Bechtel Prize Judge Chen Chen selected Anna Dunlavey’s essay “Call Me by My Name: Poetry and Translanguaging in the Multilingual Classroom” as the 2025 Bechtel Prize runner-up. The Bechtel Prize is awarded for an essay describing a creative writing teaching experience, project, or activity that demonstrates innovation in creative writing instruction.
The Bechtel Prize is named for Louise Seaman Bechtel, who was an editor, author, collector of children’s books, and teacher. She was the first person to head a juvenile book department at an American publishing house. As such, she took children’s literature seriously, helped establish the field, and was a tireless advocate for the importance of literature in the lives of young people. This award honors her legacy. Learn more about the Bechtel Prize here.
I looked around my 7th-grade classroom, wondering what to do. Actually, it wasn’t a classroom at all—it was a room formerly used as an office. My students were all English Language Learners, so I taught all 17 of them in this “pull-out” room instead of a real classroom. Among them, they spoke 10 different languages other than English: Russian, Uzbek, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Turkish, Spanish, Arabic, Urdu, Mandarin, and Cantonese.
As a teacher of English as a New Language, I believe in creating a space in which all language is valued, and no language is deemed “improper” for the classroom. I wanted to invite students to express themselves without fear of judgment. But I was confused by what my administrators wanted from me.
As a teacher of English as a New Language, I believe in creating a space in which all language is valued, and no language is deemed “improper” for the classroom.
I was still expected to follow the same seventh-grade curriculum that the English Language Arts teachers followed—the majority of my 17 students had been living in the United States for more than one year and therefore would have to take the same state English Language Arts test as every other seventh grader without modifications. I’d been criticized in an observation for not having enough student-to-student discussion, even though these students were all beginners to learning the English language, and most of them did not have another person in the class who spoke the same home language. In another observation, where I tried to group the few students who spoke the same home language together, I was criticized for their discussions not being in English.
The thing that frustrated me the most out of all of this was the text I was supposed to be teaching, an excerpt from Call Me María by Judith Ortiz Cofer. That excerpt starts with a poem that contains both English and Spanish. In the poem, María uses similes and metaphors along with translanguaging to describe her feelings about moving to New York with her father, leaving her mother and her home of Puerto Rico behind. The entire seventh grade was learning about a character who embraced speaking multiple languages, but my own students were not supposed to use any language other than English.
I was also in graduate school at the time, and in one of my classes, I was learning about a concept called translanguaging developed by Professor Ofelia García. Translanguaging means that named languages have no linguistic reality. Instead, we each create a unique linguistic repertoire where all words we know from any language and vernacular hold equal weight and importance, and can and should be used in all contexts. I recognized Judith Ortiz Cofer used translanguaging principles to write the character María. And I realized that I could use translanguaging in connection with Call Me María to create an accessible and meaningful creative writing project for my students that would allow them to work in both English and their home languages. First, I decided to scrap the entirety of Call Me María from my unit plan except for that poem. Instead of my students having a muddled and half-baked knowledge of the entire text, they would know that poem and know it well, especially the following section:
Sometimes,
when I feel like a bird
soaring above all that is ugly or sad,
I am María Alegre.
Other times,
when I am like a small,
underground creature,
when I feel like I will never
see the sun again,
I am María Triste.
My mother used to call me
her paloma, her dove,
when I was alegre,
and her ratoncita,
her little mouse,
on the days when I was triste.
Today I am neither.
You can just call me María.
I used this poem to introduce translanguaging to my students. To make the concept more accessible, I equated it to buying an expansion pack in a video game—everything from the original game is still there, and everything from the original game is still valuable, but now the player has more tools to work with. It’s the same with learning a new language.
We read the poem multiple times. My students became familiar with both the English and the Spanish words, the two Spanish speakers in the classroom becoming the appointed “experts” for pronunciation. I thought it was important for my students to watch me stumble over the Spanish, to let their peers correct me with a smile and a laugh. It helped us all relax, to see that even the teacher needed to learn.
I thought it was important for my students to watch me stumble over the Spanish, to let their peers correct me with a smile and a laugh. It helped us all relax, to see that even the teacher needed to learn.
Then, I introduced the concept of similes and metaphors. Figurative language is a difficult concept for any middle schooler, but especially if you are learning it in a new language. First you struggle to learn how to say what you mean, and now you have to learn how to say what you don’t mean? And to decode when others are saying things they don’t mean either? But I decided to approach similes and metaphors from the angle of adjectives. Adjectives, my students now knew, were words we could use to describe ourselves, and similes and metaphors were ways we could describe ourselves as well. In her poem, Maria is not saying that she physically turns into a paloma, a dove, when she is happy, or a ratoncita, a little mouse, when she is sad. She is saying that she shares qualities with them. She shares adjectives with them. When she is happy, she is proud and free like a dove. When she is sad, she is shy and secretive like a mouse. I had students brainstorm animals that they could compare themselves to when they felt happy and sad, as well as adjectives that could describe both themselves and the animal they thought of. Finally the writing began.
The poems all followed this format, similar to the one used by the character María:
Sometimes, I am [student’s name] [word for happy in home language of student].
When I am [word for happy in home language], I am [adjective] like an [animal].
Sometimes, I am [student’s name] [word for sad in home language of student].
When I am [word for sad in home language], I am [adjective] like an [animal].
Today, I am neither. You can just call me [student’s name].
Some students who had more experience with English were encouraged to add on more stanzas, but students who were new to the language were encouraged to use this basic template. Because of all the work we had done together leading up to our drafts, students were able to plug in the words they had brainstormed together to create their own poems. As the students worked, I went to each one and asked them to teach me the words for happy and sad in their home language, asking which letters made which sounds for students using different alphabets, making sure each student knew my genuine curiosity and respect for the language they had been speaking their entire lives. When we finished writing, each student presented their poem in front of the class, speaking the English sections of their poems with a confidence they hadn’t held even a few weeks before.
Translanguaging soon became the norm for speaking and discussion, a balance of the expectations of the administration with the needs of the students. However, there was one unfortunate side effect: my students used translanguaging to curse in class without my knowledge. I learned a lot of different curse words in a lot of different languages in an attempt to promote positive multilingual conversation. Still, when I think about it, I have to laugh. It wonderfully exemplifies seventh grade—no matter your culture or background, when you’re introduced to a new language, the first thing you want to know is how to curse. And anyway, this small hurdle was worth it to see my students flourish in their writing.
Now students turned in complete work, with words from their home language connecting English phrases the way mortar connects cobblestones on a street—perhaps bumpy in places, but able to get from one place to another.
Before this project, many students routinely handed in blank classwork, feeling that because they couldn’t write the entire assignment in English, it was best not to write anything. Now students turned in complete work, with words from their home language connecting English phrases the way mortar connects cobblestones on a street—perhaps bumpy in places, but able to get from one place to another. I looked up the words and phrases in Google Translate when I graded their work after class. As students practiced working with English words and grew more confident and curious about using this new language, some of their assignments shifted to entirely English, but I was careful not to view this shift as a “victory” or to see any subsequent returns to writing in two languages as a “lapse.” It was just the language they preferred to use at that specific moment.
For these students, English had once seemed as stifling as the air in that tiny classroom. Now they saw English words as extensions of their existing knowledge, an addition to the vocabulary they already had. Now that I teach English Language Arts, my thoughts on translanguaging have grown to include what dialects of English are “appropriate” for the classroom, and the political, social, and racial undertones of what is deemed acceptable English versus unacceptable English. It’s a question I want to keep digging into as I adapt my curriculum and strengthen my teaching practice.
Featured photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash.
