ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a collaborative teacher narrative about navigating cultural and linguistic pluralism in the writing classroom. We argue that, while multilingualism in most late modern societies can be an ordinary everyday practice, its cultivation and sustainability in educational settings require ‘extraordinary’ multilingual-oriented dispositions, and therefore pedagogical labor. Drawing on García’s theorization of translanguaging as seeing each and every student’s embodied language practice as accessing a continuum of languaging, we pose that writing instructors need to approach each multilingual interaction and multilingual site with critical care for how students and teachers are rhetorically attuned to multilingualism. As writing instructors with specialized training in applied linguistics and urban and bilingual education, we particularly focus on the extraordinary labor and expertise that needs to be brought to working in spaces where ‘multilingualism is the mainstream’, but not grounded in the instructional approach.
