Translanguaging Bliss, Burdens, and Illusions: Living Curriculum's Ambivalence

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Ten
  In Roundtable Session: Interrogating the Everydayness of Living Curricular Practices: Honoring Language Literacy and Identity Across Multiple Terrains (Table 2)

Abstract

This paper aims to use paradoxical personal language experiences to examine implicit binaries at work in translingual and monolingual curricular frameworks. In overlooking existential judgments in non-purist language use and honing the “me-versus-them” rhetoric, the translanguaging discourse has aligned with monolingual universalizing principles. I syncretize existential, and postcolonial aesthetics to suggest that the sense of linguistic oppression or sovereignty is primarily philosophized out of experiential duologues with ontological threats. The project uses currere narrative sequencing to engage a distinct cross-cultural linguistic history with “contradictions and inconsistencies” in language curriculum (Tozer & Butts, 2011, p.6). The inquiry is important for the development of a democratic curriculum tasked with the joint education of shifting linguistic minorities and majorities.

Author

• Germaine Tondji, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
  Presenting Author