Research: “Writing is so much more than just writing in English”: Teacher Candidates Taking Up Translanguaging in a Teacher-as-Writer Experience

Abstract

Teacher-as-writer experiences, in which teacher candidates engage deeply in their own writing and consider its implications for their pedagogies, are common features of writing methods courses. However, most existing research on these assignments has focused on the experiences of educators who write and will teach exclusively in English. We explore the experiences of bilingual teacher candidates who engaged in a teacher-as-writer assignment in our writing methods course, which we redesigned through the lens of translanguaging pedagogies (García et al., 2016). Drawing on theories of translanguaging (García, 2009) and raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015), we describe how two teacher candidates experienced invitations to compose across languages in ways that were simultaneously empowering and complicated. Ultimately, through this article, we seek to bring needed recognition of linguistic and racial diversity to discussions of teacher-as-writer experiences and to highlight the pedagogical potential of translanguaging in writing teacher education.