Moving Translanguaging Theory to Praxis: A Comparative Study of Preservice and In-Service Teachers

• In Event: Pedagogies of Hope: New Trends in Bilingual Education

Abstract

1. Purposes
Given the increase of linguistically diverse students in the U.S. K-12 school population (Suarez-Orozco & Michikyan, 2016), teacher education programs continue to seek promising approaches to prepare future and current educators to effectively teach emergent bilingual students. This paper investigates how pre and inservice teachers (PST/IST) enrolled in a TESOL certificate program at the undergraduate and graduate level at a large Midwestern university are prepared to enact translanguaging in their pedagogy and practice. Specifically, we asked: What barriers do PSTs and/or ISTs meet in adopting a translanguaging mindset? How, if at all, do they overcome these barriers to envision translanguaging as a part of their pedagogy and practice?

2. Perspectives
Though scholars have investigated translanguaging empirically in classroom contexts, much of this research has either taken place outside of the United States or within bilingual programs (Duarte, 2016; Rosiers, Willaert, Van Avermaet, & Slembrouck, 2016). What is less clear is how educators take up translanguaging in contexts where limited funding, monolingual staff, or state mandates make bilingual programming unrealistic. Furthermore, limited research has focused on how translanguaging can be used to support PST and IST pedagogical learning in teacher education programs, particularly among monolingual educators. Using Garcia and Wei (2014) as a conceptual framework, we seek to extend understandings of how teacher educators can move translanguaging as a theory into praxis.

3. Methods and Data Sources
Using discourse analysis (Brown & Yule, 1983), we analyzed graduate and undergraduate students’ postings about translanguaging to a course management site, 80 in total, for their respective online classes at the MA and BA level across a 16-week academic semester in spring 2017. We also examined artifacts including students’ weekly reflections and lesson plans for their field placements along with their final course projects. Following three rounds of coding, we used constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and in vivo codes to identify systemic, personal and pedagogical barriers students experienced as they adopted translanguaging pedagogy as well as their approaches to overcoming these barriers and envisioning translanguaging as a part of their practice.

4. Results
The results of our study reveal that translanguaging theory disrupts PST and IST’s prior conceptualizations of language and language learning. As they came to understand this new theory, they increasingly understood how a translanguaging approach to pedagogy and practice provided their students the opportunity to access their full linguistic repertoires and build upon their students’ already-present linguistic abilities. This included helping PTS/ISTs to examine their own language identities and learning experiences, consider how they position and empower students as meaning-makers, and develop their agency as educators despite systemic barriers.

5. Scholarly Significance
This paper adds to the limited research that examines how to prepare PSTs and IST’s to teach emergent bilingual students through the adoption of translanguaging practices. In comparing the developing translingual pedagogies of graduate and undergraduate students, this study helps us design teaching and learning that anticipates challenges educators face in adopting translanguaging pedagogy as well as to envision possibilities for their developing translingual practices.

Authors

• Matthew R Deroo, University of Miami

• Christina M. Ponzio, Michigan State University