Balancing Windows and Mirrors: Translanguaging in a Linguistically Diverse Classroom

• In Event: 68.037 - Translanguaging With Multilingual Students: Learning From Classroom Moments

Abstract

In the most ethnically and linguistically diverse borough of New York City is a 5th grade classroom where English, Spanish, Arabic, and Polish adorn the walls and flow from the students’ mouths and pencils. This classroom is led by a teacher who works every day to include home languages and bilingual student resources. He welcomed researchers and filmmakers to co-plan, co-teach, film, and discuss this unique multilingual space. The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate the ways in which this teacher and his students make meaning of translanguaging for students to both create connections to learning, and explore new ideas.

In this classroom, the teacher used the bilingualism of students and a multilingual ecology to create a full translanguaging approach. Translanguaging is conceptualized as the strategic use of students’ whole linguistic repertoires for specific learning moments (Garcia, 2009). This is seen as students access language and content, new and familiar worlds using all of their written and verbal home languages. Both the teacher and students made meaning of this translanguaging under a framework of mirrors and windows introduced by Gutiérrez (2007, 2012). The balance of teaching new information and language is possible through continued and deliberate use of Spanish, Arabic and Polish alongside English. This has valuable implications for teachers, school leaders, and policy makers.

The research is based on a collaborative qualitative project with CUNY-NYSIEB including co-planning and co-teaching with a classroom teacher, observations and recordings, and interviews. Working with the teacher, lessons were planned using translanguaging and facilitated to delve deeper into the meaning-making of this multilingual approach. Learning materials (student work, readings, teacher presentations, Word Walls, bulletin boards) were captured through video or photography and analyzed in relation to the class’ multilingual ecology and translanguaging. The voices and evidence of learning in illustrated students’ understandings of home languages in powerful ways. While using home languages to make personal connections to learning, students also learned about new perspectives and their peers’ languages. This critical balance of looking inward and outward plays a very important role in students’ cognitive and social-emotional growth in schools. It paves the ways for a whole new multilingual approach to teaching that any teacher, of any language background, can create and facilitate.

The context of this uniquely multilingual classroom has yet to be significantly explored within the field of bilingual education and TESOL. So much of the research relies on a binary of two languages, where every student in the class shares a common home language. Here, we now seek to explore the realness of multilingual classrooms where there may be multiple, simultaneous “bilingual educations” and a flow of languages. This is also an interesting, new example of a mostly-monolingual teacher successfully facilitating a multilingual class. With student leadership and community support, the teacher can build this translanguaging approach on an everyday level. How students and teachers make meaning of this languaging in key to understanding what teachers and schools can do to meet the needs of multilingual emergent bilinguals.

Author

• Heather Homonoff Woodley, New York University