IDEOLOGICAL RECKONING & TRANSLANGUAGING REIMAGINING: AN ENGLISH 

LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATOR’S CRITICAL AUTOETHNOGRAPHY 

 

By 

 

Christina M. Ponzio 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

A DISSERTATION 

 

Submitted to  

Michigan State University 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

for the degree of  

 

Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education—Doctor of Philosophy 

 

2021 

 

 

ABSTRACT 

IDEOLOGICAL RECKONING & TRANSLANGUAGING REIMAGINING: AN ENGLISH 

LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATOR’S CRITICAL AUTOETHNOGRAPHY 

 

By 

 

Christina M. Ponzio 

 

A limited body of research has investigated English language teacher educators’ 

positionalities and pedagogies (Peercy & Sharkey, 2018; Yazan, 2019), particularly with respect 

to translanguaging. To that end, the purpose of this critical autoethnography, or what I will later 

describe as a nos/otras autoethnography (Anzaldúa, 2015), is for me to examine my ideological 

reckoning and translanguaging reimagining as a language teacher (LT) and language teacher 

educator (LTE) based on the following questions: 

1.  How did my ideological stance as a language educator shift across my pre-service and in-

service LT experiences as well as my first years as an LTE?  

2.  How did my interactions in a nepantla contact zone catalyze and sustain my ideological 

reckoning and translanguaging reimagining as a White, English-dominant speaking, U.S.-

born, beginning LTE?  

I frame this study within the narrative traditions of Gloria Anzaldúa (2012, 2015), whose 

work consistently defied linguistic conventions and critiqued the U.S. history of linguistic 

terrorism and settler-colonization. I draw upon her theorization of (des)conocimientos, nos/otras, 

and nepantla (Anzaldúa, 2015) in order to (1) reckon with the influence of assimilationist 

language ideologies (Irvine, 1989; Wollard, 1998) on my own language learning and teaching, 

and (2) reimage my language pedagogy through more heteroglossic (Bakhtin, 1981; García, 

2009) and translanguaging (Williams, 1994, 1996; García & Li Wei, 2014) perspectives. 

Specifically, I bring together Anzaldúa’s (2015) theorization of nepantla with the notion of 

 

contact zones (Pratt, 1991; Canagarajah, 2013) to describe the collision, fracturing and 

transformation that emerged through the intentional juxtaposition of beliefs, identities, language 

practices, and experiences as a part of my participation in a collaborative self-study group named 

Transnetworking for TESOL Teachers (TTT). 

I begin by tracing my “Ideological Starting Point,” narrating my language and 

educational history from childhood through my undergraduate teacher preparation program; I 

also provide a brief account of my eight years as an LT and my first two years as an LTE (1985-

2018). Next, I narrate my “Ideological Reckoning” through consideration of data generated 

during my early experiences as a LTE before zooming into my experience as a part of TTT, a 

collaborative self-study group committed to exploring translanguaging. In the final findings 

chapter, I describe my “Bodymindsoul Transformation,” which overlaps with and extends 

beyond my interactions with TTT to more closely explore my personal self-study as a LTE.  

This study illustrates that the overlapping and iterative self-study conducted as a part of 

TTT emboldened me to contend with my complicity in perpetuating English language education 

as white supremacist settler-colonial enterprise and to pursue new opportunities to expand my 

own translanguaging capacity. Hence, this study suggests critical self-reflexivity and 

collaborative inquiry in what I am calling nepantla contact zones (Pratt, 1991; Canagarajah, 

2013; Anzaldúa, 2015) can galvanize white, English-dominant LTs and LTEs to reckon with 

their own positionalities and reimagine English language education. I conclude with implications 

for translanguaging, autoethnographic approaches to research, and language teacher education. 

 

Copyright by 
CHRISTINA M. PONZIO 
2021 
 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

To the woman for whom I am named, 

 who taught me that the heart of community is the cucina, 

that food is for remembering, 

and that all we need is to live with love, kindness and respect: 

Maria Josephine Falbo Ponzio 

September 29, 1924-December 9, 2013 

 

 v 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

 
 
 

I open my dissertation with this quote from Gloria Anzaldúa (2015): “We discover, 

uncover, create our identities as we interrelate with others and our alrededores/surroundings. 

Identity grows out of our interactions, and we strategically reinvent ourselves to accommodate 

our exchanges” (p. 75). To this end, this critical autoethnography and the identities I have 

constructed throughout the process of composing it—as a language teacher educator and 

scholar—have been made manifest through the relationships and communities that are central to 

my story. I am humbled and grateful for these connections.  

 

Thank you to my adviser, Dr. Carrie Symons. You embody what it means to be a 

humanizing educator in your day-to-day life, leading with kindness, grace, and wisdom. Your 

spirit is both soft and welcoming while also being fiercely principled. You have gently guided 

me throughout the past five years, and like the best sort of teacher (to borrow from Rudine Sims 

Bishop’s metaphor) have provided a mirror to shine back to me who I am and a window to point 

me to who I can become. I am grateful for the many laughs, deep conversations, challenging 

writing pursuits, and opportunities for teaching and learning we’ve shared, and I count on many 

more to come. Thank you, also, to you, Herminso, Lily, and Luna for opening your home to me.  

 

Thank you to each of my committee members for the distinct stance and expertise you 

bring: to Dr. Lucía Cárdenas Curiel, for your fierce heart and dedication for fostering greater 

equity within bilingual education, for inviting me to be a thought partner within teaching and 

writing, and for modeling what it means to be an advocate for emergent bi/multilingual learners; 

to Dr. Corey Drake, for your compassionate approach to listening, your thoughtful questions, and 

your consistent dedication for advancing the state of education by improving how we prepare 

teachers; to Dr. Peter De Costa, for the many seeds you’ve planted over the past five years, 

 vi 

offering a pulse on the field of applied linguistics based on the depth and breadth of your 

expertise while pointing me towards multiple avenues to join the conversations within which I 

now see myself as a part today; and to Dr. Avner Segall, for asking the sort of hard theoretical 

and methodological questions that stay with me for months, for generously engaging with my 

scholarship while illuminating how it might extend the field of language education, and for 

bringing a sense of joy and humor into scholarly conversations. With respect to five of you as a 

committee, I see you all as a collective illustration of translanguaging in the broadest sense, 

representing myriad communities of practice, disciplines, scholarly approaches and 

commitments. I also see the opportunities I have had to engage with you all together as a 

nepantla contact zone, where your different perspectives, cultures, identities, dispositions, and 

meaning-making practices collide, fracturing taken-for-granted assumptions about education and 

educational research. I am grateful for how each of you have been a part of my transformation. 

 

I extend tremendous gratitude and support to my students during the time I was a 

classroom teacher: Carlos, Angelo, Drew, Lorena, Arielis, Aracelis, Jose Alberto, Jose Armando, 

Lizmarie, Genesis M., Francheli, Tatiana, Andres O., Andres A., Genesis R., Antonio, Danny, 

Yabdiel, Yabner, Luis, Lorenzo B., Alexis, Giovanni, Isaiha, Joel, Kiara, Genesis S., Jorge, 

Natasha, Erica, Yalianez, Yuleidis, Marcos, Carlos, Angelo, Drew, Jose A., Maria, Abel, Ivan, 

Nelson, Mario, Tony, Angel, Julie, Dana, Adrianna, Miguel, Beto, Eugene, Brenda, Marvin, 

Sergio, David, Henry, Josue, Dyanaris, Manny, Guillermo,Yosue, May, Aline, Neishaliz, Lilly, 

Miguel, Francheska, Jennifer, Tatiana, Eleonore, Krystof, Sydney, Hohin, Oskars, Sue Lyn, 

Ricky, Louis, Michal Z., Michal M., Anahita, Sunny, Tomas, Jiri, Ryanka, Giulia, Elysabeth, 

Elie, Oriol, Farah, Emma, Maelle, Camille, Celyan, Allesandro, Jamael, Alena, Amina, Helena, 

Cecile, Lorenzo, Giovanni, Richard, Renad, Noor, Fadi, Farah, Baraa, Kristina, Vlad, Giorgia, 

 vii 

Amadeo, Anna, Yaela, Murtaza, Caroline, Dimitrios, Fiona, Jonathan, Julie, Pietro, Selim, Nina, 

Thomas, William, Marc, Wei-Shun, Wei-Yao, Taihei, York, Megan, Agathe, Alexis, Asaad, 

Flavia, Honore, Sofian, Marisol, Daan, Joppe, Tiphaine. I am also grateful for the opportunities I 

have had to return to the classroom in partnership with the Refugee Development Center (shout 

out to the youth who participated in RDC’s GLOBE between 2017-2019 as well as Govinda 

Acharya, Erica Binion-Brown, Kaila Davidson, Rebecca Douglas, Nikki Finch, Amy Gruber, 

Jeylani Haji, Nichole Hoerner, Ana Holguin, Anneli and Thang Mung, Carly Pollack, Cait 

Prentice, Meg Seifferly, Mariah Shafer, Rulaine Stokes, Margaret Tassaro, and Lauren Thams). 

 

A huge thank you goes out to the members of the Transnetworking for TESOL Teacher, 

or TTT: Drs. Elizabeth Robinson, Laura M. Kennedy, Abraham Ceballos-Zapata, and Zhongfeng 

Tian as well as Elie Crief and Maíra Lins Prado—without you, this dissertation would not have 

been possible! I cannot truly do justice in writing to what inspiring humans each of you are—and 

what potential our group has as a model for the sort of critical praxis-based approaches to 

collaborative self-study to reimaging the state of language education. I do hope that one day we 

all are able to meet together in person because sending digital hugs just don’t cut it! Thank you 

also to my collaborators and thought partners during the Hybridizing Pedagogies professional 

learning: Ben Briere, Abraham Ceballos-Zapata (again!), Caitlin Cornell, Mingzhu Deng, Kaitlin 

Glause, Rebekah Gordon, Zak Hill, Laura Mortensen, Hima Rawal, Vanessa Stephens. While 

our teaching and research together did not make it into the dissertation, I am thrilled to revisit our 

time together in future writing. What a fun-filled, thought-provoking, praxis-changing two weeks 

we spent together! 

 

I am grateful for the community of scholars from whom I have had the fortune to 

formally learn over the past five years, either through classes, writing partnerships or fellowship 

 viii 

opportunities: Sandro R. Barros, for first sparking my interest in translanguaging and for leading 

with your heart as an educator and scholar; Janine Certo, for pointing to poetic inquiry as a 

humanizing, heart-filled, and transformative approach to educational research; Sandra Crespo, 

for our ongoing exploration of translanguaging within the context of math education—and for 

your ongoing wisdom and guidance as I sort out what comes next for my career; and Alyssa 

Dunn and Jen Van Der Heide, for the care and critical consciousness with which you designed 

and facilitated the Fellowship to Enhance Global Understandings that allowed me to travel 

abroad for the first time—it truly was a life-changing endeavor. Thank you also to Drs. Patricia 

Edwards, Anne-Lise Halvorsen, Mary Juzwik, Randy Stanulis, and Tanya Wright, who each 

helped me grow as a literacy/language teacher educator. Likewise, I acknowledge the indelible 

impression left on me as a scholar from conversations with Drs. April Baker-Bell, Carlin 

Borsheim-Black, Suresh Canagarajah, Dorinda Carter-Andrews, Carla España, Laura Hamman-

Ortiz, Luz Herrera, Amanda Kibler, Deborah Palmer, Kate Seltzer, Trixie Smith, Laura Taylor, 

Koen Van Gorp, Manka Varghese, Vaughn W. M. Watson, Li Wei, and Bedrettin Yazan. I am 

always grateful for the opportunities I have had to be apprenticed into being a scholar as a part of 

the leadership teams for the American Education Research Association’s Language and Social 

Process Special Interest Group (through Drs. Kate T. Anderson, Diana Arya, Michiko Hikida, 

Laura Taylor, and Sarah Vander Zanden) and Second Language Research Special Interest Group 

(through Drs. Sandro R. Barros, Alissa Blair, Chris Chang-Bacon, Hyonsuk Cho, Liv T. Dávila, 

Peter De Costa, Susan E. Franco-Fuenmayor, Melinda Martin-Beltrán, Luis Poza, and Carrie 

Symons).  

 

I am fortunate to have partnered with many writers and writing communities, whose 

friendship and support have been fundamental to my ability to see myself as a writer. Thank you 

 ix 

to my first writing group, whose support sustained me throughout my first years of teaching up 

until now: Dr. Christine Dawson, Kelly Hanson, Nora Robinson, and Jillian Van Riper. Thank 

you also to my colleagues in Red Cedar Writing Project and the broader National Writing Project 

network, whose influence will forever be threaded throughout my writing. I am grateful for my 

AXE writing group, Drs. Eliana Altagracia Castro and Ashley Moore. Our friendship and writing 

group are both predicated on the same principles of love, acceptance, and vulnerability. (And our 

writing retreats truly set the bar high for all future retreats!) I have become a better writer, 

teacher, and human because of you both and am grateful for the many ways our lives continue to 

intersect beyond writing. While we haven’t written together (yet), thank you also to Christa 

Robinson and Renee Wilmot for being thought partners and friends; from preparing for FEGU, 

traveling in France, and all the conversations we have had since, your mark is also woven into 

this dissertation. A special thank you also to Dr. Matthew R. Deroo, who first sought me out on 

the 3rd floor of Erickson Hall to talk about our respective classes and how teachers were making 

sense of translanguaging. Our ongoing writing partnership and friendship have sustained and 

grounded me throughout graduate school. Thank you for generosity of spirit, your insightful 

advice, and for humanizing what it means to be a scholar.  I am also thankful for the weekly 

check-ins with Dr. Erin Bronstein during our last semester of graduate school (along with many 

walks, coffee dates and brunches before that); those check-ins, in particular, helped carry me to 

the finish line and I look forward to continuing them in the next chapter of our careers. I also 

want to express my gratitude for the many co-authors with whom I had the fortunate to research, 

write and learn alongside over the past five years: Drs. Sandro R. Barros, Eurydice Bauer, Lucía 

Cárdenas Curiel, Peter De Costa, Matthew R. Deroo, Lisa Domke, Mary Juzwik, Carrie Symons, 

and Lance Wheatley.  

 x 

 

This dissertation was made possible through the generous financial support of the 

Department of Teacher Education, the College of Education, and the Graduate School at 

Michigan State University. I am grateful for the fellowships and grants I received across my 

doctoral studies, and especially for the money I received at the dissertation stage of my program. 

Thank you!  

 

A huge thank you to my parents, Salvatore and Kathleen, for your heart-filled 

encouragement, thought-provoking conversations, and sharing with me the stories that have  

helped me understand who you are within and beyond my own story. Thank you for the support 

you have provided me throughout my K-12, undergraduate and now graduate school careers, 

cheering me on as I ventured forth on a path new to our family. Thank you also to my parents’ 

respective partners, Gena and Vince, for the love and support you extend to me, too. I am 

grateful also for my in-laws, Deb and Tim, who have supported me with caffeine and chocolate, 

reminded me to take breaks, and have rooted for me along the way. Thank you to my brothers, 

Ryan and Sal, for always encouraging me to move beyond my comfort zone and for your candor 

in our moments of processing together our family’s history. Shout out also to my sister-in-law, 

Melissa, brother- and sister-in-law, Matt and Candice, and my nieces and nephew, Alex, Ella, 

Dominic, and Norah, for the smiles you bring to my life. I am also grateful to my Aunt Lory, 

Uncle Ron, and Uncle John for your love and encouragement.   

 

I am tremendously grateful for my friend-family and the community of love, acceptance, 

and vulnerability we have cultivated for over a decade; it has been a model for how I think about 

community building within and beyond academia. To Aly, Joe, and Bryan—you are truly like a 

sister and brothers to me; you saw me on many of my worst days throughout graduate school and 

accepted and supported me with both the good and the less good. Thank you also to Amy and 

 xi 

Chelsea, James, Liz, James and Cora, Lauren and Yoshi, Ray, Alanna, Rowan, Jeannie, Frank, 

Mike, Donovan, and Chris. As I reflect on the many moments when I processed the shifts in my 

identity, grappled with my family’s history, and made life-changing decisions, I picture you all 

there at different moments, willing to hug me, listen to me, or find joy with me. The many meals 

and laughs and games we’ve shared kept my heart filled throughout this journey. You all have 

been a vital wellspring of support throughout this journey.  

 

A special thank you also to Caesar, the cat, who has been my companion during many 

lonely days throughout graduate school where I’ve been buried with reading and writing and 

teaching.  

 

And finally, I want to express my tremendous gratitude to Ben, my partner in all things. 

Thank you, first, for always being willing to teach and learn with me. Given that our first 

interaction was as colleagues in our school’s ESL department, it is only fitting that our 

relationship continues to be defined by teaching and learning together. The love and respect you 

carry for learning and learners, including me, is reflective of only one small piece of your huge 

heart. Beyond the classroom, I have learned so much from you about slowing down, being 

present, and really savoring each moment. You have also taught me how to laugh more deeply 

and smile more broadly than I ever have, and while I keep making new rules about when you can 

tickle me, I am grateful for the silliness. While I take my teaching and scholarship very seriously, 

you consistently remind me how much else there is to savor in our world. And finally, thank you 

for being my dreamer. Surviving the past five years and achieving my dream of earning a 

Doctorate of Philosophy would not have been possible without you, and I am humbled and 

grateful for your continual love and support.  

 

 

 xii 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 
 
LIST OF TABLES 
 
LIST OF FIGURES 
 
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS 
 
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 
 
CHAPTER 2: COLLECTIVE AND PERSONAL SHADOWS 

The Collective Shadow: English Language Education as Empire 

The Embodied Costs of English Language Education 
English Language Oppression throughout U.S. Education 

The Personal Shadows of an Language Teacher Educator 
Teacher Educator Development 

TE Self-Study 
Self-Study in Language Teacher Education 

 
CHAPTER 3: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 

(Des)conocimientos 
Our Ideological Shadows 
Heteroglossic Conocimientos and Translanguaging 

Translanguaging in Contact Zone Interactions 

nos/otras and the Nepantla Contact Zone 

 
CHAPTER 4: METHODOLOGY 

Autoethnography 
Other Matters of Positionality 
nos/otras Autoethnography 
Data Generation and Analysis 

xv 

xvi 

xvii 

1 

6 
6 
7 
9 
11 
12 
14 
15 

18 
18 
19 
24 
27 
30 

34 
34 
36 
39 
42 

 
CHAPTER 5: AN IDEOLOGICAL STARTING PLACE 

Interlude #1: August 10, 1985 
Language Origins (1985-2003) 
Becoming a Language Teacher (August 2003-May 2008) 

47 
47 
48 
52 
53 
55 
Interlude #2: Language Barriers (July 2009) 
61 
Shifting Practice, Shifting Ideologies (September 2008-June 2016) 
Introduction to Translanguaging: A Revolutionary Perspective of Language (August 2016)  65 
67 
Interlude #3: Why Not...Your Own? (May 31, 2017) 

Whispers of Critical Consciousness as a Pre-service Teacher 

 
CHAPTER 6: IDEOLOGICAL RECKONING 

Finding Community: Collaborative Exploration of Translanguaging (2016-2018) 
Orchestrated Collision (2018-2019) 

70 
70 
73 

 xiii 

Colliding Perspectives, Fracturing Ideologies 

Nativespeakerism 
Socioeconomic Dimensions of Bilingualism 
Raciolinguistic Intersections 

Collective Transformation 

Leveling Linguistic Hierarchies within TTT 
“Having the Courage to Go and Do It” 
“My Home is Shifting A Lot” 

 
CHAPTER 7: BODYMINDSOUL TRANSFORMATION 

Humility and Healing in Nepantla (September 2017-December 2018) 
Interlude #4 (December 2018) 
Seeking Nepantla Contact Zones 
Pursing Nepantla Abroad 
Interlude #5 (May-June 2019) 
Existing in Discomfort 

 
CHAPTER 8: PEDAGOGICAL REIMAGINING 

Discussion 

Revisiting Chapter 5: An Ideological Starting Place 
Revisiting Chapter 6: Ideological Reckoning 
Revisiting Chapter 7: Bodymindsoul Transformation 

Implications 

Adopting Ideological (Des)conocimientos as a Framework for LTE 

Stage 1: Looking Inward 
Stage 2: Establishing Common Vocabulary 
Stage 3: Looking Outward 
Stage 4: Enacting in Practice 
Stage 5: Turning Inward Again 

Designing Nepantla Contact Zones for Teacher Education 
Exploring nos/otras Autoethnography 
Decentering Ourselves: Embodying Translanguaging as Praxis 

 
REFERENCES 
 

 
 

 

 

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95 

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123 
126 

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 xiv 

 

LIST OF TABLES 

Table 1. Canagarajah’s (2013) “Cooperative Disposition of Translingual Speakers” 

Table 2. Data Generation 

 

Table 3. Coding for Nepantla  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

29 

43 

46  

 

 

 
 

 

 

 xv 

 

LIST OF FIGURES 

Figure 1: Class photo   

Figure 2: TTT Group Photo 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 3: Mapping the Timeline of TTT’s Initial Interactions 

Figure 4: My First Language Portrait  

 

 

Figure 5: Instagram Post from First Solo Week in France 

 

 

Figure 6: Instagram Post from Second Solo Week in France  

Figure 7: Instagram Post from Third Solo Week in France 

 

Figure 8: Instagram Post from Fourth Solo Week in France   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

51 

74 

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81 

123 

124 

 

125 

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 xvi 

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS 

 
 
FEGU Fellowship to Enhance Global Understandings 

LT Language Teacher 

LTE Language Teacher Educator 

NES Native English Speaker 

NNES Non-Native English Speaker 

TTT Transnetworking for TESOL Teachers 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 xvii 

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 

We discover, uncover, create our identities as we interrelate with others and our 
alrededores/surroundings. Identity grows out of our interactions, and we strategically reinvent 
ourselves to accommodate our exchanges. Identity is an ongoing story, one that changes with 
each telling, one we revise at each way station, each stop, in our viaje de la vida (life’s journey). 
(Anzaldúa, 2015 p. 75). 

 
As a teacher educator and researcher, I have focused my inquiry on addressing the 

incongruity within English language education among the predominantly white, monolingual 

English-speaking, U.S.-born teaching force and the increasingly racially, culturally and 

linguistically diverse school-aged population (Motha, 2014). More specifically, I focus on 

fostering greater educational equity, inclusion, and justice for language-minoritized learners1 in 

the U.S. by challenging ideologies, or taken-for-granted assumptions, that position language 

practices other than White Mainstream English as deficits rather than assets for learning. To that 

end, across my work as an emerging scholar and teacher educator, I have situated my work in the 

burgeoning field of translanguaging, a language theory and pedagogy that can challenge 

educators to problematize deficit-based beliefs about diverse language practices and adopt 

pedagogical practices that truly sustain language-minoritized learners’ dynamic meaning-making 

practices (García & Otheguy, 2019; Paris & Alim, 2014). However, in order for the critical 

potential of translanguaging to be realized, language teachers (LTs) and the language teacher 

educators (LTEs) who educate them must pursue the enactment of translanguaging pedagogy as 

a form of critical praxis, a term used by Freire (1999) to refer to the overlapping and iterative 

 

1 I adopt the term “language-minoritized learners” to describe students whose language practices are “marginalized 
and portrayed as deviations” (Flores & Rosa, 2015, p. 2) from the white English “standard” within U.S. schools and 
society. This term includes, but is not limited to, students who would be classified as “English learners,” or ELs, 
according to federal U.S. guidelines and would be considered eligible for English language services by a TESOL- or 
bilingual education teacher. Students identified as ELs in the U.S. are those who qualify for language development 
services based on two measures: (1) a home language survey of their language practices and those of their 
immediate family, and (2) a state-adopted language assessment (U.S. Department of Education, 2017). 

 1 

process of building awareness and taking action in pursuit of social emancipation—in this case, 

with respect to English language education. To that end, the purpose of this critical 

autoethnography, or what I will later describe as a nos/otras autoethnography (Anzaldúa, 2015), 

is for me to examine my ideological reckoning and translanguaging reimagining as an LTE. 

LTs’ and LTEs’ pedagogies are influenced by their identities, beliefs and dispositions, 

and past teaching experiences (Sharkey, 2018), all of which are constructed in relation to broader 

ideologies and social power structures. Hence, their pedagogies are never neutral, but can 

reinforce or resist dominant discourses, such as the monolingual bias, native speakerism, 

raciolinguistic perspectives, and white supremacy (e.g., Flores & Rosa, 2015; Motha, Jain, & 

Teccle, 2012; Souto-Manning & Cheruvu, 2016; Varghese, Motha, Park, Reeves, & Trent, 

2016). Thus, LTs and LTEs who have not contended with the problematic role of English 

language education in perpetuating imperialism, colonization and settler-colonization are likely 

to reproduce hegemonic ideologies and marginalizing language pedagogies. Therefore, LTs and 

LTEs must develop a critical and reflexive lens to reckon with their own ideologies in order to 

reimagine more transformative and transgressive language pedagogies, like translanguaging 

(Dinkelman, 2003, 2011; Kubota & Miller, 2017; Morgan, 2004; Peercy et al., 2019; Ponzio, 

2020; Ponzio, Robinson, Kennedy, Ceballos, Tian, Crief, & Lins Prado, forthcoming).  

While self-study has gained increasing prominence as a methodological approach for 

teacher educators to critically examine their own pedagogies (e.g., Dengerink, Lunenberg & 

Kools, 2015; Sabatier & Bullock, 2018), limited research has employed self-study among LTEs 

(e.g., Golombek, 2015; Morgan, 2004; Peercy & Sharkey, 2018; Yazan, 2019). Self-study 

methodologies, including autoethnography, offer LTEs a rigorous approach to develop situated 

theories based on the lived realities and “messiness” of language teaching (Mckinley, 2019), 

 2 

where “local” knowledge informs public scholarship (Geursen, de Heer, Korthagen, Lunenberg, 

& Zwart, 2010; Sharkey & Peercy, 2018). Furthermore, self-study can embolden TEs to 

explicitly contend with competing sociopolitical tensions that influence their professional 

identities and pedagogies (Korthagen, Loughran, & Lunenberg, 2005; Loughran, 2014; Sabatier 

& Bullock, 2018), particularly when conducted collaboratively (Boyd & Harris, 2010; Dengerink 

et al., 2015; Green & Pappa, 2020; Peercy, Sharkey, Baecher, Motha, & Varghese, 2019; Viczko 

& Wright, 2010). Believing that “a critical self-reflexive lens is crucial to the work in LTE,” 

(Peercy et al., 2019, p. 2), I employ autoethnography in this study to contend with my 

positionality and trace my shifting pedagogy as an LTE. Specifically, I ask the following: 

1.  How did my ideological stance as an LT emerge and evolve across my pre-service and 

in-service teaching experiences as well as in my first years as an LTE?  

2.  How did my interactions in a nepantla contact zone catalyze and sustain my ideological 

reckoning and translanguaging reimagining as a White, English-dominant speaking, U.S.-

born, beginning LTE?  

I frame this study within the narrative traditions of Gloria Anzaldúa (2012, 2015), whose 

work consistently defied linguistic conventions and critiqued the U.S. history of linguistic 

terrorism and settler-colonization. Specifically, I draw heavily upon her work in Light in the 

Dark/Luz en Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, which is understood to be 

Anzaldúa’s unfinished dissertation. Written during the last decade of her life (1994-2004), the 

text came to publication through the curation of Anzaldúa’s close friend, AnaLouise Keating, 

who edited the text.  

As a U.S.-born, fourth-generation immigrant, heterosexual cis female, able-bodied, white, 

English-dominant speaking scholar, I am challenged by Anzaldúa to acknowledge my complicity 

 3 

in perpetuating English language education as a white supremacist and settler-colonial enterprise. 

Among these multiple positionalities, the most relevant for purposes of this study are my 

racialized identity, language practices, and country of origin. Given these positionalities, I 

attempt to engage with Anzaldúa’s theoretical perspectives—borne from her experiences as a 

queer Chicana feminist who grew up on the Mexico-Texas border—in a spirit of criticality, care, 

and self-reflexivity. I center Anzaldúa in an effort to decenter White, often male, Eurocentric 

theoretical and methodological approaches to language scholarship. Her theorization of 

nos/otras, or “nos (us) and otras (others)” (p. 63) helps me interrogate who I am at the divide as 

both colonizer/colonized as an LT and LTE. While I cannot experience reality outside my own 

privilege, I can critically examine the mechanisms that promulgate settler-colonization in English 

language education today and my complicity therein. But acknowledging my complicity is only 

the beginning. According to Lau, Juby-Smith, and Desbiens (2017),“To be reflexive is to set in 

motion a recursive process of renaming and retheorizing (Freire, 1970), engaging in an active 

process of questioning and evaluating our own critical practices....to cultivate stronger self-

awareness as a first step to effect social change” (pp. 104-105). 

Resonating with Freire’s (1970) conscientizacao and Anzaldúa’s (2015) conocimiento, 

this awareness has moved me beyond empathy to action—to contend with my privilege as a 

white, U.S.-born, English-dominant speaker in order to center the racialized identities and 

meaning-making practices of language-minoritized learners through. In my analysis, I consider 

what inner, or embodied, resources emerged from my struggle to achieve “equilibrium between 

the outer expression of change and [my] inner relationship to it,” specifically with regard to my 

positionality, past experiences, and pedagogy (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 127). This struggle was both 

catalyzed and supported by my engagement in a collaborative self-study group named 

 4 

Transnetworking for TESOL Teachers (TTT), established based on our shared inquiry into 

translanguaging. Iterative cycles of my individual self-study and collaborative inquiry with the 

members of TTT emboldened me to contend with my complicity in perpetuating English 

language education as white supremacist settler-colonial enterprise and to pursue new 

opportunities to expand my own translanguaging capacity. Hence, this study suggests critical 

self-reflexivity and collaborative inquiry in what I will describe as nepantla contact zones (Pratt, 

1991; Canagarajah, 2013; Anzaldúa, 2015) can galvanize white, English-dominant LTs and 

LTEs to reckon with their own positionalities and reimagine English language education. In what 

follows, I share this process of reckoning and reimagining not as a generalizable example, but as 

a theoretically-grounded study that can contribute to larger “chains of inquiry” in LTE (Peercy & 

Sharkey, 2018). 

 

 5 

CHAPTER 2: COLLECTIVE AND PERSONAL SHADOWS 

Besides dealing with my own personal shadow, I must contend with the collective shadow in the 
psyches of my culture and nation—we always inherit the past problems of family, community, 
and nation...If I object to my government’s act of war I cannot remain silent. To do so is to be 
complicitous. But sadly we are all accomplices. (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 10). 
 

The Collective Shadow: English Language Education as Empire 

In following Anzaldúa’s wisdom, I first contend with the long collective shadow the 

English language casts across continents and decades of imperialism, colonization, and settler-

colonization, specifically through the lens of assimilationist language ideologies (see 

Canagarajah, 2010; Phillipson, 1992, 2006 2009). As defined by Phillipson (2006), the collective 

shadow of “linguistic imperialism” refers to “the establishment and continuous reconstitution of 

structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages...that ensure the 

continued allocation of more material resources to English than to other languages and benefit 

those who are proficient in English” (p. 347). Occurring alongside the establishment of nation-

states, the privileging of English has resulted in the eradication of other named languages as 

speakers are forced to shift to using English as the dominant language. Thus, the dominance of 

English dovetails with other forms of dominance—economic, political, and cultural (Phillipson, 

1992, 2006, 2009), resulting in the association of the English language with privilege, 

opportunity, modernity and whiteness. Just as the construction of race and white supremacy first 

emerged to justify the transatlantic slave trade as a part of a developing capitalist system (Kendi, 

2016; Ortiz, 2018), so, too, has linguistic imperialism been used to create hierarchies between 

named language systems as a way to justify land seizure, religious missionary indoctrination, and 

epistemic violence and assimilation through forced schooling (e.g., Canagarajah, 2013; Kubota 

& Lin, 2009; Motha, 2020). Skutnabb-Kangas (2012) uses the term “linguicism,” which is 

similar to racism or sexism, to refer to the "ideologies, structures and practices which are used to 

 6 

legitimate, effectuate and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material 

and immaterial) between groups which are defined on the basis of language" (p. 13). Similar to 

the emergence of racism (Kendi, 2016), linguicism emerged to rationalize unequal division of 

power and resources through imperial expansion. In other words, by deeming the language 

practices of certain communities as inferior, often alongside discrimination of their racialized 

identities and cultural traditions, colonizers and settler-colonizers could justify the subjugation of 

those communities.  

