Translanguaging and Power: Negotiating Agency in the Mesosphere

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Translanguaging in Action: Exploring Language Practices Across Diverse Classrooms (Table 1)

Abstract

This paper examines the negotiation of agency in multilingual classrooms when teachers invite students to engage multilingually in a culturally-sustaining, translanguaging pedagogy. Through a review of literature at the intersection of translanguaging and power, we develop a tripartite framework to describe the multiple levels at which power operates in translanguaging classrooms, and use this to analyze two exemplary cases in which students and teachers negotiate norms of interaction during collaborative translation tasks. Through within case and cross-case analyses, we demonstrate how participants recruit semiotic resources from micro, meso and macro levels to negotiate local norms governing their languaging. This analysis provides new tools for designing translingual pedagogies and responding to student resistance in the emergent translanguaging classroom.

Authors

• Samuel David, University of Minnesota

• Mikel W. Cole, University of Houston