Multiple Voices: A Study of Pluriliterate North Atlantic Coast Nicaraguan Youth’s Multimedia Design Practices in Classroom and Online Community Contexts
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Authors Hinton, LaToya Lynn
Publisher The University of Arizona.
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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/641364 1
MULTIPLE VOICES: A STUDY OF PLURILITERATE NORTH ATLANTIC COAST NICARAGUAN YOUTH’S MULTIMEDIA DESIGN PRACTICES IN CLASSROOM AND ONLINE COMMUNITY CONTEXTS
by
LaToya L Hinton
______Copywright © LaToya L Hinton 2020
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF TEACHING, LEARNING AND SOCIOCULTURAL STUDIES
In Partial Fullfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2020
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost I would like to acknowledge all of the students, teachers and administrative staff at the Leadership School on the URACCAN University campus located outside of Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Thank you Jamie, Stefán, Jorge, Nataly and Adán. Without their open hearts, ears and minds to the possibility of this dissertation study, it simply never would have taken place. A huge thank you to the URACCAN University administrators and faculty for encouraging me and my former Leadership School students to take on digital activism for Indigenous and local languages as an academic subject worth strong inquiry. A special thank you to the director of IPILC, officials at CEIMM and the director of Channel 5 studios. A special thank you goes out to my friend and former roommate Sasha Marley Matamoros for introducing me to her hometown of Puerto Cabezas back in 2013. Sasha and her colleagues at URACCAN University and the University of Kansas introduced me to the Miskitu language and culture for the first time. I could never have imagined doing this work without you and your beautiful family, Sasha. A special thank you to the Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship from the United States Department of Education and both the University of Kansas and the University of Arizona for allowing me to formally learn Beginning and Intermediate Miskitu. I would like to acknowledge the greater Northern Caribbean coast Autonomous Region for efforts in ongoing activism to promote their own languages, cultures and customs amidst the many political struggles for recognition in Nicaragua and abroad. A special thank you goes out to the former Mayor of Puerto Cabezas and the former Vice Mayor for inviting me with open arms into their city to work to create multimedia personalized for their community in 2016. I would like to acknowledge my husband and my in-laws both from the Miskitu and Creole communities in Puerto Cabezas for their undying support of my work with youth in their community. They personally guided me on my dissertation journey and on my personal journey of identity formation and self-discovery in Central America. A special thank you to Aunty “Tara” Bello, Anya, Jerume and Aunty Ivys Casanova for letting me live in your homes in Barrio Cocal and Barrio German Pomares. Thank you to my neighbors in those barrios for keeping me safe and speaking to me in Miskitu, Spanish and English as if I were part of the community including Sandra Davis, close friend and colleague of my husband and former professor at URACCAN for encouraging me with food and advice on academia while we watched live baseball games from your back porch. A special thank you goes out to the Global Voices Organization for funding and supporting my teaching experience at the Leadership School. Without your rising voices micro- grant I could not have lived and taught in this region of the world. I would like to thank my dissertation committee members Dr. Sheilah Nicholas, Dr. Leisy Wyman, Dr. Perry Gilmore and Dr. Laura Herlihy. All four of you inspire my career and intellect in your own unique way. You have taught me perseverance on this long journey, one of the most powerful lessons that a young scholar can learn. I am humbled by the sheer magnitude of your published work and outreach in Indigenous communities in the United States and Central America. Thank you for guiding me and not giving up on me. Last but not least, I would to thank the Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies Department, the College of Education and the University of Arizona. Thank you so much to my
4 sponsors in the TLS Department and the College of Education! And lastly, a special thank you to all of my graduate student friends and colleagues who encouraged me with their own perseverance and drive to succeed despite all odds, you all cannot be underestimated.
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DEDICATION
I dedicate this dissertation study to my husband, my dad, my brother, and my mother. My mother passed away in 2013 right before I left to go to Nicaragua for the first time. She told me before she died to go and live out my dreams. She said, do not miss this opportunity for anyone. I met my husband in 2013 right after my mother’s passing. He told me I was strong and that my mother would want me to be happy, push forward and find love and passion in my work and my personal life. My dad has been so open-minded about this dissertation journey. My dad could talk to me for six to eight hours at a time in the middle of the night. He is beyond supportive, he is fully dedicated to my cause. My brother, he keeps asking when he will see me at my sixth graduation ceremony. This one is for you Kyle, thank you for attending all of those ceremonies. You are so supportive of your little sister!
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………….7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………...... 8 1.1 The Main Points of Analysis…………………………………………………………………10 1.2 The Plurilingualism and Pluriliteracies of La Escuela de Liderazgo, The Leadership School……………………………………………………...... 13 1.3 Present and Past: North Caribbean coast Youth ………………………...... 17 1.4 The History of the Caribbean coast Region of Nicaragua...... 18 1.5 The Current Context of Bilwi, Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua...... 30 CHAPTER 2 METHODS AND METHODOLOGY…………………………...... 35 CHAPTER 3 USING COMMUNITY-ANCHORED DIGITAL AND FACE TO FACE APPROACHES TO CENTER YOUTH’S PLURILITERATE VOICES IN MULTIMEDIA DESIGN…………………………………………………...... 70 CHAPTER 4 PLURILITERATE YOUTH PRODUCE MULTILINGUAL CRITICALLY CONSCIOUS VIDEOS AS DIGITAL ACTIVISTS FOR INDIGENOUS AND REGIONAL LANGUAGE RECLAMATION………………………...113 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS………………………………………158 5.1 Focusing On Social justice And Pluriliteracies Throughout The Course………………………………………………………………………………….162 5.2 Implications for Educators and Researchers of Linguistically Diverse Students in Multimedia Classrooms……………………………………………….170 REFERENCES.………………………………………………………………………………...174
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ABSTRACT
This dissertation tracks the development of a culturally sustaining multimedia course for 54 youth ages 15 to 17 in a secondary-level Leadership School outside of Puerto Cabezas, a multilingual city on the North Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. The study focused on creating conditions for youth to consult with Indigenous leaders of local non-profit organizations, and addressing social injustices, utilizing the ancestral languages Miskitu, Mayangna and Kriol. Drawing on Critical Indigenous Research Methodology (Wilson, 2008; McCarty & Brayboy, 2014) , Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017) and auto-ethnographic insights from my own experiences as an Mixed-race Indigenous scholar, I share how I worked to create a secure engaging space for students to design a range of multimedia projects using their pluriliteracies– abilities to communicate with audiences in local, national and global multimodal discourse (Garcia, Kleifgen & Bartlett, 2007). I also describe how collaborations with school officials and local leaders gave students key access to intergenerational local and Indigenous linguistic and cultural knowledge. To forefront youth leaders’ voices and perspectives, I critically analyze the cultural and linguistic content of students’ final video projects, which addressed racial discrimination, lack of access to information about sexually transmitted disease, bullying in schools, shifts in gender roles, and domestic abuse as social injustices. Focusing on the multilingual discourse of two specific projects “La Discriminación Racial” and “Pamali Painkira,” I also highlight the pluriliteracy and raciolinguistic (Alim, Rickford & Ball, 2016) identities of five-focal youth participants, and ways that youth worked together to foster new understandings of interculturalidad- knowledge exchange and understanding between distinct cultural groups (Kohls & Knight, 1994; Barth, 2007). Overall, the study showed how Indigenous, Afro-descendant , Mestizo, and Mixed youth in complex settings in Latin America can produce independent media, representing themselves and their local communities in new, powerful ways in national and global settings. At the end of the dissertation, I discuss implications for multimedia teachers and digital activists seeking to empower diverse youth in multilingual settings, and educators who wish to develop digital culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogies (McCarty & Lee, 2014; San Pedro, 2015, building on Paris, 2012) that honor marginalized youth voices in Latin America, in particular.
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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
Recently, multiple studies have focused on the use of culturally-sustaining pedagogies to empower and support the voices of marginalized youth in the United States (Paris & Alim,
2017). This dissertation highlights ways to develop culturally sustaining pedagogies that honor marginalized youth voices in Latin America, and ways to build digital culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogies (McCarty & Lee, 2014) with Indigenous1 youth. This dissertation also examines the potential for youth and their communities to empower themselves through multimedia design as they claim new spaces for Indigenous and local languages, and support the sharing of Indigenous and local knowledge. Specifically, the dissertation shares the approaches and outcomes of a multimedia course in coastal Nicaragua that incorporated Indigenous Latin
American young peoples’ cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, Amanti,
2005), and digital funds of knowledge (De Rooke, 2015), in a community-based curricula for civic engagement (Cress, 2003). As the dissertation demonstrates, the course helped young people raise their critical linguistic and cultural consciousness, and supported youth as they created and distributed videos that addressed key issues in their local environment.
Young people in present-day Latin American contexts live digitally active lives, often participating in social media sites and applications. The internet has also become much more affordable for these youth in recent years with increasing access to mobile technologies such as tablets and smartphones in Latin America (Breuer & Welp, 2014). Many Latin American countries have internet cafes and wifi hotspots where young people connect with one another on public or borrowed computers in urban areas and regional hub towns. Through engagement in
1 I use the term Indigenous to refer to peoples who have long inhabited territories pre-European contact. I capitalize the term Indigenous out of respect and to promote equality with European names such as Spanish or English.
9 social media platforms, these young people can access transnational flows of information, which often include viral internet memes, videos, and images, that young people and adults repackage, adding their own cultural nuances and flavors (Peeters & D’Haenens, 2005; D’Haenens, Koeman
& Saeys, 2007; McGinnis, Goodstein-Stolzenberg & Saliani, 2007; Milner, 2012; Blommaert &
Varis, 2014; Shifman, 2014).
In such a globalized world, it is easy to forget that many youths in Latin American contexts are part of distinct marginalized groups of people such as Indigenous and Afro- descendant2 communities that lack accurate representation in the mass media of their home countries. Without much inquiry into individual Latin American countries’ national media such as television, film, and newspapers, it might appear that all Latin American states equally represent all of their communities (Parra, 2015). However, as in other countries, many communities in Latin American countries do not get equal airtime on television nor as much page time in the newspapers as more dominant communities. Thus, engaging in social media as a form of independent media can serve as a vehicle for marginalized Latin American youths to represent themselves accurately on a local, national and global stage (Forte, 2002; Johnson &
Callahan, 2013; Valencia Rincón et al., 2014; Cru, 2014). Further, many marginalized youths in
Latin America, like marginalized youth in other countries worldwide, are losing access to their cultural knowledge, traditions, and languages due to lack of spaces to express themselves in their languages in the public, secondary education and professional spheres. Social media engagement can also help youth create or reclaim public, secondary education and professional spaces for
Indigenous and local languages (Callahan & Johnson, 2013; Cru, 2014).
2 I use the term Afro-descendant referring to people whose ancestors came from Africa and I capitalize it because it is an ethnic category in Nicaragua and other Latin American countries. I translated it from the Spanish term Afrodecendiente.
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Often educators and even community members may assume that young people’s social media participation is not academic and the use of social media serves as a distraction from young peoples’ face-to-face classroom learning. However, this dissertation builds upon previous studies to show how social media can serve as a third space where youth can express themselves in low-stress environments which have proved to be crucial environments for situated learning and civic engagement (Boyd, 2010; Kafai & Peppler, 2011; Gee, 2009; Denner, 2011, Hayes &
Games, 2008; Dron & Anderson, 2014). As I will show, developing social media third spaces
(Guitierrez, 2008; Edirisinghe et al., 2011) requires teachers and their students to develop curricula that blend spaces inside and outside of face-to-face classrooms. For educators who only dwell in either face-to-face classrooms or online , I also show how third spaces in the forms of classroom websites or classroom social media pages can serve as important bridges for youths' digital, linguistic and cultural literacies in plurilingual and pluriliterate contexts which feature
Indigenous and Afro-descendant youth.
The following case study seeks to demonstrate the power of utilizing a third space as well as community-based learning techniques to harness Indigenous and Afro-descendant youths’ digital, linguistic and cultural literacies. In the study, I share how, as a teacher-researcher, discourse analyst, and digital activist, I engaged youth participants and collaborated with community leaders to help raise young people’s linguistic and cultural consciousness, using video production as a vehicle for youth to pursue positive social change in their community.
1.1 The Main Points of Analysis
In this study, I describe how I developed the new course on multimedia design for La
Escuela de Liderazgo, a preparatory school located on the Bilwi campus of the University of the
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Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean coast (URACCAN) serving multiple populations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth in the highly multilingual and multiethnic community of Bilwi-Puerto Cabezas (Pop. Est. 120,000), the capital city3 of Nicaragua’s North
Caribbean coast Autonomous Region. In the course, four youth participants produced four collaborative multilingual final video projects, and a fifth youth produced an additional video on her own.
In chapter 2, I articulate who I was in this specific research context emphasizing my specific cultural and racial lenses and my own language ideology. I introduce the five key youth participants and the specific pieces of data that I analyzed. Lastly, I introduce the methods that I used to analyze the key youth participants’ own social media interests and classroom-based experiences as well as their final multimedia design projects.
In chapters 3 and 4, I focus on the ways that five key youth participants: Nataly, Adán,
Jorge, Jamie, and Stefán, connected their own social media interests and classroom-based experiences to multimedia design projects from the course. I also show how the production of each video created a space for young people to develop and share critical perspectives on essential, yet controversial, youth-centered themes of injustice, as well as community-based solutions to issues ranging from Bullying to Sexually Transmitted Diseases. I show how young people’s multilingual multimedia products supplemented more longstanding face-to-face
Indigenous and Afro-descendant language reclamation and maintenance movements in the city of Bilwi-Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and provided entertainment and educational resources for
3 Puerto Cabezas is a city rather than a town because of its physical structure. It has a densely populated center with urban sprawl at its extremities. Puerto Cabezas also has a history of large scale migrations from rural areas of the Caribbean coast and other countries for various industries including but not limited to fishing, lumber and fruit extraction. See the section on Company Time (1920-1979) for more on the history of Puerto Cabezas.
12 youth and adults. I also share how youth presented their multimedia products in a face to face forum at URACCAN and on social media, receiving positive responses from university students, faculty, and community members.
In the study within, I also highlight the pluriliteracy (Garcia, Kleifgen & Bartlett, 2007) and raciolinguistic (Paris & Alim, 2017) identities of the five-focal youth participants of this study: Jamie, Jorge, Stefán, Nataly and Adán and adults in the local setting. The students at the
La Escuela de Liderazgo spoke Miskitu, Spanish, English, Kriol4, and Mayangna. Faculty and students at the Leadership School were “plurilingual” and often strategically chose to speak one of the languages from the five previously listed based on the perceived power relations in a given conversation (Freeland, 2003). Leadership School students and faculty were also “pluriliterate” and had digital written, oral, visual and audio competencies in all five languages (Garcia,
Kleifgen & Bartlett, 2007) which they selectively used in the classroom, with friends and family in face to face and online spaces. As I show in chapters 3 and 4, youth critically reflected on the ways that they chose what language to speak on a daily basis in the process of producing original videos, and showed how this strongly related to the ways that they self- identified with a particular ethnic group in one video directly related to marginalized ethnolinguistic identities of
Mayangna youth in the local context. The identities of the youth of the Leadership School also reflected the oscillation of political power in the country of Nicaragua.
In the following section, I briefly overview the plurilingual and pluriliterate context of the
Leadership school where I created a new course on multilingual multimedia design to support
Indigenous and regional language reclamation and maintenance in an intercultural community-
4 Kriol is the term for the English spoken on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. It is a unique variation of English spoken on a continuum between Standard Caribbean English and “Deep Kriol” (Freeland, 2013).
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1.2 The Plurilingualism and Pluriliteracies of La Escuela de Liderazgo, The Leadership
School
The terms plurilingual and pluriliterate refer to the agency of choosing particular languages and literacies for communication given the particular power dynamics between political parties
and ethnic groups in a given situation at a given time (Freeland, 2013; Garcia, Kleifgen &
Bartlett, 2007). Below, I further elaborate on the nuances of these terms. In Latin American
contexts, it is also important to understand how plurilingualism and pluriliteracy intersect with
long term efforts to promote intercultural education as a means of empowering historically
marginalized communities. According to Nicaraguan Law, the people of the autonomomous
regions have the legal ability to manage their administrative affairs which include primary, secondary, and higher education policy-making (Freeland, 2003). Both La Escuela de Liderazgo and the connected URACCAN-Bilwi University, the sites for this research, were founded on the
mission of “intercultural” and “community-based” education models that strive to prepare
students for local careers that support the “autonomy,” or “self-governance” on the Coast. The
Nicaraguan Constitution’s “Intercultural Bilingual Education Decree of 1980” lay the foundation
for the Leadership School’s “intercultural” and “locally-based education” models. Under the intercultural and community-based education models, La Escuela de Liderazgo, the Leadership
School also promoted the explicit use of Indigenous as well as regional languages in pedagogical design, and emphasized “community-based” pedagogy that focused on extensive collaborations
between instructors and non-profit organizations which served the URACCAN student body,
Puerto Cabezas and surrounding communities. The Leadership School deliberately included
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Miskitu, Mayangna, Mestizo and Creole worldviews in pedagogy design as informed by
URACCAN University standards (Cupples & Glynn, 2014). The coursework at La Escuela de
Liderazgo, however, did not equally emphasize regional languages (Miskitu, Mayangna, and
Kriol) and global languages (Standard Spanish and English) in classroom settings.
Although the Leadership School had a majority Miskitu student body, students completed written assignments in science, math, and social studies in Spanish. The math and science teachers allowed students to answer questions orally in Miskitu because the math and science teachers were Miskitu speakers. But, based on my observations over a 5 month period, most students in the front of the classroom preferred to answer in Spanish and none of the teachers were Mayangna speakers. Teachers encouraged writing in both Spanish and United States-based
English. Teachers never encouraged writing or speaking Mayangna or Kriol although both languages have well-established writing systems and there were speakers of both Mayangna and
Kriol in all of the classrooms. So, given this information we might conclude that Spanish and
United States-based English were academic languages and Mayangna and Kriol were non- academic. But, non-profit organizations such as Instituto de Promoción e Investigacion
Lingüistica y Revitalización Cultural, The Institute for the Promotion of Cultural Revitalization and Linguistic Research did encourage Mayangna writing when Leadership School teachers collaborated with such organizations. This unequal representation of global languages, as shown below, related to complex socio-historical power relationships between regional ethnic groups, the nation-state, the U.S, and Great Britain. The following paragraph introduces the concept of the mass media in Puerto Cabezas which followed along the same trajectory of unequal representation of global versus local languages.
The Leadership School prioritized global languages such as Standard Spanish and English
15 over local languages such as Kriol and Mayangna, this reflected the linguistic hierarchy evident in the city of Puerto Cabezas, which I describe in chapter 2. Often national and international mainstream media silences or erases Indigenous and Afro-descendant youth voices; the linguistic hierarchy in the school further reflected a pattern of linguistic inequality in media programming.
Outside of the Leadership School, television programming, film and video games from outside the country, used Standard English with Spanish subtitles or dubbed from “Standard” English into Spanish (Cupples & Glynn, 2017). Local programming was almost exclusively in Spanish apart from one local news program in Spanish and Miskitu. At the time of the study, there was no multilingual multimedia entertainment such as television programming, film or video games targeted toward youth living in Puerto Cabezas. All five focal participants in this study, however, had access to social media at URACCAN; four out of the five focal participants had access to multimedia through social media outside of the URACCAN.
Given Puerto Cabezas’ youths’ interest in multimedia and the absence of multilingual multimedia entertainment, I decided to implement a new course on designing multilingual multimedia specifically for youth in the Puerto Cabezas area. I did not do this alone, I had considerable help from my collaboration with Global Voices, an international organization dedicated to digital activism for Indigenous and less commonly spoken languages of the world
(Global Voices, 2020). This international organization funded the construction of a locally-based course that included multimedia design and Indigenous language reclamation. The Leadership
School, Global Voices and I generated a new pedagogy based on digital literacies and activism to promote more access to educational and entertainment-based programming in Indigenous and local languages.
In designing the course and the related study, I drew heavily from the critical literacies
16 cannon (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2003), attempting to critically shed light on the inequalities faced by Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, and find ways to help the youth in this study shift the dialog on representing languages and cultures of coast in the global and local media. These scholars also emphasize the collegiality of youth’s research design – meaning that the youth gain intellectual prowess through their critical consciousness formation. Digital activism in Afro-descendant and
Indigenous youth contexts (Forte; 2002; Johnson & Callahan, 2013; Valencia Rincón et al.,
2014; Wood, 2014; Cru, 2014) supports youths' self-representation of their communities, including their struggles for representation and recognition. Digital youth activists also participate in social media sites and applications as well as private and public websites to shift the national and international dialogue about their communities.
My research questions for this dissertation study were as follows:
(1) How might plurilingual youth use multimedia design and production to promote social justice for themselves and their communities?
(2) How do educators design culturally sustaining pedagogy for pluriliterate students in multimedia design courses?
(3) How can youth- and community-focused video production address linguistic hierarchies and marginalized raciolinguistic identities, and highlight the cultural funds of knowledge of youth in plurilingual, urban contexts?
To answer the questions above in the dissertation, I share my experiences creating a digital culturally sustaining curriculum that provides spaces for youth’s pluriliterate voices showing how video design can create cultural and linguistic critical consciousness on the part of youth and foster positive social change.
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As I describe in detail in the chapters that follow, “Medios de Comunicación Digital,”
Multimedia was a semester long course that I expanded from a series of invited workshops on digital dictionary making, website and video editing, spanning from February to April 2016. As part of the course, I also helped students engage in doing theatre improvisations on topics of concern, such as Bullying, Racial Discrimination, Sexually Transmitted Disease and Domestic
Abuse, and helped students turn their improvisations into seven final video projects. The multimedia projects utilized the Indigenous languages Miskitu and Mayangna and the Afro- descendant language Kriol. I also drew on the Miskitu, Mayangna, Spanish and English languages in class as I explained how to edit dictionaries, websites and videos. In related activities, students and I also used written Spanish, Miskitu, Mayangna and English in digital guides that I stored on a Facebook page named after the course “Medios de Comunicacion
Digital,” Multimedia, and multimedia students shared the steps used in creating their videos on a
Facebook page called “Miskitus y Mayangnas en el Internet.” Students also presented their work to faculty and students at URACCAN university.
1.3 Present and Past: North Caribbean coast Youth
Although North Caribbean coast youth such as my former multimedia students and the focal youth participants of this study live in the present, the history of the relationships between their respective ethnic groups follow them, historical memory informs youths' current identities and their language choice. To understand how youth in the multimedia course supported their communities’ autonomy through multimedia design, it is also essential to know how a historically-rooted social hierarchy on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast perpetuates social
18 inequalities both in and out of school, and relates to Caribbean coast residents’ demands for autonomy and multilingual spaces for expression of marginalized voices.
In the following section, I overview the history of the Caribbean coast to help readers understand 1) how linguistic, cultural and racial injustices shaped local interactions at the time of the study; 2) why URACCAN and the Leadership School coveted the concept of autonomy and strive to incorporate Indigenous and Afro-descendant cultural worldviews into their classrooms; and 3) why URACCAN and the Leadership School continued to privilege Standard Spanish and
Standard English over the local languages of instruction in 2016.
Below, I will also show how race as a social construct in the contemporary Nicaraguan state relates deeply to the kinds of colonialism experienced by Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities on the coast, and how their history of colonialism and resilience sheds light on how ethnicity indexed with language use determines access to power and capital.
1.4 The History of the Caribbean coast Region of Nicaragua
The following historical sketch delves into the advent and evolution of the term
“autonomy,” or self-governance on the Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast , as well as highlights how the people in this region have resisted by adapting to the interests of foreign powers. Despite the influence of several foreign governments: Great Britain, Spain, and the United States, the coast have retained their distinct languages and cultural practices. Two critical aspects of autonomy in this region focus on the local management of natural resources and adherence to domestic language use in private and public spheres (Freeland, 2003; Baracco, 2011; Morris, 2016). I define local languages as the Indigenous languages: Miskitu, Mayangna, and Rama as well as
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Kriol, British English, and Spanish. The Caribbean coast people’s will to maintain their viewpoints and lifeways drives and motivates the establishment and maintenance of autonomy in this region of Nicaragua (Cupples & Glynn, 2017).
Global versus local ideology remains as a point of contention for the people of the
Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast who often call themselves, Costeños or coastal people. The name
Costeño distinguishes this group of Nicaraguans as unique in the national public imagination
(Morris, 2016; Goett, 2011). Global and local ideologies exist and persist based on how the
Caribbean coast region has managed contact with outside forces. Before European contact, the
Indigenous people including the Miskitu, Mayangna and Rama communities farmed the land of the central coast or made a living by fishing and collecting marine animals on the rivers and oceans of the region (Cupples & Glynn, 2014; Cupples & Glynn, 2017). Most of the diet of the
Caribbean coast al people at that time was based on coconut, root vegetables, fish, sea mammals, sea turtles, and land-based game. Through elaborate economies based on trade and reciprocity communities interacted with each other (Cupples & Glynn, 2014; Cupples & Glynn, 2017).
When conflicts over territories arose, those, who lived in populated areas laid claim to natural resources by naming the region in their respective languages (Cupples & Glynn, 2014). Naming territories in indigenous languages and managing natural resources such as rivers, oceans, land, and animals were and still are critical practices in the assertion of self-rule on the autonomous regions. One such example is the Mayangna name Bilwi, referring to a snake which presided in the area that is now Puerto Cabezas, the current capital of the Northern Autonomous Caribbean coast Region (RACCN) (Rounsefell, 2007).
The First British Protectorate Period 1638-1787
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During the 1638–1787 British Protectorate period, Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast endured the ramifications of the African slave trade and large-scale wood cutting camps
(Baracco, 2011). Great Britain brought many slaves to the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua from
Jamaica and other British territories in the Caribbean via West Africa (Gordon, 1998; Gordon et al., 2003). Some members of the Miskitu and Mayangna communities perceived Great Britain’s business dealings at this time to be the first assault on the concept of autonomy, seeing as the
African slaves were cutting mahogany trees on a large scale for British trade rather than for local consumption.
There were conflicts within the Miskitu community at the time over British trade interests. Not all members of the Miskitu population supported British exploitation of their lands
(Gordon, 1998). During the first British Protectorate period the British perpetuated the concept of the Miskitu Kings, Miskitu officials elected by the Miskitu people. The Miskitu Kings, with support from the British military, facilitated trade in the interest of the British crown and maintained order and sustenance of its West African slave population (Baracco, 2011). The
British government, largely visually absent from the Protectorate, used the Miskitu Kings, to manage their affairs in this territory. This practice is evidence for the maintenance of the concept of autonomy on the Caribbean coast after European contact (Baracco, 2011). Before the advent of British trade relations in the territory, the Indigenous people of the Caribbean coast maintained order and made decisions on behalf of their communities. After the trade relationship was well established by the British, the Miskitu communities managed the local economies which were then and now based on natural resource extraction (Baracco, 2011). A strong stratification of power relations developed between the Indigenous communities and African people (Gordon et al., 2003). The social stratification of Miskitu, Mayangna, Rama, and
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Africans began in this First British Protectorate era pinning the Miskitu people at the top of the power hierarchy and the African population at the bottom with the Mayangna and Rama peoples somewhere in between (Gordon, 1998; Gordon et al., 2003). So, from early on the concept of autonomy has privileged one group of over the others, the Miskitu people (Gordon, 1998;
Gordon et al., 2003).
The 33-year Spanish Period
Following the end of the first British Protectorate in 1787, for a period of 33 years, the
Spanish government held power in the region, much as it had done on the Pacific coast of the country since 1522. The Miskitu Kings lost power during this time. This period of Spanish rule on the Caribbean coast technically ended when the nation-state of Nicaragua gained independence from Spain in 1820. However, in 1823, the Caribbean coast did not have much of a relationship with the Pacific coast (Gordon, 1998; Morris, 2016; Goett, 2011).
This lack of a relationship was mainly due to the Caribbean coast ’s 149-year history of trade with the British government. While the Pacific coast of Nicaragua enjoyed independence from the Spanish crown, the Caribbean coast was about to enter the Second British Protectorate era from 1844-1860 (Baracco, 2011).
The Second British Protectorate Period 1844-1860
During the Second British Protectorate, the region saw the decline of West African slavery and the fall of large-scale banana and rubber plantations, which were common throughout Central and South America at this time (Tucker, 2000). During this period, the
British wealth gained from large-scale natural resource extraction decline d and eventually
22 returned all management of local natural resources to Miskitu, Mayangna and Rama and a new population of freed Afro-descendant slaves. However, during this Second British Protectorate era, the freed Afro-descendant slaves began to replace the Miskitu people’s wage-based jobs
( Hale, 1994).
The 73-year oscillation of power between the British and Spanish governments from
1787 to 1860 never caused the Indigenous people to lose their local forms of governance.
Despite the lack of access to foreign trade enterprises the Indigenous peoples continued to fish, farm and hunt on their lands and speak their native languages at home and in public spaces. The freed Afro-descendant population began to assert their own Afro-Caribbean identity both in
African traditions and in their relationship to their former British captors. This new Afro-
Caribbean identity included the everyday use of Kriol, a language with roots in West African languages and English (Gordon, 1998; Gordon et al., 2003). During this 73-year period,
Moravian Church missionaries began to establish churches in all of the large Miskitu and Afro- descendant communities on the Caribbean coast. For the first time, the Moravian Missionaries standardized the Miskitu language and wrote it down to translate the Bible (Freeland, 1993). The value of particular forms of communication in Spanish and English contributed to the stratification of power over the Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations during both British
Protectorate periods and the 33-year period of Spanish rule (Gordon, 1998; Frühling, 2007,
Henriksen, 2008; Morris, 2016; Goett, 2011).
Here I provide a brief history of language change on the North Caribbean coast. The
Miskitu language borrowed heavily from English and Spanish in order to adapt to the various foreign powers entering and exiting the region (Salamanca, 1993). The original official language of the Moravian church before translating the Bible into Miskitu was English (Freeland, 1995).
23
Kriol also adopted some Spanish terms and grammatical features during the Spanish rule (Holm,
1988; Bartens, 2011). The Mayangna people maintained their language quite well borrowing infrequently from the Miskitu language even though the Miskitu people were in power especially during the British Protectorate years (Benedicto et al., 2016). The Rama language began its slow replacement by Kriol on the southern Caribbean coast due to the broader West African population there (Salamanca, 1993). Colonization took a substantial toll on the original inhabitants of the Caribbean coast as well as its involuntary immigrant population from West
Africa, but it did not erase their original cultures or worldviews (Gordon, 1998; Frühling et al.,
2007, Henriksen, 2008; Morris, 2016; Goett, 2011; Herlihy, 2012).
