33.274, Review: Applied Linguistics: Mary, Krüger, Young (2021)

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Subject: 33.274, Review: Applied Linguistics: Mary, Krüger, Young (2021)

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Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2022 19:12:17
From: Marie-Eve Bouchard [marie.eve.bouchard82 at gmail.com]
Subject: Migration, Multilingualism and Education

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-2247.html

EDITOR: Latisha  Mary
EDITOR: Ann-Birte  Krüger
EDITOR: Andrea S. Young
TITLE: Migration, Multilingualism and Education
SUBTITLE: Critical Perspectives on Inclusion
SERIES TITLE: New Perspectives on Language and Education
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Marie-Eve Bouchard, University of British Columbia

SUMMARY

This edited, 16-chapter volume concerning inclusion and multilingual education
brings together 42 researchers and practitioners to address how inclusive
education can be implemented in heterogenous and plurilingual classrooms, in
contexts where monolingual ideologies and policies are pervasive. All the
chapters address one central question: “How can we achieve a more inclusive
and equitable education for all learners in 21st century multilingual
settings?” (p.3). The book also includes 15 personal vignettes by an array of
educational actors who share their stories regarding inclusive practices.

Each chapter is summarized below. 

The first chapter, “Pushing back monoglossic ideologies of language towards
transformative and inclusive pedagogies for 21st century multilingual
classrooms,” was written by Christine Hélot. It offers an overview of the
volume by summarizing each of the following chapters. It also situates the
topic of inclusion and multilingual education in its broader social context by
linking it to other important questions regarding dominant and minoritized
languages, discrimination, equity, and social justice.

In the second chapter, “Lines of exclusion and possibilities in inclusion: A
tale of two schools in Austria,” author Judith Purkarthofer shows that
multilingual education does not necessarily imply inclusive practices. To
investigate how ideologies, policies, and organization may create and
reproduce new lines of inclusion and exclusion of languages and speakers,
Purkarthofer compares the case of two quite different multilingual schools in
Austria. School A is officially bilingual in German and Burgenland-Croatian, a
minority language that is more and more infrequently used within the
community. Its students often have Hungarian, Slovak, or Turkish as a home
language. School B, by contrast, is bilingual in German and English, a type of
bilingualism that can be perceived as socially and economically more
prestigious. Data were collected between 2010-2015 through participant
observation, interviews with teachers, and different workshops with students
and parents. Throughout the chapter, Purkarthoger contrasts different
ideologies and shows how exclusion and hierarchization exist in multilingual
schools even when inclusion is the underlying goal. She concludes that
multilingual schools, as much as any other institutions, can (re)produce
existing social hierarchies, yet also have the potential to question and
challenge the existing social hierarchies and to bring the students’
repertoires and lived experiences into use for learning.

In the third chapter, “Multilingual teachers meet recently arrived students:
Language ideologies and practices in preparatory classes in Germany,” Julie
Panagiotopoulou, Lisa Rosen, and Jenna Strzykala focus on the multilingual
practices by teachers in class and the ideologies they hold toward the
minority languages spoken by their students. The authors analyse
ethnographical data from a preparatory class, i.e., a class for student
immigrants who do not yet speak German, in a secondary school of a suburban
neighbourhood of Cologne (Germany). The authors focus their analysis on Ms.
Keskin, a teacher of German as a second language who is multilingual herself
and has a migrant background, and her classroom. Two excerpts from observation
data in which Ms. Keskin bans and delegitimates the use of Arabic in her
classroom are used to discuss the ideology of assimilation in place for
refugee students. The language policy the teacher enforces in her classroom is
exclusive of the students’ home languages, most specifically of Arabic in this
case. The message transmitted to students is “Speak only German in order to
learn German, and everything will be ok” (p.46) – an ideology that goes
against most recent research in the field of language learning and migration
that, rather, encourages the use of the students’ home languages. This chapter
highlights the importance of inclusive school practices and inclusive teacher
training.

