Developing Teachers' Raciolinguistic Literacies: Race, Languaging, and Teacher Education

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

Abstract

As English classrooms become increasingly accepted as bi-/multilingual spaces, critical translingual approaches (Author 1, 2017a) are necessary for all English educators and English teacher preparation programs. However, there remains limited research on the ways teachers from different backgrounds and contexts take up such approaches, and, particularly, how those approaches intersect with anti-racist pedagogies. To address this lacuna, this study draws on a comparative case study design (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016) of two secondary English teachers (one a White monolingual, the other a Chicanx bilingual) in two urban cities and relies on three primary sources of data: semi-structured interviews with the teachers, audio recordings of teachers’ classroom talk and interactions with students, and field notes of weekly classroom activities.

Findings illustrate how these two different teachers, from their perspectives, integrated a critical translingual approach into their personal stance and how that stance connected to their instructional and curricular design choices (Garcia et al, 2017) . First, we focus on two teachers’ the pedagogical methods of that brought students’ sophisticated understandings of the connections between race and language to the surface. This core component of a critical translingual approach was apparent in both classrooms, though the ways the two teachers fostered it were different, and spoke to their unique racial and linguistic positionality. Next, we discuss what emerged in those classroom moments when students made such raciolinguistic (Flores & Rosa, 2015) connections, and how what came up was different in the two classrooms.

Lastly, we explore how each teacher responded in these moments by drawing on their own articulations of their pedagogical stance, and how that stance was impacted by students’ experiences and articulated realities about intersections of race and languaging. Overall, this article illustrates how teachers’ stances and classroom designs were impacted by their positionality and identities, pointing to the ways that diverse teachers must approach their translanguaging pedagogies with an understanding of raciolinguistic realities. We end with a call for further thinking for teacher educators who wish to help teachers engage the transgressive elements of translanguaging, especially in ways that highlight intersections between race and languaging.

Authors

• Kate Seltzer, The City University of New York

• Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Riverside