Visualising Language Students and Teachers as Multilinguals: Advancing Social Justice in Education

Introduction: Being Multilingual and Living Multilingually – Advancing a Social Justice Agenda in Applied Language Studies

Paula Kalaja and Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer

1 Introduction

Applied language studies (or applied linguistics) have undergone quite a number of turns in the past few years, including a multilingual turn (see, e.g. May, 2014), and methodologically, a visual turn (see, e.g. Block, 2014). This new publication, with the title Visualising Language Students and Teachers as Multilinguals: Advancing Social Justice in Education, is a response to the theoretical call for questioning traditional or lay notions of multilingualism of individuals, be they learners, teachers, or users of more than one language, or of more than two varieties of a single language. It is also a response to the methodological call for widening the repertoire of research methodologies that have dominated research on the topic until recently: from linguistic (or verbal) methodologies to visual ones (Pitkänen-Huhta & Pietikäinen, 2017; Kalaja & Pitkänen-Huhta, 2018: 157–176). Thus, this new publication criss-crosses the multilingual and visual turns in language education and language teacher education (for short: language (teacher) education) and takes a social justice approach to these areas of expertise. The book approaches these issues from the perspective of those involved in language (teacher) education with a mission to enhance the quality of these areas of expertise, regarding aspects of becoming or being multilingual in the globalised world of today.

It is gradually acknowledged that the majority of people in the world are in fact multilingual (and not monolingual). This is a result of intensive forced displacement, transnationalism, diasporic migration, traveling of people, information and goods – globally – for a host of reasons, and also of changes in educational curricula in many parts of the world, such as in Europe. Being and becoming multilingual is thus the consequence (product) but also a key driving force (process) of the cumulative effects of many factors, including political, economic, social, educational and technological changes and/or innovations. But the acknowledgement of the wide spreading of individual and societal multilingualism is also a result of our evolving understanding of what multilingualism is and of what makes a multilingual individual. In Section 2 we will return to the concepts of multilingualism and plurilingualism, but for the sake of clarity, we will use societal multilingualism to refer to the recognition of multiple language in societies and individual multilingualism, the latter also known as plurilingualism (making plurilingualism and individual multilingualism synonyms), to refer to individual repertoires (Coste et al., 1997; Moore, 2006 even uses the plural form, ‘plurilingualisms’ to better convey the idea of complexity of individual repertoires). The current understanding of multilingualism (and related terminology) has challenged some well-established assumptions about multilingualism, including the monolingual bias and native-speakerism – as an ideology (e.g. Ortega, 2019). In short, monolingualism was assumed to be the norm in the world, multilingualism an exception. Native speakers of a language (e.g. English) were thought to be the best teachers of the language as an L2 and experts in L2 teaching methodologies because they possessed ‘full’ competence in their L1 (assumed to be unattainable by L2 learners), represented Western ways of thinking, and embodied the aesthetics of the European individual, who held cultural power over colonised nations and racialised groups. Some traditions in the definition of a multilingual individual expect a balanced command of two or more languages, which means the full productive and receptive set of competences in more than one language, according to the designation of parallel and concomitant monolinguals. A bilingual, for example, would be someone with a considered (and externally assessed) full command of two languages. Such a perspective is quite elitist, as it would mean that speakers’ partial competences would not be considered or that they would need to be schooled in the two languages to be considered bilingual. And in case a language is neither written nor spoken, it would bring the idea that the command of that language would be compromised. This would make most of us, plurilingual individuals, not recognised as such at all (Piccardo, 2019). The parallel monolingual understanding of individual plurilingualism, a sum of perfect monolinguals in different languages (apparently without contact to each other!), has accounted for many social and educational injustices in the acknowledgement of the partial, unbalanced, distributed competences of plurilingual individuals in different domains of language use. One sign of social and linguistic injustice(s) could be recognised in the very concept of ‘semilingualism’ or in the assumptions that some individuals cannot fully speak any language at all (Martin-Jones & Romaine, 1986). The same injustice was transferred to the context of language learning, in which language learners would never be able to meet the standards of the idealised native speaker of the target language, being forever condemned to stay in some sort of limbo, the interlanguage. The same issue of unbalanced competences was also present in the discussions on the profiles of native and non-native teachers of a target language. So, to keep it short, language competences (how one speaks a set of languages) and the languages included in one’s repertoire (languages perceived as having low or high prestige, for example) have been (part of) yardsticks to measure an individual’s social ability to integrate and therefore succeed in a host country, a child’s academic performance, a student teacher’s professional competence to teach an additional language. Issues of correctness and (native) speakerism and the constitution of the linguistic repertoire are then connected to social justice, in general, and to social justice in language (teacher) education, more particularly.

