Translanguaging for Justice in U.S. TESOL Teacher Education

• In Event: 61.028 - Counteracting Monolingualism in Preservice Teacher Education Through Translanguaging

Abstract

Objectives
In the current volatile political environment that promotes hatred and division, our work moves to build inclusivity and understanding through teacher education. As academics, teachers, and students, our purpose is to create compassionate and transformative classrooms by engaging with translanguaging, a teaching theory and pedagogy that uses all students’ cultural and linguistic repertoires in learning. This qualitative collaborative research study examines how students learn and apply translanguaging in an undergraduate TESOL course. The professor taught from a sociocultural perspective and used The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning (García, Ibarra Johnson & Seltzer, 2017) as the course text.
The questions we asked were:
(1) How did students make sense of translanguaging?
(2) How did students embody translanguaging in their practice teaching?
(3) How did students understand translanguaging in relationship to language, culture, and power?

Perspectives
Theoretically, translanguaging refers to the dynamic process of strategically and creatively selecting linguistic features from one unitary, complex linguistic repertoire to make meaning (García & Li, 2014). Pedagogically, translanguaging promotes ways for students and teachers to engage in fluid discursive practices that strategically include the home language practices of students in classroom meaning-making activities (García, 2014). Therefore, by valuing and leveraging students’ linguistic knowledge as assets rather than burdens in academic learning, translanguaging counters the monoglossic American classrooms by opening up inclusive spaces for the development of multilingualism.

Methods and Data Sources
Drawing on Teacher Research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993), we created case studies (Yin, 2014) of 20 undergraduate students with broad linguistic and cultural knowledge. Our case studies were comprised of data from course assignments throughout the semester. These included a) reading reflections on the course texts, b) students’ reflective journals, c) ethnographic interviews of English language learners, and d) short mock teaching scenarios. Our data analysis process was modeled on translanguaging incorporating researchers’ multiple languages, cultures, identities and experiences. We met routinely over six months to engage in collectively analyzing our data, using our understandings of translanguaging as related to language, culture, and power to interpret how students learned and applied translanguaging.

Results
We found that students made sense of translanguaging as related to justice as it embraces and celebrates diversity. None of the students opposed valuing and using students’ entire linguistic and cultural repertoires, but it was easier for monolingual English speakers to engage with translanguaging through valuing and learning culture rather than language. When it came to embodying translanguaging, students all used similar strategies of incorporating multimodality, group work and multilingual texts in their practice teaching scenarios. While we were not overly impressed by these strategies, we came to see the inherent “paradox” in students’ engagement with translanguaging. Students recognized the hope that translanguaging could bring in creating compassionate and transformative classrooms, but were also bound by the structural constraints of the U.S. education system and their own experiences.

Scholarly Significance
Our study has significant implications for preparing teachers who value all students. Translanguaging can help future teachers recognize and critique unjust power relations and learn practices that are culturally and linguistically sustaining.

Authors

• Elizabeth Anne Robinson, Suffolk University

• Zhongfeng Tian, Boston College

• Elie Crief, Suffolk University

• Maíra Lins Prado, Suffolk University