Learning to Teach English for Justice from a Translanguaging Orientation

Abstract

This research study investigated how undergraduate students understood translanguaging in relationship to language, culture, and power; and how they embodied translanguaging in a TESOL Certificate course to see if translanguaging as pedagogy affords students the elements necessary to teach for justice. Through collaborative qualitative methods utilizing teacher research we analyzed the course work of 19 student participants in the course to see their learning and application of translanguaging. We found the student participants, in response to learning about translanguaging, demonstrated understandings of the connection between language, culture, and power, and its importance in teaching emergent bilinguals. However, we also found that participants struggled with translanguaging in their teaching practice and mostly resorted to using TESOL strategies rather than embodying translanguaging. This research sheds light on the process, program and evaluation of teacher preparation and illuminates the ways in which program design and instructional strategies can best prepare teachers to teach for justice.

This study takes place in unprecedented times in the United States. Intolerance and hatred are exacerbated under the current administration. The reactionary political atmosphere, largely created by the current government, is promoting divisiveness both nationally and internationally. In the current volatile political environment nativist sentiments are driving policies that overtly discriminate against immigrants and refugees. Civil rights and laws protecting women, people of color, and LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) people are being dismantled. Political rhetoric has normalized racist discourse and hate speech.

Language can be used as a tool to reinforce prejudice and discrimination. The language a person speaks is often seen to indicate one’s nationality or belonging to a country, culture, environment, class, race or ethnicity. In the U.S., while English is not the official language, its hegemonic features tend to mask the country’s plurality of languages. Sixty-six million people (21.8% of the population) speak a language other than English at home. In particular, Spanish is spoken at home by forty-one million U.S. residents (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017). Spanish is the most spoken non-English language in the U.S. and the fastest growing student population in the U.S. is Spanish-speaking (Flores, 2017). However, language policies do not support this reality. Many states and school districts employ English-only policies. The ideology that drives these policies erases the heterogeneity of students. These policies are based on a deficit point of view that sees students’ language diversity as a problem to rectify rather than a resource. Being discriminated against based on the language one speaks or being forbidden to use one’s language has devastating effects on students.

It is crucial to build inclusivity and understanding through education to counter the growing intolerance and discrimination. As academics, teachers, and students, we believe that translanguaging, a teaching theory and approach that uses all students’ cultural and linguistic repertoires in learning, provides the theoretical and pedagogical tools to create compassionate and transformative classrooms. Working in the TESOL field, we understand the power of language. We believe it is our responsibility to use language in transformative ways. Translanguaging offers hope for building transformative classrooms (García, 2009a; García & Li, 2014). We have specifically chosen to explore translanguaging, as we believe that it represents an important shift from English-only policies and the traditionally monolingual teaching of English to teaching language for justice (Ladson-Billings, 2015). Translanguaging values students’ bi/multilingualism as a resource and strategically incorporates their cultures, languages, experiences, and stories into classrooms (García & Kleyn, 2016). We believe that translanguaging holds the promise of challenging the hegemonic power of English and leveraging language-minoritized student practices to create more equitable classrooms. In other words, we see translanguaging as a potential way to teach English for justice.

This research stemmed from the collaboration between two of the authors, Zhongfeng and Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s desire to bring together her goal of teaching for justice and her work in TESOL teacher preparation. Translanguaging as theory and pedagogy shares these same goals. For Elizabeth learning and teaching about translanguaging was revolutionary having come from years of preparing teachers using principles and practices of Sheltered English Instruction (SEI). With the purpose of preparing students to teach for justice, this research studies how the explicit teaching of translanguaging theory and pedagogy in a TESOL certificate course, open to all undergraduate students, was taken up by students. Previous work (Robinson, Tian, Martínez, & Qarqeen, 2018) introduced translanguaging in the same TESOL course a semester earlier (Spring 2017) and showed promising results among student participants in terms of an epistemic shift in their understanding of language theory and language education. To go beyond just introducing translanguaging, we built on the previous findings to better integrate translanguaging into the course. This research study was conducted in the fall of 2017. We asked three questions in our research:

• 1. How do undergraduate student participants understand translanguaging in relationship to language, culture and power?

• 2. How do participants enact translanguaging in their microteaching?

• 3. Does translanguaging as pedagogy in a TESOL course afford participants the elements necessary to teach for justice?

In the writing of our study, we are influenced by the work of García, Kleifgen, and Falchi (2008) in viewing all languages as resources for teaching; and we use the term “emergent bilinguals” for people in the process of learning another language. This term recognizes their emergent status of becoming bilinguals, highlighting the advantages these students have rather than focusing on their need to learn English (García, 2009b). In this chapter, we also use the term ELLs (English Language Learners) as it was the term used in the course when it was taught and it is also a commonly used term in the field of TESOL.

Within the political and social context of the United States we see translanguaging as a powerful tool for teacher education. Our intent is to prepare our undergraduate students, who aspire to teach English, to counter deficit monolingual ideologies through a translanguaging approach to language, culture and power. Next, we further explain our understandings of justice and what it means to us to teach English for justice. Our methodology section will introduce each of the authors of this collaborative study, explore the classroom context of the study, and share our processes of data collection and analysis. We will then elaborate on how participants understood translanguaging and how we saw evidence of important critical understandings of language, culture, and power. In our discussion section we draw on our conceptual framework to make sense of our findings and where we are in terms of preparing our participants to teach English for justice. We end with conclusions on our own teaching and implications for future work in TESOL teacher preparation in order for all teachers to teach English for justice.

