The purpose of this paper is to investigate in-service teachers’ thoughts and beliefs vis-á-vis a professional development program focusing on pedagogical translanguaging. In this ethnographically framed study, the complex relationships between teacher cognition, teacher identities and their classroom practices during a professional development project will be examined.
This paper presents the findings of a study that focuses on in-service teachers’ beliefs and perceptions concerning learning to teach through linguistic diversity. Specifically, it examines the relationship between teacher cognition, teacher identities and practice – i.e. the interrelationship between (language) teachers’ thoughts, beliefs and attitudes and pedagogical practices in transformation. The impetus for the study was the unprecedented wave of migration that Sweden, among other European countries, has experienced during the last decade. The impact these developments have had for the educational system and the lives of teachers in classrooms has at times entailed seeking to find pedagogical practices that encourage active inclusion of migrant students’ family and heritage languages in teaching and learning. The present study tells the story of one such attempt. The study stems from a larger ethnographically framed research and development project at an upper secondary school’s Language Introduction Programme (LIP) in Sweden. The project was designed to expand the LIP teachers’ professional knowledge and improve their competence in teaching multilingual, newly migrated students. Pedagogical translanguaging (Creese & Blackledge 2010; García 2009) was chosen as the main theme of the project. The main purpose of the present paper is thus to investigate in-service teachers’ thoughts and beliefs vis-á-vis a professional development program focusing on multilingual pedagogies. The complex relationship between teacher cognition, teacher identities and their classroom practices will also be examined. Data in the study include fieldnotes, interview data and video recordings of teacher workshops and classroom interactions at the LIP and are analysed through interactionist and discursive psychological approaches (Li 2017). The findings highlight insights gained and challenges experienced by the teachers during the different phases of the implementation of translanguaging pedagogies in a previously monolingual educational landscape. Moreover, both the transformative power and limits of translanguaging are addressed.
