Seeing and Hearing Bi/multilingual Students' Translingual Sensibilities and Ingenuities: Implications for Research and Practice

• In Event: (Re)Imagining English Language Arts Through a Critical Translanguaging Lens: Practical and Epistemological Insights on Teaching "English"

Abstract

Objectives
Given the limited scope of adolescent literacy research, especially about racialized
bi/multilingual youth, this paper explores two scholars’ approaches to qualitative, collaborative research alongside language minoritized youth and their classroom teachers. As equity-minded scholars, we offer a window into our own raciolinguicized subjectivities (Daniels & Varghese, 2020) and situated methodological practices. We also explore implications for researchers, who too often misperceive what we term students’ translanguaging sensibilities and ingenuities.

Theoretical framework
Our paper is anchored in theories that eschew deficit-oriented framings of racialized bi/multilingual youth and instead position them as historical actors (Gutierrez et al., 2019), cultural workers (Freire, 1998), and gifted language architects (Flores, 2020). We also center translanguaging theory and its invitation to view language “‘from the inside out’ (Santos, 2007, p. 54) and to recognize that “bilingual people language with a unitary, not dual, repertoire from which they draw features that are useful for the communicative act in which they are engaged” (Author 4, 2021, p. 208).

Methods
We took up a comparative case study approach (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2016), which “places culture, context, comparison and a critical understanding of power at its core” (p. 24). This approach was integral to our analysis, as it focused our attention on both the sharedness and the differences in our studies and our positionalities as researchers. Moreover, we also align ourselves with Patel’s (2014) call for researchers to move from a lens of “ownership” to one of answerability, asking of ourselves how we can be ethical and answerable to those who participate in our research endeavors and from whom we learn.

Data sources
In line with ethnographic methods, we collected data through field notes, analytic memos, youth produced artifacts, and audio recorded discussions and interviews. Because of our individual studies that resulted in theorizations about students’ sophisticated understandings and skillful, creative appropriations of language, the two researchers put data pertaining to these theorizations into conversation. From this emerged new codes, which we then used to re-code our existing data and draw out both similarities and discrepant data (LeCompte & Schensul, 2012). We then chose moments that were most representative of the kinds of translingual sensibilities and ingenuities we coded across our two data sets and best lent themselves to analysis and broader theorization.

Results
Our two research studies comparatively demonstrate how youth sophisticatedly drew upon
community wisdom (Yosso, 2005) and their embodied experiences with systemic and historicized injustices, to engage new social futures both inside and outside of their classrooms. Overall, students across the two studies demonstrated skillful languaging and writing/creating that represented new ways of envisioning futures and solidarities.

Significance
This paper is significant to the field, as it offers a re-examination of dominant qualitative research approaches with racialized bi/multilingual students and suggests more collaborative inquiries that are situated in side-by-side comparative analysis of translingual classrooms. In exploring this shift, this paper offers insights into research methodologies that might offer better perceptions of students’ expansive ways of languaging and that highlight their translingual sensibilities and ingenuities.

Authors

• Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Kate Seltzer, Rowan University
  Presenting Author