1 Conceptual Framework

1.1 Justice

At the core of our research team is our collective commitment to work for justice through language and through our teaching. Language shapes our understandings, our learning, our knowledge and thus our power. Teaching, and the teaching of language, hold the promise of opening up new and more just ways of understanding and being in our world. In our research team, we have spent hours discussing justice. We believe that we need to broaden our focus from just examining social and human interactions to consider the ways that human injustices impact all aspects of our world. We are influenced by Gloria Ladson-Billings’ call for a focus on “Just Justice” (2015). She explains that what is needed is a “fundamental rethinking of our work and our task as human beings” (Ladson-Billings, 2015) to confront the tremendous injustices that keep our society and our world so far away from what we know is just, fair and equitable. Ladson-Billings urges educational researchers to take up the term justice instead of focusing on a specific definition of justice such as social justice. She explains, that for educational researchers, this rethinking to address justice, “just justice”, entails making two shifts in the work we do.

The first shift is critiquing Western approaches to justice and looking broadly around the world for more comprehensive theories of justice. While some of our research team members are socialized in Western academic traditions and very much informed by the fields of social justice education (Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 2007), and multicultural education and culturally responsive education (Banks, 1996; Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Nieto, 1992), we recognize and invite broader understandings. We collectively work to expand on these Western understandings of justice by seeking out other perspectives and conceptions of justice such as those belonging to colonized and/or indigenous peoples. We do this by exploring various academic literature on colonization (Battiste, 2000) for non-Western approaches to justice and indigenous practices (Smith, 2012; Tuck, 2009) and for broader understandings of interactions between humans and the natural world. Simultaneously, we work to ensure that the makeup of our team is culturally, linguistically and ethnically diverse. In our research, we continuously work to broaden our own understandings of justice by learning from as many perspectives as possible. One small shift we have made due to our belief in the transformative power of language and terminology, is explicitly adopting a focus on justice rather than social justice. The term justice encompasses discussion about all components of Earth rather than limiting the discussion to only societal factors that are considered when using the term social justice.

The second shift, in order to rethink the work of educational researchers and confront injustices, entails moving from viewing justice as a theory to enacting justice as praxis. We understand praxis to be the simultaneous engagement in theory, research, and action to bring about change that is grounded in respect for our world and all things inhabiting our world. Justice as praxis in teaching then requires teachers to engage theory, conduct classroom research and enact changes in their own practices that respect and support all students for the purpose of bettering our world. Our overarching goal is to explore ways to implement our ever-shifting theories of justice into our own practice of researching and teaching as well as into future teachers’ practices. We strive to challenge and ultimately to change existing unjust language and literacy educational practices (García & Kleifgen, 2018).

1.2 Teaching English for Justice through Translanguaging

Our constantly evolving understandings of justice feed our immediate research goal of investigating ways to teach English for justice. On our journey of striving toward justice in our TESOL certificate courses, we are guided by the theory of translanguaging (García, 2009a; García & Li, 2014) in seeking to provide access to English in culturally and linguistically sustaining ways. Translanguaging theory critiques structures of dominance and prioritizes non-dominant ways of knowing and speaking. By openly critiquing the dominance of English, translanguaging “helps to disrupt the socially constructed language hierarchies that are responsible for the suppression of the language of many minoritized peoples” (Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015, p. 283). We view this critiquing of English dominance as akin to the challenging of Western ideas of justice in Ladson-Billings’ (2015) call for “just justice”.

As well as a theory, translanguaging is also a pedagogy. Translanguaging pedagogy is made up of three framing concepts: stance, design, and shifts (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017). Stance is a commitment by teachers to value bilingual students’ full language repertoires as a human right and a learning resource. Translanguaging lesson design establishes connections across home, school, and community languages and cultures through curricula. Translanguaging shifts are required when unforeseen and unplanned classroom interactions demand variations. When teachers engage in translanguaging pedagogy they leverage students’ bilingualism for learning, which levels the playing field and advances justice (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017). We believe that translanguaging as a theory and as pedagogy is an equitable tool teachers can employ to teach for justice.

The other theoretical tool that guides our journey toward teaching English for justice is our Teachers for Justice model in Fig. 7.1 below. Our objectives as teacher educators are for critical teachers to be able to: (1) recognize practices and structures that sustain inequalities (2) critique status quo practices and structures that sustain inequalities and (3) engage in practices that support all learners. Figure 7.1 shows how recognizing, critiquing and practicing are all connected practices, yet practicing is the largest component of teacher’s work. Each of these objectives can be further understood and assessed by looking for specific critical goals and objectives that have been taken from the literature on preparing teachers for diverse students and on preparing teachers to work with ELLs. We use this model to assess how we are doing in preparing future teachers to teach for justice.

Fig. 7.1

Teachers for justice model

2 Methodology

This qualitative study drew on methods of teacher research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993) to explore how student participants learn and apply translanguaging in an undergraduate TESOL course entitled Strategies for Working with English Learners, offered in Fall 2017. This study was conducted by a team of researchers, rather than just the course teacher, in order to explore translanguaging from different perspectives. Thereby, we designed the study to recognize and value the unique experiences (both etic and emic) and critical roles of each of the researchers. We acted as knowledge brokers to mutually inform and reinforce one another’s understanding of translanguaging during our research process. We drew on models of teacher action research to take a flexible, context-specific approach to problem-solving and implementing necessary changes in the Strategies for Working with English Learners course that was being simultaneously taught and researched (Blumenreich & Falk, 2006; Chandler-Olcott, 2002).

2.1 The Researchers

Our research team consisted of four members. Elizabeth was the professor who developed the TESOL Certificate courses and who was the instructor of the Strategies for Working with English Learners course. Zhongfeng, was a doctoral student from another institution who was knowledgeable about translanguaging. He assisted with micro teaching and videotaping in the course. Elie was an undergraduate student working with Elizabeth as a Research Assistant. He was also enrolled as a student in the course. Maíra, was an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher interested in pursuing a TESOL Certificate. She audited Strategies for Working with English Learners the following year in Fall 2018.

