Practice What We Teach: Translanguaging at Home as an Act of Resistance

• In Event: Cultivating Authentic Language Practices: Learning From Community Translanguaging Practices Outside of Schools

Abstract

Objectives
Raising bilingual children is often viewed as a commodity that builds social and economic capital for white, middle-class families (Garcia & Flores, 2017); yet, globally, families raising their children to develop and maintain rich linguistic practices, including minoritized languages, commonly experience obstacles to wellbeing, including parental shame for children’s bilingual performativity and distress for multilingual children when they are socialized into monolingual social institutions, such as schools, that systematically devalue their language practices (de Houwer, 2019). Our objective is to critically analyze two mother-scholars’ (Lapayese, 2017) experiences of raising multilingual children in order to examine the affordances provided by a translanguaging stance, connecting personal and professional experiences to political dimensions of languaging.

Theoretical Framework
We examine translanguaging as a political act (Flores & Mena, 2021) through a mother-scholar lens (Lapayese, 2012) that positions mothering knowledge as powerful for social change and rejects forced duality between what is viewed as linear/rational intellectualism in academic traditions and the emotional work of mothering. To analyze our language practices, we move from conceptions of bilingualism as a commodity to languaging as a social and political act as conceptualized through translanguaging.

Methods and Data Sources
We utilized autoethnographic methods (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015) to gather data over a three year period, including text message records, shared reflections, and fieldnotes created from phone and Zoom conversations. Collaboratively, we conducted thematic analysis (Saldana, 2021) to identify themes across the data set, then used comparative techniques (Yin, 2011) to triangulate. We both identify as critical scholars of multilingualism with differing social identities, experiences, and reasons for raising multilingual children. One of us is a bilingual/biliterate, neurodiverse, Afro-Latina woman who immigrated to the US in 1990 and is raising children alongside her white, Italian-American spouse who developed English/Spanish bilingualism as a teenager in the U.S. The other is a white woman, born in the United States whose partner is a recently-arrived immigrant who developed Spanish/English bilingualism as an adult in the US. We foregrounded our intersectional understandings (Crenshaw, 1991) of these alongside differential lines of privilege we experience in relationship to larger power structures as we conducted analysis.

Substantiated Conclusion and Scholarly Significance
Ultimately, we found a disconnect between our teaching and research of translanguaging and our own personal, linguistic practices and ideologies as mothers. We experienced constraints on access to transformative bilingual spaces coupled with dissonance between how we supported our children’s multilingual identity development and what school and community mirrored back to them outside the home. We also identified discourses of shame around multilingual mothering, our own political identities and our capacities to practice what we teach. However, taking up and naming translanguaging as a political act in our homes and to each other held keys to liberation. We argue that translanguaging can be an act of resistance and a practice that reframes discourses of shame and fear around bilingual mothering, freeing parents and children from deleterious social constraints. We acknowledge our economic and professional privilege as a limitation of these claims.

Authors

• Crissa Stephens, Georgetown University

• María Cioè-Peña, Penn GSE