Evolving a Critical Translanguaging Stance Toward Writing With Secondary English Language Arts Teachers

• In Event: Translanguaging Perspectives on Writing: Learning From Findings Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
This paper draws on data from a collaborative research project that invited three teachers of English to participate in a professional development (PD) series rooted in translanguaging and other critical perspectives on language. The paper will first detail this approach to PD, which invited teachers to reconsider the writing process through a translanguaging lens, and then explore one teacher’s efforts to translate his learning into the development of a critical translingual writing process.

Theoretical framework
Students’ bi/multilingualism is not typically viewed as a resource in secondary ELA classrooms (Stewart & Hansen-Thomas, 2016; Author 5, 2017). Particularly when it comes to the teaching of writing, teachers turn to reductive approaches that are removed from authentic writing practices and rooted in monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015; García & Kleifgen, 2020). These approaches can have deleterious effects on students’ writing and perceptions of them as writers (Author 5, 2021). In contrast to such approaches, translanguaging has emerged as a pedagogy that leverages students’ full linguistic repertoire to support their writing practices and identities as bi/multilingual people.

Methods
The project was rooted in transformative action research (García & Kleyn, 2016), which develops partnerships between researchers and practitioners that result in meaningful changes in the education of bi/multilingual students. The PD series took place over nine monthly meetings that included (1) engagement with translanguaging and related theories, (2) group reflection and discussion, and (3) invitations for teachers to translate their learning into practice. The one-on-one work with the English teacher involved collaborative pedagogical planning, classroom-based observations, and a semi-structured interview with the teacher about his experience of translating his professional learning into his approach to teaching writing.

Data sources
Data sources included recordings and transcriptions of meetings, reflective memos, and transcriptions of a focus group interview. In addition, data from the one-on-one work with the teacher included audio recordings and transcriptions of all planning conversations, classroom observations, and the final interview, pedagogical artifacts from the teacher’s planning, and student writing and other classroom work. Analysis of all data was carried out through thematic coding and discourse analysis that focused specifically on the teacher’s shifting stance toward translanguaging and writing.

Results
This paper will show how teachers’ engagement with a critical translanguaging lens on language and particularly writing was generative (Ball, 2009) and led to both meaningful professional learning and shifts in one teacher’s approach to the teaching of writing. Importantly, the paper will show how one of these teachers worked within the constraints of his context to expand the traditional writing process and invite the translingual composing practices of his students.

Scholarly significance
This paper builds on existing translanguaging research by documenting how PD focused explicitly on its critical, transgressive elements shifted not only a teacher’s pedagogy but also his overall stance and perspective on bilingual students as writers. This paper provides insights into how PD for language and literacy teachers can explicitly challenge deficit-based perspectives of bilingual students as writers and invite meaningful changes to the teaching of writing in secondary ELA classrooms.

Author

• Kate Seltzer, Rowan University
  Presenting Author