Co-Constructing Curriculum with Poetry, Cultural History, and Translanguaging

Hong Kong students experience three language dispositioning changes. They learn Mandarin for subject of “Chinese”; the instruction language of other subjects is Cantonese; English is required in universities. Although students and instructors are Hong Kong locals who share the same linguistic background and can speak Cantonese, they aren't allowed to use languages other than English. This study would examine to what extent local university students sharing the same linguistic repertoire use translanguaging in interactions; second, how translanguaging approach enables students to scaffold and facilitate language learning to co-construct meanings; third, whether the translanguaging approach has implications for educational settings.

Understanding that non-white students' cultural histories are missing from our curricular materials, we came together as a community-based research team of two white middle school teachers, located in the Niagara River Basin, and one Black researcher/teacher-educator, a coastal literacy specialist with New York Sea Grant. Guided by TribalCrit theory and critical curricular standpoint theory, we embarked upon a co-constructed curriculum design project for the 2019-2021 school years that gives students tools to become citizen scientists focused on justice issues in our community. This research is a work-in-progress and as such contains preliminary findings.

This presentation addresses the pedagogical complexities of collaborative in-role poetry-making with third graders, poetry created as a response to learning about the atrocities of Indian residential schools. As a social process, their shared words reveal the plurality of voice to elucidate “reasons, fears, desires, and questions” (Lichtenstein, 2008, p. 24). As artistic practice, their poetry reveals how students attempt to access experiences that dwell beyond the margins of their realities (Greene, 1991). I consider the incongruous pedagogical purposes of students’ in-role creations when exposed to the inability to live what Greene calls a “shared world” (p. 29).