Homes as Transnational and Translingual Sites: Teacher Candidates Traversing Borders, Languages, and Cultures with Families from Refugee Backgrounds Through Shared Reading Sessions

In an increasingly transnational society, it is essential for teacher candidates to engage with refugee-background families from culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Attending to the ways in which multilingual children, youth, and families from refugee backgrounds read and respond to picturebooks, the multimodal and translingual literacy practices that take place in homes and among families, as well as the incorporation of community-based experiences for teacher candidates, the following question guides this qualitative multiple case study: In the homes of five families from refugee backgrounds, in what ways do shared reading sessions between teacher candidates and children, youth, and caregivers foster reciprocal learning, build caring relationships, and honor linguistic and cultural identities? In creating and sustaining relationships of care and dignity, children, youth, their adult caregivers, and teacher candidates extended and reinvigorated languages, cultures, and stories. Specifically, these findings highlight themes of traversing borders, languages, and cultures, which were reflected through dialogic responses to and interactions with picturebooks, as well as drawings that children, youth, their adult caregivers, and teacher candidates produced.