Cuéllar, D. (2018, April 4). Review of New perspectives on translanguaging and education by B. Paulsrud, J. Rosén, B. Straszer, & A. Wedin. Education Review, 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v25.2353 April 4, 2018 ISSN 1094-5296 Paulsrud, B., Rosén, J., Straszer, B., & Wedin, A. (2017). New perspectives on translanguaging and education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pp. 234 ISBN: 9781783097807 Reviewed by Delis Cuéllar University of Wisconsin-Madison United States Extensive field research shows that bilingual and multilingual children and youth frequently confront notions of linguistic purism by educational practitioners. These notions of linguistic purism encompass problematic pedagogical ideas and practices, such as the expectancy that a central aspect of “correct” communication form for speakers of multiple languages consists within their isolated and compartmentalized use of the languages they know (Martínez, Hikida, & Durán, 2015). Thus, in terms of teaching and learning, it is generally accepted that multilingual individuals ought to develop their capacity to use each of their languages separately and independently from one another, without intermixing or combining their languages. New Perspectives on Translanguaging and Education, explains and problematizes the ideology and practice of strict language separation when working with bilingual or emergent bilingual students. The book offers its readers ample evidence that translanguaging—the fluid use of the Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 2 languages accessible to the bilingual or multilingual speaker—is a normal, everyday practice, as well as an asset to be embraced by the education community in order to better serve the needs of multilingual learners. New Perspectives on Translanguaging and Education is a research-based, edited volume of 12 empirical studies that take place mainly in Scandinavian locations. The researchers implement qualitative research methods to conduct their studies. The chapters appear to be written to extend existing understandings about translanguaging rather than to build foundational knowledge. An appropriate audience for this volume would include university researchers and graduate students studying language use in school settings with multilingual children or youth and faculty in teacher education programs who seek to advance critical perspectives on language learning and responsive pedagogy for multilingual students, minority language speakers, and/or foreign language learners. In this review, I present key themes covered throughout the chapters along with commentary for the purpose of encouraging readers to identify ways to integrate the book’s content into their current academic and/or professional practices. Social justice is an important overarching theme that weaves through New Perspectives. The authors note the inherent inequitable standard set for multilingual children and youth when persistent monolingual communication and performance expectations are the standard that these students are required to follow. When monolingualism is viewed as the standard, or in other words, monolingual communication is perceived to be the normative way of using language, bilingual languaging can be perceived as many derogatory characteristics like deviant, defiant, and deficient. The language monitoring of multilinguals at school during instruction time and non-academic, social time is an unjust practice documented in this volume. Through constant language monitoring, educators, including bilingual teachers, asked students to alter their habitual bilingual way of communicating. For instance, a teacher was quoted saying, I usually say, when you talk to me choose one language. If you speak Swedish, speak Swedish, yes, but do not mix (p. 214). Educators were regularly observed asking “bilingual students not to speak their mother tongue in the corridors or in the lunch hall” (p. 214). Students were consistently stigmatized for not conforming to a monolingual norm. Teacher language monitoring discouraged multilingual students from using their entire linguistic repertoires in and outside of the classroom, and served as a mechanism that silenced students. The silencing of multilingual children and youth, intentional or not, is a painful and oppressive act that is likely to have negative consequences. Although the book does not make further suggestions on how to stop or further learn about the silencing of bilingual and multilingual students, I believe this is a topic well worth additional academic and practical exploration. New Perspectives stresses that present- day linguistic and cultural diversity in schools requires the implementation of translanguaging pedagogies because they counter common types of hegemonic language ideologies and practices (e.g. monolingualism-as-the-norm perspective, silencing of students, etc.). Translanguaging practices celebrate and encourage multilingual students’ fluid use of their full set of linguistic resources and also helps students deepen their creativity and engagement in school tasks. This volume documents translanguaging practices that help young bilingual preschool children make school content more meaningful to them. These translanguaging teaching practices include deliberately using both the language of the school environment and the languages used in the students’ Review of New Perspectives on Translanguaging by Paulsrud, Rosén Straszer, & Wedin 3 homes. This practice was extended to multiple situations: translating key words when talking with children during instruction, reading bilingual books in parallel with parents (one page is read by the teacher in French and then followed by the parent reading in the home language), and encouraging young children to use their home language when commenting on texts written in the language of the school. These examples show that translanguaging can be used as a pedagogical tool by educators who do not have high-level linguistic competencies in the foreign languages spoken by their pupils. More importantly, translanguaging does not put students’ emergent languages in a hierarchy or in competition (Tobin, Arzubiaga, & Adair, 2013), a circumstance that can cause children to learn to devalue the language of their family (Mártinez-Roldán & Malavé, 2004). Translanguaging space was another important concept discussing the visibility and salience of the fluid use of multiple languages in the physical space of a preschool in Sweden. The physical space was studied through classroom observation visits and reviewing photographs taken throughout the classroom. Evidence of translanguaging was found with artifacts like bilingual labels for classroom objects, bilingual classroom notices written in both Finnish and Swedish for parents, Finnish versions of Swedish children’s books, and children’s quotations explaining their artwork that contained a fluid mixture of Finnish and Swedish. Exploring pedagogies outside of translanguaging that encourage young emergent multilingual children’s balanced appreciation for all the languages they are learning, is a topic that while outside the scope of the book, could help advance social justice in early multilingual education. Translanguaging was also found to be of great benefit for older students. Exemplars of school assignments of high school aged, multilingual students emphasized the creative and critical use of their entire linguistic repertoires. The outcome of these synthesized works was a style of agentive writing that fluidly incorporated multiple languages, transnational identities and cross-cultural understandings, that at the same time, questioned current societal attitudes and beliefs for acceptable behavior while demonstrating students’ sense of freedom and proclaiming future aspirations. To sum up, New Perspectives on Translanguaging and Education provides readers with an assortment of theoretically and methodologically sound empirical studies that together advance a comprehensive and fresh perspective on translanguaging in educational contexts. It exposes covert language ideologies, linguistic practices, and language- based power struggles in our schools and society that can create an education system characteristically unfair for multilingual students. Firmly grounded in social justice, this volume makes a strong argument for the incorporation of translanguaging pedagogies in classrooms as these have the promise to alter hegemonic linguistic attitudes, scaffold multilingual academic learning, promote higher order thinking of students, and allow bilingual children and youth to express themselves fully instead of silencing a part of themselves. References Martínez, R. A., Hikida, M., & Durán, L. (2015). Unpacking ideologies of linguistic purism: How dual language teachers make sense of everyday translanguaging. International Multilingual Research Journal, 9, 26-42. Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 4 Martínez-Roldán, C. M., & Malavé, G. (2004). Language ideologies mediating literacy and identity in bilingual contexts. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 4(2), 155-180. Tobin, J., Arzubiaga, A., & Adair, J. K. (2013). Children crossing borders: Immigrant parent and teacher perspectives on preschool for children of immigrants. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. About the Reviewer Delis Cuéllar, Ph.D., is the Early Years Associate Researcher at WIDA at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Past professional experience includes Assistant Professor of Child Development at Humboldt State University, Research Associate at the University of Oregon, and Postdoctoral Researcher at the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Education Review/Reseñas Educativas/Resenhas Educativas is supported by the edXchange initiative’s Scholarly Communications Group at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. 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