Keywords

1 Introduction

The concept of “translanguaging”—referring to “the flexible use of linguistic resources by bilinguals in order to make sense of their world” (García et al. 2015, p. 200)—has recently dominated debates on bilingual education inspiring many projects, conferences, articles, monographs and edited volumes—beyond the present one (García 2009; García and Li Wei 2014; Blackledge and Creese 2014; Jaspers and Madsen 2016, 2019). Coined in 1994 by Cen Williams in the context of north Wales, “translanguaging” has since significantly expanded in the work of Ofelia García (Beres 2015) and many others (e.g., García 2009; García and Li Wei 2014; García et al. 2015; Li Wei 2018). The educational benefits of translanguaging have been much celebrated to the extent that it is often seen as “the best way to educate bilingual children in the 21st century” (Beres 2015, p. 103). As a pedagogical strategy, translanguaging can “offer communicative and educational possibilities to all” (García 2009, p. 148), helping bilingual students develop “linguistic security and identity investment” (García 2009, p. 157) and ultimately working towards linguistic equality (García and Li Wei 2014). Within this context translanguaging can also be seen as a type of a socially just pedagogy, as it refers to a conscious pedagogical endeavour to improve the learning and life opportunities of typically underserved students, while equipping and empowering all students working towards a more socially just and inclusive society (Ayers et al. 2009; Kincheloe and Steinberg 1998; King 2005; Ladson-Billings 1994).

However, as the title of the present chapter implies, here we won’t focus as much on the positive outcomes of translanguaging, which have been thoroughly documented by many studies (cited above). Instead, we will rather focus on some complications emerging from the processes of conflict and insecurity that are increasingly affecting the lives of many students and teachers (see also P. Charalambous et al. 2016, 2019). In other words, our chapter aims to address questions such as: How can translanguaging practices be affected by language ideologies, and in particular, ideologies and discourses of conflict? And what are the challenges posed by the increasing (in)securitization processes and practices that “enact our world as if it is a dangerous world, a world saturated by insecurities” (Huysmans 2014, p. 3)?

In order to answer these questions, we draw on data from two ethnographic studies, conducted in diverse schools and classrooms, focusing on students’ linguistic practices. Both studies were conducted in Cyprus, a country that has been seriously affected by interethnic conflict and has been divided since the 1974 war. Taking into account the dominant discourses of conflict in this socio-political context, we will look at classrooms as a “charged space” (Pace 2015) that includes frictions, emotional discomfort and insecurity, and we discuss the role that translanguaging pedagogies may have in such spaces.

In what follows we first provide an account of how discourses of “security” affect our everyday lives, borrowing the concepts of “securitization” and (in)security from critical International Relation (IR) studies. We then move on to discuss the notion of translanguaging in relation to social justice pedagogies. After we briefly introduce the conflict-affected Cypriot context we present the two case studies and we discuss the complications for enacting translanguaging as a socially just pedagogy under conditions of insecurity and conflict.

2 Everyday (In)Securitization

Since 9/11, “security concerns” and discourses of threat, fear and suspicion have become much more pervasive in everyday life, significantly impacting educational institutions. Schools, nurseries, universities and youth community centres are becoming sites of security surveillance as teachers have to deal with undocumented students, and students from what are seen as “suspect communities” (C. Charalambous et al. 2018; Figueroa 2017; Khan 2017; Nguyen 2016).

For example, in the UK the Prevent policy consists of a comprehensive anti-terrorism strategy which includes local authorities, education from early child care providers to higher education, and health services. Within this policy, educational institutions are obliged to report any children who might be radicalized or “at risk”, with Muslim students portrayed as potential terrorists and teachers as de facto security professionals (C. Charalambous et al. 2018). Similarly as Nguyen (2016) describes in the US context, the FBI has warned of the “vulnerability” of high school students for recruitment by violent extremists calling out to educational institutions to report children/individuals who might be radicalized or “at risk” by observing and assessing behaviors and communication.