It is not easy to find a straightforward definition of social justice, and it is perhaps even harder to find definitions that bring issues of social justice and language diversity together. As a term that navigates different disciplines (such as political science and philosophy), explaining its specific meaning in applied linguistics might be hazardous (see Avineri et al., 2019 for an historical overview on the origins and use of the concept). Additionally, as stated by Pennycook (2021: 53), ‘the problem with the idea of social justice … is that it is also a rather vague term whose lineage is principally in liberal democratic principles’. In addition, Pennycook points out that, while social justice might be an appealing way to frame a critical project in applied linguistics, it does not really make it adequate according to theoretical and political grounds, as it remains a largely liberal and colonial idea.

Following the argument by Baugh (2018), language, injustice and inequality can co-occur and, according to Avineri et al. (2019), education is a thematic area where that co-occurrence is most visible (alongside other domains such as racial discourse, health, social activism, law and policy). These authors acknowledge that language is not neutral and can operate to limit and subvert equitable participation at school, thus reducing social justice in this particular setting. Despite Pennycook’s criticisms, we then consider that social justice provides a potentially transformative and empowering framework to carry out research on multilingualism, in general, and on individual multilingualism in education, more specifically. Adopting a social justice lens highlights manipulation and biases, inequalities and linguistic hierarchies that often marginalise individuals with diverse language backgrounds in different school settings, while at the same time proposing more equitable educational opportunities for all, regardless of their linguistic and cultural backgrounds (what we will call linguistic and culturally responsive pedagogies later on). Moreover, in the field of (language) teacher education, it allows us to think of teaching programmes as sometimes creating and reproducing inequalities in the access to the teaching profession, based on teacher candidates’ linguistic, cultural or economic differences, framed as disadvantageous.

Piller provides a clear account of what discourses on social justice are about: ‘engagement with social justice focuses principally on disadvantage and discrimination related to gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and age. It is extremely rare for language to feature as a basis on which individuals, communities, or nations may be excluded’ (2016: 5). This acknowledgement comes even after the work of some scholars towards the recognition of Language Rights as Human Rights (Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 1995). Piller continues by stressing that ‘linguistic diversity relates to economic inequality, cultural domination, and imparity of political participation’ (2016: 5). Social justice, which can be conceptualised as a goal and a process (Bell, 2007), has been connected to issues of parity of participation in cultural, economic and political domains, implying cultural recognition, economic redistribution and political representation (Fraser, 1995). Adding individual multilingualism to this equation, means that a multilingual dimension to research has the potential to highlight how linguistic hierarchies and (in)visibilities might foster or hinder that parity and participation in the three domains. More specifically, in applied language studies which focus on language (in) education, a social justice lens underscores the linguistic power dynamics at play in the making and reproduction of educational inequalities. This is an even more pressing research agenda when linguistic diversity and inequalities based on ‘linguistic scapegoating’ – i.e. using linguistic arguments as a basis for discrimination – combines with other forms of discrimination, such as those based on race and ethnicity (Baker-Bell, 2020; Rosa, 2019).

In this book we address social justice in education, in general, and in language (teacher) education, more particularly. Social justice in education is about agency and authorship of one’s own story in one’s own terms, critical dialogue, commitment to inclusion and transformation, and promotion of equity: ‘social justice education involves every aspect of education, including but not limited to, access, curriculum development, program offerings, hiring decisions and instructional choices’ (Perugini & Wagner, 2022: 45). In research in applied language studies, a social justice perspective is about both recognising and challenging the playfulness of multilingualism and the sunny-side up of multilingual lives. Through a social justice perspective, research opens up spaces that unveil the – emotional, economic, social, epistemic – precariousness of many multilingual lives, which Dovchin (2022) called ‘translingual discrimination’. A social justice perspective on individual multilingualism is about recognising that multilingualism as lived can have as much multivoicedness as voicelessness. It is about counter-narratives of hegemonic positions and perspectives. When connected to citizenship, social justice ‘runs counter to assimilationist approaches … frequently advocated in schools which tend to control and smother individual and group differences through focusing on responsibilities, social control and preparedness for work’ (Chung & Macleroy, 2022: 258).

This book answers the call to adopt a social justice perspective in applied language studies by showing and discussing ways in which students, teachers and student teachers, by actively engaging in the construction and reconstruction of their lived experiences and stories of multilingualism, become agents of critical thinking and dialogue, with a transformative and creative potential in language (teacher) education. By using drawings and other arts-based approaches, participants and researchers disrupt a long-standing tradition of logocentric perspectives in narratives and narrative studies, and on studies on the voices beyond multilingual lives (see Section 2.3, below, for more details). Indeed, while logocentrism places a heavy emphasis on written or spoken language as the primary means of communication and expression in research and storytelling, drawings and arts-based methods introduce a more diverse and inclusive range of expressive tools (i.e. semiotic resources). Researching multilingual lives from a less logocentric perspective addresses crucial issues of how multilingual individuals can participate in creating and disseminating scientific knowledge, beyond research traditions in linguistics and applied linguistics that constructed multilinguals as deviant, for example, as lacking resources in the language of schooling (just think of the tradition of analysing multilingual students’ errors or measuring their language gap). Through arts-based research methods, individuals can convey their experiences, emotions and narratives through visual art, which allows for a broader and richer spectrum of expression, also nurturing their visual literacy. From a social justice perspective, incorporating drawings and different semiotic resources challenges the dominance of text-based narratives and opens up space for alternative ways of knowing and sharing stories, also impacting research dissemination strategies. This disruption is particularly pertinent in multilingual contexts where linguistic hierarchies and power dynamics can marginalise certain voices and certain narratives.

Visualising Language Students and Teachers as Multilinguals: Advancing Social Justice in Education is intended for all those involved in language (teacher) education, including teacher educators/trainers, teacher trainees/student teachers and practising teachers of additional languages, working in different levels of education (involving their students ranging from small children to senior citizens). In addition, this book can serve as a source of inspiration for senior or junior scholars wishing to pursue research along similar lines in the educational contexts where they find themselves.

In Section 2, we will discuss the central concepts of this volume, focusing on the issues of multilingualism as lived, on the relationship between multilingualism and social justice in language (teacher) education, and on the use of arts-based approaches to promote a social justice agenda in these fields. In Section 3, we briefly present Parts 1 to 3 of the book, describing the individual contributions, which in their own way move the social justice agenda in language (teacher) education forward.

2 What is This Book About?

2.1 Multilingualism as lived: More than Words, revisited!

Our understanding of multilingualism as lived is based on two complementary arguments, but goes beyond them. Firstly, we agree with the idea that ‘in real life and everyday usage languages are not usually as neatly compartmentalized as our usage of language names suggests’ (Piller, 2016: 11); secondly, we acknowledge the importance of adopting an emic stance, a more emotional and subjective one, in the analysis of individual multilingualism, to understand how plurilinguals make sense of their linguistic stories and repertoires. It goes nevertheless beyond these principles, as we also understand multilingualism as lived as interconnected and merged with other communicative resources, which are not limited to named and discrete languages or even ‘bits of languages’ (Blommaert, 2010). This is the reason why the subtitle of this section is ‘More than Words, Revisited!’. In our previous co-edited book (Kalaja & Melo-Pfeifer, 2019), we wanted to stress the added value of using visualisations to explore individuals’ (lived) multilingualism, by adopting less logocentric methodological perspectives; now, we take the same stance but embrace a less logocentric stance also on the very idea of the multilingual repertoire itself.

