Gitte Frandsen
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
Transnational, multilingual students have extensive experiences negotiating language difference by translating, translanguaging, and drawing from their literacy and rhetorical resources (Canagarajah). Further, by traversing physical and digital borders, these students habitually engage in the transnational flow of ideas and information, which gives them access to a wealth of information and literacy resources, both from other places and from the border, i.e., where meaning emerges (Anzaldúa). However, transnational students don’t always recognize their translingual repertoires and vast knowledges as assets; often, indeed, they view their language difference as an obstacle or as something that needs fixing (Horner et al.). In this activity, students create maps that visualize and narrate their movements across space and time. The goal is for students to develop awareness of and reflect on the many communicative, literacy, and rhetorical resources they draw from in different contexts of their lives and the complexity and versatility of the communication. The emphasis on spatial, temporal, and multimodal aspects in the map-making is to visualize and visibilize the shifting and complex literacy practices transnational, multilingual individuals participate in. The collaborative component supports community-building and understanding of their classmates’ lived experiences. The storytelling aspect not only draws students’ to their rich stories; it also highlights that all stories exist in rhetorical situations. For example, as students recall specific stories while doing this activity and they choose to share or not share them with their classmates and teacher in this particular place and time and situated in a specific material and discursive ecology.