An Emerging Methodology (continued)
And Cornelia, at the very outset of her narrative, tells us, “I think I have a somewhat unusual literacy narrative or path to literacy than a lot of people do because when I was growing up before I went to school my parents were immigrants and did not speak English.” She positions herself early on as a monolingual speaker of Croatian before she went to school. Like Debleena, she also writes of family, in this case her mother and older sister, but her narrative invariably returns to her singular experiences with her Croatian picture books. All three women, regardless of the choice of their reporting tools, present their literacy narratives as unique to themselves even as Lisa suggests a parallel between her language struggles and those of her Korean students. But the audience learns nothing of the families of the Korean students and the roles they may have played in their literacy acquisition, the place(s) they inhabit in the United States, or of how they and their narratives might underscore their special positions in the world as language and literacy learners. Our emphasis on Bamberg’s (1997) narrative positioning suggests a productive line of inquiry for transnational narratives and others in the DALN, focusing on the narrator’s position within and between the cultures of which she is a part.
But we have also found ourselves needing additional questions that relate to the actual physical context that these women remember clearly and connect to their early literacy experiences. As Reynolds (2004) and Soja (1994) implicitly suggest, for a more insightful analysis we need to add to Bamberg’s concerns the relations that include the places and spaces that ultimately contribute to a narrator’s understanding of his or her literate activity (Prior, 1998). We also need to know more about the tools of reportage, and we have attempted this description in A Transnational Exhibit: A Sampling. Debleena, Cornelia, and Lisa all chose individually an array of tools (e.g., handwriting, print, still images, video, and voice) through which to convey their literacy narratives. And the language or languages one adopts for the telling of the narrative also come into play. Although all three women in our exhibit primarily chose English, Debleena does present us with an image of the Sandhali alphabet spoken by the children that surround her in the black and white photo, and Lisa shows us the Dutch children’s book Jip en Jannèke while also speaking a bit of what she calls her heavily accented “kinderlijke” Dutch.