It is acknowledged that in fact all people are multilingual according to the current definition(s) of multilingualism (or of plurilingualism) of individuals (for a concise review of these terms, see, e.g. Piccardo, 2019; Piccardo et al., 2022a). Recent accounts of what counts as multilingualism and who the plurilingual speaker is have changed our perception of balanced competences in different, isolated languages. It is now acknowledged that plurilingual speakers can use their linguistic repertoires in a flexible and hybrid way to accomplish real goals in the real world, as ‘social agents’ (Piccardo & North, 2019). These linguistic competences include the use of different registers, dialects, sociolects and languages, which, in fact, would mean that everybody is, at a certain point, plurilingual. Furthermore, one can be plurilingual by making use of partial competences in different languages, such as receptive competences in languages of the same linguistic continuum (also known as intercomprehension or receptive multilingualism), say, across the Romance Languages (such as Portuguese, Italian and Catalan): being able to partially understand a language of the same linguistic family would be a display of plurilingual competence. Additionally, knowledge and use of different linguistic resources are combined with non-verbal and para-verbal semiotic repertoires, as well as with spatial and sensorial repertoires, in a very complex, organic and complementary way, meaning that multilingualism as lived is multi-layered, embodied, multisensorial, situated and emplaced. This more complex and organic perspective on individual multilingualism should be reflected in the teaching of languages (for theorising along these lines in different parts of the world, see, e.g. Piccardo et al., 2022b, regarding different languages, and Raza et al., 2021 and 2023, regarding a single language, namely, English) and in the curricula at all levels of education. Multilingualism as lived in education would need to address issues of complementarity, redundancy, and discrepancies between the use of linguistic resources and other semiotic resources. It would, perhaps paradoxically, lead to a less logocentric language classroom, where multisensoriality (Prada, 2023) and the material culture of multilingualism (Aronin et al., 2018; Aronin & Ó Laoire, 2012), with their emotional weight, would have a meaningful place.

Despite these theoretical and epistemological advances, curricula or the series of textbooks on the market tend to provide language students and teachers with very few practical guidelines to achieve a more complex and dynamic vision of how languages work, how they are acquired and used, and especially how to address multilingualism as lived. And, also importantly, usually just logocentric methodologies are included in syllabi for (student) teachers, a limitation in the approach to language education that we expect to counter with this collection of empirical studies.

Multilingualism can be approached from a number of perspectives (for a comprehensive review, see, e.g. Cenoz, 2013). One basic distinction was already noted above between societal and individual multilingualism. In other words, the focus can be on communities where a number of languages are used, or on individuals who speak more than one language – or more than one variety of a single language. As Kramsch (2009: 2) notes: ‘In its attempts to elucidate how people learn and use various languages, SLA research has traditionally given more attention to the processes of acquisition than to the flesh-and-blood individuals who are doing the learning. It has separated learners’ minds, bodies, and social behaviours into separate domains of inquiry and studied how language intersects with each of them’. Thus, regarding individual multilingualism (or plurilingualism), a further distinction can be made between an objective and a subjective approach (Kramsch, 2009). The objective approach focuses on tracing the development of individuals’ knowledge of languages in terms of a linguistic system, including the mastery of grammar and lexicon, or in terms of an ability to communicate with others – in the languages in their repertoires. In contrast, the subjective approach attempts to figure out what sense individuals themselves make of becoming or being multilingual as subjectively experienced (or as lived), involving ups and downs, positive and negative emotions, attitudes, beliefs, ideologies, visions and identities.

