Trans/plurilingual Pedagogies: A Multiethnography

ABSTRACT Trans/plurilingual theory and pedagogies have been generating extensive attention within global English language teaching and teacher education. This article responds to the burgeoning area of trans/plurilingual pedagogies, outlining diverse pedagogical practices and perspectives from a group of English language educators at a large, cosmopolitan Canadian university. Considering recent assertions that there are onto-epistemological differences between multilingualism, plurilingualism, and translingualism, this article looks to demonstrate how (or even if) these differences manifest in the pedagogical practices of diverse faculty within the same language teaching and teacher education programs. Drawing on multiethnographic data, this article concludes with a discussion of the potential and limitations of critical pedagogies, the affordances of multiethnography as an accessible methodology for use by researchers and pedagogues, and a call for greater bi-directional knowledge flow between language researchers and classroom instructors.


Introduction
Pluri-oriented theories and pedagogies have been front and centre in language (teacher) education during the seismic multi / plural shifts over the past decades (Kubota, 2016;2020). 6Most recently, trans / plurilingual approaches, as the pedagogical soups du jour, have been generating extensive attention within English language teaching (ELT) and teacher education in Canada (e.g., Heng Hartse et al., 2018;Marshall et al., 2018;Payant & Galante, 2022) as well as globally (e.g., Cenoz & Gorter, 2020;García et al., 2017;Piccardo et al., 2021;Sun, 2022) including in Brazil (Rocha, 2019;Rocha & Maciel, 2015;Windle, 2019).This empirical and conceptual work, drawing on translingual and plurilingual theory, integrates sociolinguistic realities of language use, challenging entrenched monolingual theories and practices in language education, viewing additional languages as resources rather than problems.This recent body of work, under the banner of translanguaging / plurilingualism, has often trumpeted its critical or transformative potential, pointing to how such plurioriented approaches to language education may counter the hegemony of English, and thus unequal and inequitable relations of power (Canagarajah, 2013;Corcoran, 2019;García & Lin, 2017).Rarely, however, has this work described and situated such pluri-oriented practice to the extent that educators might adapt and adopt activities for implementation in global ELT classrooms while considering their theoretical underpinnings and transformative possibilities.Thus, our objective is to somewhat close the gap between trans/plurilingual theory, research, and classroom practice, stimulating discussion among language researchers, language teachers, and language teacher educators working in English medium of instruction (EMI) contexts.So, how are trans / plurilingual theories being taken up by scholarpractitioners in their respective post-secondary classrooms, and why might insight into such pluri-oriented pedagogies be important for global language researchers, instructors, and administrators interested in transformative educational practice?Finally, how might a novel research methodology -multiethnography -afford critical reflection that can elucidate connections between theory and classroom practice aimed at social transformation?6. Recognizing the multitude, complexity, overlap, and contested nature of terms used to describe pedagogies emerging from the multi/plural turns, throughout this piece we use pluri-oriented as a blanket term to describe understandings and approaches that valorize and/or utilize speakers/students full language repertoires as resources for additional language learning.Considering recent assertions that there are ontological and epistemological differences between multilingualism, plurilingualism and translingualism (e.g., García & Otheguy, 2020;Marshall, 2021), this article looks to highlight how (or even if) these differences manifest in the pedagogical practices of diverse faculty within the same language education context.For example, though often confused or conflated, multilingualism is generally conceived of as language policy and practice aimed at groups whereas plurilingualism is better understood at the level of individual actors, highlighting the value of accessing and utilizing multiple linguistic resources for intercultural communication (Coste et al., 2009;Marshall & Moore, 2018;Piccardo et al., 2021).Translingualism, the newest -ism to the table, like plurilingualism, is oriented towards language use of individuals, but, unlike plurilingualism, explicitly challenges static cognitive and social (and socially-constructed) boundaries between languages, often proclaiming a more overtly critical orientation based on theoretical / conceptual criteria (García & Lin, 2017;Wei, 2018).But how do these theories get taken up at the pedagogical level?Beginning with an overview of the institutional context and author subjectivities, this article proceeds to articulate five examples of pluri-oriented pedagogies employed by practitioners in their English for academic purposes (EAP), Teaching English as a Second or Other Language (TESOL), and Graduate 7 Applied Linguistics classrooms.The authors briefly describe classroom activities, outlining how these activities are inspired by theory and research.Subsequent collegial commentary presents convergent and divergent pluri-oriented ontoepistemologies, i.e., ways of knowing and doing, of language teaching and teacher education, raising important questions for consideration by language educators working to support plurilingual students across English medium of instruction (EMI) post-secondary contexts.Paramount among these considerations is the notion of consequential validity, or the potential value of theory -in this case trans/plurilingual theory -for informing classroom language teachers' and teacher educators' practice (Cummins, 2021).
7. Also known as post-graduate.
Consequential validity assigns a preeminent role to teacher agency in the local enactment of language theory and policy.Irrespective of the acquisitional or transformative potential claimed by adherents for a given trans/plurilingual theory, consequence and relevance arise from situated practice and the central role of teachers as knowledge creators uniquely positioned to negotiate institutional constraints and possibilities on behalf of or alongside their students.It is in this close pedagogical work that theoretical inadequacies, complicities, and opportunities organically emerge, providing teachers with paradigmatic insights unavailable to outside experts.Indeed, following Cummins' validity criteria, we have chosen to foreground our own curricular responses and interventions with discussions of context and the conditions of possibility that have informed our pedagogical decision-making.