In order to account for the increasing presence of security discourses in education and their impact on language education and bilingualism, the notion of “securitization” (Emmers 2013; Stritzel 2007) emerges as a helpful one, and indeed it has recently been widely used, beyond the field of IR and the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, where it was initially coined (see P. Charalambous et al. 2017; Rampton and Charalambous 2020). Securitization, in the way it has been used in IR, refers to authoritative institutional processes in which existential threats are identified, and in response to this potential danger, issues can be moved away from the realm of ordinary politics into the realm of exceptional measures, where normal political rights and procedures are suspended. Throughout this process, discourse plays a crucial part, both in declaring a particular group, phenomenon, or process to be an existential threat, and in persuading people that this warrants the introduction of special measures to ensure “security” (P. Charalambous et al. 2017).

However, a question worthwhile asking is to what extent we can separate “security” from “insecurity”. For example, does the image of armed soldiers in public places produce security or insecurity to people present? Using the metaphor of a “mobius strip” where the two sides of the string cannot be separated, Bigo and Mc Cluskey (2018) argue for the “consubstantiality of security and insecurity” (p. 126), suggesting instead the use of the parenthetic “(in)” and accordingly the terms “(in)security” and “(in)securitization” to highlight that what is considered security for some might be insecurity for others, depending on the point of view. Following the conceptualization of “(in)security” as everyday practice, Rampton and Charalambous (2020) emphasise the need to understand the “lived experience of (in)securitisation as an intensifying apprehension of institutionally authorised vulnerability and existential threat, produced (and received) in communicative practice in a range of social settings” (p. 6). In order to do so here, we turn to the communicative practice of translanguaging and the social setting of a classroom.

3 Translanguaging & Social Justice

Translanguaging theory and research emerged within more general critique of ideologies of “fixity” in conceptualisations of language, belonging and social identity and a shift of emphasis to the more fluid and hybrid nature of linguistic practices—especially in urban, globalised and culturally diverse social contexts (e.g., Jaspers 2005; Madsen et al. 2016; Rampton 1995). In this context, concepts such as “crossing”, “translanguaging”, “polylanguaging” etc. (Creese and Blackledge 2010; García 2009; Jørgensen 2008; Rampton 1995, 2006) have been introduced to describe various heteroglossic practices and their social and pedagogial implications.

Translanguaging, in particular, refers both to (a) more general habitual discursive practices of multilingual speakers, and (b) to a particular pedagogic approach for the teaching of both language and content (Canagarajah 2011; Creese and Blackledge 2010; García 2009; for a more detailed account see P. Charalambous et al. 2019). In the last two decades, translanguaging has been taken up and further developed by a number of educators (García 2009; García and Li Wei 2014; see also Beres 2015) as a pedagogical strategy that can contribute to a socially just world:

a process by which students and teachers engage in complex discursive practices that include ALL the language practices of ALL students in a class in order to develop new language practices and sustain old ones, communicate and appropriate knowledge, and give voice to new sociopolitical realities by interrogating linguistic inequality. (García and Kano 2014, p. 261)

Socially just pedagogies are generally understood as those pedagogical practices that actively address issues of oppression and privilege in the classroom with the purpose of addressing social inequalities and contributing to a more socially just society (Kincheloe and Steinberg 1998; King 2005; Ladson-Billings 1994). Although socially just pedagogies in and by themselves will not eradicate structural inequalities, they can make a contribution to recognising and critically interrogating the issues that perpetuate these injustices. Teachers who enact social justice pedagogy in their classrooms acknowledge their role as agents of social change and aim to equip their students with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to transform society into a place where social justice can exist. Basically, then, a social justice framework in pedagogical practice is driven by the determination to resist and take action against unfairness and inequity, while enhancing freedom and possibility for all students (Ayers et al. 2009).

Also committed to empowering all students, translanguaging encourages “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages” (Otheguy et al. 2015, p. 3), going thus against the powerful monolingual paradigm and the nationalist “dogma of homogeneism” (Blommaert and Verschueren 1992). As such, translanguaging pedagogy emerges as an inherently “political act”, (Flores 2014 as cited in García and Lin 2016, p. 8) within a broader “sociocritical approach to teaching” (García and Li Wei 2014, p. 92 f.), closely connected with education for social justice (García and Leiva 2014) and human rights (García and Li Wei 2014, p. 116). According to García and Li Wei (2014, p. 13) translanguaging practices “enact a political process of social and subjectivity transformation which resists the asymmetries of power that language and other meaning making-codes associated with one or another nationalist ideology, produce”.

