Layers of Meaning: Co-Designing with Bilingual Youth to Unearth their Reading Practices

This paper examines migration and belonging through the lens of heritage language and young people's engagement with reading for pleasure. We argue that a better understanding of multilingual youths' engagement with reading can help libraries devise better ways of supporting their intertwined identities as members of linguistic, cultural, and reading communities. This study presents the theoretical framework and research design for an ongoing study of Canadian youth in Ontario (aged between 13-18, and members of the French official language minority community) along with their engagement with reading (not limited to print texts and books alone). A co-design approach was selected to engage youth in exploring their relationship to reading, identity, and libraries. Data collection is currently underway and involves pre- and post-surveys of youth, workshop materials and fieldnotes, a reading diary activity, and interviews with school and public librarians. An interpretive lens will be essential to making sense of the rich data stemming from a range of artifacts collected and analyzed.