Critical collaboration across three transnational literacy autobiographies

Abstract

Historically, language and literacy education has overemphasized the ability to listen, speak, read, and write in one standard language (Campbell, 2005; Clark, 2013) without taking personal, historical, and contextual literacy experiences into account. Undertaking autobiography writing as a critical reflexive practice, this study analyzes three transnational literacy autobiographies or TLAs (Canagarajah, 2020) by each author that center critical engagement with an artifact (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010) to learn how experiences within transnational contact zones have shaped their trajectories as literacies scholars. Merging pluriversality and transnational literacies as conceptual frameworks for analyzing their autobiographies, the authors conduct an interactive elicitation strategy and identify colonialism, emotion, and identity as emergent themes. Finally, the authors suggest using TLAs through critical collaboration to center transnational literacies and pedagogies, develop a transnational ethic of care, and imagine changes in current systems of inequity in literacy education.