“Like a piece of wood”: The potential of multimodal translingual storytelling for restoration and peace

Abstract

Faced with linguicism, racism, and xenophobia aggravated by COVID‐19 and political tensions in recent years, multilingual international students, especially those of Asian descent, are in urgent need of engaging in healing practices for meaningful identity expression, restoration, and peace. Translingualism is a justice‐oriented literacy practice that disrupts the boundaries of named languages and allows communicators to draw upon all resources in their linguistic repertoires. Storytelling, as a powerful research method and a pedagogical tool, offers a unique opportunity to encourage multilingual students' translingual meaning making for healing. This qualitative case study examined how multimodal translingual storytelling functioned as a form of restoration and peace for a first‐semester Chinese student pursuing her graduate degree in English at a private university in the United States. The findings indicate that when offered opportunities to reflect on her cultural and linguistic identities, the participant was likely to detach deficit self‐perceptions as an “English language learner” and embrace her differences as a strength, which benefited her first‐semester language and academic experiences. This study calls for pedagogical strategies and curriculum design that open up humanizing spaces for culturally and racially minoritized multilingual students by acknowledging, valuing, and inviting their whole linguistic repertories through multimodal, translingual storytelling.