Inclusion beyond translation: A conversation with Maria Cioé-Peña

I teach a class of thirty children, several of whom arrived last month and share no language with me or with each other, and I need them to make a poster by Friday — how am I supposed to do this? This is the kind of question teachers often ask in my classes and the workshops I facilitate when we talk about diversity. It is easy to respond to such a question without actually answering: One could just restate the principle, remind teachers that diversity is a resource, and that every child brings something to the class, so all you have to do is build on their repertoires.¹

In one of the podcasts we recently produced as part of the Research Literacy of Teachers (ReaLiTea) project, Carolyn Blume (PH Heidelberg) and Maria Cioé-Peña (University of Pennsylvania) address this question in a rather more coherent and generative way. In this post, I summarise some of the main themes of the content, which I think might be especially relevant to those among us who work with refugee and migrant learners and other linguistically and culturally diverse classes. The usual disclaimers apply: this is, by necessity, a selective presentation of a richer dialogue, filtered through my perspective as a non-participant. If you prefer listening to content rather than reading it, you can find a link to the podcast by scrolling down.

Culture as the water

The conversation opens with an introduction that emphasises how intersectional Cioé-Peña’s work is, with research strands that draw on linguisticism, racism, and questions of ability and disability and synthesise them as coherent wholes. This allows her to shed critical light on aspects of language education, such as how certain mothers are cast as failures when their children do not conform to institutional expectations, and to point out how we often demand a great deal of parents while doing rather little to examine how we obstruct their participation.

This promising opening is the road not taken in this particular conversation, but if you’d like to find out more about Cioé-Peña’s work on the experiences of mothers of bilingual children, you may want to read her book (M)othering Labeled Children: Bilingualism and Diversity in the lives of Latinx Mothers (2021, Multilingual Matters).

What the conversation does pursue is pedagogy, and the notion of culturally-sustaining pedagogies² (teaching that maintains pluralism as a goal, not a scaffold). Cioé-Peña positions teaching and learning on the foundational claim that there is no such thing as a-cultural pedagogy, because children are continuously immersed in culture(s), both those they carry from families and communities, and those they meet at school. Culture, in her phrasing, “is the water” — you probably remember the adage that we are immersed in our culture without noticing, just like fish are unaware of the water in which they swim. The practical consequence is that culturally sustaining pedagogies are about recognising what is already in the room, and not only about what we are trying to introduce into it.

Thirty-five children, thirty nations

The first serious pressure on the position comes from Blume, the interviewer, who essentially plays the sceptical teacher: thirty-five children, thirty nationalities, hyphenated backgrounds throughout. If I am a teacher, am I being asked to learn their languages? Their cultural heritages? Because that is not possible.

This is the strawman argument that some teachers and policy makers often use when they want to rationalise inactivity and preserving existing orders. Cioé-Peña’s answer is a flat no. Drawing on translanguaging work (unsurprising, as she studied under Ofelia García), she argues that if we view classrooms and schools as multilingual ecologies, then the move this licenses is a redistribution of who has to hold what.

The alternative to doing it all is not doing nothing.

The teacher does not have to be proficient in thirty languages. The students are, and the teacher’s job is to invite them to show this. That invitation is not metaphorical: she describes classrooms where she shared no language with her students and simply brought the languages in, through posters, through parents coming in to teach the class something. Underneath is a claim about limits and possibilities that is often missing from educational discourse: that we cannot do it all, but that the alternative to doing it all is not doing nothing; it is relying on community and on technology.

Rethinking the school habitus

There is an obvious objection, and Blume raises it nicely: Schools have a culture, and ingrained behaviours, norms and dispositions of their own.³ Succeeding in school, and life, requires acquiring this culture, which is essentially a form of capital. If a teacher spends all her energy validating what students bring, and that is not what the institution rewards, is she not setting them up for failure later in life?

Cioé-Peña refuses both horns of this argument: To assume that students’ cultures do not align with the institution is reductionist. It is just as reductionist to admit that those cultures rule out success. The question is not whether teachers should help learners acquire the school habitus but how. This involves helping learners understand that they are fine as they are, but at the same time explicitly teaching them that different spaces require different practices.

She offers herself as the case: she was not always an academic, and she had to learn the rules. In her private life, she does not police her children’s language, but they have conversations about consequence and audience (she does not mind those words, but their grandparents and teachers might). Students can learn about the school habitus through exposure and through discussions in the same register: “in class, this is how you sit, and this is how you talk; in other spaces, you behave differently”.⁴

Beyond translation

This is the point at which the concrete case I began with comes up: what happens when we have thirty fourth-graders in an ‘English-only classroom, including some who are so recently arrived that they share no resources in English, the language of schooling, or with each other. How do we go about teaching in such a setting?

Cioé-Peña’s answer does not solve the logistics, but helps us understand what is wrong with the framing of the question: it is the premise that this is a translation problem. She argues that, as a society, we have become reliant on spoken and written language, and this means that when we think about inclusion in linguistically expansive spaces, we think only about translation. This ignores all the other modes and mediums through which people construct meaning.

