This book is based on a conference held at the University of Cologne in 2018 titled—as is this volume—“Inclusion, Education, and Translanguaging: How to Promote Social Justice in (Teacher) Education?”. The initial idea for this conference came about when we visited Ofelia García in New York in the fall of 2017 and were able to observe and experience translanguaging live—in a mathematics lesson at a bilingual primary school in Queens—during a research visit. This was a special event for us because we had by then been dealing with the concept for years and were constantly confronted with the standard question of how translanguaging can be put into practice in the context of teacher education, congresses and conferences.

Even though we had already experienced some good or best practice examples, we were impressed by the ease and the taken-for-grantedness with which the teacher and the pupils acted with their linguistic repertoire and knew exactly what they were doing. In other words, we observed how the teacher systematically encouraged the children to use and enact their complete linguistic repertoire and to move in what she called a “translanguaging space” when working on a maths task. The teacher then invited the children to reflect on and share their experiences in this space. One girl’s testimony made a lasting impression. She said: “the Spanish word makes it easier to understand it in English!” With this reflection, the teacher made it transparent that translingual practices were welcome in her lessons, and furthermore that this was a (pedagogical) strategy. We were also impressed by the fact that the teacher acted as a translingual and, thus, as a multilingual role model for the children. In the interview following our observation, she told us that she had been working as a teacher for many years, first abroad and now in the USA, and that she had come to know translanguaging as a didactic concept through the accompanying scientific research project. She made her commitment to the concept obvious as she said: “[it] made me understand how important it is for those kids […] to become aware […] of the functions of the language and make those connections.” She provided several examples of children utilizing the process and described their learning progress.

It is also fascinating to note that the teacher mentioned that she herself had already been employing translanguaging in her everyday life, but that it was only through cooperation with science (Ofelia García and her team) that she had learned this everyday practice of multilingualism was also a sociolinguistic concept as well as a multilingual pedagogy.

One of Ofelia García’s team members, who is now also involved in this volume as an author (in the contribution of Seltzer et al.) and who was also present during this discussion, took up this point and elucidated that many teachers from other schools as well reported comparable experiences within the framework of the accompanying scientific research. The educators would say that “[translanguaging] it’s something that […] we’ve always done”, and she further commented: “I think some teachers feel like […] they need permission to do it.”

This experience has impressed us as an example of a successful cooperation between teachers and researchers. It inspired us to organize a conference in Germany in which such an exchange between science and pedagogical practice could take place and that would showcase research projects that, for some, were conceived as scientifically supported projects, while others were interested in examining the perspectives or pedagogical practices in multilingual educational institutions and utilizing translanguaging as a theoretical framework. That is, those who took part in the conference had already worked with translanguaging as an innovative concept for years. We deliberately chose a small group of participants to make what we have been able to experience together possible, namely an intense and compelling discussion based on research data and a shared theoretical concept. This inevitably led to some interested people being excluded, who are now part of this documentation of the conference.

We hold that our discussions have contributed to confirm our starting point that social justice, inclusion and multilingualism or translanguaging must be contemplated together and that this connection is central to the present and the future of education and is, therefore, also of remarkable importance for teacher education.

This was also made possible by the participation of Ofelia García with whom we associate translanguaging in the first place (although she always stresses that she did not invent the term). She framed the conference with a keynote and a final commentary and this book with a contribution about the connection between translanguaging and social justice titled “Singularity, Complexities and Contradictions: A Commentary about Translanguaging, Social Justice, and Education” and covering the training of educators and (pre-school) teachers.

Part one of our volume unites four contributions focusing on different ways educators and children perceive and use translanguaging specifically in settings of early childhood education. With research projects from the USA, France, Luxembourg and Switzerland, two of the chapters look at multilingual education as a motor for creating space for the deconstruction of established linguistic ideologies (language-minorized Latinx students in the USA and children speaking languages other than French in postcolonial La Réunion island), while two others investigate bi-/multilingual day-care settings in historically multilingual national contexts (Luxembourg and Switzerland).

