Liberating Language Education 9781788927956

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Liberating Language Education

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Founding Editor: Viv Edwards, University of Reading, UK Series Editors: Phan Le Ha, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA and Joel Windle, Monash University, Australia. Two decades of research and development in language and literacy education have yielded a broad, multidisciplinary focus. Yet education systems face constant economic and technological change, with attendant issues of identity and power, community and culture. What are the implications for language education of new ‘semiotic economies’ and communications technologies? Of complex blendings of cultural and linguistic diversity in communities and institutions? Of new cultural, regional and national identities and practices? The New Perspectives on Language and Education series will feature critical and interpretive, disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives on teaching and learning, language and literacy in new times. New proposals, particularly for edited volumes, are expected to acknowledge and include perspectives from the Global South. Contributions from scholars from the Global South will be particularly sought out and welcomed, as well as those from marginalised communities within the Global North. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK.

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION: 101

Liberating Language Education Edited by

Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Jackson

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/LYTRA7949 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Lytra, Vally, editor. | Ros i Solé, Cristina editor. | Anderson, Jim, editor. | Macleroy, Vicky, editor. Title: Liberating Language Education/Edited by Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson, Vicky Macleroy. Description: Bristol UK; Jackson, TN: Multilingual Matters, 2022. | Series: New Perspectives on Language and Education: 101 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book engages with new ways of understanding language that include other resources and practices and bring to the fore its messiness, unpredictability and interconnectedness. The chapters illustrate how a translingual and transcultural orientation to language can provide a point of entry to reimagining language education in the 21st century”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021049925 (print) | LCCN 2021049926 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788927932 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788927949 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788927956 (pdf) | ISBN 9781788927963 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Language and education. | Multilingual education. | Languages, Modern—Study and teaching. Classification: LCC P40.8 .L53 2022 (print) | LCC P40.8 (ebook) | DDC 418.0071—dc23/eng/20211120 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049925 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049926 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-794-9 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-793-2 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK. USA: Ingram, Jackson, TN, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2022 Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson, Vicky Macleroy and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru and Chennai, India. Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd.

Contents

Contributors

ix

Introduction: Why Liberating Language Education? Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy

1

Part 1: Policies, Discourses and Ideologies 1

2

‘I Don’t Think We Encourage the Use of their Home Language …’: Exploring ‘Multilingualism Light’ in a London Primary School Thomas Quehl Recognising the Creole Community: Discursive Constructions of Enslavement and the Enslaved in Kreol Textbooks in Mauritius Ambarin Mooznah Auleear Owodally

3

Appropriating Portuguese Language Policies in England Cátia Verguete

4

Making Sense of the Internal Diversities of Greek Schools Abroad: Exploring the Purposeful Use of Translation as Communicative Resource for Language Learning and Identity Construction Vally Lytra Commentary for Part 1 Ana Souza

23

40 55

72 91

Part 2: Language-Living: Materialities, Affectivities and Becomings 5

Languaging in Language Cafés: Emotion Work, Creating Alternative Worlds and Metalanguaging Nuria Polo-Pérez and Prue Holmes

v

99

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6

Language Studies as Transcultural Becoming and Participation: Undoing Language Boundaries across the Danube Region 118 Eszter Tarsoly and Jelena Ćalić

7

The Textures of Language: An Autoethnography of a Gloves Collection Cristina Ros i Solé Commentary for Part 2 Simon Coffey

143 159

Part 3: Transcultural Journeying and Aesthetics 8

9

Visual Art in Arabic Foreign and Heritage Languageand-Culture Learning: Expanding the Scope for Meaning-Making Jim Anderson

167

Creating Pedagogical Spaces for Translingual and Transcultural Meaning-Making and Student Agency in a London Greek Complementary School 186 Maria Charalambous

10 Opening Spaces of Learning: A Sociomaterial Investigation of Object-Based Approaches with Migrant Youth in and beyond the Heritage Language Classroom Koula Charitonos 11 Translanguaging Art: Exploring the Transformative Potential of Contemporary Art for Language Teaching in the Multilingual Context Dobrochna Futro Commentary for Part 3: Liberating Language Learning through Art: The Imperative of Cultural Justice Alison Phipps

205

226

248

Part 4: Voices, Identities and Citizenship 12 How Weird is Weird? Young People, Activist Citizenship and Multivoiced Digital Stories Yu-chiao Chung and Vicky Macleroy

255

13 ‘Animating Objects’: Co-Creation in Digital Story Making between Planning and Play Gabriele Budach, Gohar Sharoyan and Daniela Loghin

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Contents

14 Visual Representations of Multilingualism: Exploring Aesthetic Approaches to Communication in a Fine Art Context Jessica Bradley, Zhu Hua and Louise Atkinson

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297

Commentary for Part 4 Kate Pahl

318

Conclusion: Language Education Collages Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy

321

Index

331

Contributors

Jim Anderson is Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work focuses on: theories and methods of second language learning and bilingualism, including content and language integrated learning (CLIL); multilingualism and new literacies; and language policy. Underlying this is a commitment to an integrated and inclusive approach to language and literacy education incorporating the areas of foreign and community/heritage language learning as well as English as an additional language and English mother tongue. Jim is co-director with Vicky Macleroy of the Critical Connections: Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project launched in 2012. Louise Atkinson is a freelance visual artist, curator, educator and researcher, with a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds. Her work explores ideas of co-production and cross-cultural understanding in and through material culture, as a way of understanding how these contribute to notions of place. Through involving participants in her artistic and research practice, Louise considers how individual voices and experiences are represented in changing constructions of heritage. Ambarin Mooznah Auleear Owodally is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Mauritius. She obtained her Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Durham, UK, and her doctorate from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Ambarin’s research work focuses mainly on language and literacy issues in the multilingual, multireligious and multicultural context of Mauritius. Among her research interests and publications is the representation of ethno-religious groups in school textbooks. Jessica Bradley is Lecturer in Literacies in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield, where she co-directs the Literacies Research Cluster and the BA in Education, Culture and Childhood. Her research interests are in multilingualism and the arts, in particular community arts and street theatre. Jessica co-convenes the AILA Research Network in ix

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Creative Inquiry and Applied Linguistics. She is co-editor of Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities (Multilingual Matters, 2020). Gabriele Budach is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Language, Literature, Education and Arts at the University of Luxembourg. She specialises in research on multilingualism in society and education in multilingual and migration contexts. In her work she draws on sociolinguistics, social semiotics and new materialist frameworks. Gabriele has been conducting ethnographic work in a range of educational contexts in adult, school and community settings in Germany, Canada, the UK and Luxembourg, promoting multilingual, multimodal and affective learning. Her recent research interests include the creative use of objects and digital technology to foster learning and learner identities. She has been external adviser to the projects Critical Connections I + II (led by Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy). Jelena Ćalić is a Lecturer (Teaching) at University College London, where she teaches Serbo-Croatian and Swedish and contributes to several teamtaught linguistic courses. Her principal research interests lie in the fields of applied sociolinguistics and critical language pedagogy. Jelena’s research is broadly concerned with the study of languages with a similar type of internal variation to Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian), the so-called pluricentric languages, the concept of koiné and koineisation, language standardisation and ideological strategies of differentiation, and attitudes to language change and variation. Together with her colleague Eszter Tarsoly, Jelena was a co-leader in the Danube Summer School (later, Challenging Europe Summer School) organised as part of the UCL Global Citizenship Programme. Maria Charalambous completed her PhD in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019. Her research focuses on transformative pedagogy that leverages students’ and teachers’ multilingualism and multiliteracies as resources for learning and identity negotiation in diasporic contexts. Following the completion of her PhD she has been committed to fostering students’ and teachers’ agency and creativity in school contexts of increased diversity, through her role as a teacher. In 2014–2015 Maria coordinated the project ‘Portraits: Innovative Approaches in Heritage Language Learning’, which was among the winners of the British Academy Schools Language Awards. Koula Charitonos is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Educational Technology of the Open University. Her research is integrative and spans three areas: (1) professional learning for complex professional knowledge work; (2) pedagogies and educational practices for connected learning

Contributors xi

across formal and informal settings; and (3) interdisciplinary research and practice in technology-enhanced learning. Koula’s current research activity contributes to understanding contemporary issues in education, in particular the opportunities provided by digital and web technologies to open up access to quality education and to support capacity strengthening to address global challenges. Yu-chiao Chung is a researcher in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, where she obtained her PhD in Bilingualism and Multilingualism. She was previously awarded both an MA in English in Education and an MRes in Education by King’s College, University of London. Her work focuses on: bilingualism and multilingualism; theories and methods of second language learning; multilingual digital storytelling in language classrooms; creativity in language classrooms; sites of learning; and e-learning and online learning in language education. She provides teacher training (CPD) focused on Mandarin and English teaching. Simon Coffey is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Modern Languages Education at King’s College London, where he is Programme Director of the PGCE. He applies qualitative approaches including discourse analysis and auto/biographical narrative to investigate why and how different learners engage with foreign languages. His research interests also include the social history of language teaching, and he is currently researching the history of French teaching in England. Simon’s work is published in a wide range of academic and professional journals and he is keen to bridge the gap between academic research and professional practice. He is co-author of the popular Modern Foreign Languages 5–11: A Guide for Teachers (3rd edition, 2017), and his latest book is an edited volume on The History of Grammar in Foreign Language Teaching (2020). Simon served as joint editor of the Language Learning Journal (2014–2019) and currently convenes the AILA Research Network ECLE (Emotion and Creativity in Language Education). Dobrochna Futro is Doctoral Researcher at the University of Glasgow, and recipient of the SGSAH AHRC DTP scholarship. Her research explores the possibility of using insights gained from researching how contemporary art engages with multilingualism to design new approaches to language teaching in a multilingual context. Before starting her PhD, Dobrochna completed an MA in Polish Philology at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland and an MA in History of Art at University College London. She has a professional background in the visual art sector, and jointly led several projects exploring the relationship of art practice and language learning.

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Prue Holmes is Professor in the School of Education at Durham University. She publishes research on intercultural and international education, and languages and intercultural communication. Prue has led and collaborated on several international research projects. She chairs the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) and co-edits the Multilingual Matters book series Researching Multilingually. Zhu Hua is Chair of Educational Linguistics and Director of the Mosaic Group for Research on Multilingualism, University of Birmingham. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK. Her main research interests span across multilingual and intercultural communication and child language. Daniela Loghin was born in the Republic of Moldova. She obtained a Diploma in Accounting from the College of Informatics in Chisinau and a Bachelor’s degree in Languages and Translation from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. She completed her studies as a Master’s student in the programme ‘Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts’ at the University of Luxembourg in 2019. Having worked as an English teacher for children for three years, Daniela is interested in topics such as multilingualism in the classroom and alternative teaching methods. Vally Lytra is Reader in Languages in Education in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has conducted fieldwork in Greece, the UK and Switzerland in schools, homes and communities that have experienced diverse migration flows. Her research interests include: community and minority languages education; inclusive pedagogies; faith literacies; language, ethnicity and diaspora; language ideologies; family language policy; and international education. Vally’s current research explores the experiences of teachers and parents with online teaching and learning during the pandemic in Switzerland. This study is part of a larger project exploring how the teaching and learning of community languages and cultures in the diaspora might be transformed and reimagined in the present and long term. Vicky Macleroy is a Reader in Education and Head of the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work focuses on: multiliteracies and digital storytelling; multimodal composition, adaptation and creativity; language development, poetry and multilingualism; transformative pedagogy and activist citizenship; and children’s literature and young adult fiction. Underpinning her research is a commitment to research methodologies that embrace collaborative and creative ways of researching. Vicky is co-director with Jim Anderson of an international literacy project ‘Critical Connections:

Contributors

xiii

Multilingual Digital Storytelling’ (2012–ongoing) which uses digital storytelling to support engagement with language learning and digital literacy. Kate Pahl is Professor of Arts and Literacy at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author, with Jennifer Rowsell, Diane Collier, Steve Pool, Zanib Rasool and Terry Trzecak, of Living Literacies: Literacy for Social Change (MIT Press, 2020). Her work is concerned with community literacy practices, and she is interested in co-production together with arts practice as methodologies to work with diverse communities. Kate’s current projects include a book about collaborative interdisciplinary research, to be published with Policy Press, and a book on the intersections between multimodality and multilingualism, to be published by Multilingual Matters. Alison Phipps is UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow and Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies. She was De Carle Fellow at Otago University 2019, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Waikato University, Aotearoa New Zealand 2013–2016, Thinker in Residence at the EU Hawke Centre, University of South Australia in 2016, Visiting Professor at Auckland University of Technology, and Principal Investigator for AHRC Large Grant ‘Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the Body, Law and the State’. Alison is now Co-director of the Global Challenge Research Fund South-South Migration Hub, MIDEQ and for the £2 Million Cultures of Sustainable Peace. She is an academic, activist and published poet. Nuria Polo-Pérez is a Lecturer in Spanish and a Doctoral Researcher at Durham University. Her research explores ‘language cafés’ as meaningful sites of language socialisation, focusing particularly on multilinguals’ experiences of languaging and their multilingual and intercultural social selves. Nuria is author of the book chapter ‘Researching language cafés: Engaging the researcher’s authentic multilingual self’ in Consoli and Ganassin (forthcoming) Refl exivity in Applied Linguistics Research: Opportunities, Challenges, and Suggestions. Thomas Quehl was a primary school teacher in Germany, where his research interest focused on anti-racist education and the institutional discrimination of plurilingual students. After retraining as a primary school educator in the UK, he teaches in London. His doctoral research (Quehl, 2021), which he completed in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, considered teacher agency in multilingual pedagogies. Thomas is interested in pedagogies for plurilingual speakers in superdiverse school settings, with a particular focus on

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participatory activities with children and young people, and in the inclusion of such pedagogies into various contexts of teacher education. Cristina Ros i Solé is Lecturer in Language, Culture and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London. She writes about identity, subjectivity and the everyday in intercultural communication, drawing on philosophy, cultural studies and sociolinguistics. Cristina has written several language textbooks and books on language education, including Mobility and Localisation in Language Learning (Peter Lang, 2011) and The Personal World of the Language Learner (Palgrave, 2016). She is currently writing Language Collections: Living Interculturality with Everyday Objects (Routledge, 2022). Gohar Sharoyan is a student at the University of Luxembourg, currently pursuing her Master’s degree in Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics, Translation and Intercultural Communication from the Yerevan Brusov State University of Languages and Social Sciences in Armenia. Gohar has been involved in radio production for the past five years, hosting her personal show on Radio ARA, a Luxembourgish multilingual radio station. She has been producing podcasts and radio features for the university campus radio programme since 2017 and is currently involved in a community project on sustainable living in Luxembourg. Ana Souza is a Lecturer at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG) and a Research Collaborator in the Postgraduate Programme in Linguistics at the University of Brasília (UnB) in Brazil and a Visiting Academic at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her research interests are in sociolinguistics, with a focus on bilingualism, languages and identities (including religious identities), language choices, language planning (families and immigrant churches), complementary schools (heritage language schools), heritage language, language teacher education and, more recently, the Englishisation of academic literacies in Brazilian universities. Ana coordinates MultiFaRE, the research group for multilingualism in family, religious and educational contexts: http://tinyurl.com/multifare2019. Eszter Tarsoly is Lecturer (Teaching) at University College London, where she teaches Hungarian and courses on language contact and minority and endangered languages. Her main research interests lie in the fields of linguistic ethnography and critical sociolinguistics. Her research is concerned with the cross-linguistic diversity of attitudes towards language, also exploring the way standard-language ideologies underpin approaches to language pedagogy and multilingual repertoires, as well as representations of sameness and difference in ways of speaking. Eszter is currently

Contributors xv

involved in a collaborative project investigating the use of local varieties of Romani in Hungarian and Slovak schools. As academic leader of a summer school on intercultural interaction, later co-led with Jelena Ćalić, she contributed to developing the curriculum for UCL’s Global Citizenship Programme. Cátia Verguete is a PhD student in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her doctoral research (forthcoming 2022) examines the legal framework that has regulated Portuguese Education Departments abroad and its interplay with the experiences and perceptions of educators working in schools in England. In 2019 Cátia accepted the position of Deputy Director for the Portuguese Education Department based at the Portuguese Embassy in London and managed by the Camões Institute. Her scholarly interests include the interaction between language planning and social justice, multilingualism and educational language policy.

Introduction: Why Liberating Language Education? Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy

Dominant paradigms of language and language education worldwide continue to be based on static notions of language as code, as a rule-governed system that is coterminous with stable communities and identities and on prescriptive pedagogical and language assessment models. This book sets out to challenge such an ordered categorisation of languages, cultures and identities. It seeks to stretch and explode their meanings by focusing on the relationships and entanglements that these complex concepts establish with specific contexts. It sits within a growing body of work in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics that has placed an emphasis on situated descriptions of language education practices and has illuminated how these descriptions are enmeshed with local, institutional and wider social forces. This line of research has alerted us to the importance of harnessing the pedagogic potential that comes with valorising and strategically deploying the multilingual repertoires of learners and teachers across a range of contexts of instruction and learning. Yet, there is a need for further empirical work that engages with new ways of understanding language and language education. These new ways expand the meaning of language by including other semiotic resources and meaning-making practices and bring to the fore its messiness and unpredictability. The current volume extends this scholarship, by illustrating how a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language pedagogy can provide a point of entry to reimagining what language education might look like under conditions of heightened linguistic and cultural diversity and increased linguistic and social inequalities. The chapters unite an international group of contributors, presenting state-of-the-art empirical studies drawing on a wide range of local contexts and spaces, from linguistically and culturally heterogeneous mainstream and higher education (HE) classrooms to complementary (community) school and informal language learning contexts. The studies bring together a plurality of voices and theoretical and methodological approaches. At the same time, they place at the centre of the analysis a 1

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focus on situated meaning-making practices and instability. This analytical focus has been shaped by the increasing destabilisation of bounded and static representations of languages, cultures, identities and communities and a strong orientation towards movement, uncertainty and rhizomatic offshoots that develop in horizontal and creative ways. The book expands these perspectives in the following distinct ways that cut across chapters. The book seeks to interrogate dominant monolingual and prescriptivist ideologies about how language is understood and how it should be taught. It questions what types of languages and varieties of language the object of study is and in what ways it should be done and, ultimately, it questions what constitutes language education. Rather than alienating learners and teachers from current educational structures, the empirical studies presented in this volume encourage them to be proactive and to work collaboratively in constructing a learning environment that better reflects their desires, their worlds and their responsibilities. In this way, learners and teachers can become engaged policy activists. Taken together, authors investigate learners’ agencies and their individual voices, their biographies and their histories. The book not only highlights their individual value, but also capitalises on the relational and organic in the working of new identities. It presents language as part of a complex semiotic assemblage of relations between humans, objects and artefacts in the extraordinary and ordinary of their lives. A focus on the personal expands our view of language by emphasising not only the instructional and formal aspects of language education, but also the more intimate and biographical aspects of the lived linguistic experience. This book addresses the non-verbal aspects surrounding and contributing to a richer multisensorial understanding of language and its material dimension where embodiment and sensation are key. Grounded on perception as well as feeling and intuition, it moves away from rationalist and pragmatic understandings of language that focus on its effectiveness. Instead, it foregrounds the new possibilities that the aesthetic dimension in language education (e.g. art-based learning approaches and digital storytelling) can open for language use that are evocative of personal and collective memories. In highlighting the different voices, textures, visions and sensations that language education can take, this book hopes to contribute to ongoing dialogue on the diverse ways of teaching and educating that language offers while demonstrating the importance of grounding language education in the local. Some of the questions that will be addressed in this book are: • •

How do learners reproduce or resist institutional and societal ideologies and policies? How do teachers reimagine their repertoires, identities and agencies?

Introduction 3

• • • • • • •

In what ways does a translingual-transcultural orientation reshape experience and generate a dynamic, fluid and agentive sense of self? How is language learning lived through artefacts and everyday materiality? What are the intimate and embodied aspects of language education? Does recognising the centrality of narrative in shaping our identities give children and young people greater ownership over their languages? Can a political view of language and literacy prepare young people to become active democratic citizens with a desire to fi nd other ways of knowing and being? In what ways can an arts-based perspective draw on multiple semiotic resources that enhance meaning-making? How can creative interactions such as artworks support language education?

How Liberating Language Education came into being

The four editors are members of the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London and the idea for this book grew out of wondering how we could make stronger connections across our research, practice and community engagement in the field of language education. Thus, we set out to look for a way to bring our ideas about language together. This book came into being as we gathered together in a small Goldsmiths office surrounded by books, papers and other objects, thinking about how the four of us could combine our expertise and unite research from both new and more experienced researchers in the field of language education. It was an exciting experience as we gave ourselves time to share, pick up and discard ideas, meander through possibilities, and reflect on our position and what we could bring to a book where we wanted to see language education differently. This book is embedded in our language histories, the plurality of our approaches and the importance of dialogue, but also in reflecting upon our own positions as researchers. We were keen to embrace a broad spectrum of research expertise and knowledge in soliciting the different chapters. As editors of this book, we drew on our own diverse and inclusive language expertise to shape the four main parts and then approached researchers whose work we knew well and whose research would contribute valuable insights into new possibilities for language and education. We decided to conceptualise our own positionality in relation to language, education and lived multilingualism through a series of four characters. We present these four characters to interrogate our own language histories and think more deeply about what we mean by liberating language education. Vally Lytra, lead editor for the fi rst section on policies, discourses and ideologies, becomes

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the weaver; Cristina Ros i Solé, lead editor for the section on languageliving: materialities, affectivities and becomings, becomes the fool; Jim Anderson, lead editor for the section on transcultural journeying and aesthetics, becomes the traveller; and Vicky Macleroy, lead editor for the section on voices, identities and citizenship, becomes the activist. The weaver

The metaphor of weaving different coloured threads to create a vibrant fabric best represents how I see languages and language education in this book. The metaphor of weaving is intimately linked to my own biography. As a young Greek child of four I found myself having to make sense of a new language (English) and new modes of cultural expression. These new language and cultural threads were interwoven with existing ones passed down from significant others, my parents, grandparents and family friends. According to family lore, I was a reluctant speaker of English during the fi rst six months. I don’t remember much of those early months of language socialisation and perhaps I have tucked away the feelings of frustration and inadequacy at not being able to make myself understood, but I do have a very clear memory of sitting on one of the nursery teachers’ laps and being read a picture book. In my heart this image has registered as a very happy moment. Upon my return to Greece, it started to become apparent to me that these recently interwoven threads were highly valued. I was praised for my ‘native’ English accent and was asked how I came to speak such ‘good English’. These were my fi rst encounters with the linguistic privilege associated with speaking a coveted global language, or in sociolinguistic terms the power of social valuations associated with named languages that position languages and their speakers in unequal ways. To these language and cultural threads, new threads have been added over the years (French, German, Turkish, a few bits of Spanish, Italian, Tamil). Some threads have got a bit loose, or perhaps their original vibrancy has faded away. The intersections and interconnections of these different threads have opened up new worldviews and understandings of the self. The fabric is in a constant process of creation and re-creation, as is the process of (language) learning, in perpetual motion, never complete. The act of weaving has been very personal and selective. It has been shaped by individual preferences and desires, professional decisions and family circumstances. At the same time, it cannot be divorced from the contexts of its production. Institutional, social and ideological forces as well as political and historical processes of migration, globalisation and post-colonialism frame the ways we make sense of the world and evaluate ways of speaking and being. It is the quest for understanding the weavings between the personal and the social and ideological in language education that has underpinned

Introduction 5

my research, practice and community engagement. In trying to make sense of these weavings, I seek to listen closely to the lived experiences of learners and teachers, to be alert to whose voices get heard and whose get ignored and who decides and to the inherent tensions in negotiations of knowledge, linguistic expertise and identity articulations. I subscribe to viewing linguistic diversity from a position of strength, as a valuable resource for communication, (language) learning and social identification, while not shying away from questions of linguistic and social inequality. Taking a reflexive stance pushes me to interrogate my own partial understandings and interpretations and to openly acknowledge where they are coming from. This analytical orientation informs the fi rst part of the book as well, exploring how policies, discourses and ideologies about multilingualism, language diversity and language learning are enacted and negotiated across schools and classrooms. The fool

Unexpectedly, academia has provided me with a playful and humorous approach to life that shies away from linear paths. It has shown me unpredictable directions driven by affect and intuition. Although my interest revolves around language, I have taken inspiration from a variety of disciplines: anthropology, philosophy, literature and the arts. I have resisted the categorisations and stasis that come with pre-established roles: a Spanish teacher, a language teacher, a researcher, an academic. Instead I have tried to follow and adapt to the social relationships I have formed along the way and the circumstances I have found myself in. This has allowed me to build an identity that is multiple and always in the process of becoming something else. Like ‘life in a caravan’, there has been constant movement between fact and fiction: on the one hand paying attention to the smallest detail of fact, like the detective looking for clues and trying to make sense of languages and cultures on the ground; on the other, imagining new vistas, imagined communities and the possibilities for world-making that they offer. Like The Fool, I believe that, sometimes, we may fi nd more sense in nonsense, more reason in the absurd, more order in a mess and more movement in the contingency of language. Similarly, multilingualism and language education are more meaningful when we dwell in the differences, the contradictions and their possibilities. Perhaps it is my biography and how I experienced the censorship of a dictatorial regime that has shaped the way I look at languages as a source of energy, force and vibrancy. It is with and in languages that I have learnt how to be subversive and creative, to fi nd ways to escape and liberate language from the constraints of hegemony and power. Or perhaps it is my fondness for multilayered identities that disarms, dissolves structures and boundaries and gives me this off-centre perspective on language.

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Liberating Language Education

Like The Fool, my approach to language education tries to challenge disciplines, the dichotomies of the self-other, and hierarchies. This view of language education sides with the ‘commoner’ by pointing out some of the limitations of some language education practices. The upside of the underprivileged position is that its outsider condition frees it from particular discourses and social constraints. It is a condition that allows for a sideways movement – a movement that connects language to the viscerality of the world through the senses and the irrational connections with our idiosyncratic pasts, presents and futures. A personal, embodied and grounded approach to multilingualism may be ‘the groundlings’ of language education who, in challenging hierarchy, portray an alternative view of how we can educate from a different viewpoint. By locating language closer to the ground, the sensual and the playful, the view of The Fool shows us a different type of ‘truth’ in language: how to ‘live’ from the ground by connecting spaces, bodies and their materiality. The traveller

Experiencing the tensions and delights that go with a cosmopolitan heritage, language learning was always much more than an intellectual exercise for me. Complementing a dry, grammar-based approach to the teaching of French and German at school, I was blessed in being able to experience French language and culture at fi rst hand from a young age through family connections and then, as an adolescent, to benefit from visits to Germany and Austria, staying with families who welcomed me with warm hospitality and kindness. These experiences were at times unnerving, but also eye-opening and deeply personal, offering escape and adventure, enabling me to feel the world differently and to question static notions of culture and identity. There is a restlessness about the traveller, dwelling in new places, meeting new people, but then moving on, and this is captured powerfully in the experience of hitchhiking and youth hostelling. This accentuates the adventurous, nomadic nature of the traveller, expecting the unexpected, going with the flow, making connections with people of different backgrounds and developing linguistic competence in the process, ever curious, and recording impressions in photographs, letters and journals composed in a mix of languages. Memories of trips in France and Germany before university remain vivid in the memory and reveal a growing sense of myself as in-between, a mediator, able to empathise with different perspectives and to see possible points of contact beyond walls and borders. Travel is experienced not only through the body and in space and time but also through engaging with creative works of the imagination. Thus the study of French and German literature at school and then at university took me on further journeys of discovery, enabling me to appreciate more deeply the relationship between language and culture as well as the varied

Introduction 7

colours, tastes and cadences reflected in different languages. I became fascinated by the connections between literary works in different languages but also by connections across art forms, in particular between literature, visual art and music. Through the arts, we can experience language and culture in ways that are deeper and more fulfilling because they draw on affective, multisensory and aesthetic experience. They enable us to see the world anew and to reinvent ourselves in the process. The perspective of the traveller in its various forms has been at the heart of my work as a teacher, teacher educator and researcher and is reflected in the stance I adopt in this book. It has led to involvement in supporting the teaching of a wide range of world languages. In our increasingly diverse classrooms, we have the opportunity to draw on a wealth of linguistic and cultural experience and share stories that transport us to different worlds and ways of being. The traveller is interested in possibilities more than certainties, and this is an aspiration that lies at the heart of the chapters in Part 3 of this book. The activist

Language as an activist is about whose voices are heard and whose stories are told. My perspective in this book is about how we can change things through our research and imagine how language and education could be different. My approach to drama was through theatre in education and entering school spaces to work with children through improvisation and imagining new places and worlds. My own theatre performances were as part of a political street theatre company for three years where we took our stories into the streets, parks, community centres and schools. Improvisation, acting and activism led to my own fi lmmaking through our political drama, Frozen Pipe Dreams. Fostering this political dimension towards fi lmmaking is crucial to the way I look at life. Digital storytelling comes out of a community activist and theatre in education background and is about alternative stories and listening to voices that are too often silenced. Being an activist is about taking risks and standing up for ways of doing things that we know and believe matter to our lives and the lives of future generations. Having the right to protest, to walk the streets with others and to fi nd strength in community is part of my life as an activist and my need to be on the move and doing, acting and creating. My way into working actively with poetry was belonging to a small writing collective producing and writing a poetry magazine, Sphagnum. Poetry, songs and music are an integral part of an activist’s life and show the power of language to affect and move others. Being part of the Spoken Word Education programme at Goldsmiths (the fi rst in the world) for five years showed me how poetry could be approached differently in schools and the importance of poetry and spaces for performance in these young

8

Liberating Language Education

people’s lives. In the primary school in Taiwan, the children use poetry to portray protests over their land and communities. Living in Lisbon for 16 years led me to research and foster multilingual childhoods and think about ways in which children become literate across their linguistic repertoire. Being a language activist is about making language matter and ‘doing stuff ’ with languages. It is also about using language in imaginative, poetic and artistic ways to create connections in and across communities, both locally and globally. This connects with the work presented in the chapter on visual representations of multilingualism and the winning entry, Language and Light, which explored indigenous people’s knowledge and spelt out multiple languages with solar-powered lights across the Australian desert. Activist citizenship is at the core of being a language activist and rethinking our place in the world. Being an activist has at its heart collaboration and working in a team. My approach to liberating language education is about fi nding ways to open up spaces for new collaborations where children and young people are given platforms to create collaboratively and share, perform and present their languages. The editors and authors of this volume, while being aware of the privilege of writing mainly from positions in academia in the Global North, speak from a variety of socioeconomic, linguistic and cultural trajectories that belie a range of language, cultural and identity positions. We believe that the heterogeneity of these standpoints and positionings has allowed us to present a view of language education that resists hegemonies, inequality and colonising attitudes in language education that arise from monolingual and Anglocentric standpoints. It therefore aims to make a small contribution to a more inclusive approach to language education which, while supporting decolonising processes, also purports to ‘liberate’ it by including a variety of languages, voices and perspectives. Such a standpoint seeks to contribute to a shifting kaleidoscopic approach to language education that rejects static versions of languages, cultures and identities that fi nd specificity, multiplicity and messiness where generic, singular and prescriptive approaches had previously taken hold. Theoretical Principles

It has become increasingly clear that prevailing models of language and language education fail to take account of the massive social and cultural change arising from globalisation and of new understandings emerging from this which radically alter our relationship to and sense of ourselves within the world (Kramsch, 2014). Liberating Language Education is about challenging assumptions and dismantling barriers. In so doing it offers an alternative vision for the future based on grounded research across multiple contexts and with multiple aims.