The Embodied Costs of English Language Education 

The domination of English language within and beyond the U.S. has resulted not only in 

structural and material inequities, but also emotional and spiritual costs to those subjugated in 

contexts where English education has been—and continues to be—deployed as a colonial and 

settler-colonial enterprise. In his account of the history of linguistic imperialism in Africa, Ngũgĩ 

(2005) describes how language, like a bullet enforcing physical subjugation, can be weaponized 

for spiritual subjugation. Through “[t]he domination of a people’s language by the languages of 

the colonising nations,” the colonizer can achieve “domination of the mental universe of the 

colonised” (Ngũgĩ, 2005, p. 16). In Ngũgĩ’s view, schooling serves as an extension of this 

weapon, alienating children in colonized contexts from the languages of their families and 

homes. By annihilating their “belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in 

their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves,” 

children in colonized contexts come to “see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement” and 

“to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves...with other peoples’ languages 

rather than their own” (p. 3). For Ngũgĩ, the experience of linguistic imperialism through 

schooling results in long-term embodied trauma, where the colonized child’s experience with 

 7 

learning is experienced only in the mind, and not in the body. As a result, learners like young 

Ngũgĩ have been conditioned to “to see the world and where he stands in it” according to the 

“language of imposition” (p. 17). In other words, through linguistic imperialism, learners 

experience disassociation between their minds and bodies, homes and schools, and the “language 

of imposition” and their own languages. 

Ngũgĩ’s account resonates with Anzaldúa’s (1987/2012) in Borderlands: The New 

Mestiza, where she weaves together her own personal trauma with the history of settler-

colonization in Aztlán, the Southwest region of the U.S. and Mexico. Anzaldúa illuminates the 

embodied violence experienced by the children of the “original Americans” of Aztlán, whose 

lands and languages were stolen by White settler-colonists. As she explains, “We were jerked out 

by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our 

history” (p. 29). She describes the extension of this oppression into the present—from the neo-

colonial influence of U.S. companies, capitalism, and devaluation of the peso to continued 

discrimination, violent assimilation, and linguistic terrorism. One telling depiction comes from 

the chapter, “How to Tame the Wild Tongue,” where Anzaldúa opens with an anecdote of her 

dentist’s fight with her tongue as he attempted to clean her teeth, explaining that “[w]ild tongues 

can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out” (p. 76). She connects this anecdote to the linguistic 

discrimination she experienced at school, where her teacher hit her for speaking Spanish at 

recess. Forced to experience her culture “through an imposed and, sometimes, borrowed 

dominant language” (Macedo, 2019, p. 14), Anzaldúa came to see her language, culture, and 

identity as illegitimate. Through her account of linguistic oppression, or terrorism as she calls it, 

Anzaldúa carves into readers’ minds and bodies the felt experience of linguistical imperialism 

and linguicism (Phillipson, 1992; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2012).  

 8 

English Language Oppression throughout U.S. Education 

Anzaldúa’s account is only one of many that reveal how public education in the U.S. has 

been weaponized to force language-minoritized learners to adopt an idealized American identity 

in place of their marginalized culture and heritage, to speak “American” or English in place of 

their own language (García, 2009; Motha, 2014; San Miguel & Valencia, 1998; Skutnabb-

Kangas, 2000). In colonial U.S., Africans kidnapped from their homeland were kept separate 

from those from the same tribes, including parents from children, by slaveholders who 

systematically suppressed what resources were shared by those who were kidnapped—in this 

case, their languages—out of fear of insurrection (Barbian, Cornell Gonzales, & Mejía, 2017; 

Kendi, 2016). Under the Grant administration, the U.S. established boarding schools modeled 

after prisons, where indigenous children were “beaten for speaking their own languages, among 

other infractions that expressed their humanity” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015, p. 151). Each wave of 

immigrant children and families in the U.S faced similar experiences of epistemic violence and 

erasure despite their attempts to preserve their linguistic and cultural roots. For instance, though 

“German immigrant communities won the right to establish bilingual schools” in the 1800s, 

“their efforts were fiercely opposed by nativists keen to pass laws mandating English-only 

instruction” (Barbian et al., 2017, p. xvi). Instead, throughout U.S. history, children who grew up 

in homes where minoritized languages were used have been encouraged to speak English rather 

than their family’s heritage languages. According to Cook and Bassetti (2011), this has resulted 

in the loss of most language minoritized immigrants’ heritage languages within two generations 

in the U.S.   

Today, language-minoritized learners continue to be forced to sacrifice fundamental 

elements of their identities and pressured “to adopt U.S. economic, political, religious, and 

 9 

cultural forms,” while being relegated to “the bottom of the socioeconomic strata of American 

society” (Tamura, 1994). According to Kendi (2016), today’s critiques of African American 

students’ use of Ebonics as “broken” or “non-standard”  (p. 472) are echoes of accounts from the 

1700s and 1800s where enslaved Africans were depicted as speaking “brokenly and 

blunderingly...like idiots” (p. 71). Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, xenophobic legislative 

policies in Arizona, California, and Massachusetts restricted bilingual education based on the 

faulty premise that English-only education would accelerate language-minoritized learners’ 

English language development (Barbian et al., 2017, p. xvii). During this timeframe, other 

seemingly well-intentioned accountability measures, like high-stakes testing, were implemented 

to mitigate the “achievement gap” for students categorized as “English learners” through 

enforcement of No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Act (see U.S. Department of 

Education, 2016). These assessments continue to be used to lump together many language-

minoritized learners into one essentialized subgroup, “regardless of their socioeconomic status, 

race, nationality, immigrant status, prior exposure to language(s), community participation, or 

other social positions and identities” (Hemphill & Blakely, 2019, p. 222). U.S. federal and state 

governments employ the terms “English learners” and “Limited English Proficient,” which 

privilege English and relegate students’ home languages as obstacles to overcome rather than 

resources for learning (Macedo, 2019, p. 11).  

Assimilationist ideologies manifest in the lived experiences of today’s language-

minoritized learners in U.S. schools, whether explicitly through English-only classroom 

restrictions or implicitly through additional annual high-stakes assessments to measure their 

English language development while ignoring their bi/multilingual capacities (Perez, Vasquez, & 

Buriel, 2016). Such accountability measures not only take away valuable instructional time, but 

 10 

also pressure teachers to adopt so-called “best practices” to produce “commodified, measurable 

learning objectives,” while ignoring “the historical role or colonizing functions of English and 

English language teaching in the world” (Hemphill & Blakely, 2019, p. 222). Here in my home 

state of Michigan, the state department of education has advanced the SIOP Model, or the 

Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (Echevarría, Vogt, & Short, 2012; Michigan 

Department of Education, 2017) for over a decade as a professional development model to equip 

teachers to support the growing number students who qualify as English learners; the SIOP 

model treats teaching as a lock-step linear process to facilitate learners’ acquisition of English as 

quickly and efficiently as possible (Crawford & Reyes, 2015). Unprepared to “de-fetishize” 

formulaic teaching methods, like SIOP, many teachers reinforce deleterious ideologies (e.g., 

English-only classroom policies, White monoculturalism) that “devalue, dismiss, and 

dehumanize” the linguistic and cultural practices of language-minoritized learners (Macedo, 

2019, p. 11). Without opportunities to trouble the nature of settler-colonization in English 

language education in the past and present, many teachers continue to reprimand and even 

punish language-minoritized students today for using their home languages in the classroom 

(Benavides, 2017; Edwards, 2017; Zehr, 2003), often claiming it will help them learn English, 

pass high-stakes assessments, and acquire the necessary capital to navigate U.S. society. 

The Personal Shadows of an Language Teacher Educator 

As a former LT and now LTE, I have been complicit in upholding English language 

education as a settler-colonial enterprise in the U.S., a point I will return to later. In order to 

pursue a decolonial approach to English language education in the U.S., I look to Anzaldúa 

(2015), who suggests that decolonization “consists of unlearning consensual 'reality,' of seeing 

through reality’s roles and descriptions” (p. 44). Her assertion is consistent with Freire (1999), 

 11 

who contends that “people must first critically recognize [oppression’s] causes (p. 47). To that 

end, the previous section is meant to be a brief accounting—for myself as much as for readers 

less familiar with this history—of the oppressive experiences of linguicism, where language-

minoritized learners’ minds, hearts, and bodies have endured and continue to endure violence 

perpetuated through English language education. Later, in the first part of my findings, I will 

outline my own personal shadows as an LT and beginning LTE as a part of my ideological 

reckoning and the development of the critical consciousness necessary to reimagine my teaching 

and "create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of fuller humanity” (Freire, 

2000, p. 47). How, then, do we move forward from this reckoning to a new reality within English 

education?  

To that end, I now consider the need for teacher educators (TE), and more specifically, 

LTEs, to contend with their personal shadows (i.e., their identities, beliefs, and dispositions) in 

order to reject English language education as a colonizing enterprise and reimagine a more 

humanizing praxis. In what follows, I review the scholarship that has explored teacher educators’ 

(TE) development and the contributions this scholarship has made to the field. I also provide a 

general outline of the role self-study methodology has played in expanding the knowledge base 

of TEs’ development, specifically in support of TEs’ critical engagement with their own 

positionalities, ideologies and pedagogies. Finally, I narrow my focus to LTEs’ self-study 

research. 

Teacher Educator Development 

TE development is a process of perpetual becoming (Cochran-Smith, 2005; Dinkelman et 

al., 2006; Loughran, 2014). Becoming a TE “involves a knowledge of teaching about teaching 

and a knowledge of learning about teaching and how the two influence one another” (Loughran, 

 12 

2008, p. 1180). TEs’ identities are multiple, even conflicting and contradictory (Darvin & 

Norton, 2015; Norton, 2013), encompassing sub-identities as schoolteachers, teachers in higher 

education, teachers of teachers, and researchers (Swennen, Jones, & Volman, 2010; Viczeko & 

Wright, 2010). TEs are influenced by external and internal influences (e.g., governmental and 

institutional policies, hegemonic ideologies, individual identities and experiences), both past and 

present, which may be in tension with each other (Loughran, 2013, 2014; Viczeko & Wright, 

2010; Zhang & Yuan, 2019). Often, new TEs draw upon their past learning and teaching 

experiences (Boyd & Harris, 2010; Goodwin, Smith, Souto-Manning, Cheruvu, Tan, Reed, & 

Taveras, 2014), which are themselves shaped by traditional power dimensions that reify racial, 

gendered, classed, and linguistic hierarchies. That said, "even amidst institutional constraints and 

ever-shifting policy contexts, teacher educators always will hold considerable power to compose 

their professional identities" (Dinkelman, 2011, p. 321). Hence, beginning TEs are in a unique 

position to construct new identities and resist traditional hierarchies. 

Much of what is known about TEs’ development builds upon commonalities between 

teaching and teacher educating, such as Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (1999) knowledge of 

practices framework. In this framework, they distinguish between knowledge-for-practice, 

knowledge-in-practice, and knowledge-from-practice, where the latter supports the development 

of teachers’ "inquiry as stance." Goodwin et al. (2014) propose an adaptation of Cochran-Smith 

and Lytle’s (1999) framework based on their mixed methods study of nearly 300 TEs, where 

they found that many TEs report feeling unprepared to support new teachers in understanding or 

developing a commitment to diversity and equity. Hence, in their adaptation, Goodwin et al. 

include a fourth element: “Diversity, social justice, and multiculturalism must undergird the 

pedagogy of teacher education” (p. 298). This fourth element complements Cochran-Smith and 

 13 

Lytle’s (1999) “inquiry as stance,” which suggests that teachers and TEs draw upon "conceptual 

and interpretive frameworks...to make judgments, theorize practice, and connect their efforts to 

larger intellectual, social and political issues" (p. 213). In order for TEs to critically examine 

their own practice in the context of broader sociopolitical issues, Goodwin et al. (2014) argue 

that they must “become conscious of their own biases and subjectivities, develop skills and 

sensibilities that can support social justice teaching and researching, build confidence as 

advocates for all learners and communities, and actively resist hegemonic practices and policies” 

(p. 298). Therefore, through interrogation of their personal biases and subjectivities, TEs can 

innovate critically-conscious and bottom-up approaches to teacher and TE learning, where their 

local knowledge and personal theories of teaching and learning can inform public, shared 

theories (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Goodwin et al., 2014; Korthagen et al., 2005). 

TE Self-Study 

In the past two decades, scholars have increasingly called for TEs to critically examine 

their own identities and pedagogies through self-study methodologies (Cochran-Smith, 2005; 

Dengerink et al., 2015; Korthagen, 1995; Loughran, 2010, 2014; Sabatier & Bullock, 2018). In 

fact, Zeichner (2007) recommends that self-study be a basic requirement for learning to be a TE, 

arguing that “[t]hose who work in TE programs need to think consciously in the same sort of 

self-study and critique of their practice that they ask their students to do" (p. 123). Through self-

study, TE researchers are challenged to develop situated theories based on “local” knowledge 

and to place those theories in conversation with public knowledge (Geursen et al., 2010). TEs 

can choose to seek out “experiences that most nurture that professional sense of self” that 

support them in constructing those identities “in context, in practice, and over time” (Dinkelman, 

2011, p. 314). When they conduct self-study in collaboration with "critical friends" (Schuck & 

 14 

Russell, 2005), TEs may be further challenged to acknowledge the competing sociopolitical 

tensions that influence their professional identities and pedagogies (Boyd & Harris, 2010; 

Dengerink et al., 2015; Goodwin et al., 2014; Dinkelman, 2011; Korthagen et al., 2005; 

Loughran, 2014; Sabatier & Bullock, 2018; Viczeko & Wright, 2010).  

Self-Study in Language Teacher Education 

Among language teacher educators, or LTEs, self-study research reflects a fundamental 

shift in language education away from the “fetish over methods” with its emphasis on 

prepackaged and structured techniques (Bartolomé, 1994) to what Kumaravadivelu (1994) 

describes as the post-method orientation and more recently, the social turn in second language 

studies (De Costa & Norton, 2016), which consider how facets of teachers themselves (i.e., their 

identities, ideologies, emotions, agency) shape their pedagogies. Given that their identities are 

inseparable from their pedagogical practices (Morgan, 2004; Motha et al., 2012; Olsen, 2008), 

LTEs who adopt a critically reflexive approach to self-study interrogate the dialectical 

relationship between who they are and what contextual factors they must negotiate in language 

education with implications for the larger field (Sharkey & Peercy, 2018). Building from Clarke 

(2009), Miller, Morgan and Medina (2017) invoke Foucault’s (1983) notion of ethical self-

formation to advance the critical identity work needed for educators to negotiate competing 

discourses and ideologies in the LTE field. While LTEs’ ethical self-formation “does not entail 

freedom from power,” their work “on the self by the self (i.e., our bodies, thoughts, beliefs, and 

behaviors)...can be regarded as the productive exercise of power” to not only become aware of 

dominant ideologies in language education, but to also reimagine them (Miller et al., 2017, pp. 

92-93). Hence, through self-study, LTEs can call into question ideological assumptions, like the 

belief that being a Native English speaker is necessary to being a good LT or LTE (Sharkey, 

 15 

2018). To that end, a recent Teacher Education Quarterly special issue edited by Zuniga, 

Lachance, Aquino-Sterling, and Guerrero (2019) centers the voices and experiences of bilingual 

LTEs. Collectively, these studies make the case that, for non-native English speaking LTEs, self-

study has affirmed their identities as bilingual speakers, emboldened their sense of agency, and 

galvanized them to reject hegemonic language ideologies, like native speakerism (see Fall, 2019; 

Díaz & Garza-Reyna, 2019; Rodríguez-Mojica, Briceño, & Muñoz-Muñoz, 2019; Yazan, 2019; 

Zúñiga, 2019).  

Adopting a collaborative approach, Peercy, Sharkey, Baecher, Motha, and Varghese 

(2019) examined the intersection between their LTE identities and pedagogies. Their shared 

inquiry challenged them to “make more clear to us the dimensions of our professional and social 

identities that we let show, the ones we hide, and the ones we can agentively leverage in ways 

that create entry points to challenge dominant discourses and enhance our work with teachers, 

schools, and communities" (p. 11). In other words, the juxtaposition of their individual 

positionalities and experiences as a part of their collective narrative inquiry revealed more 

clearly the multifaceted dimensions of their social identities and how they were positioned as 

normative or non-normative in their professional contexts. Through this juxtaposition, they argue 

that they were better able to name what they were unable to see in their own teaching as well as 

instances where they had been “domesticated” with a greater degree of what Kubota and Miller 

(2017) have called “hyper self-reflexivity” (Peercy et al., 2019, p. 4). With respect to 

“domestication,” they refer to the pressure they face to comply with dominant discourses, such as 

White supremacy or monolingualism. To that end, one of the questions they pose to the LTE 

field to consider is, “How are we, as teacher educators, complicit in maintaining structures and 

discourses that produce and reproduce inequities?” in language education (Peercy et al., 2019, p. 

 16 

12). Spurred forward by their question, my critical autoethnography is rooted in the “hyper self-

reflexivity (Kubota & Miller, 2017) of these aforementioned LTE self-studies and specifically 

the collaborative design of Peercy et al. (2019).  

 

 

 

 17 

CHAPTER 3: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 

[T]ogether we can alter cultural beliefs, behaviors, attitudes about their meanings. These identity 
categories—categories based primarily on history, biology, nationality—are important aspects of 
personal and collective identity; however, they don’t contain our entirety, and we can’t base our 
whole identidad on them. It’s not 'race,' gender, class, or any single attribute but the interaction 
of all of these aspects (as well as others) that creates identity...Conventional, traditional identity 
labels are stuck in binaries, trapped in jaulas (cages) that limit the growth of our individual and 
collective lives. (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 65-66). 
 

(Des)conocimientos 

Anzaldúa (2015) uses the metaphor of “the shadow beast” to refer to desconocimientos, 

or “the ignorance we cultivate to keep ourselves from knowledge so we can remain 

unaccountable” (p. 1). By this, I understand Anzaldúa to mean, at least in part, the taken-for-

granted assumptions, or ideologies, that circulate within society to maintain the privilege of some 

through the oppression of others. This includes knowledge of the collective shadows described in 

Chapter 2: U.S. settler-colonization, nationalism, white supremacy and “linguistic imperialism” 

(Phillipson, 2006). According to Anzaldúa, this path “leads human consciousness into ignorance, 

fear, and hatred,” creating a state of “separation and domination” that justifies our use of “force 

and violence to socially construct our nation” (p. 19). Thus, by remaining willfully ignorant of 

the binary constructions used to separate and dominate, we conform to dominant ideologies, 

assuming our place within socially-constructed hierarchies and adopting a stance of “self-

righteousness” that forms an “abyss” between ourselves and others (p. 19).  

Like a “light” in the dark, Anzaldúa offers the term conocimientos, which directly 

translates to “knowledge” in Spanish. Described as “the more difficult path,” conocimiento 

requires us to actively and courageously resist dominant ideologies, resulting in expanded 

awareness of their presence and our complicity in perpetuating them (p. 19). Thus, this 

awakening is painful, drawing our attention to the personal and collective wounds that result 

 18 

from the aforementioned systems of oppression. Conocimiento is also relational: it is through our 

wounds, whether “physical, psychic, cultural, and/or spiritual,” that we connect with others, 

building a “bridge” across difference through our “compassionate interactions” with others 

(Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 19). In what follows, I extend Anzaldúa’s (des)conocimientos to three other 

constructs—namely, language ideologies, translanguaging, and contact zones—in order to 

theorize the (des)conocimientos of LTs and LTEs. I also introduce two additional Anzaldúan 

constructs, namely nos/otras and nepantla, to further theorize the process of reckoning and 

(re)imagining that I propose must be undertaken by LT and LTEs in order to realize liberatory 

possibilities within English language education.  

Our Ideological Shadows 

The term language ideologies will be used throughout this study to identify taken-for-

granted assumptions about language, conforming to the binaries described at the opening of the 

chapter by Anzaldúa. As defined by Irvine (1989), language ideologies are "the cultural system 

of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and 

political interests" (p. 255). They represent the explicit or implicit linkages that “underpin not 

only linguistic form and use but also the very notion of the person and the social group, as well 

as such fundamental social institutions as religious ritual, child socialization, gender relations, 

the nation-state, schooling, and law” (Wollard, 1998, p. 3). In other words, language ideologies 

link together language forms with other social constructs, such as identity, power, or race 

(Schieffelin, Wollard, & Kroskrity, 1998). From a poststructuralist perspective, these ideologies 

function as a “regulatory force” (Baxter, 2016, p. 37), determining our various subject-positions 

as they relate to our language practices as well as other ideological positions (i.e., racial, 

citizenship, class).  

 19 

In what follows, I define various language ideologies that will be used throughout this 

study with particular consideration of the fluid, context-dependent, and intersectional nature 

(Crenshaw, 1991; Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016) of the ideologies and the positionalities of who I 

write about in this critical autoethnography. First proposed by legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw 

(1991), the term intersectionality refers to the overlapping axes of social division that inform 

one’s positionality and privilege with respect to broader systems of power. These axes can 

include one’s gender, sexual orientation, or class (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016); with consideration 

of the language ideologies listed below, I am primarily interested in the intersection of 

racialization, language practices, national origin and citizen, specifically with regard to native or 

non-native language use. Importantly, intersectionality is tied closely to critical race theory and 

LatCrit theory (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016), and although I do not draw explicitly upon these 

frameworks, the influence of scholars from within both traditions (e.g., Bell, 2018; Delgado & 

Stefancic, 2017; Taylor, Gillborn, & Ladson-Billings, 2015; Leonardo, 2013; Yosso, 2005) 

undoubtedly informs the theoretical perspectives at the center of this study. 

The Herderian triad refers to the linkage between a community’s language and 

geographical place (see Bauman & Briggs, 2000; Blommaert & Verschueren, 1992), a 

connection that was reified through the rise of the nation-state (Canagarajah, 2013; Valdés, 

2016). This ideology functions like a geographic border to determine one’s belonging and 

privilege in a nation-state and manifests “in evaluative views about speakers and their language 

use” (Valdés, 2016, p. 323). Relatedly, monoglossic ideologies describe structuralist notions of 

languages as bounded, pure, and autonomous systems (García, 2009), which are used to 

determine who is positioned as an insider or outsider within a language community. Bound 

together with a defined community and place, a named language system must be distinguished as 

 20 

unique from other practices and achieve a sort of “purity” in order to function as a border for 

belonging or exclusion—an ideology that has manifest in language standardization and 

purification (Canagarajah, 2013). In today’s U.S. classrooms, the Herderian Triad and 

monoglossic ideologies are present whenever a teacher enforces an English-only policy, claiming 

it will help students learn English and become “American.” Teachers who uncritically perpetuate 

these ideologies act from the assumption that “children who speak a language other than that of 

the state should be encouraged to abandon that language and instead take up only the dominant 

language” (García, 2009, p. 51), specifically White Mainstream English (Paris & Alim, 2014; 

Baker-Bell, 2019).  

A related ideology, Native speakerism (Holliday, 2006) establishes a hierarchy of purity, 

authenticity, and ownership based on speakers’ relation to a language. Kachru’s (1986) “three 

circles model” is a helpful example of this with regard to English. In the model, Kachru defined 

the three circles according to the history and function of language varieties. The Inner Circle 

refers to speakers for whom English is their first and often only language for interacting; they are 

positioned as “owners” of the language and are used to determine the “norm” with regard to 

English use. Today, these include the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The 

Outer Circle refers to post-colonial communities where English has been adopted as a second 

language and where speakers have developed their own norms, such as in the case of Indian 

English or Nigerian English. Referring to countries not colonized by the British, the Expanding 

Circle refers to contexts that use English as a foreign language and are dependent on the 

language norms set by those of the Inner Circle. Under this ideology, native language varieties 

are considered more valuable, a perspective that underlies job postings for English language 

teacher positions that require native-speaker status (Jenks & Lee, 2019). Later in this study, I will 

 21 

use the labels Native English Speaker (NES) and Non-Native English Speaker (NNES) to refer 

English speakers’ ideological positions, consistent with Canagarajah’s (2013) usage. While I 

adopt a post-structuralist perspective that our positionalities and language practices are flexible, 

mobile, and context dependent, I also acknowledge that we can “acquire labels and identities,” 

like NES or NNES, which are “reified through language ideologies” and result in tangible 

material realities (Canagarajah, 2013, pp. 15-16). Where NESs are positioned as insiders in 

English-speaking contexts, they are outsiders among NNES. Likewise, the reverse holds true: 

NNESs may be positioned as outsiders in English-speaking contexts.  

One’s NES status can also be ideologically confounded by one’s racialized positionality 

and variety of English. Echoing Holliday (2006) and Kumashiro (2000), Charles (2019) contends 

that those who are not white, but whose first language is English and come from Western 

societies, are positioned as the NES Other, meaning “that whoever does not fit within the 

category of White is abnormal and is not associated with the English language” (p. 4). The 

construction of the NES Other is influenced by raciolinguistic ideologies, which refer to the 

conflation of race and language (Alim, 2016, p. 1). These ideologies are present whenever 

“racialized speaking subjects” are positioned “as linguistically deviant even when they employ 

linguistic practices [that are] positioned as normative or innovative when produced by privileged 

white subjects” (Flores & Rosa, 2015, p. 150). According to Baker-Bell (2020), raciolinguistic 

ideologies perpetuate the Anti-Black Linguistic Racism enacted in U.S. classrooms where 

teachers assume that students who use Black language “are from a lower-class and are 

uneducated” (p. 22). Another example from the U.S. context can be found in Rosa’s (2019) in-

depth study of how the co-naturalization of language and race shapes the everyday experiences 

of Mexican and Puerto Rican youth whereby they negotiate how they identify themselves and 

 22 

others with their expressive practices. Rosa explains: 

The projected tension between multicultural identity maintenance and assimilation 

organizes distinctions such as neighborhood high school vs. selective enrollment high 

school, gangbanger/ho vs. Young Latino Professional, race vs. ethnicity, Latina/o/x vs. 

Hispanic, Latin American vs. American, bilingualism vs. monolingualism, Spanish vs. 

English, Inverted Spanglish vs. Mock Spanish, legitimate reading/writing vs. outlaw(ed) 

literacies, and school vs. street. 

In his analysis, these categories are in tension with each other as the youth in the study negotiate 

how they are positioned in proximity to Whiteness with respect to their languaging practices and 

racialized identities.  

Drawing upon both native speakerism and “White saviorism,” Jenks and Lee (2019) 

propose the term native speaker saviorism to describe the belief that language-minoritized 

students as the cultural Other might be “saved” by learning English, thus achieving proximity to 

whiteness (p. 6). Mutually reinforced by colonial and settler-colonial endeavors, such as 

enslavement and land seizure, these ideologies grew as justifications for racial, linguistic and 

cultural dehumanization based on the supposed inherent material worth, aesthetic value, 

linguistic validity, and moral good of one set of language practices over another. Native speaker 

saviorism is present in U.S. classrooms whenever teachers justify their decisions to prohibit 

languages or dialects, like Spanish or Black English, based on the assertion that students must be 

able to use White Mainstream English (Baker-Bell, 2019) to succeed in U.S. society.  

In Foucauldian terms, the aforementioned assimilationist and White supremacist 

language ideologies function as regimes of truth, their power “produced in discourses” as a part 

of “a netlike system that circulates and produces knowledge” (Kubota & Miller, 2017, p. 134). 

 23 

As previously discussed, these ideologies emerged as a function of nation-state and colonial 

governmentality, producing “governable national and colonial subjects that fit the political needs 

of modern society (Flores, 2013)” distinct from “deviant populations who were positioned as a 

threat to the integrity of the national polity” (Flores, 2019, p. 51). By extension, LTs and LTEs, 

as agents of the state, are “ethical subjects ‘acting on others’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 262) even as 

they struggle within power relations” through their reinforcement or rejection of these ideologies 

(Miller et al., 2017, p. 91). In other words, because language education is often deployed to 

uphold the political and economic agendas of a nation-state as well as the hegemonic ideologies 

mutually reinforced by those agendas, LTs and LTEs make decisions in their day-to-day teaching 

lives to align themselves and their pedagogies with linguistic imperialism and associated 

language ideologies (Phillipson, 1992)—or not. 

Heteroglossic Conocimientos and Translanguaging  

Consistent with the aforementioned ideologies, languages have traditionally been thought 

of as existing in separate compartments, or as “two solitudes” (Cummins, 1979), within bilingual 

learners’ minds. Over the past three decades, however, scholars have advocated for more holistic 

approaches to second language acquisition (SLA), such as Cummins’s (1979) interdependence 

hypothesis, which describes the possibilities for cross-linguistic transfer, and Cenoz and Gorter’s 

(2011) “focus on multilingualism,” where the goal is to support the development of learners’ full 

linguistic repertoires and language awareness (p. 358). Described as the “multilingual turn” in 

SLA, this shift moves away from monolingual language norms, where the “educated native 

speaker” is used as the goal for communicative competence, to emphasize how speakers employ 

their full linguistic repertoires in practice (Cenoz & Gorter, 2011; Cummins, 1979; May, 2014).  

In contrast to the aforementioned ideologies, heteroglossic ideologies emphasize the 

 24 

multiplicity of interrelated language practices among bilingual speakers (García, 2009), 

irrespective of national boundaries or racialized identities. Building from Bakhtin’s (1981) use of 

heteroglossia to mean “multi-voiced,” heteroglossic ideologies reject the limits of the 

aforementioned assimilationist ideologies to instead emphasize the fluid and dynamic meaning-

making practices of multilingual populations. Instead of viewing languages as discrete objects 

associated with geographic locations or static identities (Flores & Schissel, 2014), scholars who 

ascribe to heteroglossic ideologies have also advocated for translanguaging (García, 2009; 

García & Li, 2014), a relatively new theoretical perspective and pedagogical approach to 

emphasize the fluidity of languaging and agency of speakers. 

Translanguaging has its origins in Cen Williams (1994, 1996) theorization of trawsieithu, 

a Welsh term he used to refer to describe the language practices of bilingual youth as they 

learned both English and Welsh, the latter having lower status within their school’s bilingual 

education program. Despite the unequal status between the two named languages, Williams 

found that students more deeply engaged in both content learning and language development 

when they received input in one language and produced output in another. The term was later 

taken up in the U.S. context by Ofelia García (2007, 2009) to describe a pedagogical approach to 

sustain and expand bilingual learners’ full linguistic repertoires—while also critiquing existing 

hierarchies that privilege one language (and associated speakers) over another.  

Put simply, translanguaging suggests that, rather than turning one language “off” and 

turning another “on,” we creatively integrate all meaning-making resources in our repertoire to 

communicate, inclusive of named language systems, dialects, facial expressions, gestures, 

visuals, and shared ecological resources (Li, 2017). Thus, languages are conceived as not being 

independent and bounded, but are instead facets of the same cohesive and adaptive system 

 25 

(Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García & Li, 2014). Therefore, as a theory of language practice, 

translanguaging breaks down imagined boundaries and levels ideological hierarchies between 

languages and speakers.  

Translanguaging both precedes and overlaps with a number of other terms used to 

describe the practice of weaving together meaning-making resources across seemingly discrete 

linguistic and semiotic systems, such as flexible bilingualism (Creese & Blackledge, 2011), 

hybrid language practices (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, Álvarez, & Chiu, 1999; Gutiérrez, 

Baquedano-López, & Tejeda, 1999), plurilingualism (Denison, 1970; Coste, Moore, & Zarate, 

2009), codemeshing (Young, 2004, 2007; Canagarajah, 2009, 2011), metrolingualism (Otsuji & 

Pennycook, 2010) and translingual practice (Canagarajah, 2013). However, as argued by Poza 

(2017), translanguaging was the first to be codified among educators in the U.S. and is explicitly 

concerned “with social justice and linguistic inequity” in the context of “oppression and 

marginalization of national and colonial subjects” as a result of hegemonic language ideologies 

(p. 108). (See Poza, 2017 for a full literature review of translanguaging.) 

To this end, translanguaging has emerged as a promising pedagogical approach in U.S. 

language education to amplify the linguistic and cultural resources of students who are learning 

English as an additional language while expanding their capacity to critically and creatively 

negotiate the language practices privileged in schools (García, Ibarra Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017; 

García & Kano, 2014; García & Kleyn, 2016; García & Li, 2014; Menken & Sánchez, 2019). In 

centering the fluid and dynamic language practices of language-minoritized learners (García, 

2009; García & Li, 2014), translanguaging resists deleterious language ideologies that pervade 

U.S. education and marginalize students when they do not conform to so-called “norms” (Flores 

& Rosa, 2015, 2019; García, 2009, 2017; García & Otheguy, 2019; Rosa & Flores, 2017; Seltzer, 

 26 

2019). When enacted as a shared process between teachers and students—where they co-

construct new hybridized language—translanguaging is a praxis that can “give voice to new 

sociopolitical realities by interrogating linguistic inequality” (García & Kano, 2014, p. 261). 

Hence, translanguaging can transgress and transform subtractive approaches employed to 

assimilate language-minoritized learners into “standard” language deemed necessary to advance 

the interests of the U.S. nation-state (García & Sylvan, 2011; Valdés, 2016). I take up 

translanguaging in this study as the central catalyst for my conocimiento as an LT and LTE in a 

U.S. context. 