Within this context, the deployment of students’ full linguistic repertoires is seen as creating a “third space” “where alternative representations and enunciations can be generated because buried histories are released and alternative, conflicting knowledges are produced” (García and Leiva 2014, p. 204). According to García and Li Wei (2014) translanguaging as pedagogy promises to “liberate” and empower minoritised bilingual students that have been “silenced” (p. 101), “oppressed” (p. 42) and ostracised by “giv[ing them] back the voice that had been taken away by ideologies of monoglot standards” (p. 105).

Hurst and Mona (2017), for example, propose translanguaging pedagogies as a socially just alternative to colonial monolingual and anglonormative practices of continued reliance on English as the medium of education in South Africa, which disadvantages many students whose home language is not English. Indeed in post-colonial contexts translanguaging can provide recognition to languages that are usually ignored, empowering students and promoting social justice.

However, as with any educational attempt to run against powerful and hegememonic ideologies, translanguaging may produce resistance, discomfort and negative emotional reactions (P. Charalambous et al. 2016, 2019) and in this paper we focus on these instances, and the implications for teachers, learners and (socially just) pedagogy when discourses of (in)security and processes of (in)securitization affect the classroom.

Before turning to the examples from the two studies, it is worth describing the Cypriot context and the ways in which it is affected by discourses of threat.

4 The Cypriot Context

Cyprus has suffered a long history of interethnic conflict between the two major ethnolinguistic communities, Greek- and Turkish- Cypriots. As both ethnic groups had political claims over the island’s identity—“Greek” and “Turkish” respectively (Bryant 2004)—, interethnic violence (1963–1967) broke out soon after the establishment of the independent Republic of Cyprus in 1960 and the conflict culminated with Turkey’s military operation in 1974. Since 1974, Cyprus has been de facto divided, with Turkish-Cypriots residing in the north—considered “under Turkish occupation” by the UN—and Greek-Cypriots residing in the southern government-controlled areas of the Republic of Cyprus. Up until 2003 communication between the two parts was almost impossible.

Despite ongoing negotiations for reaching an agreed settlement, the so-called “Cyprus Issue” remains unresolved, leaving open many legal but also emotional questions (e.g., property rights, missing people). This “open wound” has contributed to the cultivation of a strong ethnocentric orientation in Greek-Cypriot society, with Turks being represented as an imminent threat that poses sincere security concerns.

In this context, language has played a significant role in perpetuating the conflict, as both communities viewed their language as a salient part of collective identity and as crucial for ethnolinguistic survival (Karoulla-Vrikki 2004). It is for this reason that, even though both Greek and Turkish are official languages of the Republic, Turkish was only introduced in Greek-Cypriot education in 2003, as a “foreign language” and a “measure for building trust” between the two communities. Still, studies showed how Turkish continued to invoke the “enemy” and the historical traumas of war and displacement; Greek-Cypriot students of Turkish were often called “traitors”; while teachers systematically tried to avoid references to the local contexts of Turkish language use (C. Charalambous 2012, 2014).

At the same time, the Greek-Cypriot society has been witnessing (since 90s) a diversification with significantly increasing migration and the last census estimated migrants comprising about 23% of the population (e.g., Greek-Pontian expatriates, Eastern Europeans migrants from South East Asia, and political or war refugees from Syria, Iran etc.). As a result, in 2001, Intercultural Education was first introduced in state schools and, despite considerable progress, research points to challenges posed by the hegemony of conflict narratives on the implementation of intercultural education (P. Charalambous et al. 2016; Theodorou and Symeou 2013).

Another notable change in the ideological orientations of Greek-Cypriot education has been the introduction of a peace-related policy in 2008 aiming at the promotion of a “culture of peaceful coexistence” between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. This initiative caused fierce public and educational debates, as many teachers considered the policy incompatible with the dominant culture and inconsiderate of local sensitivities. Although a significant step in introducing peace education in Greek-Cypriot official rhetoric, in actual practice the initiative resulted in relatively poor implementation outcomes (see also Zembylas et al. 2016). The second case study described here involves a teacher’s attempt to implement the new peace-related policy in 2010, in a classroom where the majority of students had Turkish as home language.

In what follows we present the two case studies conducted in multilingual classrooms, and we show how conflict discourses and processes of (in)securitization created unfavourable ecologies in the schools and classrooms for performances of Turkish speakerness.

5 The Two Studies

5.1 Case Study 1: Immigrant Children Identity Negotiation in a Greek Cypriot Primary School

This was an ethnographic study that sought to explore identity negotiation processes among immigrant students in Cyprus. It was conducted by Eleni Theodorou over a period of eight months in 2007 (January–August) and it included interviews with students, teachers, parents and members of the ethnic communities existent at the school, as well as document analysis. In addition, daily full-day observations were carried at the school both during school hours as well as after, during social events such as football games, school festivals, and graduation ceremonies, at a nearby public youth club, children’s homes, and the surrounding community throughout the duration of the fieldwork.

The school which consisted the primary site of the study was a small urban public primary school with fewer than 150 students that was chosen because of its high concentration of non Greek-Cypriot students. Thirty-three percent (33%) of the school population were non-Cypriots. Of the non-Cypriot population at the school, half were children with parents from Georgia, 21% with parents from other former Soviet Union countries, such as Russia and Bulgaria, 21% were Greeks from Mainland Greece, 4% had parents from countries of the Middle East, and another 4% from countries in Asia. The great majority of the immigrant children were Pontian whose parents had been born and raised in Georgia. It is important to note that Pontian families who originated from Georgia spoke Turkish at home (children could also communicate in Russian). At the backdrop of the sociohistorical context of Cyprus, this fact proved to be highly consequential for the way Turkophone children at the school crafted their space and positioned themselves therein and beyond, as explained below.

One of the central findings of the study was the revelation of the extent of the educational and social marginalization immigrant children suffered at the school contrary to teachers’ perceptions of social integration which they often based on the relative absence of volatile and blatantly racist incidents. Indeed, on a first glance the school appeared to be one of peaceful coexistence of different cultures, languages, and backgrounds. Closer looks however revealed that immigrant children received such strong messages of assimilation that in fact one of the strategies they deployed to negotiate their positionalities at the school was hiding and passing. Depending on the spheres and contexts they traversed, this was a twofold process of associating and disassociating with a particular social identity, in order to avoid otherization. Passing mainly consisted of asserting Greekness. Hiding was a multi-layered process which involved hiding the status of foreignness, concealing Pontianness, and distancing one’s self from Turkishness. This was mainly manifested in the way immigrant children at the school often resorted to concealing aspects of their identities, including their native language, the language(s) they spoke at home and their parents’ home country. For the purposes of this discussion, we will be focusing on processes of distancing from one’s Turkishness when at school or in public (for a discussion on how immigrant children navigated public and private see Theodorou 2008), precisely to highlight the necessity of understanding processes of translanguaging (and identity negotiation) as intricately enmeshed in fields of power which unfold in the midst of social interaction and in particular sociohistorical contexts.

As stated above, the language of the private sphere within the Greek diasporic community of Pontians from Georgia was Turkish. For Pontian children, the frictional relationship between dominant notions of Greekness and Turkishness in the Cypriot context raised issues of ethnic identity, loyalty, and patriotism all at once. As a result, Pontian children, wary of possible repercussions “because Turks did that other thing…[and] some get angry for sure, they don’t like [that you speak Turkish]” (Katerina, female, Greek,Footnote 1 immigrant), opted to keep their native tongue a secret, as exemplified in the excerpt of an informal conversation Eleni Theodorou had with a Pontian girl in the school yard during recess below:

Popi (f., im.): {I will be} Here {during the summer}. I don’t want to go to Greece, they don’t watch Turkish channels there over. They have them but they don’t watch them.

Eleni/Researcher: Whereas here you watch them?

Popi: Yes.

Eleni: Do you like it?

Popi: Yes, I like Turkish very much.

Eleni: Do you tell your classmates too that you know Turkish?

Popi: Noooo! ((emphasis in original))

Eleni: Why?

Popi: Did they ever ask or anything?

Eleni: If they did, would you tell them?

Popi: Noooo!! ((emphasis in original))

Eleni: Why?

Popi: ((She does not respond and looks at me with a nervous smile))

Eleni: If they asked you what languages you know, what would you say?

Popi: Greek ((pauses)) and Russian.

Eleni: Only? You would not bring up Turkish?

