Museums as sites of belonging, empowerment, and multimodal literacies for immigrant and racialized families
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21722180 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nidhi Menon (0009-0003-6491-4565, University of New Brunswick, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1094-1112 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Early Childhood Literacy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1468-7984 • E-ISSN: 1741-2919 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/14687984251380649 |
| OpenAlex | W4414269075 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 37 |
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
Biculturalism · Cultural assimilation · Embodied cognition · Immigration · Literacy · Narrative · Transformative learning · Vignette · Art Education and Development · Literacy, Media, and Education · Museums and Cultural Heritage
Literacy
Linguistic Justice
Literacy in the New Media Age
Translanguaging
The Importance of the Act of Reading
(Re)Centering Quality in Early Childhood Education
How the Word Gap Argument Negatively Impacts Young Children of Latinx Immigrants' Conceptualizations of Learning
The Organization of Informal Learning
Righting the Literacy Teacher Education Debt
Autoethnography
The educational work of a National Museum
That really hit me hard’
Teaching in color
Don’t tell me what to do’ encountering colonialism in the academy and pushing back with Indigenous autoethnography
Literacy theories for the digital age
On the Abolition of Belonging as Property
Resisting Positionings of Struggle in “Science of Teaching Reading” Discourse
Contesting Science That Silences
Belonging and the politics of belonging
Troubling Practice
But that's just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy
From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt
The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis
Unsettling race and language
| Highly cited | No |
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