"Figuring" Bidirectional Home and School Connections Along the Biliteracy Continuum

• In Event: The Figured World of Bilingual Education: Proyecto Bilingüe as Context for Teacher Self-Authoring

Abstract

Objective: Dworin’s (2003) bidirectional theory of bilingual pedagogy and Hornberger’s (2003) theoretical construct of the continua of biliteracy are taken up to illustrate how teachers centered home and school bidirectional flows in the figured world of their classrooms.

Theoretical Framework: Hornberger (2003) theorized in the continua of biliteracy, that production of language, written communication, and the dominant language are on the privileged end of the continua and receptive language, oral communication, and the heritage language are at the less privileged end. A strategy used by Proyecto Bilingüe teachers is to draw from both ends of the continua in order to maintain bidirectionality between the home language and culture and the school-based language and culture. These teachers acknowledge the importance of creating a space for students’ self-authoring (Holland, et al., 1998) of their bilingual identities and also hypothesize that students’ biliteracy success is directly related to inclusion of parents’ knowledge, language, culture, and experiences.

Methods and Data Sources: Qualitative inquiry of longitudinal data (2008-2013) was used to understand the bidirectional flows from students’ homes to school. The sampling of teachers in the inquiry project were participants in the figured world of Proyecto Bilingüe at Central University and agreed to have their elementary school pedagogical practices documented. The corpus of data from the university included written artifacts, classroom and online discussions, and ethnographic interviews. The corpus of data from the elementary school classrooms included audio/video recordings, fieldnotes from classroom observations, teacher interviews, transcriptions, and artifacts collected from students and parents. A constant comparative analysis method (Hatch, 2002) and focused coding (Saldaña, 2009) were used in coding and establishing themes across the diverse data set. These methods yielded thick description (Geertz, 1973; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) of the bidirectional practices. The majority of the teachers worked in schools where demographics highlight the resegregation of schools (Orfield & Luce, 2013).

Findings: The Proyecto Bilingüe teachers constantly reflected on ways spaces for authoring could be fostered. These authoring spaces facilitated students utilization of the significant funds of knowledge that were their inheritance and set the stage for their positive self-authoring of bilingual identities in elementary classrooms. Translanguaging was a significant practice for building a bridge between the funds of knowledge at home and the language arts, social studies and science curricula. Translanguaging consisted of flexible language boundaries (Velasco & García, 2014) where teachers, students and parents spoke freely, listened, translated and responded using all available linguistic resources. The types of linguistic and cultural connections made from home to school and vice versa illustrated ways the figured world in the bilingual classroom can overlap with the figured worlds of homes and communities.

Significance: If teachers constantly reflect on the ways spaces for authoring can be fostered for parents and their emergent bilingual children then students can effectively utilize the significant funds of knowledge from home and community for becoming biliterate. Translanguaging practices and authoring spaces can serve to elevate the status of bilingual education, bilingual teachers, bilingual learners, and the Spanish language.

Authors

• Maria E. Franquiz, University of Utah

• María G Leija, Oregon State University