Digital en Dos Idiomas: Multimodal Intervention as Translanguaging Pedagogy

• In Event: 77.042 - Translanguaging Embodied: Students' Expanded Translanguaging Practices Across Contexts

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to provide an account of how a group of Mexican-origin middle school-aged boys discussed and engaged their language ideologies as translanguaging practices while participants in an out-of-school digital literacy community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This work expands on contemporary translanguaging studies by examining how the boys privileged translanguaging in some contexts and minimized them in others. Specifically, they initially considered digital communication as a monolingual-English context prior to translanguaging pedagogical intervention.
As an activist-researcher, I utilized a critical ethnographic (Villenas & Foley, 2002) approach, participating with and observing the boys self-directed digital literacy practices, including coding, 3-D drafting, and graphic design. As a former bilingual educator, I understood the importance of modeling language practices and employed aspects of a translanguaging pedagogy (García, 2011) approach when assisting group members. Flores & García (2013) suggest this approach allows learners to develop new subjectivities not defined by institutions or systems.
This study employed critical pedagogy and anthropological methods. Over eighteen months, I participated as digital literacy co-learner (Rheingold, 2014) with the boys. Further, I modeled this co-learning based on Freire’s (1973) description of a coordinator, posing questions to boys about the transformative power of their learning practices. Our group met once a week during the school year and twice a week in the summers in a community center technology room. As part of my role as coordinator, I modeled translanguaging practices with the boys, both in the tech room and via written correspondence like email and text messages – forms of multi-modal translanguaging (Wei, 2017).
I collected 55 hours of audio recordings, semi-structured interviews, and participant products. Additionally, I wrote field notes and analytic memos to reflexively evaluate emergent concepts. All audio was transcribed and ethnographically coded through three iterative rounds (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). This generated themes relevant to translanguaging including the boys’ language ideologies, language use, and multi-modal communication practices.
The ethnographic accounts suggest that the boys engaged in translanguaging practices, even when they self-identified as monolingual English speakers. Boys who identified as bilingual reported the primary locations of their translanguaging practices were home and school, however when engaging in multimodal digital literacy learning, the boys privileged virtual space(s) as English-only. This could have to do with the digital literacy platforms being based in English, consideration of the learning space as an English-dominant space, or my identification as a bilingual, but English-dominant, adult. My translanguaging pedagogical interventions, specifically sending them e-mails and text messages in English and Spanish were initially met with hesitance. That is, they only responded in English, then in meetings asked me why I wrote in English and Spanish. It was clear that the boys practiced translanguaging, but had a diverse set of relations with Spanish, while English was dominant in their multimodal interactions.
This study contributes to translanguaging literature by providing an account of how educators in out-of-school contexts can bridge learners extant translanguaging practices to multimodal contexts, allowing them to connect their full linguistic repertoire to self-directed digital literacy practices.

Author

• Carlos Martínez-Cano, University of Pennsylvania