ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study of the final stage of a multi-year professional development initiative that focuses on helping teachers understand and develop a translanguaging pedagogy. The chapter will describe the overall professional development framework and activities that include collaborative design in the context of educator communities of practice. The case study will focus on the classroom design and pedagogical choices of an educator who was one of the group members. The chapter explores how this initiative provided a platform for understanding translanguaging as a multimodal practice. The case study presents examples of how, as a result of this collaborative design, translanguaging was embedded strategically to provide scaffolds and to create a transformational space in the design of instruction in an eighth-grade English language arts class. Some of the students in the class were emergent bilinguals, and many came from immigrant families. The students produced short videos in which they used their full semiotic repertoires. The case study discusses the transformative power of leveraging students’ communicative practices as creative and critical tools for learning. At the end of the project, the teacher’s design and the students’ work were used to fostering discussions between educators within the school and community and to provide a model of translanguaging practices for educators. This process presents a professional development model that focuses not only on developing educators’ pedagogical stances and classroom practices but also on fostering teacher leaders who can contribute to the professional development of their colleagues.
