Download or read book Negotiating Language and Literacy in a Bilingual/bicultural Context written by Mary E. Libby and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multi-year autoethnographically oriented practitioner inquiry was concerned with Pasifika English Language Learner (ELL) students, teachers, and staff in a multilingual, multicultural secondary school in New Zealand. Drawing from my practice as a teacher and teacher-leader, I explored the range of learning and teaching opportunities that could be created by and made available for ELL students within the context of existing school-based practices and policies. In linguistically and culturally pluralistic national contexts framed by educational policies and practices conceptualized to value one (or two) languages and cultures over others, policies often insufficiently account for the full diversity of identities, knowledges, and ideologies present in the wider population. As national borders become more permeable, there is a greater need in predominantly English speaking countries to understand the relationships, practices, and policies enacted by and for ELL students. This study was conducted from my location as an experienced teacher and teacher-leader practicing in an unfamiliar cross-cultural context. The conceptual framings recognize languages and literacies as socially constructed, socially situated, and inherently ideologic, and the enactment of school-based practice and policy as inevitably local and relational. The methodology was connected to my braided personal, political, scholarly, and professional commitments to inquiry-based practice and cultural, linguistic, and ideological diversity. Collected and analyzed during my time at the school and in retrospect, data included artifacts of practice, an inquiry journal, formal and informal interviews, and analytic memos. By putting forth conceptions of ELL students and school-based staff as generators of knowledge and situating local knowledge of practice within wider contexts, this study illuminates the importance of locating difference within discourses of possibility. Using my practice over 2 years as a case, I found that Pasifika ELL students and the school-based staff supporting them, actively resisted their positionings as silent majorities by envisioning, creating, and taking up opportunities to enact more equitable school-based pedagogy and curriculum. Using a series of vignettes of practice as data sources, I argue for the generative participation of multiple languages, literacies, and ideologies in linguistically and culturally pluralistic schools.