Institutional Context, Participants, and Methodology
Though each of us brings diverse ethnolinguistic identities and experiences to this collaboration -e.g., Colombian, Korean, Hong Kong, and Canadian-born instructors with experience teaching English in a range of geolinguistic contexts -we all completed our PhD studies at OISE/University of Toronto and we all currently work (though Brian has recently retired) as Assistant or Associate Professors of ESL and/ or Applied Linguistics at York University.In line with qualitative inquiry that forefronts author subjectivities, Figure 1 displays our convergent and divergent histories and experiences, and our personal and professional identities, which play an important part in guiding our classroom pedagogies, as seen in the following section.Prior to describing our classroom pedagogies, though, it is important to understand the institutional context in which we work, shown in Figure 1.York University, a large Canadian university serving over 50,000 students, and its bilingual (English-French) college campus, Glendon College, serving approximately 3,000 students, were some of the first post-secondary institutions in Canada to offer undergraduate, content-based, credit-bearing English for academic purposes (EAP) courses, and the distinct history of this EAP provision guides our instruction aimed at our culturally and linguistically diverse population of students (Mendelsohn, 2001).The key criterion for credit, as negotiated with the university senate more than twenty years ago, was that these EAP courses engage with academic content at a level of rigour comparable to other Social Sciences and Humanities courses.Not all the courses described in this article are specific to EAP (e.g., James' graduate English for specific purposes (ESP) and Marlon's language teacher education examples), but all contributors to this article teach in an EAP program, some exclusively.This somewhat unique content and language-integrated orientation to EAP informs our varied pedagogical practices outlined in the next section, including a strong emphasis on content related to Canadian Studies, broadly speaking, where issues of individual and collective identity negotiation are of particular interest to students and instructors alike.
An emerging, critical methodological approach, duo / multiethnography is rooted in a qualitative paradigm that challenges accepted regimes of truth, instead seeking to better understand social realities and individual agency / identity through collective reflection and storytelling.Though still fighting for legitimacy in applied linguistics, multiethnography has been increasingly embraced in language education, not only in North American contexts (e.g., Ahmed & Morgan, 2021;De Costa et al., 2022;Valencia et al., 2020), but also in a range of global and transnational contexts (e.g., Adamson et al., 2019;Lowe & Lawrence, 2020).This novel methodological approach has been increasingly adopted in service of facilitating critical reflection on the part of language teacher educators and language teachers at different stages in their academic/ professional trajectories.In order to reflect upon and interrogate our individual classroom pedagogies, we have adopted this dialogic approach that allows for a critical juxtaposition of our voices as we work together to critique and question beliefs, discourses, ontologies, and epistemologies (Sawyer & Norris, 2015).Interestingly, in a multiethnography, the authorparticipants -in this case all language (teacher) educators -are both the researchers and the researched.In our case, we have found that engaging in this dialogic process has allowed us to trace connections between our life trajectories, engagement with theory and research, and conceptions and operationalizations of pluri-oriented pedagogies.In the following sections, we present brief activity descriptions displaying how we, as classroom instructors, enact our pluri-oriented pedagogies, followed by targeted discussion in a conversational format that invites the readers to consider not only our pedagogical beliefs and practices, but also their own.

Our Stories: Pluri-oriented Pedagogies and Perspectives
In this section, drawing upon our synchronous Zoom chats and asynchronous exchanges via email and OneDrive, which produced qualitative data that were coded into emergent, salient themes (Saldaña, 2021;Silverman, 2020), we present five distinct pluri-oriented practices from across EAP, TESOL, and graduate applied linguistics classrooms at our post-secondary institution, highlighting our theoretical underpinnings, and responding to each other's described classroom activities.This section concludes with an exchange on the affordances and limitations of our research methodology in the field of language (teacher) education.

Classroom Activity #1: My metaphors
Marlon: As a recently appointed professor in our Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language (D-TEIL), I was tasked with developing a new course to help EIL teachers embrace the learning and teaching of English grammar from a critical practitioner stance.As part of this course development, building on translanguaging's notion that plurilingual speakers possess a richer, summative lexico-grammatical repertoire (García & Otheguy, 2020), I invite language teacher candidates (TCs) to view grammar as a vehicle to convey meaning, evoke concepts, and construct language users' imaginaries in discourse across languages, rather than simply viewing it as a set of rules for standard English which teachers must guard and enforce.This translingual orientation, driven by my experiences as a plurilingual user of English as an additional language, is reflected in my approach, as evidenced in my pedagogical practice and syllabus construction, as well as in two activities that I use at the beginning of the course.First, as part of my community-building efforts, we create identity portraits, which are artistic representations of who my teacher candidates are.After modeling my own identity portrait that displays my multilingual identity, I give them a blank silhouette so they can use crayons, markers, and colors to visually represent their multiple identities.This activity is followed by a virtual gallery walk in which each TC explains their portraits and showcases their diverse linguistic identities.As the culturally and linguistically diverse TCs take in each other's identity portraits, they reflect upon the inextricable links between language, identity, and pedagogical practice (Cummins, 2009;Prasad, 2020).
