Luis E. Poza’s research while affiliated with San Jose State University and other places

This systematic review considers what is known about translanguaging in relation to teaching and learning, motivated by the concept's popularity and ongoing critiques about its pedagogical utility and transformative potential. Based on thematic analysis of 111 empirical studies on translanguaging in U.S. PK-12 educational settings, we identified the following themes: (1) translanguaging emerges naturally, and purposefully, in classrooms with bi/multilingual learners, (2) translanguaging facilitates student sense-making in support of learning, (3) translanguaging increases student engagement and opportunities for collaboration, (4) translanguaging supports bi/multilingual students' identity development and sense of belonging, (5) translanguaging can create a counterspace that challenges deficit-framed ideologies and cultivates critical consciousness, (6) learning about translanguaging contributes to teachers developing more asset-oriented stances toward bi/multilingual learners and more linguistically responsive pedagogies, and (7) context plays a central role in if and how translanguaging transforms teaching and learning–translanguaging looks different, and has different impacts, across different contexts. We conclude that we know much about the positive ways translanguaging shapes teaching and learning, while also highlighting some challenges and tensions within the extant literature and the need for increased research that attends to the nuances of context, includes more methodological diversity, and centers decolonial and critical perspectives.

Policies restricting bilingual education have yielded to policy frameworks touting its benefits. This shift corresponds with evolving lines of debate, focusing now on how bilingual education can best support racialized bilingual learners. One element of this new debate is the perspective on language underlying curriculum in bilingual programs, with a focus on translanguaging– normalization of the language practices of bilingual communities and positing that bilinguals draw from a singular linguistic repertoire. This article examines initiatives undertaken in California between 2010 and 2019 using Critical Policy Analysis. The work highlights that while opportunities for translanguaging have arisen, tensions between heteroglossic perspectives and the impulses toward standardization and commodification of language undermine such possibilities, and that notable gaps remain between teacher preparation frameworks and intended pedagogical practice.

In this essay, Luis E. Poza argues that educational dignity can help practices and reforms targeting students classified as English learners move beyond a narrow focus on programmatic and material factors related to English language development and instead toward more holistic consideration of these students and their schooling ecologies. In aligning the philosophical and legal operationalizations of dignity with landmark judicial victories for racially and linguistically minoritized students, he argues that dignity frameworks are relevant and actionable for more effectively imagining and designing education as an empowering, emancipatory endeavor.

In the U.S., programming for students classified as English Learners must adhere to the framework outlined in Castañeda v. Pickard (1981), which demands a basis in “legitimate educational theory,” implementation with “adequate techniques,” and regular evaluation (p. 1010), while remaining explicitly agnostic about which theoretical orientations should guide “language remediation” (p. 1009). Unsurprisingly, such minimal thresholds and deficit orientations still countenance assimilationist ideologies and practices that devalue students’ bi/multilingualism (García and Sung in Bilingu Res J 41(4):318–333, 2018). Even in bilingual programming, colonialist approaches reinforce norms of language standardization that perpetuate linguistic racialization and marginalization (Grinberg and Saavedra in Rev Educ Res 70(4):419–441, 2000). Thus, Castañeda exemplifies the limitations of political victories subject to multitudinous interpretations and enactments. In this theoretical article, we harken to the calls for justice for minoritized communities that included demands for bilingual education during the civil rights movement (Flores and García in Ann Rev Appl Linguist 37:14–29, 2017) to imagine criteria beyond adequacy and remediation. With a glotopolítica lens rooted in the work of Latin American sociolinguists (Arnoux in Lengua y política en América Latina: perspectivas actuales, Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Olomouc, Czech Republic, pp 19–43, 2014; Blanco in Cuad Sur Letr 35–36(11):26, 2005), we conduct a genealogical analysis of language education policy for racialized bilinguals in the U.S. Linked to other decolonial projects, we propose a framework of educational dignity (Espinoza et al. in Mind Cult Act, 2020) that engages scholars, advocates, and educators in the U.S. and internationally in constructing language education policies according to racialized bilingual students’ own dignified logic rather than that of the nation-state, enabling racialized bilinguals to develop into historical actors (Gutiérrez et al. in Mind Cult Act 26(4):291–308, 2019) emancipated from the logic of regulations that offer inclusion in colonialist paradigms rather than true liberation (de Sousa Santos, in Epistemologies of the South: justice against epistemicide, Paradigm Publishers, London, 2014).