Popi: No. (Field notes by Eleni Theodorou, 13th June 2007)

Acts of direct and spontaneous admittance regarding Turkish, such as the above, occurred only in private, outside the formal structural environment of the classroom, and in the intimacy and safety of small friendship groups in the yard out of earshot of their classmates. The fear of exposure which drove all these efforts to take precautionary measures against a potential public exposure was by no means ungrounded and could not have been mitigated simply through what may well have been well-intended yet naïve efforts on behalf of teachers to encourage multilingualism in the classroom. Without a more nuanced reading of these silences, their (hi)stories, and historicities, efforts to promote (celebratory rather than critical) translanguaging in the classroom may be rendered not only ineffective (as seen in the example below) but damaging, even, for those most vulnerable.

5.2 Case Study 2: “Researching the Obstacles and Limitations for Reconciliation, Multiculturalism and Social Justice”

The second study was a two-year ethnographic project (2009–2011, funded by the Open University of Cyprus) which set out to explore the challenges and opportunities involved in the Greek-Cypriot 2008 educational initiative for “Peaceful Coexistence”.Footnote 2 The study was conducted by the first three authors and involved three phases: (1) participant observations, recordings and interviews in 6 focal classrooms for 3 months; (2) a series of 6 3-hour training seminars on Peace, Reconciliation & Social Justice in which all focal teachers participated; (3) observations and lessons designed and implemented by focal teachers based on the training they had received on peace pedagogies. The data in this paper derive from this third phase after the focal teacher, Thalia (a pseudonym), had completed her training on peace pedagogies.

Thalia was a teacher in her late 30s with 15 years of teaching experience and considerable postgraduate studies. She had been teaching at the school for the past four years and was teaching the same group for the second year. Hence, classroom relations were strong and students appeared very fond of their teacher, keen to participate and generally enjoyed their time in class. Thalia described her students as “good kids”, though “mediocre to bad” in terms of achievement, and she reported modifying her teaching considerably to meet their needs. Thalia also appeared quite knowledgeable of her students’ out-of-school lives (migration histories, residence, family circumstances, interests etc.) and her teaching often sought to incorporate this in the classroom.

The small primary school where Thalia worked was located close to the buffer zone dividing the old city centre in Nicosia, and belonged to the Zones for Educational Priority (ZEP), a special intervention programme (at the time) for addressing social inequalities in education. 95% of the students were of migrant working-class backgrounds, with complex migration trajectories. Teachers often described the school as “special”, “very different” and sometimes “difficult”. In addition to their various ethnolinguistic backgrounds, students had also varied levels of communicative and academic competence in Greek.

Turkish had a significant presence in the school as students of Turkish-speaking Pontian backgrounds formed the biggest ethnic group (about 40% of the population), with the majority originating from Georgia and Western Russia. According to teachers, most Pontian families had migrated to Cyprus in the late 1990s, often after having spent several years in Greece as repatriate Greeks. Therefore, Pontian students tended to be more confident in Greek, some of them had attended Greek education since their early childhood, and Turkish was used in their home environments mostly for oral communication. Other Turkish-speaking students in the school had Bulgarian, Roma, Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot backgrounds. Although these groups used different varieties of Turkish, teachers reported that Turkish-speaking students seemed to manage basic understanding across these varieties. Nonetheless, Greek remained the preferred language of communication between all students in the school.

Thalia’s group consisted of 11 students (3 girls, 9 boys) between 8–9 years old, of which only one was Greek-Cypriot. The remaining students had Greek as a second language, while Turkish was the home language of six students, five with Pontian and one with Turkish-Bulgarian backgrounds. Emil was by far the most fluent speaker of Turkish in class and he had also basic literacy skills, acquired through chatting online with his uncle in Bulgaria. Thalia characterised Emil (who will be the protagonist in the example below), as a “quiet but very good kid”, who was “still struggling with Greek” because, in contrast to most students, he had only entered Greek-Cypriot education a year ago, while his family could not speak Greek at all.

During our ethnographic observations it emerged that many Turkish-speaking students in Thalia’s class had considerable out-of-school experiences with Turkish people and culture. Nevertheless, our research collected evidence for the suppression of students’ Turkish-speakerness in school in various ways, similarly to case study 1. Generally Turkish-speaking students tended to refrain from speaking Turkish in school, especially in more formal contexts like the classroom, or in front of the researcher. According to Thalia, Pontian students seemed to carry from home “a guilt mixed with fear” for being Turcophone, and they often felt the need to clarify that “I speak the language but I’m not Turkish”.

