ABSTRACT
Building on, and extending the research on urban immigrant youths’ linguistic resources and communicative repertoires, this chapter focuses on a less-discussed resource that immigrant youth bring to multiple contexts: their epistemic privilege. The chapter describes the ways in which the focal youth’s epistemic privilege was not always evident in his school writing. Constrained by notions of “appropriate” form and correctness, Jordan, the focal youth, struggled to generate his descriptions of, and knowledge about the world. However, youth like Jordan who struggle with academic writing do not need remediation in their thinking or a study skills approach. The chapter argues for a resource approach to academic literacies that leverages immigrant youths’ epistemic privilege, and puts at its center the exploration of epistemologies.