The fourth chapter, written by Nathalie Thomauske and entitled “Parents
speaking other languages in early childhood settings: A ‘language barrier’ for
building an inclusive partnership of education between practitioners and
parents?” concerns the shared responsibilities of language education. The
empirical data for this chapter was collected through focus group interviews
with parents and practitioners in Germany, and is part of a broader
international study on childhood education for children with a migration
background called “Children Crossing Borders.” In this chapter, the author
contrasts “Norm” languages (German in this case) with “Other” languages (home
or minoritized languages) in order to highlight and challenge their respective
positions of power in the existing social hierarchies. The findings reveal
that integration is perceived as a task of assimilation, that learning the
Norm language is as “an act of self-empowerment in order to avoid being
discriminated” (p.61), that parents and practitioners have different views of
their respective roles, and that making the Other languages visible in the
childhood education setting has positive impacts on both the children and
their parents. Thomauske concludes that parents and practitioners should be
equal partners in the children’s language education, as they have different
but complementary knowledge and skills. 

The fifth chapter, “Dutch if possible, and also when it’s not’: The inclusion
of multilingualism in declared, perceived and practiced language policies in a
Brussels secondary school,” is about language policies and ambivalent
ideologies towards multilingualism in a Dutch-medium school in Brussels
(Belgium). Author Kirsten Rosiers examines data collected through a
linguistic-ethnographic approach that included participant observation, audio
recordings of classroom interactions, and focus group interviews with
students, as well as individual interviews with students, teachers, and the
school principal. Policy documents were also analysed. The author investigated
three levels of language policy: governmental, school, and classroom. The
qualitative analysis of the interviews resulted in the emergence of five main
themes at the classroom level: knowledge of governmental and school language
policy, reaction to other languages, perception of pupils’ language use,
attention to multilingualism, and openness to multilingual education. The
author presents her results by reviewing each of these levels and themes and
discussing how ambivalences exist within and among them. 

In the sixth chapter, “A longitudinal study of emergent bilinguals among
Chinese pupils at a Japanese public school: A focus on language policies and
inclusion,” Junko Majima and Chiho Sakurai present their long-term research on
the development of young Chinese newcomers at a public elementary school in
Osaka (Japan). This study was conducted over a period of eight years and
included 110 pupils who have Chinese as a first language. The chapter focuses
on three research questions regarding the pupils’ L2 (second language)
Japanese proficiency, the maintenance of the pupils’ L1 (first language)
Chinese, and how the pupils negotiate their identities. The results show that
speaking skills develop faster than reading skills, that L1 proficiency is
interrelated with L2 literacy, and that most of the pupils have developed
identity as Chinese or Japanese-speaking Chinese. The authors conclude that
pupils who are proficient in their L1 tend to perform better at school in
their L2. 

The seventh chapter, “To make headway you have to go against the flow’:
Resisting dominant discourses and supporting emergent bilinguals in a
multilingual pre-school in France,” is a case study of a pre-primary school
teacher, her language ideologies, and her practiced language policies. In this
chapter, authors Latisha Mary and Andrea S. Young use video recordings,
classroom observations, and interviews with the teacher to delve into the
teacher’s beliefs and experience regarding language practices in the
classroom, language acquisition, and her relationship with pupils and parents.
They discuss in details the teacher’s strong beliefs concerning social
justice, her perception of the pupils as having great potential, her
intercultural competence, and her willingness to go against the flow. Based on
this teacher’s 31 years of experience in multilingual classrooms, the authors
describe three recommendations that could help raise student-teachers’
awareness of inequalities in the classroom and question the deficit
monolingual discourse: including research-based knowledge of issues related to
multilingualism, identity and discrimination in the teacher education
programme; raising student-teachers’ sense of empathy and openness to other
cultures and languages; and providing examples of research-informed practices.

