Cultural Artifacts: Using Sylvia and Aki for Opening Up Authoring Spaces

Classrooms of teachers who participated in Proyecto BilingA 1/4e, a cohort-based master's degree program, used the historical novel, Sylvia and Aki. The research question was: What spaces for authoring were created when using Sylvia and Aki in the figured worlds of bilingual elementary classrooms? The first theme in relation to ways students authored their identities is evoking collective memory. Specifically, proverbios, dichos, consejos, and translanguaging facilitated the authoring of personal and collective histories. The second theme was the authoring of new identities, specifically ethnic, writer, and historian identities. Through prolonged study in an integrated language arts and social studies curriculum, teachers created spaces where their bilingual students valued their own personal experiences and those of subjugated communities.