Elizabeth Robinson was born and raised in Boston, U.S. She speaks English and studied French throughout her schooling. She taught English in South Korea for 2 years and in Spain for 3 years. Her Spanish is much stronger than her Korean but her love for both of these cultures and for working translingually and transculturally has infused her professional work. After receiving a masters’ degree in applied linguistics she taught ESL in public schools for 3 years. In 2004, Elizabeth went back to school for a doctoral degree in Language, Literacy and Culture from UMass Amherst. Her focus in all her work is on preparing teachers to work in linguistically and culturally sustaining ways. She has been a professor at Suffolk University in Boston since 2008 and at the time of the study she served as the Director of the Undergraduate Education Studies Program and the TESOL Certificate Program.

Zhongfeng Tian is originally from China, and a multilingual speaker of Mandarin and English with conversational fluency in Cantonese. He holds a Master of Education degree in TESOL from Boston University and at the time of the study was a doctoral candidate majoring in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Language, Literacy, and Culture at Boston College. As a former ESL/EFL teacher, he worked with students of different age groups and cultural and linguistic backgrounds in China, Cambodia, and U.S. His research is theoretically grounded in translanguaging and critical pedagogies, and he strives to transform emergent bilinguals’ learning experiences through creating heteroglossic, meaningful educational contexts.

Elie Crief grew up in a small town 1 h away from Paris, France. He speaks French and English. He also studied Spanish during his secondary and postsecondary education. He graduated from Suffolk University with a Bachelor of Science in Sociology and a concentration in Education Studies. He has been a research assistant working with this group on translanguaging projects since September 2017. His interest in education is to make classrooms become inclusive spaces and his bilingual status gives him firsthand experience to understand how language plays a role in educational settings.

Maíra Lins Prado was born and raised in São Paulo region, Brazil, and speaks Portuguese and English. She went to a language school for both Italian and French, and learned Spanish on her own. She started teaching English to students of different learning levels at 17 years old. She has a degree in Law from Faculdade de Direito de São Bernardo do Campo in Brazil and worked as a lawyer for a few years, providing multilingual legal services in Brazil. In 2017 she decided to redirect her career back to the teaching of English and translation. She then moved to New Hampshire, U.S., and joined our research group at Suffolk University.

2.2 Context

Shifting from SEI to Translanguaging

This study took place at a city university located in Massachusetts, U.S. The previous education policies in the state required all teacher candidates, regardless of their content area, to be certified in Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) to work with English learners. SEI requires teachers to use clear, direct, simple English and a wide range of scaffolding strategies (Short & Echevarria, 1999) to make content area instruction more accessible to learners while developing their academic language proficiency.

Within this language policy context, Elizabeth, as the director of the Education Studies Program of this university, developed a TESOL Certification program in 2017 to equip teacher candidates with SEI theory and practice. While preparing the TESOL program, Elizabeth met one of the authors, Zhongfeng, who shared with her his knowledge of translanguaging. Elizabeth felt that translanguaging deeply connected with her goal of teaching language for justice, particularly its mobilization of students’ full linguistic repertoires. This was a welcome contrast to the state’s SEI model which utilizes English only and excludes the rich sociocultural and linguistic experiences that all students can bring to learning tasks. During their initial meetings in January 2017, Zhongfeng and Elizabeth decided to explore what would happen as they worked to change the TESOL Certificate that had been designed from an SEI approach to a translanguaging-informed TESOL Certificate.

Implementing Translanguaging

Figure 7.2 below demonstrates the components that were included in implementing translanguaging in this study. With a strong belief in the educational promise of translanguaging and an ultimate goal of preparing teachers to teach English for justice, Elizabeth collaborated with Zhongfeng to integrate a translanguaging pedagogical orientation across the two required courses of the TESOL Certificate program: Strategies for Working with English Learners and TESOL Practice. The course under examination in this chapter was, Strategies for Working with English Learners offered in Fall 2017. Guided by our Teachers for Justice model, the course focused on recognizing and critiquing educational inequalities and practicing just ways to teach all learners. As the instructor Elizabeth grounded her teaching in a sociocultural approach. She implemented translanguaging as a new component to transform the course from an SEI-based approach into a translanguaging-informed approach through three tactics: teaching about translanguaging, creating translanguaging spaces, and asking students to apply translanguaging strategies. She regularly consulted with Zhongfeng and Elie for feedback and their perspectives on each of these tactics.

Fig. 7.2

Implementing translanguaging

Teaching About Translanguaging

Elizabeth selected the book The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017) as the core text for this course and introduced topics including translanguaging theory, stance, design and assessment throughout the whole semester. She asked students to conduct interviews with multilingual students who are traditionally considered “English learners/non-native English speakers”. The purpose of having students conduct this research was for them to learn about “ELLs’” educational and living experiences in the U.S., and to engage students in regular conversations about the connections among language, culture, and power to develop a political understanding of TESOL. In addition, Elizabeth encouraged students to compare and contrast SEI and translanguaging as theoretical and pedagogical approaches. She explicitly shared her belief in translanguaging as a more just approach to teaching emergent bilinguals.

Creating Translanguaging Spaces

Elizabeth intentionally created educational spaces to engage students in drawing upon their full cultural and linguistic repertoires when participating in class activities. Specifically, students were asked to write weekly critical reflection journals to document their thoughts and learning trajectories. Students were encouraged to clarify, think, and write in any language they felt comfortable. Moreover, students learned the linguistic and cultural rituals for greetings in all the languages present in the class, and greeted every member of the class in their own language at the beginning of each class session. Additionally, Elizabeth asked each student to share their “identity kits” (who they are in terms of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, personal interests, and any other things that are significant to them) at the beginning of the semester (Elizabeth also shared hers as a modeling practice). This served as a good opportunity to get to know each other for the purpose of establishing an inclusive learning community and developing students’ multilingual and multicultural awareness/appreciation.