Introduction 9

Informed by developments in the fields of philosophy, sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, literacy, aesthetics and the arts, and pedagogy, the book’s approach rests on a number of important principles. Firstly, it takes an integrated and inclusive view of language and language learning and there are various dimensions to this. It sees languages as porous and interconnected rather than as autonomous, bounded systems (García & Li, 2014). It acknowledges that the social values associated with named languages hierarchise languages and confer social attributes of distinction on their speakers which have real-life consequences, e.g. in terms of access to national citizenship and socio-economic mobility (Heller, 2007). While recognising how discourses of power in society can support the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, the book highlights ways in which dominant language ideologies and discourses can be resisted, reconfigured or subverted in educational spaces (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001) and strongly asserts the value of all languages (Lo Bianco, 2014). The book takes pride and pleasure in rendering visible substantial work taking place in the complementary sector to maintain home languages and cultures and to foster learners’ harmonious bilingual/multilingual development (Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Lytra & Martin, 2010). It further recognises how linguistic repertoires are developed organically but favours the broader lens of semiotic repertoires encompassing the full range of resources for meaning-making (Kusters et al., 2017; Rymes, 2014). Secondly, the book aims to reflect the symbiotic relationship between language and culture and how our journey into another language is shaped by our background and past experience, however uniform or varied that might be. In other words, learning another language is about expanding and reconfiguring an existing communicative resource and also about perceiving and nurturing a new way of being in the world (Kramsch, 2009; Ros i Solé, 2016). The process is negotiated not separately, not in binary or fi xed positions, but through movement towards a third space, a space of becoming where interactions between thoughts and words can mingle and reach out syncretically and rhizomatically towards new possibilities of meaning-making (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004; Ros i Solé et al., 2020). The creative and transformative nature of such interactions is further emphasised in the notion of ‘translanguaging space’ (Li, 2011: 1223), underlining the fact that this is ‘not a space where different identities, values and practices simply co-exist, but combine together to generate new identities, values and practices’. The book supports this translingual-transcultural orientation within language education and recognises how it can contribute both within the language learning process and in building critical metalinguistic awareness (García & Kleifgen, 2019; Little & Kirwan, 2019). It is seen as fundamental to the dialogic, multiperspectival and multivoiced forces driving the multilingual turn (Conteh & Meier, 2014; May, 2014) and which are

10 Liberating Language Education

represented in various ways in this book. Vital here is the understanding that language education should not be confi ned to the classroom but should include learning across multiple sites including social spaces, home and community, as well as virtual spaces, offline and online (Anderson & Macleroy, 2016; Reinders & Benson, 2017). Language education gains purpose and vibrancy when it is understood as part of a wider ecosystem in which boundaries both between curriculum subject areas and between formal and informal learning become blurred. Thirdly, the book recognises multiple ways of knowing and seeks to challenge the dominance of rationalist and pragmatic approaches to languages and language education. The dualist separation of mind and body is rejected, and language is seen as rooted as much in the senses and in our affective being as in cognitive processes. This aesthetic perspective foregrounds relationships or intra-actions between our embodied selves and the living (human and non-human) and material elements that constitute our life-worlds (Leung & Scarino, 2016; Ros i Solé et al., 2020). It reveals the entanglements, forces and assemblages that shape how meanings are made, breathing life into language-and-culture learning. It is within this context that the arts and creativity are seen to have an important role to play as they draw powerfully on the emotions and the senses, free up the imagination and involve new and engaging ways of seeing, feeling and expressing (Mentz & Fleiner, 2018; Moore et al., 2020). Fourthly, and consistent with the ecological and personal emphasis, active learner participation emerges as central to the theme of liberation. This book shows how from various perspectives motivation and engagement are enhanced when student agency is activated, when there is a sense of ownership, when space is allowed for experimentation, play and performance, when critical thinking and self-regulation are encouraged (van Lier, 2007). It also shows how young people can start to believe in themselves and gain the confidence to make their voices heard as activist citizens (Byram, 2021). Language education is political and it can serve to further or impede principles of democracy and equity and decolonisation, for ‘languages and intercultural communication are never just neutral’ (Phipps & Guilherme, 2004: 1; see also Gray, 2013). The chapters of this book offer fresh thinking in the four areas outlined above and open up important directions for language education. A Plurality of Methodological Perspectives

This book brings together a wealth of methodological perspectives that are consistent with its theoretical orientations of opening new possibilities for doing language education, as noted at the beginning of the Introduction. The studies position learners and language educators as agentive social actors who actively, critically and creatively engage in coconstructing their learning environments, bringing to the fore their

Introduction 11

practices, voices, biographies and desires. To capture these, chapter authors have employed a wide range of ethnographic approaches, including autoethnography, critical ethnography and case study, action research, arts-based and multisensory research approaches. This broadening of methodological perspectives aligns with the view of understanding the linguistic mode as part of a wider semiotic repertoire, as part of a multimodal, multisensory ensemble that brings together individuals, objects and technologies. It is inscribed within a broader turn towards the use of multimodal, spatial, material and sensory conceptual lenses in language and literacy research (see Mills, 2016, for an overview). It allows chapter contributors to explore to different degrees the affective, the embodied and the aesthetic alongside the sociohistorical and the ideological dimensions of language education. To this end, chapter contributors deploy long-established ethnographic tools, such as a variety of fieldwork texts (fieldnotes, written reflections, vignettes), transcripts of audio- and videorecorded interviews and the textual and historical analysis of documents. These are expanded by the examination of participants’ digital stories, photographs, artefacts and artworks (see, in particular, the chapters in Parts 3 and 4) and the exploration of ‘language biographies’ (Busch, 2017) and ‘schoolscapes’ (Laihonen & Szabó, 2017), as evidenced in Thomas Quehl’s multi-sited school ethnography (Chapter 1). As Martin-Jones and Jones (2017) have cogently argued, the plurality of methodological perspectives has resulted in ‘greater researcher reflexivity and a greater commitment to bringing the voices of research participants into developing research narratives’ (Martin-Jones & Jones, 2017: 12). Several chapter contributors emphasise the democratic, collaborative and personalised ways in which they engaged with participants for knowledge building and the creation of a sense of shared ownership and trust. A common thread that emerges across many of the studies is the researchers’ long-term investment in the field (in some cases over several years and across more than one site) and their intense engagement in interaction and mutual dialogue with research participants. This image of the researcher disrupts the dominant ‘figure of the lone researcher, a figure toiling independently to create knowledge in the field’ (Wasser & Bresler, 1996). It calls for continuously questioning the role of the researcher’s own personal subjectivity throughout the research process (Hymes, 1996). It draws attention to how the voices of both the researchers and the research participants are reconstructed and represented in research narratives, alerting us to whose voices get privileged and whose do not as well as to ‘the many tensions between the different points of view of the multiple and sometimes competing voices’ (Patiño-Santos, 2020: 218). To this effect, chapter authors engage in reflexive accounts of their multiple positionings in the field and the negotiation and transformation of identities during the various phases of the research. The researchers’ self-awareness in the field is extended when pushing against the dominant

12 Liberating Language Education

monolingual paradigm. This is encapsulated in the ‘researching multilingually’ framework (Holmes et al., 2015), which explicitly investigates the possibilities and complexities of using more than one language in the research process, discussed by Nuria Polo-Pérez and Prue Holmes in Chapter 7. Taken together, the researchers’ engagement with wider methods and methodologies documented in this book invites us to open up to new possibilities about what doing research in language education that is collaborative, interdisciplinary and sensitive might look like. Outline of the Book

Liberating Language Education is organised according to four thematic sections: Policies, Discourses and Ideologies (Part 1), LanguageLiving: Materialities, Affectivities and Becomings (Part 2), Transcultural Journeying and Aesthetics (Part 3) and Voices, Identities and Citizenship (Part 4). Each part consists of three to four chapters followed by a commentary by an invited discussant. The 14 chapters can be read in any order or according to the thematic structure proposed. Part 1: Policies, Discourses and Ideologies

In Part 1, chapter contributors take a determinedly situated, social practice approach to language and language pedagogy. This approach centres on what Ben Rampton (2020: 3) refers to as ‘a linguistics of “situated interaction” which extends beyond systems and speakers to the ways in which embodied individuals engage with each other in encounters at particular times and places’. The chapters focus on the sensibilities and tensions around how multilingualism, language diversity and language learning are represented, understood and interpreted in a range of educational spaces. The reluctance to acknowledge the normalcy of quotidian multilingual language use and to challenge deficit constructions of language learners has meant that linguistic diversity may be viewed with ambivalence by language educators (Chapters 1, 3). Added to this, language hierarchies and the social valuations associated with named languages and language varieties may privilege, marginalise or disparage particular configurations of language and cultural resources and practices under specific conditions (Chapter 4). Dominant discourses, language ideologies and policies may be accepted, adapted, recast or contested. When challenged, they can open ideological and implementational spaces (Hornberger, 2002) for the articulation of alternative discourses and the construction of identity positionings that can empower language speakers of historically minoritised languages (Chapter 2). The chapters in this part illustrate the importance of examining the ideological dimension of language education and the interconnections between policies, discourses and language ideologies.

Introduction 13

Thomas Quehl’s chapter (Chapter 1), entitled ‘“I Don’t Think We Encourage the Use of their Home Language …”: Exploring “Multilingualism Light” in a London Primary School’, traces how dominant language ideologies and discourses about language use and students’ plurilingual repertoires come into contact in a mainstream primary school. Drawing on multiple data sources from a larger ethnographic study, the chapter illustrates the construction of a discourse in which the monolingual norm and a symbolic take on multilingualism merge into what the author cogently refers to as ‘multilingualism light’. This discourse has the powerful effect of restricting the pedagogic possibilities of plurilingual children to leverage all their linguistic resources for learning. In Chapter 2 on ‘Recognising the Creole Community: Discursive Constructions of Enslavement and the Enslaved in Kreol Textbooks in Mauritius’, Ambarin Mooznah Auleear Owodally delves into the representation of the Creole minority community in Kreol textbooks, which have recently been introduced in the Mauritian education system. Through the thematic analysis of a corpus of nine Kreol Morisien textbooks, the author examines discourses associated with enslavement and the enslaved, historically connected to the Creole minority community which has felt disempowered. She uncovers how, far from being portrayed as victims, the enslaved are represented as agentive social actors and their important contributions to the history, economy and artistic expression of multicultural Mauritius are foregrounded and celebrated. The next two chapters bring to the fore processes of change in community/heritage languages education. In Chapter 3, ‘Appropriating Portuguese Language Policies in England’, Cátia Verguete investigates the broadening goals in official language policy discourses for Portuguese language abroad, from endorsing language maintenance to including the promotion of language internationalisation. The chapter reports on how Portuguese official language policies as articulated by the Portuguese government through Camões – Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua are interpreted and appropriated by its regional director and a group of language educators working across the various levels of educational provision. Situated within an ethnography of language policy, the chapter illustrates how the regional director and the language educators engaged with the policy goals in highly individualised ways based on their experiences and beliefs. In Chapter 4 on ‘Making Sense of the Internal Diversities of Greek Schools Abroad: Exploring the Purposeful Use of Translation as Communicative Resource for Language Learning and Identity Construction’, Vally Lytra sheds light on the internal diversities of Greek community schools against the backdrop of heightened transnational mobilities post-2009 and educational policy changes in Greece. The chapter emerges from a slow autoethnographic study of a newly founded Greek

14 Liberating Language Education

school in Switzerland. It illustrates how teachers and students can capitalise on the purposeful use of translation as a communicative resource to co-construct new knowledge and negotiate new identity positionings. At the same time, it alerts us to the struggle at the core of the ideology and practice of community schools between flexible and fi xed language practices. In her commentary rounding off this fi rst part, Ana Souza revisits the chapters through the lens of language planning and policy (LPP), advocating for a closer collaboration between policy and practice. She stresses that despite the persistence of the ‘monolingual bias’, the chapters illustrate ‘how much monolingualism has in fact been replaced by multilingualism in a variety of educational settings’. Part 2: Language-Living: Materialities, Affectivities and Becomings

Part 2 presents language education and language learning as an embodied practice, a way of living languages and ways of being in the world that involve multiple entanglements with the material world at different levels. It unsettles established understandings of language learning that rest on rational and disembodied models of learning by emphasising the contingent and the tangible. It hones in on the many and unique entanglements that languagers create with their favourite socialising spaces, their spoken languages and their linguistic repertoires, and the ordinary objects that accompany them in such linguistic experiences. It puts a sharp focus on how languages are lived in the here and now, while connecting with the past through individual and collective biographies, and how these are reassessed and integrated into individuals’ lives and condition their plans for the future. This part highlights the idea that languages are not only transcendental and static formations and structures, but dynamic and vibrant processes that shape our linguistic repertoires via the multitude of creative arrangements that the spaces, bodies and materials we inhabit create. The chapters in Part 2 reflect this alternative view of foreign language education, one that is built on the informal and socialising aspects of languaging, such as the languaging occurring in language cafés, and how these can give rise to personally crafted alternative worlds (Chapter 5). It is also predicated upon a view of language learning that confers language education and its agents, be they learners or educators, the power of dissolving reified political boundaries between languages and cultures (Chapter 6). Finally, it engages with the idea that languages are tangible and located at the boundaries of our bodies, made sense of through the physical and multisensorial aspects that our identities feed on (Chapter 7). In Chapter 5, ‘Languaging in Language Cafés: Emotion Work, Creating Alternative Worlds and Metalanguaging’, Nuria Polo-Pérez and

Introduction 15

Prue Holmes report on ethnographic research conducted in two language cafés in northern England that aims to draw attention to non-instructional contexts as meaningful environments for language socialisation. Following an ecological approach towards language learning, the study sheds light on the affordances of language cafés for the social, embodied experience of languaging and the mobilisation of a complex mélange of emotions that comes with it. The authors argue that language cafés bring the immersion experience to the here-and-now of everyday leisure activities, by enabling languagers to co-construct ‘other worlds’ in order to immerse themselves in the pains and pleasures of dwelling in another language regardless of geographical location. Finally, the study illustrates how the languaging experience in language cafés is often linked to episodes of metalanguaging, where multilingual speakers discuss their subjective relationships with languaging. In Chapter 6, ‘Language Studies as Transcultural Becoming and Participation: Undoing Language Boundaries across the Danube Region’, Eszter Tarsoly and Jelena Ćalić address the conventionalised separation of ‘language’ and ‘content’ in institutional discourse settings, particularly the informal but widespread division of academic subjects. They argue that the separation of ‘language’ (as ‘container’) and ‘content’ in institutional jargon draws on a more generic conceptual framing of the notion of language, which transfers the notion of national identities to institutionalised impermeable disciplinary divisions that present language as a bounded entity, reduced to the function of a receptacle for meanings, ideas and knowledge. It then presents a view of languages education that offers a more flexible language pedagogy by involving the simultaneous teaching of multiple languages in order to allow learners to recognise the permeability of borders between languages in society. In Chapter 7, ‘The Textures of Language: An Autoethnography of a Gloves Collection’, Cristina Ros i Solé engages with current discussions about the nature of language in applied linguistics which highlight the affective, embodied and multisensorial. This chapter presents a view of language education that brings together two seemingly opposed poles, the abstract and the tangible in language, and suggests a meeting point: ‘the wild’ in language. Through the use of the materiality of language writing on a piece of clothing (gloves), it presents languages as semiotic repertoires capable of tracing one’s lived materiality and sensory experiences. In doing this, it proposes that pedagogical models for foreign language education should include not only conscious, planned and intangible ways of learning, but also ways of embodying languages that are unconscious, spontaneous and tangible. Simon Coffey’s commentary adds to these chapters by highlighting the transdisciplinary nature of this part and how it reflects the recent influence of posthumanism theory in applied linguistics. He argues that a posthumanist approach could help language education offer a more distributed

16 Liberating Language Education

understanding of the location of semiotic resources. The discussion also highlights how an approach that integrates a creative and arts-based as well as a more critically engaged conception of linguistics research can problematise some long-held premises of the intercultural experience through language. Part 3: Transcultural Journeying and Aesthetics

Viewing language learning as transcultural journeying challenges the dominance of rationalist and instrumental perspectives on language and culture and recognises that communication processes are socially constructed, complex, personal and fluid. Pedagogically, this means rejecting essentialised and binary positionings and providing space for learners to bring together prior and new experience and to construct their own syncretic understandings within the ‘contact zone’. In other words, the way we understand and use language involves important subjective and intersubjective dimensions. Central in this is student agency and the unlocking of playful, imaginative and personal worlds, including digitally mediated worlds. It is here that the arts in their different forms can play a significant role in the language classroom, bringing a symbolic and aesthetic orientation which recognises perceptual, sensory and heartfelt dimensions to culture and experience, facilitating meaning-making and the generation of new knowledge. Part 3 contains four chapters, each of which explores transcultural and aesthetic dimensions to language learning through engagement with the arts in different ways. In Chapter 8, ‘Visual Art in Arabic Foreign and Heritage Language-and-Culture Learning: Expanding the Scope for Meaning-Making’, Jim Anderson explores synergies between language, culture and visual art and how they can work together within a pedagogical approach oriented towards translingual-transcultural, symbolic and aesthetic dimensions to meaning-making. It is based on a project carried out in an Arabic classroom in a London complementary school which draws on the resource ‘Language in Art and the Work of Ali Omar Ermes’. Chapter 9, ‘Creating Pedagogical Spaces for Translingual and Transcultural Meaning-Making and Student Agency in a London Greek Complementary School’ by Maria Charalambous, investigates flexible teaching and learning practices in a London Greek complementary school through the lens of a reflexive multiliteracies pedagogical framework. The chapter addresses the question of how complementary schools can respond to increased diversity and digitally mediated worlds, by endorsing multilingualism as an integral part of multiliteracies. Central to this is the teacher’s flexibility in the design and implementation of creative activities that prioritise collaboration with the students, encourage students’ agency and inspire dynamic interactions.

Introduction 17

In Chapter 10, ‘Opening Spaces of Learning: A Sociomaterial Investigation of Object-Based Approaches with Migrant Youth in and beyond the Heritage Language Classroom’, Koula Charitonos presents a small exploratory study undertaken as action research in two community schools in the UK, where migrant youth from the Greek diaspora community were invited to explore traces of their Greek heritage in their UK context, with a partially bilingual, or indeed translingual, approach allowing different conversational entry points for learners with varying levels of Greek. The study drew on a blended approach to language learning and utilised methods of inquiry learning (e.g. observation, data collection, reflection) along with web and mobile technologies to facilitate young people’s engagement in citizen-led inquiry with a focus on social and cultural issues. Central to the study is the notion of entanglement, which explores the inseparability of meaning and matter. Part 3 concludes with Dobrochna Futro’s chapter, ‘Translanguaging Art: Exploring the Transformative Potential of Contemporary Art for Language Teaching in the Multilingual Context’, which describes how multilingual works created by Krzysztof Wodiczko, Małgorzata Dawidek and Monika Szydłowska – Polish-born visual artists who, in their artistic practice, combine multiple languages with other means of artistic expression – were employed to teach Polish to a small group of 9–11 year-old pupils in a Scottish primary school. Here the potential of translanguaging art for creating translanguaging spaces in a school environment is made clear. Creative research methods are applied, involving children as coresearchers as well as ‘native speaking’ teaching assistants. Rounding off Part 3 is the commentary by Alison Phipps, which recognises the value of arts-based approaches in opening up creative spaces for language learning and intercultural being and in supporting languaging processes. In noting the ground-breaking nature of the studies presented, she also signals the need for further critical work in the area. Part 4: Voices, Identities and Citizenship

This fi nal part looks closely at how we listen to the varied voices of language learners and fi nd ways to perceive and experience languages differently. Children and young people are often forced to chase after an illusory fi xed literacy that seems distant from their own rich and noisy experience of language. Much school-based learning around language and literacy seeks to control and contain language and provides little opportunity for innovation and creativity, or an openness towards uncertainty. The move away from transdisciplinary work in schools undermines a sense of language as a powerful tool for meaning-making and does little to prepare young people to become active democratic citizens with a desire to fi nd other ways of knowing and being. Children and young people’s multivoicedness is often silenced and their digital dexterity

18 Liberating Language Education

is marginalised in educational settings. There is often no space to include their messy and complex ideas and explore narratives of freedom and social justice. The chapters in Part 4 show how engaging critically and creatively with digital media allows language learners, artists and educators to take control of the production process and represent and make sense of multilingual experiences. Transforming personal stories and cultural experiences into fi lm or different art forms pushes language learners and educators to imagine other viewpoints and reconceptualise identities. This process of creating and transforming tends to involve collaborative discovery and a space for reciprocity between young people, educators, artists and researchers. The chapters in this part are all co-authored and bring diverse personal, aesthetic and political perspectives to language education and how we make sense of and shape the world. In Chapter 12, ‘How Weird is Weird? Young People, Activist Citizenship and Multivoiced Digital Stories’, Yu-chiao Chung and Vicky Macleroy draw on the work of the Critical Connections Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project (2012–ongoing). I took my camera with me all the time wherever I went. I didn’t pay any attention to my surroundings and my life like this before. (Student, FSHS, Taiwan)

This chapter looks at the way in which digital storytelling enables young people to turn the lens on their own lives and frame stories about other ways of knowing and being. The research presented here focuses on case studies of two Taiwanese schools in the project where students walked out into their communities to uncover hidden truths and document bold and noisy stories. The voices and identities of these young people are examined in their digital stories of protest, reflection and reconnection: How Weird is Weird? and The Indestructible Belonging. In Chapter 13, ‘“Animating Objects”: Co-Creation in Digital Story Making between Planning and Play’, Gabriele Budach, Gohar Sharoyan and Daniela Loghin explore the process of digital story making as it evolved for students around an approach called ‘animating objects’. Through digital story making, Budach and her students explore, share and discuss issues of migration, language and identity. This chapter asks what kind of identity work is possible through digital story making and how it enables learners to fi nd a voice, share, articulate, and reflect on experiences and concepts. It also looks at how playful engagement with objects in digital story making can transform language learning and literacy education. In liberating language education, this chapter looks at ways of promoting pedagogies that foster criticality and creativity and sustain an ethic of social justice. In Chapter 14, ‘Visual Representations of Multilingualism: Exploring Aesthetic Approaches to Communication in a Fine Art Context’, Jessica Bradley, Zhu Hua and Louise Atkinson reflect on the process of engaging

Introduction 19

with artists and creative practitioners to explore ideas of multilingualism. They contemplate the challenges and opportunities of engaging in transdisciplinary dialogue through the visual arts and consider how applied linguists might work productively with these innovative methods. This chapter focuses on a project, ‘Visual Representations of Multilingualism’, which sought to stimulate debate and raise awareness through considering innovative ways of understanding multilingual realities and identities, and incorporating a wider range of voices and perspectives. This chapter also looks at how aesthetic perspectives towards language education can deepen our understandings of how to develop social justice oriented language curricula. Kate Pahl, the discussant for this part on ‘Voices, Identities and Citizenship’, foregrounds the idea of ‘imagining otherwise’ that connects these chapters and looks at how this kind of multilingual multimodal research frees language and therefore literacy from its fixedness. Liberating language education in Part 4 is about this new-ness and living with theory a bit more dangerously. References Anderson, J. and Macleroy, V. (eds) (2016) Multilingual Digital Storytelling: Engaging Creatively and Critically with Literacy. Oxford: Routledge. Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2010) Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective. London: Bloomsbury. Busch, B. (2017) Biographical approaches to research in multilingual settings. Exploring linguistic repertoires. In M. Martin-Jones and D. Martin (eds) Researching Multilingualism: Critical and Ethnographic Perspectives (pp. 46–59). Abingdon: Routledge. Byram, M. (2021) Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence: Revisited (2nd edn). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Conteh, J. and Meier, G. (eds) (2014) The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. García, O. and Kleifgen, J.A. (2019) Translanguaging and literacies. Reading Research Quarterly 55 (4), 553–571. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gray, J. (ed.) (2013) Critical Perspectives on Language Teaching Materials. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Heller, M. (2007) Bilingualism: A Social Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heller, M. and Martin-Jones, M. (2001) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference. Westpoint, CT: Albex. Holmes, P., Fay, R., Andrews, J. and Attia, M. (2015) How to research multilingually: Possibilities and complexities. In H. Zhu (ed.) Research Methods in Intercultural Communication: A Practical Guide (pp. 88–102). New York: Wiley Blackwell. Hornberger, N. (2002) Multilingual language policies and the continua of biliteracy: An ecological approach. Language Policy 1, 27–51. Hymes, D. (1996) Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inquiry. London: Taylor & Francis. Kramsch, C. (2009) The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (2014) Teaching foreign languages in an era of globalisation: Introduction. The Modern Language Journal 98 (1), 296–311.

20 Liberating Language Education

Kusters, A., Spotti, M., Swanwick, R. and Tapio, E. (2017) Beyond languages, beyond modalities: transforming the study of semiotic repertoires. International Journal of Multilingualism 14 (3), 219–232. Laihonen, P. and Szabó, T.P. (2017) Investigating visual practices in educational settings: Schoolscapes, language ideologies and organizational cultures. In M. Martin-Jones and D. Martin (eds) Researching Multilingualism: Critical and Ethnographic Perspectives (pp. 121–138). Abingdon: Routledge. Leung, C. and Scarino, A. (2016) Reconceptualising the nature of goals and outcomes in language/s education. The Modern Language Journal 100 (S1), 81–95. Li, W. (2011) Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43, 1222–1235. Little, D. and Kirwan, D. (2019) Engaging with Linguistic Diversity: A Study of Educational Inclusion in an Irish Primary School. London: Bloomsbury. Lo Bianco, J. (2014) Domesticating the foreign: Globalization’s effects on the place/s of languages. The Modern Language Journal 98 (1), 312–325. Lytra, V. and Martin, P. (eds) (2010) Sites of Multilingualism: Complementary Schools in Britain Today. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Martin-Jones, M. and Martin, D. (eds) (2017) Researching Multilingualism: Critical and Ethnographic Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge. May, S. (ed.) (2014) The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Mentz, O. and Fleiner, M. (eds) (2018) The Arts in Language Teaching. International Perspectives: Performative – Aesthetic – Transversal. Vienna: Lit Verlag. Mills, K.A. (2016) Literacy Theories for the Digital Age: Social, Critical, Multimodal, Spatial, Material and Sensory Lenses. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Moore, E., Bradley, J. and Simpson, J. (eds) (2020) Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Patiño-Santos, A. (2020) Reflexivity. In K. Tusting (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography (pp. 213–228). Abingdon: Routledge. Phipps, A. and Gonzalez, M. (2004) Modern Languages: Learning and Teaching in an Intercultural Field. London: Sage. Phipps, A. and Guilherme, M. (2004) Critical Pedagogy: Political Approaches to Language and Intercultural Communication. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Rampton, B. (2020) Participatory pedagogy, sociolinguistics and the total linguistic fact. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies No. 276. See https://kcl.academia. edu/WorkingPapersinUrbanLanguageLiteracies (accessed 27 January 2021). Reinders, H. and Benson, P. (2017) Research agenda: Language learning beyond the classroom. Language Teaching 50 (4), 561–578. Ros i Solé, C. (2016) The Personal World of the Language Learner. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ros i Solé, C., Fenoulhet, J. and Quist, G. (2020) Vibrant identities and fi nding joy in difference. Language and Intercultural Communication 20 (5), 397–407. Rymes, B. (2014) Communicating Beyond Language: Everyday Encounters with Diversity. New York: Routledge. van Lier, L. (2007) Action-based teaching, autonomy and identity. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching 1 (1), 46–65. Wasser, J.D. and Bresler, L. (1996) Working in the interpretative zone: Conceptualizing collaboration in qualitative research. Educational Researcher 25 (5), 5–15.

Part 1 Policies, Discourses and Ideologies

1 ‘I Don’t Think We Encourage the Use of their Home Language …’: Exploring ‘Multilingualism Light’ in a London Primary School Thomas Quehl

And too often there are parts of our country, parts of London and other cities as well, where English is not spoken by some people as their fi rst language and that needs to be changed. Boris Johnson at a leadership husting, 5 July 2019 Introduction

This somewhat muddled statement might be best understood not as a casual utterance by a politician in the midst of a stressful leadership campaign but rather as a deliberate intervention, reaching out to an audience that is seen as responsive to a particular kind of discourse. The quote illustrates how the trope of ‘language’ can be mobilised as a versatile element in ideologies and discourses around immigration, multiculturalism and racism. Within ‘natio-racial-culturally coded orders of belonging’, where the variables of ‘nation’, ‘race’ and ‘culture’ are used in flexible ways, such ideologies and discourses become politically and socially efficient not the least through the vagueness of those variables and the ways in which they are used to reference each other (Mecheril, 2018). As has been said of the situation almost two decades ago, ‘realities are constructed which suggest that the only way to be British is to be an English (or possibly Welsh or Gaelic) speaker. This discourse is common-sense, self-evident, and oppressive’ (Blackledge, 2004: 88). Thus, debates about language form part of a struggle not only over language practices but also 23

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over the kind of society Britain envisions for itself (Blackledge, 2004: 89). While Johnson’s assertion mirrors current attempts to redefine the ‘British nation’, the implicit uses of ‘language’ as a proxy for ‘immigration’ and ‘English not as fi rst language’ as surrogate for ‘otherness’ point to the fact that language ideologies – reminiscent of the role they have played in the formation of nation-states (Hobsbawm, 1992) – are constantly reloaded and employed in relation to symbolic and material resources. This overall context is relevant for any exploration of the effects of language ideologies in schools, as historically the education system has been a constitutive element of this formation of the nation-state. Moreover, schools are meant to reproduce society’s power relations and the language relations embedded in them (Bourdieu, 1991), while also being the very places where symbolic resources and material resources are intertwined, contested and (potentially) redefi ned. Moreover, language ideologies and discourses on language and its use translate into how people perceive themselves and others as speakers, and into the ways in which those experiences are enacted in language practices that affirm, undermine or change classifications and rules (Busch, 2017a: 52). In this chapter, the focus is firstly on how society’s language ideologies and discourses about language use translate into language use in the classroom, and secondly on how multilingualism is represented in the primary school. Both questions are relevant: socially, because political and media discourses (Wright & Brookes, 2019) use the trope ‘Speak English!’ efficiently and with nationalist and racist undertones in debates about immigration or the multilingual society generally; pedagogically, because the current situation in schools is still characterised by ‘the lack of recognition of the importance of nurturing pupils’ own languages in the school curriculum’ (Leung, 2019: 18). The chapter draws on a broader study in three English primary schools that focuses on teacher agency in multilingual pedagogies. Within the framework of the new sociolinguistics of multilingualism (Martin-Jones & Martin, 2017a), the ethnographic study included participant observations, semi-structured teacher interviews, participatory activities with children and an exploration of linguistic schoolscapes. The Year 4 classroom from which the data are taken belongs to a primary school in an Inner London borough, whose website states prominently that the children speak approximately 40 languages apart from English. I present data that allow us to trace how monolingual dominance affects the classroom, where a monolingual norm and a symbolic take on multilingualism merge into what I will call ‘multilingualism light’. Conceptual Framework

Exploring the question of how the monolingual norm is shaped follows the general understanding that schools are sites where ideologies are

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produced rather than merely imposed on pupils (Apple, 1982: 26), and that dominant norms conceal the processes of their own production. These perspectives point to wider conceptualisations of the relationship between structure, ideology and subject that are important for thematising the work accomplished by ideologies. One prominent framework in this regard is subjection, which emphasises, in Judith Butler’s formulation, the two-fold nature of the relationship between ideology and subject: ‘The more a practice is mastered, the more fully subjection is achieved. Submission and mastery take place simultaneously, and this paradoxical simultaneity constitutes the ambivalence of subjection’ (Butler, 1997: 116). Another salient framework that is relevant for problematising norms in the specific context of educational institutions and linguistic difference is the process of symbolic domination (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), which ‘masks its concrete sources, that works because it appears not to work, that works by convincing all participants in an activity that the rules that are, in fact, defi ned by one group are natural, normal […]’ (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001: 6). The prevalence of monolingualism in the English primary school classroom has been thematised throughout the last two decades, using various terms and theoretical perspectives. Bourne (2001a) argues that pupils learn to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate talk just as they learn their ‘basic skills’ in school, and she observes children navigating the expectations of a classroom where the teacher follows the ‘monolingual habitus’ (Gogolin, 1997), while they use their ‘mother tongue’, ‘home’ or ‘community language’ for informal talk. Kenner and Ruby (2012) describe an ‘institutional silence’ in the school where children learn to compartmentalise their use of languages in marked contrast to their plurilingual practices at home. Similarly, Welply (2017) sees the school’s monolingualism as implicitly expected without being formally defi ned, which leads to a situation where the ‘children’s experience of their other languages in school is most often marked by absence and silence’ (Welply, 2017: 450–451). Employing discourse analysis to teacher interviews, Cunningham (2019) concludes that prohibition and discouragement of what she terms ‘languages beyond English’ featured across multiple schools. The shifting paradigms associated with a ‘new sociolinguistics of multilingualism’ (Martin-Jones & Martin, 2017b: 1) allow for an extended lens through which the classrooms’ monolingualism is examined. Two concepts are important for this inquiry: language ideologies and linguistic repertoire. The institution school is historically located at the centre of dominant language ideologies, for which it also functions as a production site (Bourdieu, 1991: Ch. 1). Kroskrity (2010) suggests seeing language ideologies as a cluster concept with various convergent dimensions, of which the following appear particularly relevant to the school. Firstly, language ideologies are not neutral, since the perception of language they represent

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is formed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group. Thus, formal education is ‘a discursive space in which groups with different interests struggle over access to symbolic and material resources and over ways of organizing that access that privilege some and marginalize others’ (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001: 5–6). Secondly, language ideologies are multiple because lines of difference within one sociocultural group (e.g. class, gender or age) can generate various perspectives articulated as indices of group membership: ‘Language ideologies are thus grounded in social experience which is never uniformly distributed throughout polities of any scale’ (Kroskrity, 2010: 197). Thirdly, members of society can display varying degrees of awareness of language ideologies. On the one hand, a high level of discursive consciousness and active disputation of ideologies may exist, and on the other hand one may fi nd a ‘practical consciousness with relatively unchallenged, highly naturalized, and defi nitively dominant ideologies’ (Kroskrity, 2010: 198). The types of sites where those ideologies are produced and commented upon contribute to those varying degrees of awareness (Kroskrity, 2010: 198). This is especially significant for classroom explorations because it points to the fact that schools continuously produce dominant language ideologies and comment on pupils’ language use, while offering at the same time possibilities for educators and students to negotiate the meanings that these language ideologies and their own linguistic repertoires have for them. The lens of language ideologies is also important for problematising the concept of ‘language’ as a countable and named object or entity, and for understanding that this concept itself results from powerful languageideological processes (Blommaert, 2006: 511): ‘One “possesses” this language, and one identifies with an imagined bounded, homogeneous community of “native speakers” of the language’ (Blommaert, 2006: 515). García and Li (2014: 15) assert in reference to Althusser’s (1984) concept of ideology that ‘[s]ocietal forces, and in particular schools, enforce a call, an interpellation, by which bilingual speakers are often able to recognize themselves only as subjects that speak two separate languages’. In this wider context, it has been proposed to extend the notion of the linguistic repertoire and to draw on poststructuralist perspectives for a consideration of present conditions of linguistic diversity. Building on Gumperz’s (1964) perspective that the repertoire includes all the accepted ways of articulating messages, Busch (2012: 521) suggests that a speaker’s linguistic choices are not only determined by their interaction in a specific situation and by grammatical and social rules, but also by dimensions of history and biography. That is, the meanings that someone ascribes to languages and linguistic practices are related to their experiences and life trajectories, especially to the ways in which discursive constructions of national, ethnic and social affiliation or non-affiliation affect their perception of linguistic resources (Busch, 2012: 520).

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Language ideologies or discourses on language and language use, on linguistic normativity, appropriateness, hierarchies, taboos, etc., translate into attitudes, into the ways in which we perceive ourselves and others as speakers, and into the ways in which these perceptions are enacted in language practices that confi rm, subvert or transform categorisations, norms and rules. (Busch, 2017a: 52)

In the context of her research on language biographies, Busch (2017b: 343) describes how a student remembers her passage from a village school to a secondary (grammar) school in the regional capital as a moment that made her aware of her linguistic repertoire, as she felt that she did not ‘belong’ linguistically to the new environment. While this example illustrates how linguistic experiences relate to language ideologies, hierarchies and experiences of inclusion/exclusion, such a transition also points to the third dimension of language ideologies described above: it constitutes a passage from the unchallenged, naturalised way of speaking to becoming aware of social processes of (non-)affi liation. For emergent bilinguals, such as the two children in the episodes presented in this chapter, the transition between primary schools in two different countries represents an even more fundamental change, because in addition to the need to learn the new language English, they are faced with the language ideology of an official classroom that comments on their language use and their linguistic resources. On the whole, this conceptual framework suggests that a classroom might be best understood as an educational setting where the children’s linguistic repertoires come in contact with the classrooms’ language ideologies and where, in the process, educators and children negotiate the meanings of these repertoires and ideologies. Moreover, an emphasis on the speakers’ perspectives and their linguistic repertoire as points of departure can help to avoid objectifications inherent in fi xed categories such as fi rst, second or foreign languages (Busch, 2017a: 56). Thus, some of the currently most prominent plurilingual concepts in the context of formal mainstream education, translanguaging (e.g. García & Kleyn, 2016) and approaches that foreground heteroglossia (e.g. Busch, 2014), draw on such theoretical perspectives. The pedagogical practice of translanguaging sets out to challenge and reverse the conceptualisation of languages as separate entities. It is understood here as an approach by which students and educators are involved in language practices that include all the pupils’ linguistic repertoires in order to develop new language practices and maintain old ones (García & Kano, 2014: 261). It is underpinned by a notion of heteroglossia that accentuates the social dimension of linguistic signs and their sociohistorical associations, thus framing multilingualism as participation in a historical flow of relationships, struggles and meanings. This approach to multilingualism challenges an understanding of linguistic systems as discrete and ahistorical (Bailey, 2012: 499–500).

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At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that insights gained in non-mainstream settings – e.g. in bilingual programmes or educational settings for newly arrived immigrants (e.g. García & Sylvan, 2011) and in complementary schools (e.g. Blackledge & Creese, 2013) – or fi ndings from primary schools in other contexts, e.g. in Vienna (Busch, 2014) and in officially bilingual countries like Ireland (Little & Kirwan, 2019), will not be transferable to the mainstream primary school classroom in England without further debates and developments. Therefore, an exploration of how language ideologies are played out or reproduced in the daily workings of such a classroom appears useful, given that perhaps more than in any other setting of formal education, it is in primary schools that the foundations are laid for children’s language experiences beyond their home, for society’s language ideologies and, on a broader level, for what education is or might be about. Context and Methodology

The overall study was conducted in three maintained English primary schools in London and the East of England. The fi ndings presented here are from a Year 4 classroom of a three-form entry primary school in an Inner London borough. The school’s website states in its introductory text that circa 40 languages are spoken by the children of the school community. About a third of the students are eligible for pupil premium, i.e. the additional funding for English schools to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils. While there is not one large language group, Polish, Lithuanian and Romanian are spoken by many children. For this class, the statistical system has ten languages recorded as ‘fi rst languages’: Akan/Twi-Fante, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese/Cantonese, English, Igbo, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Romanian and Telegu (these are the names used in the statistics). The procedures at the time of enrolment, when parents/ carers are asked to state a child’s ‘fi rst language’, would of course deserve an exploration in their own right but are not addressed here. The entire study was located in the realm of ethnographic research in educational settings (Gordon et al., 2001), and combined methods of participant observations (with the researcher mainly taking fieldnotes and occasionally supporting pupils’ learning), semi-structured interviews with teachers, participatory activities with children and an exploration of the linguistic schoolscapes to understand issues around multilingual pedagogies based on the daily workings of the classrooms. The following excerpts are from fieldnotes and an interview with the teacher that have both been analysed using the approach of thematic analysis as elaborated by Braun and Clarke (2006). Contrary to the emerging pattern of a prevalence of monolingualism in the classroom’s official teaching/learning, the two vignettes presented here belong to the small number of instances when multilingualism became audible or observable. Thus, they have the status of

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‘critical incidents’. For their analysis, I use the lens of stancetaking as developed in an interactional sociolinguistic perspective, where it focuses on the possibility for speakers to take up a position with regard to the form or the content of their utterance while this positionality is seen as built into the act of communication (Jaffe, 2007a: 3). Thus, stancetaking can be linked to the theoretical approaches outlined above that conceptualise how language ideologies and discourses on language use translate into one’s own perception as speaker (Busch, 2017a: 52), or argue in the context of translanguaging theory that schools enforce an interpellation by which pupils can often recognise themselves only as subjects who speak two separate languages (García & Li, 2014: 15). In the analysis, I follow the defi nition of the stancetaker as someone who is ‘simultaneously evaluating objects, positioning subjects (self and others), and aligning with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field’ (Du Bois, 2007: 163). By using stancetaking as an analytical approach I trace how the children involved are positioned vis-à-vis the monolingual norm in the classroom. The photographs of the linguistic schoolscapes taken in the study were analysed along three criteria: the purpose of the particular item; the ways in which it used a language other than English; and its origin, i.e. whether it had been made by pupils or downloaded from an online publisher. Multilingualism was made visible in various types of displays in the schools involved in the research. Posters referring to the theme ‘Welcome’ and downloaded from online publishers were regularly shown, and children’s work from Modern Foreign Language lessons was displayed. A further type of display belonged to the ‘Language of the Month’ approach, with word cards and sometimes with a map, a flag or other illustrations. This approach has been developed in a North London Primary School that provides freely accessible resources in more than 60 languages: word cards, videoclips in which children introduce greetings, simple questions, etc., an activity booklet (Debono, n.d.), and information sheets about the respective language. Moreover, mini posters with a simplified version of British Sign Language were used in the classrooms. Finally, multilingualism was made visible in topic-related displays that showcased artwork or texts by children and included labels with keywords in different languages. I will describe the linguistic schoolscape for the school and thematise the representation of multilingualism with a description of one mini poster in more detail below. The class teacher of the Year 4 class, Ellie, was at the time of the study in her ninth year of teaching. After teacher training and an induction year in the North of England, she had worked for seven years in another Inner London primary school. She had taken on the role of year group leader and attended a school management course. Adriana and Sonia, the two pupils whose interaction is described below, were emergent bilingual learners who had been in Britain for approximately five months at the time of the episodes and had previously attended school in Romania. All names are pseudonyms.

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Findings ‘I said you must speak English’: A monolingual norm in the making

The fieldnotes from the classroom indicated solely monolingual practices in the official classroom, i.e. in those teaching/learning processes that were initiated by the teacher. When asked when she would acknowledge her pupils’ multilingualism, Ellie replied, ‘I don’t think we do encourage it that much in lessons. I can’t say we do … like with our culture week that is our big thing where they come in, they talk about their own culture, they dress up in their traditional clothes, speak the language, they teach their friend […] But it’s not all the time. That is one dedicated week’ (Interview, 24 March 2017: Lines 218–222). ‘I don’t think we encourage the use of their home language’ (Interview, 24 March 2017: Line 245). The following two episodes can shed some light on how the linguistic repertoires of Adriana and Sonia come in contact with a classroom dominated by this monolingualism, and how a monolingual norm is formed. The fi rst vignette is from a Maths lesson that had started two minutes earlier, when the two pupils were still attending their daily Phonics group for learners at an early stage of learning English. 88 Starting to work, taking the question for ‘the next step’ from the IWB. 89 Sonia asks me something about Maths; I am giving an example on the small whiteboard, 90 then she asks, ‘Can I translate?’ 91 She explains the task/my explanation to Adriana in Romanian. (Fieldnotes, 10 January 2017)

Employing the lens of stancetaking, the vignette offers insights into how Sonia signals her positionality and navigates the meanings she ascribes to the languages in the classroom. In bilingual contexts, a speaker has language choice as a stance resource, and the significance of this choice is related ‘to the specifics of the sociolinguistic context, […] in which the two languages circulate as well as ideologies about language’ (Jaffe, 2007b: 119). Although Sonia and Adriana do not have a bilingual repertoire fully at their disposal and the classroom is not a bilingual context, it is in this specific learning environment that they must fi nd their positions as emergent bilingual learners. Sonia asks for an explanation, which is given in English, and signals her intention to pass it on to Adriana and to use Romanian (Line 90, ‘Can I translate?’). By flagging the switch between languages, various aspects of stancetaking are discernible. I understand the ‘use of different languages’ as the stance-object here. Sonia’s positioning consists of her evaluation that the use of Romanian is important for her friend’s learning and of her alignment with the participant observer, whom she expects to approve her use of Romanian. She positions herself as a pupil who needs to ask for approval before using

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Romanian and, on the whole, as an emergent bilingual speaker who takes care of her friend’s learning by using their shared Romanian. Yet, another episode from a few minutes later (written down immediately after it occurred) sheds light on the complexity of the processes involved in Sonia’s positioning. 122 TQ: Why do you sit next to each other? 123 Sonia: She wants me to help her. She said help me. 124 TQ: Do you speak Romanian, when you are helping her? 125 (referring to the situation above) 126 S.: I don’t speak Romanian. I speak English. 127 TQ: Why? 128 S.: She doesn’t speak English. I said you must speak English. 129 TQ: Why? 130 S.: (shrugs) (Fieldnotes, 10 January 2017)

Here, the stance-object is not so much the use of two languages but more specifically this use and learning itself. A note of caution: as participant observer, I initiated the conversation (Line 122), introducing the theme of languages. Although ‘Do you speak Romanian when you are helping her?’ (Line 124) was linked to the fi rst episode, it might have evoked a ‘forced self-positioning’ (Harré & van Langenhove, 1991: 402– 403), which can trigger more easily a bipolarity of ‘speaking Romanian’/’speaking English’. Despite this, the utterances are useful for understanding the child’s positioning. Sonia’s evaluation of using Romanian and English differs here noticeably from the first extract because she is distancing herself from the usage of Romanian. She evokes explicitly her subjectivity and states her position as a speaker of English confidently: ‘I don’t speak Romanian. I speak English’ (Line 126). Then she highlights her stance towards speaking Romanian by positioning the other girl as a non-English speaker: ‘She doesn’t speak English’ (Line 128). Sonia emphasises her own position further by talking not only about Adriana but about the talk with her by way of ‘accountive positioning’, using talk about talk (Harré & van Langenhove, 1991: 397). Thus, she presents herself as caring about Adriana’s learning and being in the position to give her some advice about language use: ‘I said you must speak English’ (Line 128). While Sonia used Romanian previously to support Adriana’s learning in Maths, she now appears to address the use of Romanian and English on the more fundamental level of learning in general. In the interwoven meanings of ‘learning English’ and ‘English for learning’, this constitutes the typical situation of emerging bilingual learners in school. The shift from using Romanian for Adriana’s learning to learning English/English for learning is crucial for Sonia’s positioning regarding language use in the classroom and thus for understanding the continuous

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shaping of the monolingual norm. The object of Sonia’s stance, which she evaluates and in relation to which she is positioning herself, is not ‘a language’ or even ‘use of different languages’ as before, but what could be called ‘languaging for learning’ – as in ‘[p]eople language for many purposes’ (García, 2009: 31). Whereas Sonia’s self-positioning is still in line with her previous positioning as a bilingual speaker who supports her friend’s learning by talking in Romanian, she is now changing the stanceobject to the general learning in the classroom. Taking a stance in relation to this learning, the child modifies her alignments – seen as a continuous variable instead of a dichotomy between alignment versus disalignment (Du Bois, 2007: 162) – both with Adriana and with the participant observer who is addressed as representing the classroom’s rules. In these alignments – and expressed in ‘I speak English’ (Line 126) and ‘I said you must speak English’ (Line 128) – Sonia’s identification with the subject position of a successful pupil becomes apparent. This position and identity as a learner that she imagines for herself is bound to a classroom context where all official learning – except the French MFL lesson – takes place in English. The norm can be best described as ‘English is the only official language for learning’. In Line 126 ‘I speak English’, Sonia then appears to express her aspiration for the mastery of English and the wish to take up the subject position of the successful learner. This, however, is a position that is offered within the discourse of subtractive bilingualism based on a monoglossic orientation as the dominant version of EAL pedagogy (García & Flores, 2012: 234). When Sonia is striving for the mastery of English and – in Butler’s (1997: 116–117) understanding of subjection – for the mastery of the subject of the successful learner, she is simultaneously subjected into the classroom’s monolingual norm. In other words, Sonia is subjected not into the position of a monolingual speaker – which is neither her experience nor practice – but rather into the position of a plurilingual speaker who does not use her entire linguistic repertoire for learning in school. In this way, the monolingual norm of the classroom is constantly being reproduced. However, this analysis has focused on Sonia, whose current English skills allow her to experience and to imagine herself as a plurilingual speaker in other ways than are currently possible for Adriana. Thus, the monolingual norm that draws the dividing line between the official English and the ‘unofficial’ Romanian and thus comments on both children’s language use has different consequences for two children who started to attend the English (speaking) primary school at the same time. While children like Sonia and Adriana can be understood as (still) negotiating about the meanings that their languages have for them and thus as modifying these meanings, for their peers who do not rely on other parts of their linguistic repertoire for what is considered a successful participation in the classroom’s learning and who had their schooling in English throughout, the monolingual norm is not in the making but complete: English is the

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only official language for learning. The next excerpt is from an interview with their teacher. When asked about her pedagogical motivation to – potentially – include other languages, she replied: 271 I think just seeing a different side of them, you don’t—particularly with those 272 girls, Tatjana and Bisera and Maria, you wouldn’t know they spoke a 273 different language. If you spoke to them, you wouldn’t necessarily even know 274 they were from a different country, properly think they were English. But actually 275 when you hear them—and they were chatting away—‘Wow’, I didn’t realise that they276 You know, you just don’t assume that. Obviously, they speak like that at home 277 but in the classroom—and they were just talking, I think it was at playtime, 278 they were chatting away in Lithuanian and I, ‘Oh my goodness!’. And they went 279 like, ‘What?!’ – ‘I never heard you speak like that!’ So I think it’s quite 280 nice to see the other side of them. […] (Interview, 24 March 2017)

Ellie’s response ‘just seeing a different side of them’ (Line 271) can be understood as an assertion of the pedagogical perspective to include the ‘whole child’ in teaching and learning – a perspective that historically is both important and contested in English education (Alexander, 2010). Yet her description of the encounter in the playground is embedded in wider ideological contexts, where ‘language’ and ‘accent’ are intertwined with powerful discourses of inclusion and exclusion. ‘You wouldn’t know they spoke a different language’ (Lines 272–273) conveys implicitly her own positionality as shaped by a monolingual perception, which assumes that multilingualism would be audible as a ‘foreign accent’. Ellie’s apparent clarification ‘you wouldn’t necessarily even know they were from a different country, properly think they were English’ (Lines 273–274) highlights how this assumption – multilingualism would be audible – is bound up with wider discourses around orders of belonging as outlined in the introduction. It is not possible, of course, to know exactly why Ellie chose the specific wording of ‘properly think they were English’ (Line 274). But her formulation becomes meaningful only because it can draw on an order of belonging in which some accents are seen primarily in relation to what Anderson (1983) has called the ‘imagined community’ on which the concept of the nation-state is based – and this is irrespective of the fact that the language variety of accent is generally linked to regional affiliations and societal stratification. In other words, while the accent of the prime minister quoted at the beginning differs from the accents of the parents of the three children on the playground, it is only the latter (or their absence) that are thematised and challenged in dominant political discourses regarding the speakers’ legitimacy ‘to belong here’. The children themselves live the normalcy of their quotidian multilingual lives and the teacher appears to capture this contact between children’s linguistic repertoires and the school’s language ideologies, when retelling the encounter as a kind of ‘dialogue of astonishments’ – her surprise that ‘they were chatting away’ (Line 278) and the children’s astonishment about their teacher’s reaction (Line 279).

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‘It is a display that goes up …’: ‘Multilingualism light’

When arriving at the school, one fi nds near the entrance a large metallic sign showing a rainbow above the word ‘Welcome’, and beneath it translations of the word in many languages. Combining two types of representations – the rainbow as a common metaphor for diversity and the words in five scripts – the sign communicates that the many languages spoken by the children and their families are seen as a desirable feature of the school’s diversity. Walking through the school, one comes across further displays with languages other than English: in the hall, Mandarin is represented with printouts from ‘Language of the Month’ (LoM) resources; in the corridor, a large Diwali display shows decorations and texts written by children and includes labels with key words around the festival in English, Polish and Portuguese; another display shows letters in French that a class has exchanged with a school in France; a mini poster with a ‘language of the week sign’ from BSL is displayed in the classrooms; and an A4 mini poster has been designed by an online publisher with the purpose of representing multilingualism. These displays reflect the four types of visualisations of multilingualism described before. In Ellie’s classroom, the LoM word cards are displayed on the cupboard under the carefully designed heading ‘Love your language’. However, she explained that she could not use them as she was not familiar with their pronunciation (Interview, 24 March 2017: Lines 495–497), and it turned out that the teacher was not aware of the videoclip resources provided by the LoM project. Ellie’s handling of the LoM approach can be seen as instructive in relation to a symbolic approach to pupils’ multilingualism: the teacher does not seize the opportunity to make languages audible and to use the resources to explore together with her pupils their multilingualism and plurilingual experiences. Moreover, I want to add here briefly a short passage from Ellie’s colleague in Year 5. Talking about how, in his view, multilingual children experience school, he explains, ‘I think actually, it is celebrated here, you know, we got “Language of the Month”’ (Interview, 30 January 2017: Lines 414–415). When asked what they would do with LoM, the teacher replied, ‘It is a display that goes up in the classroom’ (Interview, 30 January 2017: Line 431), and his description appears almost to epitomise the symbolic take on multilingualism that prevails. Research in the English primary school has regularly highlighted the relatively superficial approaches to the children’s ‘home languages’ (Bourne, 2001b). Cunningham (2019) draws attention to a divide between the teachers’ positive rhetoric and practices characterised by tokenism, and Welply (2017: 451), too, problematises a contradictory ethos that celebrates diversity by making it visible, e.g. through multilingual signs, while the situation is framed by the school’s implicit monolingualism. The fi ndings presented here chime with these descriptions.

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By using the term ‘multilingualism light’ for the conjunction of the practice of the monolingual norm and a symbolic take on multilingualism in the classrooms, I want to highlight the phenomenon that the norm and the merely symbolic acknowledgement of children’s multilingualism need to be seen as closely intertwined. In the interview passage quoted previously, the teacher hints implicitly at a tension between the one-off event of ‘culture week’ and the everyday practice of a classroom that she describes with ‘I don’t think we encourage the use of their home language’. However, the teacher does not explicitly thematise the tension. In fact, it could be argued that the accomplishment of ‘multilingualism light’ becomes apparent at this point, because the monolingual norm is buttressed by the practices of symbolic multilingualism and protected against possible perceptions on the part of the teachers of pedagogical tensions, which the norm causes. That is, it enables the teachers to be under the impression that ‘something is done’ with the children’s languages. At the same time, practices of ‘multilingualism light’ are not only based on omissions or the failure to notice the children’s plurilingual repertoires and to include them as ‘languages for learning’, but also assign particular meanings to them. It could be argued that the one-off event, ‘culture week’, described by the teacher assigns a meaning to the children’s linguistic repertoires that exacerbates essentialising notions of culture and language – even if this happens in all likelihood against the educators’ intention. Issues of representation that illustrate further the dilemma of a symbolic take on multilingualism become obvious when we consider the A4 mini poster in the corridor next to Ellie’s classroom. This downloadable free resource from an online publisher shows at the centre the word ‘Welcome’ in the colours of the visible spectrum. Around the centre, we fi nd translations of ‘Welcome’ in 13 different languages, each translation with a caption explaining to which language the respective word belongs. This mirrors the approach of the sign at the school entrance. Yet the poster adds another aspect relevant to the production of meaning in the symbolic acknowledgement of pupils’ multilingualism. It places 14 avatarlike figures around the words, showing children who carry flags on their shoulders and stride in the same direction. Although the arrangement of flags is random, i.e. figure/flag and corresponding written word are not placed next to each other, it conveys a clear message: languages can be represented through flags, because it is normal to associate them with the nation-state. Even though this might be an extreme example as the figures are walking like standard-bearers with their flags, the representation of a language through a national flag is relatively common in primary schools and chimes with fi ndings from other schoolscapes (e.g. Laihonen & Szabó, 2017). In another school involved in the study, for instance, the teachers were encouraged to put up on the classroom doors several printouts in the shape of speech bubbles with ‘Hello’ in various languages written above national flags. The use of flags in such a way must be seen as a

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highly contradictory gesture that aims to include plurilingual children, while excluding them through the very choice of representation. That is, the dominant language ideology, which associates ‘one language’ with ‘one nation-state’, is continuously reproduced. Yet, it is reproduced in a particular way, in which the issue of belonging is constantly invoked and where there is a risk for plurilingual speakers of being fi xed to the act of immigration with the same vagueness that makes this association politically and socially highly effective in discriminatory discourses. Conclusion

This chapter was based on the assumption that the English mainstream primary school, attended by all students except those in the private sector, is a central setting for the reproduction and contestation of dominant language ideologies – yet of course not to an equal measure. The examples from the classroom showed that the forces that drive children like Adriana and Sonia to the monolingual norm – English is the only language for learning – are powerful. In fact, the children’s possibilities of negotiating the use of all their linguistic resources for learning must be seen as very restricted – at least under those classroom conditions where this use was generally not encouraged and where, importantly, resources for translanguaging strategies were not provided. Furthermore, approaches in school that are meant to respond to the children’s plurilingualism while remaining purely symbolic reproduce meanings that sustain the monolingual norm in schools and draw on society’s dominant language ideologies. Thus, the norm merges with a symbolic take on multilingualism into what has been called here the practice of ‘multilingualism light’, by which the symbolic acknowledgement of multilingualism and the invisible norm support each other with the net effect of strengthening the latter. This chapter has not dealt with pedagogical possibilities, but by tracing ‘multilingualism light’ it attempted to understand some of the current processes to which multilingual pedagogical developments need to respond. Among the aspects emerging from this status quo, I would like to highlight three questions that can guide further developments that challenge the monolingual norm: Which subject positions do multilingual approaches and activities make available to different pupils? As we have seen, the situation of the two emergent bilinguals differs substantially from the situation of the three children in the playground episode, and primary school pedagogy must respond to both groups to offer activities that position them as successful plurilingual learners who use their entire linguistic repertoire for learning. Given that ‘multilingualism light’ tends to overlook the different meanings children themselves attribute to their plurilingual repertoires, it is also crucial to ask, before advancing activities: Which preceding activities allow children and teachers to explore multilingualism and plurilingual experiences? Finally – and closely related

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to such explorations – it is relevant to address the question of representation: Which kinds of representation of multilingualism can open up possibilities for plurilingual speakers and which might exacerbate processes of othering or exclusion? ‘Multilingualism light’ is in itself not without tensions. A norm is never absolute, and a symbolic acknowledgement is never merely symbolic. It could be argued that some frictions, if minute and small, can be found in each of the examples reported here. That is, emerging bilingual pupils bring their plurilingual voices into the classroom at the same time as they are being subjected into its monolingual norm. The teacher’s recounting of the ‘dialogue of astonishments’ she had with children on the playground could, with some pedagogical skills, easily become a dialogic exploration of plurilingual experiences. And by thematising the merely symbolic acknowledgements of multilingualism and replacing them with reflective approaches – i.e. with approaches that avoid representations that reinforce the very ideologies that they intend to counter – it might become possible to move beyond the symbolic and address issues around plurilingual children’s repertoires in the classroom. In this sense, the mainstream primary school classroom as the foundation for children’s future learning can become an important place to liberate learning from monolingualising ideologies. It becomes possible to intervene in those discourses that use ‘language’ and ‘multilingualism’ as proxies for ‘immigration’ or within further representations of ‘otherness’ with highly discriminatory consequences in the hostile fashion displayed in the statement of the future British prime minister that was quoted at the beginning of the chapter. Not to attempt such interventions or to consider the phenomenon of ‘multilingualism light’ merely as a kind of pedagogical shortcoming on the part of schools and individual teachers risks missing the wider political context and the necessity to disrupt its discourses as they play out in schools. While the practices of ‘multilingualism light’ encountered in classrooms articulate and reproduce the broader context, they also continuously curtail educators’ pedagogical experience and imagination. It is in this respect too that further developments of multilingual pedagogies can have liberating effects for children as well as for their educators. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) How could we envision and pedagogically redesign the encounter between the pupils’ plurilingual repertoires and the school’s monolingual ideologies? (2) How could research in the fields of primary education and educational linguistics respond to ‘multilingualism light’? (3) What might be the specific contributions of teachers and researchers to multilingual pedagogies in the linguistically superdiverse primary classroom?