The Managua Treaty of 1860 and La Reincorporación of the Caribbean coast
In 1860, with the signing of the Managua Treaty, the region experienced the establishment of a reservation for the Indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean coast. The establishment of “La Reserva Mosquitia” was both a renunciation of the Caribbean coast as a protectorate territory and an official recognition of the Coast’s autonomy by the Nicaraguan
Government. In 1894, General of Arms Rigoberto Cabezas and his soldiers officially re- encapsulated the Caribbean coast into the Nicaraguan nation-state by force. In 1905, the British
Government officially recognized the Caribbean coast as part of the Nicaraguan nation-state by signing the Harrison Altamirano Treaty, officially published in 1906.
La reincorporación, the re-encapulation of the Coast into Nicaragua marked a distinct shift in power from the British government to the independent state of Nicaragua. Whereas
“Company Time” marked the entrance of United States-based foreign companies on the
Caribbean coast (Baracco, 2011). The United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company were
24 established in the United States in 1899. At approximately the same time the Harrison
Altamirano Treaty (1906) allowed the Nicaraguan government to commodify the Caribbean coast ’s land. The Nicaraguan government gave every family of residents (4 members or less)
“eight manzanas” of land if they did not already hold a title to their own plot of land (Great
Britain, Mosquitia & Nicaragua, 1906). By the 1920s, Standard Fruit Company integrated with
Bragman’s Bluff Lumber Company to own and operate 33,000 hectares of land (Pineda, 2006).
Company Time 1920-1979
Company Time was a period of great economic zeal for both local and international interests. These interests were based mainly on the United States' owned fruit, fish, and lumber companies (Pineda, 2006). Bragman’s Bluff the British name for the region that was formerly called Bilwi received its' new name Puerto Cabezas during Company time (1925) re-named after
Nicaraguan military general Rigoberto Cabezas (Alvarez & Escobar, 2004). General Rigoberto
Cabezas was a military leader who lead the annexation of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua into the nation-state of Nicaragua. This fact is very telling regarding the notions of place-making, power, and ownership. Although the city was renamed several times in three different languages,
Mayangna to English to Spanish, the actual owners of the territory, the Indigenous populations never left the region and were never displaced and or eradicated.
Starting in the 1920s, “Puerto Cabezas" saw its most massive boom in the population based on jobs created by foreign companies (Alvarez & Escobar, 2004). The concept of self- governance or “autonomy” during Company Time never left the minds of the people of the
Caribbean coast , they always saw themselves as sovereign with the ability to govern themselves despite the influence of foreign governments (including the Nicaraguan nation-state) or foreign
25 companies (Gordon et al., 2003; Barraco, 2011). In fact, many Miskitu and Mayangna people found work in foreign companies incorporating themselves into the global market economy
(Pineda, 2006; Alvarez & Escobar, 2004). However, the United States-based companies during
Company Time, just as their British predecessors did, privileged English speaking employees primarily comprised of Creoles. The former West African slave descendants and new voluntary immigrants from Jamaica and or the English-speaking Caribbean by this time had formed their ethnic group called the “Creoles.” The Creoles dominated United States-based companies in entry-level and low-level management positions (Gordon, 1998; Pineda, 2006). Thus, natural resource extraction was a Miskitu controlled industry during the first British Protectorate. With the abolition of slavery in the second British Protectorate, natural resource extraction became a
Creole-controlled industry by Company Time (Hale, 1987; Gordon, 1998; Pineda, 2006).
The Evolution of Autonomy: Church-Based Grassroots Organizing in the 1960s
On the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, the concept of autonomy further evolved into the autonomy law having started with grassroots organizing for the national recognition of
Indigenous and Afro-descendants’ rights. Although Company Time officially lasted from 1920 to 1979, the 1960s and 1970s saw a marked decline in economic prosperity. The Caribbean coast thus began to seek national funding from the Pacific Coast in those last two decades of Company
Time (Baracco, 2011). The Nicaraguan central government on the Pacific Coast assumed that supporting the Caribbean coast financially also meant full assimilation to the Nicaraguan national identity including "Spanish-only" instruction in primary and secondary schools
(Freeland, 1998; Freeland, 2003).
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Previously, although there was massive borrowing from English and Spanish in the
Miskitu language, before the 1960s much of the schooling on the Caribbean coast took place in the Moravian Church in the oral medium of Miskitu with some writing in English (Freeland,
1993). Mestizos (Spanish-speaking mixed-race Nicaraguans) from the rural towns on the Pacific coast of the country also began to prospect for land on the Caribbean coast encroaching on
Indigenous lands in the 1960s (Pineda, 2006; Morris, 2016). This influx of Spanish- speaking
Nicaraguans also contributed to the mandate on Spanish-only school instruction.
During his first official term (1967- 1972) President Anastasio Somoza Debayle, and his administration did not give the desires and needs of the Caribbean coast much attention. He reportedly said that the Caribbean coast was his "Finca” or farm – where he could extract natural resources for export and his profits (Towell, 1990; Gambone, 1997). Therefore, there was an impetus for Indigenous and Afro-descendant grassroots organizing. Local organizing was based in the Moravian church which by this time was “nativizing,” or educating local parishioners to become ministers (Barraco, 2011). The establishment of grassroots Indigenous organizations based in church leadership such as the Alliance of the Miskitu and Sumu (ALPROMISU) which started as the Association of Agricultural Clubs of the Coco River (ACARIC), promoted demands for recognition of Miskitu and Mayangna communal land rights. These demands for local land rights came with calls for primary education in Miskitu, Mayangna, Rama and Kriol
(Freeland, 2003).
The Sandinista Revolution 1978-1979 and the Contra War 1981-1990
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After the fall of the Somoza regime in 1979 due to the Sandinista Revolution,
MISURATA (Miskitu, Sumu, Rama, and Sandinistas Working Together) created a literacy campaign that promoted the use of Indigenous languages and Kriol as the oral media of instruction in primary public schooling on the Caribbean coast. MISURATA created the first
Miskitu, Mayangna, and Rama readers for teaching basic written literacy. Brooklyn Rivera headed MISURATA, a Miskitu leader who became the head of the Yapti Tasba Masraka Nanih
Aslatakanka/Children of the Mother Earth (YATAMA ) organization in the next few decades
(Baracco, 2011). Based on MISURATA’s literacy campaign, the Miskitu, Mayangna and Rama people united around a shared Indigenous consciousness and the notion of their legal rights to ancestral lands which had started previously with organizations in the 1960’s but now with a written face and large following (Freeland, 2003).
In 1981, the newly formed Sandinista government intercepted a message that Miskitu communities mobilized in Honduras around demands for land rights in Nicaragua. This message prompted the Sandinista government to send in troops to remove all Miskitu people in coastal towns to a camp called Tasba Pri, which ironically means “Free Land” in Miskitu (INNICA,
1982). The Sandinista government misinterpreted the Indigenous land rights claim, initially proposed by Alliance for the Progress of the Miskito and Sumu, ALPROMISU and MISURATA to mean that Miskitu people wanted to go back to the imperialist notions of the Miskitu Kingdom of the 17th and 18th centuries otherwise known as the British Protectorate years. The Sandinista government’s move to remove Miskitu communities from their land by force incited the Contra
War on the Caribbean coast which was backed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. government (Nietschmann, 1984; Bergold, 1985; Pineda, 2006).
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Elite Nicaraguans on the Pacific Coast of the country made alliances with the U.S. government in fear of the Sandinista governments’ communist principles. Most of the history of the Contra War privileges these elite Nicaraguans of the Pacific Coast and tells their story of a fight against the spread of communism. However, Indigenous people on the Caribbean coast interpreted the United States government alliance as a strategic way to regain rights to their ancestral lands (Pineda, 2006). After all, the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities worked harmoniously with United States companies in the earlier half of the 20th century and saw the United States as an ally rather than an adversary (Alvarez & Escobar, 2004; Pineda,
2006). The historical memory of the Company Time era was one of prosperity and economic opportunities for most Caribbean coast residents by the time of the Contra War in the 1980s. In
1985, the Sandinista government realized that Miskitu fighters in the Contra War were motivated based on land claims, a completely different concern than the U.S. government's anti-communist motives. As part of a peace accord, the Autonomy Law of 1987 appeared in the Nicaraguan
Constitution in 1990 (Cunningham, 2002).
The Autonomy Law 1987-Present
This law allowed for local administration of all noteworthy affairs on the Caribbean coast including education. In 1990, the residents elected the first Caribbean coast regional councils
(Larson & Lewis-Mendoza, 2012). The regional councils needed to reinforce the notion of ethnic groups by deline ating boundaries between cultures, races, and thus distinct values and ideologies. These councils understood the need to incorporate as many insights and viewpoints as possible into their decision making for the overall well-being of the people of the region. The regional councils used ethnic identity to give voice to a multitude of differing opinions and
29 perspectives. This sense-making in many ways simplified the intricacies of diversity in this multicultural society. Previous governments created all the ethnic group names: Mestizo, Creole,
Miskitu, Mayangna, and Rama before the Autonomy Law.
The history above provides insight into the ways that the Spanish, and to a lesser degree the British who financially influenced rather than controlled the Caribbean coast through trade, created the ethnic categories of “Mestizo” and “Creole” through processes of colonization. The terms Mestizo and Creole have racial qualities in that both use skin tone, facial features and bodily composure as lenses to categorize people of mixed ancestry (Herlihy, 2012). However, ethnic categories such as Miskitu, Mayangna, and Rama are “self-ascribed” cultural terminologies and linked to distinct Indigenous worldviews (Baracco, 2011). These ethnic groups have both racial and cultural qualities. Skin tone and facial features play a role in how
Mayangna and Miskitu people are categorized just like the Mestizo and Creole ethnic groups
(Herlihy, 2012).
At the time of this writing, Nicaraguan constitution codified ethnic identity choice, and
Nicaraguans by law had to choose which ethnic group to which they wish to belong
(Cunningham, 2002). At the time of the study, youth’s conscious language choice, whether it be to speak Spanish, English or Miskitu, also perpetuated the racial constructions of youth, whether youth were aware of how their choices related to the complex history above or not. As I have described above in the History of the Caribbean coast , Spanish and United States English
Language use indexes power and access to financial resources. Most residents associate fluency in Spanish and United States English with the Mestizo and Creole ethnic groups. Miskitu is the third language in power on the North Caribbean coast with 100,000+ speakers and evidence of strong intergenerational transfer. Most residents associate Miskitu speakers with the Miskitu
30 ethnic group. Fourth in the linguistic hierarchy would be Mayangna, a language associated with the minority Indigenous community of the region and Kriol, a language also associated with the minority Creole population on the Northern Caribbean coast. Kriol is higher in the linguistic hierarchy on the Southern Caribbean coast where there is a larger population of Creole ethnic group members.
The colonial history of this region above helps us understand how youth in this study found new and innovative ways to counter and disassemble the established colonially-based power hierarchy and status quo through their independently produced media.
According to youth participants, young people in Puerto Cabezas, the city where the study took place, were also acutely aware of the economic and political situation in their city at the time of the study. The next section briefly overviews two additional considerations that are important to understand related to the linguistic hierarchies in Puerto Cabezas: the associations of Spanish and Miskitu with two political parties that vied for power in the local setting, and the dramatically shifting population and new, dispersed networks of Kriol speakers, given a massive outmigration of Afro-descendant peoples from Puerto Cabezas in search of work opportunities.
1.5 The Current Context of Bilwi, Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua
Bilwi-Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, where the study took place, is a multicultural port city with historical contacts linked to the Nicaraguan Pacific Coast (comprised of Spanish and
Indigenous/Mestizo residents), the Caribbean islands, the United States and Great Britain
(Alvarez & Escobar, 2004; Pineda,2006).
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ElNuevoDiario.com.ni Received: 3/21/2018
www.gifex.com Received: 3/21/2018
Contact between Puerto Cabezas residents, who affectionately call themselves Porteños, and foreign peoples historically and currently have centered on economic ventures such as extracting lumber from mahogany trees and large-scale lobster fishing (Herlihy, 2012). Puerto
Cabezas is also the political hub of the Northern Caribbean coast; it has historically been the home of the two major political parties in the region the YATAMA organization “Yapti Tasba
Masraka Nanih Aslatakanka” English: “Children of Mother Earth” and the FSLN party “Frente
Sandinista Liberación Nacional” English: “Sandinista National Liberation Front”.
The city has certain barrios or strings of neighbors that associate with the colors, numbers, and memorials of these two political parties. The colors, numbers, and monuments of these two parties are constant reminders of the Sandinista Revolution and Contra Wars in which the two parties fought against each other. In 2016, I attended a few informal meetings with FSLN
32 youth in the FSLN building where I never heard the Miskitu language or any other language but
Spanish. Also, the linguistic landscape of the FSLN and YATAMA buildings featured Spanish and Miskitu, respectively.
As mentioned above, economic conditions related to extractive industries from foreign companies still affect residents. Residents told me on multiple occasions that they were worried about the future generations finding work and supporting their families, given the difficulty of finding employment in their city. In conversations, residents connected local job scarcity to massive migrations of people from rural communities to the city of Puerto Cabezas and the seasonality or temporary status of economic ventures both in the fishing industry and in the NGO sectors. While living in Puerto Cabezas, I observed that many families had relatives living in
Panama, Costa Rica or the United States. The sizeable Creole population in the past few decades had moved to the U.S., leaving behind a few key Creole “barrios," or neighborhoods with a few
Kriol speakers. Afterall, there were only 18,420 speakers of Kriol in Nicaragua (UNSD, 2009) in total as opposed to 113,855 speakers of Miskitu in Nicaragua (UNSD, 2009). Immigration has drastically changed the population and thus the cultural ideologies of Puerto Cabezas over the last 30 years much in this same way. At the same time, many Porteños find employment in local grassroots organizations that serve to develop and preserve the local culture and way of life.
Newly-available social media also offered new ways for Porteños to maintain contact with relatives who had migrated elsewhere.
Mass migration out of the North Caribbean coast region and the language affiliations of the political parties or organizations FSLN and YATAMA are important pieces of information for analyzing language shift in the region. Although all ethnic groups have migrated out of the region, the Creole population has had the largest migration due to job opportunities in the capital
33 city, Managua, including United States English jobs or job opportunities in the United States. So, particularly Kriol language shift in the Creole population can be associated with mass migrations out of the Northern Caribbean coast. Without as many speakers as Spanish or Miskitu it is increasingly difficult to maintain Kriol. Also, highlighting the ongoing political struggles of
North Caribbean coast residents is paramount in addressing language shift. For instance the
Miskitu language is associated with the YATAMA party which has endured physical violence from the FSLN party. Many FSLN sympathizers may refuse to use the Miskitu language due to persecution associated with the YATAMA party. In the following section, I outline the chapters of the dissertation.
Outline of the Chapters
Chapter 2 is the methodology chapter in which I introduce the five focal youth participants: Jamie, Jorge, Stefán, Nataly, Adán (all pseudonyms). I introduce my positionality as a mixed-race heritage, multilingual researcher and first-time multimedia instructor at the
Leadership School. I also overview how I became involved in Indigenous language reclamation studies in the United States, Mexico, and Nicaragua. In the chapter, I share the main methodological frameworks that I used to collect and analyze my data: Culturally Sustaining
Pedagogies Methodology, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Multimodal Discourse, and overview the main methods used in my study.
In Chapter 3, my first findings chapter, I focus on the collaborative relationships I formed as a beginning Leadership School teacher with Leadership School staff, URACCAN
University's non-profit organizations, and the Leadership School's intercultural multilingual curriculum in the process of constructing a digital culturally sustaining multimedia design class.
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In promoting a culturally sustaining pedagogy for the multimedia design class, I purposely highlight my decisions to support languages low on the linguistic hierarchy such as Kriol and
Mayangna to create awareness about inequities in language ideologies. The chapter also highlights how my collaborations with school officials and non-profit organizations gave the youth participants access to intergenerational local and indigenous knowledge, that would not have been possible without such partnerships. I also examine young people’s access to specific multimodal literacies both from global and local perspectives in this chapter, including access to textual modes in Indigenous and local languages, and overview the various social media interests of the youth participants, including young people’s use of videos, chat technologies and their respective multilingual practices online . Sharing youth participants’ comments on their social media interests and the multimedia course, the chapter demonstrates how the multimedia course provided a culturally sustaining third space (Dron & Anderson, 2014) for multimedia design.
My second findings chapter, Chapter 4, focuses on the ways that the five focal youth participants in the study disrupted and partially transformed the power dynamics of the social hierarchy in which they lived by creating new spaces online for Indigenous and regional language repertoires through the production of four multilingual videos with the aid of local community members and educators. At times, the five-focal youth participants considered themselves “digital activists” who represented the diverse global and local identities of their community online , and the first part of the chapter overviews the general themes of final video projects of the youth participants and their peers, showing how these addressed a range of key social justice issues. In the second half of the chapter, I use discourse analyses of two final video projects to show how youth praised the success of the Leadership School’s attention to interculturalidad in the promotion of the Miskitu language and culture, and also to highlight how
35 youth found direct and indirect ways to critique the silencing of the Mayangna and Kriol languages in peer and school discourse.
Lastly, in Chapter 5, I discuss the significance of activist multimedia coursework for
Indigenous and regional language reclamation and maintenance in this setting and similar settings around the world. As new communication technologies create new opportunities for millennials and future generations to develop unconventional ways of reclaiming Indigenous and regional identities, the scholarly conversation needs to target youth’s multiplicity of indigeneities. Following these discussions, I highlight the limitations, challenges, and benefits of engaging in this kind of critical studies research in secondary educational settings in similar contexts.
CHAPTER 2: METHODS AND METHODOLOGY
In this chapter I deline ate the methods and methodology used in this study. I open this chapter by describing my positionality, sharing how my experience living in the United States as a mixed-race person shaped my identities, as well as my appreciation for many different languages and worldviews. I also share how a deep interest in language learning and digital literacy led me to the Northern Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, and deeply informed how I positioned myself as a researcher, educator and digital activist in the context of my study. I use story work (Archibald, 2008; McCarty et al., 2018) as a writing style to navigate through the evolution of my own mixed identities. I also use story work to traverse my own pluriliteracy including language learning and digital literacy acquisition from a Nicaraguan perspective.
In the second half of the chapter, I describe the literature that informed the social justice vision of my study, as well the methods of data collection and the methodology of analyzing the
36 data collected. I also introduce the five youth participants: Jorge, Jamie, Adán, Nataly and
Stefán. Then, I overview some of my intentional decisions to carry out ethical Indigenous
Research practices that positioned the Indigenous youth participants and their adult community members as self-determined individuals and collectives, as outlined in the UN Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples, 2011). I elaborate on what Respect, Relationality, Reciprocity and
Responsibility mean within Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies (Wilson, 2008;
Brayboy, et al., 2012) and how I used related approaches in my own study to shape my ethical approach to research with the Miskitu and Mayangna Indigenous communities on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua.Lastly, I share how I utilized Critical Discourse Analysis and raciolinguistics to illustrate how the youth participants’ final video projects interrupted the linguistic hierarchy at the Leadership School.
The last sections of this chapter overview the kinds of data that I used in the study. In the following section, I share my journey to become a multilingual as well and how I first connected to digital language activism and multimedia design using story work.
Becoming a Polyglot and Early Connections to Digital Language Activism
Story work decolonizes the academic narrative on Indigenous peoples and re-centers the scholarly dialog around self-identification with silenced lived realities and rediscovery of voice
(Archibald, 2008). Many Indigenous researchers write about what their Indigenous language and culture reclamation process looked like in their own families and communities (McCarty,
Nicholas, Chew, Diaz, Leonard & White, 2018). In my story work I trace early experiences
37 becoming a polyglot from my childhood, my young adult life in the United States, early experiences with digital activism focused on Indigenous language work, and my experience living on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. In this particular story, I make intergenerational connections to culture and legacy that colonizing forces including the United States government and economy severed through decades of my family’s previously silenced lived experiences.
I first met the students and the coordinator of the Leadership School where I conducted my dissertation study, when I visited the URACCAN University campus with a study abroad program at the University of Kansas in the summers of 2013 and 2014. But my interest in plurlingualism and pluriliteracy started when I was a youth in Central California. I have long considered myself a polyglot who is open to learning any language that anyone is willing to teach me. In central California where I was born and lived until age 18, I was exposed to spoken
Spanish from a young age through Mexican American family friends. I could understand the language, but I could not produce it because English was the language of my home. I began to develop my bilingualism in English and Spanish when I started taking formal Spanish classes in middle school. My father was very supportive of my Spanish learning. He encouraged me to speak in class and told me that a former high school Spanish teacher said to him that to become fluent he would need to take risks practicing the language with native speakers, and go to a
Spanish speaking country. He taught me this lesson, telling me that I needed to take risks to get better at Spanish and I implemented this advice. In my first Spanish class, I began to raise my hand; even if I did not know the answer, if the teacher called on me I would answer to the best of my ability in my limited Spanish. I made lots of mistakes, and almost 20 years later, I still make mistakes, albeit fewer now. I conquered my fear of making mistakes; this allowed me greater
38 fluency than many of my peers in middle school, high school and university level Spanish as second language coursework.
Well after I learned to speak Spanish as a foreign language fluently, and after I graduated from the University of Georgia, I began learning one of my heritage languages, Eastern Band
Cherokee. I started my studies of the language during the Summer of 2010 at the American
Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) at the University of Arizona. The AILDI summer program supports Native American Language teachers from different parts of the United
States seeking professional development in their field and seeking community with other
Indigenous peoples looking to reclaim their languages and cultures. There were several YouTube videos that summer that taught basic greetings in the Cherokee language – particularly the
Giduwah variant from Western North Carolina. I felt that I could connect to the Giduwah variant most because my paternal great-grandparents most likely spoke that variant. I started with greetings like osiyo, dagwado’a, wado and ski- hello, my name is, please and thank you, respectively. I had to teach a few micro-lessons, 25-30 minute lessons introducing a basic concept in the Giduwah variant of Cherokee to ten Native American language teachers. I initially started studying the YouTube videos on greetings in Giduwah to teach a group of ten Native
American language teachers. I eventually learned enough of the Cherokee language during my
Master’s program in Linguistics that I could travel to Cherokee, North Carolina and practice speaking at a beginning to intermediate level. I completed an intensive Cherokee language course in Cherokee, North Carolina in the winter of 2012 where I reconnected with the physical location of historical memories written by my paternal great-grandfather in our family’s written documents. My father told me that he was very proud of my Cherokee knowledge, and he loved my visits to his grandfather's place of residence as a Methodist minister. Since that time in my
39 life of rediscovering myself through my family history, I have identified as a heritage language learner of the Cherokee language, and I see myself as an Indigenous researcher and educator.
I initially became a digital language activist when I had the opportunity to advocate for both Indigenous and Spanish Multimedia Design in a series of classes at the University of
Arizona for bilingual teachers and students in Mexico. Proyecto Semilla (the SEED program, hereafter), was a United States-based professional development program with one base at the
University of Arizona, funded by The United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) and Georgetown University. The program offered professional development at the University of Arizona to empower bilingual teachers and teacher coaches from 15 different states in Mexico (Anthony-Stevens & Griño, 2018 ). In the years 2011- 2014, a fellow colleague and graduate student Rolando Coto and I developed a curriculum for the SEED teachers surrounding multimedia design for teaching Indigenous languages and Spanish. I co- taught this curriculum for eight semesters, approximately three years and two summers, in
Spanish. While working with the SEED program, I learned about how to design my very first course on multimedia design with a theory and workshop component in Spanish. Through my teaching, and over the course of a number of pilot studies conducted with SEED teachers, I also learned the ways that Mexican teachers negotiated dramatically varying access to computers and the internet in their various states in rural and urban environments. Some SEED teachers had access to wifi hotspots in urban zones where they could communicate with each other through social media websites. Some did not have access to the internet at all in rural areas but they showed their students bilingual websites in Spanish and an Indigenous language in offline mode.
Every state in Mexico was different and every school had various access to computers and the internet. Through this experience with the SEED teachers, I knew that I would encounter
40 differing kinds of access to technology in Nicaragua. The next section surveys my first encounters with the Puerto Cabezas community and Miskitu culture.
Learning about Puerto Cabezas, the Leadership School, and Developing the Study
Very shortly after my intensive Cherokee language course in the 2012, a close friend and former roommate of mine mentioned that her language, Miskitu could be an excellent language for me to study as a success story as far as Indigenous Language Reclamation movements. She explained that she grew up in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua and that she was just one of over 100,000 speakers of the Miskitu language. My friend inspired me with her story about an Indigenous language that was still spoken by all three generations in a mixed/contact zone community. I found many similarities between what I observed in Cherokee,
North Carolina and what my friend and former roommate told me about her Indigenous community in Puerto Cabezas. One similarity was a long history with missionaries, and the
Christian faith. Another similarity was the rich diversity (and intercultural/multicultural worldviews) of the Cherokee and Miskitu communities. I initially thought about doing my dissertation on the socio-historical similarities and differences between the two Indigenous communities as well as their potential for language and culture reclamation prospects. However, given my short timeframe for completing my degree requirements and the complexities of human subjects permissions in two separate communities in two different countries, I decided to focus on studying multimedia design in the Miskitu community in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua.
During the summers of 2013 and 2014, I received two Foreign Language Area Studies grants from the United States Department of Education to learn the Miskitu Language, and joined a study abroad program called “Language and Culture of Nicaragua” offered through the
41
University of Kansas. During these study abroad courses, I lived with other graduate and undergraduate students in Puerto Cabezas. After the study abroad courses were over, I also had time to stay with my former roommate's family, where I learned about the daily challenges related to infrastructure needs of the city. With my roommate’s generosity and support, my dissertation study in her hometown and home country had become a reality.
Living in the city like a resident during this time helped me to adjust to the everyday challenges of maintaining myself in a foreign environment, and adapt to the way of life of most
Puerto Cabezas residents, doing things like washing clothes, cleaning the home or preparing food without machines. During the study abroad program where I was studying the Miskitu language in a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, I also met my husband, a young man from Puerto Cabezas, and greatly expanded by information and professional contacts in the city of Puerto Cabezas and surrounding towns. I first learned about the field site where I returned to do my dissertation research from my former roommate and close friend in the FLAS program, whose mother was one of the founders of the Leadership School. One of my husband’s cousins also gave me a tour of the URACCAN campus from an undergraduate student’s perspective. On the tour, I learned the location of the Leadership School Coordinator’s office and other administration buildings. I also learned that the Leadership students spoke several languages and had access to computer labs.
Before I arrived in Puerto Cabezas in February 2016, I applied for a micro-teaching grant provided by an international non-profit organization called “Rising Voices.” Rising Voices creates workshops and forums for creating online multimedia in Indigenous and minority languages such as websites, videos or blogs. These videos, websites and blogs create new online spaces for Indigenous and minority languages throughout the world (Rising Voices, 2016). I
42 wrote the “Rising Voices” grant proposal in the Fall of 2015 with the Leadership School students in mind, I consulted with URACCAN administrators previously in the Fall about the prospect of working in some capacity on campus with multilingual multimedia. I had a strong chance of receiving the “Rising Voices” grant because the year 2015 represented the first ever series of micro-grants in Central America. In December 2015, I received the “Rising Voices” teaching grant. My specific teaching grant was called “A Micro-fund for Digital Activism.” In the project, I proposed to teach three workshops and to present the Leadership students’ final projects on an online forum, so that other global Indigenous communities could read about successful Indigenous language multimedia projects in other countries. In January 2016, I approached the external affairs coordinator of URACCAN University inquiring about conducting a study on campus regarding the leadership students’ multilingualism and digital literacies. I provided details, and the coordinator and I talked about the space that I would need to conduct the study. We also discussed the potential benefits of the research for the community, and my hopes that the project would create digital spaces for Indigenous languages, and a community space for solving local youth-related conflicts. I invited both URACCAN students and
Leadership students to participate in the workshops. The external affairs coordinator forwarded my message to the coordinator of the Leadership School, who agreed to collaborate with me.
The coordinator of the Leadership mentioned that there would be a new group of
Leadership students since my original visits in 2013 and 2014. When I arrived at the Leadership
School in February, 2016, however, and met with the coordinator, the project took an unexpected turn. The coordinator asked if I could teach a whole semester course on multimedia design, instead of the proposed three workshops. Although I knew I did not have much time to plan before the class started, I accepted the position. When I informed the Rising Voices organization
43 of the opportunity to expand the workshops to teaching a full semester course at the Leadership
School, they agreed to expand my timeline for the proposed four months of the course, February
– May 2016. I noticed early on in February that several exuberant design students could shed some light on what it meant to the local community and marginalized youth communities around the world to track our multilingual/multicultural multimedia course progress. I began seeking permission from the Leadership School, URACCAN University and the city of Puerto Cabezas officials to start a dissertation study on our new course.
Positioning myself as a researcher, teacher, and digital language activist in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua
Throughout the study in Spring of 2016, I enjoyed the privilege of working with much support and acceptance from the URACCAN campus and The Leadership School staff and administrators. As a new teacher, I was expected to explain my unique perspective on multimedia design which included multilingualism. At the time, I also spent a considerable time acclimating myself to the history of the region of Puerto Cabezas and its’ surrounding towns. I was particularly interested in the ethnic make-up of the Northern Caribbean coast and the concept of its intercultural society. Since I came from a very ethnically diverse area in the United
States, Central California, multiple ethnicities were not a new experience. In contrast, the nature of the language practices throughout the area of the North Caribbean coast of Nicaragua were especially refreshing for me, given the English-only policies I had to endure in schools and professional circles in the United States.
As much as I read about the region and compared and contrasted historians’ descriptions of the zone, I knew that participatory observations and an open ear to residents’ experiences were required to understand intercultural society members and their plurilingual practices. Through
44 many interactions and everyday experiences, I further developed my awareness of the plurilingual practices of everyday life. For instance, even navigating daily transportation provided multiple opportunities to learn about youth’s engagment in global linguistic flows through music (Minks, 2013). I rode the bus through the different barrios of the city and travelled out of the city to Kamla, the small town location of URACCAN University to make those observations, and walked to find taxis in Kamla and Puerto Cabezas with students and staff from
URACCAN. Sometimes, in the taxis, students, staff and I squeezed together or even sat on each other's laps in the humidity or the rain. Sometimes youth participants and I ran and missed those taxis.
As a researcher from outside of the community with some informal and formal ties to the residents, I also carefully treaded through the linguistic and cultural landscape, and developed my understanding of ethnic identities and raciolinguistic positionings by listening to the experiences of URACCAN and Escuela de Liderazgo staff on the buses in Spanish, Miskitu and
English, and continuing to work on my own language learning. I knew that I needed to use all of the languages in my repertoire to interact effectively with the residents in this area of Nicaragua.
Since I did not have any competencies in Kriol or Mayangna, I could not express myself in those languages. With Kriol, I could understand some dialogue; if Kriol words combined with the structure of United States English with which I was familiar, I could understand nearly one hundred percent of what was said around me. At times, I would catch myself laughing at jokes in
Kriol and then worrying if the speakers would want to continue speaking with me. Because I could not understand their conversations in their entirety, however, I felt utterly embarrassed if I was asked to carry on a conversation. I was quite aware of my own biases including my own
45 imbalance of power and privilege that allowed me to distinguish, categorize and put borders around the Englishes.
