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 had a strong 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 (Cummins 2001; Skutnabb-Kangas et al. 2009), yet require specific skills, attitudes and knowledge on the part of teachers.
In our talk, we will describe COMPASS (Didactic Competences in the Multilingual Classroom), a research and professional development initiative embedded into the project One school, many languages (SMS 2.0) promoted by Eurac Research. The initiative aims to support teams of teachers from German and Italian-speaking primary schools in making the most of the increasing linguistic heterogeneity of their classes, and to accompany them on their way towards an increasingly inclusive didactic practice.
In our contribution, we will first provide our understanding of the skills, attitudes and knowledge that teachers involved in plurilingual education should possess (Guarda & Hofer 2021). For the purposes of this talk, we will focus in particular on the attitudinal component, that is on teachers’ proactive capacity to mobilise their knowledge and skills so as to act as social agents of change, to advocate for plurilingual students, and to take responsibility for their students’ development as plurilingual speakers. This description will be then followed by an overview of the two main components of the COMPASS initiative, namely a two-year professional development course geared towards issues related to plurilingual education, and a longitudinal research study on teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and reported practices.
References
Cummins, J. (2001). Bilingual Children’s Mother Tongue: Why is it important for Education? Sprogforum, 19, 15-20. Last accessed 21.12.2021 from http://www.lavplu.eu/central/bibliografie/cummins_eng.pdf
Guarda, M. & Hofer, S. (2021). COMPASS: A framework for theory and research on plurilingual didactic competences. Bolzano, Italy: Eurac Research.
Skutnabb-Kangas, T., Phillipson, R., Mohanty, A. & Panda, M. (eds) (2009). Social Justice through Multilingual Education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, Series Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights.