Humanising teacher education through translanguaging: experiences from an online English-medium instruction (EMI) course

ABSTRACTThis study examines how a teacher educator perceives and enacts translanguaging to humanise teacher education in an online English-medium instruction (EMI) course in China. Drawing on multiple sources of data, including classroom observations and the post-course interview, the findings reveal a set of translanguaging strategies, which helped the teacher educator humanise the students, field of knowledge, as well as himself in the online course. The findings enrich the existing understanding about the intertwined and mutually supportive relationship between translanguaging and humanising pedagogy. In particular, the study shows that when translanguaging is used in an embodied, emergent, and interactive manner, it can create a humanising space to support students’ content learning and whole-person development. The paper concludes with a clarion call for humanising teaching and teacher education through translanguaging in increasingly globalised and multilingual classrooms.KEYWORDS: English-medium instructionhumanising pedagogyonline teachingteacher educationtranslanguaging AcknowledgementThis article is supported by a start-up research grant [SRG2020-00028-FED] of the University of Macau as well as the Education Fund of the Macao SAR Government (Ref no. HSSUMAC-2021-12).Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).