Translanguaging
WHAT IS TRANSLANGUAGING?
Answering this question in part requires educators to shift their perspective, from viewing multilingual kids’ diverse language practices as a “problem” to “fix,” to viewing them as resources to leverage.
Translanguaging is a theory from bilingual education which, when taken up by teachers, promotes inviting the whole child into the classroom, including all of the language and sense-making resources students bring. Translanguaging is what multilingual people do: use ALL of the language they know to make meaning, communicate, and express. And by all language, we mean all: oral, written, body language, drawing, gesture, and even what people do with technology to communicate (García & Li Wei, 2014).
Traditional linguists, and even some teachers, might view these practices as “breaking the rules” of language. But translanguaging promotes another view – it asks us to think critically about the rules themselves. Who gets to determine what the “standard language” is? How have these standards harmed our students?
In order to include multilingual students in CS4All, educators must recognize students’ translanguaging and build on it strategically.
How CS4All Is Incorporating This Practice
CS4All is encouraging teachers to take up a translanguaging pedagogy approach (Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García et al., 2017; García & Kleyn, 2016) to promote the participation and support of multilingual learners in CS education.
Inclusive teaching involves three interrelated pedagogies.
As PiLaCS and Meg Ray wrote in the CSTA’s guidance for inclusive teaching, “Translanguaging pedagogy is an evidence-based approach rooted in the idea that students learn best when they can leverage all of their language resources. Translanguaging pedagogy was developed by educators working with bi/multilingual students, though its core tenet about welcoming all the ways students communicate is relevant to work with all student populations. It can be implemented by any educator, regardless of their experience with more than one language.”
Teachers do translanguaging pedagogy when they take up a stance that centers how bi/multilingual students communicate, when they design their units and classroom environment to intentionally leverage students’ diverse language practices for learning, and when they make in the-moment shifts to adapt their practice to students’ dynamic language abilities (García et al., 2017).
As they take up a translanguaging approach, we find it useful for teachers to begin planning their units and lessons by answering the questions: Code for what? What conversation will code become a part of? Rich units and lessons are rooted in conversations that bring together language, code, and practices from three areas: students’ communities, their school subjects, and different communities in the world where CS is used (eg: artists, activists, scientists, tech industry) (Vogel et al., 2020; Radke et al., 2020).
Key Terms & Resources
Participating in Literacies and Computer Science
Offers up an approach for supporting bi/multilingual learners in computer science education, as well as resources for educators to plan computer science-integrated units that leverage students’ translanguaging as a resource.
Learn more about Participating in Literacies and Computer Science.
Participating in Literacies and Computer Science
Offers up an approach for supporting bi/multilingual learners in computer science education, as well as resources for educators to plan computer science-integrated units that leverage students’ translanguaging as a resource.
Learn more about Participating in Literacies and Computer Science.
City University of New York - New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals
General (non-CS) resources to learn more about and apply translanguaging in your classroom. Includes strategy guides, video and written case studies from classrooms across subject areas.
Learn more about CUNY initiative and resource NYSIEB.
Integrating Coding and Language Arts: A View into Sixth Graders’ Multimodal and Multilingual Learning
A short article about how a teacher integrated code into her language arts class, leveraging a translanguaging approach.
García, O., & Li Wei. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan Pivot.Radke, S. C., Vogel, S., Hoadley, C., & Ma, J. (2020). Representing Percents and Personas: Designing Syncretic Curricula for Modeling and Statistical Reasoning. The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences: Conference Proceedings, 3, 1365–1372.Vogel, S., Hoadley, C., Castillo, A. R., & Ascenzi-Moreno, L. (2020). Languages, literacies, and literate programming: Can we use the latest theories on how bilingual people learn to help us teach computational literacies? Computer Science Education. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2020.1751525
Who We Are Learning From:
Participating in Literacies
and Computer Science (Pila-CS)
Participating in Literacies
and Computer Science (Pila-CS)
Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (Pila-CS) a Research Practice Partnership between New York City schools and researchers at New York University and the City University of New York to support bi/multilingual kids participating in the CS for All initiative in NYC.
Dr. Laura Ascenzi-Moreno
Co-Principal Investigator, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno is an Associate Professor and Bilingual Program Coordinator in the Childhood, Bilingual, and Special Education Department at Brooklyn College. She received her doctorate in Urban Education from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center in 2012 and has been at Brooklyn College since. Her research focuses on the literacy development of emergent bilingual students, the development of teacher knowledge, and how both of these intersect with equity. Her publications can be found in Literacy Research and Instruction, Language and Education, Schools: Studies in Education, and Language Arts Journal.
Dr. Christopher Hoadley
Principal Investigator, New York University
Dr. Chris Hoadley is associate professor in the Educational Communication and Technology Program, the Program in Digital Media Design for Learning, and the Program on Games for Learning at New York University. He has over 40 years experience designing and building educational technology, and has researched connections between technology, learning, and collaboration for over 30 years. His research focuses on collaborative technologies, computer support for cooperative learning (CSCL), and design-based research methods, a term he coined in the late 1990s. Hoadley is the director of dolcelab, the Laboratory for Design Of Learning, Collaboration & Experience.
Sara Vogel
Post-Doctoral Fellow, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Sara Vogel is a doctoral candidate in Urban Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, conducting her dissertation on how bilingual middle schoolers use language in the course of computer science education activities. At PiLa-CS she supports teachers at partner schools and across the Department of Education to leverage the diverse language practices of bilingual youth as resources in their computer science learning. She previously worked as a bilingual middle school teacher, and a research assistant for the CUNY NYS Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals. She holds a Master's degree in bilingual education from CUNY - Hunter College, and a BA in Urban Studies from Columbia University.
Dr. Jasmine Y. MaCo-Principal Investigator, New York UniversityJasmine Y. Ma is Associate Professor of Mathematics Education at NYU Steinhardt. Her research considers how young people engage in everyday activity across settings, and the ways this can inform designs for supporting their learning in the mathematics classroom. As a part of this work, she interrogates how dominant forms of mathematics instruction--as well as the assumption that modern academic mathematics is the only mathematics of value–actively and systematically marginalizes particular populations of learners.
Ostavo Palacios
Undergraduate Intern
Ostavo Palacios is a Computer Engineering student at the City College of New York. He is currently part of the PiLaCS team. He is really into web designing and loves programming! One of his goals in life is to get more minority students interested in coding.
Sarane James
Undergraduate Intern
Sarane James is a student studying Creative Writing at the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter College. She has had both creative and journalistic writing published in places such as the Girls Write Now annual anthology and Newsweek magazine. She is currently writing a novel and aims to use the power of storytelling to provide greater understanding of each other and bring us closer as human beings