Recent research suggests that English learner (EL) classification can impact students in both positive and negative ways. We do not know enough, however, about what contexts and features of EL education lead to these divergent effects. Because students are classified as ELs at all grade levels, and the structure and content of schooling change dramatically across grades, one important consideration is whether EL classification operates differently for students in different grade spans. This study draws on the knowledge of veteran EL educators in one large, urban school district to examine the affordances and potential hazards of being classified as EL in different grade spans. The paper asks first, how these educators interpret EL-classified students’ academic and social experiences at different grade spans, and second, what features of schooling shape these heterogeneous experiences of EL classification. Analysis of in-depth interviews suggests that academic exclusion, insufficient resources, and tracking, among other schooling features, increasingly constrict opportunities for students classified as ELs in upper grade spans. Key transitions – from early to mid-elementary, and from elementary to secondary – also alter EL-classified students’ experiences.

Meaningful participation (i.e., substantive involvement in socially vital activities) and educational dignity (i.e., the multifaceted sense of a person’s value generated via substantive intra- and inter-personal learning experiences that recognize and cultivate one’s mind, humanity, and potential) are vital and interrelated social phenomena. Conceptually, the two are salient for research related to learning and educational rights. Accordant with a cultural-historical framework, we have adopted and modified a social interactional methodological approach that allows us to set forth indicia of meaningful participation and educational dignity. To achieve these ends, we examine two information sources: 1) audio recordings of a 1962 voter registration workshop in the Southern United States; and 2) audio-video recordings of a college preparatory program for high school-age migrant students in California during the early 2000s called the Migrant Student Leadership Institute. Close examination of interactions in both spaces reveals the moment-to-moment unfolding of meaningful participation and educational dignity.

Scholarship suggests that bilingual students’ translanguaging skills – their multilingual and multimodal communicative competencies – should be leveraged as a valuable meaning-making resource and that translanguaging pedagogies can disrupt linguistic hierarchies and the ideologies of race, class, and nationhood that constitute them. Nevertheless, much of the scholarship in this area considers students’ language practices in unmonitored classroom moments, often in violation of curriculum language expectations for monolingual usage. This qualitative study draws upon 1 year of ethnographic observation and field notes, audio-recorded classroom interactions, and semi-structured interviews in a 5th grade dual immersion (DI) classroom to examine one teacher’s deliberate allowances for translanguaging despite administrative language separation requirements and the ambivalence they produced, and students’ subsequent meaning-making processes in class. This work highlights the particular dispositions and curriculum arrangements that teachers can rely upon to create a dynamic bilingual environment for students and offers insights into how teachers of emergent bilingual students should be prepared.

The Colorado Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act requires grade-level attainment in literacy in English for students in grades K-3. Its practical outcome, however, has been to pressure schools with bilingual programs to shift their instructional language allocations towards more English in the early grades. Proposed rule revisions debated by the state Board of Education sought to facilitate testing in students’ language of instruction for those in bilingual programs. Analysis of written and verbal opposition to the proposed rule revisions demonstrates the persistence of insidious ethnoculturalist discourses opposing bilingual education as well as the cooptation of liberal multiculturalist discourses that, while framing bilingualism as an asset, argue that it is underdeveloped in bilingual programs that do not include English instruction from the outset. Given that bilingual instruction has demonstrated time and again that it benefits students acquiring English in schools, such new discursive turns pose a threat that must be recognized to fend off further legislative and regulatory attempts against bilingual education.