A Place to Call Home: Stories of a Young Refugee-Background Child Navigating Classroom, Marginal, and Neighbourhood Places

This article explores the experiences of Anh, a seven-year-old refugee-background child, focusing on his meaning-making and identities in place. Place-based literacies highlight how location supports children in revealing and reimagining their worlds. From a Multiliteracies perspective, I highlight places as texts—spatial, material, visual, and affective, imbued with ideologies and offering meaning through relational experiences.Using narrative inquiry, I share Anh’s stories—moving from small classroom places like his desk and the Reading Nook; to the playground and the Resource Room; to his home and neighborhood—showcasing how places reflected his ways of knowing and being. As he traverses each place, I discuss that he became increasingly more creative in his language and literacy practices, incorporated his communicative repertoires, and created belonging for himself.Anh’s journeying is interpreted as: (1) Navigating White ways of listening within classroom places; (2) Creating new worlds in marginal places; and (3) Being and becoming at home. Pedagogical implications focus on listening for brilliance as young refugee-background children navigate normative school places and creating multiliterate relational practices to support situated meaning-making.