As a researcher from another country, it was also crucial for me to pay close attention to the power relations between peoples that I observed on the Northern Caribbean coast and how they were similar and different to United States contexts. Throughout my dissertation research, I was also fully aware of my foreigner status in the research context of Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua.
However, I was bilingual in English and Spanish and an emergent language learner of Miskitu.
My positioning during my research was also shaped by my brown phenotype, which often allowed me to blend and integrate myself much better than the average foreigner. My hair and skin color were mysterious browns from a Nicaraguan point of view. I used Miskitu and Spanish intentionally to appear to transit between ethnic groups, a familiar pattern in raciolinguistics scholarship (Alim, 2017).
I noticed mixed race friends and colleagues in Puerto Cabezas could transit between ethnic group classifications a bit easier than I could; I attributed this to my foreigner status. I noticed that only a few Creole women wore their hair short, and almost all Miskitu, Mayangna or
Mestiza women wore their hair long. I grew out my hair so that I could fit closer to the profile of most Nicaraguan women on the Caribbean coast.
The physical characteristic that set me apart from everyone else on the Northern
Caribbean coast of Nicaragua was my eye color of somewhere between green and brown. Given my eye color, Puerto Cabezas residents could not entirely place me into any of the racial categories in the Northern Caribbean coast Region; I was either perceived as a foreigner or a
Corn Isleña (Southern Caribbean coast resident). Corn Island has quite a few residents who look like me because their ethnic background consists of British, Afro-descendant, and Indigenous
46 ancestry. Unremarkably, that is also my ancestry but from North America instead of Central
America. Many Corn Isleños have brown curly hair, light brown skin and green or hazel eyes. In this physical way, I could pass as a Southern Caribbean coast Nicaraguan.
In my language use, I could also pass as a local to a certain degree. However, the Spanish and the English that I speak are not from this region so once I began to talk, I usually gave away my alien status. Sometimes trained Nicaraguan Spanish speakers would think that my accented
Spanish was due to my native English speaker status. My perceived native English speaker status fits with my racial categorization as a Corn Isleña, because Corn Island residents are stereotyped as dominant Kriol speakers. From the perspective of non-English speakers, there is no difference between Kriol and the United States English.
In my first month, I found myself in constant confusion about whether to use Miskitu,
Spanish or English in the city of Bilwi-Puerto Cabezas. I came home with headaches trying desperately to communicate with my in-laws in Miskitu, my husband online in English, students, and faculty in Miskitu and Spanish, after long days of translanguaging. Most of the time, however, I enjoyed my experience living on my own in the barrio, German Pomares, drawing upon a resilience, strength, and a persistent stubbornness to survive that I developed in the
United States during my childhood. While I did not experience the kind of hardships that
Porteños face every day based on infrastructural and systemic problems of access to essential services, I could relate to most people that I met in Puerto Cabezas because of my working-class sensibilities. However, most people that I met had the assumption that I was of a higher socio- economic status because I was from the United States.
Taking risks with my languages was an everyday occurrence for me in Puerto Cabezas although, after about the second month living in Puerto Cabezas, I felt pretty acclimated to the
47 city with assistance from my in-laws and friends. In German Pomares, I made friends with my neighbors and my in-laws and attempted to live my life like them. My in-laws and my friends helped me with daily tasks like carrying many water drums for my kitchen and bathroom. They also watched over me frequently when I went to the open-air markets to buy fresh food every week. However, I still made mistakes with choosing which language to speak with whom. In
Puerto Cabezas, there is constant mixing of speakers and thus constant trans-languaging. Many families in Puerto Cabezas reflect multiple racial backgrounds and heritages. Children in these families grow up speaking two, three or four languages all as their simultaneous first languages at home. The discourse norms of a plurilingual society that translanguages and recognizes who is fluent or emergent in which languages are not something that can be learned in a few days or even in a few weeks. It takes a lifetime to become adept at those kinds of discourses.
I discussed in Chapter 1, it is very common that Puerto Cabezans’ dominant use of one language evidences identification with one ethnic identity. The Nicaraguan constitution also requires individuals to choose one ethnic affiliation, despite the mixed nature of most families.
Because of these social dynamics, I was encouraged to speak all three languages, Miskitu,
Spanish and “my English” at different times, with different people and in different places in the
5-month period that I lived and worked in the Bilwi-Puerto Cabezas area.
Both my maternal in-law's and my paternal in-law's immediate families, for example, reflect mixed Creole and Miskitu ethnic groups. In both families, all family members could speak Miskitu, Spanish, and English. However, at my maternal in-laws’ home, the Creole identity was much more supported, and at my paternal in-laws' home the Miskitu identity was much more supported. I found that the maternal side of my husband’s family from whom I rented a house, would speak to me in English and Spanish (and only occasionally in Miskitu). My
48 paternal in-laws, on the other hand, were living in a Miskitu-speaking barrio called Cocal, and they spoke Miskitu inside and outside of the house with their neighbors and at their neighborhood Moravian Church. The paternal side of my husband’s family encouraged a
Miskitu-only environment and preferred to speak to me entirely in Miskitu, with the exception of emergency situations, when they permitted me to speak to them in Spanish, but never in English.
In all of the interactions above, I framed myself in the community as a new Leadership
School teacher who had a passion for all languages and multimedia technologies available in the region. Taxi drivers and new acquaintances often were intrigued and respected my role in the community as a new teacher. I was not always good at speaking all three languages in the right contexts in the city of Puerto Cabezas, but I gave it my best shot every day. I also brought a keen interest in using digital activism to support language learning to my work at the Leadership
School.
Ethical Indigenous Research Practices: Design and Implementation in Puerto Cabezas
“Indigenous people have an individual and collective right to maintain and develop their distinct identities and characteristics including the right to identify themselves as indigenous and be recognized as such.” (UNDRIP, 2011, Article 8)
The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is clear about the definition of international Indigenous peoples and their rights not only to govern themselves in their own territories but also to “develop and maintain their distinct identities.”
Supporting educational endeavors that perpetuate Indigenous languages and epistemologies in the media of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua for a local audience achieve the goals of the
UNDRIP.
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Thus, I was aware of the collective rights to self-determination that Indigenous communities require given the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
In every instance of decision making in developing the multimedia design course and how to distribute the final video projects to the local community I consulted with Indigenous members of non-profit organizations asking for their feedback. Constantly consulting with Indigenous community members throughout the entire process of this dissertation study helped me build what Wilson (2008) calls relationality, since through these consulting sessions I built long term relationships with members of the Puerto Cabezas community. In my work, I also constantly showed respect for the local way of teaching and conducting research – I went with the flow rather than created waves, listening not just with my ears but with my heart and mind.
Administrators at the Leadership School encouraged me to collaborate with community-based organizations such as Centro de Estudios e Información de La Mujer Multiétnica, Center for
Studies and Information of the Multiethnic Woman, CEIMM and URACCAN’s Channel 5 studios, to better my teaching capabilities. Through my contacts at URACCAN University I knew that collaborating with organizations like CEIMM and Channel 5 was also how local researchers normally worked – everything in research revolved around constructing long-term relationships. I also worked closely with the Rising Voices organization that had a cohort of
Indigenous communities from Central America who also vetted our process of digital activism through the multimedia design course. Through my work with Rising Voices, I had access to models of how other Central American Indigenous communities positively supported their languages and cultures through digital means. Although, I put the local community of Puerto
Cabezas first, with the encouragement of Leadership School leaders, I actively pursued reciprocal collaboration with non-profit organizations based on The University of the
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Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean coast (URACCAN) campus such as The
Institute for Promotion of Linguistic Investigation and Cultural Revitalization (IPILC).
According to Wilson (2008), reciprocity in not just the mutual exchange of information or services; reciprocity played out through relationships of interdependence is a major tenet of
Critical Indigenous Research Methods (Brayboy et al., 2014). In my study, developing reciprocity meant recognizing the interdependence of epistemologies that I accessed through collaborations with Indigenous communities and individuals at both the local international level.
Local organizations such as IPILC are led by Indigenous scholars who promote the region’s autonomy through self-determined education practices, such as the use of written and oral
Indigenous languages and cultural values in instruction, scholarship and creative expression.
IPILC affords implementational spaces for the representation of the Mayangna language in the classroom. As such, the multimedia course provided critical implementational spaces for
Mayangna specific digital activism to engage Indigenous youth activists. Indigenous youth participants empowered themselves to choose the topics of their multimedia design projects and the trajectory of the overall multimedia design course allowed for self-determined outcomes and impacts on the local community.
Throughout the study, my connections in the region and my willingness to relate and collaborate as much as possible with community members also made this study possible. The study focused on building a culturally sustaining pedagogy that incorporated youth’s pluriliterate voices for positive social change (including the equalization of an uneven linguistic hierarchy in their community. Equalizing an uneven power hierarchy required the fourth R, from Wilson
(2008), responsibility. I responded from a stance of Responsibility (Brayboy et al., 2014; Wilson,
2008). to all of the ethnic groups represented on the Northern Caribbean coast which included
51 two Indigenous and two non-Indigenous groups. I also felt responsible to youth and adults who identified with more than one of the ethnic groups on the Northern Caribbean coast. The tension surrounding adequate representation of all of the ethnic groups in the multimedia course content presented difficulties would constrict even the most respectable researcher and course designer.
But, as I will show in chapter 3 and chapter 4, accountability and the responsibility to create spaces for all the distinct voices at the Leadership School and beyond was a required course of action.
As I describe in chapters 3 and 4, community leaders in non-profits and the local university provided the supports at the Leadership School that enabled the youth participants, their peers and me to create awareness about the injustices of linguistic hierarchy as a step toward a broader and sustainable movement in the spaces of school and community, specifically the Leadership School and the greater community of Puerto Cabezas. The key to the multimedia course focused on creating spaces where Indigenous and Afro-descendant youth from national historically marginalized contexts could reposition themselves nationally and internationally through multilingual/multimodal communication. Both youth and community members featured in chapters 3 and 4 were central to this work.
The Institutional Review Board Process at URACCAN & in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua
The first steps that I took to design this study were to contact the External Relations
Director at URACCAN University and the Coordinator of the Leadership School with a research proposal that named the local community as the main beneficiary of the research. With or without approval for the study, I agreed to teach workshops on multimedia design at the
Leadership School that contained a component of social media – these workshops would be
52 made possible by A Rising Voices Grant (orginally designed for January-March, 2016). The coordinator of the Leadership School then approved of a full semester course on multimedia design and the prospect of a teacher research study upon Human Subjects IRB approval.
As part of the Human Subjects IRB protocol I received a letter of approval from the Vice
Rector of URACCAN University, the Coordinator of the Leadership School, The Mayor of
Bilwi-Puerto Cabezas and the director of The Institute for the Promotion of Linguistic
Investigation and Cultural Revitalization (IPILC). Both the youth participants and their parents also signed consent forms, available in Miskitu, Spanish and English, that detailed the what, when, where and how of the study. The study participants chose the Spanish forms.
Since this study took place in the urban zone of Puerto Cabezas, I also gained formal approval for the study from the mayor of the city, as the leader of relevant territory. I agreed to only involve urban dwelling Indigenous youth as formal participants in the research, since rural dwelling Indigenous youth would have needed the additional approval from the leaders of their rural community leader’s approval, which was logistically unfeasible, given the timeframe of the course.
In a Latin American context the urban versus rural jurisdiction is different from the
United States. Many tribes in the United States have their own institutional review boards, which can approve research involving tribal members on and off tribal lands. In Nicaragua, Miskitu and
Mayangna community members living in rural communities require approval from their community leaders to participate in research studies reflecting or representing their community.
Miskitu and Mayangna community members living in urban spaces such as Puerto Cabezas, however, require approval from the city government to represent their Indigenous community in
53 a research study. It is important to state that Puerto Cabezas is on Indigenous land and is under the jurisdiction of the Autonomy law.
Designing the Multimedia Course: Early Workability Issues and Learning to Teach with Community Funds of Knowledge
As I describe above, I started the Multimedia course as an extended version of three workshops on editing videos, dictionaries, and websites that I had planned initially to fulfill my teaching grant from Rising Voices. When the coordinator of the Leadership school requested that
I prepare a whole semester course, I decided to expand the three workshops that I had initially planned. Teaching in the SEED program, described above, I had gained an awareness of culturally responsive multimedia design and digital activism approaches from the United States and Mexican perspectives. At the same time, I knew that issues of access to technology and social justice topics would look very different on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. I designed the Multimedia course based on a series of workshops that taught video editing, website design, and digital dictionary making. I used similar software that I learned how to use in my experience with Project SEED in the United States. At the Leadership School, I also commonly taught myself new software and screen-writing techniques in Spanish and Miskitu before I taught my students.
Informed by my previous experiences with SEED teachers, I paid careful attention to young people’s access to technology. I also worked to allow the youth participants to identify and address relevant social justice topics from their own experience, and to direct their multimedia design and how they wished to participate in social media. In the early days of my new class, however, I quickly ran into challenges with workability issues stemming from a relatively small number of computers for the large number of students in my classroom. At any
54 given time, my 54 students had access to a maximum of 11 computers that had access to the internet. With the Information Sciences department at URACCAN University, I could negotiate for access to both computer labs Lakia Tara and Sam Pitts. Nevertheless, the small number of computers meant that the majority of my students would have to do worksheets preparing for their digital assignments. The URACCAN University staff and I often had additional problems obtaining a good internet connection in the two computer labs to download free software for our courses. There were only 11 completely functioning computers that could go online in total for both computer labs.
Given the large numbers of students and challenges of computer and internet access, it quickly became apparent that the original design of the Multimedia class that required all students to have access to multimedia editing software severely challenged. I realized that I needed different ways to engage more of my students in the digital activities. I changed the original curriculum of the Multimedia course at La Escuela de Liderazgo mid-stream into a theater and videography course to engage the majority of the 54 students in the class, given the difficulties with securing enough computers in the URACCAN University computer labs for all of the students. Chapter 3 highlights how I developed the course in collaboration with multiple community leaders and community-based organizations, and how my classroom and the other classrooms of the Leadership School, URACCAN University, the city of Puerto Cabezas and the online environment became the multiple research settings of the study.
As I describe in chapters 3 and 4, I was able to build the Multimedia course from the ground up in a brief period, facing minimal conflicts, by collaborating with students, the
Leadership School faculty, and local non-profit organizations. Teacher-researchers ask questions about how to improve their practice as teachers not only for better student outcomes but better
55 societal results. The definition of better societal consequences is social justice, and including participation of all groups and categories of people. In Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Paris &
Alim, 2017) students learn from you as much as you learn from them. Thus, when I designed the multimedia design course, I did not just observe my students/participants' reactions to particular curricular approaches; I also changed curricular approaches according to my students/participants’ likes and dislikes. I formally asked my students/participants what criteria would allow them to learn best.
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) through theatrical practice (Wernick et al.,
2014; Tanner, 2014) and Participatory Video (PV) (Milne et al., 2012) also influenced my work.
Both approaches draw strongly on the tenets of social justice – a means to enact change and solve problems of injustice at the local, national and international level. In the case of YPAR and
PV, while the students themselves did not become researchers, their personal experiences and interests guided the research inquiries and the critical consciousness they gained came from a collegiate critical literacies gained in the URACCAN environment of staff and students. The research inquiries then oversaw the curriculum development. I based both the research inquiries and curriculum development on social justice principles, activism, and positive community change.
The Youth Participants
The five key youth participants below were former students in my Multimedia course.
They were all 16 years old, and second year students at the Leadership School at the time of the study.
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Adán was bilingual in Miskitu, Spanish, and an emergent trilingual adding English. He self-identified with the Miskitu ethnic group.
Jorge was a predominantly Spanish speaker and writer and an emergent trilingual adding
Miskitu and English. Jorge self-identified with the Mestizo ethnic group. He was an active video game designer, video game player, and Facebook user.
Stefán was a predominantly Spanish speaker and writer and an emergent trilingual adding Miskitu and English. He self-identified with the Mestizo ethnic group. Stefán was extremely active on his Facebook account and was also a vigorous gamer.
Nataly was a bilingual in Miskitu and Spanish and an emergent trilingual adding English.
Nataly self-identified as Miskitu.
Jamie’s father was Creole, and her mother was Miskitu; As I describe in detail in chapter
4, sometimes Jamie identified as Miskitu and sometimes identified as Creole. Jamie was a trilingual in Miskitu, Spanish, and Kriol. She was also learning the "Standard" English, which used a lot of the same vocabulary but followed very different grammatical rules than Kriol.
Jamie was also a relatively economically privileged student compared to the other students in the study, because she had access to the most multimedia technologies that we used outside of the classroom.
Methods
To document what I was learning throughout the study, I tracked my own positionality, and observations of language use and dynamics in the city of Bilwi-Puerto Cabezas in a personal journal. I also kept a teacher research journal, where I described the evolution of out Multimedia course, and documented my observations of youth language online on a social media site, and offline at URACCAN and the Leadership School. During and after the class, I observed,
57 interviewed and surveyed the group of five key youth participants, described above, about their social media access and interest and multiple language usage in the classroom, on the
URACCAN university campus and in the city of Puerto Cabezas. As a teacher, I also collected class materials that I created with the assistance of Indigenous experts from non-profit organizations, and analyzed these in comparison to student artifacts, including the final student videos described in chapters 4 and 5.
Documenting Raciolinguistic Positioning Through Auto-ethnography
To consider my positionality throughout the study, I used an auto-ethnographic approach
(Sykes, 2014), to track my own perspective and experiences with identity formation and language ideologies in the contexts of Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, URACCAN University and the Leadership School. This methodology requires a dialogue between the emic and etic perspectives of the researcher participating in everyday activities with participants in an ethnographic approach, but also requires deep self-reflection and concentration on self- transformation. Throughout the study, I wrote in a personal journal about my language practices with different people that I met. Writing memos about these experiences later, I looked at my own changing identities as I adjusted and adapted my perspectives to plurilingual practice and learning in the research context. I dedicated my part of my teacher research journal, described below, to my own experiences living in Bilwi- Puerto Cabezas, as well. In my personal journal, I focused mostly on how I felt inside and outside of my house and by myself in navigating and experiencing the city. I documented some of my reactions to participating in my in-laws’ family celebrations and cultural traditions in the city. In my personal journal, I wrote about some of my
58 interactions with students' outside of the classroom here, as well, because I was reflecting on my language ideologies versus those of my students in different contexts.
By keeping extensive personal and teacher-researcher journal notes, and reflecting deeply on my positionality as a foreigner with multi-stranded relationships to Puerto Cabezas as a teacher and someone with new family connections through marriage, I was able to trace the linguistic hierarchy and the dynamics of discourse in the city as a whole. Based on my personal journal entries, I also traced how I grew in my understanding of the norms and rules of living in
Puerto Cabezas. In my teacher research journal entries, I reflected on how I grew in my understanding of the norms and rules for teaching in the Leadership School and how to effectively establish and nurture relationships with the students and staff. Although I had some exposure to the city of Puerto Cabezas and its surrounding towns before I lived there for five months, I left Puerto Cabezas in May 2016 a changed person with new values and expectations for my life.
Classroom Observations and Interviews in The Leadership School
Through classroom observations and interviews in the Leadership School, I learned about the linguistic expectations of each of the other Leadership School teachers, such as which languages they felt were necessary for engaging their students in the content coursework. I also learned about what kinds of collaborations the other teachers at the Leadership School had with non-profit organizations on the URACCAN Campus to form "intercultural" curricula, In the
Spring Semester of 2016, I observed the Mathematics, Science, English, Spanish, Civil
Engagement, Computation, Social Science classrooms, seven content classrooms in all,. To compare and contrast the methods of teaching computer courses with a fellow teacher at the
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Leadership School, and gain insight into the usual teaching practices for teaching technology- based courses at the Leadership School, I also conducted an in-depth interview with Dominic, the Computation Course instructor.
I observed the five youth participants in their Math, History, Science, English,
Computation and Multimedia classrooms in the Leadership School. In all of the classrooms observed, I concerned myself with the youth participants’ use of Spanish, Miskitu, Mayangna, and English either in written or oral form. In these class observations, I wrote notes mainly about discourse interactions between the youth participants, the peers, and their teachers in a notebook or on my computer, and I usually typed memos when I returned home from observing the students in another teacher research journal.
In my classroom observations, I noted that students used mainly Spanish, Miskitu and
United States English in other teachers’ classes. In these observations, I also noted how all of the teachers used Spanish as the medium of instruction, and how Miskitu was not often used as the medium of instruction, although the teachers used Miskitu to engage youth in several lessons. I also documented where the students were sitting in the classroom in comparison to the location of their instructor, and which classmates each youth participant generally associated with during group work or whole class assignments. Friend group configurations, as well as proximity to the instructor, seemed to play a significant role concerning the youth participants' language preferences. The students in the front of the room, bilingual students and dominant Spanish students, spoke Spanish when I visited the classrooms. The students in the back of the room, in contrast, spoke Miskitu. From the classroom observations, I also learned that the students from the city of Puerto Cabezas sat in the front of the classroom for most subjects and used their bilingual abilities to coach their emergent bilingual friends in Spanish subjects.
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I found that the Math and Science teachers used Miskitu to engage the students in the back of the room but did not necessarily speak entirely in Miskitu as the medium of instruction.
The Spanish teacher very seldom used Miskitu. From my interview with Dominic, the computation instructor, I learned that he, as well, did not use much Miskitu in his technology course, but he translanguaged in Spanish and English to explain much of the technical terms in his class, including software terminology. I also noted how, on very seldom occasions, I heard the teachers or students use the Mayangna and Kriol languages in content coursework. I virtually never heard Kriol or Mayangna used for any of the coursework as the medium of instruction.
I also occasionally recorded the students’ technology use (whether it included laptops, smartphones, or cellphones), though most of the time these devices were not allowed in the classrooms. The leadership school at the time generally prohibited the use of smartphones in all classes. I noticed how youth mostly used multimodal literacies when teachers were not watching, and how students used smartphones and computers to play games, update their Facebook accounts or access videos on Youtube.com. In other observations I noted some of the youth participants’ covert learning processes involving digital media, such as young people’s preoccupations with playing games on smartphones or researching animation software on laptops. Students mainly accessed computers during computation or the multimedia course, though I noted, as well, how one student, Jamie, used a personal laptop at the library where she could get access to wifi or a cable connection to the internet, and used her computer to design cartoons during classroom breaks.
In my classroom observations, I further reflected upon which activities engaged and motivated the youth participants more than others. For example, in the Mathematics course, I
61 noted how the instructor allowed the students to stand up and use their whole bodies to visually understand mathematical concepts such as right angles, parallel Line s , and intersections.
Students' physical movement in the classroom allowed them to engage at a deeper level in the material. Through observations, I also learned that several instructors worked in collaborations with non-profit organizations such as IMTRADEC, the Institute of Traditional Medicine and
Community Development depending upon the teacher and the subject area. The Science teacher, for instance, planned many of his lessons on traditional ecological knowledge using Indigenous epistemologies, which he accessed through his collaboration with IMTRADEC. Several
Leadership School teachers engaged in culturally relevant pedagogy design in collaboration non- profit organizations that included Indigenous epitemologies and I believe they were moving toward creating a culturally sustaining pedagogy by centering Indigenous knowledge in the curriculum.
Learning about Young People’s Perspectives on Language and Social Media Use through Observations And Interviews
The leadership students were very busy utilizing every moment Monday through
Saturday and several Sundays studying in school. I was able to catch some of the youth participants during meal breaks for snacks or during lunchtime. Occasionally I had the opportunity to observe and document youth participants talking to each other in the cafeteria, buying food from the snack bar, or at University-wide events outside of the Leadership School classrooms. To understand the general discourse norms of URACCAN, I focused on observing language practices in interactions with URACCAN students, staff, and faculty. I was also curious if the discourse at URACCAN differed from that of the Leadership School because their mission statements were slightly different from each other. For instance, the Leadership School had an
62 emphasis on intercultural leadership capabilities whereas URACCAN’s mission statement emphasized autonomy, community, and Mother Earth. Also, the level of instruction differed between the two institutions. URACCAN focused on research and activism to create positive change on the Northern Caribbean coast, whereas the Leadership School seemed more focused on training students to either become university students or to get jobs in the local communities of the Northern Caribbean coast . In these observations at URACCAN, I found differences between formal and informal Miskitu. I also listened intently to the informal environments of speaking (outside of the classroom) to see if there were significant differences in the kinds of languages used. I mostly reflected in typed memos on my computer at home, but I also occasionally wrote down students’ speaking habits in my paper notebook. I noted, for example, that at the snack bar leadership and URACCAN students were encouraged to speak Miskitu by the women selling snacks. Sometimes, Leadership School students would correct my Miskitu and re-phrase for me in a less formal way for the snack bar versus in the classroom.
The staff who were working at the snack bar spoke Miskitu or Spanish but made an effort to “teach” Miskitu to predominant Spanish speakers. Many times, I ordered food in Miskitu for lunch or a snack at the snack bar, and the youth participants would correct my "formal" Miskitu and teach me how to order in "informal" Miskitu. In the cafeteria, sometimes youth participants would tell oral stories in Miskitu and then explain them to me in Spanish. One example of one of the oral stories was about different kinds of snakes and whether they were dangerous, if the snakes were edible, or if the snakes wanted to drink a new mother's breast milk.
In these observations at URACCAN, I found that there was a difference between formal and informal Miskitu. The youth participants corrected me frequently when I ordered food because I may have been using a very official discourse for a friendly exchange.
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I reflected on the identity of how one youth, focal participant Jamie, told oral stories in the cafeteria in Miskitu, and how she seemed to regularly position herself as authentically
Miskitu with her friends by telling oral stories. She also told me about her life, her values, her family including her newborn daughter and her expectations for herself at the Leadership School.
I reflected upon these stories about her identity and intentions for her work at the Leadership
School in my analysis of her final video project “Pamali Painkira,” described in chapter 4.
On very seldom occasions, I had the opportunity to observe the youth participants in the city outside of school when I escorted them to URACCAN in taxis on weekends for video recording or when we went to Channel 5 studios in the city from URACCAN in taxis. One place that was easy to observe outside of the classroom was on buses or in taxis on the way home from school or on the way to school. I documented my interactions with local youth in taxis, on buses, in restaurants, at the Channel 5 station, and on one occasion outside of one youth participants' home. I mostly reflected in my journal about these outside interactions with the youth participants. In these instances, I learned the audio and visual modes of communication that the youth participants had access to in their city played a significant role in the formation of their pluriliteracies. The mixed music genres contributed significantly to the way that they perceived language learning for intercultural understanding. I gained a sense of the access that the youth had to cybers and internet credits for smartphones and laptops.
To further consider the language repertoires of the youth participants and their social media interests and participation outside of school, I conducted group interviews with all five youth participants. I interviewed the three young men, Adán, Jorge, and Stefán, in one face to face group interview during a lunch period of about 30 minutes in the cafeteria at the end of the semester. I also interviewed the two young women, Nataly and Jamie, on my last day at the
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Leadership School outside of the URACCAN faculty cubicles right before lunch. The group interviews focused on language choice at home, in the classroom, in taxis/buses, online and with mobile devices (texting/messaging). Since Adán did not have a Facebook account, I interviewed him separately about his involvement in offline multimodal activities such as church activities that included singing, playing instruments, reading, and speaking in Miskitu, Spanish, and some
English. From the group interviews, I learned quite a bit about the students’ mixed language use at home with their family members, especially Jamie, Nataly, and Adán. I also learned about their different access to social media technologies and how they negotiated access to such technologies. I learned which websites and applications they frequently used like Whatsapp,
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. From the informal online interviews and observations of online artifacts, I learned about what students enjoyed about the Multimedia course and what I could change to make it more engaging as well as their interests in video and meme sharing and for Stefán his video production. During my informal interviews with Jamie and Jorge, I was able to learn what languages youth also felt that they needed more practice with, such as English in the case of Jamie and Miskitu/English for Jorge. Information from the interviews shed light on the access that each of the youth had to various pluriliteracies, and how this related to the linguistic power hierarchy of the Leadership School and the everyday discourses of their home environments.
Throughout the study, I also kept a teacher research journal to track what I was learning about the evolution of my own teaching practices and students’ reactions to changes in the
Multimedia course. I reflected on the teaching strategies of other Leadership School instructors and how they compared to my teaching strategies in my teacher research journal. Mostly I wrote in this journal when I got home from teaching the multimedia course at the beginning of the
65 semester, but later I started to write about what things worked in my lessons and which ideas could have been better or tailored to our access to various software and computers. I wrote about what I thought worked or did not work based on the students’ responses if they seemed excited to learn or bored or if they were disruptive and not as focused. Throughout the course, I paid particular attention to my language use and the language use of my students. If my students would instead speak to me in Miskitu, I followed their lead and responded to them in Miskitu. I also compared my observations at the Leadership School with my ongoing views of language use and discourse in multimedia in general. To understand how plurilingual Puerto Cabezas’ youth make sense of multimedia participation, design, and production in the interest of social justice, I attempted to solve through my observations of my students' language use in my multimedia course as well as in their daily life outside of the classroom in taxis, on buses, and in their neighborhoods in Puerto Cabezas. I also commented on the overall workings of the Leadership
School and whether specific policies or suggestions by the coordinator made sense or did not make sense to me such as national curriculum mandates versus local curriculum mandates. It was my way to cope with the hierarchy of working in a unique preparatory school that belonged to an autonomous regional university in a foreign country with very different standards from what I was used to at home in the United States.
As I co-designed the course, I checked in with some of the youth participants on how the course was going on Facebook Messenger outside of class. These were very informal chat session interviews that I conducted to gauge how the students were responding to my teaching. I asked which parts of the class youth enjoyed most, and which lessons or activities were confusing or not as fun. I then tailored my lessons based on my feedback with the youth
66 participants. To understand students’ perceptions of the multimedia course, I also asked students to complete short, handwritten surveys about the course.
In creating the multimedia design course, I created many materials including worksheets, presentations, video scripts and a Handbook of Guides that I created to help youth produce dictionaries, websites and video projects in Miskitu, Spanish and English. Reviewing and analyzing the course materials, I was able to track the production process of the youth's final video projects from the planning stage with written comic strips, to improvisations in front of home video cameras, to scripted improvisations in front of television production cameras. I could see how, at each step, I could promote IPILC, CEIMM and Channel 5’s expertise into the multimedia classroom, encouraging and promoting the youth participants' voices.
I also collected students’ artifacts, and sampled students’ completed worksheets that led up to the final video projects. Analyzing students’ artifacts, especially their final video projects, provided the strongest insights into the youths' pluriliteracies, raciolinguistic practices, instances of interculturalidad and principles of culturally sustaining pedagogies. Comparing scripts and the audio recordings of the videos allowed me to reflect on how the youth participants expressed their voices and the ways that they communicated their ideas to their community.
