

Literacy, whiteness, and the marginalization of immigrant children of colour in early childhood education

As an immigrant, racialized woman, early childhood educator, and mother to racialized children, I witness daily how early childhood education in Canada continues to marginalize children of colour through its dominant approaches to literacy learning. Literacy in Canada, both in curricular content and pedagogical practice, remains rooted in whiteness as the cultural and linguistic norm. This deeply entrenched orientation not only invisibilizes the experiences and knowledge of immigrant families like mine, but also pathologizes the rich literacies and language practices that our children bring into educational spaces. Often shaped by Eurocentric narratives that center English as the dominant and ‘correct’ language, current literacy practices marginalize children who speak other languages or dialects. As Brown (2014) argues, whiteness operates as a normalized, disembodied presence in educational spaces, maintaining power through its invisibility. In literacy education, this norm is used as the measuring stick against which all other linguistic and cultural expressions are deemed deficient or inferior (Daniels and Varghese, 2020). For immigrant children of colour, particularly those whose home languages or literacies differ from standardized English, this means that their ways of knowing are overlooked within traditional educational spaces (Ladson-Billings, 2006).

This linguistic exclusion is not incidental, it is a product of a long colonial history that co-naturalizes race, language, and literacy. Rosa and Flores (2017) show how whiteness is not only centered in literacy education but also fused with the very idea of what counts as literacy. Children whose literacies are shaped by multilingualism, cultural diversity, migration, oral traditions, or storytelling practices rooted in their cultural communities are often labeled as ‘at risk’ or ‘struggling’ (Baker-Bell, 2020; Souto-Manning, 2021a; Wetzel et al., 2020). These diagnostic labels, far from neutral, reflect a deep racialized logic that seeks to ‘normalize or correct’ children of colour so that they may assimilate into white norms. The science of reading movement, with its renewed focus on phonics and standardization, is a contemporary manifestation of this logic. Mandated within literacy education programs, this approach overlooks the linguistic creativity of children of colour and dismisses their translanguaging practices (García and Li, 2014), in which they draw on their full linguistic repertoire and move fluidly between languages, to make meaning, communicate, and learn, ultimately positioning them as perpetually behind (Hoffman et al., 2020). It reifies literacy education as compensatory and remedial, drawing on a deficit lens that sees racialized children as lacking rather than thriving in their own right (Souto-Manning, 2007; 2021a). This logic not only harms children but also devalues the contributions of educators of colour, whose own language practices are positioned as liabilities within teacher education programs (Mosley, 2010). This deficit framing of children’s literacies is especially damaging for racialized immigrant children, whose families are often seen as culturally deprived rather than culturally rich (Gonzalez, 2005; Valdés, 1996). Assumptions about what counts as ‘school readiness’ or ‘appropriate language use’ strip children of their cultural identities and silence their home languages. This silencing is an act of epistemic violence—a denial of children’s full humanity and potential (Menon, in press). The dominant narrative of the “30 million word gap” serves as a key example, perpetuating harmful stereotypes of racialized communities as lacking vocabulary or intellectual capacity (Adair et al., 2017).

Souto-Manning (2021a) argues that instead of viewing the diverse linguistic and literacy practices of immigrant and racialized children as deficits, we must reframe our understanding through the concept of the “education debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006). This framework shifts our gaze from individual failure to systemic harm, recognizing that the marginalization of children of colour in literacy education is the result of accumulated racial and linguistic injustice. It asks us, as educators and researchers, to account for the historical and ongoing violence of a system that continues to prioritize whiteness and English above all else. Gutiérrez (2018) argues that Black, and communities of colour have been marginalized from the “formative anticipation of a possible future” and from contributing to the transformative designing of educational spaces and practices that contribute to the social good (p.103). Literacy education must thus disrupt and reject racist myths and high-stakes assessments which uphold narrow conceptualizations of literacy education. Instead, literacy education must open up to the rich literacies and translanguaging expertise (García and Li, 2014) of children and communities of colour to recognize their brilliance (Gutiérrez, 2018; Love, 2019). For racialized immigrant families like mine, this is not merely a theoretical issue, it is a deeply personal one. We want ourselves and our children to be seen, heard, and valued in our complexity, not merely measured against norms that were never designed for us. The work of dismantling linguistic and racial injustice in early childhood literacy must begin now, and it must center those of us who have long been pushed to the margins.

