Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften

Julie A. Panagiotopoulou
Lisa Rosen · Jenna Strzykala Editors
Inclusion, Education
and Translanguaging
How to Promote Social Justice
in (Teacher) Education?
Inklusion und Bildung in Migrations-
gesellschaften

Series Editors
Isabell Diehm, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Julie A. Panagiotopoulou, Universität zu Köln, Köln, Germany
Lisa Rosen, Universität zu Köln, Köln, Germany
Patricia Stošić, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Die Buchreihe „Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften“ versammelt
erziehungswissenschaftliche deutsch- sowie englischsprachige Monographien (auch
Qualifikationsarbeiten) und (einführende) Sammelbände, die Fragen von Erzie-
hung und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften interdisziplinär (und auch interna-
tional vergleichend) bearbeiten. Übergreifende Fragen lauten: Wie lassen sich der
gesellschaftliche und insbesondere der pädagogische Umgang mit migrationsbed-
ingter Diversität theoretisieren und rekonstruieren? Entlang welcher sozialen Kate-
gorien wird Fremdheit in Migrationsgesellschaften erziehungswissenschaftlich und/
oder pädagogisch hergestellt und legitimiert? Wie sind Inklusions- und Exklusion-
sprozesse in Bildungsinstitutionen zu verstehen?
Der sozialwissenschaftliche Begriff der Inklusion ist hier relevant, denn er setzt
nicht auf individuelle Assimilations- und Integrationsleistungen, sondern nimmt
die soziale und institutionelle Konstruktion von (Un-)Fähigkeitszuschreibungen,
(Un-)Auffälligkeiten und (Un-)Zugehörigkeiten von privilegierten und marginalis-
ierten Personen bzw. Gruppen in den Blick. Ähnlich wie der Terminus Inklusion
birgt auch der Begriff Migrationsgesellschaft ein kritisches Potential und fordert
erziehungs- und sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung heraus. Mit ihm wird nicht
nur die konstitutive Bedeutung von Migration für die gesamte Gesellschaft heraus-
gestellt, sondern er regt zur Reflexion von Normen und Normalitätsvorstellungen
und zu Veränderungen ungleichheitserzeugender Strukturen und Praktiken – auch
in Bildungskontexten – an.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/16089

Julie A.  Panagiotopoulou · Lisa Rosen ·
Jenna Strzykala
Editors

Inclusion, Education and

Translanguaging
How to Promote Social Justice in
(Teacher) Education?
Editors
Julie A. Panagiotopoulou Lisa Rosen
University of Cologne University of Cologne
Köln, Germany Köln, Germany

Jenna Strzykala
University of Cologne
Köln, Germany

Diese Open Access Publikation wurde von der Universität zu Köln gefördert.

ISSN 2524-4221 ISSN 2524-423X (electronic)

Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften
ISBN 978-3-658-28127-4 ISBN 978-3-658-28128-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication.
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Contents

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Julie A. Panagiotopoulou, Lisa Rosen and Jenna Strzykala
Singularity, Complexities and Contradictions: A Commentary
about Translanguaging, Social Justice, and Education. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Ofelia García

Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education

Translanguaging and Early Childhood Education in the
USA: Insights from the CUNY-NYSIEB Project. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Kate Seltzer, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno and Gladys Y. Aponte
Translanguaging in Multilingual Pre-Primary Classrooms
in La Réunion: Reflecting on Inclusion and Social Justice
in a French Postcolonial Context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Pascale Prax-Dubois and Christine Hélot
Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education in
Luxembourg: From Practice to Pedagogy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Claudine Kirsch and Claudia Seele
Bilingualism Versus Translanguaging in a Swiss Day-Care
Center: A Space Analysis of Language Practices and Their
Janus-Faced Effects on Social Inequalities and Educational
Opportunities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Melanie Kuhn and Sascha Neumann

v
vi Contents

Translanguaging in School Education

Translanguaging, (In)Security and Social Justice Education. . . . . . . . . . . 105
Constadina Charalambous, Panayiota Charalambous,
Michalinos Zembylas and Eleni Theodorou
‘We Learn Together’—Translanguaging within a Holistic
Approach towards Multilingualism in Education. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Joana Duarte and Mirjam T. Günther-van der Meij
Language Comparison as an Inclusive Translanguaging
Strategy: Analysis of a Multilingual Teaching Situation
in a German Primary School Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Sara Fürstenau, Yağmur Çelik and Simone Plöger

Translanguaging from the Perspective of (Multilingual)

Students, Teachers and Educators
Reflecting Lingualities and Positionalities for a Changing
Education System. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Magdalena Knappik, Corinna Peschel, Sara Hägi-Mead,
Aslı Can Ayten and Tatjana Atanasoska
German Schools Abroad: Teachers’ Views on Translanguaging
and Emerging Research Perspectives on Children’s
Language Biographies and Educational Professionalization. . . . . . . . . . . 185
Julie A. Panagiotopoulou, Lisa Rosen, Jenna Strzykala,
Janine Fißmer and Timo Neubert
‘What Shall We Sing Now, Amir?’ Developing a Voice through
Translanguaging Pedagogy—An Ethnographic Research
and Professional Training Project in Day-Care Centers
and Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Julie A. Panagiotopoulou and Maria J. Hammel
Translanguaging as a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogical
Approach: Bi/Multilingual Educators’ Perspectives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Roula Tsokalidou and Eleni Skourtou

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

Introduction

Julie A. Panagiotopoulou, Lisa Rosen and Jenna Strzykala

This book is based on a conference held at the University of Cologne in 2018

titled—as is this volume—“Inclusion, Education, and Translanguaging: How to
Promote Social Justice in (Teacher) Education?”. The initial idea for this confer-
ence came about when we visited Ofelia García in New York in the fall of 2017 and
were able to observe and experience translanguaging live—in a mathematics lesson
at a bilingual primary school in Queens—during a research visit. This was a special
event for us because we had by then been dealing with the concept for years and
were constantly confronted with the standard question of how translanguaging can
be put into practice in the context of teacher education, congresses and conferences.
Even though we had already experienced some good or best practice examples,
we were impressed by the ease and the taken-for-grantedness with which the teacher
and the pupils acted with their linguistic repertoire and knew exactly what they were
doing. In other words, we observed how the teacher systematically encouraged the
children to use and enact their complete linguistic repertoire and to move in what she
called a “translanguaging space” when working on a maths task. The teacher then
invited the children to reflect on and share their experiences in this space. One girl’s
testimony made a lasting impression. She said: “the Spanish word makes it easier to
understand it in English!” With this reflection, the teacher made it transparent that

J. A. Panagiotopoulou (*) · L. Rosen · J. Strzykala

University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
L. Rosen
e-mail: [email protected]
J. Strzykala
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_1
2 J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al.

translingual practices were welcome in her lessons, and furthermore that this was a
(pedagogical) strategy. We were also impressed by the fact that the teacher acted as
a translingual and, thus, as a multilingual role model for the children. In the inter-
view following our observation, she told us that she had been working as a teacher
for many years, first abroad and now in the USA, and that she had come to know
translanguaging as a didactic concept through the accompanying scientific research
project. She made her commitment to the concept obvious as she said: “[it] made me
understand how important it is for those kids […] to become aware […] of the func-
tions of the language and make those connections.” She provided several examples
of children utilizing the process and described their learning progress.
It is also fascinating to note that the teacher mentioned that she herself had
already been employing translanguaging in her everyday life, but that it was
only through cooperation with science (Ofelia García and her team) that she had
learned this everyday practice of multilingualism was also a sociolinguistic con-
cept as well as a multilingual pedagogy.
One of Ofelia García’s team members, who is now also involved in this vol-
ume as an author (in the contribution of Seltzer et al.) and who was also present
during this discussion, took up this point and elucidated that many teachers from
other schools as well reported comparable experiences within the framework
of the accompanying scientific research. The educators would say that “[trans-
languaging] it’s something that […] we’ve always done”, and she further com-
mented: “I think some teachers feel like […] they need permission to do it.”
This experience has impressed us as an example of a successful coopera-
tion between teachers and researchers. It inspired us to organize a conference in
Germany in which such an exchange between science and pedagogical practice
could take place and that would showcase research projects that, for some, were
conceived as scientifically supported projects, while others were interested in
examining the perspectives or pedagogical practices in multilingual educational
institutions and utilizing translanguaging as a theoretical framework. That is,
those who took part in the conference had already worked with translanguaging
as an innovative concept for years. We deliberately chose a small group of partici-
pants to make what we have been able to experience together possible, namely an
intense and compelling discussion based on research data and a shared theoretical
concept. This inevitably led to some interested people being excluded, who are
now part of this documentation of the conference.
We hold that our discussions have contributed to confirm our starting point that
social justice, inclusion and multilingualism or translanguaging must be contem-
plated together and that this connection is central to the present and the future of
education and is, therefore, also of remarkable importance for teacher education.
Introduction 3

This was also made possible by the participation of Ofelia García with whom
we associate translanguaging in the first place (although she always stresses that
she did not invent the term). She framed the conference with a keynote and a final
commentary and this book with a contribution about the connection between
translanguaging and social justice titled “Singularity, Complexities and Contra-
dictions: A Commentary about Translanguaging, Social Justice, and Education”
and covering the training of educators and (pre-school) teachers.
Part one of our volume unites four contributions focusing on different ways
educators and children perceive and use translanguaging specifically in settings
of early childhood education. With research projects from the USA, France, Lux-
embourg and Switzerland, two of the chapters look at multilingual education as
a motor for creating space for the deconstruction of established linguistic ideolo-
gies (language-minorized Latinx students in the USA and children speaking lan-
guages other than French in postcolonial La Réunion island), while two others
investigate bi-/multilingual day-care settings in historically multilingual national
contexts (Luxembourg and Switzerland).
In the contribution “Translanguaging and Early Childhood Education in
the USA: Insights from the CUNY-NYSIEB Project” Kate Seltzer, Laura
­Ascenzi-Moreno and Gladys Y. Aponte lay out the challenges and possibilities
translanguaging as a pedagogy entails in the light of recent debates in the Ameri-
can context when it comes to educating multilingual young children. Presenting
“classroom-based examples of how teachers can leverage young children’s trans-
languaging and cultural knowledge in their education”, the authors combine the
theoretical lenses of critical race theory and translanguaging to oppose the current
deficit framings and marginalization of emergent bilingual, specifically Latinx
students in the US. Seltzer et al. show how the CUNY-NYSIEB project brought
together researchers and educators to challenge the “standardization of idealized
monolingual language practices in early childhood education” and implement
translanguaging as one form of anti-oppressive pedagogy. The chapter goes on
to describe the project’s work within one kindergarten in New York City, where
teachers used books about play to reshape their teaching practice and simultane-
ously how different modes of play could apply to the way students learned and
used their languages fluidly. Despite deeply rooted stances among Latinx educa-
tors, the project managed to foster the teachers’ reflection on “how they teach,
view, and (mis)understand young multilingual children and their families”.
In their chapter titled “Translanguaging in Multilingual Pre-Primary Class-
rooms in La Réunion: Reflecting on Inclusion and Social Justice in a French
Postcolonial Context”, Pascale Prax-Dubois and Christine Hélot propose that
combining translanguaging and the theoretical frameworks of subaltern ­studies
4 J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al.

can be a way of deconstructing processes of othering, specifically in postcolo-

nial contexts such as the French island of La Réunion, where two teachers
were observed as they—with their individual teaching styles and foci—used
language-awareness activities to leverage their pre-school students’ multilin-
­
gual skills, including the often marginalized languages that enter Creole and
­French-speaking preschools in La Réunion with migrant children from neigh-
boring islands. In order to contest the effective language regime of this postcolo-
nial setting, both teachers use different strategies such as translingual spaces that
include all home languages and co-learning to enable their students to voice their
multilingual experiences, thus creating room for the deconstruction of established
linguistic ideologies and paving the way for a more socially just (language) edu-
cation. Advocating a “critical multilingual awareness” sensu García, Prax-Dubois
and Hélot conclude their contribution recommending that “teachers should be
educated to understand the process of decolonizing language teaching in schools”
and that, at a greater level, understanding language teaching as being part of hier-
archical control will create a space to debate this colonial injustice.
Focusing on multilingual early-childhood education in Luxembourg, Clau-
dine Kirsch and Claudia Seele offer insights into the translingual practices of four
educators in their chapter titled “Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education
in Luxembourg: From Practice to Pedagogy”. Drawing on videographed obser-
vations of pedagogical actions within the institutions and during professional
development courses for educators as well as on interview data, Kirsch and Seele
reconstruct how the languaging practices of the educators and, consequently, of
the children were impacted by the professional development course and its input
on the benefits of translanguaging, resulting in the educators feeling freed and
encouraged to “regularly translate […] from Luxembourgish to a home language
other than Luxembourgish and vice versa”, even keeping up the children’s home
languaging to support their “well-being, identity and language learning”, thus
encouraging children to utilize their linguistic resources dynamically and in mul-
timodal ways. The authors conclude that while translanguaging was observed to
foster participation, it did also lead to othering practices when it was not rooted
in a pedagogical stance, thus making a point for specific professional develop-
ment courses for practitioners that, among others things, increase awareness for
the effects of language hierarchies. Finally, Kirsch and Seele contend “that multi-
lingual practices need to be embedded in a reflexive translanguaging pedagogy in
order to enhance inclusion” in early childhood education.
Melanie Kuhn and Sascha Neumann discuss how institutional language poli-
cies may neutralize or even increase educational inequalities in their contribu-
tion titled “Bilingualism Versus Translanguaging in a Swiss Day-Care Center: A
Introduction 5

Space Analysis of Language Practices and Their Janus-Faced Effects on Social

Inequalities and Educational Opportunities”. Basing their analysis on ethno-
graphic interviews in bilingual French/German day-care centers in Switzerland,
Kuhn and Neumann show that even in officially bilingual settings, both languages
“can be assigned unequal legitimacy”. Through a spatial-analytical perspective on
linguistic modes of regulation, the authors reveal how language separation aims
to solidify and protect language purity while devaluing the typical language mix-
ing in children’s translingual practices. Posing the day-care centers as s­ mall-scale
language regimes, the study expounds how the use of French and German is regu-
lated according to generational difference: while the children are allowed to speak
French and simultaneously are not pressured into speaking German, the staff are
to follow strict language requirements that impose German as the language of
education. When ethnicization of French vs. German speaking children is added,
what becomes apparent is that “the bilingual concept of the day-care center is
still following a monolingual norm of language use and acquisition” and actively
hinders flexible language uses, thus opposing bilingual to translingual educa-
tion while also creating discrepancies in educational capital between French and
­German-speaking children.
In the second part, three contributions present current and completed research
projects in Cyprus, Germany and the Netherlands. These are explicitly designed
as scientific monitoring for primary schools and support them in multilingual and
social just school development through qualitative research such as participatory
observation, video observations and interviews etc. on the one hand. On the other
hand, these research projects offer and carry out thematically relevant in-service
training for teachers. They offer deep insights into pedagogical everyday life in
dealing with multilingualism and translanguaging in their respective national con-
text.
Constadina Charalambous, Panayiota Charalambous, Michalinos Zembylas
and Eleni Theodorou discuss two case studies from Greek-Cypriot schools from
the theoretical perspective of (in)security in their contribution titled “Translan-
guaging, (In)Security and Social Justice Education”, thus combining the concepts
of translanguaging and social justice education in an innovative way. The authors
take the social and historical context as the starting point for their ­considerations:
Cyprus has suffered a long history of interethnic conflict between the two major
ethnolinguistic communities, Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots. With regard to Turk-
ish and migrant children with Turkish as L1, they elaborate that Turkish has been
stigmatized by the history of conflict both in the Greek-Cypriot context and in
many of the children’s own communities and historical trajectories. By research-
ing the obstacles and limitations for reconciliation, multiculturalism and social
6 J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al.

justice as well as migrant children identity negotiation in Greek Cypriot primary

schools, the authors shed light on children’s silences and self-censoring of their
Turkish-speakerness. By doing so, Charalambous et al. reveal how language
ideologies and discourses of (in)security and conflict may pose serious obsta-
cles for enacting translanguaging as a socially just pedagogy. They therefore
conclude that the discursive, historical, ideological and cultural constraints that
frame classroom interactions as well as students’ insecurities have to be taken into
account when designing not only socially just but also sensitive pedagogies—
including translanguaging.
Joana Duarte and Mirjam Günther-van der Meij present two multilingual educa-
tion projects in the North of the Netherlands in their chapter “‘We learn together’:
Translanguaging within a Holistic Approach towards Multilingualism in Educa-
tion”. In this context, a holistic model for multilingualism in education is being
tested with the aim of developing different approaches towards multilingual edu-
cation for both migrant and minority pupils. This is done through d­ esign-based
interventions in which in-service and pre-service teachers, teacher trainers and
researchers co-develop, implement and evaluate multilingual activities for different
school types on the basis of classroom observations conducted in three different pri-
mary schools on the one hand. On the other hand, typical translanguaging scenes
were identified and incorporated into vignette-based interviews which were con-
ducted with participating teachers in order to elicit their attitudes, knowledge and
skills towards the use of multiple languages in mainstream education. Duarte and
Günther-van der Meij come to positive results, some of which clearly contradict the
current state of research on teachers strongly favoring monolingualism. The authors
stress that it is crucial to actively involve teachers while developing and implement-
ing programs for multilingual education: through experimenting in a small and safe
environment with the tailored help of researchers through professional development
workshops for instance, teachers gradually embraced their pupils’ multilingualism.
In the contribution “Language Comparison as an Inclusive Translanguaging
Strategy: Analysis of a Multilingual Teaching Situation in a German Primary
School Classroom”, Sara Fürstenau, Yağmur Çelik and Simone Plöger use data
from the research project “Multilingualism as a field of action in intercultural
school development” (MIKS-project for short). Within the framework of this pro-
ject the teaching staff of primary schools was assisted and supported in imple-
menting multilingual didactic approaches in the classroom. The authors state that
the initial conditions for joint cooperation with the schools were advantageous
because the teachers in the MIKS-schools were open and willing to engage with
the pupils’ home languages. Nevertheless, teachers also report challenges in this
area, such as the fact that children use many different family languages about
Introduction 7

which they themselves know very little. Starting from a key-incident, Fürstenau
et al. pursue the question how the teacher can include the linguistic knowledge of
the children in class and use it for joint language learning in the group despite this
challenge. In their analysis, they reveal that although the observed teacher has a
lesson plan (verb forms in the first person singular; regularities and irregularities),
she has to deal with the uncertainty of what linguistic knowledge the children will
contribute and what the linguistic basis for comparing verb forms will be. In their
case, the teacher repeatedly talks with the children about questions without know-
ing the answers. The authors conclude from this, firstly, that what multilingual
classroom situations have in common is that insecurities on the teacher’s side
occur and secondly, that studies on how teachers in multilingual teaching situa-
tions can deal constructively with insecurity and not-knowing will be useful to
advance research on multilingual didactics.
The central question, “what is translanguaging from the perspective of stu-
dents, educators and teachers?” is the topic of the third part of this volume, which
comprises four contributions. They present and analyze new research data from
recent and ongoing studies and deal with views on multilingual and translanguag-
ing pedagogies and with experiences of (bi/multilinguals) students, educators and
teachers in day-care centers and schools based on diverse studies conducted in
Canada, Germany, Greece and the US.
Magdalena Knappik, Corinna Peschel, Sara Hägi-Mead, Aslı Can Ayten and
Tatjana Atanasoska deal with the questions how to better prepare future teach-
ers using the module “German for students with a history of immigration”,
implemented in 2009 in teacher education on a national level in Germany, in
their contribution titled “Reflecting Lingualities and Positionalities for a Chang-
ing Education System”. However, the module seems, according to some recent
research results, to label these students as “others having a deficit and needing
the teachers’ help”, instead of developing a stance that values bilinguals’ learning
potential and skills. Knappik et al. present an ongoing biographical professionali-
zation research project which aims to find out more about student teachers’ atti-
tudes towards multilingualism and specifically their “academic knowledge” that
might be created by their participating in teacher education. On the basis of auto-
biographical texts, the project compares experiences and attitudes of multilingual
and monolingual students, as illustrated in this contribution. The authors discuss
selected data from two participants’ recounts and close their chapter with further
research perspectives for the ongoing project, focusing on the importance of hav-
ing future teachers reflect on their own understanding of what multilingualism is
before and after taking the university course while also putting into perspective
their own language biographies.
8 J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al.

In their contribution “German Schools Abroad: Teachers’ Views on Trans-

languaging and Emerging Research Perspectives on Children’s Language
Biographies and Educational Professionalization”, Julie A. Panagiotopoulou,
Lisa Rosen, Jenna Strzykala, Janine Fißmer and Timo Neubert present three
ongoing dissertation research projects. First, they introduce the initial project
­“migration-related multilingualism and educational professionalism” that started
in 2014 and focused on professionalization of teachers in migration societies and
especially on their views on translanguaging in German schools abroad in South-
ern Europe and North America, considering the negotiability of the language hier-
archies in both regions. In this context one dissertation project was developed,
now comparing the views of teachers working at German schools abroad in North
America—specifically Boston and Montreal. As an extended outlook for further
research in the field of German schools abroad, Panagiotopoulou et al. present
two further dissertation projects that have emerged from the initial project. The
first one aims to reconstruct educational biographies and experiences of inclu-
sion/exclusion and (non-)belonging of bi/multilingual students in German schools
abroad in Southern Europe, specifically Greece. The second project focuses on
professional biographies of teachers at German schools abroad under the question
to what extent their work experiences will professionalize them in dealing with
­migration-related diversity and, thus, contribute to inclusive school development.
Julie A. Panagiotopoulou and Maria J. Hammel present an ongoing ethno-
graphic research and professional training project that was started in 2018 at the
University of Cologne for (future) educators and teachers in their contribution
titled “‘What Shall We Sing Now,Amir?’ Developing a Voice through Translan-
guaging Pedagogy—An Ethnographic Research and Professional Training Project
in Day-Care Centers and Schools”. Based on a critique of the monolingual edu-
cational language policies in Germany and using ethnographic project data col-
lected by master students and doctoral candidates in day-care centers and schools
in Cologne, the project aims to support multilingual professionals who are inten-
sively engaged in counteracting the disadvantages that l­anguage-minoritized chil-
dren face and, thus, to contribute to social justice in education. The theoretical
framework as well as the research questions are illustrated in this chapter on the
basis of an ethnographic observation of an interaction in one of the investigated
day-care centers with language-minoritized children and educators, which were
discussed together with the professionals involved in the project. This contribu-
tion therefore highlights how translanguaging gives multilingual children a voice
to perform in everyday pedagogical life in a meaningful way and how translan-
guaging can be utilized for the analysis of ethnographic observations of learning
and teaching practices.
Introduction 9

In their contribution titled “Translanguaging as a Culturally Sustaining Peda-

gogical Approach: Bi/Multilingual Educators’ Perspectives”, Roula Tsokalidou
and Eleni Skourtou discuss aspects of translanguaging as a culturally sustaining
pedagogy. First, they introduce each of these two concepts and then illustrate
their connection using data on views of educators from a recent research project
that aimed to bring forward the issue of translanguaging in the everyday life of
those bi/multilinguals involved in education in different institutions and countries.
Their findings suggest that, according to bi/multilinguals educators, translan-
guaging could help increase confidence and self-esteem for minority/minoritized
students towards their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, Tsoka-
lidou and Skourtou point out that, in the context of multilingual education, it is a
great challenge to go against the grain of monolingualism and monoculturalism
and that translanguaging specifically can contribute to this as a form of resistance
against the restriction of monolingual and monocultural perspectives: on the one
hand, by giving spaces to students to perform using their full linguistic repertoire,
and on the other hand, by giving educators the opportunity to design and incorpo-
rate these spaces in their classrooms.
Our sincere thanks go to the authors whose contributions made it possible
for us to realize an international conference and an interesting book project. We
would also like to express our appreciation to Ofelia García for the inspiration
she has been to us for years through her own work and for the discussion of the
contributions in this volume. We hope that this book will also inspire other col-
leagues to initiate conferences and their documentations and to promote inclusion
and social justice as an international challenge in the context of early childhood,
school, and teacher education.
Finally, we would like to thank Vivien Magyar and Diana Samani, both stu-
dents at the University of Cologne and future educators, who have taken great
care and responsibility in the formatting and design of all contributions.
Cologne, March 2020
Julie A. Panagiotopoulou, Lisa Rosen and Jenna Strzykala
10 J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use,
sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you
give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Crea-
tive Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's
Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If
material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is
not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain
permission directly from the copyright holder.
Singularity, Complexities
and Contradictions: A Commentary
about Translanguaging, Social Justice,
and Education

Ofelia García

1 Singularity, Complexities and Contradiction

This book, edited by Panagiotopoulou, Rosen and Strzykala, reminds us of the

contradictions involved in enacting translanguaging pedagogical practices in
schools. On the one hand, all the chapters describe a singular vision of the poten-
tial of translanguaging to enact a more inclusive and socially just education for
language minoritized students and to disrupt what Panagiotopoulou and Rosen
(2018) have called a “monoglossic hegemony”. On the other hand, all the arti-
cles also point to the complexities in actually carrying out translanguaging peda-
gogical practices, and its relationship to the sociopolitical context in which they
are carried out. In fact, in some contexts, and without proper familiarization with
translanguaging theory and a social translanguaging stance, pedagogical prac-
tices that have been associated with translanguaging can actually acerbate the
silence of language minoritized communities. The authors in this volume do not
shy away from raising the criticism of translanguaging by authors such as Con-
teh (2018), Hamman (2018), Jaspers (2015, 2019), and Ticheloven et al. (2019).
Thus, the main message in this book seems to be that the sociopolitical context
and the degree to which official language policies promote what Panagiotopoulou
and Rosen (2018) have called a monoglossic hegemony, are paramount to trans-
languaging practices being received as an asset or a problem. Translanguaging, as
a political act (Flores 2014), cannot be simply considered a pedagogical practice.

O. García (*)
New York City, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 11

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_2
12 O. García

In order for it to be an asset, it must be seen as a tool to reverse the minoritization

process and the structural inequities that subjugated minorities students face, as
well as the monoglossic hegemonic policies prevalent in schools.
The contradiction inherent in translanguaging is clear. It has been used as an
instrument of minoritization of language communities whose dynamic bilingual
practices are perceived as “language mixing” and illegitimate. At the same time,
it is now being touted as a way of including these same communities and provid-
ing them with a socially just education. How then can translanguaging be simul-
taneously an instrument of oppression and an instrument of liberation? This is
an important question that is considered in this volume and that we attempt to
answer in this commentary.

2 Complexities: Product of the Colonial Difference

The chapters herein present different educational contexts in which some forms
of translanguaging pedagogical practices have been enacted—some are early
childhood or pre-school contexts, others primary or secondary schools. Some are
day-care settings, others are mainstream schools, yet others are bilingual schools.
International schools, as well as national schools abroad are also considered. In
some chapters how students use translanguaging to learn is highlighted. In others,
however, how teachers leverage translanguaging to educate, as well as their peda-
gogical formation, are emphasized. But what this volume makes singularly clear
is that in each context, students with language practices that differ from that of
the national elite have undergone some form of “othering,” a product of coloniza-
tion and political formations that then enregister these students as inferior.
This minoritization process has not been limited to refugees and immigrants,
but is much more encompassing, a result of power-struggles, domination over pop-
ulations, wars, conquest and colonization. Some of the contributions in this volume
address the growing refugee and immigrant population in schools (in Luxembourg,
Kirsch & Seele; in Germany, Fürstenau et al., Knappik et al., Panagiotopoulou &
Hammel; in Greece, Tsokalidou & Skourtou; in Switzerland, Kuhn & Neumann).
But in many cases, the immigrant students of today have been displaced before, as
for example, the Greek Pontians in Cyprus, now hailing mainly from Georgia, and
speaking Turkish and sometimes Russian (Charalambous et al.).
In some cases, as in that described by Prax-Dubois and Hélot, the process
of minoritization of the Réunion Creole-speaking population is more obvious,
clearly a French colony “d’outre mer.” But the geographic location of La Réun-
ion in the middle of the Indian ocean and off the coast of Madagascar means that
Singularity, Complexities and Contradictions: A Commentary … 13

many also speak Malagasy or Comorian languages, as well as others. In other

cases, however, the process of minoritization occurred so long ago that it has been
forgotten and the “othering” has been naturalized. This is the case, for example,
of Latinx in the United States (Seltzer et al.), and of Frisians in the Netherlands
(Duarte and Günther-van der Meij). In both the U.S. and Frisian cases, the contin-
uum of minoritization experiences is obvious. In the U.S., some Latinx bilingual
students are native-born, whereas others are immigrants with different histories
and cultural and linguistic practices. In Friesland, the Frisian students have been
born in the Netherlands, whereas in the same classroom there are immigrants who
speak many other languages.
What is clear when we consider all these cases together is that it is not globali-
zation that is responsible for what Vertovec (2007) has called superdiversity. True,
scholars are paying more attention to multilingualism in society and education
than we have in our past. Proof of this is just the mere number of projects dealing
with multilingual education in this volume. It is important to acknowledge, how-
ever, that what we are witnessing is the effects of colonization and what Walter
Mignolo (2002) has called “the colonial difference,” the effects of long histories
of oppression and continued experiences of minoritization and racialization (Flo-
res and Rosa 2015).

3 Language and the Singularity of the Colonial

Difference

Bauman and Briggs (2003) have shown how since the 17th century, theories of
language as a structured entity (Park and Wee 2012) have operated as an instru-
ment of colonialism and nation-building to produce and naturalize forms of social
inequality and construct modernity. That is, the ideological invention of language
by European elites has resulted not only in the imposition of rigid forms of using
language that reflect their own, but also in branding those whose language prac-
tices are different as intellectually inferior and even dangerous. It is not just that,
as Prax-Dubois and Hélot state, the languages of the South equal the vulnerability
of its speakers; the liability of speech has to do with who is the speaker and who
holds the power and controls the army and the navy. Some languages of the South
have prestige in the mouths of dominant white elites. It is the conquered and
colonized people of the South whose language is always stigmatized, relegated
to a pidgin, a creole, a mixture, a hybridity without a constructed “purity.” The
decolonial theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014, 2018) reminds us that the
South is not geographical; it is epistemological, a metaphor of human suffering.
14 O. García

In coining his theory of “coloniality,” the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Q

­ uijano
(2000) has pointed out that the exploitation and domination of racialized groups
is now carried out not solely through labor, but through the structuring of
­knowledge-systems, race, language and sex into superior and inferior. The knowl-
edges and ways of languaging of those racialized as inferior are then deemed to
be inappropriate for education, producing failure for these students. Bilingual lan-
guaging is often perceived as “mixing,” and enregistered (Agha 2005) as a mark
of intellectual deficiency among these students.
The work of translanguaging in schools must attempt to make visible this pro-
cess of minoritization and racialization. Despite the complexities, it is the singu-
larity of being the product of the colonial difference that concerns us, and that the
translanguaging work needs to put into stark relief.

4 Language Education Policies and Pedagogical

Practices in Continuum

Language education policies in schools reflect the many different ideologies of

nation-states and their schools. In fact, these policies act as instruments of gov-
ernmentality (Foucault 2008), controlling the language behavior of people, and
restricting language socialization to the ideologies of the nation-state. Panagioto-
poulou and Rosen (2018) have referred to the effect of such language policies as
upholding a monoglossic hegemony. Individual schools may also enact different
language education policies when allowed by the state, often responding to the
students, families and/or educators in the school.
In her work, Duarte (2018) has observed how the goals of multilingual-
ism in education projects respond to societal ideologies. The goals, Duarte has
explained, can be seen as in a continuum, from acknowledgement of language
diversity to actual use. That is, some of the pedagogical practices described
herein respond to a language education policy of acknowledgement, whereas oth-
ers respond to a language education policy of use.
In some of the chapters in this book, translanguaging practices function as
merely a bridge towards the dominant language and culture. In their chapter,
Duarte and Günter-van der Meij name three different functions of translanguag-
ing practices in school: 1) symbolic, that is, merely recognition; 2) scaffolding or
transitional bridge towards the dominant language and culture; 3) epistemological
or acceptance of different language practices.
At one end, the language awareness activities in Fürstenau et al. or P ­ rax-
Dubois and Hélot simply acknowledge the linguistic diversity in classrooms. At
Singularity, Complexities and Contradictions: A Commentary … 15

the other end, other projects uphold actual use of minoritized languages, such as
the bilingual education program described by Seltzer et al. and by Duarte, as well
as in the Greek schools in Canada, the U.S. and Germany studied by Panagioto-
poulou et al. There are also different degrees of usage, for example, in the chapter
by Kirsch & Seele, the teachers are observed simply engaging in translations for
the very young children. This diversity of pedagogical practices, encouraging dif-
ferent visions of multilingual utilization, support what Tupin and Wharton (2016)
have called “pedagogies of variation.”
The variations have to do with the negotiations that teachers must make in
relationship to language education policies that are in place. Prax-Dubois and
Hélot raise this question when they pose “What does inclusion and social jus-
tice mean in a French colonial context”? At a minimum, the pedagogical practices
enacted by educators in this volume negotiate the language education policy of
the nation-state so as to work with the students’ funds of knowledge.

5 Language Ideologies in Continuum

It is interesting that many of the teachers involved in the many multilingual projects
described herein did not develop a stance that supported multilingualism in edu-
cation, despite much professional development. In fact, some of the teachers who
wrote autobiographical texts considered in the article by Knappik et al. complained
about the “adversary effect” of a practice that acknowledged and used the students’
multilingualism. Unlike the Cyprus’ context of “(in)securization,” Germany is not
a context of open conflict, yet, the teachers there expressed their hesitation in fully
engaging with pedagogical practices that openly supported the linguistic diversity of
their students because of its effect in marking students as deficient and needing help.
Panagiotopoulou et al. document here how teachers’ words and actions in Ger-
man schools abroad in Greece, Canada, and the USA reflect a spectrum of ide-
ologies from monoglossic to heteroglossic. This was also the view of the Greek
teachers in the chapter by Skourtou & Tsokalidou who viewed all of these multi-
lingual pedagogical practices as a great challenge for all.
In all the cases described in this volume, teachers were involved in professional
development to different degrees. The projects described by Duarte and Günter-
van der Meij, for instance, made significant efforts to ensure that teachers were
involved in developing, designing, implementing and evaluating the multilingual
interventions. In the chapter by Seltzer et al., attention is paid to the professional
development provided by the CUNY-NYSIEB project, and the formation of a Pro-
fessional Learning Community (PLC) to discuss, design, implement and evaluate
16 O. García

the different activities. Yet, some of the negative ideologies of the teachers towards
these bilingual students remained. In fact, one of the bilingual teachers called her
Latinx pre-schoolers “nilingües,” meaning they spoke neither English nor Span-
ish. It turns out that despite much effort, ideologies about bilingual students hav-
ing “no language” remain.

6 A Translanguaging Stance. Singularity Again

A most important question raised in this volume is whether we can escape lin-
guistic ideologies. Charalambous et al. remind us that children are socialized
into language ideologies. In thinking about how translanguaging pedagogical
practices can be put into effect, García et al. (2017) have called attention to how
teachers must develop a translanguaging stance before they can design or put into
practice different pedagogical practices.
But what is a translanguaging stance and how can teachers develop such a
stance?
A translanguaging stance is grounded in uncovering the colonial difference
and the ways in which language, bilingualism and multilingualism have been
used, and continue to be used, to minoritize and racialize conquered and colo-
nized populations.
The construction of languages as autonomous entities, and bilingualism as
simply additive has worked against the language practices of minoritized bilin-
gual communities. The bilingualism of Latinx bilingual students is not sim-
ply additive; it is dynamic (García 2009). Thus, merely acknowledging or even
using what is seen as the students’ first language in education does not in any way
uncover the ways in which standard language and additive bilingualism have been
used as instruments to minoritize the language practices of some bilinguals and
rendering them as deficient. A translanguaging stance demands more than sim-
ple support of bilingualism and multilingualism, for as Kuhn and Neumann say
in this volume, bilingualism is more likely to push back translanguaging than to
support it.
A translanguaging stance has to do with the firm belief that minoritized bilin-
guals have the agency to fully leverage their unitary semiotic repertoire made up
of linguistic and multimodal signs in ways that does not correspond to the strict
parameters of one named language or another or one mode or another established
by schools. The actions of bilingual students that go beyond those legitimated in
schools are then perceived as virtuous, complex, fluid, creative and critical, and
not simply as deficient. Teachers with a translanguaging stance trust that their
Singularity, Complexities and Contradictions: A Commentary … 17

bilingual students have the potential to make meaning for themselves, even if the
process is different from that followed by children with monolingual m ­ iddle-class
parents. They understand that even though named languages are important soci-
opolitical realities, psycholinguistically the two languages do not simply corre-
spond to two dual cognitive or experiential realities (Otheguy et al. 2015, 2018).
Accordingly, when a bilingual student uses their entire language repertoire in
ways that go beyond the familiar ones in schools, teachers do not see them as
“nilingües,” but as capable of being and learning, even though they live with the
structural inequalities that keep them living in a “tierra entre medio,” in border-
lands (Anzaldúa 1987) that are not only cultural and linguistic, but also economic.
Can we escape language ideologies? Mignolo (2007) tells us that to do so
we must de-link from the colonial matrix of power, bringing to the foreground
other epistemologies so as to de-center universal emancipating claims. To bring to
the foreground other epistemologies, other knowledges, “a new common sense”
(Santos 2014, 2018), would require that teachers learn to listen to their students
anew. But this new “listening subject” (Flores and Rosa 2015) can only come into
being if we provide minoritized bilingual students with opportunities to bring
their translanguaging openly into schools. Language socialization for these bilin-
gual students would then include translanguaging openly, not only in their homes
and communities, but for academic tasks in schools. A combination of students’
translanguaging socialization experiences for academic success, alongside teach-
ers’ socialization into listening experiences where students’ translanguaging was
openly used to think, reflect, create, and produce knowledge, might then produce
some de-linking from the colonial matrix of power.
In working with teachers, I have often used Martin Luther King’s saying: “You
don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.” To develop a trans-
languaging stance we cannot wait for educators to see the whole staircase. First
steps to view the power of translanguaging are needed. The contributions in this
book enable us to take first steps.

7 Translanguaging: From Instrument

of Oppression to Instrument of Liberation

The only way to use translanguaging to liberate is simultaneously to recognize

the ways it has been used to oppress and minoritize bilingual communities. In
describing his “two-eyed” philosophy of education, Myles Horton, an American
educator who founded a school known for its role in the Civil Rights Movement,
once said:
18 O. García

You have to build a program that will deal with things as they are now and as they
ought to be at the same time. They go together, the “is” and the “ought.”. … I have
two eyes that I don’t have to use the same way. When I do educational work with a
group of people, I try to see with one eye where those people are as they perceive
themselves to be… You have to start where people are, because their growth is going
to be from there. … Now my other eye is not such a problem, because I already
have in mind a philosophy of where I’d like to see people moving …I don’t separate
two ways of looking. … I look at people with two eyes simultaneously all the time”
(1990, p. 131 f.).

The process of designing translanguaging pedagogical practices keeps one eye on

schools as they are, with language policies that reflect monoglossic ideologies,
and with language socialization practices that reflect those ideologies. But teach-
ers have potential for growth. Speaking of this human capacity to grow, Horton
(1990) adds that “it’s in the seeds… This kind of potential cannot guarantee a par-
ticular outcome, but it’s what you build on” (p. 133). The other eye then has to be
anchored in a vision, a vision and ideology of what education could be if students
were to be given experiences that de-link from the colonial matrix of power.
Translanguaging offers a vision to deal with what is and could be simultane-
ously. Translanguaging is not a method of technique, but a process with many
strands. In this book we have viewed some of these strands that together with
many others are building a tapestry of much complexity, but singularity of pur-
pose—to liberate minoritized bilinguals and educate them fairly and justly, and to
liberate ourselves from the monoglossic hegemony (Panagiotopoulou and Rosen
2018) of language education policies.

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use,
sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you
give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Crea-
tive Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's
Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If
material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is
not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain
permission directly from the copyright holder.
Translanguaging in Early Childhood
Education
Translanguaging and Early Childhood
Education in the USA: Insights from the
CUNY-NYSIEB Project

Kate Seltzer, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno and Gladys Y. Aponte

Abstract

This chapter offers insights into the education of young children—what

is referred to in the United States as early childhood education—who come
from homes where languages other than English are spoken. Drawing on
recent critiques of early childhood education in the U.S., this chapter provides
classroom-based examples of how teachers can leverage young children’s
translanguaging and cultural knowledge in their education. Overall, the chap-
ter demonstrates both the possibilities and challenges of adopting a translan-
guaging pedagogy (García et al., The Translanguaging classroom. Leveraging
student bilingualism for learning, Caslon, Philadelphia, 2017) in early child-
hood classrooms in the United States.

Keywords

Translanguaging · Emergent bilinguals · Early childhood · Classroom practice

K. Seltzer (*)
Rowan University, Glassboro, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
L. Ascenzi-Moreno
Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
G. Y. Aponte
Bank Street College of Education, New York City, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 23

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_3
24 K. Seltzer et al.

1 Introduction

This chapter offers insights into the education of young children—what is

referred to in the United States as early childhood education—who come from
homes where languages other than English are spoken. Drawing on a recent cri-
tique of early childhood education in the U.S. (Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol
2018) as well as critiques of recurring deficit framings of young children’s lan-
guaging such as research on the so-called ‘word gap’ or ‘language gap’ (Flores
2018; García and Otheguy 2016), this chapter provides classroom-based exam-
ples of how teachers can leverage young children’s translanguaging and cultural
knowledge in their education. These examples emerge from a study of an early
childhood education program that was carried out by researchers with the City
University of New York—New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals
(CUNY-NYSIEB) project. From 2011 through 2018, this New York State-funded
project worked with schools to improve the education of emergent bilingual stu-
dents. The project’s focus has been wide-ranging—from school-wide language
policy development to professional development for teachers to collaborative
instructional planning—but as maintained a singular vision that all schools can
and must view students’ bilingualism as a resource in their education. This chap-
ter outlines the work that CUNY-NYSIEB researchers conducted with a group
of early childhood educators in a “dual language bilingual” program, which had
the explicit goal of fostering students’ bilingualism and biliteracy in English and
Spanish. By detailing the professional development the research team did with
the teachers and providing examples of how their professional learning was trans-
lated into classroom work with young emergent bilingual students, this chapter
offers both a counter-narrative to deficit discourses about these students’ language
practices and opportunities for future growth and development of early childhood
educators. Overall, the chapter provides insights into both the possibilities and
challenges of adopting a translanguaging pedagogy (García et al. 2017) in early
childhood classrooms in the United States.

2 A Critical Perspective on Early Childhood

Education

This study has been framed through the convergence of two critical theories,
which together, shed light on the non-neutral nature of early childhood educa-
tion: a critical race lens on early childhood education and translanguaging theory.
We believe that these theoretical framings in combination allow us to see young
Translanguaging and Early Childhood Education in the USA … 25

emergent bilingual children, their identities, and languaging practices as they cur-
rently exist within the early childhood education landscape. They also shed light
on the ideologies that shape this educational landscape in ways that marginalize
young Latinx emergent bilinguals in the U.S. and provide us with a framework
for promoting pedagogies that can counter such ideologies.
We start with Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol’s (2018) intersectional
approach to early childhood education, which is informed in large part by criti-
cal race theory. Their work dissects the notion of “best practices” in early child-
hood education by highlighting that the standards of quality and Developmentally
Appropriate Practice (DAP) as defined by the National Association for the Educa-
tion of Young Children (NAEYC) are far from neutral. They argue that, “tradi-
tional notions of quality in early childhood education are exclusionary, rooted in
White monolingual and monocultural values and experiences, and apply deficit
paradigms to frame the developmental trajectories of multiply minoritized chil-
dren” (Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol 2018, p. 204). In other words, when
early childhood “best practices” are implicitly rooted in white, middle class cul-
tural and linguistic norms, the resources that racialized emergent bilinguals have
are not valued or, worse, considered liabilities in their learning trajectories.
Rosa and Flores (2017) present a complementary framework, a r­ aciolinguistic
perspective, which highlights the ways in which language and race are
­co-constructed and, thus, intricately interrelated. Their work brings to educators’
attention the role of the “white listening subject” who when hearing the speech of
the racialized speaker—regardless of what register it is in—interprets that speech
through a deficit lens. This theoretical lens can also be useful to examine the ways
in which young emergent bilinguals have been negatively positioned in regard to
their linguistic resources in schools.
The ideologies described by Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol (2018) and
Rosa and Flores (2017) demonstrate how educators’ day to day perceptions of
their emergent bilingual students are influenced by notions of what is considered
“standard” in early childhood education. One example of how young emergent
bilinguals are framed is the concept of the “word gap” (Hart and Risley 2003),
which refers to the alleged disparity in vocabulary with which students from dif-
ferent socioeconomic groups, predominantly from families of color, enter school.
It is argued that children from low-socioeconomic backgrounds arrive to school
knowing fewer words and they never catch up to middle-class students. By
employing a critical lens, García and Otheguy (2016) argue that the research that
generated the “word gap” has not taken into account multilingual students’ full
emergent linguistic repertoire and therefore the word gap is simply perceived and
does not truly account for young emergent bilinguals’ expansive resources.
26 K. Seltzer et al.

Another way that deficit lens of emergent bilinguals takes root in educa-
tors’ everyday practices is through the framing of emergent bilinguals’ language
practices. Many educators see emergent bilinguals’ language through the lens of
deficit and because of this, they may claim that students do not have language
and describe them as ‘semilingual’ (Cummins 1994) or ‘languageless’ (Rosa
2016). This view, in turn, shapes how teachers and school administrators focus
their instructional work on “repairing” children’s language and, thus, teach them
dominant practices without interrogating the ideologies that render their and their
families’ existing practices as deficient. This standardization of idealized mono-
lingual language practices in early childhood education perpetuates deficit views
of Latinx children (as well as other language minoritized children) and often pre-
vents teachers from appreciating and building on students’ rich linguistic reper-
toires (Ascenzi-Moreno 2018; Flores 2016; Flores and Rosa 2015; García and
Otheguy 2016; Rosa 2016; Sánchez et al. 2017).
The work of CUNY-NYSIEB has been to assist educators in developing pro-
gramming and instruction for emergent bilinguals that recognizes and builds on
multilingual students’ full linguistic repertoires. One way this is done is through
familiarizing educators with translanguaging theory, which can serve as “a coun-
terstory to the inferiority and deficit master narratives that define multilingual chil-
dren as not having language or as having limited language” (Souto-Manning and
Rabadi-Raol 2018, p. 215). Otheguy et al. (2015) have referred to translanguag-
ing as “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for
watchful adherence to the socially and politically (and usually national and state)
defined boundaries of named languages” (p. 283). Translanguaging theory argues
that bilinguals develop an integrated, dynamic linguistic system and agentively use
linguistic features (words, sounds, rules) that society ascribes to a specific “named
language,” dialect or language variety (Otheguy et al. 2015). Acknowledging the
dynamic nature of bilingualism from the internal perspectives of marginalized indi-
viduals, rather than from dominant monolingual perspectives, is an essential aspect
of anti-oppressive pedagogies that center and leverage students’ marginalized [lin-
guistic] identities. Accordingly, educators who take up a translanguaging approach
recognize that any perceived educational “gap” lies in social and educational prac-
tices framed by ideologies of inferiority rather than in the minoritized children
themselves (Baugh 2017; Flores 2018; García and Otheguy 2016).
Translanguaging theory and practice has most often been applied to elementary
and secondary school contexts, where the focus has been on how translanguaging
supports emergent bilinguals learning through multiple modalities (reading, writing,
speaking and listening) during literacy and literacy in the content areas (Celic and
Seltzer 2013). In this same vein, we ask, how does translanguaging open up new
Translanguaging and Early Childhood Education in the USA … 27

ways for teachers to value the language and literacy practices of young emergent
bilinguals? And how does translanguaging theory and practice assist teachers in
developing new instructional spaces for students’ bilingual language development?
We now turn to describing the CUNY-NYSIEB project as well as the early child-
hood education work that members of the research team undertook in 2017–2018.