In the contribution “Translanguaging and Early Childhood Education in the USA: Insights from the CUNY-NYSIEB Project” Kate Seltzer, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno and Gladys Y. Aponte lay out the challenges and possibilities translanguaging as a pedagogy entails in the light of recent debates in the American context when it comes to educating multilingual young children. Presenting “classroom-based examples of how teachers can leverage young children’s translanguaging and cultural knowledge in their education”, the authors combine the theoretical lenses of critical race theory and translanguaging to oppose the current deficit framings and marginalization of emergent bilingual, specifically Latinx students in the US. Seltzer et al. show how the CUNY-NYSIEB project brought together researchers and educators to challenge the “standardization of idealized monolingual language practices in early childhood education” and implement translanguaging as one form of anti-oppressive pedagogy. The chapter goes on to describe the project’s work within one kindergarten in New York City, where teachers used books about play to reshape their teaching practice and simultaneously how different modes of play could apply to the way students learned and used their languages fluidly. Despite deeply rooted stances among Latinx educators, the project managed to foster the teachers’ reflection on “how they teach, view, and (mis)understand young multilingual children and their families”.

In their chapter titled “Translanguaging in Multilingual Pre-Primary Classrooms in La Réunion: Reflecting on Inclusion and Social Justice in a French Postcolonial Context”, Pascale Prax-Dubois and Christine Hélot propose that combining translanguaging and the theoretical frameworks of subaltern studies can be a way of deconstructing processes of othering, specifically in postcolonial contexts such as the French island of La Réunion, where two teachers were observed as they—with their individual teaching styles and foci—used language-awareness activities to leverage their pre-school students’ multilingual skills, including the often marginalized languages that enter Creole and French-speaking preschools in La Réunion with migrant children from neighboring islands. In order to contest the effective language regime of this postcolonial setting, both teachers use different strategies such as translingual spaces that include all home languages and co-learning to enable their students to voice their multilingual experiences, thus creating room for the deconstruction of established linguistic ideologies and paving the way for a more socially just (language) education. Advocating a “critical multilingual awareness” sensu García, Prax-Dubois and Hélot conclude their contribution recommending that “teachers should be educated to understand the process of decolonizing language teaching in schools” and that, at a greater level, understanding language teaching as being part of hierarchical control will create a space to debate this colonial injustice.

Focusing on multilingual early-childhood education in Luxembourg, Claudine Kirsch and Claudia Seele offer insights into the translingual practices of four educators in their chapter titled “Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education in Luxembourg: From Practice to Pedagogy”. Drawing on videographed observations of pedagogical actions within the institutions and during professional development courses for educators as well as on interview data, Kirsch and Seele reconstruct how the languaging practices of the educators and, consequently, of the children were impacted by the professional development course and its input on the benefits of translanguaging, resulting in the educators feeling freed and encouraged to “regularly translate […] from Luxembourgish to a home language other than Luxembourgish and vice versa”, even keeping up the children’s home languaging to support their “well-being, identity and language learning”, thus encouraging children to utilize their linguistic resources dynamically and in multimodal ways. The authors conclude that while translanguaging was observed to foster participation, it did also lead to othering practices when it was not rooted in a pedagogical stance, thus making a point for specific professional development courses for practitioners that, among others things, increase awareness for the effects of language hierarchies. Finally, Kirsch and Seele contend “that multilingual practices need to be embedded in a reflexive translanguaging pedagogy in order to enhance inclusion” in early childhood education.

Melanie Kuhn and Sascha Neumann discuss how institutional language policies may neutralize or even increase educational inequalities in their contribution titled “Bilingualism Versus Translanguaging in a Swiss Day-Care Center: A Space Analysis of Language Practices and Their Janus-Faced Effects on Social Inequalities and Educational Opportunities”. Basing their analysis on ethnographic interviews in bilingual French/German day-care centers in Switzerland, Kuhn and Neumann show that even in officially bilingual settings, both languages “can be assigned unequal legitimacy”. Through a spatial-analytical perspective on linguistic modes of regulation, the authors reveal how language separation aims to solidify and protect language purity while devaluing the typical language mixing in children’s translingual practices. Posing the day-care centers as small-scale language regimes, the study expounds how the use of French and German is regulated according to generational difference: while the children are allowed to speak French and simultaneously are not pressured into speaking German, the staff are to follow strict language requirements that impose German as the language of education. When ethnicization of French vs. German speaking children is added, what becomes apparent is that “the bilingual concept of the day-care center is still following a monolingual norm of language use and acquisition” and actively hinders flexible language uses, thus opposing bilingual to translingual education while also creating discrepancies in educational capital between French and German-speaking children.

In the second part, three contributions present current and completed research projects in Cyprus, Germany and the Netherlands. These are explicitly designed as scientific monitoring for primary schools and support them in multilingual and social just school development through qualitative research such as participatory observation, video observations and interviews etc. on the one hand. On the other hand, these research projects offer and carry out thematically relevant in-service training for teachers. They offer deep insights into pedagogical everyday life in dealing with multilingualism and translanguaging in their respective national context.

