Educational Equity for Latinx Youth: Translanguaging in a Middle School Bilingual Classroom

• In Event: Translating Theory to Practice: Pedagogies of Raciolinguistics in the Classroom

Abstract

This paper is based on a qualitative case study that examines how translanguaging (Garcia, 2009; Garcia & Li Wei, 2014) was taken up during an instructional unit designed to raise students’ raciolinguistic consciousness by highlighting the intersections of race and languaging in immigration policies. Throughout the course of the unit, students drew from their full linguistic repertoires while engaging with bilingual and multimodal texts, including videos, propaganda posters, political cartoons, social media, and news articles. The use of translanguaging with these bilingual texts around immigration enabled them to express their understandings of how race and language come together to inform and shape immigration policy.

For this qualitative case study, I employed an action-research approach.  The data consisted of (1) interviews with small groups of students; (2) interviews with six focal students; (3) audio recordings of classroom lessons and discussions; (4) student work; and (5) field notes and researcher memos. Each of these triangulated pieces of data shed light on how students drew on their diverse linguistic repertoire, engaging in translanguaging, in order to write about, discuss, and process how their lives and the lives of people in their families and communities were impacted by policies around immigration that contributed to processes of racialization.

Several theoretical frameworks have guided this work. First, translanguaging, as García (2009) has theorized it, has been fundamental to my study since I will be examining it as a pedagogical practice in a New York City public school. Bourdieu’s (1986) Cultural Capital theory has also been vital in the framing of this study. Speakers of minoritized languages have a cultural capital (their language and cultural practices) that is often ignored or seen as conflicting with the culture of schools in the U.S. Paulo Freire’s (1970) Critical Pedagogy Theory has likewise helped frame my study as well as provided me with an approach through which I conceptualized and implemented the unit of study for this research. Similarly, Paris’ (2012) culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) framework has been crucial in the development and the teaching of the unit.  CSP counters the deficit approach to teaching students of color and aims to “perpetuate and foster–to sustain–linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism” in schooling (p. 93).  It seeks to disrupt school curriculums that normalize monolingualism and monoculturalism, and replaces it with content about communities of color as legitimate and worthy of learning. Lastly, Flores and Rosa’s (2015) conceptualization of raciolinguistics adds a critical dimension to conversations around immigration as students unpack their experiences with this pressing topic.

The findings of this study reveal the importance of creating spaces in the curriculum for language-minoritized brown youth that raise their socio-political awareness within a pedagogical framework that aims to be culturally sustaining. I argue that a critical translanguaging pedagogy that accounts for both race and language is vital to equip students with the tools to resist their racialization and therefore challenge their minoritization.

Author

• Luz Yadira Herrera, California State University - Fresno