Playful Translingual Assemblages in a Community Language Mapping Workshop

Background: Situated in urban Philadelphia, Autores Fuertes was part of a network of nonprofit community writing centers that provided a free afterschool writing academy for children ages 7 to 17. With a full-time lead educator and assistant educator, alongside several volunteer community educators, this center promoted itself as a “bilingual” site. Most of the enrolled children had family connections to Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. As a teacher-scholar, I collaborated with the center to implement various translingual writing workshops. Purpose: In this study, I aimed to understand how the children mapped their translingual practices in and out of the center during the Community Language Mapping Workshop, which ran for seven weeks on Saturday mornings for two hours in April and May 2019. I drew on prior scholarship on linguistic landscaping and community language mapping to frame the pedagogical activities that scaffold the children’s abilities to observe their community’s linguistic practices through a researcher’s perspective and document them creatively and critically. Research Design: I used an engaged ethnographic case study approach coupled with micro-ethnographic analysis to collect and analyze data generated through observations, pedagogical pláticas, field notes, and the children’s multimodal compositions. Conclusions: Instead of mapping their linguistic practices like cartographers with precise lines, the children exhibited an assemblage of material interactions where language emerged during everyday play. Translingualism is a common experience for bilingual children; it is the norm rather than the exception. When educators examine these practices, they will see and hear translingual reality, encompassing even the simplest activities, such as riding a bicycle, playing a video game, or going to the beach. In educational settings that embrace this approach, bilingual learners will be empowered to integrate the authentic ways they already use language in their communities, challenging assumptions of language practices and linguistic repertoires, because there is no need to assume fluency or language preference.