Raising Critical Multilingual Language Awareness Through Collaborative Translanguaging Pedagogy: Testimony of a Research-Practice Partnership

• In Event: Partnerships for Empowering Minoritized Students

Abstract

This presentation draws on a Research-Practice Partnership between a Midwestern University and elementary schools that sought to examine how collaborative learning through multilingual inquiry can be sustained in mainstream English-medium classrooms. We discuss our collaboration with teachers in co-designing multilingual activities on The Little Prince (Saint-Exupéry, 1943). This teaching unit aimed at fostering critical multilingual language awareness (Garcia, 2017) and leveraging students’ language repertoires as resources in the classroom.
The data collected over one semester with 130 students included classroom observations, in situ discussions, student work and on-going conversations with collaborating teachers.
Findings highlight how normalizing translanguaging can create contexts for power shifts between English dominant and language minoritized students and support linguistic and cultural collaboration (Prasad & Lory, 2019).

Authors

• Sandra Descourtis, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Gail L Prasad, York University

• Sandrine Pell, University of Wisconsin - Madison