Translanguaging as Troublesome Knowledge

Dr. Sue Ollerhead, Macquarie University

Dr. Sue Ollerhead works with translanguaging as a researcher and teacher educator in Sydney. In this interview, she shares her insights with Marianne Turner on the feasibility and impact of translanguaging for students of different ages in Australian classrooms.

Marianne: Sue, thank you for talking to me today, First, can I ask a general question about the way you work with the idea of translanguaging? What drew you to this idea of drawing on the language, knowledge, and experiences of students for their learning?

Sue: Hi, Marianne, it's lovely to join you. Thanks for the opportunity. I think what drew me to the idea of translanguaging was really my teaching experience. My very first experience of teaching was with adult literacy learners who were working in a factory in downtown Johannesburg, and I realized very soon after my first lesson that there was just such a wealth of linguistic knowledge in the classroom, and that the students had so much to offer.

When I tapped into that knowledge from them, our discussions were so much richer and so much more engaging. So, it struck me as a profoundly respectful and intellectual way of looking at teaching, and looking at students, not as not having language deficits, but having rich linguistic repertoires, and lived experiences that really enrich the teaching experience.

Marianne: Absolutely, that really resonates with how I feel about translanguaging as well. So, you recently co-authored an article entitled “Pedagogical Translanguaging as Troublesome Knowledge in Teacher Education” for TESOL in Context. What did you mean by troublesome knowledge?

Sue: Well, troublesome knowledge sounds like a negative term, but it actually is a term from educational theory. It comes from the idea of threshold concepts in education containing elements of knowledge that are problematic for learners because they unsettle ingrained notions of understanding of things. In this case, it refers to looking at notions of language as being finite and standardized, and neatly separable.

Many of us have grown up with these ideas, especially those of us who have been around for a bit longer than others. We can think of languages as fixed, and that a monolingual approach to teaching is the only way to go. So, for some of my students, especially older ones, who are coming back to education, it just seems very counterintuitive to be presented with this idea of inviting other languages into the classroom.

It's not just an intellectual challenge, but it's also a bit of an emotional challenge; I wouldn't say a prejudice, but something that has to be overcome. But once it is overcome, it's a portal to a whole lot of new understandings.

Marianne: That's an insightful way to put it. So, what do you think is an effective way for teachers and students and schools in general to work with this troublesome knowledge?

Sue: Well, I think the very fact that it's troublesome means that you can't just go in there insisting that this approach is the way to go. It has to be a collaborative effort. You really have to get your students along as partners. Even though they may feel more comfortable speaking their home language, many of them haven't been invited to use their home language in the classroom before.

Being overt with what you're doing in the lesson is important. For example, saying to the students, “I will invite you to discuss parts of the lesson in your home language, and that's because I really want to know what language, what knowledge you're bringing with you”.

The students need to be convinced of the benefits of translanguaging themselves. It's really about bringing them along with you, being a co-learner with them, and saying, “Okay, so what did you find out when you spoke to your peers, who speak the same language as you? What did you find out about this topic when you spoke to your parents or your family? What did you find out when you read a text about this subject in your own language?” It’s about bringing this to the learning experience so that they're invested in it themselves.

Marianne: The idea of bringing in different people is a very good one. Not just talking to one group of people, but getting information or knowledge from different sources is a really nice idea.

Sue: That's absolutely right. Of course, there's a logistical challenge with translanguaging, especially in the Australian context, because we've often got classes with up to six or seven language groups. I know in certain areas of Sydney, there may be one student who's the only speaker of that language in the classroom. So, then you can say, “how on Earth could translanguaging be worthwhile in that situation?”

Well, the thing is that they have partners in their home context, in the community context, in written texts they might be reading. Maybe they have siblings elsewhere in the school, and they can access knowledge through a home language before the lesson, and bring that to the classroom. So that's important to remember. It's a practical exercise, as much as a pedagogical one.

Marianne: Absolutely. So why do you think it's important that schools engage with this kind of knowledge? You have actually addressed that question in a way.

Sue: Yes, but I think I'd like to add one thing. We're going down a certain road very quickly in teacher education, where we're trying to do more with less time, with fewer resources. We have the advantage of artificial intelligence now, and everything seems a lot more systematic.  I think, when that happens, sometimes we overlook one of the most important professional standards for teachers: In other words, Standard 1. knowing your students and how they learn.

There's no way you can know your students if you don't know the language resources that they bring to the classroom and the cultural resources they bring. That is the key to learners investing in your teaching. It's the key to learners feeling valued. It's the key to their knowledge being shared with others in the classroom. And to me, that's what translanguaging does.

