“I feel weird when I speak हिन्दी …”: Translanguaging, resistance, and multimodality in elementary classrooms

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

Abstract

As global migration continues to rise, “immigrants make up the largest share of the population in over 150 years” in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2022). Although migration has contributed to perceptible cultural and linguistic diversity in schools, Canadian classrooms continue to be shaped by White, middle-class, monolingual norms (Cummins, 2023). Adopting an intentional translanguaging stance (García et al., 2017) in elementary schools supports emergent bilinguals’ meaning-making processes and enriches conceptions of heritage language learning. Yet, this transformative process is not easy, and I discuss young children’s conflicting responses to inviting different languages into a Grade 2/3 classroom during a multilingual collaborative photography project, and also how translanguaging practices gradually shifted their perspectives.

I reach for interconnected concepts of translanguaging (Garcia et al., 2021) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Ladson-Billings et al., 2024; Paris, 2021), critically drawing on students’ cultural resources to not only make relevant students’ identities, but sustaining them to foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism. Relatedly, multimodal perspectives (Kendrick, 2016; Kress, 2017) highlight the plurality of making meaning beyond linguistic forms (e.g. through drawings, speech, images, and sounds), which are particularly significant for children as they learn to express their understandings.

This presentation draws on selected data from a year-long design research study (McKenney & Reeves, 2019) with Grade 2/3 children and their teacher, exploring the communicative repertoires (Rymes, 2014) of emergent bilinguals and their potential to inform pedagogical transformation. Emphasizing emergent listening (Davies, 2017), data sources include informal conversations with the children and their teacher, visual creations with multilingual narratives, documents, artifacts, and classroom observations.

As we collaborated on multimodal processes and wrote multilingual narratives, children shared thoughts about multiple languages in the classroom. Many emergent bilinguals embraced translanguaging aspects that affirmed their identities of competence (Manyak, 2004) and offered them a louder voice in the classroom. However, others presented a white speaking/listening stance (Flores & Rosa, 2015), hesitating to use their languages and regulating themselves and peers due to internalized English-only norms. I interpret this resistance not as personal reluctance but as a response to systemic ideologies, including the devaluing of multilingualism, the belief that English learning “comes at the expense of the home language” (Kubota & Bale, 2020, p. 776), and racialized normative practices.

Nevertheless, supported by their teacher, the co-designed translanguaging photo project positioned children as language inquirers and experts, fostering more inclusive listening for experiences, and shifting emergent bilinguals’ identities. Languages and cultures shaped learner identities in both enabling and constraining ways, but arts-based and multimodal methods offered humanizing means to honour their complex emotions and diverse communicative practices beyond dominant language norms (Author, 2023). Multilingual visual texts told counterstories, enabling emergent bilinguals to share their lifeworlds, resist deficit narratives, and navigate raciolinguistic power dynamics.

Institutional racism in education persists through monolingual ideologies and raciolinguistic agendas that lead to deficit perspectives of multilingual communities (Rosa & Flores, 2021; Paris, 2021). Adopting translanguaging stances and culturally sustaining pedagogies enables teachers to disrupt hegemonic discourses, transform pedagogical practices, and centre children’s knowledge and brilliance (Muhammad, 2022).

Author

• Harini Rajagopal, University of British Columbia