“My Book Ideas were Spinning in my Head”: Arts‐Rich Bookmaking Experiences to Create and Sustain Multilingual Children's Meaning Making Flows and Authorial Voices

Abstract

AbstractImportant theoretical developments in TESOL education challenge the monolingual mindset, instead valuing and leveraging students' complex linguistic repertoires alongside their funds of knowledge and identity through translanguaging practices to foster literacy development. Through a case study of an arts‐rich book making experience facilitated by community organization, Kids' Own Publishing, this article uses assemblage thinking to examine how children's semiotic, knowledge, and identity resources interact to support them to create and sustain meaning making flow and to express distinctive authorial voices. Employing a critical content analysis guided by assemblage thinking, we highlight the literacy skills demonstrated in five students' published eight‐page books and show how the interaction of children's meaning‐making resources is best understood through an “assemblage” lens, a process which is under‐researched. Through this lens, we examine the facilitative role of the arts‐rich experience in furnishing vibrant activities, artifacts, and an inspiring physical space that shaped how the children's meaning‐making resources came together as flows. We consider implications for literacy learning, including the need to create conditions for all children's meaning making resources to be drawn upon in text creation in an approach that values what all students, whether they identify as monolingual or multilingual, bring to their learning.