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References Alexander, R. (ed.) (2010) Children, their World, their Education. Final Report and Recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review. London: Routledge. Althusser, L. (1984) Essays on Ideology. London: Verso. Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Apple, M. (1982) Education and Power. Boston, MA and London: Routledge/Kegan Paul. Bailey, B. (2012) Heteroglossia. In M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism (pp. 499–507). Abingdon: Routledge. Blackledge, A. (2004) Constructions of identity in political discourse in multilingual Britain. In A. Pavlenko and A. Blackledge (eds) Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (pp. 68–92). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2013) Heteroglossia in English complementary schools. In J. Duarte and I. Gogolin (eds) Linguistic Superdiversity in Urban Areas: Research Approaches (pp. 123–142). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Blommaert, J. (2006) Language ideology. In K. Brown (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edn) (pp. 510–522). Oxford: Elsevier. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J. (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage. Bourne, J. (2001a) Discourses and identities in a multi-lingual primary classroom. Oxford Review of Education 27 (1), 103–114. Bourne, J. (2001b) Doing ‘what comes naturally’: How the discourses and routines of teachers’ practice constrain opportunities for bilingual support in UK primary schools. Language and Education 15 (4), 250–268. Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3 (2), 77–101. Busch, B. (2012) The linguistic repertoire revisited. Applied Linguistics 33 (5), 503–523. Busch, B. (2014) Building on heteroglossia and heterogeneity: The experience of a multilingual classroom. In A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds) Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy (pp. 21–40). Dordrecht: Springer. Busch, B. (2017a) Biographical approaches to research in multilingual settings: Exploring linguistic repertoires. In M. Martin-Jones and D. Martin (eds) Researching Multilingualism (pp. 46–59). Abingdon: Routledge. Busch, B. (2017b) Expanding the notion of the linguistic repertoire: On the concept of Spracherleben – the lived experience of language. Applied Linguistics 38 (3), 340–358. Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cunningham, C. (2019) ‘The inappropriateness of language’: Discourses of power and control over languages beyond English in primary schools. Language and Education 33 (4), 285–301. Debono, J. (n.d.) Language of the Month Activities. London: Newbury Park Primary School. See https://www.newburyparkschool.net/lotm/activitiesbooklet.pdf (accessed 20 October 2021). Du Bois, J. (2007) The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (ed.) Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction (pp. 139–182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. García, O. and Flores, N. (2012) Multilingual pedagogies. In M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism (pp. 232–246). Abingdon: Routledge. García, O. and Kano, N. (2014) Translanguaging as process and pedagogy: Developing the English writing of Japanese students in the US. In J. Conteh and G. Meier (eds)

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The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges (pp. 258–277). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. García, O. and Kleyn, T. (eds) (2016) Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments. New York: Routledge. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Houndmills: Palgrave/Macmillan. García, O. and Sylvan, C. (2011) Pedagogies and practices in multilingual classrooms: Singularities in pluralities. The Modern Language Journal 95 (3), 385–400. Gogolin, I. (1997) The ‘monolingual habitus’ as the common feature in teaching in the language of the majority in different countries. Per Linguam 13 (2), 38–49. Gordon, T., Holland, J. and Lahelma, E. (2001) Ethnographic research in educational settings. In P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofl and and L. Lofl and (eds) Handbook of Ethnography (pp. 188–203). London: Sage. Gumperz, J. (1964) Linguistic and social interaction in two communities. American Anthropologist 66, 137–153. Harré, R. and van Langenhove, L. (1991) Varieties of positioning. Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour 21 (4), 393–407. Heller, M. and Martin-Jones, M. (2001) Introduction: Symbolic domination, education, and linguistic difference. In M. Heller and M. Martin-Jones (eds) Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (pp. 1–28). Westport, CT: Ablex. Hobsbawm, E. (1992) Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jaffe, A. (2007a) Introduction: The sociolinguistic of stance. In A. Jaffe (ed.) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 3–28). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaffe, A. (2007b) Stance in a Corsican school: Institutional and ideological orders and the production of bilingual subjects. In A. Jaffe (ed.) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 119–145). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kenner, C. and Ruby, M. (2012) Interconnecting Worlds: Teacher Partnerships for Bilingual Learning. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Kroskrity, P. (2010) Language ideologies – evolving perspectives. In J. Jaspers, J. Östman and J. Verschueren (eds) Society and Language Use (pp. 192–211). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Laihonen, P. and Szabó, T. (2017) Investigating visual practices in educational settings. In M. Martin-Jones and D. Martin (eds) Researching Multilingualism (pp. 121–138). Abingdon: Routledge. Leung, C. (2019) EAL in the mainstream: An English story. EAL Journal 9, 18–19. Little, D. and Kirwan, D. (2019) Engaging with Linguistic Diversity: A Study of Educational Inclusion in an Irish Primary School. London: Bloomsbury. Martin-Jones, M. and Martin, D. (eds) (2017a) Researching Multilingualism: Critical and Ethnographic Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge. Martin-Jones, M. and Martin, D. (2017b) Introduction. In M. Martin-Jones and D. Martin (eds) Researching Multilingualism (pp. 1–27). Abingdon: Routledge. Mecheril, P. (2018) Orders of belonging and education: Migration pedagogy as criticism. In D. Bachmann-Medek and J. Kugele (eds) Migration: Changing Concepts, Critical Approaches (pp. 121–138). Boston, MA: De Gruyter. Welply, O. (2017) ‘My language … I don’t know how to talk about it’: Children’s views on language diversity in primary schools in France and England. Language and Intercultural Communication 17 (4), 437–454. Wright, D. and Brookes, G. (2019) ‘This is England, speak English!’: A corpus-assisted critical study of language ideologies in the right-leaning British press. Critical Discourse Studies 16 (1), 56–83.

2 Recognising the Creole Community: Discursive Constructions of Enslavement and the Enslaved in Kreol Textbooks in Mauritius Ambarin Mooznah Auleear Owodally

Introduction

In a world that is increasingly (super)diverse, textbook analyses are paying particular attention to the representation of traditionally marginalised minority groups (Apple & Buras, 2006, cited in Abdou, 2018). While these groups and their histories are at times mentioned in textbooks, at other times they are omitted. When these groups are mentioned, they are often homogenised, essentialised, stereotyped or misrecognised (Apple & Christian-Smith, 1991; Gray, 2013). Focusing on the Egyptian Christian minority, Abdou (2018) argues that it tends to be negatively represented as persecuted and victimised in history textbooks in Egypt. Similarly, Chu’s (2015, 2018) studies on the representation of ethnic minorities in Chinese textbooks reveal that they are marginalised and stereotyped. In the United States, communities of colour are often misrepresented or silenced (Brown & Au, 2014). For instance, Woyshner and Schocker’s (2015) study of the visual representation of Black women in high school history books shows that they are sidelined. Linked to studies on communities of colour is emerging research on the representation of enslavement in texts used in US schools (Patterson & Shuttleworth, 2019, 2020; Thomson, 2017). These studies reveal that enslavement can be portrayed in a selective, socially conscious or culturally conscious manner (cf. Patterson & Shuttleworth, 2019, 2020). 40

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Extending this line of research on the representation of traditionally marginalised minority groups, this present chapter focuses on the representation of the Creole community in Kreol textbooks in multilingual, multi-ethnic and multicultural Mauritius. Given that this minority community is historically connected with enslavement, the research question that will be addressed here is: how are enslavement and the enslaved discursively constructed in Kreol textbooks? Before proceeding with the textbook analysis, it is important to (1) situate the Creole community, as a minority community, in multi-ethnic Mauritius and (2) discuss the relationship between the Creole community and the Kreol language in multilingual Mauritius. The Creole Community in Multi-ethnic Mauritius

The citizens of the Island of Mauritius are all descendants of voluntary and forced migrants, coming from Africa, Asia and Europe. During the French colonial period (1715–1810), African-language speaking enslaved were imported to work on sugar cane plantations belonging to French speaking landowners. During the British colonial period (1810– 1968), Indian-language speaking indentured labourers were brought to work on the island when enslavement was abolished; Chinese-language speaking traders also came to the British-administered island. Independent Mauritius (since 1968) is now home to an ethnically, religiously and linguistically diverse population. The Constitution of Mauritius divides the population into four communities: Hindus (approx. 50%), Muslims (approx. 17%), Sino-Mauritians (approx. 3%) and the ‘General Population’. Subsumed under the ‘General Population’ is the Creole community, members of which constitute approximately 29% of the Mauritian population (Boswell, 2014: 150). This ‘largest single minority group’ (Miles, 1999: 217) is heterogeneous, consisting of ‘ti creoles’ (descendants of the enslaved) and Creoles of mixed origin (those having both enslaved and European or Indian/Chinese ancestry). While many Creoles have their roots on the island of Mauritius, some have theirs in the outer islands belonging to Mauritius: Rodrigues, Agalega, St Brandon and the Chagos Archipelago. This community is also divided along social and economic lines (Boswell, 2014: 150). Despite all these differences, what Creoles share in common is an enslavement-related ancestry. This ancestry has contributed to a ‘malaise créole’, a term coined in the 1990s to describe the Creole community’s ‘growing dissatisfaction with the Church’s and the State’s treatment of slave descendants’ (Lallmahomed-Aumeerally, 2017: 450). This ‘malaise’ has particular significance in a country that cherishes and celebrates ‘unity in diversity’ (the Mauritian model of multiculturalism). Indeed, the Creole community has experienced a sentiment of  ‘un-belongingness’ to the multicultural Mauritian mosaic

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(Lallmahomed-Aumeerally, 2017: 451). Firstly, while the other communities have a motherland (France, England, India, China) to relate to, the Creole community has no specific motherland to connect with because record keeping for the enslaved lacked rigour during colonial times. Secondly, whereas the other communities practise the religion of their ancestors (Hinduism, Islam), the Creole community is mostly Roman Catholic, which they were forcefully converted to during the period of enslavement. Thirdly, while the other communities relate to their ancestors’ languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Urdu – all taught as part of the school curriculum since the mid-20th century), the Creole community lacks a distinct ancestral language around which to construct an ethnolinguistic identity because the languages originally spoken by the enslaved were not maintained. Furthermore, the French-based creole – Kreol – that the enslaved contributed to creating in the French colonial period has been adopted by the other communities and is now one of the home languages of 87% of the local population (Housing and Population Census, 2011). Finally, the Creole community feels that, compared to other communities, it has been socially and economically marginalised and that it has been disenfranchised with respect to employment, housing, education, health (Lallmahommed-Aumeerally, 2017; Thornton, 2019) and social representations. Hence, unlike the other communities, the Creole community’s ‘ancestral capital’ (Carmignani, 2006) is linked to the ‘burden of slavery [which] constitutes very controversial markers of identity’ (Arnold, 2014: 6). This ‘malaise’ was forcefully exposed in February 1999 when Kaya, a Rastafari singer from the Creole community, died in police custody. This led to five days of social unrest, material damage and the loss of six lives on an island that boasts of social peace and harmony (cf. Eichmann, 2012: 324). After this episode, efforts were made by the State and the Church to be more inclusive of the Creole community. In 2008, the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) was set up: its president recommended that positive action be taken to secure the Creole community. In 2009, a Truth and Justice Commission (TJC) was set up to investigate the repercussions of both enslavement and indentured labour. In their report, the TJC (2011) made specific recommendations to offer ‘reparation’ to the Creole community. Two of the recommendations made by the TJC are to memorialise enslavement and to introduce Kreol as a medium of instruction in the education system. The standardisation of Kreol (2004) and the introduction of Kreol as a language in its own right in the education system (2012) are arguably part of the efforts being made to address this ‘malaise’. Kreol in the Mauritian Education System

Since pre-independence times, Mauritian nationalists have argued in favour of the official recognition of Kreol as a national language, its

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standardisation, and its introduction as medium of instruction in the education system in order to improve educational outcomes. However, because of its perceived status – its association with enslavement and the socioeconomically marginalised Creole community (Thornton, 2019), and its sharing of the sociolinguistic and educational landscape with other more prestigious and well-established European languages (English and French) and Asian/ancestral languages (Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Modern Chinese)/Arabic – there has been popular and political resistance to recognising the pedagogical value of Kreol. At the turn of the 21st century, in a socially fragile and politically charged local context, popular and political debates about the place of Kreol in the education system resurfaced. Kreol was finally introduced in the primary school curriculum in 2012, not as a medium of instruction, but as an optional subject. Taught at the same time as the Asian/ancestral languages/Arabic, Kreol is one of the many optional languages parents can choose for their children. Parents tend to choose the language that is traditionally associated with the ethnoreligious group they identify with. Hence, Hindu parents will generally opt for Hindi, while Muslim parents will usually opt for Urdu or Arabic. The children who take Kreol, thus, tend to be mostly from the Creole community (Florigny, 2015). It can be argued that the place given to these optional languages in the school curriculum institutionalises and reinforces the already existing link between specific languages and ethnoreligious communities; this now includes the link between Kreol and the Creole community (cf. Auleear Owodally, 2014). The question that emerges from the above is: How is the institutionalised link between Kreol and the Creole community played out in the Kreol textbooks? In order to address this question, I focus specifically on how enslavement and the enslaved – historically connected to the Creole community – are discursively constructed in the Kreol textbooks. Analysing the Kreol Textbooks

Kreol school textbooks (Grades 1–9), which constitute the fi rst government-sanctioned Kreol textbooks ever produced in Mauritius, will be used as the corpus for this chapter. These textbooks are essential teaching resources in Mauritius, given that there are presently relatively limited materials in standard Kreol available on the local market. They are freely distributed to students of Grades 1–9 and they are accessible on the Mauritius Institute of Education website (http://mie.ac.mu/curriculum. html). The Grade 1 textbook is an introduction to Kreol literacy and the Grade 2–6 textbooks entitled Ki pase la? Bann laventir Vanessa ek Leo (Who is there? The adventures of Vanessa and Leo) revolve around the adventures of Vanessa and Leo, two school friends. The lower secondary school textbooks (Grades 7–9) do not build on the adventures of Vanessa and Leo.

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Table 2.1 References to words relating to enslavement Textbook

Number of references to the root word esklav

Number of references to esklav maron

Number of references to (gran) marona

Number of references to nwarb (‘black people’)

Grade 2, Vol. 1

1

–

–

–

Grade 3, Vol. 2

11

2

–

–

Grade 4, Vol. 1

4

3

–

–

Grade 5, Vol. 1

1

–

–

–

Grade 5, Vol. 2

30

–

–

–

125

5

5

30

Grade 7

Notes: aReferences to maron or gran maron (famous maroon). bReferences to: Nwar-kaf (black from Africa); bann nwar (blacks); esklav nwar (black slave); apranti nwar/nwar apranti (black apprentice); nwar zouvriye (black worker); nwar lafrik (African black). The texts containing the root words esklav, maron and nwar were copied in a word document: these constituted the data set for the present chapter.

While I acknowledge that textbooks are important teaching resources, I here analyse the Kreol textbooks as curriculum artefacts. Curriculum artefacts are repositories of meaning about languages, people and places. They also embody particular ideologies and particular worldviews (Canale, 2016; Hjelm et al., 2019) that learners encounter as part of (language) learning (Weninger, 2018). The focus of the study being on how enslavement and the enslaved are discursively constructed in the Kreol textbooks, I searched for words related to enslavement (esklav, esklavage, esklavri) in the corpus. In the Grade 3 textbook, the root word esklav often preceded the adjective maron (referring to maroons), leading me also to identify the word maron in the corpus. In the Grade 7 textbook, the word nwar (meaning ‘black’ and referring specifically to black people) was related to the word esklav, so a search was carried out on the word nwar too. These data are presented in Table 2.1. Following Braun and Clarke (2006), I ran a thematic analysis of the data set with the aim of identifying the main themes under the topic of enslavement. I worked through these themes using a bottom-up approach, allowing the data to drive the themes as far as possible. However, my reading of current work on representations of enslavement in school books (Patterson & Shuttleworth, 2019, 2020) and local work on identity issues relating to the Creole community’s historical connections with enslavement (Chan Low, 2004; Police-Michel, 2007) influenced my analysis. Findings

There are various references to enslavement and the enslaved in the textbooks (Grades 1–6), and there are three chapters that focus

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specifically on enslavement in the Grade 7 textbook: ‘The slave trade and enslavement’, ‘Resistance’ and ‘Resilience’. In the coming section, I describe the themes that emerged from the analyses and refer to selected texts, here translated into English, to show how enslavement is discursively constructed. Pain and suffering

The physical pain and suffering of the enslaved are implicitly referred to in the primary school textbooks and explicitly referred to in the secondary school textbooks. On one of their adventures, Vanessa and Leo discover part of a treasure map. They walk through a cave, travel back in time, and meet a man, Alber, who has the other part of the map: ‘The man looked like an enslaved, but he was wearing a torn shirt and torn trousers’ (Grade 3, Vol. 2: 107). Although this description suggests that Alber is an enslaved, it minimises the inhumanity associated with enslavement, possibly because this text is written for eight-year-olds. Patterson and Shuttleworth (2019), who analyse narratives/ images of enslavement in children’s literature, say that when depicting enslavement for young readers, authors have to negotiate the tension between portraying violence and portraying it in an age-appropriate manner. The Grade 7 textbook, on the other hand, foregrounds the agony of the enslaved, described as being treated inhumanly, starved, whipped and chased. The texts depict the slave trade, both legal and illegal, as well as the frightful condition of the enslaved as they were abducted, sold and transported on ships and as they suffered and died during epidemics. Extract 1 Grade 7: 20

Deport the enslaved from Africa, after having abducted them, capture them, from far away villages in the middle of the forest, and then take them, after having tied them up, to slave depots on the coast of Gore, Ouidah and Loango. Sell them in lots, which helped the slave traders to charge the ships quicker and the intermediaries to sell children, adolescents and weak adults more easily … Clients assessed the strength of each slave, checking their teeth and eyes. In Ouidah, there is still an open air vault where the enslaved were piled up whatever the weather. The vault was surrounded with a pit full of caimans. (emphasis added) Extract 2 Grade 7: 33

Just as the slave is about to put his foot in the water, he loses balance. A dog jumps on him and bites his right leg; the pain paralyses all his facial muscles. The second dog bites his neck, he tries to free himself. A cry is stuck in his throat.

Extract 1, an excerpt from an informational text, describes in crude terms the distressing experience of those who were captured, transported

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and enslaved. Harsh and unsettling words like ‘deport’, ‘abducted’, ‘capture’, ‘tied them up’, ‘sell’ and ‘piled up’ are used to emphasise the physical violence the enslaved were subjected to. Syntactically, the absence of the subject, which makes the verb the head of the sentence, foregrounds the brutality of the acts committed (rather than focusing on the actors or agents of the acts, who are nevertheless implied in the above extract). Extract 2 is an excerpt from a narrative text, told from the enslaved person’s perspective as he is being chased and fi nally seized. Extract 2 zooms in on the moment he is caught up by the starved hunting dogs set loose by the vicious masters; these dogs attack him, hurt him, immobilise him and bite/choke him to death. Economic contribution

The textbooks also underline the contribution of the enslaved to the economic development of Mauritius. The primary school textbooks refer to the enslaved, brought to work on the plantations as early as 1639, to cut ebony and to build roads (Grade 5, Vol. 2: 55). There is also the story of Alber (Grade 3, Vol. 2: 107), who buys a plot of land with the treasure he has found. He then cultivates sugar cane with the help of Indian indentured workers whom he employs. Interestingly in this narrative text, Alber’s contribution is described in terms of him being a free man and a landowner, rather than an enslaved. As well as describing the economic input of the enslaved, the texts also highlight the economic involvement of the descendants of the enslaved beyond the enslavement period. In the Grade 7 textbook, the different tasks carried out by the enslaved are presented in a text (Extract 3) about the development of Port-Louis, the capital city of Mauritius. Extract 3 Grade 7: 23–24

Here again, Labourdonnais used the blacks (bann nwar); he put each worker in charge of a team of black apprentices … Had to feed them (‘them’ refers to the shipmen travelling the oceans in the 18th c), repair their ships, replenish their food and water stocks, check their military capacity, etc; often workers and black slaves became part of their crew … It is around that time (circa 1772) that the road service was instituted. Owners could not throw broken glass or litter on the roads. They had to move their latrines if these were on roads used by people. They were also asked to level their streets and build pavements. All this work was done by the blacks (bann nwar). When public buildings were erected and public work was carried out, the inhabitants were asked to send their black workers (bann nwar) to perform these tasks … the enslaved also had to take care of the drainage system … On Sundays … blacks (bann nwar) and malbars had to clean all the streets and pavements in their own camps and burn the trash.

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Extract 3 highlights the contribution of the enslaved to building and developing the infrastructure in Port-Louis and for keeping the city clean. They also participated in the economic activity of Port-Louis, through their work on the ships docked in the port. In Extract 3, and in many of the texts in the Grade 7 textbook, the word nwar (black) is used almost synonymously with the enslaved. Other than the 130 references to esklav (and its derivatives) are 30 uses of the word nwar to refer to the enslaved. As well as describing one of the physical characteristics of the enslaved who were dark/black, the constant use of the word in the Grade 7 textbook could be interpreted as a reclamation of the word nwar, acknowledging with pride the fact that it is the black enslaved who built and developed Port-Louis and who actively participated in the economic activity taking place in and around the city. Artistic expression

The artistic contribution of the enslaved is also given importance in the textbooks. As early as in the Grade 2 (Vol. 1: 141) textbook, the sirandann is explained as ‘a kind of riddle which in the past was recited as a song and which was then practised by the enslaved’ and sirandann are provided in the textbook for learners to solve. Other than illustrating the cognitive complexity/maturity and linguistic prowess of the inventers of the sirandann, the sirandann are also used to encourage learners of Kreol to take up the challenge of solving them. As well as emphasising their linguistic dexterity, the textbooks foreground the musical skills and talent of the enslaved. They are portrayed as using the raw materials available in their environment to produce musical instruments: ‘Malgache enslaved could build these instruments because the calabash is like the coconut, and bamboo was also present in Mauritius’ (Grade 3, Vol. 2: 70). The enslaved are also associated with the séga, a musical genre with origins in enslavement added to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014. Extract 4 Grade 3, Vol. 2: 71

The history of séga The origins of the séga go back to the time of enslavement. The enslaved sang and danced to express their misery and their pain, especially when they remembered their native country. They lit a fi re and heated their ravanes (large tambourine-like musical instrument used to make séga music), coming together to protest against the injustice and domination the colonisers subjected them to. Extract 5 Grade 3, Vol. 2: 88

Drum séga (danced in Rodrigues) is the dance form that enslaved ancestors invented to free and distract themselves in hard times.

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Extracts 4 and 5 make explicit the connection between the séga and the enslaved, be it in the music and musical instruments they invented or in the dance form they created. The texts also portray the enslaved as using their artistic skills to communicate their pain, soothe their miseries, entertain themselves as a community, affi rm their revolt against their everyday living conditions and express their desire for freedom. The enslaved are, thus, discursively constructed as forming a community artistically engaging with, and creatively responding to, the harsh conditions of their lives. Today the séga has the status of ‘unofficial national music’ in Mauritius and is performed for tourists as part of the country’s local culture (cf. Eriksen, 1998). It is feared that the inscription of the séga as heritage could lead the tourism industry to repackage, commodify and re-present this musical genre for use in an increasingly elitist tourism environment (Boswell, 2016: 105). Resistance

Resistance is a recurring theme in the textbooks: maroons, rebellious enslaved or freed enslaved are described as committing acts of defi ance. Maroons – who are runaway or escaped enslaved – are regularly mentioned in the textbooks. According to Allen (2004: 2), maroonage was the most consistent public manifestation of resistance and the constant reference to maroons in the textbook, as illustrated in Table 2.1, is a clear example of a discourse of resistance. When Vanessa and Leo meet Alber, he tells them – in an ancient Kreol that the children recognise as different from the Kreol that they themselves use – that the part treasure map in his possession had belonged to his grandfather, an enslaved who had run away from a pirate ship. When his grandfather came to Mauritius, he helped maroons hide. Hence, Alber’s grandfather exemplifies rebelliousness. On another adventure, Vanessa and Leo travel to the neighbouring island, Réunion, and visit Mafate. The text specifically mentions that Mafate, named after a maroon, is an area where maroons used to hide. The texts also portray maroons as a source of danger for the colonisers, whom they often attacked. Maroons were partly responsible for the Dutch abandoning Mauritius in the 17th century. Extract 6 Grade 5, Vol. 2: 56

But there are inhabitants who continued living in Mauritius when the Dutch left. Who is it, according to you? Yes, it is those enslaved who had run away to live in the forests. Finally, it is they who were the fi rst Mauritians!

In Extract 6, the narrator addresses students in a conversational tone, urging them to think of the maroons as the fi rst real or authentic Mauritians. This discourse about maroon ancestry – associated with

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49

notions of liberation, agency and dignity – arguably places maroons at the centre of ethnic imagination and national imagination in Mauritius. Placing maroons at the centre of the national imagination has been observed in contexts such as Brazil and the West Indies (Eichmann, 2012: 325). Other than texts about the maroons’ acts of defiance, there are also texts about the resistance of the enslaved. In the Grade 7 textbook is a narrative text about a runaway slave. Because the story is told from his perspective, readers see the landscape that he observes, feel his physical pain, and sense his fears and his hopes as he runs through the forests, savagely chased by hunters. Despite his desperate efforts to reach the gran maron (notorious maroons) (Grade 7: 36), he is caught. Recollecting his mother singing to him in her ancestral language when he was a child, he starts singing: ‘I was singing in the language of my country and I was singing about the freedom found in mountains and valleys’. Although the actual words from the ancestral language are not provided, it is very significant that he describes the words as belonging to ‘my country’, referring to the ancestral land of his mother and, by extension, his own ancestral land. At the end of his song, ‘For a moment, I am fi lled with a feeling of freedom. I manage to escape the surveillance of the guards, I run and after that, my feet come together and I jump into nothingness’ (Grade 7: 38). The caught enslaved is portrayed as expressing his resistance – linguistic resistance – by singing in the language of his ancestors, before committing the ultimate act of resistance for an enslaved – suicide. The textbooks also describe the plight of the enslaved after slavery was abolished: they are described as refusing to work on plantations, migrating to Port-Louis and the coastal regions (Grade 5, Vol. 2), and wearing shoes as a symbol of their new status of free men (Grade 7). Discussion

Unlike literary production in Mauritius which reveals the absence of the period of enslavement and the figure of the enslaved (Arnold, 2014), the Kreol textbooks unambiguously underline the period of enslavement and forcefully highlight the figure of the enslaved. While the enslaved people’s agony is clearly acknowledged and plainly portrayed in the textbooks, the enslaved are not only depicted as the victims of Mauritian history. On the contrary, the enslaved are described as the fi rst authentic Mauritians, as significant contributors to local economic growth and home-grown artistic expression, and as strong resisters to colonial power and domination. It can thus be argued that the enslaved are discursively constructed as active overcomers of adversity and significant contributors to the creation and development of Mauritius. A comparison of school texts portraying enslavement in the context of the United States and in the context of Mauritius throws light on the

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situatedness of the meanings and discourses associated with enslavement. An analysis of a Grade 5 Social Studies textbook unit on Thomas Jefferson by Thomson (2017) shows how the third American President is presented in a positive light while the enslaved are depicted in a negative light. A more recent review of contemporary published elementary school level books that represent enslavement in US history by Patterson and Shuttleworth (2019, 2020) indicates that the narratives in these books fall under three main categories. Firstly, there are narratives adopting a selective tradition where the violence associated with enslavement is minimised, where masters and enslaved are depicted as working together and where prominent enslaved figures are omitted. Secondly, there are narratives adopting a social conscience perspective, in which enslavement is depicted as painful, while downplaying the role of institutions through the use of the passive voice. Finally, there are narratives that are culturally conscious, with enslavement being systematically presented and Black American experiences being portrayed in a positive light. The present data on the representation of the enslaved in the context of Kreol textbooks in Mauritius seem to fall under Patterson and Shuttleworth’s (2019, 2020) ‘cultural conscience’ category, where the vicious violence the enslaved were subjected to is implicitly or explicitly described, where their contribution to economic growth and artistic expression is highlighted, where they are given voice (be it through their use of African languages or the variety of Kreol spoken in colonial times) and where their acts of defiance and resistance are celebrated. The apparent difference in the depiction of enslavement and the enslaved in the US school materials and the Mauritian Kreol textbooks could be explained by very particular sociopolitical context in which these books are produced and the intended readership for these books. One of the features of multicultural Mauritius is that its population, which values uniqueness within diversity, is ‘obsessed by the past […] as a source of identity, stability, meaning and solace’ (Boswell, 2006: 205, cited in Arnold, 2014). This local obsession has contributed to the Creole community’s feeling of unbelongingness to the Mauritian multicultural nation and its feeling of being marginalised as descendants of the enslaved. Since enslavement is ‘stigmatised in collective representation’ (Arnold, 2014: 10) and since dominant discourses on enslavement are often ‘strongly couched in terms of cultural deracination’ (Eichmann, 2012: 322), this community has found it challenging to connect with its historical past. The texts about enslavement and the enslaved, found in the Kreol textbooks, transcend the discourses of stigmatisation and deracination usually associated with enslavement. Through their positive representation of the enslaved, these texts are contributing to creating and circulating an alternative and empowering discourse for the Creole community. These textbooks thus arguably constitute an ideological space where learners of Kreol, most of whom come from the Creole community, are encouraged to renegotiate

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51

their feelings of unbelongingness and their marginalised identity (cf. Hornberger, 2002). The Kreol textbooks can thus be said to play an important role in contesting existing social ideologies and in creating a (new) social reality for learners of Kreol (cf. Canale, 2016). Not only are Kreol learners exposed to such empowering discourses about their locally settled ancestors, but they are also exposed to narratives that showcase the diasporic connections of the enslaved. By referring to the enslaved with geographical roots in Africa and with travelling histories throughout the world – in particular Rodrigues and Réunion Island – the textbooks construct the enslaved and their descendants as part of a diaspora, sharing connections, life experiences and life battles with other enslaved and their descendants in the Indian Ocean and, potentially, beyond. The importance of diasporic connections cannot be underestimated in Mauritius where existing ethnic and religious groups claim – and take economic and symbolic advantage of – their connections with larger diasporic communities. Arnold (2014: 5) states that, compared to other Mauritian past histories (notably Indian indenture history), the paradigm of enslavement has had less ‘symbolic capital’. One can argue that the discursive construction of the descendants of the enslaved as having diasporic connections helps reconfigure this earlier paradigm where the Creole community’s diasporic connections had been unrecognised or misrecognised. Textbooks can be seen as constituting an ideological space where ethnic minority identities are (mis)represented, (re)imagined, performed, negotiated, but also constituted or imposed in discourse and social activity (cf. Lytra, 2016). The Kreol textbooks can be argued to constitute or to open up an ideological space where the Creole community’s distinctiveness as descendants of the enslaved is acknowledged and commemorated. Through such remembrance of and reconciliation with the past – which constitute important aspects of identity construction – a stronger sense of ethnic distinctiveness and ethnic belongingness (for the Creole children), as part of Mauritian national belongingness, can be achieved for the younger generations of Mauritian learners of Kreol. Hence, the Kreol textbooks potentially open up an ideological space where the Creole community’s ‘malaise’, its sense of unbelongingness to the multicultural Mauritian nation, can be renegotiated. Conclusion

The end of the 20th century was marked by a growing awareness of a ‘malaise créole’ and the need to address it. One way of addressing this has been to engage Mauritians, and more particularly the Creole community, with the history of the enslaved. The 2001 United Nations’ declaration of enslavement as a crime against humanity empowered Creole pressure groups and progressive politicians to open up long-repressed issues

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relating to this aspect of Mauritian history (Arnold, 2014). The declaration of 1 February as a public holiday to commemorate the abolition of slavery (in 2005), the establishment of the TJC to investigate the impact on enslavement and indenture on Mauritius (in 2009), the inscription of the séga on the UNESCO Representative List (in 2014), all illustrate efforts – even if largely symbolical – to acknowledge the important place of the enslaved and their descendants in the Mauritian rainbow nation. This effort to recognise, remember and reconcile with an enslaved past is also seen in the Kreol textbooks, which (consciously or unconsciously, knowingly or unknowingly) circulate empowering discourses to those children studying Kreol, children coming mainly from the Creole community. Although the textbooks alone will not suffice to reconfigure representations of ethnic minorities and ethnic minority identities, the Kreol textbooks still open up an ideological space for this reconfiguration to be negotiated. Further research on the teaching and learning of Kreol in classroom settings could help investigate the Kreol classroom as an ideological space for the (re)negotiation of ethnic identities. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) Choose any of the extracts provided in this chapter and provide a detailed analysis of the discursive construction of the enslaved and/or enslavement in that extract. (2) Had you been given the opportunity to carry out interviews with the panel of textbook writers, what questions would you have asked them about the topic and/or representation of the enslaved and enslavement in the Kreol textbooks? (3) In what ways do you think the methodological tools provided in Corpus Linguistics could have enhanced the analysis of this corpus? (4) What is the significance of the discursive construction of the enslaved and enslavement in school textbooks in the context of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement? References Abdou, E.D. (2018) Copts in Egyptian history textbooks: Towards an integrated framework for analyzing minority representations. Journal of Curriculum Studies 50 (4), 476–507. Allen, R.B. (2004) A serious and alarming daily evil: Marronage and its legacy in Mauritius and the colonial plantation world. Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 25 (2), 1–17. Apple, M. and Christian-Smith, L. (1991) The Politics of the Textbook. London and New York: Routledge. Arnold, M. (2014) Coming to terms with the past? The controversial issue of slavery in contemporary Mauritian fiction. Journal of Romance Studies 14 (2), 5–19. Auleear Owodally, A.M. (2014) Language, education and identities in plural Mauritius: A study of the Kreol, Hindi and Urdu Standard 1 textbooks. Language and Education 28 (4), 319–339.

