Abstract
This paper foregrounds participatory action research (PAR, McIntyre 2008) as a critical strategy for engaging educators and communities in confronting epistemic (in)justice in mainstream classrooms in South Tyrol (Italy). In Italian postmigrant (Foroutan 2019) and postmultilingual society (Li 2018), educational institutions still often remain resistant to the linguistic and epistemic shifts brought about by mobility and migration. Curricula continue to prioritise dominant, autochthonous languages, reinforcing assimilationist ideologies and marginalising the knowledges and languages of migrantised communities. These dynamics result in the misrecognition (Fraser 2009) of those heritage languages that have no or weak historical ties with a given territory, and the reproduction of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) and oppression (Mitova 2020).
Drawing on a two-year PAR project with two teams of primary schoolteachers (tot. N. 30), this paper illustrates how collaborative inquiry can challenge institutional inertia and reframe heritage languages as valuable epistemic resources. The project aimed at encouraging educators to critically reflect on their own ideologies and practices, and to co-construct alternative pedagogies that resist monolingual solutions to linguistic diversity. Framed by concepts such as colonialingualism (Meighan 2022), translanguaging (García & Kleyn 2016) and transknowledging (Ennser-Kananen et al. 2024), the paper will provide examples of and critically reflect on how PAR fostered mainstream teachers—alongside pupils and their families—to rethink legitimate knowledge production, (re)center marginalised knowledges and promote more equitable educational practices.
References:
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