These developments have led to the redefining of traditional terminology (e.g. multilingualism or repertoire), introducing new terminology (including translanguaging, plurilingualism, multicompetence) and challenging some traditional notions such as mother tongue, L2, L3, etc., fossilisation, language attrition, semilingualism, interlanguage, communicative competence, and assumptions about the nature of languages as discrete and fixed units. They have also debunked some misconceptions about communication: communication has to be monolingual, interlocutors should all speak and share the same language, languages are the principal meaning makers in communication (see Canagarajah, 2013; García & Li, 2014). So, if plurilingual individuals make use of all their verbal and non-verbal resources to communicate, in a dynamic, selective, goal-oriented way, according to the ingredients of the context (e.g. a formal or informal situation, interlocutors and languages present, objects available, own bodily resources, etc.), then translanguaging would be a more accurate way to describe how plurilingual subjects collaboratively perform to co-construct sense (Li, 2018; Prada, 2023). It has not so much to do with the use of unique languages to communicate or about switching languages as if we were dealing with parallel monolingualisms, but rather with the flexible and skilful navigation of the plurilingual and multisemiotic repertoire in a given time and space.

This stance is important in terms of language education programmes. To acknowledge the full communicative repertoire of students would go beyond knowing which L1, L2, L3 or Lx a student has learnt at school or acquired during their linguistic biography. It would mean knowing how they make use of those linguistic repertoires, how they subjectively perceive them, and how they combine them to accomplish and co-create meaning. It thus comes as no surprise that concepts such as mother tongue or foreign language are increasingly under fire: the first can no longer be considered the yardstick to measure the emotional bond to a language or the communicative competence of an individual; and foreign language is a term that more often than not helps to stigmatise individuals and languages. Additionally, mother tongue and foreign language are not stable biographic givens: not always the language one learnt first, not always a language one learnt later in life (Dabène, 1994; Melo-Pfeifer, 2019). That is why, in the scope of this introduction, we prefer the terms modern and world languages or additional languages, to refer to languages being used, learnt, or taught (see also Melo-Pfeifer & Tavares, 2024).

These developments are beginning to be recognised, and thus fostering awareness of multilingualism – and related multiculturalism – has become one of the core aims in language education since the launch of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (Council of Europe, 2001) and the more recent updates to the original document (e.g. Council of Europe, 2007, 2020). These guidelines were developed for teaching additional languages, including English, in Europe but have since been adopted in other parts of the world, too (Byram & Parmenter, 2012; for comparisons of practices and policies across different countries and educational contexts, see Björklund & Björklund, 2023).

The ever increasing multilingualism, or linguistic and cultural diversity of language learners (and possibly also that of their teachers) in language (teacher) education is posing new challenges regarding, e.g. classroom interaction and assessment practices (for recent theorising along these lines in different parts of the world, see, e.g. Piccardo et al., 2022b, regarding different languages, Raza et al., 2021 and 2023, regarding a single language, namely, English, and Melo-Pfeifer & Ollivier, 2023, on the challenges of multilingual assessment). The multilingualism of language learners (which might differ from that of their teachers) and the way learners live their multilingualism have been viewed by teachers with mixed feelings (or attitudes and beliefs): either in positive or negative terms – or as an asset or as a problem (e.g. Haukås, 2015; Lundberg, 2019); or in three orientations – as a right, as a problem, or as a resource (Paulsrud et al., 2020).

2.2 Multilingualism and social justice in language (teacher) education: Towards linguistically and culturally responsive practices