Constadina Charalambous, Panayiota Charalambous, Michalinos Zembylas and Eleni Theodorou discuss two case studies from Greek-Cypriot schools from the theoretical perspective of (in)security in their contribution titled “Translanguaging, (In)Security and Social Justice Education”, thus combining the concepts of translanguaging and social justice education in an innovative way. The authors take the social and historical context as the starting point for their considerations: Cyprus has suffered a long history of interethnic conflict between the two major ethnolinguistic communities, Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots. With regard to Turkish and migrant children with Turkish as L1, they elaborate that Turkish has been stigmatized by the history of conflict both in the Greek-Cypriot context and in many of the children’s own communities and historical trajectories. By researching the obstacles and limitations for reconciliation, multiculturalism and social justice as well as migrant children identity negotiation in Greek Cypriot primary schools, the authors shed light on children’s silences and self-censoring of their Turkish-speakerness. By doing so, Charalambous et al. reveal how language ideologies and discourses of (in)security and conflict may pose serious obstacles for enacting translanguaging as a socially just pedagogy. They therefore conclude that the discursive, historical, ideological and cultural constraints that frame classroom interactions as well as students’ insecurities have to be taken into account when designing not only socially just but also sensitive pedagogies—including translanguaging.

Joana Duarte and Mirjam Günther-van der Meij present two multilingual education projects in the North of the Netherlands in their chapter “‘We learn together’: Translanguaging within a Holistic Approach towards Multilingualism in Education”. In this context, a holistic model for multilingualism in education is being tested with the aim of developing different approaches towards multilingual education for both migrant and minority pupils. This is done through design-based interventions in which in-service and pre-service teachers, teacher trainers and researchers co-develop, implement and evaluate multilingual activities for different school types on the basis of classroom observations conducted in three different primary schools on the one hand. On the other hand, typical translanguaging scenes were identified and incorporated into vignette-based interviews which were conducted with participating teachers in order to elicit their attitudes, knowledge and skills towards the use of multiple languages in mainstream education. Duarte and Günther-van der Meij come to positive results, some of which clearly contradict the current state of research on teachers strongly favoring monolingualism. The authors stress that it is crucial to actively involve teachers while developing and implementing programs for multilingual education: through experimenting in a small and safe environment with the tailored help of researchers through professional development workshops for instance, teachers gradually embraced their pupils’ multilingualism.

In the contribution “Language Comparison as an Inclusive Translanguaging Strategy: Analysis of a Multilingual Teaching Situation in a German Primary School Classroom”, Sara Fürstenau, Yağmur Çelik and Simone Plöger use data from the research project “Multilingualism as a field of action in intercultural school development” (MIKS-project for short). Within the framework of this project the teaching staff of primary schools was assisted and supported in implementing multilingual didactic approaches in the classroom. The authors state that the initial conditions for joint cooperation with the schools were advantageous because the teachers in the MIKS-schools were open and willing to engage with the pupils’ home languages. Nevertheless, teachers also report challenges in this area, such as the fact that children use many different family languages about which they themselves know very little. Starting from a key-incident, Fürstenau et al. pursue the question how the teacher can include the linguistic knowledge of the children in class and use it for joint language learning in the group despite this challenge. In their analysis, they reveal that although the observed teacher has a lesson plan (verb forms in the first person singular; regularities and irregularities), she has to deal with the uncertainty of what linguistic knowledge the children will contribute and what the linguistic basis for comparing verb forms will be. In their case, the teacher repeatedly talks with the children about questions without knowing the answers. The authors conclude from this, firstly, that what multilingual classroom situations have in common is that insecurities on the teacher’s side occur and secondly, that studies on how teachers in multilingual teaching situations can deal constructively with insecurity and not-knowing will be useful to advance research on multilingual didactics.

The central question, “what is translanguaging from the perspective of students, educators and teachers?” is the topic of the third part of this volume, which comprises four contributions. They present and analyze new research data from recent and ongoing studies and deal with views on multilingual and translanguaging pedagogies and with experiences of (bi/multilinguals) students, educators and teachers in day-care centers and schools based on diverse studies conducted in Canada, Germany, Greece and the US.

