Kate Seltzer

Part I. Dynamic bilingualism at school -- Translanguaging classrooms : contexts and purposes -- Language practices and the translanguaging classroom framework -- Documenting students' dynamic bilingualism -- Part II. Translanguaging pedagogy -- Translanguaging stance -- Translanguaging design in instruction -- Translanguaging design in assessment -- Translanguaging pedagogy in action -- Part III. Reimagining teaching and learning through translanguaging -- Standards in the translanguaging classroom -- Content-area literacy in the translanguaging classroom -- Biliteracy in the translanguaging classroom -- Biliteracy in the translanguaging classroom -- Socioemotional well-being and social justice.

As one of the largest school-aged populations, Latinxs1-with their concomitant diverse demographic profile-are far from a monolithic entity. However, despite their diversity and unlike most immigrant groups, Latinxs share a history of US domination, intervention, and occupation that spans centuries in Latin America and in the United States itself (Gonzalez, 2000). Within the United States, Garcia (2009b) notes that the linguistic colonization of Latinxs unfolded through "a policy of eradicating Spanish by encouraging a shift to English" (p. 111). She explains that the United States has done this "by adopting a policy of debasing and racializing Spanish, linking it to subjugated populations, immigration, poverty, and a lack of education" (Garcia, 2009b, p. 111).Power-laden social, linguistic, and racial hierarchies saturate the lives of Latinxs in myriad ways, primarily through the "coloniality of being" (Mignolo, 2000), where Latinx children's lived...

ABSTRACT As part of an ethnographic study of a secondary English Language Arts classroom, one teacher took a critical translingual approach to curriculum and instruction, encouraging students to engage in translanguaging and to explore the intersections of language with power and identity. The larger study’s central question was, what does participation in a critical translingual English curriculum bring up about students’ identities and ideologies in relation to language? Guided by this question, this article details a series of lessons that featured a spoken word poem in which the author used English to reflect on her relationship to Spanish and asked students to explore their language practices in their own writing. This article illustrates that while students’ poems expressed an apparent internalization of deficit language ideologies, they also expressed resistance to those very ideologies through the voicing of a translingual sensibility.

This chapter takes up translanguaging theory and explains how it disrupts our traditional understandings of language and bilingualism in education. It then contextualizes the theory in the practices of a teacher and his students in a multilingual classroom. The principles of what we term a translanguaging pedagogy – the stance, design and shifts – are then discussed. The chapter ends by explaining how applying translanguaging theory and practice to the traditional question of “How to teach a second language” transforms it to: “How to engage students in appropriating language features associated with a school language into their own unique repertoire”. Although the shift seems subtle, the consequences for language pedagogy are huge.

This case study of two secondary English teachers integrates a critical translingual approach in two urban classrooms. Our inquiry is guided by two questions: (1) How did two teachers engage critical translingual approaches in their classrooms? (2) How did their positionalities shape implementation of these approaches? This article illustrates how teachers’ stances and practices can be affected by their identities, pointing to the ways that diverse teachers must approach their translanguaging pedagogies with an understanding of raciolinguistic ideologies. We end with a call for teacher educators to help teachers engage the transgressive elements of translanguaging in English classrooms and hone their raciolinguistic literacies so that they can design classroom learning in more humanizing ways.

This article centers on Faith, a Latinx bilingual student who, because of her failure to pass a standardized exam in English language arts, had to repeat 11th-grade English. Despite this stigma of being a “repeater,” during the year-long ethnographic study I conducted in her classroom, Faith proved to be an insightful and critical reader and self-described poet who shared her writing with her peers as well as with other poets in online forums. Drawing from that more expansive classroom study, this article features Faith’s metacommentary on language and her own writing process and explores how her insights (1) disrupt monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies by highlighting the disconnect between her sophisticated understandings of language and the writing process and her status as a “struggling” student; (2) draw attention her wayfinding, which chronicles her navigation of those ideologies that complicate her search for a writerly identity and obscure the translingual nature of all t...

This chapter argues that doing bilingualism in schools from the bottom-up has the potential to open up multilingual spaces in what are officially monolingual classrooms. Focusing on two U.S. classroom case studies––one a primary classroom where students are Karen speakers; the other, a secondary classroom where all students are recently arrived immigrants speaking 15 different home languages––the chapter describes how the teachers’ leveraging of students’ translanguaging disrupts the English-only hegemony of the classroom. Translanguaging pedagogical practice is thus described as adhering to four principles: a school-wide multilingual ecology, the educators’ stance as caring and co-learners, an instructional design of relationships, and a commitment to students’ deep engagement with learning.

