This presentation highlights inclusive, compassionate and effective responses to meeting the needs of children and youth who are in the process of resettlement and integration, sharing teacher perceptions of and approaches to students’ language and literacy practices through development and enactment translanguaging pedagogy at the secondary level.
Wide-spread and comprehensive understanding of the teaching and learning needs of children and youth from refugee backgrounds remains an unmet goal within most education systems. School districts and individual schools often conflate these needs with those of voluntary immigrants, identifying students as English Learners (ELs) and placing them in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes without specific understanding of or supports for their needs. Nonetheless, educators generate knowledge within their own classrooms, based on their daily work to support these students’ resettlement and social and educational integration. To highlight these efforts and the situated knowledge and expertise of educators who have developed inclusive, compassionate and effective responses to meeting the needs of children and youth who are in the process of resettlement and integration, the purpose of this presentation is to shed light on teacher perceptions of and approaches to students’ language and literacy practices, synthesizing the broad findings that educators discovered to be facilitative and supportive. The presentation documents the efforts of a committed group of educators in a school located in a large urban city in Canada, who drew upon and engaged students’ linguistic resources as a key foundation for student learning, relationships and engagement, creating translanguaging spaces and enacting translanguaging pedagogy in their classrooms. Documenting these processes and synthesizing the critical contributions of teachers’ efforts, the presentation examines a translanguaging theory of language as pedagogy for teaching and learning with youth from refugee backgrounds. Inspired by Hornberger’s (2009) continua of biliteracy, and its contributions in making visible how educators can observe, act and reflect on pedagogical activities, the presentation proposes a three-dimensional matrix for organizing translanguaging pedagogy, comprising axes of (1) teacher- and student-initiated translanguaging practice; (2) planned and spontaneous engagements with translanguaging; and (3) translanguaging as either a scaffold or a resource for learning.