Data Analysis
I used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Wodak et al., 2013) to get a better understanding of the “language ideologies” (Schieffelin, Woolard & Kroskrity, 1998), feelings and thoughts about “normalized” written and oral communication, in a plurilingual/intercultural environment, like Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Discourse analysis is a powerful tool to zoom in on the microstructure of language as well as zoom out and look at the broader social dynamics
67 through language use (Gee, 2015). It is an analytical frame that is the appropriate fit to use in places like Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, because to go deeper into the language ideologies of the city requires an understanding of the power relations (or greater social hierarchy) that determines or profoundly influences those ideologies. Using Critical Discourse Analysis in Puerto Cabezas,
I looked at the historical power relations of the city, and colonial forces such as previous relationships to Great Britain and Spain and their impacts on the Caribbean coast 's identity formation as a region . For instance, examining the oscillation between names of the area such as La Mosquitia, the North Atlantic Coast and the Northern Caribbean coast , provides windows into how the whole region has changed its identity according to evolving discourses related to the political shifts described in Chapter 1. Also, looking at the economic pursuits of Puerto
Cabezas residents helped me understand the marketability of particular identities and thus language use (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) over time.
Critical discourse analysis and multimodal analysis also helped me make sense of my observations of young people’s pluriliteracies, my various journal entries, and young people’s media artifacts and video productions. As I mention in chapter 1 and above, Nicaraguans on the
Caribbean coast learn from a very young age that they must choose to identify with one ethnic group, even if they are indeed mixed. To pay attention to the way that this translanguaging and thus transracialization was part of what it meant to be Porteñ@, I paid attention to the ways that youth participants in this study described their language choice with friends, Leadership School faculty, and family members. I also paid attention to how their language choice related to their identity formation, their positions of power versus marginality (their socioeconomic status) and even race. I also analyzed my data to see how youth used each of their languages including
68 borrowing, blending, or the insertion of single words or phrases from other languages to position themselves as being part of one ethnic group in specific contexts and situations.
I also used Multimodal Discourse analysis (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001) to further understand the modes and media that the youth participants and I engaged in inside and outside of the classroom. Modes are like channels of information in the form of visuals, sounds, and gesture. The youth participants encounter various music styles on buses, in taxis, in the city of
Bilwi-Puerto Cabezas and on the URACCAN campus as well as text messages, photos, videos, and memes online . These are all modes of information that they must sift through to make meaning of their everyday lives. Popular culture and the mass media shape these modes of communication flows. Multimodal discourse analysis helps to examine the dialogue between the mass media and youths’ interpretations/utilization of these communication flows. Under this umbrella of Multimodal Discourse analysis, I used methods from visual anthropology that emphasize dialogue with participants about their emic perspectives of their visual modes to analyze photographs or image macro memes shared online , analyzing image Macro Memes
(Blommaert & Varis, 2014; Milner, 2012) using visual anthropological methodology. When analyzing videos and Video internet macro memes, however, I focused on the interplay of modes including gesture and movement, as well as sound, in addition to using a visual framework.
Outside of the classroom, I also focused on documenting youth participants’ language practices (written and oral) and use of multimedia technologies. With permission, I observed the youth participants online . I also reviewed young people’s posts on social media including memes, videos, written posts, and photos. To understand the youth participants’ pluriliteracies outside of the classroom, I additionally observed the wall posts, instant message conversations and comments of the youth participants online, especially on a social media site on Facebook
69 that I developed with youth to to distribute the final seven video projects to the local, national and international community. During the summer of 2016, I typed memos about the memes shared on the youth participants’ pages, any updates on the Miskitus y Mayangnas en el internet
Facebook Page, our class website, and any informal chat conversations I had with the youth participants. My observations focused on the use of written text in Miskitu, Spanish and English as well as layered texts with audio, visual, and movement components in videos and internet macro memes. With students’ written and verbal permission, I also collected artifacts online by taking screenshots on my laptop and pasting the screenshots into word documents. I wrote short memos about the screenshots, analyzing students’ online artifacts for possible meanings in the discourse of the Northern Caribbean coast region of Nicaragua, Central America, greater Latin
America and, in some instances the United States. Lastly, when I returned to the U.S., I informally interviewed two of the young men Jorge and Stefán online , on Facebook messenger, about meme sharing and production.
My ongoing analysis of collective observations, interviews, classroom artifacts, and analysis of discourses which included varying language ideologies and raciolinguistic positioning and multimodal literacy access, provided a sharp picture of what it meant to be plurilingual and pluriliterate in Puerto Cabezas Nicaragua. Through regular journaling in my teacher research journal and personal journal, I also critically reflected on the development of culturally sustaining pedagogy in the Multimedia course. I thought genuinely about the relationships I was developing with each of the main youth participants, as well as Leadership
School staff and community leaders over the course of the study.
The next chapter elaborates on how I established and maintained collaborations with key community members from non-profit organizations on the URACCAN campus for creating a
70 culturally sustaining curriculum for the Multimedia course, and facilitated youth participants’ access to pluriliterate competencies at the Leadership School.
CHAPTER 3 USING COMMUNITY-ANCHORED DIGITAL AND FACE-TO-FACE APPROACHES TO CENTER YOUTH’S PLURILITERATE VOICES IN MULTIMEDIA DESIGN
This teacher research chapter describes how the first multilingual multimedia course developed at the Leadership School, a unique preparatory school located on the URACCAN
University campus in the Northern Autonomous Zone of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua.
Below, I focus on the ways that digital and face-to-face community-anchored learning were key approaches used in designing a new multimedia course to align with the core leadership school’s mission statement. In the plurilingual environment of the Leadership School, students used their multiple oral and written language abilities to position themselves as members of specific ethnic groups. In the United States, scholars who study students’ ethnic group positioning through language increasingly represent a burgeoning subfield of language and education research called raciolinguistics .
Raciolinguistics, the interdisciplinary field, suggests that understanding race through language and language through the lens of race is key in exposing power hierarchies in schools and communities (Alim, Rickford & Ball, 2016). Leading researchers of culturally sustaining pedagogies have applied raciolinguistics in seeking to understand race and language in classrooms and related power imbalances, and as a key resource in creating transformational
71 critical pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Seltzer & De los Ríos, 2018). In this chapter I describe, in two sections, show how exercising culturally sustaining pedagogies, addressing raciolinguistics in community anchored digital and face-to-face learning helped students gain access to pluriliteracies, abilities to dialog between local and global textual, oral, visual, and gestural modes of communication (Garcia, Kleifgen & Bartlett, 2007).
In section 1, I show how interculturalidad, a culturally relevant curriculum in Latin
American Schools (Kohls & Knight, 1994; Barth, 2007) relates directly to culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017), a critical decolonizing educational framework in United
States’ Schools. I describe how raciolinguistics (Alim, Rickford & Ball, 2016) critically informs culturally sustaining pedagogy design in illuminating language and power hierarachies related to race. I highlight how third spaces (Guitierrez, 2008; Edirisinghe et al., 2011) serve to ease language insecurities, brought about by language and power hierarchies related to race and help students gain crucial access to pluriliteracies from their local as well as global communities.
I feature my own pedagogical tools as analytical windows into the application of culturally sustaining pedagogies, raciolinguistics , and third spaces to anchor emerging pluriliterate youth’s voices in multimedia design. I share a comic strip template, and a Facebook chat session to show how bringing social media into the classroom as a third spacepedagogical approach created a safe space for students to gain a critical consciousness around raciolinguistic ideologies, and access pluriliteracies previously inaccessible to them in the classroom. I designed the comic strip on my personal experiences to show students how I was racialized based on my language choices and to model ways of using multimedia design to critically reflect on such raciolinguistic positioning in the community. I then show how Jaimie, used an online conversation as a venue for sharing and thus voicing her personal linguistic insecurities and
72 challenges to accessing local and global varieties of English. I also lay out how the leadership students tackled their written language insecurities and critically self-reflected and formed alternate social media identities to promote and produce a multilingual Facebook page.
In section 2, I demonstrate how instructors from outside Indigenous communities can develop culturally sustaining pedagogies in respectful, reciprocal relationships with community members. I share how I collaborated with Indigenous language and multimedia experts to help students develop a critical consciousness on local community conflicts and their culturally sustaining resolutions. In my collaboration with Indigenous language and multimedia experts, non-profit based community-anchored learning aided the leadership students in reaching their goals to produce and promote local multilingual multimedia. I also show how I used strategic collaborations with non-profit organizations to ground culturally sustaining pedagogies for multimedia design in youth’s situated lived experience in their community, promoting and perpetuating a localized intergenerational knowledge exchange.
Over the course of the chapter, I show how situated learning both on and offline helped to engage and empower the multimedia students to take charge of their own learning trajectories and how both digital and face-to-face third spaces helped youth develop a critical consciousness around culturally revitalizing work to promote Indigenous and Afro-descendant languages in their own independently produced multimedia.
Section 1 Interculturalidad, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Raciolinguistics : Creating Inviting Social Media-based Third spaces for Youth to Express their Local and Globalized Voices
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In this section, I begin with a discusson on Interculturalidad, an ideology in Latin
American Schools that promotes culturally relevant curriculum (Kohls & Knight, 1994; Barth,
2007) as it relates to culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017) and to my own pedagogical design decisions. I also show how raciolinguistics (Alim, Rickford & Ball, 2016) can critically inform culturally sustaining pedagogies design. And, lastly I showcase how the introduction of a third space (Gutierrez, 2008; Edirisinghe et al., 2011) in the form of class social media sites, can create a safe space for countering students’ language insecurities in culturally sustaining and revitalizing (Lee & McCarty, 2014) pedagogy-based coursework.
Crucially I discovered early on in my teaching journey that the Leadership School strongly endeavored, and in many ways succeeded, in carrying out its mission “To form human resources with intercultural leadership capabilities. To prepare professionals with scientific and technical capabilities [that include] cultural values” (Leadership School, 2016). Informed and guided by the principle of Interculturalidad. Following the lead of URACCAN University’s human resources model, the school had created a culturally relevant curriculum steeped in community-based situated learning (Gee, 2009; Cupples & Glynn, 2014). However, largely due to socio-historical power hierarchies (see Chapter 1) based on ethnicity in social studies, civics, math, science or technology related coursework, a clear critical consciousness around linguistic inequalities was not evident or easily observed in the curriculum. As I describe in this chapter, I found that helping students to form a critical consciousness based in raciolinguistics (Alim,
Rickford & Ball, 2016) could provide an empowering space for youths’ inquiry into the linguistic inequalities of the region and to promote an equalization of under-represented languages (Miskitu, Mayangna and Kriol) in the learning space particularly in their written forms.
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Designing the new multimedia course involved helping the students to define the appropriate linguistic, cultural content and social justice significance of their multimedia projects. Culturally sustaining pedagogies seek to include multicultural students’ cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge in the classroom, but also seek to reverse social injustices brought about by colonial ideologies in schooling that marginalize and erase the complexity of multicultural students’ lived experiences (Paris & Alim, 2017; McCarty & Lee, 2014). To both honor the educational goals of the Leadership School and reverse social injustices brought about by colonial ideologies, I sought to decolonize the curriculum of the multimedia design course by first listening intently to the goals of Leadership School administrators and Indigenous officials at URACCAN university who worked for non-profit organizations. I then invited Leadership
School administrators and the Indigenous officials in URACCAN university’s non-profit organizations into the classroom to help guide the students’ decision-making about the cultural and linguistic content of their multimedia projects, and deepened our understanding of what was and was not “decolonizing” in this region of the world.
Interculturalidad and Leadership School Expectations: Student and Teacher Bi/Multilingualism as a Resource for Spanish and English Acquisition
In our first faculty meeting Spring 2016, the Coordinator of the Leadership School expressed a common assumption that since the majority of the students were fluent Miskitu speakers, they felt more comfortable speaking in Miskitu. Her unstated teacher expectation was that the Miskitu language should be used to help students who made up the majority of our classrooms. She was very clear about the smaller numbers of Mayangna and Creole students in the class, but did not identify them as speakers of Mayangna or Kriol. Rather, she emphasized that teachers should be sensitive to the ethnic and linguistic diversity of their students. She also
75 shared that in recent years, the Leadership School had recruited students from the Puerto
Cabezas urban area, specifically monolingual Spanish speaking Mestizo students and some bilingual Miskitu and Spanish speaking Miskitu students, in the hopes that the urban students could provide peer support to the rural students in developing Spanish speaking, reading and writing abilities.
The Leadership School’s coordinator’s premise that the bilingual students should help their peers use more Spanish in class, harkened back to a policy in education that served to transition Indigenous students from Indigenous language medium education to Spanish medium education. Interculturalidad is a concept rooted in community building and exchange of culturally informed knowledge (Kohls & Knight,1994). Latin American education literature defines intercultural education as pedagogies that incorporate Indigenous knowledge systems while building a strong foundation in Spanish reading and writing. The original era for this definition of intercultural education started in places like Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia in the 1930s
(Lopez & Küper, 1999). If interculturalidad is focused on community building and the exchange of culturally informed knowledge, then maintaining Indigenous knowledge systems, but teaching in Spanish fits this original education policy. United States-based English as foreign language coursework also held great importance at the Leadership School adding to the complexity of intercultural beliefs, much like in many other Latin American countries’ administrators highly coveted English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instruction in secondary school (Padilla González
& Espinoza Calderón, 2015).
However, the Leadership School also encouraged bringing Indigenous and Afro- descendant knowledge systems into the classroom a hallmark of intercultural education models of the 1980s onward in Latin American contexts (Suarez, 2009; Ruiz & López, 2013; Migge,
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Léglise & Bartens, 2010). Following this structure for maintaining students’ Indigenous and
Afro-descendant knowledge systems, and thus culturally relevant pedagogy expectations, new teachers learned about the Leadership School’s URACCAN non- profit collaborative expectations. The Coordinator emphasized that collaborating with non-profit organizations on campus would enrich students' education. Since a focus on “human resources” appeared in both the URACCAN and the Leadership School’s mission statements – the Leadership School and
URACCAN administration encouraged Leadership School teachers to work with organizations that could help their students attain employment in the local community. In turn, the Leadership
School and staff comprised the “human resources” in terms of becoming the role models, youth care workers, and teacher aids. Moreover, these staff members acted as windows into Indigenous cultural knowledge bases that the Leadership School students could bank as capital for careers in specialized fields in their local community (Cupples & Glynn, 2014). In support of this expectation, the Leadership School and URACCAN Administration helped students to gain access to material resources (such as cameras, computers, medical equipment, traditional plants, etc).
Many of the Leadership School staff (teachers and administrators) readily promoted the students’ “intercultural leadership capabilities” through utilizing languages such as Miskitu,
Spanish and English in the classroom. However, an explicit focus on valorizing all of the students’ Indigenous and Afro-descendant communication repertoires in the classroom, and thus acknowledging the linguistic hierarchy brought about by various socio-historical colonial practices on the Caribbean coast , needed closer attention.
Understanding the differences and similarities between Interculturalidad and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies
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Although Afro-descendant and Indigenous cultural knowledge-bases are encouraged and promoted in primary, secondary and higher educational spheres through the concept of interculturalidad, intercultural education policy virtually ignores racial disparities that disproportionately affect Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. A critique of intercultural education is that it lacks a consciousness about the current inequalities and injustices both inside and outside of education spaces that individually face Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. In this way, intercultural education does not correspond with culturally sustaining pedagogies because its focus is on community building, reciprocity, and interdependence among community members but it turns a blind eye to the national politics that isolate and relegate the Caribbean coast to the second class citizenry.
Culturally sustaining pedagogies, in contrast, try to use the on-going struggles of peoples of color in society as a core focus. Many Latin American scholars critique the concept of interculturalidad because they believe it creates a kind of color-blindness also seen in the United
States that silences marginalized communities’ on-going struggles for recognition at the national level (Hooker, 2005). Latin Americanists who focus on these injustices on the Caribbean coast
(particularly on the south Caribbean coast ) reflect upon military police brutality, Mestizo squatters on autonomous land, Afro-descendant displacement from state allocated lands, forced cultural assimilation, Spanish-only schooling practices, underdevelopment and low economic conditions (Gordon, 1998; Frühling et al., 2007, Henriksen, 2008; Morris, 2016; Goett, 2011).
Unsurprisingly, in choosing topics for their multimedia projects, the leadership students did want to focus on a few of these topics on their own, including racial discrimination and poverty (two of their original themes for multimedia design).
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Thus, I want to illustrate how the design of the Multimedia course helped the leadership students form a critical consciousness to move beyond simply reclaiming their culture and language in education spaces into a space where they could question their current language choices with respect to the national and local status quo of language and power relations.
Forming a critical consciousness around language choices associated with ethnicity, required an understanding of the concept of raciolinguistics.
Raciolinguistics and the Development of a Digital Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy
Raciolinguistics (Alim et al., 2017) as an interdisciplinary field, broadly looks at how language racializes minoritized youth and adults globally and in the United States.
Raciolinguistics scholars in Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, and Educational
Linguistics focus on how language is used to create and perpetuate the concept of race as a social construction and subsequently shapes the way we speak and how we form our identities; this is the dichotomy Alim (p. 5) theorizes as “languaging race and racing language.” As such, raciolinguistics as a concept helps to understand language and power in society.
Raciolinguistics as a concept can also be used to help deconstruct the complexity of the socio-historical and current power hierarchy of Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. The current and socio-historical power hierarchy among ethnic groups in Puerto Cabezas is based very heavily on agency in language choice, diverse linguistic abilities, and transiting between cultural discourses and ethnic categorizations. Deconstructing the present and socio-historical power hierarchy between ethnic groups in Puerto Cabezas is key to understanding where a new culturally inclusive pedagogy is genuinely liberatory (See chapter 1 for details on the Caribbean coast ’s ethnic socio-historical power hierarchy), particularly, if it questions national processes of cultural
79 and racial assimilation based on multicultural youth’s language choice. An astute critique on language choice based on racial categorization sheds light on whether a pedagogy is culturally sustaining. If a pedagogy supports a counter-narrative on typical racial discourse connected to colonial language practices of assimilation in schools it may safely call itself culturally sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2017; McCarty & Lee, 2014).
In the multimedia design course, as a teacher and teacher-researcher, I made clear decisions about how to encourage a critical lens on the one-to-one language and ethnic identity binary. I saw my own critical lens on the one-to-one language and ethnic identity binary as a point to start a productive dialog with the multimedia students and thus a way to explicitly implement a culturally sustaining pedagogy standard. I used social media technology to situate my own experience of being racialized in Puerto Cabezas as a teaching tool and pedagogical approach to the subject of raciolinguistics and its application in the specific regional context.
Setting a Standard for Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy Through Raciolinguistics
Living in Puerto Cabezas, I encountered people of different ethnicities and the way that they spoke to each other which afforded me the opportunity to think about how I could help the leadership youth develop and share critical perspectives about the language norms around them.
Further, I wondered how I could make space in the classroom for my students to express their critical consciousness of literacies in a multimodal way. I subsequently decided that I would center my lived experience in Puerto Cabezas in a digital comic strip as a way to relate to some of the students’ lived experiences in a non-threatening affinity space (Gee, 2017), as an avatar, a cartoon to represent me from social media practice. A comic strip template offered a creative venue to demonstrate for the Leadership students how they could raise questions about the norms
80 of society’s power particularly regarding the correct way to communicate in their everyday lives and in the independent media.
I created a comic on Bitstrips.com that featured myself as an avatar in several barrios of
Puerto Cabezas in Figure 1 below. The speech bubble in each frame represents the particular language norm I heard in the city expressed in Spanish, Kriol or Miskitu (See Figure 1 Key). I problematized the notion that I should speak a particular language so that Puerto Cabezas’ residents could racialize me as part of a particular ethnic group. I provide a translation for each of the comic frames and follow with an analysis.
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Figure 1. Bitstrips.com comic “My Identity”
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Figure 1 Key: The numbers in each comic scene/frame above correspond with the transcribed line numbers below. In addition, Spanish text is normal, Kriol text is in bold and Miskitu text is bold and italicized. The English translation for each line is italicized.
1 LH: “No sé cuál etnia soy?” I do not know which ethnicity I am?
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2 LH: “Pienso que necesito escoger a una” I think that I need to choose one
3 Two Creole “Where you guan?” friends: Where are you going?
4 Two Creole “You Creole Gyal” friends: You are Creole Girl
5 LH: “Mmm creo que siii pero no puedo hablar el criollo” Mmm I believe so but I cannot speak Kriol
6 Miskitu “Miskitu mairin sma? haha” Woman: Are you a Miskitu woman? haha
7 Latina Woman: “No eres Latina verdad?” You are not Latina right?
8 LH: “Swis! Dejame! Guan! Soy yo única y feliz!” Leave! Leave me! Go on! I am me unique and happy!
In line 1, I open with the topic of questioning my own ethnic identity, which was a real tension for me living in Puerto Cabezas and working on the URACCAN campus. For example, on campus, I was required to write my ethnicity to check out equipment for the multimedia course and I could not decide which ethnicity to write. I often wrote United States or
“estadounidensa” to say that was my “nationality” but in reality, I did not have an ethnicity that matched the existing categories used in this region of the world. To clarify, the term “American” is often used in the United States to express nationality. But, I have to state that many Central
Americans would not use “Americana” as a nationality term for those from the United States.
This is simply because Central Americans see themselves as Americans. To distinguish themselves from the United States, they use the term “Norte Americanos” which means North
Americans or “estadounidenses,” referring to people specifically from the United States.
Nevertheless, Puerto Cabezas residents did try to racially categorize me using the linguistic
84 discourse much in the same way as the fictional comic characters did in lines 3, 4, 6, and 7. In line 3, two Creole friends ask me in Kriol where I am going. In line 4, the two Creole friends say that I am part of their ethnic group, that I am Creole. In line 5, I state that I think I might be part of the Creole ethnic group, but I cannot speak the language (which according to commonplace regional assumptions that Creole members speak Kriol rules out the possibility of my Creole ethnicity membership). In line 6, I am approached by a Miskitu woman and asked in Miskitu if I am a Miskitu woman. And, finally in line 7, I am approached by a Latina woman and asked in
Spanish if I am Latina. In every line, my avatar must grapple with ethnic identity as it relates to language use, an everyday phenomenon in the face-to-face spaces of Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua.
Several individuals in Puerto Cabezas working in restaurants, the city center or clothing stores (as I depict in the comic) would ask me (in real life) in their respective languages whether
I was part of their ethnic group. If I could respond well in their language, that indicated to them that I could claim ethnic group membership. In line 8, I speak in all three languages Miskitu,
Kriol and Spanish to tell the different individuals that I met in the city to leave me alone - that it is not so simple to categorize me, after all I am unique and happy with who I am.
The goal for showing this comic to the multimedia students was for them to form a critical consciousness around racialization practices in their everyday lives that caused them to speak one language over another. The comic strip turned out to be extremely powerful for setting a standard for leadership students to recognize and critque ethnic identity as a one to one correlation with language choice. I presented the comic to the youth and asked them to reflect on creating a comic based on their own plurilingual experiences. During the brainstorming process for producing their own comics, youth slowly felt comfortable talking about race and their language choices. Ultimately, my original comic successfully helped provide a safe venue with
85 which the students created a video project “La Discriminación Racial” to critique the racialization of Mayangna youth through their language choice. I feature a detailed analysis on this video in chapter 4.
As a teacher and digital activist, I needed to find ways to scaffold written literacies in
Miskitu, Kriol and Mayangna to help students not only to gain a critical consciousness around the raciolinguistic ideologies of their region, but to help students access pluriliteracies previously inaccessible to them in the classroom. Understandably, it was often difficult for students to articulate language power hierarchies particularly between written and oral modes of communication with no prior opportunities to do so. The leadership students needed assistance navigating those power hierarchies, questioning them, and ultimately finding ways to confront them.
The following Facebook chat conversation with Jamie provided a venue and example of how students could face difficulty trying to articulate language power hierarchies, particularly between written versus oral modes of communication. In this conversation Jamie exhibits her language insecurity with United States- based English. Her attempt to grapple with identifying herself with the English/Kriol language as a heritage language given that Spanish is the only scaffold for her in learning to read and write in English. English reading and writing is recognized as part of her pluriliteracies and one she seeks to add to a developing a global linguistic repertoire. In the the following Facebook chat conversation, it becomes apparent that the Multimedia course supports Jamie’s desire to add Kriol to her, local and global linguistic and pluriliterate repertoire.
Facebook Chat with Jamie
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Note: Spanish text is normal; English is italicized; and, Kriol is in bold text.
1 LH: “Esta vez no vamos a tener problemas tengo una actividad que puede ayudarles con una compu y sin una y si quieres practicar tu ingles conmigo siempre estoy lista jiji” This time we will not have problems I have an activity that can help you guys with a computer or without one, and if you want to practice your English with me I am always ready hehe 2 Jamie: “I like you scool” I like your class 3 LH: “mi clase?” My class?
4 Jamie: "yes”
5 LH: “En mi manera de hablar ingles es "I like your class"...pero quiero decirte que no sé como hablar en el ingles criollo y estoy buscando por una maestra no quiero decir que solo hay una manera de decir las cosas en ingles...yo quiero aprender otras maneras” In my way of speaking English it is "I like your class" ... and, I want to tell you that I do not know how to speak in Kriol and I am looking for a teacher I do not want to say that there is only one way to say things in English ... I want to learn other ways 6 Jamie: [Happy Facebook stickers] “jajaja yo tengo un diccionario de ingles y español en mi mano aurita ni yo entiendo lo que escrivo” hahaha I have a dictionary of English and Spanish in my hand right now and I don’t understand what I write 7 LH: “No es muy dificil! Hay muchos cognados entre los dos lenguajes” It is not very difficult! There are many cognates between the two languages 8 Jamie: “sip tienes razon pero yo no entiendo ni uno” yes well you are right but I do not understand one 9 LH: “Solo necesitas practicar más como yo con el español y miskitu” You just need to practice more like me with Spanish and Miskitu 10 Jamie: “sip es facil el español pero ingles es muy dificil” Yes well Spanish is easy but English is very difficult
In the exchange above, Jamie and I started chatting around how I could improve the
Multimedia course based on her feedback in line 1. Strikingly, Jamie opened up to speak “her”
English, Kriol, in her very first line, writing, “I like you scool” in line 2. Although somewhat
87 confused at first when I read line 2, I realized right away that she was referring to the Multimedia course. I could have continued in “my English” but instead, I switched to Spanish, which was our usual form of written communication on Facebook, in line 3. Jamie responded in English again in line 4 with “yes” as if she was trying to prompt me to continue in English instead of
Spanish. In line 5, I told her that in my way of speaking English her sentence would be “I like your class.” Then continuing in line 5, rather than tell her to use my English, I told her that I needed a Kriol teacher as positive reinforcement and valuing Jamie’s way of speaking English,
As such, I worked to disrupt international and commonplace discourses at the Leadership
School that valued United States English over Kriol. In line 5, I purposely asked for a Kriol teacher, so I could reinforce a truly culturally sustaining pedagogy. In this instance, I might have drawn on dominant language ideologies to position myself as a natural born citizen of the United
States who enjoys the privilege of United States-based English as a first language who in this case would have preferred to speak United States-based English rather than Kriol. In contrast, I positioned myself as an instructor conscious of Kriol’s stigmatized status in relation to United
States-based English in the racialization process. Here I prefer to use “United States-based
English” instead of “American English” because Kriol is an American English spoken by Central
Americans. I told Jamie that I was looking for a Kriol teacher, placing her and other Kriol speakers in a place of power and prestige rather than a place of marginalization and stigmatization.
Reflecting on my own positionality in the linguistic hierarchy allowed for a dialog around transforming the status quo around our Englishes. After I sent Jamie the last part of line 5, “I do not want to say that there is only one way to say things in English… I want to learn other ways,”
Jamie sent five Facebook stickers of the excited emoji, indicating happiness and excitement
88 about my support for her English, Kriol. Interestingly, the word in Miskitu for “class” is “kulka” borrowed directly from Kriol “skul,” meaning “class” in United States English.
At the time of this study there were no Kriol written text aids to help students like Jamie to learn United States’ English. Students like Jamie tried to use their written literacy in Spanish to help them to learn how to read and write in United States-based English. In line 6, Jamie refers to using the Spanish-English dictionary, but she does not know what she is writing in English.
Since Jamie had funds of knowledge in Kriol, she could have benefitted from reading in Kriol (a phonetic writing system) to aid in her United States’ English learning. This early exchange on
Facebook Chat helped establish a safe zone where Jamie and I could explore her pluriliterate competencies that crisscrossed all of the languages that she, spoke, read and wrote.
Leadership Students’ Pluriliteracy Development in the Classroom: The Culturally Sustaining Multimodal Composition Dilemma
Pluriliteracy stems originally from the concept of plurilingualism which outlines youth and adults’ abilities to transit between discourses in various languages by actively choosing which language to use with which person at a particular time (Freeland, 2013). But, what makes pluriliteracy different from plurilingualism is its connection with 21st-century ways of knowing
(Coyle, 2015). Pluriliteracy has transcended spokenlanguage and incorporated multimodal communication into its repertoire. Thus, pluriliteracy looks at youth and adults’ abilities to transit between written, spoken, visual and gestural discourses in any given language with any given person at any given time (Garcia, Kleifgen & Bartlett, 2007; Meyer & Coyle, 2015; Coyle,
2018). At the Leadership School before the multimedia course, written literacy (textual modes) in languages of Afro-descendant and Indigenous youth (Kriol, Miskitu and Mayangna) were not readily accessible due to the administration’s preferences for Spanish and English written
89 literacies. Thus, in the classroom, leadership students needed explicit support in acquiring pluriliteracies in Miskitu, Mayangna and Kriol through teaching tools that incorporated all modes of communication (visuals, text, movement, and sound).
To teach design in the Multimedia course, I showed the students how to do multimodal composition, a process of building complex meaning through deliberately choosing to layer specific modes of communication (Smith, 2016, 2017, 2018). I wanted to teach the students how to self-select and layer modes of communication (visuals, text, movement, and sound) including all their language repertoires, and to digitally convey real life events in their communities. I knew the key to engaging my students consisted in showing relatable examples of multimedia products (such as videos) that applied to youth-centered topics steeped in local community discourse.
Since I had observed a relative absence of written text in Miskitu, Mayangna and Kriol, I endeavored to bring written literacies in those languages to the center of the multimodal composition process. I centered Miskitu, Mayangna and Kriol written literacies for two reasons. I perceived the relative absence of these Indigenous and Afro-descendant written languages as an inequality, an imbalance of power, and privilege toward the written colonial languages Spanish and English (at the top of the linguistic hierarchy). My second reason for centering Miskitu,
Mayangna and Kriol written literacies involved my assumption that written literacy constituted a necessity in the overall multimodal composition process, since written text is a modality readily used in designing “scripted” videos or multilingual videos that include subtitles.
