The Translingual Identity Development of Two California Teachers: Case Studies of Self-Authoring

ABSTRACT

While recent literature advocates a translingual approach to pedagogy, the implications of such an approach for teacher identity development has been little explored. This article presents case studies of two English-dominant California teachers who learned Spanish: a Filipino-American teacher of Spanish, and an Anglo-American teacher of ESL. Both teachers were interviewed as they began teaching and again three years later, as they increasingly acquired leadership roles in ethnically-diverse educational institutions. Theorizing identity development as a process of self-authoring, and breaking new ground within this paradigm by including the now-experienced teachers’ analytical voices as co-authors to this article, we explore the discursive resources and practices they appropriated in their early years of teaching as evidenced in their narratives, as well as the ways that their emerging translingual identities enabled participation across linguistic and social barriers.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity construction
• language teaching
• language use and identity
• social justice
• Spanish
• teacher identity

Acknowledgments

We thank Karen Johnson for helpful comments on an early draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this literature, and in our article, the term pedagogy generally is used to mean “ways of teaching” and is roughly synonymous with teaching practice.

2. Puedes translates as you can (second person singular, familiar, while puede is the formal equivalent).

3. We thank an anonymous reviewer for some of the wording of this sentence.