Critical translingual-transcultural perspectives: dual language picturebooks mediating children’s complex local and global cultures and identities

As teachers work in ever more linguistically and culturally complex situations, they are obliged to engage with the multiple languages, cultures and identities that children bring to the classroom. Morgado (2019, p. 165) stresses the importance of picturebooks ‘as multimodal representations of reality that need to be carefully selected if they are to be used for the purpose of learning about contemporary societies’. If contemporary societies are complex and diverse, multilingual and multicultural, transnational and transgressive, then the English classroom should reflect the reality of these hybrid, fluid identities. This paper explores the affordances of two dual-language picturebooks to engage with repertoires of linguistic and intercultural knowledge in a primary English language pre-service teacher education programme in Norway. These two picturebooks are: Norwegian and Northern Sámi Ábiid plástihkat – Plasten i havet (2020), created by Rita Sørly (author) and Malgorzata Piotrowska (illustrator) and translated into Northern Sámi by Rauni Magga Lukkari; and Marisol MacDonald Doesn’t Match/Marisol MacDonald no combina (2011) by Monica Brown and Sarah Palacios (illustrator) written in English and Spanish. Dual language picturebooks invite teachers to open the sliding glass door to more socially-just, diversity-focussed and language-conscious approaches in English language education. Intermingling images with different sounds and scripts, enhances the authenticity of the inter/trans-cultural experience, prompting the (un)silencing of languages and the unveiling of children’s hidden diversities. Embedded in critical multicultural analysis (Botelho and Rudman, 2009), mediated by translingual practices and drawing on teachers’ reflections during a scheme of work on multilingual picturebooks, this paper explores a critical translingual-transcultural framework (Ibrahim, forthcoming) for acknowledging children’s diverse lives, and ensuring the selection of literature that represents these diversities. Furthermore, it argues for reconceptualising the intercultural as transcultural space, moving the reader from an in-between space to a reciprocal, fluid exchange of knowledge, identities, modalities and language(s). Baker, W. (2022). Intercultural And Transcultural Awareness In Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Botelho, M. J. and Rudman, M. A. (2009). Theorising critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature. New York: Routledge. Ibrahim, N. (Forthcoming). Through the critical translingual-transcultural lens: a Northern Sámi-Norwegian dual language picturebook in English language education. H. Hoff (Ed.). Reimagining the role of literature in intercultural language education: New approaches and future perspectives. Special Issue of Intercultural Communication Education. Morgado, M. (2019). Intercultural mediation through picturebooks. Comunicação e sociedade. [Online], Special Issue, pp. 163-183.