Rooted in community: three multilingual teachers develop a translanguaging stance through shared struggles

Translanguaging has been theorized as an ideological and pedagogical stance that centers the voices, practices, and experiences of bi/multilingual students of Color. While prior research has documented the pedagogical affordances of translanguaging in bi/multilingual education, teachers’ struggles in enacting this stance remain underexamined. This study employs collaborative autoethnography to examine how three multilingual teacher-researchers developed a translanguaging stance through shared struggles while teaching Chinese American children in a community-based Chinese heritage school. Drawing on translanguaging theory and Wynter and McKittrick’s concept of intellectual struggle, we engaged in a dialogic spiral of reflection using year-long ethnographic fieldnotes, reflective journals, and meetings where we examined the complexities of bi/multilingual identities and navigated the tensions surrounding dominant language ideologies and student agency. Findings illustrate how collective reflection functioned as a critical site for teachers’ learning, healing, and reimagining bi/multilingual education beyond monolingual and standardized norms by leveraging bi/multilingual’s holistic ways of being and doing.