Abstract
This talk looks at linguistic diversity in South Tyrolean primary schools and frames discourses around its inclusion in teaching and learning practices from a post-migrant and epistemological perspective. Drawing on Kerfoot and Bello-Nonjengele (2023), the paper will first argue that plurilingual education in the context of post-migrant societies is not only a policy or linguistic issue, but also a site for epistemic (in)justice, in that it can either prevent plurilingual students from making epistemic contributions in the classroom or, on the contrary, promote them as legitimate knowers in the educational community. The paper will then report on the experiences of two colleagues, a teacher of Italian and a teacher of German, who work in the same class at a primary school in the Province of Bolzano. From 2021 to 2023, the teachers took part in a participatory action research initiative aimed at the collaborative development of instruments and strategies geared towards the principles of pedagogical translanguaging (García and Li Wei 2014), i.e. a form of inclusive plurilingual education in which students are constructed as epistemic agents and where all their linguistic resources are treated as educational capital. Drawing on the qualitative analysis of data gathered over the course of the two years by means of individual semi-structured interviews and visual documentation of classroom work, the talk will exemplify how the two teachers’ stances (RQ1) and pedagogical practices (RQ2) developed to embrace more inclusive and diversity-conscious forms of plurilingual education. The paper will conclude by highlighting the need to rethink the logic of plurilingual education from below in ways that validate all students’ epistemic capacity.
References:
García, O & Li Wei (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kerfoot, C. & Olayemi Bello-Nonjengele, B. (2023). Towards epistemic justice: Constructing knowers in multilingual classrooms. Applied Linguistics 44 (3), 462–484.