Asking Students to Apply Translanguaging Strategies

Elizabeth designed opportunities in the course for students to apply what they learned in designing lesson plans and microteaching. Students were introduced to Universal Design for Learning (Rose & Meyer, 2000) and Backwards Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) as two principles for designing curriculum to support all learners. Students were asked to draw on these principles to design a translanguaging lesson planning template (adapted from the core textbook García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017). They could choose any teaching topics related to their own interests but needed to consider how to use different translanguaging strategies and approaches to address the needs of emergent bilinguals. Each student was asked to microteach a section of their lesson in 7–10 min while the class acted as “students”. Students were required to show the rationale, goals, content objectives, language objectives and the translanguaging strategies they would use during their microteaching. A short debrief session followed each microteaching in which students received feedback from Elizabeth and their classmates. A final step was for students to watch the videos of their own microteaching and then engage in a written reflection and assessment of themselves and how the lesson went, what worked and what might be done differently.

In summary, in this course, Elizabeth engaged students holistically in understanding, experiencing, and reflecting upon translanguaging as theory and pedagogy to develop a critical perspective of issues related to emergent bilinguals. The goal was for students to engage with translanguaging to foster necessary skills to teach English for justice.

2.3 Participants

Twenty-six undergraduate students enrolled in the course Strategies for Working with English Learners and nineteen of them, fourteen female and five male (aged 19–22), agreed to participate in the study. None of these students had any previous teaching experience. Notably, these courses are open to any undergraduate students interested in working with English learners or obtaining a TESOL certification. Thus the participating students held diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. This was very different from traditional demographics in the state’s teacher preparation programs (which were predominantly White, monolingual speakers). Among the nineteen participating students, there were seven self-identified monolingual English speakers and twelve bilingual students who spoke English in addition to Cambodian, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, Haitian Creole, Pashtu, and Polish. Moreover, students also studied different subject areas including business, history, fine arts, biology, sociology, Spanish, and Asian studies. Table 7.1 below provides information on all the participants.

Table 7.1 Students participant information

2.4 Data Sources

To gain a rich, in-depth understanding of how students learned and applied translanguaging, we collected five sets of artifacts generated from students’ participation in class activities and student assignments. They are: (1) students’ reading responses to multiple assigned texts including the book The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017); (2) students’ weekly reflective journals in which they were asked to respond to a journal prompt at the beginning of most classes; (3) students’ ethnographic interviews with multilingual speakers; (4) students’ final portfolios including a philosophy of teaching statement, a translanguaging lesson plan, a reflection on their microteaching, an SEI/ESL classroom observation and reflection, and a resume; and (5) fifteen videotapes of students’ microteaching sessions.

2.5 Data Analysis

Using principles of systematic data analysis (Halsall et al., 1998; Hubbard & Power, 1999), we first organized students’ artifacts by creating individual profiles for each of our participants. Therefore, we ended up with nineteen profiles consisting of all five data sources mentioned above. In our first round of data analysis we divided 8 profiles up among our research team to see what would emerge from the data. Elie, Zhongfeng and Elizabeth conducted this first round of reading our assigned student profiles and documenting our thoughts on them, bearing in mind our research questions. As a team we next engaged in iterative collective analysis of each profile. As one of us presented our reflections/notes on individual profiles, the rest of the team members memoed. We subsequently engaged in member checks to compare thoughts about each profile and inductively code (Maxwell, 2013) for common themes across the profiles. We also coded for students’ understandings of translanguaging in relation to language, culture, and power, and for how they enacted translanguaging in lesson designs and microteaching scenarios.

Our second round of analysis beginning in the fall of 2018 included Maíra. At this time Maíra was auditing the Strategies for Working with English Learners course that was being taught for a third time. This experience provided her with knowledge of translanguaging. Both Maíra and Zhongfeng held an outside perspective on the data being analyzed, as they did not attend the course under examination. On the other hand, Elizabeth as the instructor and Elie as a student in the Fall 2017 course held insider perspectives. The combining of these two perspectives contributed to the findings’ trustworthiness (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Our entire data analysis process valued and intentionally drew upon our own linguistic and cultural backgrounds, experiences, and identities. Table 7.2 below demonstrates the different roles of each member of our research team across the duration of this research project.

Table 7.2 Researchers’ roles

3 Findings

This section of the chapter responds to our first two research questions by elaborating on the findings from our analysis. First, we show how data reflect the ways that participants understood translanguaging in relationship to language, culture and power by highlighting individual quotes from class assignments. Next, we share the ways that participants enacted translanguaging based on our analysis of the translanguaging lesson plans they designed and their microteaching.

3.1 Participants’ Understandings of Translanguaging in Relationship to Language, Culture and Power

As authors and researchers we believe in the interconnectedness of language, culture and power. Our hope for this study was that by teaching about translanguaging in the TESOL Certificate program the students would understand this important relationship as well. Our analysis of participants’ understandings of translanguaging showed these concepts were clearly highlighted in their work and writing. We came up with four major themes in response to the question of how the participants understood translanguaging in relationship to language, culture and power. First, we recognized that most participants viewed translanguaging as a method or a group of strategies. Second, we identified the ways the participants made sense of language related to translanguaging. Third, we saw that participants recognized and valued cultures. Finally, we saw that some of the participants also demonstrated an awareness of power relationships. We recognize that in separating out each of these components we lose the focus on their connection. We explore the implications of our findings in the discussion section.

Translanguaging as Strategies

While analyzing the participants’ assignments, it became evident that their understanding of translanguaging was directly connected to teaching strategies. This is not surprising considering translanguaging was introduced to them in the class Strategies for Working with English Learners, which focused on teaching methods seen through a translanguaging perspective.

We found in both Riley’s¹ reflection paper about her microteaching exercise, as well as her reflection paper produced from observing an ESL classroom, she referenced translanguaging as different teaching strategies.

