Transladoras Sin Fronteras: Merging Linguistic Borderlands to Take Up Students’ Translanguaging Corriente

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Acknowledging and Taking Up Teacher Expertise in Translanguaging Co-Designs: Voices From the Field (Table 9)

Abstract

Objectives
In this work, you will see how translanguaging districtwide study group members implement strategies gained from an individual inquiry into their classroom practice. The project was created to further develop dual-language bilingual education (DLBE) teachers’ knowledge(s) and experience(s) regarding their instructional practices in biliteracy and translanguaging through active participation and critical transformation by way of collaborative study. This research aims to learn from in-service bilingual educators’ current instructional practices in biliteracy and translanguaging through a study in which participants engaged in research about their own enactment of Translanguaging Pedagogy (García et al., 2017).

Perspectives
This work is positioned to understand how these teachers leveraged translanguaging in their DLBE classrooms. We drew from the translanguaging corriente as our framework and from a flexible biliteracy approach. La corriente represents how students’ fluid language and cultural practices flow through the classroom, even when invisible, like a pervasive water current (García et al., 2017).

Different perspectives and approaches to teaching biliteracy are needed in the field of bilingual education. Bilingual educators have a cause for concern with the increase of Hispanic/Latino/a/x simultaneous-bilingual children (children who develop two languages at the same time) in bilingual education to find a more appropriate pathway that leaves behind the traditional concept of sequential biliteracy acquisition (children who develop literacy in one language first then learn a second one). Moving towards embracing a flexible biliteracy approach that takes up emergent bilingual students’ corriente and co-shifting as needed for deep comprehension of text and language development is necessary in the bilingual education field (Garcia, 2009).

Methods and data sources
This study will focus on the empirical work of three DLBE teachers implementing Translanguaging Pedagogy. The project was an ongoing learning process, a qualitative research approach emphasizing co-learning, co-participation, and systemic transformation (Tian & Shepard-Carey, 2020).

Primary data sources in this study were testimonies (Bernal et al., 2017), classroom observations, and textual and visual documents. The interview transcripts and field notes were analyzed through two rounds of coding through a thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to identify themes, then interpret their meaning to generate final themes (Creswell, 2014).

Results
Teachers in this study leveraged their culture-specific ways of knowing and doing translanguaging to cultivate bilingual identities for themselves and their students. Further, the findings demonstrate that this work provided the participants a space to examine their linguistic repertoire through a collaborative study which informed their practices promoting the co-design with their students of multimodal assessment en vivo, building el aguante with translanguaging, and exploring translanguaging fronteras.

Scholarly significance of the study
This Translanguaging Teacher-Researcher Collaboration project sheds light on how districts and schools can create sustainable learning space(s) where teachers can better understand translanguaging in more profound ways and apply it to their practice.

Author

• Susana Ibarra Johnson, New Mexico State University