Towards Translanguaging with Students at Public School: multimodal and transcultural aspects in meaning making

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to report on an experiment that approximates with translingual and multimodal practices in workshops about migration involving secondary public school students and to rethink its implications in relation to the teaching of English in contemporary transcultural landscape from a critical perspective. It is situated in a community project on critical education through languages, which involves a set of workshops from a partnership between a public university and a public secondary school. As a collaborative work, it includes language professors, undergraduate students and a teacher and her students from a public secondary school where the project took place. It reports on the students’ context, from which meaning making emerges and it is analyzed in the light of the theoretical conceptions here selected. It is founded on qualitative and interpretive methodology and it relies on contingent processes and procedures of the workshops in question. It assumes critical literacy as a social practice, translingual practices as part of the everyday experience resembling assemblage (instead of fixed and linear movements in meaning making) and multimodality as inherent to interaction in knowledge construction. The notion of workshop is equivalent to secondary school students’ meaning making. The result suggests that resources and practices resembling translingual and multimodal ones might enhance students’ engagement, creativity, critique and ethics modifying language teaching-learning and the use of technology.

Keywords: insights for creative learning; teacher education; translingua-lmultimodal practices in public school.