Walking the Talk: A Critical Autoethnographic Narrative of One Teacher Educator's Emerging Translingual Identity/Practice

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

Abstract

Objectives
Given the growing interest in identity and language education (De Costa & Norton, 2017), this paper presents a critical autoethnographic narrative (Yazan, 2019) of one TESOL teacher educator’s emerging translingual identity and practice (Canagarajah, 2013). Though extant scholarship has explored the principle role identity plays in language educators’ pedagogies (Varghese, Motha, Park, Reeves, & Trent, 2016; Waller, Wethers, & De Costa, 2017; Zheng, 2017), less is known about language teacher educators’ identities (Peercy & Sharkey, 2018), specifically with respect to translanguaging. Therefore, this study asks: How do I as a language teacher educator negotiate the formation of my translingual identity and practice across time and space?
Perspectives
Situated in poststructuralist perspectives, this study integrates translanguaging and spatiotemporal scales. As both a theory and pedagogy, translanguaging emphasizes the socially-constructed nature of “languaging” as a fluid and dynamic practice (García & Li Wei, 2014). Furthermore, it contradicts the pervasive monolingual bias reflected in many U.S. teachers’ backgrounds, school policies, and state/federal accountability measures (García & Otheguy, 2019). Scales are used as a heuristic to trace the evolution of identity and language across time and space (Canagarajah & De Costa, 2016); from this lens, language teachers’ and teacher educators’ identities are pushed and pulled by multiple factors within situated contexts. In this study, tracing my identity formation across time and space revealed what underlying beliefs and practices were embedded in the discursive construction of my identity and practice and what agency I enacted within this process.
Methods and Data Sources
Designed as a critical autoethnographic narrative, this yearlong study grew out of our larger collaborative self-study among language teacher educators, teachers, and students. A portion of the data comes from this self-study and includes 20 hours of video recordings of our discussions and my written artifacts. I also collected artifacts and reflective memos from three other contexts: teaching as a high school ESL teacher from February-April 2019, my language learning experience in France from May-June 2019, and preparing TESOL pre-service teachers from September 2018 through July 2019. I employed narrative as both “a research tool and a learning tool...to interpret “this series of experiences, to reconcile what is known with that which is hidden, and to construct and reconstruct” an understanding of myself as a translanguaging teacher educator (Yazan, 2019).
Results
Preliminary findings from this ongoing study reveal that through situated practice, I problematized the structuralist notions of my own monolingual English identity to instead perceive the fluidity of my meaning-making resources. Likewise, as I iteratively reflected on my own language identity, practice and pedagogy, I perceived greater agency for myself as well as for my students. Together, these experiences inform how I design opportunities for pre-service teachers to employ translanguaging in communicative contexts and explicitly reflect on how these experiences contributed to their emerging pedagogies.
Scholarly Significance
This study emphasizes the need for language teacher educators to reflect on and critically examine their own identities, practices and pedagogies across time/space in order to prepare future teachers to adopt translanguaging pedagogy.

Author

• Christina M. Ponzio, Melvindale-Northern Allen Park Schools