Pedagogical variations of critical literacies practices in a secondary transnational education program

Abstract

A case study design was employed in a secondary-level transnational education program to shed light on the complexity of critical literacies practices in the transnational education space. Findings reveal three pedagogical approaches to critical literacies in the English literacy classrooms, whereas critical reading of texts was salient in the Mandarin class. Data unravel that human and nonhuman entities assembled to affect the enactment of various critical literacies approaches and students’ meaning making in the globalized school context (e.g., the school's multiculturalism, its technological materiality, the IB curriculum, teachers’ prior life/professional experience, students’ cross-border experiences, and global accountability). The paper recommends that critical literacies in globalized schooling contexts should engage cognitive processes, as well as transnational youths’ embodied cross-border experiences, their multilingual/multimodal repertoires, and histories and realities related to their languages. Such an approach to critical literacies could enable bi/multilingual learners’ ethical meaning making across places, languages, and modes.