| dc.description.abstract | Multilingual students labeled as English learners (ELs) in U.S. public schools receive inequitable support, as current educational policy ignores students’ non-academic English linguistic resources. Despite constraints on local and national levels, teachers who work with multilingual students can shift their instructional practices to provide linguistically sustaining education, particularly through translanguaging pedagogies. However, researchers continue to uncertain about the best way to support teacher engagement with translanguaging. Project TRANSLATE, or Teaching Reading And New Strategic Language Approaches to Emergent bilinguals, was designed to support MLLs to translate sections of academic text from English into their languages, compare and evaluate their translations with classmates, and discuss their refined understandings of the text (Jiménez et al., 2015). This project’s most recent goal was to provide additional supports for teachers through an entire reading curriculum, ultimately offering a translanguaging-focused set of educative curriculum materials for EL teachers. Through this dissertation, I will examine the efficacy of these materials in supporting participating teachers’ learning about translanguaging pedagogies as they use the curriculum. Overall, I offer three papers to understand how we might support teacher learning about translanguaging. First, a literature review examines current research about supports for in-service teachers to engage in translanguaging pedagogies. Next, I present an empirical study about how educative curriculum materials offer another way to support in-service teacher learning about translanguaging, followed by a multiple-case study describing how educative curriculum materials become enacted across contexts. Overall, these papers reveal the potentials and pitfalls of translanguaging-focused educative curriculum materials to effect changes to teachers’ practices. | |
