Adopting Translanguaging Pedagogies with Unequal Pedagogical Resources Across Students’ Languages

• In Event: Belonging, Positioning, and Personhood in Translanguaging Spaces: Opportunities and Tensions in Classroom Contexts

Abstract

Purpose and Framing
When enacting translanguaging pedagogies, teachers are often confronted with an inequitable amount of pedagogical resources across languages beyond English that multilingual students speak in their classrooms (e.g., languages not supported by Google translate, few children’s books in students’ languages). Given these pedagogical conditions, it can be difficult for teachers to equitably enact translanguaging pedagogies for all of their multilingual students. We view few pedagogical resources not just as a pedagogical constraint but also as an issue of linguistic justice closely tied to how linguistic models of personhood (Flores et al., 2016) are constructed in classrooms. In this presentation, we explore how a second-grade teacher effectively incorporated a language with few pedagogical resources (Marshallese) into her translanguaging literacy curricula.

Theoretical Perspectives
In this paper, we draw upon a social literacies perspective (Street, 1995) that conceptualizes literacy as a situated practice that maintains dominant monolingual ideologies in English-medium schooling. We also draw upon the concept of translanguaging pedagogies (García et al., 2016) to understand how teachers can encourage multilingual students to fluidly draw upon all of their language practices in instruction.

Methods and Data Sources
This study was based in an English-medium classroom with an English-speaking teacher and students who spoke Marshallese (20%), English (32%) and Spanish (48%). In this study, we blended research methodologies – ethnography (Blommaert & Jie, 2020), practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2015), and discourse analysis (Bloome et al., 2022). Data includes videos of classroom literacy learning, students’ written work, interviews and field notes. We used inductive analyses (Thomas, 2021) to examine patterns in the data and then identified rich points (Agar, 2006) for closer analysis within each of these patterns.

Findings
Our analyses show several themes. First, we found that Marshallese children were positioned as experts on language by their teacher and classmates through teachers’ incorporation of Marshallese when reading Spanish-English books and by welcoming students’ sharing of their Marshallese expertise in parent-teacher conferences. Second, we found that the teacher creatively adapted resources for adults such as a book on Marshallese legends, used adult Marshallese dictionaries in writing workshop and pictures, cultural artifacts and maps of the Marshallese Islands as prompts for children to create oral stories. Third, we found the teacher built upon culturally-specific artifacts such as foods (e.g. lava rocks, rice-banke), crafts (e.g. wicker hair flowers, shell jewelry sets) and the Marshallese flag in the classroom. Lastly, the teacher would supplement the lack of children’s books in Marshallese by frequently drawing upon students’ own culturally-and-linguistically-significant writing as a resource (e.g., children’s writing about Hula dancing).

Significance
The significance of these findings point towards the possibilities available for teachers to enact translanguaging pedagogies even when few pedagogical resources exist for students’ languages. Researchers and educators can learn from these creative and responsive adaptations in order to create conditions to construct broad and inclusive linguistic models of personhood that affirm all students’ languages and cultures in classrooms.

Authors

• Faythe Beauchemin, Boston College

• Lexi Woodward, University of Arkansas