Refugee background youth face formidable challenges of social and educational integration especially because rapid development of English is required to catch up with their same-age peers and graduate from high school. Commonly, youth from refugee backgrounds meet the criteria for all three groups of students (English learners, low SES background, and socially marginalized) at risk of academic underachievement (Cummins, 2014), particularly, those with limited or interrupted formal schooling. Despite calls for essential changes in literacies pedagogies to include multiliteracies (multilingual and multimodal) (e.g., Cope & Kalantzis, 2009), many refugee background youth still learn in classrooms that emphasize monolingual, print-based pedagogies (Cummins, 2014), founded on standard language and literacy ideologies. These practices severely restrict refugee background learners’ access to intellectually challenging content knowledge and their capacity to represent and communicate their rich background experiences. Recently, digital storytelling, the composition of a 2-4 minute digital film related to personal experiences, has shown promise for: 1) increasing refugee background learners’ language competency, facility with visual media, and academic confidence (Emert, 2013); and 2) extending possibilities to communicate complex aspects of personal experiences. Our study reports on an ethnographic case study using digital storytelling with refugee background youth in a secondary school. It addressed the ways in which digital storytelling can leverage refugee background learners’ communicative resources to make visible their literacy strengths and challenges, and affirm their identities. We draw from socio-cultural perspectives, funds of knowledge, multiliteracies, and translanguaging, and engage in a thematic analysis of field notes, observations, interviews, student artifacts, and the digital stories to report on four interrelated themes: complex critical thinking, 21st century literacy competencies, language and literacy challenges, and identity affirmation. Implications for pedagogic possibility for refugee background youth realizing literacies in and across geopolitical, social, emotional, and semiotic borders, in the institutional setting of schooling, are discussed.
