Negotiating Identities in Translanguaging Spaces Within a State With a Restrictionist Language and Anti-Immigrant Past

• In Event: Engaging and Reimagining Racialized Notions of Citizenship, Participation, and Leadership in Bilingual Educational Settings

Abstract

Translanguaging spaces are spaces where the boundaries separating languages, and the identities associated with them, are removed giving way to hybrid identity performances in which participants fluidly use their full communicative repertoire (Li, 2018). This proposal seeks to contribute a nuanced understanding of identity negotiation in a translanguaging space by considering the role of homogenizing discourses (Ndhlovu, 2017), particularly monolingual ideologies and essentialist views of immigrants and citizenship, in the interactions and identity positionings that took place in a translanguaging space that I deliberately designed. Identity is approached as a fluid process that emerges in social interactions and is performed in discourse (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005).

Recent research on translanguaging spaces raises awareness of the tensions that arise in these spaces, such as: students’ resistance to reveal their minoritized identities (Charalambous, P., Charalambous, C, & Zembylas, 2016); monopolization of the translanguaging space in two-way immersion programs by students dominant in the societal language (i.e. English in the U.S.) (Hamman, 2018); and students’ contestation of their teachers’ use of Spanish during English class (Allard, 2017). By bringing these tensions forth, this research highlights the relevance of addressing the power structures and hegemonic assumptions permeating these spaces.

The data for this proposal is drawn from a study in which I examined the deliberate design of a translanguaging space in a set of language and literacy lessons for emergent bilingual third-grade students. I engaged a group of five students with varied linguistic experiences in English and Spanish in discussions about immigration using poems from Jane Medina’s (1999) bilingual book, My Name is Jorge, as the text-base.

This proposal focuses on critical incidents that illuminate how prevailing homogenizing discourses about language, immigration, and citizenship seeped into this translanguaging space. Critical incidents encompass interactions that open up windows for looking into the role that power and hegemony play in our classrooms regardless of the theories that we endorse (Brookfield, 2017). In this particular case, these incidents opened opportunities for identifying and unpacking ideological blind spots encountered when enacting an innovative instructional approach that requires a deep ideological shift.

The critical incidents revealed these themes: (1) grappling with the boundaries between languages; (2) resisting the immigrant label; and (3) contesting citizenship affiliations. These themes convey different instances of how homogenizing discourses were both reified and resisted in this space. By looking closely at how identity was negotiated through these tensions, this work enabled me to enhance my awareness of how my own and my students’ identity positions vis á vis broader power structures and hegemonic assumptions influenced how we related with each other and the content taught. This awareness is key for redressing the role that I play as a teacher in reifying homogenizing discourses that marginalize historically minoritized students.

Author

• Marcela Ossa Parra, Queens College, CUNY