Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments by O. García & T. Kleyn (review)

Translanguaging with Multilingual Students explores the experiences of emergent bilingual students and their teachers in education based on the principles and practices of translanguaging, a theory that conceives of linguistically diverse students as users of rich linguistic repertoires to navigate their world. García and Kleyn, experienced practitioners, scholars, and advocates for equitable education, make a momentous, ambitious contribution to scholarship about challenges and new possibilities in bilingual education.

Part One provides a theoretical grounding for the case studies that form the core of the text. Translanguaging challenges the assumed rightness of traditional monolingual views of language. Education, the authors suggest, must instead legitimize all students’ linguistic practices as individual and meaningful, inviting educators to become “co-learners” (p. 17) as they support students’ unique voices and ways of accessing learning. Such a commitment embraces the linguistic diversity of emergent bilingual students as a form of advocacy for equal treatment in challenging and divisive times.

Part Two outlines the authors’ translanguaging educational project, CUNY-NYSEIB, which connected theory, practice, and research in a multi-phased process of inquiry and transformation. Six case studies took place in New York City public schools, exploring various ways in which translanguaging can transform educational norms and teacher and student experiences in learning. The chapters, which include examples of classroom strategies and student work, are accessible for educators who work in a variety of contexts with heterogeneous student groups including students with disabilities, newcomers, students with interrupted formal education, and emergent bilingual as well as monolingual students. Chapter 3 explores translanguaging as a strategy for including Grade 8 students’ diverse language repertoires in creative writing. Chapter 4 elaborates Gutiérrez (2007)’s framework of “windows and mirrors” (p. 85) to help Grade 5 students use translanguaging to connect their personal and cultural backgrounds to new meanings in literacy building. Chapter 5 investigates how translanguaging freed a “grupito” of Grade 2 students to make meaning and “drive the lesson” (p. 116) in a rigorous academic experience that transformed both students and teacher. Chapter 6 highlights intentional and fluid uses of translanguaging to support Grade 8 students who collaboratively engaged with complex texts and developed critical thinking skills while gaining independence as learners. Chapter 7 investigates the often under-explored socio-affective dimensions of learning in a Grade 11/12 classroom where translanguaging helped students participate more fully in the analysis of difficult texts by accessing their interests and cultural practices. Chapter 8 is a variation on previous themes and recounts a science lesson that took place in a Spanish-medium middle school classroom where learners were encouraged to explore challenging content-area material by selecting features of either English or Spanish.

The studies prioritize academic objectives while including all participants in a collaborative, culturally and linguistically valuing space. Students’ linguistic diversity is fundamental to the learning process, guiding the development of metalinguistic awareness, cultural consciousness, and new understandings of participation and voice. Each case study ends with a teacher commentary and includes discussion questions for the reader to consider in light of new learning.

Part Three outlines a translanguaging education policy that balances students’ individual, internal linguistic repertoires and the external educational ecologies in which they learn (p. 182), inviting resistance to the monolingually based categorization of learners and challenging traditional definitions of education models and content areas. The final section of the book provides guiding principles for teachers and teacher educators who seek to explore translanguaging in their own work. The authors include concrete ways to incorporate translanguaging in different classrooms and programs, while acknowledging that teachers’ translanguaging pedagogies will differ across unique social ecologies and as students’ linguistic practices and understandings vary, creating new possibilities for engagement and resistance.

Rather than a recipe book for “good teaching,” this valuable text is a call to action for education scholars and professionals to effect substantive change. Important questions emerge: How would such radical innovations work...