3 Working in the Early Childhood Context: The

CUNY-NYSIEB Project

The CUNY-NYSIEB project was started in 2011 by co-principal investigators

Dr. Ricardo Otheguy, Dr. Ofelia García, and Dr. Kate Menken. The project, affili-
ated with both the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Soci-
ety (RISLUS) and the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate
Center and generously funded by the New York State Education Department,
had the overarching goal of improving educational outcomes for those students
labeled English Language Learners but whom the project referred to as emergent
bilinguals. To meet this large goal, the project partnered with schools across New
York State, working with administrators and teachers to promote two interrelated
“non-negotiable” principles: (1) that students’ bilingualism is a resource in their
education, and (2) that the ecology of a school should reflect the bilingualism of
its students. To this end, members of the CUNY-NYSIEB team—bilingual and
TESOL educators from universities within the CUNY and SUNY (State Uni-
versity of New York) system and PhD students—were assigned to schools and
worked collaboratively with stakeholders to develop a cohesive language policy,
build a diverse group of advocates for emergent bilinguals within the school, and
make changes to existing curriculum and instruction so that it better leveraged
students’ bilingualism through the use of translanguaging strategies.
In the 2016–2017 academic year, the project’s focus shifted from intensive
work in schools to the production of resources that would help educators across
New York State educate themselves on emergent bilingual students and bet-
ter serve them in the classroom. After producing a series of Topic Briefs on dif-
ferent populations of emergent bilinguals in the state (i.e.: Newcomer students,
students labeled “Long Term English Language Learners,” etc.), members of
the project decided that the production of resources had to emerge from what
­CUNY-NYSIEB always did best: work with teachers on the ground in schools.
For this reason, in the 2017–2018 academic year, the project partnered with three
schools to work with teachers in early childhood education, dual language bilin-
gual education, and high school English as a Second Language (ESL) education.
28 K. Seltzer et al.

In this chapter, we focus on the work the team did with a small group of early
childhood educators at a bilingual school in a borough of New York City.
This chapter focuses on the collaborative work among teachers at the Villa
School (pseudonym) and university-based researchers in the CUNY-NYSIEB
project. The Villa School is a Pre-K-8 dual language, bilingual public school
located in urban area in the Northeast of the US. The school has a unique his-
tory in that it emerged from the combined advocacy of parents in the commu-
nity with the assistance of a local non-governmental organization dedicated to the
betterment of the neighborhoods. Parents at the time (mid 1990s) recognized the
need for bilingual programs within the diverse community which included Latinx
students from a variety of countries and African-Americans. The school was cre-
ated through a grant supporting the creation of small schools within the district.
It is distinguished by having a dual commitment to bilingual education and being
responsive to parent and community needs.
The dual-language bilingual program at the Villa School has been commit-
ted to providing students and families with learning that is rooted in the com-
munity. As such, it is expected that teachers, educational leaders, and parents
have a say in how the bilingual program is carried out within the school. Since
its inception, the bilingual program has been rooted in project-based learning
and ­teacher-developed bilingual units of study around topics such as the ocean or
restaurants. However, with the adoption of Common Core Standards at the state
level and more pressure for New York City schools to adopt curriculum aligned to
these standards, the school’s teacher-generated curriculum became less so. Addi-
tionally, the school experienced a shift in the early childhood program as the state
and district pressure has been placed on reading and writing objectives in Kinder-
garten. As a result, across the school, the teacher-written literacy curriculum was
replaced by a pre-packaged curriculum available only in English that teachers
would have to adapt, even in Kindergarten. To reach the curriculum’s goals with
young emergent bilinguals, play-based spaces were eliminated in favor of explicit
literacy instruction.
Our work in the school was a result of a convergence of interests. The Kinder-
garten teachers at the school had attended a workshop about play in Kindergarten
and wanted to incorporate play into their schedule. Our work with Kindergarten
was determined, in part, because of New York City Department of Education
(NYCDOE) policies. While a PreK class is part of the school, all professional
development for PreK teachers is centralized at the NYCDOE. Therefore, PreK
teachers are not involved in the overarching school-based professional develop-
ment. Therefore, the scope of our work was limited to the Kindergarten teachers.
The positive aspect of this, is that Kindergarten is a contested space in education.
Translanguaging and Early Childhood Education in the USA … 29

While Kindergarten is considered early childhood, it has increasingly become a

site for explicit reading and writing instruction. Kindergarten children in public
schools in New York City, and many other districts across the country, are held to
reading and writing standards that previously began in first grade classrooms. It is
this context for literacy learning in which we began our work.
Our aim was for the work at the Villa School to be collaborative. Our
group was comprised of the Kindergarten team of teachers at the school, one
Research Associate, Gladys Y. Aponte, and one Associate Investigator, Laura
­Ascenzi-Moreno. The teachers brought to the work their inquiry about how they
could incorporate play into the day with their students. The CUNY-NYSIEB
team brought their understanding of translanguaging theory and their experience
as bilingual teachers. The school principal supported this work by providing the
entire team with time built in for a Professional Learning Community (PLC). The
PLC met on a weekly basis to discuss scholarly articles, plan collaboratively, and
share and reflect on videos of students at play, anecdotes, and student work. The
team worked collaboratively to better understand the dynamic ways students learn
through their uses of language as well as their social interactions and play.
The PLC started out by reading two texts around play selected by the
­CUNY-NYSIEB team. For each article, teachers focused on how it applied to
emergent bilingual students. The first text, “Play-based Learning and Intentional
Teaching: Forever Different?” by Susan Edwards (2017) was selected so the
group could refine their thinking about the different types of play that exist within
early childhood settings–open-ended play, modeled play, and purposefully-
framed play—and define the teachers’ role in relation to these different types of
play. During the discussions, the team recognized that the three types of play are
opportunities to observe, welcome, and build on students’ multilingualism. The
second text, “Playing within and Beyond the Story: Encouraging Book-Related
Pretend Play” by Jodi G. Welsch (2008) highlighted how play-based activities
originating from shared texts could be supportive of children’s literacy develop-
ment. The members of the PLC appreciated the idea of placing books and text-
related props at play centers to elicit play relevant to the literature they read as a
class. This set of articles provided the PLC members with a foundation for how
to conceptualize and plan for play in ways that maximize their students’ engage-
ment, conceptual learning, and dynamic language development.
As the PLC progressed, the team planned collaboratively and adapted their
practices and play centers to allow different modes of play that could center and
extend students’ multilingual identities and their emergent literacy skills. For
example, teachers placed books that had been read in both English and Spanish,
such as The Three Little Pigs/Los Tres Cerditos in play centers so that students
30 K. Seltzer et al.

could engage with the stories through their play. The teachers also added cul-
turally relevant and book related props to different play areas to elicit students’
unique cultural perspectives and bilingual imaginations when interpreting, reen-
acting, reimagining, and extending stories. The teachers created a puppet show
center, and the block area, dramatic play center, kitchen, art center received
finger puppets, pretend foods, dress-up clothing, and different playthings that
could encourage children to transform stories in ways that reflect their dynamic
multilingual worlds. These thoughtful adaptations allowed teachers to observe
students’ language practices holistically during play and to better understand,
appreciate, and build on students’ dynamic emergent bilingualism. Several impor-
tant findings emerged from the work within this PLC: students fluidly used their
multimodal linguistic repertoires during play, they reimagined and played beyond
texts in ways that reflected their personal bilingual experiences and creativities,
and their teachers exhibited ideological shifts while simultaneously continuing to
communicate deficit thinking about their students. We describe these three find-
ings in the following section.

4 What Did We Learn? Translanguaging and Play

in the Early Childhood Classroom

Our first finding from this work seems, at first glance, fairly obvious: the chil-
dren in the kindergarten classrooms engaged in translanguaging while they were
at play in the play centers. Obvious as this may seem—it is our belief that trans-
languaging is the typical way of languaging for bilingual people—it is worth stat-
ing out right. Acknowledging the ways that young bilingual students language
can counter the recurring, deficit mindset we laid out earlier in this chapter: that
bilingual students lack proficiency in either language and are in need of remedia-
tion at such an early age. Additionally, paying close attention to how the students
languaged while at play was an important element of teachers’ professional devel-
opment. By using an observation protocol to stimulate their thinking and focus-
ing their attention on students’ languaging rather than any “absence” of language
(Fig. 1), the teachers were able to see and hear their students in a new light (for
more on this protocol, see our resource on the New York State Education Depart-
ment’s “Bilingual Education Resources: Supporting and Sustaining Initiative”
page).
As students played, teachers saw high levels of engagement. They talked
excitedly to one another at the different centers. There was laughter and extended
interactions between students who might not have interacted before. And all the
Translanguaging and Early Childhood Education in the USA … 31

Fig. 1 Observation protocol developed for teachers to document language and play

while, students drew on both English and Spanish to understand, discuss, reen-
act, and co-construct meaning of the stories they read. For example, in the block
center, where students focused on building using wooden blocks, students built
the pigs’ three houses for finger puppets that were added to the center and reen-
acted the story together. The following interaction occurred during students’ play
at the block center:

Student 1: Y sopló, y sopló [and he blew and blew]…Open the – [pause]

Student 2: Puerta! [Door.]
Student 1: Open the puerta! Open the puerta de casa! [Open the door! Open the
door to the house!]

In their reenactment of the pivotal moment when the wolf tries to blow the pigs’
houses down, students drew on both English and Spanish, collaboratively build-
ing on one another’s language practices to tell the story. Because both students
were Spanish-English bilinguals, they fluidly shifted between English and Span-
ish, using language in ways that do not conform to monolingual expectations.
Seen through a translanguaging lens, these two students were not “incomplete”
bilinguals or “non-linguals” who lack necessary vocabulary in both English and
32 K. Seltzer et al.

Spanish; they are drawing on the full linguistic repertoire to make meaning of the
story and play with one another. Turning this lens on students’ languaging was
highly important for the teachers, who—as already discussed—expressed deficit
thinking about them.
This next finding from our work builds off of the previous one. Not only did
students translanguage at the play centers to engage with the stories they read;
they also translanguaged to go beyond the stories in creative and innovative ways.
This, again, counters discourses of “languagelessness” and, relatedly, “illiteracy”
that so often pervade the education of emergent bilinguals in U.S. schools. An
example of this creativity and innovation emerged from students’ performance of
a puppet show that retold the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Building
off of their play in the puppet play center, the teachers facilitated students’ crea-
tion of a short performance that students put on for all the kindergarten classes,
teachers, and CUNY-NYSIEB researchers.
The performance featured several examples of how students’ translanguag-
ing—and their experiences as members of bilingual, bicultural families and
communities, what Seltzer (in press) has called their translingual sensibilities—
enabled them to go beyond the story itself to create something new. One example
was the students’ uses of English and Spanish as characters in the story. Though
their performance was done primarily in English, the student who played “Baby
Bear” spoke her part exclusively in Spanish. The students did not translate for
her, nor was her use of Spanish at all “marked” within the otherwise English per-
formance. Instead, the effect was that of a fluidly bilingual story, told in a way
that would resonate with and understood by the bilingual audience members.
Though students had read the story in both English and Spanish—kept separate in
the texts—their performance integrated them and, as a result, created something
new.
A second example of how students translanguaged in ways that went beyond
the text was through the small changes they made to the details of the story itself.
During a pivotal moment in the story, when the bears discover that Goldilocks has
tasted each of their bowls of porridge, the performers (a student narrator and three
students playing the three bears) said the following:

Narrator: Papa Bear said…

Papa Bear: Someone has eaten my porridge!
Narrator: And Mama Bear said…
Mama Bear: Someone has eaten my porridge!
Narrator: And Baby Bear said…
Baby Bear: ¡Alguien se comió mi avena! [Someone has eaten my oatmeal!]
Translanguaging and Early Childhood Education in the USA … 33

While the narrator, Papa Bear, and Mama Bear all spoke the lines of the story
in English in ways that stuck closely to the language of the original text, Baby
Bear’s line demonstrates how the student made the text her own through her
use of Spanish. In order to speak her line, the student translated the word “por-
ridge”—the name of a food rarely eaten in any U.S. household—to “avena,”
which refers to the more commonly consumed “oatmeal.” “Avena” would have
been a well-known food item for members of the bilingual audience, as it was
to the girl playing the role of Baby Bear, and her facile translation speaks to her
ability to navigate not only the languages but the cultural references. In short, by
making space for students to use all of their language practices in the play cent-
ers, students brought to the performance their bilingual imaginations and expe-
riences. This reimagining of even a small detail from The Three Little Pigs/Los
Tres Cerditos highlights students’ membership in bilingual communities and fam-
ilies as well as their bilingual pride, which enabled them to creatively transform a
traditional tale to reflect their bilingual lives.
A final finding from our work with the early childhood educators at the Villa
School was that these teachers—all Spanish-speaking Latinx working in a bilin-
gual program—simultaneously evidenced ideological shifts as a result of their
professional learning with the CUNY-NYSIEB team and continued to communi-
cate deficit thinking about the Latinx students they taught. For example, during an
exit interview with the small group of teachers, one shared this about the videos
the CUNY-NYSIEB team showed during several sessions of the PLC:

The videos you presented helped me see how to support kids during play…taking
them where they’re at and expanding from there. Now in the dramatic play it’s beau-
tiful. A lot is happening that wasn’t before (Teacher A, December 2018).

Because the teachers had been interested in developing their facilitation of stu-
dents’ play-based learning, the CUNY-NYSIEB team took time to provide read-
ings and videos and to engage the teachers in discussions about how students can
be taught by leveraging the languaging they draw on in their play. By creating
opportunities for students to play—something that has, more and more, been
reduced in early childhood classrooms in the U.S.—and focusing explicitly on
supporting students in their play, this teacher saw how “beautiful” the play cent-
ers could be and how much learning was taking place “that wasn’t before.”
Focusing specifically on language, another teacher shared this anecdote about
her observations of students’ play:
34 K. Seltzer et al.

When kids are playing with a student who prefers a language, they are motivated
to speak that language, even if they don’t typically prefer that language (Teacher A,
December 2018).

Here, the teacher is sharing that, for example, a student she might label as more
“English-dominant” would use more Spanish to play with a peer she might label
as “Spanish-dominant” and vice versa. This willingness on the part of students
to play using the language they were less comfortable using demonstrates the
flexibility of the play centers and the purposeful development of play scenarios
that draw on students’ translanguaging practices and cultural funds of knowledge
(Moll et al. 1992). Both teachers’ comments here demonstrate that they observed
shifts in how their young students were playing and using language in the class-
room. The first teacher expressly attributes this shift to what she learned in the
PLC, a testament to the positive influence that professional learning can have for
teachers. And the second teacher’s comment demonstrates her attention to her
students’ languaging, an awareness that the CUNY-NYSIEB team aimed to culti-
vate through the PLC.
Though the team saw this kind of positive shift in teachers’ attitudes towards
play and towards the idea of teaching language through play, we also heard teach-
ers express deficit thinking towards their students and their language practices.
For example, during a different set of interviews, two different teachers made the
following comments:

Teacher A: We have many Hispanic students who listen to Spanish at home but
don’t speak it. The rest are bilingual, they speak both languages well. One child
doesn’t dominate either language well, talks like baby talk. He’ll say one thing half
Spanish half English, it doesn’t matter what week we’re in (Interview, September
2018).
Teacher B: Most [students] prefer English, but that doesn’t mean they’re strong
in English. Their Spanish is good but not strong. They don’t have that strong back-
ground (Interview, September 2018).

Again, it is important to note that these teachers are Spanish-speaking Latinx

teachers in a long-standing bilingual program. We include these examples not to
demonize the teachers but to show just how deeply deficit-based ideologies run,
even among people who identify as Latinx bilingual students’ advocates and allies.
When these teachers emphasize students’ lack of ability in either English or Span-
ish or when they called their students “nilingües” (a play on the Spanish word
bilingüe or bilingual by changing the “bi” to “ni,” which means “­ non-lingual”),
one can see evidence of deeply-held ideologies of what Rosa (2016), has called
Translanguaging and Early Childhood Education in the USA … 35

‘languagelessness’, the idea that Latinx people in the U.S. who do not engage in
monoglossic language practices do not have the ability to use either language well.
Despite the work of the PLC—and despite other evidence of the teachers’ embrac-
ing of a new lens on their young students’ language practices –these teachers’
commentary demonstrates just how difficult it can be to combat such deficit think-
ing about Latinx children, even among the most willing teachers.

5 Where Do We Go from Here? Implications

for Educators and School Leaders

CUNY-NYSIEB’s work at the Villa School has elicited ideas and implications for
future work in early childhood classrooms. For example, in discussing the con-
tradictory views and language ideologies communicated by the teachers at the
school, the team thought about how we might encourage teachers to reflect fur-
ther on how they teach, view, and (mis)understand young multilingual children
and their families. One way to do this is to encourage all teachers to see these
students and families through an assets-based lens and engage them in more
authentic, powerful ways. We see great potential in questionnaire or language
profile tools that bring forth family and community translanguaging practices and
funds of knowledge (Moll et al. 1992). Thinking along these lines and inspired by
Morell and Aponte’s (2016) work (also see García et al. 2017, language profiling
tool), the CUNY-NYSIEB team compiled this list of questions for teachers to ask
the families of young emergent bilinguals:

Questions to Ask Families of Young Emergent Bilinguals

• What languages do your family members speak at home?
• In what language do you speak to your child most of the time?
• What languages does your child understand?
• In what language does your child speak to you… to others?
• What are some ways your child uses gestures or objects to communicate?
• In what language does your child attempt to read/write?
• In what languages do you sing, read, or tell stories to your child?
• How has your child learned English so far (television shows, siblings, child-
care, etc.)?
• What are some of your interests? What do you feel comfortable sharing with
our class community?
36 K. Seltzer et al.

Inspired by the intake questions in Right from the Start: A Protocol for Identifying
and Planning Instruction for Emergent Bilinguals in Universal Prekindergarten
(Morell and Aponte 2016).
This kind of questionnaire—combined with tools like the Child Language
Observation Protocol discussed earlier in this chapter—provides teachers with
a more nuanced portrait of who students and their families are and how they
language, which can, in turn, lead to shifts in instruction that leverage young
emergent bilinguals’ rich linguistic repertoires towards new language practices,
including those expected of them in school settings (García et al. 2017). It also
provides teachers with the opportunity to reflect on their own preconceived
notions about young emergent bilinguals and their families, something they can
do in community with their colleagues, as the teachers at the Villa School did in
their PLC.
Another idea that emerged from our work at the Villa School related to the
teachers’ choices of texts. Though we did see students take traditional stories like
Goldilocks and the Three Bears and make them their own, we would like to see
more early childhood educators choose books that are culturally sustaining and
contain evidence of students’ language practices—not kept separate, but inte-
grated into multilingual, multicultural stories (for a list of books and resources
that feature characters from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, visit
CUNY-NYSIEB.org). These texts make space for students to see themselves in
the classroom and learn about the lives and experiences of others (Espinosa and
Lehner-Quam 2019). Teachers could look for published stories that resonate with
their students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds as well as use students’ own
stories as classroom texts. By bringing such texts into the classroom and design-
ing opportunities for students to engage in play at centers that relate to these
texts, teachers can build on students’ translanguaging and cultivate creative and
engaging new learning opportunities.
Taking up a translanguaging lens on the language and literacy education of
young emergent bilinguals means starting with the idea that these children are
gifted language users: creative, highly aware, adept, and flexible. In addition to
organizing their play around multilingual, multicultural texts, teachers could cre-
ate opportunities for students to play and further build their critical multilingual
awareness (Prasad 2018; Velasco and Fialais 2016). Teachers could organize
their centers (as well as their whole-class instruction) around questions like, how
do different people (their parents, a local shop owner, a neighbor) say different
things? What words, phrases, songs, and stories are the same or different across
languages and cultures? How do people communicate with more than just spoken
Translanguaging and Early Childhood Education in the USA … 37

language? These are questions and topics about which young emergent bilinguals
have much to offer, and it is incumbent upon teachers to invite them in.
For play to take hold in emergent bilinguals’ classrooms, school administra-
tors need to be on the same page as teachers. We advocate that there be a cohesive
vision and policy about how play is incorporated into the school day and how it
is sustained. We found that while teachers’ practices are framed by their own per-
sonal belief systems and knowledge, their work is also impacted by how school
administrators prioritize instructional initiatives and how they measure their
effectiveness. Within this project, these tensions were evident in how the newly
instituted space for play—center time—was implemented in actuality and how its
effectiveness was measured. We believe that these tensions are not exclusive to
these teachers and this school, but are the reality of many, if not, most programs.
The kindergarten teachers were the catalysts for finding time to reintroduce
play into their days. While, by the end of the study, administration agreed to
the schedule change to include center time, its frequency had been reduced and
replaced with more targeted literacy instruction. It is important to point out that
through the structured play sessions that the teachers set up, students’ literacy
skills were being supported through the relation of the centers to shared bilingual
texts and the development of oral language. In addition, the administration wanted
to see the results of center time which resulted in the creation of plays. While a
play is an appropriate activity for kindergarten students, framing center time as
resulting in a culminating activity both draws attention away from the importance
of incremental work that happens over time within the centers and demonstrates
how student-directed learning was redirected to meet the demands of the school.
As demonstrated through the findings, full access to play and the language prac-
tices students use for that play, is critical to emergent bilinguals’ language devel-
opment and to teachers’ understanding of students’ language practices.
In short, our work at the Villa School has strengthened our stance that Latinx
bilingual children language in ways that go beyond monolingual conceptions
and play in creative ways that enable them to represent their learning, their prior
knowledge, and ways of knowing. Too often, this languaging and play is viewed
through a deficit lens, or is over-regulated, and these children are seen as lacking.
By taking up a translanguaging, play-based lens on early childhood education,
educators and schools can counter this deficit thinking and create powerful learn-
ing experiences for all emergent bilingual children.
38 K. Seltzer et al.

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Translanguaging in Multilingual
Pre-Primary Classrooms in La Réunion:
Reflecting on Inclusion and Social
Justice in a French Postcolonial Context

Pascale Prax-Dubois and Christine Hélot

Abstract

This chapter explores the strategies and ideologies of two teachers who, each in
their own way, try to mobilize the languages of young plurilingual learners (aged
3–4 and 5–6) in a pre-school situated in a marginalized area in La Reunion, a
French island in the Indian Ocean and central hub of migration for families from
neighbouring islands. We argue that translanguaging crossed with subaltern stud-
ies can be a powerful approach to deconstruct othering processes. Following
this analysis, we propose a model for teacher education that includes three main
objectives to rethink inclusion and social justice in a French post-colonial context.

Keywords

Translanguaging · Subaltern studies · Othering · Inclusion · Social justice

1 Introduction

According to Spivak (1985), Europe has asserted its position of sovereignty by

‘othering’ its former colonies. France is a good example of this process: it still
holds many so called “overseas” territories where linguistic and cultural practices

P. Prax-Dubois (*)
Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
e-mail: [email protected]
C. Hélot Strasbourg, France

© The Author(s) 2020 41

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_4
42 P. Prax-Dubois and C. Hélot

have been subordinated by the centralized education system, and where the prin-
ciples of inclusive education (UNESCO 2009) are still not being implemented.
French education is described by the latest PISA evaluations (2018)1 as the most
unequal among the richest OECD countries and is also well known for its ideo-
logical position on the national language, i.e. French, considered as the first and
foremost priority for integration. This means that acknowledging and valuing the
rich plurilingual repertoires of many students is a real challenge, both in metro-
politan France and all the more so in overseas territories scattered throughout the
world (Hélot and Erfurt 2016; Laroussi 2016; Muni Toke 2016).
This is the case of La Réunion, a small multilingual French island located in
the South West of the Indian Ocean where the complexity of multilingual lan-
guage practices has been the subject of a lot of research. Recognizing language
practices within the theoretical framework of translanguaging means that schools
should adopt a pedagogy moving from the separation of languages and from the
priority of the French language to a pedagogy of “variation”, as expressed by
researchers in La Réunion (Prudent 2005; Lebon-Eyquem 2015; Georger 2005;
Tupin and Wharton 2016). However, research addressing the exclusion of lan-
guages other than Creole, such as Malagasy and Mahoro-Comorian languages
spoken by many children in Reunionese schools, is still lacking. Furthermore,
teachers are not educated to understand the affordances of multilingual education,
how linguistic and cultural diversity is linked to issues of social justice (Piller
2016; Prax-Dubois 2018) and how they could become agents of social change
(Hélot 2007) even in such a highly complex context.
Our chapter is based on the analysis of data collected in two pre-primary
classrooms, where two teachers implemented language awareness activities
(Prax-Dubois 2018). Through a critical discourse analysis of the verbal interac-
tions between children and their teacher and the transgressive lens of tranlanguag-
ing pedagogy, which, as explained by García (2014), strives to make the voices
of ‘subaltern’ subjects audible, we will describe the strategies developed by the
two teachers, each in their own way, to mobilize migrant and indigenous students’
plurilingual repertoires. More specifically, we will explain how they succeeded
(or not) in promoting the inclusion of multilingual children in their teaching
approach, through the deconstruction of the process of othering (Spivak 1985;
Said 1978/2005). In other words, we will argue that specifically in post-colonial

1http://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/PISA2018_CN_FRA_FRE.pdf.
Translanguaging in Multilingual Pre-Primary Classrooms … 43

contexts such as La Réunion, teachers should be educated to understand the pro-

cess of decolonizing language teaching in schools (López-Gopar 2016). We will
conclude with propositions to (re)imagine a teacher education curriculum that
includes the issue of linguistic diversity and social justice (Piller 2016) in postco-
lonial contexts.

2 Context

2.1 Pre-School Education in France

Pre-primary school in France is conceptualized as “école maternelle” and is

­well-known as a specific model of education for the early years. It became inte-
grated into the primary sector as early as 1881. In September 2019, French presi-
dent Macron decided it should become compulsory from age 3 in a bid to fight
the high levels of child poverty in France. The latest curriculum dates from 2015.
It applies to all écoles maternelles in mainland France and similarly in the over-
seas territories. Language awareness activities dealing with linguistic diversity are
mentioned for children aged 4 to 6, but only with “modest”2 ambitions, because
the foremost objective is language acquisition “in all its dimensions”, meaning
the acquisition of different language competences in French. The formulation in
French, “mobilisation du langage” expressed in the singular noun phrase hides an
equivalence between language in general and the French language (Georger 2005,
p. 7). This persistent ideology is all the more striking in La Réunion (and in other
overseas French territories, see Hélot and Erfurt 2016) where Creole is the main
language of communication and where many children speak diverse minoritized
languages.
Research in French on plurilingualism in pre-school structures (crèches, kin-
dergarten, or pre-schools) is scarce compared to publications in English (Hélot
and Rubio 2013). For these authors, the language development of very young
children in early childhood education and care (ECEC) is not only an educational
issue but involves political choices, ideologies, and an ethical positioning. Hélot
(2013, p. 52) describes bilingualism in the French context in terms of a dichot-
omy between elite bilingualism (with languages such as French and English for

2“Modeste” meaning limited, see: Programme d’enseignement de l’école maternelle:

https://www.education.gouv.fr/pid25535/bulletin_officiel.html?cid_bo=86940.
44 P. Prax-Dubois and C. Hélot

example) and mass or migrant bilingualism (when minoritized languages such

as Turkish or Arabic are concerned), the difference residing in the ideological
attribution of symbolic values to competing languages on the linguistic market
(Bourdieu 1982). Thus, the availability of bilingual education in dominant lan-
guages and its nonexistence in minoritized languages are a further source of edu-
cational inequality (Hélot and Erfurt 2016) both in mainland France and all the
more so in overseas territories (Muni Toke 2016).

2.2 The Reproduction of Exclusion or Excluding

Neighbours

From a socio-historical point of view La Réunion is an insular society devel-

oped to “serve” France rather than model it (Bertile 2002) Its population has
been European, Malgache, African and Asian from the beginning and its dyna-
mism meant to lead to economic growth. It is a pluralistic society where the term
“white” refers more to social class than to skin colour (Gerbeau 1997). The sud-
den access of the island to the post-modern era, since its transformation from an
agricultural plantation economy into a tertiary economy in the 1980s, did not
impede the reproduction of inequalities.
The GDP per inhabitant is higher than in neighbouring islands but mark-
edly lower than the GDP in mainland France and La Reunion now sees itself as
a “donating Northern country” in relation to its poorer neighbours in the South
(Bertile 2002). Indeed, the subsidies given to La Réunion by both mainland
France and the European Union, are lower in Mayotte, a neighbouring overseas
territory, therefore, it does not encourage solidarity between the different islands
and it even fosters the development of stigmatizing stereotypes towards people
who have no other choice but to move from a poorer island (Anjouan for exam-
ple, which is a non-French island) to a richer one (Mayotte, which is French)
and also from Mayotte and Madagascar to La Réunion. Such socio-political
and economical injustice born out of the invention of collective identities (Said
1978/2005), and notions like “overseas” or “Francophonie”, ends up creating
socio-ethnic inequalities that have a major impact on the ideology of languages
and knowledge transmission in schools (Fig. 1).
Translanguaging in Multilingual Pre-Primary Classrooms … 45

Fig. 1 Political map of the Indian Ocean. http://www.sciencespo.fr/

2.3 Selective Plurilingualism in Schools in La Réunion

Lebon-Eyquem (2015, p. 146) has recently shown3 that today, “two thirds
of children aged 5 speak very little French or none at all”. She also recorded
languaging practices where it was impossible to distinguish clear profiles
­
between speakers of French and speakers of Creole. But as stated above, the
issue of the exclusion of languages other than Creole in education in La Réun-
ion has hardly been addressed. In our doctoral research (Prax-Dubois 2018),
we carried out a survey among 22 teachers working with newcomers in pre-pri-
mary, primary and secondary schools which revealed the diversity of languages
brought into La Réunion by students identified as “allophones”,4 as well as the

3110 children aged 5 were surveyed: their language interactions were recorded both in and
outside of schools.
4“allophone” is the term used in the French curriculum to refer to children who do not

speak French (circulaire 2012-141 du 2 octobre 2012). Hélot (2013) argues they should be
called “bilingual”.
46 P. Prax-Dubois and C. Hélot

widespread presence of Shimaore and Malgache. While the teachers confirmed

the rapid acquisition of Creole by their students, they also denounced the rac-
ism and solitude a great majority of these children suffer from. Their social
marginalisation is most obvious in the erasure of their plurilingual repertoires
which, as migrant languages from the Indian Ocean islands, remain largely
invisible, and this even in the face of the recent popularity of the language
awareness approach.5
We would like to argue that such language in education policies create an
image of the other and her languages which relegates Creole and the other Indian
Ocean languages to the domain of folklore (in the Gramscien sense). It feeds into
colonial dichotomies (Prudent 2005; García 2014) and hides the complexity of
such processes. This is why subaltern studies, according to us, allow for a new
conceptualization of the relationships of power between languages and access to
knowledge and underlying ideologies.

3 Translanguaging and Subaltern Studies in Creole

Speaking Contexts

As Hélot (2013, p. 58) reminds us:

“Languages, in our societies, are always caught in processes of subordination

and domination through the attitudes expressed towards their speakers” (our
translation).

This is the reason why we propose to use both the transgressive perspective of
translanguaging (García 2014, 2017) and that of subaltern studies with the con-
cepts of othering and colonial difference, in order to highlight the ideologies that, in
school and elsewhere, exclude a whole sector of the mainstream population through
the production of images that maintain some groups at the service of others.

5See professional education for teachers on plurilingual Education offered by the CASNAV
in La Reunion (Centre for the schooling of newcomer students): https://www.ac-reunion.fr/
casnav/formations-casnav.html.
Translanguaging in Multilingual Pre-Primary Classrooms … 47

3.1 Transglossic Spaces, Colonial Difference

and Othering

The colonial subject is constrained socially and symbolically by her language

practices. It is as if the languages of the South could only be conceived through
the vulnerability of their speakers who are seen as having no other opportunities
but to master the language of the colonizers if they want their share of available
resources. But this analysis lacks a finer observation of the discourse strategies as
well as of the agency of teachers trying to implement multilingual approaches in
their classrooms (Menken and García 2010), whether monolingual or legitimately
“bilingual” classrooms. This is why García (2014, p. 108) proposed to replace
the diglossic model by a transglossic one to describe “a societal stable, and yet
dynamic, communicative network in the 21st century, with many languages in
functional interrelationship”.
The prefix “trans” does not only translate the idea of crossing or mixing,
but refers to transgressive theories of language (Pennycook 2007). Pedagogi-
cally, this implies that transglossic spaces should be opened up in classrooms,
the voices of subaltern speakers should be heard and the colonial dimension of
power relationships should be discussed (García 2014). In Creole speaking con-
texts, this means reframing linguistic diversity within the paradigm of transgres-
sive and critical approaches so that the new spaces created allow for colonial
injustice to be debated, in other words for three centuries of history to be uncov-
ered ­(Prax-Dubois 2019b).
Colonial difference is the figure of speech through which coloniality con-
ceives of the other as inferior, marked by a linguistic, cultural, moral or intel-
lectual handicap and, therefore, inferior to the metropolitan standard (Mignolo
2000/2012; López-Gopar 2016). Situated at the intersection of Western, male,
Christian, white thought with different approaches to local history and to
naming the world, colonial difference is also an abstract place where power
is exercised while being contested, a space where the subaltern6 knowledge
of speakers is reinvested but also reified by hegemonic thinking (Mignolo

6Guha (1983/1999) was one of the first researchers to develop the field of subaltern stud-

ies and to question the national and colonial historiography, after he became aware of the
social failure of independent India.
48 P. Prax-Dubois and C. Hélot

2000/2012; López-Gopar 2016). Inspired by the work of Said (1978/2005) and

his notion of orientalism, the concept of othering was defined as central to colo-
nial discourse, which ambivalence lies in the reification of the colonized subject
as both an object of desire and of derision expressed through political and dis-
cursive practices of racial and cultural hierarchy (Bhabha 1994).
Spivak (1985) proposed the notion of “new subaltern” and described the pro-
cess of othering in colonial contexts as based on three dimensions: a) a permanent
communication campaign informing people of their subordination, b) a system-
atic reference to the other as culturally and morally inferior, and c) the organisa-
tion of lack of access to knowledge being mediated by colonial agents who are
not indigenous, therefore trustworthy. In this way, Spivak deconstructs the natural
logic of “us vs them”, explaining that formerly colonized post-war states could
be regrouped in a single entity “the third world”, which could then be maintained
in a state of dependency and inferiority by the “first world”, a global process she
named “worlding”.
What is the impact in La Réunion of this notion of “worlding” on “wording”?
How are discursive spaces configured on a small island which belongs to both
a franco-European entity and an Indian–Oceanic space situated between Mauri-
tius and Madagascar, submitted to a capitalist economy since its control by La
Compagnie des Indes and then by the French State and the European Union, but
influenced by a profound Creole vision of the world? What can this mean for the
education of children living in a region that feels the pressure of such geopoliti-
cal and socioeconomic factors? What does inclusion and social justice mean for
young children in multilingual pre-schools in a French post-colonial context?

3.2 Translanguaging and Critical Discourse Analysis

To address these issues, we propose to analyse data gathered through

­non-participant observation of language awareness activities carried out in May
and June 2013 in two pre-primary classrooms (children aged 3–4 and 5–6). The
school is situated in one of the three poorest areas of the island. The area around
the school is known for the high number of migrants coming from the neigh-
bouring islands, more specifically Mayotte and other Comore Islands. This had
resulted in some resident families sending their children to schools outside of this
area. The school is suffering from lack of funding and an important turn-over of
teachers ­(Prax-Dubois 2018).
Translanguaging in Multilingual Pre-Primary Classrooms … 49

In order to understand these processes of intra-insular exclusion from a soci-

olinguistic point of view and to analyse the impact of socio-cultural factors on
the way teachers apprehend their students’ plurilingualism, we use the notion of
translanguaging, “to observe closely the way in which people use language and
base [their] pedagogical practices on that use, and not on what the school sys-
tem says are valuable practices” (García 2007, p. 13). We also opted for a critical
approach to discourse analysis with the aim to redress or lessen social inequali-
ties (Fairclough, ([1995] 2013, pp. 10 f.) though highlighting the ideologies
underlying language education implemented by teachers with their students.
Critical discourse analysis brings to the fore whether students’ voices as well as
those of communities speaking othered languages are recognized and supported
or whether they are excluded from the learning process (Cummins 2011). There-
fore, this means that every teacher can act upon the redistribution of power within
her own classroom (Hélot 2007, p. 123). Among the competences conceptual-
ized by García and Li Wei (2014) and the ten grounded principles for decolo-
nizing Primary English Language Teaching (López-Gopar 2016), we chose those
more specific to teachers working at the pre-school level in a marginalized area
of La Réunion. Our aim is to analyse whether it is possible in a French postco-
lonial context, to resist the process of othering produced by “the colonial differ-
ence discourse that positions Indigenous children as inferior and in need of help”
­(López-Gopar 2016, p. 199).

4 Translanguaging Strategies in a Post-Colonial

Context

Our analysis does not oppose a competent teacher to one who would be less
competent. Both teachers, each in their own way, wished to contest the language
regime in place, and have in common an interest in their students’ linguistic and
cultural diversity and in using the pedagogical freedom allowed within a rather
constraining national curriculum. Therefore, we are interested in the way each
teacher managed human interactions and social inequalities according to their
level of agency in a highly normalized sociolinguistic context.
50 P. Prax-Dubois and C. Hélot

4.1 Strategy n° 1: The Negotiation of the Curriculum

Constraints

The classroom is a strategic space for the negotiation of power relationships and
Isabelle7 knows what she is doing in her bilingual class when she decides that
on “French day”,8 she will devote her French language lesson to the translation
of “je t’aime” in all her students’ languages, because mothers’ day is approach-
ing. She chose to carry out a plurilingual activity on the day when Creole is not
supposed to be used. In other words, plurilingualism takes the place of additive
bilingualism and Creole finds its own space among the other Indian-Oceanic
languages thanks to the links created between the various languages used in the
interactions.

Isabelle: maintenant il manque une langue qu’on n’a pas fait (Now there is one lan-
guage missing)
[XXX}
Isabelle: en :: ? (Which one?)
Jean-André: MI AIM A OU
Kelly: mi aim a ou
Isabelle: en quelle langue? (Which language is it?)
Groupe d’élèves: EN CREOLE
Isabelle: alors / ça c’est facile / comment on dit ensemble? (So, this is easy/How do
we say it all together?)
Groupe d’élèves: MI AIM A OU

Isabelle has no need of specific pedagogical support to carry out this research
task, because “students can translanguage, as they find new information”
and the activity connects them to their everyday life (García and Li Wei 2014;
­López-Gopar 2016), in this instance the preparation of mothers’day. She needs no
pedagogical materials that would be using named languages, and in this way she
helps her students to find their own voices and to develop critical thinking as was
previously explained by Hélot (2007) writing about the Didenheim project.
Anna, the second teacher speaks neither Creole nor her students’ languages
as she has been recruited from mainland France. Therefore, she prefers to use a

7The names of the teachers have been changed for the purpose of the article.
8In this bilingual French/Creole pre-primary class of 5/6 year olds, the use of each lan-
guage as a language of instruction is implemented every other day. In this instance, the
language of schooling on that day was French.
Translanguaging in Multilingual Pre-Primary Classrooms … 51

­ ultilingual picture book presenting vocabulary in French, Shimaore and Mal-

m
gache to encourage her newcomer students to express themselves. In the fol-
lowing extract, she tries to get her students to guess the word “tree” by saying it
herself in Shimaore: “mwiri”:

Anna: alors c’est quoi Abdou? ça c’est quoi Abdou / viens nous montrer / qu’est-ce
que c’est mwiri? (So, what is it Abdou? What is that Abdou/ Come and show us/
what does “mwiri” mean?)
[Abdou se lève et montre l’image de l’arbre silencieusement] (Abdou stads up and
shyly shows the picture of the tree)
Anna: SUPER / Comment on dit en français? (Great/ How do you say it in French?)
Groupe d’élèves: un A: RBRE (A tree)
Anna: un a: rbre (A tree)
Groupe d’élèves: un A: RBRE (A tree)
Anna: mwiri c’est arbre en / en shimaore / en maore // c’est bien: (Mwiri means tree
in Shimaore, in Maore, good)

Anna considers her students’ languages the same as she does French, as fixed
entities that she wants them to master as a priority, through their lexical, pho-
nological and morphosyntactic components. However, she does open up a pluri-
lingual space through the use of a multilingual book that she discovers at the
same time as her students. She really wants to give them some power through the
opportunity to share their own expertise and also to have access to the translation
of everyday lexical items in languages that remain excluded from the curriculum.
In a certain way, even if the students are silent, they are cognitively active thanks
to the allowed presence of their home languages.

4.2 Strategy n° 2: The Mobilization of Inner Speech

The fact that students remain silent in the classroom does not necessarily mean
that they are inhibited or that they refuse to speak. Le Meur (2011) for example,
explains that it is the third dimension of language beyond speaking and writing,
“the living proof of what is unexpressed”. When silence is active, it gives way to
inner speech, and García and Li Wei (2014) have shown its centrality in translan-
guaging practices.9

9See also Prax-Dubois (2018, 2019a).

52 P. Prax-Dubois and C. Hélot

When Anna uses the word tree in Shimaore (mwiri) to start questioning her
students about its translation in French, she proposes that they compare both
languages, French the language of schooling and Shimaore a minoritized lan-
guage whose speakers are often discriminated against in La Réunion. This
­language-inquiry task does allow her in fact “to build translanguaging capaci-
ties and extend metalinguistic awareness” (García and Li Wei 2014, p. 122) but,
beyond the correct answer, also demands that her students concentrate both on
a cognitive and affective level. It seems as if the three students concerned do not
interact, leaving their peers to occupy all the discursive space:

Anna [à Chaïma]: tu es d’accord? Chaïma Abdou vous êtes pas d’accord? Tu es

d’accord ou pas? Inchati c’est ça ou pas? Inchati c’est ça mwiri? C’est ça mwiri?
Groupe d’élèves: non:
Anna (to Chaïma): Do you agree? Chaïma, Abdou, don’t you agree? Do you agree
or not? Inchati, Is it right or not? Inchati is that what mwiri means? Is this mwiri’
The students´ group: No

We know that “I don’t know” and silences can discretely signify many hidden
messages (López-Gopar 2016). But the repeated questioning of the teacher pre-
vents her from becoming aware of the students’ submerged language competence.
Isabelle interacts differently with her students because in her bilingual class-
room she is used to questioning her students without any normative linguistic
supports and, therefore, trusts them to manage the discursive space while at the
same time watching out for her marginalized students to express themselves. And
this is the reason why she is able to hear Zaïna who utters two barely audible
words in the middle of the interaction in Creole:

– Groupe d’élèves: MI AIM A OU

– Zaïna [à voix basse]: nsouhou vendza
– The students´ group: MI AIM A OU (I love you in reunionese Creole)
– Zaïna [in a low voice]: nsouhou vendza (I love you in Shimaore)

There was no need to question Zaïna to know what language she spoke, nor
how she would translate a term. Waiting for her inner speech to let her feel like
expressing herself, the teacher has opened a transgressive space giving time to
her student to become aware of her peers’ freedom of expression in Creole and
to allow herself, albeit quite moved, to express her understanding of the world in
Shimaore.
Translanguaging in Multilingual Pre-Primary Classrooms … 53

4.3 Strategy n° 3: Funds of Knowledge and Co-Learning

The issue of role taking in teaching is central in educational sociolinguistics.

­Co-learning is defined by Li Wei (2014, p. 169) as “a process in which several
agents simultaneously try to adapt to one another’s behavior so as to produce
desirable global outcomes that would be shared”. In an inclusive multilingual
classroom, students’ funds of knowledge put into perspective with those of the
teacher must be considered as vital resources because they are socio-historically
defined (Moll et al. 1992; Li Wei 2014; López-Gopar 2016, p. 201).
In her bilingual class, Isabelle has a continuous interest in linguistic diversity
and in the different ways the children express themselves in Creole and in French,
therefore she also includes Shimaore in her pedagogy, for example in the case of
Louis:

– on écoute bien Louis et on va répéter après Louis / d’accord? / Louis / dis nous
je t’aime en maore (We listen carefully to Louis and we’re going to repeat
after Louis OK/Louis tell us I love you in Maore)
– Louis [portant un regard circulaire sur l’ensemble des élèves]: nousouvendza
(Louis looks around the whole class at all the students)
– Isabelle: allez on répète (Go on, let’s repeat)
– Groupe d’élèves: NOUSOUVENDZA

Through these interactions, Isabelle deconstructs the othering Louis could be sub-
jected to as an “allophone” student. She behaves as a multilingual language and
literacy teacher and gives us an example of what decolonizing language education
could mean in a post-colonial pre-primary school, in the sense given by López-
Gopar (2016, p. 196): “decolonizing primary English language teaching is a col-
laborative endeavor in which all of the actors produce knowledge and perform
different roles”.
Anna’s pedagogical strategy is different. She also tries to avail of her students’
funds of knowledge but she remains in charge of interactions in order to bring
migrant students to use the French language and to understand its categorisation
system:

Anna: alors c’est quoi Abdou? Ça c’est quoi Abdou / viens nous montrer / qu’est-ce
que c’est mwiri? ((So, what is it Abdou? What is that Abdou/ Come and show us/
what does “mwiri” mean?)
[Abdou se lève et montre l’image de l’arbre silencieusement] (Abdu stands up and
silently shows the picture of the tree)
54 P. Prax-Dubois and C. Hélot

Anna: SUPER / Comment on dit en français? (Great/ How do you say it in French)
Groupe d’élèves: un A: RBRE (Student group: tree)

In other words, the teacher keeps in charge of the circulation of languages in

the classroom, starting with the words in the multilingual book to move towards
French, but the students do not perceive her interest in their own knowledge, and
they need more time to understand the communicative situation. Furthermore,
this activity (using the multilingual book) is not related to a social project but
only to learning some vocabulary items by heart.
Anna, however, has enough courage to be aware of it and to change her didac-
tic approach leaving aside the normative multilingual wordbook. Indeed, she
finishes her lesson with a more natural conversation highlighting her students’
linguistic practices out of school. But the necessary safe space for the students
to express themselves freely is not solid enough and the friendly and well- inten-
tioned questioning of the teacher, who is not aware of such pre-conditions, turns
into a kind of cross-examination:

Anna: alors Abdou toi tu parles le maore à la maison? (So Abdou, what language do
you speak at home?
[Abdou confirme d’un hochement de tête] (Abdou nods)
Anna: avec qui? avec papa avec maman avec tes frères et sœurs? (With whom? Your
Dad, your Mum, your brothers and sisters?)
[Abdou infirme avec un mouvement de tête de droite à gauche] (Abdou denies turn-
ing his head from right to left)
Anna: Ben / Inchati / toi tu parles le maore? (Well, Inchati, do you speak Maore?)
[Inchati confirme d’un hochement de tête] (Inchati nods)
Anna: avec qui? (With whom?)
[___] (silence)
[…]
Anna: avec papa? (With Dad?)
[___]

All dialogues are socio-historically situated and give rise to ambivalent feelings
towards the languages used (López-Gopar 2016). Without an awareness of and an
inscription of these exchanges in the history of colonisation in the Indian Ocean,
the identity investments of some students meet with the identity assignations of
others and because these processes remain hidden the relationships of power
reproduce themselves in the classroom.
Translanguaging in Multilingual Pre-Primary Classrooms … 55

5 Promoting Inclusion and Social Justice in French

Postcolonial Pre-Primary Classrooms

Including students’ knowledge in the education agenda and promoting social jus-
tice means teacher education should start with a thorough reflexion on linguis-
tic ideologies, the sharing of knowledge and evaluation (Shohamy 2006). Piller
(2016, p. 127 f.) explains how submersive education which, according to UNE-
SCO (2016) concerns 40% of students in the world accessing school knowledge
through a language which is not theirs, imposes on these children a double chal-
lenge: “having to learn curriculum content through a new language while study-
ing curriculum content in that language”. This is the reason why, in our opinion,
it beholds teacher educators both in mainland France and in its overseas terri-
tories, to make teachers aware of the three functions of the French language at
school: the first being instruction, the second communication, both in the tradi-
tional sense given to the French language in the curriculum, and the third function
should not be forgotten, subordination.
To illustrate our point, we look again at Anna and Isabelle’s strategies in order
to conceptualize a teacher education model which could put into perspective the
three essential dimensions of the process of othering as elaborated by Spivak
(1985): a) the systematic reference to the moral and cultural inferiority of targeted
subjects that Mignolo (2000/2012) expressed in terms of colonial difference, b)
the continuous reminder of their subordination in the name of this inferiority, and
c) the colonial mediation which aim is to control access to resources and in this
way leads to the maintenance of the allegiance of subaltern subjects. As a coun-
terpoint to these three factors of subordination, we outline below three strategies
developed to various degrees by the two teachers.

