Museums as sites of belonging, empowerment, and multimodal literacies for immigrant and racialized families

This paper explores how museums can serve as transformative spaces for early childhood literacy, identity formation, and belonging, particularly for racialized immigrant children. Moving beyond print-centric definitions of literacy, it positions museums as multimodal environments where young learners engage with language, sound, image, and movement to make meaning. Drawing on a personal vignette of visiting the Royal Ontario Museum with my children, I illustrate how these encounters become acts of literacy, cultural affirmation, and identity negotiation. For children navigating multiple languages and cultures, museums offer spaces of imaginative play and embodied learning that resist deficit narratives and assimilationist expectations. Through a social justice lens, this paper frames museums as pedagogical counterspaces that center the cultural and linguistic assets of marginalized communities. It highlights the power of everyday museum interactions to support intergenerational connection, affirm cultural identities, and foster agency. By recognizing racialized immigrant children as active meaning-makers and co-creators of knowledge, museums can evolve into relational spaces that reflect and respond to the diverse communities they serve. This work calls for a reimagining of early childhood literacy education, one that honors the lived experiences, cultural wealth, and epistemologies of racialized immigrant families.