Heejin: I can imagine that this warm-up activity would instantly create a welcoming and safe learning environment to explore the intersectionality of class participants' evolving personal / academic identities in a creative way.I am curious to hear more about how you promote translingual perspectives among your TCs.
Marlon: Well, I am happy you asked!Another example of this type of pluri-oriented practice is when we discuss metaphor use across languages, sharing metaphors in an online forum.In an asynchronous forum discussion, TCs are invited to share sayings in the languages that they spoke or knew about, explaining metaphors contained in such sayings.This leads to a prolific discussion of metaphors in English, Italian, Mauritian Créole, Punjabi, and Spanish, among other languages.This exercise allowed TCs to realize that there were common metaphors in romance languages like Spanish and Italian.One example I remember was: 'buono come il pane' in Italian or 'bueno como el pan' in Spanish, which literally mean 'as good as bread'.These metaphors are used to speak of someone who is kind and has a good character.
Jacqueline: This translingual and transcultural way of exploring metaphor seemed to provide the conditions for your students to uncover new, exciting, and progressive ways of understanding and teaching English lexico-grammatical components.Might you share a tangible example of this activity?Marlon: Sure, below is one example of an exchange between students on the e-learning space: My Italian Metaphors by (Student name) -Friday, 18 September 2020, 12:31 PM Number of replies: 3 "Buono come il pane" -This is an Italian metaphor that translates to good as bread in English.This metaphor makes me think of and is similar to the English saying, "good as gold".I chose this metaphor since it is something my Italian parents used to say to me while growing up.They would use this expression as a way to describe someone that had a heart of gold.It can be used when explaining a kind and helpful person.
"Fa un freddo cane!" -This is another Italian metaphor that is like the English saying, "its dog cold!" and can be used when it is extremely cold outside.My parents would use this metaphor when I was growing up, which makes it a saying that reminds me of my childhood.When my older brother and I would complain that it was freezing outside our parents taught us this metaphor, and it is now something that we still joke about to this day.
James: I love how you are able to produce meaningful "play" with and across language(s) in this type of metaphor / translation activity, while promoting metalinguistic awareness, encouraging students to draw on and shuttle between available linguistic resources (Canagarajah, 2013).I can certainly see the influence of translingual theory in your pedagogical practices.I wonder, though, whether highlighting the distinctiveness of English, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. merely reifies the notion that there are distinct languages, rather than linguistic repertoires without artificial boundaries (García & Lin, 2017)?And I also wonder if these types of pedagogical practices are ever challenged by fellow faculty or students for diverting time and attention from the main task at hand, teaching English?Marlon: Those are interesting points.For me, the challenge is creating a space where theoretical and applied linguistics could safely intersect to nurture and inspire culturally and linguistically diverse TCs by presenting them with foundational concepts and tools to help them re-imagine grammar conceptually, not prescriptively.Thus, the intention is that TCs could reaffirm and embrace their rich plurilingual repertoires in order to help them unpack the notion of the monolingual native speaker as the prevalent model for grammar teaching and learning.I feel it is important to help TCs share metaphors in the multiple languages that they speak, so they notice how these languages influence the way they think and experience the world, thereby inspiring a form of critical intercultural rhetorical awareness.I do not think this reifies distinctions between 'named' languages, and I am not sure the students would appreciate the potential distinction made between plurilingual and translingual conceptualizations of linguistic repertoires.Also, no, I have experienced no pushback at all from colleagues or students!I am fortunate to collaborate with colleagues who are open to acknowledging TCs' plurilingual repertoires and their translanguaging practices.Moreover, TCs feel proud and more confident about their multiple languages, so they welcome these interactions.
Brian: James, I know Marlon's teaching context very well, having taught there for 14 years.The belief in distinctive languages-aligned with distinctive methodologies and measures of proficiency-was, and for some, continues to be a foundational principle of the college where D-TEIL is housed.From the perspective of consequential validity (cf.Cummins), an argument could be made that longstanding frustration with this "distinctiveness" has been a causal factor in enabling the kinds of plurilingual/translingual teacher and student agency Marlon describes.A decade ago, pushback would have been more pronounced.Another enabling factor has been the sustained publication of plurioriented research, which provides a theoretical justification or "cover" for teachers who want to explore these ideas in their local practice.
Heejin: Brian, that's a good point on the conditions that foster teacher agency.Towards that goal, Marlon, can you elaborate how your TCs were able to transform their critical understandings into practice within and/or beyond the classroom?Marlon: I think that activity frees my plurilingual TCs to look at grammar across languages and acknowledges their robust lexico-grammatical systems, which can be a first step in becoming more cognizant of how their future students may learn English grammar.This openness to translanguaging and transcultural practices was on display when they did virtual English as a foreign language class observations and a small intervention with Colombian students.They quickly made connections between theory and practice when they saw how resourceful their host language teachers were using English cognates when communicating with introductory level students.These 'real world' experiences TCs had during their practicum experiences demonstrate the potentially impactful, if not transformative nature of this type of language teacher education.

