5: Following the Translanguaging Corriente in a Multimodal Family Storytelling Workshop

This study explores the ways that bilingual mothers and their children engaged in multimodal composition in an intergenerational, library-based storytelling workshop. We analyze how they spoke, composed, and shared across their languages in ways that revealed the translanguaging corriente (García et al., 2017), or the invisible flow of communication as multilingual people utilize their full linguistic repertoires. Utilizing qualitative case study methods, we found that mothers and children in the library storytelling workshop composed in ways that honored the fluidity of their translanguaging corriente; as they created and discussed their stories, they moved naturally through both languages and modes. By doing so, they facilitated both authentic storytelling and expression of their bilingual and transnational identities—creating “changes in the landscape” (García et al., 2017, p. 4) of the storytelling workshop and reshaping it as a multilingual and multimodal space. Ultimately, we highlight the importance of understanding how multimodality flows alongside and through the translanguaging corriente, and invite educators to imagine how they might create spaces through which children and families can experiment with moving freely between languages and modes during the composition process.