ERIC Number: EJ1057657
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0159-6306
EISSN: N/A
A Critical Discourse Analysis of Gisela's Family Story: A Construal of Deportation, Illegal Immigrants, and Literacy
Abraham, Stephanie
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, v36 n3 p409-423 2015
In this paper, I use critical discourse analysis to analyze a student's narrative about the arrest, incarceration, and deportation of her mother to Mexico. The student, Gisela, was a fifth grader in my classroom during the 2008/2009 school year, and I encouraged the students to collect family stories from their relatives. Gisela created this story, and she wrote and illustrated this with the help of her father, student peers, and me. I draw on Gloria AnzaldĂșa's constructs of nepantla and nepantlera, narrative analysis, and systemic functional linguistics to show how Gisela's construed this story to create a powerful and creative narrative that disrupted autonomous forms of literacy along with the excluding and damaging discourses circulating about immigrants in our community.
Descriptors: Discourse Analysis, Immigrants, Mothers, Foreign Countries, Grade 5, Elementary School Students, Law Enforcement, Personal Narratives, Literacy, Creativity, Critical Literacy, Critical Theory, Mexican Americans, Undocumented Immigrants, Student Attitudes, Family Relationship, Food Processing Occupations
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Grade 5; Intermediate Grades; Middle Schools; Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Georgia; Mexico
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A