Classroom Activity #2: Multimodal Terminology Corner
Heejin: Guided by a curricular focus on social justice, the "Multimodal Terminology Corner" illuminates well my multimodal and multilingual orientations (Cummins, 2009;Cummins & Early, 2011).In this online activity, students are asked to review academic terms/ concepts critical to engaging with culturally sensitive course readings, adding their thoughts to a virtual bulletin board on Padlet (padlet.com), an online educational application.For this activity, students are guided through five steps: 1) quoting and locating key academic terms and concepts; 2) interpreting/meaning-making; 3) plurilingual and intercultural understanding; 4) applying the understanding; and 5) visualizing the concept and understanding (see Figure 2).Heejin: Prior to this activity, students had engaged in a series of class discussions related to systemic racism in Canada (e.g., Davis, 2018), where students were expected to report back their understandings of these course readings, highlight forms of racism using media resources, and share their lived experiences in social and academic settings through guided discussion prompts.The multimodal terminology corner activity is designed as a follow-up activity to these discussions, promoting a deeper understanding of the readings, and a growing ability to identify and engage with recurrent and newly emerging forms of social and racial marginalization related to many of my students' lives during the COVID 19 pandemic (e.g., anti-Asian sentiments, BIPOC movements).They explored how selected terms from the course readings might be used and understood across cultures, providing examples from their L1, and drawing on the multimodal resources available through the Padlet's image and video collection for further explanations 8 .Thus, multimodality with plurilingual and intercultural exploration is additive (Cummins, 2021), standing in stark contrast to an apolitical, transmission model wherein collaborative and creative knowledge co-construction is not possible.During this activity, students seemed to meaningfully engage and synthesize important terms such as systemic racism, microaggression, and xenophobia, which are fundamental for students' explication of their experiences during the pandemic.By the end of the course, it was evident that many students effectively integrated the lexical knowledge gained through these collective efforts as I witnessed the appropriate use of the terms in online discussions and final reports.
Marlon: Heejin, I feel inspired by how your terminology corner provides students with an independent-study tool that is quite helpful to learn and retain new academic vocabulary, while simultaneously encouraging them to make connections across words, languages, concepts, and cultures.The multimodal nature of this activity grants students access to the mental imagery that they already associate with each concept in their other languages.Thus, one could say that this activity brilliantly combines languaging, or making meaning through linguistic production, and builds on learners' plurilingual lexical repertoires (Galante, 2020;Piccardo et al., 2021).I am looking forward to implementing these terminology corners in my EAP courses! 8. On Padlet, students could add a relevant video or picture to their posts through the Padlet's cloud-based collection of royalty-free public images or videos.
James: In my estimation, there is great potential in using these types of lexical building opportunities to not only enhance students' academic literacies but also their critical language / cultural awareness, where they are prompted to consider the role of languages in promoting, maintaining, exacerbating, and / or challenging unequal social relations of power (Cummins, 2009).I can't help but wonder whether your pedagogies are influenced by your own linguacultural background and personal / professional journey?
Brian: I'm wondering the same as it presents an opportunity to reflect on the role of (plurilingual) language teacher identity in shaping our curricular decisions and relationships with students.
Heejin: I can surely sympathize with students who may experience different types of discrimination.Indeed, my own journey of identity construction and negotiation as a Korean speaker / instructor of English as an additional language has impacted everything I do in the classroom.As such, it was my sincere hope that learners engaged in this task would develop critical awareness of issues around identity, social injustice and inequity.In this way, this instructional practice then attempted to not only serve students' academic literacies (e.g., lexical knowledge; advanced reading skills; critical thinking skills) but also, perhaps just as importantly, instill in students a more social justice-oriented lens through which to see the world and, ultimately, equip them with action strategies to resist against unjust biases and discrimination outside the classroom.
James: It is interesting to consider that the immediate language learning outcomes for these undergraduate students that you are working with may be secondary to the longer-term development of critical, intercultural and language awareness during their undergraduate degree programs.After completing this activity, I wonder if you noticed any changes in students' work or responses in their class engagement?
Heejin: In completing this activity, students were able to connect sociopolitical and sociocultural factors with the use of certain terms in different cultural contexts, thereby raising not only their critical literacies but also their metalinguistic and intercultural awareness (Morgan & Vandrick, 2009).To illustrate, students often noted similar and differing patterns of prejudice and discrimination that exist in their own culture (e.g., boy/male favoritism and xenophobic patterns toward regional dialects and minoritized/ racialized ethnocultural groups in China; intergenerational difference in perceptions toward racism in different nations).Toward the end of the course, I could see how students were confidently and astutely able to integrate those terms to express their thoughts.The following excerpt, which is part of the student reflection on the class activity of allyship development, exemplifies how discussions and engagement with key terminology enabled their critical, reflective capacities: "Dr.Davis mentioned that we must commit to ending this pattern of systemic racism by learning and unlearning.Learning how to respond to racism, to call it out and to expand on a pedagogy that is inclusive to all beings etc. […] it is our social responsibility to be mindful in the things we say and do and to contribute to the eradication of this evil called Racism from society."(Student entry from online discussion forum)

Classroom Activity #3: Multilingual Identity Text Project
Jacqueline: Many of my ELL (English language learners) students see themselves as deficient users of English.This fact resonates at a personal level with me, as a Hong Kong-born user / instructor of English as an additional language who engaged in a challenging transnational journey, where I had to negotiate my evolving, hybrid academic and professional identity.Thus, I am particularly interested in attending to students' transnational self-efficacy and academic success.In my EAP course, students design and create an Identity Text Project in which they draw upon their distinctive linguistic and cultural characteristics that represent them as unique individuals in a multilingual and multicultural society (Cummins & Early, 2011).In the "narrative, reflective space" afforded, students are excited to tell their personal stories (via Padlet and eClass, our e-learning space) that provide cultural insights and describe the impact of various factors (e.g., family, culture, institution, and peers) on their transnational identity construction and negotiation (Zaidi et al., 2016).The Identity Text Project effectively promotes ELL students' target language learning through making meaning of learned concepts, engaging in intercultural dialogues, and producing innovative multimodal work.These learning outcomes align with plurilingual pedagogy that maximizes available resources and opportunities to ensure language can be learned and used in meaningful ways as students take ownership of their learning process.