Using a translanguaging framework, we examined the language and literacy practices of racialized, emergent bilingual children in a bilingual (English/Spanish), community-based writing program in urban Philadelphia. Located in South Philly’s Italian Market, the program’s target audience was emergent bilingual, Latinx children who were 7 to 17 years old. The center offered an afternoon academy program, week-day evening and Saturday morning workshops, and summer writing camps. When we began research at the center in 2015, we noted that despite its bilingual name, the center operated primarily in English. For instance, teachers and volunteers spoke overwhelmingly in English to the children, and the focal texts of lessons and the children’s writing pieces were produced only in English. We were concerned about the apparent lack of bilingualism, and specifically the lack of active use of Spanish at the center. To address this, we approached the center’s director about offering bilingual wr...

Recent scholarship has identified how the reading assessment process can be improved by adapting to and accounting for emergent bilinguals’ multilingual resources. While this work provides guidance about how teachers can take this approach within their assessment practices, this article strengthens and builds on this scholarship by combining translanguaging and raciolinguistic lenses to examine the ideologies that circulate through assessment. By comparing interview data from English as a new language and dual-language bilingual teachers, we found that while reading assessments fail to capture the complexity of all emergent bilinguals’ reading abilities, they particularly marginalize emergent bilinguals of color. Thus, we expose the myths of neutrality and validity around reading assessment and demonstrate how they are linked to ideologies about race and language. We offer a critical translingual approach to professional learning that encourages teachers to grapple with these ideolo...

This chapter describes an author study that took place in a secondary English Language Arts classroom in New York City. The author study was organized around translingual writers, or those who integrate different language practices in their work, and asked students to read not only for the content of the writing, but for the linguistic and rhetorical choices the authors made. After reading these translingual mentor texts, students were tasked with writing college essays that expressed their new understandings about language. Like their translingual men-tors, students were invited to write their essays in ways that integrated their different language practices. Throughout this translingual author study, students brought to their readings their sophisticated understandings of language, resulting in rich conversations , connections, and debates. This chapter draws on excerpts of students' classroom talk as well as from two students' college essays and metalinguistic talk about their own writing to illustrate how the use of translingual mentors can bring to the surface the linguistic expertise, creativity and criticality (Li W, J Pragmat 43(5):1222-1235, 2011) that language minoritized students already have, but are often obscured in the English classroom.

This article adds to the growing body of literature that calls for shifts in teachers' and researchers' stance and practice toward a re-seeing and re-hearing of students for their linguistic assets and expertise. By taking up the theory of translanguaging (Garc ıa, 2009; Garc ıa & Li Wei, 2014) to understand students' language practices, I trouble the labels and terms so often assigned to language minoritized students, particularly those that fall into the larger categories of "home" and "school" language. To do this, I draw on data collected during a year-long ethnographic study of an 11th-grade English language arts classroom in New York City. This study took up what I term a critical translingual approach (Seltzer, 2019), engaging language minoritized students-bilingual students as well as those students traditionally viewed as monolingual-in metalinguistic conversations, literacy activities , and writing that delved into the role language played in their identities and lived experiences. By centering students' talk and writing about their own languages, this article serves as a call to educators and researchers to relinquish conceptualizations of "standard" or "native" language and to embrace those that foster students' critical integration of new features into their existing linguistic repertoires.

While current research focuses on the marginalization and educational crises of students classified as English language learners-whom we identify as emergent bilinguals (García & Kleifgen, 2010)-this article highlights some of the contexts for learning that help these students thrive academically, culturally, and socially in two urban English classrooms. We explore the concept of translanguaging (García, 2009a; García & Li Wei, 2014) through the writing of two students who took up this practice as a challenge to coloniality in English classrooms. We also outline how two secondary teachers in New York City and Los Angeles adopted a translanguaging pedagogy (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017). Through our analysis of two focal emergent bilingual students, we demonstrate how a translanguaging pedagogy-one that puts students' language practices at the center and makes space for students to draw on their fluid linguistic and cultural resources at all times-is a necessary step forward in twenty-first-century English instruction. Our findings illustrate that the teachers' translanguaging pedagogies disrupted the inherently monolingual and colonial tendencies of English classrooms through curricula that promoted metalinguistic awareness and reflection about their own linguistic and cultural identities, and integrated stu-dents' diverse language practices to push back against colonialist ideologies. Our study adds to the nascent body of literature that translates theories of translanguaging into practical pedagogical approaches in secondary English classrooms.

This case study of two secondary English teachers integrates a critical translingual approach in two urban classrooms. Our inquiry is guided by two questions: (1) How did two teachers engage critical translingual approaches in their classrooms? (2) How did their positionalities shape implementation of these approaches? This article illustrates how teachers' stances and practices can be affected by their identities, pointing to the ways that diverse teachers must approach their translanguaging pedagogies with an understanding of raciolinguistic ideologies. We end with a call for teacher educators to help teachers engage the transgressive elements of translanguaging in English classrooms and hone their raciolinguistic literacies so that they can design classroom learning in more humanizing ways.