Three key findings emerged from my analysis of teacher participation in language problem solving events. First, students’ tendency to make explicit metalinguistic connections during collaborative translation was facilitated by bodily and material arrangements that
promoted shared attention on texts, especially on alternative translations. Previous TRANSLATE research has pointed to the potential importance of these kinds of routines (Pacheco & David, 2012), and this analysis supports and adds to this finding by demonstrating how teachers can highlight alternative translation choices in a variety of ways. These include structural
arrangements such as rearranging bodies and texts around a table, as well as in-the-moment moves that respond to student cues by redirecting their attention or providing resources to overcome frustration.
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Second, power struggles manifested during interaction when students used routines appropriate to community translation that conflicted with teachers’ goals for the lesson.
Pedagogical translation is intended to leverage students’ community translingual practices for improved learning outcomes, so teachers’ inability or unwillingness to validate students’
translation strategies and translingual identities poses a potential problem. The implication of these data may be that, the better teachers understand and validate community translation practices, the better they may be able to leverage them for pedagogical purposes.
A third finding, building on the second finding from RQ 1, is that teachers’ participation in LPSEs became more strategic and effective as they learned to think about collaborative translation as a tool to achieve curricular objectives. The professional vision analysis above reminds us that teachers’ shift toward process-orientation planning implicates aspects of the practice beyond the LPSE. However, in light of my first finding from RQ 2, the LPSE may be seen as an especially important site for adapting translingual practice into school-based pedagogy. During LPSEs, students grappled with authentic translingual problems grounded in curricular texts and grade appropriate academic language. Furthermore, LPSEs drove students to codeswitch in order to recruit a wider range of linguistic resources, giving teachers insight into student thinking as well as opportunities to co-construct the groups’ definition of the problem.
Through process-oriented planning, a teacher like Rachel was even able to predict and plan for specific LPSEs, creating opportunities to probe for specific understandings before, during, and after translation.
This analysis shows collaborative translation to be a complex and iterative process. When participants identify problems, suggest alternatives, or comment on the nature of source text or translated text, it can unite the attention of all participants or split the interaction into several
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distinct threads. Problems that are settled or abandoned can resurface at later times, or not at all, and a teacher who wishes to leverage this process for specific learning goals must constantly make decisions about how to highlight the contributions that meet those goals. Clearly, having well-articulated goals is essential to this process. However, as these cases make clear, it is also important for the teacher to make space for linguistic (and sociolinguistic) topics that students are attending to. It is a delicate balancing act, with student motivation a central concern. Too much focus on teacher-centered objectives takes agency away from students to identify the nature of the problem they want to solve, and too little focus on objectives may leave students to wonder why they are engaged in the activity at all. The findings presented here point to the strategies teachers employed, at the level of instructional planning and at the level of in-the- moment interactional choices, to comprehend and navigate this complexity.
Contributions
From this qualitative analysis of pedagogical translation as an emergent practice in an 8th grade language arts team, this study provides important insights for understanding translingual pedagogy and its potential in language arts classrooms. In this section, I outline the contributions that this study makes to theory and research on translingual practice and professional vision, and to classroom practice. I conclude with suggestions for future research.
Contributions to theory
First, findings from this study support and expand on Reckwitz’ (2002) argument that practices consist of embodied mental and physical routines, mediated through material and spatial resources, constantly reproduced and reformulated through the agentive performances of
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participants. In particular, this study demonstrates the way participants recruit embodied and materially mediate routines in fairly individualized and improvisational ways to acquire and adapt a new practice. By studying these periods of instability and transformation of practices, we may see more clearly the “constellation of mental and bodily routines” that define the individual in social practice theory, and explore the role of individual agency in determining the shape of emergent practices within communities.
This study also supports and builds on Chouliaraki and Fairclough’s (1999) argument that production, networking, and reflexivity are central features of social practices. I argue that the successful introduction of translingual pedagogies into language arts classrooms involves a project of weaving together features of school and community practices, and that recognizing and leveraging participants’ reflexive understandings about those practices is central to this task.
Furthermore, this study finds that the question of what is produced through translation practice is a key difference between community and pedagogical translation practices. The goal of
producing of a translated text that effectively communicates the essential details of a source text gives rise to different routines than the goal of leveraging translation toward improved reading comprehension and other pedagogical objectives, and the conflict between these goals may be at the heart of the power struggles discussed above. Leveraging the reflexive aspect of practices to align teacher and student understanding of the goals of translingual pedagogy may be an
essential first step to successfully integrating the practice into standards-based language arts instruction.
Second, this study expands translanguaging scholarship (Canagarajah, 2012; García &
Sylvan, 2011) by situating translanguaging within a larger social practice framework. In doing so, I have described how improvisation and routinization interweave and inform each other in