Heejin: Jim Cummins' (2009) transformative multiliteracies pedagogy posits that when learners are given an opportunity to express their ideas with whatever modes of expression and whatever forms of literacies are available to them, learners will show increased engagement and investment in learning.In this sense, this is a very empowering activity for students, and I can see the influence of Jim's scholarship in your pedagogical practice!I am particularly interested to know more about how an identity text project is executed.
Jacqueline: Yes, my work has been heavily influenced by Jim's scholarship.I would say the same for all of us that studied with him at OISE/University of Toronto, no? Anyway, let's proceed with a general explanation of the identity text project.First, drawing on their plurilingual and pluricultural competence (Coste et al., 2009), students produce a multilingual, multimodal "text" -i.e., a text that uses available semiotic resources, including audio, video, image-where they reflect on their linguistic and cultural identities via digital storytelling (Corcoran, 2017).The result of this project is two main artifacts that promote critical reflection on identity construction and negotiation, including an audio-recorded digital "text", as well as a multimodal poster that highlights their struggles and achievements in a new cultural context.Figure 3 showcases an example of one student's multimodal infographic poster of her transnational journey from Syria to Canada.Marlon: As an avid user of multimodal identity texts in the language classroom, I applaud your creative implementation of this Identity Text Project, which clearly welcomes and acknowledges students' pluri-competence and diverse experiences.I think inviting EAP students or TCs to narrate their personal life-stories can situate them simultaneously in their memories of the past, their present experiences, and their envisioned future (Ng, 2011;Valencia et al., 2020).Learning about your use of identity texts happily validates my identity-infused orientation to the teaching of English as an additional language!I suspect I already know your answer, Jacqueline, but I wonder if you ever get any pushback from administrators about incorporating a non-traditional assignment like this one in your credit-bearing EAP classroom?Jacqueline: Recognizing York University's teaching priorities with respect to eLearning, the Identity Text Project is complementary to traditional course work, promoting broad academic literacies, including critical thinking skills (Lea & Street, 2006).Even though students are occasionally hesitant to share their evolving identities in class, I see the urgency and importance of engaging them in a student-led learning process afforded by this activity that helps them construct and negotiate their identities and consider their subjectivities.From my students' learning outcomes and reflections, I am convinced of the efficacy of this multiliteracies pedagogy!Brian: That's such an interesting point on eLearning and its affordances for the kinds of innovative multimodal identity work you are doing.Regarding Marlon's question on pushback, administrators have gotten much more (i.e., your innovative project) and perhaps much less (i.e., fewer economic efficiencies and savings) from their exuberant rush to bring in more information technologies and computer-assisted learning into post-secondary education.
James: I wonder if you noticed any changes in students' attitudes, perspectives and/or academic production in class following this project?Jacqueline: Yes, I did see significant changes in my students' self-perceptions and identity formation after they completed the project.When we initially discussed major course themes such as racism, discrimination, and power relations between the dominated and the oppressed, many ELL students identified themselves as socially and linguistically marginalized, drawing on ideas such as intersectionality (Collins & Bilge, 2020).I was surprised to find how the project has inspired students to reshape their identities and reposition their social status.For example, a student in my class was a Syrian refugee who had been living independently in Canada for a few months.In her reflection, she expressed that she used to be passive and silent in other courses and was not comfortable to talk about her background publicly.I was thrilled to see this student passionately share her transnational journey in her Identity Text Project and discuss how she has transitioned from a "deficient" ELL learner to a multicompetent user of English (Cook, 2016), from a minoritized, marginalized member to an active, engaged, and legitimate member in the new community, and from a refugee to a proud Syrian-Canadian.This student was invited to present her Identity Text Project at the York University Undergraduate Research Fair in 2021 and received an award for her academic achievement.This type of academic trajectory demonstrates that ELL students can actively engage in academic endeavors beyond the classroom level, claiming agency, and affirming their evolving, hybrid, transnational, multilingual identities (Nicolaides & Archango, 2019).To me, that is transformative!James: In my "English for Specific Purposes: Theory and Practice" course in our Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (LAL) graduate program, I go about de-centring English from the jump.During the first class, I invite my graduate students -all active language teachers with at least two years' experience -to contribute to a "classroom language landscape document" by writing short phrases (e.g., "what's up?", as seen in Figure 5) in the languages that they "know", leading to discussion of Englishes, languaging, heteroglossic variation, and language hierarchies (Lau & Van Viegen, 2020).The result of this activity is a permanent classroom product that can become a fixture on the classroom wall and / or e-learning space, and a constant reminder of our collective cultural and linguistic diversity.Heejin: Your "classroom language landscape" activity is an excellent instantiation of creating a welcoming and engaging dialogue among class participants, instigating critical reflection on English(es) and ELT throughout the course.I am curious to hear more about the discussions that this activity invoked.
