Navigating and Responding to Raciolinguistic Ideologies: Refugee and Immigrant Students' Literacy Practices Across Contexts Sumyat Thu A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philsophy University of Washington 2020 Reading Committee: Anis Bawarshi, Chair Nancy Bou Ayash Suhanthie Motha Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English © Copyright 2020 Sumyat Thu University of Washington Abstract Navigating and Responding to Raciolinguistic Ideologies: Refugee and Immigrant Students' Literacy Practices Across Contexts Sumyat Thu Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Anis Bawarshi Department of English Drawing on critical race theory scholarship and literacy studies with a focus on translingual and transnational, this dissertation argues that the dominant ideology of literacy needs to be understood at the intersections of language and race. In an antiracist and public scholarship framework, this study offers a portrait of literacy practices across contexts by four college students from the diasporic Burmese community in Duwamish (Greater Seattle). Through interview conversations, self-talk reflections, writing samples across contexts, and counterstory artifacts produced for a community exhibit at a local Asian Pacific American museum, this study examines how multilingual students of color practice literacy as they move across home, school, work, community, and digital spaces in different relationships to the White, monolingual English ideology. The findings present that the ways participant collaborators (the term used for students in this study) mentally and socio-emotionally navigate the White monolingual English ideology is entangled with their metacognitive awareness of and relationship to their intersectional identities, of which the most salient are transnational refugee and immigrant identity, racial identity construct, and multilingual college student identity. In experiencing and engaging specifically with the dominant ideology of literacy, participant collaborators show a range of different metacognitive relationships from compliance and internationalization to recognizing raciolinguistic oppression as is and engaging in conscious resistance of the stock stories of the ideology. Participant collaborators hold these multiple competing critical reflections, stock stories and assumptions, ways of knowing and processing as part of their literacy metacognition. This study offers implications for examining the intersections of race, language, and literacy as well as for writing and literacy pedagogy in order to make our pedagogical efforts be more antiracist and translingual. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Literacy as Mediated by White, Monolingual English Ideology……………………...1 Chapter 2: Methodology of Antiracist and Public Scholarship………………………………….35 Chapter 3: Profile Stories of Participant Collaborators………………………………………….79 Chapter 4: Ways of Knowing: Navigating the White Monolingual English Ideology………......96 Chapter 5: Translingual and Culturally Sustaining Literacy Practices Across Contexts……….150 Chapter 6: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….....198 References………………………………………………………………………………………219 Appendix 1: Recruiting participant collaborators………………………………………………238 Appendix 2: Consent Form……………………………………………………………………..239 Appendix 3: Memo for Participant Collaborators……………………………………………...241 Appendix 4: Research Project Timeline………………………………………………………..242 Appendix 5: Interview Topics/Questions—A General Guide………………………………….243 Appendix 6: Oral History Interview Waiver (Permission) …………………………………….246 Appendix 7: Self-Talk Reflection Prompts……………………………………………………..247 Appendix 8: Counterstory Artifact Brainstorming Prompt…………………………………….248 Appendix 9: Zadie’s Comic Sketch: “Counterstory of Language Identity” …………………...249 Appendix 10: Olive’s Photo Essay: “Finding Balance: A week in the life of a first-generation college student” ………………………………………………………………………………...250 Appendix 11: La Meh’s poem: “To the Lost Ones” …………………………………………...253 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Primarily, I would like to thank the four students who worked with me in this study— thank you for spending your valuable time with me and sharing your literacy stories and voices for both academic and public audiences through the dissertation and the community exhibit. You all have deeply enriched my understanding of literacy, and it has been an honor to build relationships with you and get to know you better as individuals with distinct life trajectories and aspirations. This dissertation project makes me appreciate our intersectional commonalities and differences even more as we carry the stories of our ancestors and create new stories for ourselves and our intergenerational community in the diaspora. I also would like to thank the leaders and members of Northwest Communities of Burma (NWCB) organization for creating community spaces and introducing me to the larger Burmese community ever since I arrived to Duwamish (Seattle) in 2014. I especially thank my dissertation chair and advisor, Anis Bawarshi, for being my advisor and