Cultivating Translanguaging Space: Teachers' Stance, Pedagogical Design, and Students' Agency in a Three-Year Ethnography

• In Event: Translanguaging in Five Heritage Language Learning Spaces: Challenges and Affordances for Both Teachers and Learners

Abstract

Recent studies (Authors, 2025; Jin & Liu, 2023) have highlighted bilingual teachers’ translanguaging pedagogies in community-based heritage schools, showing how translanguaging practices support bilingual students in sustaining their heritage language and culture while critically examining their lived realities. However, few studies focus on teachers’ dynamic relationships and interactions with students, and how these interactions further inform and shape translanguaging pedagogy. As such, this study examines the translanguaging pedagogies of two Chinese American bilingual teachers within Mandarin Language Arts classrooms at a Chinese community heritage school (CCHS), asking: 1) How do these two Chinese American bilingual teachers build relationships and interact with students when enacting a translanguaging stance? 2) How do these teacher–student interactions inform and shape the teachers’ translanguaging pedagogy?
This study is guided by intertwined theories of translanguaging, including translanguaging pedagogy—comprised of translanguaging stance, design, and co-learning (García et al., 2017)—, and translanguaging space (Li, 2011). Together, these frameworks situate translanguaging within collaborative, community-centered educational ecologies. They help illuminate how students engaged in translanguaging practices to co-construct knowledge with teachers and how they used their lived experiences, knowledge, creativity, and criticality to shape teachers’ instructional practices.
This study is part of a three-year-long critical ethnographic project situated in a CCHS in the Midwest U.S. Born and raised in Mainland China, I currently serve as a teacher educator and researcher at a U.S. university and have been working as both a teacher and researcher at the CCHS for the past four years. The two Chinese American bilingual teacher participants have taught at the school for over three years, and a total of 33 consent forms were obtained from student participants. The data includes 144 hours of audio/video recordings from two classrooms, approximately 10 hours of individual interview recordings, and rich artifacts from teachers and students. Following a phronetic iterative approach (Tracy, 2018), I employed a two-stage coding process, beginning with descriptive coding in the first cycle, followed by pattern coding in the second (Miles et al., 2018).
The first finding reveals that both teachers created a translanguaging space where they and their students could draw on their full linguistic repertoires and cultural knowledge to support meaning-making and knowledge construction. The second finding shows that both teachers actively cultivated a classroom culture in which students took responsibility for supporting and learning from their peers. The final finding shows how students, through their challenges and critiques of instructional moments, prompted teachers to engage in critical reflection and refine their translanguaging pedagogy.
This study contributes to the fields of bilingual and biliteracy education, as well as teacher education in bi/multilingual settings, by offering ideological and pedagogical insights into how Chinese American bilingual teachers enact translanguaging pedagogy with students. The study underscores the importance of teachers positioning themselves as co-learners and building strong, trust-based relationships with students, highlighting that translanguaging spaces are not created by pedagogy alone, but through mutual respect, shared cultural connections, open communication, and community-based knowledge.

Author

• Jiadi Zhang, University of Missouri - St. Louis