Crossing Borders | Final Symposium
The Translanguaging Messages of the Crossing Borders Strand
The Crossing Borders strand breakout team reviewed the wide range of frameworks they had explored during the institute to investigate the urgent need for narrative plentitude in our teaching and learning:
Bilingual Blues - Gustavo Pérez Firmat
Soy un ajiaco de contradicciones.
I have mixed feelings about everything.
Name your tema, I'll hedge;
name your cerca, I'll straddle it
like a cubano.
I have mixed feelings about everything.
Soy un ajiaco de contradicciones.
Vexed, hexed, complexed,
hyphenated, oxygenated, illegally alienated,
psycho soy, cantando voy:
You say tomato,
I say tu madre;
You say potato,
I say Pototo.
Let's call the hole
un hueco, the thing
a cosa, and if the cosa goes into the hueco,
consider yourself en casa,
consider yourself part of the family.
Soy un ajiaco de contradicciones,
un puré de impurezas:
a little square from Rubik's Cuba
que nadie nunca acoplará.
(Cha-cha-chá.)
Inspired by the translanguaging of Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s poem Bilingual Blues, the team broke into pairs to write their own translanguaging poems for two voices.
Together our pairs wrote the starting line of our poems with the phrase:
Soy/Somos un ______________ de __________
Each of our pair members contributed 3 lines to make a 7 line poem together, and then figured out how we would share our 7 line poem out loud to our peers, using such formal elements as repetition, remixing, and choral readings.
Yesenia and Marimar modeled the process by performing their POEMA A DOS VOCES that they had written together:
Soy un mole de contradicciones
Soy un mole de contradicciones
Una corunda de complexities
I love my kids, y quiero a mi madre
I love my son y quiero mucho a mi papá
Hence, I say vengan acá
Y ellos responden, wait a minute, ma
Le pregunto, what was your favorite thing about today?
And he responds, coming home, mama
Waffles are the queen in the morning,
Pero en la noche el pan dulce reina.
For me, it’s my cafecito in the morning
While tea is had at night
El habanero es mi madre,
The chili con queso are my friends
If my dad is the rock that grounds me
My friends are the stars that inspire me
Even if my English es not very good looking,
It gets the colors from my Spanish.
While I’ll always think in English first
Spanish is the language that weaves through it
Canto en español, and I sing in English
My English and Spanish voices sound completely different,
One is more emotional & expressive, while the other is succinct
Final Translanguaging Reflection: Storytelling
How have you benefited from the opening of translanguaging spaces?
¿Cómo te has beneficiado de la apertura de espacios para translenguar?
What negative impact happens when those spaces are closed to us?
¿Qué impacto negativo sucede cuando esos espacios se nos cierran?
How do we open spaces for all our students to be represented?
¿Cómo abrimos espacios para que todos nuestros estudiantes estén representados?
How do we create spaces in classrooms that empower and give voice to all our students?
¿Cómo creamos espacios en las aulas que empoderen y den voz a todos nuestros alumnos?
We concluded by generating ways for opening up spaces and for empowering voices for narrative plentitude in our classrooms, and then prepared to join our colleagues from the other strands.