The eighth chapter, written by Stéphanie Galligani and Diana-Lee Simon, is
“Rethinking Inclusion: A case study of an innovative university diploma
programme for refugee students in Grenoble (France).” This chapter explores
the importance of interpersonal relations among teachers and refugee students
in order to foster integration. The authors first address inclusion at a macro
level, discussing language policies concerning education for migrants in
Europe. They then look at inclusion at a micro level by focusing on the
experience, ideologies, and practices of different actors (director, manager,
teachers, refugee students) at the Grenoble Alpes University. The data
collected through semi-structured interviews indicate that the social and
affective relationship among teachers and students is primordial in an
inclusive approach. The authors discuss their results in relation to Mauss’
concept of giving-receiving-reciprocating and point out that “reciprocity is
thus the fundamental mode of interpersonal or inter-group relations” (p.143). 

Roula Kitsiou, Sofia Tsioli, George Androulakis, and Inaam Alibrahim are the
authors of the ninth chapter, “Experiences, challenges and potential of
implementing a participatory approach to designing educational material for
and with refugee women in Greece.” They consider the education of women
refugees in Greece using a participatory approach. They draw on data collected
through semi-structured interviews conducted online (via Skype) with four
members of the educational material team of their broader project, “Languages
without Borders.” This project is based on critical pedagogy, participatory
research, and translanguaging theory. The authors examine the potential and
challenges of their project by discussing their adoption of a translanguaging
framework, the development of critical and culturally sensitive material, and
the development of meta-working awareness. One interesting conclusion is that
with their participatory approach, it is difficult to know who are the
learners and who are the teachers, as these two roles apply to all
participants. 

In the tenth chapter, “Transforming our classrooms to embrace students’
multilingualism through translanguaging pedagogy,” authors Maite T. Sánchez
and Ivana Espinet examine and compare two linguistically diverse classrooms in
New York City. English is the main language of instruction in these
classrooms, but the teachers use a translanguaging approach to learning and
they encourage their students to use their full language repertoire. This
approach is transformative for the students of the two teachers in this study.
By bringing multilingualism into the classrooms, the teachers are challenging
“the linguistic hierarchy that positions English as more valuable than other
languages” (p.181), which allows the students to discover the value of their
multilingual skills and knowledge. The vignette at the beginning of the
chapter is representative of what the implementation of translanguaging
pedagogy in a classroom can look like. 

Chapter 11, “Spaces of power, spaces of resistance’: Identity negotiation
through autobiography with newcomer immigrant students” by Timea Kádas Pickel,
explores how young immigrant adolescents engage in a process of identity
reconstruction through an autobiographical activity involving identity texts,
photography, and correspondence. This project took place in a lower secondary
high school in France and included 22 students of 15 different linguistic
backgrounds. The three steps of the autobiographical activity were followed by
a focus group interview. The author presents an analysis of the students’
written texts and discourses centered around three themes that emerged during
the study: narrative identity and memory, identity and otherness, and
empowerment. In conclusion, she highlights the necessity for new forms of
literacy instruction in order to meet the needs of the newcomer immigrant
students.

The twelfth chapter, entitled “Framing critical perspectives on migration,
fairness and belonging through the lens of young people’s multilingual digital
stories” and written by Vicky Macleroy, explores how young people use digital
storytelling to think critically about issues of migration, fairness, and
belonging. The author analyses the multilingual digital stories of three
groups of young filmmakers in Cyprus, England, and Palestine. For the making
of these short films, young people (7-14 years old) were invited to use their
full plurilingual repertoires to express strong messages of resistance and
hope. The three digital stories analysed by the author challenge the
stereotyping of Palestinians, the adults categorizing children as numbers in
Bulgaria, and the perception of refugees by young children in Cyprus. The
author shows how the multilingual digital storytelling approach to literacy,
within a social justice framework, can challenge the dominant discourses on
migration, identity, and inclusion. 