When I showed students written oral narratives in Miskitu and Mayangna in my lesson plans for multimodal composition, or when I featured examples of video planning activities that featured written dialog in Miskitu, Mayangna and Kriol, however, I realized I had a fatal design
90 flaw. Many of my students had language insecurities (Wyman, McCarty, & Nicholas, 2013) connected to written Miskitu, Mayangna and Kriol. Students such as Jamie explained that they could not read in Miskitu. I further define language insecurities as students’ anxieties or worries about learning to read and write in languages such as Miskitu, Mayangna, and (in Jamie’s case)
English. I attribute these language insecurities to students’ challenges with gaining access to written resources and supports for the languages indicated. Thus, creating clear access pathways to pluriliteracies (textual, visual, audible and movement modes of communication that included
Miskitu, Mayangna and English) on and offline helped students on their emergent path to proficiency in all of their communities’ modes of communication. I discovered that the three
Mayangna students also needed significant support in reading and writing in Mayangna. And as stated earlier, Kriol did not appear in its written form according to my observations at the
Leadership school. Thus, I had a dilemma: how would I make the Multimedia course culturally sustaining if my students could not engage in multimodal composition with all of their language repertoires. The answer to this conundrum came in an unexpected place, the third space
(Gutierrez, 2008; Taylor, & Klein, 2015).
Leadership Students’ Pluriliteracy Development Outside of the Classroom: The Third Space, Social Media & Culturally Sustaining Situated Learning
Multimedia artists and social media scholars study and conceptualize online networked communication as the third space (Kafai & Peppler, 2011; Edirisinghe, Nakatsu, Widodo,
Cheok, 2011; Pasfield-Neofitou et al., 2015; Dron & Anderson, 2014). Teachers conceptualize the third space as the “in-between space,” a space where they can bring real world experience in and send classroom experience out (Gutierrez, 2008; Taylor & Klein, 2015). As a teacher of multimedia design, I knew that social media platforms could situate my students’ learning in real
91 world experience in digital communities. Community members practice expressions of
“affiliation” and “identity” in digital communities on social media platforms just as they do in face-to-face communities (Sergeant & Tagg, 2014). Just as in face-to- face communities, digital community members use multimodal forms of communication to indicate their affiliation and identification with the community. However, the specific way of layering multimodal forms of communication for purposes of indicating affiliation and identity with a specific digital community is unique to the online multimedia design process (otherwise known as multimodal composition). This process includes but is not limited to designing memes, layered visuals and text that go “viral” shared continuously across social media platforms, and videos. This process also includes commenting on memes and videos using hashtag links.
At least half of my students already affiliated and identified with social media-based digital communities, and at least half had Facebook accounts and frequented YouTube.com in their free time. When I told my students that we would be editing short videos using
MovieMaker, the students immediately went to Youtube.com for inspiration. With my help they began downloading music from their favorite videos, taking screen shots of their favorite images or finding similar images to insert from Google Images. Situated learning is learning by doing in the real world (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Gee, 2004, 2009) multimedia design or multimodal composition and any learning through digital technology is another form of learning by doing.
For example, in situated learning, students discover how to build a fun new game on a smartphone by playing several existing fun games on smartphones. I observed Jorge constantly playing “Bubble Shooter” on my smartphone in class. He could tell me all of the strategies to win the game. In his spare time in the computer lab “Lakia Tara” at URACCAN, he designed online games similar to “Grand Theft Auto.”
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When comparing the third space to social media practice, Edirisinghe et al. (2011) write that the third space, just like situated learning online, is both imaginative and real. Their quote below uses the metaphor of the mirror to effectively explain the significance of the third Space, and how social media practice allows youth to inhabit imagined worlds while they are still in the real world. They can take on an imagined persona while they self-reflect on their true identity.
The third space is both imaginative and real - This is a resemblance to the mirror; the
reflection is on the mirror where the person is not. It is both imaginative and real
concurrently, thus accommodating both, the person before the mirror looking in and the
person reflected in the mirror looking out, the reflection and the real (Edirisinghe et al., 2011,
p. 124).
Before the Multimedia course began, 17 of 54 students had Facebook accounts and most of those 17 had other social media accounts such as Instagram, Twitter or Whatsapp.
I created two Facebook pages in the Multimedia course, one to store all of the digital guides for software editing called “Multimedia” and one to track our progress creating multilingual final video projects called “Miskitus y Mayangnas en el Internet.” English
Translation: Miskitus and Mayangnas on the Internet. The “Miskitus y Mayangnas en el
Internet” page explicitly served to promote the digital activism of creating a new space for youth-centered, locally-situated Indigenous and independently produced multimedia. The multimedia that students produced in the course in face-to-face environments went online , and the multimedia design they saw online also influenced their face-to -ace multimedia production.
I wrote Miskitu and Spanish commentaries on the page that included photos of every aspect of the multimedia design process, from the planning stages to the final projects. In my commentaries, I highlighted community experts who the Multimedia students and I collaborated
93 with in the local context and how they helped us with the intricate steps of layering modes of communication in a culturally sustaining way. A secondary goal was to track our progress producing youth-centered, Indigenous, locally-based media, so that other teachers, researchers and digital activists would have a blueprint for doing similar work in the future. I created the websites in February of 2016 at the start of the semester which were updated bythe multimedia students throughout the semester until May 2016.
Three out of the five focal youth participants of this study were especially passionate about the video projects and course Facebook page and had the most access to technology at the time. I invited Jorge, Stefán and Jamie to act as key administrators of the Facebook pages during the 2016 Spring semester. As administrators, they shared the websites with their friends inside and outside of the Leadership school, wrote comments on the pages, and updated the websites after the Multimedia course concluded. I observed Jorge, Stefán and Jamie’s participation on the two class social media sites and on their own Facebook pages to better understand their pluriliteracy practices in the third space.
Drawing on the third space in the multimedia course changed the whole feeling of my students’ multimedia design process. In contrast to students’ expressed feelings of insecurity around language use in the physical classroom, I also noted how each of the students seemed to express comfortable feelings towards written communication in the third space. Jamie, for instance, posted stickers in English on our Facebook page, “Miskitus y Mayangnas en el
Internet” rallying the class to push forward on our video recording efforts.
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Students’ Examples of Third Space Written Communication
In our previous chat conversation and in general during the face-to-face multimedia course, Jamie expressed insecurities about her abilities to read and write in English.
In the moment of participating in the third space, Jamie shed her fears and insecurities about using English to communicate effectively like the ones she expressed to me in our earlier
Facebook chat.
Jamie’s Facebook Sticker Post.
In Jorge’s case, When I first observed him speaking face-to-face with friends, classmates and teachers on Facebook, he wrote solely in his native language Spanish, the language with which he felt most comfort in expressing himself. However, Jorge wrote to me in Miskitu in a mixed English, Miskitu and Spanish Facebook chat conversation. Early in the Spring Semester
2016, Jorge and I where talking about my how to sustain the Multimedia course with looming costs on the horizon for students’ multimedia projects. I provide the transcription of the
Facebook Chat conversation below.
Facebook Chat Conversation with Jorge.
(NOTE: Below, Miskitu appears in bold italics, Spanish is normal, and English translations for both languages appear in italics below the original line.
Jorge: “Hi!!”
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LH: “Hi!!” Jorge: “Naskisma” How are you LH: “Pain sna kuna drap kum sibrin brisna” I’m fine but I’m a little scared Jorge: “De q” Of what LH: “kau kahla apu” I don’t have much money Jorge: “Siempre llega” It always comes
In face-to-face interactions, Stefán mainly assisted his peers in our multimedia design efforts with transportation and a listening ear; I never saw him speak up to defend all of the languages and cultures of Caribbean coast. I always observed Stefán to be the good student, helping me and his peers to complete our tasks by volunteering transportation resources or fulfilling a short character role in a video. He passively supported our efforts in the face-to-face.
Online , however, Stefán found a platform to reach out to those on the Pacific side of the country as an unabashed ally to Indigenous language activists. I define “activism” as a deliberate act to decolonize a space – this definition of activism also relates to digital spaces, such as Facebook.
The Caribbean coast of Nicaragua has a long history of Indigenous language activism as means to invoke and support the Autonomy Law as discussed in Chapter 1. These community-based deliberate acts to decolonize spaces exist both inside and outside of political organizations.
Stefán became a digital activist as he posted on the “Miskitus y Mayangna en el Internet” page defending our efforts to represent all of the languages and cultures of the Atlantic Coast, and telling our followers that he would not take down any of the multilingual videos we posted.
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Stefán’s comments on the Miskitus y Mayangna’s En El Internet Page.
Stefán: “Yo soy estudiante se la escuela de liderazgo y estoy de acuerdo con publicar videos o sitios wep, asi se daria mas conosimiento de toda las culturas eh idiomas que ahi en Nicaragua, ademas no les estamos quitando nada solo estamos representado las culturas que ahi en la costa atlantica!”
I am a student from the Leadership School and I am in favor of publishing videos and websites, that way one can give more knowledge of all the cultures and languages that there are in Nicaragua so we are not taking down anything we are representing the cultures that are here on the Atlantic Coast!
With the third Space, the youth demonstrated that their situated lived experience was at the center of the work we were doing and that their situated lived experience involved affiliating and identifying with the digital community, the third space environment, and social media sites.
The third spacelearning environment also created the conditions for students to imagine new identities and take up new stances as active civically engaged individuals in their own peer-based community, the third space, social media sites.
When the leadership students took on a persona separate from their own, they released much of the anxiety they felt around the written word, e.g. Jamie’s quote in line 6 of our
Facebook chat “hahaha I have a dictionary of English and Spanish in my hand right now and I don’t understand what I write,” was eased when she posted English stickers on our Facebook page. On the social media class sites, the leadership students could showcase their multimodal composition competencies,their way to affiliate and identify with the digital community. The leadership students’ way to affiliate and identify with the digital community situated their learning in the multimedia course to their direct lived experiences. Applying their new competencies in multimodal composition to their direct lived experiences in digital communities helped the leadership students to bring real world experience in and send classroom experience out (Taylor & Klein, 2015), a hallmark of the Third Space.
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Thus to recap, social media class pages were an effective digital pedagogical approach to creating a community-anchored course based in students’ lived experiences. Students who learned in this environment could reflect upon their own lives and sense that their own contributions to the work of multimedia design were worthy of academic inquiry. In the pluriliterate climate of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, our social media class pages supported the multimedia design students in student-centered ways, as I deliberately promoted Indigenous and Afro-descendant language use (written and oral) in these emerging digital communities.
Any work done in the physical environment eventually went online . All of the culturally sustaining work in forming the digital pedagogy for the multimedia course was also grounded in close collaborations with Indigenous experts in the multimedia design field and the close relationships that I formed with Indigenous and Afro-descendant community members in the city of Puerto Cabezas. In the following section, I share my journey into forming collaborations with Indigenous experts in Multimedia Design working in non-profit organizations on the
URACCAN campus.
As I describe below, working with Indigenous experts in non-profit organizations on the
URACCAN campus helped culturally enrich and revitalize the Indigenous language learning experience for students. Face-to-face third space learning with Indigenous experts in the
Multimedia field also mirrored the students’ application of their multimedia design knowledge to the digital community third space, and the leadership students’ situated lived experiences in the daily environment of the Leadership School, URACCAN University and the city of Puerto
Cabezas.
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Section 2 Privileging Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in Curriculum Development: Collaborations with Leadership School and URACCAN University Staff
Teachers in Indigenous/ mixed cultural settings cannot do culturally sustaining work alone. Culturally sustaining pedagogy formation must also be situated in youth’s situated lived experience in their community. In this section, I focus on how my students and I collaborated with Indigenous experts in Multimedia Design. That poignant journey started from day one in
February 2016 and evolved and shaped our Multimedia design goals and aspirations throughout the course, ending with seven critically-conscious multilingual youth-based videos poised for online publication that I will describe in chapter 4. In order to critically engage students in multilingual multimedia design and make the design process truly culturally sustaining, I deliberately included Indigenous community members who were experts in the fields of
Linguistics, Multimedia Design and Critical Consciousness on Multi-ethnic Women in every stage of the multimedia design process. Without these sustained relationships, youth could not form in depth inquiries into social injustices in their communities through their own cultural lenses.
When working with both the Leadership School administrators and Indigenous officials in non-profits, I used a combination of reciprocity, relationality, respect and responsibility, (the four Rs) of Critical Indigenous Research methodology (Wilson, 2008; Brayboy et al., 2014) and
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017; McCarty & Lee, 2014; Lee &
Lomawaima, 2016). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy Design and Critical Indigenous Research methodology helped me to create an inviting and engaging space for students to design the content of all their multimedia projects including their final video assignment.
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The first step in creating meaningful collaborations with Leadership School and
URACCAN University staff started with an exploration of which non-profit organizations located on campus were already collaborating with which particular academic subjects. I also wanted to know how these collaborations functioned in the classrooms. The information on such organizations was readily accessible through the URACCAN University website. The two on- campus organizations I investigated were IMTRADEC, the Institute of Traditional Medicine and
Community Development and IEPA, the Institute for the Study, and Promotion of the Autonomy of the Caribbean coast . My particular interest focused on their orientation and purpose. I learned that the science course partnered with IMTRADEC, an organization concerned with integrating traditional Indigenous medicinal principles with community development while social studies, language arts, and civics and spirituality courses were developed in collaborations with instructors and IEPA staff.
CEIMM and IPILC were two additional organizations that shared similar motivations with our multimedia course. CEIMM is the acronym for Centro de Estudios e Información de La
Mujer Multi-Étnica, The Center for Studies and Information about the Multi-Ethnic Woman while the acronym IPILC stands for Instituto de Promoción e Investigación Lingüística y
Revitalización Cultural, The Institute for the Promotion of Linguistic Research and Cultural
Revitalization. I had some initial background knowledge about these organizations, and knew that IPILC focused on promoting and revitalizing Indigenous languages such as Mayangna and
Miskitu. I also knew that CEIMM could appeal to the social justice component of our course because they were known for creating awareness regarding issues such as domestic violence, sexual abuse and poverty.
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I introduced myself early on in my study to the directors and assistant directors of IPILC and CEIMM. I was also fortunate to receive assistance from one of the CEIMM organizers to connect and subsequently collaborate with URACCAN University’s Channel 5 Studios. CEIMM and Channel 5 had worked on editing infomercials (discussed below). Channel 5 had the most experience with editing and producing multimedia programming for a local audience, so collaborating with this organization may have been the most helpful of all in designing a successful multilingual multimedia design course that was accountable to the local community.
As I discuss below, collaborating with these organizations greatly informed the pedagogy to develop in creating spaces for students’ pluriliterate voices in multimedia design for positive social change.
Investigating Collaboration Possibilities
In the first week of the multimedia course and prior to seeking collaborations with
CEIMM and IPILC, the Leadership School students and I were engaged in the planning stages of creating scenes for a video timeline experimenting in MovieMaker video editing software. This activity took place just prior to students producing the comic strips inspired by the “My Identity”
Bitstrips.com comic. The students were learning about the sequences of stories told in pictures with subtitled text by using photos to convey a beginning, middle, and end of a story. In this stage of the unit, students did not have themes for their final video projects but they experimented using Moviemaker to make slideshows with photos of themselves, family members, friends with subtitles and music. Some of the students wrote their subtitles for their video timelines in Spanish, while others experimented with some Miskitu.
To create semi-professional videos such as the ones students saw on Youtube.com, the project would have required better and more access to computer labs beyond the two
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URACCAN computer labs Lakia Tara (Bright Star in Miskitu) and Sam Pitts. In the face of these challenges, collaboration with CEIMM offered both possibility and resolution. By this point in the course, the students had started to create simple 1 to 2 minute slide show videos on
MovieMaker; to create longer videos based in their own experiences, they needed access to more hardware and they needed access to more Indigenous language-medium instruction on multimedia from experts in their field.
CEIMM: Violence Against Women Conference
During the first week of teaching, I went with an undergraduate URACCAN student to a
CEIMM conference addressing violence against women. The CEIMM Conference provided wonderful ideas for student projects, and inspired reflection on how I might comply with the
Leadership School’s expectations for collaboration with internal and external organizations.
Attending the CEIMM conference also led me to realize how collaborating with the CEIMM and
IPILC organizations could provide assistance and support with guidance on the students' final video project themes, access to videography equipment, and linguistic resources to support the students’ multilingual abilities.
At the CEIMM conference, I was especially interested in a few infomercial style videos that featured a URACCAN undergraduate student. The URACCAN undergraduate had collaborated with the CEIMM organization to complete his sociology coursework at URACCAN
University, and in the process of this collaboration, he trained a few of his close friends to act as themselves as URACCAN University students. The resulting infomercials were made by youth for youth, with the supervision of the CEIMM adult staff and experts. In the infomercials, the student actors related their personal experiences to the URACCAN mission as well as to the stance of the CEIMM organization. They also explicitly showcased the perspectives of multi-
102 ethnic women (some of whom experience daily sexual harrassment and violence), as a way to reach out to their peers. Importantly, these undergraduate actors also provided essential information about the various URACCAN University resources available for sexual violence victims.
The undergraduate students' infomercial-style video effectively reached young multi- ethnic women and provided information about the seriousness of sexual violence, including rape and constant sexual harassment and abuse. Although the youth chose emotionally charged topics, the youth actors appropriately used and integrated humor into their performance to address this weighty subject. The infomercial videos resonated for me in reflecting on my own experiences of daily sexual harassment as a single woman living in Puerto Cabezas’ Cocal and German Pomares
Barrios. The focus on issues that directly affected local multi-ethnic women also provided me with a direction, as I thought about how my students could use and create videos to highlight local social issues in the multimedia course. I noted CEIMM had a clear purpose, and they captured the attention and imagination of the local youth audience quite well. College students who worked with CEIMM produced videos that served a social justice focus. Moreover, CEIMM had access to high-quality video cameras and the know-how for filming onsite at URACCAN
University. I saw the possibility of meeting the Leadership School’s expectations for collaborations by pursuing a connection to CEIMM, who I felt would be incline d to support social justice content in the Leadership School students’ final video projects.
Another possible benefit of collaborating with CEIMM at the Conference came from my observation of Leadership students leading the anthem of the Atlantic Coast. As I watched, I noted how students started by singing in Spanish and then switched to Miskitu, Mayangna, and, lastly, back to Spanish. Students having the choice to sing in three of the languages of the
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Caribbean coast caused me to think about the practice of educational language ideologies, this was performance of URACCAN’s mission statement and the Leadership School’s mission statement. The youth ritualized the representation of the Autonomous communities while at the same time they had the agency to choose which of the languages to perform in song and thus which ethnicities they represented. I knew that CEIMM promoted social justice content in their infomercials. I hoped to contribute to the connection that CEIMM could deliver social justice content in multiple languages in their infomercials. I decided to use infomercials as a way to create an interdependent relationship with CEIMM that could play on the Leadership School students’ strengths. By this time, I acquired an awareness of my students’ language insecurities around the Indigenous languages Miskitu and Mayangna, I knew that rehearsed singing in the languages did not equate to competence both in written and oral modes of communication. I knew that the director of IPILC had explicit knowledge in teaching Mayangna and Miskitu written and oral competencies. I sought her collaboration very early on our course in the end of the first month, to center Mayangna and Miskitu written competencies as a goal for our multimedia design.
IPILC: The Comic Strip Assignment
About the 3rd week into the spring semester, I met with the IPILC Director, a Mayangna woman who was a trained linguist in both the Mayangna and Miskitu languages. At the time, I was wrestling with the challenge of incorporating the Mayangna language effectively into our multimedia course because I did not speak the Mayangna language, nor could I read or write in
Mayangna. In our initial meeting, the IPILC director and I talked about the teaching materials she had created to teach Mayangna as a native speaker of the language. I learned that
URACCAN University offered coursework in Mayangna as a second language for undergraduate
104 students. We talked for a time about how to design a language class based on conversation versus a focus on grammar. She showed me the written grammar that she had developed for
Mayangna, and referred to important resources such as bilingual storybooks and a dictionary housed in the University library.
The IPILC Director also confirmed that there were three Mayangna students in my class
(two young women and one young man), who were all speakers of Mayangna, but who might have some problems writing in the language. I told her I observed a similar situation with
Miskitu in the course; an observation I gleaned from interactions with Jamie. I explained to the
IPILC director that my husband is a native speaker of Miskitu who learned to read and write in
Miskitu in the church as a child, and I wondered whether the urban versus rural distinction in reading might differ for urban students who grew up in Miskitu-centered church environments.
She agreed that although we were not certain about every student’s writing abilities in their
Indigenous language, students’ literacy in both Miskitu and Mayangna would need attention in the multimedia course. We decided to work together to address this need by collaborating on script writing and subtitles for students’ final video projects.
The IPILC director was very knowledgeable in teaching in Miskitu and Mayangna, and played a direct role bringing both languages into the multimedia course as the primary medium of instruction. When she came to the class to assist with the comic strip assignment, she spoke in both Mayangna and Miskitu, and stressed that students should write the dialog for their comics in
Miskitu and Mayangna. She also reached out to the students who she thought needed extra help writing in Mayangna and Miskitu, after observing which students preferred to write the dialog of their comics in Spanish, Miskitu or Mayangna. These comic strips provided the themes for the students’ final video projects.
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By collaborating with the IPILC organization, I made a conscious choice to incorporate
Mayangna in our course, and thus actively promoted the Mayangna language and culture. This, in turn, provided an opportunity for all of my students to learn about the Mayangna language and culture, regardless of their ethnic identity. The purposeful collaboration with the IPILC director helped me develop both relationality and responsibility in my project (Wilson, 2008; Brayboy et al., 2012). I built an interdependent relationship with the director of IPILC over time on the
URACCAN University campus. She was a Mayangna Indigenous expert in her field, Linguistics.
I relied on her provide assistance in written Mayangna in the digital dictionary assignment using
WESAY software, the comic strip assignment and the script for one of the final video projects that included Mayangna, titled “La Discriminacion Racial” described in chapter 4.
Including Mayangna in these assignments also encompassed the idea of responsibility to the Mayangna Indigenous community. Without this collaboration, the Mayangna language and culture would have been non-existent in my curriculum design, because I had very little expertise in the Mayangna language or culture. The IPILC director and I supported the students’ reading and writing abilities in Miskitu and Mayangna in the comic strip assignments considerably by advocating that the comic strip characters’ dialog be in Miskitu and Mayangna, and helping students with their written scripts in Miskitu, Mayangna, and Spanish. The students’ theater scripts then served as textual guides for the student’s mainly audio, visual, gestural and movement-based performances which I describe in the next chapter. By collaborating with
IPILC, I pro-actively worked to reverse the unequal representation of Mayangna.
CEIMM, The Center for Studies and Information about the Multi-Ethnic Woman, also played an important role as I developed hands-on, engaging activities in my class, after the conference on violence against women. The support that I received from CEIMM came in the
106 form of video production know-how and also bilingual instruction to transmit that video production knowledge to the leadership students. By this time in the process in late February- early March, the students had developed basic social justice based themes for videos that would show case their lived experience through theater performance.
CEIMM: Filming Theater Skits
During the fourth week of my class, students and I started filming theater skits with
CEIMM to practice for our final recordings, which we were preparing to work on at the local TV station, Channel 5 Studios. In improvisations of the theatre skits, the multimedia students practiced taking on the characters of their peers, family members and friends to convey the topics of their comic strip storyboards. The tools that the students used were simple: their imaginations, classroom props such as desks (to create settings), classroom doors (for entering and exiting scenes) and CEIMM video cameras (to simulate real television cameras).
As students progressed towards making their videos, they shifted focus from the modes of reading and writing in their languages (planning) to learning how to use a digital camera for semi-professional video production effectively. CEIMM, the students and I collaborated in this endeavor. I created a poster board that illustrated the camera angles and various types of camera shots that conveyed different meanings in a video storyline . That became the visual that a
CEIMM official used to further introduce the process of using a camera for the video project they formed in both Spanish and Miskitu. I did not know that this particular CEIMM official was a fluent Miskitu speaker at the beginning of the course, until she asked me in Spanish if she could do a translation in Miskitu of her presentation. She used my poster as a visual model.
By relying on a Miskitu CEIMM official who was a Indigenous expert in her field to conduct workshops on digital camera use in her own language, a trust and interdependent
107 relationship built over time with CEIMM. This collaboration also helped me show responsibility to the Indigenous communities of Puerto Cabezas, as CEIMM and I endeavored to represent the
Miskitu language and culture in our instruction and content in an academic setting which previously privileged Spanish.
Student presentations on all of the themes of each group’s theater presentations demonstrated for the CEIMM officials the nature of our work. Students’ comic strip assignments also provided the themes for the theater skits. Two exciting comic strip ideas/themes focused on controversial reflections on injustices in local and global society: discrimination between
Mayangnas and Miskitus, presented in Miskitu and Spanish languages and the issue of poverty, presented in Miskitu and Mayangna. Even though these were controversial topics, I encouraged students to reflect on real issues in society through their theater performances. IPILC, CEIMM officials and the Leadership School staff all supported the students’ ideas, as well, since these were based on real world issues that directly affected the students as youth. I could see critical pedagogy principles playing out in the class, as students, community members and I designed a curriculum that created awareness about injustices, and invited just societal outcomes in the local context.
The follow-up project to the theater performance assignment was for students to create their own poster models on using camera angles, stage directions and transitions for their video projects in groups. The comic strip assignment, the camera angles assignment, and the theater skits comprised the planning stage for the students’ final video projects. After the planning stage of the students’ final video projects they began recording the final video projects with Channel 5 studio’s professional cameras and audio equipment.
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URACCAN University’s Channel 5 Studios: Students’ Final Video Projects.
I initially pitched my ideas about filming five Leadership student-themed videos to the director of Channel 5 by showing videos of my students’ short improvised skits that they had recorded with CEIMM cameras in our Leadership School classroom. Despite the fact that the lighting was poor, and the sound even worse without artificial lights or external microphones, the director of Channel 5 initially approved and supported all of the themes of the videos because they were congruent with URACCAN University objectives. URACCAN’s mission statement is
“la formación de recursos humanos, con conocimientos y capacidades científico-técnicas, actitudes humanísticas, sentido del emprendimiento y la innovación, que contribuyen al fortalecimiento del Sistema Autónomico Regional y del país.” “Training [students to be] human resources, with scientific and technical knowledge and skills, humanistic attitudes, a sense of entrepreneurship and innovation, which contribute to the strengthening of the Regional
Autonomous System and the country.”
When we were close to the end of the class in the sixth week, I developed a calendar scheduling three Sundays where we would do our professional recordings with Channel 5, the university’s television channel. At the director’s request, I also wrote a letter of collaboration between the Leadership School and Channel 5.in English, outlining our proposal for collaboration, student schedules, and a request for some support in organizing travel for students from the city, and finally assuming responsibility for student liability.
In this collaboration, there were many more formalities than with my collaborations with
CEIMM and IPILC. Channel 5 required a written consent form that detailed our collaboration. In order for students to learn the basics of video production through their theater improvisations in
109 hands-on recording sessions outside of class, we also needed to complete detailed letters of collaboration between the Leadership School and Channel 5. The formal steps involved in creating our collaborations provided the students with key Indigenous experts in professional video shooting and editing needed to form a truly culturally sustaining curriculum.
One of the Indigenous experts available to our class through the collaboration with
Channel 5 was the director of the studios. As I learned, the director was a Miskitu community member highly committed to representing realistic dialog and interactions between Miskitu family members and professional officials such as nurses, doctors, teachers and school administrators. As such, working with the director required a deep understanding of respect and reciprocity. The student video themes promoted the concept of autonomy and supported solutions to local problems. However, one of the videos titled, “La Discriminación Racial” created some conflict for the Channel 5 Director because of the outright focus on social justice and positive change for the Mayangna community. I discuss this tension and a related, challenging interaction in chapter 4.
The collaborations with IPILC, CEIMM and URACCAN University’s Channel 5 studios put me on the frontlines of the social hierarchy and conflicts experienced by minoritized
Nicaraguans, and offered a vantage point on curriculum development that very few foreign educators possess. These collaborations also positioned my multimedia course as a site for deep reflection on youth's critical multimodal practices, Indigenous and Afro-descendant youth representation in the mass media, the role of Indigenous epistemologies in video design, and how to create digital awareness about social injustice.
Before the multimedia class, the multimedia students mostly engaged in globally-based dialog (mainly in Spanish with some English) when they engaged in multimedia design and
110 sharing in social media spaces. By carefully planning and carrying out face to face work with
Indigenous experts in Multimedia design (in the case of CEIMM and Channel 5 Studios) and
Linguistics (in the case of IPILC), however, we were able to make explicit choices to decolonize the social media experience for the multimedia students. Students were able to engage in their own, localized multimedia production). Students, regardless of the positionality to the Miskitu,
Mayangna and Creole communities found that their could learn about the languages of their peers and advocate on behalf of themselves and their peers. The Multimedia students and I could not have accomplished our goal of producing youth-based localized independent media without strong intergenerational relationships with Indigenous experts in their supporting fields.
Conclusion
In the multimedia course, I encouraged the multimodal use of all of the languages that students brought to the course and into the class environment. The underlying notion of pluriliteracy for me as a pedagogy design objective meant that I needed to create a safe space for students to use Spanish, English, Miskitu, Mayangna or Kriol in effective and productive ways.
In section 1, I outlined how I specifically achieved my goal of supporting the students’ pluriliteracy development in all of their languages by purposely including social media class websites as a third space in classroom instruction. Encouraging students to critically self-reflect on their face-to-face positionalities with regard to race and language (the Bitstrips.com comic) and imagine themselves as civically engaged individuals supporting activism for Indigenous languages and local languages of their region created a safe space for students that eased language insecurities particularly with Miskitu, Spanish and Kriol/English. The third space of social media websites also helped the leadership students to situate their multimodal composition
111 prowess in a real-world digital community that valued their lived experience. In addition, I asked myself what kinds of secure environments could inspire and reassure the Leadership
School students that Miskitu, Mayangna, and Kriol, written language choices in their lived experience in the Puerto Cabezas community, were in fact academic and valuable to their pursuits at intercultural leadership capabilities through multimedia design.
I also worked with the non-profit organizations IPILC, CEIMM, Channel 5 Studios to create these spaces by situating the students’ multimedia design in real-application with intergenerational dialog with Indigenous experts in their fields. As I have shown above, to get to the point where I could support students’ pluriliteracies, I found it extremely beneficial to develop collaborations with URACCAN University affiliated non-profit organizations. These collaborations effectively empowered students to use their Indigenous languages (Miskitu and
Mayangna) in creating multilingual multimedia for a local and international audience.
Partnerships with non-profit organizations also supported the students in framing their projects in relation to real-world conflicts that needed innovative culturally relevant solutions. Instead of simply offering any possible solutions to the students’ conflicts based on their lived own experiences, the collaborations with Indigenous expert-led non-profits respectfully applied culturally driven solutions in a responsible direction to respect reciprocal intergenerational knowledge exchange.
The youth participants in this study had interests in multimedia participation and design outside of the Leadership School and our two class websites helped them to connect their interest in social media to their academic coursework. Thus, the students in the multimedia course, in collaboration with local and international non-profit organizations, achieved a strong level of
112 cultural and linguistic consciousness that they applied to topics of leadership and activism that could serve them in the present and future.
