Abstract
In European postmigrant and postmultilingual societies (Foroutan 2019; Li 2018), educational institutions tend to beless receptive to the transformations brought about by migration experiences and the increasingly complex interweaving of languages. As a result, while the languages spoken by autochthonous communities are prioritized in school curricula, those lacking historical associations with a given territory tend to be structurally marginalized. The legitimacy of certain languages over others can reinforce uneven relationships between dominant and migratized (Tinsley-Kent & Qureshi 2023) language communities. Within this scenario, the teaching and learning of heritage languages (HLs)—i.e., the languages of first-, second- and third-generation speakers among transnational communities (Polinsky 2015)—offers an interesting context for considering a postmigrant perspective on education.
This paper contributes to such perspective by reporting on the experiences of two volunteer teachers of Albanianas a HL in South Tyrol (Italy), a historically multilingual sub-state entity where hereditary educational institutions arenot yet fully legitimized in institutionalized educational and political discourse. Drawing on data generated throughsemi-structured interviews and spontaneous narratives of life trajectories, the paper explores a) how the two teachers position themselves as language educators in a postmigrant and postmultilingual society, and b) their connection to two key dimensions of the postmigrant experience—space and time. Their narratives unveil how the two HL teachers were able to reconfigure their identities as mediators across cultures, languages and societal structures and amidst the challenges and tensions associated with migration dynamics. By centering their emic experiences and narratives of self, this paper amplifies HL teachers’ voices as legitimate contributors to a de-migratized perspective on education, i.e. one that views the teaching and learning of HLs as an integral component of postmigrant and postmultilingual societies.
References
Foroutan, N. (2019). Die postmigrantische Gesellschaft. Ein Versprechen der pluralen Demokratie. Bielefeld:transcript.
Li, W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30.
Polinsky, M. (2015). Heritage languages and their speakers: State of the field, challenges, perspectives for futurework, and methodologies. Zeitschrift für Fremdsprachwissenschaft 26, 7–27.
Tinsley-Kent, J. & Qureshi, F. (2023). Words matter. The framing of migrants in immigration policy. Progressive Review,30(1), 15-20.