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Boswell, R. (2014) Can justice be achieved for slave descendants in Mauritius? International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 42 (2), 146–161. Boswell, R. (2016) Making the past pay? Intangible (cultural) heritage in South Africa and Mauritius. In M.L. Stefano and P. Davis (eds) The Routledge Companion to Intangible Cultural Heritage (pp. 96–110). London and New York: Routledge. Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3 (2), 77–101. Brown, A.L. and Au, W. (2014) Race, memory, and master narratives: A critical essay on U.S. curriculum history. Curriculum Inquiry 44 (3), 358–389. Canale, G. (2016) (Re)searching culture in foreign language textbooks, or the politics of hide and seek. Language, Culture and Curriculum 29 (2), 225–243. Carmignani, S. (2006) Figures identitaires créoles et patrimoine à l’île Maurice: Une montagne en jeu. Journal des Anthropologues 104–105, 265–285. Chan Low, J.L. (2004) Les enjeux actuels des débats sur la mémoire et la réparation pour l’esclavage à l’île Maurice. Cahiers D’Etudes Africaines 44 (173–174), 401–418. Chu, Y. (2015) The power of knowledge: A critical analysis of the depiction of ethnic minorities in China’s elementary textbooks. Race Ethnicity and Education 18 (4), 469–487. Chu, Y. (2018) Visualizing minority: Images of ethnic minority groups in Chinese elementary social studies textbooks. Journal of Social Studies Research 42 (2), 135–147. Eichmann, A. (2012) From slave to Maroon: The present-centredness of Mauritian slave heritage. Atlantic Studies 9 (3), 319–335. Erisken, T.H. (1998) Common Denominators: Ethnicity, Nation-building and Compromise in Mauritius. Oxford: Berg. Florigny, G. (2015) Représentations et impact réel de l’introduction du créole mauricien dans le cursus primaire sur l’apprentissage des autres langues. Island Studies 2, 56–67. Gray, J. (ed.) (2013) Critical Perspectives on Language Teaching Materials. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hjelm, T., Valijärvi, R.L., Lee, A., Linnenweber, A., Tárkányi, T. and Troll, P. (2019) Learning language, learning culture: Constructing Finnishness in adult learner textbooks. European Journal of Cultural Studies 22 (3), 309–326. Hornberger, N.H. (2002) Multilingual language policies and the continua of biliteracy: An ecological approach. Language Policy 1, 27–52. Housing and Population Census (2011) Republic of Mauritius. See https://statsmauritius. govmu.org/Documents/Census_and_Surveys/HPC/2011/HPC_TR_Vol2_ Demography_Yr11.pdf (accessed 19 October 2021) Lallmahomed-Aumeerally, N. (2017) Minority rights and anti-discrimination policy in Mauritius – the case of ‘Malaise Creole’. International Journal of Cultural Policy 23 (4), 446–463. Lytra, V. (2016) Language and ethnic identity. In S. Preece (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity (pp. 131–145). London: Routledge. Miles, W.F. (1999) The creole malaise in Mauritius. African Affairs 98 (391), 211–228. Patterson, T. and Shuttleworth, J.M. (2019) The (mis)representation of enslavement in historical literature for elementary students. Teachers College Record 121 (6), 1–40. Patterson, T.J. and Shuttleworth, J.M. (2020) Teaching hard history through children’s literature about enslavement. Social Studies and the Young Learner 32 (3), 14–19. Police-Michel, D. (2007) Le discours de l’exclusion et de l’esclavage dans la société mauricienne (1993–2003). In S. Bunwaree and R. Kasenally (eds) Rights and Development: A Mauritian Reader (pp. 121–145). Addis Ababa: OSSREA. Thomson, S.L. (2017) Thomas Jeff erson, slavery, and the language of the textbook: Addressing problematic representations of race and power. Language Arts Journal of Michigan 32 (2), 20–26.

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Thornton, E.N. (2019) Race, nativity, and multicultural exclusion: Negotiating the inclusion of Kreol in Mauritian language policy. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 16 (2), 1–33. TJC (Truth and Justice Commission) (2011) Report of the Truth and Justice Commission. Mauritius: Government Printing. See https://www.usip.org/sites/default/fi les/ROL/ TJC_Vol1.pdf (accessed 21 December 2020). Weninger, C. (2018) Textbook analysis. In C.A. Chapelle (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of Applied Linguistics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Woyshner, C. and Schocker, J.B. (2015) Cultural parallax and content analysis: Images of black women in high school history textbooks. Theory & Research in Social Education 43 (4), 441– 468.

3 Appropriating Portuguese Language Policies in England Cátia Verguete

Introduction I am completely part of the staff. They treat me like any other teacher. The same. In this school, I am a colleague. (Maria) In this school it is a bit different because I am here during the school day teaching the A Level course. In after-school classes, the school is merely a hired space and often there is no contact with the school. (Nuno) You go in and out of school and you see no one, it’s really difficult to get through to them and to develop a relationship. It’s almost impossible. You go in and come out, see nobody. I feel like a complete outsider. (Ângela)

Maria, Nuno and Ângela (pseudonyms) are three Portuguese teachers working in England for the Camões institute – the Portuguese international institution dedicated to the worldwide promotion of Portuguese language, culture and cooperation on behalf of the Government of Portugal. Maria works full-time in a primary school in central London. She teaches Portuguese to all pupils as a main curricular language and she provides bilingual support within the school day to children for whom Portuguese is a home language. Being integrated into the school allows her to develop a number of projects in collaboration with her mainstream peers. For example, with the Art teacher she has produced content language integrated learning (CLIL) modules in which all the pupils were involved in project-based language learning about geometric shapes, colours and materials through Portuguese and then designed and painted tiles. She has also developed projects with the class teacher which help progressively introduce literacy and grammatical content or develop knowledge in other areas, such as geography or mathematics. As for Nuno, he divides his time between three secondary schools, providing after-school classes in two of them and teaching within the curriculum in 55

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the third. He teaches only students whose home language is Portuguese. Where he teaches within the curriculum, his integration into the school manifests itself in discussions with the examinations officer and the English as an additional language (EAL) coordinator as part of his preparing groups of students for their Portuguese GCSE or A Level examinations. For his after-school provision at the other two schools, his interaction is much more limited. It is similar to Ângela’s interaction with each of the five different sites where she delivers her after-school classes, which include a church hall, since there were no available school premises to hire nearby. Her class groups contain children from multiple schools in the area and her occasional interaction with school staff is restricted to the premises’ manager either opening the space or securing it for the night at the end of her class. The interview excerpts above relate to different types of Portuguese language teaching and educational support provided by teachers working for the Camões institute in some form of partnership with the mainstream provision. Among these different types of language provision, some offer a glimpse of a different dispensation whereby mainstream and complementary education engage together as educational counterparts and fi nd ways of liberating language learning. The Camões language provision complies with a particular legal framework which is centrally formulated in Portugal. Recent developments have tended to construct the language as a major asset in cultural diplomacy, in the role of Portugal in Europe and in the wider world, representing it as an invaluable medium of international communication. This construction of the language denotes a discursive move away from its previous representation solely as a language of the emigrant community, with an emphasis on a paradigm of language maintenance. Much of the original text remained unchanged in the latest redrafts, whose principles continue to centre on the promise of ‘fulfi lling the commitment to the Portuguese communities’, but in this new policy the goals were broadened to allow ‘any learners who wish to do so, regardless of their nationality or mother tongue’ to study Portuguese as a second or foreign language (Decree-law no. 165/2006 of 11 August 2006). While it is helpful and significant to illuminate these shifting policy discourses, examining the interpretations, appropriations and interactions taking place on the ground facilitates an understanding of some of the constraints and affordances of providing language learning and teaching at the intersection of national and transnational policies and practices. The voices and experiences of the Portuguese educators will be foregrounded in this chapter, to reveal how the teachers and their regional director engage with the policies and the intricacies of implementing them, mediated as they are by multiple networks of social and institutional activity. In this way, the aim is to contribute to the growing critical and poststructuralist sociolinguistic literature on language policy engagement (Johnson, 2013a; Martin-Jones & Costa Cabral, 2018; Menken &

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García, 2010; Van de Aa & Blommaert, 2017), with ‘engagement’ being understood here as a binding element of collaborative policy making and complementary knowledge building involving researchers, educational practitioners and other social actors. The chapter draws on data from my ethnographic study of language policy (Hornberger & Johnson, 2011) examining Portuguese overseas language policies and the processes leading to their implementation in schools in England. The conceptual framework is discussed, followed by an explanation of the selected methodological approach, before zooming in on the accounts and experiences of the three teachers and their regional director. To conclude, there is a discussion of the implications of the fi ndings for Portuguese language policy making in England and elsewhere. Conceptual Framework

Research on language policy has long diverted from a sole focus on the macrosociological level and instead investigated a multitude of layers of activity (Johnson, 2013a; Ricento & Hornberger, 1996). Johnson (2013a: 239) argues that ‘[f]or any language policy, one must consider the agents, goals, processes, and discourses which engender and perpetuate the policy, and the dynamic social and historical contexts in which the policy exists, keeping in mind that these categories are neither static nor mutually exclusive’. These multiple layers of language policy and planning are conceived in terms of three interrelated policy processes: creation, interpretation and appropriation. These processes can be envisaged as occurring in a sequence of multiple unfolding levels – macro, meso and micro. The meaning of these levels is relative to one’s positioning in the process. Policies can be created at any one of these levels and in multiple contexts – from the (inter)national to the local domain; they are then interpreted, also at multiple levels, by policy agents exercising varying degrees of power, and put into action locally in creative and unpredictable ways. One important tension in the field of language policy is the paradigmatic split between a strand of research that emphasises the incapacitating power of the state and other macro-level institutions in shaping work and conditions and a substantial body of studies that celebrate the power of individual educators to creatively re-create, interpret and appropriate language policies in their local context (Tollefson, 2013). This is part of a wider longstanding sociological discussion on the (im)balance between authoritative structural forces and the agentic capacities of individuals (cf. Ahearn, 2001; Wertsch et al., 1993). Recent educational frameworks tend to adopt ecological perspectives which account for the interaction of those individual capabilities with the ideological and structural circumstances available to actors (Liddicoat, 2018; Priestley et al., 2015). The structural element relates to factors of influence and decision making, such as social and relational management and power distribution. The ideological

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element, in turn, comprises the circulating values, beliefs and ways of thinking and speaking. Liddicoat (2018: 4) explains that ‘ideologies are discursively constructed products’. While language ideologies within and around policy texts may advantage certain languages and language varieties or instantiate hegemonic worldviews about language users and ethnolinguistic groups, dominant discourses at one level of policy may not be dominant at other levels. The ideological fields in which the policy agents act shape their own worldviews and social cognition. Language policy discourses – written or spoken – are influenced by language ideologies that are particular to a specific context (Johnson, 2013a). This chapter contributes to Johnson’s (2013b) argument that it is important to respect both the discursive power of language policies and that of language policy agents at different levels of policy enactment. Decisions about language learning in schools such as those visited by Maria, Nuno and Ângela are negotiated and co-constructed at the interface of such structural forces and of the ideologies and discourses circulating thereabout. According to Hornberger (2002), within the discursive boundaries created and perpetuated by language policies, there are ideological and implementational spaces for languages to flourish. Language planners and local educators have the power to either open or close possibilities for multilingual education in schools and communities. Examining these spaces and possibilities has revealed many instances of agency across the multiple layers and processes of language policy (Menken & García, 2010). From an ecological perspective, agency too results from the interaction of a set of individual and personal capabilities with the contextual structural and ideological conditions that might help or hinder its achievement (Priestley et al., 2015: 19). Johnson (2013a) introduced the idea of educational language policy engagement to address the epistemological tension caused by researching with teachers, who are frequently seen as ‘blind followers who implement policies mandated from above’ (Menken & García, 2010: 250). He argues for ‘epistemic solidarity between researchers and educators and critical interrogation of power imbalances in policy processes’ (Johnson, 2013a: 170). This notion of epistemic solidarity has also been defended by J. Van der Aa and J. Blommaert (2017: 269). The concept entails a paradigmatic shift involving consideration for all the components (i.e. goals, context, discourses, agents, methods) and for each process of the development of a language policy (creation, interpretation, appropriation) based on a participation framework. That is, a framework that includes multiple social actors, teachers and administrators working collaboratively in action-research projects, engaging in decision making together: planning, acting, observing, reflecting and reformulating critically informed language policies (Johnson, 2013a: 174–176, drawing on Goffman, 1979). Inherent to the idea of engagement is an agenda of social justice which is supported by critical educational

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practice and grounded on the principle that all languages and linguist repertoires are of equal value. This chapter contributes to that agenda by suggesting ways in which a wider range of actors can and should be involved in the process of Portuguese language policymaking in England. Methodological Approach: Ethnography of Language Policy

Ethnographies of language policy are said to develop a theoretical and methodological understanding of the connections between the agents, contexts, goals and discourses involved in the process of language policy creation, interpretation and appropriation (Johnson, 2013a). It is an approach that entails reflecting upon the theories and frameworks around the language policy subject of study (etic approach) while capturing the behaviours and representations of the participants (emic approach). This is an exercise that requires a dialogue between the textual and contextual analysis of potentially vague and polysemic policy texts and the ethnographic understanding of a particular local context (Hornberger & Johnson, 2007). This chapter is based on my multi-sited ethnographic (Johnson, 2007; McCarty, 2011) doctoral research study on Portuguese language provision in England. The broader study involved textual and historical analysis of the legal framework emanating from Portuguese official bodies regarding overseas language provision, in a fi rst stage, followed by the ethnographic scrutiny of the educational contexts and agents responsible for delivering the Portuguese language. The collection of data took place over a period of two years and occurred in multiple sites and across two different levels of the policy process: the meso-level – in-depth interviews with the regional director of Camões in London, at the Portuguese Embassy; and the micro-level – three-part phenomenological interviews and participant and non-participant observations of the work of four Portuguese teachers in their different schools and classes. This was all documented in fieldnotes, audio-recordings and photographs. There was also collection of documents, including teaching and learning resources and planning schemes, learners’ work samples and teacher self-assessment reports. All the data collected and/or generated for the purpose of my dissertation were originally in Portuguese and, during the process of data analysis, I translated the relevant excerpts into English. In my professional opinion as a certified Portuguese/English translator, and to the best of my knowledge and belief, the translations reflect faithfully and correctly the content and meaning of the original texts. Here, I focus on a selection of interview excerpts that illuminate the Portuguese educators’ understanding of the policies, their engagement with them, and the ways in which they appropriate them in their interaction and daily negotiations with the policies and practices of the local schools and communities.

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Portuguese Language Policy Appropriation At the meso-level: The regional director Little by little we get more people to know the Portuguese language, where Portugal is, that there are many people in the world who speak Portuguese. (Margarida)

When we met for our fi rst interview, Margarida had been the director of Camões in the UK and the Channel Islands for six years. Her account of those six years provides evidence of her efforts to promote both the acquisition of Portuguese language by a wider public and its maintenance by the emigrant community, echoing the broader goals of the official policy. She correlated language internationalisation with the broad dissemination of knowledge about Portugal, the Portuguese language and Lusophony, aligning with the underlying ideology of recent policy texts that construct Portuguese as a plurinational, widely spoken language. This construct of Portuguese as a language that is spoken by a large number of people is not, according to her, a perception that is held in the UK, where she believes that ‘most people have no notion of the number of speakers of Portuguese worldwide’. The local perception, she said, is that Portuguese is a language spoken only by an ethnic minority community, and the response of head teachers to any negotiations about introducing Portuguese in their school is as follows: We don’t teach minority languages – if we started teaching Portuguese because we have Portuguese students, we would have to teach all the other languages, and we have children who speak dozens of different languages.

Her observations resonated with Clyne’s (2008) critique of the monolingual mindset whereby a number of ‘fallacious clichés’, such as the sufficiency of global English or an already overcrowded curriculum, are pretexts for constraining the implementation of a more comprehensive multilingual approach. In her view, one main constraint to the implementation of Portuguese as a mainstream language related to this ‘monolingual mindset’ whereby: people don’t need to learn other languages, as they speak English and that suffices them; they are not particularly interested in foreign languages in general, even less in foreign languages that aren’t those that they have already accepted.

She relates this ‘acceptance’ to wider historical factors and to the prestige of certain languages in relation to others. The prestige of some languages goes beyond their formal status. That changed throughout history. Latin was the lingua franca at one point, then French, in the times of the Sun King. French still holds that prestige, the idea that it is a language of culture and that the cultured, more educated people, can speak French. There is still that preference here.

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Regarding the shift taking place in England in terms of language choice in schools, with French at the forefront of the national language market and Spanish gaining ground, at the expense of German (see Collen, 2020; Tinsley, 2019; Tinsley & Doležal, 2018), she connected it to more recent economic and cultural dynamics. Nowadays, Spanish is taking many students away from German, for example, and German, which has always been a marketplace language, a language of power, is losing many students to Spanish. The Spanish market is growing internationally.

For her, the Portuguese language is losing in this competition due to its low attraction value in terms of economic influence and cultural symbols, despite its high number of speakers worldwide. We have the number of speakers, but we don’t hold great economic power or international prestige in terms of cultural production.

As such, most of her efforts to promote the maintenance and/or acquisition of Portuguese lead to negotiations laden with discourses of segregation between so-called modern foreign languages (MFL) and community languages. The reported conversations chime with what has been termed selective multilingualism (Haarmann, 1991), where a small number of traditionally learnt languages are recurrently given a central position. In this perspective, learning MFL is seen as an asset for the individual and society and learning community languages is seen as a burden (Sarhimaa, 2012). Head teachers are portrayed as occupying an educational dilemma that restrains them from acknowledging and supporting any particular languages. The perceived lower prestige of community languages and the perceived complexities of their integration into the curriculum continuously result in educational responses that marginalise them from the mainstream altogether and relegate them to extracurricular circumstances (Tinsley & Board, 2016), such as those experienced by Ângela and Nuno in the introductory excerpts. More often than not, those responses materialise in a tenancy agreement being signed, between Camões and a particular school, which allows for children in the area to take part in the after-school courses and gives the school some very welcome income. Occasionally, there have been responses which result in meaningful educational collaboration and allow for ideological and implementational spaces to open (Hornberger, 2006) for Portuguese language learning to flourish in unconventional ways. The teachers’ accounts below illuminate these negotiations and interactions further. At the micro-level: The teachers’ views

When I met Ângela at one of the schools, we had the opportunity to talk about concrete aspects of her practice. I got to observe some of her

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classes and to have a good browse through the materials she used. As we went into the school together and walked along the corridors, I had the feeling that Ângela was not completely at ease using the spaces and, indeed, she later told me that she felt like a complete ‘outsider’ in the school (opening quote). It was a brand new building and I was struck by how bare and white the walls were inside the school and in the classroom. We waited a few minutes until the students started coming in. On entering, she greeted everyone in Portuguese and asked them about their week as she turned the computer on. The clinically white room was suddenly lit up when the enormous interactive whiteboard projected an image of the class Padlet – an online board or canvas that can be used to display and share information – which she had created collaboratively with the pupils throughout the year. There were rows of instructions for completing a variety of tasks, which were organised with the different levels of proficiency of the students in mind. There were links to activities, websites, and language- and culture-related content and games. There were videos and pictures of the children’s work. Each entry was marked by the comments of the pupils, the parents and Ângela herself, who all contributed to this amazingly colourful and lively interactive bulletin board. The class started with everyone looking at the interactive board and joining in a conversation about a common topic – it was around food and eating habits. Some students had posted pictures of traditional dishes that they had prepared at home with the help of family members. After this, each pair or small group of children got on with different activities which were age and level appropriate. Ângela moved from group to group to answer questions, offer advice and help with the tasks. The pupils came from a few different schools in the area and the two class groups included a range of children from Reception to Year 6. She explained that: the age gap makes it very complicated. (…) With such a variety of students, I don’t think that it is about teaching them Portuguese, it’s more about giving them experiences in Portuguese in a more formal environment.

Ângela reported having to design most of the teaching and learning resources that she used in her classes because she felt that the textbook – an illustration of a covert policy mechanism aimed at language standardisation (Shohamy, 2010) – was unsuitable. For those children who spoke Portuguese at home, she felt that the language content was ‘too easy’, which was demotivating. For those very few who were beginning to learn the language and did not usually speak it at home, the books were impenetrable, as all the instructions were in Portuguese. Ângela’s understanding of her students’ learning needs and her experiences of language teaching informed her pedagogical approach and, despite any overt or covert policy mechanisms, guided her appropriation of the language policy (Johnson,

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2013a) – this is the creative and agentive process through which agents privilege particular discourses in their plan of action and make a policy their own. Her take on the after-school provision of Portuguese was reminiscent of Larsen-Freeman’s (2010) conclusion that the only true managers of learning are those teachers who ‘can live with the paradox of knowing that teaching does not cause learning, all the while knowing that to be successful, one must act as if it does’. Ângela was certainly committed to ‘unlocking the learning potential’ (Larsen-Freeman, 2010: 184) of her students in Portuguese, and the extreme circumstances in which she taught did not seem to deter her from using a range of well-founded language teaching methodological choices. From a sociolinguistic point of view, the whole experience was a great reminder that language maintenance is intricately bound to community maintenance (Hornberger, 1988), meaning that the after-school provision of Portuguese (or of any other so-called community language for that matter) is about much more than just language learning and proficiency. It is about socialisation and belonging (Lytra & Martin, 2010) and, as such, it serves a vital role in the preservation of that intrinsic value of language learning (Ricento, 2005). Ângela’s work focused on promoting language maintenance among the emigrant community. Her interpretation and appropriation of the policy text seemed defi ned by the professional experiences afforded to her in practice (Priestly et al., 2015: 133). She had little or no contact with the wider mainstream school community. She had never considered broadening the language offer to other children and, in any case, this would have been restricted by the nature of her relationship with the mainstream. She regretted the distant relationship between herself and the mainstream colleagues and believed that ‘when you are there during the day (…) that is really good’. She explained that spending time in the school during the day would allow her to meet mainstream colleagues and would help her in developing more meaningful work with the pupils. There was no evidence of Ângela’s deliberate professional engagement with the policy and its broader goal of language internationalisation and foreign language teaching aimed at a wider audience. When asked about the policy text, her answer was: In terms of legislation, well, I know the practical stuff, about applying, holidays, our rights and duties. The introduction to these texts is always the same. It’s about valuing the language, passing it from generation to generation, also about maintaining the culture, all to do with Camões’ objectives, I think that’s good. (Ângela)

She did not pay much attention to the policy text, other than in respect of ‘the practical stuff ’. Her account was redolent of Johnson’s (2007) observations in relation to his own ethnographic study of the development

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of Title III in the School District of Philadelphia, where he noted that ‘the teachers are resistant to being involved (or simply taking on more work), and cite their lack of knowledge about (…) language policy, and policy in general’ (Johnson, 2007: 118), the implication being that where one is positioned in the policymaking process might influence one’s awareness and knowledge of the policy itself. Contrastingly, Nuno was profoundly knowledgeable about the ideological and structural shifts of the Portuguese legal framework. He had deeply reflected upon and studied the teaching and learning reality of Portuguese language provision in England, having completed 11 years of teaching within it and two Master’s degrees in relation to it – one in Portugal and the other in the UK. He interpreted the policy as emphasising language internationalisation and the delivery of ‘a general Portuguese as a foreign language’. As he put it: There has been in these documents a certain promotion of an idea of a general Portuguese as a foreign language, fitting into the Common European Framework, via QuaREPE, which does not fully relate to the specific needs of our students. In the classes, we need to adapt to the needs of the students, and most of our students have Portuguese as a heritage language. So, I don’t think that this has pressured the classes to change, no. (Nuno)

While he recognised the shifting discourse of the policy text, he was not especially concerned by it as he reported that this had in no way ‘pressured the classes to change’, and he continued to develop his practice based on the language profi le of the learners attending the classes, who mainly ‘have Portuguese as a heritage language’. He explained that his objective was to provide students with the opportunity to communicate more effectively in Portuguese and to attain a certification for this, both in the shape of the Camões exam and a GCSE/A Level paper, but also to cater for their needs as bilingual, biliterate and bicultural children through content-enriched resources and materials, including aspects of the history, geography and literature of the Portuguese-speaking countries. In fact, his testimony provided a different take on language dissemination: To offer an education in Portuguese language, for those who have Portuguese in their lives, at home, in the family, friends and, at the same time, giving them the notion that they can use Portuguese not only with their family, they can use it for anything. That, I think is to disseminate Portuguese. I have had complaints that my Portuguese class seems more like history, seems more like sociology, seems more like science. You can use Portuguese for everything and anything! (Nuno)

For Nuno, language dissemination related to bringing awareness to the Portuguese-speaking communities of the wealth and breath of a linguistic and cultural legacy. It meant making the Portuguese language and culture more valuable and attractive ‘for those who have Portuguese in

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their lives’. It is an understanding that relates to breaking away from preconceived dominant language ideologies which have resulted in the marginalisation of particular languages and of heritage language learners (Valdés et al., 2009). Like Ângela, he ‘takes in’ or appropriates particular elements of the Portuguese language policy – including standardised testing, in the shape of the Camões certification – and he combines them with elements of the mainstream educational context – such as preparation for GCSE and A Level exams – to the advantage of his language learners. Despite his natural optimism, Nuno’s account revealed some of the key challenges of teaching in such circumstances. Like Ângela, he also started most of his classes with a common topic and then divided the pupils into groups according to their ages and proficiencies. The diversity of levels and age groups imposed difficulties: In this group, some are working for A Level 1 and others are working for A Level 2. There is a lot to do and I feel that we move very slowly. I don’t have enough time. I generally set a task for one group and then leave them working on their own while I set a task for the other group. Then I move from one group to the other to support them with their tasks. A two-hour class is in fact a one-hour class per week.

Having to teach more than one syllabus or towards different exam papers meant that the two-hour slot allocated to his after-school classes was further subdivided, which restricted his contact time with the students and their learning outcomes. The reduced amount of time allocated for after-school classes and the difficulties imposed by the sheer variety of ages and proficiency levels in these groups is not specific to Portuguese provision (see Conteh et al., 2007; Issa & Williams, 2009; Kenner & Ruby, 2012; Lytra & Martin, 2010). Nuno’s lessons were carefully and deliberately planned with different activities that attempted to cater for this diversity and lack of time. Textbooks were infrequently used. Not only did the circumstances require the use of different textbooks within the same group, but also the textbook content was dissimilar to the content required by the Portuguese GCSE and A Level specification, for which he prepared many of his students. When the A Level course was taught within curricular time, there was more time allocated to classes and this improved both the pupils’ learning experience and Nuno’s collaboration with his mainstream peers. Rather than a basic tenancy agreement, whereby the school is ‘merely a hired space’ (Nuno’s opening quote), this type of relationship begins to position Nuno and the mainstream as counterparts in the education of the pupils. A glimpse of collaboration

One primary school in the heart of London presents an exception. Negotiations between the director and the head teacher resulted in an

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agreement between the two parties which included the free use of the school premises for after-school community language classes and the allocation of a Portuguese teacher, courtesy of Camões, to deliver Portuguese language within the curriculum to the culturally and linguistically diverse student population of the school. According to the director, this collaboration has been extremely positive and has developed a lot further than initially planned. Not only does the Portuguese teacher promote the internationalisation of the language through classes in Portuguese as a foreign language to all pupils, but she also provides invaluable bilingual support throughout the school day to the Portuguese speaking children who are EAL learners. She does this by collaborating with other mainstream teachers in projects that involve teaching curricular content through the medium of Portuguese to all the children in the school. Adding to the excerpt at the start of the chapter, in which she declares that she is ‘completely part of the staff ’, Maria’s collegial relationship with her mainstream colleagues is well captured in my fieldnotes before I met her at school for the first time: I arranged to meet Maria in school at 4pm. The school is a five-minute walk away from the tube station. Maria was waiting for me at the school gate. She was chatting away with a small group of pupils. We went into Reception and I signed in. Everyone was very friendly and chatty. (…) Maria used the school spaces with great ease and confidence, really looking like she was at home there. (…) Members of staff walked in and out of the room and conversed with her about students and school activities. Maria knows everything that goes on in the school, she attends every meeting, training, special days, projects. (…) After the interview, Maria took me on a guided tour around the school. We went into most classrooms and I was impressed by the decorations and the quality of the work being exhibited – many involving Portuguese language and various cultural aspects. Everything was laminated, colourful, glittery, large, hanging from the ceiling. I made a remark about it and Maria said proudly ‘We are an outstanding school!’ (Fieldnotes, 18 September 2017)

The use of the first person plural pronoun (‘we’) emphasises Maria’s familiarity with a school where she planned and developed her teaching activities collaboratively. These were explained in great detail and I also had the opportunity to observe it all in practice. Her classes in Portuguese as a foreign language followed the school curriculum for foreign languages. All the work schemes, materials and resources for the classes were prepared by her. She taught Portuguese classes through play and singing. She explained that the main objective of the language curriculum in the school was language awareness, rather than competence. For the Portuguese speaking children it was about building their confidence alongside developing their language abilities. For these children she planned additional activities that supported their learning of curricular content.

