"If you want to be taken seriously, you have to speak like a white person": TESOL graduate students' grappling with translanguaging-as-social justice stance
Book Chapter
Pontier, RW, Tian, Z. (2023). "If you want to be taken seriously, you have to speak like a white person": TESOL graduate students' grappling with translanguaging-as-social justice stance
. 1 81-101. 10.1515/9783110735604-005
Pontier, RW, Tian, Z. (2023). "If you want to be taken seriously, you have to speak like a white person": TESOL graduate students' grappling with translanguaging-as-social justice stance
. 1 81-101. 10.1515/9783110735604-005
This study investigated a graduate level TESOL class's development of translanguaging-as-social justice stance-their grappling throughout the process of not only learning about bilingualism from a translanguaging perspective but also considering it as a form of social justice. The class focused specifically on translanguaging and consisted of nine multilingual, multicultural doctoral and masters-level students. Drawing on Peña-Pincheira and De Costa's (2021) ecological framework for leveraging teacher agency for social justice to analyze a representative class conversation, we found three overarching tensions that characterized students' translanguaging- as-social justice stance: (a) home v. school language expectations, (b) separationist v. flexible and dynamic understandings of bilingualism, and (c) translanguaging theory v. translanguaging pedagogy. Despite high levels of purpose and reflection, competing micro-, meso-, and macro-level influences contributed to students' varying levels of autonomy and competence. Across tensions, students showed development of their translanguage-as-social justice stances by (a) recognizing oppression, (b) combating feelings of powerlessness, (c) pushing back/transgressing, and (d) being part of a collective. To close the chapter, we provide key conclusions and implications for both research and practice.
