Exploring translanguaging pedagogy in an Asian American history classroom with a Chinese bilingual community teacher

This study examines a Chinese bilingual community teacher’s translanguaging pedagogy in an Asian American history classroom within a community-based Chinese heritage school. Drawing on four months of classroom observations, artifacts, and interviews collected as part of a larger critical ethnographic study, this article explores the teacher’s ideological shift and purposeful design of translanguaging pedagogy as she navigates the dual goals of heritage language maintenance and teaching Asian American history with Chinese American bilingual children. Through continuous reflection, the teacher developed a translanguaging stance and enacted translanguaging as a loving pedagogy that empowered her Chinese American bilingual students to draw on their full linguistic and cultural repertoires and community knowledge to engage with the immigration, transnational, and racialized experiences of the Chinese American community. This study offers implications for practitioners seeking to approach translanguaging as a pedagogy that supports both bilingual development and content learning, as well as for researchers focused on teacher education in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts.