Engaging With Theory in Professional Development: Taking Up a Critical Translingual Approach With Teachers of English

• In Event: Changing Paradigms and Practices in Teacher Preparation in Support of Emergent Bilinguals

Abstract

Purpose

This paper explores initial findings from a Professional Development (PD) project that aimed to develop a critical translingual approach (Author, 2020) to language and literacy teaching, specifically writing. The PD series, which involved a small group of English teachers, occurred over the course of one year, and aimed to develop a translanguaging stance (Authors, 2017) and encourage a translation of that stance into classroom practice. This paper asks: What does engagement with critical theories reveal about teachers’ ideologies in relation to language and writing?

Theoretical Framework & Perspectives

The PD series introduced participants to translanguaging theory (Otheguy, Garcia & Reid, 2018) and to translingual orientations towards writing (Canagarajah, 2011) which reframe the writing classroom not as a space that teaches students to use “standard” or “academic” language, but that encourages codemeshing, appropriation, and an understanding of all writing as heteroglossic. This project is rooted in Ball’s (2009) approach to PD that centers generativity, or “teachers’ ability to continually add to their understanding by connecting their personal and professional knowledge with the knowledge that they gain from their students to produce or originate knowledge that is useful to them in pedagogical problem solving” (p.47). The paper asserts that generativity can be catalyzed through engagement with theories that broaden teachers’ views of language, writing, students, and themselves.

Methods & Data Sources

The PD series involved monthly meetings with teachers that included (1) engagement with translanguaging and other theories that draw connections between language, identity, and power, (2) reflective journaling, and (3) classroom-based “actions” prompting teachers to translate their shifting ideologies into practice. Data sources included fieldnotes and reflective memos on each PD session, audio recordings and transcriptions of each session, and a series of dialogic interviews (Way et. al., 2015) with each of the six participants. Data analysis drew on both deductive codes from the project’s theoretical framework and inductive codes from participants’ talk and reflective writing, which I used to establish themes (Saldaña, 2015). Because the research question explores participants’ responses to theory, I also drew on discourse analysis (Gee, 2011) to understand how teachers’ responses were related to their ideologies about language and writing.

Results & Significance

Initial results of this study demonstrate that engagement with critical theories (1) brought up tensions that emerged from teachers’ own raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) and deficit views of students’ language/writing; and (2) elicited “flickers of transformation,” or moments that “illustrate how scripts might be disrupted or interrupted simply by talking through them” (Way et. al., 2015, p.721). Citing teachers’ commentary and reflective writing/text production, I show how the PD series encouraged teachers to conceptualize their teaching practice not simply as a set of “strategies” but as part of the on-going project of learning and shifting their ideological selves. This research is significant to the field and to this year’s Call for Proposals as it positions teachers and researchers as accompanying one another in efforts to transform classroom practice and our ideological selves in ways that align with broader movements towards equity.

Author

• Kate Seltzer, Rowan University