5.1 Valuing and Promoting a Social Approach

to Language

Anna listens to her students with what she knows or she thinks she knows of the
translation of the multilingual wordbook. Her beliefs, born out of her ideologies,
lead to the children’s silence while they are trying to figure out misunderstandings
in the interaction. Isabelle, whose professional history is different, uses her didac-
tic resources to listen to children with what she does not know. Because she can
bring together her students’ discourses and their understanding of the world, they
become language teachers, too (López-Gopar 2016).
56 P. Prax-Dubois and C. Hélot

It is tempting to link this approach to the language awareness approach. This

approach allows for students to make links between different languages and gives
emergent bilingual children an expert role in languages excluded from the cur-
riculum. However, in France, this type of approach continues to insist on nor-
malized languages as pre-existing the students’ spontaneous language practices.
Furthermore, valuing and legitimating family languages within the framework of
language awareness is not sufficient (Coste 1995; Hélot 2007; Hélot and Rubio
2013). For example, García (2017, p. 267 f.) reminds us that too often “some
multilingual awareness programs pay more attention to dominant languages
than to their communities’ own regional and immigrant languages”, and do not
sufficiently insist on the link between the present—day linguistic diversity and
the history of colonisation in the world. Therefore, when educating teachers in
La Réunion (or elsewhere), it is necessary to articulate language awareness with
complementary approaches deconstructing the processes of subordination of
minoritized groups.

5.2 Reappropriating the History of Human Interactions

Anna and Isabelle interpret the top-down language policies and formulate their
own didactic approach according to the way they conceive their agency in rela-
tion to their perceptions of constraints, each of them in their own professional
context (Prax-Dubois 2018). What Anna is lacking is the very strength of Isabelle,
an understanding of micro and macro sociolinguistic and sociohistorical contexts
and an awareness of the interdependence of these contexts at different levels. Her
objective was to build “the common history of the class” (Hélot 2007, p. 158)
with, as a background, a questioning of the separation of the world between East
and West, geographical spaces which like languages, are “made by men” (Said
1978/2005, p. 17) and need to be disinvented (Makoni and Pennycook 2007).
To help teachers to understand these processes, García (2017, p. 277) proposes
to move from the framework of language awareness to that of critical multilingual
awareness and to integrate in the teacher education curriculum three essential
competences: “awareness of plurilingualism and the importance of democratic
citizenship, awareness of colonial histories and of imperialistic oppression and,
awareness that language is socially created, and thus socially changeable”. These
main principles were at work in the Didenheim project in Alsace (Hélot 2007)
which objectives were to challenge intolerance, racism and violence through
the cultural rootedness of such processes (Hélot 2007) in order to decolonize
Translanguaging in Multilingual Pre-Primary Classrooms … 57

them (Hélot 2019). Rehistorizing language education is also the main aim of the
CEAR10 project in Mexico (López-Gopar 2016), which showed how important
it is to explore the historical dimension of the children’s backgrounds as a key
process to decolonize primary English language teaching. However, in the face of
hierarchical control,11 it is also crucial for teachers to work collaboratively.

5.3 A Critical Analysis of Mediation Processes: Who

Says What, How and Why?

For teachers to go against the grain, Spivak explains that they should be made
aware of othering processes by looking at the “other” as a fighting partner for
social justice rather than as an anthropological being. This reflection on the other
is first of all a reflection to be carried out on oneself. It is based on the distance
the teacher allows herself to take towards institutional discourses but also on the
type of mediation one decides to implement as a counterpart to colonial media-
tion, this in order to give subaltern subjects access to resources. In other words,
subaltern subjects should always collaborate to be more efficient in their trans-
formative practices.
In La Reunion, Lebon-Eyquem (2018) has elaborated a hermeneutic approach
for her master’s course in language science. Through an analysis based on
­self-reflection and the rehistoricization of their biographical narratives, her stu-
dents became beginner researchers. Her research shows the impact of their
exchanges on the questioning and negotiation of their positioning towards pluri-
lingualism. She noticed for example, how some of them managed to uncover the
symbolic and ideological processes that hide in many speakers’ representations
of languages. Engaging in such a reflective process could be linked to educat-
ing students to critical discourse analysis. We would like to argue that this could
help teachers to apprehend differently the socio-economic, historical, linguistic
and educational phenomena which are more interdependent than what they con-
ceive of by systematically asking: who says what and why? How does it impact
my professional practice, my ideologies, those of my colleagues, of parents, of
inspectors, of people visiting my classrooms, etc.? While keeping in mind that,

10Critical-Ethnographic-Action-Research project.
11Readers need to know that teachers in France are regularly “controlled” by inspectors
whose role is to make sure the national curriculum is implemented.
58 P. Prax-Dubois and C. Hélot

“language belongs to speakers rather than to nation states” (Hélot 2019, p. 94)
and that once aware of this, everything is possible.

6 Conclusion

As educators working today in French schools either on the mainland or in

overseas territories (the two contexts are intrinsically linked by their colonial
past), it beholds us to implement inclusion and social justice meaningfully. This
means that we cannot continue to ignore the double impact of colonial history
and imperialistic oppression on school failure, two factors which according to
García (2017) and Hélot (2019) are at the heart of most multilingual contexts
today. Therefore, we have crossed research on subaltern studies with research on
translanguaging and argued that both theories can provide us with the concep-
tual tools we need to deconstruct the paradigm of absolute efficiency that sepa-
rates the world today, no longer in terms of what is fair or unfair but according
to the survival of the fittest, or between former masters and new slaves (Camus
1951/2010). We believe this is possible from the very first years of early school-
ing, that is from the beginning of the appropriation of named languages, and the
subordination of human beings to market driven societies.

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Translanguaging in Early Childhood
Education in Luxembourg: From
Practice to Pedagogy

Claudine Kirsch and Claudia Seele

Abstract

An inclusive translanguaging pedagogy aims to promote learning and par-

ticipation by drawing on the learners’ entire semiotic repertoire. The focus of
this chapter are the translanguaging practices of four early years practition-
ers in Luxembourg. We analyse the deployment of their linguistic repertoire,
their reasons for translanguaging, and the ways in which their practices con-
tributed to inclusion and participation. We found that the practices comprised
using linguistic resources dynamically, translating, and ‘home languaging,’
and depended on the practitioners’ pedagogical stance. We argue that multilin-
gual practices need to be embedded in a reflexive translanguaging pedagogy in
order to enhance inclusion.

Keywords

Early childhood education · Luxembourg · Translanguaging pedagogy · Inclusion

C. Kirsch (*)
University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
e-mail: [email protected]
C. Seele
RAA Mecklenburg-Vorpommern e. V., Waren (Müritz), Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 63

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_5
64 C. Kirsch and C. Seele

1 Introduction

Educational institutions worldwide must cope with increasingly heterogeneous

intakes and, therefore, monolingual pedagogical strategies are no longer appropri-
ate. Owing to migration and globalisation, a growing number of children enter
these institutions with more varied linguistic repertoires than those of the domi-
nant majority. However, their resources are neither fully acknowledged by edu-
cation systems nor systematically included in policies, curricula and teaching
practices. In education, inclusion refers to ‘a process of addressing and respond-
ing to the diversity of needs of all children, youth and adults through increasing
participation in learning, cultures and communities’ (UNESCO 2009, p. 8 f.).
The index for inclusion in early childhood education (Booth et al. 2008) provides
professionals with concrete strategies that promote inclusion such as recognis-
ing cultural and linguistic diversity as a resource, showing respect for children’s
identities and cultures, and drawing on differences to support play, learning and
the participation of all children. Language policies on early language education
of the European Commission address the necessity to accommodate children’s
diverse needs and backgrounds, and promote equal opportunities and social jus-
tice (e.g. European Commission 2011). Translanguaging is a central pillar for
realising more inclusive, learner-centered, multilingual pedagogies (García and Li
Wei 2014; García et al. 2017). As a sociolinguistic and socio-educational concept,
translanguaging refers, on the one hand, to the process of deploying one’s entire
semiotic repertoire to make meaning and communicate and, on the other hand, to
pedagogical practices that leverage these processes to support learning and par-
ticipation (García and Otheguy 2019).
In Luxembourg, multilingualism is an everyday reality (Fehlen and Heinz
2016). Apart from the three official languages – Luxembourgish, French and Ger-
man – many more are spoken on account of the high proportion of immigrants
in Luxembourg. In 2018, 47.5% of the residents did not have Luxembourgish
citizenship (STATEC 2019) and 63.7% of the four- to six-year-olds spoke a first
language other than Luxembourgish (MENJE 2019). Despite this multilingual
reality, educational practices were found to hold on to monolingual norms and
policies of separating and excluding languages (Christmann 2011; Neumann
2015; Seele 2016). Studies such as PISA, PIRLS and the national épreuves stand-
ardisés (standardised tests) have repeatedly shown that academic achievement
largely depends on students’ socio-economic, migrant and language backgrounds
(MENJE 2018). Recent language education policies therefore call for multilin-
gual approaches in early childhood which aim to reduce the persistent inequalities
in attainment and promote social justice.
Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education in Luxembourg … 65

The present chapter focuses on the translanguaging practices of professionals

in early education and a day-care center in Luxembourg. Early childhood educa-
tion is divided into formal and non-formal institutions (Kirsch and Seele 2020).
Formal education for young children is organised within the official school sys-
tem and comprises a two-year compulsory preschool for four- to six-year-olds
and an optional preschool year for three-year-olds called the éducation précoce
(early education). In the éducation précoce, teachers and caregivers collaborate
and follow the national primary school curriculum. Non-formal educational insti-
tutions are a more recent development. They include state or private out-of-school
educational institutions such as day-care centers (MFI and SNJ 2013). Profes-
sionals adhere to the national framework plan for non-formal education (MENJE
and SNJ 2018). In this paper, we analyse the ways in which professionals deploy
their semiotic repertoire and examine the extent to which their translanguaging
practices contribute to inclusion and participation. The data for the present chap-
ter stem from observations and interviews of the project ‘Developing Multilingual
Pedagogies in Early Childhood’ (MuLiPEC), conducted from 2016 to 2019 by
Kirsch.

2 Translanguaging Pedagogies

The call for more flexible approaches that open up to the diversity of the chil-
dren and can accommodate their needs comes from various fields: the index for
inclusion (Booth et al. 2008), work on linguistic human rights (Skutnabb-Kangas
1995), and education (Weber 2014), to name a few. ‘Multilingual pedagogies’
(García and Flores 2012) or ‘translanguaging pedagogies’ (García et al. 2012,
2017) recognise the existence of multiple linguistic resources in educational
institutions and attempt to leverage students’ unitary semiotic system to support
meaning-making and learning (García et al. 2017). This resource-based pedagogy
places the learners at the center, values their linguistic and cultural practices,
and offers them some choice over their language use. The transglossic learning
arrangements challenge dominant monolingual practices and equalize positions
of learners’ by allowing them to deploy their multilingual repertoires flexibly.
To contribute to the implementation of the pedagogy and help practitioners
conceptualise the main aspects, García et al. (2017) identified three interrelated
elements; stance, design and shifts. The stance refers to the teachers’ commitment
to embrace multilingualism, draw on students’ repertoires, and consider their lan-
guages as part of a unitary system rather than as isolated and bounded entities.
The design refers to the curriculum and activities that integrate children’s diverse
66 C. Kirsch and C. Seele

linguistic and multimodal resources and enable children to connect home and
school languages. The shifts denote the teachers’ deviations from the design and
the flexible ways in which they adapt to the children’s needs.
Studies in monolingual, bilingual and multilingual early years settings have
identified various purposes and benefits of translanguaging: facilitating communi-
cation and meaning-making, promoting participation and learning and supporting
the children’s socio-emotional development and multilingual identities (García
2011; Garrity et al. 2015; Kirsch 2017). In these studies, translanguaging was
transformative in that it changed individuals and made teachers develop inclusive
practices which valued all languages and challenged dominant monolingual prac-
tices. This was the case when teachers raised the status of minority languages,
drew on the children’s varied funds of knowledge for learning, and designed col-
laborative tasks where children used their linguistic repertoires flexibly (Gort and
Sembiante 2015; Mary and Young 2017; Palviainen et al. 2016).
Some studies shed light on the relationship between translanguaging and
inclusion. Studying translanguaging in a bilingual education programme in a
secondary school in Sri Lanka, Wijesekera et al. (2018) found that the teachers
generated inclusion through creating feelings of solidarity and interdependence
between students of two ethnicities, who had historically lived in separation and
anxiety. This led to respect and the feeling of being a member of a community.
Examining the use of multiple languages in a Dutch-medium secondary school
in Brussels, Jaspers (2015) concluded that this practice may reinforce traditional
language hierarchies. While abiding to the school’s monolingual language policy,
the teachers, Mr S in particular, reverted at times to French and the children’s
home languages including Turkish and Arabic. This flexible language use created
some ‘camaraderie’ (p. 125) between Mr S and the students. While students may
have felt respected, valued and more included, Jaspers argued that this languaging
practice also raised the students’ awareness of language hierarchies. Given that
the home languages were only used at transitional moments and in a playful way,
they had less status. Furthermore, Hamman (2018) showed that the flexible lan-
guage use in a primary dual-language class in the US led to children’s unequal
participation. The teachers and children used more English than Spanish which
provided the English-dominant children with more opportunities to show their
expertise and at times positioned the Spanish-dominant speakers as different.
Finally, Mary and Young (2017) reported that a preschool teacher in France used
translanguaging strategically to help children learn. The teacher used words and
concepts in Turkish to show the three- to four-year-olds that she was knowledge-
able of some cultural practices. This helped the children connect linguistic and
cultural practices at home and at school. The resulting inclusive practice testifies
Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education in Luxembourg … 67

to the teacher’s intercultural competence ‘underpinned by the value she places on

equity and her consequent commitment to offer all the children in her care equal
access to education’ (Mary and Young 2017, p. 8). Taken together, Jaspers (2015),
Hamman (2018), Mary and Young (2017) and Palviainen et al. (2016) seem to
agree that teachers should carefully monitor their language use, that is plan how
to use translanguaging strategically in teaching and learning in order to promote
inclusion and ensure participation.
In sum, this section has shown that the translanguaging pedagogy intents to
promote children’s learning and participation through the inclusion of their entire
linguistic and non-linguistic repertoires. Studies focusing on the relationship
between translanguaging and inclusion in early education are scarce. Moreover,
most studies either focused on one institutional language and the children’s home
languages (e.g. Belgium, France) or two institutional languages (e.g. Finland,
Sri Lanka, US). Virtually no studies paid attention to the languaging practices
of multilingual children and staff in contexts where two or more languages are
used. The present study addresses these gaps and examines the translanguaging
practices in a day-care center and a class of the édcuation précoce in multilingual
Luxembourg in relation to inclusion. In order to examine if and how these prac-
tices are embedded in a reflexive translanguaging pedagogy that implies a more
general inclusive stance (García et al. 2017), we ask:

• In what ways do practitioners deploy their linguistic repertoire?

• Why do they translanguage?
• To what extent does their translanguaging practice contribute to the inclusion
and participation of all children?

3 Methodology

The present case study is part of the longitudinal research project MuLiPEC
which examines the influence of a professional development course about mul-
tilingual pedagogies on the practitioners’ knowledge, beliefs and practices (see
Kirsch and Aleksić 2018). In this chapter, we focus on the practitioners of one
formal and one non-formal education setting, who work with three-year-olds. Ms
Clara (teacher) and Ms Jane (educator) work in an éducation précoce in a town
in the South of Luxembourg and Mr Ken and Mr Ted are educators in a day-care
center in the Center of Luxembourg. All four are aged between 30 and 39, have
more than 10 years’ experience and are multilingual. They all speak Luxembour-
gish, French, German, and English and Ms Clara and Mr Ken some Portuguese
68 C. Kirsch and C. Seele

and Spanish respectively. The language diversity of the children was high in
each setting. None of the 11 children in the précoce spoke Luxembourgish as a
home language, but Arabic, Cape Verdean Créole, French, Portuguese, and Ser-
bian/Croatian/Bosnian were spoken. While most children were from working
class backgrounds in this school, most children in the day-care center were from
middle-class families. Of the 21 children, most did not speak Luxembourgish as
a home language but Arabic, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Portu-
guese, Russian, Spanish, and Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian were spoken.
The present chapter draws its data from 36 days of observations in the set-
tings, 6 observations of the professional development course, and 11 inter-
views. A research assistant, Mortini (PhD candidate), and Kirsch observed and
­video-recorded daily interactions. An overview of the activities is given in Table 1.
All video-recordings and interviews were transcribed and relevant paralinguis-
tic resources (e.g. tone of voice) and extralinguistic resources (e.g. mime, ges-
tures) were included in the observations. To analyse the translanguaging practices,
Kirsch identified, firstly, monolingual and multilingual dialogues. Next, she ana-
lysed the deployment of the practitioners’ and the children’s linguistic resources
in transglossic situations, examining which features of the repertoire were used
and how these were orchestrated. Codes included using resources flexibly, trans-
lating and ‘home languaging’. The first code refers to instances where adults and
children dynamically combine various verbal and non-verbal resources from their
repertoires to communicate in bi- or multilingual conversation. Translating means
that specific key words or sentences are translated from Luxembourgish to another
language or vice-versa. In other words, the same content is mentioned in two
‘named’ languages. Finally, the code ‘home languaging’ denotes situations of lan-
guage separation where adults switched from Luxembourgish to a home language
to talk to a particular child, thereby remaining in a monolingual mode. Thus,
they may speak French to one child, German to another and Luxembourgish to
the whole group, using one language with one person at the time. The categories
may of course overlap and we distinguish them mainly for analytical purposes. In
order to identify the nature and purpose of translanguaging, Kirsch made a micro-

Tab. 1 Overview of the type of language promoting activities

N° activities Story-telling Language Ritualised Singing Art N° activities
activities activities
Précoce 7 10 10 6 7 40
Day-care 7 10 4 4 3 28
center
Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education in Luxembourg … 69

analysis of teacher talk (Seedhouse 2005), coding for communication, knowledge

construction, well-being, inclusion/exclusion as well as interaction promoting
strategies (e.g. asking questions) and language modelling strategies (e.g. correc-
tive feedback). The findings generated from the video-recordings were compared
across the two settings and triangulated with the interviews. The latter were ana-
lysed with thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) with a particular focus on
the reasons for translanguaging and the relationship between translanguaging and
inclusion.

4 Findings and Discussion

Languaging practices were, according to the practitioners, largely shaped by

the traditional monolingual curriculum and the expectations of parents who had
enrolled their children in the précoce or the day-care center to learn Luxembour-
gish. The practitioners explained that they had a habit of using Luxembourgish
unless they needed to comfort a child during the settling-in-phase. Over the
course of the professional development, they learned and experienced that trans-
languaging promoted language learning and did not confuse children (García
2009). Mr Ken explained that he felt good, ‘almost freed’ because he could let
children communicate in their home languages without him having to ask ‘do I
have to intervene, do I have to insist on Luxembourgish?’. He believed that he
could better accommodate children’s needs. Ms Clara and Ms Jane similarly
reported using home languages more frequently, feeling ‘relieved’ and ‘less con-
strained’ (interviews, March and June 2017). From February 2017, thus more
than half a year into the professional development path, translanguaging became
a legitimate practice in all settings (Kirsch et al. 2020). While all practitioners
deployed features of several ‘named’ languages of their repertoire, they combined
these in different ways. The following three sections present the orchestration
of these linguistic resources in a more bilingual, monolingual and multilingual
mode.

4.1 Using Translations

The practitioners in both settings regularly translated from Luxembourgish to a

home language other than Luxembourgish and vice versa, across the different
types of activities and for several purposes. Firstly, they translated key-words and
sentences to facilitate communication, ensure comprehension and value home
70 C. Kirsch and C. Seele

languages as shown elsewhere (Gort and Sembiante 2015; Mary and Young 2017;
Lewis et al. 2013). Representative examples of both settings in Luxembourg fol-
low. In October 2016, the children in the précoce mixed salt, flour and water to
produce salt paste. When Abdul vigorously stirred the mixture, Ms Clara shouted
in Luxembourgish ‘lues’ (slowly) which she translated into French (‘doucement’),
Abdul’s home language. The translation ensured that Abdul understood the warn-
ing, which he may not have understood in Luxembourgish. In the day-care center,
Mr Ken translated some words into English to engage an English-speaking child
named Aaron during the sharing of a book on animals. In Excerpt 1, he pointed to
a tiger and Paul, a Luxembourgish-speaking child, mentioned that it was friendly.
Mr Ken asked Paul if it looked friendly (line 2). Aaron uttered ‘not friendly’ in
Luxembourgish, disagreeing with Paul (line 3). Mr Ken translated these two
words into English and turned them into a clarification question (line 4). Aaron
confirmed in Luxembourgish that the tiger was not friendly without any further
elaboration.

Actor Original utterance (Luxembourgish, English translation

English)
1 Paul Awer ‘t ass ee léiwen Tiger. But it is a friendly tiger.
2 Mr Ken Wéi weess du dann, dass ee léif ass? How do you know that it is friendly?
Kuckt e léif? Does it look friendly?
3 Aaron Net léif. Not friendly.
4 Mr Ken Not nice? Not nice?
5 Aaron Nee. No.

Excerpt 1 Book on animals (07.11.2016)

Secondly, translating was used to promote language learning. When teaching

key words, Ms Clara and Ms Jane translated these to help children understand
and memorise the words by encoding them in two languages. Furthermore, they
regularly translated from Portuguese or French into Luxembourgish to help chil-
dren follow a conversation and encourage their participation. During a story-
telling activity in February 2017 (Excerpt 2), for example, three-year-old Sarah
described a picture in Portuguese, which led Ms Clara to translate the child’s
utterance into Luxembourgish. This translation legitimised the use of Portuguese
in class and enabled the non-Portuguese children to understand Sarah’s contribu-
tion. Ms Clara then extended the sentence to provide additional input in Luxem-
bourgish.
Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education in Luxembourg … 71

Actor Original utterance English translation

(Luxembourgish, Portuguese)
Sarah Tem livros na cabeça. It has books in his head.
Ms Clara Deen huet Bicher um Kapp. An dann He has books on his head. And then he tries
probéiert hien ze trëppelen, mee dat to walk but this is difficult.
ass schwéier.

Excerpt 2 Storytelling activity, book project (06.02.2017)

Translating is one of many communication strategies, as illustrated in the follow-

ing example of Ms Clara. During one morning circle in February 2017, for exam-
ple, when the children routinely counted all children, then the boys and the girls
in turn, Abdul became confused. Rather than counting the boys, he counted the
girls. Ms Clara repeated the Luxembourgish word for boys and made a ‘no’ ges-
ture with her fingers, when Abdul began to count the girls a second and a third
time. She then translated the word ‘boy’ into French, but realising that Abdul did
still not know what to do, she showed him a picture of a boy and repeated the
Luxembourgish word, articulating it slowly and carefully. Abdul finally under-
stood his task. This example shows that Ms Clara orchestrated many resources
of her multimodal semiotic repertoire (Blackledge et al. 2017; García and Oth-
eguy 2019). Translating, a bilingual strategy, did not suffice to help Abdul under-
stand the word ‘boy’. Given that young children are in the process of developing
concepts, they need to experience word meanings in a wider range of ways and
teacher-led translanguaging can therefore contribute to meaning-making.
There were plentiful examples of translating for the purpose of learning words
in the day-care center. Excerpt 3 shows Gaspard saying ‘knife’ in French and Mr
Ken translating the word into Luxembourgish and praising Gaspard. In Excerpt 4,
Tony mentioned a colour in Luxembourgish, which Mr Ken translated for Gas-
pard into French.

Actor Description Original utterance English translation

(Luxembourgish, French)
Gaspard Taking a knife Couteau Knife
Mr Ken Pointing Mat engem Messer. Richteg With a knife. Correct, Gaspard,
Gaspard, super. super.

Excerpt 3 Conversation over lunch (09.01.2017)

72 C. Kirsch and C. Seele

Actor Description Original utterance English translation

(Luxembourgish, French)
Tony Gréng Green
Mr Ken To Gaspard Vert Green

Excerpt 4 Language activity (19.06.2017)

The educators in the day-care center had developed the practice of asking chil-
dren for labels and translations, unlike the practitioners in the précoce. Excerpt 5
is drawn from the activity with the animal book (November 2016). Turning to
Aaron, Mr Ken switched from Luxembourgish to English and asked if he had
seen a fox (line 1). Aaron pointed to one. Switching back to Luxembourgish, Mr
Ken asked for a translation of ‘fox’ (line 3). Aaron said daddy in Luxembourgish,
expressing the idea that the fox is male. Mr Ken repeated his question and Aaron
responded in Luxembourgish that he did not know. Aurélie created a Luxem-
bourgish compound to indicate that the fox was female. She thereby challenged
Aaron.

Actor Original utterance English translation

(Luxembourgish, English)
1 Mr Ken Aaron, have you seen? Where is Aaron, have you seen? Where is the
the fox? fox?
2 Aaron (pointing) (pointing)
3 Mr Ken Wéi heescht deen dann? Wéi What is it called? What do we call it?
nenne mir deen?
4 Aaron Papa Daddy
5 Mr Ken A wéi soe mir op And how do you say in
Lëtzebuergesch? Luxembourgish?
6 Aaron Ech weess net. I don’t know.
7 Aurélie Nee, ‘t ass ee Mamafuuss. No, it is a mummy fox.

Excerpt 5 Book on animals (07.11.2016)

An analysis of the classroom discourse revealed that the practitioners in the school
setting used different interaction promoting strategies and engaged children differ-
ently from the practitioners in the day-care center. Mr Ken and Mr Ted tended to
work at the word-level, believing that three-year-olds develop languages in stages
and are at the word-level stage (interview, September 2016). This may explain
their focus on label quests and translations (Excerpts 1, 3, 4, 5). They tended to
use closed questions to stimulate talk but rarely used modelling strategies such
Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education in Luxembourg … 73

as c­ orrective feedback and extensions unlike Ms Clara and Ms Jane (Excerpt 2).
Another difference is the ‘automatic’ use of translations. Mr Ken and Mr Ted
explained that they wished all children to feel well and included, and that the use of
the children’s home language contributed to this aim. However, the purpose of their
translations was not always clear: they translated when there was no apparent need
and no signs of misunderstanding. Aaron spoke Luxembourgish (Excerpts 1, 5)
and Gaspard was able to speak Luxembourgish in June 2017 (Excerpt 4) but the
educators translated nevertheless. Ms Clara and Ms Jane, by contrast, used translat-
ing more purposefully and in combination with other strategies, which would sug-
gest a more careful monitoring both of the children’s needs and their own language
use (García 2009; Palviainen et al. 2016).

4.2 Home Languaging

At the beginning of the academic year, all practitioners switched from Lux-
embourgish to a home language within an otherwise Luxembourgish space for
communicative purposes other than translating words. This practice happened
across activities and was legitimated by the intention to contribute to children’s
­well-being (see also Seele 2016).

[Using home languages] is particularly important at the beginning of a school year

to ensure that children feel well, accepted and understood. Furthermore, they are
less afraid if we explain something in their language and request something. They
develop a sense of security. Slowly, you then add Luxembourgish.
(Interview Ms Clara and Ms Jane, 9.9.2016)

The idea that the use of home languages is helpful and legitimate in the early stages
but then needs to be replaced, as seen in the interview excerpt, was expressed by
all practitioners. Through the professional development path, they became aware of
the relationship between home language, well-being, identity and language learn-
ing and therefore continued to use home languages during the whole academic year
(Cummins 2000; Mary and Young 2017; Kirsch 2017). This was particularly the
case when they wanted to comfort or discipline a child or ensure comprehension.
While working on an assessment task at the end of the school year in June 2017,
Ms Jane switched from Luxembourgish to Portuguese to accommodate for San-
dro’s linguistic needs. She explained the task in Portuguese to be sure he under-
stood. As seen previously, Mr Ken switched to English to address Aaron (Excerpts
1 and 5) and to French to address Gaspard (Excerpt 4). Excerpt 6 illustrates a simi-
lar switch to French by Mr Ted to address Gaspard during an outdoor play activity.
74 C. Kirsch and C. Seele

Gaspard sat in a huge box, playing on his own. Mr Ted approached him, sat in front
of the box and tried to engage him in a conversation. He put a card box piece on
top of the box and called Gaspard. Gaspard looked up but did not speak. Mr Ted
switched to French asking him to use the board to make a window. When Gaspard
did not react verbally, Mr Ted built a ‘window’ himself and tried to play peekaboo
(line 1). Gaspard looked up but did not react. Mr Ted put more pieces close to the
box, encouraging Gaspard to build a window (line 3). Gaspard did not react. When
Nadia arrived, Mr Ted switched back to Luxembourgish, asking if she wanted to
get into the box and informing her that they were building a window (line 5). He
then called Gaspard, asking him to look. The conversation shifted from monolin-
gual French (lines 1, 3) to monolingual Luxembourgish (line 5).

Actor Description Original utterance English translation

(Luxembourgish,
French)
1 Mr Ted Building Fais une fenêtre! Build a window! Gaspard,
window Gaspard, regarde. Tu look. Can you see? Good
peux voir? Bonjour. morning. Good morning.
Bonjour.
2 Gaspard looking
3 Mr Ted Taking more Encore une fenêtre. Tu Another window. Do you
pieces and veux? Gaspard, tu veux want? Gaspard, do you want
putting them une fenêtre? a window?
close to the box
4 Nadia arrives
5 Mr Ted Gees du och an Will you go into the box as
d’Këscht Nadia? Mir well, Nadia? We build a
maachen eng Fënster. window. Gaspard, look.
Gaspard, kuck.

Excerpt 6 Outdoor play (27.03.2017)

The switch to French was intended to engage Gaspard in a conversation but Mr

Ted did not succeed. Gaspard played happily on his own and did not wish to
engage, notwithstanding the use of the home language or the number of prompts.
This excerpt illustrates the educators’ adult-centerd way of interacting without
paying close attention to the child’s linguistic, social or emotional interests. Many
observations revealed that the educators seemed to find it difficult to observe or
carefully listen to children, let them take a lead, and engage them in a meaning-
ful way. By addressing children in their home language while they tried to com-
municate in the language of the institution, the educators may well have ‘othered’
these children (Thomauske 2017).
Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education in Luxembourg … 75

4.3 Using Resources Flexibly and Dynamically

Children in both settings were observed combining features of their semiotic rep-
ertoire in flexible ways to communicate. By contrast, we observed mainly the
practitioners in the précoce orchestrate their linguistic as well as paralinguistic
and extralinguistic resources in dynamic ways. A first example presented was
the observation of Abdul counting boys. This fluid translanguaging practice was
observed in most activities from the second term onwards once the children had
developed more skills in Luxembourgish and Ms Jane in Portuguese. Both prac-
titioners seemed to have opened up to multilingual education and developed a
translanguaging stance. Excerpt 7 illustrates Ms Clara and Felice translanguag-
ing while looking at a book during free-play. This excerpt is typical of situa-
tions of dialogic reading in this classroom and illustrates how adults and children
weaved together multimodal and multilingual resources to communicate, negoti-
ate meaning and ensure comprehension. In this particular dialogue, only two peo-
ple participate. Moving easily between Luxembourgish, Portuguese and English
and using the whole body enabled Ms Clara and Felice to co-construct meaning.
The ­three-year old boy pointed to details in the picture, labelled the animals in
Portuguese (lines 1, 5), and used English (line 3) or Luxembourgish with Portu-
guese (lines 7, 11) to make himself understood. To guarantee comprehension, he
pointed and imitated the slithering movement of a snake. The teacher listened to
Felice and confirmed (lines 2, 4) or corrected his speech (line 6) when he con-
fused snakes with worms. To help Felice remember the names of the animals and
the word ‘heart’, she pointed to the objects in the book, drew a heart on his chest
to make him feel the shape (line 12), repeated words (lines 4, 6, 8) and trans-
lated (lines 2, 4, 6, 10). As Felice did not know the word ladybird, she offered
him the word in Luxembourgish and Portuguese. Felice not only had an opportu-
nity to acquire the Luxembourgish names of the animals he knew in Portuguese
but he may also have learned more about a grasshopper, a snake and a ladybird.
Ms Clara showed him the grasshopper he had not mentioned and provided some
explanations (line 2). She also rephrased his short utterances and embedded them
in slightly larger chunks (line 8, 12) to promote language learning. In contrast to
Excerpt 6 of the day-care center, Ms Clara monitored her speech and was highly
responsive to the child’s interests and needs. She let Felice take the lead, provided
input when necessary to move the conversation on, translated with a purpose in
mind and created a space where both could use their entire semiotic repertoire
76 C. Kirsch and C. Seele

for ­ meaning-making. The range of strategies deployed, such as translations,

­repetitions, explanations, questions, corrective feedback, pointing and drawing
are very similar to the strategies used by other teachers (e.g. Mary and Young
2017; Mifsud and Vella 2018). In this carefully scaffolded child-initiated interac-
tion, Ms Clara posits both herself and the child as multilingual. This position-
ing, which includes and legitimates the child’s language practices, may enhance
the child’s confidence and well-being and make him feel valued and included in
class. It is a core strategy of a translanguaging pedagogy according to Palmer
et al. (2014).

Actor Description Utterance (Luxembourgish, English translation

Portuguese, English)
1 Felice pointing Caracol Snail.
2 Ms Clara Jo, do ass e Schleek. Yes, this is a snail. A
pointing En Heesprenger, gell, de grasshopper, it jumps,
sprengt. doesn’t it?
3 Felice pointing Oh, another one. Oh, another one.
4 Ms Clara Nach een. Schleek. Another one. Snail.
5 Felice slithering Oh, cobra. Uh, snake.
like a snake
on the floor
6 Ms Clara Nee, et ass keng Schlaang, et No, it is not a snake, it is a
ass e Wuerm. Et ass e Wuerm. worm. It is a worm. (…)
7 Felice pointing to a Uh, roud e schwaarz. Uh, red and black.
ladybird
8 Ms Clara Et ass roud mat schwaarze It is red and has black dots
Punkte, mee wéi heescht but what is it called?
deen?
9 Felice Eu não sei o que é. I do not know what it is.
10 Ms Clara Ah, weess du et net? Dat ass Uh, you do not know? That
en Himmelsdéierchen. is a ladybird. A ladybird.
Joaninha. (…)
11 Felice pointing to a En huet en coração. He has a heard.
heart
12 Ms Clara drawing a Jo, en hued en Häerz um Yes, he has a heart on his
heart on his Bauch. belly.
chest

Excerpt 7 Book reading in the précoce (04.07.2017)

Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education in Luxembourg … 77

5 Summary and Conclusions

Focusing on practitioners in early childhood education in Luxembourg, this chap-

ter set out to analyse their reasons for translanguaging, the deployment of their
linguistic repertoire, and the ways in which their practice contributed to inclusion
and participation. The results showed that all four practitioners associated trans-
languaging with particular aims such as communication, learning, participation,
well-being and recognition of home languages (García 2011; Garrity et al. 2015;
Gort and Sembiante 2015; Kirsch 2017). Furthermore, we found that all practi-
tioners, who adhered to monolingual policies at the beginning of the professional
development path, began to deploy their multilingual and multimodal repertoires
more flexibly. This encouraged children to use language features dynamically.
Translanguaging became a legitimate practice. The adults’ multilingual language
practices included translating, ‘home languaging’ and, especially in the case of
the précoce, using semiotic resources flexibly and fluidly. Like teachers else-
where (Gort and Sembiante 2015; Mary and Young 2017; Palviainen et al. 2016),
the practitioners in Luxembourg frequently deployed translations. Unlike other
studies, they also reverted to various home languages for purposes other than
translations. To ensure their well-being, they at times addressed children in their
home languages, speaking one language to one child, a second to the other. In this
way, they created a situation of parallel monolingualism. This practice of frequent
switching testifies to the practitioners’ multilingual competence and is typical of
residents in Luxembourg who need to constantly accommodate the interlocutors’
linguistic needs in this highly diverse country. Similar to the Welsh study (Lewis
et al. 2013), the translanguaging practices in Luxembourg developed with the
children’s (and the practitioners’) developing language competence.
There were some differences in the translanguaging practices between the
practitioners. Ms Clara and Ms Jane engaged less in ‘home languaging’ and
used their semiotic repertoires more fluidly, as a result of having developed a
dynamic view of multilingualism (García 2009). Furthermore, they monitored
children’s linguistic needs more carefully than the practitioners in the day-care
center, possibly because of their longer experience of observing and assess-
ing children at the end of each term or the teacher education programme, which
focuses on planning, teaching, assessment and reflection on one’s practice. Ms
Clara and Ms Jane had come to deploy translanguaging as part of a pedagogy
including design and stance (García et al. 2017), thus legitimating and making
‘visible the m
­ eaning-making potential of all students’ (García and Otheguy 2019,
p. 11). In doing so, they helped all children participate in daily interactions and
78 C. Kirsch and C. Seele

literacy activities. By contrast, Mr Ken and Mr Ted tended to use translating and
‘home languaging’ to accommodate for the perceived needs of the children with-
out always considering their actual needs or reflecting how this may enhance their
participation. There were some examples of unequal participation and ‘othering’
(Hamman 2018; Thomauske 2017), possibly because the multilingual practices
were not embedded into a translanguaging pedagogy.
With the limited data at hand, we do not claim that the practices we observed
in the day-care center led to exclusion. But, based on our findings, we wish to
remind practitioners and researchers that we need to take a close look at the forms
of flexible language use, and their implications. Translanguaging can be inclusive
and encourage participation if practitioners use their linguistic repertoires stra-
tegically and based on children’s needs, and if they are aware of language hier-
archies (Jaspers 2015; Hamman 2018). We therefore agree that translanguaging
practices need to be integrated into a wider transformative pedagogy that values
social justice and inclusion (García et al. 2017). While we agree with the need to
monitor languages as emphasised by García (2009) or Palviainen et al. (2016),
our findings have shown that this complex ability does not come automatically,
and may need to be developed, for example through further training with a focus
on observation and reflection. Future research could examine factors beyond the
adults’ languaging practices, such as the children’s views, policy frameworks, the
institutional context and parental contributions.

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Bilingualism Versus Translanguaging
in a Swiss Day-Care Center: A Space
Analysis of Language Practices
and Their Janus-Faced Effects
on Social Inequalities and Educational
Opportunities

Melanie Kuhn and Sascha Neumann

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of institutional language policies in bilingual

Swiss day-care centers (French/German), we discuss implications these poli-
cies have in terms of balancing or even intensifying educational inequalities.
Referring to a space analytical approach, we investigate to what extent lan-
guage practices are regulated in relation to imaginations of the social order

This paper is a modified version and translation of the article “Differenz und Ungleichheit
im Kontext von Mehrsprachigkeit. Raumanalytische Perspektiven auf Regulierungsweisen
sprachlicher Praktiken im frühpädagogischen Feld” in the volume Differenz—
Ungleichheit—Erziehungswissenschaft. Verhältnisbestimmungen im (Inter-)Disziplinären,
edited by I. Diehm, M. Kuhn, and C. Machold and published by Springer VS in 2017.
Translated by J. Harrow, Mulsum, Germany.

M. Kuhn (*)
Pädagogische Hochschule Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Neumann
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 83

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_6
84 M. Kuhn and S. Neumann

of languages in the social space surrounding the institution. In terms of social

justice, our findings raise the question whether bilingualism is more likely to
push back translanguaging rather than support it.

Keywords

Bilingualism · Day-care center · Inequality · Switzerland · Translanguaging

1 Introduction

The increasingly widespread understanding that day-care institutions for chil-

dren under the age of 4 serve not only a care function but also an educational
one is being accompanied by growing expectations that they can promote equal
opportunity.1 Assuming that “language” is an “obvious element in promoting
equal opportunities” (EKM and BFM 2012, p. 14), educational, social, and inte-
gration policies in Switzerland focusing on preschool care and educational insti-
tutions anticipate that day-care will “contribute to promoting the local national
language” (Edelmann 2010, p. 2032). Accordingly, a number of empirical stud-
ies focus primarily on inequality as educational inequality and explore the poten-
tial of preschool language education and support for creating equal opportunities
and preventively reducing educational disadvantage (see, for day-care centers and
playgroups, e.g., Edelmann et al. 2013; Isler 2014; Vogt et al. 2015). Moreover,
there are now a number of ethnographic studies that take a closer look at everyday
life in formally monolingual and multilingual early education fields to see how
the way linguistic practices address and socially position speakers produces hier-
archical differences (on kindergartens in Switzerland, see, e.g., Kassis-Filippakou
and Panagiotopoulou 2015; on preschool childcare in Luxembourg, see Neumann
2012a; Seele 2015; on Kindergartens in Germany, see Diehm et al. 2013a; Kuhn
and Mai 2016; for international comparisons, see Panagiotopoulou 2017). Based
on the premise in social theory that one function of language is to produce social
orders (Heller 2006; Blackledge and Creese 2010), these studies assume that the
hierarchy of languages points to hierarchical orders of power and domination. It
reflects “social dominance relations” and stabilizes them by “symbolically legiti-
mizing them” (Niedrig 2002, p. 3 f.). The aforementioned studies do not reduce

1For empirical findings on Switzerland, see Burger (2013) and Knoll (2018).
2Original German quotations are translated into English.
Bilingualism Versus Translanguaging in a Swiss Day-Care Center … 85

questions of social inclusion and social justice merely to educational success. In

relation to inequality, inclusion, and social justice, they often address and analyze
language more (but by no means exclusively) regarding the situated reproduction
of social relations of dominance and inequality more generally.
The main interest of German-language studies on power and inequality
addressing how multilingualism is dealt with in pedagogical fields is on the insti-
tutional devaluation of marginalized minority languages in monolingual settings
and the normative and standardizing effects of early promotion of the majority
language. This chapter, in contrast, focuses on bilingual Swiss child day-care.
Here, it cannot be assumed in advance that only one language is considered to
possess prestige and be worth promoting. As we shall show, however, even in
bilingual day-care centers, the two formal languages of the institution—the offi-
cial cantonal languages, German and French—can be assigned unequal legiti-
macy. The hierarchy of both languages does not necessarily “reflect” the “social
dominance relations” (Niedrig 2002, p. 4) of the majority and minority lan-
guages, but can serve as a countermodel designed to resist the language relations
in the surrounding social space.
In the following, we shall apply the methodological heuristic of the “language
regime” (Busch 2013, p. 127, translated) in two steps to develop a ­spatial-analytical
perspective on linguistic modes of regulation (Sect. 2). Then, using interview data
from an ethnographic study, we shall show how the German and French languages
are related to each other hierarchically in the constitution of the local language
regime, and how generationalizing, ethnicizing, and spatializing differences are
produced and reproduced in this process. This reveals a separation of languages
that aims to establish and protect purity of language and problematizes the mixing
of languages to be found in children’s translingual practices (Sect. 3). The chapter
concludes with thoughts on analyzing the relation between language policies and
questions of social inequality and educational opportunities (Sect. 4).

2 Methodological Considerations

2.1 A Spatial Analysis of Using the Language Regime

to Produce Difference in Day-Care

Since the so-called spatial turn, theoretical perspectives in the social sciences
have generally regarded space as a phenomenon that is not only generated through
being practiced but also changeable (Soja 1989; Lefebvre 2006). Based on the
assumption that the production of space is linked closely to social conditions
86 M. Kuhn and S. Neumann

(Günzel 2008, p. 11), the analytical focus of studies applying spatial analysis is
on the entanglement of space, society, and power. Sociolinguistic studies, such as
that of Heller and Duchêne (2012), reconstruct the connection between language,
space, and globalization with the help of such a s­ patial-analytical approach. Busch
(2013), in turn, analyzes the entanglement of language, space, and time using
the example of the language dispute in Austria. Drawing on Lefebvre’s (2006,
p. 333) theoretical analyses of the threefold dimensionality of space, she devel-
ops the heuristic of the language regime that she understands, following Coulmas
(2005), as that “bundle of habits, legal regulations, and ideologies” that “restrict
the speakers’ choice of linguistic means in spatially situated interactions” (Busch
2013, p. 135). In the following, we shall apply these methodological considera-
tions to the field of day-care centers using interview data. Referring to Busch
(2013, p. 135), the first dimension of spatial practices would include habitual-
ized, institutionalized, and routinized language practices that r­e-/produce social
space (Busch 2013, p. 137). In day-care centers, these would be collective prac-
tices such as circle times, mealtimes, reading aloud sessions, or handicraft les-
sons. With the second dimension of spatial representations, Busch (2013, p. 137),
following Lefebvre, summarizes scientific discourses and ideological conceptions
of spaces that are located on a societal level. With regard to educational organi-
zations, however, this also includes assumptions about which linguistic practices
are taken to be “legitimate and desirable” in which of the above-mentioned set-
tings, as well as the explicit regulation modes in language practices such as
“house rules, decrees, and laws” (Busch 2013, p. 137). Under the third dimension
of representation spaces, Busch subsumes the “lived in and experienced” space
(2013, p. 138). From an analytical point of view, this is about “how subjects read
the space and how they relate themselves to it, how they “interpret” it, and how
they “shape it” (Busch 2013, p. 138). These three dimensions of linguistic space
are entangled in multilayered ways and usually cannot be distinguished from each
other clearly in empirical research. Nonetheless, they evoke perspective-broaden-
ing focuses of attention when it comes to interpreting the data material.
In the following, an expert interview conducted in the ethnographic study
“Linguistic Landscapes. Case Studies on Pedagogical Practices in Dealing with
Multilingualism in Bilingual Day-Care Centers,”3 will be used as a basis to
examine the corresponding day-care center as a “small-scale language regime”

3The study was directed by S. Neumann and M. Kuhn with the collaboration of K.
Brandenberg and L. Tinguely from January 2014 to August 2015 with funding from the
Jacobs Foundation and Stiftung Mercator Schweiz.
Bilingualism Versus Translanguaging in a Swiss Day-Care Center … 87

(Busch 2013, p. 127).4 The interview conducted with a manager of a bilingual

­day-care center in a municipality of Western Switzerland can be analyzed not just
in terms of the discourses on language and space (spatial representations) that are
entrenched within it. It is far more the case that analyses can also question—indi-
rectly—the speaker’s self-positioning in space (the representation space) and the
spatial location of language practices (the spatial practices).

