Learning From the Experiences of Preservice Teachers Enacting Translanguaging Read-Alouds

• In Event: Teachers’ Experiences With Translanguaging Theory and Pedagogy Across Contexts

Abstract

Overview:
Researchers and literacy educators have underscored the need to prepare preservice teachers (PSTs), who are largely white and speak English as their primary language, to teach in linguistically diverse classrooms (García-Sánchez & Orellana, 2019; Ortiz & Franquiz, 2015). These classrooms are overwhelmingly dominated by monolingual ideologies that ignore, devalue and erase bilingual students’ linguistic resources and identities. Responding to this need, a growing number of scholars have called for teacher education programs to take a practice-based approach to teaching in ways that draw upon bi/multilingual students’ language practices in schooling (Nash et al, 2018). In this proposal, we explore how PSTs who do not share the linguistic backgrounds of their students engage read-alouds using translingual children’s books with small groups of bilingual students as part of a literacy methods course.

Theoretical Perspectives:
In this paper, we draw upon a social literacies perspective (Street, 1995) that conceptualizes literacy as a situated practice that is never neutral as it is influenced by ideologies, power relations and cultural models of “doing literacy” that overwhelmingly maintain unmarked, dominant monolingual ideologies English-medium schooling. We also draw upon the concept of translanguaging (Garcia, 2009) to think about how preservice teachers and bi/multilingual students fluidly and dynamically draw upon their language practices in read alouds while often transcending the traditionally forced boundaries and borders of named languages, disrupting the monolingual ideologies and pressing against hierarchical relationships among languages and among speakers of languages.

Methods:
In this study, we blended ethnography (Blommaert & Jie, 2010), practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2015), and discourse analysis (Bloome et al., 2022). Data includes videos of PST read-alouds, audio of planning and discourse analysis sessions, PST written reflections, and field notes. This analysis focuses on PSTs’ read-aloud videos and their discourse analysis of their read-aloud videos. We used inductive analyses (Thomas, 2016) to examine patterns in the data and then identified rich points (Agar, 2006) for closer analysis within each of these patterns.

Findings and Significance:

Our analyses of PSTs’ experiences and reflections with students in their translingual read alouds show several themes. First, PSTs often centered students’ languages and cultures in the read-alouds but also self-identified missed opportunities in which they could have made further connections. Second, the experience of the read alouds often helped them to think critically about how reading comprehension was taught in their practicum classrooms as well as what kinds of interactions the approaches encouraged and what readers were being positioned as “successful”. The significance of these findings points toward the insights that emerge for PST when they engage in practice-based assignments in which they closely examine the enactment of pedagogies that push against linguistically hegemonic ideologies and draw upon students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

Author

• Faythe Beauchemin, Boston College