Theoretical framework: Critical literacy, culturally relevant pedagogy, and multimodal meaning-making

This paper is situated at the intersection of critical literacy (Freire and Macedo, 1987; Freire and Slover, 1983; Vasquez, 2017), culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), and multimodal literacy (Kress, 2003; Mills and Unsworth, 2017) as interpretive and pedagogical frameworks to examine how immigrant and racialized children engage with meaning-making in children’s museums. Drawing from these three paradigms allows for a nuanced, socially just approach to understanding young children’s literacy practices and identity formation in informal learning environments, where visual, sensory, spatial, and cultural experiences coalesce.

Paulo Freire’s (Freire and Macedo, 1987; Freire and Slover, 1983) notion of critical literacy offers a foundational lens for this work. Freire argued that reading the word must be grounded in reading the world, insisting that literacy is not merely a cognitive task but a political and ethical one. Literacy, for Freire, involves interpreting and transforming one’s lived reality. In the context of early childhood museum experiences, critical literacy invites us to see how children ‘read’ objects, displays, and social interactions as part of a broader interpretive process. Museums are not neutral spaces—they are ideological landscapes that convey dominant historical narratives, racial hierarchies, and cultural values. For immigrant and racialized families, engaging with museum exhibits often involves navigating these dominant discourses while making space for counter-narratives and personal connections. Freire’s (Freire and Macedo, 1987; Freire and Slover, 1983) work urges educators and researchers to consider how children and families bring their prior knowledge, questions, and embodied understandings to these encounters. This is particularly salient for racialized children who may not see themselves reflected in mainstream museum narratives. When children read and respond to these absences or under representations, they enact a form of critical literacy, identifying contradictions between their lived experiences and institutional narratives and imagining alternative ways of knowing and being. Such moments of friction can serve as pedagogical openings for critical reflection, storytelling, and meaning-making that resist and reframe dominant scripts.

Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) extends this commitment to justice through her framework of culturally relevant pedagogy, which argues for a sharp focus on the strengths of racialized students. By integrating three interrelated domains: academic success, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness, Ladson Billings (1995) offers a vision of education that centers minoritized children as knowers, creators, and agents of change. Culturally relevant pedagogy insists that children’s cultural knowledge and home languages must be valued in educational settings, not simply tolerated but used as essential resources for learning. In the museum context, this means inviting children to draw upon their home experiences, languages, and cultural memories as they interpret and engage with exhibits. For example, a dinosaur skeleton or an ancient artifact is not simply an object to be observed, but a prompt for storytelling, imaginative inquiry that may be inflected by a child’s cultural background, linguistic repertoire, or prior experiences with similar objects or myths in their family. This pedagogy also acknowledges that culture is not fixed. As Ladson-Billings (1995) notes, social justice-oriented pedagogies must recognize the heterogeneity of cultural experience and the fluid, ever-changing nature of identity. In the museum, immigrant families may creatively layer and remix cultural meanings, creating hybrid interpretations that challenge dominant understandings and expand what counts as knowledge. Importantly, Ladson-Billings’ emphasis on sociopolitical consciousness resonates with Freire’s (Freire and Macedo, 1987; Freire and Slover, 1983) call for education to support critical engagement with the world. For young children, this might mean noticing who is missing from a display, asking why certain stories are told while others are silenced, or imagining alternative futures that reflect their own values and hopes. In these moments, children are not just absorbing knowledge but actively shaping it, becoming subjects of their own learning rather than objects of adult-designed curricula. Culturally relevant pedagogy thus repositions immigrant and racialized children from the margins to the center, affirming their full humanity, intellectual capacities, and right to be seen.

A third paradigm that enriches this analysis is multimodal literacy, which has its roots in social semiotics and emphasizes the multiple modes through which meaning is made—linguistic, visual, gestural, spatial, aural, and even olfactory and tactile (Kress, 2003; Mills and Unsworth, 2017). Young children are natural multimodal communicators. Long before they master conventional reading and writing, they draw, gesture, sing, dance, build, and dramatize. These modes are not supplementary but central to how children think, express, and understand. Gestures and drawings are among the earliest forms of writing, and symbolic play involves sophisticated forms of embodied communication. Multimodal literacy recognizes this rich semiotic repertoire and affirms that literacy is not confined to alphabetic print. In museum environments, multimodal literacy becomes especially vital. Exhibits often include images, videos, sounds, tactile materials, and interactive displays that invite children to touch, move, respond, and co-create meaning. For racialized immigrant children, this offers multiple points of access to engage with content, connect with their families, and make sense of their world. A museum visit might involve a child pointing excitedly at a carved figure that resembles an object from home, narrating a story in their heritage language, or mimicking the movement of an extinct animal. Each of these moments is a literacy act, grounded in multimodal expression and situated within a cultural context.

