Translanguaging for a hopeful future

Abstract

In this special issue, Guest Editors Sabrina Sembiante and Zhongfeng Tian set out to frame translanguaging as a Pedagogy of Hope, specifically, the hope that by adopting a translanguaging pedagogy, teachers can help counteract the pervasive monoglossic bias that is so often inherent in the curriculum, instruction, program structures, and the ideologies of individual teachers. The five articles in this issue do indeed provide glimpses of that hope. One significant contribution of this special issue is the wide range of students in various contexts where these pedagogies of hope are being tried out. These include young preschool students with rich linguistic repertoires in bilingual and multilingual education programs (Sembiante et al. and Kirsh and Mortini), predominantly English-dominant elementary school students in a Chinese immersion classroom (Tian and Lau), predominately English-monolingual pre-service and in-service teachers in university ESL methods courses (Ponzio and Deroo), and a bilingual graduate student in a Spanish as a world language program (Prada). The articles largely focused on current and future teachers as agents for enacting translanguaging as a pedagogy of hope, with three of the articles (Tian and Lau, Ponzio and Deroo, and Prada) specifically focused on the transformations in what García, Johnson, and Seltzer (2016) would describe as translanguaging stances, shifts, and designs. In each case, there are clear shifts from ignorance and resistance to varying degrees of acceptance. Tian and Lau’s participant – a native-Chinese third grade immersion teacher deeply concerned about protecting space for Chinese language instruction – really grappled with the concept but was willing to negotiate with Tian as a collaborator and experiment with translanguaging pedagogies. Prada described his participant – a recent immigrant and well-educated language teacher from Latin America –moving from strong ideologies of linguistic purism to embracing translanguaging pedagogy through a process of ‘small epiphanies’ and an overall ‘critical awakening or despertar crítico’. The largely monolingual-English teacher education students in Ponzio and Deroo’s study went through a multimodal entextualization cycle (MEC) with carefully planned tasks that supported their growing understandings of translanguaging as theory and pedagogy. While the bilingual and multilingual teachers in the two preschool studies (Sembiante et al., and Kirsh and Mortini) were already engaging in translanguaging pedagogies, the authors found variations in their translanguaging shifts and designs. They also focus on the agency of the students themselves as they draw on their full linguistic repertoires to engage in their classrooms. I will comment briefly on each article, highlighting findings that stood out to me, and connecting them with my own observations and experiences as a former bilingual (Khmer) teacher, as a teacher educator, and as a researcher. I’ll then conclude by returning to the theme with comments on the hope I find in this special issue. Sembiante et al. focused on the Show and Tell time in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) Spanish-English preschool classrooms. They grapple with one of the major tensions in our field as we seek to move away from the historical practice of insisting on the strict separation of languages in bilingual classrooms. Such practice ironically reinforces a parallel version of the monolingual bias, with monolingual instruction in two named languages stacked side-by-side. While we know that