Social Semiotics, Education, and Identity: Creating Trajectories for Youth at Schools to Demonstrate Knowledge and Identities as Language Users

Abstract

This dissertation is comprised of three teacher-researcher studies carried out with the intention of showing teachers how to move beyond the monolingual paradigm to build upon linguistic and cultural diversity in their everyday practice. The monolingual paradigm is linked to ideologies regarding proficiency in English as the principle means of academic success and citizenship. These studies challenge this traditional way of viewing education by treating learning "as an emerging property of whole persons' legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice" (Lave, 1991, p. 63), whether these are interest-based communities of practice beyond the classroom or bilingual communities of practice within the classroom. In order to recognize and explain this learning and inform teaching practices, I adopt a social semiotic approach in order to explore how meaning is constructed through language, and also through social interactions with all modern aspects of society, including gesture, image, performance, and music (Kress, 2012; van Leeuwen, 2005). I explore how these interactions allow youth to create diverse identities, beyond immigrant, refugee, limited English proficient, learner, and "other", in three educational arenas: 1) Outside of the classroom in interest-based communities of practice at school, 2) in a secondary dual-language content classroom, and 3) online in an educational transnational telecollaboration project. In all three studies I triangulate quantitative data of student participation and academic achievement with qualitative participant narratives and teacher-researcher observations. What results is insight into the impact of creating multimodal trajectories for youth to perform identities and knowledge as language users in schools, where historically messages of youth's social identities are ascribed in much more constricting ways (Harklau, 2003). Viewing these youth as language users, rather than learners, sends a message to both educators and youth that in education, identity formation trumps skills development, and this can lead to higher expectations, more engaging learning, and opportunities for youth to question race-language educational legacies (Malsbary, 2014; Wenger, 1998).