James: Discussions surrounding the classroom language landscape are often interesting and involve questions surrounding language varieties.In an effort to validate students' diverse and evolving linguistic repertoires, I often challenge students to consider more broadly their inter-and intralinguistic knowledge of "standard English vs. other Englishes" and other languages / dialects.Building on this initial activity, I pose a set of provocative questions about acronyms used in our course (e.g., ESP; EAP): What does it signify when English is forefronted in these terms?Is English the only language that is used for specific (academic/occupational) purposes?What are the cultural/ linguistic profiles of those who use English for specific purposes?
What other examples of acronyms or language use in the ELT (aha, another one!)classroom elevate certain languages and language users at the expense of others?Again, this discussion serves to increase these scholar-practitioners' critical language awareness, drawing immediate attention to issues of classroom language use, power, and subjectivities (De Costa et al., 2017;Siqueira, 2021).Next, assuming a three-hour course -standard in our graduate program-the remainder of the class is focused on interrogating "common sense" ideologies of English language teaching (Cummins, 2007;Phillipson, 2016) such as, "English is the best language for intercultural communication", "Those who use English as an additional language draw upon only English when engaged in academic/ professional linguistic production", and "English instruction is most effectively carried out by native speakers of English".This set of Day 1 activities set the stage for critical reflection upon oft-obscured monolingual ideologies and ontoepistemologies underpinning the work we do as language teachers and teacher educators (Kubota, 2020;Moore et al., 2020;Watson & Shapiro, 2018).Jacqueline: Interesting!I also pose these types of questions in my EAP course.James, I think these types of awareness-raising practices about monolingual ideologies in ELT display a plurilingual approach that challenges coercive power relations between individuals and groups, something evident in both plurilingual and translingual approaches to language education (Cummins, 2021;Marshall, 2021).
Heejin: It is noteworthy that you challenge the implicit colonial discourses and monolingual ideologies (e.g., named language hierarchies) often implicit in English teaching and learning.In this sense, would you say, at least to some extent, your pedagogy follows the spirit of translanguaging, as outlined by García and Otheguy (2020), Wei (2018), and others?James: Jacqueline, I do think my pedagogical practice in the area of English for specific purposes acts in the spirit of translanguaging and I certainly value the recent contributions of translingual theory and translanguaging pedagogy, especially as it applies to the teaching of writing in an additional language.For example, in addition to working with in-service language teachers in our Linguistics and Applied Linguistics graduate program at York University, I also work in international contexts (e.g., Mexico) where I design and teach English for research publication purposes courses (see Flowerdew & Habibie, 2021).However, as I continue to refine and operationalize my pedagogies for supporting plurilingual scholars' advanced literacies (see Englander & Corcoran, 2019), I am not sure it makes much difference whether I label these practices as translanguaging or plurilingual or multilingual, given their shared philosophical orientations and transformative objectives.I suppose I'll leave that for the readers to decide.
Marlon: These insights certainly resonate with me, as I feel the boundaries between translanguaging and plurilingualism aren't clearly defined when it comes to pedagogical application.Wouldn't you say that teachers simply use the ideas they feel work best for their teaching contexts and needs regardless of theoreticians' big debates and divides (Kumaravadivelu, 2001)?
Brian: I agree.The theoretical debates can seem overly dogmatic at times, trivializing the knowledge creation, expertise and experience of practitioners, which is why consequential validity (Cummins, 2021) and Kumaravadivelu's (2001) post-method parameters (i.e., particularity, practicality, possibility) are so important.I'd also add that given James' setting of a graduate course on ESP, an emphasis on teachers' assessment of local needs in adopting pluri-oriented pedagogies makes a lot of sense.
James: Working with graduate students who have language teaching experience is always enjoyable and rewarding given the immediate connections they can often make between theory, research, and pedagogical practice.Importantly, I agree with Marlon that practitioners must be able to find meaningful connections between theory and practice, answering the "so what?" question that can sometimes get lost in esoteric and myopic debates between theoreticians and researchers.Ultimately, in order to pave the way for transformative pedagogical practice that promotes critical literacies, we need to make theory and research accessible to our students, and that can only be done when there are real connections that students make between scholarship and real-world experiences.These pedagogies should be situated within the sociohistorical and sociocultural contexts in which they are used -there is no such thing as a perfect, one-size-fits-all approach to language teaching/teacher education.

