Translanguaging and Multimodality as Flow, Agency, and a New Sense of Advocacy in and from the Global South

This volume provides six distinct frameworks for integrating translanguaging and multimodality as pedagogical possibilities in today’s classrooms and beyond. It brings the two constructs together in investigating the language and literacy experiences of multilingual learners across a range of sociocultural and educational contexts.

The book features contributions from scholars across the Global North and Global South who embrace the importance of validating scholarly experiences from the Global South as a way to transcend geographical boundaries in creating more equitable knowledge spaces. The contributing authors share their innovative theoretical and methodological orientations to translanguaging and multimodality, informed by their considerable expertise as scholars and educators. They address conceptual questions such as issues related to cultural flow, civic and professional identities, entanglement, materiality, “first-order languaging,” and raciolinguistic ideologies. Each chapter deals with these questions through integrated and innovative analyses of empirical evidence in: Chinese word instruction, teacher professional development, multimodal composition, online language tutoring, and online teaching videos in Global South societies or transnational interactions. Together, the chapters push against normative theoretical and applied boundaries to help us envision new dynamic intersections of translanguaging and multimodality for today's classrooms and societies.

Provocative and disruptive, this book explores the possibilities of mixing and remixing definitions, epistemological standpoints, and methodological options and shows the continuing growth found in translanguaging and multimodality research worldwide. It will be a key resource for practitioners, researchers, and scholars of education and pedagogy, bilingual education, language and literacy education, applied linguistics, literacy studies, and language arts. It was originally published as a special issue of Pedagogies: An International Journal.

Raúl Alberto Mora is Associate Professor in the Doctorate of Education and Chair of the Literacies in Second Languages Project at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín, Colombia (currently teaching remotely from Norway). His research explores second-language literacies in cities and gaming communities and the potential for alternative literacies as pedagogical proposals in second language education.

Zhongfeng Tian is Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education at Rutgers University–Newark, USA. His research centres on working with classroom teachers to provide bi/multilingual students with equitable and inclusive learning environments in ESL and dual language bilingual education contexts and preparing culturally and linguistically competent teachers with social justice orientations.

Ruth Harman is Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education and an adjunct faculty in the Linguistics Department at the University of Georgia. Her research has focused on innovative pedagogical and research practices that promote disciplinary literacy development, youth civic engagement, and critical semiotic awareness.