On the spatial/temporal entanglement of language regimes

Starting from a sociolinguistic perspective, situated language practices cannot be
analyzed in isolation from the historical, sociopolitical, and institutional contexts
in which they are embedded (Heller 2006; Pennycook 2010). In a spatial theory
interpretation, the assumption of such a context dependence of language prac-
tices primarily refers to the sociohistorical conditionality of each space (Foucault
2006; Lefebvre 2006). Busch (2013, p. 139) transfers this premise to the field of
language with Bachtin’s concept of the “chronotopos” (2008) when she points out
that in every speech act, “references to different space–time structures” can be
discerned, and that ultimately, every language regime “can be thought of as such
a chronotopos linked to other times and spaces”.
Methodologically, this means that we have to take an additional analytical step
and reconstruct a local language regime along with the constructions of difference
implemented within it by also focusing on the historical and extralocal framings.
In the following, we perform such a contextualization of the empirical findings
on the constructions of difference in the early educational language regime in two
ways: First, the expert interview itself serves as such a contextualization. By this,
we follow Seele’s assumption (2015, p. 160), borrowed from Pennycook (2010),
that the sociohistorical conditions of language practices should not be viewed
as a statically given context, but rather as being accomplished and recontextual-
ized locally in everyday practice. On this basis, we can ask: Which sociopolitical
and/or historical phenomena are appropriated in what way in the interview? How
does the person interviewed use these to contextualize the language regime of the
institution? In the interview, this means that practices of contextualization can be
traced that are carried out by the person being interviewed herself (first-order con-
textualizations). When analyzing difference and inequality, we can, in turn, ask the
following questions: What modes of regulating and enabling language practices

4For this chapter, the heuristic of the language regime was applied retrospectively to the
data after it had been collected and, together with an expert interview, this analysis here
refers to a more limited database than that in Busch’s ethnography (2013, p. 172f.).
88 M. Kuhn and S. Neumann

does the person invoke during the interview? What differences does she construct
thereby? When doing this, we focus on the representations of space and the repre-
sentation spaces as well as the spatial practices that can be reconstructed from the
interview. Second, we draw on social science literature and legislative texts to con-
textualize the language regime against the background of the historically devel-
oped and contested language situation and the legal de-/regulation of institutional
day-care in this particular Swiss canton (second-order contextualization).

3 Constructions of Difference in the Local

Language Regime of the Day-Care Center

3.1 Spatial Representations and Representation Spaces

The heuristic of spatial representations focuses the analysis on the discourses over
language and space invoked by the manager, the ideas she formulates regarding
which language practices are considered “legitimate” in the day-care center, and
the explicit ways they are regulated through house rules, decrees, and laws (Busch
2013, p. 137). The use of the two formal institutional languages of German and
French is regulated in different ways for the individual groups of speakers.

Generation-based construction of difference: The rights of children—the duties of

professionals

Giving the children the opportunity of not having to speak German. I think it’s
important that we keep this open. Hence, no pressure, that’s very important.

The explicit formulation that the children should not be pressured into speaking
German makes it apparent that they are implicitly and, so to speak, conversely
granted the right to speak French in everyday activities at the day-care center. For
the professional staff, in contrast, the manager imposes relatively rigid language
requirements that are intended to exclude their use of French.

So, I’ll also try to picture it and say when you come in the door, turn on the switch,
[speak] German5 … Well, I stand by the fact that I’ll correct very quickly then and
simply go there and say no, not like that, and either they do it or they have to look
for another job.

5In this location, this means various dialects of Swiss German.

Bilingualism Versus Translanguaging in a Swiss Day-Care Center … 89

Whereas the children should not be forced to speak German, the staff members,
in turn, are required to submit unconditionally to a monolingual language regime
in the day-care center (turn on the switch, [speak] German). Language-related
misconduct is ultimately sanctioned by exclusion from the organization (they
have to look for another job).
Insofar as German has a continuous legitimacy in everyday life at the day-care
center whereas French is a legitimate language only for the children, both lan-
guages are brought into a hierarchical relationship with each other, thus, creating
an inequality between German and French (Brandenberg et al. 2017, p. 265). At
the same time, the respective symbolic capitals of the children’s languages of ori-
gin are also assigned a different rank. Although francophone children are allowed
to speak their language of origin every day at the center, German is still the lan-
guage to which, and “in which, and through which children are educated” (Neu-
mann 2012a, p. 188). Furthermore, the language regime of the day-care center is
institutionalized in line with the “generational order” (Alanen 2005). It acknowl-
edges different ways of regulating language for different speakers in the field:
Whereas children are expected to adapt receptively, staff members, in contrast,
are expected to actively use the German language. This leads to a generational
differentiation between children and professional staff, which, in turn, is the basis
of a pedagogical order (Brandenberg et al. 2017, p. 266).
From the perspective of the heuristic of representation spaces, the ­ (self-)
positioning of the manager in space, and her ways of appropriating and shap-
ing the language space (Busch 2013, p. 138), this sequence brings to light that
the manager presents herself as a kind of “language police officer” who moni-
tors adherence to the language regime and intervenes promptly in the event of any
language-related misconduct on the part of the staff (correct very quickly … not
like that). In doing so, she assigns to herself and her management team (see we
below) a central role in maintaining the institutional language regime of this con-
ceptually bilingual institution. This is described as being a laborious task:

So, all the work with parents, then the whole team, that also took a lot of energy,
because we always had to make sure that the educators didn’t slip into French.

Contextualization
On the level of a second-order contextualization, the textual “house rules, decrees,
and laws” (Busch 2013, p. 137) relating to the regulation of language practices
also have to be analyzed from the perspective of spatial representations. From a
social theory perspective, it can be assumed that they prefigure a local language
regime without determining it (Nadai 2012, p. 51). A distinction can be made
90 M. Kuhn and S. Neumann

between the nonlocal political documents of the regional authority of the canton
such as recommendations and laws on the one side versus the local documents on
the institutional level such as the pedagogical concepts and curricula on the other
side. On the political level, the language regime of the day-care center is dereg-
ulated in two ways: In the cantonal Law on Supplementary Family Day-Care
Facilities (FBG) (Grosser Rat des Kantons 2011), the associated implementation
regulations (Staatsrat des Kantons 2011), and the cantonal standards and recom-
mendations for institutions and facilities for child care (Direktion für Gesundheit
und Soziales 2010), there are—in contrast to Kindergartens—no requirements
regarding the use of the two official cantonal languages German and French.6
Moreover, these documents define only a care but not any educational function
for day-care centers. This type of institution “meets the parents’ care needs while
simultaneously ensuring educational supervision” (Direktion für Gesundheit und
Soziales 2010, p. 9). As a result, it is hardly surprising that these documents con-
tain no recommendations relating to language education. Thus, neither the promo-
tion of language nor the use of the official languages is regulated politically.
In contrast, the concept of the day-care center formulates the programmatic
intention to guarantee7 “the balance” between the two languages German and
French by “mostly bilingual staff” (see also Brandenberg et al. 2017, p. 263).
If one understands a pedagogical concept as a textual representation of every-
day (language) practice, then, in view of the theoretically proclaimed equality
of both languages, one can observe only a loose coupling between the situated
language practices and their document-based regulations—and, thus, a discrep-
ancy between the institutional program and its practical implementation. This is
an issue that can be registered frequently in day-care centers (Neumann 2012a).
However, the manager does not interpret this discrepancy between the bilingual
concept and the monolingualizing practice as a relapse behind her self-formulated
bilingual claims:

Yes, simply you know what is written down, yes, the mission statement. Well, we
have a brochure in which it says that our crèche is bilingual … Well, we are bilin-
gual because we only speak German, otherwise we would be French-speaking.

6For schools, and thus for the Kindergartens for 4–6-year-olds that are part of the school
system, the territorial principle is used to regulate that the language of instruction must cor-
respond to the official language of the municipality of a school district: either German or
French. If a school district includes French and German-speaking or bilingual communi-
ties, attendance at public schools in both languages is guaranteed free of charge.
7For reasons of anonymization, no source is given here.
Bilingualism Versus Translanguaging in a Swiss Day-Care Center … 91

As this seemingly paradoxical statement already suggests, the manager legiti-

mizes the monolingual German language regime of the day-care center as a nec-
essary strategy to counter the dominance of French that she justifies with an—in
this case, language-based—construction of difference, in which an ethnicization
of different groups of children is embedded.

An ethnicizing construction of difference: French- and German-speaking children

It’s not just like that with the children, we have maybe eight or nine
­German-speaking children in a group and maybe only three or four French-speaking
ones and then the groups simply speak in French. So, the German speakers learn
French, the French speakers do not learn any German … That is also one reason
why we said, well, those who speak French, they can just as well learn German.

This example given by the manager has to be understood as fictitious, inasmuch

as the ratio of two-thirds German and one-third French-speaking children dis-
cussed here is not consistent with the more equally balanced occupancy figures
at the day-care center. It is to be understood far more as a complaint designed to
dramatize the personal experience of French being spoken as a matter of course
even when German-speaking children are in the clear majority. With an ethniciz-
ing differentiation between German- and French-speaking children, she states that
there is no mutual learning, and thus implicitly positions francophone children as
being unwilling to learn. The manager concludes from this that it is acceptable
to expect the francophone children to do what the German-speaking children—
through their willingness to learn—do almost as a matter of course: namely, to
learn the other language. In this way, she makes the French-speaking children
responsible for the seemingly natural dominance of the French language. By
emphasizing that this is not just the way things are with children, she construes
the dominance of the French language as a general problem rather than a prob-
lem specific to children. Against this background, the monolingualizing language
regime of the day-care center is brought into play as a necessary strategy to resist
the dominance of French.

Contextualization

Well, I started there 30 years ago as an intern and the majority of us spoke French
… That we consistently speak German with the children, that started about 12 or
13 years ago … We have worked out quite purposefully, simply from the experience
over the last few years, so simply really that the German language comes first, yes.
92 M. Kuhn and S. Neumann

The manager describes the “chronotopos” (Bachtin 2008) of the language prac-
tice at the day-care center in relation to other times (Busch 2013, p. 139). By cit-
ing the 30-year-old experience with the hegemony of French as the reason for
the change in the language practice introduced some 12–13 years ago, she herself
undertakes an institutionally historical contextualization of the currently domi-
nant language regime (first-order contextualization).

3.2 Spatial Practices

The heuristic perspective of spatial practices targets the language practices in

the everyday life of the day-care center that reproduce the social space and, thus,
reconstitute it over and over again (Busch 2013, p. 137). By applying this ana-
lytical approach to the observational data from the project, we can show how
different spaces are created by the different ways in which language practices
are regulated. This can be seen in, for example, the spatial formation of the chil-
dren’s circle times: When the professional staff ask for a German translation of
something the children have said in French, the children’s French language is no
longer considered to be as legitimate to use within the circle time in the same way
as it is to use it outside ( Brandenberg et al. 2017, p. 265). For the data from the
interview, however, the analytical perspective on spatial practices, which focuses
more on the microlevel of everyday life, has to be readjusted. In this context, we
can ask which space-related references the manager is actually using to constitute
the language regime of the day-care center when talking about the local language
practice. The manager spatializes what happens in language by separating the
inside from the outside of the daycare center in two different ways.

Spatializing construction of difference I: Day-care center versus the city

In order to be bilingual, we have to upgrade German here in city X. If we were in

another city, it might well be the other way around.

With the statement to “upgrade German”, the manager is describing the directive
that the professionals should speak only German with the children. In a spatial
localization (here in city X), she constructs the monolingualizing language regime
as a necessary regional requirement (we have to), whereby she brings the ­day-care
center into play as a place that aims “to preserve valued elements of a threatened
language” (Heller 2006, p. 52).
Bilingualism Versus Translanguaging in a Swiss Day-Care Center … 93

Contextualization
This linking of the local language regime of the day-care center with “other
spaces” (Busch 2013, p. 139)—namely, with the relation of the German to the
French language in the surrounding social space—can also be read as a practice
of first-order contextualization. The manager is referring to the fact that the ratio
of language majority to minority is different in city X than in Switzerland as a
whole. Although far more people speak German than French in Switzerland, the
situation in city X is quite the opposite. Here, German is spoken by only a minor-
ity.8 By doing this, the manager sets up a border between the “inside” of the day-
care center and the “outside” of the social language space, and she legitimizes
the precedence of German practiced in the daycare center9 as being due to the
hegemony of French outside.
On the second-order level, the language regime of the day-care center can be
contextualized within the framework of the cantonal and nationwide language
debates. Historically, there has always been a contested relationship between Ger-
man and French in Canton X that lies on the language border between French- and
German-speaking Switzerland. The language policy debates in the canton were
initiated by the demands of the German-speaking population, which is explained,
among other things, by the fact that especially the G­ erman-speaking regions had
suffered from political neglect and economic underdevelopment until the 1950s
(Helbling 2004, p. 10). In particular, reforms of the cantonal school law led
repeatedly to conflicts between the language communities (Helbling 2004, p. 8).
Indeed, an independent German-speaking school system was established only in
the 1970s. At the cantonal level, it is only since 1991 that all official documents
have to be available not only in French but also in German. The fact that the “lan-
guage issue” seems to be about more than language is made clear by the way that
the language border between German-speaking Switzerland and French-speaking
Western Switzerland is sometimes also described with the (criticized) concept
Röstigraben as a cultural border dividing French-speaking from ­German-speaking
Switzerland. When it comes to institutional early childhood education, par-
ents in French-speaking Western Switzerland, for example, are unfamiliar with

8This leads to the paradoxical situation, according to Helbling (2004, p. 5), that both lan-

guage groups in the canton often refer to themselves as a “minority”.

9Compare the aforementioned statement by the manager: “When you come in the door,

turn on the switch, [speak] German”, in which the door symbolizes the border between the
French/outside and the German/inside.
94 M. Kuhn and S. Neumann

the preschool playgroups known as Spielgruppen that are very widespread in

­German-speaking Switzerland (Feller-Länzlinger et al. 2013, p. 17). In contrast,
the use of crèche places for children under the age of 4 is higher in French-speak-
ing than in German-speaking Switzerland (Neumann et al. 2015, p. 23).
On the national level as well, the issue of how to deal with Switzerland’s con-
stitutional quadrilingualism in education is still controversial (Arquint 2014).
Current political debates, which have been put to the vote in some cantons via cit-
izens’ initiatives, focus, on the one hand, on the question of a “Standard German
requirement” in Kindergartens in German-speaking Switzerland (Berthele 2010).
This is sometimes interpreted as a threat to regional Swiss-German linguistic
identity (Knoll 2016). On the other hand, foreign language teaching at elementary
school level is under discussion, with critics seeing this as a threat to national
unity (Ribeaud 2013). Hence, the local language regime at the day-care center has
to be understood against the background of these current and historical language
policy conflicts in the surrounding language space. The manager herself also goes
on to refer to the family space.

Spatializing construction of difference II: Day-care center versus the family home

On average, the children attend for about sixty percent of the week. And if they
speak only French at home, it’s simply not enough for us to speak only two or three
sentences of German. There just has to be consistency and that’s what counts then.

The manager justifies the need to consistently adhere to the German-dominated

language regime through the fact that the children attend the daycare center for
only a few days a week and are otherwise exposed to the francophone language
practices in their family homes.10 Here as well, a spatial difference is evoked
between the inside and the outside, and the inside is constructed as a space to
counter the outside by legitimizing the language practices inside the ­day-care
center as a necessary pedagogical consequence to counter the language use estab-
lished at the outside place of the family home (see also Seele 2015, p. 169).
The day-care center is presented as having a limited influence on this familial
outside, so that the parents are also understood as addressees of the institutional
language regime:

10In Switzerland, children attend their day-care centers for an average of 2.5 days per

week. One reason for this is the high cost for the parents. In German-speaking Switzerland,
parents pay two-thirds of the full costs; in French-speaking Switzerland, about one-third
(Kibesuisse and Netzwerk Kinderbetreuung Schweiz 2015, p. 5).
Bilingualism Versus Translanguaging in a Swiss Day-Care Center … 95

Well, it is also the case that we also have to maintain our attitude when dealing with
the parents. Well, I always first try to speak German with the parents, but most of
them don’t like to speak it; they have certain inhibitions. But I think that’s where it
starts. That is to say, demand something from them—from the parents as well and
not just from the children. And after that, they are the example, I mean model.

Here as well, a necessity (have to) is evoked. It is also essential to persist with the
monolingualizing practice vis-à-vis the parents. It seems that more is expected
of them than of the children, because they should at least try to communicate in
German. The manager seems to assume not so much incompetence in the fran-
cophone parents, but more of an inhibition and a reluctance to speak German.
Following the motto “nip it in the bud”, she protests that parents should also be
expected to use German, because they should serve as a practical language role
model for their children (I mean model).
The manager aims not only to regulate the parents’ language practices within
the day-care center but also to suggest that parents adopt specific language prac-
tices in the family space:

Well, I think that’s also important now, when parents ask … that we really pass on
the advice … that is very important, that they simply stick to one language. Because
otherwise, the child will mix them up very, very strongly indeed.

Although the advice to speak only one language at home does not seem to be
handed out without being solicited (when parents ask), it is, nonetheless, assigned
a very high significance (very important). Ultimately, it remains to be seen
whether the manager is pushing for the use of a single common family language
or proposing an orientation toward the widespread concept of “one person–one
language” (Döpke 1992), according to which each parent should speak to the
children in her or his first language and, thus, use only one language. Nonethe-
less, the proclaimed and evidently undesired effects on children of parents using
several languages (because otherwise) are clearly highlighted: This leads to the
child mixing up the languages very, very strongly indeed. As a consequence, a
flexible and strategic shuttling between French and German—as is common in
practices of translanguaging (García and Wei 2014)—is labeled not only as need-
ing to be avoided but also as avoidable through a strictly monolingual mode of
language use by parents. Hence, in the bilingual regime of the daycare center, the
flexible use of different linguistic repertoires appears as a both disadvantaging as
well as an illegitimate practice. Finally, this demonstrates (again) that a bilingual
concept is not in every case a fruitful basis for the implementation of a translin-
gual environment. This applies in particular if a bilingual concept still sticks to
monolingual norms of language use.
96 M. Kuhn and S. Neumann

4 Conclusions on How Early Educational Language

Regimes Relate to Inequality

In the institutionalized language regime of the bilingual day-care center, speak-

ers are “restricted in their choice of linguistic means” by a range of regulations
(Busch 2013, p. 135). By emphasizing the maintenance of the language regime
by the professional staff as something that has to be monitored and declaring
that nonacceptance is a justification for sanctions, the manager clearly reveals
how language regimes are linked to power. Different rules on the use of language
apply for the different groups of actors in the day-care center. Although the chil-
dren are not expected to speak German, the parents should at least try do so in the
institution and the staff members have to do so. The ethnicizing and spatializing
differentiations serve primarily to legitimize this generationally ordered language
regime that—according to the manager’s statements—is only necessary because
French-speaking children are supposedly not willing to learn and because the
French language dominates the sociospatial and familial environment. It is only
against this background that the manager can present the generationally differ-
entiating language regime of the day-care center as a compensatory solution to
problems (such as the threatening superiority of the French language and the
unwillingness of francophone children to learn German), while the institutional
practice of differentiation is itself involved in the construction of these problems
(Neumann 2012b, p. 147 f.).
What opportunities for participation and education does the institutionalized
language regime offer to the French- and German-speaking children, and what
inequality-related effects are possibly associated with this?11 In line with Heller
(2006, p. 17), we can say that the language regime:

make[s] sense only if understood as part of [a] political … mission, a mission which
itself can only be understood as a part of minorities struggles for power.

Interpreted in this way, the regime aiming to protect the German speakers who
are perceived as oppressed can, on the one hand, be read as a policy of empower-
ment for German-speaking children who are a linguistic minority in the social
space. The day-care center presents itself as a political actor in the contested

11This cautious formulation reflects the methodological challenges facing qualitative ine-
quality research (Diehm et al. 2013b; Emmerich and Hormel 2017).
Bilingualism Versus Translanguaging in a Swiss Day-Care Center … 97

power field of languages. In line with this, the bilingual concept of the day-care
center is still following a monolingual norm of language use and acquisition.
At the same time, the regime of promoting bilingualism by privileging the Ger-
man language places limits for a flexible use of language in terms of an active
translanguaging by adults and children, which, for both French-speaking and
German-speaking children, means that they are offered limited opportunities for
learning how to cope with a complex linguistic environment. At the same time,
this delivers comparatively more limited opportunities for participation in every-
day activities for francophone children—at least until they have acquired recep-
tive German language skills. What is applied to the French-speaking children here
is a “subtractive bilingualism” (García 2009, p. 142): The use of the first language
(French) is restricted in order to promote a second language (German). As a con-
sequence, at an early age, these children gain the experience that their language
of origin is assigned a lower status in the institutional hierarchy of languages.
Looking at the educational relevance of the preschool institution of the day-care
center, we, nonetheless, have to ask whether German-speaking children might not
be disadvantaged in the long term when the day-care center so decisively does not
feel responsible for teaching French. This is not just the language of the majority
in the canton, but also the first foreign language in all German-speaking elemen-
tary schools in the canton—and, thus, ultimately an educationally relevant capital.
In view of the realities of migration in society, this particularly affects those chil-
dren whose family language belongs to neither one language group nor the other.
Because the majority of migrants in city X acquire or have acquired the hegem-
onic lingua franca French and often do not speak German, these parents usu-
ally choose to send their children to school in the francophone part of the school
system. In this case, the German language skills acquired by the children at the
day-care center will result in a loss of educational capital in the francophone edu-
cation system in which they will continue to be relevant only as a foreign lan-
guage. Hence, the institutionalized language regime of the day-care center that
either discriminates against or favors individual language groups in both cases
impacts on inequality. The effects seem to be mutually entangled and, in terms of
educational biographies, they correspondingly differ in their impact on the further
educational pathways of different groups of children. Hence, effects can be disad-
vantageous in various ways and point to the Janus-faced consequences of institu-
tional language policies in fields of education.
98 M. Kuhn and S. Neumann

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Translanguaging in School Education
Translanguaging, (In)Security
and Social Justice Education

Constadina Charalambous, Panayiota Charalambous,

Michalinos Zembylas and Eleni Theodorou

Abstract

This chapter draws on two ethnographic studies in Greek-Cypriot schools,

focusing on immigrant children with Turkish as L1, a language that has been
stigmatized by a history of conflict both in the Greek-Cypriot context and in
many of the children’s own communities and historical trajectories. Analysing
children’s silences and self-censoring of their Turkish-speakerness, it examines
how language ideologies and discourses of (in)security and conflict may pose
serious obstacles for enacting translanguaging as a socially just pedagogy.

Keywords

Translanguaging · Conflict · Insecurity · Securitization · Social justice

C. Charalambous (*) · E. Theodorou

European University Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
e-mail: [email protected]
E. Theodorou
e-mail: [email protected]
P. Charalambous
Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture, Nicosia, Cyprus
M. Zembylas
Open University of Cyprus, Latsia, Cyprus
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 105

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_7
106 C. Charalambous et al.

1 Introduction

The concept of “translanguaging”—referring to “the flexible use of linguistic

resources by bilinguals in order to make sense of their world” (García et al. 2015,
p. 200)—has recently dominated debates on bilingual education inspiring many
projects, conferences, articles, monographs and edited volumes—beyond the pre-
sent one (García 2009; García and Li Wei 2014; Blackledge and Creese 2014;
Jaspers and Madsen 2016, 2019). Coined in 1994 by Cen Williams in the context
of north Wales, “translanguaging” has since significantly expanded in the work
of Ofelia García (Beres 2015) and many others (e.g., García 2009; García and Li
Wei 2014; García et al. 2015; Li Wei 2018). The educational benefits of translan-
guaging have been much celebrated to the extent that it is often seen as “the best
way to educate bilingual children in the 21st century” (Beres 2015, p. 103). As a
pedagogical strategy, translanguaging can “offer communicative and educational
possibilities to all” (García 2009, p. 148), helping bilingual students develop “lin-
guistic security and identity investment” (García 2009, p. 157) and ultimately
working towards linguistic equality (García and Li Wei 2014). Within this context
translanguaging can also be seen as a type of a socially just pedagogy, as it refers
to a conscious pedagogical endeavour to improve the learning and life oppor-
tunities of typically underserved students, while equipping and empowering all
students working towards a more socially just and inclusive society (Ayers et al.
2009; Kincheloe and Steinberg 1998; King 2005; Ladson-Billings 1994).
However, as the title of the present chapter implies, here we won’t focus as much
on the positive outcomes of translanguaging, which have been thoroughly docu-
mented by many studies (cited above). Instead, we will rather focus on some compli-
cations emerging from the processes of conflict and insecurity that are increasingly
affecting the lives of many students and teachers (see also P. Charalambous et al.
2016, 2019). In other words, our chapter aims to address questions such as: How
can translanguaging practices be affected by language ideologies, and in particu-
lar, ideologies and discourses of conflict? And what are the challenges posed by the
increasing (in)securitization processes and practices that “enact our world as if it is a
dangerous world, a world saturated by insecurities” (Huysmans 2014, p. 3)?
In order to answer these questions, we draw on data from two ethnographic
studies, conducted in diverse schools and classrooms, focusing on students’ lin-
guistic practices. Both studies were conducted in Cyprus, a country that has been
seriously affected by interethnic conflict and has been divided since the 1974 war.
Taking into account the dominant discourses of conflict in this s­ocio-political
context, we will look at classrooms as a “charged space” (Pace 2015) that
Translanguaging, (In)Security and Social Justice Education 107

includes frictions, emotional discomfort and insecurity, and we discuss the role
that translanguaging pedagogies may have in such spaces.
In what follows we first provide an account of how discourses of “security”
affect our everyday lives, borrowing the concepts of “securitization” and (in)
security from critical International Relation (IR) studies. We then move on to dis-
cuss the notion of translanguaging in relation to social justice pedagogies. After
we briefly introduce the conflict-affected Cypriot context we present the two
case studies and we discuss the complications for enacting translanguaging as a
socially just pedagogy under conditions of insecurity and conflict.

2 Everyday (In)Securitization

Since 9/11, “security concerns” and discourses of threat, fear and suspicion have
become much more pervasive in everyday life, significantly impacting educa-
tional institutions. Schools, nurseries, universities and youth community centres
are becoming sites of security surveillance as teachers have to deal with undoc-
umented students, and students from what are seen as “suspect communities”
(C. Charalambous et al. 2018; Figueroa 2017; Khan 2017; Nguyen 2016).
For example, in the UK the Prevent policy consists of a comprehensive
anti-terrorism strategy which includes local authorities, education from early
­
child care providers to higher education, and health services. Within this policy,
educational institutions are obliged to report any children who might be radical-
ized or “at risk”, with Muslim students portrayed as potential terrorists and teach-
ers as de facto security professionals (C. Charalambous et al. 2018). Similarly as
Nguyen (2016) describes in the US context, the FBI has warned of the “vulner-
ability” of high school students for recruitment by violent extremists calling out
to educational institutions to report children/individuals who might be radicalized
or “at risk” by observing and assessing behaviors and communication.
In order to account for the increasing presence of security discourses in educa-
tion and their impact on language education and bilingualism, the notion of “secu-
ritization” (Emmers 2013; Stritzel 2007) emerges as a helpful one, and indeed it
has recently been widely used, beyond the field of IR and the Copenhagen School
of Security Studies, where it was initially coined (see P. Charalambous et al. 2017;
Rampton and Charalambous 2020). Securitization, in the way it has been used in
IR, refers to authoritative institutional processes in which existential threats are
identified, and in response to this potential danger, issues can be moved away
from the realm of ordinary politics into the realm of exceptional measures, where
normal political rights and procedures are suspended. Throughout this process,
108 C. Charalambous et al.

discourse plays a crucial part, both in declaring a particular group, phenomenon,

or process to be an existential threat, and in persuading people that this warrants
the introduction of special measures to ensure “security” (P. Charalambous et al.
2017).
However, a question worthwhile asking is to what extent we can separate
“security” from “insecurity”. For example, does the image of armed soldiers in
public places produce security or insecurity to people present? Using the meta-
phor of a “mobius strip” where the two sides of the string cannot be separated,
Bigo and Mc Cluskey (2018) argue for the “consubstantiality of security and
insecurity” (p. 126), suggesting instead the use of the parenthetic “(in)” and
accordingly the terms “(in)security” and “(in)securitization” to highlight that
what is considered security for some might be insecurity for others, depending
on the point of view. Following the conceptualization of “(in)security” as every-
day practice, Rampton and Charalambous (2020) emphasise the need to under-
stand the “lived experience of (in)securitisation as an intensifying apprehension
of institutionally authorised vulnerability and existential threat, produced (and
received) in communicative practice in a range of social settings” (p. 6). In order
to do so here, we turn to the communicative practice of translanguaging and the
social setting of a classroom.

3 Translanguaging & Social Justice

Translanguaging theory and research emerged within more general critique of ideol-
ogies of “fixity” in conceptualisations of language, belonging and social identity and
a shift of emphasis to the more fluid and hybrid nature of linguistic practices—espe-
cially in urban, globalised and culturally diverse social contexts (e.g., Jaspers 2005;
Madsen et al. 2016; Rampton 1995). In this context, concepts such as “crossing”,
“translanguaging”, “polylanguaging” etc. (Creese and Blackledge 2010; García
2009; Jørgensen 2008; Rampton 1995, 2006) have been introduced to describe vari-
ous heteroglossic practices and their social and pedagogial implications.
Translanguaging, in particular, refers both to (a) more general habitual discur-
sive practices of multilingual speakers, and (b) to a particular pedagogic approach
for the teaching of both language and content (Canagarajah 2011; Creese and
Blackledge 2010; García 2009; for a more detailed account see P. Charalambous
et al. 2019). In the last two decades, translanguaging has been taken up and fur-
ther developed by a number of educators (García 2009; García and Li Wei 2014;
see also Beres 2015) as a pedagogical strategy that can contribute to a socially
just world:
Translanguaging, (In)Security and Social Justice Education 109

a process by which students and teachers engage in complex discursive practices

that include ALL the language practices of ALL students in a class in order to
develop new language practices and sustain old ones, communicate and appropriate
knowledge, and give voice to new sociopolitical realities by interrogating linguistic
inequality. (García and Kano 2014, p. 261)

Socially just pedagogies are generally understood as those pedagogical practices

that actively address issues of oppression and privilege in the classroom with
the purpose of addressing social inequalities and contributing to a more socially
just society (Kincheloe and Steinberg 1998; King 2005; Ladson-Billings 1994).
Although socially just pedagogies in and by themselves will not eradicate struc-
tural inequalities, they can make a contribution to recognising and critically inter-
rogating the issues that perpetuate these injustices. Teachers who enact social
justice pedagogy in their classrooms acknowledge their role as agents of social
change and aim to equip their students with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills
needed to transform society into a place where social justice can exist. Basically,
then, a social justice framework in pedagogical practice is driven by the determi-
nation to resist and take action against unfairness and inequity, while enhancing
freedom and possibility for all students (Ayers et al. 2009).
Also committed to empowering all students, translanguaging encourages “the
deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful
adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usu-
ally national and state) languages” (Otheguy et al. 2015, p. 3), going thus against
the powerful monolingual paradigm and the nationalist “dogma of homogeneism”
(Blommaert and Verschueren 1992). As such, translanguaging pedagogy emerges
as an inherently “political act”, (Flores 2014 as cited in García and Lin 2016, p. 8)
within a broader “sociocritical approach to teaching” (García and Li Wei 2014,
p. 92 f.), closely connected with education for social justice (García and Leiva
2014) and human rights (García and Li Wei 2014, p. 116). According to García and
Li Wei (2014, p. 13) translanguaging practices “enact a political process of social
and subjectivity transformation which resists the asymmetries of power that lan-
guage and other meaning making-codes associated with one or another nationalist
ideology, produce”.
Within this context, the deployment of students’ full linguistic repertoires is
seen as creating a “third space” “where alternative representations and enuncia-
tions can be generated because buried histories are released and alternative, con-
flicting knowledges are produced” (García and Leiva 2014, p. 204). According
to García and Li Wei (2014) translanguaging as pedagogy promises to “liberate”
and empower minoritised bilingual students that have been “silenced” (p. 101),
110 C. Charalambous et al.

“oppressed” (p. 42) and ostracised by “giv[ing them] back the voice that had been
taken away by ideologies of monoglot standards” (p. 105).
Hurst and Mona (2017), for example, propose translanguaging pedagogies as a
socially just alternative to colonial monolingual and anglonormative practices of
continued reliance on English as the medium of education in South Africa, which
disadvantages many students whose home language is not English. Indeed in
post-colonial contexts translanguaging can provide recognition to languages that
are usually ignored, empowering students and promoting social justice.
However, as with any educational attempt to run against powerful and
hegememonic ideologies, translanguaging may produce resistance, discomfort
and negative emotional reactions (P. Charalambous et al. 2016, 2019) and in this
paper we focus on these instances, and the implications for teachers, learners and
(socially just) pedagogy when discourses of (in)security and processes of (in)
securitization affect the classroom.
Before turning to the examples from the two studies, it is worth describing the
Cypriot context and the ways in which it is affected by discourses of threat.

4 The Cypriot Context

Cyprus has suffered a long history of interethnic conflict between the two major
ethnolinguistic communities, Greek- and Turkish- Cypriots. As both ethnic
groups had political claims over the island’s identity—“Greek” and “Turkish”
respectively (Bryant 2004)—, interethnic violence (1963–1967) broke out soon
after the establishment of the independent Republic of Cyprus in 1960 and the
conflict culminated with Turkey’s military operation in 1974. Since 1974, Cyprus
has been de facto divided, with Turkish-Cypriots residing in the north—consid-
ered “under Turkish occupation” by the UN—and Greek-Cypriots residing in the
southern government-controlled areas of the Republic of Cyprus. Up until 2003
communication between the two parts was almost impossible.
Despite ongoing negotiations for reaching an agreed settlement, the so-called
“Cyprus Issue” remains unresolved, leaving open many legal but also emotional
questions (e.g., property rights, missing people). This “open wound” has con-
tributed to the cultivation of a strong ethnocentric orientation in Greek-Cypriot
society, with Turks being represented as an imminent threat that poses sincere
security concerns.
Translanguaging, (In)Security and Social Justice Education 111

In this context, language has played a significant role in perpetuating the con-
flict, as both communities viewed their language as a salient part of collective
identity and as crucial for ethnolinguistic survival (Karoulla-Vrikki 2004). It is
for this reason that, even though both Greek and Turkish are official languages of
the Republic, Turkish was only introduced in Greek-Cypriot education in 2003,
as a “foreign language” and a “measure for building trust” between the two com-
munities. Still, studies showed how Turkish continued to invoke the “enemy” and
the historical traumas of war and displacement; Greek-Cypriot students of Turk-
ish were often called “traitors”; while teachers systematically tried to avoid ref-
erences to the local contexts of Turkish language use (C. Charalambous 2012,
2014).
At the same time, the Greek-Cypriot society has been witnessing (since 90s)
a diversification with significantly increasing migration and the last census esti-
mated migrants comprising about 23% of the population (e.g., Greek-Pontian
expatriates, Eastern Europeans migrants from South East Asia, and political or
war refugees from Syria, Iran etc.). As a result, in 2001, Intercultural Education
was first introduced in state schools and, despite considerable progress, research
points to challenges posed by the hegemony of conflict narratives on the imple-
mentation of intercultural education (P. Charalambous et al. 2016; Theodorou and
Symeou 2013).
Another notable change in the ideological orientations of Greek-Cypriot
education has been the introduction of a peace-related policy in 2008 aiming at
the promotion of a “culture of peaceful coexistence” between Greek and Turk-
ish Cypriots. This initiative caused fierce public and educational debates, as
many teachers considered the policy incompatible with the dominant culture
and inconsiderate of local sensitivities. Although a significant step in introduc-
ing peace education in Greek-Cypriot official rhetoric, in actual practice the ini-
tiative resulted in relatively poor implementation outcomes (see also Zembylas
et al. 2016). The second case study described here involves a teacher’s attempt to
implement the new peace-related policy in 2010, in a classroom where the major-
ity of students had Turkish as home language.
In what follows we present the two case studies conducted in multilingual
classrooms, and we show how conflict discourses and processes of (in)securiti-
zation created unfavourable ecologies in the schools and classrooms for perfor-
mances of Turkish speakerness.
112 C. Charalambous et al.

5 The Two Studies

5.1 Case Study 1: Immigrant Children Identity

Negotiation in a Greek Cypriot Primary School

This was an ethnographic study that sought to explore identity negotiation pro-
cesses among immigrant students in Cyprus. It was conducted by Eleni Theo-
dorou over a period of eight months in 2007 (January–August) and it included
interviews with students, teachers, parents and members of the ethnic com-
munities existent at the school, as well as document analysis. In addition, daily
­full-day observations were carried at the school both during school hours as well
as after, during social events such as football games, school festivals, and gradu-
ation ceremonies, at a nearby public youth club, children’s homes, and the sur-
rounding community throughout the duration of the fieldwork.
The school which consisted the primary site of the study was a small urban
public primary school with fewer than 150 students that was chosen because of
its high concentration of non Greek-Cypriot students. Thirty-three percent (33%)
of the school population were non-Cypriots. Of the non-Cypriot population at
the school, half were children with parents from Georgia, 21% with parents from
other former Soviet Union countries, such as Russia and Bulgaria, 21% were
Greeks from Mainland Greece, 4% had parents from countries of the Middle
East, and another 4% from countries in Asia. The great majority of the immigrant
children were Pontian whose parents had been born and raised in Georgia. It is
important to note that Pontian families who originated from Georgia spoke Turk-
ish at home (children could also communicate in Russian). At the backdrop of
the sociohistorical context of Cyprus, this fact proved to be highly consequential
for the way Turkophone children at the school crafted their space and positioned
themselves therein and beyond, as explained below.
One of the central findings of the study was the revelation of the extent of the
educational and social marginalization immigrant children suffered at the school
contrary to teachers’ perceptions of social integration which they often based on
the relative absence of volatile and blatantly racist incidents. Indeed, on a first
glance the school appeared to be one of peaceful coexistence of different cultures,
languages, and backgrounds. Closer looks however revealed that immigrant chil-
dren received such strong messages of assimilation that in fact one of the strate-
gies they deployed to negotiate their positionalities at the school was hiding and
passing. Depending on the spheres and contexts they traversed, this was a twofold
process of associating and disassociating with a particular social identity, in order
Translanguaging, (In)Security and Social Justice Education 113

to avoid otherization. Passing mainly consisted of asserting Greekness. Hiding

was a multi-layered process which involved hiding the status of foreignness, con-
cealing Pontianness, and distancing one’s self from Turkishness. This was mainly
manifested in the way immigrant children at the school often resorted to conceal-
ing aspects of their identities, including their native language, the language(s)
they spoke at home and their parents’ home country. For the purposes of this dis-
cussion, we will be focusing on processes of distancing from one’s Turkishness
when at school or in public (for a discussion on how immigrant children navi-
gated public and private see Theodorou 2008), precisely to highlight the necessity
of understanding processes of translanguaging (and identity negotiation) as intri-
cately enmeshed in fields of power which unfold in the midst of social interaction
and in particular sociohistorical contexts.
As stated above, the language of the private sphere within the Greek diasporic
community of Pontians from Georgia was Turkish. For Pontian children, the
frictional relationship between dominant notions of Greekness and Turkishness
in the Cypriot context raised issues of ethnic identity, loyalty, and patriotism all
at once. As a result, Pontian children, wary of possible repercussions “because
Turks did that other thing…[and] some get angry for sure, they don’t like [that
you speak Turkish]” (Katerina, female, Greek,1 immigrant), opted to keep their
native tongue a secret, as exemplified in the excerpt of an informal conversation
Eleni Theodorou had with a Pontian girl in the school yard during recess below:

Popi (f., im.): {I will be} Here {during the summer}. I don’t want to go to Greece,
they don’t watch Turkish channels there over. They have them but they don’t watch
them.
Eleni/Researcher: Whereas here you watch them?
Popi: Yes.
Eleni: Do you like it?
Popi: Yes, I like Turkish very much.
Eleni: Do you tell your classmates too that you know Turkish?
Popi: Noooo! ((emphasis in original))
Eleni: Why?
Popi: Did they ever ask or anything?
Eleni: If they did, would you tell them?
Popi: Noooo!! ((emphasis in original))
Eleni: Why?
Popi: ((She does not respond and looks at me with a nervous smile))

1Pseudonyms and ethnic self-identification were provided by children participants them-

selves.
114 C. Charalambous et al.

Eleni: If they asked you what languages you know, what would you say?
Popi: Greek ((pauses)) and Russian.
Eleni: Only? You would not bring up Turkish?
Popi: No. (Field notes by Eleni Theodorou, 13th June 2007)

Acts of direct and spontaneous admittance regarding Turkish, such as the above,
occurred only in private, outside the formal structural environment of the class-
room, and in the intimacy and safety of small friendship groups in the yard out of
earshot of their classmates. The fear of exposure which drove all these efforts to
take precautionary measures against a potential public exposure was by no means
ungrounded and could not have been mitigated simply through what may well
have been well-intended yet naïve efforts on behalf of teachers to encourage mul-
tilingualism in the classroom. Without a more nuanced reading of these silences,
their (hi)stories, and historicities, efforts to promote (celebratory rather than criti-
cal) translanguaging in the classroom may be rendered not only ineffective (as
seen in the example below) but damaging, even, for those most vulnerable.

5.2 Case Study 2: “Researching the Obstacles

and Limitations for Reconciliation, Multiculturalism
and Social Justice”

The second study was a two-year ethnographic project (2009–2011, funded

by the Open University of Cyprus) which set out to explore the challenges and
opportunities involved in the Greek-Cypriot 2008 educational initiative for
“Peaceful Coexistence”.2 The study was conducted by the first three authors and
involved three phases: (1) participant observations, recordings and interviews in
6 focal classrooms for 3 months; (2) a series of 6 3-hour training seminars on
Peace, Reconciliation & Social Justice in which all focal teachers participated;
(3) observations and lessons designed and implemented by focal teachers based
on the training they had received on peace pedagogies. The data in this paper
derive from this third phase after the focal teacher, Thalia (a pseudonym), had
completed her training on peace pedagogies.
Thalia was a teacher in her late 30s with 15 years of teaching experience
and considerable postgraduate studies. She had been teaching at the school for
the past four years and was teaching the same group for the second year. Hence,

2For a detailed description of the project and its overall results see Zembylas et al. (2016).
Translanguaging, (In)Security and Social Justice Education 115

classroom relations were strong and students appeared very fond of their teacher,
keen to participate and generally enjoyed their time in class. Thalia described
her students as “good kids”, though “mediocre to bad” in terms of achievement,
and she reported modifying her teaching considerably to meet their needs. Thalia
also appeared quite knowledgeable of her students’ out-of-school lives (migration
histories, residence, family circumstances, interests etc.) and her teaching often
sought to incorporate this in the classroom.
The small primary school where Thalia worked was located close to the
buffer zone dividing the old city centre in Nicosia, and belonged to the Zones
for Educational Priority (ZEP), a special intervention programme (at the time) for
addressing social inequalities in education. 95% of the students were of migrant
working-class backgrounds, with complex migration trajectories. Teachers often
described the school as “special”, “very different” and sometimes “difficult”. In
addition to their various ethnolinguistic backgrounds, students had also varied
levels of communicative and academic competence in Greek.
Turkish had a significant presence in the school as students of Turkish-
speaking Pontian backgrounds formed the biggest ethnic group (about 40% of
the population), with the majority originating from Georgia and Western Rus-
sia. According to teachers, most Pontian families had migrated to Cyprus in
the late 1990s, often after having spent several years in Greece as repatriate
Greeks. Therefore, Pontian students tended to be more confident in Greek, some
of them had attended Greek education since their early childhood, and Turk-
ish was used in their home environments mostly for oral communication. Other
­Turkish-speaking students in the school had Bulgarian, Roma, Turkish and Turk-
ish-Cypriot backgrounds. Although these groups used different varieties of Turk-
ish, teachers reported that Turkish-speaking students seemed to manage basic
understanding across these varieties. Nonetheless, Greek remained the preferred
language of communication between all students in the school.
Thalia’s group consisted of 11 students (3 girls, 9 boys) between 8–9 years
old, of which only one was Greek-Cypriot. The remaining students had Greek
as a second language, while Turkish was the home language of six students,
five with Pontian and one with Turkish-Bulgarian backgrounds. Emil was by far
the most fluent speaker of Turkish in class and he had also basic literacy skills,
acquired through chatting online with his uncle in Bulgaria. Thalia characterised
Emil (who will be the protagonist in the example below), as a “quiet but very
good kid”, who was “still struggling with Greek” because, in contrast to most stu-
dents, he had only entered Greek-Cypriot education a year ago, while his family
could not speak Greek at all.
116 C. Charalambous et al.

During our ethnographic observations it emerged that many Turkish-speaking

students in Thalia’s class had considerable out-of-school experiences with Turk-
ish people and culture. Nevertheless, our research collected evidence for the sup-
pression of students’ Turkish-speakerness in school in various ways, similarly to
case study 1. Generally Turkish-speaking students tended to refrain from speak-
ing Turkish in school, especially in more formal contexts like the classroom, or
in front of the researcher. According to Thalia, Pontian students seemed to carry
from home “a guilt mixed with fear” for being Turcophone, and they often felt the
need to clarify that “I speak the language but I’m not Turkish”.
Likewise, Emil for several months withheld the fact that he also had a Turk-
ish name (Mehmet) and refused to be called by this at school. He also appeared
“uncomfortable” during classroom discussions about Muslims and Turks and
tried to conceal his family’s relations with the Turkish-speaking north.
In contrast, Thalia’s own classroom practices did not, in any way, encourage
monolingual norms. In line with the suggestions in the translanguaging litera-
ture discussed above, with which she was familiar from her studies, she generally
embraced her group’s diversity and encouraged students’ use of home linguis-
tic repertoires to ensure understanding and maximise communication. Thus, she
often invited students to offer synonyms of Greek words in their home languages
or use home languages to explain aspects of the lesson to peers, which resulted in
hybrid constructions that combined different linguistic features.
However, when Thalia tried to formally encourage linguistic performances of
Turkish she met considerable resistance, as her sincere and well-intended educa-
tional attempt ran against powerful ideologies of (in)securitization and conflict.
This ideological clash becomes obvious in the extract that we present and dis-
cuss below (for an extended discussion of this episode see P. Charalambous et al.
2018). This extract comes from a series of 3 lessons that Thalia designed during
the training education workshops, and involved teaching positive Greek-Turkish
relations within the framework of peace education. To this end, Thalia chose a
story that thematized Greek-Turkish relations, included Turkish characters and
Greek-Turkish bilinguals, and contained Turkish lexical items.
During the first lesson, in which Emil was absent, Thalia introduced the story,
and the class discussed the bilingualism of the Greek protagonist (who was using
many Turkish words) comparing it to their own bilingualism, whether it involved
Turkish or not. Thalia also shared with students the fact that her own grandfa-
ther was bilingual because he had been living and working with Turkish Cypri-
ots. Thalia then attempted to elicit some Turkish phrases from students but they
resisted, and there were references to Emil as a more competent bilingual.
Translanguaging, (In)Security and Social Justice Education 117

The next lesson started with a brief revision of what they did last time. Taking
advantage of Emil’s presence, Thalia told him that they needed him last time to
compose a note that would be sent to the fictional Turkish character of the story.

