Abstract
This chapter explores one ESL composition instructor's agency in creating a multilingual and multicultural classroom as well as promoting translanguaging pedagogies in a mid-western U.S. university. Data for this ethnographic case study include classroom fieldnotes, audio recordings, interviews, and artifacts. Adopting three bodies of literature—Funds of Knowledge, translanguaging, and teacher agency—data analyses highlight three major themes: (1) the teacher's agentive display of his own multilingual and multicultural identity, (2) his encouragement on students' use of their full linguistic repertoires for learning, and (3) his utilization of students' cultural funds of knowledge in classroom discussions and writing. His agentic instructional decisions in teaching reflect his valuation of students' linguistic and cultural backgrounds and also indicate his cultivation of students' multilingual and multicultural writer identity. As few studies have explored language teacher agency and Funds of Knowledge in higher education contexts, this chapter further enriches current literature.
TopIntroduction
With the rapid increase in linguistic and cultural diversities in college classrooms, many instructors are facing the challenge of how to make learning relevant to their students’ lives and connect instruction to their backgrounds. Often, it is the case that the identities and needs of multilingual students are ignored or treated as a hindrance in English-medium higher education institutions (Preece & Martin, 2009). This ideology puts multilingual and multicultural speakers in deficit perspectives and thus, what they bring as their background knowledge to the educational setting becomes useless and problematic (Martin, 2009). Furthermore, this type of the treatment of multilingual students as problematic is at odds with the efforts to globalize and diversify higher education campuses in English-speaking countries. On the one hand, universities make great efforts to diversify the student body by recruiting students from various regions and countries, and on the other, they adopt assimilationist policies and practices in curriculum design and education, leading to the marginalization and exclusion of students from diverse backgrounds. When such linguistic and cultural discontinuities happen in universities, students from diverse backgrounds find themselves having to cope with and spend so much time making sense of the “academic community norms and practices” (Preece & Martin, 2009, p. 4) of the school which automatically set them back in comparison to their fellow undergraduate students who come from the same linguistic and cultural backgrounds as the university. We argue that a multilingual and multicultural space is needed in higher education in order to meet the educational needs of students with diverse backgrounds and set them up for success.
This chapter is based on the premise that teachers’ perceptions and ideologies inform their practices and guide them in enacting their agencies in creating multilingual and multicultural educational spaces (Razfar, 2012; Weng et al., 2019). Lee and Canagarajah (2019) highlight the important role of teachers in promoting multilingual and multicultural classroom environments and argue that both monolingual and multilingual teachers can achieve this goal. Similarly, Canagarajah (2012) puts forward that developing translingual competence and multilingual and multicultural pedagogies are not necessarily related to language teachers’ ethnic or national status. In today’s superdiverse context of higher education, it becomes necessary for instructors to “micro-plan” (Baldauf, 2006) and incorporate strategies for multilingual and multicultural learning and tailor the lessons to respond to the local needs of their classrooms. This urgent call for multilingual and multicultural pedagogies in higher education requires educators to adopt flexible approaches to teaching and learning that affirms and builds on diverse students’ cultural and linguistic repertoires. Among the myriad of such approaches, Translanguaging and Funds of Knowledge are two frameworks that have a similar goal of building on students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds as legitimate sources of knowledge for teaching and learning purposes. Translanguaging refers to the flexible use of languages in educational settings as a bilingual pedagogy that affirms diverse students’ identities (García, 2011), and funds of knowledge is a framework that attempts to capitalize on students’ cultural knowledge and skills to maximize their inclusions and learning (Moll et al., 1992).
Despite the substantial research on multilingualism and multiculturalism in K-12 settings, research on how college instructors effectively educate linguistically and culturally diverse students and how they affirm their multilingual and multicultural identities have largely gone unnoticed. Responding to this gap and by adopting Translanguaging and Funds of Knowledge lenses to multilingual and multicultural education, this book chapter reports on an ethnographic case study of an English-speaking ESL teacher, David (pseudonym), who taught ESL composition courses to international college students in a midwestern university in the United States (U.S.). Thus, this book chapter aims to address the following research question: How does one ESL teacher enact his agency to promote a multilingual and multicultural pedagogy in a college-level ESL composition class?
Key Terms in this Chapter
Identity Modelling: Teachers show to their students on how to speak and write as certain types of people. For instance, in the study, David shows students how to be a multilingual and multicultural speaker and writer.
Teacher Agentic Act: Teachers display their instructional practices and decision-making in class. Their agentic act in class reveals their intentional purposes.
Linguistic Repertoire: The total range of lexical and structural resources that an individual has available for communication in different situations. This concept applies to both monolinguals and multilinguals since it not only refers to a multilingual’s competence in more than one language, but it can also be used to refer to the multiple styles and registers that an individual might have and access in different communicative situations for different purposes.
Translanguaging Spaces: Interactionally-constructed spaces by bi/multilinguals where they critically and creatively use all their linguistics resources to convey meaning and express their identities in social interactions.
Writing as a Process: Writing involves a series of steps, such as brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing. At each step, teacher assessment on student work is different. In second/foreign language classrooms, this writing process should include allowing students to use their home language in drafting to facilitate idea and content creation.
Multilingual and Multicultural Spaces in Class: Teachers do not view students’ diverse linguistic and cultural background as deficit or obstacles. Instead, they draw upon those diverse resources in classroom teaching. Multilingual spaces are created by teachers in collaboration with students and they are safe spaces where the strategic use of the cultural and linguistic resources available to the students are encouraged and valued.
Translanguaging: “Using one’s idiolect, that is, one’s linguistic repertoire, without regard for socially and politically defined language labels or boundaries” ( Otheguy et al., 2015 , p. 297). Translanguaging theory is disinterested in the idea of languages as separate codes and views language as a socially situated practice and resource. From a pedagogical perspective, translanguaging refers to a pedagogy for diverse learners and multilingual classrooms where the teacher deliberately and strategically incorporates practices that encourage the use of students’ full linguistic repertoires.