Chapter 3 Learning from Latinx pre-service teachers’ understandings of their linguistic repertoires

Abstract

This chapter presents what we learned from Latinx pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) understandings of their linguistic repertoires as depicted through language portraits. Drawing on the concept of the translanguaging stance or an educator’s way of being that views students’ families and communities as holders of knowledge and the classroom as a democratic space to work towards social justice, we demonstrate what we learned from Latinx PSTs language portraits (N = 80) with respect to the disinvention and reconfiguration of languages and the connections between language, the body, emotions, and linguistic identities. The findings we report in this chapter contribute to the burgeoning research on the use of translanguaging in higher education by demonstrating that (a) Latinx PSTs’ bodily-emotional lived experience of language may lead them to disinvent named languages and reconstitute language practices in ways that reflect complex and nuanced translanguaging stances, and that (b) understanding translanguaging stance as an ever-changing and context-bound disposition that can shift through time and space has implications for teacher education.