This article examines translanguaging that occurs in and as a community. Expanding the notion of translanguaging, we conceptualize community translanguaging as collaborative meaning-making among children, their family and community members, and their collective semiotic resources. Using a family literacy project as the research site, this article showcases how participating families built (on) cultural and semiotic wealth beyond the individual’s and across diverse sign systems; this was demonstrated both in the process and as the product of family storybooks. Taking an ecological approach and drawing from the notions of spatial repertoires, assemblages, and distributed/collaborative agency, the analysis shows that languaging is inherently social, intertextual, multimodal, and contingent on the dynamic of the semiotic ecology. Families collaborated, cross-culturally, metalinguistically, multimodally, and across generations, to discuss, write, draw, and digitize their family stories. This expanded concept of community translanguaging counters the coded notion of language and resulting separatist paradigm of language education with pedagogical implications. Leveraging community repertoires provides new opportunities to create educational space(s) where more/various semiotic resources can be drawn upon to maximize creativity in teaching and learning. It also can engage families and communities from diverse backgrounds in ways that empower, rather than marginalize, diverse ways with words and beyond.

Introduction: The fast-growing population of multilingual learners (MLs) in U.S. schools calls for ML-focused instructional support from content classroom teachers to acquire content knowledge and language proficiency simultaneously. However, teachers in general lack competency in content-language integrative pedagogy that builds on MLs’ transliterate capabilities, placing MLs at a greater disadvantage in the content classroom. Given that teachers’ classroom practices are shaped by their underlying language ideologies, it is important to examine what ideological beliefs and attitudes teachers are operating with for their day-to-day work with MLs. Framed by scholarship on content-language integrated instruction, language ideologies, and transliteracies approaches, this study examined the relations between content teachers’ ideological beliefs and attitudes toward teaching MLs in the content classroom and several teacher-related variables.Methods: This study employed a sequential mixed-methods design for a more comprehensive understanding of teachers’ ideologies about working with MLs. Quantitative data analysis was conducted by confirmatory factor analysis and multiple regressions using survey responses of in-service content teachers (N=100) followed by focus group interviews (N=24).Results: Results of a confirmatory factor analysis using a survey suggested that teachers who were more likely to endorse English-only monolingual pedagogy did not necessarily view themselves as having lesser sensitivity to MLs’ backgrounds in their classroom. Results of regression analyses showed that teachers using pull-out or push-in instruction were more inclined to support language-integrated content teaching and considered themselves more sensitive to MLs’ backgrounds than teachers who instruct specialized content. Interestingly, the specialized content teachers having a greater percentage of MLs in their classroom were more supportive of the language-integrated content teaching pedagogy than other teachers using the teaching role. Analysis of focus groups provided contextualized rationales for teachers’ chosen stances toward the English-only monolingual, separatist pedagogy or the transliterate, integrative pedagogy for MLs.Discussion: The findings demonstrated that teachers’ ideologies were not merely individual beliefs but also intertwined with the hegemonic language ideologies of the larger education system. The complexity of the shifting ideologies points to the pressing need for integrating ML-specific attention into teacher education and ongoing professional development programs.

This paper explores how transmodalising pedagogy contributes to equitable STEM literacy education for emergent bilingual learners (EBLs). Attending to the urgent call for serving linguistically and culturally diverse learners in STEM classrooms and informed by the supporting theories and practices of transmodalising pedagogy, this paper provides a repertoire of transmodalising pedagogy to support elementary school EBLs’ STEM disciplinary content and literacy learning. Particularly, this paper shares two elementary teachers’ lessons in mathematics and science classrooms to showcase how transmodalising disciplinary literacy instruction for young EBLs can afford equitable access to STEM curriculum while engaging EBLs in disciplinary discourse practices.

Framed by theories and methods from critical discourse analysis and social semiotics, this comparative case study of six Missouri school systems asked: How do school districts represent and address their changing communities? Discourses of equity, language, identity, and demographic change were examined across school system websites, mission statements, and policies. Analyses showed that all cases except for one White rural district highlighted the value of diversity through their mission statements, homepage photos, and hyperlinks to policies and resources for changing communities. However, four districts also presented deficit perspectives about racially, culturally, and linguistically minoritized students and highlighted neoliberal educational reform values of marketable competitiveness and accountability. Only one highlighted social equity and inclusivity. Deeper analyses focused on three cases demonstrate how competing discourses reflect ideological debates in education, which can shape community engagement and perceptions of students.