Translanguaging in Contact Zone Interactions 

 

In his theorization of translingual practice2, Canagarajah (2013) operationalizes Pratt’s 

(1991) contact zones to illuminate the potential for translanguaging to disrupt perceived 

boundaries between language practices. In her keynote address for the Responsibilities for 

Literacy conference, Pratt (1991) explains that contact zones refer to “social spaces where 

cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical 

relations of power, such as colonization, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many 

parts of the world today” (p. 29). To illustrate the concept, Pratt references a series of texts that 

are themselves reflective of translanguaging, such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s (1613) 

letter to King Phillip III of Spain, where he integrated his indigenous language, Quecha, with 

Spanish and illustrations, including adapting traditional Christian imagery. As Pratt explains, the 

 

2 At the time, Canagarajah distinguished translingual practice (i.e. situated social processes where bilingual 
speakers negotiate meaning using shared resources) from translanguaging as bilingual speakers’ cognitive 
processes. Indeed, Williams’s (1996) original theorization, trawsieithu, referred to students’ cognitive processing 
skills. However, as discussed in the previous section, others have since forwarded a more critical orientation to the 
theory, defining translanguaging as a “socioeducational process [that] enables students to construct and constantly 
modify their sociocultural identities and values, as they respond to their historical and present conditions critically 
and creatively” (García & Li, 2014, p. 67).  

 27 

first part of Guaman Poma’s letter, Nueva corónica, or New Chronicle, appropriated “the official 

Spanish genre” of the chronicle, which was “the main writing apparatus through which the 

Spanish represented their American conquests to themselves” (p. 34). In her view, Guaman 

Poma wrote his Nueva corónica “to construct a new picture of the world, a picture of a Christian 

world with Andean rather than European peoples at the center of it” (p. 34). Thus, Guaman’s 

letter grew from his contact zone interactions as an indigenous Andean of Incan descent who had 

adopted, at least to some extent, the language, cultural practices and Christian religion of Spanish 

colonizers in 17th century Peru. 

 

Canagarajah (2013) extends Pratt’s usage of contact zones in order to distinguish between 

the “linguistics of contact” over the “linguistics of community” (p. 29). Rather than defining a 

community based on a static set of communicative practices (meaning the linguistics of contact), 

such as the use of Spanish among Spaniards or Quechua among indigenous Incans, Canagarajah 

suggests that people adaptively co-construct an integrated repertoire of meaning-making 

resources to communicate across language difference when opportunities for contact emerge in 

shared social spaces (meaning linguistics of community), such as in Guaman Poma’s letter. 

Thus, contact zone interactions are fertile ground for translanguaging. While contact zones can 

be conflictual spaces, as people interact across difference, they also represent authentic contexts 

and purposes for people to negotiate meaning with others; they can also foster the development 

of what Canagarajah (2013) calls the “cooperative disposition” of translingual speakers (see 

Table 1). Canagarajah describes the cooperative efforts of speakers in contact zone interactions 

as forms of “synergy” and “serendipity,” where the former refers to speakers’ combined effort to 

communicate and the latter refers to their acceptance and openness of each other on their own 

terms (p. 41).  

 28 

Table 1.  
Canagarajah’s (2013) “Cooperative Disposition of Translingual Speakers” 

Domain 

Features 

Language awareness 

●  Language norms as open to negotiation 
●  Languages as mobile semiotic resources 
●  A functional orientation to communication and meaning 

Social values 

●  An openness to diversity 
●  A sense of voice and locus of enunciation 
●  A strong ethic of collaboration 

Learning strategies 

●  Learning from practice 
●  Adaptive skills 
●  Use of scaffolding 

Drawing upon Pratt (1991) and Canagarajah (2013), the collaborative self-study 

community of which I have been a part, TTT, has described our community as a contact zone, a 

space that has supported our collaborative investigation into translanguaging through 

juxtaposition of our respective language backgrounds and resources (Ponzio et al., forthcoming). 

Together, we found that through our contact zone interactions, we affirmed each other’s cultural 

and language practices, demonstrated evidence of the dispositional characteristics associated 

with Canagarajah’s (2013) translingual practice, and collectively challenged hegemonic language 

ideologies and associated power dynamics. As a part of my individual reckoning and 

reimagining as an LT and LTE, I revisit our group’s development and collective transformation 

in Chapter 6; however, as I suggested to the group back in November 2018, our collaborative 

space afforded us the opportunity “to look at the self [in order] to look back outward again.” 

Thus, while TTT has had its own collective journey as a group, I focus here on its fundamental 

role as a part of my personal journey.  

 29 

nos/otras and the Nepantla Contact Zone 

I put Pratt and Canagarajah’s use of contact zones in conversation with two additional 

constructs that Anzaldúa (2015) theorizes: nos/otras and nepantla. Put simply, the term nos/otras 

directly translates from Spanish to us/others; however, Anzaldúa’s placement of the slash is 

purposeful, representing a bridge between us and others. A Nahuatl word for “in-between space,” 

nepantla could be used to describe this bridge, and is defined by Anzaldúa (2015) as “the site of 

transformation, the place where different perspectives come into conflict and where you question 

the basic ideas, tenets, and identities inherited from your family, your education, and your 

different cultures” (p. 127).  

Resonating with Pratt’s (1991) contact zones, nepantla emerges in the collision of 

cultures and identities, dispositions and meaning-making practices; in connection with 

Anzaldúa’s theorization of (des)conocimientos, however, nepantla also fractures our taken-for-

granted assumptions of ourselves and the world around us. Within these fractures, these cracks, 

we can “develop a new sense of awareness and begin to ‘see through’ the competing ideologies 

that surround us” (DeNicolo & González, 2015). Hence, nepantla is a transformative liminal 

space where, in our process of becoming and self-reflection, we experience a shift in 

conocimiento. Importantly, nepantla are “places of constant tension” and “struggle,” to which 

Anzaldúa attributes her own personal transformation, healing and creation. Through this tension, 

we come to “dis-identify with existing beliefs, social structures, and models of identity” 

(Keating, 2006), leaving us “open to make sense of competing cultures and belief systems” 

(DeNicolo & González, 2019, p. 9). Thus, it is within nepantla, at the slash between nos and 

otras, that we undergo the journey of conocimiento. 

 30 

Important to Anzaldúa’s theorization of both (des)conocimiento and nepantla is their 

onto-epistemological nature. Within nepantla, we undergo the process of conocimiento not only 

in our minds, but also in our bodies. As Anzaldúa (2015) explains: 

In nepantla you are exposed, open to other perspectives, more readily able to access 

knowledge derived from inner feelings, imaginal states, and outer events, and to “see 

through” them with a mindful, holistic awareness. Seeing through human acts both 

individual and collective allows you to examine the ways you construct knowledge, 

identity, and reality, and explore how some of your/others’ constructions violate other 

people’s ways of knowing and living. (pp. 122-123).  

Just as Anzaldúa blurs the division between us/others—whether with regard to race, gender, 

sexuality, national origin, or language—so, too, does she resist the Cartesian divide between 

mind/body/spirit. While I will elaborate on this further as a part of my methodology in next 

chapter, I will highlight here that Anzaldúa’s onto-epistemology centers the body as “the ground 

of thought” and “the text” (p. 5). Thus, the unlearning and relearning we experience in nepantla 

in the process of conocimiento is in our bodies as much (if not more) as in our minds.  

Anzaldúa uses the term las nepantleras to refer to those who live at the slash, the 

“intermediaries between various mundos” who are able to “grasp the thoughts, emotions, 

languages, and perspectives associated with varying individual and cultural positions” (p. 82). 

They are trouble-makers who upset ideological binaries, their associated subject-positions, and 

the privileges that result. They are bridge-builders who “advocate a ‘nos/otras’ position” 

whereby they contend with their complicity in perpetuating existing power structures, face the 

mutual harm they have experienced within their personal desconocimientos, and “[honor] 

people’s otherness” in pursuit of conocimientos (Anzaldúa, 2015, pp. 82-83). They are also 

 31 

visionaries who imagine “a time when the bridge will no longer be needed,” when we will “have 

shifted to a seamless nosotras,” and when perceived divisions will have dissolved between our 

belief systems, geographical spaces, and meaning-practices (Anzaldúa, 2015, pp. 151-152).  

Like contact zones, nepantla spaces challenge us to strategically leverage shared 

linguistic, semiotic, and ecological resources to negotiate communication across difference. And 

like las nepantleras, my collaborators in TTT deeply ruptured my taken-for-granted assumptions 

about language practice and pedagogy. Thus, my engagement with TTT was a generative space 

for developing the aforementioned resources, both inner and outer, that extended beyond my 

interactions in the group; these resources are reflective of characteristics listed on Canagarajah’s 

(2013) overview of the “cooperative disposition of translingual speakers.” That said, these 

characteristics are not inclusive of the full set of resources I identified in my analysis of my 

ideological reckoning and pedagogical reimagining. As previously mentioned, Anzaldúa’s onto-

epistemology underscores the embodied (i.e., psychic, emotional, felt) experiences of 

transformation in liminal spaces, experiences that involve negotiating new perspectives, such as 

heteroglossic ideology and translanguaging, with perspectives rooted deep in our identities, 

beliefs, and past experiences, such as monoglossic or raciolinguistic ideologies (García, 2009; 

Flores & Rosa, 2015). Therefore, I bridge together nepantla and contact zones as a part of my 

theoretical framework, in order to describe what inner resources and emotions resources I drew 

upon within and beyond our group’s interactions—dissonance and resonance, guilt and 

contrition, shame and acceptance—as part of my struggle to achieve “equilibrium between the 

outer expression of change and [my] inner relationship to it” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 127). As I will 

later argue, the emergence of these resources and the strategies I developed to negotiate them 

were central to my translanguaging conocimiento.  

 32 

With respect to my conocimiento as a LT and LTE, I conceptualize translanguaging in its 

broadest sense as a part of this study, blurring boundaries between named language systems 

along with the borders they reify between geographic locations, nation-states, and speaking 

communities. Translanguaging also disrupts hierarchies that privilege meaning-making resources 

used to enforce imperialism, colonization, and settler-colonization: linguistic means of 

communication (over non-linguistic means like visuals or movement) and forms of English 

associated with white, NES status. Instead, translanguaging affirms the legitimacy of all 

meaning-making resources: named languages, dialects, and registers, both spoken and written 

forms, along with drawings, hand gestures, dancing, whistling, inflection, and so on. In 

connection with Anzaldúa, I also contend that the emergence of my translanguaging 

conocimiento involves recognizing how I draw upon broader ideologies—as narratives that 

influence how I conceptualize myself, my interactions, and the world around me—along with my 

inner resources—inclusive of the assimilationist scripts into which I have been acculturated for 

thinking, being and feeling based on my various positionalities as well as the embodied resources 

I develop to resist those scripts. I now turn to how Anzaldúa’s onto-epistemology is infused into 

my methodological approach in this study, beginning with its initial, organic design and ending 

with data analysis.  

 

 33 

CHAPTER 4: METHODOLOGY 

“Gauman Poma’s New Chronicle is an instance of what I have proposed to call an 
autoethnographic text, by which I mean a text in which people undertake to describe themselves 
in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (Pratt, 1991, p. 35). 
 
“In these auto-ethnographies I am both observer and participant—I simultaneously look at 
myself as subject and object. In the blink of an eye, I blur subject /object, class, gender, and other 
boundaries” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 3).  

Autoethnography 

Well before I read Anzaldúa’s (2015) Light in the Dark or Pratt’s (1991) “Arts of the 

Contact Zone,” I had set out to write an autoethnography. As a research method, 

autoethnography involves systematic analysis of one’s personal experiences within one’s 

sociocultural contexts (Ellis, 2004). Consistent with ethnographic tradition, autoethnographers 

contextualize who they are, what they think, and how they feel within their interactions and 

relationships (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015); they also “rely on their personal 

experiences to make sense of sociocultural issues by focusing on the impact of dominant 

discourse and corresponding ideologies” (Yazan, 2019, p. 40). Furthermore, by turning “the 

ethnographic gaze inward...while maintaining the outward gaze of ethnography” (Denzin, 1997, 

p. 227), autoethnographers blur the boundaries between their scholarly identities and their 

personal identities. Thus, conducting autoethnographic research is a deeply personal and 

transformative endeavor that is predicated on deep self-reflexivity, vulnerability and risk taking, 

whereby autoethnographers publicly make academic the personal and make personal the 

academic (Lin, 2004; Spry, 2001; Yazan, 2019).  

Having an established practice of writing personal narrative and memoir, I was interested 

in autoethnography as both a method and product of research and writing as well as a tool for my 

ongoing identity construction. Like Anzaldúa (2015), through my established practice of writing 

over the past two decades, I had found that the writing “‘writes’ me” (p. 3) and is where I 

 34 

undergo “always-in-progress, transformational processes” (p. 139). To that end, I wondered how 

endeavoring to compose an autoethnography might support the development of my emerging 

translanguaging pedagogy as an LT and LTE. Later discovering the synchronicities between the 

frameworks I was adopting from Anzaldúa and Pratt and their alignment with autoethnography 

only reinforced my methodological decision. 

However, I also questioned whether it was my place to undertake autoethnographic 

research and writing given my positionality as a white, English-dominant speaking, U.S.-born 

educator. By that, I mean that within the central constructs of this study (i.e., language, race, 

national origin), I occupy positions of privilege, which seemed to contradict another defining 

characteristic of autoethnography. According to Pratt (1991), unlike traditional ethnographies, 

where “European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usually their 

conquered others),” autoethnographies are written by “the so-defined others” (p. 35). Resonating 

with Pratt, Boylorn and Orbe (2014) write that scholars who engage in autoethnography “invite 

readers into the lived experience of a presumed ‘Other’ and to experience it viscerally” (p. 15).  

While my autoethnography would not center the experiences of “a presumed ‘Other’,” I 

did envision it as a rejection of “canonical ideas about what research is and how research should 

be done” that are predicated on “a White, masculine, heterosexual, middle/upper-classed, 

Christian, able-bodied perspective,” consistent with Ellis, Adams, and Bochner’s (2011) view of 

autoethnography (pp. 2-3). Rather than representing my experiences to others solely from my 

viewpoint—and within the taken-for-granted ideologies that constructed my privileged 

positions—I wanted to adopt a theoretical and methodological approach that would allow me to 

analyze, within my interactions, the influence of the dominant ideologies into which I had been 

acculturated and to catch a glimpse of them from the viewpoints of those with whom I interacted, 

 35 

namely language-minoritized speakers. In Anzaldúan terms, I wanted to engage in 

autoethnographic self-reflexivity through the “eyes of others” (Cantú & Hurtado, 2012). By this, 

I refer to Anzaldúa’s (2012) supposition that while we might begin on “the opposite river bank” 

from those with whom we interact, we eventually “have to leave the opposite bank...so that we 

are on both shores at once” during our journey “to new consciousness” (p. 100). To that end, I 

began to conceptualize a form of critical autoethnography that might take as its starting point 

Anzaldúa’s (2015) nos/otras framing. Reflective of Anzaldúa’s words at the opening of the 

chapter, I intended to “simultaneously look at myself as subject and object” (p. 3) through what I 

am calling nos/otras autoethnography.  

Other Matters of Positionality 

Before I elaborate on how I am conceptualizing this research and writing genre, I want to 

highlight another tension I encountered with respect to my positionality: Was it my place to draw 

so heavily on Anzaldúa’s (2015) work throughout this study? Put simply, I questioned whether I 

was appropriating her work given my racialized identity and language practices. Although I 

allude to this in Chapter 1, where I briefly describe my positionality and explain my rationale in 

aligning this study with Anzaldúa, I would like to return to this point by threading together 

elements from my theoretical framework and methodological commitments.  

First, this study is meant to disrupt the ideological constructions that both emerged from 

settler-colonization in the U.S. and continue to perpetuate them, specifically constructions that 

privilege Whiteness, NES status, and White Mainstream English. As I have already explained, 

my second purpose is to intentionally decenter myself and the dominant ideologies that privilege 

my racialized identity and language practices—and to reimagine myself and my interactions as 

an LT and LTE through translanguaging as a critical lens. Decentering myself in this study 

 36 

requires conscious interrogation of my positionality as a U.S.-born, fourth-generation immigrant, 

first-generation college student, heterosexual cis female, able-bodied, white, English-dominant 

speaking scholar, specifically with regard to my country of origin, language background and 

racialized identity. 

To this end, I began with a commitment to make central to my theoretical and 

methodological frameworks the perspectives of those who, in Spivak’s (1993) terms, have been 

positioned on the margins, but had reclaimed “marginality.” Recognizing both the center and the 

margins as being unbounded and fluidly defined (Spivak, 1993), I was interested in what had 

been theorized by “deconstructionists that do their work from within (from an intimacy with the 

structure)” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), particularly with regard to U.S. settler-colonialism and 

English language education. Thus, I align myself and this study with Anzaldúa’s (2012; 2015) 

theoretical and methodological perspectives, all borne from of her experience in the literal and 

figurative “borderlands” between Spanish, Nahuatl, and English and between U.S. and Mexico—

what was once called Aztlan before it was colonized by the Spanish and later the U.S. Much of 

Anzaldúa’s writing emerged during the 1980s and early 1990s, during “the era of mainstream 

academics fighting to preserve the Western canon and of political mobilization by conservatives 

to add an amendment to the U.S. Constitution establish English as the official language of the 

United States” (Cantú & Hurtado, 2012). Later, I also discovered that Anzaldúa herself was an 

English teacher and the director of bilingual and migrant education in Indiana, a Midwest 

neighbor of my home state of Michigan; like me, she identified as a woman and was a first-

generation college student. Thus, while I knew I could by no means claim to understand 

Anzaldúa’s theories from the vantage point of an insider, I did recognize in her writing situated 

 37 

perspectives that might support my endeavor to decenter myself as a white, U.S-born, NES LT 

and LTE and instead center language-minoritized speakers in the U.S. 

While I continue to question whether it is possible to decenter myself, I find further 

clarity in Morrison’s (2013) theorization of the “white gaze,” Flores and Rosa’s (2015) “white 

listening subject,” and Kendi’s (2015, 2019) definitions of “racist” and “antiracist.” According to 

Flores and Rosa (2015), the white listening (and speaking) subject, as with the racialized subject, 

is not a biological or physiological category, but a performative and ideological position (see 

also Daniels & Varghese, 2019 and Jenks & Lee, 2019). Therefore, the adoption of language 

ideologies that perpetuate the “white gaze” (Morrison, 2013), such as monoglossic and 

raciolinguistic ideologies, are not exclusive to white NESs, but are present whenever language-

minoritized speakers and their language practices are deemed inferior according to idealized 

white, middle-class norms (Paris & Alim, 2014). Another example of this is reflected in how 

Kendi (2016, 2019) disrupts of the racist/antiracist binary by framing “racist” and “antiracist” as 

ideological positions that one can adopt and even alternate between from moment to moment. In 

his definition, one is racist when they are “supporting a racist policy through their actions or 

inaction or expressing a racist idea” and antiracist when they are “supporting an antiracist policy 

through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea” (Kendi, 2019, p. 13).3 What I take Flores, 

Rosa, and Kendi to mean is that one’s positionalities are not necessarily synonymous with their 

ideological stances; hence, it is possible to unravel one’s own positionalities and perspectives 

from the ideological forces that shape them. Therefore, while I can never exist outside the 

 

3 One potential assumption that could be made from both Flores and Rosa (2015) and Kendi (2016, 2019) is that it is 
possible those in inhabit NNES and/or racialized positions to adopt the ideological perspectives of “white listening 
subjects” or “racists. It is not my place or purpose here to make this assertion; instead, I draw upon their examples to 
specifically point to the potential for me, as the subject and object of this study, to adopt ideological positions that 
undermine my privilege as a white NES. 

 38 

ideological constructions of Whiteness, the dominance of English, or the privileges I experience 

therein, I can undergo a process of conocimiento to parse “reality, identity, language, [the] 

dominant culture’s representation and ideological control” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 3) from my own 

ideological viewpoints.  

nos/otras Autoethnography 

 

To this end, Anzaldúa’s nos/otras framing helps me navigate the tension of taking up her 

theoretical perspectives given my positionality, particularly since she herself questioned whether 

she, herself, was guilty of appropriation. As a sixth-generation Chicana, Anzaldúa grew up along 

the the U.S.-Mexican border and learned both English and Spanish; during her childhood, she 

and her family migrated between Texas and the Midwest. Throughout much of her writing, 

Anzaldúa draws upon the indigenous Nahuatl roots from which she had been separated through 

settler-colonization, and to this end, she questions whether “we Chicana/o writers and artists also 

are misappropriating Nahuatl language and images” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 53). Several lines later, 

she resolves this tension for herself (at least momentarily): “I feel that I am part of something 

profound outside my personal self. This sense of connection and community compels Chicana/o 

writers/artists to delve into, sift through, and rework Native imagery” (pp. 53-54). Her emphasis 

on connection and community is fundamental to her conception of nos/otras: 

The nos is the subject “we,” that is the people who were in power and colonized others. 

The otras is the ‘other,’ the colonized group. Then there is also the dash, the divide 

between us. However, what is happening, after years of colonization, is that all the 

divides disappear a little bit because the colonizer, in his or her interaction with the 

colonized, takes on a lot of their attributes. And, of course, the person who is colonizing 

leaks into our stuff. So we are neither one nor the other; we are really both. There is not a 

 39 

pure other, there is not a pure subject and not a pure object. We are implicated in each 

other’s lives (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 282). 

Similar to the fluid ideological positions of the “white listening subject” (Flores & Rosa, 2015) 

or racists and antiracists (Kendi, 2019), nos/otras seems paradoxical: one can simultaneously be 

us/others, colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed. When given the choice between the 

theoretical and methodological perspectives of nos or otras, especially given the purposes of this 

study, I choose the latter. Thus, I adopt Anzaldúa’s nos/otras framing in my methodological 

approach to conduct a form of critical autoethnography that considers who I am at the slash—

where I attempt to see “from both shores at once” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 100). In Freirean (1991) 

terms, I intend to follow the lead of those whose own critical consciousnesses and pursuit of 

liberation could illuminate my own journey of conocimiento.  

 

In conceptualizing what I mean by nos/otras autoethnography, I stay close to Anzaldúa’s 

methodological approach to research and writing, which has been conceptualized as a method in 

its own right as testimonio. Directly translated as “testimony” from Spanish, testimonio refers to 

a narrative of marginalization. Further theorized within Chicana/Latina feminist traditions, 

testimonios can be described as a social justice methodology that explores one’s life experiences 

with respect to political, social, historical, and cultural histories, bridging together individual’s 

life stories with collective histories of oppression (Blackmer Reyes & Curry, 2012). As a form of 

counter-narrative, testimonios bear witness to one’s individual experiences of marginalization as 

a way to raise consciousness and elicit social change, serving as “a discourse of solidarity” 

(Blackmer Reyes & Curry, 2012, p. 526) and providing a sense of validation and community 

among others who share in these experiences (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 

2012). While I gesture to testimonio in how I conceptualize nos/otras autoethnography, what I 

 40 

am intending to do here does not align with the purpose of testimonio as a methodological 

approach—nor can it, given my positionality. 

What I do learn from testimonio, however, is how to recognize the body as “the ground of 

thought” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 5). According to Anzaldúa, “Writing is not about being in your 

head; it’s about being in your body. The body responds physically, emotionally, and 

intellectually to external and internal stimuli, and writing records, orders, and theorizes about 

these responses” (p. 5). Therefore, in conceptualizing nos/otras autoethnography, I make central 

what I learn from the body—from physiological reactions in moments of conflict and collision, 

from the emotions that emerge in moments of questioning and fracturing, and from the sense of 

connection and community that result in transformation. Thus, as I discuss in the next section, 

recognizing these moments is central to my process of analysis.  

 

Finally, I conceive of nos/otras autoethnography as an endeavor where I face my 

shadows as an LT and LTE, so to speak. As Anzaldúa (2015) explains, “Tu camino de 

conocimiento requires that you encounter your shadow side and confront what you’ve 

programmed yourself (and have been programmed by your cultures) to avoid (desconocer), to 

confront the traits and habits distorting how you see reality and inhibiting the full use of your 

facultades” (p. 118). It is at the dash, within the liminal space of nepantla, that it is possible for 

me to encounter my shadow self (desconocimientos) and embark on a journey of conocimiento:  

La rajadura gives us a third point of view, a perspective from the cracks and a way to 

reconfigure ourselves as subjects outside binary oppositions, outside existing dominant 

relations. By disrupting binary oppositions that reinforce relations of subordination and 

dominance, nos/otras suggests a position of being simultaneously insider/outsider, 

internal/external exile. (p. 79). 

 41 

In connection with Anzaldúa’s assertion that “the body is the ground of thought,” my emotional 

reactions help me recognize my shadow self and les rajaduras in my (des)conocimiento, laying 

bear what taken-for-granted assumptions have, until now, circulated below the surface of my 

consciousness. Therefore, throughout my analysis, I identify points of emotional tension, which 

point to fractures in my (des)conocimiento through which I can begin to see myself, my 

interactions, and the ideologies that circulate within from “both shores at once” (p. 100), from 

both nos and otras. At the same time, as Anzaldúa points out, there is a danger in writing about 

oneself of “falling into self-indulgence, sentimentality, or grandstanding” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 

103). Thus, while I focus my analysis on myself and the embodied resources that emerge 

throughout my personal reckoning and reimaging, I also stay close to the purposes and 

theoretical frameworks informing this study. I have also enlisted a dozen critical friends 

inclusive of my colleagues in TTT who have read my findings and pointed out when I have been 

myopic in my analysis and writing.  

Data Generation and Analysis 

When selecting data to include in this study, I began by collecting artifacts that reflect my 

language history as well as my development as an LT and LTE. (See Table 2 for an overview of 

the timeline and data for each chapter.) 

 

 

 42 

Table 2. 
Data Generation 

Chapter 

Timeline 

Data 

Chapter 5: An Ideological 
Starting Point 

Chapter 6: Ideological 
Reckoning 

Chapter 7: Bodymindsoul 
Transformation 

 

1985-2016: Includes 
references to childhood, K-12 
schooling, my pre-service and 
in-service experiences as an 
LT, and the start of my PhD 
program in Curriculum, 
Instruction and Teacher 
Education (CITE) 

2016-2019: Includes brief 
references to my early 
experiences in CITE; zooms 
in on my experiences as a part 
of a collaborative inquiry 
group called Transnetworking 
for TESOL Teachers (TTT) 

2018-Present: Includes brief 
references to my interactions 
with TTT and zooms in on 
my personal experiences 
within and beyond the group, 
including two months in 
France 

●  Personal artifacts (i.e., 

photos, school 
assignments, blog 
posts) 

●  Recalled memories 

 

●  Personal artifacts (i.e., 

blog posts) 

●  Transcribed video 

recordings, field notes, 
and my research 
memos from TTT 
meetings 

 

●  Personal artifacts (i.e., 

blog posts) 

●  Transcribed video 

recordings, field notes, 
and my research 
memos from TTT 
meetings 

 

In Chapter 5, I trace my “ideological starting place,” narrating my language and 

educational history from childhood through my undergraduate teacher preparation program; I 

also provide a brief account of my eight years as an LT and my first two years as an LTE (1985-

2018). Much of the data that informs this part of my autoethnography is based on memories and 

written artifacts (e.g., course papers, formal teaching statements, and the personal blog I have 

maintained from 2008 to the present). With respect to the memories I wrote about in Chapter 5, I 

dug through old file folders, both physical and digital, and skimmed my personal blog; I then 

 43 

drafted a timeline of moments from childhood onward. Finally, I composed a narrative account 

of the selected moments, piecing them together chronologically, which I then reread and revised 

to identify the presence of language ideologies throughout my experiences.  

In Chapter 6, I focus on my interactions with members of TTT, or Transnetworking for 

TESOL Teachers, the collaborative inquiry group of which I have been a part since 2018. Given 

that I had started to conceptualize this present study just as TTT was forming, I was strategic 

about maintaining records from our interactions. This was aided by the fact that, as a group, TTT 

had also decided to generate data from our meetings as a part of our collective self-study (see 

Ponzio et al., forthcoming). Hence, we took notes and recorded our meetings, which we later 

transcribed; we also created a Google Drive folder shared only amongst our group where we 

stored our individual artifacts and memos from our meetings. I consulted with the group before 

revisiting these data for this study. Therefore, data for this chapter include the transcribed video 

recordings from our meetings between September 2018-April 2019 as well as written artifacts I 

composed during that time. I analyze the ideological reckoning our group experienced 

collectively and I experienced personally as a result of our interactions in this nepantla contact 

zone. 

For purposes of analysis, I began by rereading the transcripts from our TTT meetings, 

using descriptive coding (Saldaña, 2016) to refamiliarize myself with the interactions and 

identify interactions that seemed particularly salient with regard to my ideological reckoning. I 

then recoded those moments using an approach I designed based on Anzaldúa’s (2015) 

conception of nepantla (see Table 3) to identify moments of collision and conflict, questioning 

and fracturing, and transformation and reconstruction. This allowed me to narrow the data to the 

most relevant moments. Next, I employed emotion coding (Saldaña, 2016) to identify the 

 44 

affective dimensions in these moments; in some cases, the emotion was stated explicitly in the 

data, while in other instances, I made inferences based on the data and my recollection of the 

moment. In the last round of coding, I drew more explicitly on the language ideologies outlined 

in the theoretical framework and coded instances where these were apparent. Following these 

cycles of coding, I reorganized the moments that I analyzed according to the categories in Table 

3 and grouped together instances with associated language ideologies in order to compose a more 

cohesive narrative.  

 In Chapter 7, I  drew upon data and data analysis from previous chapters and employed 

additional analyses to narrate my personal transformation, or conocimiento. Data for this chapter 

overlaps with my interactions with TTT and includes excerpts from my blog, including my two-

month journey to France. Therefore, some data in Chapter 7 come from transcribed recordings 

from TTT meetings; I reviewed the written artifacts I composed during my engagement in TTT 

(November 2018-June 2019) and pulled related excerpts. As for my journey to France, it was 

both intentionally planned as potential opportunities to further propel my process of 

conocimiento; in fact, while I was just beginning to conceptualize the theoretical framework for 

this study at the time, my experiences with TTT made me wonder how I might create new 

contact zone interactions for myself. As a result, I also entered this experience with the intention 

of generating data for this study. During my time in France, this took the form of continued 

reflective writing and photographs, which I shared on Instagram and my personal blog. As with 

Chapter 6, I composed a narrative account of the selected moments for Chapters 7, piecing them 

together chronologically, which I then reread and revised to identify the presence of language 

ideologies throughout my transformation.  

 

 

 45 

Table 3. 
Coding for Nepantla 

nepantla contact zones: theoretical spaces that foster... 

consciousness-raising 

praxis/action 

...by colliding and conflicting 

...through questioning and 

...resulting in transformation/ 

fracturing 

reconstruction 

●  different perspectives 

●  you question the basic 

come into conflict  
●  collision of cultures 

and identities, 
dispositions and 
meaning-making 
practices 

ideas, tenets, and 
identities inherited 
from your family, 
your education, and 
your different cultures 

●  fracturing our taken-

● 

the site of 
transformation 
●  become open to 
making sense of 
competing cultures 
and belief systems 

for-granted 
assumptions  

 

 

 46 

CHAPTER 5: AN IDEOLOGICAL STARTING PLACE 

“I believe that it is through narrative that you come to understand and know your self and make 
sense of the world. Through narrative you formulate your identities by unconsciously locating 
yourself in social narratives not of your own making” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 5).  
 

Interlude #1: August 10, 1985  

I am born on the outskirts 
of Detroit, 
in a hospital built on the 
p e r i m e t e r 
of urban 
s 
p 
r 
a 
w 
l 
marking the divide between 
the wilting urban epicenter of Michigan and 
the blossoming suburbs.   
  
I am born the fourth generation in a family of immigrants, 
drawn by Henry Ford’s promises 
      of white picket fences, 
             drawn from their native Italy 
                                              and Hungary 
                                                    and Germany. 
 
I am born at 1:05 p.m., splitting 
a hot summer day in ha 
                                              lf for my mother, 
who spends the morning laboring and 
the afternoon welcoming me into the world. 
I am born to a Brady Bunch family, 
      a father and mother who 
              have already fathered and mothered 
                                half sisters and brothers with 
             other fathers and mothers. 
  
I am born on the border 
of both families, 
our parents marrying eight months earlier  
                          (you understand, don’t you?), 
expecting my older brothers and sister to 

 47 

play house together 
even though they were 
strangers. 
  
Twenty months later, my younger brother arrives, making me the forever 
middle 
child 

*** 

Language Origins (1985-2003) 

 

I was born in Detroit in the 1980s to white4, English-dominant, native-born U.S. citizens. 

