Cultivating Co-learning in Participatory Design for Translanguaging Pedagogies

This chapter draws from a participatory design research (PDR) project in an English medium classroom in the U.S. The two-year project involved collaboration between a second grade teacher and the researcher, who is the author of this chapter, to incorporate translanguaging pedagogies into literacy instruction. Grounded in critical and feminist perspectives of collaborative and design research, this chapter examines notions of sustainable and equitable collaboration by asking how co-learning was present and facilitated in our research partnership and co-teaching. Specifically, the chapter employs frameworks of radical reflexivity and co-learning to qualitatively examine data from four semi-structured reflexive interviews. In the findings, the author discusses how co-learning became a foundational component of and emanated across two dimensions of our work together: (a) our ideologies surrounding multilingualism and our research partnership, and (b) the affordances and constraints of engaging collaboratively with translanguaging pedagogies. Implications of this project include practical recommendations for building bidirectional teacher-researcher collaborations. The chapter concludes with suggestions for organizations and institutions aiming to generate and support equitable long(er)-term teacher-researcher collaborations that facilitate meaningful co-learning.