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Within the context of forced migration, literacy can facilitate liberation and participation, though literacy often serves instead to exclude. Given the ongoing global refugee crisis, literacy researchers must work toward understanding how literacy shapes the livelihoods of those impacted by forced migration. The purpose of this study was to interrogate the ways in which certain literacies were valued or disregarded in the pursuit of a college degree and to uncover the ways that refugee-background students navigated these limitations. Using a multiple case study, this research explored the experiences of six students from refugee backgrounds as they navigated the literacy expectations of the college program. This chapter highlights two themes – our way versus their way and playing the game – that highlight the ways that participants pushed against the literacy constraints that they perceived in the program.

To deconstruct colonizing ideologies and expand our understanding of global meaning making (Tierney, 2018) in this chapter, we describe a qualitative study that explored how a cohort of teacher candidates (TCs) from a large Southwestern university in the United States made sense of a community mapping project as part of their international service-learning program in rural South Africa. The TCs observed, collected, and reflected on various literacy activities and artifacts. Findings suggest that the TCs grappled with colonizing perspectives and practices specifically related to language, literacy, and cultural hegemony. They identified and struggled with the power and privilege they noticed bolstering Western literacies and the English language in the local community to the extent that it overshadowed local languages and local cultural norms. They questioned the historically situated use of certain spellings in local texts and how such spellings are connected to Apartheid policies still influencing this rural community. By engaging in the community mapping project, the TCs also recognized that literacy is socially informed and is more than just reading and writing but employs a range of semiotic tools such as images, movement, and music. The transformative process of participating in the community mapping project helped TCs develop a deeper understanding of the relationships between community and school literacies and grapple with the broader impact of Western epistemologies in the Global South.