Moreover, as scholars such as Narey (2017) and Rumenapp et al. (2018) argue, privileging written language in early literacy is a social justice issue. It marginalizes children from communities whose communicative practices emphasize oral, gestural, or visual modes. Multimodal literacy expands what counts as literacy, offering more equitable pathways for participation and learning. In children’s museums, where children are invited to engage with exhibits through touch, movement, dialogue, and play, multimodal approaches support both inclusion and depth of engagement. These environments affirm that learning is not linear but layered, sensory, and dialogic. Taken together, this framework aligns with my own positionality as a racialized mother and early childhood educator who has navigated museum spaces with my children. Our experiences of joy, alienation, recognition, and storytelling within exhibits remind me that learning is not confined to classrooms, nor is it neutral. Museums, when imagined critically and creatively, can become sites of possibility—places where children read the world, tell their stories, and imagine new ones. Through these encounters, they do not merely consume knowledge but participate in its ongoing creation.

Museums as vibrant, multifaceted learning environments

Museums serve as vibrant, multifaceted learning environments that support young children’s literacy learning through tactile engagement, inquiry, and dialogue. Traditionally viewed as spaces for the passive consumption of knowledge, museums have increasingly been reimagined as dynamic, interactive institutions that respond to the diverse needs and interests of the families and children who visit them. This transformation reflects a broader pedagogical shift—from understanding museums as institutions about something to institutions for somebody (Weil, 1999: p. 229). Within this paradigm, museums are no longer confined to static displays of artifacts but are instead positioned as powerful, learner-centered spaces where knowledge is co-constructed and situated within lived experiences (Andre et al., 2017; Kelly, 2007).

As informal learning environments, museums have garnered increasing scholarly attention for their potential to foster meaningful learning beyond traditional classroom settings (Lester et al., 2022; Mujtaba et al., 2018; Rogoff et al., 2016). These spaces are often defined by their open-ended, flexible structure, which invites self-directed exploration and collaborative engagement. Unlike the more structured frameworks of formal schooling, museums encourage young children and their families to draw on prior knowledge while experimenting with new ideas, often through creative and personalized forms of inquiry (Mujtaba et al., 2018). In early childhood contexts, museums offer unique opportunities for immersive, multisensory, and multimodal learning. Children and their caregivers are invited to participate in hands-on exhibits, interactive programming, and educational activities that engage the senses—touching fossils, drawing in activity stations, listening to multilingual audio guides, or engaging in dramatic play. These experiences can be more memorable and meaningful than traditional, print-based literacy instruction. As such, museums function as critical components of a child’s broader educational ecosystem, where literacy is imbued with embodied, experiential, and affective learning.

Crucially, museums are not merely alternative learning spaces, they are dialogic, relational, and affectively charged environments in which children engage with knowledge on their own terms. Their potential to foster multimodal learning—through sight, sound, movement, and interpersonal exchange—makes them especially significant for early childhood education and for children whose cultural and linguistic experiences are often marginalized in dominant educational discourses.

Multimodal literacies: Embodied, relational, and politically situated

This capacity for dynamic, multisensory engagement highlights the importance of understanding literacy as inherently multimodal. Such a perspective is not only pedagogically innovative but also ethically and politically necessary. Multimodal literacy challenges the print-centric and English-dominant models that continue to shape mainstream early childhood education, often to the exclusion of bi/multilingual, immigrant, and racialized children (Kress, 2009; Mills, 2016).

Literacy, when conceptualized through a multimodal lens, goes beyond reading, writing speaking and listening. It encompasses the full spectrum of meaning-making practices—gesture, image, sound, movement, spatial arrangement, and oral storytelling—rooted in children’s social, cultural, and material worlds. As Kress (2009) notes, modes of communication are culturally and socially determined; what counts as literacy is defined by the communities that use and value those modes. In this way, multimodal literacy foregrounds the lived realities and epistemologies of marginalized children, validating the diverse ways they express, interpret, and navigate the world. Kress and Jewitt (2003) emphasize that modes are not universal but shaped by cultural practices that transform material into meaning. This insight is particularly relevant in informal learning settings like museums, where children’s literacy practices often extend far beyond conventional definitions. In these spaces, drawing, dramatic play, building structures, singing, or engaging in collaborative storytelling become powerful forms of communication and inquiry.

