Rescaling Languaging and Knowledge in Paraguayan Schools: Culturally Sustaining and Translanguaging Pedagogies as Scalar Projects

• In Event: Discovering (to Construct) the Educational Possibilities of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: Video-Based Linguistic Anthropological Approaches

Abstract

Culturally sustaining and translanguaging pedagogies place minoritized communities’ cultural and linguistic practices at the center of instruction, taking those practices as norms and as inherently valuable contexts and resources for learning. This is to say that these pedagogies valorize knowledge and practices that have traditionally been devalued in education. Such valorization happens in multiple ways, for example in the selection of minoritized youth’s own languaging practices as target content worthy of study (e.g., Alim, 2007), and also in the moment-to-moment interaction of learning and teaching. Linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic work on scales (Blommaert, 2007; Canagarajah, 2016; Lempert, 2012) and scaling practices (Canagarajah & De Costa, 2016; Kyratzis & de León, 2019) illuminates just this kind of production of social value in interaction—or how people use specific discursive resources to make things in their world, languages and cultural practices, bigger or smaller, more important or less important, more powerful or less powerful by locating or contextualizing them within scales. Carr and Lempert (2016) describe “scale-making as social practice and project” (9). In this way, culturally sustaining and translanguaging pedagogies are scalar projects and the result of people’s “conceptual and practical labor” (9).

This paper examines the communicative labor of Paraguayan teachers and students at community-based events where the rural, Guarani-speaking communities’ languaging and lifeways were scaled up, made semiotically central and powerful, in contrast to their usually marginalized locations. Using video data from two ethnographic studies, I describe specific discursive resources (e.g., evaluative indexicals and spatial, temporal, person deictics) and patterns of collaboration to render Jopara—the usually stigmatized varieties of mixed Spanish and Guarani—and local knowledge of medicinal herbs and ranching practices valuable and powerful. In this social and semiotic process, or scalar project, students and teachers produced positions of power for themselves and their communities: the kinds of positions that are a goal of both translanguaging and culturally sustaining pedagogies.

Author

• Katherine Mortimer, University of Texas - El Paso