Introduction to Special Issue: Translingual and transmodal complexity and innovation in English-language-dominant Southern schooling

This Special Issue brings together a group of studies that address the monolingual and text-based bias in English-language-dominant Southern schooling contexts, in Australia, Kenya and South Africa. They are studies written about schooling sites that in one way or another are on the margins of the social order, both locally and from a global perspective. Their location means that they provide opportunities for research-based perspectives and understandings, as well as opportunities for theorisation and insight, that might be less available in schooling contexts in the dominant centres. The collection draws on a shared critique of the construction of language/s as boundaried and autonomous and they challenge assumptions around standardised and ‘big’ languages and of print-based communication which are sometimes seen to hold naturally privileged positions as resources for meaning-making and clarity of thought across all contexts. They present a critical view of a text-literacy bias in schooling and present research that pays attention to innovation and complexity with regard to transmodal semiotic resources in schooling. They recognise and elaborate on the multilanguaged and multimodal nature of all communicative activity (Bakhtin 1981). In particular, they draw on and engage with the construct of translanguaging (Garcóa and Wei 2014; Wei 2017) which recognises the heteroglossic nature of language and semiosis as communicative and meaning-making activity in situated social settings. Anglo-normative ideologies in the schools studied, along with deficit assumptions regarding the language and literacy resources of children and youths, are shown to contrast with the fluid languaging and meaning-making resources of youths and children who are learning in these different settings. The research here contributes to an argument that the monolingual and monomodal bias of predominant classroom discourse in English-dominant Southern contexts can be a deadening orientation to learning where it does not draw on students’ resourcefulness with language, image and sound nor prepare them for equitable participation in the multilingual and multimodal, or heteroglossic, communicative environments that they come from and return to from schooling.

The articles variously focus on and analyse instances of creative innovation by teachers who attempt to address the challenges of classroom learning and teaching under the constraining conditions of mass schooling practices in these contexts. They present accounts of teachers’ innovative practices as examples of fluidity, creativity, border-crossing and transgression. The research studies focus on examples where students are encouraged to draw on their own language and semiotic resources, trans-semiotic imaginative constructs and identity practices, including their facility with local languaging practices, visual imagining and musical facility, so as to develop these in focused and academically productive ways.

Susan Ollerhead’s research at a school in Sydney is set against the context of the growing numbers of migrant students enrolling in Australian schools and the limited institutional focus on the changes that need to be made by teachers to accommodate the needs of students who are not fluent users of Standard English in this context. She presents an account of a research project where researchers and teachers-as-researchers collaborated to explore the potential of translanguaging and trans-semiotising pedagogies to enhance communication and classroom learning amongst multilingual students from migrant backgrounds. The chapter provides a finely grained description of the ways in which one teacher who is a monolingual English-speaker collaborates with academic researchers to enact a multilingual stance in her classroom, by trialling and enacting a range of translingual and transmodal pedagogies. The study illuminates the ways in which these pedagogies enable students to access semiotic resources across multiple modes and languages. Her article examines the impact of these multilingual and multimodal engagements on students’ productivity and investment in their learning.

Maureen Kendrick, Margaret Early and Walter Chemjor’s study explores the context of an afterschool journalism club in rural Kenya as a learning space for adolescent girls to produce and design multimodal video texts around news in a rural community. They draw attention to new literacy practices that require users and producers to be fluent with the affordances of images, gestures, movements, music, speech, and writing across print and digital media. They identify the emergent and dynamic language and semiotic practices that include students learning to be explorers, participant-users, performers and activists in their design of video-texts.

Carolyn McKinney and Robyn Tyler, in one article and Mastin Prinsloo and Lara Krause, in a second one, present studies based on research at schools in Khayelitsha Cape Town. McKinney and Tyler examine linguistic ideologies and meaning-making in science. They present an ethnographic study of bilingual isiXhosa/English youths working in an after-school project at a South African high school where students are encouraged to draw on their multiple semiotic repertoires and language resources to produce scientific explanations in both everyday and academic registers. They identify such translanguaging activity as disrupting normative monoglossic conceptions of language in this context and as challenging what is considered as legitimate language use for science learning. Prinsloo and Krause’s study focuses on teacher and student creativity and flexibility in the context of the fluid languaging practices of the township and in the schools and the rigid curricula demands of what they identify as a centralised and elite-oriented schooling system. They show teachers using translanguaging as a pedagogic strategy to help students understand English-language texts on which they are about to be examined. Their study emphasises the creative as well as the transgressive elements of the teachers’ translanguaging strategies which happen ‘under the covers’, without the support of the school principal or the local state Department of Education, while written examination has to take place only through the medium of Standard English.

Finally, Virginia Zavala provides a commentary on the four articles and makes the point that translanguaging as pedagogy has the potential to liberate the voices of marginalised students but the situated analysis of each case shows us to what extent this potential can be realised productively in particular contexts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.