For young children, multimodal expression is intuitive and expansive. They move fluidly across modes—drawing, singing, storytelling, movement—without privileging one form of communication over another. As Leung (2018) reminds us, these are not just aesthetic choices but intentional acts of meaning-making, legitimate sign systems through which children make sense of their experiences. Multimodality, then, reflects and affirms the sociocultural and linguistic contexts in which literacy is enacted. From a justice-oriented perspective, multimodal approaches are not simply educationally enriching, they are ethically urgent. When educators prioritize narrow, print-based literacy practices, they risk marginalizing children whose communicative resources lie outside dominant linguistic norms. Narey (2017) argues that such exclusion is not a neutral oversight but a systemic inequity that perpetuates racialized and linguistic hierarchies in early education. Rumenapp et al. (2018) further underscore that learning environments which support multiple communicative modes create more equitable and accessible pathways for diverse learners.

Thus, integrating multimodal literacies into early childhood learning is a critical act of resistance against deficit-based, assimilationist educational paradigms. It invites educators, researchers, and institutions to reconceptualize literacy as a dynamic, relational, and culturally grounded practice—one rooted in children’s identities, experiences, and communities. Despite growing interest in multimodal literacy, significant gaps remain, particularly in understanding how young children from immigrant, newcomer, and racialized backgrounds explore and enact literacy within informal learning spaces like museums. This prompts a critical question: How might museums, as public cultural institutions, serve not only as sites of learning but as counter spaces where racialized children and their families can resist marginalization, assert agency, and co-construct meaning? The following sections explore museums as such counter spaces in early childhood education, as sites of both resistance and possibility.

Vignette: Multilingual and multimodal encounters at the ROM

The vignette that follows is drawn from a personal journal entry documenting a visit to the ROM with my children, an experience that has lingered with me for its richness in meaning-making, relational connection, and cultural learning. As both an early childhood educator and a mother, I understand culture and language not only as academic pursuits but as deeply embodied, lived experiences. Autoethnography, for me, offers a relational mode of inquiry that allows personal experiences to be understood as social phenomena (Schmid, 2019), and I approach this work with a commitment to ethical reflexivity. Before including this vignette, I sought and received informed consent from my children, who are now older. Their names have been omitted, and we engaged in a process of dialogue to ensure they were comfortable with how their experiences were represented. I also recognize the limitations of this account; it does not claim to offer generalizable findings but instead contributes a situated perspective grounded in one family’s encounter with a public cultural institution. In line with Bishop’s (2020) articulation of Indigenous autoethnography, I continually ask myself: Who am I speaking for? What am I speaking to? This form of inquiry demands ongoing reflection, relational accountability, and a commitment to contextual and cultural ethics.

On a rainy spring afternoon, I stepped into the ROM’s dinosaur exhibit with my two preschool-aged children. Their fingers were sticky from a recent snack, their eyes wide with anticipation. The air inside the exhibit was cool and faintly metallic; the lighting dim, punctuated by spotlights that illuminated the towering skeletal remains of prehistoric creatures. My children darted ahead, their footsteps echoing against the tiled floor as they approached a fossilized Triceratops. “നോക്കൂ, അമ്മേ! വളരെ വലുത്!” (“Look, Mummy! So big!”) my four-year-old son exclaimed in Malayalam, our native language, tugging on my sleeve and pointing upward. My six-year-old daughter, equally enthralled, moved eagerly from one display to another, but hesitated near the glass enclosures and roped-off areas that restricted her from fully engaging with the exhibits. Her desire to explore was tempered by the institutional boundaries of the space, which asked children to look but not touch.

The museum was alive with the presence of families from a wide array of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, reflecting the vibrancy of Toronto, one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world. As my children moved from one exhibit to the next, I heard families conversing in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, and Arabic, their voices full of excitement and wonder. This vibrant multilingualism, however, stood in stark contrast to the exhibit itself. The accompanying texts, descriptions, and signs were presented only in English, a language that, while widely used, was not the mother tongue for many of the families in attendance. The words and signs did not reflect us as immigrants, people of colour, or multilingual speakers. The signage served not only as information but also as a subtle gatekeeping mechanism, reinforcing who the exhibit was truly intended for.

Even though my family and I were invited in, much of what was displayed had no connection to me—an immigrant. The artefacts, the curation, and the aesthetic choices reflected a dominant cultural narrative that did not acknowledge or include our histories or epistemologies. Whiteness was imbued in the artefacts, not just in their geological origins or scientific classifications, but in the very design and framing of the exhibit. The ropes were not the only boundaries; whiteness prevailed in the signs, the displays, and the institutional tone of authority. I found myself searching for points of cultural or linguistic connection, but the exhibit remained silent to our presence, even as we stood there, fully engaged. Although I wanted to slow down and read the accompanying texts beside each display, I could sense my children’s growing frustration as I repeatedly reminded them not to touch the fossils or get too close. I realized then that it was time to move toward the interactive section, an area where children were encouraged to engage with the materials through tactile, bodily exploration.

