A Critical Review of Immigrant Children’s Literacies and Identities from a Deleuzian Perspective

Abstract

This article examines how Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome concept can be applied to educational research about immigrant children’s literacies and identities. It explores the intersection of literacy and identity encountered in sociocultural and poststructural (particularly a Deleuzian perspective) paradigms, reviews studies on immigrant children’s literacy and identity from these two perspectives, and discusses challenges posed by each. The rhizome concept advances a new way of research about immigrant children, who are often marginalized by the dominant school culture. This new way of research emphasizes literacy as a process of becoming, highlighting immigrant children’s multilinguality, creativity, and intersections of multiple literacies across school, home and community and across global and local contexts and the fluidity of their identities. The paper finally calls for an awareness of the complications, connections and multiplicities that literacy research confronts concerning immigrant children and puts forward some pedagogical implications.