Introduction: Listening to and Lifting Up Bilingual Voices Through la Corriente in Writing Development and Pedagogies

It was April of 2023 at the Chicago Marriott Downtown in the Indiana Room, where we gathered at the American Education Research Association (AERA) annual conference to present a symposium that Millie (Gort) had organized on translanguaging perspectives on writing. The presentations vividly captured the voices of children, youth, and adults who used multilingual/multimodal methods to engage in writing and meaning making. Among the familiar faces in the room was Angie (Zapata), who, as the discussant, delivered her remarks after the presentations. Angie’s words not only beautifully captured the essence of each paper presentation, but also provided insights on links across papers, clarifying and highlighting multiple points about the themes that emerged across the presentations. She also challenged each presenter, as well as the audience, to think deeply about how we support bilingual writers and the importance of the symposium’s contribution to the field. The audience offered poignant questions and remarks about the research, engaging the presenters in further reflection. We didn’t know it then, but that was how our book project began to take shape: exploring the ways we, the future editors and chapter authors, could enrich and move forward the scholarship on translanguaging in the area of writing. After the conference ended, Millie, Margarita (Gómez), Kate (Seltzer), and Angie continued to meet and share our thoughts, questions, and reflections over texts and emails. We pondered how we could honor the young writers and teachers we learned about through the symposium papers, and how we could expand the collection of work to better reflect the range of contexts where bilingual youth are writing, and where their current and future teachers are learning to support them in that process. We considered how we might engage a broader audience in the conversation to disseminate more widely the translanguaging dexterity and potential of the bilingual students from the studies. We also wondered how we might facilitate teachers’ efforts to support bilingual students to express themselves fully and authentically through their writing. As we met over the next several months to puzzle through these questions and build on what we had started in that conference symposium, we thought more specifically about how we could draw attention to the translanguaging corriente that was ever-present across multiple settings—in classrooms, community spaces, and after-school writing clubs, as well as teacher education and professional learning spaces. These conversations not only coalesced into an exciting project; they galvanized us as scholars and teacher educators, and learning into a thought partnership about translanguaging and its connections to the practices of bilingual writers/composers and approaches to teaching them.