At a low table designed for hands-on learning, my children joined others in tracing the contours of fossil replicas. They pressed their palms into textured stone molds, turned plastic bones over in their hands, and invented narratives about dinosaurs, weaving between English, Malayalam, and imagined languages. As my daughter examined a nest of dinosaur eggs, “I’m the dinosaur doctor,” she announced, cradling a replica egg. My son chimed in, saying the bones belonged to a dinosaur from Kerala, mapping ancestral memories onto prehistoric times. Another child contributed by adding dinosaur babies to the scene. A child who code-switched between English and Arabic gently corrected my son’s pronunciation of a dinosaur’s name, explaining, “That’s how my big brother says it.” They began co-constructing a story about dinosaur siblings hiding in a cave. The children crawled under the display table, dragging toy fossils behind them, their bodies becoming instruments of narrative as they growled, whispered, and rearranged the materials to reflect their collective vision.

These interactions, while seemingly playful, were layered with meaning. The children were making sense of the world through play, engaging in inquiry, improvisation, and knowledge-building. As my children brushed sand from bones, pieced together replicas, and formed relationships through play, I began conversing with other immigrant parents. What began as casual remarks about the exhibit soon unfolded into deeper exchanges about our native languages, shared experiences of migration, and the joys and challenges of parenting across cultures. One father smiled when he overheard my children speaking Malayalam. “We speak Tamil at home,” he said. We laughed, comparing phrases, recognizing familiar cadences. These linguistic connections, both among children and between adults, became bridges for belonging, gestures of mutual recognition that disrupted the dominant narrative of the museum. As our children connected through curiosity, investigation, and the pleasure of discovery, we too connected through storytelling and mutual recognition. In this space, multiple narratives were co-created and shared. Through these exchanges, identities were not only expressed but affirmed and negotiated. Still, even in that space of connection, the museum remained a contested terrain. Our multilingual voices filled the room, but they were not mirrored in the institution’s language. Our presence animated the exhibit, yet the walls around us, textual, linguistic, and cultural, remained firmly intact.

The exhibit space pulsed with improvisation, relationality, and joy. The museum’s material affordances—interactive screens, fossil casts, and open-ended storytelling zones—enabled children to imagine themselves as paleontologists, time travelers, and caretakers of ancient worlds. Their embodied play and multilingual meaning-making disrupted the notion of a singular, normative learner, instead foregrounding co-authorship, collaboration, and cultural hybridity. These encounters were not incidental, they were pedagogical. They illuminated the ways in which racialized and multilingual children bring rich epistemologies into museum spaces and engage in complex, multimodal literacies that often go unrecognized in formal educational settings. The museum, in this instance, became a site of shared authorship and possibility, where knowledge flowed across bodies, languages, and generations, offering a glimpse into what inclusive, justice-oriented literacy practices might look like. Still, even in that space of connection, the museum remained a contested terrain. The joy of watching my children imagine freely was accompanied by the quiet awareness that the invitation into this public cultural space came with unspoken expectations: to adapt, to decode, to translate, but not to see ourselves reflected. In that realization, the museum became more than a place of learning, it was also a site of quiet exclusion, where belonging was partial, and visibility, conditional.

While this vignette is shaped by my particular standpoint as a racialized immigrant mother and early childhood educator, it offers a glimpse into how racialized immigrant families and children co-author knowledge in institutional spaces not always designed with us in mind. The empirical scope is limited to one moment, one family, and one museum visit, but it reveals the potential of relational, embodied, and multilingual meaning-making. These moments, though fleeting, invite us to imagine more inclusive and culturally sustaining spaces for children and families, spaces where everyone sees themselves not only invited, but fully belonging.

Museums as counter spaces in early childhood education: Sites of resistance and possibility

Museums function as dynamic, informal learning environments that offer children access to artifacts, narratives, and sensory experiences often absent from traditional classroom settings (Andre et al., 2017). Unlike formal schooling, which tends to privilege print-based literacy and standardized curricula, museums invite multimodal engagement, where children interpret exhibits through touch, movement, sound, and imaginative play (Kress, 2003; Mills and Unsworth, 2017). This was vividly illustrated during my family’s visit to the ROM, where my preschool-aged children interacted with fossil replicas, pressed their hands into textured molds, and invented multilingual dinosaur stories. These moments exemplify how museums expand conventional notions of literacy by fostering embodied, collaborative, and culturally situated meaning-making.