It's not about letting students speak any language they want in the classroom. That's not what it's about at all. It's really about tapping in to the knowledge that they bring with them, and using that as a resource, not just for you, as a teacher, but for all the other students as well. So, if we go back to professional standards for teachers, everybody should be doing translanguaging in every single subject across the curriculum, because that's really what it means.

Marianne: I agree. Language is a gateway to background knowledge. But often we don't think about it like that in Australian classrooms.

Sue: That's absolutely right.

Marianne: So, in your experience, both as a researcher and a teacher educator, what have you seen that, you would say is an example of successful engagement with translanguaging?

Sue: Well, I've been really fortunate to work with some amazing teachers who are coming to me and saying, “Okay, we've heard about this idea of translanguaging, and we'd really like to find out more, because this really goes against the way we were trained. Or this goes against what we understood was a good way to approach language in a classroom”.

I love working with teachers in the field because they're seeing in real time how their students engage. For example, I was working with a Year One teacher in a school in the inner west of Sydney. I think it was 98% language background other than English, and the students came from a broad variety of language backgrounds, such as Nepali, Hindi, Arabic, Greek, and Pasifika languages.

The students were initially very quiet in class. They were doing rote learning, and they didn't really engage with play. As part of a project, we spent a term with the students, and did a series of lessons with them around family, especially around family meals, and we did some play work with them. We had little models of food, and we play acted what their family meals looked like.

We had multilingual story books, and that opened up getting to know the students, what they spoke about during their family meals. The project culminated in a literacy book about their family dinners. It was a really meaningful experience, not just for us as academics and researchers, but for the teacher who had been trained a certain way, but then saw the potential of doing things differently. We also engaged the parents who did a lot of translation for us. And so, from being a teacher-student effort, it turned into a community effort. I think that's what translanguaging is about. It's about making the most of all the resources that you have in a classroom, because those aren't always visible.

Marianne: That certainly sounds like a success. And what have you seen as challenging for teachers and also challenging for yourself when you're engaging with translanguaging pedagogy in your own teaching?

Sue: The thing that I've learned the most, and which strikes me every time I speak with teachers is that you really have to be respectful about the specifics of the context that teachers come from, and translanguaging may mean something quite different in each context that you go into. Some teachers recently have been saying to me that they understand why, pedagogically, it's important and how it could work. But they have certain students who actually would be quite triggered by hearing another language, a specific language being spoken in the classroom because they might come from context where they were taught that it was a bad language. Or that language reminds them of traumatic experiences.

Recently I've been working with STARTTs, the NSW services for treatment of survivors of torture and trauma. And that's a very real thing. I hadn't really understood until I did that work with them that you have to be very careful about just saying, “Okay, everybody go off and speak your language” because there’s the possibility of slurs being thrown around in the classroom. That's why it's very, very important that you take your learners along with you. There need to be guidelines for respectful use of language. You need to plan it very systematically into your lesson plan. It's not that the first language is used at all stages of the lesson. Maybe it's only for specific stages of the lesson.

While translanguaging as a theory is very fluid, sometimes in pedagogy you have to be systematic in order for the approach to be successful. So that's what I've learned.

I've come out of being taught in a very monolingual way a long time ago, and I've had to evolve. So, I'm learning all the time, and our teachers are learning all the time. What I find encouraging is that there's an acknowledgement of diversity in our classrooms in Australia, and that we can harness that for learning so we don’t miss out on valuable opportunities.

Marianne: Absolutely. And that’s a very important point about the slurs in other languages. But it’s also true, as teachers, we don't hear everything. So those kinds of slurs are likely to be happening in English, too.

Sue: Well, that's what I think too. Who says they're not doing that in English? Teachers also get concerned that students are talking about them in other languages, but my answer to that is, “they will be talking about you in English as well!”

When you're a secondary teacher, that comes with the territory.

But it is a real concern for teachers, and one that sadly often gets used as an excuse. “Translanguaging is all well and good. But it doesn't work in our context”. I'm pushing back against that, because I think, with respectful guidelines, and getting your students to ascribe to those, I think that's a part of classroom management.

Marianne: I very much agree. And on that note, I'd just like to say thank you so much for talking to me today, Sue. This has been very, very interesting.

Sue: Thank you, Marianne.

Sue Ollerhead is a Senior Lecturer in Languages and Literacy Education at Macquarie University. Her research focuses on multilingualism, translanguaging, and culturally responsive pedagogy. Drawing on her global teaching experience, she works with schools, refugee education networks, and teacher education programs to promote linguistically responsive, trauma-informed practices in diverse classrooms