A Longitudinal Case Study of a Transnational Teacher's Multiliterate Identity and Pedagogy

This study explores multiliteracies as a pedagogy in teacher education for sustaining cultural and linguistic diversity. Specifically, this study examines how a multiliteracies pedagogy shaped the literacy identity and work of a teacher who grew up in China and moved to the United States to become a secondary English teacher. Using ethnographic methods, this case study inquired into this teacher's conceptualization of literacy and her literacy pedagogy across her first 4 years living in the United States, as she matriculated into a teacher education program, engaged in learning about multiliteracies, and became a teacher in U.S. schools. Data sources included coursework artifacts during her preservice teacher education program, a digital story she created, email communications, and semi‐structured interviews. Key findings highlight how a multiliteracies framework can support multilingual individuals' identification as readers and writers, sustain family literacies, and affirm multilingualism and transnationalism as assets in literacy learning and teaching. This telling case extends theories of multiliteracies and teacher education through its discussion of what literacy research and education can learn from the multiliterate lives and pedagogy of transnational teachers of color, including how transnational literacy practices within digital composing can create new meanings comprised of multiple time‐frames, languages, and geographies. Implications of this study include disrupting cultural and linguistic assimilation within literacy teacher professionalization, transforming monolingual and monomodal ideologies in English Language Arts education, and uplifting the literate identities of not only multilingual and transnational students, but also transnational teachers of color.