However, museums are not ideologically neutral. As Freire (Freire and Macedo, 1987; Freire and Slover, 1983) argues, all literacy practices are inherently political, shaped by power, representation, and exclusion. While the ROM’s interactive exhibits allowed for open-ended exploration, the broader institutional structures—English-only signage, Eurocentric historical narratives, and physical barriers (roped-off displays)—reinforced dominant cultural norms. My children’s initial wonder was tempered by the realization that the exhibit did not reflect our linguistic or cultural realities. This tension underscores the dual nature of museums: they can be sites of both possibility and exclusion, contingent upon whose knowledge is centered and whose voices are amplified (McCreary and Murnaghan, 2019). The museum’s failure to incorporate multilingual signage or culturally diverse perspectives reflects a broader issue in public cultural institutions: the implicit gatekeeping of knowledge through language and design. For racialized immigrant families, this exclusion is not merely an inconvenience but an ideological erasure, one that positions them as outsiders to dominant narratives. Yet, as Vasquez (2017) contends, critical literacy involves not only interpreting texts but also interrogating absences and silences. In this sense, my children’s playful reinterpretations of the exhibit, blending Malayalam, English, and imaginative storytelling, served as acts of resistance, reclaiming the museum as a space where their linguistic and cultural identities could flourish (Souto-Manning, 2021a; 2021b).

Museums as relational counterspaces for belonging and literacy

Museums can serve as powerful counterspaces where immigrant children and families experience a profound sense of belonging, spaces that not only acknowledge but actively affirm their cultural and linguistic identities (Vlad, 2022). Despite the structural constraints often embedded in dominant cultural institutions, interactive museum environments offer opportunities for agency, recognition, and connection. At the fossil-tracing table, my children, alongside others, engaged in vibrant multilingual storytelling, weaving together English, Malayalam, and invented languages. One child, fluidly shifting between Arabic and English, gently corrected my son’s pronunciation of a dinosaur’s name, an act that redefined multilingualism as a pedagogical resource rather than a linguistic deficit. These moments exemplify Ladson-Billings’ (1995, 2006) concept of culturally relevant pedagogy, in which children’s home languages and cultural knowledge are foregrounded as integral to learning.

The museum’s material and spatial affordances—tactile exhibits, open-ended play zones, and communal tables—created conditions for intergenerational and cross-cultural connection. These spaces supported multiple semiotic resources—gestures, images, sounds, movement, and spatial design—that resonate with how young children, particularly from immigrant backgrounds, naturally engage with the world (Kress, 2003; Mills and Unsworth, 2017). As my children participated in play, I found myself in conversation with other immigrant parents, sharing stories of migration, family, and the complexities of parenting across linguistic and cultural borders. These spontaneous encounters transformed the museum from a site of observation into a dynamic space of relational knowledge-making. Such moments are especially significant for racialized immigrant families, who frequently encounter social isolation in mainstream educational and cultural contexts. When thoughtfully designed, museums can counter this isolation by nurturing communities of solidarity, care, and mutual recognition. This relational potential aligns with Freire’s (Freire and Macedo, 1987; Freire and Slover, 1983) understanding of literacy as a dialogic and collective process, cultivated not through individual mastery but through shared meaning-making. Intergenerational dialogues, collaborative storytelling, and laughter exchanged around the fossil table illustrate how museums can foster literacy as a deeply social, embodied, and culturally situated experience. Unlike traditional classrooms, which often reduce literacy to individual achievement and standardized assessments, museums enable it to emerge through interaction, emotion, movement, and multimodal expression.

Reimagining museums as counterspaces for literacy also requires a fundamental shift in how we conceptualize literacy and belonging, particularly for immigrant children of colour and their families. This shift challenges literacy paradigms rooted in English language acquisition and normative developmental benchmarks, advocating instead for frameworks that center the lived experiences and literacy practices of marginalized communities. A social justice approach expands our understanding of what counts as literacy and who is recognized as a literate subject. Within museum spaces rich in visual, tactile, and auditory modalities, immigrant families engage in meaningful, affirming literacies that reflect their complex identities.