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Last year, I planned a grammar project for Year 2 with the English teacher. I did in Portuguese all the grammar that they were going to study in English, for example the nouns, adjectives, verbs. I gave them a word and they had to put it in one of the boxes. This was before their English class. Perhaps it worked because they had the chance to hear it twice, it was a reinforcement, not just that it was their mother tongue. Afterwards, in class they were much more confident to put their hand up and answer the teacher’s questions. Their progress was visible. (Maria)

A key point to note here is that working alongside the school, as their educational partner, helped promote and sustain more than one type of multilingualism, more effectively. Although this project seemed aimed primarily at internationalising Portuguese and promoting it as a foreign language, its impact was much deeper and created opportunities for bilingual education through collaboration with mainstream schooling. Concurring with Johnson (2007: 259), this goes to show that ‘a community of educators create their own space for multilingual language development’ and where languages are valued and seen as a resource (Ruiz, 1984) for learning, multilingual education can be promoted. In offering a less commonly taught language to all the children, the mainstream school promoted positive attitudes towards less commonly taught languages more broadly. This glimpse of collaboration seems indeed to fit well within the broad goals enunciated in the recent versions of the Portuguese language policy in that Maria teaches Portuguese as a foreign language to the wider school audience while supporting the Portuguese speaking community’s bilingualism. When asked directly about the goals of the Portuguese overseas provision, Maria’s response was similar to Ângela’s (above): Cátia: Maria: Cátia: Maria: Cátia: Maria: Cátia: Maria: Cátia: Maria:

Do you know the legal framework for the provision of Portuguese overseas? [Laughter] In terms of the teachers or the students? This document [I show her the policy], do you know it? I read it sometimes, parts of it. I’ve never read the whole document. I read the parts about timetables, for example, or absences and holidays. Practical stuff. Generally, I don’t look because we are informed by the network. (…) Let me see. Ah, yes, yes, to promote the language, help the community, and the culture, yes, that too. So, how do you defi ne what you do? What I do is to promote the Portuguese language in a foreign context, international. I am interested in fi nding out if you know the goals of the policy. No. It’s intuitive. I never read the whole document, honestly.

As she understands it, her work is to ‘promote the language (…) and the culture’, ‘help the community’, ‘in a foreign context, international’, unknowingly (she has never read the whole document) aligning with the broad goals of the policy text. Like Ângela, her interpretation and

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appropriation of the policy text seems to be defi ned by her professional experiences, rather than by deliberate engagement with the policy text. Her only engagement with the text relates to practical matters of personal and material interest, such as the rules about timetables, absences and holidays. Remarkably, she explicitly states her reliance on ‘the network’ to interpret the goals of the policy for her. Conclusion

The goals of Portuguese overseas provision have broadened from the promotion of language maintenance by the Portuguese-speaking community to including an agenda of language internationalisation. It could be pointed out that the policy’s goals and methods are misaligned. While the policy goals aim at an increasingly diversified audience of learners, the policy mechanisms (texts, curricula, textbooks) propose increasingly standardised pedagogical practices. Johnson (2013a: 117) has observed that policy language often ‘satisfies everyone partially and no one completely but receives the support of a majority of its creators nonetheless’. Discursive occurrences like ‘language internationalisation’ and ‘Portuguese speaking community’ are vague and polysemic. They allow for educators and policymakers at various levels of activity to explore the various semiotic possibilities of policy texts and to re-create them and appropriate their language in ways that open significant ideological and implementational spaces (Hornberger, 2002) for the great variety of language learners. The testimonies presented here provide evidence of a range of complementary perspectives and interpretations of the Portuguese official language policies by the main agents of its situated deployment – the teachers and their regional director. Their interpretations range from fully echoing the official policy goals to only partly endorsing them. While the conversations with the regional director reflected her efforts to promote the broadening goals of the official policy, the teachers’ engagement with the policy goals was only partial and each had their own individual take on the policy’s intentions and scope. The perceptions of the Portuguese educators were shaped by their professional knowledge and experiences, rather than by deliberate engagement in policymaking. Johnson and Freeman (2010: 27) write that ‘the line of power does not flow linearly from the pen of the policy’s signer to the choices of the teacher’ – certainly, this is even more so when teachers are only partly familiar with the policy texts. Including the teachers in policymaking induces ownership and has been shown to result in more successful policy implementation (Johnson, 2007; Priestley et al., 2015). The data further suggest that the implementation of Portuguese language policies in England is mediated by multiple factors which are discursive, ideological, structural and institutional in nature. All these

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factors contribute to shaping each school’s response to the partnerships being proposed. For instance, persistent monolingual ideologies and discourses of segregation between languages in mainstream education were shown to continue to constrain language learning. Negotiations about the physical use of school space often end up being delegated to the school premises manager who by default becomes the main decision maker of a school’s language policy. Cooper (1989: 91) has remarked that ‘the way one defi nes the problem influences the policy which is set to deal with the problem’. It is not advocated here that language should be seen as a problem; indeed, it should always be seen as a resource for learning (Ruiz, 1984). If schools define their linguistic and cultural diversity as a logistical problem, all that is required for the implementation of language learning is indeed a policy about the management of premises. Defi ning their linguistic and cultural diversity as a language policy matter, on the other hand, would require the school to review its administrative and educational practices (Corson, 1999). This is an approach that calls for a broader and more participative process of decision making. Johnson (2013a) argues (and I agree) for expanding the community of individuals who have a say in policy development and creating a more open and egalitarian discourse in developing policies. Bridging the gaps between the multiple levels of institutional authority through wider engagement in the development of language policies, including administrators, university scholars, teachers, students and parents, can only improve the language policy process and the significance of multilingual policy intentions. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) How are language policies created, interpreted and appropriated in your context? (2) How can the process of language planning and policy be more participatory? (3) What would you include in a language policy in your model of language education? References Ahearn, L. (2001) Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30, 109–137. Clyne, M. (2008) The monolingual mindset as an impediment to the development of plurilingual potential in Australia. Sociolinguistic Studies 2 (3), 347–365. Collen, I. (2020) Language Trends 2020: Language Teaching in Primary and Secondary Schools in England – Survey Report. London: British Council. Conteh, J., Martin, P. and Robertson, L.H. (eds) (2007) Multilingual Learning Stories from Schools and Communities in Britain. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Cooper, R. (1989) Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corson, D. (1999) Language Policy in Schools: A Resource for Teachers and Administrators. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Council of Europe (2001) Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goff man, E. (1979) Footing. Semiotica 25 (1-2). Haarmann, H. (1991) Monolingualism vs. selective multilingualism: On the future alternatives for Europe as it integrates in the 1990s. Sociolinguistica 5, 7–23. Hornberger, N. (1988) Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance: A Southern Peruvian Quechua case. Dordrecht: Foris. Hornberger, N. (2002) Multilingual language policies and the continua of biliteracy: An ecological approach. Language Policy 1 (1), 27–51. Hornberger, N. (2006) Frameworks and models in language policy and planning. In T. Ricento (ed.) Language Policy: Theory and Method (pp. 24–41). Oxford: Blackwell. Hornberger, N.H. and Johnson, D.C. (2007) Slicing the onion ethnographically: Layers and spaces in multilingual language education policy and practice. TESOL Quarterly 41 (3), 509–532. Hornberger, N.H. and Johnson, D.C. (2011) The ethnography of language policy. In T.L. McCarty (ed.) Ethnography and Language Policy (pp. 273–289). London: Routledge. Issa, T. and Williams, C. (2009) Realising Potential: Complementary Schools in the UK. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Johnson, D.C. (2007) Language policy within and without the school district of Philadelphia. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania. Johnson, D.C. (2013a) Language Policy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, D.C. (2013b) Positioning the language policy arbiter: Governmentality and footing in the school district of Philadelphia. In J. Tollefson (ed.) Language Policies in Education: Critical Issues (pp. 116–136). New York: Routledge. Johnson, D.C. and Freeman, R. (2010) Appropriating language policy on the local level: Working the spaces for bilingual education. In K. Menken and O. García (eds) Negotiating Language Policies in Schools: Educators as Policymakers (pp. 13–31). New York and London: Routledge. Kenner, C. and Ruby, M. (2012) Interconnecting Worlds: Teacher Partnerships for Bilingual Learning. London: Trentham. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2010) Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liddicoat, A.J. (2018) Constrains on agency in micro language policy and planning in schools: A case study of curriculum change. In J. Bouchard and G.P. Glasgow (eds) Agency in Language Policy and Planning: Critical Inquiries (pp. 149–170). New York: Routledge. Lytra, V. and Martin, P. (2010) Sites of Multilingualism: Complementary Schools in Britain Today. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Martin-Jones, M. and Costa Cabral, I. (2018) The critical ethnographic turn in research on language policy and planning. In J.W. Tollefson and M. Pérez-Milans (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning (pp. 71–92). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCarty, T.L. (ed.) (2011) Ethnography and Language Policy. New York: Routledge. Menken, K. and García, O. (eds) (2010) Negotiating Language Policies in Schools: Educators as Policymakers. New York: Routledge. Ministério da Educação (2006) Decreto-lei No. 165/2006, de 11 de Agosto. In Diário da República, 1ª Série, No. 155, de 11 de Agosto de 2006. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda. Priestley, M., Biesta, G. and Robinson, S. (2015) Teacher Agency. An Ecological Approach. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Ricento, T. (2005) Problems with the ‘language-as-resource’ discourse in the promotion of heritage languages in the U.S.A. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9 (3), 348–368. Ricento, T. and Hornberger, N.H. (1996) Unpeeling the onion: Language planning and policy and the ELT professional. TESOL Quarterly 30 (3), 401–427.

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Ruiz, R. (1984) Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal 8 (2), 15–34. Sarhimaa, A. (2012) Language Diversity Is Everybody’s Business – European Language Diversity for All – European Policy Brief. Brussels: European Commission. Shohamy, E. (2010) Cases of language policy resistance in Israel’s centralized educational system. In K. Menken and O. García (eds) Negotiating Language Policies in Schools: Educators as Policymakers (pp. 182–197). New York and London: Routledge. Tinsley, T. (2019) Language Trends 2019: Language Teaching in Primary and Secondary Schools in England – Survey Report. London: British Council. Tinsley, T. and Board, K. (2016) Language Trends 2015/16: The State of Language Learning in Primary and Secondary Schools in England. London: British Council. Tinsley, T. and Doležal, N. (2018) Language Trends 2018: Language Teaching in Primary and Secondary Schools in England – Survey Report. London: British Council. Tollefson, J.W. (2013) Language Policies in Education: Critical Issues (2nd edn). London: Routledge. Valdés, G., González, S.V., García, D.L. and Márquez, P. (2009) Heritage languages and ideologies of language: Unexamined challenges. In D.M. Brinton, O. Kagan and S. Bauckus (eds) Heritage Language Education: A New Field Emerging (2nd edn) (pp. 107–130). London: Routledge. Van der Aa, J. and Blommaert, J. (2017) Ethnographic monitoring and the study of complexity. In M. Martin-Jones and D. Martin (eds) Researching Multilingualism: Critical and Ethnographic Perspectives (pp. 259–271). London and New York: Routledge. Wertsch, J., Tulviste, P. and Hagstrom, F. (1993) A sociocultural approach to agency. In E. Forman, N. Minick and A. Stone (eds) Contexts for Learning: Sociocultural Dynamics in Children’s Development (pp. 336–356). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4 Making Sense of the Internal Diversities of Greek Schools Abroad: Exploring the Purposeful Use of Translation as Communicative Resource for Language Learning and Identity Construction Vally Lytra

Introduction The agiasmos [Benediction ceremony] of the new Greek school attracted a large crowd. Father Alexander of the local Greek-Orthodox parish blessed students, teachers and parents, wishing them all a healthy and successful school year. Local Greek and philhellenic community-based organisations were invited and sent representatives; also, a representative from the City of Lausanne was present. There was a positive energy, a sense of new beginnings that was commented upon very favourably. At the welcome reception afterwards, more established and recently arrived families from Greece mingled effortlessly, chatting away in Greek. Conversations in French and English among adults were less audible, confi ned to clusters of non-Greek heritage spouses and adult learners of Greek. The school’s managing committee comprised of parents with school-age children has made it a point to seek out families who haven’t had any prior experience with institutionalised forms of Greek language education abroad, especially among the recently arrived professionals through community, work-related and personal networks. Also, the school’s remit has been expanded to include, for the fi rst time, adult learners of Greek with or without a Greek heritage affi liation. I spoke 72

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with a young man who is a keen language learner, having already studied Japanese, and was told about a group of teachers teaching Classics in local high schools, who have signed up for Greek classes. (Vally Lytra, Research journal, 9 September 2017)

The entry to my research journal documents the inaugural event of a new Greek school in Francophone Switzerland. The observations start with the Benediction ceremony to mark the auspicious beginning of the new school year. This is an iconic feature of school life in Greece and in the diaspora, signifying the symbolic connection between education, learning and divine blessing. Although the spiritual moorings of the Benediction ceremony may have waned over the last decades, as a cultural practice it continues to have resonance for many families, attracting high levels of attendance. The observations also record the Greek school’s increasingly heterogeneous student population, with diverse biographies, migration trajectories and language abilities. The school welcomes children of recently arrived and well-established families where commonly at least one parent is of Greek heritage, as well as adult learners of Greek who do not tend to have a Greek heritage affiliation. To a large extent, the heterogeneous student population represents the internal diversity of Greek schools abroad, especially after the 2009 fi nancial crisis which pushed many families to immigrate. In this chapter, I examine how one of the school’s key actors (Maria, co-founder, teacher and current director) reflects on the internal diversities of the school and how she attended to them through the purposeful use of translation as communicative resource in instructional interactions and during school events and celebrations. The Greek school described is a grassroots initiative spearheaded by a dedicated group of parents and qualified primary and secondary school teachers with school-age children. It is akin to what have been referred to in the language education literature as ‘community’, ‘complementary’ or ‘supplementary’ schools in the UK and Europe and ‘heritage’ schools in the United States. These are voluntary after-school educational programmes organised, supported and led by different ethnolinguistic, cultural or religious communities with the primary purpose of sustaining the shared language, culture and collective identity of the community for the next generation in a diasporic context (Lytra & Martin, 2010). The chapter draws attention to the internal diversities within diaspora communities and how they are shaping community members’ negotiation of language repertoires and cultural practices (see also studies in CurdtChristiansen & Li, 2021). It contributes to a growing body of recent studies on Greek diaspora communities which have started to document the heightened internal diversities of Greek schools abroad and how these might be shaping and transforming pedagogic practices, language ideologies and language policies as well as the mission and curricula of these

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schools (Damanakis et al., 2014; Panagiotopoulou et al., 2019; Skourtou et al., 2020). Additionally, the chapter extends studies on the use of translation in educational spaces by focusing on how teachers and students deploy acts of translation as communicative resource to co-construct new knowledge and negotiate new identity positionings in a community school context. House (2016) argues that translation mediates between the original and the new, the source and the target, and between different languages and cultures. Wolf (2011) asserts that translators need to be seen as agentive social actors who make choices that are ideologically and politically motivated, as the process of translation not ‘only reflects and transfers existing knowledge, but continuously creates new knowledge’ (Wolf, 2011: 20). In what follows, fi rst I present an account of the conditions that led to the creation of the new Greek school. Then, I discuss the conceptual framework inspired by a repertoire approach to language and language learning and a discursively constructed view of identities. I continue with a description of my chosen methodological approach and my positionality as community researcher. In the Findings section, I draw on extended excerpts from a reflective interview with Maria, supported by written texts, participant observations of school events and celebrations and insights from whole-group discussions with all five teachers during termly school meetings, to address the following questions: (1) How do teachers and students capitalise on the purposeful use of translation as communicative resource for language learning and identity negotiations? (2) To what extent and in what ways can such language practices reshape pedagogies and ideologies in community schools? (3) What tensions in the ideology and practice of community schools do they bring to the fore? New Educational Realities, New Mobilities

The creation of the new Greek school came about at a particular historical and sociopolitical juncture. In 2011, in the throes of the fi nancial crisis, the Greek state and its educational authorities halted the administration and fi nancial support of many Greek schools abroad by substantially reducing teacher secondments and the free-of-charge delivery of textbooks and other materials (see Stylou, 2019, for further discussion). Consequently, the administrative and fi nancial responsibilities of maintaining many of these schools were transferred to parents, diaspora institutions and communities. These new educational realities have co-occurred with the ‘new’ migration of families from Greece to Europe and other parts of the world. Described in a local daily as ‘a Greek wave on the shores of Lake Geneva’ (Collet, 2018), Francophone Switzerland has witnessed a sharp increase in the immigration of highly educated Greek professionals with young families post-2009. Beyond broad similarities in the socioeconomic and educational profi les of ‘new’ migrant

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families, there remain important differences in terms of motivations for migration, educational and professional trajectories, processes of insertion and adaptation in the host society, individual and familial expectations and aspirations. The recent Greek family migration follows earlier mobilities from Greece and across the Greek diaspora and has contributed – albeit in a small way – to sustained high levels of migration in the region. The main drivers of migration have been economic and educational opportunity. Lausanne and its environs have attracted a large number of international sports organisations (most notably the International Olympic Committee) and multinationals as well as companies specialising in health care, public and private health care providers and several internationally acclaimed higher education institutions (BLI, 2019: 15). Most of the Greek school parents in the study are employed in these sectors and contribute alongside approximately 160 other nationalities to the emergent ‘cosmopolitan’ outlook of the city and its environs (BLI, 2019: 6). The increase of Greek families with school-age children in the region has created a sustained interest in Greek language and literacy learning, especially in early years and primary school. Formal institutional initiatives, such as Greek schools and Greek home language classes in international schools, vie for parental attention with increasingly popular Greek language courses over Skype and other platforms with language tutors based in Greece or in the region. The Greek school in this study is one of two not-for-profit, fee-paying Greek schools in the area. Founded in June 2017, according to the school’s website it was conceived out of a desire for high-quality Greek language and culture classes for children and adults through an individualised, cross-curricular and inclusive approach to pedagogy, fi rmly anchored onto students’ real-life experiences and encounters living and learning in a multi-ethnic city. Theoretical Orientations A repertoire approach to language and language learning

The changing demographics in language classrooms due to migrationinduced multilingualism has called for adopting a theoretical lens that views multilingualism as being at the centre of second language acquisition (SLA) and language education with the purpose of ‘expand[ing] the perspectives of researchers and teachers of L2 learners with regard to learners’ diverse multilingual repertoires of meaning-making resources and identities’ (Douglas Fir Group, 2016: 25). This conceptual shift towards multilingualism, also referred to as the ‘multilingual turn’ in language analysis (Conteh & Meier, 2014; May, 2014), has highlighted the importance of activating and building upon students’ and teachers’ diverse and complex language and cultural knowledge as a resource for learning,

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instruction and social identification against the dominance of wider societal monolingualism and normative language purist ideologies. This conceptual repositioning has problematised a homogeneous and autonomous view of language and language learning as the acquisition of a set of skills where languages are uncoupled from the cultures of which they are part. They have shifted our understanding from language as a discrete and bounded entity to language as ‘a set of ideologically-defi ned resources and practices’ (Heller, 2007: 2), and from a focus on code to language users and their language repertoires embedded in specific biographies and sociocultural contexts. In this chapter, I take a ‘repertoire’ approach to language, where repertoires are defi ned as ‘biographically organized complexes of resources’ that ‘follow the rhythms of human lives’ (Blommaert & Backus, 2011: 9). Within a repertoire approach, Blommaert and Backus (2011: 9) further argue, language learning is regarded as ‘a process of growth, of sequential learning of certain registers, styles, genres and linguistic varieties while shedding or altering previous existing one’. This approach foregrounds the dynamic nature of language and language learning as well as the historical anchoring and contextual and biographical embeddedness of language repertoires (Busch, 2012; Kramsch, 2012). Rymes (2014) extends the notion of repertoire beyond languages, registers and genres to ‘communicative repertoire’. This includes a broader range of meaning-making resources comprised of ‘gesture, dress, posture, and even knowledge of communicative routines, familiarity with types of food or drink, and mass media references including phrases, dance moves, and recognizable intonation patterns that circulate via actors, musicians, and other superstars’ (Rymes, 2014: 9). Taking a repertoire approach to language and language learning to investigate the internal diversities within Greek schools and classrooms compels us to explore the distribution of knowledge and access to languages and other meaning-making resources and the negotiation of language ideologies and discourses. It sheds light on how particular ways of speaking associated with particular linguistic forms might be privileged over others, under what conditions and by whom, and their social valuations. An emergent and discursively constructed view of identities

The aforementioned conceptual repositioning is in line with a broader questioning of fi xed and separate framings of identities and the traditional modernist view of the organic relationship between language, identity and the nation, where language is regarded as a quintessential marker of ethnonational identity associated with inheritance and a particular territory (Pujolar, 2007). Instead, identities are viewed as emergent, fluid and discursively constructed (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004). Following Bucholtz and Hall (2005), I regard identities as a ‘relational and sociocultural

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phenomenon that emerges and circulates in local discourse contexts of interaction’ (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005: 586). Identities are thus constituted through indexical processes by which social actors create ‘semiotic links between linguistic forms and social meanings’ (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005: 586). These theoretical perspectives illustrate that ‘doing’ identity work involves how social actors reproduce, resist or rework particular subject positions, as they emphasise, downplay or silence affiliation and co-membership in different discursive environments. In contemporary diasporic contexts, community relations and membership are seen as complex and continuously reconstructed and boundaries between communities as malleable and permeable (Li, 2018). Studies on language and identity have highlighted that language practices may not neatly map onto national, ethnic or cultural affiliations (Hua & Li, 2016), that there may be a mismatch between language proficiency in the heritage language and a sense of cultural belonging (Canagarajah, 2008) and that group membership is dynamic and affiliation and inheritance are negotiated (Rampton, 1995). At the same time, it is important to remember that fluid and flexible conceptualisations of language, identity and diaspora community ‘may be at odds with widely-held beliefs among participants who often see “their” language, identity and community as bounded objects that have remained unchanged over time and across space. While it might be plausible to dismiss participants’ views as “folk etymologies”, they function as powerful “member categories” with real-life consequences for their users’ (Lytra, 2014: 553). Concurring with Jaspers and Madsen (2019), instead of dismissing dominant idealised participant conceptions, it is crucial to examine the interplay between linguistic fi xity and fluidity and the possibilities for social positioning they open up or close down. This co-focus is all the more relevant in researching language and identity in community school contexts whose primary purpose is to sustain students’ languages, cultures and identities of inheritance. These educational spaces are often constructed by the curriculum and parental expectations in essentialised ways, as indexing ethnonational belonging (Lytra, 2014). Translation as communicative resource in educational spaces

The use of translation practices can be seen as a response to the heightened linguistic diversity within educational institutions and the call for flexible pedagogic arrangements that are attuned to students’ needs. Aligned with a repertoire approach to language and language learning, translanguaging for pedagogic purposes recognises and attempts to leverage students’ and teachers’ entire language repertoires and all meaningmaking modes in an integrated way for effective teaching and learning (García & Li, 2014). Through a translanguaging lens, translation is seen as one of many resources available to students and teachers to support

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communication and language learning in multilingual educational spaces. Students and teachers deploy translation practices to navigate languages and cultural references and make links between them and across different formal and informal learning contexts (Mary & Young, 2017). In addition, translation has the potential to develop inclusive practices that value and legitimise all languages and cultures in the classroom as resources for learning. It encourages participation and supports students’ socioemotional development (Kirsch & Seele, 2020). However, studies have also alerted us to tensions in and potentially exclusionary implications of flexible language use in educational settings. Jaspers (2015) points out that using French and students’ home languages (Arabic and Turkish) may reinforce dominant language hierarchies in a Dutch-medium secondary school in Brussels. In a similar vein, Charalambous et al. (2020: 118) illustrate that students’ public performances of Turkish in a Greek-Cypriot primary school elicited ‘emotional discomfort, and hesitation resulting in self-censorship’, interrogating to what extent it is possible to avoid social valuations associated with named languages. In this chapter, we use the focus on translation practices as a lens to probe into the evolving language ideologies and language practices at the school and the possibilities and tensions in students’ and teachers’ negotiations of knowledge building, linguistic expertise and identity articulations. A Slow Autoethnography of Greek Language Education Abroad

The data presented in this chapter are part of a slow autoethnographic study of the creation and establishment of a new Greek school in Francophone Switzerland. I have adopted Grandia’s (2015) idea of ‘slow’ ethnography to describe a mode of research where the ethnographer is embedded in the research context through longstanding entanglements and relations with participants. This mode of research involves embedding oneself in place and pace (Grandia, 2015: 304). My research interest in Greek language education was sparked by my role as the mother of two young children who were growing up away from their parents’ country of origin (Greece). Having recently relocated to a new country, I was looking for an educational and social space where my children could meet, play and learn alongside other children who had familial ties with Greece. Upon moving to Lausanne in August 2009, I sought out and enrolled my children in the then state-run Greek school which operated on Saturday mornings. Over more than a decade, I have followed closely the rhythms of Greek school life in Lausanne and have witnessed first-hand the aforementioned changes and transitions at the level of educational policy and demographics and the opportunities and challenges they have posed. At the same time, I have played an active role in supporting, co-shaping and advocating for Greek language education through my interconnected roles

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and identities. My professional identities of ethnographer, applied linguist and language educator are intertwined with my identities as mother, friend, fellow Greek and the different roles I have taken up over the years as Greek school parent. More recently, I was one of the founding members of the new Greek school and have been actively co-constructing with teachers the school’s pedagogy and curriculum. In this respect, the research has a strong autoethnographic element in that I observe and attempt to make sense of the participants’ ways of being and knowing from their perspectives while being a co-participant in the sociocultural context myself. Being embedded in Greek school life over time has meant that the research has followed its pace. There have been periods of intensive participant observation and documentation, such as during school transitions and tensions, the design and implementation of educational projects, the performance of school events and celebrations, and other quieter periods. Since the observations and visual and written texts collected over three years reflect my own intellectual and personal perspectives of representing events and practices that constitute the ordinary and everyday of Greek school life, there is a concern that the research may sound somewhat journalistic or culminate in a series of anecdotal vignettes. I have sought to address this difficult conundrum by taking a collaborative stance and by ‘engaging research participants as dialogic partners’ (Campbell & Lassiter, 2010: 760). Lassiter (2005: 16) defi nes collaborative ethnography as ‘an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration at every point in the ethnographic process, without veiling it – from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, and, especially, through the writing process’. This epistemic position allows for divergent views, visions and interpretations to be expressed and recorded. It also challenges the authority of the ethnographic gaze, thus redefining research participants from ‘subjects’ or ‘informants’ to ‘epistemic partners’ with their own agendas (Campbell & Lassiter, 2010: 760). The teacher who features in this chapter, Maria, has been an ‘epistemic partner’ in this research journey since its inception. Upon relocating to Switzerland in 2010, she too enrolled her child in the state-run Greek school and was an active member of the Parents’ Association. Having studied history and archaeology and being a qualified secondary school teacher, she was one of the co-founders of the new Greek school, one of its first teachers and, as the school continues to grow, its first director since 2018. Throughout this time, we have worked together on supporting and promoting Greek language education in the region and we share a long-established friendship and a relationship of trust. She too is embedded in the sociocultural context of the study. The grounded community research presented in this chapter calls for a cautious, respectful and reciprocal approach to analysis and interpretation. The chapter draws on excerpts from a reflective interview with Maria, supported by written texts, participant observations of school events and

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celebrations and whole-group discussions with all five teachers during termly meetings documented in my research journal to provide ‘a thick understanding of the local’ (Grandia, 2015: 312). How Maria and the other teachers made sense of the internal diversities of the school’s student population and how they adapted and evaluated their pedagogic practice accordingly emerged as recurring themes in the data. Informed by the theoretical perspectives guiding this chapter, the selection and analysis of the interview excerpts focus specifically on the purposeful use of translation as communicative resource in instructional interactions and during school events and celebrations and its potential for language and literacy learning and identity development. Findings Engaging with diversity: Teacher beliefs and reported use of translation as communicative practice

As the fieldnotes from the Benediction ceremony point out, since its inception the Greek school has attracted many newly arrived internationally mobile families from Greece and other countries. Children join the school with rich multilingual repertoires: a walk around the school yard during break times revealed children seamlessly moving between different forms of Greek, French and occasionally English, and deploying their language resources to varying degrees for play and sociability depending on friendship configurations and their expanding language capabilities. I seldom observed any overt policing of linguistic boundaries, such as the use of phrases like ‘we speak Greek here’. Maria and the other teachers are multilingual as well and share similar migration trajectories and language socialisation experiences with many of the internationally mobile families whose children attend the school. While the school was founded with the explicit aim of sustaining children’s Greek language, culture and identity, the working consensus among teachers seems to be not only to acknowledge linguistic diversity as the norm but also to purposefully exploit it as a resource for instructional purposes. For instance, in termly meetings, teachers reported encouraging the use of digital dictionaries and translation applications such as Google Translate for literacy homework or the use of translation practices for scaffolding purposes (e.g. to ensure comprehension, support content development) and for classroom management. I asked Maria to specifically reflect on how she integrated the use of French and English in her teaching practice and under what conditions: Maria:

I’ll give you an example. Yesterday for instance during the history class we were talking about democracy, we asked ‘what is democracy?’. First, they responded in French, they know this word in French. Then I said, ‘this word which you know in French and

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some of you have already been taught some things about [democracy] [it] started in this city’. We are studying [classical] Athens at the moment. ‘What does this [word] mean?’ ‘Why are we learning about it?’ ‘Because for the fi rst time in history in a very specific way everybody decides for everybody’. And ‘how did they decide?’ and we discussed the details, I talked about it in simple terms so that they can understand. Children immediately translate the word in the language they know to understand [it], and this happens all the time with all things. We were working on vocabulary building about parts of the house and doing house chores. They were telling me the words in French fi rst, especially some of the children for whom Greek is mainly a second language, or they try to remember in Greek, and they juxtapose the two words. I can’t say that I use French all the time, I don’t want to create this impression, but sometimes and for some important things I want them to make the connection

Vally: Maria: yes, make the connection

In her reflection, Maria discusses the co-creation of pedagogical moments with her students that welcomed their other languages and curricular knowledge from the mainstream school during whole-class instruction. French is the language of instruction in mainstream schools in the region while German and English are taught as foreign languages. Some children attend English-medium international schools where French, German and Spanish are also taught. Through translation, students, especially those dominant in French, were able to use their language knowledge of French to support their developing understanding of new vocabulary and concepts and the creation of new meanings in Greek. Maria remarked on the ubiquitous practice of translation as a pedagogic practice initiated by the students: ‘children immediately translate the word in the language they know to understand [it], this happens all the time with all things’. As Leeman et al. (2011), Little and Kirwan (2019) and Prada (2019), among others, have stressed, making such comparisons across languages supports critical metalinguistic awareness, an important element for the development of language and literacy abilities. Indeed, teachers repeatedly reported drawing children’s attention to French and English words of Greek origin and highlighted how identifying the root origins of words could enhance their vocabulary and conceptual development across languages. The translation act of the word ‘democratía’ in Greek to ‘démocratie’ in French is an example of how students sought to build on the knowledge they already had and brought to the Greek language class. It served to activate and expand their previous curricular knowledge from the mainstream school and connect it to their learning of Ancient Greek history in the here and now. The translation act pointed to an understanding of students’ linguistic resources and (language) learning experiences as

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interconnected and their language repertoires not as fi xed but as constantly evolving. In this view, features of Greek are seen as part of students’ wider communicative repertoire anchored onto their everyday lived experiences across learning spaces. From a pedagogical standpoint, it suggests the endorsement of flexible language practices based on the assumption that students’ and teachers’ entire communicative repertoires can be actively and strategically deployed as a resource for learning. It supports the development of a positive sense of self by giving children some choice over their language use and making them feel valued and included. Moreover, Jonsson (2019: 338) has argued that such student-initiated translations have the potential ‘for levelling the teacher-student relationship’ – at least temporarily. They provide opportunities for students to showcase their prior knowledge and negotiate ‘expert’ identity positionings, thereby promoting students’ motivation and self-esteem (Leeman et al., 2011). Yet, towards the end of her reflection Maria qualifies her own use of French during Greek language lessons by mitigating the extent of its use: ‘I can’t say I use French all the time, I don’t want to create this impression, but sometimes and for some important things’. This stance shift seems to point to an inherent tension in the ideology and practice of community schools with regard to what is considered as appropriate language use (Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Ganuza & Headman, 2017). While flexible language practices, such as the use of student-initiated translations, may be viewed as communicatively and pedagogically valuable, the use of French or other languages all the time and/or without a specific pedagogical purpose did not appear to be appropriate or legitimate in a Greek language instructional setting. Similar issues of appropriateness and legitimacy were raised when teachers commented on students’ French or English inflected Greek as requiring remedial work. On the one hand, teachers acknowledged that traces of other languages were inevitable as children were dominant in French and/or English. On the other hand, they reported their efforts to eliminate these traces in the children’s written work in particular, through employing self- and other-correction strategies. The teachers’ stance towards French and English inflected Greek illustrates the at times uncomfortable co-existence of more flexible language use alongside more rigid language separation practices. It highlights the tension between ‘seeking to teach and learn through linguistic diversity’ and ‘participants’ understanding of what kind of languaging is appropriate’ (Gynne, 2019: 347). In the next section, I explore how literary translation can be mobilised to construct an inclusive school culture and open up opportunities for new identity positionings, through the example of a storytelling performance in Greek and French that was organised by the school’s managing committee.