When travelling from Frankfurt to Heidelberg on trains with very limited English signage, she points out, she somehow managed to be on the right platform in time, board the right carriage, and sit on the right seat. To do so, she relied on visual cues, gestures, and the ordinary competence of a person in a signed environment. Her point is that we possess all of this and systematically devalue it.

This is where universal design for learning (UDL)⁵ enters, and where I think the conversation earns its length. UDL is what gets us out of the translation box, because it obliges us to ask how we communicate and how we build community rather than only which languages are being spoken. Problematically, we often withhold support for inclusion, because it might strike us as infantilising⁶ and we imagine that adults “must arrive fully cooked”. The cost of that expectation is our own capacity to grow and to move through unfamiliar spaces.

“That’s assuming that it’s been working”

The last movement in the podcast addresses the reader who thinks none of this applies to them: the teacher in a region with little diversity, in a selective school, who might reasonably ask why they should care. Cioé-Peña does not concede the premise: “That’s assuming that it’s been working”. And it has been working, she continues, for a small portion of the population, which is precisely what has produced the stratification we then observe in society and in classrooms.

This is not about a special focus on the migrant child or the racialised child;
it’s about acknowledging that all children arrive
with different interests and different voices.

And then, there’s also the question about whether such homogeneity exists in the first place. She describes an event where everyone present shared a language and a cultural background and where the needs in the room were nonetheless entirely various, because people are individuals. The illustrations she chooses are deliberately trivial: a smell you cannot tolerate, the one chair you can read in, the way a backpack has to be balanced. Her claim is that these are real needs, and that we routinely ask people to deny them in order to conform to a centre.

The alternative to that, she argues, is not a special focus on the migrant child or the racialised child, but an acknowledgement that all children arrive with different interests and different voices. A school which insists otherwise is running a small factory, expecting everyone to come in the same and go out the same.

The conversation ends on a broader register than pedagogy, moving through hyperindividualism, the manufacture of fear from difference, and the idea that classrooms are microcosms of the society we want to see. Whether that turn persuades will depend on the reader. What stayed with me is smaller and more usable: her account of telling children that their needs are not too much, and that different needs can be equally legitimate.

Where does this leave us?

I said above that her answer to the fourth-grade poster problem does not solve it, and I want to end there rather than on the uplift. Reframing a question is a real intellectual service — the translation frame genuinely is too narrow, and the multimodal alternative genuinely is available. But the teacher who asked it will still be in that room on Monday with five children and twenty-five others and a curriculum that says English only. The move from think about meaning-making (not translation) to here is what you do tomorrow at 9:15 is not made in this conversation, and I do not think anyone in it pretends otherwise.

That gap is, I suspect, where most of the interesting work in language teacher education actually sits.

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Notes

1. Some readers, whose education includes the introduction to analytical philosophy that is Babylon 5, will remember that “every answer is a response, but not every response is an answer” (S03E09, Point of No Return). ↩︎
2. Just some background on the term, in case it’s useful: Culturally sustaining pedagogy is a term introduced by Django Paris (2012), and it was initially a critique/extension of framings such as ‘culturally relevant’ / ‘culturally supportive’ teaching. Later, Paris and Alim (2014) qualified the term in two ways: (a) they framed culture as a dynamic, youth-generated phenomenon rather than as static heritage, and (b) they noted that sustaining does not equal endorsement (e.g., some cultural values entail regressive elements like misogyny or homophobia that a critical pedagogy has no obligation to sustain). ↩︎
3. In the German education system, which Blume references, this is described as the middle-class school habitus (bildungsbürgerlicher Habitus). This overlaps with what other theorists variously describe as cultures/codes of power (Delpit), institutional habitus (Reay), legitimate language (Bourdieu), and hidden curricula (Jackson, Apple). In this post, I will use school habitus as a –doubtless imprecise– but helpful shorthand. ↩︎
4. I often have similar conversations with my students when they challenge me for correcting their papers by quoting my lecture materials on prescriptivism. The analogy I use is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with jeans, tuxedos, or tank tops, and a fashion website might have sections on all of the above, but there is something odd about going to the seaside in a suit and tie, and you will be refused entry in a nightclub for not wearing the right clothes. ↩︎
5. UDL is too complex to explain in a footnote, but it is a framework for designing instruction that involves multiple modalities of meaning-making (pictures, audio, gestures) to accommodate people for whom one channel is not available. originated in special-education and disability-rights contexts but has been taken up much more broadly. This is similar to the ways that a curb cut originally built for wheelchairs ends up helping parents with strollers, delivery workers, people with suitcases and more. ↩︎
6. I recognised more of this than I expected to. Not long ago, I had included in a Greek Ministry of Education textbook for Modern Greek a set of icons designating activity types (reading, writing, etc.), in addition to the instructional text. These icons did not survive production, which seemed at the time to be a formatting decision. Listening to Cioé-Peña, I am less sure that is all it was. An icon signalling this is a writing task is a second channel of meaning, available to a child regardless of how much of the surrounding Greek they can decode, and it costs nothing to a child who does not need it. Cutting it indexes exactly the perspective that views the verbal channel as the only legitimate one. ↩︎

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