Likewise, Emil for several months withheld the fact that he also had a Turkish name (Mehmet) and refused to be called by this at school. He also appeared “uncomfortable” during classroom discussions about Muslims and Turks and tried to conceal his family’s relations with the Turkish-speaking north.

In contrast, Thalia’s own classroom practices did not, in any way, encourage monolingual norms. In line with the suggestions in the translanguaging literature discussed above, with which she was familiar from her studies, she generally embraced her group’s diversity and encouraged students’ use of home linguistic repertoires to ensure understanding and maximise communication. Thus, she often invited students to offer synonyms of Greek words in their home languages or use home languages to explain aspects of the lesson to peers, which resulted in hybrid constructions that combined different linguistic features.

However, when Thalia tried to formally encourage linguistic performances of Turkish she met considerable resistance, as her sincere and well-intended educational attempt ran against powerful ideologies of (in)securitization and conflict. This ideological clash becomes obvious in the extract that we present and discuss below (for an extended discussion of this episode see P. Charalambous et al. 2018). This extract comes from a series of 3 lessons that Thalia designed during the training education workshops, and involved teaching positive Greek-Turkish relations within the framework of peace education. To this end, Thalia chose a story that thematized Greek-Turkish relations, included Turkish characters and Greek-Turkish bilinguals, and contained Turkish lexical items.

During the first lesson, in which Emil was absent, Thalia introduced the story, and the class discussed the bilingualism of the Greek protagonist (who was using many Turkish words) comparing it to their own bilingualism, whether it involved Turkish or not. Thalia also shared with students the fact that her own grandfather was bilingual because he had been living and working with Turkish Cypriots. Thalia then attempted to elicit some Turkish phrases from students but they resisted, and there were references to Emil as a more competent bilingual.

The next lesson started with a brief revision of what they did last time. Taking advantage of Emil’s presence, Thalia told him that they needed him last time to compose a note that would be sent to the fictional Turkish character of the story.

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THALIA: ok, Emil should tell us now, in case you found Meltem ((fictional character)), what would you tell her in Turkish,

because she lost her slipper and so on and so on

Emil: miss I would tell he::r-

Maria: in Turkish!

Yorgos: not in Greek!

THALIA: let’s see if those who know understand him ((Maria holds a pencil case in front of Emil like a microphone)) ah Maria is doing the reporter,

Emil tell us something

Emil: miss I would tell he::r

THALIA: ((whispering to Emil))in Turkish now, not in Greek, say

Emil: (2’) miss (6’)

THALIA: whatever you were going to say in Greek, say it in Turkish,

yesterday we didn’t have someone to help us

Emil: (5’) miss

THALIA: say

Emil: (2’)

THALIA: do you want to say it first in Greek and then in Turkish?

Maria: miss he is ashamed

THALIA: ok, fine, first in Greek and then in Turkish

Emil: I would tell her “I found the slipper in the sea a::nd

I took it (1’) and I took it (.) to give it to you”

THALIA: nice, now say it in Turkish,

now that you said it so nicely

Emil: (4’)“(-edin)(2’) buldum ben denizde”a(12’)

((Thalia waits for Emil to go on but he doesn’t; she continues with another classroom task))

(Classroom recording, fieldnotes taken by Panayiota Charalambous)

  1. aEnglish translation: I found your (slipper) in the sea

As evident in the episode above, despite the fact that a large group of students had at least some level of competence in Turkish, and despite Thalia’s best intentions, the attempt to encourage students to perform their home linguistic repertoires was met with considerable resistance: pauses (lines 12, 15, 17, 26), hesitation (e.g., lines 4, 10, 15), and silence (lines 26–27). Throughout the extract both Thalia and the students are supportive and encouraging (e.g., lines 5, 6, 12, 13,) whilst Emil seems very willing to perform the task (which was constructed as “helping the class”—line 14) and please Thalia; in fact, he does not abandon the attempt and tries to deliver the content of the task (a message to Meltem). It’s only in line 18 that Thalia realises that the problem is the medium in which the task was supposed to be delivered and she therefore recommends a change (first in Greek and then in Turkish). Indeed, Emil responds immediately to this change and without a hesitation tries in line 22 to perform the task in his L2 even with some audible difficulties in constructing the sentences and choosing the right Greek words. When he finally attempts to translate the message to his L1 and home language there are again hesitations and pauses, and he leaves the task unfinished. After a whole 12s pause, Thalia steps in and changes the task to relieve the tension.