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Literary translation and the negotiation of new identity positionings

Cultural events and celebrations are a permanent fi xture of Greek school life. These events tend to be outward facing, opening the doors of the school to a larger audience, for instance adult learners of Greek and their families and friends, parents of school-age children, and other Greek community members and interested parties. These events serve to reinforce the teaching of Greek culture which is seen as interconnected to Greek language teaching. At the same time, they aim to build a sense of school community as well as to anchor the school onto the local context of Lausanne and Francophone Switzerland. In these particular contexts, literacy events in French, such as the recitation of a poem written by a 19th century local Swiss poet to commemorate the Greek War of Independence and the philhellenic movement in the region, or closing the Christmas nativity school play with a student-initiated rap performance, were viewed by the teachers as valued practices and generally positively evaluated. Teachers regarded the introduction of these cultural texts during cultural events and celebrations as affording opportunities for students to negotiate their own voice and sense of being which is indexed through bringing together and juxtaposing Greek and French cultural texts. One such cultural event was the performance of folk stories in Greek and French. The performer was a well-known Swiss storyteller, actor and translator who had lived and studied in Greece and who is currently based in Geneva. He has edited and translated into French two books of Greek and Cypriot traditional folktales. For the school event, he performed folktales in Greek that he had selected and adapted for younger and older audiences, followed by a Greek folktale he had translated into French. Maria reflected on the performance and the impression it made on her with the following words: Maria:

so, he performed stories in Greek using, I was surprised to see, literary words, unusual words, words you don’t hear in everyday talk, dialectal words. Additionally, he translated Cypriot folktales which are generally speaking difficult to translate. When he was narrating the stories, his language took on the distinctiveness of the region [of the folktale]. And, of course, he did this magical thing; he narrated a Greek folktale in French. I was sitting in the corner of the school hall and it was an amazing moment I have to tell you. I was checking on the children for practical reasons and I saw how they were watching attentively and how they were reacting to the stories and how they reacted after the story in French. I mean they immediately understood that the two languages were interconnected in their minds in a very pleasant way at that particular moment. What did they understand? I can understand a person who speaks Greek and French. Secondly, this was the fi rst whole-school event.

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Vally: Maria:

Vally: Maria:

I saw they were communicating with each other. They were watching the performance and they were collectively processing it. They were aware of being part of the Greek school. what did you make of the performance of a Greek folktale in French? [It was] necessary, that’s the fi rst word that comes to mind. The man himself and his audience move seamlessly between the two languages. It was absolutely normal for him to say a Greek folktale in French as well. And, of course, our adult learners who had difficulties really enjoyed it. Through translation a Greek tale is represented in another language. It’s important, it’s a gain, it’s part of bilingualism from the other side of the mirror. You suddenly see a Greek text, a Greek thought, how can I explain this, a tradition, a way of life, because that’s what folktales represent, historical moments and so on, you hear it in another language in another language.

In her extended narrative, Maria reconstructs the performance by emphasising the linguistic and cultural hybridity of the folktales drawing together different forms of literary and dialectal forms of Greek from different parts of Greece and Cyprus. The performance in question was enhanced by objects and live music (the storyteller played the clarinet) and it attracted adult learners of Greek who had joined the event with their own children. Despite the cognitive demands the stories placed on the children and the adult learners, Maria describes the high level of collective engagement of the audience with the storytelling and the enjoyment they experienced. According to Maria, the highlight of the performance was when the storyteller ‘did a magical thing’ – he narrated a Greek story in French. From a pedagogic standpoint, the integration of a Greek story in French in the performance has the effect of encouraging students to make connections between aspects of the two languages and cultures and their previous experiences of the storytelling genre. Maria observed the children quietly discussing the performance, asking each other questions and points of clarification. The translation of the Greek folktale in French and its retelling acts as a multimodal scaffold for Greek language and culture learning, especially for language learners new to Greek. It also creates a social space through which both children and adult learners of Greek can assert their legitimacy as being simultaneously Greek and French speakers regardless of language ability. Although the two languages are kept separate in the storytelling, Maria sees them as ‘interconnected in their minds’, as constituting integrated parts of the audience’s language repertoires. Consistent with a translanguaging perspective, this conceptualisation of language suggests that the boundaries of socially named languages are broken down in the speakers’ minds (Li, 2011). Makalela (2019: 249) argues that such ‘a unitary view which posits that languages are fused at

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a cognitive level is helpful for teachers so that they can treat these languages as complementary rather than isolated units that could be placed in separated boxes’. The literary translation of the Greek folktale into French and its performance offers students the possibility of engaging in a new way with collective representations of Greek culture and heritage. Blackledge and Creese (2010: 148) remind us that folk stories ‘become cultural artefacts, which develop community status through their iterative retelling and represent particular understandings of heritage’. On the one hand, these understandings of Greek culture and heritage point to the past, to stories from a distant time and place. As such, they represent, as Maria points out, ‘a tradition, a way of life […] historical moments’ and endorse culturally authentic ways of behaving, valuing and being in the world. On the other hand, they orient to the present and accrue new meanings in the local context of the bilingual performance. They provide the audience with social identification possibilities, highlighting the importance of multiple and interconnected languages and cultures in this identification process. Maria uses the metaphor of the act of literary translation as a mirror that reflects aspects of Greek culture and heritage ‘from the other side’. The tale is disembedded from its original language and cultural context (Greek) and recontextualised into a new one (French). The implication is that it provides the audience with a new but equally legitimate viewpoint of what counts as Greek culture and heritage. For children of Greek heritage in particular it offers an alternative view into their own culture and heritage through the majority language and culture and the language in which they are most likely to be dominant, supporting them to build their self-esteem and a positive linguistic identity as multilinguals. In this way, the storytelling performance becomes about them, about being part of a Greek school community in the diaspora that collectively values and celebrates the students’ multilingual realities, while mainly maintaining language boundaries. Conclusion

In this chapter, I explored how teachers and students in a newly established Greek community school made sense of and responded to the internal diversities within the school which in turned reflected broader demographic changes in Greek communities worldwide as a result of the ‘new’ Greek migration. I illustrated that acts of translation were deployed as a communicative resource to serve important discursive functions: to bridge curriculum knowledge across learning spaces; to support and expand the learning of new vocabulary and concepts; and to develop critical metalinguistic awareness. Translation practices connected learning and texts to the students’ lived and embodied experiences and broke down boundaries between mainstream, community languages education and

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the wider community. Student-initiated translations fostered a sense of agency to access knowledge and understanding while propelling the teacher to relinquish her linguistic authority role in the classroom and take up the role of facilitator and co-learner (García & Li, 2014). I also showed how acts of translation opened up discursive identity spaces for students and adult learners of Greek to sustain existing identities and stimulate new identity positionings as ‘experts’ and as ‘multilingual learners of multiple learning communities’ (Leeman et al., 2011: 484). As such, inspired by the work of Li (2011), acts of translation can be viewed as creating momentarily a ‘translanguaging space’, that is, ‘a social space for the multilingual language user by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment, their attitude, belief and ideology, their cognitive and physical capacity into one coordinated and meaningful performance, and making it into a lived experience’ (Li, 2011: 1223). In such a space, teachers and students can work together to co-construct new knowledge and negotiate new identity positionings. Students in particular can develop an understanding of Greek language learning as part of their broader communicative repertoires that encompass language and other semiotic resources. It is important to remember that the translation practices described in this chapter emerged alongside language practices that consolidated language boundaries. Maria’s qualification of using translation ‘sometimes and for some important things’ as well as teachers’ reports of remedial work on students’ French and English inflected Greek brought to the fore the tension of linguistic and cultural fluidity and fi xity that is at the core of community schools’ ideology and practice: on the one hand, the recognition of diversities within the school and in broader society and the adoption of flexible and adaptive language and cultural practices and, on the other hand, the desire to protect, maintain and pass onto the next generation reified and stable representations of community languages, cultures and identities (Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Li, 2018; Li & Hua, 2014). This tension is inherent in a repertoire approach to language that encompasses both monolingual and multilingual forms and their social valuations. It also alerts us to whose language and cultural resources count, where and when, and who decides (Lytra, 2013). At the same time, Maria’s qualification needs to be seen within concerns about pedagogical translanguaging further marginalising home/minority languages and consolidating the dominance of majority/national languages (Ganuza & Headman, 2017; García, 2009). To this end, one may argue that the maintenance of language boundaries in Greek community school classrooms can be viewed as a response to the double invisibility of Greek communities and their schools in Francophone Switzerland (Lytra, 2014). Firstly, the invisibility of community languages in general in mainstream Swiss educational provision and society has resulted in the absence of links between community

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language education efforts and formal schooling processes. While Switzerland has four official national languages (French, German, Italian and Romansch), the implicit message is that only French and to a lesser extent German and English (the two taught school languages) are important in the region where the Greek school is located. Secondly, with the exception of some (negative) media coverage during the fi nancial crisis, in public discourse Greek communities in Francophone Switzerland have historically been constructed as small yet ‘model’ migrant communities. More recently, the ‘new’ Greek migration of ‘highly qualified individuals’ has attracted some media coverage and the new Greek school has been hailed as a hub of ‘harmonious integration’ through ‘multiplying the dialogue and the ties with the receiving society’ (Collet, 2018; Lytra, 2019). Such celebratory media discourses, however, have the effect of homogenising Greek communities’ and community members’ lived experiences and biographical trajectories and erasing the internal diversities within them. Further studies can focus on how these dominant discourses mutually shape and are shaped by social actors’ accounts of the kind of school and learning community they imagine and enact. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) Think about your own educational context, or an educational context you are familiar with. What are the language repertoires of students and teachers and what language ideologies circulate in your context? (2) How might translation practices support students and teachers to develop their agency to use their entire language repertoires for learning and identity negotiations? (3) How can the use of translation as a communicative resource contribute to a translanguaging pedagogy, a pedagogy that is inclusive and socially just and that aims to educate students holistically? (4) What tensions might arise when using a translanguaging pedagogy in your context? (5) What other communicative resources besides translation can students and teachers draw upon to co-create a translanguaging space? References Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2010) Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective. London: Continuum. BLI (Bureau Lausannois pour l’Intégration des Imigrés) (2019) Déchiffer la Démographique Lausannoise [Deciphering the Demographics of Lausanne]. Cahiers 8. See https:// www.lausanne.ch/vie-pratique/integration (accessed 25 August 2020). Blommaert, J. and Backus, A. (2011) Repertoires revisited: ‘Knowing language’ in superdiversity. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies No. 67. See http://www. academia.edu/6365319/WP67_Blommaert_and_Backus_2011._Repertoires_revisited_Knowing_language_in_superdiversity (accessed 25 August 2020).

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Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2005) Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7 (4–5), 585–614. Busch, B. (2012) The linguistic repertoire revisited. Applied Linguistics 33, 503–523. Campbell, E. and Lassiter, L.E. (2010) From collaborative ethnography to collaborative pedagogy. Reflections on the Other Side of Middletown project and community–university research partnerships. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 41 (4), 370–385. Canagarajah, S. (2008) Language shift and the family: Questions from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12 (2), 143–176. Charalambous, C., Charalambous, P., Zembylas, M. and Theodorou, E. (2020) Translanguaging, (in)security and social justice education. In J.A. Panayotopoulou, L. Rosen and J. Strylaka (eds) Inclusion, Education and Translanguaging: How to Promote Social Justice in (Teacher) Education (pp. 105–123). Wiesbaden: Springer. Collet, C. (2018) Une Vague Grecque sur les Rives du Léman [A Greek Wave on the Shores of Lake Geneva]. 24 heures, 15 March. Conteh, J. and Meier, G. (eds) (2014) The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Curdt-Christiansen, X.-L. and Li, W. (2021) Changing faces of transnational communities in Britain. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 269, 3–13. Damanakis, M., Constantinides, S. and Tamis, A. (eds) (2014) Νέα Mετανάστευση από και προς την Ελλάδα [New Migration from and to Greece]. Rethymno: University of Crete. Douglas Fir Group, The (2016) A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual word. The Modern Language Journal 100 (S1), 19–47. Ganuza, N. and Hedman, C. (2017) Ideology vs. practice: Is there a space for translanguaging in mother tongue instruction? In B.A. Paulsrud, J. Rosén, B. Straszer and Å. Wedin (eds) New Perspectives on Translanguaging and Education (pp. 208–226). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. García, O. and Li, W. (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Grandia, L. (2015) Slow ethnography: A hut with a view. Critique of Anthropology 35 (3), 301–317. Gynne, A. (2019) ‘English or Swedish please, no Dari!’ – (trans)languaging and language policing in upper secondary school’s language introduction programme in Sweden. Classroom Discourse 10 (3–4), 347–368. Heller, M. (2007) Bilingualism: A Social Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. House, J. (2016) Translation as Communication across Languages and Cultures. London: Routledge. Hua, Z. and Li, W. (2016) ‘Where are you really from?’: Nationality and ethnicity talk in everyday interactions. Applied Linguistics Review 7 (4), 449–470. Jaspers, J. (2015) Modelling linguistic diversity at school: The excluding impact of inclusive multilingualism. Language Policy 14 (2), 109–129. Jaspers, J. and Madsen, L.M. (2019) Fixity and fluidity in sociolinguistic theory and practice. In J. Jaspers and L.M. Madsen (eds) Critical Perspectives on Linguistic Fixity and Fluidity: Languagised Lives (pp. 1–26). New York: Routledge. Jonsson, C. (2019) ‘What is it called in Spanish?’: Parallel monolingualisms and translingual classroom talk. Classroom Discourse 10 (3–4), 323–346. Kirsch, C. and Seele, C. (2020) Translanguaging in early childhood education in Luxembourg: From practice to pedagogy. In J.A. Panayotopoulou, L. Rosen and J. Strylaka (eds) Inclusion, Education and Translanguaging: How to Promote Social Justice in (Teacher) Education (pp. 63–81). Wiesbaden: Springer.

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Kramsch, C. (2012) Editor’s introduction to the Special Issue. L2 Journal 4, 1–8. Lassiter, L.E. (2005) Collaborative ethnography and public anthropology. Current Anthropology 46 (1), 83–106. Leeman, J., Rabin, L. and Román-Mendoza, E. (2011) Identity and activism in heritage language education. The Modern Language Journal 95 (iv), 481–495. Li, W. (2011) Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43, 1222–1235. Li, W. (2018) Community languages in late modernity. In J.W. Tollefson and M. PerezMilans (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning (pp. 592–609). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Li, W. and Hua, Z. (2014) Language and literacy teaching, learning and socialization in the Chinese complementary school classroom. In X.L. Curdt-Christiansen and A. Hancock (eds) Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities: Many Pathways to Being Chinese (pp. 117–135). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Little, D. and Kirwan, D. (2019) Engaging with Linguistic Diversity: A Study of Educational Inclusion in an Irish Primary School. London: Bloomsbury. Lytra, V. (2013) From kebapçı to professional: The commodification of language discourse and social mobility in Turkish complementary schools in the UK. In A. Duchêne, M. Moyer and C. Roberts (eds) Language, Migration and Social (In)equality: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work (pp. 147–167). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Lytra, V. (2014) Revisiting discourses of language, identity and community in a transnational context through a commemorative book project. Multilingua 33 (5–6), 551–574. Lytra, V. (2019) Conclusion. In J.A. Panagiotopoulou, L. Rosen, C. Kirsch and A. Chatzidaki (eds) ‘New’ Migration of Families from Greece to Europe and Canada: A ‘New’ Challenge for Education? (pp. 237–252). Wiesbaden: Springer. Lytra, V. and Martin, P. (eds) (2010) Sites of Multilingualism. Complementary Schools in Britain Today. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Makalela, L. (2019) Uncovering the universals of ubuntu translanguaging in classroom discourses. Classroom Discourse 10 (3–4), 237–251. Mary, L. and Young, A. (2017) Engaging with emergent bilinguals and their families in the pre-primary classroom to foster well-being, learning and inclusion. Language and Intercultural Communication 17 (4), 455–473. May, S. (ed.) (2014) The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Panagiotopoulou, J.A., Rosen, L., Kirsch, C. and Chatzidaki, A. (eds) (2019) ‘New’ Migration of Families from Greece to Europe and Canada: A ‘New’ Challenge for Education? Wiesbaden: Springer. Pavlenko, A. and Blackledge, A. (2004) Introduction: New theoretical approaches to the study of negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. In A. Pavlenko and A. Blackledge (eds) Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (pp. 1–33). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Prada, J. (2019) Exploring the role of translanguaging in linguistic ideological and attitudinal reconfigurations in the Spanish classroom for heritage speakers. Classroom Discourse 10 (3–4), 306–322. Pujolar, J. (2007) Bilingualism and the nation-state in the post-national era. In M. Heller (ed.) Bilingualism: A Social Approach (pp. 71–95). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. Harlow: Longman. Rymes, B. (2014) Communicating Beyond Language: Everyday Encounters with Diversity. New York: Routledge.

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Skourtou, E., Kourtis-Kazoullis, V., Aravossitas, T. and Trifonas, P.P. (eds) (2020) Language Diversity in Greece: Local Challenges with International Implications. Cham: Springer. Stylou, G. (2019) Greek language education in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany: Changes and perspectives of Greek language teachers. In J.A. Panagiotopoulou, L. Rosen, C. Kirsch and A. Chatzidaki (eds) ‘New’ Migration of Families from Greece to Europe and Canada: A ‘New’ Challenge for Education? (pp. 175–198). Wiesbaden: Springer. Wolf, M. (2011) Mapping the field: Sociological perspectives on translation. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 207, 1–28.

Commentary for Part 1 Ana Souza

Liberating Language Education adopts a situated approach to revisit key concepts in language education. More specifically, this book presents timely contributions that invite the readers to reconsider the impact of the ‘monolingual bias’ and its replacement by a ‘multilingual turn’ on the educational experiences of learners linked to multiple identities and languages. The ‘monolingual bias’ is based on the notion that the ‘native-speaker’ and their language variety is the unmarked, uniform, invariant standard to be used as the reference for language learning (May, 2014b). In contrast, the ‘multilingual turn’ challenges the ‘bounded, unitary and reified conceptions of languages and related notions of “native speaker” and “mother tongue”’ (May, 2014a: 1). Besides being based on a new understanding of learning, the ‘multilingual turn’ is also based on a perspective that values equal opportunities for learning (Meier & Conteh, 2014). This newness, though, is characteristic of the West (Blackledge et al., 2014). After all, ‘multilingualism has been a naturalised dimension of life for most people in the world, such as on the Indian subcontinent or in Africa’ (Lo Bianco, 2014: xv). In fact, multilingualism has long been advocated as the norm by scholars in other contexts, albeit with little impact on the pedagogies and practices adopted in schools worldwide (May, 2014a). The opening section of Liberating Language Education – Policies, Discourses and Ideologies – illustrates how multilingualism is experienced in four different educational contexts. The content of the chapters can be categorised by the ideas behind three English idioms: the road to hell is paved with good intentions, gaining ground, and peeling the onion. Chapter 1 calls attention to the fact that good intentions are not always converted into best educational practices. Chapter 2 shows how the representation of ethnic and linguistic minorities in textbooks is becoming more accepted. Chapter 3 explores different groups of actors who play a role in language policies. Chapter 4 illustrates how translation can be used as a way of implementing multilingual pedagogical practices. The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions

The interactions in the fi rst chapter are set in a primary school in London. The author, Thomas Quehl, examines how multilingualism is 91

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represented in the school. For that, Quehl draws on his fieldnotes, participatory activities with students and an interview with a teacher of a Year 4 group (eight-year-old pupils). The picture presented in this chapter contrasts with the content of the second chapter. Here, in spite of teachers’ good intentions, minority ethnicity and languages are marginalised. The linguistic norm in the school and in the specific classroom being reported is monolingual and multilingualism is only present in a symbolic way. This approach to the students’ languages and to languages in the school curriculum has been named by Quehl as ‘multilingualism light’. It is very disappointing to learn that the situation described in this chapter shows that not much has changed in the UK in the last ten years, at least. The same tokenistic practices of using multilingual welcome signs in several languages reported in this chapter were already mentioned in studies such as Sneddon’s in 2008. In 2010, Blackledge and Creese reported that British mainstream education ignored the multilingualism of its pupils and marginalised the teaching of minority languages in favour of English. On the one hand, this marginalisation is surprising, as a number of educational policies in the UK in the 21st century have adopted a multilingual and multidisciplinary orientation (e.g. DfES, 2002, 2003, 2013a, 2013b). On the other hand, the conflict between those who make policy and those who put it into practice is not something new. It has already been recorded by scholars such as Trowler (2003, in Conteh & Meier, 2014a) and García and Menken (2010). García and Menken (2010), in fact, advocate that teachers should be seen not as followers of policies, but as policymakers themselves. In their view, ‘the dynamics of language education policies [are] produced by educators in interaction with not only government officials and education bureaucracies, community, families, and students, but also with external sociopolitical contexts and resources, and internal experiences, beliefs, and ideologies’ (García & Menken, 2010: 250). Gaining Ground

The second chapter, written by Ambarin Mooznah Auleear Owodally, explores the educational system in Mauritius. More specifically, Auleear Owodally investigates how the Creole community is being represented in the Kreol textbooks adopted from 2012 onwards. The textbooks were analysed with a focus on the references made to enslavement, a past shared by the various members of the heterogeneous Creole community. Auleear Owodally concludes that in the nine textbooks used in Mauritian basic education, a positive representation of and for the Creole community is being mediated. This representation is particularly relevant due to the Creole community’s historical feeling of not belonging in Mauritius. As explained by Auleear Owodally, this feeling results from four issues: a Creole identity is not acknowledged in the Mauritian constitution; the Creole community does not have an ancestral religion – instead, they

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practise the religion into which they were converted in the period of enslavement; they do not have a motherland to refer to due to lack of records of their origins; and the Creole community also lacks an ancestral language to refer to. In other words, this chapter focuses on issues of identity and multilingualism and shows concerns with the sociological and anthropological dimensions of language learning, i.e. the relationship between the language learner and the larger social world (Norton, 2014). The representations of enslavement and the enslaved in the Kreol textbooks are especially important due to the fact that textbooks are powerful tools (Hu & McKay, 2014). As Gray and Block (2014) specify in relation to English language teaching: [The] textbook is […] a way of constructing the world that suggests what it means to be a speaker of [a specific language] in the world. Such regimes of representation are perforce political, in the sense that what is selected for inclusion is determined by parties with vested interests […] They are also ideological, in the Marxist sense that the forms the representations take tend to reproduce existing power relations […]. (Gray & Block, 2014: 2)

In sum, this second chapter brings a positive example of how representations of marginalised groups in textbooks can contribute to addressing social inequalities. In other words, the study reported can be described as fitting a critical sociolinguistics perspective of language planning and policy (LPP) (Ricento, 2000). Peeling the Onion

Cátia Verguete also writes about schools in London. However, the focus of the third chapter in Part 1 is on Portuguese complementary schools, i.e. schools created by migrant groups to preserve their linguistic and cultural heritage as a complement to the formal education offered by their host society (Keating et al., 2013). This context is particularly interesting as it is situated in the intersection of national and international educational policies, as Verguete herself highlights. The aim of this chapter is to understand how macro policies are interpreted at both the meso- and micro-levels. In this way, the ‘onion layers’, as Ricento and Hornberger (1996) refer to the multiple layers of LPP, are explored. With this purpose, the LPP adopted by the Portuguese government in relation to the education of their nationals abroad (macro-layer) are considered and the regional director of the organisation that offers Portuguese classes (meso-layer) as well as teachers of Portuguese (micro-layer) are interviewed. In addition, the teachers are also observed. The study shows that the teachers’ engagement with the policies is very limited. Consequently, so is the impact of the policies on their teaching. The data in this chapter illustrate that it is not unusual for policies to remain as ‘political and ideological statements far removed from actual practices’ (García et al., 2006: 275, in Meier & Conteh, 2014: 296). The

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Portuguese teachers are reported as not engaging with the LPP adopted by their institution. However, this behaviour cannot be dismissed as not representing LPP implementation. On the contrary, as proposed by Johnson (2009), LPP should be understood as a set of processes which can be created, interpreted and appropriated in different ways, including acceptance, compliance, adaptation and recasting – thus, the importance of understanding the teachers’ lack of engagement raised in this chapter. The fourth chapter in Part 1 also reports on research in complementary schools, this time a Greek school in Switzerland. Interestingly, this chapter starts with a reference to a religious ceremony to mark the beginning of the school year. As explained by the author, Vally Lytra, the Benediction Ceremony symbolises the link between education, learning and the divine, which is a feature of school life in Greece and in the Greek diaspora. In other words, as touched upon in Chapter 2, links between languages, identities and religion are flagged. Another particularity shared between the second and the fourth chapters in Part 1 is their open recognition that communities are not homogeneous groups. This last chapter takes a step further and specifically reports on a study that chooses to explore the diversity within the Greek school. With this purpose, the school director’s and teachers’ positionings in relation to the use of translation as a communicative resource are explored through interviews and whole-group discussions, respectively. The students’ perspectives on the use of translation as communicative resource for language learning and identity negotiation are accessed via accounts presented by their teachers. In this way, the meso- and microlayers of LPP are investigated with examples of pedagogical practices that can be transferred to other contexts. Lytra concludes that the Greek complementary school in Switzerland can be viewed as a ‘translanguaging space’ (Li, 2011), i.e. a space in which students and teachers can draw on the whole range of their multilingual and multicultural repertoires and experiences for their social interactions. Having said that, she considers it important to highlight that a tension is noted between the school’s flexible linguistic and cultural practices and its desire to maintain community languages, cultures and identities. Summing up, all four chapters deal with how linguistic ideologies are reflected in the adoption of specific language policies that relate to issues of representations and identities in multilingual and multicultural contexts. As a consequence, these chapters lead us to consider how much monolingualism has in fact been replaced by multilingualism in a variety of educational settings. Meier and Conteh (2014) already called attention to the need for policy development to become a conversation between policymakers and practitioners. The four chapters in this book section reinforce this need and indicate that teacher education should be a new focus for studies on multilingualism and LPP in language education. In Chapter 2, for

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example, a more balanced relationship between policy power and interpretative agency (Johnson & Ricento, 2013) would be presented if the teachers’ perspectives on how the textbooks have been changed were explored. Equally useful would be to explore how the textbook changes have impacted on the teachers’ practices of exploring the relationship between languages and identities, including religious identity, a very recent field within applied linguistics (Souza, 2016). Moreover, as illustrated in Chapter 1, teachers may have a positive perspective on the importance of language and identity issues in society and in learning. However, they do not seem properly equipped to transform their positive perspectives into practice. As also illustrated in Chapter 1, a more balanced relationship between policy power and interpretative agency (Johnson & Ricento, 2013) would be presented if the teachers’ perspectives on how the textbooks have been changed were explored. Equally useful would be to explore how the textbook changes have impacted on the teachers’ practices of exploring the relationship between languages and identities, including religious identity, a very recent field within applied linguistics (Souza, 2016). In other contexts, such as the one presented in Chapter 3, issues of multiple languages and identities are dismissed in the practices adopted by teachers. In turn, the Greek school’s director and teachers in Chapter 4 illustrate some conflict between multilingual pedagogical practices and the characteristic monolingual ideologies of complementary schools. Teacher education can play an important role in the implementation process of policies (Souza & Barradas, 2021). Therefore, it is suggested that it should be at the heart of future studies on multilingualism and LPP. Both initial education and continuing professional development can be safe spaces for supporting teachers with the incorporation of multilingual perspectives and strategies into their practices without any guilt. Creating time for teachers to develop more familiarity with research and policies as well as to explore their beliefs and values can make a difference in ensuring that the ‘multilingual turn’ becomes an integral part of actual classroom practices worldwide. References Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2010) Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective. London: Continuum. Blackledge, A., Creese, A. and Takhi, J.K. (2014) Beyond multilingualism: Heteroglossia in practice. In S. May (ed.) The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education (pp. 191–215). London: Routledge. Conteh, J. and Meier, G. (eds) (2014) The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DfES (Department for Education and Skills) (2002) The National Languages Strategy. Languages For All, Languages For Life: A Strategy For England. London: HMSO. DfES (Department for Education and Skills) (2003) Aiming High: Raising the Achievement of Minority Ethnic Pupils. London: HMSO.

