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Dear readers,
2021 has been a year of profound reflection, change, awareness and engagement for our small Bi-Multilingual Education Special Interest community. We have invested in creating spaces to promote dialogue that would be at the same time critical and celebratory of bi-multilingualism. This is not an easy feat. Often, conversations about bi-multilingualism tend to fall into extremes, either focusing on perceived assets or deficits of individuals or phenomena. We wanted to counteract dominant discourses, providing alternative spaces for questioning, affirming and decentering monolingualism.
Through our Twitter account @TESOLBiMulti as well as myTESOL, we have promoted a series of Twitter chats to encourage dialogue on the intersections of race, racism, whiteness, language(ing), and identity. The first Twitter chat was led by J.P.B. Gerald, based on his publication ELT after Whiteness, co-authored with Vijay Ramjattan and Scott Stiller on Language Magazine. The goals of the chat were to examine racism and whiteness in language teaching and learning, reject the white-centric canon, and encourage participants to examine their own whiteness and how it affects their teaching and learning. We created the hashtag #ELTAfterWhiteness1 and shared unique quotes from the article for people to react to or comment. Figures 1 and 2 below show an example of the interactions we had during our first Twitter chat.
#ELTAfterWhiteness1 Post in the Form of a Quote
Participant Comments and Reactions
J. P. B. Gerald did such a courageous job facilitating our first attempts at engaging the TESOL community in reflecting about the colonial roots of our field, manifested in deeply entrenched ideologies of standard language and whiteness. These are often hard dialogues to have and we are so proud and grateful that J. P. B. Gerald helped us spearhead what would become a cycle of brave conversations in our bi-multilingual special interest community.
Through the week-long Twitter chat and campaign #LanguageIsAVerb, we wanted to affirm the right to be multilingual in all its forms, fluidity, hybridity and identities. We also used the hashtag to fight against linguistic discrimination. The planning and designing team included an incredible group of multilingual language educators and professionals located in the US, Sweden, Brazil, Germany and the UK: Vanja Karanović, Constanze Ackermann-Böstrom, Malwina Gudowska, Alia Amir, Ching-Ching Lin, Ruth Kircher, A.R.Shearer, Tasha Austin, María Rosa Brea, J. P. B. Gerald, John Rihalf, Anna Belew, Warda Farah, and Madalena Xanthopoulou from We Live Languages. Figure 3 details the prompts and activities we engaged in for 7 days.
#LanguageIsAVerb Week-At-A-Glance
On the first day of the campaign, we all created hashtags using all of our linguistic and semiotic repertoires. Figure 4 is a beautiful visual created by one of our planning and designing team members and editor for this issue, A.R.Shearer, using the hashtags participants languaged in.
#LanguageIsAVerb Multilingual Hashtags
The high level of engagement and sharing was evident in so many incredible, thought-provoking, and touching posts and comments about what it means to be multilingual and what it looks like to affirm our multifaceted identities in a world often dominated by monolingual ideologies. Two of our team members who moderated conversations offered the following testimonials about their experiences:
Dr. Alia Amir
#LanguageIsAVerb was a truly inspiring week! By mixing words, concepts, phrases, our identities, and positionality - consciously and unconsciously form a voice. Our voices, and hybrid expressions are like those patchworks which have a gazillion pieces tied together. Language is a verb, indeed! Multilingualism is a norm – in so many ways. But we often forget in our daily grind whether we are neglecting either of our languages or not!
The hashtag itself was thought-provoking for me, and left me pondering until I saw each day how others’ interpretation was for different people. Pictures, songs, stories, hybrid anecdotes shared by the team, as well as the retweets, created a stir in what mostly is a parallel language world of Twitter.
Each day’s prompts reminded us and challenged us to think a little about each of the languages we speak other than English - which we might not have used in a certain domain. We were left pondering and mulling over translations! Are two languages equal - many of us wondered about the old unsolved question!
With each day, the anecdotes made us think and reflect upon our own complicated relationship with our languages in action, the ideologies we carry and the ideologies and puritanic approaches embedded in our subject i.e. teaching of English as a second language! The hashtag instigated dialogue among language users of different languages!
It was indeed a small grassroots movement to create language awareness about languages and a good reminder to remember that classrooms are also part of the hybrid and multilingual world!
A big thank you to the team, the organizers and all those who participated!
Shukriya!
Alia’s Moderation and Sharing
https://twitter.com/aliawhs/status/1449100272123457553?s=20
Malwina Gudowska
Whether it is fiction or non-fiction, for pleasure or for academic research, I gravitate toward books on language and linguistic identity so it was a pleasure and honour to share some of my favourites for Day 4 of #LanguageIsAVerb. From Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, to last year’s The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh, books about the multilingual and multicultural experience offer a window into the lives of others and an opportunity to so often see ourselves. It was also such a pleasure to read other people’s book and story recommendations and I have so many saved for future reading. Thank you for this great opportunity!
Malwina’s Moderation and Sharing
https://twitter.com/MalwinaGudowska/status/1448606245376696326
I am deeply thankful to all participants who dared to be multilingual with all their beings. We need to continue to advocate for naturalizing multilingual and multimodal ways of being, knowing and doing. Language is a verb! We hope to continue this campaign, making it even stronger, reaching out to increase participation of marginalized and racialized multilinguals from all over the world. Check out the hashtag #LanguageIsAVerb on Twitter and Instagram to read and see more posts and comments. I would like to also express immense gratitude to our planning and designing team. Without community, there is no force! Figure 7 is a fantastic word cloud created by another of our planning and designing team member, Vanja Karanović, drawing from ideas shared during the #LanguageIsAVerb campaign week.
#LanguageIsAVerb Word Cloud of Ideas
Other opportunities for dialogue on Twitter also included the chat #CriticalConversations led by Tasha Austin who describes learning lessons, outcomes, and meaningful sharing of another invaluable experience in her featured article #CriticalConversations in this same issue. Thank you all who participated in #CriticalConversations for your amazing contributions. I applaud our brave host Tasha Austin in leading us in collectively thinking, sharing and creating spaces for countering antiBlackness in TESOL education. I am deeply thankful that Tasha Austin accepted our invitation to share her insights in this special issue.
In addition to Twitter chats, we also had the great opportunity to host a series of webinars that can be viewed at the TESOL International Association YouTube Channel. Below you can find the direct links:
Three of the webinars were expanded into feature articles in this special issue. We are thankful to all presenters and in particular Kirti Kapur, Cynthia Carvajal and Linh Phung for accepting the invitation to write about and share their experiences leading webinars for and with our TESOL Bi-Multilingual community.
The most important accomplishment of 2021 was the building of a strong community committed to challenging and resisting harmful ideologies that position marginalized and racialized multilingual individuals as inferior. We are working together to raise awareness and resistance while making room for imagination. I believe we can make a conscious choice to collectively rethink and rebuild ways of being, knowing and doing that center and naturalize multilingual and multimodal practices. The events and this newsletter are concrete attempts at doing that, embodying and reclaiming our languaging while decentering standardized English. Reach out to us, follow us @TESOLBiMulti if you believe in it as well. Happy New Year!
Abraço forte,
Clara Vaz Bauler
References
Gerald, J. P. B., Ramjattan, V. J., & Stillar, S. (2021, May). After Whiteness. Language Magazine. https://www.languagemagazine.com/2021/05/17/after-whiteness/
Clara Vaz Bauler holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Santa Barbara and is an associate professor of TESOL/Bilingual Education at Adelphi University, NY. Her research focuses on ways digital media can create spaces for legitimizing minoritized students’ linguistic-semiotic resources. | 