1 THALIA: ok, Emil should tell us now, in case you found Meltem ((fictional charac-
2 ter)), what would you tell her in Turkish,
3 because she lost her slipper and so on and so on
4 Emil: miss I would tell he::r-
5 Maria: in Turkish!
6 Yorgos: not in Greek!
7 THALIA: let’s see if those who know understand him ((Maria holds a pencil case
8 in front of Emil like a microphone)) ah Maria is doing the reporter,
9 Emil tell us something
10 Emil: miss I would tell he::r
11 THALIA: ((whispering to Emil))in Turkish now, not in Greek, say
12 Emil: (2’) miss (6’)
13 THALIA: whatever you were going to say in Greek, say it in Turkish,
14 yesterday we didn’t have someone to help us
15 Emil: (5’) miss
16 THALIA: say
17 Emil: (2’)
18 THALIA: do you want to say it first in Greek and then in Turkish?
19 Maria: miss he is ashamed
20 THALIA: ok, fine, first in Greek and then in Turkish
21 Emil: I would tell her “I found the slipper in the sea a::nd
22 I took it (1’) and I took it (.) to give it to you”
23 THALIA: nice, now say it in Turkish,
24 now that you said it so nicely
25 Emil: (4’)“(-edin)(2’) buldum ben denizde”a(12’)
26 ((Thalia waits for Emil to go on but he doesn’t; she continues with another class-
27 room task))
(Classroom recording, fieldnotes taken by Panayiota Charalambous)
aEnglish translation: I found your (slipper) in the sea

As evident in the episode above, despite the fact that a large group of stu-
dents had at least some level of competence in Turkish, and despite Thalia’s best
intentions, the attempt to encourage students to perform their home linguistic
repertoires was met with considerable resistance: pauses (lines 12, 15, 17, 26),
hesitation (e.g., lines 4, 10, 15), and silence (lines 26–27). Throughout the extract
both Thalia and the students are supportive and encouraging (e.g., lines 5, 6, 12,
13,) whilst Emil seems very willing to perform the task (which was constructed as
“helping the class”—line 14) and please Thalia; in fact, he does not abandon the
attempt and tries to deliver the content of the task (a message to Meltem). It’s only
118 C. Charalambous et al.

in line 18 that Thalia realises that the problem is the medium in which the task was
supposed to be delivered and she therefore recommends a change (first in Greek
and then in Turkish). Indeed, Emil responds immediately to this change and with-
out a hesitation tries in line 22 to perform the task in his L2 even with some audi-
ble difficulties in constructing the sentences and choosing the right Greek words.
When he finally attempts to translate the message to his L1 and home language
there are again hesitations and pauses, and he leaves the task unfinished. After a
whole 12s pause, Thalia steps in and changes the task to relieve the tension.
So, how can we interpret the “sensitivities” and the “silences” that emerge,
despite the teacher’s efforts and good intentions? In order to do so, we need to
consider how wider collective narratives, historical trajectories, sociopolitical
processes, and larger ideologies may impact classroom interaction, and specifi-
cally the ways in which linguistic diversity is “voiced”—or not.
We do so in the discussion section that follows, where we reflect on how the
two case studies can help us rethink concepts such as “translanguaging” and their
relation to social justice pedagogies.

6 Discussion and Implications

A socially just pedagogy involves pedagogical strategies that encourage criti-

cal questioning and resistance against systems of oppression and normalisation,
and inspire social action that challenges injustice (Ayers et al. 2009; Kincheloe
and Steinberg 1998; King 2005; Ladson-Billings 1994). A translanguaging peda-
gogical approach involves pedagogical strategies that are designed to empower,
liberate and “give voice” to students to express their marginalised full linguistic
repertoires. However, in both the case studies we discussed, rather than recording
creative polylingual performances we evidenced silence and inarticulateness. As
this chapter has shown, strong (in)securitization discourses may have complicated
the enactment of translanguaging as socially just pedagogy.
Despite students’ linguistic practices at home, as well as linguistic compe-
tences, students’ public performance of their home linguistic repertoires in edu-
cational settings seemed to cause emotional discomfort, and hesitation resulting
in self-censorship. This urges us as researchers and educators to rethink and inter-
rogate our concepts and practices. How easy is to avoid associations with named
languages? Can we escape linguistic ideologies and how? And to what extent
can we transcend language as a powerful index of ethnonational belonging? Fur-
thermore, how can we rethink translanguaging as a socially just pedagogy when
issues of (in)security are involved?
Translanguaging, (In)Security and Social Justice Education 119

These questions become more pressing in contexts where language is unavoid-

ably part of a “conflicted heritage” which students have to negotiate in their eve-
ryday lives (C. Charalambous 2019) and which may pose a risk and create severe
insecurities. Indeed, in students’ home communities (Pontian, Bulgarian) we can
find narratives of conflict with Turks and histories of oppression of Turkish lan-
guage use. With the political situation in Cyprus remaining unresolved, the issues
raised in this chapter continue to create complications and other recent studies
also discuss their emotional and political complexities (Zembylas et al. 2017,
2019a, b—the first in the context of religious education, the second in Holocaust
education and the third in human rights education). But issues of (in)security are
not unique for Cyprus. With the increase of (in)securitization processes that was
described in the beginning of this chapter minority languages in different coun-
tries might also be (in)securitized, and their public performance in the classroom
may be seen as threatening. Khan (2017) describes such processes taking place
in the UK, whilst Zakharia (2016) describes the impact of (in)securitization pro-
cesses on Arabic education in NYC.
As Jaspers and Madsen (2019) remind us, language socialisation literature
has long argued that from very early on children socialise into language ideolo-
gies, and power asymmetries between different “named languages” and that this
metapragmatic awareness always shapes to an extent their language use. This is
also the case with (in)securitization processes and children in both case studies
knew that performing Turkish in the classroom could potentially put them at risk.
The examples discussed here do not undermine the pedagogical potential of
translanguaging practices. They do though urge us to carefully examine the dis-
cursive, historical, ideological and cultural constraints that frame classroom inter-
actions, as well as students’ insecurities, in order to design not only socially just
but also sensitive pedagogies—including translanguaging. In this endeavour the
concept of “inarticulateness” maybe as useful as “translanguaging”. According to
McDermott (1988) inarticulateness should not be approached as the product of
individual inability of linguistic deficiency but rather bound to social situations,
roles, and social structures that condition what is sayable (McDermott 1988). In
this way inarticulateness may serve as “an invitation to listen in a new way”. The
call for socially just pedagogies in conditions of (in)security requires attention to
silences (Rampton and Charalambous 2016; Spyrou 2016) and inarticulateness as
much as to issues of recognition, voice and polylingual creative performances.
This can help educators to seriously take into consideration the emotional and
political complexities and the students’ precarious positionings.
120 C. Charalambous et al.

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‘We Learn Together’—Translanguaging
within a Holistic Approach
towards Multilingualism in Education

Joana Duarte and Mirjam T. Günther-van der Meij

Abstract

Within two multilingual education projects in the north of the Netherlands a

holistic model for multilingualism in education is being tested. This is done
through design-based interventions in which in- and pre-service teachers,
teacher trainers and researchers co-develop and evaluate multilingual activi-
ties for different school types. Results show that through experimenting in a
safe environment teachers gradually embraced their pupils’ multilingualism.
This contradicts earlier findings on teachers strongly favouring monolingual
instruction and viewing migrant languages as a deficit.

Keywords

Translanguaging · Holistic approach · Multilingual education · Design-based

research

J. Duarte (*)
University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]
M. T. Günther-van der Meij
NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 125

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_8
126 J. Duarte and M. T. Günther-van der Meij

1 Introduction

Since the rise of modern nation-states, dominant monolingual language ideolo-

gies have perpetuated in much of the industrialized world—with Europe being
no exception. In particular, over the past two decades, academic success for those
who find themselves speaking a plurality of languages, has been pressured by
monolingual standards in dominant languages (Pulinx et al. 2017). These ideolo-
gies have failed to comprehend and cater for the rich complexities of human col-
lective existence and thus, at times have been implemented as weapons in ever
persisting battles for nationalistic control. As the world undergoes processes lead-
ing to superdiversity through the intensification of migration (Vertovec 2007), it
is unlikely that nation building tactics from the past, such as the continuation of a
monolingual habitus (Gogolin 2002), will be able to manage the composition of
modern states. This is already evident across a plethora of institutional platforms,
where multilingual identities are often denied full participation, contributing to
the degradation of intercultural existence and equality. One such platform capable
of moulding shared beliefs, expectations and norms is the school, which behaves
as a microcosm for its surrounding environment and can provide an insight into
future societal operations.
Nowadays, pupils from minority language backgrounds face a gap between
their academic achievement and that of their majority speaking peers (Sam-
son and Lesaux 2015). Typically, in explaining this gap, educators take a defi-
cit approach to multilingualism, where insufficient linguistic capabilities in the
dominant language of the school are seen as the key cause for poor academic per-
formance (Pulinx et al. 2017; Young 2014). Conversely, those within the scien-
tific community have seen the vast benefits of multilingualism as a resource to
learners and classrooms, if fostered in an appropriate way by the teaching staff
(Tolbert and Knox 2016). Currently however, the special linguistic and cognitive
benefits available to multilinguals are typically allotted mostly to children belong-
ing to a socially privileged background, where the transnational human capi-
tal offered by migration is commonly acknowledged (Fürstenau 2016). Equally,
students deriving from socially disadvantaged migrant families, often presenting
multilingual skills in languages low on the linguistic hierarchy, are seen as prob-
lematic or worse—a threat (Angelis 2011; Fürstenau 2016; Pulinx et al. 2017).
The current study is set in the officially bilingual Province of Friesland, in
the North of the Netherlands. In this region the minority language Frisian and
the dominant language Dutch are spoken next to other minority and migrant lan-
guages. Friesland has known a growing number of migrants in the last decade
‘We Learn Together’—Translanguaging within a Holistic Approach … 127

(CBS [Central Bureau voor de Statistiek] 2016). Language maintenance of Fri-

sian is of high importance for the region, especially because of the high inter-
ference of Dutch (Gorter et al. 2001). This has led to strict language separation
in education (Duarte and Günther-van der Meij 2018a). With the arrival of other
minority and migrant languages, schools are nowadays faced with a new chal-
lenge: incorporating these languages into their everyday practice. This is the
motivation behind recent multilingual education projects based on a holistic
model for multilingualism in education (Duarte and Günther-van der Meij 2018b)
that aims at acknowledging and using both migrant and minority languages of
pupils in education, next to the majority and foreign languages and is suitable for
different school types (e.g., trilingual, mainstream, newcomer schools). Official
or pedagogical translanguaging is one of the approaches of the model (Duarte
2018).
The aim of the present chapter is to shed light on the potentials of (official)
translanguaging as a part of a holistic approach for multilingualism in educa-
tion (Duarte 2017; Duarte and Günther-van der Meij 2018b), in which also other
approaches for the use of multiple languages in education are featured. It looks
at translanguaging at two levels: classroom practices and professional develop-
ment of pre- and in-service teachers. Further, it wishes to address the following
research questions:

• What interactional functions can translanguaging-based pedagogies fulfil for

knowledge acquisition?
• To what extent can translanguaging-based sequences deploy teachers’ profes-
sional development for multilingualism in education?

2 Translanguaging (Functions) and the Holistic

Model

According to Li Wei (2017), “the term translanguaging seems to have captured

people’s imagination” (p. 9). As such, it has almost shifted from a descrip-
tive label for the flexible use of pupils’ linguistic repertoires to make meaning
(García 2009) to a prescriptive concept that researchers and practitioners in edu-
cation should be using as a theoretical lens proposing an alternative view of bi-
and multilingualism (Vogel and García 2017). The term has been widely applied
to pedagogy, but also to the analysis of everyday social interaction, c­ ross-modal
communication (Gort 2015), linguistic landscape, visual arts, music, and
128 J. Duarte and M. T. Günther-van der Meij

transgender discourse (MacSwan 2017; Li Wei 2017). García and Kano (2014)
refer to translanguaging in education as

a process by which students and teachers engage in complex discursive practices

that include ALL the language practices of ALL students in a class in order to
develop new language practices and sustain old ones, communicate and appropriate
knowledge, and give voice to new socio-political realities by interrogating linguistic
inequality. (p. 261)

In terms of the use of the concept in pedagogical settings, a plethora of studies

has examined multiple advantages of a translanguaging lens on how teachers
act multilingually and how learners acquire and use their respective languages
in classroom settings. Concrete examples of studies looked at how learners use
two languages in small group activities to support bilingual learning (Childs
2016; Martin-Beltrán 2009), the co-construction of knowledge in content classes
(Duarte 2016), interaction of emergent bilinguals in school settings (Gort 2015),
the general use of two languages in classroom settings (Palmer et al. 2014;
MacSwan 2017), the effects of using two languages for the teaching of reading
(Soltero-Gonzalez et al. 2016), within science classrooms (Jørgensen 2008), as a
means of balancing the power-relations among languages in the classroom (Cana-
garajah 2011), in promoting minority languages (Cenoz 2009), for raising par-
ticipant confidence and motivation (Creese and Blackledge 2010), as a maximiser
of learning literacy skills (Hornberger and Link 2012), and for general empower-
ment and early language learning (Latisha and Young 2017).
Duarte (2018) described translanguaging spaces, in which various interac-
tion practices serve different functions depending on a) whether the aim of the
teachers is to acknowledge or actively use the different languages; b) whether the
teachers are proficient in the languages involved in the translanguaging moment,
and c) the types of languages involved. Instances of official translanguaging (see
Tab. 1) with a symbolic function are aimed at recognizing and valorizing migrant
languages within mainstream education and require no proficiency in those lan-
guages from the teacher. A scaffolding function is achieved when temporary but
systematic bridges towards other languages are incorporated in everyday teach-
ing attributing equal value to all languages. Teachers require no knowledge
of migrant languages to do this, as long as pupils are perceived as the experts
for their own family languages. Similar aims can be reached by scaffolding the
acknowledgement of various instruction languages present within the teaching
‘We Learn Together’—Translanguaging within a Holistic Approach … 129

Tab. 1 Functions of official translanguaging. (Note. Adapted from Duarte 2018, p. 13.)

model (such as Dutch, Frisian and English). Jones and Lewis (2014) also refer
to “scaffolded translanguaging” in the context of bilingual education. Finally,
official translanguaging can likewise fulfil an epistemological function when
the different languages are actively used to enhance both content- and language
knowledge. This is appropriate for exploring migrant, minority and foreign lan-
guages in their full potential as learning instruments. However, a teacher profi-
cient in those languages is needed to interact with the pupils.
Criticism to translanguaging pedagogies stresses its lack of empirical verifica-
tion in terms of measurable effects on educational outcomes. In addition, teachers
often complain that its goal is too philosophical and it lacks a clear definition in
terms of pedagogical tools (Ticheloven et al. 2019). Conteh (2018) also delivers
a critical review of translanguaging as pedagogy, claiming that the emphasis of
research has so far been on understanding processes of interaction rather than on
exploring its pedagogic potential. Jaspers (2018) states that the implementation of
translanguaging at school is likely to be less transformative and socially critical
than implied, as research a) has much in common with the monolingual ideolo-
gies it criticizes, b) trades on causality effects that cannot be taken for granted, c)
is becoming a dominating rather than a liberating force.
In sum, although enjoying positive echoing in research and, to a certain extent,
pedagogical practice, the implementation of translanguaging as a pedagogy does
not yet belong to the pedagogical status quo across schools in Europe. On the one
side, a translanguaging pedagogy clashes against prevailing monolingual ideolo-
gies often translated into immersion models for language teaching which lead to
strict language separation. On the other side, ideas of teachers in relation to the
130 J. Duarte and M. T. Günther-van der Meij

value and functions of pupils’ other languages lead translanguaging practices to

be perceived as ‘illegitimate’ in mainstream education (Kamwangamalu 2010).
For these reasons, in the current study translanguaging was included in a
wider holistic approach towards multilingualism in education (Duarte 2017;
Duarte and Günther-van der Meij 2018b). Research on multilingual approaches
has recently called for the development of such holistic or integrative models
that “recognize that language learning and teaching is more than the sum of the
elements of that equation seen as isolated units – language, learning and teach-
ing – and should therefore be seen from a more holistic and ecological per-
spective” (Melo-Pfeifer 2018, p. 193). The model presented here (Duarte 2017;
Duarte and Günther-van der Meij 2018b) combines five approaches to teaching
and knowledge along a continuum that oscillates between the acknowledgement
of different languages and their actual use in instruction. By doing so, teachers
can choose whether to focus on, for example, language awareness with activi-
ties in which languages and dialects in the classroom and the environment are
explored, on language comparison in which typologically related and unrelated
languages are compared or on conveying content-knowledge through a foreign
language using the CLIL-approach (Content and Language Integrated Learning).
Finally, the model addresses attitudes, knowledge and skills of both teachers and
pupils (Herzog-Punzenberger et al. 2017) within a multilingual approach. Lan-
guage awareness, language comparison and receptive multilingualism approaches
focus more on attitudes whilst CLIL and immersion focus more on knowledge
and skills in the language(s). As the model shows, translanguaging is a feature
that appears in each of the five approaches and is mostly manifested in interac-
tion. For more detailed information about the model see Duarte and Günther-van
der Meij (2018b). The present study looks at the role of translanguaging as a part
of a wider pedagogical approach for professional development of primary school
teachers for multilingual education.

3 Research Design

In general, classroom interaction in most European schools is dominated by

national languages, with the exception of foreign or, to a lesser extent, regional
minority languages used in education (Duarte 2016; Duarte et al. 2013). Across
the literature on professional development (PD) there is a clear correlation
between multilingual teacher training, exposure and experience, and the degree
of monolingual ideology permeating teacher beliefs, practices and knowledge.
Other factors that became clear throughout the studies pertained to practical
‘We Learn Together’—Translanguaging within a Holistic Approach … 131

i­mplications, such as a lack of multilingual resources, time and the demands of

standardized testing (Haukås 2016; Lee and Oxelson 2006; Young 2014). These
too, however, could be associated with an absence of appropriate multilingual
training. In the current study, we look at the role of translanguaging as integrated
within a holistic approach towards multilingualism in education in the North of
the Netherlands aiming at addressing the PD needs of primary schools and teach-
ers in our particular setting.

3.1 The Research Context and General Design

For this chapter we discuss data from two research projects. The 3M-project
(Meer kansen Met Meertaligheid—More Opportunities with Multilingualism)
works with 12 schools in order to develop multilingual activities for pupils aged
8–10, the Languages4all-project (Talen4all) focuses on pupils aged 10–12 in 8
schools. Despite the fact that each project focuses on different age groups, in both
projects other age groups were involved as well. Both projects focus on different
school types such as trilingual Frisian-Dutch-English schools, refugees/newcomer
schools, schools with a high percentage of migrant language speakers and schools
with a high percentage of Dutch speakers. In the activities developed, all (home)
languages that are present at the school are involved. Within both projects a large
team of teachers and researchers jointly develop the educational experiments,
following the holistic model for multilingualism in education. A d­ esign-based
approach (McKenney and Reeves 2013) was used to work with teachers in
order to co-develop the multilingual teaching activities. Design-based research
acknowledges the complexity of educational contexts by carefully examining the
different processes, levels and actors involved in carrying out a jointly engineered
educational experiment (Cobb et al. 2003). Previously assembled theoretical
knowledge is used together with an iterative cyclic design to improve the original
experiment. Regular school visits as well as the organisation of workshops for
the teachers add to their theoretical knowledge and experiences which are useful
in the development of the activities. During these visits, the implementation of
teaching activities was captured in video observations.
In both projects, the intervention phase lasted for about 18 months, spreading
over two school years. Six professional development workshops with key experts
in the field were conducted, alongside individual feedback sessions during regu-
lar school visits. Student, teacher and principal-questionnaires were conducted
before and after the intervention. The evaluation of this phase was conducted in a
final workshop on the basis of data collected in the school visits.
132 J. Duarte and M. T. Günther-van der Meij

3.2 Data Collection: Classroom Interaction

For the current study a total of 29 hours of video observations were recorded in
three project schools. The recordings were conducted in subject lessons in which
the language of instruction varied. After careful consideration by the research
team, two excerpts were selected for the present paper that exemplify the func-
tions of official translanguaging as in the model proposed by Duarte (2018),
such as different types of interaction patterns and including different languages
(national, foreign, migrant and regional minority). More examples can be found
in Duarte and Günther-van der Meij (2018b).

3.3 Data Collection: Teacher’s Attitudes, Knowledge

and Skills towards Multilingualism in Education

At the end of the intervention phase of the two projects, an evaluation work-
shop took place, aiming at a reflection on the teaching approaches developed, its
effects and how participating teachers saw their future role within their schools.
In order to elicit this information and foster a discussion, we used vignettes
(Bloor and Wood 2006; Steiner et al. 2016). For the current research, the concept
of vignettes was redefined to translanguaging-based vignettes, in order to present
participating teachers with a representative sample of translanguaging interaction
taken from the implementation of the activities developed throughout the inter-
vention. For the development of the five different translanguaging-vignettes, we
repeatedly reviewed all video-data and stipulated five different criteria that should
be as different as possible in the selected video data:

1. different ages of the pupils (ranging from 4- to 14-years old);

2. different subjects involved;
3. translanguaging as embedded in different approaches such as CLIL;
4. diverse interactional perspectives (teacher or pupils-led);
5. different languages involved (Frisian, English, Dutch, migrant languages).

The discussion on the vignettes was conducted during a PD-workshop in June

2019 with 30 teachers and 4 preservice teachers, distributed into 7 groups
(4 to 5 participants per group). All interaction of the participants was recorded
(N = 164 min) and transcribed (N = 74.127 words). Data was analysed using the
‘We Learn Together’—Translanguaging within a Holistic Approach … 133

MaxQDA-software (release 18.2.0). Transcripts were coded by applying t­hematic

analysis (Clarke and Braun 2013), pre-divided into 6 large coding categories:
attitudes, knowledge, skills, challenges, examples of pedagogic activities and
changes occurred through project participation. In total 107 codes were applied to
the transcripts of the vignette discussions, ranging from 45 to 149 words.

4 Results

4.1 Interactional Functions within ­Translanguaging-

Based Pedagogies

Below two excerpts are discussed that show examples of the different func-
tions of translanguaging (Duarte 2018). In the first excerpt, the research team’s
Polish pre-service teacher performed an activity with the class of 3rd graders.
While explaining the story of the Tower of Babel she involves a group of five
­Polish-speaking pupils and asks how several words in the story are uttered in
other languages present in the classroom (Tab. 2).
The teacher asks the pupils to translate different words from the story from
Dutch to Polish, Arabic and Frisian. All languages are allowed. This interaction
illustrates both a symbolic and a scaffolding function of translanguaging as the
teacher acknowledges all languages in the classroom by explicitly involving them
in her story. In addition, the teacher uses the languages to check comprehension
of the key-terms of the story. The Dutch language is used as a bridge to the other
languages.

Tab. 2 Building the Tower of Babel using multiple languages

134 J. Duarte and M. T. Günther-van der Meij

Tab. 3 Discussing the role of words in communication

In the second excerpt a grade 5 teacher discusses the theme “communication”

in a language lesson at a mainstream city school with a high percentage of Dutch
speakers. The teacher uses English, Frisian and Dutch as languages of instruction
(Tab. 3).
The teacher switches back and forth between English, Dutch and Frisian. The
pupil in this excerpt answers in Dutch with the Frisian word for “word”. In this
excerpt translanguaging has three functions. By including French translanguaging
has a symbolic function. It also has a scaffolding function as translanguaging is
used as a bridge between the three languages. Finally, because of the topic of the
lesson translanguaging also has an epistemological function as the both content
(about the function of language) and knowledge in the languages are enhanced.
In sum, these two excerpts show how translanguaging can fulfil different peda-
gogical functions. The teachers are consciously using translanguaging to attain
several communicative aims: to acknowledge different languages, as a lever
between different languages and to enhance both content and language knowledge.

4.2 Analysis of Translanguaging Sequences for PD

The recordings of the group discussions on the translanguaging-based vignettes

were transcribed and then coded. From the six codes applied, the largest amount
was coded as “skills” (33%), followed by “knowledge” (20%), “examples of
activities” (15%), “changes through project participation” (14%), “attitudes”
(9%) and “challenges” (9%). In the following, the categories skills, knowledge
and attitudes will be discussed.
‘We Learn Together’—Translanguaging within a Holistic Approach … 135

4.2.1 Reported Skills in Translanguaging-Based Approaches

Teachers describe a variety of practical skills that they apply in their teaching
and that are related to the use of several languages. They often relate these skills
to different functions they have identified from their use of multilingualism in
class. Four main functions of translanguaging were coded in the data. The largest
amount of skills was attributed to the code facilitating content comprehension,
which contains various accounts of how teachers use the different languages in
their classes in order to enhance knowledge acquisition and comprehension of
the pupils. An example of this is presented in the excerpt below. A teacher in a
school for newly arrived pupils explains how she pauses her class to allow the
­Arabic-speaking pupils to discuss new content, using several dialects, and then
reach a group conclusion that is translated into Dutch:

Because in Arabic you also have different dialects. At least that’s what they say in
my class. They go back and forth in their own language. I listen to them, but I don’t
understand it. Then they come to a conclusion and then we also talk about it in the
group. I think this is very valuable.

The importance of connecting the home languages to the Dutch language to

enhance comprehension is often highlighted. One of the teachers for example
describes how she teaches new concepts by looking them up in the home lan-
guages—e.g., asking parents, other pupils or using Google Translate—and then
explicitly links them to the Dutch concept.
Next to content comprehension, teachers identify acknowledgment and aware-
ness as one of the main functions deriving from the use of several languages in
instruction. In the excerpt below, a group of teachers is commenting the interac-
tion in one of the vignettes:

S3 For which function does the teacher use the different languages?
S1  ell not so much to learn that language, I think.
W
S4 Awareness.
S1 Yes, awareness that there are multiple languages, more languages.
S3 And appreciation that someone can speak them

The teachers in this group comment how valorizing the different languages pre-
sent in the class can be just as important as developing activities to learn different
languages. In terms of the didactic implementation and classroom management of
the use of several languages to enhance comprehension, teachers report on how
136 J. Duarte and M. T. Günther-van der Meij

they explicitly use peer-mentoring. In the excerpt below, two teachers report on
the experience of their school with a high percentage of newly arrived pupils:

S1  he peer-system works nicely at our school. There are often children who
T
are already further in their language skills.
S3 Who already know the language.
S1 And in this way that they can help each other again. They can then translate
and enhance comprehension for the new children but also for the teacher.
And if there are problems, they help translate and understand the problem

In two of the groups there is a discussion on the relevance of developing an own

micro-language policy when official institutional policies are mainly monolin-
gual:

We speak Dutch every day. We also have different days for English and Frisian. On
a Dutch day, when a child asks something in Frisian, I answer in Frisian. It facili-
tates reading comprehension. Then a child also learns faster, because he understands
it better. I would like to use the languages interchangeably much more. Children
have no problems with that at all, we only think that. In this way you can develop
your own policy a bit. When the director comes in, I stick to the official language
policy.

4.2.2 Reported Knowledge in Translanguaging-Based

Approaches
The segments coded under the category “knowledge” were sub-divided into six
thematic categories: language acquisition in multilingual settings, teaching meth-
odologies, role of translation, interconnectedness between languages, advantages
of a comprehensive approach and parental participation. The majority of the seg-
ments were attributed to the teaching methodologies sub-category. In the fol-
lowing excerpt, for example, the teacher demonstrates knowledge on receptive
multilingualism:

Sometimes it does not matter what language you speak, as long as you understand
each other, like with receptive multilingualism. You may not speak a language but
understand it, like with Frisian and Dutch. Then the point is that you get the mes-
sage even though you speak a different language.
‘We Learn Together’—Translanguaging within a Holistic Approach … 137

While commenting on the excerpts in the vignettes, teachers also provided their
views on the combination of different teaching approaches:

S4 I ask myself what the goals here are in terms of language. If we look, we
also see that this segment is done from a CLIL perspective, where you have
content and language goals. What do you actually want in such an interac-
tion that the children learn?
S1 Yes, this is also translanguaging.
S3 But translanguaging and CLIL can work together.
S1 Yes!

This excerpt clearly shows that teachers are aware of the different teaching
approaches that can be implemented in order to use several languages in instruc-
tion and how to combine them.
Next to knowledge on specific teaching methodologies, teachers also shared
their experiences on language acquisition in multilingual settings. In the excerpt
below, teachers discuss the importance of pupils’ home languages for learning
new concepts:

S2  es, these are all important principles, that you first

Y have to understand
something in your own language so that you can then build the other lan-
guage more easily.
S3 Because then you are learning something useless. You just learn an empty
word.
S1 Yes, because you don’t know what it means, and you don’t know how to
apply it

A teacher in another group provides an account of the skills of pupils with and
without prior instruction in the home languages:

If a child is eight or ten, and they speak Chinese at home and no one else speaks this
language in class, it is difficult but possible. They have learned how to learn, they
know how to sit on a chair at a table, how to pay attention, how to write. Skills like
that enhance learning of a new language. We also had children from Eritrea who had
no education at all in their home country. They don’t even know what it is like to sit
on a chair at a table all day or to write with a pencil. So, they first have to learn the
motor skills to write.
138 J. Duarte and M. T. Günther-van der Meij

This teacher is thus aware of the transfer of skills that pupils with prior school-
ing can accomplish within the Dutch education system and that teaching needs to
accommodate to this situation. Another teacher discusses phases in the language
acquisition of multilingual pupils:

You also see that students first have some sort of intermediate phase in that they use
words in Dutch but sometimes in their own language and that it is very logical for
them but not always for us.

4.2.3 Reported Attitudes in Translanguaging-Based

Approaches
Explicit attitudes are difficult to elicit, in particular in a group discussion. As a
result, only 9% of the coded segments were attributed to this category. Three main
sub-categories were distinguished: change in attitudes, awareness and vision devel-
opment and bidirectionality of teaching and learning. In terms of changes in atti-
tudes a teacher in one of the groups reports that the “whole attitude of the staff and
how we deal with multilingualism” has changed within the school. In another group,
this is made more concrete in terms of changes in attitudes at different levels:

S1  es, if you talk about the use of multilingualism in the classroom: the social
Y
aspect, the linguistic, the pedagogical aspect. What comes out of that.
S2 I think that is great and special because it also implies a change in thinking
about these aspects.
S1 Yes, indeed

In one of the groups, teachers reported on the need to develop their own vision on
multilingualism and to cooperate with other teachers:

“That is certainly the first big change, awareness, understanding, how do you deal
with multilingualism, what is your vision, that kind of thing and the other teachers
help you with this. Awareness and vision development are important.”

Another discussion focused on the need to acknowledge that learning is bidirec-

tional and for this to take place, teachers should be open to pupils’ cultures:

S2  kay. So, you refer again to the home situation. Things from the home
O
country.
S1 And that ultimately happens because you are open to your pupils’ cultures.
S2 That is different than: ‘we will teach you how things are around here’. You
learn together
‘We Learn Together’—Translanguaging within a Holistic Approach … 139

Finally, another group summarizes changes in attitudes within their school in the
following way: “But you know it is no longer ‘me laughing at you’, but ‘we laugh
together’. You see what I mean? And I noticed that this change is due to our gen-
eral positive attitude.”

5 Discussion and Conclusion

In this chapter we set out to outline the potentials of translanguaging-based

approaches as part of a holistic approach for multilingualism in education (Duarte
2017). We investigated classroom interaction in three schools participating in a
two-year intervention for multilingualism in education (see description in Duarte
and Günther-van der Meij 2018b) in order to pinpoint several functions of trans-
languaging. In addition, we used vignettes as an impulse to elicit teachers’ skills,
knowledge and attitudes towards translanguaging-based approaches.
Both data sources point towards the relevance of the symbolic function of
translanguaging (Duarte 2018) for both pupils and teachers. At the interactional
level, teachers often make bridges towards the pupils’ home languages in order
to enhance learning. They also emphasise the importance of linking home lan-
guages to the Dutch language. In our sample, we found this to happen mainly at
a semantic level, i.e., teachers asking for single words in the pupils’ languages.
The exception was one school for newly arrived pupils that encourages pupils to
engage in longer interactions in their home languages during official classroom
talk. Other schools also stimulated interaction in pupils’ languages by using
­peer-coaching during group work. These recurring translanguaging spaces make
use of “diverse multiple meaning-making systems” (Li Wei 2017, p. 24) and seem
to occur naturally at the project schools.
At the PD level, teachers in fact reinforced the relevance of acknowledging
the different languages of the pupils and of linking them to concepts in Dutch. In
their discussions, several skills were mentioned in order to realize this, such as
asking the pupils themselves or their parents, using translation or involving peers.
As seen in both interaction excerpts and in several accounts of the teachers,
the symbolic function of translanguaging—the awareness and acknowledgement
of different languages—is often perceived to be linked to cognitive aspects of
learning. Teachers reported that such awareness moments facilitated content com-
prehension and learning in both language and content subjects. This happened
often without the teachers themselves being proficient in the pupils’ languages
and being able to check the pupils’ answers in their family languages.
140 J. Duarte and M. T. Günther-van der Meij

Another aspect that emerges in both interaction and teacher discussions is

related to the process of language learning itself. The data shows how both
explicit language comparisons and making language a topic in class can also
enhance (meta-)linguistic knowledge of all pupils. In teachers’ accounts of the
use of translanguaging they reported more often on the benefits of using several
languages in instruction to enhance knowledge on languages in general but not to
learn one specific language.
The current study, although based on a small sample of video observations
and vignette-based discussions, points towards the importance of addressing
pedagogical skills, knowledge and attitudes of teachers in PD (Fürstenau 2016;
Pulinx et al. 2017) while developing and implementing programmes for multilin-
gual education. Teachers in our sample gradually embraced and used their pupils’
multilingualism through experimenting in class in a small and safe scale, discuss-
ing the results with colleagues and researchers before engaging in another cycle
of experimenting. The iterative design-based approach (McKenney and Reeves
2013; Cobb et al. 2003) used to co-develop the multilingual teaching activities
seemed to provide enough possibilities for teachers to develop their knowledge
on language development and teaching in multilingual settings, to experiment
with and implement different pedagogical skills in a translanguaging-based peda-
gogy and to report having developed a positive attitude towards the use of multi-
lingualism in education. As such, our results so far contradict earlier findings on
teachers perpetuating monolingual myths, (Angelis 2011; Fürstenau 2016; Gkain-
tartzi et al. 2015), on the perception of migrant languages as a deficit (Kaptain
2007; Pulinx et al. 2017; Tolbert and Knox 2016) and on home languages having
little value, cognitively or otherwise (Gkaintartzi et al. 2015; Pulinx et al. 2017;
Vaish 2012; Young 2014).

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Language Comparison as an Inclusive
Translanguaging Strategy: Analysis of a
Multilingual Teaching Situation in a
German Primary School Classroom

Sara Fürstenau, Yağmur Çelik and Simone Plöger

Abstract

This chapter highlights the practical implementation of language compari-

sons in a multilingual classroom. Following the key-incident-approach, we
analysed a specific teaching situation in a German primary school in order
to point out how the teacher shapes a translanguaging strategy that includes
all children and their knowledge, and how she deals with the associated chal-
lenges.

Keywords
Translanguaging · Language comparison · Multilingual classroom · Inclusive
teaching

Translated by Judith Keinath

S. Fürstenau (*) · Y. Çelik · S. Plöger

Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Plöger
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 145

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_9
146 S. Fürstenau et al.

1 Introduction

In educational projects all over the world, it has been stated that educators
should encourage their students to use their entire linguistic repertoire to think,
reflect and extend their inner speech (for an overview see Hélot 2013). The pre-
sent chapter focuses on language comparison as a didactical core element of
­multilingualism-sensitive classrooms. The use of language comparisons has been
promoted in the context of Translanguaging Pedagogy, and we will trace it back
to Hawkins’ (1984) ideas of “Awareness of Language”.
Although language comparisons play an important role in the conception of
didactic approaches to multilingualism, their practical implementation in the
classroom can qualify as a research desideratum. In this contribution, we address
this desideratum by analysing a classroom situation. The aim of the analysis is to
work out how a teacher shapes the language comparison in a multilingual learning
group and how she deals with the associated challenges. One challenge frequently
mentioned with regard to multilingual classrooms in migration societies is the fact
that the children use many different family languages about which the teacher her-
self knows very little. The analysis in this article is led by the question as to how
the teacher can include the linguistic knowledge of the children in class and use it
for joint language learning in the group despite this challenge. The paper is based
on data from a research project (“Multilingualism as a field of action in intercul-
tural school development”, short MIKS-project) in which the teaching staff of pri-
mary schools was assisted and supported in implementing multilingual didactic
approaches in the classroom. An important precondition for language comparisons
in multilingual settings was met: teachers in the ­MIKS-project schools were open
and willing to engage with the pupils’ home languages.

2 Theoretical Framework, State of Research

and Research Questions

2.1 Translanguaging Pedagogy

To analyse language education in multilingual classrooms, it is useful to adopt

a pedagogical concept of translanguaging that involves all languages in a class-
room, as the one offered by Ofelia García and others:

Translanguaging can be defined as a process by which students and teachers engage

in complex discursive practices that include all the language practices of students in
Language Comparison as an Inclusive Translanguaging Strategy … 147

order to develop new language practices and sustain old ones, communicate appro-
priate knowledge, and give voice to new socio-political realities by interrogating lin-
guistic inequality. (García and Kano 2014, p. 261)

As we know, the inclusion of children’s multilingual language practices into

class is by no means the norm but rather the exception in most schools world-
wide (see Hélot 2013). Against this background, teachers who want to develop
translanguaging pedagogy in multilingual classes are facing major challenges. It
is not merely a matter of including all the language experiences of all students;
in addition, new language practices should be jointly developed in the multilin-
gual learning group—involving all children in the communication—with the aims
of learning something and of questioning language hierarchies in social contexts.
It was not without reason that one of the MIKS project’s focal points was the
support of school development processes. For a single teacher, it is hardly possi-
ble to implement translanguaging pedagogy in this comprehensive sense. Rather,
it needs the cooperative development of a “multilingualism-friendly school
culture”, as Katrin Huxel observes in her case study of a MIKS project school
(Huxel 2018). This corresponds to the categorization of translanguaging peda-
gogy as “transformative” pedagogy (García and Wei 2014).
With regard to the lessons in every single classroom, many questions remain
open as well. Some researchers point out that translanguaging among children is
most likely to occur naturally once a school decides to be open to all children’s
languages (Creese and Blackledge 2015; Vogel and García 2017). This expecta-
tion is based on the finding that multilingual children are accustomed to access
their full linguistic repertoire for communicative purposes, even in educational
contexts. Accordingly, teachers can support the learning processes of individual
children already by permitting all languages in class and by welcoming multi-
lingual activities. This is not enough, however, if we adopt the comprehensive
understanding of translanguaging pedagogy outlined above and the premise that
teaching should support co-constructive learning in the group. Following Suresh
Canagarajah (2011), we therefore base the analysis of classroom interaction in
this paper on an understanding of translanguaging as a “social accomplishment”
(p. 4). In this understanding, translanguaging “is an interactive achievement that
depends on aligning one’s language resources to the features of the ecology to
construct meaning” (p. 5). The teacher is therefore faced with the task of shap-
ing “translanguaging as a form of social practice” (p. 5) in the classroom, draw-
ing on all children’s language experience and knowledge, and rendering it useful
for joint learning in the group. With this in mind, we view translanguaging as an
inclusive teaching strategy. The professional actions of a teacher who ­implements
148 S. Fürstenau et al.

translanguaging as an inclusive teaching strategy can be characterized by

using three core components described by García et al. (2017, p. xii): “stance”,
“design” and “shifts”. According to the authors, a “translanguaging stance sees
the bilingual child’s complex language repertoire as a resource, never as a defi-
cit” (p. xiii). The second component, design, relates to planning and organizing a
multilingualism-sensitive classroom. The third component, shifts, means that the
teacher is essentially prepared for dynamic multilingual acting and thinking in the
classroom and is willing to take up the children’s multilingual knowledge spon-
taneously. These core components are—as the analysis in this paper will show—
suitable to capture the characteristics of teacher action in shaping a multilingual
teaching situation. When shaping such a situation according to our understand-
ing, all students should get the opportunity to develop cooperative metalinguistic
awareness and mutual understanding, to recognize the value of all languages, and
to jointly challenge language hierarchies. These goals of translanguaging peda-
gogy can be traced back to the concept of language awareness, as will be illus-
trated below.

2.2 Language Awareness

In the scientific literature on Language Awareness, the following definition attrib-

uted to B. Gillian Donmall (1985) is popular: “Language Awareness is a per-
son’s sensitivity to a conscious awareness of the nature of language and its role
in human life” (as cited in Garret and James 1993, p. 109). This concept has been
used for decades as a basis to develop teaching that combines linguistic education
in the school and majority language, in foreign languages, in the student’s home
languages and in minority languages; today, it is of outstanding importance for
approaches to multilingualism didactics. Eric Hawkins, who developed the con-
cept in the 1970s, is considered the founder of Language Awareness. In the scien-
tific discussion on foreign language didactics since the 1960s, the focus has been
increasingly on teaching communicative competences, contrasting it to didactics
that focus on teaching grammar. In this context, Hawkins’ notion of “Aware-
ness of Language”, which he describes in his book with the same title (1984),
was special and innovative. From Hawkins’ point of view, one important goal of
language teaching is to reflect language, thus rendering students’ implicit knowl-
edge about language accessible and making it explicitly the subject of the les-
son. Unlike didactic approaches that focus on communication skills, “Awareness
of Language” is about developing metalinguistic knowledge: “our new curricu-
lum topic will seek to give pupils confidence in grasping the patterns in language”
Language Comparison as an Inclusive Translanguaging Strategy … 149

(Hawkins 1984, p. 4). In addition, Hawkins developed the concept not only from
a linguistic but also from a pedagogical perspective:

We are seeking to light fires of curiosity about the central human characteristic of
language which will blaze throughout our pupils’ lives. […] Above all we want to
make our pupils’ contacts with language, both their own and that of their neigh-
bours, richer, more interesting, simply more fun. (Hawkins 1984, p. 6)

Our request to use linguistic diversity in the classroom for joint learning in the
group and to design inclusive situations can also be traced back to Hawkins’
thoughts on “Awareness of Language” (p. 3). According to Hawkins (1984), when
children “come from different language backgrounds” and “tell one another about
their language experiences”, all children “can feel that they have something to
contribute. Experiences that they share […] can, if properly handled, unite chil-
dren”. Hawkins’ ideas live on programmatically in current concepts of multilin-
gualism didactics. However, there are still hardly any answers to the question as
to how multilingualism in the classroom should be “properly handled” in order
to make joint learning possible. This question arises in particular with regard to
learning groups in which the children have experiences with a great variety of
languages the teacher is barely familiar with. Our analysis of a teaching situation
in this paper aims at this desideratum.

2.3 Language Comparison

Comparing linguistic forms of expression is, according to Hawkins (1984), the

core element of a didactic that follows his concept of Awareness of Language:

A contrastive study, at an appropriate level, of […] patterns [in language] with those
met in other languages (foreign languages studied in class as well as the ethnic
minority languages of classmates) will be part of […] growing insight into the way
language works to convey meaning. (p. 5)

In research, foreign language didactics were the first to come up with language
comparisons as a teaching strategy—a didactic approach that soon was discussed
controversially (for an overview see Ticheloven et al. in press, for an example see
Mehlhorn 2011). Due to the complexity of language comparisons, it is not easy
to clearly outline the subject of a language comparison in the classroom and to
use the comparison for linguistic learning. Nevertheless, language comparisons
play an important role in recent concepts of multilingualism didactics. But the
150 S. Fürstenau et al.

scientific study of concrete experiences in the classroom has just begun. The sci-
entific discussion is often about challenges, obstacles, and the reasons why lan-
guage comparisons are rarely carried out in multilingual learning groups (see
Bredthauer 2019; Ticheloven et al. in press). The unease of teachers when deal-
ing with languages they do not understand and about which they know nothing is
an important issue. One of the few empirical studies on language comparisons in
“hyperdiverse-multilingual classes” (p. 5) in German schools (Bredthauer 2019)
is based on six expert interviews with teachers who teach language subjects at
secondary level and declare that they regularly conduct language comparisons to
incorporate the knowledge of their multilingual students. These teachers take the
plunge of accepting that the classic role allocation in school changes when the
students act as experts in their languages in class and when there are things the
teacher does not know. Bredthauer elaborates, however, that the surveyed teach-
ers take on an important “accompanying and moderating function” (p. 15) when
guiding language comparisons, a task the respondents perceive as highly demand-
ing (2019, translated from German). Hawkins (1984) attempts “to challenge
pupils to ask questions about language” (p. 4). In light of the role that teachers
play in including and comparing the students’ languages, we would like to add
that it can be equally important to challenge teachers to ask questions about lan-
guage. The fact that language comparisons in multilingual classes can stimulate
joint learning not only among the children, but may also include the teacher as a
learner will be depicted in the classroom analysis in this paper.
The following questions, derived from theory and state of research, guide the
analysis of a multilingual classroom situation: How does the teacher include the
children’s knowledge? To which extent is the teaching situation inclusive? In
which ways does joint learning take place in the group? What are the goals of lan-
guage comparison and what is the subject of comparison?