Consistent with the mass exodus of white Michiganders from the city in the 1970s and 1980s in 

response to desegregation, my family resided in the suburbs of Southeast Michigan.5 Hence, my 

primary language from childhood onward has been a Midwest variation of White Mainstream 

English (Baker-Bell, 2019). However, from an early age, I became aware of language varieties 

and U.S. regional connections to English dialects. Due to an unusual set of circumstances 

between 1989-1992, my family and I were “snowbirds,” a term that usually refers to retirees who 

travel south during the winter and return north during the warmer months. For those three years, 

my family left Southeast Michigan each fall, traveling south through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, 

Georgia and most of Florida until we reached West Palm Beach Gardens. The following spring, 

we followed the same route back to Michigan. We always drove, which meant we made multiple 

stops along the way, where my mom would point out the change from “pop” to “soda,” and my 

 

4 As I will explain below, my father’s family is Italian and immigrated to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century at a 
time when they may have been racialized other than white (Salyer & Richards, 2004); today, I have only been 
positioned as white (as far as I know), but both my father and younger brother are, as Samy Alim (2016) describes 
himself “ambiguously brown” (p. 34), and have been asked what their race is.   
5 When probed about her parents decision to move outside Detroit, my mother referenced the violent response to the 
Detroit-based Civil Rights efforts, or the Detroit Rebellion of 1967 (she, like many Michiganders, calls them “riots”) 
and the subsequent decline of the city and schools. My father and his parents resided in the eastside Italian 
neighborhood of Detroit called “Cacalupo,” or “car loop” (so called because the neighborhood included the streetcar 
turnaround at Gratiot and Harper Avenues; Delicato, 2005) until after he became an adult. Neither parent recognizes 
the structural and economic decline of Detroit as a result of the racist policies and practices reflected in the brutal 
response of the city’s police, the segregation of housing and schools, and rising black unemployment rates (Darden 
& Thomas, 2013; Kendi, 2016).  

 48 

dad would mimic the shifting cadence of gas station attendants and waitresses’ speech that we 

encountered along the way.  

As third-generation immigrants6, neither of my parents speak their predecessors’ 

languages, though they express deep pride in their national origins. I recall learning a smattering 

of Italian words from my father’s side of the family. I was taught to say che fai with my hand 

cupped, fingers pressed together, to ask, “What are you doing?” My younger brother and I would 

exchange the phrase meno fottere, emphasized with the “fuck you” hand gesture of sliding the 

top of your hand from under your chin outward, to (strongly) convey, “I don’t care!” My Sicilian 

grandfather and Calabrian grandmother had quite a few words for which they disagreed about the 

pronunciation, and so today, I struggle to figure out the spelling of Italian words I recall hearing 

as a child. In the few memories I have of my Calabrian great-grandmother, Serafina, she is 

reaching out to hold my chin in her small, gnarled hand and speaking to me in Italian. I was both 

drawn to and afraid of her in these moments, unable to understand what she said.  

My mother is a self-proclaimed “mutt,” who traces her family’s roots back to “Hungary, 

France, Germany, and Italy.” While she was unable to pass along her linguistic heritage to me or 

my siblings, she does remember her maternal grandmother, Anna, being a multilingual speaker 

who knew something like seven7 languages. Despite my parents’ monolingualism, what I did 

take away from my parents’ pride in their families language backgrounds and national origins 

was a question: How did different countries acquire different words?  

When I was 7 or 8 years old, I imagined there was once a great language auction, where 

representatives were sent to bid on words for their countries. I assume this childhood conception 

 

6 I learned in the course of writing this dissertation that my great-grandfather on my mother’s side was himself the 
third generation in his family to reside in Detroit, Michigan, contrary to the narrative I believed until recently. 
7 I grew up thinking she spoke seven languages, but recently learned that Anna spoke nine languages: German, 
Croatian, Serbian, Hungarian, Slovakian French, and English.  

 49 

of linguistic diversity was inspired by the Old Testament Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, 

which begins with all of humanity sharing a common speech and ends with the Judeo-Christian 

God sabotaging humanity’s effort to collaboratively build a tower to reach the sky by making it 

so all people no longer spoke the same language. As a child, I imagined it was then that people 

began forming different countries and associated language practices. Today, I realize that my 

childhood sense-making of language was implicitly bound to nation-state boundaries, consistent 

with the Herderian Triad (the ideological association between one nation, one language, one 

people; Bauman & Briggs, 2000; Blommaert & Verschueren, 1992), due in part to my parents’ 

narratives of their families’ language backgrounds. 

Living somewhat of a migratory life during my first years of schooling exposed me to 

greater linguistic, racial, and socioeconomic diversity than if I only lived in Michigan as a child. 

In fact, during my time in Florida, West Palm Beach Gardens’ school system was undergoing a 

process of forced desegregation. Unlike the schools I attended in Michigan, my classmates in 

Florida reflected greater racial and economic diversity. In Michigan, 99.9% of my schoolmates 

identified as white and one out of every 20 qualified for free and reduced lunch; in Florida, 

nearly 25% of my schoolmates were racially minoritized and 1 out of every 3 qualified for free 

and reduced lunch. Hence, during my first years of schooling, my closest friends identified as 

Black or Brown, some whose home language practices were distinct from my own (National 

Center for Educational Statistics). While my stint in Florida’s educational system was only for 

three years (with the remainder spent in Michigan), it was the foundation for my formal 

schooling. Some of my earliest and most vivid memories of being in school are tinged with a 

child’s recognition of the disparities in how children are differently positioned in U.S. 

 50 

classrooms based on their racialized identities; at the time, though, I simply wondered why my 

teachers were meaner to some students than others. 

Figure 1: Class photo 

 

This is a class photo from my 1st grade class at Palm Beach Gardens Elementary School in 
Florida; I am the fourth student in the bottom row. 

 

My early fascination with language continued into my adolescence, where I learned to 

impress others by using “big words” and being well spoken according to White Mainstream 

English practices. At school, I was known by my friends as a walking dictionary and by my 

teachers as a bookworm, titles that I wore proudly. I took great pride in the praise I received 

when I recited a Robert Frost poem at an academic competition and read a Biblical passage at 

my grandfather’s funeral, careful to enunciate the fancy language I saw on the pages of 

Eurocentric texts privileged in my communities. That said, I also remember playing with 

language as a teenager, experimenting with cuss words and slang to represent myself as less of a 

goody-two-shoes—another label I was often given by my friends. I used the English language to 

construct particular identities, recognizing that my words were a source of power and agency.  

 51 

My diary entries from those years included goals like “visit all seven continents” and 

“learn seven languages” (perhaps echoing my mother’s stories of her grandmother, Anna). 

However, it wasn’t until high school that I had the opportunity to learn another language in a 

formal context. Given the option to study French or Spanish in high school, I chose French since 

it connected with my mother’s familial roots. While I recall learning French in somewhat of a 

conversational manner, much of it was through the drill-and-practice sort of rote learning 

common in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. At the start of college, I briefly studied Latin, but by 

the end of my first year, I reverted back to studying French. When my parents declared 

bankruptcy for our family’s trade business during my first year of college, I became solely 

responsible for funding my college education. Like many of the decisions that I made as a first-

generation college student8, my decision to continue with French was a practical matter: since I 

was able to begin with a more advanced course, I could complete my university foreign language 

requirement with less courses, allowing me to graduate and begin my career as quickly as 

possible. Financial limitations also precluded me being able to study abroad in a French-

dominant context, an opportunity that I saw as being necessary to move toward being bilingual. 

As a result, I considered myself to be a monolingual English speaker, even after formally 

studying French for five years. 

Becoming a Language Teacher (August 2003-May 2008) 

By the end of my first year of my undergraduate studies, I decided to become an English 

language arts (ELA) teacher; around the same time, I began advertising my services as a private 

English instructor on the campus Website in an effort to supplement my meager income from a 

 

8 Given that I was the first in my family to attend college, my parents were unfamiliar with the process. It was 
through observing my best friend from high school, Jen, that I learned when I needed to take college entrance 
exams, to seek federal financial aid, and to apply to college; unable to afford multiple application fees, I only 
applied to one school and was fortunate to be admitted. 

 52 

part-time job on campus and whatever was left over from my student loans after my classes were 

paid. I was soon recruited as a conversation partner for two Chinese graduate students and a 

TOEFL tutor for a young woman who previously taught in Taiwan. Seeing how quickly I took a 

liking to being a tutor for international students, my then-roommate, Guangye9, suggested I 

consider teaching English as a second language (ESL). Unlike Guangye, whose parents had 

immigrated to the U.S. from China and South Korea and learned English later in life, I was 

unfamiliar with the term “ESL” and the fact that it was a discipline in which I could become 

certified to teach, especially since I was not fluent in another language. That said, choosing to 

pursue an ESL teaching certificate as a part of my secondary English language arts teacher 

preparation program seemed like a promising possibility to ensure my future job viability as a K-

12 teacher in the U.S., especially given my success with the international students I tutored. And, 

in truth, given that I graduated from college as the U.S. was entering the Great Recession, 

becoming certified to teach ESL was one reason I was able to find a job in Michigan during a 

time when teaching positions were far and few between.10  

Whispers of Critical Consciousness as a Pre-service Teacher 

While my motivation to pursue teaching ESL was based, in part, on future job security, at 

the time, I would have claimed an alternate motive, explaining that I had come to recognize 

language could be “used as a gatekeeper to let certain individuals in while leaving others out” 

and had “embraced teaching as an opportunity to inspire and empower others” as an ESL 

 

9 Pseudonyms have been used for the names of all participants besides myself and my immediate family, for whom 
our identities are readily apparent. 
10 In Michigan as well as in other parts of the U.S., becoming an English language arts (ELA) teacher is distinct 
from becoming an English as a Second Language (ESL) or bilingual teacher. In contrast to ESL and bilingual 
education, which is designated for students’ who qualify for Language Assistance Programs to support their 
developing capacity to use the English language, ELA, as a discipline, focuses on the study of the English language 
and the development of literacy skills. While there is overlap in the two areas, Michigan’s educational systems treat 
the two disciplines as distinct. (See Motha, 2014 for further consideration of how and why ESL is treated as a 
separate discipline.)  

 53 

teacher. Taken from my professional teaching statement in 2008, these quotes reflected the first 

whispers of critical consciousness—where I was becoming aware of the social construction of 

language and literacy practices, how people were positioned as having more or less power based 

on these constructions, and how they were situated with respect to broader ideologies. That said, 

this early belief that I could “empower others” through English language and literacy education 

could also be seen in a Freirean (1999) sense as  “false generosity” in association with native 

speaker saviorism (Jenks & Lee, 2019). What I could not yet understand were the underlying 

deficit-based perspectives of language and literacy practices outside White Mainstream English 

that were implicit in my belief that school-based English language and literacy were necessary 

for students’ empowerment. 

In my first year of college, I first became explicitly aware that race is socially constructed 

through Omi and Winant’s (1994/2004) theorization of racial formation, Wilson’s (1859) Our 

Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, and Johnson’s (1912) The Autobiography of an Ex-

Colored Man. In a paper I wrote during my third year of college, I explained that through these 

experiences as a beginning college student, I “began to tear apart my perception of the Other—of 

individuals from other races, ethnicities, or cultures as being extremely different from me.” 

These ideas proved to be foundational when I began my teacher preparation courses later in 

college, specifically in the context of the English literacy courses I took. In contrast to the classes 

I took for my ESL certification, which focused on the study of linguistics and second language 

acquisition, the classes I took for my ELA certification emphasized more sociocultural and 

critical perspectives of literacy.  

The distinct foci of both areas of study proved to be fundamental to the emerging critical 

lens through which I was learning to see language and literacy education. In the same 

 54 

aforementioned course paper, I discussed Purcell-Gates’s (2002) challenge to teachers to 

recognize non-standard language dialects as “difference instead of deficit” as well as other 

arguments that teachers could teach students to recognize the “the hegemonic power structure” 

underlying language and literacy as well as “to value the discourses of traditionally marginalized 

groups” (Cadiero-Kaplan, 2002, p. 378). Confronted by these critical understandings of literacy, 

I saw it as my “duty” as a future teacher to question “very ugly and inaccurate beliefs that have 

developed over the past two decades of my literacy education,” namely the misconception that 

my own literacy learning experiences were “the norm” and that mainstream literacy practices 

were “superior to those who engage in other, invalid literacy practices.” As a pre-service teacher, 

I understood that rejecting these assumptions and acknowledging my privileged position as a 

White Mainstream English-dominant speaker was fundamental to being able to unpack, with my 

students, the “continual onslaught of dominant ideologies that have the potential of skewing our 

perception of ourselves, literacy and the world.” However, I had little idea of what that looked 

like in practice.  

Interlude #2: Language Barriers (July 2009) 

A recent Tweet: "Thinking about language barriers. Not the kind that prevent people from 

communicating but other obstacles faced by immigrants because they aren't fluent in the 

 

language or culture of power." 

*** 

Monica11 was a graduate student hopeful who had just arrived to the United States four 

months earlier. She needed to pass the TOEFL test in order to be admitted to a highly-

11 Monica as well as Stewart, Julie, Brad, and Kelsey (introduced in the next excerpt) were all from Taiwan, but 
adopted names commonly used in the U.S.; this common practice among Asian immigrants in the U.S. can be 

 

 55 

competitive graduate program in education, and she wanted me to help her learn English. I began 

meeting with her twice a week, helping her work through the TOEFL manuals and CDs she had 

purchased as well as the course material for her English as a second language classes. Being only 

several years my elder, we quickly became friends, and often our conversations would focus less 

on the academic content, and more on our spouses, families, and friends. By the end of that 

school year, I was confident that Monica would successfully pass the TOEFL. 

When summer arrived, we decided to take a break from tutoring, and that break was 

extended when Monica not only passed the TOEFL, but was accepted to the graduate program. 

Both of us were consumed with our studies, and so meeting regularly was impossible. 

Late that following January, I got a call from Monica, who wondered if I could meet with 

her for coffee. She needed to interview someone for a class project and had thought of me. 

During our meeting, she shared some of her recent academic writing with me, and I was very 

surprised to note the insight and intellect apparent in her writing. Certainly, this mental aptitude 

was not a new characteristic she acquired. I realized that somehow, because of her developing 

English, I had developed a perception of her as being less intelligent. How could she convey 

what she was really thinking before when she couldn't express it in English—and I couldn't 

understand it in Chinese? I was so ashamed to recognize this underlying bias, but it was a 

moment that profoundly shifted my future work as a English language teacher. 

*** 

Back in Taiwan, they were both reporters, but in the United States, Stewart and Julie had 

taken jobs making sushi at the local Meijer. They had two kids to support afterall. I spent three 

 

described as “indexical bleaching” (Squires, 2012), technique of deracialization, whereby one’s name is stripped “of 
contextually marked ethnoracial meaning” (Bucholtz, 2016, p. 275) in order to achieve proximity to whiteness and 
NES status in the U.S. context. 
 

 56 

evenings a week at their house, tutoring the two parents and their kids, Brad and Kelsey. I 

quickly felt welcomed into their home and their family. 

Brad and Kelsey were my main priorities; their parents wanted me to help them prepare 

for the upcoming school year, and so I spent most of my time with them. But once a week, Brad 

and Kelsey would escape to the basement to their computer games and the TV, and I would work 

with Stewart and Julie, going over foundational English language skills. 

At the end of each session, Julie would serve a terrific feast of traditional Taiwanese 

food, a true reward for our hard work. Every meal was different, and it was exciting for me to try 

new food. Julie would smile proudly as I enjoyed her cooking and the kids cheered me on as I 

became more adept with chopsticks. One evening, after I took my first bite of an unknown 

protein, Kelsey noticed the quizzical look on my face. "Kelsey, what is this?" I asked, wondering 

what I was chewing. 

She looked up at the ceiling, as though the English word for what she was thinking would 

appear there. Stumped, she started to wave her hands around her stomach, "It's in the pig's 

stomach, and it goes like this," tracing her hands in an imaginary curve. 

I gulped. "Pig intestines?" 

"Yeah!" She exclaimed, excited that I got it. "Do you like it?" 

"Um, yeah," I said, taking another tentative bite. 

At the next lesson, Julie showed me a letter she received from her insurance company. 

She needed to call them to address the matter, but did not feel confident in her speaking ability. 

Together, we wrote out a script to support her telephone conversation and practiced it over and 

over. It was the first time I really realized how difficult everyday life in a new country could be 

when you weren't fluent in the language. 

 57 

After dinner that night, Stewart, Julie, and I remained at the table to talk. I was curious to 

know about their lives before they came to America and why they had decided to come. Stewart 

shared about their early years of marriage, knowing that my own wedding was coming up 

quickly. 

"We were reporters before we came here—before Brad and Kelsey. We worked together 

for the same newspaper. After the kids came, Julie stayed at home, and I continued to work, but 

she worked sometimes. We decided last year that we wanted our kids to learn English and to go 

to an American school, so we decide to move here. But now, we can't be reporters. We don't 

know English well. My brother got us a job making sushi." 

*** 

Jose is a forty-something father of six who immigrated from Mexico almost two decades 

ago. When he smiles at you, he discreetly keeps his upper lip from revealing a missing front 

tooth. His work ethic and energy is unmatched by the 18 and 19-year old bussers that he buzzes 

around, swiftly clearing, wiping, setting up tables, and hefting precariously-packed trays to the 

dishwasher before the youngsters even make it to the table. His playful attitude is reminiscent of 

a ten year-old boy, and he frequently makes bets with the servers that he can carry 20 wine 

glasses in one hand. He can. 

Jose and I were hired on the same day. The manager asked me if I would help him 

navigate the language of the mound of paperwork we needed to fill out. Jose smiled at me 

gratefully, his upper lip pressed firmly against his gums, as I patiently explained the questions. 

From that moment, we were fast friends. 

Having worked in the restaurant industry for many years, Jose proudly shared his trade 

secrets. He showed me how to wipe the knives before rolling them with the forks and napkins. 

 58 

He demonstrated how to clean the table, swishing the rag around to follow the grain of the 

wood—it's faster and tidier—when he noticed my less-than-perfect efforts. He encouraged me 

when I stumbled as a new server. At the end of each shift I worked, he would announce my level 

of proficiency. "Christina, you were 75% today," and then, "Oh you were over 90% today. 

Almost 100%." These days, he calls me Super Christina, always stating that I am over 100%. He 

seems proud. 

Over the past two years, Jose has become very perceptive about my facial expressions. 

Most days, I come into work with a smile, enjoying the people that I work with and serve. He 

frequently asks, "Christina, why are you so nice?" I teasingly tell him I'm just pretending. 

Several months after I first started, Jose noticed that my smile wasn't so big, and like a 

concerned parent, he asked what was wrong. At first I hesitated, but was grateful for the 

opportunity to unburden myself. I explained to him how stressed I was. I was working two jobs 

while completing my full-time internship to become a teacher, and I was still not making ends 

meet. And my then-husband had just left his part-time job. Jose listened patiently, and at the end 

of my short confession, reminded me that I would be done soon. That I would get a teaching job. 

That he was sure I was a great teacher. 

One night, as I was cleaning my tables, Jose came by to help me move the tables and 

chat. The recent presidential primaries had taken place, and Jose was excited that Barack Obama 

had won the Democratic Party nomination. 

"I hope he wins," he announced. When I looked at him questioningly, he continued: 

"Christina, I have a secret to tell you. You can't tell anyone. Not even your husband." He paused, 

perhaps debating whether to tell me. "I am illegal. You know how I had worked here before. 

Well, I had to leave in the past because they found out. They told me to come back when I 

 59 

could—they really liked me. I went to a couple other places and had to leave when I thought they 

were going to find out. And now I'm back here. But hopefully, if Obama wins, that will mean 

good things for my people." 

I nodded in agreement and promised I wouldn't say a word. I hoped that Jose was right. 

That Obama would win and that somehow that would mean Jose could gain legal status. 

The next week, when I came into work, our manager had a short meeting before our shift 

started. He made several customary announcements about guest counts and service standards. 

And he closed by saying, "Take it easy on Jose tonight, gang. He's had some Jose Kryptonite, 

and isn't feeling so super today."  

Jose? Not feeling well? That was unusual. I walked around the restaurant in search of my 

friend. "What's a matter?" I asked when I found him in the booths. 

"Oh nothing." 

"Jose?" 

"I can't tell you. Maybe I can tell you in a couple of weeks. But it's bad for my family. 

Knowing I couldn't press him further, and that we both had worked to to do, I didn't pursue the 

issue. But I was concerned. Later that night, as I was cleaning my tables, Jose came by to bus my 

last table.  

"Jose, I understand if you don't want to talk, but you can if you want to. You know I 

won't say anything." 

He looked at me solemnly, his brown eyes darker than normal. "My mom died." Tears 

filled the eyes of this strong middle-aged man. "And I can't go to see her. I haven't seen her in ten 

years. And now I won't ever see her again. I need to go—but if I do, I won't be able to come 

 60 

back. And my kids..." His voice trailed off. He bent over a table, and his body began to shake. 

He quietly wept, hiding his face with his hand. 

 

Shifting Practice, Shifting Ideologies (September 2008-June 2016) 

While my early experiences reflected a nascent critical consciousness of the 

assimilationist and White supremacist ideologies underpinning education in the U.S., those 

ideologies were deeply embedded in the beliefs I brought to my classroom as a beginning ESL 

teacher. During my first years of teaching, my students, whose parents were mainly from Puerto 

Rico and Mexico, had grown up and attended school in Michigan their entire lives. Up until my 

arrival, the school district did not have a bilingual or English language development program; 

because of increased accountability measures associated with No Child Left Behind, the district 

was under pressure to improve standardized test scores among their students, who were mainly 

language-minoritized learners. In my new position, I was tasked with establishing an ESL 

program, specifically with a focus on the district’s adolescent bilingual English and Spanish 

learners and a handful of others who spoke Hmong and Tagalog.  

The little guidance I received from one of my administrators included the suggestion that 

I review the district’s student list for names that looked “foreign” to determine who my students 

would be. Although I was horrified by this suggestion, I was not sure how to begin. By the end 

of my first week, I discovered that there were state guidelines for identifying English learners in 

public schools, and by the end of the first month, had tested students’ whose home language 

surveys listed a language other than English. What this also meant, though, was that many 

students, who had already completed over half of their K-12 school careers in the U.S., suddenly 

had a new class foisted on them by a twenty-something white lady telling them they did not 

 61 

know English—at least not well enough to be in the general education English language arts 

classes. My students were not shy in their resistance, particularly as we began to develop a 

relationship. “ESL?” They would ask, “What does that stand for—Every Stupid Latino?”  

Even with the emerging critical lens I brought into my first year of teaching, there were 

many misconceptions I needed to interrogate. In those first months of teaching, I was quickly 

confronted with a tension, which I described in the teaching journal I kept at the time: 

I want to empower my kids since in many ways, I’m sure they feel disempowered. This 

means having them play a part in the decision-making process with regard to classroom 

expectations and consequences. But how does this work with the language barrier? 

Should I ask them to write this in Spanish if they are not comfortable using English? I’m 

sure [the bilingual teaching assistant] would help me decipher what they are saying. But 

at the same time, it’s an English as a Second Language class. I don’t think I can have an 

English ONLY policy; it just doesn’t seem practical nor does it seem entirely beneficial. I 

think I’m going to aim high—we will establish the rules collaboratively; currently, I have 

it planned that students will work in small groups to come up with ideas. They can 

discuss in English or Spanish, but must share out in English. Good compromise?  

In what was my first attempt to build classroom community on my own as a beginning teacher, I 

imagined a heteroglossic approach (though I would not yet know to call it that) to invite all 

students to co-construct expectations for our learning communities.  

Despite these early intentions, I briefly implemented an English-only policy in my 

classroom to compensate for my weak classroom management practices. Essentially, I was 

overwhelmed with my students’ talkativeness and thought that restricting their use of Spanish in 

class might make it easier to manage their behavior. In other words, I attempted to enact a 

 62 

restrictive classroom language policy in order to control my students’ behavior and protect my 

status as the English-dominant classroom teacher. I found further reinforcement for this policy in 

broader language policies, such curricular standards and standardized assessments. When my 

students asked if they could write in Spanish for a test, I reminded them that the state test would 

require them to demonstrate their knowledge in English. Unsurprisingly, neither policy went 

over well with my students, and I quickly backpedaled these restrictive classroom language 

policies in order to preserve the relationships I was building with them. Thus, whatever critical 

capacity I had begun to develop during my teacher preparation program was nothing compared 

to the reckoning that began then and continued over the decade I spent as a classroom ESL 

teacher—unlearning and relearning that came at a cost to my students.  

I learned a great deal in those first years of teaching and started to question whether 

decisions I made as a teacher were truly in students’ best interest—or if they were meant to 

protect my ego as a beginning teacher. Bumping up against diverse language and cultural 

practices in my classroom was illuminating in this regard. About halfway through my first year 

of teaching, one of my students from Puerto Rico, Ishmael, asked me, “Miss, don’t you know 

that Puerto Ricans like to talk a lot?” As a result, I started to ask myself whether my attempts to 

restrict their interactions in class were actually contradicting their cultural practices. I connected 

this with my own family’s cultural practices, recalling the contrast between gatherings with my 

paternal grandfather’s Sicilian family, which were filled with loud voices and active hand 

gestures, and gatherings with my maternal grandmother’s German and Hungarian family, which 

were much quieter and smaller affairs. I also began to consider how my own upbringing may 

have shaped what I expected from my students. For instance, I started to explicate to students 

that when I was growing up, my father insisted I look him in the eye when he was talking, a sign 

 63 

of respect that he connected to his Italian background. While I often encouraged my students to 

look at me when I was talking, seeming to think there to be a connection between their aural 

comprehension of English and their ability to process what my facial expressions were saying, I 

also relaxed this request, recognizing that some students might not be comfortable with making 

eye contact based on their own cultural backgrounds. 

The longer I taught and the more I loosened up, though, the more I realized that my 

classroom practices—and the state standards and assessments to which I was held accountable—

contradicted how my students naturally made meaning and communicated. Essentially, our 

classes became rich contact zone interactions, where I began to develop the cooperative 

disposition of a translingual speaker (Canagarajah, 2013); over time, I became more open to 

collaboratively negotiating across difference, adapting communication to include shared 

ecological resources, and centering students’ agency in choosing what resources they used to 

make meaning and communicate. During classroom discussions, students fluidly moved between 

English and Spanish, incorporating gestures, using Google Translate, and looking up images to 

support their conversations, practices that I also began to take up. I encouraged them to capture 

their ideas in writing using whatever resources were most readily available, whether that meant 

moving between languages or including pictures and gestures; however, my aim was always to 

expand students’ English language capacities and school-based literacy practices, reflecting the 

continued privileging of White Mainstream English (Baker-Bell, 2019). Using Title III federal 

funding, I built an extensive library of multicultural and bilingual texts and accrued enough 

laptops for each student to use during class, recognizing the need for more resources to negotiate 

and co-construct meaning—particularly resources that reflected students’ backgrounds and 

interests. Over time, my own meaning-making repertoire expanded. During my first teaching 

 64 

position, I came to understand quite a bit of Spanish (and occasionally could use it in speaking 

and writing); my second position was in an even more multilingual context, with over 40 

languages represented in the district. Thus, over the eight years I was in the classroom, I picked 

up a smattering of words in other languages from my students, like como ce dice (how do you 

say), je ne sais pas (I don’t know), or كل اركش , or shukran (thank you). As I focused more on 

shared meaning-making and communication and less on adhering to restrictive classroom 

language policies, the boundaries I perceived between languages began to dissolve. A decade 

later, when I returned to school to begin my doctoral studies, I would come to understand this as 

translanguaging.  

Introduction to Translanguaging: A Revolutionary Perspective of Language (August 2016) 

I was formally introduced to the concept of translanguaging in the context of the first 

course I taught as a beginning doctoral student and teacher educator. The class happened to be 

the same ESL practicum course I had taken as pre-service teacher over a decade before and was 

newly under the supervision of faculty member, Dr. Sandro Barros, who had chosen García and 

Li’s (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education as the central text for the 

course. I recall going for a walk with my partner, who is also an ESL teacher, after devouring the 

book; I shared with him my beginning understanding of translanguaging. Together, we wondered 

whether or not we, as self-defined monolingual English speakers, could engage in 

translanguaging and whether we already enacted translanguaging in our teaching. These 

questions would stay with me in the years to come, but were particularly on my mind as I 

prepared to teach the class.  

 

As both theory and pedagogy, translanguaging captured my imagination as a language 

educator and would become the central focus of my own scholarship. Following that meeting, I 

 65 

reflected on my initial understanding of translanguaging in my teaching journal, describing the 

various meaning-making resources that “live” within each individual’s language system, or 

repertoires (García & Li, 2014). I explained that each individual’s meaning-making practices 

include linguistic means, visuals, body language, music, or “any of the other things around us 

that we used to make sense of the world.” I also recognized that “it no longer makes sense to 

teach language in the way that we've been doing it, where we give power to one supposedly 

superior form of English over another” rather than acknowledging that “each of my individual 

students as having his or her own language system.” In other words, I acknowledged that 

language is not a unified, static system solely composed of linguistic resources, but is particular 

to each individual speaker, who fluidly integrates multiple resources to make meaning. I began to 

connect translanguaging to the sociocultural and critical perspectives of literacy that I had begun 

to adopt when I was an undergraduate in my own teacher preparation program, but had not yet 

extended to how I thought about teaching ESL: 

This makes language learning a social justice issue (and maybe even a human rights 

concern)...Sandro talked about Paulo Freire and his belief that love is the great thing 

governing us all—regardless of what system or belief system is above all of that…So 

ultimately language is a vehicle for creating meaning within and between humans, 

meaning that we might then call love.  

These early musings about translanguaging seemed revolutionary to me at the time, and indeed, 

for many beginning and experienced ESL teachers, translanguaging is revolutionary. Unlike the 

more cognitive and sociocultural theories of language development that I had been introduced to 

in my teacher preparation program, translanguaging offered a more critical perspective. 

 66 

Interlude #3: Why Not...Your Own? (May 31, 2017) 

After a three-hour drive to northern Michigan, I pulled into the driveway to my dad’s 

house, I felt a bit of nervousness—an awareness that despite our weekly phone conversations, I 

felt further away from him than I had in years. Over the past 9 months, I had gestated new ways 

of thinking and being as a first-year PhD student, and they made me disconnected from my 

father. 

He helped me carry my bags in and after I settled into the guest room, he was excited to 

show me the projects he’s been working on. First was the new boat he had outfitted for fishing, 

having cut out the original metal seat and welded in a rotating chair and a winch-and-pulley 

system to make anchoring easier on his 60-something body. He showed me where he takes the 

boat in and out of the water, explaining that he is waiting to put in a dock until he better 

understands how the water flow would affect the shoreline. When he gave me a tour of his new 

camper, he remembered that he accidently snapped off the latch to hold the exterior door open 

when he was mowing earlier; using his screw gun, he pried off the base from the outside of the 

camper, describing to me how he would drill in a new hole and reset the hinge to make the latch 

work again. Then I helped haul wood off into his truck, watching him use different pieces to 

counterbalance lumber that was double the length of his truck. 

While we worked, I shared with him my plans for the summer, including working with 

the Refugee Development Center. “They’re all legal, eh?” he asked, and I gave him a short 

explanation about the process the refugees go through to come to the U.S. “What if you found 

out one of them wasn’t legal? What if you found out the father of one of your students, like Radi, 

was a terrorist?” I cringed twice over: once for the mispronunciation of Ravi, my former 

student’s name, and again at the question. Over the phone, these would have been questions that 

 67 

made me angry at my father, but in person, while we worked, I was able to read him better. As 

we talked, I explained that I am an educator, not a law enforcement agent. There are myriad 

factors that I consider, one of which is my own moral code and responsibility to the children in 

front of me. There was so much more I wanted to say, but I left it at that, knowing it was a topic 

we’d revisit.  

Three hours later, when I decided to settle in at the kitchen table to start in on my reading 

and writing for the day, my dad sat next to me, wanting to hear more about my work.  “Why 

refugees? Why not...your own?” It was a loaded question—and one that I had not yet really 

articulated an answer. I started with the simplest answer: it was an opportunity that arose this 

winter that fit with some of my goals as a graduate student. But certainly it’s more than that—

and so I decided to start at the beginning, where I always start: my brother. 

I explained to my dad that since my childhood, I found myself troubled by the fact that 

some youth are validated through schooling (like me) while others are devalued (like my 

brother). Five decades ago, this included my father who, as a child of Italian immigrants from the 

lower class, was unfamiliar with the “school’s codes and customs of the rules of the culture of 

those who have power” (del Carmen Salazar, 2013, p. 135). I pointed to my father's own 

language and literacies, the fact that he is a jack-of-all-trades, but that his literacies are not “held 

up” in the same way as my own school-sanctioned practices. I talked about my younger brother, 

and how the subtle messages he received from his teachers throughout schooling made him 

believe his ways of being, of reading, of thinking were less valid than others. Though I chose to 

conform to practices in order to “do school,” my brother engaged in the defiant practices and 

boundary maintaining mechanisms that del Carmen (2013) describes as a form of resistance to 

the shaming he experienced in the classroom. And then I explained that this along with my 

 68 

experiences in stumbling into TESOL education as an undergraduate were just the beginning of 

my "journey for humanization...toward critical consciousness" and envisioning my responsibility 

as a "humanizing pedagogical agent" in education (del Carmen Salazar, 2013, p. 131). Today, I 

see my work among refugee and linguistically-diverse youth as being the small sliver I am 

responsible for within the much-larger challenge that we are contending with in education—to 

humanize schooling for all students on a global scale. A question I posed to him is the same I ask 

myself: At what point do we envision “our own” on a global scale?  

