Teachers inquiring into translanguaging and multimodal pedagogies: emerging creative and critical entanglements during transnational professional development

Abstract

ABSTRACT Our reflexive study responds to the need for learning about translanguaging and multimodality as entangled pedagogies in non-English-dominant contexts from teachers’ perspectives. This conceptual-empirical article re-examines a yearlong ethnographic study which traced how a community of seven in-service English language teachers in Colombia and the United States collaborated online and in person to make sense of and use translanguaging and multimodal pedagogies innovatively. Drawing on the notion of entanglements (assemblages of interconnections, events, people, practices, and resources that reveal tensions and translanguaging and multimodalities), we conceptualize them as enmeshed with social contexts. We ask, “What entanglements emerge when teachers implement translanguaging and multimodal pedagogies to enrich their practice in a context with inequitable access? Data sources include bilingual interviews, fieldnotes, and teacher-produced multimodal texts. We use dialogic reflexivity and vignettes to discuss teachers’ creation of new entanglements of translanguaging and multimodal pedagogies within the constraints of their setting. Emerging insights include 1) awareness of unequal access; 2) critical use of multimodalities and translanguaging for advocacy; 3) understandings of translanguaging and multimodalities for equitable access; and 4) translanguaging and multimodal pedagogies as creative, assemblages of interconnections, events, people, practices, and resources. These entangled pedagogies enabled teachers’ creativity and criticallity.