Paul Prior kicks off the symposium
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On Oct 6 we had the honor of hosting a number of scholars to talk about the prefix trans. They all helped us to think about how to engage with the trans prefix in our theory, research and practice. Paul Prior kicked off the symposium asking how the prefix trans complicates the root words we’re interested in studying. Prior asserted that movements across spaces signaled by the word trans have been traditionally thought of as separate and bounded, but in reality they’re really complicated and not easily separable. The theme of how complicated all of these concepts are and how the prefix trans complicates them further is one that we would keep coming back to and one that I’m still currently grappling with. In this post, I’ll give a brief summary of each talk and then reflect a bit on my takeaways from the day.
Dylan Dryer gives his plenary
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Dylan Dryer gave the first of our two plenary talks. His talk argued that there is a moral imperative bound up in the prefix trans and that it has the potential to occlude the past and the present. Dryer challenged us to think carefully about whether we’re ready to deal with what trans does and suggested we still need to do some work if we want trans to help us build alternative constructs of language and minds.
Jody Shipka gives her plenary
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Jody Shipka gave the second plenary talk of the day. She shared an experience she had with one of her students when she assigned a multimodal project. This experience made her wonder if we can make space for waiting and stillness and not be so quick to try to solve writer's block. She thinks perhaps we should begin to privilege initiation and emergence rather than stabilization leading to a final finished product.
The first panel consisted of Mark Pacheco, Nathan Phillips, and Natalia Smirnov. Pacheco showed us translanguaging in practice in a second and a third grade classroom in which translanguaging was used as a means of supporting student learning and negotiating resources. Philips pushed us to think about the prefix trans as a relationship that is locational and emergent and as productive when paired with literacy. For him, a transliteracies framework for research means the ability to focus on mobility, equity, and inquiry. Smirnov proposed that we expand our understanding of transliteracies by paying attention to infrastructure as a means to attend to what can’t move. Her work challenges educators to think about how they create civic infrastructures in their classrooms.
Anna Smith and Steve Fraiberg were our last panelists of the day. Smith shared her understanding of transliteracies as an inquiry process and, like Jody Shipka, she is interested in inviting others to play and learn. She uses Silverstein’s concept of poetics of likeness to ask questions that have important implications for our trans work. For me, the most interesting ofthese questions is “what our trans boundary-making moves to account for movement, mobility, and change? Fraiberg’s talk focused on the transliterate processes and practices that mediate how students learn to invent the university. For him, knotworking serves as a theory that can help us understand writers and actors as “weaving together resources across near and far-flung spaces.”
As this summary makes clear, the way each of these scholars thinks of and uses the trans prefix is slightly different and can be applied to many phenomena and contexts --the words scholars use, composing and inquiry processes, language practices, research practices, theories, and institutions. The work that the trans prefix facilitates is at once exciting and daunting. As I begin to think about transliteracies and translingualism as concepts that I can use in my own work, I am inspired by how these scholars find the concept helpful but refuse to simplify or stabilize it. At the end of the day, we’re right to say that all of this is complicated, but that’s what makes theorizing and (re)defining this tiny prefix so important and productive. One of my biggest takeaways from this day revolves around politics and power and what the prefix trans does to all of the root words we discussed. The talks and our conversations make me wonder: how do our own positionalities influence how we understand the prefix and the root words and what does it mean that we’re the ones who are (re)defining or transforming these words? Who else should be brought into these conversations so we can continue to practically and theoretically problematize and renegotiate boundaries, systems, and definitions?
If you're intrested in learning more about the sympsoium, check out this archive of tweets by CWS student Logan Middleton.