Not all teachers as the Leadership School took advantage of collaborations with non- profit organizations on campus. It is difficult for me to conceptualize what it would have been like without such collaborations in the multimedia design course. Overall in Indigenous communities, these kinds of partnerships are crucial not just for making sure that students are understanding the target material in the course but recognizing that their community's knowledge is valuable and applicable to the target academic material. Western worldviews attached to specific technologies and performances can act as forms of colonization in themselves if the discourse around them is not localized and grounded in local community members’ actual wants, needs, and desires for the future. That is precisely why I endeavored so hard to decolonize the multimedia course by framing it as culturally sustaining.
In the next chapter, Chapter 4: Puerto Cabezas’ Youth Produce Multilingual Videos as
Digital Activists for Indigenous and Regional Language Reclamation, I overview and analyze the content of the focal students’ seven final video projects, to shed light on how teachers can begin to utilize students’ pluriliteracies as assests in confronting and countering the linguistic hierarchy of a plurilingual environment like the Leadership School. The chapter also analyzes the cultural meaning behind the topics of the seven final video topics and the discourse of the languages used in all seven final video projects, showing how the projects worked to reverse the linguistic and social hierarchy of environments with diverse Indigenous and Non-Indigenous student bodies like the Leadership School.
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CHAPTER 4: PLURILITERATE YOUTH PRODUCE CRITICALLY CONSCIOUS VIDEOS AS DIGITAL ACTIVISTS FOR INDIGENOUS AND REGIONAL LANGUAGE RECLAMATION
In chapter 3, I describe the collaboration process engaging the stakeholders—URACCAN
University-based non-profit organizations, the voices of five focal youth students, and the
Leadership School—in designing and implementing the multimedia course (“Medios de
Comunicación Digitales”). The multimedia course provided an innovative way to showcase youth-produced independent media in Indigenous and local languages in Puerto Cabezas,
Nicaragua. Students’ seven related final video projects centered on solutions to youth related conflicts in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua and its surrounding towns, spotlighting the Indigenous languages, Miskitu and Mayangna. The online publication of five of these youth videos opened national and international spaces for the the languages and cultures of the Caribbean coast of
Nicaragua. The video “Pamali Painkira” (Perfect Family) featured mixed language use in
Miskitu and Kriol, a local English variety spoken by 35,000 to 50,000 Creole ethnic group members on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. When youth from the class shared their final videos with students and faculty at URACCAN University, the two videos “La Discriminación
Racial” (Racial Discrimination) and “Pamali Painkira” (Perfect Family) fostered creative dialogue about the use of the Mayangna language and the Kriol languages in local media.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine how space was created for multicultural
Leadership students to share their pluriliterate voices, perspectives on critical local issues, and community oral tradition in video production. As discussed in chapter 1, culturally sustaining curricula provides instruction that features multicultural young peoples’ funds of knowledge and
114 seeks to transform the system of schooling so that it serves to equalize unjust power relations in society (Paris & Alim, 2017). In this chapter I show how the collaborative process of course design and implementation unfold in in response to recognize pluriliterate youth voices in video production curriculum and highlighted critical youth perspectives on their daily lived experience, local culturally informed leadership choices to solve community-based conflicts, and assisted youth in creating awareness about social injustices stemming from colonial forces.
Although I focus on Miskitu culturally-informed solutions to community conflicts in the videos analyzed below, all of the videos were steeped in productive cultural exchanges between ethnic groups that supported interculturalidad and revealed the complexity of young people’s identities and experiences.
Next, I discuss how youth in the multimedia course created awareness around the absence of the Mayangna language in the local media space in a video titled “La Discriminación Racial”
(Racial Discrimination) and Mayangna youths’ raciolinguistic positioning. In the video, youth chose to highlight the topic of racial discrimination against their Mayangna peers as a relevant issue for discussion. The video also served as young people’s response to the linguistic hierarchy in the local context. Looking closely at the youth’s raciolinguistic positioning and language use in the multilingual discourse of the video, I underscore the importance of supporting youth’s goals of representing the Mayangna language in local media. Although Leadership School administrators and URACCAN based non-profit organizations supported and advocated for the students to address the marginalization of Mayangna youth in the multimedia course, significant tensions arose around youths’ representation of the Miskitu community which I address in the section on “La Discriminación Racial.”
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The final example of a youth-produced video, “Pamali Painkira,” affords a deeper look into the linguistic hierarchy that silenced the Kriol language in Puerto Cabezas and the
Leadership School . Although students did not create videos with the express purpose to promote the Kriol language in the multimedia class, one animation video titled “Pamali Painkira”
(Perfect Family) featured phrases from Kriol and borrowings from the Kriol language embedded in a mainly Miskitu discourse, such as “family” instead of Miskitu “Pamali” or “Kiamka.” At the time of the study, the video also shed light on the raciolinguistic positioning of mixed youth like
Jamie, the producer of “Pamali Painkira,” and the notable absence of Kriol discourse by students and staff at the Leadership School. In my analysis of Jamie’s overall representational choices and mixed language use in her animation, and contrasting her translanguaging to her stated choice of making a “Miskitu” animation, I problematize the ways that the discourse of the
Leadership School made space for Miskitu cultural and linguistic expression, but limited the expression of the Kriol language. I also use observations and interview data to show Jamie’s perspectives on the use of Kriol in academic discourse, including multimedia production.
Taken together, the student video examples in this chapter show how youth used video production to 1) raise awareness of a broad set of issues encountered in their daily lives including: sexually transmitted disease, domestic violence, bullying in schools, and changing gender roles in urban settings, 2) explore digital spaces as a means of maintaining traditional
Miskitu dance and oral tradition, 3) create critical awareness of complex identities and the linguistic hierarchy in their communities, and 4) take steps toward equalizing the imbalance of power that privileged colonial languages over languages such as Miskitu, Mayangna, and Kriol in digital spaces.
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Towards the end of the chapter, I share examples of the very positive responses that the youth received when they shared their videos with college students and faculty in a final, public forum for sociology and psychology undergraduates and faculty at URACCAN University, and when they shared their videos with the broader Puerto Cabezas community online . In the chapter conclusion, I discuss how educators can transform linguistic hierarchies in schools moving toward equal representation for all languages, and share suggestions on how to support and encourage mixed youths’ perspectives in digitally culturally sustaining ways. I also raise the question of how we might seek to understand the impact of a digital culturally sustaining curriculum to focus on youths’ reactions to their own work, as well as local and global community reactions to young peoples’ media products.
Miskitu Language and Culture-Based Youth-Produced Videos
When offered the space to express their pluriliterate voices in the multimedia class, the
Miskitu leadership students addressed a plethora of critical topics in their multilingual videos.
The five videos overviewed in this section highlighted topics ranging from sexually transmitted disease, domestic violence, traditional Miskitu dance and oral tradition, and bullying in schools.
In the videos, youth offered sensitive critiques surrounding topics of social issues in Miskitu society, and through their interpretations of global youth issues.
Notably, with the support of local collaborators discussed in chapter 3, youth also offered
Miskitu community-inspired viewpoints on local solutions to conflicts in the videos, and used
Indigenous languages in their videos. Leadership School and URACCAN Channel 5 staff all encouraged the Leadership Students to use their Indigenous languages at various intervals of the
117 video production process. The sub-coordinator of the Leadership School, a Miskitu woman and fluent speaker of Miskitu from the Waspam area north of Puerto Cabezas and I encouraged the youth to speak Miskitu in their videos and to read and write their scripts in Miskitu to the best of their ability. When it came time to record the videos, the Miskitu director of URACCAN
Channel 5 studios encouraged youth to think about how their Miskitu parents, grandparents, and peers would react in real life to the conflicts proposed in their video topics. He also explained to the youth that acting had a lot to do with reflecting upon people’s lives that they knew in the real world. As they took on related roles in their videos, young people critically thought and problem- solved in real time, using their local cultural ways of knowing.
Real-life conflicts and solutions inspired each of the youth’s videos. I turn to the videos produced by the students. The Miskitu youth from rural and urban cultural contexts also chose to highlight topics that were specific to their backgrounds.
“Luhpi Saura, Luhpia Pain”: Tackling Domestic Violence Through A Miskitu Youth Cultural Lens
The first video produced by rural Miskitu students “Luhpia Saura, Luhpia Pain” (Bad
Son, Good Son) for example, featured two brothers of opposite moral dispositions. In the video,
Luhpia Saura, a rebellious son, does not want to help his family members by doing chores around the house and farm. Luhpia Pain, the good son, does not have a problem supporting the family through shared work inside and outside of the home. After Luhpia Saura tires of his parents’ suggestions to support the family unit through work, he physically assaults his family members including his mother, father, and grandfather. He then convinces his brother, Luhpia
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Pain to drink copious amounts of rum. Both brothers die from alcohol poisoning, but Luhpia
Pain is greeted by an angel in the afterlife and Luhpia Saura is greeted by the devil.
The Moravian church has a very strong influence in some rural areas of the northern
Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, even as other Miskitu rural and urban communities do not follow
Christian teachings. Nicaragua relatively recently passed Nicaraguan Law 779, designed specifically to prevent violence against women (Assamblea Nacional de Nicaragua, 2012). In choosing the topic of the video, the youth l explained that they personally experienced similar circumstances regarding physical violence in their own community and they wanted to create awareness around both alcohol abuse and domestic abuse. Youth also expressed tensions around the resulting moral judgement for abusive practices that both impact youth themselves and their family members.
The moral theme of the video, its tragic end, and the lesson learned were highly intertwined with Christian beliefs, even as the video also underscored respect for elders and extended family members, a strong Miskitu cultural value, and cultural value found in many
Indigenous communities around the world. In the video, youth also reflected on the lifestyles of youth in rural Miskitu families, who often work tirelessly to support their families through physical labor from a very young age. Overall, the video “Luhpia Saura, Luhpia Pain” helped youth to express the trauma of violence in multiple forms, and to urge adults to contend with this heavy topic as a place for healing and deep discussion. The video featured critically conscious social justice informed youth who were empowered to take a stand against violence on their own terms.
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“SIDA Wal Iwanka” and “La Paciente”: Addressing Sexually Transmitted Diseases with Miskitu Youth Culture-based Solutions
The second Miskitu video, “SIDA Wal Iwanka” (Life with Aids) features a young woman who falls in love with a classmate at school, then discovers that she contracted HIV from her love-interest classmate. The young woman’s mother reacts to the news of her daughter’s condition as a violation of her moral compass, and requests that her classmate come to their home and discuss his intentions with her daughter. The young woman’s mother solves the dilemma by insisting that the classmate to marry her daughter, and to take care of her as his responsibility to her daughter.
The third Miskitu youth-produced video “La Paciente” (The Patient) was also about another young Miskitu woman who contends with telling her conservative religious mother that she has a sexually transmitted disease. Amidst the pressure and frustration of telling the truth, the young woman faints in the nurses’ office when her mother receives her medical results. Instead of punishing her daughter, the conservative mother character supports her and reassures her that with the correct medical treatment she will recover. Like SIDA Wal Iwanka, the video highlights a cross-cultural convergence of information surrounding the sexual health and well-being of young women in this region and youth perspectives discussing the challenges related to sexually transmitted diseases with conservative parents. In “La Paciente” the mother character simply listens to her daughter and provides support for her health rather than suggesting that she marry, an alternate solution.
The youth at the Leadership School wanted to specifically reach out to parents or guardians to voice their own solutions to the tensions surrounding some of the predominant issues such as sexually transmitted disease and entering into sexual relationships as they come of
120 age into adulthood. The youth actors of “SIDA Wal Iwanka” & “La Paciente” argued for more resources and access to them for Miskitu youth in Puerto Cabezas’ barrios and more rural towns to prevent and cure sexually transmitted diseases. Moreover, they shared their own observations of peers suffering from similar diseases in silence because of the shame associated with their condition. “SIDA Wal Iwanka” was shot mainly in the Miskitu language with no Spanish subtitles in order to reach rural audiences of monolingual Miskitu speakers. “La Paciente” was shot in Miskitu and Spanish with some noticeable English borrowings created for a multilingual audience in the city of Puerto Cabezas. Notably, in the videos, youth also borrowed Spanish medical terms to index the “outsider” nature of the topic itself while tackling the reality of a local space that needed a local solution.
In the often conservative environments of Puerto Cabezas and the rural northern towns of the Caribbean coast , youth-based solutions to tensions around sex were very difficult to propose to?. With that in mind, the Leadership School administration and URACCAN non-profit organizations CEIMM and Channel 5 Studios endeavored to create a safe space for youth to express their fears and insecurities as well as support for and assistance in confronting such issues through this much needed intergenerational dialog. Channel 5 studios leaders made careful decisions about how to visually or audibly represent topics involving sexual intercourse in their videos without putting the youth and community members into uncomfortable situations.
Specifically community leaders at Channel 5 studios and I worked with students to find ways of communicating complex and tough topics through humor, song and special camera shots that made the content appropriate for conservative audiences but still sent a powerful message. In
“Sida Wal Iwanka,” (Life with AIDS), for example, the Channel 5 director zoomed the camera in
121 on a heart-shaped pillow to represent a love scene between youth characters. In the studio we then layered a popular Bachata love song over that clip.
Sexually transmitted disease and treatment strongly affect young people from around the world (Burtney & Duffy, 2004). The Leadership students’ choice to highlight the important role of women in Miskitu society is also fundamental to understanding the videos from a Miskitu cultural point of view. Jamieson (2001) notes that Miskitu youth in the rural community of Kaka
Bila experienced similar tensions with their parents over their coming of age period and romantic relationships outside of parental supervision. These topics also bring into play Miskitu parents’ concerns in maintaining traditional matrilocal patterns of residency and matriline al family structures. The potential challenges and importance of following a mother’s advice is evident in the videos “SIDA Wal Iwanka” and “La Paciente,” which blend global youth cultural ideas (e.g. anxieties surrounding sexually transmitted diseases) and Miskitu cultural view points. Local solutions in all five videos focused on the strong Miskitu mother figure character and reflect matrilineal/matrifocal Miskitu family structures in Puerto Cabezas and surrounding towns.
“Baile Liwa Mairin”: Sustaining Oral Tradition
The Miskitu youth-produced video “Baile Liwa Mairin” (Mermaid Dance) featured a blend of the traditional Liwa Mairin oral story that is sung or told aloud with the addition of theater performance. In the story, a young man falls in love with a mermaid against the wishes of his family members. When the young man’s mother locates him (after he has been missing for several days), he is dangerously ill and a community healer explains that he must have been in contact with an evil spirit like a mermaid. When the healer revives him with herbal medicine, he refuses to listen to his mother and goes to the mermaid once more. The mermaid then pulls him
122 into the water to drown, the assumption is that Liwa Mairin is a malevolent creature, with cruel intentions.The notion of Miskitu youth refusing advice from their mothers on romantic relationships is a central theme in this video from a Miskitu point of view (as indicated above in
Jamison’s analysis (2001). The oral song and dance performance, Liwa Mairin is popular throughout the Caribbean coast, and indexes Miskitu pride. Renditions of the popular dance and the oral story in documentary form existed before the leadership student’s video, “Baile Liwa
Mairin,” the leadership students saw either the documentary or the dance as a resource for the visual performance of this oral story in the local community, but none of the previous renditions specifically featured a theater performance, the new addition to the leadership students’ version of the story.
The youth’s video mimics a mixture of a telenovela, and a music video blending theater performance and dance. One leadership student sang the entire oral story starting with the chorus, “Liwa Mairin …Liwa Mairin…Mairin Painkira Sma…” English Translation:
“Mermaid…Mermaid…You are a beautiful woman,” in an acapella style with classical guitar, while his four youth peers traditionally danced and improvised the role of the mother, healer, love-struck youth and Liwa Mairin. This video illustrates youth’s multimodal layering as
Indigenous to the Caribbean coast, danced and performed since childhood, thus inherent in the cultural and linguistic repertoires they brought to the course. The leadership school students chose a local lake near URACCAN University to represent the visual symbolism of water as a beautiful life giving force that also represents danger and uncertainty, the key trope of Liwa
Mairin, herself (Herlihy, 2012). The Miskitu community has a long history of layering modes such as audio (song), gesture and movement (dance) and strong visuals to their oral performance
(Minks, 2013).
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And, the storyline of the “Baile Liwa Mairin” video echoed the common theme seen in the previous youth-produced videos on sexually transmitted disease that shadowed young people’s challenges to follow parental advice. Nataly, who played the mermaid character, Liwa
Mairin in the video, commented that acting in “Baile Liwa Mairin” helped her to transmit her
Miskitu cultural knowledge with video design through multimodal composition. In her final student evaluation of the Multimedia course, Nataly remarked that the class allowed her to enjoy the opportunity to engage in an acting role in producing videos that showcased and blended the views of her Miskitu ancestors with theater performance for a global as well as local audience.
Nataly’s comments evidenced youth’s application of interculturalidad – the bridging and sharing of cultural knowledge in the development of their complex pluriliteracies – layering modes of communication from global and local perspectives. Nataly was featured in a total of three videos in the course, more than any of her peers.
“El Bullying Rausaukanka Tuktan Nani Ra”: Confronting Bullying and Encouraging Interculturalidad
The fifth Miskitu youth-produced video, “El Bullying Rausaukanka Tuktan Nani Ra”
(The Bullying Maltreatment of Children by Children) concerns a young man who is repeatedly bullied by two Miskitu siblings at his school. After the mother of the bullied young man reports her son’s repeated incidents of torment to the director of the school, both bullies are expelled and must face their strict Miskitu mother. The video showed the potential for Mestizo youth to critically work through ways of effectively representing their characters through mixed language use. Stefán, a Mestizo, in an otherwise almost exclusively Miskitu cast, could have simply spoken in Spanish in the video; however, Stefán, by choosing to blend Miskitu and Spanish like
124 a bilingual Miskitu youth, demonstrated his sophisticated understanding of pluriliterate discourse in Puerto Cabezas. Like Stefán, in producing the videos, youth took on different ethnic roles in to share and exchange cultural knowledge and experience as a form of interculturalidad at the
Leadership School. Lots of consultation took place between youth like Stefán and his Miskitu peers outside of our filming sessions, as they encouraged him to present a potential Miskitu identity for his character. The strong sense of the purpose of cultural knowledge exchange and bridging through interculturalidad resolved much of the tension around cultural appropriation or misrepresentation. Prior to making the “Bullying” video, a youth in the Puerto Cabezas community had committed suicide because he was repeatedly bullied in school, thus the focus on the seriousness of the video’s theme compelled youth like Stefán to take action.
The youth actors of this video expressed their worry and concern for bullying in their community of Puerto Cabezas through the production of this video. The Miskitu youth producers also featured a local solution reflecting their own family lives, again showcasing a strict Miskitu mother as a strong solution to the conflict of bullying in schools.
Taken together, the videos described above showed how student actors in Miskitu- focused videos blended cultural knowledge from their own communities as well as knowledge from global youth perspectives to negotiate conflicts in their society. These videos also showed how Indigenous Miskitu youth were able to represent themselves and their communities in digitally culturally sustaining ways with the support of school administrators, non-profit organizations and culturally informed teachers.
The following two indepth sections of the chapter, “La Discriminación Racial” and
“Pamali Painkira” analyze how peer pressure and bullying inform youth’s language choice and contribute significantly to racialization practices by youth at the Leadership School specifically. I
125 use transcriptions of the students’ video project scripts and interview data with youth actors to show the intricacies of bullying and peer pressure as indicators of youth perspectives on racialization and racial discrimination. The video “La Discriminación Racial” featured Miskitu,
Mestizo and Mayangna youth actors, and focused on bullying. This video specifically highlighted Mayangna youth perspectives on racial and linguistic discrimination in school.
“La Discriminación Racial”
Compared to the videos described above, the video “La Discriminación Racial” (Racial
Discrimination) focused on an especially sensitive topic: the discrimination that Indigenous
Mayangna youth experienced in the school at the hands of Indigenous Miskitu peers. In Chapter
3, I showed how my Bitstrips.com comic offered a way for speaking about the complex relationship between ethnic identity and language choice.The comic activity further created a safe space for the leadership students to begin applying the concept of raciolinguistics ,
“languaging race and racing language” to critique the status quo of their everyday experiences and those of their peers.
With the support of the administration at the Leadership School and the URACCAN
University staff, the youth participants and their peers began the brave journey of acting out scenes in the sixth video “La Discriminación Racial” which took up youth circumstances within the linguistic hierarchy of the school, and where youth privileged the Indigenous language
Miskitu over the Indigenous language Mayangna. I partnered with the IPILC director to write a script for the Leadership School students on their topic of “La Discriminación Racial” that included the basic storyline that the Leadership School students’ suggested related to a few bullies who harass a few Mayangna students based on their ethnicity. The Leadership School
126 students suggested that we use Spanish, Mayangna and Miskitu languages to tell a story of
Mayangna youths’ struggles with peer pressure and acceptance at school. The youth actors then, improvised and ad-libbed as they read their lines in Spanish, Miskitu and Mayangna – inserting their own personal experiences (as in the case of Student 1) or experiences based on observations of their real-life peers (as in the case of Adán). In the ad-libbing process, the youth actors created a natural dialog in Spanish, Miskitu and Mayangna tackling the subject of “fitting in” with their respective peer groups on campus.
In the video, one of the Mayangna youth enjoys speaking Mayangna fluently with her
Mayangna peer, played by one of the focal youth participants, Adán, who in real life identified with the Miskitu community. In the video, Adán’s character refuses to speak Mayangna with his peer, and he speaks to his Mayangna peer completely in Miskitu because of peer pressure from his Miskitu friends.
While the video was a fictional story, it reflected real experiences and viewpoints common to Mayangna youth at the Leadership School, out of 54 students only 3 students identified with the Mayangna community. A common theme in the raciolinguistics youth literature relates to the power of peer pressure in schools (Zentella, 2017), and how peer pressure can have a strong effect on how youth see themselves vis-a-vis their respective ethnicities
(Zentella, 2017; Buriel, Perez, Vazquez, 2016). Peer pressure also contributed greatly to the relatively low status of Mayangna in the linguistic hierarchy at the Leadership School. Mayangna youth were a small minority of the overall school population and in my observations, none of the teachers could speak Mayangna fluently at the school, at least I never saw any of the teachers utlizing Mayangna to help students learn academic content, however many teachers were fluent in Miskitu and did use the Miskitu language to help students learn academic content. In general,
127 at the time of the study, students used Miskitu rather than Mayangna in peer settings mirroring classroom settings. In my classroom observations of the youth participants’ interactions with their peers at URACCAN University and from classroom discussions with the youth producers of “La Discriminación Racial,” I also noted that the three Mayangna youth at the Leadership
School generally did not speak Mayangna in public spaces on campus, but most likely spoke
Mayangna with family members or friends outside of school.
According to the elders in the Mayangna communities of Siuna and Rosita, both the written and oral forms of the Mayangna language are exclusively intended for use in the local communities of the Northern Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Out of respect for the Mayangna community leadership, I did not upload the video “La Discriminación Racial” to Youtube.com for public viewing, and I do not share the actual Mayangna script used in the video. Instead, I provide the English translation of the Mayangna script for the reader. Spanish text is normal,
Miskitu is bold and italicized, English translations of Spanish, Miskitu and Mayangna are all italicized.
1 Nataly: Los odio los destesto mil veces….no sé cuanto los odio. I hate them I detest them a thousand times...I don’t even know how much I hate them.
2 Student 1: [in Mayangna] We are ok with our culture even if they treat us badly.
3 Adán: Yawan nani laik apu kaiki sin sat painika sin sat Miskitu turi aisisa laik apu kaikisa Mayangna kulkikaia yawan nani bila kum aisisa saura an painika yawan nani video pulaia gamekara sna an pulaisna. They don’t like us even our friends even if we speak Miskitu they do not like us you see... us Mayangna students our language is terrible with my friends I will continue to play video games.
4 Student 1: [in Mayangna] Why do you not want to speak to me in Mayangna?
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5 Adán: Nu sna well pana pain sa an turi pain aisisa, pain yawan nani pain auya win wan painika, nu apu dia mata saura wan lukiba yawan nani saura lukiba saura upla kum sa naura kulba yawan nani saura lukiba. I know friend that’s good we speak the [Mayangna] words, and we get along. But my friends, I do not know why they [our peers] think of us in a bad way, they think of us as bad people and now at school, they [our peers] think of us badly. 6 Student 1: [in Mayangna]: I am going to be sick now… I cannot do this!
7 Adán: Yawan nani saura dia daukaia baku kuna kulkaia malika tak apia saura wan muni. They did this horrible thing to us, but they cannot do this kind of thing to us in school.
8 Teacher: Dia daukram man nani? What did you all do?
9 Teacher: Rausauhkan pliras kulki ra taki was! Do not look to discriminate in our school get out!
10 Teacher: Qué aprendimos de la historia sobre los Mayangnas? What did learn about the history of the Mayangnas?
The youth actors of “La Discriminación Racial” decided to create awareness in the
Puerto Cabezas community around the silencing of the Mayangna language and culture in youths’ everyday lives. They also called attention to ways that the discourse at the Leadership
School perpetuated the marginalization of the Mayangna language among peers of the same age and same interests. In the video, Adán ad-libbed mainly in the Miskitu language until the last scene where he spoke one line in Mayangna. One of Adán’s peers, in contrast, spoke only in
Mayangna to his character to reinforce the desirability of Mayangna as a youth language in school settings. Because the youth producers of this video observed that Miskitu or Spanish were the default peer languages at the Leadership School, they decided to offer a counternarrative portrayal of Mayangna as a sought-after peer language in their video.
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The girl (Student 1) who played one of the Mayangna students in the video was a trilingual student who could understand and speak Mayangna, Miskitu, and Spanish, all of the languages used in the video. She was shy at first about speaking Mayangna on camera but then persevered with the help and encouragement of the IPILC director and I. As the video production process unfolded, and Adán ad-libbed in Miskitu and Student 1 clearly understood what Adán was saying in Miskitu and ad-libbed in Mayangna in response.
When the video opens, Nataly plays one of the discriminating bullies who does not like the Mayangna students on campus. She speaks in Spanish to one of her peers, agreeing with his comments about detests Mayangnas on campus.
Nataly initially felt shy about saying turn 1 in Spanish on camera and told me that it was her first time acting, so it was uncomfortable taking on a role of someone with an opposite personality to her own. While she said that she would never say such things in real life, she was willing to take on the persona of the racist bully for the purpose of sharing the powerful anti- discrimination message of the video. The exaggerated connotation of the words “los destesto mil veces” – “I detest them a thousand times,” foreshadows how Adán’s character and his fellow
Mayangna peer will be treated.
In the dialogue, in turns 2-5, Adán is ad-libbing in Miskitu as his character refuses to speak in Mayangna to avoid the criticism of his other friends. In turn 5, Adán´s character says that he can speak the Mayangna language fine and that he gets along well with his Mayangna speaking peer, but because of the peer pressure, he cannot bring himself to speak Mayangna.
Although Adán’s character is encouraged to speak in Mayangna by his Mayangna peer, he does not want to speak and publicly associate himself with the Mayangna ethnic group. He chooses instead to racialize himself as Miskitu by speaking in Miskitu. In turns 3-5, Adán’s character also
130 comments on the way that Mayangna people are stigmatized in the community outside of the immediate school setting.
Later in the video, Nataly and a few other leadership students acting as discriminating bullies play a nasty trick on the Mayangna student characters by throwing a bag of “urine”
(water) onto the unsuspecting students. Adán’s character and Student 1 respond by ad-libbing turns 6 and 7 above.
The next scene takes place in the history classroom, where Nataly’s character and her friends sit in front of their teacher, played by me, waiting to hear their punishment for the trick they played on their peers. In turns 8-10, as the teacher character, I use Miskitu and Spanish to address the discriminating bullies. In my history teacher role in turn 9, I also expel the discriminating bullies from school, using Miskitu. In turn 10, I switch to Spanish to ask Adán and Student 1 what they learned about the history of Mayangna resilience. The question posed to
Adán and Student 1 here is not simply about what they learned from their peers’ discriminating actions and their subsequent expulsion from school, but from the overall state of Mayangna relations with other ethnic groups in the Puerto Cabezas community at large. The intentional switch to Spanish, by my teacher character, was to reach a larger audience sending the anti- discrimination message to everyone, intentionally not singling out Miskitu youth, but grounding the discussion in regional, national and global discussion on racial discrimination.
Turns 11 and 12 at the end of the video, spoken by Adán and Student 1, send a powerful message about the Mayangna people’s survival and cultural perseverance despite facing racial discrimination, referering to the two Mayangna student characters, and also the greater racialized experience in Puerto Cabezas. After turn 12, the video abruptly transitions to a Mayangna traditional song and the credits of the video.
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It is difficult to grasp the full power of the anti-discrimination message of this video in its
English translation. One point of “La Discriminación Racial” was to show an imaginary scene of bullying portraying the lived experiences of Mayangna students’ treatment at the Leadership
School, to create awareness about the potential of racial discrimation, but I crucially to point out that a hate crime on the level of this video (throwing urine) never occurred in reality. All of the videos were loosely based on the Leadership School students’ lived experiences, the peer pressure to speak Miskitu does occur in peer-based environments (such as in playing video games) as Adán indicated in Miskitu in turn 3. However, the video also reflects on the subtlety of how discriminating practices play out through the layers of racial categorization based on specific language choice in youth’s peer-based environments in the Puerto Cabezas community.
One of the central tenets of this video is that Adán’s character is silenced as a Mayangna individual by the discriminating practices taking place at his school, where he must transit between the Miskitu and Mayangna ethnic groups to avoid losing his friends. He tells his
Mayangna peer in the opening lines that he is mistreated as a Mayangna person thus he must avoid the Mayangna language. He insists that he continue to play video games with his friends, even if he cannot freely be Mayangna. When the discriminating students assault Adán’s character, he continues to use the Miskitu language to explain to his peer the “the urine” incident cannot happen on school campuses. Only at the end of the video, after the history teacher expels the discriminating students, does Adán feel that he can freely speak in Mayangna, and state his last turn in Mayangna.
The seriousness of this video becomes evident when we realize that the transracialization processes embodied by Adán’s language choice happened in real life at the Leadership School, when three Mayangna students regularly did speak Miskitu with their friends to avoid
132 discrimination as Mayangna people. This video’s extremely sensitive theme also resulted in my facing considerable backlash from the then director of Channel 5 studios, who accused me of encouraging students to depict the Miskitu characters as the villains of the story while we were editing “La Discriminación Racial” in the Channel 5 studio in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua.
In the video, although the leadership school student actor “bullies,” speak in Spanish, and the “Mayangna students,” speak Miskitu and Mayangna, some of the bully characters appear phenotypically Miskitu. After seeing that the “bullies” looked “Miskitu,” the Channel 5 director became upset and said that he saw the video’s content as a personal attack on himself as a
Miskitu person, and that he felt that the video portrayed Miskitu people in a negative light and his ethnic group was being unfairly targeted. He then told me in Spanish that I was the “real problem,” that Creole people in the present and in the past had always discriminated against
Miskitu people.