Keeping my father and brother in the back of mind is a constant reminder that the youth I 

work with have ambitions and experiences and perspectives of the world that cannot be 

encapsulated within the narrow view I possess of the world as a monolingual, white female. The 

inevitable binaries to which I subconsciously subscribe fail to capture the creativity and 

criticality, resilience and ingenuity, and fluidity and supercomplexity of their identities. And so 

instead, I turn to an old adage my dad shared with me when I was young: "Listen two times as 

much as you speak." And in this way, I can envision the connecting tendrils between us, all 

together, "our own." 

Why refugees?  For you, Dad. 

 

 69 

CHAPTER 6: IDEOLOGICAL RECKONING 

“Nepantla is the site of transformation, the place where different perspectives come into conflict 
and where you question the basic ideas, tenets, and identities inherited from your family, your 
education, and your different cultures” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 127).  
 

Finding Community: Collaborative Exploration of Translanguaging (2016-2018) 

While translanguaging became a central area of focus for me in my first year of my 

graduate studies, I was somewhat on my own as I figured out how to teach and write about a 

theory that I was just coming to understand myself. Most of my first year was spent learning to 

navigate graduate school and becoming familiar with the general landscape of research, although 

I would dig into research articles with “translanguaging” in the title when I had the time. During 

my second year, Sandro transitioned out of his role as lead faculty for the ESL practicum course 

and my fellow co-instructors moved on to other teaching positions; as a result, I was suddenly 

the resident “expert” for the course. Partnering with another experienced graduate student who 

was going to teach the class for the first time, we decided to re-tool the curriculum based on 

García, Ibarra Johnson, and Seltzer’s (2017) practitioner-friendly text, The translanguaging 

classroom: Leveraging student bilingualism for learning, which I had discovered while 

wandering the exhibit hall at the American Education Research Association (AERA) annual 

conference for the first time. Reading and teaching this book gave me new language to think not 

just about the moves enacted in practice by teachers, but also the ideological shift that 

translanguaging required, a shift the authors call a “translanguaging stance.” Later that year, I 

read Canagarajah’s (2013) Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. 

His theorization around “translingual disposition” gave me another framework to consider 

teachers’ “orientation towards language diversity and difference from a non-deficit perspective” 

 70 

that is “socially acquired through individuals’ embodied practices and experiences, thus being 

not only cognitive but also affective” (Lee & Canagarajah, 2019, pp. 353-354). 

 

Around the same time, I embarked on my first co-writing endeavor with Dr. Matt Deroo 

(then a graduate student), where we examined data from our respective courses to figure out 

what made it easier or more challenging for teachers (who were mainly white, English-dominant 

speakers) to take up translanguaging. Unsurprisingly, our analysis led us to also question what 

ideological forces influence teachers’ beliefs about language and therefore what pedagogical 

practices they adopt. (See Deroo & Ponzio, 2019, 2021; Deroo, Ponzio & De Costa, 2020). As I 

continued to teach the ESL practicum course across nine semesters and began my own research, 

I found myself coming back to the inquiry Matt and I took up, which also led me to consider 

other questions: Can white, monolingual English-speaking teachers ever really understand the 

fluid meaning-making capacities of bi- and multilingual students? Can they engage in 

translanguaging, even with minimal development in other languages? If so, can they engage in 

translanguaging without Whitewashing or appropriating translanguaging, and potentially 

undermining its critical aims? And how do new and practicing teachers come to reject 

assimilationist ideologies that are counterintuitive to both the practical application and 

sociopolitical implications of translanguaging? (See also Barros, Domke, Symons, & Ponzio, 

2020; Ponzio, 2020.) 

 

The questions I was asking in my teaching and scholarship led me to turn the lens inward 

to consider how I, as a white, mostly monolingual English-speaking teacher, might critically 

interrogate assimilationist ideologies and engage in translanguaging pedagogy. Around the same 

time, I was fortunate to connect with other scholars who were asking similar questions. At 

AERA 2018, I found myself presenting at the same session as Drs. Elizabeth Robinson and 

 71 

Zhongfeng Tian; though I had connected with Zhongfeng before, meeting together at this session 

led the three of us to talk about the similarities in our work and the challenges we faced. We also 

identified a shared commitment to social justice within English language education. We wanted 

to talk further and decided in May 2018 to begin a shared inquiry into translanguaging.  

In September 2018, Elizabeth and Zhongfeng invited two others to join: Elie Crief, an 

undergraduate in Elizabeth’s class and also her research assistant, and Maíra Lins Prado, who 

had recently moved to the Boston area and was interested in enrolling in Elizabeth’s class. 

Similarly, I invited Drs. Abraham Ceballos-Zapata and Laura Kennedy. I first met Abe in August 

2016 when we were assigned to be co-instructors for the TESOL practicum course; two years 

later, I taught the same course with Laura. Together, the seven of us began meeting twice a 

month using Zoom and a shared Google Drive folder to explore translanguaging, an inquiry that 

led to further investigation into our individual backgrounds and contexts, language repertoires, 

and translanguaging practices. We recorded our meetings from the start, some of which we 

would later transcribe for purposes of data analysis.  

In the next section, I zoom in on the interactions amongst the members of TTT as a 

nepantla contact zone (Anzaldúa, 2015) and a fundamental facet of my ideological reckoning as 

an LTE. In drawing from Anzaldúa’s conception of nepantla, I highlight (1) the collisions among 

our group members’ respective cultures, identities, dispositions, and meaning-making practices, 

and (2) how those collisions fractured basic ideas, tenets and identities I inherited from my 

background with specific attention to broader language ideologies.  

I first describe the genesis of our group, providing a brief overview of each member’s 

background. After, I explore how our colliding perspectives fractured many of my taken-for-

granted assumptions about language and language education, specifically through the lens of 

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assimilationist language ideologies. I conclude by describing several facets of our group’s 

collective transformation. In the final section of the findings, I continue to extend Anzaldúa’s 

framework to share how TTT became a site of transformation, where I demonstrated greater 

openness to others’ cultures, belief systems, and meaning-making practices in connection with 

Pratt (1991) and Canagarajah (2013).  

Orchestrated Collision (2018-2019) 

When we first began meeting in September 2018, members of TTT resided in 

Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Michigan; since then, members have travelled or moved to 

other physical spaces: Pennsylvania, France, Germany, Mexico, South Korea, and Costa Rica. 

Throughout that time, we created a shared online meeting space, which we described in previous 

work as a “contact zone” (Pratt, 1991; see Ponzio et al., forthcoming); together we co-

constructed shared meaning-making practices across our group members’ various linguistic 

resources, cultural backgrounds, and educational experiences. What brought our group together 

was our shared interest in translanguaging as a language theory and pedagogy. We began our 

first meeting by discussing the questions we brought to our inquiry: How do we adopt and enact 

translanguaging as a language practice? How does one develop the stance or disposition needed 

to enact translanguaging? How does this vary based on our respective positionalities? And what 

does this all mean for our teaching?  

 

 

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Figure 2: TTT Group Photo 

Note. This image includes the members of TTT (beginning top left: Maíra, Christina, Laura, 
Abe, Zhongfeng, Elie, and Elizabeth). 

 

 

Figure 3: Mapping the Timeline of TTT’s Initial Interactions 

Note. This image illustrates the when and where each member of TTT began to interact, 
resulting in the formation of our inquiry group; credit to Elie Crief for creating this image. 

 

 

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For many of us, our interest in translanguaging grew from a desire to create educational 

spaces where teachers and learners can co-construct knowledge based on all the resources they 

bring. For me, personally, I shared that “[I believe] the purpose of education is not just to, you 

know, teach someone how to use English, it's, you know, to create opportunities where they can 

become themselves in fuller ways.” Collectively, we acknowledged the practical reality of 

translanguaging—where individuals agentively choose to fluidly integrate multilingual, 

multimodal, multisemiotic, and multisensory resources to construct knowledge and 

communicate. However, translanguaging also contradicted many of the experiences we had 

previously in teaching and/or learning in English as a Second language contexts, where English, 

as a static language system, was centered rather than learners’ evolving dynamic language 

repertoires. Thus, our group began with some awareness that translanguaging offers what I 

described as “a paradigmatic shift that can open up the constraints that have long limited how we 

think about language education and literacy education.” The teacher educators in our group also 

realized, as Abe explicated, that we were not alone in “really trying to figure out what 

translanguaging really is while we’re teaching it,” a point that I will return later. This 

acknowledgement reflected my central motivation for joining the group: “I’m not sure how I can 

teach people to adopt a pedagogical practice without them also being able to engage in that 

linguistic practice. And then I don’t know how to teach them how to do that if I don’t also know 

how to engage in it as part of my meaning-making practice.”  

Despite our shared commitments and curiosities, one important dynamic in our group that 

became apparent in that first meeting was the diverse representation with respect to our national 

origins and language backgrounds. In fact, the majority of our group members represent 

language identities and national origins that are not English dominant or U.S. born. Having come 

 75 

from France, Elie, an undergraduate student at the time, explained that the members of his family 

are French-dominant speakers, though he added that he had learned some Hebrew from his 

family and that his uncle speaks Arabic. Elie had also studied Spanish and English in school and 

was attending a U.S. university. Maíra, a prospective graduate student from Brazil, had recently 

moved to New Hampshire. (Her move to Germany in summer 2019 marked the conclusion of her 

active involvement in TTT.) Being that her mother was a Portuguese and English language 

teacher, she was raised in a bilingual home; she eventually became an ESL teacher herself when 

she was 17 years old. Later, she also studied French and Italian formally and Spanish informally. 

Then a second-year graduate student, Zhongfeng grew up in China, speaking Mandarin and 

English. Three years before, he moved to the U.S. for graduate school, and shared the following: 

“When I first came into the States, I always treated myself as an English language learner, so I’m 

not very confident saying that I’m a bilingual speaker, because you know English has the 

dominant power here.” Originally from Mexico, Abe grew up speaking Spanish, though his post-

secondary academic life has been conducted in English. When TTT convened for our first 

meeting, he was beginning a new position as an assistant professor, teaching intermediate-level 

Spanish language classes as well as elementary world language and ESL teacher preparation 

classes. 

 

The remaining three group members, Elizabeth, Laura, and myself, were born in the U.S. 

and described ourselves as white, monolingual English speakers, despite our previous language 

learning experiences. Elizabeth shared, “I would say that I am monolingual, even though I speak, 

I mean, I speak Spanish, but I don’t use Spanish in my life very often” (emphasis mine). 

Similarly, Laura explained, “I do identify as monolingual, but I have other languages in my back 

pocket to a certain [degree]” (emphasis again mine). She went on to explain that she speaks 

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Korean, having lived and taught in South Korea for six years, learned some Spanish from her 

mother, who taught it at a local school, and had “dabbled in” Swahili. (Sparked by Laura’s 

response, Elizabeth shared that she also previously taught in South Korea and speaks Korean.) 

Like both Elizabeth and Laura, I found myself using the same word, “but,” to give a similar 

disclaimer: 

I did study French in high school and college, but like a lot of [you] are saying, I’ve never 

considered myself fluent in French, and part of that is maybe because I haven’t had the 

opportunity to go to a French-speaking context…[T]hroughout my teaching experience, 

you know, you pick up words from your students, so I picked up a smattering of Spanish 

here or a little bit of Arabic there…I definitely see myself as being more monolingual. 

While this collision of our respective backgrounds emerged organically, we quickly saw the 

affordance of purposefully elucidating these differences in our future interactions. Elizabeth, in 

particular, suggested that the juxtaposition of our positionalities (specifically as self-defined 

monolingual and multilingual speakers) might support our self-study of translanguaging. As we 

continued, this meant that we were intentional about naming and, to the extent possible, 

mitigating power dynamics in our group with respect to broader assimilationist language 

ideologies.  

We also recognized that our collaboration would likely not lead to conclusive answers to 

the questions we brought to our first meeting. As Laura suggested at the beginning of our first 

meeting, “So maybe it’s ok if our [collaboration]—ends in questions. Here’s what I still wrestle 

with around translanguaging, and here’s how I’m coming into—here’s what I bring with me into 

the classroom, and here’s where I think I’m going with translanguaging but I’m still not sure. 

And I think it’s ok to say that. It means making yourself vulnerable enough to do that.” In 

 77 

rooting our shared inquiry into translanguaging in a stance of vulnerability, our group began to 

cultivate a willingness to engage our differing viewpoints and experiences from a place of 

openness. 

Colliding Perspectives, Fracturing Ideologies 

In the next section, I highlight a series of interactions that were one part orchestrated and 

one part organic among our group members as we explored translanguaging, assimilationist 

language ideologies, and our respective experiences with both. Like stone striking stone, each of 

these interactions represents a collision—a spark—for consciousness-raising and praxis. 

Notably, our group members did not experience direct conflict with each other; consistent with 

our commitment to open vulnerability, our interactions reflected mutual respect of each other’s 

lived experiences. Thus, our experiences layered onto each other within a dialogic process of 

collective meaning-making. For myself, any conflict I did experience emerged internally in 

response to the collision of our respective viewpoints and backgrounds; I allude to some of these 

internal conflicts below, but will attend to them in greater detail in the next chapter.    

Nativespeakerism 

In preparation for our second meeting, we decided to read Flores and Aneja’s (2017) 

article, “‘Why Needs Hiding?’ Translingual (Re) Orientations in TESOL Teacher Education.” 

For Zhongfeng, Elie, Maíra and Abe, the article resonated with their experiences as multilingual 

speakers who have been positioned as non-native English speakers, or NNESs. Zhongfeng 

shared that the article helped him question the lack of efficacy and privilege experienced by 

NNESs: “If we as non-native speaker...always put ourselves at a lower end compared to native 

English speakers...how can we really—you know—how can we really leverage the 

multilingualism in our classroom when we work with diverse group of student populations?” He 

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then elaborated on the disparate opportunities available to NNESs pursuing jobs as TESOL 

educators as compared with native English speakers, or NESs.  

Elizabeth chimed in, asking Elie if he would be willing to talk about his experience 

teaching English during a study abroad trip to Vietnam, which Elizabeth had organized. While 

Elizabeth thought Elie’s multilingual capacity was an asset in this context, Elie questioned this: 

“Yah, I don’t know if I...was just a bit like self-conscious about my accent, and I know that for 

non-native speakers, it is difficult to understand someone who speaks English with an accent like 

me. I found it a bit, I don’t know, uncomfortable...the kids would not understand me at all.” 

Building from Elie’s comment, Maíra described the “mutt complex” that Brazilians tend to 

experience: 

There’s a general feeling, like, we’re not good enough as a nationality, like Brazilians are 

not as good like, we wished we lived somewhere else. And there’s this kind of thing, and 

we make fun of ourselves with our accents. If you know just a little English, you already 

look down upon people who know a little less...and you, like, make fun of people who 

have a strong accent, like a strong Brazilian accent while speaking English, and you make 

fun of people who use wrong expressions. 

Maíra also admitted that Flores and Aneja’s (2017) article brought tears to her eyes because it 

resonated so strongly with the self-doubt she experienced when she became an English teacher in 

Brazil. Maíra’s story reminded Zhongfeng of his experience in being criticized for his 

translanguaging practices in China: “But in China, if you do codeswitching, people will think 

you are showing off...That’s why whenever I go back to China, I’m very aware [that] I should 

speak pure Chinese; I shouldn’t speak [mixed] sentences to my classmates, to my old friends.” 

Across all three group members’ examples, the dominance of Nativespeakerism—and the 

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associated influences of the (the ideological association between one nation, one language, one 

people; Bauman & Briggs, 2000; Blommaert & Verschueren, 1992) and monoglossic 

perspectives (the ideological assumption that languages are bounded, pure, and autonomous 

systems; García, 2009)—contributed to their self-consciousness in speaking English—or whether 

they would face ridicule by peers within their countries of origin for their multilingual capacities.  

Those of us within the group who are positioned as NESs also shared how we 

experienced pressure to conform to notions of linguistic purity associated with 

Nativespeakerism; in our case, however, this pressure resulted in us questioning our capacity to 

become bilingual in languages other than English. This was evident in the language portraits 

(Busch, 2018) that we created and shared at our earlier meetings, where we visually represented 

the language practices that are a part of our repertoires. According to Busch (2018), this self-

portrait activity was first adapted in the context of language learning at the beginning of the 

1990s, when an article in the German journal Grundschulzeitschrift suggested giving students the 

task of filling in a drawn body silhouettes by choosing different colors and placement to 

represent their relationship to various named language systems, dialects, and registers. Having 

done the activity myself earlier that year, I proposed the task to the group, who agreed that 

creating and sharing our language portraits might provide a generative avenue to make our 

language identities visible to each other. In introducing her portrait to the group, Laura 

explained: “I'm actually kind of afraid to use languages [other than English]. It's, at least in 

speaking, I love learning them, but speaking them I'm afraid because I don't know that I kinda 

just keep them separate in my head.” Laura’s testimony resonated with Elizabeth who shared, “I 

have the same thing around fear and for me...it's less about the receiver and more about me and 

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my self-image...I share similar feelings around like not wanting to try out language unless I can 

do it correctly.”  

Figure 4: My First Language Portrait 

Note. This image reflect the language portrait I created to represent my relationship to my 
language practices based on their color and placement on silhouette. The following is my 
written reflection about the portrait: 

 

When I was creating my linguistic portrait, I wanted to represent the multiple registers 
of English I use in my day-to-day life; for this reason, I chose to use different shades of 
blue to do so. The center part of my body, which includes my heart, hands and extends 
up to my head is colored in with a sort of blue that I see as being light and playful and 
chose to represent my everyday English register. It’s the register that I use most 
frequently to think and reflect, to communicate and socialize, and to build 
relationships; it’s also the register that I move most easily in and can most readily 
create and play with language. I also used a darker blue in my head region to represent  
so-called “academic” English, which I am using to refer to the formal register that 
comes with power and prestige in society, particularly in academic contexts. I associate 
this register of English with my head, because using this register requires me to think 
critically in order to comprehend and communicate with the particular vocabulary, 
sentence structures, and discourse that enables me to claim an identity as a teacher and 
researcher. It’s also a register that I am fairly comfortable communicating with, though 
it’s not what I would use to express my emotions or connect with others. I used a dark,  
but more purple-y blue around my feet to represent the English registers that I can 
employ to move about in the world. While I can use them, they are not the most  

 

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Figure 4 (cont’d) 

familiar or comfortable for me (and are therefore furthest from my heart and head. 
Some examples of what would be included within these registers would be the shifts in 
my language choice to talk to an auto mechanic or insurance representative or ATT 
service desk clerk. With regard to my connection to my family’s language 
backgrounds, I chose to use green for Italian, purple for German and pink for 
Hungarian. I added a few dots of green near the heart region of my portrait to indicate 
that I have a smattering of Italian in my repertoire that is closely associated with my 
heart and family. German and Hungarian are represented by dots of color outside, but 
in proximity, to my portrait. While I can’t employ either language, I feel a greater 
association with them than many other languages. Finally, I used red, orange, and 
yellow to represent French, Arabic, and Spanish, respectively. There is a bit of red in 
the heart region to indicate that French connects to my family, but I added dots of red 
along with orange and yellow around my feet. Similar to the purplish blue I used for 
context-specific English registers, I see my association with these languages as being 
more about how I move in the world and interact in new spaces. 
 

 

Around the time our group began meeting, I had begun explicitly acknowledging the 

shame I felt as a self-defined monolingual ESL teacher, which I shared with the group: “As 

somebody who has been an ESL teacher for over a decade, I have often felt like a fraud.” This 

statement hearkened back to the doubts I had when I first decided to become an ESL teacher: 

that I could (or should) not be an ESL teacher without having extensive experience in developing 

my own bilingual capacity or living in a context where English was not the dominant language. 

These doubts reemerged anytime I talked to someone, like one of my family members or a new 

friend (generally, all monolingual English speakers), who marveled at the possibility that I could 

teach ESL without sharing a language with learners. And these doubts surfaced whenever I 

acknowledged the inequity, the lack of reciprocity, and potentially the lack of empathy 

underlying my expectation that students learn English as an additional language while I remained 

safe and comfortable in my monolingual English privilege.  

Sharing these doubts with the members of TTT was the first time I truly made this 

admission public to other educators. In reflecting back on this moment, I was beginning to 

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explicitly recognize the “monolingual disposition” (Gogolin, 1994) in English language teaching 

(ELT), not as the advantageous marker of the “static, ideal native speaker” privileged by 

linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992) but a deficit in multilingual teaching contexts. My 

group members helped me see that I was not alone in doubting my capacity as an emergent 

bilingual. I also recall being struck by the fact that, as a white NES, my emergent bilingual 

capacity was marked by my privilege, contrasting with how these practices might be “read” 

differently than others, like Zhongfeng and Maíra’s experiences in China and Brazil, 

respectively. Listening to Zhongfeng, Elie, Maíra, and Abe illuminated the challenges faced by 

NNESs, who are expected to learn English as the lingua franca, but who also face criticism for 

being bilingual; in hearing how this contradiction negatively affected others in TTT, who I was 

coming to know as friends, this disparity made me wonder how I might subvert the linguistic 

hierarchies that resulted in the privileges I experience as a result of my NES status. 

Socioeconomic Dimensions of Bilingualism 

Following our earlier discussion of self-consciousness and shame associated with 

bilingualism, we extended our interrogation of access to and privilege in becoming bilingual with 

specific attention to socioeconomic dimensions. We considered how each of us might, as 

Elizabeth suggested, “feel differently about the term bilingual” in relation to the social capital 

associated with becoming bilingual based on our respective contexts. To that end, Maíra 

explained that while English is commonly taught in Brazilian schools, opportunities to become 

bilingual are often unavailable to those within the lower class. Similarly, Abe shared his 

experience in Mexico: “If you say ‘a bilingual school’...the first thing that comes to people's 

minds is it's private,” meaning that students’ families must pay a tuition for their attendance. He 

also explained that if one is described as bilingual, their language practices are assumed to 

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include Spanish and English as opposed to Spanish and “Mayan or any indigenous language,” 

which Abe associated with the supremacy of English. This seemed to resonate with Zhongfeng, 

who named the fact that English, as a dominant global language, is assumed to provide “social 

capital that can help people” and “increase their social mobility.” Zhongfeng also connected 

Abe’s point about bilingual status being afforded to those in Mexico who speak Spanish and 

English rather than Spanish and Mayan with a similar phenomenon emerging in dual language 

education programs in the U.S., where bilingual NESs have more social capital than bilingual 

NNESs. (See Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Heiman & Yanes, 2018; and Palmer et al., 2019.)  

I shared how, similar to the class dynamics in Brazil and Mexico, opportunities to expand 

my bilingual capacity were also limited by my family’s financial status:  

By and large, the opportunities I've had to continue pursuing learning additional 

languages have felt a bit tied—a lot tied to class...When I went to college, I [had started] 

thinking I might also become...an English and French teacher. And then when I thought 

about [my] marketability [as a future teacher], I decided not to. And then I, you know, I 

didn't have the opportunity to study abroad. I haven't had the opportunity to do any of 

that, anything like that since, because honestly, because of finances...because of my 

family's resources or lack thereof...money has often felt like the thing that's prohibited me 

from having the time to pursue language studies. 

In connection to my earlier admission of feeling like a fraud as a self-defined monolingual ESL 

teacher, I contended with my social class as another layer of shame, emboldened by Maíra and 

Abe’s contributions. However, I also took what Elizabeth and Zhongfeng shared to heart, 

acknowledging that I did not have to become bilingual, acknowledging later in our conversation 

my recognition that “because I exist in privilege as an English speaker, I know I've been able to 

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lean on that, whereas if I was in another context, I probably would have had to pursue studying 

English in order to gain the social mobility that I've been able to achieve [in the U.S.].” This 

discussion resurfaced in the memo I composed after our meeting: 

Our discussion really speaks to [the fact that] the intersectional nature of exploring 

translanguaging means confronting the hegemonic presence of English...the relationship 

between language performance and being able to claim “bilingual” or “multilingual,” and 

the other identity markers that are wrapped up in all of this...our group as a “contact 

zone” allows us to contend with our linguistic identities and practices (and potentially 

pluralize them), including how other identity markers weave into this.  

Thus, TTT’s discussion raised my awareness of additional intersectional dimensions of privilege 

and oppression in association with language and language learning. Although I would not be able 

to name it as such until much later, I began to consider how I could simultaneously be nos/otras 

(us/others), both language colonizer/colonized (Anzaldúa, 2015). 

Raciolinguistic Intersections 

The intersectional lens (Crenshaw, 1991) we brought to our discussions also extended to 

interrogating the overlapping dimensions of language and race. During one of our meetings, 

Zhongfeng and Abe shared their experiences in being racialized as “people of color” when they 

came to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies in language education—which contrasted with how 

they positioned themselves, particularly with respect to the construction of race in China and 

Mexico. According to Zhongfeng, this experience was an “uncomfortable transition” from 

China, which is “relatively more homogeneous” and where people “don't really talk about race 

and diversity.” Thus, in coming to the U.S., he suddenly “became a minoritized person.” As he 

continued to explain, this experience raised many questions for him: “What do you mean 

 85 

‘students of color’? You label people based on their skin color?...White is also a color. So why—

white students—they are not students of color?”  

Building from Zhongfeng’s experience, Abe jumped into the conversation: “I think it's a 

common experience when you've been the mainstream in other places and then you come here 

and then you get all these labels. And I, I had a similar experience.” Just as Zhongfeng found the 

term “people of color” to be inaccurate, Abe found the term “Hispanic” to be “too broad...it's like 

just the huge group of people that it's like, it's just from, it's from the mainstream perspective. 

Like it's a label from the mainstream perspective.” In this regard, both Zhongfeng and Abe 

highlighted their experiences in being racialized according to the “white gaze,” a term I will 

explain below, upon immigrating to the U.S..  

Our group explicitly connected the topic of race back to language and Nativespeakerism 

in order to trouble the notion of White Mainstream English. Zhongfeng raised the point that there 

are multiple English varieties despite the dichotomization between NES and NNESs and between 

standard and non-standard dialects. “How can we really appreciate different Englishes to try to 

support both monolingual and multilingual students, right?...Monolingual isn’t necessarily 

monolingual; I mean you guys also speak regional dialects of English, if I understand that 

correctly. I speak standard Mandarin, but also I speak my hometown dialect, that’s another 

version of Mandarin.” Citing Lippi-Green’s (2012) work, Elizabeth highlighted the relationship 

between White Mainstream English with racial and class privilege; she also described her own 

experience switching between regional dialects: “Like I grew up with two English teachers and 

so like my language was always very policed. But then I also grew up in an area where...we had 

a Boston accent...You were cool if you had an accent. So I definitely did some of that, you know, 

switching of the way I spoke depending on my context and the purpose of my communication.”  

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Our discussion reminded me of a chapter from Johnson’s (2005) Privilege, Power, and 

Difference that I had read a few months before, which explored the idea that “[s]ystems 

organized around privilege have three key characteristics. They are dominated by privileged 

groups, identified with privileged groups, and centered on privileged groups” (p. 90). I shared 

with the group my recollection of the chapter, extending the social construction of racial 

privilege to linguistic privilege: “With regard to race, whiteness is considered the ‘norm’ and so 

that means that really understanding the [plural constructions of race] gets blurred whereas if 

you’re situated in an identity that is marginalized, you have a greater awareness of [this] 

plurality.” As Johnson explained, the practices of privileged groups who are centered become 

positioned as the “norm.” Hence, one’s privilege is predicated on how near or far their 

positionalities and practices are from the so-called norm.  

In the U.S., where the language practices of white, middle and upper class NESs have 

been centered, those whose racial, class, and linguistic identity are outside this are rendered 

inferior (Alim & Paris, 2015; Valdés, 2016). This ideological phenomenon has been described by 

Toni Morrison (2013) as the “white gaze” and extended by Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa 

(2015) to theorize the “white listening subject.” In connecting our group’s discussion to Johnson 

(2005), I was attempting to articulate my emerging understanding that those whose privileged 

positionalities and practices are centered do not necessarily recognize their normalization is 

socially constructed within a system of power, nor do they truly see or hear what is 

marginalized. In contrast, those whose positionalities and practices are marginalized are keenly 

aware of both what is positioned at the center and on the periphery—what Du Bois (1897/1994) 

called double consciousness: 

 87 

[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in 

this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only 

lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, 

this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes 

of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused 

contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two 

thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose 

dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (p. 38) 

Later in TTT’s discussion, I explicitly named bi/multilingual speakers’ awareness and 

capacity to negotiate “this plurality of practice and plurality of identities” as a form of 

double consciousness.  

While I had come to question the boundedness of several social constructions, 

namely NES/NNES status, named language systems, and even national borders, I also 

questioned my capacity to fully see let alone understand these manifestations given the 

limitations of my positionalities. I associated my “awakening” to these manifestations, as I 

discuss below, with my continued learning around translanguaging. Just as translanguaging 

blurred perceived boundaries between named language systems, the lines between related 

constructions had also begun to blur. Although I previously recognized that the boundaries 

drawn between English and Spanish, Black English and White Mainstream English, NNES 

and NES status, the U.S. and Mexico were human constructions, my group members’ 

accounts also put a face to the very real material consequences associated with these 

boundaries and the hierarchies that grew from them—material consequences that were not 

reflected in much of my lived experiences.  

 88 

In seeking to extend our conversation to consider its practical implications for 

teacher education, I shared my belief that, among white, monolingual English pre-service 

teachers, an “awakening [has] to happen” whereby they pluralize their perspectives of 

meaning-making practices across contexts “as a way to affirm diversity,” whereas bi- or 

multilingual pre-service teachers “already know about this plurality of practice and plurality 

of identities” and have “had to navigate across those contexts.” This discussion, in 

particular, challenged me to contend with the multiple levels of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 

1991) that must be a part of undertaking enactment of translanguaging as a liberatory praxis. 

In considering how I might raise awareness around racial and linguistic hierarchies within 

the TESOL teacher education courses I taught, I recognized that LTs who are members of 

marginalized language groups have to develop critical consciousness in order to survive; 

LTs who are members of privileged groups can survive without acknowledging this, but 

must be challenged to do so. I was left wondering what this might mean for differentiating 

my instruction as a teacher educator for pre-service teachers based on their positionalities. 

My engagement with TTT at this point had also begun to overlap with another teaching 

endeavor: returning to the high school classroom to co-teach a unit on the relationship between 

language, identity and power. While I do not elaborate on this experience in the context of this 

study, it inevitably seeped into the discussions I was having with TTT (and vice versa). To that 

end, our discussion of the intersection of language and race—specifically Abe and Zhongfeng’s 

experiences—connected to a discussion I recently had with high school students about the 

arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects. In a memo composed after our TTT 

meeting, I wrote that “named languages and monolingualism are social constructs that, like race, 

have very material realities.” Through colliding with Zhongfeng and Abe’s personal experiences, 

 89 

I become increasingly interested in the emerging field of raciolinguistics: “I wonder to what 

extent the two (race and language) are mutually constituted as social constructs and how seeking 

to deconstruct the former must occur along deconstruction of the latter.” In the coming months, 

this question would stick with me, becoming an important facet of my transformation and 

pedagogical reimagining. 

Leveling Linguistic Hierarchies within TTT 

Collective Transformation 

Deepening our exploration of translanguaging was transformative for our group. For 

Zhongfeng, learning about translanguaging was deeply personal: 

[Through] learning [about] translanguaging gradually, I think I need to value, validate 

and value my own bilingualism. This is an asset that I have. I can bring more than other 

people can bring to the classroom that I speak another language other than English, so I 

think gradually I developed kind of this translingual identity myself. 

With respect to our discussion about educators who NNES and NES educators, Zhongfeng 

highlighted the fact that NNES educators likely have greater metalinguistic awareness as a part 

of their bi/multilingual development, even while they may question their ability to use English. 

Similar to Zhongfeng, Abe connected his learning about translanguaging to both his language 

practice and pedagogy. Referring to a previous conversation with me, Abe explained, “I was 

telling [Christina] that at least one thing that translanguaging does for me is that the things that I 

might do with my friends, in terms of linguistic practices, now I feel more comfortable in 

bringing that into the classroom and showing it to my students and telling them that this is ok.” 

In this regard, their engagement with translanguaging supported Zhongfeng and Abe in 

repositioning their multilingualism as assets to be celebrated. 

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Elizbeth, Laura, and I were also affirmed by translanguaging with respect to the diversity 

of practices within our linguistic repertoires. At our second meeting, Zhongfeng reminded the 

group of the “myth” of the fully competent bilingual and the self-criticism that emerges from it: 

“So lots of people, they still hold this conception, like bilinguals, they have to be fully competent 

in both languages so that they can claim themselves as bilingual.” Drawing upon his experience 

in teaching “self-considered monolingual students,” he explained that, in disrupting 

compartmentalized views of one’s first and second languages, translanguaging refutes this myth 

by challenging the assertion that bilingualism requires full competency in two languages. By the 

end of that same meeting, Laura described herself as an “emergent bilingual.” Likewise, when 

sharing my language portrait at a later time, I explained that “the portrait also gave me space to 

own the fact that even though I can’t necessarily have a conversation or write something in 

French or in Italian or Spanish, these are language systems that are still a part of my 

identity…[Creating my portrait] really helped me to pluralize and own the fact that I do negotiate 

meaning with more [linguistic] diversity I guess than I had previously thought. And there’s 

something sort of empowering about that.” This acknowledgement marked a fundamental shift in 

my self-confidence as a language learner and was at the heart of a decision I made in the coming 

months to travel to France as a part of a university fellowship program and remain there on my 

own for a month.  