mentor for both my dissertation project and M.A. thesis! You have always steadily supported me, addressed my concerns at every step of the way, and given encouragement and inspiration whenever I needed whether I realized it or not in those moments of ebbs and flows during the dissertation journey. The way you approach scholarship with clarity, precision, and a humble curiosity of learning will always serve as guidance for me in my future endeavors. Many, many wholehearted thanks to Suhanthie Motha, one of my advising committee members and my mentor for life in graduate school for going above and beyond in your mentorship and generosity to really see me and hear me in making sense of my experiences as a transnational and multilingual woman of color in academia. The way you value relationships, relational work, and our humanness before the scholarship and professionalism has taught me to not lose sight of why we are here in the first place and how much our day-to-day life can feel nourishing and in the spirit of community if we see each other in our full, complex dimensions beyond the categories of teachers, students, and colleagues. I also would like to thank Nancy Bou Ayash, one of my advising committee members, for teaching me about translingual scholarship ever since the very first class I took when I began graduate school. Thanks also to Leilani Nishime, my GSR and advisor for the certificate of public scholarship program, for the opportunity to learn from you and work with you in thinking through what public scholarship means to me. Thanks to Juan Guerra who stepped in on behalf of Anis for my dissertation defense—thank you for supporting me as my entrance advisor when I started grad school. Your presence at my defense makes it a full circle for me as a complete celebration at the end. Many thanks to Candice Rai with whom I had a great opportunity to learn from and work together in the Expository Writing Program. My gratitude for your many forms of support beyond the capacity that we have known each other, Candice. Thanks also to Ali Dahmer for scheduling the details and hosting my dissertation defense on Zoom—your support and excellent program management is so appreciated. Although I felt diminished about a Zoom defense at first, it turned out to be a great gathering with advisors, friends, and family—thank you for sharing that moment with me. I am also very appreciative of the consistent support and camaraderie of my graduate school friends, colleagues, and mentors, especially Holly Shelton, Zhenzhen He-Weatherford, Mandy Macklin, Alison Cardinal, Carrie Matthews, LaShawnDa Pittman, Katie Malcolm, Ahmad Alharthi, TJ Walker, and Langgang friends. Thanks to everyone who wrote with me in writing groups, in-person and virtual--I’ll carry the memories of supporting one another and drawing strength from each other in various writing groups that I joined throughout the dissertation writing process. Thanks also to my friends and community outside of the grad school bubble and especially to Laura Ahn for attentively listening to me and offering insightful conversations to help me see the full extent and potentials of who I am and could be. Without the love and support of my family members, I would not have been able to pursue a PhD education and complete this dissertation as a first-generation graduate student. Many thanks to my parents, U Myo Khin and Daw Win Win Myint, for believing in me and supporting my pursuit of dreams. Heartfelt thanks to my loving sisters—Kyi Aye Mya, Kyi Khine, and Kyi Than Swe—your unwavering love and sisterhood makes me stronger and a better person. There’s so much that I can’t thank you enough for. Thanks also to my partner, Oscar Garcia-Telles, for being my family in the U.S., making sure I laugh when I’m stressed out, and for your care and encouragement whenever I needed. Love to you all. DEDICATION ဤစာတမ်းကို ြမန်မာြပည်မှနိုင်ငံေရးဒု ကခသည်များ၊ နို င်ငံေရးစီးပွားေရးအေြကာင်းများေြကာင့် အြခားနိုင်ငံများသို့ ေရွ ့ေြပာင်းေနထိုင်သူ များ၏ အေတွ ့အြကံ ပုံြပင်များအတွက် ရ ည ်ရ ွ ယ်ပါသည်။ Chapter 1 Literacy as Mediated by White, Monolingual English Ideology To my question of what it means to be a multilingual person in the U.S., Olive, one of my participant collaborators1, reflects: I think being a multilingual I’m more aware of people of color and their experiences because I know I’m from a refugee background and I speak languages besides English. I think it makes me more sensitive and more accepting. If I hear about another minority group going through a problem, because I speak another language and also, I’m from a minority background, I feel like I understand people’s struggles better. To Olive, being a multilingual in the U.S. is rooted in her migration history to the country, her identity of having been a refugee, and the “languages besides English” that she brought to her new life in the U.S. After living in a refugee camp on the border of Burma and Thailand for several years, Olive’s family, a group of Karen ethnic minorities of Burma, was able to move and settle in the U.S. when Olive was 9 years old. She recounts her first experience of going to school in the U.S.