I was completely shocked by the director’s allegation that I had somehow caused the plight of the Miskitu people in Puerto Cabezas. Seeing myself as clearly an outsider, I was not fully aware of how I was racially categorized by the director until he made the comment that I was discriminating against him, a Miskitu man, as a Creole woman. To him, I phenotypically looked like a Creole (Afro-descendant) and sounded like a Creole (speaking Spanish with an
English accent), so he categorized me without considering the possibility that I might not identify with the Creole ethnic group and might not share the same history or same ideology as the group in question. Instead, the administrator racially categorized me as “a Creole” to explain to me how the power hierarchy among ethnic groups in Puerto Cabezas functioned. From this interaction, I began to realize that I was routinely racialized in the Puerto Cabezas context regardless of my intentions to be categorized as an outsider. My language use and my appearance
133 dictated how I should be racialized. And, the racialization process differed depending upon who interacted with me at which time. I had no real control over how people categorized me in this setting.
While I had been encouraged by school leaders and community members to discuss discrimination against Mayangna students at the school, along with other potentially sensitive topics in my work with students, using critical pedagogy at the Leadership school and discussing raciolinguistics put me at risk at the Leadership School confrontation with entrenched power hierarchies in Puerto Cabezas. I was perceived to be part of the power hierarchy based on my looks and speech patterns whether or not I believed that I was an outside privileged researcher from the United States “exempt” from local categorizations, I was still perceived as a Creole by my looks and my language proficiency in Spanish and Miskitu.
Interestingly, from a Creole perspective, I did not fit into the Creole community because
I could not speak the Kriol language. Creoles in the community often mistook me as a member of their community until I could not carry on a conversation with them effectively in Kriol. I realized that race as a concept is imagined and affects peoples’ perceptions of others, regardless of socio-historical, cultural or national affiliations. I recognized that the director of Channel 5 was not the only one who racially categorized me every day that I lived in Puerto Cabezas. For instance, taxi drivers often asked me where I was from in Miskitu “Aniwina Sma?” or Spanish
“De dónde es usted?” and on very few occasions in Kriol “Gyal, from where you come?” In these instances and many others, I was being racially categorized based on my looks and the way
I spoke.
As discussed in chapter 3, raciolinguistics and “transracialization” – the ability for speakers of languages to transit between ethnic group identifications - is not just a concept
134 proposed by Alim (2016) but a reality in Nicaragua. Specific language use indexes ethnic and racial categorization practices on the Northern Caribbean coast. Therefore, when I thought about developing teaching approaches that included the leadership students’ pluriliteracies for positive social change, my awareness of racial tensions and conflicts in the region was paramount. The lesson learned as an outsider-teacher/researcher in this context revolved around closely listening to community members’ racial perceptions of me so that I did not repeat historical and present cycles of oppression and marginalization. Yet, as a teacher of color, I faced my own feelings of oppression and marginalization. Strikingly, I had to address both sensitive positionalities in our shared collaborative efforts for positive social change in the community.
The video theme of “La Discriminacion Racial,” chosen by youth themselves in consultation with the Leadership School Coordinator and her assistant, offered the youth video producers an important chance to convey their own theme of anti-discrimination based on real events that they witnessed at their own school.
The next section, using the student video, “Pamali Painkira, I discuss how to support mixed youth, particularly those who possess both Afro-descendant and Indigenous identities, through digital culturally sustaining pedagogy design. I also delve into the complexity of Jamie’s choices to portray a Miskitu family in her video while drawing on her own mixed Miskitu and
Creole family experience and linguistic repertoires of Kriol, Spanish and Miskitu.
“Pamali Painkira”
In this section, about a video made by Jamie titled “Pamali Painkira”
(The Perfect Family) I raise awareness around the silencing of Creole identity among mixed youth at the Leadership School by showcasing Jamie’s experience in producing a cartoon about a
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Miskitu family. I discuss how peer pressure at the Leadership School may have influenced Jamie to position her final video project as a cartoon for Miskitu youth, even as the video drew on
Jamie’s lived experiences of her own mixed Miskitu and Creole family, and featured her mixed language repertoires of Miskitu, Spanish and Kriol. In showcasing how Jamie’s experience producing a final video project in the Multimedia course reflected a marginalized Creole identity,
I do not mean to critique the intercultural education model as a point of pride at the Leadership
School. In general, the Leadership School’s curriculum was very inclusive of Afro-descendant culture and worldviews in the way that it promoted African dance as part of its core coursework.
However, access to African-based knowledge through language was not as easy to observe in school, and mixed youth like Jamie experienced significant peer pressure to assert a purely
Miskitu identity.
Leadership school students portrayed a strong Miskitu peer culture at the school in the
“La Discriminación Racial” video, and Miskitu pride in peer culture created an important, safe space for promoting and maintaining the Miskitu language both in and outside of the classroom.
As I will describe , the content and discourse analysis of “Pamali Painkira” offered additional insights into mixed youths’ ever-changing identity formation in a region of the world that promotes “mixedness” through interculturalidad and mestizaje, while often struggling to create awareness about silenced marginalized identities within and in between “the autonomy of all of the communities of the Caribbean coast.”
In the video “Pamali Painkira,” Jamie shared the story of “Joysi”, an urban Miskitu young woman who faces chronic loneliness because both of her parents work outside of the home. The young woman decides to meet new friends at school, and desides to befriend a zombie she encounters on the school bus. When she presents her new zombie best friend to her
136 parents, they are first shocked that he is a zombie, but then they accept him as part of the family.
Jamie, who played the Miskitu young woman and her mother in the video, told the URACCAN
University forum that she wished to highlight a common phenomenon in Puerto Cabezas with her video; namely, how, in many households in Puerto Cabezas, both parents have to work to support their families due to unstable economic conditions. She also shared stated that she was like Joysi in her video, a Miskitu youth who felt lonely due to both of her parents working outside the home.
The portrayal of the family in the video also highlighted how Jamie herself was culturally brokering between at least two ethnic group perspectives, Creole and Miskitu. Jamie’s video was based on Jamie’s own life experiences growing up in a mixed family environment where her father is Creole, and her mother is Miskitu. Although traditionally many Miskitu women have worked in the home caring for their children and maintaining the household while their husbands have worked outside the home, this gender role dynamic is quite different in Creole contexts
(Herlihy, 2012). Also, traditionally, Miskitu families are extended so that it is very rare to have a
Miskitu only child, whereas Creole families are nuclear and only children can be quite common.
Jamie’s deliberate and unconscious language choices for her video further represented her mixed Creole/Miskitu identity in the face of peer pressure to identify as just Miskitu. Kriol is a local Nicaraguan Caribbean coast English variety that borrows from West African Languages,
Spanish and to a lesser degree Miskitu. Kriol is very similar to Jamaican Patwa and possibly borrowed from Patwa during the large migrations of Jamaicans to the Caribbean coast of
Nicaragua during the historical period of “Company Time,” described in chapter 1, that influenced the ethnic make-up of the Creole ethnic group who are the current fluent speakers of
Kriol on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua (Gordon, 1998). The Indigenous Rama community in
137 the Southern Caribbean coast also speaks Kriol rather than their Indigenous language, Rama
(Freeland, 2013). Linguists state that Kriol has roots in West African Kwa languages (Bartens,
2013).
The English as a Second Language course at the Leadership School privileged the United
States English language and worldviews over the Kriol language and its worldviews. I never got a clear sense of exactly how many youths at the Leadership School considered themselves mixed
Miskitu and Creole. The coordinator of the Leadership School explained to me in my orientation that there were several Kriol speakers in the 2015-2016 cohort of students and that some of these students identified with the Creole ethnic group. On my initial orientation to the students at the
Leadership School, I may not have recognized that some youth might have a connection to the
Creole identity, or the Kriol language simply because in the beginning of the Spring semester
2016, I had never heard any of the students speaking Kriol or talking about having a connection to that community. During several participant observations of the English as a Second Language course, many of the Leadership School students told me that they had a parent who could speak
Kriol. These mixed youth, including Miskitu mixed youth from rural and urban zones, made solid connections between the two Englishes on their own without much encouragement from their teachers.
In this section, I seek to honor these youth and explore possible ways of supporting them through creating safe zones for their multiple identities, using a raciolinguistics framework to point out how mixed youth may position themselves to avoid racial discrimination experienced as peer pressure. However, first I show how mixed youth’s position in Nicaraguan schools (like the Leadership School) can be conflictual and contradictory. In Nicaragua, the concept of mixedness or mestizaje can be a statist notion of unifying diverse peoples under the same
138 national identity (Miller, 2004). The Spanish language is a huge part of this unification process, particularly in the primary and secondary school systems (on both the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts of Nicaragua). Raciolinguistics in this arena takes on a new meaning because we are talking about choosing to speak Spanish to be part of a “mixed race” group of people (the Mestizo ethnic group) as well as to align oneself with the nation-state’s core values of citizenship.
Mestizaje in many former colonies of Spain also literally means the mixing of European and Indigenous blood. Mestizo means “mixed-race” in Spanish (Miller, 2004), and a blend of
Indigenous, Afro-descendant and European communities can be found throughout Latin
America. Autonomy in Nicaragua, on the other hand, is the notion that Indigenous and Afro- descendant people of the Caribbean coast can claim their cultural consciousness (Cupples &
Glynn, 2014; Gordon, 1998). As such, notions of autonomy are in opposition to the idea of
Mestizaje, state acculturation through the use of the Spanish language. Intercultural education models in Nicaragua must make sense of these conflicting notions that mestizaje is statist
(acculturation into the nation-state) and that autonomy overtly values a cultural consciousness that separates Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations from the centralized power of the
Nicaraguan nation-state (Cupples & Glynn, 2014; Gordon, 1998).
At the time of the study, for mixed youth at the Leadership School, the structure of intercultural education in general, and language education curricula, in particular, sent the message that it was ok to adopt the Spanish language and align oneself as a mixed person with the nation-state. Nicaragua, is run by the centralized government on the Pacific Coast of the country primarily run by Mestizo leaders. At the same time, educators and educational leaders espousing intercultural education locally, as we have seen, encouraged youth to emphasize each of their distinct cultural identities as a means to fit into the tenets of the Autonomy Law,
139 expressing valuable Indigenous identities, honoring Indigenous and Afro-descendant cultural practices, and promoting Indigenous language use, as discussed in Chapter 1.
In Jamie’s case, I never observed her speaking Kriol with any of her friends at the
Leadership School. To contextualize her language use, it is also important to note that, during the time of the study, Kriol, like Mayangna, was also at the bottom of a linguistic hierarchy among youth at the Leadership School, which directly reflected the different linguistic hierarchy of the school curricula and the city of Puerto Cabezas. Jamie decided to do her animation “Pamali
Painkira” on her own instead of working with her peers like all of the other Miskitu language and culture based videos. In my interactions with Jamie, I took a number of steps to create a safe zone for Jamie where she could be herself; she did not have to be swayed by her peers’ comments and persuasions or judgments. This safe zone did not come easily because both Jamie and I faced power hierarchies based on the colonial relationship between our two countries, the
United States and Nicaragua before we met. I also held a position of power because I was
Jamie’s teacher at the Leadership School. The power dynamic between us was painfully uneven from the beginning.
From the first moment that I met Jamie, however, she began to note common ground between us, as well as the crucial differences that separated us. In our everyday conversations, we were able to connect with our passion for technology and the apparent fact that we were both of African ancestry and both mixed people. Early on in our relationship as teacher and student,
Jamie explained that her favorite topic to study was computation and she asked for help outside of class on weekends to learn more about photo/video editing.
Moreover, our shared African ancestry gave us an unsung comradery that Afro-diaspora scholars refer to when they talk about “Black Consciousness” (Dixon & Burdick, 2011). For
140 instance, several times I observed that Jamie wore her hair naturally curly or in braids rather than straight. Afro-diaspora scholars interested in decolonization processes in Latin America often point to the overlap between African American-centered movements for reclamation of African identity in the United States and those in Latin America (Marble, Marble & Agard-Jones, 2008).
During the Black Power Movement in the United States and the Black Lives Matter Movement,
Afro-descendants wearing their hair in its naturally curly state, in braids or an Afro often indicated “Black Consciousness” and an effort to physically decolonize themselves (Norwood,
2018). In my experience living in majority Miskitu barrios such as Cocal in Puerto Cabezas, it was not common to see Miskitu youth wearing Afros or African style braids. When youth did sometimes use similar hairstyles, they could experience racial categorization in the Miskitu community. In some instances, I heard Miskitu adults say to such Miskitu youth “Nikru takisma,” you are becoming black. Since I myself often wore my hair naturally, as well, I interpreted Jamie’s stylistic choice as a kind of comradery in shared “Black Consciousness.”
Despite our shared African ancestry, one fundamental difference that separated Jamie and
I involved the kind of English that we spoke. I spoke Standard English from the United States, and she spoke Kriol from Nicaragua. Freeland (2013) explains that Standard English and Kriol are on a continuum where many speakers can translanguage between the two different grammatical structures. Although, many sociolinguists have indicated that Kriol has shifted toward Standard English or toward Spanish in the last 40+ years (Holm, 1975; Escure & Holm,
1983; Bartens, 2009), I agree with Freeland (2013) that “deep Kriol” has its own unique grammatical structure that exists in this context. Many of my acquaintances in Puerto Cabezas including a few administrators at URACCAN University could translanguage between the two
Englishes reasonably easily. However, these individuals had access to written Standard English
141 materials, having taken formal English as a Foreign Language coursework. Not all Kriol speakers have access to Standard English as a Foreign language coursework.
One day early in our relationship, in the back of a school bus on our way back home to
Puerto Cabezas, Jamie opened up to me to explain that her father spoke “her English [Kriol].”
She explained at that time that she did not understand “my English [United States-based].” The fact that Jamie pointed out early on that she could not understand my English was a strong claim regarding the differences between Kriol and Standard English and her reality at the Leadership
School, a place that also offered English as Foreign Language coursework. Noting the tension that the differences between our Englishes created, I tried by every means to level the uneven power structure and make a safe space for Jamie’s expression in Kriol. One of the ways that I endeavored to create that safe space was in our Facebook chat conversations online . As I showed in Chapter 3, I valorized Jamie’s English by asking for a Kriol teacher in our chat, instead of telling Jamie to correct her English to fit the United States English standard.
A later example of Jamie’s crisscrossing between pluriliteracies came when Jamie mixed languages and used a few English phrases in her Miskitu script for “Pamali Painkira.” Jamie named her animation “Pamali Painkira.” The Miskitu language does not have the letter “f,” and there are quite a few words from Kriol and Spanish used in Puerto Cabezas that follow a pattern of using a “p” in place of an “f” as a miskitu-zation of Spanish words. For example, new technological words like “pon” and “poto” from English “phone” and Spanish “foto” respectively become Miskitu words by replacing their “f” sound with a “p” sound. Thus, the word “Pamali” was an apparent miskitu-ization of the English word “family,” and Jamie’s preference of a Miskitu word borrowed directly from English.
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Painkira, the second word in the title of Jamie’s animation, means “beautiful” in most contexts in the Miskitu Language. The closest word in Miskitu that Jamie could find to translate “perfecta” in Spanish was “Painkira.” Jamie’s intended meaning for the title in Spanish was “La Familia
Perfecta,” or “The Perfect Family” in English. Jamie borrowed so frequently from both Spanish and English it was initially difficult for me to disern whether she wanted her title to feature
“Pamilia” or “Pamali,” both Miskitu-zations of Spanish and English words. On close examination of our original script I found that we had written Pamali, the English borrowing in the title. Jamie, like many youths in Nicaragua, attended primary school in the Spanish language and thus acculturated into the nation-state narrative and Spanish language discourse/ worldview.
Jamie, as a Puerto Cabezas native, was also exposed to all three of her languages routinely, and she regularly negotiated meaning making between two or three languages using innovative translations like the words painkira. For Jamie, negotiating meanings for multiple audiences of
Spanish speakers, Miskitu speakers and Kriol speakers was a normalized process that did not warrant analysis or critique. For Jamie, translating and interpreting and thus brokering between cultural groups is a way of life. For Jamie, the brokering process between very disparate worldviews existed as a form of interculturalidad with or without the Leadership School curriculum.
To create the script for Jamie’s video, “Pamali Painkira,” Jamie dictated lines to me as I typed the lines of her imagined characters in whichever language she spoke. As part of our established safe relationship that supported all of her linguistic competencies, I did not correct
Jamie when she dictated borrowed words, such as the use of the word “family” instead of
“kiamka” in her Miskitu script in one of the early lines below, or borrowed other words from
Spanish and Kriol. As such the dictation of “Pamali Painkira” script provides a valuable window
143 into Jamie’s language use and her perception of what is Kriol and what is Miskitu, she could have corrected me as I read the lines for the father character and she could have told me to change my pronunciation from an “f” to a “p” matching the title of the script, but she did not, and she also did not tell me to say kiamka instead of family.
In the script below, I changed my normal presentation of Miskitu from bold and italicized to normal so that I could distinguish between Miskitu-borrowed Kriol English and United States- based English within the text. Miskitu-borrowed Kriol English appears in bold and United
States-based English in underlined bold text. The United States-based English translation is in
Italics below the actual spoken text.
Jamie’s Script for “Pamali Painkira”
1 Joysi: “Mamá nu sma dia ai takan naiwa skul ra?” Mom do you know what happened today in class? 2 Joysi’s “Ay luhpi nawas chance apu sna bikas uba wark brisna sip sma wark Mom: wina balarika ai wiaia” Oh now I don’t have the time to talk to you sweetie because I have a lot of work to do but when I come back I will talk to you
3 Joysi: “Wel Pain Mamá wark wina balma taim mai wiaisna” Well fine mom, after you come back from work you will talk to me
4 Joysi’s “[rumwina kitchinra wan] Manin family nahki sma?” [He went from Dad: the room to the kitchen] Morning family how are you? 5 Joysi: “Pain…” Fine… 6 Joysi: “Yang papiki an mamiki dia daukisa nawas? Uba yahkan diara wali sna.” My parents what are you doing now? You are really busy and can you listen to something… 7 Joysi: “Mamá, Mamá Na taim mai wiaisna” Mom, Mom will you listen to me now[?] 8 Joysi’s “Ay luhpi nawas uba swapri sa …yauhka ai wis bikas nawas aisaia sip Mom: apia sna” Oh sweetie I’m really tired now…tomorrow I say because because now I cannot talk
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9 Joysi: “Man nani taim apu yang dukira an laik apu sna! Yang Upla kum ai walbia want sna.” You guys never have time for me and I hate it! I want someone to listen to me 10 Johnathan: “AHHHH”
11 Joysi: “AHHHH”
12 Joysi: “Naksa, ninam dia? Hello, what is your name? 13 Johnathan: “Yang nini Johnathan an man ninam …” My name is Johnathan and your name… 14 Joysi: “ahh yang nini joysi” ahh my name [is] joysi 15 Joysi’s AAAAHHHH Mom and Dad: 16 Joysi: “Waita papá painika mai marika want sna” Wait Dad I want you to meet my friend 17 Joysi: “Na taim paina kum brisna witin nina lika Johnathan” Now I have a friend his name is Johnathan 18 Joysi’s “Pamnika ba lika ba upla kum pruan sa baha pana apia sa” Dad: Your friend is a zombie this is not a friend 19 Joysi: “Baku wipara painikara bikas witin baman yangra ai walisa” Actually he is like a friend because he listens to me 20 Joysi’s “Wel Luhpi panikam ba pain sa” Dad: Well sweetie your friend is good 21 Joysi’s “Au sika sip sma Johnathan wal pana kaia” Dad: Of course he can be your friend 22 Johnathan: “Tingki Joysi papika” Thanks Joysi’s Dad 23 Joysi: “Tingki Papá” Thanks Dad
We can see that Jamie borrows from Spanish, Kriol and United States-based English in her script above. I played the voice of Joysi’s Dad, who Jamie originally named “Johnny,” clearly an English name. I also read the script that Jamie dictated. In the script above, there appear multiple simple lexical borrowings from Kriol such as in line 17, 20 and 23 “Wel,”
“taim” and “Tingki” (“Well, “time” and “Thanks” respectively). We can also see compound
Kriol+ Miskitu verbs in lines 1 and 9 such as “nu sma,” “want sna” and “laik sna,” (“you know,”
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“I want” and “I like” respectively). Kriol verbs often do not mark the past and the present in the same way as United States-based English. Notably, “nu” is in the present tense and not the past tense. In lines 2 and 4 the words “wark” and “manin” are notably Kriol borrowings, rather than
United States-based English borrowings because the “a” sound has replaced the “or” sound as in
“Morning and Work.” Much of this analysis of Miskitu Kriol borrowings is well known to
Miskitu and Kriol linguists (Salamanca, 2018; Bartens, 2013).
The following example also shows an English borrowed word, and some the common
Kriol borrowings in Miskitu (some of which have undergone Miskitu-ization versus Jamie’s marked insertion of the word “family”), in line 4, the cartoon character Joysi’s Dad’s opening line in Jamie’s video:
Joysi’s Dad: [rumwina kitchinra wan] “Manin family, nahki sma?”
Rum-wina kitchin-ra wan Manin family, nahki sma
room-loc kitchen-loc 3SG.PAST-PERF-go morning family, how 2pl.pres-be
‘He went to the kitchen from the room’ ‘Morning family, how are you?’
The English word “family,” from Joysi’s Dad’s in the opening scene, instead of the
Miskitu “kiamka,” above is an example of an English borrowed word dictated by Jamie as part of her script. The word “family” is not something common in borrowings from Kriol into
Miskitu. This could have been a slip on the part of Jamie, who heard Miskitu and Kriol mixed in her family environment. It is ironic that Joysi’s Dad uses the English word “family” when
Jamie’s father self-identifies as a member of the Creole ethnic group and actively speaks Kriol to his family members, Jamie included.
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In line 4, in the excerpt above of Joysi’s Dad’s opening scene, the stage directions in brackets for the animated characters, “rumwina kitchinra wan”, appear in Miskitu. In these directions, as well, we can see borrowings from Kriol.The words “rum” and “kitchin” are borrowed from Kriol and are quite common usages in Puerto Cabezas varieties of Miskitu.
Manin is also borrowed from Kriol meaning “Morning” and it is common in all varieties of
Miskitu as a greeting. I included detailed morphological descriptions above to show how Miskitu speakers borrow Kriol words, often they add Miskitu locative endings such as in the case of rum-wina kitchin-ra, ‘from the room into the kitchen’ in addition to switching the f’s in Kriol words to p’s such as in the case of “pain” meaning “fine.”
Jamie’s variety of Miskitu is not unique, other scholars such as Freeland (2003) and I myself have noted how commonly other community members in Puerto Cabezas, as well, use mixed Kriol/Miskitu in ways that are similar to Jamie’s lines above. The striking part about the lines in Jamie’s animation is the discourse between the characters Joysi and Joysi’s Dad where one can explicitly read Kriol and United States-based English words such as manin and family.
In Jamie’s dictated script for the video, only the daughter Joysi and her father character use Kriol words in their interactions; the daughter Joysi speaks to her mother only in Miskitu, raising the possibility that Jamie was mapping common patterns from her everyday family language use with her Creole father and Miskitu mother onto her imagined animated family characters as she scripted the video.
In the oral reading of Jamie’s script, Jamie spoke in a highly mixed style borrowing both from Spanish and Kriol which characterized her variety of Miskitu. Although Jamie had shared that she was consciously trying to script her animation entirely in Miskitu for a Miskitu audience, she ended up mixing her Miskitu with Kriol, United States-based English and Spanish
147 borrowings, echoing the way she commonly spoke. When Jamie recorded the animated character’s voices, she inserted another borrowing from Kriol. Other places in the script, as well, examples highlight Jamie’s common crisscrossing between pluriliteracies is in the script of her animation video “Pamali Painkira.” Below, for instance, is line 16 from the script of “Pamali
Painkira” where Jamie dictated “Waita” in Joysi’s line to her father, borrowed word from Kriol, in bold below:
Ex. “Waita painika mai marika want sna”
Gloss: ‘Wait, I want you to meet my friend.’
“Weit” is a command word from Kriol that is used quite frequently in most varieties of
Miskitu. “Waita,” in contrast, is a marked creolism that Jamie uses that is not common in other variants of Miskitu. In the actual recording of the animated characters’ voices, Jamie inserted the
Spanish word “papá” meaning, “dad” in Spanish after “Waita” otherwise Miskitu line , making the above line in the actual animation to read: “Waita papá painika mai marika want sna.”
In describing how she designed her video, Jamie told me that she chose to use the
Miskitu language as the medium of her animation intentionally to depict a Miskitu family to an imagined Miskitu audience. Jamie did not explicitly state that she used mixed language in her animation such as in the case of “waita”to address a mixed audience or even a multilingual audience. Having all the characters in the animation speak Miskitu to depict a Miskitu family, however, did not reflect the complexity of mixed language use in mixed families in Puerto
Cabezas (cf. Freeland, 2003), including Jamie’s own family. Looking closely at Jamie’s language choice and the cultural framing of the script of the video, we can see how much
148 linguistic and cultural contact in this setting sometimes shaped young people’s language use, even when they tried to use “typical” or “pure” Miskitu concepts.
Jamie proclaimed that the language she used in the video was Miskitu and that her audience would be Miskitu youth. It is possible that, in the raciolinguistically marked setting,
Jamie wanted her peers, Leadership School Staff, URACCAN students, staff and me to see her as part of the Miskitu ethnic group.
A related example of language choice came when I interviewed Jamie along with her friend Nataly about the languages that they used in their homes. When I asked which language the girls would like use to do their group interview, both Jamie and Nataly agreed that they would like to do their interview entirely in Miskitu, emphasizing their shared Miskitu ethnic identity. At the time, I wondered if Jamie had done the interview with a peer who identified as
Mestizo, would she have decided to do the interview in Spanish? Afterall, as indicated in the
Facebook chat conversation in chapter 3, most of my conversations with Jamie at the Leadership
School were in Spanish (our lingua franca). The fact that Nataly identified as Miskitu and thus wanted to do the interview in Miskitu, was a kind of peer pressure for Jamie. This kind of peer pressure really helped Jamie to proudly assert a Miskitu identity, key to maintaining Miskitu.
Jamie was not what I would call an “active” Kriol speaker in the setting of the Leadership
School, but she did often speak Miskitu with her peers. In the interview, however, Jamie indicated that she saw herself as a member of both the Miskitu and Creole ethnic groups, mentioning that she spoke Kriol with her father at home, re-positioning herself as both Miskitu and Creole.
In the group interview, Jamie was acutely aware of her Puerto Cabezas variety of Miskitu with its heavy borrowings of Kriol and Spanish. For example, when I asked a question that
149 involved a Miskitu word that Jamie did not know, she laughed and asked an informal “Nahki?”
How?. I explained to the best of my ability in Spanish what the word meant, then she said a line that I cannot ever forget, “Miskitu, Miskitu profe.” In that line, Jamie highlighted her consciousness that there was a pure or unmixed Miskitu versus blended Miskitu (her variety).
But, Jamie did not attempt to “purify” her Miskitu in her animation, “Pamali Painkira” based on this awareness and her intended Miskitu audience. So, that lead me to believe that I created a safe space in the Multimedia course for mixed or blended Miskitu varieties, given that the audience for the videos could be Puerto Cabezas youth who typically speak mixed varieties of
Miskitu.
Also, if I have not made this clear, many youth in Puerto Cabezas are mixed, and therefore could directly relate to “Pamali Painkira’s” sensibilities. The tension I witnessed with
“Pamali Painkira” did not stem from Jamie’s mixed language, but from the way she described the intended audience of the video as Miskitu youth, not mixed youth or Miskitu-mixed youth.
Even though in our interview Jamie acknowledged her own mixed identity and her own mixed language style, she struggled to articulate the intentionality of expressing that mixed identity in the depiction of her imagined “perfect or beautiful” family. I attribute that struggle to peer pressure in a school environment that emphasized Miskitu-ness but held few explicit places for mixed-Miskitu-ness.
Examining young people’s language choices in both “Pamali Painkira” and “La
Discriminación Racial” showed how language choice was not random for the Leadership School students. Youth like Jamie may have been racially transiting in specific interactions in school to manage peer pressures to be Miskitu-only. Just because mixed youth did not outwardly show all of their identities through deliberate language choice in all of their projects or assignments, this
150 did not mean that young people were not needing or wanting support for their various ethnic identities. With Jamie, for instance, I had to look between the lines of our discussions to see how she indicated that Kriol was significant to her as an Afro-descendant as well as an Indigenous individual. I also had to recognize that Jamie faced strong peer pressure to identify as a Miskitu- only individual. In our group interview, Jamie easily could have left out her father’s language entirely for fears of peer pressure in the Miskitu language interview. Because Jamie and I had created a safe zone based on our mixedness, however, and I sent Jamie direct messages about the value of her variety of English, Jamie felt comfortable showing her true linguistic repertoires.
It took me a long time to acknowledge Jamie’s linguistic positioning as both Miskitu and
Creole through our conversations outside of the Leadership School. It was difficult to realize that
Jamie was reaching out for support for her Creole identity while she outwardly supported her
Miskitu identity (almost exclusively at times). I did not hear a lot of Kriol from Jamie, but later I concluded that less speaking in Kriol did not equate to the Kriol language being unimportant to
Jamie. Sometimes the focus with mixed youth should be on what is not heard rather than what is heard.
Sharing Young People’s Videos and Pluriliterate Voices With Faculty and University Students
Sharing and receiving feedback in Indigenous and culturally marginalized communities is an integral part of sensitive, responsible social justice-based research. Working in a preparatory school on the campus of a well-known local university, I had the unique opportunity to share my students/participants final videos first with the URACCAN audience, and then with the greater
Puerto Cabezas community. Towards the end of my time teaching the multimedia course, I
151 arranged meetings with URACCAN University faculty members in the Sociology and
Psychology departments to plan a forum at the university to showcase the youth’s final videos.
This collaboration was relatively easy, since the faculty members reached out to me through their professional connections with the Leadership School staff, and the Leadership School staff talked openly with professors at the university about the youth’s video topics, and how the young people wanted to tackle issues of changing gender roles, domestic abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, bullying, and racial discrimination. Building on our mutual interest to have some constructive academic dialogue on the topics that concerned the youth in their everyday lives, faculty members and I planned the forum as a dedicated space for sharing youth’s projects and pluriliterate voices.
In the forum, I showed the seven youth-produced videos described in this chapter. A youth actor from each of the videos also explained the significance of his or her production for the Puerto Cabezas community and the Northern Caribbean coast. Professors in the Sociology and Psychology Departments then asked questions about the content or the technical execution of each of the videos, and the youth had a chance to respond to their questions. If the young people felt that they needed assistance from their teacher or the Leadership School staff, they could request help answering the questions from the university faculty members. The university faculty members also opened the floor of the conversation to their undergraduate students, asking them to comment on the video content from theoretical lenses in their coursework.