Following our review of the concept ‘social justice’ in Section 1, particularly in what concerns the connection between social injustice and linguistic inequalities, addressing social justice in education is based on the premise that teachers and researchers alike should ‘avoid being complicit in sustaining an oppressive status quo and to rethink their roles as contributors to advance justice in marginalized and vulnerable communities’ (Mertens, 2022: xxiii; see also Li, 2023). This implies taking a proactive stance in the promotion of social justice. A way to advance social justice in language (teacher) education would be to fully acknowledge the linguistic and semiotic repertoires of students and teachers alike, in their uniqueness, heterogeneity, and in their potential for creative use. This would also encompass the recognition that not all individuals have the same embodied repertoires available to communicate: some students might come short in listening capacities, others might not be able to see or walk, others might still be developing their linguistic repertoires in the language of schooling, others might be struggling to maintain their language(s) of origin. To cope with differences in linguistic and cultural repertoires in the classroom, some authors have called for the development of linguistic and culturally responsive teaching practices, which would acknowledge, legitimate and leverage the repertoires brought by students (and therefore, the repertoires of their families) to the classroom (Bonnet & Siemund, 2018; Candelier et al., 2007; Herrera, 2016; Kirsch & Duarte, 2020; Li, 2023; Tavares, 2023; Yiakoumetti, 2012). These practices would be valid for both school subjects more directly related to languages (language subjects), and for so-called ‘non-linguistic subjects’ (such as Maths). In this subsection, we will only refer to linguistic and culturally responsive practices in the language classroom, and just touch upon the theme of less ableist practices in that context, as this is not the main theme of the volume. Together, multilingual pedagogies highlight ‘a shift in focus from issues of integration and interaction between different cultures to social justice issues’ (Zilliacus et al., 2017: 168). Some approaches to acknowledge, capitalise and leverage the potential of students’ linguistic and cultural repertoires have been proposed. Among them, we can name the pluralistic approaches to language and culture teaching and learning (Candelier et al., 2007), pedagogical translanguaging (Cenoz & Gorter, 2022), and decolonising language education (Macedo, 2019), which includes the discussion about deracialising the language curriculum and being aware of raciolinguistic ideologies in language and teacher education (Rosa, 2019; Rosa & Flores, 2020). These approaches seek to promote linguistic equity in multilingual and multicultural teaching and learning contexts and offer support for communities – mainly linguistic communities – which have been oppressed or disregarded, and they are engaged in promoting social change through transformative language education. They all have in common the acknowledgement that previously acquired linguistic and semiotic repertoires, biographical experiences and individuals’ dispositions and goals are paramount to understand how they engage in language learning, how they view their own and others’ multilingualism and how they live with and across languages. Also importantly, they acknowledge that multilingual education should be a goal not only for students with a migrant background, but for all the school population, as the benefits attached to language education include increased multilingual awareness, cognitive and linguistic abilities, and enhanced intercultural competence, among others. Thinking of multilingual and intercultural education for all also avoids systematically focusing on migrant students as lacking something and on proposing multilingual pedagogies as an instrument to overcome it, hence avoiding accentuating discourses of othering in multilingual education. Culturally and linguistically responsive practices in language education address two complementary issues related to social justice: firstly, by normalising the use of previously acquired linguistic and semiotic repertoires of all students; and secondly, by stressing the value of multilingual education for all, and not just to overcome deficits in the language(s) of instruction.

Linguistically and culturally responsive practices such as the ones listed above are a way of challenging practices based on ‘ableism’: being or not being able to speak the language of the school, being or not being able to adapt to a school culture or to the so-called culture of the host country (in certain homogenising discourses!). Promoting less ableist practices could also mean diversifying input in the language classroom, to include students’ repertoires and pay justice to their abilities and set of cognitive assets, which implies addressing students traditionally considered ‘monolingual’. Most of the activities in the language classroom are based on visual and/oral input, which exclude part of the learners from the communicative and learning tasks, if they have seeing or hearing characteristics that distinguish them from the majority of the classmates. And if we criss-cross issues of language competence in the language of schooling with multisensoriality (or a lack thereof to some degree) and ableism, we can infer how urgent social justice issues should enter the language classroom.

2.3 Multilingualism, social justice and arts-based approaches to research

Recently edited books have been acknowledging the need to rethink research methodologies to cope with the linguistic and cultural repertoires of the participants, in order to strive for more equity in research designs, for more balanced participation of all individuals involved, and for promoting social justice not only in the dissemination of results, but in all moments of research design and development (among them, CohenMiller & Boivin, 2022; Martin-Jones & Martin, 2017; Purkarthofer & Flubacher, 2022; Robinson-Pant & Wolf, 2017; Warriner & Bigelow, 2019). Most of the books add the use of visual methodologies or other less logocentric research methods in research to the mainstream research methods based exclusively on linguistic data, striving for multiliteracy usages in research and challenging graphocentrism (Menezes de Souza, 2017), and they make the case that research on multilingualism should be made multilingually, following the work by Holmes et al. (2013 and 2016). In this book, we claim that research on individual multilingualism, when performed through a social justice lens, should combine doing research multilingually and multisemiotically.