Crucially, museums can offer racialized immigrant families not only access to knowledge, but access to belonging, a deeply affective and political dimension of literacy learning. Belonging in early childhood is not merely a developmental milestone; it is a racialized and political experience (Yuval-Davis, 2006). While early childhood education frameworks frequently cite belonging as a foundational value (Stratigos et al., 2014), dominant norms continue to center White, monolingual, able-bodied children, thereby marginalizing families who do not fit this ‘norm’ (Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol, 2018). The denial of belonging has long-term consequences, undermining children’s self-worth, constraining identity formation, and reinforcing exclusion and assimilation (Souto-Manning, 2021b). Recognizing the museum as a site of literacy, therefore, demands a critical intervention, one that disrupts exclusionary narratives and repositions cultural institutions as spaces where diverse communicative repertoires are not only welcomed but celebrated. In contexts where dominant narratives often pathologize or erase immigrant and racialized communities, the museum experience can affirm cultural knowledge, celebrate multilingualism, and provide representational justice. When children encounter exhibits that reflect their heritage, or when they are invited to co-create meaning through inquiry, storytelling, and play, they begin to see themselves not as outsiders but as integral participants in public cultural life. These shared experiences also support co-learning and cultural negotiation, strengthening intergenerational relationships and fostering identity development amid processes of migration and adaptation.

Framing museum visits as legitimate acts of literacy-making reorients our pedagogical priorities toward justice. It marks a shift away from deficit-based understandings of immigrant learners, and toward an affirmation of their complex, multimodal, and relational literacies. Museums, then, become spaces of belonging where immigrant children of colour see their histories, languages, and ways of knowing reflected and respected. In doing so, they not only serve as counterspaces to dominant narratives but also emerge as vital, imaginative, and inclusive terrains for cultivating equity-driven literacy practices and reimagining educational futures.

Museums as sites of identity-making and multimodal literacies

Museums can serve as transformative spaces where racialized immigrant children and families experience identity not as fixed, but as fluid, relational, and constantly evolving. The vignette illustrates how children engage in improvisational acts of becoming within these spaces. My daughter’s tentative pause near the roped-off exhibits revealed an embodied awareness of institutional boundaries, both material and symbolic, that regulate who may touch, question, or co-construct knowledge. Yet within the interactive zone, she and other children transcended these constraints, becoming co-authors of meaning through imaginative play, multilingual dialogue, and cultural reference. This form of embodied literacy aligns with multimodal literacy frameworks (Mills and Unsworth, 2017), which view children as agentive, meaning-making subjects who draw on gesture, movement, sound, and language to express and negotiate identity.

For racialized immigrant children, museums can become spaces where identity is not imposed or predetermined but continually constructed through everyday encounters (Souto-Manning et al., 2021). A dinosaur fossil might evoke a familial memory; a textured artifact might elicit a gesture rooted in home culture. These meaning-making acts, what Freire (Freire and Macedo, 1987; Freire and Slover, 1983) described as “reading the world”, are simultaneously personal and political. As children draw on their cultural repertoires to engage with institutional narratives, they disrupt fixed identity categories and assert presence in spaces that have historically excluded their histories and ways of knowing. In this sense, the museum becomes a vital site of identity negotiation, where hybrid meanings emerge, dominant scripts are unsettled, and children’s cultural subjectivities are validated. This identity work is particularly urgent for racialized children, who are frequently marginalized or rendered invisible within dominant educational and cultural institutions (Souto-Manning, 2007; Souto-Manning et al., 2021). When my son spoke animatedly in Malayalam or when the Arabic-speaking child offered a gentle correction, these were not incidental moments but acts of linguistic and cultural affirmation. Drawing from Souto-Manning’s (2021b) call for belonging for racialized children in early childhood education, I theorize belonging as resistance, by making moments visible when these children create spaces of recognition and relationality within systems that often deny their full humanity. These are not merely individual expressions but collective, embodied performances of identity and belonging that challenge normative scripts of assimilation.

Museums, then, can function as sites where immigrant children and families read the word and the world (Freire and Macedo, 1987), participating in immersive, sensory-rich environments that invite embodied, experiential, and relational ways of knowing. Encounters with artifacts, visual art, soundscapes, and interactive displays allow children to engage with texts that are layered, infused with histories, imaginaries, and knowledge systems that may resonate with lived experience or spark new paths of identity formation. In these moments, the museum shifts from a static repository to a co-constructed space of meaning-making and affirmation. For children navigating multiple linguistic and cultural contexts at home and school, museums provide an expanded and inclusive literacy landscape. Here, children interpret sociocultural messages embedded in exhibits (reading the world) while participating in language-rich exchanges with family, educators, and peers (reading the word). These interactions deepen not only comprehension but also relational and identity work. In this light, museums hold radical pedagogical potential, not merely as curators of artifacts but as living, evolving institutions that support racialized immigrant children and families in imagining new possibilities for self, community, and belonging. They remind us that immigrant children are not waiting to be taught how to belong; they are already enacting belonging in transformative and agentive ways that institutions must learn to witness, honor, and amplify.