I attempted to use as many translanguaging strategies that I could by allowing the students to draw pictures, as well as put their half of the story in any language that they felt comfortable with as long as they could summarize what they meant. … [The teacher] used a few translanguaging methods such as bringing up visuals on a PowerPoint as she went over key vocab that they should have used in their project, and reviewed everything to make sure that they had made the right ideas connected to their vocab words. By working with each other the students could also use the translanguaging method of using everyone’s knowledge as tools to their project. … The methods of translanguaging seemed to do very well in this classroom, and it was clear that the students had been learning a lot because of these methods. (Riley)

Every mention Riley made of translanguaging in these excerpts was as methods or strategies. They were listed as allowing students to express themselves through drawings, through languages they were comfortable with, group activities using all of the students’ funds of knowledge as tools, and teacher presentation that included visuals. Translanguaging was not mentioned as a theory or teaching approach more than practical activities to support learning in the classroom.

Hannah also wrote about translanguaging as techniques in her lesson plan, as well as in her later reflection paper on her microteaching exercise.

Using visuals are a useful translanguaging technique, as it allows me to communicate with my students in multiple ways. … I definitely still could have included some translanguaging techniques. Letting students discuss the grammar in their own language or ponder how the rules apply and can be different could be included in my lesson. (Hannah)

Hannah planned her microteaching activity around the use of visuals, which she saw as a translanguaging technique that allowed multiple forms of communication among her students. Multimodality, the use of visuals or combining audio and visual texts, was a commonly cited strategy participants attributed to being translanguaging. Hannah later criticized her own microteaching for lacking enough translanguaging techniques, such as allowing discussions among the students in their own language. The use of students’ various languages as resources in the classroom would have been more in line with our understandings of translanguaging. Hannah recognized she could have gone further than only using multimodality to support her students.

Translanguaging and Language

We found that all of the participants recognized that allowing the strategic use of emergent bilinguals’ language repertoire was beneficial to students’ learning. The vast majority of participants clearly included activities in their lesson plans that required or allowed the use of multiple languages. Although Martina’s micro teaching activity itself was not about language, her lesson plan about business incorporated the use of multiple languages by students and the teacher.

Translanguaging Objectives:

• In small groups, students discuss their own perceptions of culture in their home languages and English, then discuss it with the rest of the class in both languages;

• Individual self-writing: students translate a vocabulary word bank and use their skills to compare and contrast mission and vision statements of companies in English and in their home languages;

• Teacher-student: Teachers gives class overview in home language and English. Teacher shows content in slides with important vocabulary words in both languages.

• Materials: Slides with content in both languages. Small case text for students to identify role of readers in corporate culture, available in both languages. (Martina)

Martina organized the translanguaging objectives within the lesson plan to provide an environment that supported both English and students’ home language. She encouraged students to have discussions about the class theme in small groups in both home languages and English. Attention was given to allowing students to translate the necessary vocabulary for the lesson. Martina also planned for herself as a teacher to give a class overview and provide class materials such as slides both in English and in students’ home language. This demonstrates her understanding of translanguaging as embracing the students’ linguistic backgrounds. Her planning implies the teacher should already be bilingual or make an effort in the direction of incorporating languages other than English in class.

In her teaching philosophy, Emily supported the importance of allowing the strategic use of students’ language repertoire in the classroom as learning support.

I feel as though it is always important to take in account the students’ bank of knowledge and to let them use whatever language they are comfortable in, while also helping them learn English and more skills. (Emily)

Emily acknowledged the importance of recognizing and allowing students to use their own knowledge and linguistic backgrounds while helping them learn English and other skills. All of the participants at some point observed the value of language support in the learning of emergent bilinguals, even though not all of them deliberately included it in their lesson plan. We see this as a clear awareness of the value of home languages and language diversity as resources in classrooms, instead of a problem to hinder learning that should be avoided. There is no evidence the participants believe in or value an English-only method and mentality. This worth assigned to language diversity can be seen in statements such as in Bruno’s class observation assignment, and in Hannah’s teaching philosophy.

Another great strategy that the teacher used was speaking Spanish. … The teacher also made it evident to the students to think in both languages, their home language and English to try and think of their response as it would make it easier for them in the long run. (Bruno)

It is also important to recognize how these different experiences can add to the class as a whole, since everyone has their own set of abilities and knowledge to share. This especially includes looking at the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of students and setting up the classroom in a way that gives them resources. ELL students specifically need certain resources and techniques in order to properly communicate their knowledge. (Hannah)

Bruno considered the use of language to be a valuable strategy in class, both speaking Spanish, as well as encouraging the emergent bilinguals to think in both their home language and English. Hannah considered each students’ linguistic background as ability and knowledge they were able to share. Hannah also acknowledged bilingual students’ need for specific communication resources.

Translanguaging and Culture

We also found that participants made deep connections with culture in their understandings of translanguaging. Nearly all the participants developed pedagogical stances that viewed diverse cultural backgrounds as resources that contributed to emergent bilinguals’ learning and identity affirmation. Here we selected two quotes from the philosophy of teaching statement in participants’ final portfolios to demonstrate their beliefs in the value of culture when working with emergent bilinguals.

I encourage diversity in culture and students to share and express parts of themselves to the classroom; that will make them feel like they are in a strong community rather than just a classroom. (Riley)

I welcome diversity and acknowledge that each student brings their own culture, identity, and experiences, that impact the ways in which they learn. I will strive to see cultures intermingling and shaping our classroom through collaborative group work and assignments. (Chris)

Both Riley and Chris recognized the importance of bringing in and valuing different cultures in a classroom (they “encourage” and “welcome” “diversity in culture”). They pointed out that by engaging students in “intermingling” diverse cultures, identities, and experiences collaboratively, teachers could potentially develop “a strong community” more than “just a classroom”: a heterogeneous, inclusive educational space where every student develops a sense of belonging and feels safe and affirmed to express themselves. This in turn could positively impact students’ learning. From these two quotes, we saw that by the end of the course the participants demonstrated multicultural awareness and appreciation and developed their disposition toward leveraging cultural diversity and building community for all learners through teaching practices.

