Translingual Identities And Transnational Realities In The U S College Classroom

Exploring the roles of students’ pluralistic linguistic and transnational identities at the university level, this book offers a novel approach to translanguaging by highlighting students’ perspectives, voices, and agency as integral to the subject. Providing an original reconsideration of the impact of translanguaging, this book examines both transnationality and translinguality as ubiquitous phenomena that affect students’ lives. Demonstrating that students are the experts of their own language practices, experiences, and identities, the authors argue that a proactive translingual pedagogy is more than an openness to students’ spontaneous language variations. Rather, this proactive approach requires students and instructors to think about students’ holistic communicative repertoire, and how it relates to their writing. Robinson, Hall, and Navarro address students’ complex negotiations and performative responses to the linguistic identities imposed upon them because of their skin color, educational background, perceived geographical origin, immigration status, and the many other cues used to "minoritize" them. Drawing on multiple disciplinary discourses of language and identity, and considering the translingual practices and transnational experiences of both U.S. resident and international students, this volume provides a nuanced analysis of students’ own perspectives and self-examinations of their complex identities. By introducing and addressing the voices and self-reflections of undergraduate and graduate students, the authors shine a light on translingual and transnational identities and positionalities in order to promote and implement inclusive and effective pedagogies. This book offers a unique yet essential perspective on translinguality and transnationality, and is relevant to instructors in writing and language classrooms; to administrators of writing programs and international student support programs; and to graduate students and scholars in language education, second language writing, applied linguistics, and literacy studies.

The self-inquiries in this edited volume exemplify the dynamism that permeates global ELT, wherein English language educators and teacher educators are increasingly operating across blurred national boundaries, creating new ‘liminal’ spaces, charting new trajectories, crafting new practices and pedagogies, constructing new identities, and reconceptualizing ELT contexts. This book captures the diverse voices of emerging and established ELT practitioners and scholars, originally from and/or operating in non-Western contexts, spanning not only the so-called non-Western ‘peripheries’, but also peripheries created within the ‘center’ when certain members are minoritized on the basis of their race, language, and/or place of origin. The chapters address a range of related issues occurring at the intersections of personal and professional identities, pedagogy and classroom interactions, as well as research and professional practices in liminal transnational spaces.

This book brings together top scholars on different sides of the important scholarly debate between the translingual movement and the field of second language writing. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives, this volume examines the differences in theory and practice with the hope of promoting reconciliation between the two schools of thought. Chapters address the tensions in the relationship between translingualism and second language writing and explore programs, pedagogies, and research that highlight commonalities between the two camps. With contributions from leading scholars, this book comprehensively addresses the issues related to this contentious debate and offers ways to bring the two camps into conversation with one another in a way that promotes effective teaching practices. By providing a panoramic view of the current situation, the text is a timely and unique contribution to TESOL, applied linguistics, and composition studies.

This edited volume contributes to the creation of a comprehensive and a more inclusive understanding of an increasingly complex global ELT landscape across countries as well as across teaching and learning settings. The volume brings together inquiries from language teachers, educators and researchers from different backgrounds in the Global South and the Global North, who use their experiences of shuttling across borders to reflect on the shaping of their pedagogical, research and professional practices across higher education settings. The chapters weave the personal, professional and theoretical in a seamless manner, examining transnational identities and pedagogical practices formed and informed by both communities – ‘home’ and ‘host’ – and include narratives that are not unidirectional. The contributing authors also use a variety of qualitative research methods, along with reflexive writing and exploration of the authors’ own positionalities, to shed light on transnational identities and critique dominant pedagogical assumptions.

Multimodal composition is becoming increasingly popular in university classrooms as faculty, students, and institutions come to recognize that old and new technologies have enabled, and even demanded, the use of more than one composing mode for communicating, solving problems, and keeping up with the latest discourse. Professionalizing Multimodal Composition embraces and enacts multimodal composition in various writing courses and programs by exploring institutional, programmatic, and individual faculty initiatives for capacity building and human resource development across institutions. Academic leaders, scholars, and faculty who have successfully designed and launched academic programs or faculty development initiatives discuss the theoretical and logistical questions considered in their design, the outcomes they achieved, and how others can emulate them. This exchange of knowledge, insight, experiences, and lessons learned among community members is critical for enabling or inspiring other programs, departments, and institutions to conceive, design, and launch academic programs or faculty development initiatives for their own faculty. The larger goal of professionalizing is to work with teaching faculty to increase their interactional expertise with multimodal composition, and this collection offers a set of models for how faculty can do that at their own institutions and in their own programs.

This book explores language maintenance and development in the linguistic lives of second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants as they navigate migration and diaspora, highlighting the role of women in acting as custodians and gate-keepers of family languages towards creating a sense of home. The volume features an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on work from narrative, storytelling, literary studies, and linguistic anthropology, as well as interviews with multiple generations of immigrant families, to reflect on the ways these families foster a sense of home and maintain connections to their homelands through language. Robinson showcases the voices of a diverse range of families to examine the choices women in immigrant families make between the use of family languages, dominant community languages, or a mix of the two. The volume enhances our understanding of the ways in which immigrants navigate the linguistic landscapes of home and community amid migration and diaspora. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, language and gender, and language and migration.

This edited book on Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) provides and explores powerful examples of FLCs as a impactful form of professional learning for faculty in higher education. The chapters describe faculty learning community initiatives focused on diversity, equity, and belonging in higher education. Contributing authors provide a framework for faculty learning communities and how these communities can offer faculty a place and space to explore antiracist and social justice-oriented teaching. show the impact of faculty learning communities on teaching practices or student learning, and describe how these communities of practice can lead to institutional change. The book’s foreword, by Milton D. Cox, investigates the past and future of faculty learning communities focused on diversity and equity.

In Beyond Productivity, a wide range of contributors share honest narratives of the sometimes-impossible conditions that scholars face when completing writing projects. The essays provide backstage views of the authors' varying approaches to moving forward when the desire to produce wanes, when deciding a project is not working, when working within and around and redefining academic productivity expectations, and when writing with ever-changing bodies that do not always function as expected. This collection positions scholarly writers' ways of writing as a form of flexible, evolving knowledge. By exhibiting what is lost and gained through successive rounds of transformation and adaptation over time, the contributors offer a sustainable understanding and practice of process—one that looks beyond productivity as the primary measure of success. Each presents a fluid understanding of the writing process, illustrating its deeply personal nature and revealing how fragmented and disjointed methods and experiences can highlight what is precious about writing. Beyond Productivity determines anew the use and value of scholarly writing and the processes that produce it, both within and beyond the context of the losses, constraints, and adaptations associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.