Magdalena Knappik, Corinna Peschel, Sara Hägi-Mead, Aslı Can Ayten and Tatjana Atanasoska deal with the questions how to better prepare future teachers using the module “German for students with a history of immigration”, implemented in 2009 in teacher education on a national level in Germany, in their contribution titled “Reflecting Lingualities and Positionalities for a Changing Education System”. However, the module seems, according to some recent research results, to label these students as “others having a deficit and needing the teachers’ help”, instead of developing a stance that values bilinguals’ learning potential and skills. Knappik et al. present an ongoing biographical professionalization research project which aims to find out more about student teachers’ attitudes towards multilingualism and specifically their “academic knowledge” that might be created by their participating in teacher education. On the basis of autobiographical texts, the project compares experiences and attitudes of multilingual and monolingual students, as illustrated in this contribution. The authors discuss selected data from two participants’ recounts and close their chapter with further research perspectives for the ongoing project, focusing on the importance of having future teachers reflect on their own understanding of what multilingualism is before and after taking the university course while also putting into perspective their own language biographies.

In their contribution “German Schools Abroad: Teachers’ Views on Translanguaging and Emerging Research Perspectives on Children’s Language Biographies and Educational Professionalization”, Julie A. Panagiotopoulou, Lisa Rosen, Jenna Strzykala, Janine Fißmer and Timo Neubert present three ongoing dissertation research projects. First, they introduce the initial project “migration-related multilingualism and educational professionalism” that started in 2014 and focused on professionalization of teachers in migration societies and especially on their views on translanguaging in German schools abroad in Southern Europe and North America, considering the negotiability of the language hierarchies in both regions. In this context one dissertation project was developed, now comparing the views of teachers working at German schools abroad in North America—specifically Boston and Montreal. As an extended outlook for further research in the field of German schools abroad, Panagiotopoulou et al. present two further dissertation projects that have emerged from the initial project. The first one aims to reconstruct educational biographies and experiences of inclusion/exclusion and (non-)belonging of bi/multilingual students in German schools abroad in Southern Europe, specifically Greece. The second project focuses on professional biographies of teachers at German schools abroad under the question to what extent their work experiences will professionalize them in dealing with migration-related diversity and, thus, contribute to inclusive school development.

Julie A. Panagiotopoulou and Maria J. Hammel present an ongoing ethnographic research and professional training project that was started in 2018 at the University of Cologne for (future) educators and teachers in their contribution titled “‘What Shall We Sing Now,Amir?’ Developing a Voice through Translanguaging Pedagogy—An Ethnographic Research and Professional Training Project in Day-Care Centers and Schools”. Based on a critique of the monolingual educational language policies in Germany and using ethnographic project data collected by master students and doctoral candidates in day-care centers and schools in Cologne, the project aims to support multilingual professionals who are intensively engaged in counteracting the disadvantages that language-minoritized children face and, thus, to contribute to social justice in education. The theoretical framework as well as the research questions are illustrated in this chapter on the basis of an ethnographic observation of an interaction in one of the investigated day-care centers with language-minoritized children and educators, which were discussed together with the professionals involved in the project. This contribution therefore highlights how translanguaging gives multilingual children a voice to perform in everyday pedagogical life in a meaningful way and how translanguaging can be utilized for the analysis of ethnographic observations of learning and teaching practices.

In their contribution titled “Translanguaging as a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogical Approach: Bi/Multilingual Educators’ Perspectives”, Roula Tsokalidou and Eleni Skourtou discuss aspects of translanguaging as a culturally sustaining pedagogy. First, they introduce each of these two concepts and then illustrate their connection using data on views of educators from a recent research project that aimed to bring forward the issue of translanguaging in the everyday life of those bi/multilinguals involved in education in different institutions and countries. Their findings suggest that, according to bi/multilinguals educators, translanguaging could help increase confidence and self-esteem for minority/minoritized students towards their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, Tsokalidou and Skourtou point out that, in the context of multilingual education, it is a great challenge to go against the grain of monolingualism and monoculturalism and that translanguaging specifically can contribute to this as a form of resistance against the restriction of monolingual and monocultural perspectives: on the one hand, by giving spaces to students to perform using their full linguistic repertoire, and on the other hand, by giving educators the opportunity to design and incorporate these spaces in their classrooms.

Our sincere thanks go to the authors whose contributions made it possible for us to realize an international conference and an interesting book project. We would also like to express our appreciation to Ofelia García for the inspiration she has been to us for years through her own work and for the discussion of the contributions in this volume. We hope that this book will also inspire other colleagues to initiate conferences and their documentations and to promote inclusion and social justice as an international challenge in the context of early childhood, school, and teacher education.

Finally, we would like to thank Vivien Magyar and Diana Samani, both students at the University of Cologne and future educators, who have taken great care and responsibility in the formatting and design of all contributions.

Cologne, March 2020

Julie A. Panagiotopoulou, Lisa Rosen and Jenna Strzykala