Cosmopolitan Literacies of Belonging in an After‐school Program With Court‐Involved Youths

Abstract

This article focuses on the concept of belonging as an embodied practice that is expressed by adolescents in multimodal ways and that can be nurtured inside and also beyond schools, such as within afterschool programs. We explore belonging in an afterschool program designed for court‐involved youth. Our research is theoretically framed by educational cosmopolitanism and multimodal literacy and we situate our analysis within a discussion of cosmopolitan literacies of belonging. The research reported in this article is part of an ongoing, multi‐year study, and our initial analyses suggest that youth seek out and create opportunities to experience and communicate a sense of belonging through play, in fleeting moments, during structured curricular moments, and through both verbal and non‐verbal modes. Our article concludes with recommendations for how practitioners might build on adolescents’ cosmopolitan literacies of belonging within institutional contexts.

Writing From Behind the Fence

“…This statement is similar to one from a study by Boudin ( 1993 ) about incarcerated women who gained "confidence that their own life experiences were significant" (p. 194) when they participated in a literacy curriculum based on AIDS. Further parallels can be found with a study about the literacy lives of court-involved youths, in which participating in arts-based, multimodal activities enabled students to experience a sense of belonging through their interactions with others (Vasudevan, Kerr, Hibbert, Fernandez, & Park, 2014 ).…”

“…Michael Bitz, the founder of the Comic Book Project, an after‐school program for students in urban schools, had similar results in his research with graphic storytelling. As he stated, “in the process of creating comics, students are extending literary pathways that, in the end, address the basic literacy concepts we're all trying to get at” (Viadero, , para. 23).…”

Seeking Asylum

“…As Vasudevan, Kerr, Hibbert, et al. () suggest, “multimediated spaces nurture the emergence of adolescents' cosmopolitan literacies… as they view their social locations as connected to another's a few feet or a few thousand miles away” (p. 547).…”

The uses of (digital) literacy

“…In specific contexts, Stornaiuolo, Hull, and Nelson (2009) worked with international digital exchange projects in after-school settings to 'develop ongoing, multiple means of measuring students' learning, which encourages our redesign of the activities and the development of new measures more sensitive to the kinds of expanded literacies evident in participants' interactions' (388). Vasudevan et al (2014) built on these approaches to work with court-involved youths on an 'alternative-to-detention' programme utilising multimodal storytelling. Crucially with regard to our interest in the more porous interchanges facilitated in 'the third space', the researchers in this intervention saw ourselves not only as researching the literacies and practices of belonging among the youth participants, but also as providing a service in the form of arts-based, digital media workshops for this organization.…”