"I've Learned They Have a Lot to Say": Using Curriculum to Support Teachers' Translanguaging Pedagogies

• In Event: Challenging English Monolingual Narratives: Exploring Curriculum-Embedded Professional Learning to Promote Translingual Instruction

Abstract

Purpose: The multilingual learner (ML) population in public schools brings rich linguistic knowledge that becomes underutilized or even ignored as teachers are pressured to quickly bring students to grade-level “standards” of English proficiency. However, providing classroom instruction that builds on students’ linguistic knowledge supports students’ academic and personal growth (e.g. Jímenez et al., 2015; García & Kleifgen, 2019). To help teachers of MLs to provide this kind of instruction, our research team developed a year-long reading curriculum specifically for ML students in upper elementary and lower middle school grades; we worked with teachers of MLs in two school districts in the U.S. southeast during the 2021-2022 school year. This presentation shows how teacher enactment of this reading curriculum led to teachers’ development of translanguaging pedagogies.

Theoretical framework: Translanguaging, or the use of a speaker’s entire linguistic repertoire (Otheguy et al., 2015), naturally occurs in spaces with multilingual people as they make meaning together. When teachers adopt translanguaging pedagogies, they strategically build on students’ full linguistic repertoires to support their learning as well as their multilingual identities. García et al. (2017) describe three strands of a translanguaging pedagogy: stance, design, and shifts. While teachers may be open to building on students’ languages, or have a translanguaging stance, they may be unfamiliar with how to accomplish this, or engage in translanguaging design. Therefore, a team of teacher educators and researchers worked with teachers to create a reading curriculum centered in translanguaging practices. Our research question asks: How does a translanguaging-focused reading curriculum support teachers’ development of translanguaging pedagogies?

The reading curriculum, which includes guided reading with culturally relevant texts, fluency practice, and translation activities that encourage students to use all their language resources, provides teachers with a structure and strategies for translanguaging design. Moreover, these curriculum materials are educative, meaning that they promote both student and teacher learning (Davis & Krajcik, 2005).

Data and methods: Data for this presentation includes three rounds of semi-structured interviews, conducted with six participating teachers at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year and bi-monthly classroom observations. Transcribed interviews were deductively coded, focusing on teachers’ descriptions of what they learned during curriculum enactment, and triangulated with classroom observations and informal teacher conversations.

Results: Teachers reported developing a range of strategies for translanguaging design, which affected their stance and shifts in the classroom. Their refined translanguaging pedagogies included wanting to learn more about students’ languages and backgrounds, making plans to apply strategies outside of the curriculum, attempting to learn new languages, and becoming an advocate for students’ use of their languages with administrators.

Significance: Teachers’ translanguaging stances impact how they view their multilingual students as well as how they instruct their students, so that a less developed stance can negatively impact multilingual learners. Menken and Sánchez (2019) state that a translanguaging pedagogy can come before a translanguaging stance; our hope is that the acquisition of translanguaging pedagogies will lead to a translanguaging stance that celebrates and grows the whole student, with their linguistic knowledge and experience.

Authors

• Holland White, Valor Collegiate Academies
  Presenting Author

• Emily Phillips Galloway, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Robert T. Jimenez, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author