In this article, we call for translingual praxis—an antiracist and decolonial pedagogy that interrogates, with students, language ideologies and their political histories. Amplifying the voices of scholars of color, we provide a rationale for and illustrate four strategies for delinking our language work from the legacies of racism and colonization.

This article analyzes two of the inevitable messes of translingual scholarship and teaching in composition studies: the criticism that arose from cross-disciplinary conflict with second language writing and the semantic ambiguities that result from the–ism in translingualism. The article reviews a variation in uptakes of translingualism, while arguing that specific strands—translingualism as a disposition and praxis—are the most fruitful in pushing English studies toward a more collective pursuit of language awareness and justice.

This multimedia article shares five short video-recorded stories that highlight specific moments of struggling to practice antiracist and linguistic justice values within different disciplinary situations: giving feedback on student writing, training tutors in the writing center, working with pre-service teachers, debating learning objectives in department committees, and responding to prescriptivist attitudes from colleagues. This praxis-driven work responds to Inoue’s 2019 CCCC Chair’s Address and his calls to confront white language supremacy by providing vulnerable accounts of the intellectual, interpersonal, emotional and pedagogical labors and challenges involved in fighting for raciolinguistic justice. Teachers and administrators may find the video stories and accompanying reflections useful when developing pedagogical approaches, designing professional development workshops, or reimagining departmental policy-making and curriculum development.

Without offering explicit, basic instruction in writing to graduate students, we up the risks of maintaining the exclusion of the most underserved of adult learners in graduate education, and, thus, perpetuating social and racial hierarchies in professions requiring advanced degrees and in society writ large. This article highlights the ways in which graduate writing intersects with Basic Writing, especially given the politics of remediation facing adult learners in both contexts. It then analyzes one attempt to administer and teach a graduate writing course for English language learners and concludes with a catalog of administrative concerns Basic Writing teachers and administrators may want to consider when developing and teaching similar courses.

While we in composition studies may have grown more sensitive to and welcoming of cultural and linguistic differences in the classroom, we remain far from united in pursuits to combat explicitly in our pedagogies the politics of standardized English. To move toward linguistic justice, we call for unified intention and action across our field to explicitly combat the very monolingualist ideologies so many of us, no matter our good intentions, uphold and perpetuate in our classrooms and institutions. One issue preventing unified approaches in contesting monolingualist ideologies, as we see it, is that we do not forefront in our minds and our practices the material consequences of monolingualist ideology, nor have we come to a holistic consensus on the monolingualism paradigm. With this article, we hope to clarify just what it is we’re rejecting when we contest monolingualism, and, in so doing, be better prepared to combat more explicitly the harms of linguistic hierarchies.