the shaping of these sceneries and more particularly the linguistic landscapes which they illustrate, are contributed by a large variety of actors…These actors do not necessarily act harmoniously, nay even coherently but, on the other hand, whatever the resulting chaotic character of linguistic landscape, the picture that it comes to compose and which is familiar reality to many is most often perceived by passers-by as one structured space. We mean here a gestalt made of physical objects …and above all, written words that make up their markers. These objects, indeed, are all toppled with linguistic elements indicative of what they stand for. (Ben-Rafael et al. 8)
There are several striking patterns in the multilingual literacy narratives we have collected for this exhibit in terms of how students respond to the act of creating print and multimodal literacy narratives, how they position themselves in relation to language politics and schooling within their literacy narratives, and how they align their language and composing resources to fit the situation and the expectations of the DALN. As you move through our exhibit, we invite you to notice, as we did, the following patterns or landmarks in the multilingual literacy landscape: