This presentation focuses on a China-U.S. transnational adolescent girl, Meiyi, and her family in a three-year critical ethnographic study exploring their transnational and multiliterate practices (1) in multiple geographic locations (e.g., China and the U.S.); (2) across various contexts (e.g., home, school, communities, and digital spaces), and (3) through various modalities (e.g., print text reading/writing, photography, talk, drawing, cooking, movement). In this presentation, using transnational literacies as the theoretical framework, I will showcase a constructed narrative that follows the plot of Meiyi’s poetry. I will intentionally and unapologetically focus on the translingual and transnational multiliteracies of Meiyi and her family that centered on their intergenerational knowledge, lived histories, care, love, and joy, to push against assimilationist ideologies in English Language Arts education. This narrative illuminates how Meiyi and her family’s transnational literacies dynamically and fluidly encompassed their intergenerational wisdom across and in between national borders, contexts, and time. This study offers pathways for literacy/ELA teachers and researchers to become humble listeners of their im/migrant students’ stories to carve out humanizing curricular and pedagogical spaces by weaving together various modes, literacies, and languages.

Tairan Qiu (she/her/她), Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English Language Arts and Literacy Education at the University of Houston. Tairan grew up in Kunming, China, and is a first-generation im/migrant in the United States. As a transnational migrant and Asian woman, Tairan’s research is at the intersection of language, literacy, culture, and criticality, with a focus on the mobility and dynamicity of language and literacy practices of multilingual youth and families in a transnational context of migration. Tairan leverages her multi-sited empirical and methodological scholarship to promote cultural, linguistic, and literacy pluralism and justice in schools, homes, communities, and digital spaces for im/migrant adolescents and families. Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as Written Communication, Journal of Language and Literacy Education, English Journal, Equity & Excellence in Education, Qualitative Inquiry, and International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. She is also a Reading Hall of Fame Emerging Scholar Fellowship Fellow, a Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color (CNV) Fellow for the National Council for Teachers of English, and a Scholar of Color Transitioning into Academic Research Institutions (STAR) Fellow with Literacy Research Association. In addition to her research, Tairan is also committed to working in and with BIPOC communities through community-based service. Funded by the Community Literacies Collaboratory, Tairan is the co-founder of the University of Houston-Project Row Houses Community Literacies Center in Third Ward, Houston, TX. This arts-based Community Literacies Center offers weekly literacy events to BIPOC and multilingual children, youth, and caregivers, where they can discover, understand, and embrace their vibrant literacy practices in community with each other.