Unpacking Identities and Envisioning TESOL Practices Through Translanguaging: A Collective Self-Study

• In Event: Exploring Critically and Socially Just Ways Forward in Language Education Through Collective Self-Study

Abstract

Overview
This paper explores how we—a community of seven transnational students, teachers, and teacher educators—have adopted and adapted the framework of translanguaging in our teaching. Using collective self-study (Gallagher et al., 2011; Lighthall, 2004) as the methodological framework for this paper, we examine our linguistic identity constructions as well as our language teaching and learning practices in hopes of disrupting monolingual ideologies and challenging linguistic power dynamics.
Perspectives
We were profoundly influenced by Canagarajah’s (2013) discussion of “contact zones” within translingual contexts, which emphasizes the “linguistics of contact” in “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other,” (Pratt, 1991, p. 29). Rather than focusing on the linguistics of community where a community defines its static set of communicative practices, our opportunities for contact over the last year have catalyzed the development of a shared repertoire of communicative resources and allowed us to develop both a shared purpose and communicative repertoire to advance our inquiry into translanguaging.
Methods
Using Zoom, our community met twelve times throughout an academic year to explore our translanguaging teaching practices, a self-study that led to further investigation into our individual backgrounds and contexts and language repertoires. To explore our identities as well as our triumphs and challenges in taking up translanguaging pedagogy in our teaching practices, we examined transcripts and notes generated during our online meetings; our reflective analytic memos; and artifacts. Using constant comparative methods (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), we identified emerging themes in our conversations, including creating community, interrogating ‘practitioner’, and exploring ‘home’.
Results
Members of our community brought their experiences from previous contexts as well as their rich and diverse linguistic repertoires. As a result, our shared space made possible the “multilateral flow of people, things, and ideas across borders” and “made more visible mixed forms of community and language” (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 25). Through the collective self-study, we came to understand the interdependent relationship between translingual disposition and translanguaging stance and the ways in which the two fuel each other. More broadly, our collaboration reinforced our capacity to challenge traditional (false) dichotomies in TESOL (e.g. native/non-native, researcher/practitioner) and the underlying power dynamics of English monolingualism.
Scholarly Significance
Our collective goal has been and continues to be to open ourselves up to the mystery and possibilities of translanguaging. As one member of the group explained, “We’re opening up this space to look at the self, but we’re looking at the self to look back outward again.” One implication of this outward turn is the need to affirm bilingual prospective TESOL educators. A member of our community explained it this way, “when I think about our teacher preparation programs, if we really are committed to this work, part of it means ensuring that people who are bilingual feel like our TESOL teacher preparation programs are spaces that they can enter and be affirmed and feel successful.” Our collective self-study worked to envision a more critical and socially-just way forward in our practices as TESOL teachers, teacher candidates, and learners.

Author

• Laura M Kennedy, Northern Michigan University