3 Research Project and Methods

The project “Multilingualism as a field of action in intercultural school devel-

opment” (short MIKS-project) was funded by the BMBF (Federal Ministry of
Education and Research) for six years (2013–2019).1 MIKS includes a train-
ing programme for professionalization and school development, which aims at

1https://www.ew.uni-hamburg.de/en/einrichtungen/ew1/vergleichende/diver/forschung/

laufende-projekte/miks.html.
Language Comparison as an Inclusive Translanguaging Strategy … 151

developing constructive approaches to incorporating students’ home languages

into the classroom (Fürstenau 2016). The training programme was developed in
three primary schools during the first phase of the project (2013–2016) and then
implemented and scientifically investigated at 17 project schools in North Rhine-
Westphalia from 2016 to 2019. It comprises training days with a focus on the
development of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic knowledge and of possible
multilingual teaching strategies, trial phases in which teachers experiment with
multilingual strategies in their own lessons, and guided reflection exercises (for
details see Lange 2019). During the trial phases, teachers could choose or design
ways of multilingual teaching that fit their own classroom and teaching style. In
this regard, according to Mechthild Dehn the MIKS project is an “impulse pro-
ject” (as cited in Fürstenau 2019): Teachers receive knowledge input and are sup-
ported in designing multilingual lesson units, but at the same time, they develop
their own multilingual teaching practices. The scientific investigation of the
MIKS project included both qualitative (i.e. participant classroom observation,
interviews with teachers and head teachers, observation of training days) and
quantitative methods (survey questionnaires before and after the training pro-
gramme). All project schools had a linguistically diverse school population with
monolingual and multilingual students born in Germany as well as newcomer stu-
dents. From the 17 project schools, four focus schools were selected for partici-
pant observation based on their explicit interest to be a focus school.
Results from the scientific study of the MIKS project show that multilin-
gual classroom situations differ greatly, e.g. depending on whose languages are
incorporated, by whom, for which reasons and in what manner (see Dlugaj and
Fürstenau 2019; Gilham and Fürstenau 2019). Project school teachers reported
to use language comparisons more frequently than other multilingual teaching
practices (Ticheloven et al. in press). Based on an analysis of observation pro-
tocols, we distinguished three levels of teacher initiative (Ticheloven et al. in
press): responding to student-initiated comparisons (1), improvising spontane-
ous comparisons (2), and planning lessons that include comparisons (3). In this
paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of a classroom situation on the micro
level. The data basis is one of 92 protocols from classroom observations in which
a teacher conducts a language comparison in a planned manner. The situation
illustrates a successful handling of the challenges outlined above. The teacher
creates an inclusive classroom situation in which individual multilingual children
can contribute their knowledge and, at the same time, the group can learn jointly.
In addition, the teacher ensures that all children can understand the goal of their
joint conversation about language and the subject of comparison. When choos-
ing the teaching situation for analysis, we thus followed a key incident approach
152 S. Fürstenau et al.

­(Erickson 1977; Wilcox 1980). The objective was to “write it up so that others
can see the generic in the particular, the universal in the concrete, the relation
between part and whole […]” (Erickson 1977, p. 61). The results shed light on
micro-level teaching patterns that represent and corroborate the bigger and more
abstract theory of comparing languages in a multilingual setting.

4 Analysis: Comparing Languages in a Multilingual

Primary School Classroom

The analyzed teaching situation was observed at Hollyhock School, one of

the MIKS focus schools. The school is located in the center of a German
­medium-sized city. In the school year 2017/2018, about 230 students attended the
school, 57% of which, according to school management, use another family lan-
guage besides German and 70% have a migrant background. At the school there
are heritage language classes for the languages Albanian, Arabic, Greek, Portu-
guese, and Turkish. According to the headmistress, the school participated in the
MIKS project because they feel that multilingualism and German as a second
language classes are challenging and that an existing school development group
should be supported in its work.
We analyse a teaching situation in an inter-year class 1/2 where the children
are six to eight years old. Topic of the lesson is the lexical category verbs. At the
beginning of the lesson, the teacher Ms Steffens asks the children if they know
what verbs are. Some children know that verbs are “doing words” (“Tuwörter”).
Ms Steffens lets the children tell her verbs in their basic form and in first per-
son singular and writes them on the board: spielen—ich spiele [play—I play],
laufen—ich laufe [run—I run], etc. Then she draws the children’s attention to the
common feature of the German verb form in first person, i.e. the ending -e2:

‘What do you notice now? What do these [she stresses the word and points to the
first person forms] words all have in common?’ She calls on a student. The student
stands up, points to the ending of each word on the board and says, ‘e, e, e, e.’ Ms
Steffens nods and says: ‘There are many children in our class who speak a language
other than German. Can any of you say spielen [play] in another language? How do
you say spielen in your language? I can say it in English. In English you say play.
Which other languages do you know?’

2Allprotocol citations are from an observation protocol dated 8 May 2018, written by
Yağmur Çelik. All proper names are pseudonyms.
Language Comparison as an Inclusive Translanguaging Strategy … 153

Fig. 1 Blackboard Presentation (8th of May 2018, Hollyhock school)

As an introduction to the subject, Ms Steffens initiates a ten-minute conversation

in which the teacher and the children jointly compare languages. Subject of com-
parison are the verb forms in first person singular. With the question “Which other
languages do you know?”, the teacher addresses the whole learning group. During
the following conversation, she never addresses individual children with specific
expectations. Rather, it is up to the children to decide which linguistic knowledge
they want and are able to contribute. During the conversation, the children intro-
duce seven languages of their own accord: Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Albanian,
Bulgarian, Polish, and Kurdish. The teacher develops the blackboard presentation
by letting the children dictate verb forms and writing them down phonetically (see
Fig. 1: 2nd line Arabic, 3rd line Persian, 4th line English, 5th and 6th lines Bul-
garian, and 7th line Kurdish). The teacher herself adds the English form “I play”
on the blackboard once none of the children raises the hand any more. Thereupon
a boy contributes Bulgarian and writes “I play” in Bulgarian using Cyrillic script
on the board after the teacher wrote the phonetic version. In the course of the con-
versation, other children point out that while they may speak Turkish, Albanian
154 S. Fürstenau et al.

and Polish, they do not know the verb forms; therefore, these languages do not
appear on the blackboard. In the protocol is noted, for instance, “Another student
says somewhat desperately: ‘I can speak Polish, but I don’t know what it means’”.
The teacher does not comment on this. Below, we will analyse in detail chosen
passages from the observed sequence with regard to the teacher’s pedagogical
approach and her creation of an inclusive discussion in class.
Following the introductory question “Which other languages do you know?”,
the teacher picks a student who raises his hand:

He says an Arabic word. She asks: ‘Tell me your language.’ He replies: ‘Arabic.’ She
repeats: ‘Arabic? And how do you say this in Arabic? Say it again.’ He repeats the
word to play again in Arabic. She imitates him and asks grinning: ‘Do I pronounce
that correctly?’ The boy and the other Arabic-speaking students shout ‘no’ and laugh.
She laughs, tries it again and says: ‘Oh man, that’s difficult. Can you pronounce
that?’ The students shout ‘yes’, laugh, and repeat the word loudly a few times. She
repeats it with them and the students try to help her with the pronunciation. She tries
it a few more times and then says: ‘Now, of course I can’t speak Arabic. Do you also
know how to say I play in Arabic?’ She looks briefly at an orange note on her desk.3
An Arabic-speaking girl puts her hand up and says two Arabic words. Another stu-
dent corrects her pronunciation. Then Ms Steffens says: ‘I’ve had it written down for
me; that’s how it is written.’ She writes innaa aleabu4 on the board below ich spiele,
then looks at all students and says: ‘This is not Arabic writing. These are the German
letters.’ She turns to the ­Arabic-speaking boy who answered first and asks him to say
the word again. He repeats it; she repeats it as well, is briefly corrected in her pro-
nunciation by the students and then corrects herself again.

The Arabic-speaking children contribute their knowledge, and the teacher posi-
tions herself as a learner (“Do I pronounce that correctly?”, “Now, of course I
can’t speak Arabic”). In advance, the teacher had asked someone to write down “I
play” in Arabic using Latin script (“orange note”). But that was her only prepara-
tion for this language comparison, and the spelling is corrected by the children
in the further course of the language comparison (see below). Not only Arabic-
speaking children, but all children participate and correct each other and the
teacher when it comes to the pronunciation of Arabic (“‘Can you pronounce that?’
The students shout ‘yes’, laugh and repeat the word loudly a few times”). Then,

3The teacher had asked an Arabic-speaking person to write down for her “I play” in Arabic
using Latin script. That was her only preparation for the language comparison.
4In the further course of the conversation, this spelling is changed by the children to: ana

aleabu (see Fig. 1).

Language Comparison as an Inclusive Translanguaging Strategy … 155

the teacher assumes again the teaching role by directing the children’s attention to
the writing (“This is not Arabic writing. These are the German l­etters”).
Other children raise their hands and introduce various languages. The observa-
tion protocol indicates that in this process, the children and their teacher jointly dis-
cover the linguistic knowledge present in the group. It becomes clear that all parties
are very interested in this knowledge, as is shown e.g. in the following situation:

Ms Steffens writes manbasi miconam5 on the board. The pupil Zahir Zia nods con-
tentedly. […] She turns to him: ‘That means I play? In which language?’ He looks
startled, points with both hands to his upper body and says in a high voice: ‘In my
language.’ Ms Steffens laughs and says: ‘What is your language?’ He says again in
a high voice: ‘In Persian.’ An exclamation of admiration ‘oaah’ can be heard from
some children.

Multilingualism and engaging with different languages do not yet seem to be

a normal part of class in this group, since the children meet the knowledge of
Persian with “admiration”, and the teacher did not know that Zia Zahir speaks
Persian. She knew that some children in the group speak Arabic, but the family
languages of other children seem to be new to her. This also applies to Julian.
Only when no more children raise their hands and the teacher contributes her own
English language skills (she writes “I play” on the board), Julian pipes up:

Julian says he knows it in Bulgarian. Another student loudly calls his name and
points to him: ‘Julian can do that.’ Ms Steffens looks at him in surprise: ‘Julian,
Bulgarian! I play?’ He quickly says the Bulgarian words for it. It is followed by a
‘Woaah’ of admiration that sweeps through the classroom.

Julian dictates, and the teacher writes “as igraje” on the blackboard. Obviously,
the children understood that in the current situation—unlike in most classroom
situations—knowledge in languages other than German is required. The situation
is inclusive since all children focus on the multilingual knowledge available in the
group (“Julian can do that.”). “Admiration” may also be evoked by the apprecia-
tion in the classroom context. Julian is further able to write “I play” in Bulgar-
ian on the blackboard using Cyrillic script, and the teacher as a moderator can
contribute her knowledge of various scriptures: “Look, Julian writes in Cyrillic
letters. Have you ever seen that?” Some students exclaim: “Like cursive hand-
writing.” She nods and says: “Yes, it looks a little bit like cursive handwriting.”
Another student says: “Our writing is different, too.”

5“Miconam” means “I do” and “basi” means “game”.

156 S. Fürstenau et al.

This creates a new occasion for comparison, this time on the level of writing.
Julian is not the only one in the group who knows about different writing systems
(“Our writing is different, too”). This is probably a knowledge that has not played
a major role in the classroom so far but becomes meaningful now by way of the
inclusive setting.
In a next step, Ms Steffens wants to write the first person forms for another
verb—to run—on the board:

She says that now they will also conjugate the verb to run multilingually and starts
again with Arabic. She asks: ‘Can anyone say I run in Arabic?’ A student puts her
hand up and says two Arabic words. Another student heckles: ‘No, that means
walk.’ Ms Steffens: ‘It means I walk? And run is yet another word?’ She frowns.
The Arabic-speaking students think and look at each other, but do not answer. Ms
Steffens says: ‘But ana definitely. Does it mean I? Does ana mean I?’ She writes
the word ana on the board and asks: ‘and run?’ A student says: ‘ana irkot.’ The other
­Arabic-speaking students repeat it and Ms Steffens writes ‘ana irkot’ on the board. I
am surprised how attentively and quietly the other students listen. Ms Steffens says:
‘Look, I’m wondering right now. That means [she points to the word innaa alaebu
on the board] I play and that means I run [she points to ana irkot]?’ The students
nod ‘yes’. Ms Steffens asks: ‘Why is here [she points to the word innaa] another
word for ‘I’ than here [she points to the word ana]?’ An Arabic-speaking student
says: ‘That’s wrong.’ Ms Steffens: ‘This is misspelled? Is it also ana?’ The student
nods and Ms Steffens says: ‘Who knows how that is written. We can’t write Arabic.
But then this should also be an ana.’ She changes the word innaa to ana. The stu-
dents nod.

The protocol contains various indications that in this situation everybody

involved is stimulated to think about language while the teacher and several
­Arabic-speaking children work out together how to write “I run” in Arabic using
Latin script on the blackboard. The joint reflection begins on the semantic level as
the children orally translate “I run” into Arabic (running vs. walking). The teacher
thinks ahead (“‘It means I walk? And run is yet another word?’ She frowns.”).
The teacher lets the children go on pondering by not insisting on a quick answer
but first writing down the part of the translation the children seem to agree on:
ana. “Does ana mean I? […] and run?” Ms Steffens asks. Now a student dictates
“ana irkot” and other children agree by repeating the wording. The pondering has
obviously led to a joint result. Even the children who cannot translate ‘I run’ into
Arabic seem to be pondering (the observer is “surprised how attentively and qui-
etly the other students listen”). In the next step, the teacher once again pursues
the matter of comparing languages and discovering regular patterns. She draws
Language Comparison as an Inclusive Translanguaging Strategy … 157

attention to the translation of the word I into Arabic, or rather to its phonetic
representation in Latin script, because there are two different spellings, “innaa”
and “ana” on the blackboard. Although it was the teacher who introduced the
spelling “innaa” (“orange note”, see above), a student now dares to say, “That’s
wrong.” The teacher, in turn, accepts the student’s correction without questioning
it (“then this should also be an ana”) and corrects the spelling on the blackboard.
The teacher arranges the situation in such a way that the children have the last
word, thus honouring the children’s knowledge. At the same time, she observes
something the group has in common, which is that apparently none of those pre-
sent has learned to write Arabic script (“Who knows how that is written. We can’t
write Arabic.”). In the role of teacher, Ms Steffens draws the attention of the class
to the significance of different writing systems. However, with the spelling “ana”
established by the children, everyone seems to be satisfied (“The students nod.”).
With the aim of making different languages visible for comparing them, the chil-
dren incidentally accomplish the feat of assigning sounds of the Arabic language
to Latin writing.
After the group has agreed on Arabic, a student speaks up and names a lan-
guage that has not yet been considered, but which is spoken by many children at
Hollyhock School: Kurdish. “Ms Steffens: ‘Oh, we forgot Kurdish. Do you know
it?’ Another Kurdish-speaking girl laughs and says, ‘Anyone can do that’.”
The teacher’s wording in the first person plural—“We forgot Kurdish”—can be
seen as a further inclusive approach to multilingualism. By using we, the teacher
makes it clear that Kurdish as a language is significant for all in the group, not
only for those who speak Kurdish at home. Quickly the girls dictate the teacher I
play and I run in Kurdish. Subsequently, Zahir Zia dictates I run in Persian—man
midoam—and explains that man means I.6 The teacher takes up the example to
explicitly compare the first person forms:

Ms Steffens summarizes: ‘Well that’s the same as in German. The I at the beginning
stays the same. We always have an -e as ending and in Persian we always have an -am.’
She underlines the word man and the ending -am with a different colour.

Again, the teacher speaks in first person plural (“… and in Persian we always
have an -am”), thus emphasizing the significance of the Persian verb form for

6Besides “man”, the other Persian verb “man basi miconam” and “man midoam” also have
the “mi-” in common, which is a prefix for verbs in present tense.
158 S. Fürstenau et al.

joint learning. She draws the students’ attention to both similarities and differ-
ences between the verb forms:

As a last example, she takes the Bulgarian word and asks Julian for the translation
of I run. He says it and she writes as titscham on the blackboard. She asks again:
‘What is now the same in Bulgarian?’ Nikolas raises his hand and says that the first
word as recurs. Ms Steffens nods and underlines the as; then she asks about the end-
ing: ‘Is the ending the same, too?’ The students shout: ‘No.’ A student says: ‘No,
but as means I’. Ms Steffens: ‘That’s possible. But as you can see, endings are not
necessarily the same in every language. Here we have different endings [she points
to the Arabic translations], in German the ending is always the same and in Persian
it is the same, too. But in Bulgarian it is different. Thus, it can differ from language
to language.’

Although Julian is the only student in the group who speaks Bulgarian, the
teacher clearly addresses all children with the question “What is the same in Bul-
garian?” Nikolas recognized that the word “as” recurs. Then Ms Steffens asks the
children to look at the endings of the Bulgarian first person forms written in Latin
script on the blackboard (“Is the ending the same, too?”). The protocol states
that “The students [i.e. all and not just the boy who speaks Bulgarian] shout:
‘No.’” The student who then objects “but as means me” refers to the meaning
of a word in a language that is new to her and shows what she has learned. The
teacher answers “that’s possible”, making it clear that she herself is not the one
who speaks Bulgarian, and continues the joint reflection on language. Finally, the
teacher uses all the verb forms gathered on the board for a short talk on the sub-
ject of comparison—verbs in first person singular—and points out with regard to
the observed regularities and discrepancies that “it can differ from language to
language.” The gist of what all children should learn in this German lesson is also
explicitly stated by Ms Steffens: “In German, the ending is always the same.”

5 Conclusions

We chose the analysed teaching situation as a key incident because it is produc-

tive for answering the research questions formulated above. The analysis provides
guidance on how a teacher may create an inclusive classroom situation in which
individual children can contribute their knowledge and, at the same time, the
group can learn jointly. Furthermore, we can see in the analysed situation how a
teacher may ensure that all children understand the goal and subject of language
comparison and jointly develop language awareness. To conclude, we will map
Language Comparison as an Inclusive Translanguaging Strategy … 159

out how the characteristics of the teacher’s actions can be captured with the three
core components of translanguaging pedagogy devised by García et al. (2017,
p. xii): “stance”, “design” and “shifts”.
How does the teacher in the analysed teaching situation succeed in activating
the multilingual knowledge of first- and second-graders for language compari-
son and in making it the subject of conversation? It is noteworthy that the teacher
addresses her questions consistently to the whole group, not to individual chil-
dren. It is up to the children themselves to decide whether they want to contribute
their knowledge or not. We attribute the lively participation of the children not
least to the stance of the teacher: The way in which the teacher treats the chil-
dren’s statements displays a permissive, appreciative, curious and e­ rror-friendly
stance. By way of genuine questions and great interest, the teacher seems to
encourage the children to talk about their family languages, even though they
have not been used to it in the classroom context. Besides, the teacher seems
to literally infect all children in the group with her interest in languages, which
helps to develop a conversation in which they actually think together about lan-
guage. This becomes apparent, for example, in the fact that children express and
discuss observations about their classmates’ languages which they do not under-
stand themselves. The joint reflection is supported by the teacher’s moderation,
who takes the children’s contributions seriously and picks up on them, repeatedly
making it clear that the group (“we”) has a common interest in all represented
languages. Thus, the teacher ensures an inclusive classroom situation in which
the group can learn jointly not only by her stance, but also by explicit announce-
ments. Hawkins (1984) assumes in his conception of “Awareness of Language”
that “[a]ll can feel that they have something to contribute” (p. 3). This is obvi-
ously true in the analysed situation, regardless of whether the children grow up
monolingual or multilingual.
The analysis has shown that, during their conversation about languages,
teacher and children jointly discover the linguistic knowledge existing in the
group. In the process, the knowledge of individual children receives great recog-
nition—even “admiration”, according to the observation protocol. We therefore
assume that addressing the existing multilingualism is a new experience for the
learning group. The analysis thus provides an insight into a classroom situation,
in which the transformative potential of translanguaging pedagogy becomes
apparent. According to Vogel and García (2017), translanguaging pedagogy even
has “the potential to transform relationships between students, teachers and the
curriculum” (p. 10). Our analysis of the teaching situation contains references to
such a transformative process, since it is indeed true that “teachers and students
learn from each other, and all language practices are equally valued.” (Vogel and
160 S. Fürstenau et al.

García 2017, p. 10). The described transformations take place as part of a school
development process. The teaching staff of Hollyhock School, where the teaching
situation was observed, decided to address multilingualism as a field of action for
school development by participating in the MIKS project. The teachers try out
multilingual didactic approaches in the classroom and thus gain new experiences.
A special experience for the teachers consists in planning and designing les-
sons in which contents—more specifically: languages—are addressed, about
which they know very little themselves. This makes a careful design no less
important, as the analysis has shown. The observed teacher guides the language
comparison in a well-planned manner. In the analysis, we mapped out how the
teacher in her role as a moderator ensures that all children can understand the
goal and the subject of language comparison. The teacher does not lose sight
of the subject of the lesson (verb forms in first person singular) and repeatedly
tells the children explicitly what they need to understand (regularities and irregu-
larities). Ultimately, this multilingual language comparison is a planned part of
German language class, and the goal is to understand verb forms of the German
language. Nonetheless, the art of teaching consists in maintaining openness to the
children’s knowledge and thoughts despite the plan, and this is where the shifts
come into play.
García et al. (2017) describe it as a challenge in the classroom “to follow
the dynamic movement of the translanguaging corriente” (p. xiii). Although the
observed teacher has a plan, she has to deal with the fact that it is completely
unclear which linguistic knowledge the children will contribute and what the lin-
guistic basis for the comparison of verb forms will be. The teacher repeatedly
talks with the children about questions without knowing the answers. The “shifts”
consist in the “moment-by-moment decisions” (García et al. 2017, p. xiii), e.g.
when a child dictates something in a language the teacher does not understand,
and she writes it in phonetic spelling on the blackboard. Such shifts are only pos-
sible if the teacher takes the children’s knowledge seriously and is prepared to
leave safe ground. Findings from the MIKS project indicate that this willingness
among teachers varies considerably depending i.a. on their own experiences with
language learning (Gilham and Fürstenau 2019).
It is a task for further research to investigate how teachers in multilingual
teaching situations deal with linguistic uncertainties, and which strategies they
pursue when applying multilingualism didactics in order to use languages they
know very little about. To prepare for a lesson, the teacher may of course read up
on languages spoken by children in her class as part of the design. This approach
played only a minor role in the teaching situation analysed above (the teacher
had Arabic words written in Latin script on a slip of paper in advance). Other
Language Comparison as an Inclusive Translanguaging Strategy … 161

l­essons we observed at the MIKS focus schools were based on, e.g., cooperating
with multilingual parents who contribute their linguistic knowledge to lessons. In
any case, multilingual classroom situations have in common that insecurities on
the teacher’s side can hardly be avoided, that is to say, moments of not-knowing
will occur. This conflicts with the self-image of some teachers. Therefore, studies
on how teachers in multilingual teaching situations can deal constructively with
insecurity and not-knowing will be useful to advance research on multilingualism
didactics.

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 Translanguaging from the Perspective
of (Multilingual) Students, Teachers and
Educators
Reflecting Lingualities
and Positionalities for a Changing
Education System

Magdalena Knappik, Corinna Peschel, Sara Hägi-Mead,

Aslı Can Ayten and Tatjana Atanasoska

Abstract

To improve teacher education for multilingual and often minoritized class-

rooms, we aim to find out more about future teachers’ understandings of mul-
tilingualism. Using a biographical professionalization research approach, we
investigate the interactions of students’ biographical and academic knowledge
in autobiographical texts, focusing on two minoritized students. Their texts
allow to reconstruct biographical knowledge of family language policies, Her-
itage Language Instruction and translingual lifeworlds. They also show the
students’ knowledge of language ideologies that devalue multilingualism.

M. Knappik (*) · C. Peschel · S. Hägi-Mead · T. Atanasoska

Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
C. Peschel
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Hägi-Mead
e-mail: [email protected]
T. Atanasoska
e-mail: [email protected]
A. C. Ayten
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Münster, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 165

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_10
166 M. Knappik et al.

Keywords
Teacher education · Minoritized pre-service teachers · Understandings of
multilingualism · Language ideologies

1 Introduction

Multilingualities are neither neutral nor equal, even though they are part of eve-
ryday life and education in most societies all over the world. Research shows
that minoritized multilingual students still face social injustice and run the risk of
being educationally disadvantaged (Kuhn and Neumann 2017; ­Panagiotopoulou
and Rosen 2018). Classroom practices that devalue multilingual languaging prac-
tices are greatly contributing to this inequality. This is often the case in national
education systems that still support mainly monolingualism even though they are
factually multilingual, such as in Germany or Austria. Teachers often report to be
overcharged by the lingual heterogeneity in their respective classrooms, feeling ill-
prepared and fearing to lose control (Arnold 2015; Baumann and ­Becker-Mrotzek
2014; Bredthauer and Engfer 2018). To better prepare future teachers for a chang-
ing education system, the module “Deutsch für Schülerinnen und Schüler mit
Zuwanderungsgeschichte” (German for students with a history of immigration,
short “DaZ module”) was implemented in teacher education in 2009 in Germany. In
some of Germany’s federal states, it is mandatory for all students in teacher educa-
tion), including the state where our project is located, and facultative in some of the
other states (Baumann 2017). The module (6 ECTS1) usually comprises a lecture
and a seminar and provides an introduction to multilingualism and its didactics.
The “DaZ module” is meant to equip future teachers with knowledge to work
on language-related didactics and education inequalities. Some studies show that
teacher education students who participate in seminars that prepare teachers for
multilingal classrooms show a greater appreciation of multilingualities and less
insistence on strictly monolingual teaching practices (Strobl et al. 2019—albeit
for a more extensive version of the module with 12 ECTS, Born et al. 2019).
Furthermore, they show a higher competence in teaching matters related to
­

1The University of Duisburg-Essen is the only university in North-Rhine Westphalia that

offers a 12 ETCS module. The University of Dortmund offers 9 ECTS for secondary
school teacher education degrees and 6 ECTS for other teacher education degrees. Before
implementation, 12 ECTS were recommended (Stiftung Mercator 2009).
Reflecting Lingualities and Positionalities … 167

­ ultilingualism and German as a Second Language (Bührig et al. 2020). The sum
m
of attended seminars is the most important predictor for their competence growth
(Stangen et al. 2019). However, some results also point towards an adversatory
effect: The module seems to create and label a group of students as others, and
moreover, as others having a deficit and needing the teachers’ help (Döll et al.
2017). This seems to happen instead of developing a stance that values emerging
bilinguals’ linguistic curiosity, flexibility and their communicative and learning
skills. Bredthauer and Engfer (2018) summarize their review of twelve empirical
studies on teachers’ beliefs about multilingualism by pointing towards a consid-
erable discrepancy between teachers’ overt positive stance towards multilingual-
ism and their lack of actual multilingual teaching practices and negative views on
minoritized languages. This is in line with research that stresses the importance of
developing a professional and reflective stance toward issues of migration, social
inequalities and language(s) as part of teacher education (Skerrett 2015; Gomez
and Johnson Lachuk 2017; Dirim and Mecheril 2018; Gottuck et al. 2019). This
is beautifully complemented by García’s et al. (2017) insistence on the develop-
ment of a translanguaging stance as the foundation for lesson planning and teach-
ing within translanguaging pedagogy.
However, before we can do more research on teachers’ stances on multilin-
gualism, we need to find out more about students’ actual understandings of multi-
lingualism. What do they mean when they talk about multilingualism?
We approach this question with a focus informed by biographical profession-
alization research (Dausien 2003; Volkmann 2008; Schwendowius 2015; Daus-
ien and Hanses 2017; Thoma 2018; Epp 2019). Drawing on the sociology of
knowledge and its distinction between different kinds of knowledge (Berger and
Luckmann 1966), biography research focuses on biographical knowledge (Alheit
and Hoerning 1989; Dausien and Hanses 2017). Biographical knowledge is the
knowledge we acquire throughout our lives. It is stacked up over the time of the
life-span and specific to each individual. However, biographical knowledge is
not just of a personal or individual nature, it also contains institutional and social
knowledge, as individuals’ experiences are embedded within social and institu-
tional frames. By forming their biographical knowledge, they interpret and make
sense of their experiences, and of themselves, within these frames. This allows us
to view the students’ biographical knowledge as being in a multi-layered interac-
tion with social frames such as language ideologies (Irvine 2016). These inter-
actions might shape their understandings of multilingualism and their respective
beliefs.
It is important to note that biography is not simply a term that relates to indi-
viduals’ life stories. Dausien and Hanses (2017) point out that biography is also
168 M. Knappik et al.

a social construct. Individual life stories reflect social expectations on (normal)

biographies. They argue that it is possible to reconstruct social expectations of
normalcy from the ways in which individuals present themselves through their
life stories. From this perspective, a biography research approach is interested not
only in individual life stories, but also, as Dausien and Hanses stress, in more
general and abstract reconstructions of social expectations and constructions of
normalcy with regard to biographies. In a similar vein, biographical texts allow to
reconstruct social membership categories and the “rules” of their inclusiveness or
exclusiveness by analyzing how individuals negotiate their own social member-
ships in their biographical texts.
Biographical professionalization research also highlights the interactional
(Dausien and Hanses 2017) nature of biographical knowledge with other kinds
of knowledge, such as “academic knowledge”. This relationship may be viewed
as fluid (Epp 2019), or, as we find, also contradictory. We use the term “academic
knowledge” to refer to the knowledge that might be created by participating in
higher education. Processes of knowledge creation are individual. They are only
partly influenced by the content matter of a curriculum and the learning opportu-
nities that educators provide.
Thus, we ask:

• What understandings of multilingualism do future teachers have?

• What kinds of knowledge do future teachers’ understandings of multilingual-
ism entail?
• Which influences of their biographical knowledge on their understandings of
multilingualism can we reconstruct?
• Which interactions of biographical and academic kinds of knowledge can we
reconstruct?

2 Method

To answer these questions, we conduct the ongoing project “DaZu” (“Aushand-

lungen von Zugehörigkeiten im DaZ-Modul”—“Negotiating Social Memberships
in the DaZ-Modul”2). The project “DaZu” consists of quantitative and qualitative

2The research group working on this ongoing project is Tatjana Atanasoska, Sara Hägi-
Mead, Magdalena Knappik, Corinna Peschel (University of Wuppertal) and Aslı Can Ayten
(University of Münster); the project is led by Sara Hägi-Mead.
Reflecting Lingualities and Positionalities … 169

data; in this article, we will focus on the qualitative data. To pilot our study, we
asked students who participated in the DaZ-Modul to write down their “multi-
lingualities biographies”. This was an assignment at the end of their seminars in
the module. We used a prompt that focused on the students’ individual encoun-
ters and experiences with multilingualism, multilingual speakers and German as
a Second Language. We also asked them to write about any content matter they
came across during their studies that had to do with multilingualism. The prompt
was accompanied by a short questionnaire that asked students about their back-
ground information (like age, languages learned in their first three years, etc.).
They could decide whether they wanted their text to be included in our project
or not. 125 biographies were collected and anonymized using an individualized
alphanumerical code. The written texts are two to four pages long in average.
Asking the students to write seems to have two major advantages: First, writ-
ing gives access to thoughts and beliefs, which otherwise could not be analyzed
by us. Second, writing could, thanks to its epistemic quality, be a chance for the
writers to organize their own knowledge and beliefs and reflect on them.
The data collection method proved apt to elicit explicit positionings of stu-
dents towards multilingualities and their speakers. Students recounted both every-
day experiences and things they learnt in their studies. It is possible to reconstruct
biographical and academic knowledge from the texts, and it is very interesting
how those kinds of knowledge contradict each other. Those contradictions seem
to be a great source of data for analyzing frictions and changes in knowledge and
concepts (also in those, that might have been inert before), developments in the
way students reflect on multilingualism and, hence, learning processes.
As a limitation, in the pilot’s writing prompt, we did not explicitly ask stu-
dents to reflect. We only had one point of data collection (towards the end of the
DaZ-Modul), so it is not possible to reconstruct learning processes. However, we
could reconstruct potential signposts for such processes. These are points where
students make the aforementioned contradictions the subject of discussion. The
seminar setting of data collection frames the relationship between students and
researchers who were the seminar teachers. Institutional frameworks can have
influenced which content students chose to write about. Considering the strong
social desirability that is to be expected here, it is even more remarkable when
students position themselves in opposition to content matter that was taught in
the module. We utilized the data of our pilot study to develop a heuristic for these
questions and to further develop our research design for the main study.
We interpreted the biographies using both, initially, a sequential analysis
approach (Reichertz 2016) and later a category building approach drawing on
Grounded Theory Methodology (Charmaz 2006).
170 M. Knappik et al.

3 Findings

When analyzing the biographies of multilingualism, we noticed that there are

systematic differences between the biographical knowledge of minoritized multi­
lingual students and students who grew up monolingual German-speaking. For
students who grew up monolingual German-speaking, the contents of the DaZ
module are knowledge productions about “others”. For migration-related multi-
lingual students it is contents that address themselves as members of the group/
category that is produced by the module (“with immigrant history”). They do
not simply assign themselves to this group, but negotiate this addressation inten-
sively. For this text, we will highlight the biographical knowledge of two mul-
tilingual students and the negotiations that are part of their understandings of
multilingualism.3 In the following, we will present findings about the students’
negotiations of being a “Speaker of German as a Second Language”, about
their family language policies, about their experiences with Heritage Language
Instructions, and about their views on translingual practices. We chose to present
the findings following the temporal sequence of the students’ texts.

3.1 Negotiating Being a “Speaker of German as a

Second Language” (“DaZ-Sprecher*in”)

At the beginning of their texts, three-quarters of the multilingual students identify

themselves as “DaZ speakers”. According to the contents taught in the DaZ mod-
ule, this term refers to speakers who have acquired German after the age of three
(Ahrenholz 2017). The term is used in the literature to distinguish this constella-
tion of acquisition from that of simultaneous bilingual language acquisition, i.e.
the acquisition of two languages within the first three years of life.

“My first contact with a DaZ speaker is probably I myself. Even though I now speak
German much better than Arabic, it was the language with which I first came into
contact, as I was born in Tunisia. But in the DaZ seminars I learned that your first
language is not the same as the language one speaks best, but a completely neutral
and time-oriented term” (BDS28, pp. 1–5).

3For analyses on majorized students’ understandings of multilingualism, see Hägi-Mead

et al. (forthc.).
Reflecting Lingualities and Positionalities … 171

“Before I went to university, I was able to make experiences with speakers of Ger-
man as a Second Language in many contexts, because I am basically a speaker of
German as a Second Language myself. My family is originally from Turkey. My
parents were both born in Turkey, albeit my mother completed her education fully in
Germany. Hence, I was born in Germany” (RRA28, pp. 1 ff.).4

There are three things to note here: Firstly, the students self-identify as members
of the group of “DaZ-speakers” with modalizing expressions such as “probably”
(BDS28), which gives the impression that they assign themselves to this category
hesitantly. Secondly, they link their identification as members of this group with
explanations about their (educational) biography and sometimes, as in the case
of RRA28, that of their parents. Thirdly, their assignment entails statements
about their language skills in German and in their family language. The latter two
points are usually closely intertwined; throughout their texts, descriptions of their
language skills can be found.
First, the modalizing self-identification (“I am basically a speaker …”,
RRA28; “is probably myself”, BDS28) could be a reaction to the writing prompt.
The first question of the prompt asked about experiences with “DaZ-speakers”
which means that it is, in fact, not directed at them but at monolingually raised
students. The modalization could also indicate that multilingual speakers do not
like to be assigned to this category. The term “Second Language” is often under-
stood as pejorative, especially by multilingal speakers themselves (Miladinović
2014; Dirim and Pokitsch 2018, also Ennser-Kananen and Montecillo-Leider
2018 in critique of the term “English language learners”). It should also be noted
that students who were raised monolingual German-speaking do not define them-
selves as such in their biographies. Being raised monolingually is an unmarked
category.
Second, the self-assignment as a DaZ-speaker does not stand alone, but is
linked with explanations of the writers’ migration biography. They explain why
they are bilingual: either they themselves were born in the country of their fam-
ily language, as in BDS28, or their parents, as in RRA28. This indicates that
the writers feel a need to explain their bilingualism. RRA28 also mentions their
mother’s educational biography, which was “fully” completed in Germany. One
reason for this could be that she wants to show how long her family has been
in Germany already, at least since her mother’s elementary school enrolment.
A complementary interpretation is that by mentioning her mother’s educational

4All quoted passages are translations from the German original.

172 M. Knappik et al.

biography, and not merely the duration of her stay, she wants to point out her
family’s strong affiliation with the German educational system.
Third, both students make statements on their language skills in their fam-
ily languages and in German. BDS28 says that his German is now much better
than his Arabic, thus referring to a common understanding of first language as
one’s “best” language. The fact that the term “first language” as it is used in sci-
entific literature differs from this common understanding—namely that the term
is meant to be “neutral and time-oriented” (BDS28)—shows, again, that the com-
mon understanding contradicts this understanding. It seems to be relevant for stu-
dents to emphasize their high language skills—in German and, partly, also in the
family language.

3.2 Family Language Policy

Another important part of the students’ multilingualism biographies is their explana-

tion (and endorsement) of their family language policy (Macalister and Mirvahedi
2017). This term refers to the decisions that parents and their children make
about the languages used at home (Crump 2017). According to Crump, family
language policies have three components: ideology, practices and management.
In the students’ texts we learn about their representation of their parents’ ideolo-
gies—what, in their perspective or recollection, their parents advocated and why.
In very general terms, students also mention what was practiced in the family.

“The first language that I learned as a child was the Turkish language. My parents
spoke only Turkish with me up until I was three years old. It was important to both
of them that I have a good mastery of my family language. […] I have to say this
worked pretty well” (RRA28).

The family language policies of the students in our data vary, but they are sim-
ilar in the two biographies examined here: both parents decide to use the fam-
ily language exclusively (RRA28) or mainly (BDS28) for the first three years of
their children’s lives. The reason for this strategy is also the same: both families
are convinced that their children would learn German later anyway; it is also
important for the family of RRA28 that she has a good command of their fam-
ily language. Both students evaluate the family language policy of their family as
positive, both with reference to their language skills in German; RRA28 also with
regard to her family language skills in Turkish. If we recall the opening passage
of RRA28’s biography where she highlights her mother’s educational biography,
Reflecting Lingualities and Positionalities … 173

it is now possible to present another interpretation for this. RRA28 might want
to emphasize here that her family’s language policy, choosing Turkish only for
the first three years, does not show a lack of educational aspiration or orientation
towards the German educational system: At least one parent made this decision in
full knowledge of the German educational system.
Crump (2017) stresses that a family language policy is never decided and
enforced by parents alone, but negiotated between parents and children. We do
not find any mention of such negotiations on the part of the children in the two
biographies, but their positive presentation can be read as an endorsement of their
family’s language policy.

3.3 Heritage Language Instruction

(“Herkunftssprachlicher Unterricht”)

Both students recount experiences with Heritage Language Instruction (HLI) in

their texts, and both assess it negatively. BDS28 recounts his perspective as a for-
mer student of HLI as a child, and RRA28 reflects on observations of HLI that
she made during an internship during her teacher training. BDS28’s recollection
is characterized by a child’s perspective. He remembers that, as a child, he did
not like the HLI teacher, that he found the textbooks boring, that the lessons took
place in the afternoon. He also felt excluded from a group of students with a dif-
ferent Arabic-speaking country of origin in the class. From an adult perspective,
he analyzes that emotional distance to his family language was also a reason for
his rejection of HLI. He states that he was emotionally distant to his father who,
being a quiet man, never talked much to him. As a consequence, he says he did
not experience his family language to be a language of emotions, but rather one
that he was distant to. As an adult, however, he regrets that he “did not seize this
opportunity” (BDS28) to develop literacy in his family language through HLI.
RRA28, who did not attend HLI as a child, discusses it from the perspective of
a future teacher:

“During a practice placement at a high school I was given the opportunity to visit
a ‘Turkish heritage language class’. To my horror, I had to find out in the Turkish
class that most students were not able to speak correct Turkish nor German. Instead,
they talked a mixed language using both of them, but this was marked by grammati-
cal mistakes. […] Additionally, it has to be said that the teacher was originally from
Turkey. He also was not able to speak German correctly. In my view, this is very
problematic, because the teacher acts as a linguistic role model and, hence, should
be able to also use the German language correctly” (RRA28, 22–30).
174 M. Knappik et al.

For RRA28, it is horrendous that the students do not speak German or Turkish
correctly in the HLI class she observes. She reports that the students use trans-
lingual practices and make grammatical mistakes. At this point, we do not know
whether she rejects translingual practices per se, or if she mainly rejects the lack
of correctness she observes. Yet, it is not clear what RRA28 classifies as gram-
matical errors. In translingual practices, for instance, words from one language
are often inserted into the syntactic and/or morphological system of the other
language, which is called code mixing (Dirim 1998). If we were to assess the
correctness of an entire discourse from within the system of a single (named)
language, this phenomenon can appear as a lack of correctness in this language.
RRA28 also criticizes the German language skills of the teacher who is of Turk-
ish origin. She argues that teachers should also be language models and, thus, in
her view, this teacher should also be able to speak German correctly.
RRA28’s presentation is characterized by a strong dissociation from the
observed lessons and the HLI teacher. In Sect. 4, we will discuss this in the
context of her position as a member of a minoritized language group and
in the context of societal demands on citizens’ (German) language skills in
­German-speaking countries.

3.4 Views on Translingual Practices

We do not know whether RRA28 disavows translingual practices per se. Her
recollections and observations seem to be based on the common idea of sin-
gle named languages, rather than the idea of a translingual repertoire. She also
describes her own language skills within the frame of separated, named lan-
guages. However, in her work as a substitute teacher, RRA28 aims to create trans-
languaging spaces:

“Based on my own experiences, it was important to me to include first languages in

my teaching. So first of all, I got an overview of the individual first languages. My
mastery of the Turkish language was very helpful. In my lesson planning, I tried
to translate important expressions into the students’ respective first languages as
well, in order to make understanding easier. It should be assumed that most of the
“newly arrived students5” also went to school in their home country and are, there-
fore, familiar with certain contents. It is important to build on this knowledge. By

5Students who enter the German school system after the age of 6, due to their family’s
migration, and who have usually participated in another country’s school system before.
Reflecting Lingualities and Positionalities … 175

i­ncluding the first languages, a very pleasant atmosphere was created in the class
and the pupils had a lot of fun learning” (RRA28).

Even though RRA28 describes what she does in the vocabulary of separate lan-
guages, it is apparent that she is eager to include her student’s repertoires in a
meaningful way. She values her students’ prior knowledge. Her lesson planning
must have required some time and effort, but she does not mention it. Instead, she
values her own family language skills as a resource for her planning.
BDS28, on the other hand, creates the image of a “cosmos” to describe his
very positive translingual experiences at secondary school.

“The secondary school I attended had a high percentage of migrants - an estimated

72%. Playing with languages and cultures was part of everyday life, and living
together between nations, religions and peoples was part of our identity. Boys could
be insulted in dozens of languages from Russian to Italian to Polish and you could
compliment girls and sing love songs to them from Turkish to Arabic to Spanish.
Every day we talked about what things were called in other languages or reflected,
in fact, on speaking habits. Sometimes we parodied the other language and had to
laugh if something meaningful came out of it. […] Foreign languages were a very
conscious thing for us. This showed musically as well. Russian, Turkish or Greek
music was not uncommon in the schoolyard and everyone knew a few songs. In this
place we were foreigners, but we were foreigners together and identified ourselves
with multiculturalism and multilingualism. We tried to take racism’s pungency away
with humor, not only by throwing whole racist resentments at each other in jokes,
but also by calling ourselves K*****, P****** or N****.6 In fact, inter-ethnic con-
flicts were never an issue, even homosexual teachers were respected to the greatest
extent. By living together with the foreign, we had simply learned to be tolerant and
to empathize with the other. We had developed our own little cosmos” (BDS28).

BDS28 describes multilingualism here as a part of the lebenswelt/lifeworld7

(Schütz and Luckmann 1973) in which he lived as a secondary school student.
His recollections seem to be situated mainly in the schoolyard. In this multilin-
gual lifeworld, all languages seem to be available to everyone. Here, all students
form a group in their shared “foreignness”, they are equal to each other. Their
interactions are characterized by humor and respect. They also share experiences
of racism, and “we [tried] to take the edge off racism with humor”. BDS28 recalls

6The student uses three racial slurs, he writes them fully in his original text. We censored
them in the quotation of his text to disrupt the reproduction of the slurs.
7Ingrid Gogolin (1994) refers to migration related multilingualism as “lifeworld multilin-

gualism”.
176 M. Knappik et al.

translingual practices such as singing love songs to girls and insulting boys,
using a rich repertoire of languages for both. The young students use translingual
practices in such a way that, in the words of BDS28, they create their “own lit-
tle cosmos”. The youths also reflect on language(s) on a meta-level: “Every day
we talked about what things meant in other languages, or reflected on speaking
habits”.
BDS28 also uses named languages to describe the languaging practices in this
“cosmos”, but he emphasizes how everyone could participate in any languaging
practice, regardless of the languages’ names. This practice transcends notions
of multilingualism as entailing just a first and a second language, or the notion
of languages and their speakers as being associated with members of a specific
nation. The shared languaging experiences that BDS28 describes are available to
all, and instead of different “worlds”, this translingual space creates their “own
cosmos”.
Later in his text, BDS28 describes the “cultural break” he experiences when
entering university. Here, nobody cares for his full linguistic repertoire, as only
German and English are valued as academic languages. This shows that the
understanding of multilingualism described here, this translingual and equal cos-
mos, is not related to an individual alone, but describes the linguistic and social
practices of a local community. The “cosmos” disappears in another context, at
university.