Classroom Activity #5: Trans-Semiotic Culture Jamming
Brian: James, I couldn't agree more on the need to make scholarship accessible and relevant to the real-world challenges students experience.That has been the guiding aspiration for a content-based EAP course titled, "Dealing with Viewpoint" I taught at Glendon College from 2008 to 2020.The course sought to develop advanced academic language skills while promoting critical multiliteracies related to citizenship (Windle & Morgan, 2020).Over the past ten years, I have integrated plurilingual / translanguaging elements in several course assignments, one of which I describe here.The "culture jamming" assignment explores a semiotic, multimodal orientation to L2 work, drawing on students' experiential familiarity with social media as well as their everyday encounters with the kinds of remixed, hybrid texts characteristic of Toronto's ethnolinguistic diversity.For this assignment, students select a spoof ad or culture jamming image for analysis, responding to the following prompts in approximately 400-500 words: How does it work as a parody or copy of the original ad or image?In your opinion, how effective is it in terms of "meme warfare"?How does it use image and texts to "jam" our consumer culture and/or act on our emotions?
In class, I provide several examples of culture jamming images, discussing compositional strategies and techniques (e.g., visual parody, aesthetic imitation).I also focus attention on what I describe as examples of "emo-fishing"-how text designers integrate plurilingual and trans-semiotic elements such as digraphia (orthography/grapheme mixing) that engage with multilingual audiences in differentiated ways, for some, indexing strong emotional responses linked to postmemory, e.g., the intergenerational transfer of traumatic historical events for diasporic communities (Ahmed & Morgan, 2021).One example I like to show in class comes from a political rally held at the Ontario Legislature in December 2008 (see Figure 5).As I explain to students, for Ukrainian-Canadians the postmemory of the man-made famine in Ukraine under Stalin's rule (i.e., the Holodomor) would be indexed by this multimodal poster and its mixing of Cyrillic and Roman scripts, no doubt provoking strong feelings of opposition to the late Canadian parliamentarian, Jack Layton.
For the next class, I ask students to bring in one or two assignment examples and ask them to do a short, informal presentation focused on reasons for their choice and emergent analyses based on course readings.The group discussions around this activity are especially useful for raising intercultural, plurilingual and trans-semiotic awareness.Jacqueline: Thank you for sharing this inspirational, empowering EAP classroom pedagogy, Brian, I wonder, are students allowed to select a multilingual culture jamming product/ad from their "home country"?Might that enrich the content of their presentation and enhance their plurilingual and trans-semiotic awareness?
Heejin: I agree that this assignment is a powerful way to facilitate students' engagement with critical literacies.Particularly, it is meaningful as it speaks to unique sociocultural and sociolinguistic student populations reflecting the diverse ethnocultural and linguistic makeup of Toronto.As Jacqueline alluded to, it would be ideal if students brought their own spoof ads and utilized their cultural and linguistic knowledge to decode the trans-semiotic expressions.
Brian: Absolutely.Jacqueline and Heejin, this has been an important addition to this assignment in recent years.When students bring in culture jamming items from other countries and in different languages/scripts, I encourage them to explain the requisite cultural and semiotic knowledge needed to understand the sign makers' rhetorical intentions (see e.g., Ferraz & Mezan, 2019).

Methodological Affordances and Limitations
James: As we come to the end of this project, I am curious as to how you all view your experiences with multiethnography as a research methodology.This is now the fifth time I have participated in such a project and while other experiences have undoubtedly been positive, our project has been unique in certain ways.For example, though one might argue that duo/multiethnography often works best when there are a range of contrasting perspectives, leading to analysis of convergent, divergent, dynamic author perspectives, working on this project has highlighted the undeniable synergies in pedagogical orientations and practices of our group.
Heejin: Indeed!This project has certainly made me feel connected with colleagues who share similar pedagogical orientations and approaches despite differing teaching trajectories and expertise.This connectedness has been an important source of developing and maintaining relationships with colleagues, particularly during the pandemic, and greatly influenced how I teach.Through our continued back-and-forth dialogues via zoom and emails, I believe we became more comfortable with sharing our ideas, at times challenging, questioning, and confirming my perspectives, which impacted (and often validated) my pedagogical practices.
Jacqueline: I absolutely agree that multiethnography can effectively enhance researchers' team building through exchange of professional knowledge, critical insights, and expertise.Despite all the uncertainties and challenges I have been encountering during these isolating pandemic times, this collaborative project certainly affirmed my (and others?) pedagogical orientations and classroom practices.More importantly, this emergent methodological approach recognizes our critical reflections as both instructors and researchers, providing the conditions for transformation of current conditions and construction of a new social future (New London Group, 2000).
