Multiple Voices: A Study of Pluriliterate North Atlantic Coast Nicaraguan Youth’s Multimedia Design Practices in Classroom and Online Community Contexts Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Hinton, LaToya Lynn Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 02/10/2021 01:13:26 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 2 3 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. 5 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! 6 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 7 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