Engaging Opportunities: A Small Moments Reflexive Inquiry of Translanguaging in a Graduate TESOL Course

ABSTRACT This article draws upon a small moments writing strategy to support language teacher educator learning as a form of reflective practice. Three language teacher educators formed a community of practice to analyze audio recordings of a graduate level TESOL course focused on dynamic bilingualism and translanguaging to identify opportunities where a professor and his students might leverage and enact their own linguistic repertoires to enhance their meaning-making about translanguaging as theory and praxis. Findings reveal four types of engaging opportunities: to expand and continue the co-construction of knowledge about translanguaging; to create space for teachers and students to translanguage; to engage students in clarifying inaccuracies or misunderstandings about translanguaging; and to complicate prior understandings of and socialization into language and how it works. Implications are provided to support the language teacher education community in developing pedagogy that better supports students’ understandings of translanguaging as a theory of language and practice.