Marlon: Some photographers argue that you don't take photographs; rather, photographs are given to you, the result of the confluence of a series of fortuitous events.In a similar vein, I was given multiethnography during my doctoral studies when a colleague of mine and I found out how analogous our data collection journeys were despite our vastly different research contexts (Sri Lanka vs. the Americas).Therefore, out of curiosity and solidarity, we started a series of critical conversations.That was several years ago, and I'm happy to report that this is my ninth multiethnography.Successful multiethnographies can be a cathartic experience based on trust in a consensual and safe creative space.I say creative because you can start with some ideas, but you never know how the narratives will be weaved together until you come to the final stage of the article, writing it up as a type of script (Sawyer & Norris, 2015).However, because we mostly rely on narratives emanating from self-experience, multiethnography is constantly questioned as a legitimate research methodology among applied linguistics scholars (Lowe & Lawrence, 2020).James: Those are real concerns you raise about perceived legitimacy.As is often the case with novel methodological approaches, there are those who bristle at change, often raising issues of validity stemming from paradigmatic fundamentalism.Without completely dismissing those who question the validity of our approach, I think it is important to, first, suggest that there is a certain internal validity to the triangulation of perspectives and, second, highlight that ethnographic work should be viewed as an accessible and innovative form of research that can incorporate perspectives of those with differing levels of research expertise, providing a forum for debate and discussion that leads to critical reflection and change.The importance of accessibility should not be underestimated in the field, where both real and perceived vertical hierarchies all too often limit knowledge exchange between theoreticians, researchers, and practitioners (Liu et al., 2020).I look forward to seeing how this novel methodology is adopted for a variety of purposes, not only in the research community, but also at the pedagogical level, where there is growing evidence of its efficacy in language teaching and teacher education classrooms (e.g., Tjandra et al., 2020;Huang & Karas, 2020).I envision its adoption as a potentially game-changing tool for critically oriented language educators and researchers looking to impact social relations of power within and beyond the classroom walls.
Brian: I would also add that the game-changing possibilities are reciprocated through our unique field-internal experiences of texts, genres, lexicogrammar, and interpersonal relationships characteristic of EAP settings.I hope duo / multiethnographers in other fields check out what we have to offer.

Discussion and Concluding Thoughts
Our conversations display a surprising amount of convergence with respect to adoption of pedagogical approaches that draw on extant theory and research.While we may put forth differing theoretical and related epistemological influences (multiliteracies; multilingualism; plurilingualism; translingualism), we largely agreed that the ways in which we take up theory in the classroom have similar transformative objectives of identity affirmation, promotion of linguacultural diversity, and challenging inequitable relations of power within and beyond the classroom.What is also apparent from our discussions is that the affirming nature of pluri-oriented pedagogies applied not only to plurilingual students using English as an additional language, but also their instructors, a point that should not be lost on global ELT, with its long history of monolingualism and native speakerism (Cook, 2016;Kiczkowiak & Lowe, 2021;Phillipson, 2016).But are these plurioriented perspectives and practices enough to meaningfully challenge systemic inequities in language education or are we, as some have suggested, merely creating plurilingual subjects for participation in advanced capitalist economies?(e.g., Flores & Rosa, 2015;Kubota, 2020) And, further, can pluri-oriented perspectives travel freely across global geolinguistic contexts, or are these modernist, emancipatory objectives housed in antiquated, critical ideals that do not adequately consider subjectivities and onto-epistemologies emanating from the global south?(Pennycook & Makoni, 2019;Sousa Santos & Meneses, 2019;Sugiharto, 2021).These remain open questions, with need for further exploration regarding the longer-term impact of pluri-oriented language teaching and teacher education on both practitioners and their students as they travel through their academic and professional trajectories.Surely, social transformation requires more than simply pluri-orienting our pedagogies; education is not a panacea for curing all social ills.That said, our multiethnographic conversations suggest the potential of pluri-oriented pedagogies to meaningfully impact culturally and linguistically diverse students' trajectories; for practitioners who share our transformative objectives, engaging in critical reflection on the connections between theory, research, and practice may be invaluable to personal and professional impact and self-efficacy.
Finally, in considering the implications of our multiethnographic findings, the issue of consequential validity looms large.Drawing on our collective perspectives, it seems clear that our pluri-oriented pedagogies are enacted with a range of theoretical underpinnings that are often meaningful in as much as they are relevant and effective in our classrooms (Cummins, 2021).Translanguaging, for example, is yet another name for a growing list of pluri-oriented pedagogical approaches that allow for language teachers and teacher educators to challenge monolingual ideologies, policies, and pedagogies.Thus, while we recognize some of the distinct onto-epistemological underpinnings claimed for different pluri-oriented theories, e.g., multiliteracies; multilingualism; plurilingualism; translingualism, these distinctions may be somewhat inconsequential to their enactment.Furthermore, asserting the inherent emancipatory or transformative qualities of one theory over another (translanguaging versus plurilingualism, for example) serves to disempower and marginalize practitioners as knowledge creators and change agents.This is not to say that engaging with theory is unimportant for TESL educators.Indeed, as evidenced by this article, dialogic engagement with pedagogies may afford meaningful reflection on synergies between educational philosophies, theories of language (learning), and pedagogical practices, a process facilitated by, we argue, multiethnographic investigations such as ours (indeed any range of dialogic methodologies would facilitate such processes).Ultimately, we hope this pedagogically oriented piece has provided language teachers and teacher educators with ideas for pluri-oriented classroom practice while highlighting the connections between theory, research, and practice.We conclude this piece by adding our voices to a call for greater collaboration between researchers and practitioners, thereby challenging coercive relations of power, and promoting a more equitable, bi-directional knowledge flow that holds central EAP teacher agency, knowledge, and experience.

Figure 3 -
Figure 3 -Student sample of Infographic Identity Text