Translanguaging and The 1619 Project: How a Salvadoran-American 3rd grader made sense of African enslavement

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Translanguaging

Abstract

In this paper, I examine how Alejandra, a 3rd grade, emergent multilingual child of parents from El Salvador, participated in a teacher-created literacy and social studies curriculum about the enslavement of Africans, based on The 1619 Project. I draw on two theoretical perspectives to understand Alejandra: 1) race-first critiques of US society and schooling and 2) translanguaging, especially scholarship that uses Bakhtin to push translanguaging theory and practice further. I demonstrate how Alejandra’s dialogic utterances crossed borders of language, time, place, and race to make meaning and I argue that a student-centered and content rich curriculum encouraged Alejandra and her peers to take on and try out new understandings, by drawing from their full repertoire of languages and experiences.

Author

• Audrey Lensmire, Augsburg University