Designing Translingual Pedagogies: Exploring Pedagogical Translation Through a Classroom Teaching Experiment

• In Event: Unleashing and Sustaining the Potential of Translanguaging Pedagogies in Second Language Learning Contexts Through Teacher-Researcher Collaboration

Abstract

This study’s purpose was to examine how middle-grades language arts teachers learned to integrate one approach to translingual pedagogy into their instruction. Drawing on social practice theory (SPT) as a theoretical framework, we discuss pedagogical translation as an emergent social practice, in which translation routines familiar to multilingual students may be leveraged in language arts classrooms. Translation is not simply the substitution of words from one language to another, but a complex process requiring communicative and metalinguistic competencies (Malakoff & Hakuta, 1991). SPT centers analysis on practices: socially-determined, goal-directed coordinations of mental and embodied routines, material artifacts, and negotiated understandings (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; Reckwitz, 2012; Schatzki, 2001). We position pedagogical translation as a paradigm case of translingual pedagogy--instruction designed to leverage the full range of students’ linguistic resources--and focus analysis on teacher participation as they integrate new translingual routines into existing instructional practice.
Our methodology was rooted in design-based research (DBR), with data drawn from a classroom teaching experiment (Cobb, 2000) iteration of a DBR project aimed at creating an instructional protocol that encourages students' to leverage divergent linguistic resources to collaboratively read and translate texts. This protocol is intended for teachers in linguistically diverse classrooms, but especially teachers with emerging proficiencies in languages other than English. As a classroom teaching experiment, this study was designed for pragmatic and theoretical goals (Cobb, 2000, p. 314). We sought to develop strategies for supporting teachers learning to enact translingual pedagogies, and to develop our theory about how our instructional protocol and other translingual pedagogies support learning. We recruited four teachers from a middle school with a large ELL population, facilitated professional development to introduce pedagogical translation, and observed them implementing the approach over three weeks.
Data include video-recordings of professional development and classroom instruction, teachers’ reflections from an online blog, focus group and individual interviews conducted during and after the study, and lesson artifacts. Following DBR protocols, data analysis included macro- and micro-level cycles of analysis. Micro-level analysis occurred during the experiment, as teachers digested and narrated each day’s lesson to then plan for future instruction, and as researchers reflected on and refined the instructional sequence. Macro-level analysis described the instructional sequence as a whole in a systematic retrospective analysis. Using conjecture mapping (Sandoval, 2014), we describe the instructional theory’s evolution for how pedagogical translation can be leveraged for literacy learning.
Results are presented as narratives describing how teachers made choices that meshed new routines with existing instructional practice, documenting trajectories of teacher participation as agentive designers of translingual pedagogy. This study makes significant contributions by responding to calls for examining how translingual pedagogies can be integrated into diverse contexts (e.g. Creese and Blackledge, 2010). This study shows that teachers’ routinized teaching practice is a powerful mediator of new pedagogies, thus highlighting the challenges of bridging classroom literacy practices with students’ everyday bilingual activity. At the same time, this study demonstrates how teachers can address these challenges through local design choices that mesh new routines with existing instructional practice.

Authors

• Mark Barba Pacheco, University of Florida

• Samuel David, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Robert T. Jimenez, Vanderbilt University