“Some people get lost”: A Practitioner Inquiry into the Transnational, Diasporic, and Educative Experiences of Participants in an After School Reading and Writing Group

This practitioner research study documents the experiences and perspectives of nine Academic Upgrading students in an After School Reading and Writing Group who were enrolled within an urban college in Toronto. The group is composed of multilingual participants who count among their primary or secondary languages: Arabic, Bajan (A variation of West African Creole), Dhalik, English, Tigrinya, Spanish, and Urdu. These students were placed within an Academic Upgrading program to improve their literacy skills with the hopes of attaining entrance into the mainstream college. Drawing inspiration from practitioner research studies that intentionally research and “teach against the grain” (Cochran-Smith Lytle, 2009, p. 23), the After School Reading and Writing Group co-selected diasporic literature. Through discussions and writing, members recounted their own complex engagements across cultural, linguistic, and educational contexts. This research explores what happens when students narrate their own educational histories in a literary discussion group with texts that offer them an opportunity to explore the intersections between migration, race, power, identity, and schooling. I locate this work within the research on out-of-school literacies (Bronkhorst Akkerman, 2016; Hull Schulz, 2002), critical literacy (Duncan-Andrade, 2007b; Freire Macedo, 1987; Morell, 2009) and counternarratives of schooling (Delgado, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Sandoval, 2000). I document central tensions that influenced members’ educational histories and trajectories. These include literacy shaming, language policing, racial discrimination, the medical model of disability, and academic assumptions about what they could and could not accomplish. Findings surface the complexity of the group’s engagements with texts, the internalized deficit perspectives that often haunt their writing, the compulsion and reluctance to share vulnerable stories—their struggle to see themselves as legitimate writers with authorial voices. This study has implications for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers concerned with deepening understandings of teaching writing and reading to academically marginalized students.

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