Review of “What Immigrant Students Can Teach Us About New Media Literacy”

             One of my students this semester just immigrated from China last year and though her grammatical writing does not always adhere to English conventions, she diligently translates words from Chinese to English on her iPad everyday.  I find it endearing that she is catching up so quickly to her English-fluent peers, and I’m also becoming more accustomed to her usage of the iPad in class (which I have never seen her use for any other purpose).  For her, technology has been an enormous asset in this catching-up process.  With this said, I think that “transnational digital practices” and the ways in which we can integrate them into culturally responsive pedagogy is largely contingent upon the kind of immigrants we have in our classroom.  Depending on their originating country, duration that they have lived in the U.S., and the skill level of their native English-speaking peers – our educational practices would be tailored differently.  As echoed by some of my peers, the scope of Lam’s piece did not acknowledge much of this heterogeneity. 
             Lam’s transnational framing of curriculum topics (such as global economies and immigration) and the way that her students facilitated a media production of immigration policy sounds like an ideal integration of technology and pedagogy intended to “enhance language and literacy development.”  I believe that with careful curricular scaffolding and available computers, this seems feasible, however, when I envision immigrant students, I think of the one in my current class and her struggle with writing English.  I am more interested in how we can leverage technology to help immigrant students and other ELL learners with basic writing and reading fluency, not to say that there isn’t value in leveraging their multi-cultural and linguistic knowledge’s for larger-scale multimedia projects.
             For example, when I discussed lesson plans with my CT and how I’d implement the students’ literary analysis essay (creating a thesis statement, developing essay structure, etc), she advised that I give more explicit instruction and models to better aid the aforementioned student, and a few other students in my class who have IEP’s.  I wonder if there are any existing transnational digital tools that these students could refer to, that could supplement the instruction that I give the rest of the class.
             I know that the focus of our discussion this week will concern diversity and ELLs overall, but since Lam’s focal student(s) were speaking to the Chinese experience, I wanted to point us to Lisa Lowe’s chapter on “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian-American Differences.”  Lowe's theory doesn’t connect to technology directly but can help us think about some of the differences and nuances that I mentioned earlier.