Our group also began to explicitly critique the taken-for-granted practice of centering 

English within and beyond our interactions with each other. While we vocalized a commitment 

to advance translanguaging as language theory and pedagogy, our conversations were 

predominantly in English, a matter that we openly questioned. As Abe pointed out, “It's always 

about English, right?...We're very open to bring in our languages in our group. But to some 

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point, right.” As Abe also pointed out, though, the dominant set of shared resources we had to 

negotiate meaning within our group was English, which I echoed:  

Abe, I think it gets at that tension...we know that English, you know, being able to 

communicate in English, is [treated as] a privilege and its associated with power. But 

obviously it also creates that sort of commonality. And that's, for me, that's just this 

reminder [that] I exist in privilege. How do I use my privilege to complicate that notion, 

those notions of power and to support others?...I'm grateful that we all share English, but 

then I also feel like I shouldn't just expect that our conversation is going to be in English. 

I then suggested to the group that one of the constraints we faced was the limitation of time; our 

group had started writing a book chapter and our meetings were now dedicated to that endeavor. 

“I don't know what that would look like if we weren't on a [schedule]...but maybe at some point 

maybe we should just have a meeting where, you know, everybody uses just whatever you want 

to use and we'll, we'll figure it out.”  

My mind lingered on this tension in the memo I wrote following our meeting: “As I said 

to the group, I’m interested to know what it might be like to not lean on English as our shared 

resource and for others in our group to integrate their full set of linguistic resources (and for me 

to have to be ok with not knowing—for us to use other resources to figure it out).” In connection 

with our group’s earlier exploration of the NES/NNES hierarchy and how we were learning to 

overturn it, I continued to mull over how I might intentionally decenter myself—and the primacy 

of English—in order to actively center language practices that tend to be marginalized in the 

U.S. “It’ll be interesting to continue moving the center, so that translanguaging practices are at 

the center of our discussion. Not sure how to do that, but I think I need to do more listening (and 

question posing) in our next meeting and less talking.” In other words, I had concluded that 

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perhaps my responsibility in seeking to decenter English also meant actively decentering myself 

in our group’s interactions—a conclusion I will return to in the next chapter. 

“Having the Courage to Go and Do It” 

In response to our group’s expressed willingness to engage in more fluid meaning-

making, Abe brought to the subsequent meeting a metaphor that he used to conceptualize his 

own translanguaging practices: lírico. Referring to his experience in beginning graduate school 

in the U.S. a decade before, Abe explained that he often thought to himself, “I'm missing some of 

the language that people use to talk about all sorts of things...that people do in academia." 

Despite this feeling, he continued with school, “having the courage to go and do it, even though I 

was missing the language,” which he associated with líricamente. Upon introducing the term to 

the group, Abe explained that we could translate it to “lyric or lyrical.” Seconds later, Elizabeth 

shared the Google Translation of the term: “lyrically or to put to song.” Abe asked her how she 

understood the term in English, to which she responded, “as a sense of musicality.” Using this as 

a building block of shared meaning, Abe expanded it to include the cultural understanding he had 

of the term: “Growing up I remember people will say, "Oh, this is a professional musician and 

this is a lyrical one, or like lírico. Right?” He then explained that a professional musician would 

be seen as “someone who went to school and studied [music]...who plays by following the charts 

and the notes and all that...someone who has the language for music.” In contrast, líricos refer to 

people who played instruments and even had bands, “but then they don't know anything about, 

about like the theory of music. They just learned that by doing it...as someone who is trying to 

pay attention to the people, to the interactions and being aware that there is, there's some 

language that you are missing but doing it anyways.”  

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For Abe, the metaphor of lírico was a particularly apt metaphor to describe his own 

translanguaging practices when he began teaching in the U.S. as a graduate student. Propelled by 

the group’s follow-up questions, Abe explained that he questioned his ability to teach in the U.S., 

feeling like he missed “certain language to interact in certain situations,” and wondered whether 

what he included in his syllabi was “off the mark, just like writing stuff that nobody teaches.” 

However, he did it anyway: “When I'm drawing from my own experience and thinking about all 

the things that were helpful in my experience, that's what gives me the courage to say, ‘No, I 

think this is important. I'm going to add it’...I feel like applying this lírico to other people, too 

[is] a way of empowering or creating more conversations” rather than excluding them because 

their way of engaging does not adhere to the “norm.”  

In the memo I composed following our meeting, I shared how our group’s conversation 

had catalyzed growth for me in two regards. First, I recognized that in introducing us to the 

concept of líricamente, Abe created an authentic translanguaging interaction for our group, 

where the integration of his personal examples, Google Translate, and our questions fostered our 

collective meaning-making of the term. Second, as I explained, “Our conversations have 

continued to push me to see greater fluidity in our language practices, despite the structural 

boundaries that society has imposed.” While I first recognized this when I was introduced to 

translanguaging as a beginning teacher educator, our group’s interactions provided space to 

observe and engage in it consciously and critically as a part of our shared meaning-making 

practices. As I will illustrate in the next chapter, “This [made] me feel more willing to engage 

with texts or conversations where the words or phrases or grammatical constructions are 

unfamiliar—but where there are enough shared resources to negotiate meaning.”   

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As I highlighted later in the meeting, Abe shed light on another dimension of 

translanguaging that, as I later noted to the group, was perhaps “less talked about in 

translanguaging scholarship” but had been gradually surfacing throughout our meetings: 

courage. In coming to understand the enactment of translanguaging as a courageous act, 

particularly when considering one’s positionality with respect to broader assimilationist 

ideologies, I began to think about a necessary shift for LTs and LTEs that was not just predicated 

on an intellectual understanding or practical application of translanguaging but required a deeper 

shift with regard to one’s embodied (i.e., psychic, emotional, felt) resources, particularly when 

that shift requires rejection of “basic idea, tenets, and identities [inherited]” from one’s culture, 

family and education. As I will discuss next, this discovery was further illuminated in our 

group’s exploration of the concept of “home” and became a central part of my personal ongoing 

transformation. 

“My Home is Shifting A Lot” 

 

Taking Pico Iyer’s (2013) TED Talk, “Where is home?” as a jumping off point, our 

group had turned our attention to exploring our respective definitions of “home” in relation to 

translanguaging and our shifting conceptions of our language identities and resources. First, our 

group agreed that, as Zhongfeng suggested, “home is more contextualized, situated, and not 

place bounded” and that our group had become a sort of “home” for us. Second, we recognized 

the affective dimensions of “home.” Beginning by describing the sense of home she experienced 

with her family, Elizabeth suggested a “home” is “safe and supportive,” and is where we feel a 

sense of connection and support, and as Maíra highlighted, a sense of “community and trust.” 

We had co-constructed our self-study “home” based on our mutual goals and cultivated a shared 

set of practices to support our collaboration: a commitment to vulnerability, risk-taking, and as 

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Zhongfeng suggested, to “interrogate ourselves to become [better people] during this process.” 

Consistent with a point I made in the previous section, our group has “multiple conflicting voices 

that can co-exist in [our] space,” which Zhongfeng attributed to our shared “respect for 

differences” and heteroglossic approaches to meaning-making. In this regard, Zhongfeng added, 

“[We each] bring different expertise, different knowledge, different histories to this home. 

Knowledge is distributed, and it's not just held by one person, this dominant person, to pass 

knowledge to other people. We treat each other as brokers of knowledge, and we learn from each 

other and grow together.”  

Anzaldúa (2015) suggests that, “To be in conocimiento with another person or group is to 

share knowledge, pool resources, meet each other, compare liberation struggles and social 

movements’ histories, share how we confront institutional power, and process and heal wounds.” 

Thus, while our group’s discussion of “home” afforded us the opportunity to celebrate the shared 

resources and community we had cultivated together, our discussion also raised our critical 

consciousness of additional complexities associated with calling a space “home.” For one, the 

space we had co-constructed—where we were learning to strategically leverage shared resources, 

negotiate communication across difference, and level hierarchies associated with dominant 

ideologies—conflicted with many of the ideas woven into our familial histories, educational 

experiences, and broader social structures. Hence, seeking to amplify the practices we drew upon 

as a group required us to actively reject parts of ourselves, our pasts and our communities. I 

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explained to the group that this level of awakening reminded me of the allegory of Plato’s cave,12 

explaining that “once you've seen something, you can't unsee it.” In this regard, I referred to the 

awakening that had occurred for me through translanguaging as a liberatory pedagogy:  

As I've moved away from perceiving home in this monolingual way, I can no longer look 

at my home in the same way. Like I'm not even as comfortable—if I think of home and I 

think of, like, my family for instance. A lot of times I actually find myself more 

uncomfortable in that space, because [their] sense of inclusion is restrictive, it's 

exclusionary...Being able to find new homes where these are the sorts of practices—[like] 

adopting a translanguaging practice is what's centered...that's beginning to feel more like 

home. 

Echoing Anzaldúa (2012), I no longer felt “rooted” among my “home-ethnicity,” but instead felt 

rooted in a new network, or the “new tribalism” that Anzaldúa connected to Deleuze and 

Guattari’s analogy of the self-as-rhizome:  

The ‘root’ you connect to becomes your spiritual ground of being, your connection to 

your inner self, which is your greatest strength. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use a 

 

12 From Plato’s (2012) The Republic: “And now I will describe in a figure the enlightenment or unenlightenment of our nature:—
Imagine human beings living in an underground den which is open towards the light; they have been there from childhood, 
having their necks and legs chained, and can only see into the den. At a distance there is a fire, and between the fire and the 
prisoners a raised way, and a low wall is built along the way, like the screen over which marionette players show their puppets. 
Behind the wall appear moving figures, who hold in their hands various works of art, and among them images of men and 
animals, wood and stone, and some of the passers-by are talking and others silent. 'A strange parable,' he said, 'and strange 
captives.' They are ourselves, I replied; and they see only the shadows of the images which the fire throws on the wall of the den; 
to these they give names, and if we add an echo which returns from the wall, the voices of the passengers will seem to proceed 
from the shadows. Suppose now that you suddenly turn them round and make them look with pain and grief to themselves at the 
real images; will they believe them to be real? Will not their eyes be dazzled, and will they not try to get away from the light to 
something which they are able to behold without blinking? And suppose further, that they are dragged up a steep and rugged 
ascent into the presence of the sun himself, will not their sight be darkened with the excess of light? Some time will pass before 
they get the habit of perceiving at all; and at first they will be able to perceive only shadows and reflections in the water; then 
they will recognize the moon and the stars, and will at length behold the sun in his own proper place as he is. Last of all they will 
conclude:—This is he who gives us the year and the seasons, and is the author of all that we see. How will they rejoice in passing 
from darkness to light! How worthless to them will seem the honours and glories of the den! But now imagine further, that they 
descend into their old habitations;—in that underground dwelling they will not see as well as their fellows, and will not be able to 
compete with them in the measurement of the shadows on the wall; there will be many jokes about the man who went on a visit 
to the sun and lost his eyes, and if they find anybody trying to set free and enlighten one of their number, they will put him to 
death, if they can catch him.” 

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similar structural model, the rhizome, for the self...Unlike a plant with a single tap root, 

rhizomes spread in all directions, creating a … network in which every point can be 

connected to every other point’ (p. 68).  

Spread though our group was across geographic locations, language practices, and cultural 

backgrounds, our roots had extended to each other, forming what we quite literally named as a 

“network,” or the “Transnetworking for TESOL Teachers.” More than a professional network, 

though, we had come to feel rooted in the self-study “home” we had co-constructed. 

Elizabeth suggested that perhaps part of what we were doing as a group was challenging 

the concept of “home,” which reminded me of the conversation I had with my father two 

summers before (see Interlude #3). I shared an abbreviated version of the anecdote with my 

group, explaining that when I told my dad about my collaboration with the Refugee 

Development Center, he asked, "Why refugees? Why not your people?" Sharing my dad’s 

question aloud with the group reverberated back to the many times in the past where he 

suggested that “we should take care of ‘our people’ first” or that I marry “a good Italian man” 

because we would “do things the same way.”13 Anzaldúa (2012) describes this tension in this 

way:  

Your ethnic tribe wants you to isolate, insisting that you remain within race and class 

boundaries. The dominant culture prefers that you abandon your roots and 

assimilate…How can you step outside ethnic and other labels while cleaving to your root 

identity? Your identity has roots you share with all people and other beings—spirit, 

feeling, and body constitute a greater identity category. (p. 140). 

 

13 I often assumed this meant he questioned marrying my mother because she was not an Italian-American; at some 
point in my young adulthood, I recall my mother discovering that she had Italian lineage on her father’s side and her 
making a point to share this around my father’s family. They did eventually divorce each other. 

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In vocalizing my dad’s questions aloud to my fellow group members, I was immediately struck 

by a sense of dissonance, of shame, sadness, and rejection. Not yet able to name these feelings, I 

shared with them the reaction I was having in the moment: “Even right now, the emotional 

reaction I'm having to that is just, it's, it's visceral, because it's a sense of like, this person who I 

have thought as being home doesn't share the worldview that I have now.” Similar to me, 

Elizabeth shared that she also feels “much more comfortable doing the work and having the 

conversations that I have in classrooms and in intellectual spaces than I often do at home,” which 

made her wonder how we might “educate our families or have these conversations in families.”  

Abe acknowledged the fear that emerges for him when, in the decade he has spent in the 

U.S., he encounters others who advocate for “homogeneity, like having everybody at the 

same...it's scary” He explained that he worries less about people disagreeing about politics or 

other viewpoints, “but there's some things that really are like what Christina says, like, ‘What 

about your people?’ It's hard to think about it...how do I even start a conversation in that case?” 

As I listened to Abe, I connected the embodied recollection I was experiencing with what he was 

sharing, wondering about his lived experiences given the intersections of his multiple 

positionalities: a Spanish-English bilingual speaker who had immigrated to the U.S. to pursue 

graduate school, who found himself being racialized in new ways upon arriving in the Midwest. 

While I knew I could not experience his reality, I wondered what I would feel if I could share in 

Abe’s experiences. Although I will elaborate on this further in the next chapter, I was, to use 

Anzaldúa’s (2015) language, shifting my attention from my “customary point of view (the ego)” 

(p. 150), a practice that I would come to understand as central to decentering myself within our 

group, my ongoing self-study, and my enactment of translanguaging as praxis. In building upon 

what I shared, Elizabeth and Abe both affirmed and complicated my experiences as I questioned 

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who and where my home really was; as I came to call “home” the communities I shared with 

others actively seeking critical consciousness, I had come to feel more like an outsider within my 

familial home. 

Second, Elie, Abe, and Maíra reminded our group that claiming a space as home was also 

a privilege. As Elie shared, in order for him to feel at home, he must feel accepted as an insider, 

but that he also “[feels] really guilty to feel home.” He continued, explaining that while he might 

feel at home in Boston, he is also reminded that it is “another place that we stole from indigenous 

[people].” Thus, he simultaneously feels at home while also feeling guilty for “really feeling 

entitled...everywhere I go,” a tendency that leads to him “feeling like an intruder” even when 

he’s “surrounded [by] white people." Prodded by a follow-up question from Elizabeth, Elie 

continued: “I would love to travel and study, [but]...I don't want to stay in the same place all the 

time...I will always feel like I was like colonizer or like, I think it's a privilege because of 

colonization...because of my passport was stronger...I'm intruding in certain people's place or 

gentrifying or benefiting from the gentrification that happened before.” Abe chimed in, threading 

together Zhongfeng’s assertion from earlier that home is not necessarily bound to a physical 

place with Elie’s acknowledgement that calling a place “home” is a matter of a privilege.  

We've been discussing about home goes beyond place. But I still think that place is a very 

important part of it, right? Because even though many things that you think about home, 

you think you think about it beyond place in space, I think you're always going to have a 

place in space. And that's why I thought Elie's reflection on like, be mindful of like, your 

privilege, and colonization and indigenous lands, is important. 

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Expanding upon both Elie and Abe’s comments, Maíra shared that while she is making New 

Hampshire “home with some effort,” she knows she will be leaving in the coming months for 

Germany. She then explicitly acknowledged her disenfranchisement as an immigrant in the U.S. 

If I made this home and I would think that I wanted to stay, I cannot. Because of red tape, 

you know, I can't. I'm an immigrant. So the only place right now that I could go and stay 

is Brazil. So like, I feel at home, everywhere I go, but I cannot stay because of fees and 

documents. And I am treated as a foreign while I'm here. So like, we can make this 

internal evaluation to make ourselves feel at home, but it won't be. So like you would 

need a certain amount of money or marry someone or whatever to get a document that 

says this is home, or else is just a feeling and then you have to go. 

In addition to connecting to Elie and Abe’s discussion of home and privilege, Maíra seemed to 

push back on a comment I had made earlier, when I wondered aloud to the group whether I am 

“more at home” according to how “comfortable in my own skin” and “whether I believed in my 

own sense of self worth.” Although she did not explicitly challenge what I said, Maíra 

highlighted the reality that whether she is at home in the U.S. or not is not necessarily a matter of 

how she feels, but is more a matter of the material realities and legal limitations of establishing a 

home outside one’s nation of origin.  

Collectively, Elie, Abe, and Maíra further complicated our group’s conceptualization of 

home, and for me, personally, held me to account for my privileges as a white NES and U.S. 

citizen. Toward the end of our meeting, I acknowledged that  “being an insider or feeling like 

you can claim a space as your home...reflects privilege,” which could be associated with one’s 

racial identity, with one’s ability to own their ancestral land in spite of colonization, or with 

being in a space where one’s home language is the dominant language. This moment of 

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reckoning—where I contended with the privilege that came with finding belonging in a new 

community, to speak as an insider, and to experience a sense of home—was a critical spark in 

my learning, not just within my mind, but within my body. As I will discuss in the next chapter, 

this realization is something I carried with me into other interactions beyond our group, 

including a two-month sojourn in France, where I would live outside the U.S. for the first time.  

 

 

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CHAPTER 7: BODYMINDSOUL TRANSFORMATION 

“Your bodymindsoul is the hermetic vessel where transformation takes place” (Anzaldúa, 2015, 
p. 133). 
 
 

In the previous chapter, I traced my ideological reckoning as a part of the collaborative 

self-study and collective transformation among TTT. Specifically, I highlighted instances where 

our group’s interactions catalyzed the development of my critical consciousness, from an 

intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1991), of the ideological constructions and material 

consequences associated with linguistic hegemony. Consistent with Pratt’s (1991) and 

Canagarajah’s theorizations of contact zone interactions, TTT co-constructed interactional 

practices to foster a culture of translanguaging within our group’s interactions. Reflective of 

Anzaldúa’s (2015) theorization of nepantla, we cultivated a set of inner resources necessary to 

the translanguaging transformation reflected in our group: critical self-interrogation, openness, 

vulnerability, and risk-taking. Occurring in what I am calling a nepantla contact zone, these 

experiences were fundamental in catalyzing the development of these same inner resources for 

me personally. Thus, in this next chapter, I describe how I carried these resources with me into 

my interactions beyond our group and what personal transformation I experienced in my 

“bodymindsoul” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 133). 

 

While the organization of these chapters makes it appear that this development was 

linear, this was not the case; instead, many of the interactions I describe in this chapter happened 

concurrent to my interactions with TTT. Hence, it is important for me to mention the overlapping 

relationship of our group’s interactions with my own personal interactions as a part of this 

process of reckoning and reimagining. In other words, the fluid and interdependent nature of 

these consciousness-raising interactions and opportunities for praxis were fundamental to my 

development across contexts. Additionally, in what follows, the order that I write about some of 

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my experiences is not necessarily reflective of when they occurred chronologically, but is instead 

reflective of the development of my critical consciousness as it relates to the experiences. In 

other words, the order in which I write about these experiences is meant to lead the reader 

through my reflective process rather than the actual associated events. In an attempt to represent 

this process, I use the fractal nature of a tree’s growth as a metaphor; as each root or branch 

expands in one direction or another, it is overlaid with the development of another root or branch 

that follows a similar developmental pattern, each growing on their own. In other words, you 

could imagine that one of the branches of a tree symbolizes my transformation as a part of TTT, 

overlapping with another branch that symbolizes my transformation while in France, which both 

overlap with a third branch that symbolizes my transformation during my personal self-study. 

Thus, the timeline of events described in this chapter overlay with the interactions among TTT 

described in the previous chapter; likewise, the patterns in my development through interacting 

with TTT reoccurred in my development beyond TTT.  

Humility and Healing in Nepantla (September 2017-December 2018) 

The multiple “collisions” I had with fellow members of TTT sparked fundamental shifts 

in how I approach research and teaching as an LTE. I recognized our group as a space where we 

could inquire into translanguaging together; for me, personally, it was also a space to contend 

with my complicity in perpetuating linguistic oppression and to engage in self-study of my 

language learning and teaching. As I shared during TTT’s second meeting, I began to think of 

our group in a Freirean sense:  

When you were talking [Zhongfeng], I was thinking about...how in order to engage in 

liberation as it relates to language and oppression, we really have to do this work 

together. And I see myself as having to step back and think about how I can let—not 

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“let”—but how I can create space for people who have typically been marginalized 

because of their language backgrounds to take the lead, but also to not put all that 

responsibility on them. [Instead of] “get your white people,” I’m thinking about “get your 

English—your monolingual English people.” 

In other words, I recognized that our group provided us an opportunity to intentionally subvert 

linguistic hierarchies in English language education, where whiteness and English are typically 

privileged, and to instead purposefully center experiences and practices among our group’s 

members that are often pushed to the margins. Thus, in thinking of our group as a collective 

space for self-study, I recognized the tremendous opportunity I had to learn alongside the 

members of our group. However, I also felt a tension in that I did not want to expect undue 

emotional labor from my group members, particularly when they were so vulnerably sharing 

their experiences in being marginalized. I was also committed to our shared learning being 

reciprocal; as much as I was learning from my fellow group members, I wanted to give back in 

equal measure. In Anzaldúa’s (2012) terms, I was attempting to “give up investment” in my 

“customary point of view (the ego)” and to shift my attention to see my group members’ 

circumstances from their respective positions (p. 150).  

My participation in the group became a sort of dance as I navigated this tension, where I 

had to consistently check myself: How am I sharing? How am I listening? How can I decenter 

myself while centering my fellow group members? Essentially, I wanted to understand the 

experiences and perspectives of my fellow group members without defaulting to taken-for-

granted ideologies or superimposing my own interpretation—an endeavor I am not sure is truly 

possible. Recalling one of my dad’s many adages (and his father’s before him), I attempted to 

"listen two times as much as I spoke." I recall becoming increasingly self-conscious of my talk 

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time and actively resisting my inclination to fill up space when there were quiet pauses in our 

conversation. Instead, when I noticed that some members were particularly quiet, I asked direct 

questions. I also unofficially became our group notetaker; when group members shared, their 

words appeared on each of our computer screens as I captured them in our group’s shared 

Google Doc. Because I knew they would be able to read my interpretation of what they shared, I 

felt particularly self-conscious about how I represented their words on the page; while I knew 

they could tweak in real time what I wrote, I also recognized that my listening was being made 

visible. I wanted to convey through this non-verbal act how closely I was listening by attempting 

to represent on the page how they were representing themselves aloud (not just how and what I 

was hearing). 

Through these efforts, my growth outside our group extended in two important ways. 

First, as TTT group members’ personal experiences challenged me to contend with my privilege 

and complicity as a white, U.S. born NES, I felt a deepened sense of responsibility to become 

more aware of linguistic oppression as a part of U.S. history and education and its intersections 

with other identity markers. Essentially, my interactions with members of TTT (and the journey 

to France that I will describe later in this chapter) led me recognize that “my explorations in 

graduate school around language and literacy with a focus on translanguaging in TESOL 

education were essentially superficial if I didn’t really dig into the nature of language education 

as a colonizing enterprise,” which I wrote in a journal entry from December 2019. Thus, 

independent from our group, I embarked on what I described as a “months-long meditation on 

liberation and oppression (with Freire in the back of my mind)” where I “read and read and read 

and journaled and thought” with the express goal of expanding my critical consciousness. 

Consequently, I began a more in-depth study of “linguistic hierarchies, linguicism, monoglossic 

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and raciolinguistic ideologies...all taken-for-granted within the context of U.S. K-12 TESOL 

education,” which “run in opposition to translanguaging.” In extension of a practice that I had 

begun to develop alongside fellow members of TTT, I found myself listening more closely and 

endeavoring to sit with the felt and embodied experiences of those I read: the personal counter-

narratives of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Jacques Derrida, Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde; the 

theoretical and empirical works of critical race theory, decoloniality and raciolinguistics 

scholars; and alternative histories of the U.S. that critiqued dominant ideologies and narratives 

(e.g., Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015; Isenberg, 2017; Kendi, 2016; Ortiz, 2018). Many of these accounts 

were new to me, which made me wonder about the limited perspectives and criticality reflected 

in many of my previous undergraduate and graduate-level English language, literature and 

education courses in Michigan. (For a full list of the book-length texts I count as a part of my 

education in critical consciousness, visit this link.)  

Through repeated efforts to shift my attention from myself and my ego, both among TTT 

and in my ongoing self-study, to empathize and try to see the circumstances of others’ from their 

positions, I moved towards nepantla, “the place between worldviews” that became “a turning 

point initiating psychological and spiritual transformations” that led me to look inward 

(Anzaldua, 2015, p. 150). While I only expand on it briefly here, given my focus of this study on 

language teaching and education, in that same journal entry, I also began to recognize that my 

personal self-study “simultaneously required me to grapple with my own experience with abuse 

and trauma in the context of my childhood while opening my eyes in a new way to oppression 

and trauma writ large in the U.S. context.” Put most simply, as I engaged in a spirit of openness, 

vulnerability, and risk taking with the stories of those who have been historically marginalized in 

the U.S., whose languages and cultures have been stripped from their bodies and whose voices 

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have been silenced, my own experiences in being silenced emerged from the inner caverns where 

I had hid them away.  

Interlude #4 (December 2018) 

Shards of unsaid words  
like holy communion  
pressed onto my tongue 

purifying incense   

asphyxiating raw humanity. 

 

To swell with clenched jaw  

pinching slips of truth  
into yellow falsehoods,   
provocations like bile,  

hot humors  

of silenced womanhood. 

 

Traveling from spleen  
out of mouth, hooked  
onto the jagged edges  

of scar tissue, worms writhing  

into inescapable knots. 

 

Heart choked  

up from ribcage, inner-child  
offerings cloaked in shame 

 

Recalling my personal experiences with trauma was less of a matter of remembering 

them in my mind as it was of remembering it in my body, as I explained in that same journal 

entry: 

Trauma is like that. It makes you question what is good, what is new, what is life. How 

are you to know you can trust what seems good or new or life when all your previous 

experiences have taught you otherwise? First a disclaimer: I don’t know what it is like to 

carry centuries of racial trauma in my bones or to have that trauma reinscribed daily by 

both systemic oppression and individual encounters with those I know I can’t trust—or 

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those that I think I can trust, but find out I can’t. But I can make sense of it in a surface 

way with my own trauma.  

In making this connection, I began to explicitly recognize that efforts to contend with histories of 

oppression and to reimagine English language education as a liberatory pursuit, specifically 

through translanguaging praxis, required unlearning and relearning not just in my mind, but in 

my body. Connecting back to my experiences with TTT, I pursued a stance of empathy that did 

not center myself as a part of this ongoing self-study. Just as I had attempted to shift how I 

listened to my fellow TTT members without immediately superimposing my interpretation, I 

attempted to do the same with the stories and histories I read. While I turned to my personal 

experiences with trauma to empathize with the embodied harm experienced by those historically 

marginalized in the U.S., I also reminded myself to not assume that I could really understand 

how others’ experiences with systemic oppression lives in their bodies. Drawing connections 

between my experiences and those of others was fundamental for expanding my empathy and 

recognizing our shared humanity—but paradoxically I also had to continuously decenter myself 

so as not to recenter privileged perspectives or positionalities.  

As Anzaldúa (2015) suggests, I attempted to use my “wounds as openings to become 

vulnerable and available (present) to others,” which meant “staying in [my] body” (p. 153). 

Thus, just as I had learned to sit with the heavy and uncomfortable feelings of my own personal 

history in order to heal, so, too, did I begin to sit with the heavy and uncomfortable feelings of 

our history of language oppression and of instances where I might have been complicit in 

perpetuating harm as an LT and LTE. I explained this connection in another journal entry 

(December 2019): “Recognizing my complicity in perpetuating abuse and trauma and oppression 

within the broader system, reminds me of the survivor’s guilt I had to wrestle with last winter. 

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As I started to name the physical and verbal and emotional abuse I experienced growing up, I 

had to sit and relive those memories.” While I was the object of abuse in some of these 

memories, many of them were “moments where I witnessed it, perhaps only avoiding being hit 

by words or objects or hands because I stayed quiet. I also had to acknowledge that then as now, 

I have not only survived, but thrived, benefiting in spite of the abuse and oppression because of 

my conformity and silence.”  

In connection to Anzaldúa (2012), I “ground” myself in my own body in order to 

“connect” to my own inner resources, resulting in empowerment, or “the bodily feeling of being 

able to connect with inner voices/resources (images, symbols, beliefs, memories) during periods 

of stillness, silence, and deep listening or with kindred others in collective actions” (pp. 152-

153). At the same time, I had to immediately turn my lens outward to use my experiences “as a 

conduit to recognizing another’s suffering” and to take “responsibility for making changes” 

(Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 153). Thus, I extended this feeling of empowerment outside myself as I 

considered my place in U.S. society as an LT and LTE and inward as I reflected in my journal 

that “my personal liberation has been wrapped up in [acknowledging] my complicity in systemic 

oppression.” As I connected threads across my personal experiences with broader circumstances 

of oppression, I considered how I had benefited as a white, English-speaking learner throughout 

my schooling in the U.S. at the expense of my peers, whose racialized identities and 

marginalized language practices were positioned as deficits. Often, my White Mainstream 

English language and literacy practices were valorized throughout my experiences in school, and 

as a result, I leaned into the praise I received as a walking dictionary and bookworm. These 

affirming experiences likely contributed to my decision to become an ELA and ESL teacher, 

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where I also centered the same White Mainstream English practices, thus reinstituting the same 

patterns of dominance and oppression. 

Furthermore, I considered how I benefited as an ESL teacher, whose job security was 

predicated on the number of students’ whose English language practices were assessed as being 

within the threshold to qualify them for ESL services—assessments that I gave and evaluated. 

While I never intentionally placed students in the district’s ESL program who did not qualify 

according to state and district criteria, I do recall actively resisting parents and students who 

questioned my evaluation and advocated to not be placed in the program, especially in my first 

years of teaching. While I contended then that it was in the students’ best interests, I now 

question whose best interest I really had in mind. I also recall being a part of a meeting between 

the superintendent and the district’s ESL department, where I was newly hired into my second 

teaching position. Also new to his position, the superintendent asked the members of our 

department about the potential for bilingual education programming. My colleagues and I 

quickly responded in favor of the current design of the district’s ESL program, explaining that 

research had not found bilingual education to be more beneficial. While I had not yet 

encountered the well-established body of scholarship that highlights the benefits of bilingual 

education over ESL programming (e.g., Valentino & Reardon, 2015), I do recall a short moment 

of panic, knowing that I was not qualified to teach in a bilingual education program—an impulse 

toward self-preservation that reflected my willful ignorance of what might actually have been in 

the best interest of students. Suffice it to say that I continued to have a position in the district 

until I chose to leave four years later to pursue graduate studies full time. 

 

From this ongoing self-study within and beyond TTT, I experienced a transformation 

within my inner resources that aided me in navigating the difficult emotions of my continued 

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unlearning and relearning. Broadly, I describe these resources as the active choice of seeking 

discomfort in three ways: (1) moving toward defensiveness, (2) moving toward guilt, and (3) 

moving toward humility on the periphery. Believing, as Anzaldúa (2015) suggests, that we “can 

know the other” through both love and pain (p. 153), I considered what I might learn from 

discomfort. First, I began to more readily recognize moments when I experienced discomfort—

when I feel the need to defend myself or to run away from an interaction. In those moments, I 

feel my fists and chest tighten, my mind jumping to rationales for why I could justify fighting in 

or fleeing from an interaction where I was confronted by my own culpability in perpetuating 

dehumanization. Sometimes, these moments are instances where I do not recognize that I need to 

speak out against a harmful comment made by a colleague—or am scared to do so. Other times, 

these have been moments where I am afraid that the version of myself that I hold in my mind is 

not reflected in how others see me, such as the moment in the last chapter when Maíra 

challenged me to question whether my self-confidence is central to being able to call a place 

“home.” I felt ashamed that I had not immediately considered the material realities associated 

with immigrating to a new country and wondered how flippant I sounded when I suggested it 

was just a matter of being comfortable within yourself. In Anzaldúa’s (2015) view, by shifting 

my “customary point of view (the ego)” to “include the complexity of feeling two or more ways 

about a person/issue,” I began to move towards “a less defensive, more inclusive identity” (p. 