4 Discussion

The students’ biographical texts allow us to reconstruct their biographical and

academic knowledge of multilingualism and, thus, to gain insights into their
understandings of multilingualism. With their recounts of their family language
policies, their experiences with Heritage Language Instruction (HLI), and of a
translingual lifeworld (as in BDS28), their texts allow to identify some shared
elements of multilinguals’ biographical knowledge. These are elements that the
texts of monolingually raised students in our data do not contain. However, this
result should be regarded as preliminary, as it needs further confounding by more
data.
The biographical texts also allow to reconstruct the students’ knowledge
of social expectations of multilingualism and of language ideologies (Irvine
2016). Through their participation in monolingual institutions, their socializa-
tion in a society with a monolingual norm, through their reception of media and
Reflecting Lingualities and Positionalities … 177

(mainstream) arts, knowledge about language ideologies has become part of their
biographical knowledge. In most biographies, this knowledge is not articulated
as explicitly as the abovementioned elements—family language policies, HLI
or translingual lifeworlds (although in some other text in our data, it is). Their
knowledge about social expectations on multilingualism can be reconstructed by
analyzing what the students seem to think is in need of explanation, and by ana-
lyzing their recurring assessments of language skills.
In the opening passages, the students explain why they are bilingual by relat-
ing their migration biographies and, in RRA28’s case, also her family’s migration
history. This allows to reconstruct a knowledge of multilingualism as something
that needs explanations in Germany. The social expectation of normalcy is mono-
lingualism and a non-migration biography.
Both students combine their recounts of their family language policies with an
emphasis on their strong language skills. RRA28 also highlights her family’s con-
nections to the German education system. It can be reconstructed that the students
have a biographical knowledge that family language policies focusing on the fam-
ily language are, in Germany, not considered an everyday part of parenting or a
self-evident family right. Instead, family language policies seem to be in need of
defense by highlighting strong language skills.
The students’ biographical knowledge shows that the terms “first language”,
“second language”, and “DaZ-speaker” are, in the common sense, not “absolutely
neutral and time-oriented” terms, as BDS29 formulates for the technical term
“first language”. As a technical term, it conveys no information about the level
of mastery of this language, but in their biographical knowledge, the opposite is
more accurate. This can be reconstructed as the students only assign themselves
hesitantly to the category “DaZ-speaker”, and they are fast to highlight their
strong German language skills. Here, the students’ biographical knowledge con-
tradicts the academic knowledge they acquire in the DaZ module.
We understand the students’ articulations as answering and countering the
social expectations on multilingualism that is part of their biographical knowl-
edge. In their biographical texts, they self-position and re-position themselves
against social expectations and ideologies on languages. We can reconstruct this
in their assessments of multilingual policies, e.g. in their endorsement of their
own family language policy, or in their rejection of HLI. Both needs to be inter-
preted against the language ideology of monolingualism as being the norm, and
against the societal devaluation of migrant languages. With their endorsement of
their family language policy, they reposition themselves against societal expec-
tations that families should speak majorized languages. As regards to HLI, their
178 M. Knappik et al.

negative assessments allow them to align themselves with a common negative

societal view on HLI that is reflected in its massive institutional marginalization.
By this alignment, they might gain a socially viable position.
The students reposition themselves also against the simplicity of some of the
technical terms and teaching matters that form part of their academic knowledge.
These can be seen as “single stories” (Adichie 2009) if compared to the com-
plexity of a multilinguals’ language biography. BDS28’s recounts of his father’s
stillness and their ensuing emotional distance are opposed to the idea that fam-
ily languages are important for the authentic expression of emotions, as might be
emphasized in teaching as part of the module’s advocacy for multilingualism. In
these regards, we can see how the students reposition themselves against assump-
tions and expectations on multilingualism that form part of their biographical
knowledge.
In the instance of the emphasis on language skills, and on correctness in par-
ticular, the biographical texts also take up language ideologies in an affirmative
way. RRA28’s text is characterized by a strong emphasis on correctness in lan-
guage use. This can be interpreted as adoption of the language ideology of ideal-
izing correctness, and this ideology often contains the idea of a native speaker
as the ideal speaker of a language (Holliday 2006). BDS28 does not formulate
correctness as a strong goal, but he constantly negotiates why his family language
skills are “this bad” (BDS28). We can observe an adoption of language ideolo-
gies by multilingual students or teachers in several studies on translanguaging as
part of teacher education, too. Holdway and Hitchcock (2018) show that engage-
ment with translanguaging literature in a further education course changes teach-
ers’ teaching practice to be more inclusive of multilingual resources. Out of seven
teachers in this study, one teacher does not change her teaching and insists on
focusing on teaching content matter using English-medium only. We think it is
noteworthy that this very experienced and well-educated teacher is herself mul-
tilingual due to migration. Martínez-Roldán (2015) found that bilingual teacher
candidates tended to reinforce hegemonic English languaging practices in an
after-school program for Latinx students when there were no specific rules and
spaces for the use of Spanish.
We have to take into account that speakers of minoritized languages are often
taken as representative for their whole group (Gümüşay 2020). Minoritized future
teachers are, in particular, in the position to negotiate their ideas on (multilingual)
education, and their language biography, by negotiating the expectations of a
society that widely endorses monolingual ideologies (Thoma 2018). The empha-
sis on correctness, and on their language skills, could be a way to leverage their
language and educational biographies within this frame.
Reflecting Lingualities and Positionalities … 179

5 Conclusion

In order to further improve teacher education for a multilingual and often minor-
itized student population, we think it is important to find out more about future
teachers’ actual understandings of multilingualism. Using a biographical profes-
sionalization research approach, we are interested in the interactions of biographi-
cal and academic knowledge in the students’ understandings of multilingualism.
The term biographical knowledge does not only entail personal experiences, but
also reflects social expectations on normalcy and “normal” biographies as social
constructs (Dausien and Hanses 2017). Thus, this approach enables us to recon-
struct students’ biographical knowledge on social expectations and ideologies on
multilingualism and multilinguals, as well as their acts of (re-)positioning them-
selves against those expectations. We used biographical texts written by students
in teacher education with a focus on their experiences with multilingualism as
instrument of data collection. In this text, we presented two minoritized multilin-
gual students’ biographies.
Family language policy, their experiences with Heritage Language Instruction,
and, partly, their experiences with translingual lifeworlds are shared elements
of their biographical knowledge of multilingualism. With Schwendowius and
Thoma (2016), we suggest that it is important for teacher educators to acknowl-
edge these elements as funds of knowledge (Moll et al. 1992). The translingual
lifeworld that BDS28 describes is rich, multi-faceted and full of informal learn-
ing: linguistic and metalinguistic learning, the experience of solidarity, finding
strategies for dealing with the experience of racism, and the development of a
respectful empathy for all “others”. Similarly, to know about family language pol-
icies and about HLI is a fund of knowledge that is important for (future) teachers
to have in a multilingual migration society. In teacher education, this needs to be
part of reflective work (“biography work”, Dausien and Hanses 2017) for students
in order to become aware of structural shortcomings and to develop transforma-
tive ideas for institutions such as Heritage Language Instruction, in particular if
personal experiences with this were negative.
The biographical texts also allowed for reconstructions of the students’ bio-
graphical knowledge of social expectations on lingualities and language ideolo-
gies, mainly the expectation of monolingualism as normalcy. We found that the
students re-position themselves against some of these ideologies, for example by
endorsing their family-language-oriented family language policy. However, we
found that they have also taken up some of the ideologies, mainly the idealization
of correctness and the idea of languages as separate entities. This was also appar-
ent in their recurrent affirmation that their (German) language skills were strong.
180 M. Knappik et al.

The project “DaZu” is ongoing. So far, we gained first insights into the stu-
dents’ understandings of multilingualism and how their biographical knowledge
might interact with the academic knowledge they create when participating in the
DaZ module. In a further step of the project, we will collect biographical texts
before the DaZ module and ask students to comment on their own texts after the
DaZ module. This way, we hope to gain more insight into possible changes of
students’ understandings of multilingualism after the DaZ module and into their
ways of reflecting on their biographies.
Martinéz-Roldán (2015) points out that bilingual future teachers “need time to
reflect on their own biographies, to interrogate their understandings and valuings
of bilingualism, and teacher education programs should provide such opportuni-
ties” (Martínez-Roldán 2015, p. 55). The act of writing down your own language
biography and reflecting on it in teacher education could provide an excellent
opportunity to do this. Such kinds of reflection and ways of prompting it could
then perhaps become a regular part of teacher education.

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German Schools Abroad: Teachers’
Views on Translanguaging
and Emerging Research Perspectives
on Children’s Language Biographies
and Educational Professionalization

Julie A. Panagiotopoulou, Lisa Rosen, Jenna Strzykala,

Janine Fißmer and Timo Neubert

Abstract

In this chapter, we present three ongoing dissertation projects that emerged

from the research project “migration-related multilingualism and educational
professionalism” (led by Julie A. Panagiotopoulou and Lisa Rosen). The com-
mon ground of these projects is the focus on German schools abroad and the
qualitative research approach to firstly, translingual practices and language
ideologies, secondly, multilingual educational biographies of students, and
thirdly, transnational professional biographies of teachers.

J. A. Panagiotopoulou (*) · L. Rosen · J. Strzykala · J. Fißmer · T. Neubert

University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
L. Rosen
e-mail: [email protected]
J. Strzykala
e-mail: [email protected]
J. Fißmer
e-mail: [email protected]
T. Neubert
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 185

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_11
186 J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al.

Keywords
Translanguaging · Inclusion/exclusion · German schools abroad · Language
biographies · Educational professionalization

1 Introduction

In this chapter, we present research projects on German schools abroad. After

introducing the initial project “migration-related multilingualism and educa-
tional professionalism” (see Sect. 2.1), we outline Jenna Strzykala’s doctoral
research, which focuses on the views of teachers working at German schools
abroad in North America—specifically Boston and Montreal (Sect. 2.2). Rather
than discussing desiderata in the following, we present two new projects that have
emerged from the initial project (see Sect. 3). We therefore refrain from draw-
ing a conclusion in the classical sense, but rather see these two projects as an
extended outlook for further research in the field of German schools abroad. The
first project is led by Julie A. Panagiotopoulou and will be the subject of Timo
Neubert’s dissertation project. It aims to reconstruct educational biographies of
multilingual students in German schools abroad in Southern Europe, specifically
Greece. The project focuses on experiences of inclusion/exclusion and (­non-)
belonging of “Greek” bi/multilingual students in the context of German schools
of encounter (see Sect. 3.1). The second project is the doctoral research project
of Janine Fißmer, supervised by Lisa Rosen. It focuses on professional biogra-
phies of teachers at German schools abroad that are characterized by mobility and
internationality. The overarching question is to what extent the work experiences
gained at German schools abroad will professionalize teachers in dealing with
migration-related diversity and thus contribute to inclusive school development
(see Sect. 3.2).

2 Migration-Related Multilingualism
and Pedagogical Professionalism

2.1 The Initial Research Project

Within the framework of the international comparative project “Migration-related

multilingualism and pedagogical professionalism” (the theoretical background,
design and first results can be found in Panagiotopoulou and Rosen 2015b), the
German Schools Abroad: Teachers’ Views on Translanguaging … 187

aim was to dwell on the practical experiences and those relating to the educa-
tional biography of pedagogical professionals in multilingually organized educa-
tional institutions in and outside Germany using expert interviews (Bogner and
Menz 2009). The interview guide comprised eleven questions, some of which
refer to the multilingual and translingual reality of multilingual children and ado-
lescents both in the context of the educational institution as well as outside of
it and prompted the pedagogical experts to share their views. Other questions
invite the interviewees to comment on scientific findings and to focus on their
own experiences as well as on the students multilingual practices at the German
schools abroad in order to answer the following leading research question: “[i]f
and how do the experiences gained by pedagogical professionals in multilingually
organized educational settings interrelate with their views on migration-related
multilingualism, linguistic diversity and language practices at school?” (Panagio-
topoulou and Rosen 2015b, p. 230).
With respect to the research field of German schools abroad, it should
first of all be noted that while these schools are private schools within their
host countries, they are supervised and partially funded by the German state
­(Brüser-Sommer 2010) and follow one of the official German curricula from
kindergarten to high school. These institutions are open to students from local,
bi-national, expat and migrant families while maintaining strong ties to Germany
and especially the German language. Teaching staff at these schools can be either
locally recruited or temporarily dispatched teachers trained and tenured in Ger-
many who keep their status as civil servants. Within the many German schools
abroad across the globe, a distinction can be made between different school
types: the two most important are Deutschsprachige Schulen [German-speaking
schools] and Begegnungsschulen [schools of encounter]. In this second context,
students may graduate with both national degrees and the German Abitur [high-
school diploma]. While the official language of the host state is partly also the
language of instruction in bilingual encounter schools, German is the sole lan-
guage of instruction in German-speaking schools (Brüser-Sommer 2010).
First starting with German schools abroad in Greece and Canada and later on
in the United States, a theoretical contention was that the views of pedagogical
professionals regarding multilingualism and their interaction with the linguistic
reality of multilingual children are always embedded socio-culturally and are
therefore shaped by concrete values and concepts: according to Maitz (2014),
these values can be understood “as assumptions and convictions that can be
used to explain and justify linguistic facts and practices” (p. 4), they relate to
language ideologies that are mostly unconscious and rarely articulated as such.
Instead, they are “located in metalinguistic statements” and hence can only be
188 J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al.

made accessible through “a qualitative analysis of authentic metalinguistic dis-

courses” (Maitz 2014, p. 4). A comparative axis should therefore be established
with the different fields of research in Southern Europe and North America,
considering the negotiability of the language hierarchies in both regions: while
Greek is assumed to increasingly lose its status as a dominant, official language,
and German to gain a stronger, more dominant role in the context of the German
schools in Greece (see Sect. 3.1), the sociopolitical value of the Francophonie in
Québec and especially the asserted dominant position of French within the Ger-
man school in Montreal is unlikely to be challenged by German as one of many
heritage languages in Canada (see Sect. 2.2).
Using Grounded Theory according to Charmaz (2014), the analysis of
selected interviews from the corpus—now encompassing 65 interviews from
German schools abroad, which are currently being extensively analyzed in Jenna
Strzykala’s doctoral research (see Sect. 2.2)—has so far yielded a broad variety
of views towards migration related multilingualism and heteroglossia (Bakhtin
1981) in educational settings.1 The findings hint at the following preliminary
insights: Multilingual teachers in German schools abroad showcase a spectrum
ranging from monoglossic to heteroglossic views when it comes to addressing
multiple languages in their teaching practice. Even with multilingual teachers
one cannot assume that their own linguistic reality and that of their students is
being addressed in their daily school life. While some hold very dynamic views
on bilingualism, others adhere to monoglossic (teaching) approaches, specifically:

• Some partially doubt the monolingual language policy of the German school
as educational ideal and as didactical principle or they may contradict these
offensively
• Some plead for a compensatory language training for non-native speakers or
for multiple monolingual actions, in order to support the L2 language acquisi-
tion of multilingual children (Panagiotopoulou and Rosen 2015b, 2017)

1In addition to German schools abroad, complementary schools were also among the fields
of research of the initial project “­ migration-related multilingualism and pedagogical pro-
fessionalism” (on the methodology of international comparison and the different fields of
research see Panagiotopoulou and Rosen 2015, p. 231f.). At the present time, we have con-
ducted 21 interviews in Canada and the USA using the above-mentioned interview guide
adapted to complementary schools. Results regarding the sampled complementary schools
have already been published (see Panagiotopoulou et al. 2017; Panagiotopoulou and Rosen
2019).
German Schools Abroad: Teachers’ Views on Translanguaging … 189

From this we developed the hypothesis that the (emerging) multilingualism of

educators in the context of German schools abroad does not automatically lead to
a simple appreciation of the multilingualism of students. Moreover, these teachers
are beginning to question and distance themselves from the monolingual decree;
some of them even implicitly adopt translanguaging at school (for translanguag-
ing as a pedagogy, see García 2009; García and Li Wei 2014) by including and
valorizing the family languages.

2.2 Multilingual Teachers’ Views on “Family”,

“National”, and “Academic” Language(s)
and Everyday Multilingual Practices of Staff
and Students at German Schools in the USA
and Canada

Building on these first findings from the initial project as well as on its design is a
doctoral dissertation focusing on a specific aspect of everyday school life at Ger-
man schools abroad, namely Translanguaging as an everyday social practice of
multilingual families, students and educators as coined by García (2009; see also
García and Li Wei 2014).
This section presents the ongoing research on selected data gathered in the
USA and Canada pertaining to the views on multilingualism in everyday school
life of (multilingual) teachers at German schools abroad. This dissertation pro-
ject shares a common research interest with the initial project, i.e., reconstruct-
ing underlying (language) ideologies and investigating their links to (implicit)
institutional (language) policies. It focuses on the translanguaging strategies—
self-reported, sometimes unconscious, often unacknowledged—that frame the
everyday lives of multilingual teachers and students in German schools abroad,
reconstructed through the views or beliefs of the interviewees, presuming that
“all beliefs exist within a complex, interconnected and multidimensional system.
Within that multidimensional system, beliefs may be primary or derivative (i.e.,
grounded in primary beliefs), core or peripheral (i.e., endorsed with more or less
conviction) and be held in clusters, that are more or less isolated, thereby allow-
ing incompatible or inconsistent beliefs to coexist” (Buehl and Beck 2015, p. 66).
Thus, considering both the educators’ own histories of migration, their profes-
sionalization and their own language ideologies on the one hand, and the reported
or implied language policy of the institution they represent on the other hand, this
project explores how they navigate their multilingual practices and how and to
what extent translanguaging frames these practices within and outside of what
one could argue is a German (educational) enclave.
190 J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al.

By focusing on German schools abroad in Canada and the USA, what

becomes possible is a comparative approach working on two simultaneous axes:

• first, between extra-European German schools abroad as German educational

enclaves and state schools in Germany (or what the interviewees report on
their experiences with state schools in Germany)
• second, between two North American countries—the USA and Canada—as
extra-European fields of action of the German school system, its (language)
policies, and exposure to (migration-related) (linguistic) diversity

Especially the second axis is what adds novelty to the initial research project.
As fields of comparison, Canada and the United States are intrinsically differ-
ent when it comes to the social history and role of (European) migration and
the contemporary (educational) value of multilingualism (and social diversity at
large). Canada and especially Québec are historically multilingual, with French
and English being official languages and very present in both English-language
and French-language public education. Support for so-called heritage languages
for migrants and their children is long-established in education policy (even
if tension between policy and classroom reality do exist and are still pervasive
­(Breton-Carbonneau et al. 2012)). However, the United States’ educational sys-
tem serves an imagined monocultural, monolingual audience with very little
acknowledgement for the (linguistic) needs of multilingual and migrant children
(García 2009; Flores and García 2017). Considering these fundamental dif-
ferences when it comes to the social and political status of (migration-related)
multilingualism, German schools abroad, albeit private schools and hence only
marginally impacted by national educational policies, are of particular inter-
est here as they allow for an extra-European comparison of German educational
enclaves. Furthermore and beyond their contextual and historic differences,
Québec with its ever-strong Francophonie and its “French linguistic landscape”
(Crump 2017, p. 155) following Bill 101 and the USA with its infamous History
of bilingual education relegated to “racialized basements” (Flores and García
2017, p. 15) as extra-European fields share a non-negotiability of their respective
dominant national language. In fact, as opposed to the marginalization of Greek
in favor of the increasing dominance of German as observable in German schools
in Greece (see Sect. 3.1 for a follow-up project focusing on language hierarchies
in German schools in Greece), English and French respectively exist as strong
competition with German in the USA and Québec and appear very unlikely to
be challenged by the German language even within German schools. Considering
German Schools Abroad: Teachers’ Views on Translanguaging … 191

these new particularities that come with the expansion of the research field into
North America, the following research questions are to be answered:

• What role does German as “family”, “national” and/or “academic” language

play in a non-German-language dominated extra-European school context as
opposed to its increasingly dominant role in Europe? When it comes to edu-
cators in German schools abroad, how do the German language and reported
everyday multilingual practices impact the beliefs regarding multilingualism
these educators hold?
• To what extent does translanguaging—as every day and/or pedagogical prac-
tice—appear in the educators’ self-reports as a “natural” strategy for managing
and synergizing the linguistic expectations of the German school abroad and
those of the national context?

First results from the gathered interview data with educators in Boston and Mon-
treal hint at various levels of conformity with as well as resistance to the per-
ceived policy, with pedagogically intended and student-initiated (and tolerated)
translingual time-spaces playing a major role in these multilingual settings, partly
creating (with or without conscious attempts) what García et al. (2017) have
called “translanguaging classrooms”.

3 Further Perspectives: Follow-up Projects

3.1 Between Exclusivity and Exclusion in the European

South: Educational Biographies of Multilingual
“Greek” Students in German Schools

German schools abroad are considered to be exclusive educational institutions:

They function mainly as private Begegnungsschulen—meaning schools that are
supposed to facilitate an encounter and a dialogue between the respective “differ-
ent cultures” (Federal Foreign Office 2019; Kultusministerkonferenz 2017)—for
socioeconomically privileged (upper) middle class families from the host coun-
tries (Kühn and Mersch 2015). This is because German schools abroad promise—
obviously based on the EU concept of plurilingualism (see below)—a German
International High-School Diploma (DIA). According to the website of the Ger-
man School in Thessaloniki (http://www.dst.gr/integrierte-begegnungsschule),
this diploma grants access to universities in “virtually all European countries, the
USA and other countries of the world”. This assessment provides a characteristic
192 J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al.

example of the way the DIA is used for self-promotion in the case of German
schools abroad, in Thessaloniki and elsewhere. In Greece, the aforementioned
(upper) middle class families use these schools as a purposeful preparation for
their children’s “educational migration” triggered by the European financial cri-
sis (Gkolfinopoulos and Panagiotopoulou 2020). From a German perspective,
this serves as a recruitment strategy by the schools, which was elaborated by the
KMK: through “German language promotion and binational school diploma” it is
not only possible to win over those students who are “German” but also “young
foreigners are prepared for economic contacts with Germany or respectively for
academic studies in Germany” (KMK 2017, p. 3). As an instrument of recruit-
ment, but also as a place of supposed intercultural encounter, these German
schools abroad target Germans who work abroad on the one hand while, on the
other hand, allegedly offering the opportunity to adolescents in the host countries
to get to know the “German culture” and language (Kühn and Mersch 2015) and
also to be plurilingual European citizens. In German schools abroad, the envi-
sioned “dialogue between the cultures” (KMK 2017, p. 3) is therefore based on
a simplistic idea of two separable national cultures (Radtke 2011) and on “named
languages that represent different cultures and political states” (García and Oth-
eguy 2019, p. 2). Following García and Otheguy (2019), it can be assumed that
in German schools in Greece “raciolinguistic ideologies […] operate even when
practices follow a philosophy of plurilingualism”. In addition, the expectation
for students positioned as Greeks in German schools in Greece “is not that they
speak and use the national [German] language ‘to varying degrees’ but to what
is considered a ‘native’ norm” (p. 7). This in turn leads to the classification of
children as “native German(-speaking)” versus “native non-German(-speaking)”
from a young age when transitioning to German schools abroad. The questions
how these ideologies correspond with the bi/multilingual students’ and teacher’s
translanguaging practices and how the according ascriptions are processed in the
students’ educational biographies still remain empirically open.
The main prerequisite for education in exclusive schools like the German
schools abroad is “a certain linguistic capital” (Bourdieu 2017, p. 126), which
in Germany consists of the school-sanctioned (foreign) languages, i.e., the “lan-
guages of the former colonial powers and current privileged nation states”
(Thoma 2018, p. 61). The empirical question concerning the possible implica-
tions of these exclusive and simultaneously exclusionary language policies for
the educational biographies of students who speak languages that are considered
“low-prestige (migrant) languages” in Germany remains equally pertinent in the
global South. The evidence provided by research in “a German school abroad in
postcolonial foreign countries” indicates an alarming shift in linguistic (power)
German Schools Abroad: Teachers’ Views on Translanguaging … 193

relations, namely the delegitimization of the language(s) “of the native popula-
tion” in favor of “a focus on the spread of the German language” (Paulus 2011,
p. 27 f.). Since the “legitimate” language always functions as a means of dis-
tinction, thus facilitating the reproduction of inequalities (in school) (Bourdieu
2017), the issue addressed here concerns not only the global South but also the
European South. Based on the existing internationally comparative groundwork
in the North American and the Southern European regions investigating the
views of teachers in German schools towards migration-related multilingualism
(Panagiotopoulou and Rosen 2015b, 2017; see also Sect. 2.1), it was possible to
reconstruct how ambivalent the German language policy is and, depending on the
host country, to what extent it is oriented mono- or plurilingually. For instance,
at the German school in Montreal, children are exposed to an elite “trilingual-
ism” already in the school’s kindergarten prior to their enrollment in primary
school (see Panagiotopoulou 2017a), whereby German, which is considered an
“immigrant language” in Canada (Statistics Canada/Census 2016), is valorized
and thus added to the elite “linguistic trinity of German-French-English”. By con-
trast, in the kindergarten of the German school in Athens, all ­“non-(monolingual)
German-speaking” preschoolers are “consistently” taught in “German only”
(Panagiotopoulou 2016, p. 18) to prepare them for the German primary and sec-
ondary schools characterized by that same strict language separation (Neubert
2018). These first research results imply that “foreign” or “domestic” adoles-
cents who are living bi/multilingually by attending German schools abroad are
faced with language hierarchies and language ideologies depending on the host
country. Paulus (2011) points out that these schools’ self-definition as German
schools reflects a normative stance that causes not only the termination and pre-
vention of domestic perspectives, but also the exclusion of certain behavioral pat-
terns that are connected to the local culture. To what extent and how “translingual
practices” (Canagarajah 2013), which are important locally (i.e., in the everyday
life of bilingual “German-Greek” families), are excluded from everyday school
life could be reconstructed through an ethnographical research approach. Glo-
rius (2016) claims that the educational biographies generated by German schools
abroad do not only involve gaining knowledge but also a “loss of capital” and
sometimes lead to negatively connotated “either-or decisions” (p. 114). Regard-
ing language use, the question thus arises whether students with Greek as a fam-
ily language, labeled as a “low-prestige (migrant) language” in Germany, lose
their own “linguistic capital” (Bourdieu 2017) by attending a German school
in Greece. Furthermore, what remains to be seen is to what extent children and
youths experience exclusion as well as being out of place through the course
of their socialization in an exclusive school—as they are being addressed as
194 J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al.

“foreign”, not-German and/or not-German-native speaking—and to what extent

they see their own family languages (apart from German) as not relevant (any-
more) for their own educational process.
From the perspective of pedagogical biographical research, it is important
to address the impact such institutional contexts may have on individual educa-
tional processes of (emergent) bi/multilingual students, for instance to find out
how young and older children use their entire linguistic repertoire to learn in
class. Thereby, the project is focusing primarily not on the process of language
acquisition, but rather on the process of self-positioning that adolescents perform
(interactively) through their experiences of inclusion/exclusion as well as on the
labelling processes with which students may be confronted in a school context
that is influenced by the pervasive ideology of “native-speakerism” (Knappik and
Dirim 2013). In detail: The project aims to reconstruct experiences of the partici-
pating “Greek” children—preschoolers aged 5 to 6 and primary school children
aged 7 to 12—with the school’s monolingual and plurilingual policies by observ-
ing their practices and interactions with each other and their educators. Addition-
ally, high schoolers who have graduated or are about to graduate with the German
International High-School Diploma will be interviewed using biographic narra-
tive interviews (see Thoma 2018). Thus, in order to exemplify educational biog-
raphies from kindergarten through high school, a quasi-longitudinal field research
design is implemented in the context of one of the German schools abroad (not
named here for anonymization purposes), using a research strategy which com-
bines biographical and ethnographical approaches (Dausien and Kelle 2009;
Schnitzer 2017; Panagiotopoulou 2017b).

3.2 Transnational Professionalization for Schools in the

Migration Society?

In conjunction with the abovementioned the research project “Transnational

Professionalization for Schools in the Migration Society?” focuses on the pro-
fessional biographies of teachers who have gained work experience at German
schools abroad. They are expected, and this will be initially discussed in the fol-
lowing, to contribute to inclusive school development in migration societies, simi-
lar to teachers with a so-called migration background.
A central consideration relates to institutionalized educational inequali-
ties: Students with a so-called migration background are still disproportionately
affected by these disparities in the German school system (Rosen 2019). In addi-
tion to the structural reform of the education system (Rosen 2018), models and
German Schools Abroad: Teachers’ Views on Translanguaging … 195

strategies of inclusive school development are applied at the personnel level to

the recruitment of teachers with transnational (professional) biographies (Pana-
giotopoulou and Rosen 2015a): For example, teachers with a so-called migration
background are supposed to contribute to the reduction of educational disadvan-
tage through “habitus sensitivity” (Fabel-Lamla and Klomfaß 2014). However,
the positive impact of personal or familial migration experiences on pedagogi-
cal-professional competences in dealing with migration-related diversity, which
is assumed in educational policy, must be questioned on the basis of explora-
tory studies (Lengyel and Rosen 2015; Panagiotopoulou and Rosen 2016; Rosen
2015). Similar to teachers with a so-called migrant background, teachers who
worked at a German school abroad are also assumed to have specific competences
in dealing with migration-related diversity, such as special pedagogical abilities
in dealing with multilingualism, acquired through work experiences abroad. For
example, one of the central educational policy documents states that they acquire
“intercultural competences” (KMK 2017, p. 4). In addition, the document states
as a goal for returning teachers that a field of activity should be found for them
“in which they can optimally use and ideally expand their newly acquired skills in
teaching practice, thus also contributing to school development at home” (KMK
2017, p. 5). Furthermore, in the context of symposia organized jointly with educa-
tional researchers, in particular of the internationally and interculturally compara-
tive educational sciences, the connection between “German school work abroad
and intercultural socialization” is currently being deepened.2 However, on these
occasions the quasi-automatism of “intercultural experiences towards intercul-
tural competence” is relativized by the question of whether “returnees from school
work abroad can contribute to the interculturality and internationality of schools
in Germany” (p. 4), but still is made thematically relevant (Köhler-Fritsch 2018).
In the empirical preliminary work within the above described project “Migration-
related multilingualism and pedagogical professionalism”, a certain potential of
these experiences of (temporary) migration abroad could be reconstructed along
the lines of views on m ­ igration-related multilingualism that teachers hold: The
teachers at German schools abroad interviewed in the course of expert interviews
expressed themselves in a diversity-conscious manner by questioning monolin-
gual ideologies of the German school system and switching to translingual, i.e.,
teaching practices that include and valorize the family languages of their stu-
dents (Panagiotopoulou and Rosen 2015b, 2017; see also Sect. 2.1). However, the

2see https://www.interedu.phil.fau.de/2019/03/27/tagung-deutsche-auslandsschularbeit-und-

interkulturelle-sozialisation/.
196 J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al.

majority of German schools abroad has so far been regarded as a “blind spot” in
educational research (Adick 2013, p. 109; Kühn and Mersch 2015, p. 198f.). In a
systemization of existing studies the “subject area of returnees” has been identi-
fied as one of a total of three “overarching research topics” (Mägdefrau and Wolff
2018, p. 6) and the question how “the competences of returnees can be used for
school development processes at home” (p. 13) is outlined as a central strand of a
research framework plan for German schools abroad (Mägdefrau and Wolff 2018,
p. 6). This desideratum is taken up by the research project “Transnational Profes-
sionalization for Schools in the Migration Society?” and focuses on the question
of professionalism of teachers addressing migration-related diversity through
work experience at German schools abroad, more specifically through the acquisi-
tion of their own temporary migration experiences. Is there a difference between
these teachers within the framework of an explorative research approach and the
mainstream of teachers who often perceive the migration-related diversity of their
students as a deficit and not as a resource (Auernheimer and Rosen 2017)? Do
they see themselves as being habitualized and professionalized with regard to their
students’ diversity?
In order to investigate these initial questions, three research approaches will be
selected and systematically triangulated (Flick 2004) in the course of the research
process:
(1) Firstly, a document analysis (Wolff 2004) will be carried out to examine
teachers’ experiences abroad with regard to their (re)arrangements of the “self“ and
the “other”. This analysis will investigate publications of the Central Agency for
Schools Abroad (ZfA) and of the AGAL [Working Group of Teachers Abroad] of
the GEW [Union Education and Science]. These publications are yearbooks (since
2004), the magazines “Begegnung” [encounter] (since 1980) and “TIP/TIPP—The-
orie, Information, Praxis” [theory, information, practice] (until 2006) and newslet-
ters.3 One guiding question will be whether and to what extent there are similarities
and disparities between the reports of teachers at schools abroad within vs. outside
the “Fortress Europe” (Bade 2016, p. 92) respectively in the “global South” vs. the
“global North”. These results are to be included in the choice of interview partners in
the subsequent data collection and analysis stage.
(2) Secondly, biographical-narrative oriented interviews (Rosenthal and
Fischer-­Rosenthal 2004) are carried out to reconstruct the subjective views
of teachers on migration-related diversity along their experiences of “being a

3see https://www.auslandsschulwesen.de/Webs/ZfA/DE/Services/Publikationen/publikationen_

node.html.
German Schools Abroad: Teachers’ Views on Translanguaging … 197

s­tranger” and to conduct an intersectional analysis. According to the theoretical

sampling in the course of the iterative or circular research process, approximately
12 teachers should be interviewed who

• have taught for at least three years at a German school in a European or

­non-European country,
• completed their schooling abroad at “schools of encounter” (“Begegnungss-
chulen”) (Kühn and Mersch 2015, p. 195) and taught a heterogeneous group
of students
• have professional experience as teachers in Germany and
• whose stay abroad at the time of the interview dates back between two and
five years.

(3) Teachers will be selected on the basis of maximally and minimally contrasting
case studies from the second research step. Following an ethnographic approach
(Lüders 2004), these teachers will then be accompanied in this third phase of the
study in their everyday teaching practice. By means of participating observa-
tions, their routines in dealing with migration-related diversity in school and dur-
ing lessons will be captured and reflected in feedback discussions. Specifically,
the participants’ estimations of whether school situations are linked to the gain in
diversity awareness through their work abroad will be examined. Furthermore, it
will be explored whether and to what extent they believe to “capitalize” on their
employment abroad in terms of their teaching career.

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‘What Shall We Sing Now,
Amir?’ Developing a Voice
through Translanguaging Pedagogy—
An Ethnographic Research
and Professional Training Project
in Day-Care Centers and Schools

Julie A. Panagiotopoulou and Maria J. Hammel

Abstract

With the aim of promoting inclusion and social justice in education, a new
project supports (multilingual) professionals who address their own peda-
gogical practice of counteracting the disadvantages multilingual children face
within a monolingual norm in Germany. The presentation of the project high-
lights how translanguaging as a pedagogy gives language-minoritized children
a voice and as a sensitizing concept can be utilized for the analysis of pro-
ject data and especially of ethnographic observations of learning and teaching
practices.

Keywords

Translanguaging · Professionalization · Ethnography · Multilingualism

J. A. Panagiotopoulou (*) · M. J. Hammel

University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
M. J. Hammel
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 203

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_12
204 J. A. Panagiotopoulou and M. J. Hammel

1 Introduction

This contribution focuses on an ethnographic research and professional train-

ing project for (future) educators and teachers in Cologne (Germany) titled
“Translanguaging Pedagogy in Multilingual Day-care Centers and Schools”
(TranslaPed), led by Julie A. Panagiotopoulou, that aims to support multilingual
professionals who intensively deal with shaping their own pedagogical practice
in a more inclusive way and, thus, contribute to social justice. After a brief critical
review of educational language policy in German day-care centers and schools
(2.), the theoretical framework of the project that was started in 2018 at the Uni-
versity of Cologne will be discussed under the question how translanguaging
can be utilized as a sensitizing concept for the analysis of ethnographic observa-
tions of learning and teaching practices (3.). Furthermore, the design of the main
project, as well as the research questions of Maria J. Hammel’s dissertation will
be presented using an example from a daily pedagogical routine showing how
­language-minoritized children “develop a voice through translanguaging” (4.).

2 Educational Language Policy in Germany

Germany’s official monolingual language policy has become particularly appar-

ent in recent years under the conditions of (forced) migration and the consider-
able challenge of including refugee children in day-care centers and schools. The
current language policy regarding newcomers aims to integrate them through lan-
guage assimilation, and by doing so (re)produces the monoglossic hegemony in
Germany (Panagiotopoulou 2020; Panagiotopoulou and Rosen 2018). Although
many newly arrived students are already multilingual, they are often approached
by monolingual authorities and educational institutions as if they had no language
resources at all. Utilizing ethnographic studies in so-called preparatory classes
for newcomers in Cologne, we were able to reveal, in particular, how young chil-
dren who grow up in multilingual families and/or have become literate in more
than one language (e.g. in Arabic and English) before their (forced) migration are
often stigmatized as “zero-language speakers” (in German: “Nullsprachler”), pos-
sessing only non-lingual resources (Panagiotopoulou et al. 2020).
Even multilingual children who grow up in Germany and attend day-care for
the first time are also—metaphorically speaking—newcomers, as they and their
parents are officially confronted with this language policy reproducing a strictly
monoglossic hegemony for the first time. In particular, children from immigrant
families are assumed to not being able to speak German, especially “native”
‘What Shall We Sing Now, Amir?’ Developing a Voice … 205

and “academic German”, due to their multilingualism (for a critical view on

monolingual language ideologies in day-care centers and schools see Montan-
ari and Panagiotopoulou 2019). These children’s language practices are usually
regarded as problematic, their language skills as insufficient for the German-
speaking d­ ay-care center, while the solution offered for this self-made problem
is a separate language support, without taking into account the competences
in home languages. However, this is very likely to achieve the opposite effect,
since restricting children’s multilingual repertoire in educational institutions puts
young learners at a disadvantage by preventing them from using all their available
resources and strategies for learning and by stigmatizing them as “semilinguals”
(Panagiotopoulou 2017a). This language policy implicitly requires that all lan-
guage users (even those who live multilingually) should speak “German only” in
a German educational context. In (formally) monolingual day-cares and schools,
members of the educational staff, even those who act multilingually in their own
everyday lives, tend to communicate monolingually with multilingual colleagues,
students and parents and hence to exclude “other” languages (Panagiotopoulou
and Zettl 2020) or to silence the voices of “others”, e.g. of Arabic-speaking new-
comers in preparatory classes (Panagiotopoulou et al. 2020).
One of inclusive pedagogy’s main principles, which originated long before
the debate on inclusion in Germany even started, may be formulated as treating
“family language worlds” of all children [and educators] with respect in educa-
tional institutions regardless of whether they consist of “standard”, “dialectal” or
“mixed” registers (List 2004, p. 133). Nowadays and although the issue of multi-
lingualism is being explicitly addressed in the German educational guidelines for
early childhood language training, the focus remains mainly on “the promotion of
the [academic] German language” (Lengyel and Salem 2018, p. 443 f.). Primar-
ily “migrant languages” such as Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Italian or Greek tend
to be marginalized and each of them neglected as a “non-academic language” (as
opposed to the “language of education”, in German: “Bildungssprache”), whereas
only selected languages with elite prestige such as English are offered in special
(private) bilingual day-care centers in the form of foreign language acquisition.
Therefore, this language policy encourages the exclusion of home languages, thus
contradicting the values of inclusive multilingual pedagogy (Panagiotopoulou
2016).
This educational language policy is also transposed onto the landscape of
further education for (early) pedagogical staff, as the current study by Samuel
Jahreiß (2018) unveils. The reason appears to be that the “understanding of mul-
tilingual education, which is aimed at all children in day-care centers in order to
promote an increase in competence in all spoken languages, has not yet become
206 J. A. Panagiotopoulou and M. J. Hammel

part of further training for pedagogical specialists” (Jahreiß 2018, p. 52). Multi-
lingual educators in Cologne day-care centers often express skepticism towards
the implementation of multilingual education regardless of whether they are
themselves living multilingually, which can be attributed to underdeveloped
pedagogical concepts (Roth et al. 2018). This result is particularly problematic
because “early childhood multilingual education”, which is also understood as
being inclusive, “lives off multilingual role models” in education and family con-
texts (Chilla and Niebuhr-Siebert 2017, p. 97; Uçan 2018).
In pedagogical practice the opposite is the case: Restricting young children’s
multilingual repertoires in the context of monolingual educational institutions
puts many children in Germany at a disadvantage by preventing them from
using all their available multimodal, linguistic and semiotic resources and strate-
gies for learning, as they usually do. This is an important reason why question-
ing monolingual language policies and teaching practices through ethnographic
observations of multilingual and translingual children’s learning practices in
German day-care centers and schools is of paramount relevance to promote
social justice in education.

3 Translanguaging as a Theoretical Framework:

Promoting Social Justice in Education Contexts

Multilingual children do not use autonomous languages or linguistic systems but

make use of their whole linguistic repertoire (García 2009), e.g. “their words”
(such as “uzeug” or “aeplano”, see the following excerpt) often without consid-
eration for conventional language boundaries. In order to communicate with other
multilinguals, even very young children combine the accessible linguistic ele-
ments into an integrated whole which can always be adjusted to the situation and
their interlocutor’s repertoire. This might seem, to a certain extent, extraordinary
from the external perspective of a monolingual language user. However, from the
perspective of multilingual children, this dynamic language usage is authentic,
legitimate and conducive to learning. In order to make this transparent, ethno-
graphic studies in day-care centers can be crucial. To analyze such observations
and make them comprehensible for the participating educators, many scholars in
different, also German speaking countries use translanguaging as a “sensitizing
concept” (Charmaz 2014, p. 117), (for an overview of ethnographic studies see
Montanari and Panagiotopoulou 2019). We would like to illustrate this with an
excerpt from the field study “Lena” (Panagiotopoulou 2016):
‘What Shall We Sing Now, Amir?’ Developing a Voice … 207

Lena, a two and a half-year-old child from a German-Greek-speaking family looks

at me and says “uzeug” while viewing a picture book.
I can’t understand what she means, so I ask her: “Τί είναι αυτό?” [“What is
that?”]
Lena asks back: “aplano”?
I answer, emphasizing and correcting her utterance “α, εννοείς αεροπλάνο!”
[“Ah, you mean aeroplano!”] to signal that I now understand what she meant
(namely in Greek “aeroplano”, pronounced by Lena as “aplano”, in German
“Flugzeug”, pronounced as “uzeug”).
Lena nods so as to confirm, while also repeating, emphasizing and correcting her
own utterance: “aeplano!”

Ethnographic studies may provide scholars and educators with a deeper insight
into the practice of translanguaging by young children like Lena who tend to
cross conventional language boundaries despite the monolingual language poli-
cies of the German educational institution. In the course of professional train-
ing for pre-service teachers and educators, these ethnographic observations may
respond to such important questions as: How do multilingual children use their
entire linguistic repertoire to communicate and learn (e.g. see above: What is an
“uzeug”)? Taking observations on translanguaging into account, this may con-
tradict the traditional understanding of languages as autonomous, clearly defined
systems (L1, L2, L3 etc.) which are learned or acquired by individuals as mono-
lingual codes in an additive manner (L1 + L2 + L3 etc.). Ethnographic observa-
tions of language practices also entail questioning the ideology that multilingual
adults (like Lena’s interlocutor in the observation above) allegedly do not “mix”
their languages and any kind of “language mixing” presents an irregularity and
a deviation from the monolingual norm. Ethnographic research projects in (offi-
cially) mono- or multilingual regions of the globe and in the context of (formally)
mono- and multilingual educational institutions for children, adolescents and
adults suggest the opposite: despite the ability to act monolingually in monolin-
gual settings, authentic language usage of multilingual individuals remains flex-
ible and dynamic (Creese 2017).
Furthermore, translanguaging is also “a practical theory of language” (Li Wei
2018, p. 9) which underscores “the necessity to bridge the artificial and ideologi-
cal divides between the so-called sociocultural and the cognitive approaches to
Translanguaging practices”. As Li expounds, multilingual children do not disas-
semble their complex linguistic repertoires, in order to pick just “one namable lan-
guage” or register for communication, because even when they act monolingually
in specific situations, when they are in a “monolingual mode”, their thinking pro-
cess still takes place “beyond language, and thinking requires the use of a variety
208 J. A. Panagiotopoulou and M. J. Hammel

of ­cognitive, semiotic, and modal resources” (Li Wei 2018, p. 18). In the above-
mentioned excerpt, we see how Lena, a two and a half year old child, implements
elements from her entire linguistic repertoire to communicate with her interlocu-
tor while she develops her bilingualism: “young kindergarteners use translanguag-
ing for […] metafunctions”, e.g. “to construct meaning within themselves” or “to
mediate understandings among each other” (García and Li Wei 2014, p. 82). With
her translation “a(ero)plano”, Lena ensures that her original utterance “uzeug”
is recognized as “airplane” by her interlocutor. Furthermore, with her improved
second emphasized attempt (“aeplano”), Lena also approaches the target lan-
guage utterance (“aeroplano”) by adding an element and it is precisely this inten-
tional emphasis that renders a variety of linguistic and semiotic resources and her
dynamic, translingual learning process observable. In this interaction Lena demon-
strates knowledge and at the same time she creates new meaning, since “[t]ranslan-
guaging […] enabled the learning to take place” (García and Li Wei 2014, p. 82).
Similarly, by using observations from a bilingual kindergarten in the USA, García
(2011, p. 47) found that the most prevalent use of translanguaging by young chil-
dren was to co-construct meaning, both with others and within themselves.
If ethnography “has enabled the voices” of children, like Lena, “to be heard”
(James 2001, p. 255; Panagiotopoulou 2013, p. 771), through professional train-
ings based on such ethnographic observations (future) educators and teachers
could be enabled to hear the voices of (emergent) bi/multilinguals, more pre-
cisely, to support them in “developing a voice through translanguaging” (García
and Li Wei 2014, p. 108) by critically reflecting on (their own) traditional con-
ceptions of autonomous languages and monolingual pedagogical practices. Espe-
cially if they intend to support young bi/multilingual children comparable to Lena
by including “all the language practices of all students in a class” (García and Li
Wei 2014, p. 66, original emphasis) and encouraging them “to learn within and
across languages” (List 2010, p. 10), educators challenge their own teaching as
the concept of translanguaging “has the potential to change the nature of learning,
as well as of teaching” (García and Li Wei 2015, p. 229).
As a sensitizing concept translanguaging redirects our attention from the
separate namable languages and varieties existing as autonomous systems to the
authentic language practices (the languaging) of multilinguals. As a pedagogy
translanguaging has been put into practice in schools and day-care centers already
(García et al. 2017; Seltzer et al. see this volume), which bears implications for
educational (language) policy: “the voices of Others come to the forefront, relat-
ing Translanguaging to criticality, critical pedagogy, social justice, and the lin-
guistic human rights agenda” (Li Wei 2018, p. 24; García and Flores 2012).
‘What Shall We Sing Now, Amir?’ Developing a Voice … 209

4 Translanguaging Pedagogy in Multilingual

Day-Care Centers and Schools: A Research
and Professional Training Project in Cologne

In this section we will briefly depict how the intention of the project to empower
and support (future) teachers and educators utilizing the concept of translanguag-
ing pedagogy arose and how it led to the current design. Following the publica-
tion of the expertise “Multilingualism in Childhood” (Panagiotopoulou 2016)
published as part of the “Further Education Initiative” of the DJI (German Youth
Institute) early childhood educators and teachers were informed in detail about
the “multilingual turn” (Conteh and Meier 2014), the approaches of “multilin-
gual pedagogies” (García and Flores 2012), as well as the German concept of
“multilingual didactics” (Reich and Krumm 2013) and the “possible perspec-
tives for a reorientation of language pedagogical practice” and “concepts of an
inclusive pedagogy […], such as Translanguaging (García and Li Wei 2014;
García 2009)” (Panagiotopoulou 2016, p. 24). Two bilingual (German-Italian and
­German-English) day-care centers based in Cologne approached the author of
the expertise at the University of Cologne on their own initiative and asked for
concrete support in “changing structures that have become entrenched in daycare
life” (e.g. strict language separation according to the immersion model and striv-
ing for “elite multilingualism”) and for assistance in opening up new language
support programs “for immigrant, language-minoritizedchildren” through a fur-
ther training on translanguaging.
Furthermore, a third day-care center introduced itself to us at a city network-
ing event regarding multilingualism in day-care centers. Subsequently, this kin-
dergarten, which already utilized the term translanguaging (also as a result of
the above-mentioned publication) in its language training program to declare its
orientation towards lived and authentic multilingualism (in German, Arabic and
Turkish) also expressed a desire for further training. This apparent need for fur-
ther training in translanguaging, which was generated and formulated directly
from early pedagogical practice, gave rise to the idea of initiating a superordinate
project that would offer the unique opportunity to document the beginning of the
implementation of translanguaging pedagogy in the Cologne area, to develop a
further training concept for the implementation of translanguaging in pedagogical
everyday life in German day-care centers.1

1In the meantime, primary schools in Cologne were also involved in the project, however,
the present contribution focuses on day-care centers.
210 J. A. Panagiotopoulou and M. J. Hammel

The process of developing a training concept on translanguaging for day-care

centers will be accompanied by Maria J. Hammel’s dissertation project: Through
constant gathering, documentation and comparison of ethnographic data
­(interviews and observations) we will be able to create a multi-sited perspective
on if and how different day-care centers in Cologne overcome monolingual ide-
ologies and practices, and adopt a more inclusive and multilingual approach. To
that aim the accompanying research is pursuing the following questions:

1. What expectations do the participants have of a professional training on trans-

languaging? To what extent can an implicit striving for “elite multilingualism”
in contrast to “marginalized multilingualism” be discerned?
2. What experiences, perceptions and deeper insights do the participants have
during the training and how do they compare to their expectations?
3. Which language ideologies do they overcome and/or which translanguaging
practices do they implement in their practice on the basis of further training?
4. What conclusions do they draw at the end of the training?