Honouring the everyday brilliance of immigrant and racialized children

Museums hold radical potential as counterspaces where immigrant and racialized children are not merely included but recognized as knowledge-holders, storytellers, and meaning-makers. Museums need to include children’s voices and perspectives within a space that privileges artefacts and collections that are curated by adults (McCreary and Murnaghan, 2019). Rather than reinforcing narratives of assimilation or deficiency, museums can foreground the intellectual and cultural richness of racialized immigrant families, challenging the erasure of their languages, histories, and epistemologies. During our visit to the ROM, this brilliance was palpable. When my son spoke in Malayalam or when an Arabic-speaking child corrected an adult, these were not incidental moments but acts of epistemic agency. Through translanguaging (García and Li, 2014), these children navigated linguistic and cultural worlds with fluidity. Such moments exemplify culturally sustaining practices, expansive, multimodal engagements with language, identity, and meaning (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris and Alim, 2017). When museums affirm these practices, they shift from being passive repositories to dynamic spaces of recognition and creative potential. Yet, the limits of institutional inclusion were equally visible: the absence of non-English signage, Eurocentric narratives, and minimal cultural context often rendered our knowledge invisible, even as our bodies animated the space. This contradiction highlights the need for museums to move beyond symbolic diversity toward relational accountability, an active commitment to learning with and from the communities they serve.

Adopting culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies can reposition museums as spaces of justice-oriented learning. This requires recognizing not only the content immigrant families bring but the frameworks through which they engage with the world. Literacy learning becomes multimodal and translingual; cultural competence means designing participatory, experiential experiences in museums that validate home knowledge while offering encounters with other worldviews (McCreary and Murnaghan, 2019). Sociopolitical consciousness entails curating narratives that make visible colonial legacies and invite critical engagement with history and power. In such environments, racialized immigrant children are not simply included, they become co-constructors of knowledge (McCreary and Murnaghan, 2019). A child who hears a familiar language, sees an artifact linked to migration, or is invited to share their story becomes a knowledge producer. These encounters challenge deficit narratives and foreground an ethic of possibility and recognition. Museums can offer immigrant and racially minoritized children an immersive and empirical learning experience through direct engagement with objects, artifacts, and interpretive displays. By making visible the artefacts often excluded from dominant historical narratives, museums, alongside educators and families, can support children in reclaiming and navigating their own stories and identities (McCreary and Murnaghan, 2019).

By resisting White, monolingual, and Eurocentric norms, museums can function as counter-hegemonic educational spaces (Souto-Manning, 2007). Through multimodal storytelling, inquiry-based learning, and multilingual interpretation, they affirm the complex literacies racialized immigrant families practice every day. These spaces do not ask children to leave parts of themselves behind but invite them in, saying: your knowledge matters, your story belongs, and your brilliance is the foundation of this space. In this way, museums become living pedagogical environments, sites of relational, justice-driven, and culturally sustaining learning.

Conclusion: Museums as pedagogical literacy spaces of resistance and possibility

This paper has examined the potential of museums as transformative counterspaces in early childhood education, spaces that support multimodal literacy, affirm identity, and foster belonging and empowerment for racialized children and families. Rather than viewing museums as neutral extensions of formal education, this work positions them as politically charged environments where immigrant and racialized children assert their identities, challenge dominant narratives, and enact dynamic literacy practices. At the core of this argument is a recognition that immigrant children are not passive recipients of knowledge but active cultural producers. When they draw on home knowledge and move fluidly between languages and literacies, they enact culturally sustaining pedagogies that reflect their lived experiences and community strengths.

Museums, when committed to justice-oriented pedagogy, can amplify these practices through intentional design and critical curation. Multilingual signage, sensory-rich exhibits, and participatory storytelling create entry points for families to co-construct meaning. These engagements broaden what counts as literacy and reframe identity as both cultural and political. Realizing this potential, however, demands institutional transformation. Museums must move beyond diverse content to interrogate their own roles in perpetuating exclusionary narratives. Critical self-reflection, community partnership, and pedagogical innovation are necessary to center those historically marginalized in these spaces.

Ultimately, this reimagining challenges conventional literacy education by asserting that belonging is not a passive state but a collective, political process. When museums value multilingualism, celebrate cultural richness, and foster agency, they become spaces of genuine belonging and co-created knowledge. By centering immigrant children’s brilliance, museums can model educational spaces that are not only inclusive, but deeply transformative.