Multiple questions showed faculty and university students’ support for strengthening all local communities and the inclusion of all ethnic viewpoints on the Northern Caribbean coast .
Given URACCAN faculty members’ focus on “el fortalizamiento de la Autonomia de Los
Pueblos” or “the strengthening of all the communities autonomies,” faculty asked, “Why weren’t
152 there more videos that had the Kriol language and Creole ethnic group represented?” At the forum, several professors and administrators at URACCAN who identified with the Creole ethnic group also expressed their desire to see their community represented through video production, just as the other Indigenous and local communities. This question did not surprise me, given the lack of Creole language representation at the Leadership School in classroom settings, and how many residents/colleagues had mentioned the visual and audial disappearance of the Creole culture in the city of Puerto Cabezas.
Other questions focused on similar topics of vocal and dance performance. For example, the audience asked students “How can we help the Leadership School students to honor their original oral knowledge and histories in these videos, like in Baile Liwa Mairin?” and “Is there a place for more traditional dance forms from all of the ethnic groups in these videos?” These comments showed that the URACCAN community valued the original multimodal expression of the Northern Caribbean coast, and how they felt that their oral traditions mainly performed in dance routines should be firmly represented and passed on intergenerationally from elders to youth.
Some questions were about specific technical aspects of the video production process such as the name of the software used to produce the animation, Pamali Painkira. Faculty and students were also interested in how to view the videos after the forum and whether the videos were just for the Northern Caribbean coast community. Many questions showed community members’ enthusiasm for a possible follow-up multimedia course, or follow-up workshops conducted by community members themselves.
None of the videos were critiqued for being too controversial or for portraying the community in a negative light. Instead, the general comments on the videos were positive, and
153 both undergraduate students and faculty praised the youth for focusing on real conflicts that did indeed deserve local solutions. The university faculty and students also praised the videos for using local languages and discourses to give a voice for the first time to community members who had previously been silenced.
The Digital Afterlife of the Final Video Projects
The significance of creating new digital spaces for Indigenous and local languages at its core focuses on raising the visibility of less commonly understood languages and cultures from around the world (Rising Voices, 2016). We shared the final video projects from the class with the Rising Voices organization in spring of 2016, and also published the videos in a semi-public arena so that other Indigenous communities could view and comment on the final video projection, and to get local, regional, national and international views and commentary on videos in Indigenous languages. At the time of the publication of this dissertation, the Miskitus y
Mayangnas en El Internet Facebook site has received 924 likes, and 924 followers in the four years since we created the site. I took special precautions with “La Discriminación Racial” and
“Pamali Painkira,” however, since I knew that I required additional permissions to share them publicly due to their content and the nature in which they were produced just for a local audience. I purposely did not post “La Discriminación Racial” online, for instance, because of its
Mayangna content, though I explained to local community members who contacted us on the
“Miskitus y Mayangnas en el Internet” page, that I could send them a copy of the “La
Discriminación Racial” video with all of the Mayangna language content if they personally requested one. The IPILC director, a Mayangna community member and linguist, specifically
154 stated that the Mayangna language should remain in the local community, so I interpreted that comment to mean that it should not be online in a public capacity. However, upon speaking with several former Leadership School students who created the original videos, I learned that viewing the vidoes help them to keep the memories of our multimedia course alive for themselves and family and friends who have been invited to view them. Thus, the audience is mainly local – spread by word of mouth and through localized friend and family groups on
Facebook.
Although the original plan for the videos asked for them to be on local television channels. I decided that the safer option for the youth would be the independent media circuit so that they could share the videos with their friends and close acquaintances. Although all of the videos accept “La Discriminación Racial” are on Youtube.com for public viewing, it is challenging to search for them without knowing the exact names of the videos. Youth have passed the website links to community members, and the overall response to the final video projects showed that some were very well received in the community and were very popular.
Others needed more promotion or did not spark as much interest for reasons that are unknown.
“SIDA Wal Iwanka,” Life with AIDS received 850 views by 2018, and had a few comments in
Miskitu praising its storyline and the nice acting skills of the youth actors. The kind of comments that this video received were generally light-hearted. Some wittily pointed out the gravity of sexually transmitted diseases and infidelity in relationships. In the first 3 months after publication online in September of 2016, “Luhpia Saura, Luhpia Pain” received 397 views; “La
Paciente” and “El Bullying Rausauhkanka Tuktan Nani Ra” received 79 and 33 views, respectively. “Baile Liwa Mairin” received the most views of the videos posted; over 9,500 views in the year after publication online in 2017. A few community members sampled some of
155 the images in the video and used these in documentaries on Miskitu oral traditions surrounding fishing practices and Indigenous maritime knowledge.
Thus, I conclude that the digital afterlife (Soep, 2012) of such a project is tremendously valuable for the Caribbean coast community of youth and adults seeking to do digital activism work and for international Indigenous and mixed communities that work with pluriliterate 21st century youth.
Conclusion
It is possible to create a digitally culturally sustaining curriculum in a multi- ethnic/multilingual zone like the Puerto Cabezas community in Nicaragua, if both adults and youth are willing to share their cultural worldviews stemming from their unique ethnic communities. In the first section of this chapter, I showed that the five Miskitu culture related videos held potential local solutions to complex transnational based conflicts. The strength of the these potential solutions lay in sharing the content of the videos with community members from various ethnic groups both in online and in face to face capacities. The youth voice behind the videos’ content anchored the culturally based solutions in real-world narratives that can inspire future youth in a future digital afterlife. Every theme of the videos including “La Discriminacion
Racial and “Pamali Painkira,” received unique reactions from mutliculturally informed perspectives in the community, creating thought-provoking academic dialog that anchoried the videos in transnational discourse while centering Indigenous youth perspectives. I noted how multiple themes related to Miskitu cultural worldviews were evident in the videos, particularly the “Baile Liwa Mairin” video that served a particularly strong culturally sustaining addition to the list of videos because it drew on local Indigenous multimodal composition practice while it
156 explored blending global multimodal layering techniques. All of the Miskitu culture-based videos showcased strong Miskitu mother figures as central to solution making for complex international youth conflicts such as bullying and sexually transmitted diseases.
“La Discriminación Racial” and “Pamali Painkira” showed the intersection between multiple cultural worldviews stemming from different ethnic groups, and demonstrated both pluriliteracies and interculturalidad. “La Discriminación Racial” showcased the peer pressure challenges to speak the Miskitu language rather than the Mayangna language and suggested how teachers can create safe spaces to highlight minoritized youth’s resilience and help youth question normalized peer practices that have the potential to silence their peers’ culture and identity formation. The “Pamali Painkira” example showed that mixed-youth in majority culture school settings and communities (in this case Miskitu culture) contend with peer pressure to
“purely” identify with one ethnic group. Given my analysis on raciolinguistic positioning in this setting, I conclude that in examining the discourse around “Pamali Painkira” and specifically its intended audience as well as the actual script of “La Discriminación Racial,” youth did face considerable pressure to speak one language so their peers could racially categorize them as a member of one ethnic group. Examining the implications of these videos, I conclude that as educators we have the power to create safe discussions around the underlying power hierachies in youth’s expressed struggles with peer pressure and support minoritized youth. The following discussion indicates the implications of my analysis in this study.
Implications
One of the exciting parts of doing multimedia design work with pluriliterate youth is the potential of blending intergenerational perspectives on current issues through multiculturally
157 informed discourses. Several of the youth-produced videos in this chapter revealed global youth issues and transnational ideas about these issues, as youth balanced “traditional knowledge and practice (from several different local cultural communities)” and “global cultural knowledge and media flows.” I suggest exploring and delving into the multifaceted interface of global youth culture and traditional ways of knowing in mixed and Indigenous settings with similar youth.
Diverse youth may express concerns about sensitive topics such as racial discrimination in their everyday lived experiences in and outside of the school environment. As educators we often observe related dynamics playing out in our schools, though we might have a difficult time addressing them. Outside educators may also receive pushback from community members if they assume that local communities seek solutions to trans-national conflicts from outside of their community, especially if the local community strives for localized decision making based on historic struggles for self-determination, autonomy or sovereignty.
To successfully produce a meaningful and impactful critical studies pedagogy, collaborations with community members are important, in order to insure that the community
(youth and adults included) determine the outcome of their own educational goals and aspirations. Although some of the content of the videos was potentially very controversial, the adults at the Leadership School encouraged the youth not to censor their ideas and to model real- world solutions to emotionally charged conflicts. Working closely with community members and carefully interacting with, and listening to, youth themselves, I was able to co-construct a space at the Leadership School where the youth participants felt comfortable sharing their everyday experiences with family and friends in their videos.
Teachers must also work to establish safe-zones with youth so that they feel that their topics are safe for discussion in private and public forums. Organizing and carrying out the
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URACCAN public forum for video screening was a crucial step in welcoming experiences of diverse youth than often need support in societies with imbalances in power. At the forum, I learned much on the importance of creating safe-zones for youth to discuss their intentionality in critically conscious multimedia design. I learned that undergraduate students and faculty members in this context sought to understand youth’s lived experiences on their own terms. I also learned that the collegiate community at URACCAN embraced controversial social topics for the sake of a productive dialogue on community-based solutions and collaborations to support youth coping with tense situations. The overall forum valorized the youth’s lived experiences as academic analytically informed topics for discussion with University students, faculty and the public at large.
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
The first purpose of the study was to explore what multimedia teaching approaches support Puerto Cabezas, Nicaraguan youth’s multimodal communication styles including their various linguistic repertoires and their Indigenous and local epistemologies. The second purpose of this study was to explore how youth make sense of how “to do” multimedia participation, design and production in the interest of social justice for themselves and their communities.
As a teacher-researcher, the main approaches that I used to support Puerto Cabezas’ youths’ pluriliterate development in developing the multimedia course was collaborating with non-profit organizations such as CEIMM, IPILC, and URACCAN University’s Channel 5 studios, and listening to the youth’s voices on teaching approaches that would showcase their strengths in social media participation, performance arts, and situated learning. The collaborations with CEIMM, IPILC and Channel 5 studios allowed the youth access to Miskitu
159 and Mayangna textual modes of communication not previously accessible at the Leadership
School. These collaborations also allowed the youth access to culturally-based solutions to their own first-hand observations of community conflicts and controversies such as sexually transmitted disease, racial discrimination, and bullying. The new multimedia course also served as a safe space to discuss potentially culturally-based solutions to community conflicts and allowed the youth to build a cultural and linguistic consciousness about injustices in their community not previously explored in other coursework.
Chapter 3 focused on the implementation of a culturally sustaining pedagogy that utilized youth’s and adults’ localized lived experiences with raciolinguistic positioning in the multimedia design process. One of my original research questions was “How do educators design culturally sustaining pedagogy for pluriliterate students in multimedia design courses?” The purpose of this chapter was to examine my own process in establishing teaching approaches that invited ongoing collaboration with students, staff and non-profit organizations on the Leadership School and
URACCAN University campus.
The first section of this chapter focused on raciolinguistics as concept that illuminated language based racialization processes and youth identity formation in the Puerto Cabezas community as key for doing critically informed multilingual multimedia design. The first section of the chapter also showed the student benefits of the third space online pedagogy of the multimedia course, creating a safe space for students to orient toward written communication in
Miskitu, Spanish and English with new found confidence and freedom of expression. In efforts to support the additional layering of textual modes in the Miskitu, Mayangna and Kriol languages in students’ multimedia products, these focal participants were encouraged to write in those texts online in third spaces such as Facebook instant chat boxes.
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Textual modes in the form of scripts served as guides in the final video projects. The
“Miskitus y Mayangnas en el internet” Facebook page served as a safe space where students could bring their digital literacies into the classroom and share their multimedia design competencies outside of the classroom, showing the real world application of what they were learning in the course. I showcase both the posts and the chat conversations of three of the focal youth participants on Facebook as a window into how working within third spaces supported students’ situated learning of multimedia design.
The second section of the chapter elaborated upon how I developed my work with students over time in collaboration with community leaders from the Center on Studies of the
Multiethnic Woman (CEIMM), the Institute for Linguistic Investigation and Promotion and
Cultural Revitalization, (IPILC), and URACCAN University’s Channel 5 Studios. Initially in my lesson planning, I did not know how to assess how many of my students could speak, read or write in the Mayangna or Miskitu language. During the first week of the course, I attended a conference on violence against women hosted by the CEIMM organization. At the conference, I observed three students sing in the Mayangna language. From that initial interaction with the
CEIMM organization, I saw the potential of collaborating with CEIMM could offer access to semi-professional video cameras and the knowledge of how to film various kinds of shots in local languages. I also recognized the potential of doing infomercial style videos about topics of interest that CEIMM would be willing to support an one approach to students’ final video projects. Moreover, I could also see that collaborating with IPILC would allow for the incorporation of Mayangna and Miskitu texts into the students’ final video projects. With the addition of the Leadership School administrative staff promoting collaborations with these non- profit organizations, I knew that the content of the videos would have important community
161 implications and achieve our goal to make the course culturally sustaining and revitalizing.
Lastly, the collaboration with Channel 5 studios gave the students access to professional video cameras, expert directors and producers of local programming and the greater Puerto
Cabezas’ audience for final video project showings. The collaboration with Channel 5 studios unlocked additional insight into the power hierarchy among ethnic groups for me, the teacher- researcher. This insight into the local ethnic group power hierarchy ultimately contributed to more cultural and linguistic consciousness in the video “La Discriminación Racial,” which featured the problematizing of Miskitu and Mayangna community relations.
In addition to providing technical support and access to hardware and software, CEIMM and Channel 5 were a valuable source of intergenerational cultural knowledge (particularly
Miskitu worldviews and epistemologies). The collaborations with these non-profit organizations also contributed to my overall intention to provide a culturally sustaining pedagogy. As leaders worked with youth to help students identify and represent solutions to lived community conflicts in the Leadership Students’ final video project topics, these collaborative interactions fostered the transfer of intergenerational cultural knowledge and intergenerational problem solving.
Overall, the findings from Chapter 3 show the potential of collaborations with both students’ pluriliterate voices and non-profit organizations for the creation of a truly digital culturally sustaining pedagogy that seeks to create positive social change in the Puerto Cabezas’
Nicaraguan community. Chapter 4 looked at the actual content of the youth participants’ final video projects, and youths’ cultural and linguistic consciousness in multimedia design as it related to finding local solutions to conflicts in Miskitu, Mayangna and Creole societies. In chapter 4, I also showed how youth- and community-focused video production might address linguistic hierarchies and marginalized raciolinguistic identities in plurilingual, urban contexts,
162 and how plurilingual youth might use multimedia design and production to promote social justice for themselves and their communities, fostering cultural and linguistic consciousness through multimedia design as means to do social justice work in the local context.
In total, chapter 4 develops a clear picture of the youth participants’ ability to convey real world conflicts and local solutions using their own pluriliterate voices and understandings. The new multimedia course offered at their school, La Escuela de Liderazgo created a safe space that supported these youths’ pluriliterate voices and understandings by incorporating local languages and cultures and local language and cultural activists in every stage of the multimedia design process.
5.1 Focusing On Social Justice And Pluriliteracies Throughout The Course
One powerful theme running throughout my work with youth in the multimedia design course was a strong focus on social justice for positive social change on the Northern Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Chapters 3 and 4 problematize the inequalities of textual and oral representations of the Miskitu, Mayangna, and Kriol languages in the national mediascape. Both chapters also shed light on the silencing of Miskitu, Mayangna and Kriol languages as legitimate texts for study at the Leadership School, and seek to create counter-narratives for these normative silencing practices of Indigenous and local languages.
Chapter 3 demonstrated how multimodal communication in the context of the Leadership
School fell under both political and cultural epistemological constraints. In the first chapter, the explicit mention that two out of Jamie’s four languages, Miskitu and Kriol were not in accordance with accessible textual modes of communication showed that the Leadership School
163 privileged Spanish text as acceptable academic text at the expense of Miskitu and Kriol texts.
Jamie’s case also showed that social media platforms such as Facebook and multimedia design sites such as Animaker were a means by which such languages could be given their own space, both inside and outside of the classroom. Also, the “Baile Liwa Mairin” video, in chapter 4 highlighted how some layered modes of communication such as gestural, visual and oral modes may also lend themselves to local and Indigenous ways of knowing where as other modes may not, made the case for a critical understanding of multimodality and cultural funds of knowledge in classrooms. Lastly, the crucial collaborations with non-profit organizations on the Leadership
School/URACCAN University campus, made the first findings chapter unique in that few studies highlight non-profit organizations as sites for Indigenous expert knowledge on multimedia design.
In my teacher research journal, I often asked myself questions about what kinds of modes
I should emphasize in my lesson plans—should I incorporate more oral modes in Miskitu,
Mayangna and Kriol or should the focus be on textual modes? However, when I looked at the former students’ feedback on what they enjoyed learning about in the class, their responses about their experiences acting, dancing, and animating gave me a sense of a wide range of teaching approaches not only served their needs, but also made space for students to privilege their cultural and digital knowledge from outside of the classroom.
Importantly, creating a third space and ongoing discussions with students about what was working and what they enjoyed learning about helped me,an outsider and new teacher who was not familiar with the diverse communities like Puerto Cabezas,understand students’ preferred modes of communication. Talking with students about their wide ranging modes of communication also raised my awareness of what modes of communication were most
164 accessible, and which were typically marginalized, in school. As I have shown in the introduction chapter and chapter 3, students in the school at the time of the study negotiated a general lack of accessibility to Kriol, Miskitu and Mayangna textual modes. The inaccessibility of these modes in school also mirrored broader ethnic group hierarchies and power dynamics of the Northern Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. In chapter 3, I showed how creating a third space to talk about language ideologies and cultural practices both of the past and the present helped to create a new space for culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogy for Indigenous and Afro- descendant youth. I also showed how collaborating with non-profit organizations that support
Indigenous language reclamation movements (such as IPILC) or support rights for Afro- descendant young women (such as CEIMM) helped me increase my awareness of the discrimination that youth face and build upon the linguistic or cultural awareness possessed by local leaders of social movements, further bridging the school-community gap for Afro- descendant and Indigenous Leadership Students. Findings from the chapter underscore the importance of new outsider teachers acknowledging imbalances in power between ethnic groups in the regions where they work.
In the introduction to this study and in chapters 3 and 4, I showed how the power hierarchy of ethnic groups severely influences both the oral and written language choices in this region of the world. Thus, from a multimodal perspective not all modes are equally accessible to
North Caribbean coast youth on and offline. As a result, teaching multimedia design with an explicit focus on supporting and developing young people’s multilingualism involved both introducing new software and hardware such as Moviemaker, Animaker, digital video cameras, external microphones and tripods to youth, and also introducing new previously inaccessible modes (such as Miskitu and Mayangna texts) into the social justice work of the Leadership
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School and community organizations such as CEIMM and Channel 5 Studios. Using written scripts and subtitling in the process of video production and editing were the main ways that I made space for these textual modes in our multimedia work. Visual and gestural modes in communication in video contexts meant nothing to audience members without the additional layers of oral and textual modes.
Without strategic layering of multiple modes of communication, multimedia videos convey no clear final messages. As I describe, the technicalities of creating the final video projects with collaborations from non-profit URACCAN University organizations were also extremely complex. Nevertheless, by connecting students’ multimodality to the work of
Indigenous language activists, the class created opportunities for Indigenous language activists to help open previously closed doors to Miskitu and Mayangna texts. This also helped us shape our work digitally in ways that were culturally sustaining.
In chapter 4, I examined how focal youth participants’ linguistic and cultural awareness of controversial topics came across in the content of four videos produced at the Leadership
School, and how youth understood the content of their final projects within the context of the multimedia course. By focusing on the youths’ consciousness of societal inequity and linguistic inequity, chapter 4 also cast light on the unequal social structures which created the controversial cultural and linguistic content of the seven videos. The youth-produced video topics that I surveyed in the chapter focused on young people’s perspectives of the structure of the Miskitu family, gender roles, and how to manage outside cultural influences such sexually transmitted diseases and bullying in a local context, as well as the issue of racial discrimination within the local Puerto Cabezas community.
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In the chapter, I also examined how youth planned and executed the cultural and linguistic content of the videos, drawing partially from the youths’ own personal experiences living in the Puerto Cabezas/ Northern Caribbean coast Region of Nicaragua, while also drawing on the intergenerational transfer of cultural knowledge. For example, when we were planning in our comic strip assignment, the multimedia students created the themes for the final video projects such as racial discrimination, poverty, and living with AIDS. These were all issues that the youth saw affecting their community in a negative way. Since they knew that the main audience of their videos would be their own community, the youth decided that the point of their final videos would be to provide solutions to the problematic issues that their community faces.
Given the Leadership School’s mission statement “to form human resources with intercultural leadership capabilities,” the focus of identifying community problems and solutions was very natural for the multimedia students.
As I further described in the chapter, other teachers and the Leadership School administrative staff also strongly supported the youths’ efforts by encouraging young people’s ideas and sharing their own cultural and linguistic knowledge on related topics when students needed help. For instance, with the video “La Discriminación Racial,” the director of IPILC provided all of the text in Mayangna for the Mayangna speaking youth actors in the video. The one true Mayangna speaker in the video had the ability to ad-lib or improvise the lines that were given to her as a guide for expressing herself in her language. Also, the Miskitu speaker, Adán, who acted as a Mayangna youth experiencing discrimination from his school mates, also ad- libbed in Miskitu. The point of the Mayangna youth constantly speaking in Mayangna and the other Mayangna youth speaking completely in Miskitu (except for the last turn of the video), showed a pattern of language loss in the Mayangna community, but also of youth discourse that
167 is often influenced by discrimination practices. This consciousness of injustice between the two
Indigenous and ethnic communities (Miskitu and Mayangna) came to the multimedia students through their personal observations of their community. Yet it also came from inter-generational dialogue in the media production process itself. I propose that is why the content of the videos was seen as so powerful and potentially controversial. If the content were not based on true events and simply imaginary – it would not have moved the local audience members to think critically about community problems and solutions.
Using the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis helped highlight the underlying power hierarchies and injustices that cause issues like language shift due to bullying and intimidation. Critical Discourse Analysis has a way of zooming in and zooming out of communication repertoires to really see within the conversation styles which languages are amply represented and which languages are silenced in a given text. So, for instance, with the video “Pamali Painkira” – Jamie’s interpretation of the language in her video was purely
Miskitu, but when I talked with her in our group interview about her use of Kriol and Spanish at home it became apparent that her conversation style in Miskitu borrowed heavily from Spanish and at times from Kriol. Critical Discourse Analysis helped me get at both a youth cultural consciousness and a linguistic consciousness at the same time. Puerto Cabezas, the city where
Jamie is from and grew up, is and arguably always has been a contact zone so language mixing is very common. But, the idea that Jamie saw her mixed language as Miskitu reads deeply into the language ideologies of herself and her family. In Jamie’s household, she was taught to value the
Miskitu language and culture and so she saw herself as an advocate for teaching the Miskitu values (both cultural and linguistic) to future generations in her video “Pamali Painkira.” But, also Jamie witnessed the IPILC director tell the students it was a good idea to use their
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Indigenous language in their video planning texts. Although her own family was ethnically mixed, Jamie stressed the Miskitu-ness of her animated family by generating what she thought was an “all Miskitu script.”
Chapter 4 focused on grasping the significance of the content of the four videos mentioned not only from an outsiders’ perspective but also from within the community.
Community members in the URACCAN forum embraced the lived experiences of the youth themed videos. They also looked to see if they could screen the videos well after the Multimedia course ended online . Community members wanted all of the ethnic communities on the
Caribbean coast highlighted in the youth’s multimedia design work, and they especially liked to see their traditional oral knowledge and dance performance represented in digital form (such as
Baile Liwa Mairin). As mentioned one well respected community member pushed back on the topic of the “La Discriminacion Racial” video, yet other respected community members admired the video for its activism and push toward equality and positive change.
In conclusion, both findings chapters 4 and 5 in this study underscore the vitality of culturally sustaining teaching tools (such as the Bitstrips.com comic) and crucial collaborations with non-profit organizations for linguistic, cultural and technological expertise. Both chapters valorize the school and community experiences of marginalized students such as those of Afro- descendant and Indigenous communities., and the kinds of collaborations and inviting teaching approaches and tools that can help to create a critical consciousness of linguistic and cultural conflicts and solutions that draw heavily on students’ digital and face to face community-based cultural knowledge.
Youth in Latin American contexts have the ability to create awareness of injustices in their communities through social media campaigns featuring youth organizations (Forte, 2002;
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Johnson & Callahan, 2013; Valencia Rincón et al., 2014; Cru, 2014), but youth organizations very seldom produce videos with solutions to these injustices. A digital culturally sustaining pedagogy with aims for positive social change has the ability to bridge students’ awareness of injustices with locally and intergernationally negotiated solutions. Youth practices, perspectives, media products, and the ways that we shaped our in consultation with community members, provide insights into social hierarchies, language conditions that sprout from those social hierarchies, and how youth can form a critical consciousness. Both chapters look at social injustices, whether we look at silencing of language through overt bullying and discriminating practices or through covert silencing of textual modes of communication in classrooms that privilege Spanish texts. Chapters 3 and 4 also look at how to disrupt those social hierarchies and voice silenced languages and discourses.
The multimedia class as a whole also showed the potential to disrupt status quo injustices through culturally sustaining pedagogy formation and real-life videos online that are part of a multilingual digital media movement. Findings further underscored how creating a third space for student and community member inclusivity does not have to stay in the classroom; it can go online and create real change inside and outside of the classroom. The next section focuses on the implications of such findings for educators and researchers who would like to explore similar topics.
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5.2 Implications for Educators and Researchers of Linguistically Diverse Students in Multimedia Classrooms
This section summarizes some key implications of doing critical teacher research for culturally sustaining pedagogy development and critical discourse analysis of students’ multimedia projects for positive social change.
For new educators of linguistically diverse Afro-descendant and Indigenous youth in
Latin American contexts, an understanding of the social hierarchies among ethnic groups and language ideologies related to those social hierarchies in your region is paramount. I went into the Northern Caribbean coast of Nicaragua context with a minimum of three years of socio- historical study relating to Miskitu, Mayangna and Creole communities’ resisting the Nicaraguan central government’s silencing of their languages and worldviews. I also studied the ongoing conflicts between the FSLN and Yatama political parties in the Puerto Cabezas community. I paid critical attention to those conflicts as insights into language ideologies in both the city of
Puerto Cabezas (in particular barrios) as well as in surrounding school contexts like the
Leadership School. Without these valuable insights into power hierarchies and politics new teachers can create pedagogy that is not sensitive to injustices between communities.
Privileging one community’s perspective over another was a real fear that I had with the students’ video “La Discriminación Racial,” a fear that was proven to be justified when the
Channel 5 studios director the older generation claimed that I negatively targeted the Miskitu community in illuminating the historical conflict between the Mayangna and Miskitu communities. My advice in similar circumstances for new teachers in similar environments would be to listen to multiple perspectives on conflicts between communities. Young Miskitu adults in their early to mid-twenties affliated with Channel 5 studios (URACCAN graduates of
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Information Technology), shared a very different view of the message that the “La
Discriminación Racial” video conveyed, they praised the video for its emphasis on the
Mayangna youth point of view and advocated to create more space for similar dialog in the community. Instead of being offended by the content, these young adults really embraced the controversial topic as a place for productive dialog about positive change.
Also, the Leadership School youth who came up with this topic saw evidence of racial discrimination in the form of bullying at their own school, and thus they felt it was relevant to share among their peers. Since the content of the video was fairly controversial and the
Mayangna language used was not permitted for sharing with the general public, we purposely limited the distribution of the “La Discriminación Racial” video; it was never posted online and only shared in the URACCAN University environment. In light of the possibility that social justice work with youth, including digital culturally sustaining pedagogy, may be met with some resistance, I recommend that teachers listen to as many perspectives on conflicts between communities as possible, and teach students about the strong sensitivities of their multimedia content to try to avoid offending community members. Also, teachers should find places that are safe to share controversial content so that productive dialogs can be achieved.
For new educators in similar contexts, it is also important to not impose your worldviews on your students. I did not come up with the topics for the youth’s final video projects. Although,
I saw the potential of infomercial style videos from the CEIMM organization, I let my students brainstorm the topics for their videos using a comic strip assignment with the assistance of
Leadership School administrators and non-profit organization staff. It was clear from the very beginning that the topics of each video were okay with the school and its collaborators. If we had created topics for the videos alone without these collaborations, we could have risked the youth
172 producing offensive content for both the school and greater community. I want to acknowledge transformative journey that I experienced as an educator in this diverse context through my collaboration with local educators. I hope that local educators feel inspired by such collaborations to apply similar pedagogy decisions in their own classrooms supporting youth in developing pluriliteracies including intercultural viewpoints and critical consciousness for positive social change in the local community.
For researchers in similar contexts, the topic of linguistic and cultural consciousness in multimodality studies is very compelling. Because the study of multimodality in marginalized youth contexts is very new, more studies that look at youths’ strategic layering of modes as well as the accessibility of particular modes of communication in their environments would contribute significantly to the literature. Without understanding the power hierarchies among ethnic groups and the language ideologies in Puerto Cabezas, I could never have conceptualized the issue of accessibility of certain modes of communication. This is where I saw the overlap between multimodality studies and critical discourse analysis. Since there were not very many studies that looked at this topic, it was also initially difficult for me to see that the absence of textual modes in certain languages could be attributed to injustices such as language and cultural erasure in schools and communities. I encourage researchers who are interested in multimodality to question the assumption that all modes of communication are accessible to all students.
For researchers with different positionalities working with linguistically and ethnically diverse youth, I also recommend that researchers try to think about participants’ changing identities depending upon context. For instance, I could have looked and Jamie’s video “Pamali
Painkira” from the narrow lens of positive Miskitu language maintenance for future generations of Miskitu youth. After all, that was Jamie’s stated intention for her video. But, when Jamie
173 explained that she spoke Kriol, Miskitu and Spanish at home in our interview, I began to think about her video in different way. I began to think about her mixed identity and how her video expressed a mixed Miskitu and Creole family’s values and linguistic expression. This insight into her family’s worldview illuminated my potential for unintentionally silencing her Creole identity. This is a touchy place for researchers from outside of similar communities because it may be difficult to relate to youth could claim separate identities at different times. My advice would be to carefully pay attention to observations, interviews, and artifacts (such as videos) to see if what youth participant’s say regarding his, her or their identity is consistent. If it is not consistent, listen for changes in context and positionality over time, both on your part and theirs.
This list of implications is not exhaustive, but comes from with my own moments of intense discovery as a teacher-researcher in a hyper linguistically and culturally diverse environment. Topics of race, language, and equal representation of diverse ethnic groups in digital and face to face contexts are not easy for any researcher or educator, but the value of such inquiry and investigation give voice to very real concerns of marginalized youth in similar contexts around the world. In an increasingly connected and divided world, we cannot afford to avoid these controversial dialogs in pursuit of positive social change.
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