“Going around it to go into it”: tensions and questions in teacher–researcher work towards a critical translanguaging stance

Abstract

Abstract This article blends autoethnography with other qualitative research methods to address the following question: what tensions and questions emerged as a white, English-dominant researcher and white, English-dominant teachers co-developed a critical, anti-racist translanguaging stance? The co-development of such a stance occurred through a year-long professional development (PD) series on critical translingual approaches to English teaching (Seltzer, Kate. 2020. “My English is its own rule”: Voicing a translingual sensibility through poetry. Journal of Language, Identity and Education 19(5). 297–311), which, unlike many traditional teacher education and development programs, shifted away from “strategies” and “best practices” and instead centered and aimed to unpack ideologies that lead to deficit perceptions and ways of teaching racialized bi/multilingual students. By drawing on three moments from this PD series, I explore and raise questions about how (or whether) the translanguaging co-stance (García, Ofelia, Susana Johnson & Kate Seltzer. 2017. Rejecting abyssal thinking in the language and education of racialized bilinguals: A manifesto. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 18(3). 203–228; Tian, Zhongfeng & Leah Shepard‐Carey. 2020. (Re) imagining the future of translanguaging pedagogies in TESOL through teacher–researcher collaboration. Tesol Quarterly 54(4). 1131–1143) the teachers and I were developing was as explicitly critical and anti-racist as I intended. To delve into these moments, I mesh data from the PD project with scholarship on whiteness, translanguaging, and raciolinguistic ideologies to explore these tensions and reflect critically on my own ways forward in collaborative translanguaging research with teachers.