Bridging Theory to Practice: Exploring the Role of an Educative Translingual Curriculum to Support Linguistically Diverse Classroom Practices

Abstract

This study investigates how five teachers of multilingual learners (MLLs), working in an officially English‐centric school district, make sense of a reading curriculum based in translingual pedagogies, or instruction that builds on language and languaging practices (e.g., language brokering, translation, and codemeshing) familiar to multilingual youth. Participating teachers, describing themselves as mostly monolingual educators, utilized the curriculum during a support class for their MLLs. We show how this curriculum, containing what we classify as educative curriculum materials (Davis & Krajcik, 2005), operated to support, and extend linguistically supportive instructional practices occurring within participating teachers' classroom figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998). Using data from classroom observations and teacher interviews, we show how the curriculum operated as a mediating artifact to support teachers' development of more linguistically diverse practices within their classrooms. Findings indicate that curriculum materials bridged theory to practice by supporting teacher development of these practices, which, in turn, bolstered their beliefs in the importance of students' home languages, and led to a shift in how teachers understood, interpreted, and resisted English‐centric policies at their schools.