150). Thus, instead of attempting to rationalize what I shared earlier or mentally “checking out” 

of the conversation, my interactions in TTT taught me to double down on listening, recognizing 

that my discomfort indicated an opportunity for me to listen and learn.  

 

Second, I began to look more closely at the emergence of shame in these defensive and 

discomforting moments; these moments reflected barriers I have built internally that served no 

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one but myself. This explicit realization emerged in response to Dunbar-Ortiz’s (2015) 

description of the “race to innocence”: 

A “race to innocence” is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of 

complicity in structures of domination and oppression. This concept captures the 

assumption made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to any country. 

They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what occurred in their adopted country’s 

past...Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical 

trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behaviors of living 

generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent 

immigrants. (p. 229) 

In a memo that I composed after finishing the book, I explained, “Dunbar-Ortiz’s final words 

remind me that the overwhelming guilt I experience, whether I am acknowledging trauma and 

abuse in my family or the history of oppression experienced by indigenous people on this 

continent or elsewhere—this guilt is useless. In fact, I tend to think that it is this guilt that makes 

people turn away, to ignore, to [attempt] to erase these atrocities. This guilt perpetuates 

dehumanization.” I then turned back to Dunbar-Ortiz, who asks, “How then can US society come 

to terms with its past? How can it acknowledge responsibility?” Quoting the late Native historian 

Jack Forbes, Dunbar-Ortiz explained that he “always stressed that while living persons are not 

responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is 

a product of that past. Assuming this responsibility provides a means of survival and liberation” 

(p. 335). She then shared a few ways forward, which include acknowledging the violence of US 

military intervention, bringing to light the history and heritages of indigenous ancestries in U.S. 

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K-12 schooling, honoring the treaties the U.S. made with indigenous communities, restoring 

sacred sites, and providing reparations for reconstruction and expansion of Native nations.  

In response to Dunbar-Ortiz and others I had recently read, I recognized that “not one 

[Black, Indigenous or Person of Color] I have read has said the way forward is for white people 

or settler colonists or monolingual English-speaking U.S. citizens to feel guilty. As a social 

construct, guilt forces us to turn away or look down rather than to look directly at oppression.” 

Once again making a connection to my experiences with harm in my personal history, I 

explained:  

The guilt I experienced from my childhood trauma forced me to close myself off, to put 

up a shell, to disconnect. I have learned to see that acknowledging responsibility helps me 

to imagine a way forward where I can do and be differently. I can take up space and have 

a voice despite those who inflicted abuse in my family. I can come alongside those who 

have also experienced abuse rather than fearing that their experiences with oppression 

will remind me of my own. 

In seeing these parallels between my personal experiences and the nature of oppression writ 

large, I could no longer knowingly associate myself with the dehumanizing practices of English 

language education. And that meant that I had to continue seeking opportunities as an LT and 

LTE where I could unlearn and relearn, not from the dominant perspectives and practices 

privileged in the U.S., but from the perspectives and practices positioned on the periphery. 

However, just as I had begun to learn to empathize without centering myself, I had to consider 

how I might pursue opportunities to learn from the periphery without imposing myself or 

reasserting my privilege as a white, U.S. born, NES.  

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Ultimately, I began to consider how I might adopt what I am calling a stance of “humility 

on the periphery.” By this, I am referring to instances I have where I have been invited and 

accepted to stand alongside others who are positioned on the periphery based, for instance, on 

their language backgrounds, racialized identities, or national origins. These experiences emerged 

organically, often because of a shared commitment, such as collaboratively inquiring into 

translanguaging, travelling as a part of an educational fellowship, or choosing to take a similar 

class or professional learning experience—although they also require intentionality on my part to 

seek out these shared commitments. They can be conceptualized as contact zones (Pratt, 1991), 

where individuals from across a variety of positionalities, backgrounds, and experiences have the 

opportunity to collide and negotiate across their differences in order to achieve a shared purpose. 

However, simply sharing this space does not mean that I have been invited to stand alongside 

others who have been historically marginalized. Instead, in my initial interactions, I have 

extended what I learned from my engagement in TTT in order to decenter myself and center 

others: monitoring my talk time, conveying active listening through my body language and 

question asking, and explicitly naming and questioning problematic power dimensions that 

inevitably emerge in social interactions. I check whether what I am sharing or asking comes from 

a place of ego, where I am attempting to maintain my unearned privilege as a white, U.S.-born, 

English-dominant speaker by reinscribing dominant ideologies, or whether I am intentionally 

carving out space to level hierarchies and co-construct knowledge. I also attempt to convey that I 

am always learning, rather than feigning awareness and knowledge, but that my continued 

learning is my responsibility. In my view, these intentional choices are all necessary to foster the 

development of the inner resources requisite for these experiences to become nepantla contact 

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zones. I will further illustrate the enactment of these inner resources in the next section, as they 

have become central to how I attempt to “live with a translanguaging stance.”  

Seeking Nepantla Contact Zones 

TTT’s interactions and our critical study of translanguaging began to seep into other 

interactions in my life. Within our group, many of us aligned ourselves with translanguaging as a 

“theory of language and practice…[that] has the potential to disrupt monolingual bias [and] the 

potential to disrupt these like perceived boundaries around nation-states and people,” a point I 

raised during one of our later meetings (February 22, 2019). I wondered how we might extend 

this to blur perceived boundaries between ourselves and others within our personal interactions: 

“People talk about how translanguaging disrupts these perceived boundaries, [like those] 

between nation states, but if we zoom in on a micro-level, it also disrupts these boundaries in our 

interpersonal relationships.” I also saw this as a necessary challenge for myself, acknowledging 

that “if I'm not doing this on a personal level, I can't do it in my own teaching.” Consistent with 

Anzaldúa (2015), who suggests that the “path of knowledge requires that we apply what we learn 

to all our daily activities, to our relationships with ourselves, with others, with the environment, 

with nature” (p. 91), I wondered aloud to TTT what it might mean to “live with a 

translanguaging stance across spaces in practice,” an objective that I began to actively pursue in 

interactions beyond our group. 

 

One example of this occurred during a writing retreat that began later the same day that I 

stated my desire to “live with a translanguaging stance” (February 22, 2019). I attended the 

retreat with two close friends from graduate school, Ashley Moore and Eliana A. Castro, both 

bilingual English-Spanish speakers. During our interactions, we often default to using English, a 

meaning-making resource that we all share; however, towards the end of our retreat, we were 

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joined by Ashley’s then-partner, whose dominant language is Spanish. During brunch, the three 

of them had launched into a discussion in Spanish. When this happened in the past, either with 

them or others speaking a language in which I had limited capacity to engage, I often tuned out 

and excluded myself during the discussion, reflective of monoglossic ideologies of language 

separation. However, as I recalled in a memo I wrote a month later (March 29, 2019), I explicitly 

made a decision to listen more actively during this occasion. Having picked up some Spanish 

from my students and studying on my own for a brief period in the past, I was surprised to 

discover that I understood more than I expected. While I could not contribute to the conversation 

in Spanish, I could understand much of what my friends were saying and would contribute in 

English when I could.  

Around that same time, I began co-teaching a high school ESL class as a part of an 

ongoing research project to investigate my translanguaging pedagogy as an LTE. Given that I 

had returned to the very classroom I taught in as an LT, I inevitably compared this to previous 

teaching experiences from three years before. Referring to this experience in that same memo 

(March 29, 2019), I wrote, “I’m also noticing that I am very willing to listen and try to make 

sense of what students are saying in the moments where they are using resources other than 

English.” Additionally, my interactions with TTT, where we had contended with our taken-for-

granted practice of resorting to English as the dominant language, had taught me that I needed to 

be doubly aware about resisting the dominance of English and explicit in my willingness to 

engage in meaning-making using other resources. In other words, I had to explicitly reject my 

assumed privilege as a dominant English speaker in order to disrupt the influence of 

assimilationist ideologies. Thus, in returning to the ESL classroom, I recognized more readily 

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that students were unlikely to integrate meaning-making practices other than English into their 

classroom interactions unless I, as the teacher, repeatedly invited them to do so.  

While it is beyond the purview of this current study to map the transformation within my 

enacted translanguaging pedagogy as an LT and LTE, for now, I point to this experience as 

another example that I was actively seeking discomfort in nepantla contact zones. Reflecting on 

these aforementioned experiences in that same memo, I recognized that “in our U.S. context, it 

seems rare that I have to extend beyond the linguistic resources I use on a daily basis and this is 

part of my privilege.” I continued in the memo to explain the following: 

I notice that, when I am engaged with others whose linguistic repertoires include 

language systems other than English, they are apologetic if they are concerned that I (or 

others around me) cannot understand them (e.g., because of accent, grammar use, etc.). I 

think of Elie’s comments when he was sharing at the conclusion of our meeting [that 

suggested] it is his responsibility alone to communicate in English in a prescribed way 

rather than our shared responsibility to negotiate meaning together. 

While I recalled other instances from the past where people were apologetic for their accent or 

grammar when speaking English, such as colleagues or parents of previous students, I was 

learning to claim my responsibility to disrupt the presumed power dynamic in our interactions. 

To that end, I wondered how else I might stretch my own meaning-making practices as well as 

actively redistribute the privileges I have as a U.S.-born NES. When the opportunity to apply for 

a program called the Fellowship to Enhance Global Understandings, or FEGU, appeared through 

my university, I was eager to apply. 

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Pursing Nepantla Abroad 

As previously mentioned, I was unable to study abroad during my undergraduate 

education because of financial constraints. While I had often imagined leveraging my experience 

as an ESL educator to teach abroad, this never seemed feasible for me as a young professional 

who was establishing her career just as the U.S. economy was careening into the Great 

Recession. Hence, FEGU seemed to be a once-in-a-life opportunity that would allow me to study 

abroad with the support of a university fellowship. FEGU is an established program for doctoral 

students within the College of Education at Michigan State University; the general premise of the 

program is to create a learning experience for doctoral students to investigate educational 

systems within contexts outside the U.S. and their intersection with other facets of society, such 

as language, gender, race, or immigration. Serendipitously, in the year I chose to apply, the 

program was being offered in France, which would afford me the opportunity to extend my 

language repertoire using a resource I had already begun to develop. In addition, given what I 

learned from Elie throughout TTT, I felt particularly primed to explore the dynamics of 

education, language, race, and socioeconomic status in France. While I would have been pleased 

to have studied in another country or language context, I also recognized that I had essentially 

prepared for this opportunity well before I even applied. 

In my application for FEGU, I explained that I would bring a unique lens to “[exploring] 

the intersection of identities, ideologies, and education” in the French context, particularly in 

relation to “my growing expertise as it relates to how learners’ identities are discursively 

constructed within micro-level sociocultural contexts, like individual classrooms, meso-level 

contexts like schools and neighborhoods, and macro-level contexts, like nation-states.” By this 

point, I had also already decided to embark on “an ongoing autoethnographic project” that had 

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grown out of my collaboration with TTT. To that end, my expressed goal in participating in 

FEGU was to “problematize the limitations of my U.S. and monolingual English-centric 

paradigms and broaden the set of experiences and lens I bring to my work as a teacher and 

scholar in the TESOL and bilingual education world” from an intersectional perspective that 

considers “immigration status, religion, race, age, gender, and linguistic, physical, and cognitive 

abilities.”  

While I had not yet encountered Anzaldúa’s theorization of nepantla, I had explored Pratt 

and Canagarajah’s theorization of contact zones and had begun to recognize the need to create 

contact zone interactions for myself given the predominantly white and monolingual English-

speaking contexts within which I most frequently interacted. Looking back on this experience, I 

can also see how my interactions with TTT had taught me to pursue what I would now describe 

as nepantla contact zones. Until this point, my interactions had generally emerged organically. 

Thus, my engagement in FEGU marked the first opportunity where I drew upon my experience 

with TTT to intentionally enter a contact zone interaction with the expressed purpose of 

transforming my ideological perspectives and inner resources. Thus, in a TTT meeting that I 

attended just after being accepted to the FEGU program, I explained the following: “The benefit 

that I have is I'm going to go in with the frame of translanguaging in mind. So I think that the 

kind of risk taking then I'll be able to take [into] it will be very different [than] three years ago 

when I also said I'm a monolingual English speaker.”  

My interactions with TTT quite literally bled into my experiences as a part of FEGU; I 

recall carrying my open laptop, where I was listening to Elie share his final comment during a 

TTT meeting, as I walked to Room 107 in Erickson Hall for my first in-person FEGU meeting. I 

closed my laptop as I entered the room, but my conversation with TTT lingered in my mind as 

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the faculty members and fellows participating in FEGU introduced themselves. Later in the 

meeting, when I was paired with two other fellows, Candice and Ofelia (both multilingual 

speakers who grew up in the U.S.), I shared that one of my goals in participating was to expand 

my critical consciousness of hegemonic language ideologies as well as my own translanguaging 

capacity. In response, Ofelia shared that she tended to not employ her Spanish resources in 

academic contexts because of unspoken expectations to use English, but that it limited what she 

could express. Recalling this in the memo I wrote later that day, I returned to one of the 

questions I had explored with TTT: How can I, as a person who exists in linguistic privilege, 

“create space to support others in using their full linguistic resources—to know that it’s ok for 

me to have to do the work of figuring out what they are saying in French or Mandarin or Spanish 

or Arabic?” I recognized that, similar to what I would do in a classroom context, I could directly 

ask what a word is in another language or open Google Translate, but I began to wonder how 

else I might take responsibility for shifting away from English while I was also learning a new 

language. In Anzaldua’s (2015) framing, I was motivated to “discover resources” within myself 

and to “take responsibility” for consciously contributing in my interactions within new contact 

zone communities (p. 136) 

This question became a central concern of mine as I prepared to embark on my two-week 

FEGU journey, and, in fact, was the reason I decided to remain in France for an additional six 

weeks beyond the fellowship. I was in the privileged position of having the university cover the 

majority of my travel expenses, including my airfare, and I knew that it was common for FEGU 

fellows to request an adjustment to their return flight date in order to extend their stays. After 

researching multiple options for lodging, including considering home stays or short-term 

teaching positions, I found a relatively inexpensive Airbnb in southwest France, where I would 

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travel by train. My intention in staying and traveling to another part of France was to be forced to 

navigate communication beyond English—to intentionally seek discomfort.  

In thinking about the structure of my experience from the perspective of an LT, I 

recognize the tremendous benefit of being immersed in a language learning experience with 

multiple levels of support. Thus, I think of the two weeks I spent in Paris as a part of FEGU as an 

opportunity to expand my French language repertoire and translanguaging capacity while being 

well supported within my zone of proximal development. While I certainly was immersed in 

French during the two-weeks FEGU program, I rarely had to extend myself beyond English. 

During our journey to and from the airport, when we checked into our hotel, and throughout our 

excursions around Paris and nearby villages, my FEGU colleagues and I were consistently 

surrounded by others who were bilingual English-French speakers, including the two faculty 

members who hosted the fellowship, two graduate students who had previously participated the 

same FEGU program the year before and returned to support our experience, and our tour guide, 

Felipe. We spent several days observing and eventually teaching English language lessons at un 

lycée just north of Paris, but even then, les professeurs et les étudiantes parlent anglais. The rare 

occasions where I had to negotiate meaning-making and communication without assistance were 

when we were ordering food or taking le metro, which I only did a few times on my own. 

Generally, during these interactions, I was joined by two other fellows and close friends, Christa 

and Renee. Together, we would negotiate meaning using various ecological resources, such as 

menus or signs; I also had the opportunity to more explicitly use my developing French. The 

support and success I experienced during these two weeks were vital in building my confidence 

in my expanding translanguaging repertoire while being relatively within my comfort zone. 

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However, before I knew it, FEGU came to an end, and I began my month-long solo journey in 

the southwest corner of France.  

Interlude #5 (May-June 2019) 

Figure 5: Instagram Post from First Solo Week in France 

 

 

Note. This photo and caption was composed during the first week of my solo stay in France. 

 

 

 123 

Figure 6: Instagram Post from Second Solo Week in France 

 

 

Note. This photo and caption was composed during the first week of my solo stay in France. 

 

 

 

 124 

Figure 7: Instagram Post from Third Solo Week in France 

 

 

 
Note. This photo and caption was composed during the third week of my solo stay in France. 

 
 

 

 125 

Figure 8: Instagram Post from Fourth Solo Week in France 

 

 

 

 
Note. This photo and caption was composed during the fourth week of my solo stay in France. 

 

Existing in Discomfort  

While my time in France could be analyzed as a part of a whole dissertation on its own, I 

wish to highlight how my experiences there point back to the ongoing transformation that grew 

 126 

from my interactions with TTT. With me, I carried an increased awareness of the multiple 

ideological influences that shape linguistic hierarchies. This included Elizabeth and Zhongfeng’s 

fierce commitment to pursuing the enactment of translanguaging as an act of social justice and to 

level socially-constructed language hierarchies. I also carried with me Abe’s story of lírico and 

the example he and Laura both set in having “the courage to go and do it,” with regard to 

entering communicative contexts in which they had developing capacity in the dominant 

language. And I carried with me the vulnerable strength and critical self-awareness modeled by 

Elie and Maíra in shifting the physical and abstract space I would call “home.” (In truth, each of 

these statements could be said of all members of TTT.) 

Being in France on my own challenged me to navigate linguistic hierarchies and how I 

might mitigate them in new ways. Essentially, this was the first time I was living in a context 

where the dominant language was not English. Even though English is a lingua franca in France 

and even though most people with whom I interacted knew some English, I did not want to rely 

on or expect this in my interactions–for a couple reasons. For one, I wanted to practice and 

expand my capacity to communicate in French. I also saw myself as an interloper, and as such, I 

did not want to rely on my privilege as an NES or to be perceived by others as an “entitled 

American.” At the same time, I could only get so far on my French skills—and a bit further with 

Google Translate—before many people with whom I interacted switched to English. Attempting 

to limp through conversations in French felt like another imposition, particularly when my 

interactions were predominately with people in the service industry. Essentially, I felt like to do 

so would be to trap the servers or sales clerks with whom I interacted into practicing French with 

me. This raised a whole other set of questions around power dynamics in relation to class.  

On the one hand, I wanted to discard my privilege as a NES. I wanted to be courageous, 

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like Abe, and immerse myself in French. I wanted to strike up a conversation with strangers who 

seemed open to it. On the other hand, I was grateful that I could withdraw within myself, and to 

rely on the taken-for-granted assumption that others would switch to English on my behalf. I 

could put my headphones on, bury my face in my phone, and find human connection through 

Instagram or Snapchat—recognizing that this, too, was a privilege. As I shared in Interlude #5 

(Figure 7), “My privilege makes it possible for me to stay within myself if I so choose, but at 

what cost. Practicing vulnerability, empathy and openness means pursuing what is unknown. To 

extend beyond our boundaries in pursuit of liminality. And to have the choice to do so with 

relatively little consequence is itself privilege. What do we discover about ourselves and those 

around us in liminal spaces?” A week into my solo journey, I resolved to find a community 

context where I could stretch beyond myself. Through a website called Meetup that I had first 

encountered in Detroit, I discovered a weekly conversation class, where I eventually met two 

other women from the U.S.; after meeting with the teacher, a native French woman who had 

lived in California for a time, I found she also gave one-on-one classes, of which I took 

advantage a handful of times. (See Interlude #5, Figure 8.) Grateful though I was for these 

experiences, they were not the interactions I had hoped for before coming to France. (See 

Interlude #5, Figure 9.) At the same time, I knew how fortunate I was to have the time and 

financial resources to afford them.  

Grounding myself in my body and my discomfort once more (Anzaldúa, 2015), I 

grappled with the mix of these complicated emotions: I felt sadness in my loneliness, but I also 

felt tremendous joy and gratitude for the opportunity to be abroad. In any given moment, I might 

feel powerless and resourceful. I was, for the first time, sojourning in a new country—a privilege 

that I had yearned for, but questioned whether I would ever enjoy. I was also humbled to 

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consider that I was the first person in my family to set foot in Europe since my great-

grandparents immigrated. I remember sitting alone at the southwest corner of France, staring at 

the Atlantic Ocean and feeling so small and lucky. I knew the other side of this ocean, having 

glimpsed it in New York and Rhode Island and North Carolina and Florida during one of many 

road trips. But I was the first in four generations to view it from this side of the world.  

Sitting in what little knowledge I have of my family’s roots, I began to wonder what 

courage and determination it took for my great-grandparents to decide to leave behind their 

homes in Palermo and Calabria, Italy and Osijek, Croatia (my mother stills calls it Austria-

Hungary), escaping the violence and economic hardship of their homelands at the turn of the 

20th century. I wondered what fears and hopes they carried as they began anew as immigrants in 

a new country and a new language, laboring in the coal mines of Clarksburg, West Virginia and 

the Ford auto plants of Detroit, Michigan to create a home for their new families. I wondered 

what heartbreaks or joys my grandparents experienced as the children of immigrants in a 

xenophobic country, learning English while attending school—at least until 11 or 12 years old, in 

the case of my paternal grandparents—before they began to work in Detroit factories themselves. 

And I wondered what threads of connection were lost between their generations, my parents, and 

now me, in cutting roots on one side of the Atlantic and setting down new roots on the other side.  

Somehow, I needed to travel 4,000 miles to truly begin to grapple with what was both 

lost and gained over four generations of assimilation—to catch a glimpse of myself as nos/otras. 

I recognized that I simultaneously existed in privilege and loss. I had the privilege of being born 

in the U.S. because Salvatore and Francesca, Serafina and Giovanni, Anna and John, and two 

forebears whose names I do not know chose to leave behind their homes and communities. I had 

the privilege of being a NES because those same forebears chose to sever their Italian, 

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Hungarian, and German roots, believing it necessary for their children to learn English, become 

“Americans,” and be successful in U.S. schools and society—the result of monoglossic 

ideologies (García, 2009) and native speaker saviorism (Jenks & Lee, 2019) seeping into their 

home language policies. And even if my Italian and Hungarian forebears were once racialized as 

other than white in the U.S. context, my parents and I are racialized as white today.  

If I am being really honest, then as now and in the dozens of moments in between when I 

have grappled with this reality, I have been brought to tears, my heart tight in my chest and my 

instincts telling me to turn away. Bury it away again. You’re making too much of it. You’re 

fine—and others have had it worse. They are feelings of grief that I do not understand and 

wonder if I ever will, given the loss of my family’s history over the passage of time and 

assimilation and silence. What I do know is that these feelings resonate with those I mentioned in 

the last chapter, when I reckoned with the survivor’s guilt I experienced with abuse in my 

immediate family—when I accepted the fact that I had both suffered abuse and was complicit in 

it. After all, I chose to remain silent and to conform to the prescribed codes of behavior in my 

family (I know this is not really fair to my child self). If I am being doubly honest, I always ask 

myself why it matters, especially in the context of this study and especially in academic 

conversations. In turning back to the theoretical framework of this study, though, I resolve to 

turn back and answer that question. Why does it matter? What does my body, as the ground of 

thought (Anzaldúa, 2015), tell me? 

*** 

“Nepantla is the midway point between the conscious and the unconscious, the place where 

transformations are enacted. Nepantla is a place where we can accept contradiction and paradox” 

(Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 56). 

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*** 

at the edge 

of the ocean, the opposite  

boundary of the liminal  

 

 

 

 

space  

 

crossed by my forebears 

both nos/otras 

oppressor/oppressed 

 

simultaneously 

standing on opposite  

shores  

 

both product/producer of assimilation 

 

of school gates 

creating rifts  

like the Atlantic Ocean between children and  

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their parents 

 

severed roots shallowly grown 

thirsty for “home”  

*** 

 

This poem was composed during the final day of composing my findings for this study 

and represents the in-the-moment fracturing and transformation that occurred as I relived and 

narrativized my time in France through the theoretical lens of this study nearly two years after.  

While I am only just beginning to explicitly name how I am a product of oppression as much as I 

have been a producer of it, I recognize that contending with the deleterious effects of forced 

assimilation and erasure experienced by my family continues to live on today in my body and 

relationships. In reflecting on what it means, I recognize that viewing myself as nos/otras has 

allowed me to have compassion and empathy for myself and to extend that to other generations, 

past, present and future, of people who have been or may be forced to sever their linguistic and 

cultural roots. Likewise, I see the emergence of that empathy and the inner resources therein as 

necessary to the work of actively decentering myself and the assimilationist language ideologies 

that reify my privilege as a white, NES, U.S.-born LT and LTE. And finally, I contend that this 

effort to decenter myself has been necessary to center the meaning-making resources of 

language-minoritized students through translanguaging pedagogies. To this end, I now turn to the 

discussion and implications for this study. 

 

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CHAPTER 8: PEDAGOGICAL REIMAGINING 

“Your ethnic tribe wants you to isolate, insisting that you remain within race and class 

boundaries. The dominant culture prefers that you abandon your roots and assimilate…How can 

you step outside ethnic and other labels while cleaving to your root identity? Your identity has 

roots you share with all people and other beings—spirit, feeling, and body constitute a greater 

identity category” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 140). 

This critical autoethnography began as a self-study of my emerging translanguaging 

pedagogy as a white, self-defined monolingual NES LT and LTE. This study is rooted in some of 

my earliest questions as teacher: How can I advance more equitable and inclusive educational 

experiences among language-minoritized learners in spite of the gatekeeping functions of 

language and literacy in K-12 U.S. education? My initial exploration into translanguaging came 

through my interactions with my students—where, in the contact zone space of our classroom, 

our respective meaning-making resources, cultural practices, and backgrounds collided. At the 

time, our translanguaging interactions grew from the practical matters of teaching and learning: 

to build relationships with students, to communicate, and to scaffold the development of school-

based English language and literacy practices. Throughout the course of these interactions, 

though, taken-for-granted assumptions about classroom power dynamics and language 

hierarchies remained. It was not until I began to explicitly learn about translanguaging that I 

began to consider what ideological forces I needed to trouble in order to enact it as praxis. Thus, 

this critical autoethnography evolved into a study of my ideological reckoning and 

translanguaging reimagining as an LT and LTE. Over the past decade and a half, I've become 

aware of how I, as a seemingly well-intentioned white, NES LT and LTE, have been caught up 

in assimilationist language ideologies, or desconocimientos, both carried away by and 

 133 

perpetuating them. Unraveling their influence has resulted in the ongoing process of 

conocimiento reflected in the findings of this study (Chapter 5-7), which I now thread together 

with the literature review and theoretical framework (Chapters 2-3) by way of discussion. I then 

conclude with what implications this study offers LTs and LTEs. 

Revisiting Chapter 5: An Ideological Starting Place 

Discussion 

In looking back at Chapter 5, “An Ideological Starting Place,” my earliest experiences 

continually centered White Mainstream English, though there were multiple opportunities for me 

to exist in culturally and linguistically-diverse spaces, or contact zones (Pratt, 1991). I learned 

from a young age to associate particular language variations or language systems with 

geographic locations, whether the regional dialects of the Midwest compared with the Southeast 

U.S. or the bounded named language systems of European nation-states, all reflective of the 

Herderian Triad and monoglossic ideologies (Bauman & Briggs, 2000; Blommaert & 

Verschueren, 1992; García, 2009). Even though I knew that my grandparents and great-

grandparents spoke Italian, Hungarian and German, I also knew that, here in the U.S., our family 

spoke English. Once I began school, specifically in Florida, my classrooms had the potential to 

be natural contact zones, raising my awareness of linguistic, racial and economic diversity in the 

U.S. While I do not recall explicitly negotiating communication, beliefs or values with my peers, 

my experiences at school and among my family made me curious about language diversity, as 

evidenced by my “language auction” imagining, exchanging Italian swear words and hand 

gestures with my younger brother, and my decision to study another language as soon as I had 

the chance. However, even after studying French for five years in high school and college, I 

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continued to define myself as monolingual, reflective of the influence of native speakerism 

(Holliday, 2005) and the “pure” boundaries delineated by monoglossic ideologies (García, 2009). 

I chose to pursue college as a first-generation student because school had been a place 

where I was affirmed. As a white, fourth-generation immigrant, I was acculturated into White 

Mainstream English as well as the literacy practices I encountered in school, and I self-identified 

as a reader and writer from a young age. When I began college, those identities informed my 

decision to become a teacher, specifically an English language arts teacher. My undergraduate 

experience and teacher preparation program represent important contact zones that began 

pointing me towards nepantla. From sharing a home with Guangye and tutoring international 

students to eventually deciding to also become an English as a second language teacher, I began 

to bump up against language and cultural practices outside those into which I had been 

acculturated. These opportunities emerged from a mix of happenstance and intentionality: I 

chose to go to college and become an English teacher, to build a friendship with Guangye and 

become roommates, and to post an online advertisement to be an English tutor. These choices 

were, at least in part, the result of my NES status, the alignment of my literacy practices with 

whiteness, and the access and privilege they both afforded me in school.  

However, these decisions were also the result of my precarious financial status. Guangye 

and I became roommates because we realized that renting an apartment five miles southwest of 

campus and cooking our own meals would be less expensive than living in the dorms. I began 

tutoring because I needed to supplement my income; if it had not been for that, I may never have 

met Monica, Stewart, Julie, Brad, and Kelsey, whose lived experiences complicated my 

awareness of what it meant to be NNESs and immigrants in the U.S. I decided to study French 

and become an ESL teacher to ensure I could finish college quickly and gain employment as a 

 135 

teacher. And because I had to work a third job as a server at a local restaurant during my 

teaching internship and first year of teaching, I had the opportunity to meet Jose, who made me 

further aware of the challenges of being an undocumented NNES in the U.S. In other words, 

while my racial and linguistic privilege may have contributed to me going to college and 

becoming a teacher, my lack of class privilege resulted in a handful of decisions that led to life-

changing contact zone interactions.  

My experiences in college and particularly the juxtaposition of my teacher preparation 

classes to become certified to teach ELA and ESL mark other early fractures, or rajaduras, in my 

(des)conocimiento. Through Wilson (1859), Johnson (1912), Omi and Winant (1994), and 

Purcell-Gates (2002), I began to see race, language, and literacy as social constructs created to 

maintain the power of few and the disenfranchisement of many. I also began to explicitly 

recognize that I had benefited because of the alignment between my language and literacy 

practices with White Mainstream English. I claimed responsibility (at least in words, if not yet in 

action) to disrupt the power dynamics of language and literacy in my future classrooms. 

However, with few real-life examples of how to do this in the classroom, I reproduced the same 

assimilationist ideologies into which I was indoctrinated as a beginning ESL/ELA teacher, 

upholding the ideological belief of native speaker saviorism (Jenks & Lee, 2019) whereby 

language-minoritized students positioned as cultural Others might be “saved” by learning 

English and achieving proximity to whiteness.  

The eight years I spent as a classroom teacher, ESL program coordinator, and de facto 

advocate for students and families marked a radical period of unlearning and relearning for me, 

but as I point out in Chapter 5, this came at a cost to the 150 students14 I taught over that time. 

14 Carlos, Angelo, Drew, Lorena, Arielis, Aracelis, Jose Alberto, Jose Armando, Lizmarie, Genesis M., Francheli, 
Tatiana, Andres O., Andres A., Genesis R., Antonio, Danny, Yabdiel, Yabner, Luis, Lorenzo B., Alexis, Giovanni, 

 

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How many times did they have to implicitly or explicitly resist restrictive classroom language 

policies, curricular resources that did not reflect their identities or experiences, or instructional 

and assessment practices that undermined their language and cultural resources? How much 

courage did it take for Ishmael to ask me, “Miss, don’t you know that Puerto Ricans like to talk a 

lot?” How much more challenging, disaffirming, and dehumanizing had I made their educational 

experiences?  

