In this article, we examine the affordances of polylingual and polycultural learning ecologies in expanding the linguistic repertoires of children, particularly young Dual Language Learners. In contrast to settings that promote the development of English and academic language at the expense of maintaining and developing home language, we argue that the social organization of learning should privilege participation in dynamic, hybrid literacy practices. Children are often more likely to experiment with English and academic genres, while also taking on powerful identities as learners and language users, when formal and informal modes of communication are leveraged, multimodality and language-crossing encouraged and the use of both home and academic vernaculars promoted within a context that values social relationships and the playful imagination. We argue that children’s literacy practices develop in particular social and ‘located’ relationships, and we examine one such after-school setting designed with these principles in mind, the long-standing UC Links/Las Redes partnership, where home languages and intercultural experiences are unmarked and necessarily integral to participating in the shared practices of the community. We highlight the affordance of one common practice of the community, children s communication with the mythical cyber wizard, El Maga (sic), and the ways this practice strategically draws on students full linguistic toolkits in order to invite them to integrate modes and genres of communication that challenge the divide between everyday and school-based literacies, stretching children beyond their current levels of literacy development.

This article discusses theoretical lenses drawn from scholars in the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies to consider students’ positioning in relation to emotional-cognitive, private-public dichotomies that permeate normative notions of what can and should count as successful engagement with school. Specifically, we explicate Caruth’s metaphor of the speaking wound, in conversation with other trauma studies scholarship, to consider the representations of lived experiences carried into classrooms and the consequences of interpreting and representing students’ lives. To provide context for our conceptual argument, we discuss qualitative data of two students’ experiences across a school year. We argue that trauma theory illuminates two overlapping, yet distinguishable, ways trauma can be productively conceptualized in schools and marshaled as a context for analyzing structural inequities: first, to consider the trauma individuals carry into classrooms as a potential source for deepening students’ connections to school; second, to recognize how some students’ positioning within the institution of public schooling in the United States constitutes a trauma that must be heard and proactively addressed. In both conceptualizations, we argue for inserting trauma theory into conversations about the moral and pedagogical imperative to work toward increased equity in schools and classrooms.

Drawing on the combined theoretical lenses of positioning theory and academic literacies, this article presents case studies of four children from one urban classroom, two of whom scored at or above proficient on the large-scale writing assessments required by their district and state and two of whom scored below. Using criteria from state rubrics, we closely analyzed the writing products children produced for high-stakes assessments and classroom writing projects as well as drew on a range of qualitative data to contextualize children's writing within the complex relationships with writing observed across the school year. Our findings suggest test scores may be inaccurate or highly malleable based on relations between the features of the writing children produced, students' identities as writers and preferred practices, quirks of the testing context, and arbitrary features of the test itself. Indeed, our analyses found that some children's test scores misrepresented their capabilities as demonstrated in the writing they produced both within and outside of the testing situation. Furthermore, the form of the assessments risked positioning these children in just the ways that would frustrate rather than promote their attempts to put their best writing on the page. Our data suggest that the children's test scores did not provide the information about achievement in writing that such tests are assumed to convey and that both the form of on-demand writing assessments and the dichotomized sorting they facilitate potentially undermine some of the very goals, often articulated by policy makers, underlying the push for accountability through testing.

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