Relocating the linguistic repertoire: from in us to among us

Abstract

ABSTRACT This inquiry into the location of the linguistic repertoire was driven by a pedagogical encounter with mounting putty, the white adhesive used to attach materials to another surface. This encounter began at a community writing center during a writing workshop I was teaching on poesía bilingüe when children took up the putty, creating objects that became poetry. I wondered whose linguistic repertoire these words and things had come from and to whose they belonged. If the linguistic repertoire remains within a user, it is unified as an absolute cognitive container of language. It cannot account for the visible, audible, dynamic, and creative linguistic practices of multilinguals while accounting for inward cognitive firings within that same multilingual. The location of the linguistic repertoire implicates pedagogical practice because if the repertoire is singular, unified, and located within the bounds of a single cognitive subject, then the pedagogical responsibility of knowing and using words remains within that subject, and the educator is left to their ontological and epistemological assumptions as to what is in that linguistic repertoire, often leading to problematic pedagogies. However, if the linguistic repertoire is relocated among us, there is theoretical and pedagogical potential for learning, surprise, and ever-elusive change.