Pedagogical translanguaging as "troublesome knowledge" in teacher education

Abstract

This paper reports on the shifts in understanding experienced by participants in a postgraduate initial teacher education course designed around pedagogical translanguaging as a core theoretical and pedagogical concept. Throughout the semester-long unit, teacher education students engaged with culturally and linguistically responsive teaching approaches by reflecting upon and shifting their understandings of how plurilingual students’ home languages can be celebrated and included in classroom teaching, even when English remains the medium of instruction. However, adopting pedagogical translanguaging as a concept and practice was not without its challenges, with both monolingual and plurilingual teacher education students having to confront and overcome deep-seated beliefs that “English-only is best”.

Using a grounded approach to analyse teacher education students’ written reflections and transcripts from semi-structured interviews, our research found that learning about pedagogical translanguaging presented teacher education students with what Meyer and Land (2003) refer to as a threshold concept, which opened up new and previously inaccessible ways of thinking about linguistic diversity. Our teacher education students faced challenges in redefining their positions as they encountered counterintuitive beliefs about language and teaching, alongside the necessity to reevaluate their own language identities. Our analysis reveals that pedagogical translanguaging represents troublesome knowledge for these students, often leading them into an uncomfortable liminal space, with the practical application being the most troublesome hurdle.