While I began to recognize my own translanguaging capacity and to exhibit the 

characteristics associated with the cooperative disposition of translingual speakers (Canagarajah, 

2013) during that time, the lens I used to view my students, myself and our interactions was 

largely constrained by assimilationist language ideologies and my desconocimientos. Thus, while 

my time in the classroom represents a critical contact zone in my process of conocimiento, the 

collisions in this space did not yet result in the fracturing and transformation that within the 

internal and liminal space of nepantla. To be honest, I question whether I should have even had 

my own classroom without having developed this critical awareness since I likely enacted undue 

harm on my students, a question that resonates with recent critiques of practice-based teacher 

education (i.e., Daniels & Varghese, 2019; Peercy et al., 2019). Today, as an LTE, I contend that 

much of what I learned during my eight years of teaching should be central to how we educate 

future LTs and is reflective of what scholars in TESOL and bilingual education have advocated 

for over a decade, a point that I will return to in the implications section (e.g., García, 2009; 

 

Isaiha, Joel, Kiara, Genesis S., Jorge, Natasha, Erica, Yalianez, Yuleidis, Marcos, Carlos, Angelo, Drew, Jose A., 
Maria, Abel, Ivan, Nelson, Mario, Tony, Angel, Julie, Dana, Adrianna, Miguel, Beto, Eugene, Brenda, Marvin, 
Sergio, David, Henry, Josue, Dyanaris, Manny, Guillermo,Yosue, May, Aline, Neishaliz, Lilly, Miguel, Francheska, 
Jennifer, Tatiana, Eleonore, Krystof, Sydney, Hohin, Oskars, Sue Lyn, Ricky, Louis, Michal Z., Michal M., Anahita, 
Sunny, Tomas, Jiri, Ryanka, Giulia, Elysabeth, Elie, Oriol, Farah, Emma, Maelle, Camille, Celyan, Allesandro, 
Jamael, Alena, Amina, Helena, Cecile, Lorenzo, Giovanni, Richard, Renad, Noor, Fadi, Farah, Baraa, Kristina, 
Vlad, Giorgia, Amadeo, Anna, Yaela, Murtaza, Caroline, Dimitrios, Fiona, Jonathan, Julie, Pietro, Selim, Nina, 
Thomas, William, Marc, Wei-Shun, Wei-Yao, Taihei, York, Megan, Agathe, Alexis, Asaad, Flavia, Honore, Sofian, 
Marisol, Daan, Joppe, Tiphaine 

 137 

García & Li, 2014; García, Ibarra Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017; Seltzer, 2018). This emerging 

realization is what informed my commitment to make translanguaging as a critical praxis the 

central focus of my current work as an LTE and researcher.  

Revisiting Chapter 6: Ideological Reckoning 

Given my aims in this study and the gap I intend to address among LTE scholarship, the 

findings reflected in Chapter 6, “Ideological Reckoning,” offer new insight into the role of self-

study among LTEs and perhaps its potential in preparing LTs to enact translanguaging as a 

critical praxis. TTT emerged from a common purpose: our shared inquiry into translanguaging. 

Unlike my time in the classroom, where students were more or less forced to interact with me, 

the opportunities I had to explicitly learn about translanguaging in theory and practice as a 

beginning LTE and specifically as a part of TTT represent a co-constructed contact zone, where 

each member chose to be a part of the group. Thus, to the extent possible, we attempted to 

position each other as equals—unlike the inherent teacher-student power dynamics of the 

classroom.  

Having translanguaging as our central focus undoubtedly said a lot about our 

predispositions towards interacting with each other as well as the practices we co-constructed to 

create generative contact zone interactions. We all had experience negotiating communication 

across named language systems. We each already had a vested interest in English language 

education, either as learners, LTs, or LTEs; we all had already been introduced to 

translanguaging and shared a commitment to its critical aims. Thus, from the beginning, our 

group was not shy in naming and critiquing assimilationist language ideologies. We were also 

quite open from the beginning about sharing our respective experiences with language and 

language education from an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1991) and became more so 

 138 

over time as we discussed vulnerable matters, such as Zhongfeng and Abe acknowledging their 

experiences in being racialized within the U.S., Maíra and Elie acknowledging their self-

consciousness and doubt in using English, or Elizabeth, Laura and I acknowledging the 

uncertainty we felt in calling ourselves “bilingual.”  

While I was familiar with many of the matters we discussed in the group from my own 

studies as a doctoral student, such as the deleterious influence of native speakerism (Holliday, 

2006) or raciolinguistic ideologies (Alim, 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015), TTT put real faces and 

experiences to these matters. Among a community of people who I consider friends, I felt a 

heightened sense of accountability to acknowledge my complicity in perpetuating harmful 

ideologies and to take active steps to redress this harm in my work as an LT and LTE. Within the 

very real human-to-human interactions of our group, I experienced feelings of guilt when I 

realized that I benefited as a NES LT at the expense of NNES LTs, like Zhongfeng or Abe, in the 

field of English language teaching. I felt contrite when I realized that my overly simplistic 

supposition that feeling at “home” had to do with one’s sense of self-worth undermined the 

layers of complexity and marginalization that Maíra faced in calling New Hampshire “home.” I 

felt affirmed when my groupmates echoed my struggle in feeling at home among my immediate 

family in contrast to the acceptance and understanding we experience among each other. I felt 

inspired by everyone’s stories of courage and resolve in navigating new contexts, even when 

they felt like interlopers in new languages and cultures. And I felt a growing sense of empathy 

that helped me move beyond myself as I sought to understand, to the extent possible, the 

experiences of my groupmates. While I did not understand it then, this experience planted an 

important seed that later allowed me to extend that empathy to myself, a point I will return to 

shortly. 

 139 

Reflecting heteroglossic commitments to meaning-making (García, 2009), our group’s 

interactions also provided me with multiple real-life examples of how to consciously decenter 

English (and myself) to the extent possible, explicitly contend with inherent ideological power 

dynamics (as discussed above), and draw upon the inner resources necessary to enact in 

translanguaging. Although English was the shared resource among our group, we explicitly 

questioned its centrality in our interactions and purposefully integrated opportunities for 

meaning-making using other resources, such as visually representing our language practices 

through our language portraits or exploring the term lírico as a metaphor for translanguaging. 

That said, our group’s interactions made me increasingly aware of how difficult it is to work in 

opposition to ideological forces, such as monoglossic ideologies (García, 2009) and native 

speakerism (Holliday, 2005), even with our conscious efforts to decenter English. I became 

much more self-conscious about how I participated in our interactions, which resulted in more 

careful listening and purposeful speaking during our discussions. Over the course of these 

interactions, I began to shift my attention from my “customary point of view (the ego)” to 

instead focus on trying to see and empathize with my group mates’ perspectives, a process that 

taught me to let go of my defensiveness in order to adopt a more inclusive stance (Anzaldúa, 

2015, p. 150). These interactions raised my awareness of the often invisible inner resources 

needed to resist hegemonic ideologies and enact translanguaging in practice: vulnerability, risk 

taking, courage, and humility. 

Revisiting Chapter 7: Bodymindsoul Transformation 

The experiences I carried with me from my engagement in TTT directly influenced my 

ongoing self-study and future interactions as reflected in Chapter 7: “Bodymindsoul 

 140 

Transformation.”15 While I have no doubt that, without my engagement in TTT, I would have 

still pursued the Fellowship to Enhance Global Understandings that resulted in my journey to 

France, I also know my interactions with TTT framed my experience and contributed to my 

decision to remain alone in France beyond the two-week fellowship. I was nearly always self-

conscious about my presence as an interloper and consistently attempted to use French even 

when it would have been easier to rely on English. I often reminded myself that I had many 

resources I could rely on to make meaning (e.g., ecological resources, technology, and what 

French I did know) as well as extensive knowledge about learning another language and 

translanguaging as a theory of practice. I also carried with me the commitment to levelling 

hierarchies that was central to TTT’s exploration of translanguaging as well as the examples of 

courage, humility and critical self-awareness of my group mates.  

Considering what privileges I had in a space where I could not take for granted the 

language, cultural practices, or ideological constructs, I began to see more clearly what it meant 

to teeter on the edge of nos/otras, to be both us and others, oppressor and oppressed, insider and 

outsider simultaneously. While I did not fully understand it at the time, existing alone on the 

opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean led me to turn my emerging consciousness inward to wonder 

who the people in my family were who chose to emigrate from Europe to the U.S. and under 

what circumstances. What emotional resolve did it take to leave behind their homes and 

communities, to know they might never see loved ones again, and to begin anew in a new 

 

15 In discussing the experiences described in Chapter 7, I refer to them here in chronological order in order to 
illustrate the trajectory of my learning for pedagogical purposes whereas in the actual findings reflected in Chapter 
7, I wrote about the events themselves in order of my process of conocimiento. For one, this decision was made in 
order to create a cohesive story arch. I also made this decision to illuminate the fact that my ideological reckoning 
and transformation came about through purposeful reflection after my time in France and as a part of my ongoing 
self-study. I highlight this here to detangle the actual chronology of the events versus the chronology of my internal 
processes. 

 141 

country, language and culture? What challenges did they face in finding new jobs, connecting 

with new communities, and finding belonging and acceptance? What facets of themselves and 

their histories were silenced by English and U.S. culture? And what parts of themselves were 

they unable to share with their children and grandchildren in a borrowed language? These 

questions were only flickers during my time in France, but they remained with me when I 

returned to the U.S. and began to engage in self-study on my own. They also reinforced my 

commitment to translanguaging, grounding in in my “bodymindsoul” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 133) 

rather than just in my mind.  

In that respect, my interactions with TTT and my time in France challenged me to 

embark on a deep and critical journey inward upon my return that I now saw as fundamental to 

learning to decenter myself and the privileges of my positionality in order to enact 

translanguaging as a critical praxis. Learning of my friends’ experiences with language 

oppression from an intersectional perspective made me realize how much I had taken for granted 

as a white, U.S. born, NES and made me wonder what else I did not know. I also recognized that 

I had more work to do on my own if I was going to, in Anzaldúa’s (2015) words, do more than 

“pay lip service to diversity issues” and contend with the “privilege of whiteness” (p. 145). This 

resulted in a deep dive into theoretical perspectives (e.g., critical race theory, decoloniality), 

historical overviews (e.g., Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015; Kendi, 2016; Ortiz, 2018), and narrative accounts 

(e.g., Anzaldúa, 2012, 2015; Ngũgĩ, 2005) with which I had limited exposure to throughout my 

educational career. Having learned to listen differently through my interactions with TTT—to 

not just hear and see, but also to feel alongside the stories and experiences of my groupmates—I 

engaged differently with the felt and embodied experiences of those I read than I might have 

before when I only attempted to understand in my mind. 

 142 

Recognizing that I may never fully understand the accounts of others in the 

“bodymindsoul” (Anzaldúa, 2015) from the stance of my racial, linguistic, and citizenship 

privilege, I began to drawn threads of connection to my own experiences with harm, specifically 

those borne from familial trauma and patriarchal definitions of gender, as a source of empathy as 

well as an example of how to feel my way through the accounts of embodied harm of which I 

listened and read. I also began to wonder more about the silences in my family’s history with 

respect to immigration, language, class, and even the racialization of Italian-Americans. Why did 

I know so little about my family’s histories and language practices and cultural roots? The easy 

answer is “assimilation”—the ideological influences of the Herderian Triad (Bauman & Briggs, 

2000; Blommaert & Verschueren, 1992), monoglossic ideologies (García, 2009), and native 

speakerism (Holliday, 2006) made manifest in the lived experiences of my family—how they 

parented, how they passed down stories, how they built emotional connections (or not) with 

others. I also wondered why it was so emotionally challenging to look at this history of loss. I 

had come to find it much easier to name how I have produced oppression as an LT and LTE, but 

much harder to name how I might be a product of it.  

Looking to Anzaldúa for insight, I recognize that making this intellectual and emotional 

leap requires me to reject the binary construction of nos/otras, or colonizer/colonized, and to 

paradoxically see myself as both. On the one hand, I have experienced privilege as a white, U.S.-

born, NES with some class privilege and education; on the other hand, I have experienced loss, 

limited access to resources and opportunities, and hardship as the result of the limitations of my 

class privilege, my family’s educational history, and the erasure of assimilation. When I began to 

identify with the latter, I questioned whether it was my place to identify as “colonized.” As far as 

I know, no member of my family was ever kidnapped from their homeland and forced into 

 143 

enslavement. No member of my family had their home ripped away from them, their land and 

communities demolished through colonization and settler-colonization. And regardless of my 

forebears’ experiences with being marginalized, my day-to-day reality reflects the privileges of 

being racialized as white, of speaking English, and of U.S. citizenship. Whatever experiences 

with violence and war, economic hardship, discrimination and xenophobia, and language loss 

and erasure my family has experienced is not a part of my experience. Is it? This question cannot 

be answered here, but has made me wonder what the fields of epigenetics (the study of how 

behavior and environment influence one’s genetics) and trauma research (van der Kolk, 2014; 

Menakem, 2017) might contribute to the conversation about assimilationist language ideologies, 

the trauma of language loss in oneself and their connections with their family, and the need for 

translanguaging to be enacted in U.S. classrooms as a critical praxis. 

Reaching through these wounds, I extended beyond the connections of my “home-

ethnicity” to re-root myself in what Anzaldúa (2015) describes as rhizomatic “new tribalism, 

referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the self: “Unlike a plant with a single tap root, 

rhizomes spread in all directions, creating a…network in which every point can be connected to 

every other point” (p. 68). Ultimately, it was through nepantla contact zones—the overlap 

between my external interactions and my internal ideological reckoning—that I learned to 

reconfigure myself “outside the us/them binary” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 82), a process I now see as 

fundamental to the translanguaging reimagining of my pedagogy as an LT and LTE. In truth, my 

experience is only further evidence to support the wisdom of visionaries from whom I have 

learned. These include those explicitly woven throughout this dissertation, from poets and 

writers like Gloria Anzaldúa and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, educational linguists, like Ofelia García 

and Suresh Canagarajah, and my collaborators in TTT: Abe, Elie, Elizabeth, Laura, Maíra, and 

 144 

Zhongfeng (all writers and educators in their own right). These also include the voices of the 

students who have been my teachers all along, who in refusing to lose parts of their humanity to 

education have taught me to regain my own. This brings me back to the purpose of this study: to 

advance educational equity, inclusion, and justice for language-minoritized learners in the U.S. 

To this end, I now turn to what I can distill from my ideological reckoning and translanguaging 

reimagining that has broader implications for the field of language teacher education. 

Implications 

Much like me, many LTs and LTEs fail to reckon with the underlying dehumanizing 

biases they bring into their classrooms let alone reimagine more humanizing possibilities for 

their pedagogical practices, like translanguaging. While I first came to understand and engage in 

translanguaging through my interactions with students, LTEs must continue to imagine new 

pathways within language teacher education in order to ensure LTs begin the overlapping and 

iterative process of awareness-building and praxis before they enter their own classrooms. 

Likewise, LTEs who are themselves complicit in perpetuating assimilationist ideologies must 

also reckon with and reimagine their pedagogical commitments. To this end, I offer four main 

implications based on the findings of this study for LTs and LTEs. 

Adopting Ideological (Des)conocimientos as a Framework for LTE 

 

One common thread throughout my process of conocimiento from my teacher preparation 

program to my work as an LTE today is the emergence of what I am calling an “Ideological 

(Des)conocimientos” framework for designing language teacher education. Upon revisiting my 

writing from my time as a pre-service teacher and onward, I was struck by how often the 

revelations I had about my own language and literacy education as well as my future work as an 

LT grew from texts and classroom conversations where these ideological manifestations were 

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explicitly named and analyzed. From the seeds that were planted then to the learning that has 

come since, I propose an “Ideological (Des)conocimientos” framework to catalyze awareness-

raising and praxis in language teacher education. However, I first want to acknowledge that in 

Light in the Dark, Anzaldúa (2015) herself conceptualized a seven-stage journey to describe her 

process of conocimiento as an artist and activist. From what I can distill from Anzaldúa and my 

own development as an LT and LTE are five stages that I have explored within language teacher 

education courses I have taught; I will use, as an example, a graduate-level course on ESL 

teaching methods to support K-12 literacy instruction that I designed.  

Stage 1: Looking Inward 

For the first stage of this framework, I recommend that LTs and LTEs begin by reflecting 

on their own educational experiences (e.g., through composing a literacy autobiography or 

language portrait), a practice that has become common in teacher education courses (i.e., Florio-

Ruane, 1994, Busch, 2018). Importantly, they should put this in conversation with the notion of 

intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) and the “spokes” of another common pedagogical activity, 

“the social identity wheel” (Harro, 1982), to consider how their respective stories are reflective 

of their multiple positionalities. Alongside this work, they can engage with other personal stories 

of language education, which serve the dual purpose of being “mentor texts” for their own 

writing as well as providing additional narratives with which to juxtapose to their own. For 

example, I have previously used Yazan’s (2019) “Identities and ideologies in a language teacher 

candidate’s autoethnography” and various passages from España and Herrera’s (2020) En 

comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students, but 

other possibilities could include memoirs or novels that teachers might use in their future 

classrooms, such as Ruth Behar’s Lucky Broken Girl or Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. Likewise, 

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teachers can share their stories aloud once they have had some time to build community and 

connection. This act of shared reflection serves as a touchstone that teachers can revisit 

throughout their learning. Similar to my experiences as a part of TTT (see Chapter 6), where we 

shared our own language portraits and language autobiographies, this shared act of storytelling 

can ground teachers’ inquiry in their own experiences while allowing them to juxtapose their 

experiences with the rich narratives of others. This helps teachers construct a multifaceted lens 

with which to consider the myriad experiences of learners, past and present, rather than the 

myopic or essentialized view they might hold if they only engage with their own stories. In my 

experience, this juxtaposition also seems to surface complexities of our experiences, perhaps 

buried because they are taken for granted, such as in Elizabeth sharing that she also knew some 

Korean after Laura shared this part of her background or me realizing that my class status was a 

significant factor in my language learning experiences after Abe and Maíra discussed the role of 

class with respect to language learning in Mexico and Brazil, respectively.  

Stage 2: Establishing Common Vocabulary 

Threaded into the initial reflection of Step 1, teachers can establish a common vocabulary 

for naming and analyzing ideological influences in education (i.e., the language ideologies 

outlined in Chapter 4). This provides teachers with shared terminology to describe variations in 

their individual experiences or contexts with respect to how they are positioned within broader 

ideological structure, or master-narratives, through no fault or intention of their own. Consistent 

with the patterns of engagement within TTT, the use of this language to describe teachers’ 

respective experiences can challenge them to contend with their experiences in being 

products/producers of these ideologies without labeling themselves in static terms. While I 

cannot speak for other members of TTT, I can say for myself that I could better take 

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responsibility for past, present and future acts when I could describe how I was either 

conforming to or resisting particular ideologies from one moment to the next. Teachers can then 

use this vocabulary to extend their lens from themselves to the learners they are seeking to 

center, considering who students are as multifaceted individuals. This includes explicitly naming 

common misconceptions of language-minoritized learners, themselves rooted in assimilationist 

ideologies, as well as engaging with more humanizing accounts of language-minoritized 

learners. For example, in viewing “Immersion,” a YouTube video that is commonly used to raise 

teachers’ awareness of language-minoritized learners’ experiences with marginalization in 

schools, I asked teachers to name instances that reflected the influence of assimilationist 

language ideologies versus heteroglossic ideologies. Throughout this experience, teachers can 

see how the teacher and students moved from one set of ideologies to the next in any given 

moment, a practice that they can apply to examine their own self-study of their moment-by-

moment enacted pedagogy. 

Stage 3: Looking Outward 

Next teachers can extend their lens outward to consider the influence of these ideologies 

within broader policies, programs and structures in U.S. education, from legislation and court 

cases to accountability measures and curricular standards. As with before, teachers can employ 

the vocabulary they have developed to name and analyze language ideologies that inform what 

and who is being centered with respect to the U.S. educational systems; importantly, the 

accounts included should be selected to juxtapose competing perspectives and scales. Borrowing 

from a unit of study in España and Herrera’s (2020) En comunidad, teachers can use the 

perspective of master narratives and counter-narratives to analyze legislative and policy 

endeavors, theoretical perspectives, and educational practices. For example, in the 

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aforementioned class, I asked teachers to read about important legal cases and policies enacted 

by the federal government as well as interviews conducted among activists and advocates 

seeking change at the local level in their exploration of the history of U.S. bilingual education.   

Consistent with my efforts through my personal self-study to embed myself in historical 

accounts, theoretical perspectives and personal narratives (see Chapter 7), the intention of this 

stage is to raise teachers’ awareness of the manifestation of these ideologies within broader 

educational structures, which then reify those same structures. Simultaneously, I want teachers to 

recognize their agency to resist these ideologies and structures, similar to what I and my TTT 

colleagues discovered as we considered how we might shift our interaction practices with each 

other, our teaching practices, and even how we interact in the world to reflect a translanguaging 

stance. Again inspired by España and Herrera’s (2020) En comunidad, teachers can identify 

master narratives that are present in their schools and classrooms (i.e., de facto English-only 

classroom/school language policies, inadequate resources for engaging bi/multilingual parents 

and caretakers) and create counter-narratives in resistance, such as composing poetry, designing 

infographics, writing letters to local officials, or designing professional development for their 

colleagues. 

Stage 4: Enacting in Practice 

The next stage, where teachers explicitly engage with teaching and learning in action, is 

one that I have not yet fully envisioned with respect to the emergent framework I offer here and 

for which the findings of this study do not explicitly address. With respect to the course that I 

have used as an example, this stage actually constituted the longest amount of time and was 

inclusive of learning about curricular standards, diagnostic and standardized assessments, 

curricular design, instructional practices, scaffolding learning, conducting formative assessment, 

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and reflecting on practice. What I can say is that my experiences in engaging in translanguaging 

practices among TTT and then extending this within my own self-study (including my sojourn to 

France and my return to the K-12 classroom) were instrumental in allowing me to extend the 

critical lens and translanguaging practices I was developing to real-life experiences. In my future 

work as a scholar and LTE, I plan to analyze the data I have collected when I returned to the K-

12 classroom to consider how my learning from across various nepantla contact zones 

influenced how I approached curriculum design, instruction and assessment as an LT and how it 

has since informed my pedagogy as an LTE. What I can say now (and will expand on shortly) is 

that the intentional co-construction of nepantla contact zones can provide teachers with fertile 

ground for their own inquiry and self-study through the iterative process of reflection and 

practice. 

Stage 5: Turning Inward Again 

In the final stage, teachers can turn the lens inward once again. They can revisit the 

stories they created about their own language or literacy experiences at the beginning of the 

course, reflect on their learning from across the course, and explicitly state what beliefs they hold 

about being language teachers. I believe it is important for teachers to engage in introspection 

through writing, such as through writing a philosophy of teaching statement, but also to make 

their accounts public. For instance, in the aforementioned course, I asked teachers to record 

FlipGrid videos where they role-played giving a presentation or participating in a job interview 

with colleagues. As with my own learning, the overlapping and iterative process of looking 

inward and outward is fundamental to building awareness as well as one’s capacity to take action 

in pursuit of social emancipation.  

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Designing Nepantla Contact Zones for Teacher Education 

 

A second implication of this study is the potential for designing what I have described as 

nepantla contact zones among pre-service and in-service LTs as well as LTEs as a context for 

self-study. As I illustrate throughout this study, nepantla contact zones are both outward and 

inward endeavors. While Pratt’s (1991) and Canagarajah’s (2013) theorization of contact zones 

seems to refer to outward interactions and adaptive communicative practices that emerge 

organically, my theorization of nepantla contact zones, particularly in light of Anzaldúa’s (2012) 

framing, involve intentionality, both in interacting with others and in reflecting within oneself. In 

alignment with the intersection between Anzaldúa and Pratt’s theorizations, I also currently see 

them as being rooted in three objectives: (1) colliding with identities, practices, and beliefs 

distinct from one’s own; (2) questioning and fracturing one’s taken-for-granted assumptions; and 

(3) actively reconstructing and transforming one’s awareness and actions.  

With respect to intentional interaction with others, I contend that nepantla contact zones 

must emerge from members’ shared interests and investment in improving the conditions of our 

society; in the context of this study, I have focused on improving the conditions of our society 

through language education, specifically through translanguaging pedagogy, but I imagine this 

concept could be extended to other shared endeavors in healthcare, local governments or other 

social systems. Building from my own experiences, these interactional spaces can certainly 

emerge organically on their own provided that members engage in spaces where they come into 

contact with language and cultural practices, beliefs and values, and histories and lived 

experiences that contrast with their own. To that end, schools and classrooms themselves can act 

as contact zones, but as I argue earlier, members need to be positioned as equals; in other words, 

although teacher education classes and departments can be contact zones, I would caution against 

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superimposing participation in such a group as a condition for completing graduation 

requirements or faculty service requirements since this could reify the exact power dynamics 

such a group is meant to mitigate. That said, given the tremendous segregation within the U.S. 

today (see Bonilla-Silva, 2006 and Kao, Joyner, & Balistreri, 2019), LTs and LTEs are not likely 

to engage in contact zone interactions through happenstance alone; thus the creation of nepantla 

contact zones has to be somewhat intentional. One possibility is to pursue the co-construction of 

shared inquiry groups through a virtual platform, as illustrated by TTT.  

 

Given the aforementioned objectives, all members within a nepantla contact zone are 

positioned as equal participants in the endeavor with conscious attention to inherent ideological 

power dynamics. This is predicated on several interactional practices. One is adopting a stance of 

humility, whereby all members acknowledge equal validity of each other’s’ viewpoints and 

experiences and are open to making sense of competing beliefs, values, and cultural practices. 

This includes intentional listening whereby those listening recognize that they are attempting to 

hear and understand the speaker’s experiences from the speaker’s viewpoint rather than 

superimposing their viewpoints as listeners. Another practice involves acknowledging and taking 

responsibility for one’s own discomfort (e.g., defensiveness, guilt, shame) without 

superimposing that responsibility on other group members. This may involve actively revising a 

viewpoint in the moment during the group’s interaction; it could also involve turning inward 

through personal self-study and reflection.  

 

The element of intentional reflection within oneself with the purpose of personal 

transformation is, to me, what distinguishes nepantla contact zones from contact zones. In my 

view, colliding with others’ perspectives, identities, cultures, dispositions, and meaning-making 

practices through interaction functions as a catalyst to raise members’ awareness of how much 

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they cannot see or understand given their positionalities and the limitations of their perspectives. 

As I began to question what I know to be true from my own, isolated experiences—my beliefs 

and taken-for-granted assumptions fracturing—I began to see the contours of how much I could 

not know or see given the limitations of my privileged perspective. To turn back to my fellow 

TTT group members and to ask them to fill in those gaps might have unfairly positioned them as 

being responsible for my learning and would have shifted the power dynamics in the group. 

More specifically, I would have centered my privilege as a white, U.S.-born NES. To use 

Anzaldúa’s (2012) language, in choosing to self-educate and self-reflect, I “put certain aspects of 

[my] identities backstage,” so our shared inquiry into translanguaging could remain central (p. 

77). Thus, I saw it as my responsibility to seek out voices and perspectives to fill in those gaps 

through ongoing self-education and reflection. To that end, I turn to the next implication I offer 

in this study.  

Exploring nos/otras Autoethnography 

To paraphrase Anzaldúa, through writing, we write ourselves, undergoing ongoing 

transformation as our writing takes shapes on the page. As this study illustrates, engaging in self-

study through a critical lens can challenge LTs and LTEs alike to reckon with their own 

ideologies in order to reimagine more transformative and transgressive language pedagogies, like 

translanguaging. First, this study affirms and extends the findings of prior research that reveals 

how LTs and LTEs can engage in self-study to contend with assimilationist language ideologies 

and competing sociopolitical tensions that influence their pedagogies (e.g., Dengerink et al., 

2015; Dinkelman, 2003, 2011; Golombek, 2015; Kubota & Miller, 2017; Morgan, 2004; Peercy 

et al., 2019; Ponzio et al., forthcoming; Sabatier & Bullock, 2018; Yazan, 2019). This study also 

affirms the affordance of conducting self-study research in collaboration with others (e.g., Boyd 

 153 

& Harris, 2010; Dengerink et al., 2015; Green & Pappa, 2020; et al., 2019; Viczeko & Wright, 

2010). This study also offers new insight into the potential for self-study research, specifically in 

what I am calling nos/otras autoethnography. While I outline how I conceptualize this approach 

to research in Chapter 4, I wish to highlight to recommendations for how this method might be 

taken up by others. 

 

First, engaging in autoethnographic research challenged me to both closely examine my 

own personal experiences while gaining distance from them through various theoretical 

frameworks in order to consider the influence of broader sociocultural issues, dominant 

discourse, and corresponding ideologies (Yazan, 2019). This occurred through the multiple 

layers of analysis that occurred throughout the process of data generation, where I first recalled 

memories and culled artifacts that would help me answer my two research questions; I was 

fortunate to have kept much of my previous writing as a pre- and in-service teacher—writing that 

was itself generated during times in my life where I was composing my new identity as a teacher. 

In the next layer, I had to weave together a cohesive narrative with the intention of leading the 

reader through these experiences while staying close to my theoretical framework to nuance my 

analysis and illuminate key findings within my narrative. In this regard, writing as a form of 

research method was supported by the juxtaposition of the narrative account I composed about 

myself with the multiple theoretical lens I used in this study: language ideologies, contact zones, 

nos/otras, and nepantla. This overlapping process—of narrativizing my experiences while 

consistently regrounding myself in theory—was necessary in order to be able to “simultaneously 

look at myself as subject and object” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 3). In fact, as I was writing my final 

findings chapter, I made the decision to reread Anzaldúa’s (2015) Light in the Dark, seeking to 

gain distance from the memories I was writing about—memories that I had created more 

 154 

recently. Staying close to theory was one way I attempted to avoid “falling into self-indulgence, 

sentimentality, or grandstanding” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 103) throughout composing 

autoethnography, particularly as I attempted to see myself as both nos and otras.  

 

Composing a nos/otras autoethnography was also facilitated by the overlapping nature of 

the collaborative self-study in which I was engaged with members of TTT alongside my 

independent self-study; as I contended with my own past experiences, I was able to make them 

public during our meetings, where my experiences were literally juxtaposed with the various 

positionalities and experiences of my colleagues. During these interactions, I was intentional 

about listening and engaging with my colleagues’ input from their standpoints, once again 

allowing me to examine my narrative from multiple viewpoints. As I engaged in the process of 

analysis and writing, I also attempted to adopt the same intentional practices that I had developed 

through interaction with TTT: moving towards the discomfort of defensiveness, guilt, and 

humility on the periphery. These intentional practices essentially served as an analytic approach, 

whereby my embodied reactions to the data I was generating helped me determine how to 

interpret my experiences. I came to recognize this discomfort as a “light in the dark” and 

evidence of my emerging conocimiento as I rejected the dominant, dehumanizing assimilationist 

ideologies into which I had been acculturated. In future work, I intend to continue theorizing 

what it means to enact nos/otras autoethnography as an approach to research and what potential 

it offers to LT and LTEs seeking to engage in critical approaches to research and teaching.  

Decentering Ourselves: Embodying Translanguaging as Praxis 

 

A common adage in education is to “center our students” in the classroom. In response, I 

ask: What needs to be moved from the center in order for our students to be there?  

 155 

In the context of many classrooms in the U.S., what is centered are the meaning-making 

practices and cultural resources of the predominately white, U.S.-born, English-speaking 

teaching force—which are then reflected back to them in their multiple ideological 

manifestations: 

De facto English-only school policies.  

English-centric standardized assessments.  

Whitewashed curricular guidelines and resources.  

Enacting translanguaging as a form of critical praxis helps us renegotiate what is at the 

center, positioning all meaning-making resources as equally valid for learning and positioning all 

members as equal participants in the democratic classroom community (García, Ibarra Johnson, 

& Seltzer, 2017). However, in order for its critical aims to be realized in U.S. language education 

classrooms, many teachers—myself included—must learn to see and hear their students and 

their students’ meaning-making practices and cultural resources for what they are, not through 

the exclusionary lens of the “white gaze” (Morrison, 2013). As Anzaldúa (2012) suggests, this 

requires that we set aside our “customary point of view (the ego)” (p. 150) in order to let go of 

the binary thinking that is mutually reinforced by the construction assimilationist language 

ideologies, national borders, and the social construction of race. In other words, we must learn to 

decenter ourselves.  

This study provides new and important insight into the deeply critical and self-reflective 

work in which LTs and LTEs must engage in order to ensure they are not undermining the 

transformative potential of translanguaging for language-minoritized students (Poza, 2017). To 

this end, this study calls into question whether translanguaging can truly be enacted as a critical 

praxis if LTs and LTEs do not uncover the underlying assimilationist ideologies that inform their 

 156 

pedagogical stances and problematize their culpability in perpetuating linguistic and racialized 

oppression. Thus, in order to ensure translanguaging is more than an educational fad, LTs and 

LTEs alike must engage in a process of intentional collision, fracturing and transformation in 

order to reimagine more liberatory and democratic translanguaging approaches to English 

language education.  

In my experience, this process of transformation was first catalyzed by the practical 

realities of interacting across meaning-making practices and cultural resources and was fueled 

through the ongoing intellectual endeavor of learning about translanguaging as a language theory 

and pedagogy. But even more so, the ideological reckoning that was truly necessary for my 

pedagogical transformation came through embodied learning. I had to learn to sit and listen to 

the accounts of others, to feel my way through what they were sharing. I had to be witness to the 

courage and vulnerability and openness of my peers in TTT. I had to go abroad and experience 

the loneliness and discomfort and humility in order to intentionally usurp ways of being and 

thinking that I had long taken for granted. And I had to reach, deep down, through my own 

wounds to heal from severed roots and discover how to connect to a new root system irrespective 

of binary social constructions or assumed boundaries between languages. Across these embodied 

experiences, I have begun to decenter myself in order to embody translanguaging as praxis.  

In order to discover the roots of connection 
My father would tell us, “listen two times as much as we speak.”  
 
Anzaldúa would say, “our bodies are the ground of thought.” 
 
And so I say:  
 
Listen to our bodies two times as much as our minds. 
Move toward defensiveness and guilt.  
Seek humility on the periphery.  
And seek moments of collision and fracturing in order to transform the state of language 
education. 

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