ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a poetic inquiry into a remarkable day in an English-language classroom with young adult emergent bilinguals: an experiment with translanguaging and poetry. As a methodology, poetic inquiry’s strength lies in its ability to foreground the emotional and affective lives of participants. In this study, I focus on the affective dimensions of three newcomers’ bilingual poetry writing and poetic transcripts that emerged from our follow-up conversations. I draw on MacLure’s concept of wonder as an analytical lens to curate and explore poetic texts in the study. Taking up affect theory’s materialist orientations, I consider the ways in which translanguaging pedagogy, affect theory, arts-based methods, and my findings are entangled and generative. I propose a more expansive view of translanguaging as a dynamic synaesthetic process of meaning making within complex and intersecting assemblages of language and matter, and I conceptualize translanguaging with the arts as performative inquiry into the self, relationality, and belonging in the world.
