The Cafeteria as Contact Zone: Developing A Multicultural Perspective Through Multilingual and Multimodal Literacies

Abstract

This article describes the inaugural year of a cross‐cultural after‐school program that used a problem‐solving, project‐based pedagogy to promote meaningful interactions between immigrant middle school students and their urban, low‐income peers. The program relied on the students' local knowledge as they worked together to create social maps of their school and a multilingual video against gossip. These collaborations used local literacies to promote a multicultural perspective.

The Experiences Entailed by the Intersectionality of Korean (Im)migrant Mothers’ Multi-identities in Layered Contact Zones of the United States

“…While the concept of contact zones was originally applied to broad macro-level social configurations, in social science and educational research the concept is largely applied to diverse micro-level school settings including classrooms (Canagarajah, 1997;Harris, 1995;Malsbary, 2014;West (2012), basic writing tutorials (Baker, 2006), school cafeteria (Kelly, 2012), a global university (Kenway & Bullen, 2003), community college ESL (Curry, 2001), and freshman composition courses (Lu, 1994). On the other hand, both Miller (1994) and Beauvais (1996) criticized Pratt for not demonstrating how the concept of contact zone could be applied in English language teaching and learning but tried to fill the gap.…”

Moving Beyond Data Transcription

“…Kelly's (2012) article, “The cafeteria as contact zone: Developing a multicultural perspective through multilingual and multimodal literacies” describes PODER-YES, a cross-cultural after-school program, that drew upon immigrant and urban middle school students’ local literacies to promote a multicultural perspective of appreciation and collaboration among diverse peers. The goal of the program was to cultivate meaningful interactions between students as they worked collaboratively to utilize funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzales, 1992) regarding the social milieu of the school.…”

“…“From Bad to Worse: The Rumor Cycle,” a multilingual video set in different spaces in the school addressed the social issue of gossip. Kelly's (2012) video analysis focused on a scene that occurred within the cafeteria, that [author] presented as a “contact zone” a space where different cultural groups come into contact. (See From Bad to Worse: The Rumor Cycle http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1002/JAAL.00143/asset/supinfo/jaal143-sup-0003-VideoS3.mpg?v=1&s=0aa850c3c42d8392ec882db6b89a44f174276781.…”

“…(pp. 307–308) Kelly's (2012) use of video as a data collection, analysis, and publication tool enriches criteria for rigor through depicting participants’ voices in multimodal ways that would not be possible if the dialogue in the video had been transcribed alone. Kelly's statement, “When transformed from page to screen these segments are linked visually by the camera tracking the maligned student's progress across the cafeteria,” demonstrates that in representing the visual elements of the issue of gossip, the learning experience is transmediated (Siegel, 1995) for participants and understood in a deeper, more rigorous way for both the researcher and readers of the article.…”

Building on Content, Bridging Literacies, and Broadening Community

“…As in Volume 56, feature articles will be accompanied by a podcast interview with the article's author(s), made available when the table of contents for each issue is posted online. We also encourage writers to include video clips with their articles to illustrate and extend their data (e.g., Fisher & Lapp, ; Kelly, ).…”