Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning and Love by M.F. Orellana (review)

In her description of an after-school program called the B-Club, Orellana focuses our attention on how educational settings can be spaces where children and adults with diverse cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic identities learn together in the absence of core standards, published curriculum or accountability measures. In her brief, powerful narrative, Orellana offers insights into how educators can create “contact zones” that serve as spaces where diverse languages and cultures are celebrated and where learning with and about others has a critical role in language and literacy development.

As a trained ethnographer, Orellana weaves together her personal story and those of the participants of the B-Club to narrate what occurs in a multi-age after-school program where children from a community of immigrants in central Los Angeles, California, and undergraduate students from a local university form a learning community where they “play with linguistic and cultural border crossings.”

In chapter 1, Orellana provides an overview that positions her study of the B-Club in social, cultural, and political contexts, and establishes her lenses as an ethnographer and community activist. Chapters 2 through 4 describe the program’s design and the sociocultural learning theories that guide it. Orellana uses ethnography as both a pedagogical tool and a source of research data. As participants in the diverse B-Club community, undergraduate students share notes of their experiences to explore assumptions about the roles of adults and children in learning, and about culture and language. In chapter 4, Orellana introduces her conception of “love” in the educational context, emphasizing the importance of fostering “deep human” relationships and arguing that people learn in spaces where they recognize that others care about their learning. In a later chapter (chapter 7) she describes particular literacy routines that promoted learning and love.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on how globalization and transnationalism shape B-Club members’ perspectives on the world. Stories of the transnational lives of some of the immigrant children attending the B-Club are shared, as are descriptions of the transnational community in which they live. Contrasting perspectives of the community by children and undergraduates are presented to illustrate the challenge of seeing a community in all of its complexity.

Chapters 8, 9, and 10 offer descriptions of constructs that are central to the work explored in this issue: transculturation, translanguaging, and transliteracies. Building upon theories of transculturality and comparative knowing, in chapter 8 Orellana describes how participation in the B-Club presented participants with opportunities to develop transcultural skills “to see things from others’ perspectives” (p. 91) and to use this knowledge to make decisions about how to interact with others. The diversity of cultures in the B-Club community and the collaborative nature of the learning in the B-Club positioned children to actively “broker” or “mediate” their linguistic and cultural knowledge, which Orellana notes is critical for cultivating transcultural dispositions.

In chapter 9, Orellana turns to the construct of translanguaging, which in recent years has gained the attention of bilingual educators and scholars and resulted in publications describing the theory behind it (e.g., García & Wei, 2014) and how it looks in practice (e.g., Velasco & García, 2014). Orellana adopts García’s (2009) definition of translanguaging as discourse practices that bilingual or multilingual individuals draw upon depending on need and circumstances. In the multilingual context of the B-Club, adults and children translanguage as a “normal” form of communication. Orellana extends the definition of translanguaging to include “collective translanguaging,” where group communication is shaped by language choices of individuals with differing resources within their “linguistic toolkit.” Examples of linguistic flexibility and accommodation are provided to illustrate how children negotiate language differences in the translingual space of the B-Club. To demonstrate the connections between translanguaging and transliteracies, Orellana dedicates chapter 10 to descriptions of participants’ interactions with multilingual texts.

Orellana’s examples of transcultural and translanguaging practice are helpful for educators working in multilingual contexts...