Community Voices: Resettled Youth Use Their Writing to Reposition Themselves

Abstract

ABSTRACT Resettled youth often face many challenges while enrolled in schools, such as expectations to quickly assimilate and acquire English language and literacy skills or being positioned in deficit-oriented ways. In this article, we use qualitative methods to seek to understand how resettled youth positioned themselves as authors and use their writing to reposition themselves in a two-week summer writing camp. We argue that educators and scholars need to reframe traditional ways of teaching and learning literacy and consider the diverse cultural and linguistic identities resettled youth bring with them by paying attention to the ways in which they represent and negotiate their identities through their writing. Using the following questions to guide our inquiry–In what ways do resettled youth in a writing camp position and reposition themselves in their writing? How do these positionings relate to how they express their identities in their writing?–we show how the recently resettled youth position themselves as authors of important stories. We also show how they repositioned themselves from vulnerable to resilient individuals and from despondent to hopeful and aspirational youth.