Designing Translingual Pedagogies: Exploring Pedagogical Translation through a Classroom Teaching Experiment

Abstract

This study examined how middle-grades language arts teachers learned to integrate a small-group collaborative translation activity into their teaching practice. We discuss what we call pedagogical translation as an emergent social practice, in which translation routines that are familiar to multilingual students may be leveraged toward instructional goals in a mainstream language arts class. The data were drawn from a classroom teaching experiment iteration of a larger design-based research study, whose goal is to create a fully developed instructional protocol useful to all teachers in linguistically diverse language arts classrooms, but especially teachers with limited or emerging proficiencies in languages other than English. We position pedagogical translation as a paradigm case of translingual pedagogy—instructional approaches designed to leverage the full range of emerging bilinguals’ linguistic resources—and we focus our analysis on the agentive participation of teachers as they integrate new translingual routines into their instructional practice. Using a conjecture mapping procedure, we describe the evolution of an instructional theory for how pedagogical translation can be leveraged toward literacy learning objectives. We present qualitative narratives describing how participating teachers made locally situated design choices that meshed new routines with existing instructional practice, documenting trajectories of teacher participation as agentive designers of translingual pedagogy.

Keywords:

• Design-based research
• literacy
• professional development
• translanguaging
• translingual pedagogies

Acknowledgements

We thank the students and teachers who participated in the study, as well as Mark Gonzales for his support and insight during data collection.

Notes

1 Fue and estaba both translate to was in English, albeit with different shades of meaning. It should be noted, however, that an attentive teacher can ask targeted questions like this regardless of whether they know what the words mean, and in doing so elicit students’ metalinguistic knowledge that can inform future instructional decisions.

2 In this article, and during the PD, we used the term line to refer to any short text selection, usually 1–3 sentences long, that students or teachers selected to translate.

3 From the Lauren Hill song, Ex Factor.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible through funding from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.