Translanguaging as a Tool for Liberatory Organizing

• In Event: Translanguaging as Embodied Language Policy in Critical Inquiries about Linguistic Justice Across Generations and Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines translanguaging as a dynamic tool for organizing and creating otherwise worlds (Gergen, 2015) in contact zones (Pratt, 1991). Drawing examples from a multi-year participatory design research project with US-based K-12 heritage language educators, we studied how translanguaging functions for and as political education, identifying translanguaging as a way for multilingual educators to engage with the political action of claiming educational rights. The study’s significance is to re-member (Dillard, 2008) translanguaging as more than oral and print literacy practices, but as an anticolonial strategy and art for survivance and the evasion of linguistic and cultural removal and replacement with narrow forms sanctioned by the state.
Perspectives
Contact Zones are “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt, 1991). The US is an example contact zone: a settler colonial nation-state, constructed through racial capitalism and biocultural removal and replacement with European settler forms. Schools are microcosmic contact zones: technologies of governmentality that collectively enact the settler colonial project of the state (de Rezende Rocha, et al., 2025). As a contact zone art, translanguaging is more than language usage, but strategies and practices that emerge and are creatively used in order to survive, strategize, re-claim, and (re)create worlds despite suppression, conversion, and erasure. However, as translanguaging has become increasingly acknowledged and utilized in language and literacy research and pedagogies, it is often separated from its anticolonial roots, instead reflecting languaging as communication acts and practices, disembodied from the sociopolitical ecology (Douglas Fir Group, 2016).

Mode of Inquiry
Data were gathered throughout a multi-year participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) with one 107 participant multilingual educators: bilingual in Spanish/English and Hmong/English. Data were gathered during the professional development cycles. This process involved (1) multiple iterations of desires and needs mapping (adapted from Litmann, et al., 2021), (2) professional development creation and participation, and (3) three repetitions over five years. Data include needs and desire concept maps, educator questionnaires, and ethnographic notes (reflexive and observational) regarding the role of translanguaging. We used key concept coding to identify professional development desires and coded ethnographic notes for dimensions of translanguaging: pedagogical practice, stance, and strategic use.

Findings
Data showed participating multilingual educators from displaced communities drawing on political dimensions of translanguaging: moving beyond verbal communication practice and creatively designing professional development and study spaces outside the purview of typical language teacher professional development. These included critical disability studies, ethnic studies, youth participatory action research, anticolonial and critical language awareness study groups, and abolitionist approaches to teaching and learning.

Significance
This study reflects deeper utility of translanguaging that reclaims its political capacities, showing how educators and community members creatively operate outside of schooling systems to identify, seek out, and create for themselves liberatory education opportunities that resist systems of compliance and conversion to monolingual, English-dominant, and subtractive curriculum.

Authors

• Jenna Cushing-Leubner, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater

• Natalia Benjamin, Rochester Public Schools