While some participants recognized culture individually as a valuable resource to be incorporated in teaching practices, there were other participants who demonstrated a holistic understanding of culture, language, and power in translanguaging pedagogy. As Erin pointed out in her teaching philosophy statement in the final portfolio:

We need to incorporate culture and language into our lessons as well. When teaching to a diverse group of students each and every culture should be acknowledged and taken in to account. Most textbooks are set up to only include White culture and that also needs to change. (Erin)

Evidently, Erin firstly emphasized that every student’s culture and language should be both acknowledged and incorporated in lesson designs and teaching practices. She further problematized U.S. textbooks being White culture-centered and the need for them to reflect more cultural diversity. We saw that she also developed a critical cultural awareness which acknowledged the hegemonic nature of White culture in U.S. education that leaves out many other minoritized cultures. When Erin explained her teaching philosophy informed by translanguaging pedagogy she demonstrated an inseparable relationship between language, culture, and power.

Translanguaging and Power

In addition to making connections to language and culture, we also saw that participants understood translanguaging in relation to power. Below we have selected several representative quotes from participants’ different assignments to illustrate how they recognized and critiqued the unequal power structures embedded in U.S. society, the education system, and classrooms.

In an interview with a multilingual speaker who was categorized as an “English learner” Chris, a self-identified monolingual English speaker, sincerely expressed what she learned:

I learned how incredibly fortunate I am to have been born in the U.S. as an English speaker. Unlike my interviewee, I was privileged to have a great education where I would understand everything easily because it was taught in my language… (my interviewee) came over to the US at age 16 and had to work instead of going to school. (Chris)

Undoubtedly, Chris recognized her privilege and power as a native English speaker in an English-dominated society who was educated under an English-only policy. She also showed an emergent empathetic understanding of language-minoritized speakers in the U.S. Her quote generally demonstrated her critical understanding of the hegemonic power of English within U.S. society and the different roles ascribed to speakers of different languages.

Similarly, Carmen, a bilingual speaker of Spanish and English, also acknowledged the “mythical” superior power of English when she was asked to write about her own language experiences in her journal:

Sometimes I cannot find the proper way to express myself in English and I try to do it in Spanish, but people look down on that. There have been numerous times when my parents have questioned why I talk to my sister in both languages. They always wanted us to speak just one type of language b/c to them someone that speaks both at a time means someone with disorganized thoughts. (Carmen)

She felt denigrated for her use of home language because Spanish is a minoritized language and viewed in American society as inferior to English. Besides this, even her parents were opposed to her language mixing or translanguaging practices. From Carmen’s words, it is clear to see that people still hold misconceptions of linguistic purism (to avoid “cross-contamination” of languages), which reflects a monolingual understanding of languages as separate, fixed entities (García, 2009a). Carmen realized the linguistic hierarchies in U.S. society (the hegemony of English) and problematized the social stigma associated with translanguaging practices of language-minoritized speakers.

In addition to developing a critical awareness of the dominance of English in U.S. society and the education system, participants also critiqued the unequal power dynamics between teacher and student in traditional U.S. classrooms. After learning about translanguaging pedagogy and other related sociocultural theories of language teaching, several participants demonstrated a new imagination of the classroom environment in their philosophy of teaching statement:

To foster the best education through my teaching practices, I feel it is critical to be a student under the knowledge of my own students, therefore showing the respect and value that I have for those I am teaching. Cultivating an environment where the learning and teaching is mutual for everyone is key for utilizing all knowledge present. (Hannah)

I believe in the students becoming the teachers in the classroom. I believe that we are all students and can learn from each other. (Chris)

I believe that the teacher role is to guide providing access to information rather than acting as the primary source of it. (Martina)

All these quotes share one common theme: they aim to disrupt the traditional power held by teachers. The participants’ words demonstrate an understanding of teachers’ and students’ roles as dynamic and of the shifting and reciprocal knowledge or expertise in classrooms. This educational philosophy echoes translanguaging pedagogy which positions all students as competent knowledge contributors/producers along with teachers and encourages them to bring in their diverse funds of knowledge and full cultural and linguistic repertoires. Students in this sense are empowered to develop their agency, creativity, and criticality (Li, 2011) in different learning tasks.

To summarize, we found that participants fostered critical understandings of power structures in both macro- (U.S. society and education system) and micro- (U.S. classroom) levels. They recognized the dominant power of English and how it devalues minoritized language practices and produces harmful effects in society and in education systems. Further, they challenged the traditional power dynamics in classrooms by reimagining an equal relationships between teachers and students. We believe that the formation of these critical awareness could contribute to developing their pedagogical stance in teaching English for justice.

3.2 Students’ Enactment of Translanguaging

Our goal of preparing students to teach for justice requires that as teacher educators we go beyond the teaching of translanguaging as both theory and pedagogy. We wanted the participants to be able to embody translanguaging in their teaching practices. Elizabeth designed the course so that participants would recognize the inequalities created by English supremacy, and be able to critique English-only practices. However, the praxis that informs our work of preparing teachers for justice requires engaging in practice. Theories and understandings alone will not achieve teaching for justice. We need to understand how the participants embodied what they were taught.

There are two required courses for the TESOL Certificate. Strategies for Working with English Learners provides a theoretical preparation and TESOL Practice provides opportunities to put theories into practice. Because we conducted our research in the theoretical course, there were not as many opportunities for participants to demonstrate how they would implement translanguaging in their teaching practice as they have in the TESOL Practice course. However, our data included lessons that the participants designed and videos of the participants’ microteaching, both of which highlighted participants’ teaching practices. Our analysis showed that the participants enacted translanguaging in two ways. First, the majority of them designed translanguaging lesson plans that valued and used the linguistic repertoires of emergent bilinguals. Second, participants employed various strategies to support emergent bilinguals in their microteaching.

