Evolving Translanguaging Stance and Practice Through a Critical Translingual Professional Development Series

• In Event: (Re)Centering Criticality in Language Education: Exploring Translanguaging as Consequential Praxis

Abstract

Purpose
This paper draws on data from the first phase of a transformative action research project (Garcia & Kleyn, 2016), which invited three teachers of English - all of whom identified as white and monolingual English-speaking - to participate in a year-long professional development series rooted in translanguaging and other critical, assets-based perspectives. This paper will detail this PD series and how it cultivated in teachers a critical self-awareness and a critical translanguaging stance towards teaching racialized bi/multilingual students.

Theoretical Framework
A translanguaging pedagogy (Author, 2017) describes an approach to educating bi/multilingual students that is rooted in translanguaging theory and enacts three interrelated strands - a teacher’s stance, design, and shifts – and explores what such pedagogy looks like in action. However, less is known about how and why teachers take up such an approach (or do not) in their work with bi/multilingual students. This study addresses these questions through a critical translingual PD series that made space for teachers to engage with theories, texts, and questions that center the critical potential of translanguaging.

Methods and Data Sources
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 was carried out through monthly meetings with three teachers that included (1) engagement with translanguaging and related theories, (2) reflective writing and discussion, and (3) “actions” that invited teachers to translate their learning into their practice.

Data collected over the course of the nine months included recordings and transcriptions of each meeting, reflective memos written after each meeting, and transcriptions of a semi-structured focus group interview conducted during our last meeting in June 2022 which utilized dialogic interviewing techniques (Way et. al., 2015). Analysis of these data was carried out through thematic coding and discourse analysis.

Findings
This paper will show how teachers’ engagement with critical aspects of translanguaging was generative (Ball, 2009) and led to meaningful learning. Drawing on representative moments from the PD series, this paper will explore how translanguaging theory, when presented through an explicitly decolonial, anti-racist lens, provided teachers with both a mirror on their own identities and past practices and a space to envision future approaches to English teaching that work against monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies.

Significance
This project has implications for the preparation and development of teachers, and particularly white, monolingual teachers, that extend beyond the methods fetish (Bartolomé, 1994) and toward generative inquiry into what they believe about language, teaching, their students, and themselves. Through this kind of inquiry, this paper puts forth an approach to developing critical teachers who can successfully teach and learn in culturally, racially and linguistically complex classrooms. This paper also contributes to the larger theme of the symposium: that (re)centering the explicitly transgressive elements of translanguaging in teacher preparation can work against the dilution of its transformative potential that may occur as it becomes more widespread.

Author

• Kate Seltzer, Rowan University
  Presenting Author