So, how can we interpret the “sensitivities” and the “silences” that emerge, despite the teacher’s efforts and good intentions? In order to do so, we need to consider how wider collective narratives, historical trajectories, sociopolitical processes, and larger ideologies may impact classroom interaction, and specifically the ways in which linguistic diversity is “voiced”—or not.

We do so in the discussion section that follows, where we reflect on how the two case studies can help us rethink concepts such as “translanguaging” and their relation to social justice pedagogies.

6 Discussion and Implications

A socially just pedagogy involves pedagogical strategies that encourage critical questioning and resistance against systems of oppression and normalisation, and inspire social action that challenges injustice (Ayers et al. 2009; Kincheloe and Steinberg 1998; King 2005; Ladson-Billings 1994). A translanguaging pedagogical approach involves pedagogical strategies that are designed to empower, liberate and “give voice” to students to express their marginalised full linguistic repertoires. However, in both the case studies we discussed, rather than recording creative polylingual performances we evidenced silence and inarticulateness. As this chapter has shown, strong (in)securitization discourses may have complicated the enactment of translanguaging as socially just pedagogy.

Despite students’ linguistic practices at home, as well as linguistic competences, students’ public performance of their home linguistic repertoires in educational settings seemed to cause emotional discomfort, and hesitation resulting in self-censorship. This urges us as researchers and educators to rethink and interrogate our concepts and practices. How easy is to avoid associations with named languages? Can we escape linguistic ideologies and how? And to what extent can we transcend language as a powerful index of ethnonational belonging? Furthermore, how can we rethink translanguaging as a socially just pedagogy when issues of (in)security are involved?

These questions become more pressing in contexts where language is unavoidably part of a “conflicted heritage” which students have to negotiate in their everyday lives (C. Charalambous 2019) and which may pose a risk and create severe insecurities. Indeed, in students’ home communities (Pontian, Bulgarian) we can find narratives of conflict with Turks and histories of oppression of Turkish language use. With the political situation in Cyprus remaining unresolved, the issues raised in this chapter continue to create complications and other recent studies also discuss their emotional and political complexities (Zembylas et al. 2017, 2019a, b—the first in the context of religious education, the second in Holocaust education and the third in human rights education). But issues of (in)security are not unique for Cyprus. With the increase of (in)securitization processes that was described in the beginning of this chapter minority languages in different countries might also be (in)securitized, and their public performance in the classroom may be seen as threatening. Khan (2017) describes such processes taking place in the UK, whilst Zakharia (2016) describes the impact of (in)securitization processes on Arabic education in NYC.

As Jaspers and Madsen (2019) remind us, language socialisation literature has long argued that from very early on children socialise into language ideologies, and power asymmetries between different “named languages” and that this metapragmatic awareness always shapes to an extent their language use. This is also the case with (in)securitization processes and children in both case studies knew that performing Turkish in the classroom could potentially put them at risk.

The examples discussed here do not undermine the pedagogical potential of translanguaging practices. They do though urge us to carefully examine the discursive, historical, ideological and cultural constraints that frame classroom interactions, as well as students’ insecurities, in order to design not only socially just but also sensitive pedagogies—including translanguaging. In this endeavour the concept of “inarticulateness” maybe as useful as “translanguaging”. According to McDermott (1988) inarticulateness should not be approached as the product of individual inability of linguistic deficiency but rather bound to social situations, roles, and social structures that condition what is sayable (McDermott 1988). In this way inarticulateness may serve as “an invitation to listen in a new way”. The call for socially just pedagogies in conditions of (in)security requires attention to silences (Rampton and Charalambous 2016; Spyrou 2016) and inarticulateness as much as to issues of recognition, voice and polylingual creative performances.

This can help educators to seriously take into consideration the emotional and political complexities and the students’ precarious positionings.