Translanguaging in Design

Translanguaging lesson design is one of the three framing concepts that make up translanguaging pedagogy (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017). We analyzed the lessons participants designed in order to see how they planned to enact translanguaging. Our analysis of 19 lesson plans revealed that 17 of those lesson plans had language objectives that recognized the linguistic diversity of emergent bilinguals. The other two lessons made reference to drawing on students’ cultural backgrounds, but did not include any consideration or use of students’ diverse linguistic repertoires.

Almost all of the lesson plans that included translanguaging allowed students to use both their home language and English to complete some of the class objectives such as writing assignments or participating in group work. An example of creating these multilingual spaces in lesson plan designs can be seen in the lesson objectives for Ivan’s biology lesson:

Students will be able to:

• Recognize and track biology vocabulary cognates

• Work in groups to complete the quiz using both English and their home languages

• Use both English and their home languages to write notes relative to the class topic

• Read their notes to each other and ask for opinions and comments in both languages (Ivan)

Ivan’s lesson objectives demonstrated his willingness to allow languages other than English into his lesson to facilitate students’ participation and learning. This allowance was mirrored in almost all the participants’ lesson plans. While consideration of languages and making spaces for languages other than English is helpful for emergent bilinguals, their home languages are not being valued for the contribution they can make to lessons.

There were very few lesson plan designs that drew on the linguistic repertoires of emergent bilingual students as a source of knowledge for the lesson. Two stand out as moving beyond using multilingual resources as a scaffold for students’ learning. One was Riley’s lesson about the structure of fictional stories. Her goal was for groups of students to create a story using a variety of languages. Here is her translanguaging objective:

Create a story that has a diverse amount of languages, each section of the story written by a new member of the group. These stories will be fiction based, and in the short story category. (Riley)

Martina’s lesson on business ethics was the other lesson plan that incorporated the linguistic resources of students. Below are her translanguaging lesson plan objectives which were also shared above:

• In small groups, students discuss their own perceptions of culture in their home languages and English, then discuss it with the rest of the class in both languages

• Individual self-writing: students translate a vocabulary word bank and use their skills to compare and contrast mission and vision statements of companies in English and in their home languages (Martina)

Both of these participants designed lessons that incorporated linguistic diversity in the leaning objectives of the lessons. They went further than just allowing spaces for multiple languages within the lesson. Riley wanted students to create a multilingual text and Martina wanted students to use their home languages and cultures to make comparisons and contrasts. They both used languages other than English as resources in their lesson plans to raise their metalinguistic and cross-cultural awareness.

Microteaching Strategies

We recognized in analyzing participants’ assignments to answer our first research question that participants understood translanguaging primarily as a method or a group of strategies for working with emergent bilinguals. This finding was corroborated in our analysis of microteaching videos. In answering our second question about the ways that participants embodied translanguaging, the data demonstrated participants enacting specific strategies to carry out translanguaging.

Arthur microtaught a lesson on Chinese Dynasties. He worked hard to master the correct pronunciation of key vocabulary words in Mandarin. Arthur viewed the strategy of defining key concepts and terms in a language other than English as translanguaging. His written reflection on his microteaching identified his use of Mandarin words as a translanguaging strategy:

I thought that the translanguaging techniques that I used throughout my lesson were effective, especially my use of Mandarin Chinese throughout the lesson. (Arthur)

Another common strategy participants attributed to translanguaging pedagogy was multimodality, utilizing multiple means of representing the materials and information they were introducing in their microteaching. An example of the embodiment of multimodality was Chris’s art lesson. Chris asked students to work in pairs to guide each other through a blind recreation of an image. Students were encouraged to use any signs, languages or means of communication necessary to complete the task. As an artist, Chris embodied a strategy that she knew well and believed in. She explained in the debriefing following her microteaching that the way she incorporated translanguaging into her lesson was through multimodality. Chris’s philosophy of teaching statement further demonstrated her beliefs in multimodality and hands-on work as valuable learning strategies:

I believe in the use of multi-modality as a learning tool for each type of learner. Visuals and hands-on experience with materials will help my students succeed in my classroom. (Chris)

In summary, participants demonstrated their enactment of translanguaging primarily in their lesson designs. The majority of lesson plan designs included translanguaging as a scaffolding tool by allowing students to use texts in their home languages and providing translations for students. However, there were fewer instances of participants who used multiple languages during their microteaching. For example, in her Spanish lesson, Carmen taught Spanish verbs through the medium of English. As another example, Arthur’s lesson on Chinese Dynasties, explored briefly above, used a language other than English by introducing Mandarin words. Richard’s lesson on a Spanish poet also incorporated both Spanish and English in the microteaching. Richard read the poem in Spanish, and he provided a translation in English and analyzed the poem with the class using English and Spanish.

Overall, everyone, except for two participants, incorporated multiple languages in some way into their lesson plans to enact translanguaging as a scaffolding tool in their pedagogical design. There were three participants who used translanguaging to legitimize languages other than English in their microteaching and build metalinguistic and cross-cultural awareness.

4 Discussion

In this section, we explore what we learned from our findings section regarding participants’ understandings and enactments of translanguaging to answer our third research question about whether translanguaging as pedagogy in the Strategies for Working with English Learners course afforded participants the elements necessary to teach for justice. Drawing on our theoretical understandings we next visualize what teaching for justice might entail. As the prefix trans- suggests crossing between, we cross between our theoretical tools: justice as praxis (Ladson-Billings, 2015), our teaching for justice model, and translanguaging pedagogy (García, Johnson, & Seltzer 2017) to show in Fig. 7.3 below our understandings of translanguaging pedagogy for justice.

Fig. 7.3

Translanguaging pedagogy for justice

Each of these theoretical tools is supported by three simultaneous and dialectic components. In Fig. 7.3, justice as praxis is the larger context of our work and requires the simultaneous engagement in theory, research and practice. Teaching for justice entails recognizing inequalities, critiquing existing inequalities and enacting culturally and linguistically sustaining practices. The inner circle demonstrates translanguaging pedagogy and its three components: (1) a teacher’s stance in valuing bilingual students’ full language repertoires as a human right and a learning resource, (2) a teacher’s lesson designs to support and connect home, school and community languages and cultures, and (3) a teacher’s spontaneous shifts in classroom interactions to support meaning making and learning. We use Fig. 7.3 to evaluate our practice and whether or not it has afforded our participants the elements necessary to engage in translanguaging pedagogy for justice.