The goals of the dissertation project are to be achieved with the help of vari-
ous documentation and survey instruments in accordance with “Constructing
Grounded Theory” (Charmaz 2014). The instruments are briefly presented in the
following.
In relation to the addressees of the training (educators, day-care center man-
agers): narrative-generating expert interviews are conducted a few days before
and immediately after a workshop to collect data concerning explicit and inter-
pretative knowledge (Bogner et al. 2009). The main aim of the pre-interviews is
to clarify the expectations of the participants. The post-interviews are intended to
reflect the effects of the training and to draw conclusions about possible changes
in the interviewees’ attitudes towards translanguaging. In addition, for the student
ethnographers involved in the preparation and implementation of the project and
the project leader and trainer, guided interviews (Bohnsack et al. 2018, p. 151 f.)
are being used, which are also conducted before and after each workshop.
In this training concept, ethnographic observations are collected by student
ethnographers several weeks before the first training unit. The ethnographers,
who are future educators and teachers, are in the final phase of their (master)
studies and will be trained and accompanied in a weekly ethnographic research
workshop simultaneously with the ongoing survey. This will help assess an eth-
nographic attitude during the observation process (Panagiotopoulou 2017a) as
well as the production of thick descriptions (Geertz et al. 1983) and possibly to
sharpen the further focus of observation by a first common coding of selected
‘What Shall We Sing Now, Amir?’ Developing a Voice … 211

sequences (Charmaz 2014). The collected data also serve as an empirical basis
for the student ethnographers’ final master theses, which generate a great usability
and efficiency of the survey for various purposes.
Certain sequences, like the following example, were then specifically selected
from the available observation protocols to give the observed educators the
opportunity to reflect on their own pedagogical practice during the workshops.
All children and educators [sit] around the table and start the morning cir-
cle. Amara says, “Yalla, alle Kinder erstmal psssscht” [“Yalla, all children first
psssh”] and puts her finger on her mouth. Some of the children do the same until
finally all are quiet. Then they begin to recite an Arabic prayer song, “Bismil-
lah”, and gesture to it. First, they make a bowl with their hands, then they wipe
their face with their hands. When the song ends, Amara asks, “Was sollen wir
jetzt singen, Amir?” [“What shall we sing now, Amir?”] Amir says a little qui-
eter: “Alle meine Entchen” [“All my little ducklings”] (a German children’s
song). Amara repeats: “Alle meine Entchen? Ok!” [“All my little ducklings?
Ok!”]. They start to alternately knock twice on the table and clap their hands
once and sing “Alle meine Entchen” with the melody from the song “we will rock
you” (from the rock band Queen). The children all join in and knock loudly on the
table and clap their hands.
(Day-Care Center Arkadaş, 13.12.2018; ethnographer F. Kamphuis; the
names of the day-care center, educators and children are pseudonymized and are
subject to data protection guidelines).
In this short example of a daily ritual of the researched day-care center we
see a “meaningful performance” (Li Wei 2011, p. 1223). The starting statement
“Yalla, all children first psssscht” regularly invites all children to participate in
the daily pedagogical routine through translanguaging, which “opens up a space
of resistance and social justice” (García and Li Wei 2014, p. 115), including also
language practices of “minoritized” children and educators. What is special here
is the fact that the utterance begins with an Arabic word generally known in the
field, continues in German and ends with an onomatopoetic interjection, which
is accompanied by the associated gesture (“puts a finger on the mouth”). These
diverse, verbal and non-verbal signs enable all children to understand the request
and to independently follow and participate in the group event. At the same time,
it is signalized that multimodality and migration-related multilingualism are wel-
come within this particular action, which makes this morning circle “a translan-
guaging space” for its participants.
Following García and Li Wei, translanguaging opens up trans-spaces capable of
stressing the sociopolitical order (García and Li Wei 2014, p. 137), which in this
case would be the monolingual norm that predominates German day-care centers
212 J. A. Panagiotopoulou and M. J. Hammel

and also the expectation towards children to act “only in German”. The children
here experience that songs can be sung in different and also in their own home
languages and that they (when asked by the educator) are given the opportunity to
decide about the content of the morning circle themselves, as shown by the three-
year-old child named Amir. That morning, he makes the decision that a traditional
German song should now follow a traditional Arabic song, namely “Alle meine
Entchen”, and thus both languages—Arabic and German—are used in a non-hier-
archical way. By singing the song to an internationally known, modern rock mel-
ody, this “act of translanguaging” irritates the monoglossic hegemony again and
identifies the observed situation as the practice of a creative and multimodal trans-
space and as “a social space” for multilingual, yet ­language-minoritized educators
and children “by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history,
experience and environment […] into one coordinated and meaningful perfor-
mance”. (Li Wei 2011, p. 1223).
The fact that this transformative moment is initiated by the educators on a
daily basis, as the ethnographic observations have shown, proves that the practice
of a translanguaging space is not an accidental, special competence of individual
multilingual educators in the observed day-care center, but has already been insti-
tutionalized as part of a pedagogical concept (and that translanguaging plays a
central role in the educators’ professional practice).2
The training session in which the educators were confronted with the scene
above was recorded and later transcribed, as were all future training sessions. As
can be seen from the transcript of this workshop, one of the participants explained
that the translanguaging morning circle “encourages the participation of all chil-
dren”. This shows how the transcripts of the workshops allow for conclusions
about the connection between the confrontation with the observed sequences and
the subsequent reflection in the interview to be drawn.
Based on Melanie Kuhn (2013), referring to Cloos (2001, 2008), the theoreti-
cal orientation of this project aims at the perspective of professionalization, since
the discourse on early childhood education is more concerned with the theory of
professionalization than profession (Kuhn 2013, p. 140). However, as Kuhn has
pointed out, there is a desideratum regarding genuinely professional-theoretical
empirical studies, specifically ethnographies, that focus on the everyday practices
of educators. (Kuhn 2013, p. 143).

2This is the same principle Claudia Seele (2015) has worked out, namely the spatialization
of pedagogical action. However, it is not the reference to monolinguality that constitutes
the pedagogical space, but the translanguaging of those involved.
‘What Shall We Sing Now, Amir?’ Developing a Voice … 213

Therefore, this training project is based on the scientifically substantiated dis-

cussion of daily practices in each educational context with the observed educators
themselves. Due to the “closeness to practice and the focus on the outcome, such
a project format has the potential to connect theory with practice and increase
the overall quality of further education” (König and Friederich 2015, p. 14). This
connection is also established by addressing the observed actions of educators
within a workshop, stimulating reflection on one’s own competences. According
to Kuhn (2013, p. 144), promoting a more scientific and reflective practice that
leads to an improvement in the quality of early childhood education is a recom-
mended strategy of professionalization.
Thole et al. (2015) explained that pedagogical specialists who are confronted,
for example, with video sequences from their own practice, view the situations
directly in relation to themselves and their views (Thole et al. 2015, p. 129).
However, the knowledge applied in the actions is not explicable3 (Thole et al.
2015, p. 137). The project’s format tries to counteract this aspect by enabling edu-
cators to generate theoretical knowledge based on their own pedagogical prac-
tices. Afterwards they may use this knowledge both for reconsidering their past
pedagogical practices and consciously constructing new ones. This can reduce the
aforementioned research desideratum concerning the reflection of pedagogical
professionals on their own actions “as a necessary prerequisite for the develop-
ment of a professional attitude” (Thole et al. 2015, p. 140).

5 Outlook

We regard pedagogical professionals in day-care centers and schools as actors

jointly responsible for the implementation of language policies, since they act
“at the local level” and in everyday pedagogical life as “language policymak-
ers” (García and Menken 2010, p. 249). Through their practice they can question
implicit language ideologies and norms as well as explicit or de facto language
policy regulations and change their own strategies and practices when dealing
with multilingualism. This is precisely the reason why they ask for concrete sup-
port from science and research.
Representatives from day-care centers and schools in Cologne that wanted to be
involved in our research and professional training project were invited to the con-

3For this result, the analysis of the transcript of our first training course provides a
­counter-argument, but this must be addressed elsewhere.
214 J. A. Panagiotopoulou and M. J. Hammel

ference in Cologne—which is documented in this book—where they exchanged

ideas with other scholars and educators about promoting social justice through
translanguaging pedagogies in an international context by attending the lectures of
Ofelia García and Kate Seltzer et al. (see this volume) and then the workshop of
Claudine Kirsch and Claudia Seele (see this volume). After the conference, the first
working meeting with the participants, on which we report here, was organized in
order for the students of the University of Cologne to start their ethnographic stud-
ies in 2018. Both these future educators and the professionals working in practice
and involved in the project are multilingual. With this project it is important to sup-
port and empower especially migration-related multilingual educators and teachers
who, despite the official monolingual language policy in Germany, have set out
to change their practice. In a further step, together with Claudine Kirsch from the
University of Luxembourg and with the support of Ofelia García, we will set up a
network with day-care centers and schools in New York to promote international
exchange between interested educators, teachers and scholars.

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Translanguaging as a Culturally
Sustaining Pedagogical Approach:
Bi/Multilingual Educators’ Perspectives

Roula Tsokalidou and Eleni Skourtou

Abstract

In this paper we will focus on data from bi/multilingual educators and discuss
aspects of translanguaging as a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris and
Alim, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies. Teaching and Learning for Justice in
a Changing World, Teachers College Press, New York, 2017). The data from
the bi/multilingual educators come from a recent qualitative research (Tsoka-
lidou, SiDaYes! Πέρα από τη διγλωσσία προς τη διαγλωσσικότητα/Beyond
bilingualism to translanguaging, Gutenberg, Athens, 2017) that aimed to bring
forward the issue of translanguaging (TL) in the everyday life of multi/bilin-
guals. Our findings suggest that TL could function as a means of increasing
the confidence and self-esteem of minoritized students, while offering them a
feeling of normality and pride for their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. It
also becomes clear from our data that going against the grain of monolingual-
ism and mono-culturalism is a great challenge for all.

Keywords

Translanguaging · Culturally sustaining pedagogy · Multilingual educators

R. Tsokalidou (*)
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
e-mail: [email protected]
E. Skourtou
University of the Aegean, Rhodos, Greece
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 219

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_13
220 R. Tsokalidou and E. Skourtou

1 Introduction

The contemporary world is challenged by demographic changes which make

promoting diverse linguistic and cultural dexterity necessary not only for valu-
ing all communities but also for the development of “skills, knowledges, and
ways of being needed for success in the present and the future” (Paris and Alim
2017, p. 5). As Paris and Alim (2017) put it, the future is a multilingual and mul-
tiethnic one, regardless of attempts to suppress that reality (p. 6). This reality
cannot but challenge educators to acknowledge and develop the diverse linguis-
tic and cultural skills of their students as well as of themselves. To this end they
call upon a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP). This is in line with García’s
(2017) suggestion that teachers need to take up a “translanguaging stance”, shed
their authoritative position, and adopt different roles. She suggests that through
TL teachers can take on the four roles of “detective”, “co-learner”, “builder”
and “transformer”. She notes that as teachers of migrants, they are also inter-
ested in social justice. Such an ideological stance requires them to become co-
learners of their students’ worlds (through interviews, life stories, co-production
of ­video-documentaries). At the same time, through translanguaging practices,
teachers are also involved in transforming the social reality of their adult migrant/
refugee students, as they build on the human ability to re-mix and recontextual-
ize; that is, to inscribe language performances and identities into new contexts
(García 2017, p. 23). In this paper we will discuss aspects of translanguaging as
a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (or CSP) (Paris and Alim 2017). We will then
illustrate this connecting of the two concepts using data on views of bi/multilin-
gual educators from a recent qualitative research (Tsokalidou 2017) that aimed
to bring forward the issue of translanguaging (TL) in the everyday life of multi/
bilinguals from different parts of the world. In this paper, we will specifically pre-
sent the perspectives of those bi/multilinguals who are involved in education. Our
findings suggest that TL in education could function as a means of increasing the
confidence and self-esteem of minoritized students, while offering them a feeling
of normality and pride for their linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

2 Translanguaging

Translanguaging (Baker 2003, 2011; Garcia 2009a, b, 2011) could be considered

one of the most dynamic contemporary sociolinguistic approaches to the study of
linguistic variation (Tsiplakou 2016). Through this approach we look into what
we refer to “beyond bilingualism” or beyond what has been called by Cummins
Translanguaging as a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogical Approach … 221

(2007) the “two solitudes” or double monolingualism. Research in the area of

bilingualism and language contact phenomena, within a fluid and ­ever-changing
contemporary sociopolitical and educational context, has very little to benefit
from a study in the types of bilingualism or in issues of maintaining heritage lan-
guages. Within the context of the constant need for (re)defining the deeper mean-
ing and dimensions of language contact, of language itself, we attempt to muster
all our intellectual tools in order to shed more light onto the issue of what we
call “communicative collaboration”, both on a personal and a collective level.
Based on Tsokalidou (2017), we call “collaboration” the process whereby all our
linguistic and cultural tools render us communicatively competent and in a posi-
tion to handle our uniqueness as well as our explicit or implicit relations with the
other members of the communities we inhabit as linguistically active and socially
vibrant members. Translanguaging as a term, process and surrounding reality can
express the collaborative relations that connect each person with his/her linguistic
equipment, as well as with the rest of the members of the communicative commu-
nities in which s/he partakes (family, friends, professional context, etc.).
According to Tsiplakou (2016), it is common knowledge that most linguistic
communities, synchronically and diachronically, are characterized by multilin-
gualism and hybridity. In this context, she suggests that the approach of trans-
languaging puts forward a dynamic stance to language, not as a static system, but
as languaging, a series of performances placed within specific social and cultural
micro- and macro-contexts. Within the context of translingual performances,
many elements from various linguistic repertoires can be put to use, producing
a variety of multi-level sociocultural meanings and acts of identity. Thus, while
translanguaging allows for values to be negotiated, and personal “voices” to be
heard, it also creates a broader “platform” where issues of language ideologies
and language policies can become more visible.
Τhe term “translanguaging”, or TL for short, was created by the Welsh edu-
cationalist Cen Williams in the 1980s in order to describe the planned and sys-
tematic use of two languages for teaching and learning within the same lesson
(Baker 2003, 2011). It was coined as a Welsh word “trawsieithu” by Cen Wil-
liams and a colleague of his (Dafydd Whittall) during an in-service course for
deputy headteachers in Llandudno (North Wales) and it was later translated into
English as “translinguifying” but then changed to “translanguaging” following a
conversation between Cen Williams and Colin Baker. “Translanguaging” came to
mean the process whereby one language is used in order to reinforce the other
with the aim to increase understanding and in order to augment the pupils’ ability
in both languages (Williams 2002, p. 40). In other words, through translanguag-
ing, pupils internalize new ideas they hear, assign their own understanding to the
222 R. Tsokalidou and E. Skourtou

message/concept and, simultaneously, utilize the message/concept in their other

language(s), from their own perspectives. In doing so, they augment and supple-
ment the message/concept through dual language processing. This idea seems
to be in line with the notion of “transduction of meaning” (Kress 2000) and the
“cone scheme” analysis developed by Skourtou (2011, p. 150), according to
which shared content is expressed by similar concepts in each language, although
the languages are different. Therefore, the cone scheme includes L1—L2 on top,
E1—E2 in the middle and C1 = C2 at the bottom, forming a cone. Although we
find this idea very interesting, we believe that it expresses the approach to TL
by Williams (2003), as the more recent approaches go beyond the dichotomy of
L1—L2, treating the language level in a similar manner to that of the concept and
content levels, as we will discuss later.
Williams (2003) suggests that translanguaging focuses more on the pupils’ use
of two languages (and what they are able to achieve by using both languages)
rather than on the teachers’ role within the classroom, although it may be engi-
neered by the teacher. Williams (2003) also suggested that through translan-
guaging often the stronger language is used in order to develop the weaker one
thereby contributing towards a relatively balanced development of a child’s two
languages. This approach was important in the Welsh context as the aim was for
the child to develop their two (or more) languages at school and translanguaging
was seen as a strategy for retaining and developing bilingualism rather than one
promoting the teaching of the second language. The four potential educational
advantages of translanguaging put forward by Williams, as documented by Baker
(2001, 2006, 2011) are:

a) the promotion of a deeper understanding of the subject matter

b) the development of the students’ weaker languages
c) the facilitation of the co-operation between the home and the school and
d) the integration of fluent speakers with early learners.

Ofelia García (2009a, b) extended the term “translanguaging” to mean more than
the pedagogic variation of linguistic input and output. García treats “translan-
guaging” as a strategy that bilinguals use to make meaning, shape their experi-
ences, gain understanding and knowledge, and make sense of their bilingual
worlds through the everyday use of two (or more) languages. García proposed
the definition of “translanguaging” as “a powerful mechanism to construct under-
standings, to include others, and to mediate understandings across language
groups” (García 2009a, p. 307 f.). García argues that it is impossible to live in
communities such as New York and communicate among multilinguals without
Translanguaging as a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogical Approach … 223

translanguaging (García 2009b, p. 151). Based on observations of translanguag-

ing practices in bilingual communities, García’s approach towards translanguag-
ing helped extend the use of this process to include the complex everyday
realities of home and street (García 2009a).
In other words, García (2009a, 2011) views translanguaging as “engaging in
bilingual or multilingual discourse practices” (2009a, p. 44), as an approach cen-
tered not on languages, but on the communicative practices of bilinguals. Within
the notion and process of translanguaging, other linguistic contact phenomena are
included, such as code-switching and translation, but the emphasis is given on
the process adopted by bilingual students in their classrooms, rather than on the
languages involved.
The proposed approach to translanguaging seems to be in line with the
approach to bilingualism proposed by Brutt-Griffler and Varghese (2004, p. 94),
according to which “Bilinguals remind us that linguistic space is rather a contin-
uum of Language (…) it is not only languages that cohabit in the same space but
(…) also an accompanying process of (…) ‘mixing of cultures and world views’
that is impenetrable to some, troubling to others”. In other words, according to
the above approach, the fusion of different views and cultures plays a significant
role in understanding bilingualism, and, at the same time, the traditional distinc-
tion of autonomous languages is abandoned as emphasis is given to the existence
of a linguistic continuum as expressed by bilinguals themselves. This definition
shows that the resistance to bilingualism is attributed, to a great extent, both to
the concerns of the dominant society about a potential subversion of the linguistic
norm, and to the failure of monolinguals to appreciate the importance of language
coexistence for bilinguals and the rest of society (Tsokalidou 2015). Equivalent
is the approach expressed by Velasco and García (2014), according to which the
language practices learned by emergent bilinguals are in functional interrelation-
ship with other language practices and form an integrated system. TL is more
than code switching, which treats languages as separate systems (or codes) that
are “switched” for communicative purposes. Moreover, we believe that while
code-switching refers mainly to the language level, translanguaging allows
us to refer to the wider ideological issues of multilingual management and the
development of languages and language varieties, life in between different cul-
tures and language varieties, elements which make up our personal and collec-
tive identity/identities. García and Kleyn (2016) make a thorough review of the
literature on translanguaging, explaining the differences between TL approaches
to ­code-switching and Cummins’ interdependence hypothesis and emphasize
that for them TL “refers to the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic reper-
toire, which does not in any way correspond to the socially and politically defined
224 R. Tsokalidou and E. Skourtou

boundaries of named languages” (García and Kleyn 2016, p. 14). To express this,
they refrain from using L1 or L2 and instead they symbolize language use as Fn
and TL as a series of Fn (Fn, Fn, Fn, Fn…) where for code-switching and other
traditional models of bilingualism the symbols L1 and L2 are used and Fn stands
for any language use. They note that in the TL model, named languages such as
English, Spanish and Russian have a material and social reality but not a linguis-
tic one. They also explain that Williams’ TL model refers to an internal linguis-
tic view of language but it corresponds to an external social view of language,
namely Welsh and English.
According to our approach, translanguaging could include a variety of adopted
language practices such as translation, transference of elements, code-switching
and others, while surpassing them at the same time. It becomes an educational
and social practice that contributes to linguistic creativity through the synthesis of
linguistic and cultural multimodal elements (Tsokalidou 2016). Through translan-
guaging we can, thus, overcome the socio-educational reality of “invisible” bilin-
gualism, which refers to the existence but ignorance of the bilingual potential of
students from various backgrounds in Greek schools, as these students are termed
“αλλόγλωσσα” (“alloglossa” meaning “other language speaking”) and not bi/
multilingual, as their linguistic wealth remains simply invisible (Tsokalidou 2012,
2015, p. 44 f.).

3 Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP)

As Edwards (2004) proposes globalization has given multilingualism visibility but

also an added value associated with the ability to speak several languages. How-
ever, not all language speakers receive the same added value for their languages
(Tsokalidou 2017). Nonetheless, through translanguaging weaker or stigmatized
languages can find a place along dominant ones whose value is not questioned.
This is in line with the approach known as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (or
CSP) (Paris and Alim 2017) which “calls for schooling to be a site for sustain-
ing the cultural ways of being of communities of color” (p. 5). Like in the U.S,
Greece and Europe as a whole are also challenged by demographic changes which
make promoting diverse linguistic and cultural dexterity necessary not only for
valuing all communities but also for the development of “skills, knowledges, and
ways of being needed for success in the present and the future” (p. 5). As Paris
and Alim (2017) put it, the future is a multilingual and multiethnic one, regardless
of attempts to suppress that reality (p. 6). Paraphrasing the goals and content of
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) (Ladson-Billings 2017), translanguaging can
Translanguaging as a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogical Approach … 225

become a powerful means of expressing the ways in which race, ethnicity, lan-
guage, literacy and engagement with culture are enacted in shifting and dynamic
ways. The coexistence of languages, the constant references to the need for more
than one, imposed upon us, way of being and expressing oneself, the need to sus-
tain elements from our familial and communal lives along with elements that con-
nect us to our contemporaries, while leading us to a common diverse and dynamic
future can be located and expressed through creative translanguaging practices. As
participants mentioned when asked to expand on the notion of translanguaging,
cultures and languages need to be sustained as fluid, ever-changing and dynamic,
according to the many and complex ways in which people place themselves
within and beyond ethnic, cultural and linguistic groupings in their effort to define
their own sociolinguistic universe.
According to its founders (Paris and Alim 2017), CSP relies on the theories
of funds of knowledge, the third space and culturally relevant pedagogy. Funds
of knowledge refer to the knowledge that students bring with them from their
homes and communities and which needs to be used for their cognitive and
overall development (González et al. 2005). Third Space theory focuses on the
uniqueness of each person as a hybrid (Gutierrez 2008) and is used in order to
understand and bring forward the spaces “in between” two or more discourses
or binaries (Bhabha 1994). Through this approach we can appreciate the process
whereby people negotiate and synthesize their traditional cultural background
with newly imposed cultures, creating their unique third space cultures. Cultur-
ally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) involves three main components which are:

a) a focus on student learning,

b) developing students’ cultural competence and
c) supporting their critical consciousness (Ladson-Billings 2017).

Ladson-Billings (2017) discusses how these three components have been mis-
understood and misused by teachers who seem to follow culturally relevant
pedagogy. She stresses, among other issues, the fact that culture goes far beyond
issues or lists of “cultural tendencies” or “cultural stereotypes”, encompassing
worldview, thought patterns, ethics, epistemological stances and ways of being
that are fluid and dynamic (p. 143). Through a study of both CRP and CSR, it
becomes evident that such approaches cannot be implemented without involving
multilingual and translingual practices in class. As it has been shown from our
research, language and culture are so intertwined that they cannot be separated in
our efforts to sustain them as we support our multilingual/multicultural students
within and outside the classroom context. The work of Bucholtz et al. (2017)
226 R. Tsokalidou and E. Skourtou

makes this connection evident, too, as they claim that one “of the most important
yet most devalued resources available to youth of color is their language”, which
is often and superficially described as “improper”, “sloppy”, “ungrammatical” or
“broken” rather than as innovative, creative or flexible, central to young people’s
creation of their identities (p. 44). As the same writers claim, the recognition of
the importance of language in the lives of youth of color has led Paris and Alim
(2017) to include “the valorization of language as a central component of CSP”
(p. 44). The impossibility of separating language from culture is made clear in
the statement by Bucholtz et al. (2017) that “it is culture, produced primarily via
language, that endows experience with meaning and provides a deeply held sense
of identity and social belonging” (p. 45). Although the work of Bucholtz et al.
(2017) refers mainly to youth of color, we believe that the same premise holds for
all minoritized students in general as well as adults who often feel that their color
or their ethnic/cultural/linguistic backgrounds place them in a position of feeling
like a “wog” or a “gharib” (Tsokalidou 2017). This feeling is not just a personal
matter, but it reflects vividly the established structural power inequalities between
mainstream and minorized communities in migration communities. In this con-
text it is worth highlighting the point made by Paris and Alim (2017) that “too
often cultural practices, activities, and ways of being and doing are invoked in
ways that obscure the racialized, gendered, classed, dis/abilitied, language (and
so on) bodies of the people enacting them.” (p. 9). Just like culture and language
cannot be sustained separately, Paris and Alim claim that CSP is about sustaining
cultures in relation to sustaining the bodies and the lives “of people who cherish
and practice them” (p. 9). This is an important aspect that makes cultural values
and realities person-specific and person-centred and helps educators and stu-
dents realize the individual complexities and idiosyncrasies that matter for people
within the contexts of their ethnic and other affiliations. Such a realization makes
the bond between CSP and translanguaging even more vital as we all need to
appreciate the unique ways in which individuals and groups express their universe
combining all the linguistic (which are also culturally sustaining) means available
to them.
In their discussion of multilingualism, Cenoz and Corter (2015) note that dur-
ing the last 15 years there has been a shift from a cognitive to a social perspective
in the fields of second language acquisition and bilingualism, as well as a turn
towards multilingualism. Within this context the distinction between a second and
a foreign language seems to lose its momentum. The example of the sociolinguis-
tic context of countries in regions other than Europe, such as Lebanon and other
countries in the Middle East, has given us more parameters to consider (Tsoka-
lidou 2000, 2012) which challenge traditional terms used in language learning
Translanguaging as a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogical Approach … 227

and use. Having studied the written work of immigrant students in Greece, Archa-
kis (2019) notes that the issue of hybridity and hybrid identities, as it surfaces
from the students’ own texts, needs to be taken into consideration in the planning
of language teaching. Archakis proposes that the terms “teaching Greek as a sec-
ond or foreign language” within the context of hybridity and diversity are at least
redundant, while a more general term such as “language teaching” can be more
accurate and meaningful. Equivalent issues of the inadequacy of monolingual lan-
guage tests for adult immigrants in Greece have been noted by other research-
ers (Androulakis 2015; Moschonas 2010). This approach seems to be in line
with the holistic view of the linguistic repertoire as adopted in “Focus on Mul-
tilingualism”, a research and teaching approach for multilingual contexts (Cenic
and Seltzer 2011). This approach encourages students to use their resources
­cross-linguistically rather than separately (Cenoz and Gorter 2015). Blommaert
(2010) proposed the term “truncated multilingualism” in order to describe the
use of bits and pieces from different languages that people have at their disposal
while communicating in multilingual contexts as “repertoires composed of spe-
cialized but partially and unevenly developed resources” (p. 23). Although we
find the term appropriate for many multilingual communicative contexts, we
prefer to describe this process as translanguaging, as the term “truncated” might
have negative connotations that may not do justice to the often miraculous way
in which people actually manage to communicate across individual or named,
according to García (2016), language borders. We can say that despite the limita-
tions set by one’s lack of knowledge of many aspects of the languages that make
up one’s “linguistic universe”, communication does happen and strong bonds do
form between people from diverse backgrounds.

4 The Research: Methodological Issues, Research

Sample and Findings

The research presented here belongs to a qualitative research paradigm and the
analysis carried out can be described as qualitative content analysis (Tsokalidou
2017). As Zhang and Wildemuth (2009) suggest, “qualitative content analysis
goes beyond merely counting words or extracting objective content from texts to
examine meanings, themes and patterns that may be manifest or latent in a par-
ticular text. It allows researchers to understand social reality in a subjective but
scientific manner” (p. 1). Qualitative research is fundamentally interpretative,
and interpretation represents our personal and theoretical understanding of the
­phenomenon under study (Patton 2002). However, the current research can be
228 R. Tsokalidou and E. Skourtou

characterized as inductive within a grounded theory approach, according to which

the researcher does not derive variables/categories from existing theories or previ-
ous related studies but immerses herself in the data and lets the categories emerge
on their own.
The data presented below is part of the research by Tsokalidou (2017) which
involved a broader range of issues to be addressed. In this paper we focus on the
data regarding bi/multilingual educators and their views on TL practices. The
data were gathered through a combination of oral communication and inter-
views with the participants. Since they all live in different countries (Australia,
Sri Lanka, Dubai, Germany, Italy, Thailand and Greece) the interview questions
were, in some cases, sent to them by email and communication with them took
place either through social media or in person. In every case, however, the partici-
pants themselves wrote or corrected the content of the provided answers and had
control over the way in which they answered the questions. The purpose of the
research and its focal concept of translanguaging were explained to them, while
a short definition of TL was provided in the written interview questions. Τhe
bilingual participants were encouraged to express their views on the given topics.
They all wanted their own name to be used in the analysis as they all expressed
their desire for their voice to be heard.
The findings presented come from the following bi/multilingual partici-
pants who are all involved in education. Valbona, 45, is an Albanian background
woman living in Greece who teaches Albanian to Albanian-background stu-
dents. She regards Albanian, Greek and English as her languages of use. Sta-
cey, 26, is a Greek-background woman living in Canada who teaches Greek to
Greek-background students. She mentioned English, Greek, French, Italian,
­
(some) Arabic, (some) Hebrew and (some) Turkish as her languages of use.
Devika, 50, is an Australian-Sri Lankan woman living in Sri Lanka who teaches
English to tertiary education students. She mentioned English, French, Italian,
Spanish, Korean and Sinhala as her languages of use. Gianna, 55, is a Greek-
background woman living in France, teaching French to students in informal
French education. She referred to Greek, French, Russian and English as her lan-
guages of use. Kathy, 39, is a bilingual (American-)Lebanese-background woman
living in Dubai, carrying out seminars on self-improvement to adults. She uses
English, Arabic, French and Spanish. Max, 68, is a Greek-background man liv-
ing in Adelaide, Australia, teaching theater to students in formal education. He
mentioned Greek, English and French as his languages of use. Last but not least,
Badal, 57, is a man from Pakistan who lives in Italy and teaches ethnology to
University students. He uses Balochi, English, Urdu and Italian to communicate.
Translanguaging as a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogical Approach … 229

5 Educators’ Perspectives on Translanguaging

The participants answered questions about the use of TL in class, the possible
advantages and disadvantages of TL for both bi/multilingual and monolingual
students. Below we examine their main responses.
Valbona replied that TL “είναι ελευθερία για μένα. Πιάνω των εαυτό μου
ότι μιλάει άλλη γλώσσα, πχ ελληνικά αντί για αλβανικά στην τάξη. Αρνητικό
ίσως είναι ότι δεν ενισχύεται η εκμάθηση της γλώσσας στόχου, αλλά
απελευθερώνει τα παιδιά κι εμένα πάρα πολύ, ‘απερίγραπτη’ ελευθερία.
Αντιλαμβάνομαι ότι μιλάω ελληνικά αντί για αλβανικά από τα «ήρεμα»
πρόσωπα των μαθητών/ριών μου”. [it is freedom for me. I catch myself speak-
ing another language, i.e. Greek instead of Albanian in class. Perhaps it is nega-
tive as the learning of the target language is not reinforced but it frees the children
and me very much, “indescribable” freedom. I realize that I speak Greek instead
of Albanian when I see the “calm” faces of my students].
Stacey said “I question the absolute immersion (in my case the immersion into
the Greek language) and use of the languages my students speak. In a­ ddition,
I am certain that the use of multiple languages will boost their confidence and
self-esteem. I also turn to code switching when I teach, in order to ease the
­language-learning process. Especially now that I teach to English-speaking pre-
schoolers Greek I need to switch between English and Greek often, otherwise they
don’t understand and lose interest”. Moreover, she commented that “By allow-
ing students to speak in their own language and by enabling them to share their
heritage language with their classmates, we raise their self-respect and shape a
positive environment for them. Furthermore, TL eases the educational process. It
makes it quicker and easier for students to understand a new concept or idea, as
they will relate it to previous knowledge”.
Especially in relation to the monolingual students, Stacey said that “This cul-
tural and linguistic exposure fosters an unprejudiced attitude for monolingual
students and promotes a peace building and conflict resolution culture”.
When asked about her own language use in class, Devika replied that “I am
currently learning to understand Sinhalese, and expanding my vocabulary and
phraseology, to enable me to create course materials in English for students from
rural and regional areas who are cut off from the wider world. There is a need
for me to start to think as they do, to understand how best to reach them and help
them equip themselves with English skills in a way which respects their original
language and cultural base”. Moreover, according to Devika, translanguaging
lessens her “perceived remoteness” from her students, while it “opens our minds
230 R. Tsokalidou and E. Skourtou

to think outside our own exclusive frame of reference. It helps us stay open and
fluid and adaptive, in dealing with others”.
Gianna said about the importance of TL in class: “Προσϕέρει μια
κανονικότητα, ϕυσιολογικότητα στο να είσαι δίγλωσσος/η, νομιμοποιεί
κατά κάποιο τρόπο αυτή την κατάσταση. Ιδίως στα παιδιά που η άλλη τους
γλώσσα δεν είναι και πολύ ´αποδεκτή´, όπως τα αραβικά ή τα πολωνικά.
Αυτή η κατάσταση τα βοηθάει να νοιώσουν καλύτερα και να προοδεύσουν
γενικά και στα μαθήματα γλώσσας αλλά και στα υπόλοιπα μαθήματα. Να
βγουν από το μπλοκάρισμα που τους προκαλεί το ότι είναι διαϕορετικά
από την πλειοψηϕία και να δουν τη διγλωσσία σαν κάτι θετικό κι όχι σαν
ελάττωμα” [It offers a sense of normality to being a bilingual, it legitimizes,
somehow, this situation. Especially for children whose other language is not very
“acceptable”, like Arabic or Polish. This situation helps them feel better and make
general progress in language class as well as in the other classes. To get out of the
blockage caused by the fact that they are different from the majority and to see
their bilingualism as something positive and not a defect].
In relation to monolingual students, according to Gianna, TL “Τους βοηθάει
να καταλάβουν, να αντιληϕθούν ότι υπάρχουν πολλοί τρόποι να πούμε, άρα
και να δούμε μια κατάσταση, μια ιδέα, τον κόσμο, τους άλλους/ες. Κάπου
τους/τις ωθεί να βαθύνουν τις γνώσεις τους σε μια άλλη γλώσσα ή να πάνε
και σε μια άλλη γλώσσα, να μη μείνουν μονόγλωσσοι/ες” [helps them under-
stand, realize that there are many ways to express, to see a situation, an idea, the
world, the others. Somehow it urges them to deepen their knowledge in another
language or to go to another language, not to remain monolingual].
Kathy said about TL: “I think it’s something that good teachers do anyway. In
my classes I’ll use slang, Arabic or French words to get my meaning across if I
feel it resonates more with my students. I’m also careful to pick up their language
and re-use it to explain things rather than sticking to textbook terminology”.
When asked about monolingual and bilingual students in her classes, she com-
ments that “Most of my students are bi- and tri-lingual. I don’t have any mono-
lingual students, what I have is mono-cultural or mono-socialized students and
that makes for a greater barrier to teaching new concepts than language does I
think”. When students are narrowly socialized and educated they have a harder
time being flexible and accepting of new ideas. Remember that I teach innovation
and entrepreneurship so the students that have traveled more, explored more and
experienced more are much faster at picking up and adopting new concepts that
the ones that have stayed put.
Translanguaging as a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogical Approach … 231

Max said the following: “Well, clearly, students can feel `more comfortable´
about crossing bridges in communications. Sometimes, language classes are quite
strict and the teacher demands that responses must only be in the language under
study. I know from personal experience this puts great pressure on individuals
who may avoid the task to avoid embarrassment”.
´If you provide this “freedom of speech´ you will have many more “teachable
moments” in your classes”.
Badal said about TL in class: ´“My personal opinion is that such a process
might be very effective for students from all backgrounds. It increases the con-
fidence of those kids who are a minority in number and whose language is not
the medium of instruction or communication in school and society but also to the
host students who, learning a few words from the minority/guest language, create
a kind of bridge to approach the world of the minority´….´each language has its
place in this mosaic of the world of diversities but also of similarities at the same
time”.
From the participants’ own views, we can see that, according to bi/multilin-
guals involved in education, TL provides as a means of increasing confidence and
self-esteem for minority/minoritized students, gives them “indescribable free-
dom” (in the words of Valbona above), “strength of thought”, a feeling of pride,
a deeper adaptability and openness and as Max mentions this freedom of speech
provides “more teachable moments”. This last point about creating more teach-
able moments seems to be in line with the argument put forward by García and
Kleyn (2016) that translanguaging in education is not random or haphazard but
strategic. Although the insights of the participants in this research project focus
on broader cultural rather than linguistic goals in their TL teaching practices, the
opportunities created through them have strategic importance for the class con-
text. As Gianna and Badal suggest, assisting the students’ need to overcome any
negative feelings attached to the other, minoritized, languages and cultures and
giving them a sense of normality and belonging is one major strategic goal in
education and TL can be a very powerful means of achieving it. Moreover, the
participants’ views on TL in education seem to be in line with the research find-
ings of University students who were asked to participate in multilingual prac-
tices (Kyppö et al. 2015), such as the importance of cultural contexts and their
impact on language use and TL especially. As Kathy suggested, in order for the
benefits of multi/bilingualism to become evident, it is important that cultural
aspects are developed, since mono-culturalism may hinder human development
more so than monolingualism. The use of various languages allows for other
“voices” to be heard and have a place within social and educational norms.
232 R. Tsokalidou and E. Skourtou

6 Conclusions

Within an educational context, the strategic use of TL, as explored by García

and Kleyn (2016), could be aligned with the idea of creating more teachable
moments. This is suggested by our findings as well. Other main issues that sur-
faced from our research are TL as a means of assisting students to overcome any
negative feelings attached to their other languages and cultures and giving them
a sense of normality and belonging, which is another major strategic goal in edu-
cation for social justice. Moreover, TL in education is related to the importance
of cultural contexts and their impact on language use (also suggested by Kyppö
et al. 2015), the restriction of monocultural perspectives and the treatment of
bilingualism as the embodiment of the world’s cultural diversity.
TL for our participants appeared to be a powerful means of cultivating a
deeper understanding of the world, offering openness, adaptability and creating
more teachable moments. However, it also became clear from the bi/multilingual
educators’ perspectives that going against the grain of monolingualism and mono-
culturalism within and beyond the educational context is a great challenge for all,
even for those who strongly believe that it is only through TL that all “voices”
can be heard and given a place within social and educational norms.
However, all agree that it is important to highlight diverse cases where stu-
dents are given the space to perform using their full linguistic repertoire, and
educators are multifunctionally designing and incorporating TL spaces into their
teaching and the everyday life of their classrooms (Fu et al. 2019). This way we
could follow how educators develop their TL stance, how students are practicing
it, and how TL itself results to benefits both on emotional and cognitive aspects of
learning and schooling of these students. As García concludes in her foreword to
Fu et al. (2019): “It is all here ‘within reach’”.

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List of Contributors

Gladys Yacely Aponte, Fieldwork Advisor and Course Instructor at Bank Street
College of Education and doctoral student in Urban Education at The Graduate
Center, City University of New York. Main research areas: bilingual education;
translanguaging; internalized linguistic inferiorities.

Dr Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, Associate professor of Bilingual Education and

bilingual program coordinator at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
and research associate of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in
Urban Society (RISLUS). Main research areas: biliteracy; bilingualism; translan-
guaging; teacher knowledge; equity-based instruction in literacies.

Mag. Tatjana Atanasoska, Research assistant at the University of Wuppertal,

School of Education, Area: Multilingualism and Education. Main research areas:
German as a second language; German as a foreign language; teacher education;
teacher professionalization.

M.A. Aslı Can Ayten, Academic staff at the University of Münster, Institute
of Educational Science and temporary lecturer at the University of Wuppertal,
School of Education, Area: Multilingualism and Education. Main research areas:
heritage language instruction; critical race theory; teacher professionalization;
translanguaging.

M.Ed. Yagmur Celik, Research associate at the University of Hamburg, Depart-

ment of Education. Main research areas: multilingualism; language comparison;
multilingual education.

© The Author(s) 2020 237

J. A. Panagiotopoulou et al. (eds.), Inclusion, Education and
Translanguaging, Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1
238 List of Contributors

Dr Constadina Charalambous, Assistant professor at European University

Cyprus, Department of Education Sciences. Main research areas: sociolinguistics;
applied linguistics; language education; multilingualism; linguistic ethnography;
language politics.

Dr Panayiota Charalambous, Greek language teacher in secondary education

at the Cyprus Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Youth. Main research
areas: literature education; literacy practices in divided societies; intercultural and
peace education; ethnography in education.

Dr Joana Duarte, Professor at the NHL Stenden University of Applied

Sciences, research group on Multilingualism and Literacy and Professor at the
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the University of Amsterdam.
Main research areas: multilingual education; teachers’ professional development;
global citizenship education and didactics.

M.A. Janine Fißmer, Research fellow at the University of Cologne, Department

of Education and Social Sciences. Main research areas: gender and education,
especially research on so-called male-dominanted areas; intercultural education;
social justice; transnational spaces of education; qualitative, especially biograph-
ical research.

Dr Sara Fürstenau, Professor at the University of Hamburg, Department of Gen-

eral, Intercultural and International Comparative Education as well as Educational
Psychology. Main research areas: multilingualism and language education; school
and curriculum development in the migration society; transnational education.

Dr Ofelia García, Professor Emerita in the Ph.D. programs in Urban Education

and Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York, former professor at Columbia University’s Teachers
College and Dean of the School of Education at Long Island University. Main
research areas: language education; bilingualism and bilingual education; sociol-
ogy of language; language policy.

Dr Mirjam Günther-van der Meij, Associate Professor at the NHL Stenden

University of Applied Sciences, research group on Multilingualism and Literacy.
Main research areas: trilingual language acquisition; literacy development in mul-
tilingual settings; multiliteracies; multilingual education including minority and
migrant languages.
List of Contributors 239

Dr Sara Hägi-Mead, Professor at the University of Wuppertal, School of Edu-

cation, and director of the Area Multilingualism and Education. Main research
areas: German as a second language; language(s)-aware teaching; self-reflective
learning and teaching.

M.A. Maria J. Hammel, Research fellow and doctoral candidate at the Univer-
sity of Cologne, Department of Education and Social Sciences. Main research
areas: multilingualism and doing difference; ethnography in fields of early child-
hood education; training for educators on multilingualism.

Dr Christine Hélot, Professor Emerita at the University of Strasbourg and asso-

ciate professor at the University of Luxembourg, invited professor at various uni-
versities in Europe and at the CUNY Graduate Centre, New York. Main research
areas: language in education policies; bilingualism and multilingualism in family,
school and early childhood education contexts; children’s literature; multilingual
literacy.

Dr Claudine Kirsch, Associate professor at the University of Luxembourg, Fac-

ulty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, and Vice-head of the Insti-
tute for Research on Multilingualism. Main research areas: language learning and
teaching; multilingualism; early childhood; family language policies; family lit-
eracies; professional development.

Dr Magdalena Knappik, Research assistant at the University of Wuppertal,

School of Education, Area: Multilingualism and Education. Main research areas:
linguistic ethnography; translanguaging; critical pedagogy; critical race theory;
writing research; teacher education.

Dr Melanie Kuhn, Professor at the University of Education of Heidelberg, Fac-

ulty of Education and Social Sciences, Institute for Educational Sciences. Main
research areas: education, migration and inequalities; early childhood education;
professional theory approaches; methodology of ethnographic research.

M.Ed. Timo Neubert, Research fellow and doctoral candidate at the University
of Cologne, Department of Education and Social Sciences. Main research areas:
multilingualism; educational language policies; teacher education..
240 List of Contributors

Dr Sascha Neumann, Professor at the Eberhard-Karls-University of Tübingen,

Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, Institute of Education. Main research
areas: early childhood education; childhood studies; theory and history of social
work; multilingual education in the early years.

Dr Julie A. Panagiotopoulou, Professor at the University of Cologne, Depart-

ment of Education and Social Sciences. Main research areas: education and inclu-
sion/exclusion in migration societies; early childhood education; multilingualism
and translanguaging; language policy in families, care-day centers and (pre)
schools; methodology of multi-sited ethnography.

PD Dr Corinna Peschel, Senior researcher at the University of Wuppertal,

School of Education, Area: Multilingualism and Education. Main research areas:
German as a second language; teacher education and professionalization; writing
research.

M.Ed. Simone Plöger, Research assistant at the University of Hamburg, Diversity

in Education Research Group. Main research areas: schooling of newcomer stu-
dents; language education and multilingualism; school and classroom ethnography.

Dr Pascale Prax-Dubois, Teacher educator for newcomer students in La Réun-

ion and researcher at the University of Strasbourg and the University of La
Réunion. Main research areas: language education policy in migration contexts;
multilingual practices of creole speakers in the Indian Ocean; multilingual teacher
education in post-colonial contexts.

Dr Lisa Rosen, Professor at the University of Cologne, Department of Education

and Social Sciences and Link Convenor of Network 07 “Social Justice and Inter-
cultural Education” of EERA (European Educational Research Association). Main
research areas: school development, pedagogical professionalization and profes-
sionalism in migration societies; marginalized educational spaces; inclusive and
multilingual education; diversity-aware, intersectional as well as internationally
comparative educational research.

Dr Claudia Seele, Project manager at the Regional Agency for Education, Inte-
gration and Democracy (RAA) Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Main research areas:
early childhood education; multilingualism; educational ethnography; childhood
studies.
List of Contributors 241

Dr Eleni Skourtou, Professor at the University of the Aegean, Department of

Primary Education and director of the Language, Literature & Folks Culture Lab.
Main research areas: language education; second language learning; bilingual-
ism and education of minorized children; literacy, orality, multiliteracies; text &
meaning making.

Dr Kate Seltzer, Assistant Professor of ESL and Bilingual Education at Rowan

University, Department of Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Education. Main
research areas: language ideologies; English education; translanguaging; translin-
gual approaches to writing.

M.A. Jenna Strzykala, Research fellow and doctoral candidate at the University
of Cologne, Department of Education and Social Sciences. Main research areas:
(forced) migration and multilingualism; educational language policies; translan-
guaging; internationally comparative educational research.

Dr Eleni Theodorou, Associate Professor at European University Cyprus,

Department of Education Sciences. Main research areas: sociological and anthro-
pological constructions of childhood; multicultural education politics and policy;
family involvement; teacher professionalism.

Dr Roula Tsokalidou, Professor at the School of Early Childhood Education

and director of the Confucius Institute of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Main research areas: language, ethnicity and gender; language teaching; language
contact; bilingualism and translanguaging.

Dr Michalinos Zembylas, Professor at the Open University of Cyprus and Hon-

orary Professor, Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation
at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. Main research areas: emotion and
affect in education; social justice pedagogies; higher education; peace/human
rights education; decolonization.