Abstract
Research over the last decades has demonstrated that leveraging all students’ linguistic resources in the mainstream classroom, including their heritage languages, yields a variety of beneficial effects for their cognitive, linguistic and identity development, and intercultural learning (among others, Cenoz & Gorter 2022; Cummins 2021). Nevertheless, many educational systems in post-migrant societies, i.e. societies characterized by increasingly interconnected migratory experiences and plural identities (Gaonkar et al. 2021), continue to address linguistic diversity and societal change through subtractive ideologies that delegitimize and marginalize non-dominant language varieties, thereby perpetuating linguistic and epistemic injustices (Fricker 2007) and exacerbating disparities in learning opportunities.
Against this backdrop, this paper interrogates the intricate relationships between language and social power dynamics and structures, and responds to the need to challenge institutional immobility by validating the knowledge, competences and identities that all students bring to the classroom. It does so by documenting on research conducted in South Tyrol (Italy), an officially trilingual region characterised by complex historical and ongoing interaction processes between established language groups and more recently settled language communities, and where the role of language in the educational sphere is highly politicised and contested.
Following a brief overview of the research context, the paper reports on a two-year participatory action research initiative aimed at the promotion of linguistic diversity in mainstream education, and documents in particular the experiences of a team of primary school teachers – eight professionals teaching various subjects from Italian, German and English to mathematics, music and science - in the validation of their plurilingual students’ epistemic capacity. Based on the qualitative analysis of data generated through individual semi-structured interviews and visual documentation of classroom activities, the paper exemplifies how the teachers began to reconceptualise and enact plurilingual education in more inclusive ways, i.e. ways that support the learning of the institutionalised languages of schooling while also sustaining and promoting the epistemologies and competences of non-dominant heritage language speakers. By showcasing the experiences of the participating teachers, the paper aligns itself with scholarly work that sees the role of language in education as not solely a policy or linguistic issue, but also an epistemic one (Menezes de Souza 2017; Kerfoot & Bello-Nonjengele 2023), and confirms that plurilingual classrooms can be crucial sites for the promotion of epistemic justice from below.
References
Cenoz, J. & Gorter, D. (2022). Pedagogical Translanguaging. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cummins, J. (2021). Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners: A Critical Analysis of Theoretical Concepts. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Fricker, P. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gaonkar, A.M., Ost Hansen, A.S., Post, H.C. & Schramm, M. (Eds.) (2021). Postmigration: Art, Culture, and Politics in Contemporary Europe. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.
Kerfoot, C. & Olayemi Bello-Nonjengele, B. (2023). Towards epistemic justice: constructing knowers in multilingual classrooms. Applied Linguistics 44(3), 462–484.
Menezes de Souza, L.M.T. (2017). Epistemic diversity, lazy reason and ethical translation in post-colonial contexts: The case of indigenous educational policy in Brazil. In C. Kerfoot, & K. Hyltenstam (Eds.), Entangled discourses: South-North orders of visibility (pp. 189–208). Routledge.