ABSTRACT

This concluding chapter for the edited collection on transnational writing pedagogy begins by briefly exploring how living and teaching in a context of urban superdiversity explicitly challenges monolingual assumptions, while demanding teachers’ sensitivity to students’ crossing of many intertwined borders: national, linguistic, cultural, and class. The chapter then addresses two critiques of the translingual writing approach—that it lacks pedagogical specificity, and that it does not attend to students’ expectations of learning Standard English—by outlining the insights from the edited collection which can be applied in the classroom. The chapter discusses strategies for helping students to recognize and deconstruct monolingual worldviews by offering opportunities to investigate both students’ own language experiences and the creation and application of external language standards. Finally, the chapter suggests the necessity of crossing borders between writing disciplines by examining a translingual pedagogical activity drawn from the field of basic writing.