In applied language studies, in general, and in language (teacher) education, more specifically, issues such as ‘how are languages learnt at different stages of life?’, ‘what differences can be observed in the learning pathways of monolingual and plurilingual learners?’, ‘how do language learners/speakers become language teachers?’ or ‘how do student teachers develop professionally?’ have been addressed through methods anchored in discourse and linguistic-verbal discursive practices (such as interviews, questionnaires, written or oral narratives). These studies rarely take embodiment and multimodality into consideration in data collection and/or in the analyses. Applied language studies, probably because the name of the field is so dominated by the term language, has been characterised by a linguistic bias that sees it as the preferred modus for meaning making, positioning other (concomitant) modi to an underestimated and subaltern position. This would explain why language (teacher) education and research in these fields has been determined by an empire of the written discourse, ‘empire langagier’ (Morilhat, 2008), or a bias known as ‘lingualism’ (Block, 2014).

The predominant glottocentric approaches to language, communication, plurilingualism and identity have already been acknowledged in this chapter. We defined those approaches as methodologies and perspectives that focus predominantly on written or spoken language as the central and most significant means of communication and knowledge production. They strongly convey the idea that rational discourse is word-based only (or mostly) and, as a byproduct of this connection, also monolingual only. Such a perspective emphasises the written or spoken word as the primary mode of expressing ideas, conducting research and conveying knowledge, thus limiting how linguistically diverse populations are present(ed) in research on their own multilingualism. Such a perspective tacitly accepts a hierarchy between modes of meaning making and the subordination or exclusion of meaning makers aside from words (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016: 65) in research. According to Morilhat (2008: 16), this epistemological stance entails as a corollary that ‘the complex modes of our being in the world are ignored, purged to the benefit of the language relationship alone. The exclusive attention given to the constitutive power of language results in the disappearance of extra-linguistic reality’ (translation by Melo-Pfeifer). Against this backdrop, arts-based approaches emerge as a methodological (and even ontological or ‘theoretical’, Melo-Pfeifer & Chik, 2022) alternative in research that brings the multisensorial and multimodal ways of producing and interpreting meaning to the forefront, thus valuing participants’ multiliteracies and challenging the above-mentioned graphocentrism in research. Ortega (2019: 29) refers to this complexity of meaning making as follows:

Human meaning-making is always multisensory and embodied, multimodal and situated, and always involving much more than purely linguistic resources or perfect correspondences between what is said (a linguistic matter of words but also embedded in many other nonlinguistic signs, symbols, and resources), what is meant (a nonlinguistic matter of intention and construal), and what is understood (a nonlinguistic matter of construal and effect).

Arts-based research makes use of a set of tools that adopt and combine ‘the tenets of creative arts in order to address social research questions in holistic and engaged ways’ (Leavy, 2015: 4). It therefore answers the call to expand research objects and tools beyond words. It can be interpreted as an effort to extend beyond the limiting constraints of discursive communication in order to express meanings that otherwise would be left untold. Seen from this perspective, it is an approach that challenges the standardisation of research methodologies and promotes ‘methodological pluralism’ (Barone & Eisner, 2012: 4).

Arts-based approaches, such as those using drawings or photographs, might be considered innovative and disruptive in three ways. First, they recognise the relationship between emotion and cognition, supporting the appreciation of emotions as central elements in learning, teaching and researching, due to the emotional inscription of lived experiences. Secondly, they favour other modes of expression, benefiting the participation of audiences that, for different reasons, may have difficulties in verbal expression (hearing or speech problems, recent immigrants and refugees, etc.), offering a multimodal voice to voice-deprived audiences, thus promoting greater equity in the production of scientific facts and discourses (Melo-Pfeifer & Schmidt, 2019). Thirdly, they recognise the value of involving subjects in the complex and multi-stakeholder processes of language learning and teaching and of adopting an emic perspective to research.

