Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2019

In today’s globalized multilingual classrooms, deficit ideologies tend to disregard the cultural capital and mobile semiotic resources that immigrant and culturally diverse students bring with them (Blommaert 2010). There is a growing need to focus on culturally sustaining pedagogies that reframe how we think about teaching multilingual learners (Paris and Alim 2017). By bringing two perspectives – Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (Halliday 1993) theory and García’s (2009) notion of translanguaging – into dialogue, we explore their conceptual alignments and complementarities. Building upon this, we envision culturally sustaining SFL as an integrative framework which holds the promise of fostering meaningful heteroglossic contexts of learning for multilingual learners in supporting their multiliteracies (see Khote 2017; Harman and Khote 2018). Data from one of the author’s English Language Arts (ELA) classroom will further illustrate: (a) how students’ complex linguistic repertoires were mobilized as a foundational resource for developing disciplinary literacy, and (b) how multilingual students engaged with the curriculum to interrogate discourses that diminish their authentic participation in the classroom.

In this article, a conceptual discussion grounded in our practice as educators and scholars we use a bilingual poem, collaboratively written by young people from Latinx immigrant backgrounds, as an entry point to engage with existing discussions among practitioners and scholars on connections between translanguaging and Freirean praxis, and more broadly, on translanguaging and its potential for social transformation. Grounding our discussion in our work at a bilingual community education non-profit organization that seeks to empower Latinx immigrants, we explore how we are developing translanguaging spaces for immigrant students and families, spaces guided by a collective vision of social transformation, through what we call translanguaging praxis. Through articulating this translanguaging praxis, we foreground the transformative potential of translanguaging. We argue that translanguaging is not only a political act but that it can also be a critical, rebellious and creative one through which educators, students and families can respond to dominant narratives on Latinx immigrants in the US, co-constructing counter-stories through which they express who they are from their own perspectives and in dialogue with each other.

This article explores the synergies between translanguaging and feminist poststructuralism to deepen understandings of how educators can teach for justice. I highlight how both theories challenge dominant structures and boundaries; how they privilege process over product; and how they both illuminate non-dominant voices and experiences. I explore how both translanguaging and feminist poststructuralism have helped me challenge foundational epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies as a teacher educator in the field of teaching English. Throughout this article I examine what taking up these theories to challenge and question the status quo means for how we might better engage language as a tool for justice.

Translanguaging pedagogy, stemming from a dynamic view of bilingualism, aims to creatively mobilize students’ plural communicative repertoires for meaningful learning and destabilize hegemonic discourses about minoritized students and languages. It espouses in itself a criticality that raises awareness of the inequitable and arbitrary nature of language hierarchy, separation and marginalization for social justice purposes, a central tenet shared with critical literacy (CL) education. This paper explores the convergences and alignments between translanguaging pedagogy and CL and the affordances for critical bilingual learning when employed together. To examine the synergies between translanguaging and CL, I use Janks’ (2010) synthesis CL model to tease out their interconnections as well as their transformative potential when used jointly in bilingual classrooms. Elaborating on key literacy events from a CL project with emergent bilingual students, this paper illustrates how translanguaging opens up spaces for rigorous language and CL engagement.