Abstract
The workshop is grounded in the concept of "inclusive plurilingual education," i.e. education that values the diverse linguistic resources students bring to the classroom and leverages them to enhance equity in access to learning opportunities and to support identity development (Guarda and Mayr 2024). The workshop consists of two sections: the first explores the key principles of inclusive plurilingual education in relation to the concepts of epistemic agency and justice (Fricker 2007). In the second part, the participants will review and discuss three plurilingualism-oriented learning units that were developed by teams of teachers and researchers as part of a participatory action research initiative. While originally designed for and implemented in a number of South Tyrolean primary schools where Italian and German are, respectively, the first and second languages of instruction and English is an additional foreign language, the workshop participants will be invited to reflect on how they would adapt the materials to their own professional contexts and educational goals. The workshop will encourage a plurilingual exchange among the participants: in the first part, English and German will be used flexibly, while the second section will feature teaching units with descriptions and guidelines in Italian and German, inviting the participants to draw on all the resources of their linguistic repertoires to engage in the analysis and discussion.
Bibliographic references:
Fricker, P. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Guarda, M. & Mayr, G. (2024). The challenge of challenging dominant language ideologies and hierarchies for inclusive plurilingual education. In S. Karpava (eds.), Multilingualism and Multiculturalism. Language Teaching and Learning (pp. 31-51). Leiden/Boston: BRILL.