In the next chapter, “Inclusion strategies for emergent bilingual pupils in
pre-school in France: The importance of the home-school relationship,” authors
Ann-Birte Krüger and Nathalie Thamin consider schools as spaces for social
transformation and explore the relationship between parents and schools. They
focus their work on the schooling of emerging bilingual pupils and the
training of teachers in a context of multilingualism. Data was collected in
two nursery schools in Franche-Comté region in France. They ask the question
“How can we involve parents and what methods can we consider and test?”
(p.230). The authors answer this question and present their results by
discussing three main categories of methods: formal contact between parents
and teachers to improve communication, informal contact between parents and
teachers (e.g., participation of parents in activities, morning coffee
conversations, day-to-day interactions), and language awareness activities in
the classroom. The authors conclude that collaboration between the parents and
the schools contributed both to the inclusion of the emergent bilingual pupils
in school as well as to the empowerment of their parents. 

The fourteenth chapter, entitled “Teacher language awareness: A personal and
pedagogical journey” and written by Ondina Gage, is a case study of a
multilingual teacher working within the context of restrictive and monolingual
education policies in California (USA). The author argues that the teacher’s
own language awareness, as well as her personal and formative experiences,
fostered an inclusive classroom for her students. The data analysis in this
chapter is divided into three main sections: the policy context within which
the teacher works, the teacher’s language training and pedagogical
perspectives, and interactions between the teacher and her students in the
classroom. The author ends by indicating and discussing three characteristics
of the teacher’s language awareness that helped her create an inclusive
classroom and navigate the existing policies that did not support
multilingualism in the classroom: empathic perspective-taking, supporting
learner identity, and affordances of language awareness. 

Chapter 15 was written by Rosa Maria Faneca, Maria Helena Araújo e Sá, and
Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer: “Fostering more inclusive linguistic practices in
Portuguese classrooms: Is teacher education the key for integrating heritage
languages?” The trio examine the educational practices implemented by 10
different teachers in order to promote the inclusion of languages and cultures
in their classroom. Their analysis shows that the teachers demonstrated it is
possible to move their teaching practices from monolingual education to a
multilingual mode of communication, and that these teaching practices are
beneficial for the students in terms of intercultural and plurilingual
development. 

In the final chapter, author Jim Cummins offers a concluding review of the
entire book. Entitled “Pedagogies of powerful communication: Enabling
minoritized students to express, expand and project identities of competence,”
the chapter aims to answer the question “Collectively, what are these accounts
of teachers, students, parents and communities working together actually
saying?” (p.285). The author discusses the “big picture” (p.286) drawn by the
collective insights of the different contributors to this volume, with a focus
on empowerment. 

EVALUATION

This valuable collaboration offers the reader a glimpse of what inclusive
educational practices can look like in different contexts considered as
monolingual polities. It brings the reader to classrooms in Austria, Cyprus,
England, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, Palestine, Portugal, and the USA. All
these classrooms are quite different, as they belong to different realities,
yet they all share the characteristic of being sites of transformative and
transgressive pedagogies. This inspiring volume shows that educators are
actors of change, that their teaching practices can have a real impact on the
inclusion process of many refugee and immigrant children and adults, and that
they can (and should) challenge the systems in place. In each chapter, we see
that collaborations among students, parents, teachers, and the community at
large are essential, and that the use of the students’ multilingual skills and
knowledge are beneficial for learning. 

The contributors to this volume also capture the ambivalences, contradictions,
and complexities that exist among the existing ideologies and educational
policies, and the need to rethink them. 

The vignettes between the chapters are a great bonus to this book. They are
stories from parents, teachers, second language coordinators, and a speech
pathologist, among others, and they provide extra evidence that change is
possible. 

This book is particularly relevant for educational actors and researchers, but
also for those interested in multilingualism, translanguaging, migration,
inclusion, social justice, and policies.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marie-Eve is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French, Hispanic and
Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is an
anthropologically oriented sociolinguist, and she is interested in language
contact, language attitudes and ideologies, language variation and change, and
language and identity, among other things.





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