Background: The focus on translanguaging practices in multilingual classrooms canbe seen, by and large, as responding to risks of violence entailed in diverse contextsof language use, including the teaching and learning of mathematics. However, thepractice of translanguaging alone cannot counteract the hegemonic authority ofmonolingual and monologic curricula being present through interactions amongteachers, students, and researchers, as well as material resources.Purpose: Drawing on Bakhtin’s philosophy of language, we discuss dialogicalityas a critical and democratic organizing principle for the pervasive polyphony thatcharacterizes every utterance constituting heteroglossia. Dialogicality reconstitutesour relation to language through the “other” and the need to see any utterance as anonteleological process among subjects and objects. As such, the aim is to explorehow acts of dialogicality may address the potential risks of onto/epistemic violence intranslanguaging practices. Focusing on either emergent or orchestrated translanguagingin three European states: Greece, Catalonia and Sweden, we discuss how dialogicalityallows for alternative accounts of language use in complex classroom events.Method: Methodologically, we start by encountering the sociopolitical contextof monolingual and monologic curricula in Europe, where the three cases wetheorize take place, along with our considerations for dialogicality in the realm oftranslanguaging. Our theorizing-in-practice unfolds a double effort in reading. First,what can we read today as risks of onto/epistemic violence in each of these cases?1Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden2Autonomous University, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain3Malmö University, Malmö, SwedenCorresponding Author:Anna Chronaki, Malmö University, Skåne County, Malmö 205 06, Sweden.Email: anna.chronaki@mau.se1104040TCZXXX10.1177/01614681221104040Teachers College RecordChronaki et al.research-article2022 Chronaki et al. 109And second, what is the potential of dialogic translanguaging across the cases andwithin the boundaries of state monolingual policy and monologic discursive cultureof school mathematics?Findings: The present article contributes by discussing dialogicality as a relationalonto/epistemology toward addressing translanguaging practices. Concerning thefirst question, our theorizing-in-practice shares evidence of the inevitable presenceof onto/epistemic violence in every utterance. The limited scope of a crudemathematisation process through language appears continuously in mathematicsclassrooms, serving to place either the object or the subject into fixed narratives.Regarding the second question, our dialogical reading of translanguaging denotes theimportance of the importance of minor responding(s) to such moments of violentrisk. We understand them as “cracks” in the authoritative status of monolingual andmonologic mathematics curricula; we argue that such minor, yet crucial, cracks areof great significance for creating acts of dialogicality from “below,” disrupting thehegemonic authority of an assumed neutral mathematical language.Conclusions/Recommendations: The risk of onto/epistemic violence is inevitablein any discursive and embodied encounter in multilingual mathematics classrooms,including the translanguaging practices. The study suggests that acts of dialogicalitybecome minor responses to violence in ways that both counteract oppressivemonologic discourse and open toward a relational onto/epistemology withmathematics, children, teachers, material resources, and researchers. Rememberinghow Bakhtin insisted that “language is never unitary” and “dialogue” is not a panacea,we emphasize the need for a continuous focus on creating acts of dialogicality withlanguage and discourse.
Sage Publications, 2022. Vol. 124, no 5, p. 108-126