Peggy Semingson

Poets, Artists, and Storytellers: Bilingual, Bicultural, and Transnational Narratives

Peggy Semingson is an assistant professor of Literacy Studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Arlington. Her work focuses on bilingual learners as well as digital pedagogies. She previously taught bilingual and ESL learners in California and Texas for eight years. this letter synthesizes and highlights bilingual and multilingual children’s books by U.S. authors that focus on the latin-american immigrant experience. trends in picture books by bilingual and multilingual children’s authors in the United States over the past two decades focus on the authors’ hybrid identities, often drawing upon their own lives in terms of transnationalbicultural-multicultural experiences that represent the authors’ own complex cultural and linguistic heritage. Often these texts, evoking the nuances of the settings and characters who inhabit cultural and linguistic borderlands, are written by authors who while writing prose or poetry are also author-illustrators or whose books represent vivid narrative depictions of bicultural latino lives. The books discussed here represent the continua of the types of experiences that capture the author’s own lived experience. One example is carmen lomas Garza, a native texan from kingsville, who portrays stories that resonate broad themes through art and words both In My Family / En Mi Familia and Family Pictures / Cuadros de Familia. Other authors include Juna Felipe Herrera, Francisco Jiménez, and tomas Rivera. The texts discussed in this letter are primarily what are known as parallel texts, or texts that present narrative or poems in both languages. In this case, english is presented (typically first) juxtaposed with a Spanish translation, often done by the author as translator reflecting her or his own pride in the native tongue. Most significantly, these texts lend themselves well to analysis of social and historical issues and themes of racism, linguistic isolation, family, and hope. Bilingual and multilingual texts are especially relevant with changing demographics in the United States and internationally; they offer insight into those not from the author’s background. by PEGGY SEMINGSoN Po et s, A rt is ts , a nd S to ry -

Social scholarship and the networked scholar: researching, reading, and writing the web

Abstract What does it mean to be a digital/social scholar today? What does it take to be a networked scholar? What complicating and mitigating factors are emerging today for digital and networked scholarship? Those are some of the questions that a group of digitally connected “obnoxious academics” (the Authors) have been wrestling with, first individually and now as a collective, for several years now. The four authors, all literacy teacher educators and former schoolteachers, engaged with social media, new/digital literacies and the new calls for digital scholarship, share their reflections situated in three distinct regions of the United States and Colombia (the Global South). The Authors discuss conceptual and practical considerations and cautionary tales for researchers, students, and practitioners willing to engage in their own digital turns. The goal of this conversation-turned-article is to involve others in a larger dialog about the kind of global and digitally connected networks we need to create in order to develop stronger forms of digital scholarship that truly address the questions and research challenges in contemporary times.