The recent calls for using visual methods and arts-based approaches in applied language studies include the study of creative and multilingual post-communicative methodologies in language learning (Coffey & Patel, 2023), beliefs about languages and societal and individual multilingualism (Chik & Melo-Pfeifer, 2023; Umino, 2023), the composition of plurilingual repertoires and dominant language constellations (Aronin & Vetter, 2022; Carbonara, 2023), students’ and teachers’ plurilingual biographies (Busch, 2017; Carbonara, 2023; Melo-Pfeifer & Chik, 2022; Prasad, 2015), and the understanding of multilingualism as subjectively experienced by individuals, in different circumstances not limited to school and formal education (Kalaja & Melo-Pfeifer, 2019). These calls converge on the fact that they all see visual and artistic productions as ‘identity texts’ (Cummins & Early, 2011) fostering reflection on beliefs, ideologies, linguistic and professional development, and the circumstances surrounding the lives of multilinguals. Identity texts, the authors claim in the title of the book, allow for ‘the collaborative creation of power in multilingual schools’ (Cummins & Early, 2011) or, as put by Moore et al. in the subtitle of a book, the ‘collaborative construction of new linguistic realities’ (2020). They are therefore an instrument for addressing equity and social justice for plurilinguals in contexts of multilingual education by challenging imposed power relations based on linguistic competences.

3 How Are the Three Parts of the Book Organised?

In addition to this Introduction and Conclusion, Visualising Language Students and Teachers as Multilinguals: Advancing Social Justice in Education comprises three parts, and these emphasise different orientations towards temporality: past, present and/or future. If we understand visual methods, and particularly drawings, as narratives of personal relevance for the subjects, then temporality becomes an important clue to read them. The way the table of contents of this publication is organised highlights the different uses of visual methods. Firstly, visual methods can be used to reconstruct histories of individual multilingualism, by means of production and interpretation of visual (or multimodal) biographies (Part 1). Secondly, visual methods can be used to diagnose current beliefs, ideologies and attitudes concerning individual and societal multilingualism and how these carve teachers’ professional identities and actions (Part 2). Thirdly, visual methods can be used to support teachers’ professional development towards multilingual pedagogies by envisioning their future selves in action (Part 3).

Of Chapters 1 to 13, each one reports on an empirical study, bringing something novel to the field, and being divided into the standard sections of Introduction (including aims of the study), Background to the Study, Research Methodology, Findings, and Lessons Learnt, a concluding section, with a critical evaluation of the study from the perspective of social justice.

3.1 Reconstructing histories of individual multilingualism

Part 1 of the book comprises five chapters and starts with Chapter 1, by Karita Mård-Miettinen and Siv Björklund, titled ‘From YouTube, I Watch Videos and Vlogs and Other Stuff in Different Languages: Immersion Students as Users of Multiple Languages’. The chapter reports on a study with students (attending Grades 5–8) enrolled on an immersion programme within the Finnish educational system, where two languages are used in instruction: Finnish as the L1 (or the majority language) and Swedish as an L2 (or the minority language) of the students. The study sought to find out if the students’ multilingualism out-of-school was similar or different in their experience. The students were asked to take a set of photographs of the use of their repertoire of different languages beyond school. These were complemented with commentaries in writing and interviews. The pools of data were subjected to content analysis. Indeed, the students identified themselves as users of multiple languages beyond school premises, the languages were used for specific purposes (and mixed) and indicated increased metalinguistic awareness.

Chapter 2, by Daniel Roy Pearce, Mayo Oyama and Danièle Moore, titled ‘Just Native Assistants? Exploring the Plurilingual Potential of Assistant Language Teachers in Japan through Visual Polyethnography’, is concerned with a specific group of teachers, namely, assistant language teachers (ALTs), and their evolving role and identity within the Japanese educational system. The ALTs used to be assumed to be native speakers of, say, English and thus considered to have full competence in the language and be apt representatives of English-speaking countries and cultures. And even if this was not necessarily the case, they were