Abstract
Schools in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, are becoming increasingly multilingual. This is also true for South Tyrol, Italy’s northernmost province, in which institutional trilingualism (German, Italian, Ladin) and diglossia now coexist with new languages and varieties brought into the area thanks to migration flows. The increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of the province has an impact on everyday school life and poses new challenges to teachers. The inclusion and valorisation of all the languages that students bring into the classroom, as well as the mobilisation of their entire linguistic repertoires for learning, in fact, are considered ways to infuse more social justice into the classroom (Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2009), yet require specific competences - i.e. skills, knowledge, attitudes and beliefs - on the part of teachers. This generates a need for training and professional learning.
In this chapter, we will provide our understanding of the competences that teachers need to work in linguistically heterogenous classes. Drawing on a framework we recently developed to inform our research on plurilingual didactic competences (Guarda & Hofer, 2021), in our contribution we will focus in particular on the importance of teacher attitudes and beliefs, i.e. a teacher’s motivational force to mobilise their knowledge and skills so as to challenge dominant language ideologies and practices, and to take responsibility for their students’ development as plurilingual speakers. This description will then be followed by our own reflections as to the ways in which such attitudes and beliefs can be fostered through professional development initiatives, as well as on the challenges that we, in our capacity as researchers and teacher educators, encounter when working with teachers towards more inclusive and socially just forms of plurilingual education.