We initially experienced disappointment upon recognizing that participants viewed translanguaging not as a powerful new approach in the field of teaching emergent bilinguals, but rather as a method consisting of employing different strategies, such as scaffolding and multimodality in order to support emergent bilinguals. However, we reminded ourselves of our goal and of our theoretical framework of teaching for justice. We recognized the injustice of our assigning the responsibility of realizing the potential of translanguaging to our participants. We needed to include ourselves, and most notably the course professor in our analysis. We concur with Jaspers’ (2018) work on the limits of translanguaging to be transformative. This study, the course under investigation, and our writing of this project all promote the dominance of English. Any disappointments then, should be aimed at ourselves, not our participants.

An important component of teaching for justice, as well as developing a translanguaging stance, is learning to recognize inequalities. As researchers we recognize the inequalities we are involved in perpetuating through our own insistence on using English. For our participants, at a macro-level, they recognized the linguistic hierarchies (the hegemony of English) in the U.S. society and in the education system. At a micro-level they recognized the inequalities that exist in traditional classroom power dynamics and they reimagined more equal relationships between teachers and students. Once injustices are recognized we must have tools to critique and counter these unjust practices. Theories and research, two of the components of praxis, are these tools. While our analysis does not show participants’ recognition of translanguaging as theory, participants clearly theorized the importance of language and culture in teaching. Participants also engaged in critiquing power in their criticism of dominant White culture and also monolingual practices. Participants’ research, which entailed interviewing multilingual students, also provided deeper awareness of the relationship between dominance and privilege and power through non-monolingual perspectives.

Teaching practice is the third component of each of the theoretical frameworks we have woven together in Fig. 7.3. Lacking more opportunities in this class for participants to engage in teaching practices, we looked at their lesson plans as evidence of what they would do in a classroom. We saw definitive signs of participants’ translanguaging design in their lesson plans. Almost all participants included space or allowances for multiple languages in their lesson plans. However, in the one opportunity participants had to teach, we saw many enact practices such as lecturing through PowerPoints that upheld the dominant role of the teacher. Few participants provided the space for languages other than English. The most common translanguaging strategy was the use of multimodality where participants used imagery, text and/or oral language in their lessons. While implementing a strategy such as the use of multimodality in a lesson does not constitute teaching for justice, it must be noted that participants took up a great deal of the elements in Fig. 7.3 necessary to teach for justice. We have all made important progress but, we cannot claim to prepare students to teach for justice without first being honest about the dominant practices we as researchers, and teacher educators are engaged in, and second, providing them many more opportunities to engage in teaching practices that not only acknowledge minoritized languages and cultures but insist on sustaining them and drawing on them as teaching resources.

5 Conclusions

This collaborative qualitative study explored how students understood and enacted translanguaging in a TESOL certificate course Strategies for Working with English Learners. We analyzed students’ coursework and microteaching through thematic analysis combined with the multiperspectivity of the researchers. We found that by engaging with translanguaging as theory and pedagogy in multiple ways throughout the whole semester, students developed a pedagogical stance which valued cultural and linguistic diversity and recognized the hegemony of English and unequal power dynamics between teachers and students in classrooms. Generally speaking, all the students embraced translanguaging as a better way (compared to strict English-only instruction in SEI) to work with emergent bilinguals.

Students employed a set of strategies in their lesson designs and microteaching practices to accommodate emergent bilinguals’ needs. Some of these strategies were providing translations, allowing the use of home languages, and adopting multimodality. However, we were concerned that these teaching strategies only represented a symbolic feature of “linguistic tourism” (Matsuda, 2014, p. 482), i.e., a touristic representation of linguistic diversity in a classroom. Students at this stage mainly understood translanguaging as a group of mechanic strategies. We argue that translanguaging pedagogies need to go beyond this level and foster students’ critical language awareness in teaching. As García and Kleifgen (2018) point out, “a translanguaging pedagogy is not simply a series of strategies and scaffolds, but also a philosophy of language and education that is centered on a bilingual minoritized community” (p. 80). We echo this interpretation.

Implications for TESOL teacher preparation and for us moving forward are to recognize translanguaging as a philosophy, a process and a perspective. We must be explicit in all our course materials and in our teaching about our goals of learning to teach English for justice from a translanguaging orientation. We must also recognize this goal as a long term project. We believe one of the first inequalities that must be recognized is monolingualism. We recommend this be done by interrogating perceptions of language and by teaching about translanguaging as it theorizes language. An understanding of the fluidity and non-bound nature of our linguistic repertoires would help future teachers tap into what García, Johnson, and Seltzer (2017) refer to as the translanguaging corriente, the flow of bilingualism in classrooms for the purpose of meaning-making. They could see that the best way to promote justice in classrooms is by leveraging the cultural and linguistic knowledge of all students as teaching and learning resources.

We believe it is unrealistic for us to expect participants to implement translanguaging in transformative ways when it has not been modeled for them. As teacher educators we have to move beyond simply teaching about translanguaging theory and pedagogy. Perhaps it is more fruitful to show students sample lesson plans with concrete translanguaging practices infused in the planning in order that they can come to see concretely how theoretical concepts are applied in the classroom context. We must ourselves model what it means to teach for justice. We believe we need to recognize the injustices we perpetuate by teaching in English-only. Through critiquing our own practice we have come to see that we must teach differently by drawing on all the linguistic and cultural resources of our TESOL students. Translanguaging can only be transformative if it occurs at all levels of teaching. Along with preparing our TESOL students, we must prepare ourselves to teach English for justice.