Ava Becker, Ashley R. Moore
While translanguaging and other plurilingual pedagogies have gained popularity for their potential to validate students’ linguistic repertoires as they strengthen them, such approaches have generally neglected to acknowledge the distinct affective habitus that can accrete around certain linguistic resources and shape our (non-)use of them. In so doing, we may be inadvertently perpetuating the emotional harms we seek to guard against. As enthusiastic proponents of whole-repertoire approaches to pedagogy, we wondered: How should educators respond if activating certain linguistic resources at school causes a learner’s cheeks to burn with internalized racism or their voice to stammer? In this paper, we pose these provocative questions to complexify and enrich the practice of plurilingual pedagogies, bringing insights from those diverse pedagogies into conversation with work on embodied multilingualism and emotion, and trauma-informed pedagogy. We conclude by discussing possibilities for trauma-informed plurilingual pedagogies.