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DfES (Department for Education and Skills) (2013a) The National Curriculum In England: Framework Document. London: HMSO. DfES (Department for Education and Skills) (2013b) National Curriculum Review: New Programmes of Study and Attainment Targets from September 2014. See https:// www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/fi le/211215/NC _programmes_of_study_and_attainment_targets_September_2014_Consultation_ Document_Final_080713.pdf (accessed 27 January 2021). García, O. and Menken, K. (2010) Stirring the onion: Educators and the dynamics of language education policies (looking ahead). In K. Menken and O. García (eds) Negotiating Language Policies in Schools: Educators as Policymakers (pp. 249–261). London: Routledge. Gray, J. and Block, D. (2014) All middle class now? Evolving representations of the working class in the neoliberal era: The case of ELT textbooks. In N. Harwood (ed.) English Language Teaching Textbooks: Content, Consumption, Production (pp. 45–71). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hu, G. and McKay, S. (2014) Multilingualism as portrayed in a Chinese English textbook. In J. Conteh and G. Meier (eds) The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges (pp. 64–88). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Johnson, D.C. (2009) Ethnography of language policy. Language Policy 8, 139–159. Johnson, D.C. and Ricento, T. (2013) Conceptual and theoretical perspectives in language planning and policy: Situating the ethnography of language policy. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 219, 7–21. Keating, M.C., Solovova, O. and Barradas, O. (2013) Políticas de língua, multilinguismos e migrações: Para uma reflexão policêntrica sobre os valores do português no espaço europeu. In L.P. Moita Lopes (ed.) O Português no Século XXI – Centro Geopolítico e sociolinguístico (pp. 219–248). São Paulo: Parábola. Li, W. (2011) Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43, 1222–1235. Lo Bianco, J. (2014) Foreword. In J. Conteh and G. Meier (eds) The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges (pp. xv–xvi). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. May, S. (2014a) Introducing the ‘multilingual turn’. In S. May (ed.) The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education (pp. 1–6). London: Routledge. May, S. (2014b) Disciplinary divides, knowledge construction, and the multilingual turn. In S. May (ed.) The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education (pp. 7–31). London: Routledge. Meier, G. and Conteh, J. (2014) Conclusion: The multilingual turn in languages education. In J. Conteh and G. Meier (eds) The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges (pp. 292–299). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Norton, B. (2014) Identity, literacy, and the multilingual classroom. In S. May (ed.) The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education (pp. 103– 122). London: Routledge. Ricento, T. (2000) Historical and theoretical perspectives in language policy and planning. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4 (2), 196–213. Ricento, T. and Hornberger, N. (1996) Unpeeling the onion: Language planning and policy and the ELT professional. TESOL Quarterly 30, 401–427. Sneddon, R. (2008) Magda and Albana: Learning to read with dual language books. Language and Education 22 (2), 137–154. Souza, A. (2016) Language and religious identities. In S. Preece (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity (pp. 195–209). Abingdon: Routledge. Souza, A. and Barradas, O. (2021) Portuguese in England: Cultivating communities of practice. In A. Souza and S. Melo-Pfeifer (eds) Portuguese as a Heritage Language in Europe: A Pluricentric Perspective (pp. 49–84). Campinas: Pontes.

Part 2 Language-Living: Materialities, Affectivities and Becomings

5 Languaging in Language Cafés: Emotion Work, Creating Alternative Worlds and Metalanguaging Nuria Polo-Pérez and Prue Holmes

Setting the Scene Researcher vignette I Language café 1 Today, again, I was nervous before coming, and during the day I felt the urge to talk to myself in French to get into the mood. When I arrive, I find the place packed with people. I see Antoine and Molly, with whom I spoke last time. ‘Je viens de finir mon cours; j’ai donné 6 heures de cours aujourd’hui et je suis un peu fatiguée, mais ça va. Et vous?’ It’s a weird feeling pronouncing these words. I feel funny, as if I am playing a game. The words don’t come naturally through my mouth. When will I internalise these kinds of introductory greetings so that I can choose what facial expressions to put while I speak? Soon other people join our conversation. ‘Salut! Vous parlez français? Est-ce que je peux me joindre à vous ?’ Everyone says what they are studying, what college they are in … Antoine then tells us about his travels around Spain … We discuss Almodóvar’s Volver (a girl who did A Level Spanish says she doesn’t get Spanish humour). At some point, I notice the Arabic conversation near us. Eavesdropping is something I cannot avoid in this language café … One of the guys is making a big effort to form his sentences in Arabic. He asks the others ‘How do you say in Arabic “how do you say …?”?’ And one of them replies ‘Mada taqul …?’ And I almost felt like giving the answer myself. Researcher vignette II Language café 2 It’s my turn to buy Hugo a drink (he paid last time). Ruth arrives late, but full of energy! She’s just been to the cinema to watch The Salesman, 99

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an Iranian movie which she highly recommends. I love her enthusiasm when she talks about movies. And her French is so clear. When I’m older, I want to be like her. With Regina, it’s only four of us today. The conversation fl ows so smoothly, from swearwords in different languages, to Brazil, and then politics … and everything seasoned with so many interesting personal anecdotes. Everyone is such a good listener! Even when it takes me ages to find the way to convey what I want to say. When the time comes, we say bye with two kisses. Once again, I’m heading to the train station with a smile on my face. I’m so glad I came. It seems that, after all, I can speak French! And I love this French little bubble we have created for ourselves. Introduction

Language educators have extensively explored what happens inside the classroom and inside students’ minds in search of the most effective ways to boost language proficiency. At the same time, proficient speakers of multiple languages usually attribute their success to out-of-class learning (Benson, 2011). In fact, it is generally agreed upon, among teachers and learners alike, that immersion experiences are a sine qua non for language and intercultural development. Current language education tends to focus on the development of communicative skills in the classroom, and relies heavily on student mobility and study abroad for students to experience authentic foreign language socialisation. In this chapter we aim to decentre conventional understandings of language immersion, by challenging the view that travelling to the ‘target language’ countries is the only way to engage in authentic language socialisation. We do so by drawing attention to the transient language-centred environments of language cafés (LCs), as illustrated in the two opening researcher vignettes. LCs are generally public events which provide a nonformal space for individuals to practise a specific language or languages through interaction. They are commonly organised in public places, e.g. cafés, bars, parks, cinemas or libraries. They are non-formal because they do not belong to any institutional programme or provide formal instruction, and they are usually free of charge or accessible for a very small fee. Here we use ‘language café’ as an umbrella term, as it derives from the social aspects of the ‘coffee culture’ of modern times and the traditional view of cafés as social hubs, or even artistic and intellectual centres (Davis & Holdom, 2009; Holliday, 2011). Other denominations include ‘language exchange’, ‘languages encounter’, ‘language meetup’ or ‘language club’. Yet they all share the aim of gathering together people interested in speaking a certain language through informal interaction. Recent work, underpinned by poststructuralism, sees success in additional language development as going beyond measurable skills as

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highlighted in competence models (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004). Adding a new language enables speakers to establish human connections, engage in aesthetic, social and intellectual pleasures, and experience personal transformations which may involve highly intense emotions (Kramsch, 2009; Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004; Ros i Solé, 2016). It also involves identity work and social investment (Norton, 2013). Learners start to make sense of themselves as multilinguals when they start dwelling in languages (Phipps, 2007), and begin to develop multilingual identities. Fisher et al. (2018) argue that developing a multilingual identity contributes to the efforts that individuals invest in learning and maintaining their languages, and helps to enhance social cohesion in increasingly diverse societies. We adopt an encompassing view of multilingualism (e.g. Martin-Jones et al., 2012): to avoid the ideological assumptions of superiority and inferiority embedded in the ‘native’– ’non-native speaker’ dichotomy, we use ‘multilingual speaker’ to refer to any individual who is engaged in additional language learning or usage. Our approach to the study of LCs as non-instructional settings draws on the ‘ecology’ metaphor, ‘which captures the dynamic interaction between language users and the environment as between parts of a living organism’ (Kramsch, 2002: 3). Thus, the ecology of an LC refers to (1) the relationship and interconnectedness between LC participants – with their complex individual backgrounds, experiences, identities, emotions, languages, ideologies and their roles/motivations/objectives as LC participants; and (2) the LC environment – its physical space and the broader contextual situation. An ecological approach sees language development as the result of meaningful participation in human events (van Lier, 2004), thus merging language acquisition and language socialisation. Language development is a complex, non-linear, dynamic and emergent process based on the interactions and interrelations between learners and their ecosystem with no simple cause–effect relationships (Kramsch, 2002; Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008; van Lier, 2004). From this viewpoint, the focus is on the experience of language learning, rather than on ‘efficiency’ or measuring completeness in learning the language code. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken in two different LCs in the UK, we illustrate how these environments offer significant places for language socialisation, regardless of the speaker’s geographical location. Languages are not just learned, but lived and embodied through languaging, which is ‘inextricably interwoven with social experience’ (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004: 2). Moving beyond instrumental and utilitarian views of language learning, languaging embeds the efforts of being a person in another language and the cultural and material worlds surrounding it (Phipps, 2007). We contend that the ecology of LCs enables multilinguals to co-construct unique environments to experience languaging and perform their multilingual social selves. After reviewing extant research conducted on LCs, we present our theoretical framework, research questions and methodological approach.

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To answer our research questions we focus on three key aspects of the languaging experience in LCs emerging from our study: (1) emotion work; (2) creating alternative worlds; and (3) metalanguaging, where multilingual speakers discuss their subjective relationships with languaging. We conclude by answering our research questions, and discussing the limitations of the study and directions for further research. Language Cafés in the Literature

The use of public spaces as language learning environments is not a new phenomenon. Even before the advent of social media, Cortazzi and Jin (1996) drew attention to the boom of ‘English corners’ (informal weekly meetings to practise English) in city parks in China. However, despite the growing research interest in social spaces for learning beyond the classroom (Benson & Reinders, 2011; Conacher & Kelly-Holmes, 2007; Nunan & Richards, 2015), LCs remain an understudied context in language education. Gao (2009) studied participant experiences in a Chinese ‘English club’ through their spontaneous ‘reflective experiential accounts’ in a web forum. These accounts revealed perceptions of the English club as a place for supportive peer-learning, self-assertion and changes in self-perception. Liu (2013) used statistical data to study the development of students’ selfefficacy as a result of participating in a Chinese university ‘English bar’. Other studies feature LCs where teacher-facilitators intervene to enhance the learning experience. In Turkey, Balçıkanlı (2017) shows how the ‘English Café’ is perceived as a place (1) to practise English, (2) to socialise, (3) to exchange knowledge and life experiences, (4) to learn from others and (5) as a safe place to take risks and deal with emotions through peer support. In Japan, Murray and Fujishima (2016) and more recently Mynard et al. (2020) gathered narratives from the LCs embedded in the self-access centre facilities from two Japanese universities. They focused on understanding the complex social dynamics in these environments in order to better support their growth and efficacy as learning spaces. However, all of the above studies represent contexts of English as a foreign language (EFL). Due to the socioeconomic status of English as a global language, some scholars have argued that research fi ndings from EFL contexts might not always apply to other language contexts, for instance, when it comes to learning motivations (Duff, 2017). Secondly, researchers in these studies position themselves as detached observers in the field, while in our study the ethnographer (Nuria, fi rst author) participates in the LC events as a multilingual speaker and learner, and draws on her multilingual self as a resource in all the stages of the ethnographic research process (Holmes et al., 2013, 2016). Finally, previous research on LCs, and indeed language education research more broadly, is grounded on the development of language competences and communicative skills.

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We are inspired by Gao (2009), who argues for a holistic, humanistic approach to learning, which sees learners as complex human beings and not ‘simply’ students, and where learning encompasses growth as people and not just the acquisition of instrumental skills. Also, we share with Murray and Fujishima (2016) and Mynard et al. (2020) the ecological approach which acknowledges the contextual complexities in LC environments. Next, we discuss our theoretical standpoint: language learning as a lived, social experience. From Language Learning to Languaging and Dwelling in Languages

The concept of languaging is understood, from a cognitivist perspective, as a means to mediate cognition and ‘a process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language’ (Swain, 2006: 98). However, language learning is not just a cognitive activity done with the head with the ultimate goal of acquiring enough linguistic knowledge and skills for communication purposes (Kramsch, 2009; van Lier, 2004). Cognitive approaches fail to consider that ‘[l]anguages are not only “acquired” and “learnt”, but also “lived”’ (Ros i Solé, 2016: 1). Phipps and Gonzalez (2004) elaborate on their concept of languaging from an existential point of view: rather than mediating our thoughts when trying to use another language, languaging is ‘the effort of being a person in that language in the social and material world of everyday interactions’ (Phipps, 2007: 12, emphasis added). Phipps and Gonzalez (2004) suggest a paradigmatic shift – from language learning to languaging. They propose investigating the ontological skills of being in another language in the whole social world, focusing on meaning-making and developing new human connections, and living in and with cultures to become interculturally critical beings, rather than learning about cultures to develop intercultural communicative competence. Thinking in ‘competence’ terms can be misleading, as ‘[b]eing intercultural is not about being safe in your knowledges and ways of doing things, it is about working away as border crossers, making the links, fi lling the gaps and then taking time to be quiet, to listen and to reflect’ (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004: 93). Finally, languaging involves living languages from within and in connection with their material worlds, rather than studying language as an objective reality from a distance. Although Phipps and Gonzalez (2004) and Phipps (2007) do not explicitly discuss the affective dimension, their examples of languaging as an embodied and social experience suggest that languaging necessarily involves emotion work. In that respect, second language acquisition (SLA) research on affect has attempted to establish linear cause-effect relationships between ‘aff ective factors’ and achievement, i.e. how certain

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emotions, understood as variables in quantitative analysis, can predict levels of language learning achievement. For instance, some emotions, such as foreign language anxiety, have been considered as ‘negative’ emotions as they act as an ‘affective fi lter’ (Krashen, 1981) which hinders success in language learning (Dewaele, 2010). According to Pavlenko (2013: 8), these studies fail to understand that ‘anxiety, attitudes and motivation are dynamic and social phenomena and the relationship between these phenomena and levels of achievement is reciprocal rather than unidirectional’. Ros i Solé (2016: 101) suggests a new approach to humanise emotions by ‘focusing on the impact language learning has on the emotions we experience rather than how emotions impact the process of language learning’. Furthermore, she contends that emotions are intersubjective phenomena: rather than being lodged in the mind of the individual, they are constituted and, we would add, emergent, in social interaction. Emotions are also reactions to past experiences, and to the relationships of individuals with their environment. We argue, therefore, that emotion work is interwoven with the social experience of languaging. Language education needs to move beyond the utilitarian, instrumental view of language learning which downgrades the language learner to ‘an efficient professional who serves the market economy and its neoliberal imperatives’ (Ros i Solé, 2016: 20). As Kramsch (2009: 3) puts it, ‘students discover in and through the foreign language subjectivities that will shape their lives in unpredictable ways’. Although this may lead to better employment opportunities, language education should emphasise the personal transformational journey that living in more than one language can provide to language learners and their sense of self (MEITS Project, 2019). This understanding of languaging involves identity investment (Norton, 2000). Norton (2000, 2013) argues that if learners invest in languaging, they expect to see their cultural capital increased through symbolic or material resources, which in turn enhances their sense of selves, their hopes for the future, and their imagined identities. This process can be disrupted by the ever-present power issues in social relations, which might result in motivated learners desisting from investing in the language in certain contexts (Norton, 2000, 2013). However, Ros i Solé (2016: 66) contends that, while some might want to ‘climb up a power-social ladder’, learners’ becomings and self-identities do not always develop vertically based on ‘levels of achievement’, but grow laterally in unexpected directions. Thus, there are no single benchmarks for the language learner, but rather a myriad of combinations and possibilities for development and transformation of the self. Likewise, Phipps and Gonzalez (2004: 127) argue that ‘no learning of language can be conducted in isolation from living through it’, and this is why languaging is also an act of dwelling. For Phipps (2007), the notion of ‘dwelling’ involves experiencing how to flow socially in another culture

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and in the material worlds of other languages. It is inhabiting new places and being part of them in ‘neighbourly’ ways, by knowing, for instance, ‘what the right kinds of coffee are to order, how to eat the cakes, how to use the serviettes, how to count with one’s fi ngers and thumbs’ (Phipps, 2007: 154). This should not be confused with ‘going native’. Dwelling ‘keeps the misunderstandings and stumbling in the relationships rather than working towards an intercultural communicative nirvana in which awareness has erased all difficulty in communication’ (Phipps, 2007: 154). In other words, through dwelling in another language, languagers experiment with their views of themselves as multilingual social beings in the world. We argue that many multilingual speakers, such as the LC participants in our study, seek out alternative and decentred ways of dwelling in their languages by making them part of their everyday lives or leisure activities, irrespective of the ‘target language’ country proximity. While immersion experiences abroad provide excellent opportunities for languaging and dwelling in languages, and a companion to classroom learning, we believe that the affordances for multilingual socialisation beyond the national boundaries of ‘target language’ countries have been neglected in language education research and practice. We argue for greater investigation into how language learners experience languaging and co-construct alternative worlds in developing their multilingual identities, and how the leisured spaces of LCs (regardless of geographical location) afford this lived experience. Thus, the research questions we address in this chapter are: RQ1:

How does the ecology of LCs facilitate multilingual speakers’ experience of languaging? RQ2: How do multilingual speakers experience languaging in LCs? Methodology

To answer our research questions we draw on data from Nuria’s threeyear ethnographic study in two LCs. Ethnography allowed for a datadriven, emergent research design to approach holistically the naturally chaotic and hugely complex environment of LCs. Nuria participated in and collected data from two LCs in northern England (UK). LC1 is a university-based multilingual LC, attracting both UK and international university students (typically aged 18–23) interested in practising different languages (mainly French, Spanish, German and Italian, although some were interested in speaking Chinese, Arabic, Catalan, Russian, Portuguese or Japanese). LC1 attracted 30–40 participants at each event, and took place twice each term at the Student Union bar. This LC was unstructured and transient, with a dynamic flow of people coming and going during the events, and conversation groups of both first-timers and regular attendees. Different language groups organised themselves

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around language tables and individuals could move among these tables during the event. LC2 took place in a public house (or ‘pub’) in a nearby city. It consisted of a small group of regular attendees, with different professional backgrounds and nationalities, who met once a month to have a drink and speak French. As opposed to LC1, LC2 was intergenerational and characterised by regular attendance. The core of regular attendees (who had become long-lasting friends) were of mixed ages and professional backgrounds; two spoke French as a fi rst language and others had mixed abilities in French. All were fluent in several languages, and considered themselves cosmopolitan, highly educated people who enjoyed using their languages and learning from others. Both LC1 and LC2 were free of charge and ran without any ‘teacherfacilitators’; that is, conversations and groupings in these LCs were unsupervised, self-initiated and self-managed by the participants. The ethnographic study was approached from a complex researcher positioning, in connection with the different language positions occupied by the ethnographer and the participants. The ‘researching multilingually’ framework (Holmes et al., 2013), which draws attention to the possibilities and complexities of using more than one language in the research process, guided Nuria’s intentional decision making regarding the fieldwork. The framework involves a three-step process: (1) the researcher’s realisation of the multilingual dimensions of their project; (2) reflexive consideration of the possibilities and complexities of these multilingual dimensions vis-à-vis the spatial/contextual and relational aspects of the research; and (3) informed and purposeful decision making regarding the use of more than one language in all research stages. As the short vignettes at the beginning of the chapter illustrate, Nuria decided to participate in the LCs as a learner of French, a language that she did not speak very well and into which she had not been previously socialised. This was a conscious decision in order to prioritise authenticity in the field, and to balance the power dynamics between her, as researcherparticipant, and other LC participants. If she had participated only as a Spanish first language speaker, with her teacher identity in the background, she might have influenced how co-participants perceived her, and therefore reduced opportunities for relational work to develop trustworthiness in the field (Warriner & Bigelow, 2019). Instead, she wanted to immerse herself in the languaging experience, legitimise her participation as an insider and genuine multilingual language learner and language enthusiast, and thus preserve a non-interventionist and naturalistic approach to the fieldwork. Nonetheless, identity work and the enactment of different social roles and relationships are what ethnographers do in the field (Coffey, 1999). This work was mediated by the different language subject positions that Nuria, as ethnographer, inhabited in the research (Holmes et al., 2016) as a fluent speaker of different languages: a teacher of Spanish (her fi rst

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language); an EU migrant in the UK; a UK university doctoral researcher whose fi rst language is not English, yet engaging with her supervisors and undertaking her doctoral work in English; a learner of French; a fluent speaker of Italian and Portuguese, with personal attachments to and extensive socialisation experiences in those languages; and with fleeting attachments to Arabic, a language she once learned fondly and feels nostalgic about. All these positionings intertwine in synergic ways to allow the researcher to take advantage of her in-betweenness in the field (Corbin Dwyer & Buckle, 2009; Probst, 2016). Thus, Nuria’s multilingual subjectivities, despite her modest French, enabled her to flow in the LC conversations and deal with the relational aspects of the research in authentic ways. Rather than extracting data from participants in the field, she contributed as a genuine participant to both LCs, co-constructing with participants experiences of languaging. The data sources we draw on in this study include: Nuria’s researcheras-participant reflective journal (approximately 35,000 words); audiorecordings of naturally occurring conversations in the LCs (seven hours); and 17 audio-recorded, semi-structured interviews with participants, and short written reflections from eight of them. Ethical approval was received prior to the fieldwork. Audio-recorded data were transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Participants could choose the language(s) of the interview and their written reflective accounts, in accordance with Nuria’s languages. Nuria recognised that, for some participants, the opportunity of practising their languages was an incentive to participate, thereby mirroring the LC atmosphere. The transcriptions of the excerpts respect the original wording used by participants and therefore include occasional linguistic errors. When necessary, an English translation is provided. Pseudonyms are used to maintain participants’ anonymity. We now present examples from the study that address our research questions. Following our understanding of language learning as socialisation, identity work and world making, we discuss three key emergent themes that inform participants’ languaging in the two LCs: (1) emotion work, (2) creating alternative worlds and (3) metalanguaging. Languaging and Emotion Work in Language Cafés

Speaking in the LC was perceived by participants as different in many ways from what they usually experience in the classroom, and these differences are underpinned by the ecology of these events. We focus on participants’ feelings and emotions regarding the fi rst time(s) they attended the LC, when emotion work became more salient in our data, especially in LC1, where the fi rst LC experiences were fresh for most participants. We present emotions as pertaining to three different stages: before, during and after the LC events.

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Before the language café

When asked about how they felt the first time they attended LC1, the thematic analysis of interviews and written reflections revealed participants’ use of emotionally intense words such as ‘scared’, ‘nervous’, ‘awkward’ and ‘fear[ful]’. Some participants expressed how the idea of chatting in another language with strangers can be daunting and scary: ‘it was nerve-wracking having to join a group’ (Elisabeth’s interview, LC1); others admitted being nervous, fearing they would be ‘the worst’. These feelings and emotions were also recurrent in Nuria’s reflective journal, even after attending each LC several times. In one of her entries, she noted down a text message that she sent to her friends on her way to the venue: ‘What am I doing? I don’t even speak French!’ (Nuria’s reflective journal, third time in LC2). In another entry, she reflected upon the awkwardness she felt at the start of the event: ‘Je viens de finir mon cours; j’ai donné 6 heures de cours aujourd’hui et je suis un peu fatiguée, mais ça va. Et vous ?’ It’s a weird feeling pronouncing these words. I feel funny, as if I am playing a game. The words don’t come naturally through my mouth. When will I internalise these kinds of introductory greetings so that I can choose what facial expressions to put while I speak? (Nuria’s reflective journal, third time in LC1)

This excerpt illustrates how even a simple spontaneous interaction to start a conversation in the LC is an embodied, and emotionally intense, languaging experience that involves much more than knowing the words or exchanging information effectively. It is about being comfortable in one’s body to perform one’s social self in another language, even nonverbally. As Phipps and Gonzalez (2004) put it, languaging is about trying to be someone in another language in the whole social world. Participant emotions before attending the LC ought to be contextualised in the ecology of these events. The LC represents a free and informal space in the absence of teachers and preset lesson plans. Freedom, beyond its positive connotations, can also be feared, as it represents the chaotic and the unknown. Thus, the experience of participating in an LC commences before entering the space. On the way there, first-timers start wondering who will be there, how it works, what they will talk about, is it safe …? These thoughts, informed by the participants’ own prejudices and knowledge of the world, shaped their imagined picture of the unknown place. This unknown can trigger the mobilisation of different physical emotions, such as social anxiety, intermingled with feelings of self-doubt in the case of less confident learners who question their legitimacy as speakers of a particular language. Murray et al. (2017) refer to these affective entry boundaries as ‘the invisible fence’ in LCs. This metaphor parallels Kelly’s (2018) reflections on why many people resist learning a new language.

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During the language café

Once there, participants co-constructed very different emotions by conversing face-to-face with one another. Some admitted feeling ‘relieved’ when they realised there were participants of all levels, including lower levels. They were not ‘the worst’, after all. They described the LC environment as ‘fun’, ‘relaxed’, ‘supportive’, ‘non-judgemental’, ‘casual’, ‘not stressful’, ‘welcoming’, ‘warm’, ‘enjoyable’, ‘informal’ and ‘free’. As in Balçıkanlı’s (2017) study, our participants conceptualised the LC as a ‘safe’ place where mistakes do not matter and everyone helps one another. This suggests that, rather than performing language competencies in the LC, participants were engaging in languaging – focusing on meaningmaking and human connections over linguistic accuracy (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004). In cognitive and psychological studies, feelings of anxiety have been associated negatively with the affective fi lter that can inhibit language learning (Dewaele, 2010). However, participants’ narratives revealed that they regarded participation in these events as emotional investment. Emotions evolved as a result of the dynamic social relationships they developed with the environment and people. This resonates with the ‘sociality’ view of emotions as intersubjective phenomena, co-constructed through social interaction (Ros i Solé, 2016). Anxiety and self-doubt transformed into fun and relief when individuals physically connected with others in the LC. Having to ‘talk for talking’s sake’ possibly creates a collaborative atmosphere of interdependence and reciprocity that enables participants to feel emotionally bonded, as this participant conveyed: [In the LC] you’re always gonna meet somebody who’s been through the same experiences as you or is going through it now, so it’s less daunting because everyone is in the same boat, and everyone is there to learn […] and is there to help each other out. (Molly’s interview, LC1)

Having a shared enterprise, and having been through the same experiences of trying to socialise in a different language, is what connects LC participants, and what helps to make this environment less threatening and more power-balanced than other social encounters in the target culture, where having a voice and being listened to cannot be taken for granted (Norton, 2000). After the language café

Two main interrelated themes emerged here: a sense of achievement, and changes in self-perception as multilinguals. Some participants summarised their experiences of self-achievement and ownership over their performances in the LC: ‘glad that I came’,

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‘satisfying’, ‘feeling good about yourself’, ‘proud of myself’, ‘it’s a good feeling to have’, ‘sense of achievement’, ‘sense of satisfaction’. These feelings were also recurrent in Nuria’s reflective journal, as expressed in the opening vignettes. Participants exercised their agency by taking the initiative to attend the event voluntarily. Furthermore, as there were no teacherfacilitators guiding the conversations, the participants – instead of performing their student selves and letting themselves be guided by an ‘expert’ – co-owned the dynamics of and interactions within the space. Concerning the second theme – changes in self-perception as multilinguals – like Nuria in Vignette II, some participants reported these realisations after the LC: Ah! I didn’t know I could do that! […] Hey! I do like learning languages! (Rebecca’s interview, LC1) I just spent the last hour speaking in a different language and I managed! (Amy’s interview, LC1) Actually, I spent an hour talking in French and it wasn’t a massive disaster! […] Oh, I actually can speak French! (Robert’s interview, LC1)

At that time, Rebecca, Amy and Robert were enrolled in Spanish/ French language courses informed by communicative approaches (Littlewood, 1981). Most likely, these participants had spoken French or Spanish before, and engaged in some meaningful interaction in class. It is plausible to consider that, although these participants knew they could speak the language, they may not have been aware that they could language. Although they had performed their ‘student selves’ before, they had not experimented with their whole social selves in this language in authentic ways outside the classroom. Thus, through living the language in connection with the leisurely activity of having a drink with others, these participants engaged in a new sense of multilingual social selves. They became languagers who began to live the language from within; they enacted new forms of dwelling, reconnecting with the pleasure of language learning as they experienced in their bodies what it feels to sound and flow socially in another language (Phipps, 2007). We have contextualised the affordances for languaging in the ecology of the LCs, where emotion work played a significant role. Next, we discuss how languaging in LCs also elicits subjective responses related to memories (Kramsch, 2009) and place. Creating Alternative Worlds: Dwelling Temporarily in ‘Otro Mundo’

By organising and participating in LCs, participants created their own spaces for language socialisation – wherever they resided – in order to live in and through languages.

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Literally, I completely forget that I’m in England when I’m there! (Elisabeth’s interview, LC1) C’est bizarre parce que peut-être que pour nous [les britanniques] c’est une manière d’échapper un peu de notre … la culture … notre culture, et d’expérimenter dans quelques heures, une heure, ce que ce soit, quelque chose de différent, dehors de la culture dominante. (Joanne’s interview, LC2) [It’s weird because maybe for us (British) it’s a way of escaping a bit from our … the culture … our culture, and a way of experiencing for a few hours, one hour, whatever, something different, outside the dominant culture.] Toda una sala de gente aprendiendo o hablantes de idiomas que no son el inglés. ¡Qué gozada! (…) Mis intercambios y noches en los LCs significan periodos de alegría, ya que puedo comunicar en idiomas y ponerme en otro mundo que no tiene nada que ver con [esta ciudad], aunque solo sea por unas pocas horitas. (Nathan’s reflective piece, LC1) [A room full of learners or speakers of other languages that are not English. What a pleasure! (…) My exchanges and evenings in the LC mean times of happiness, since I can communicate in languages and put myself in another world that has nothing to do with [this city], even if just for a few hours.]

Even Nuria expresses a similar feeling when she describes ‘the French little bubble’ that participants in LC2 have created for themselves (see Vignette II). These comments reveal that LCs are conceptualised as transient other-worlds – worlds of escapism to experience ‘something different, outside of the dominant culture’, albeit only ‘for a few hours’. When people leave the event, they must reconcile themselves to the fact that they have not travelled physically afar, despite feelings of having been in another world (‘otro mundo’). As Nathan hinted, these feelings are afforded by the vibrant multilingual atmosphere that people create, which makes eavesdropping very tempting (see Vignette I). It is not so much about the place, but about what multilingual people create by coming together, in contrast to their dwelling in a local society where they appear to perceive monolingualism as the norm. Igarashi (2016), in Murray and Fujishima (2016), draws similar conclusions. The LC invokes a sense of displacement, in her participants’ words, ‘a totally different world’: a place where regular social positionings are disturbed, and where people feel comfortable and uncomfortable simultaneously. For her, the LC is a heterotopia – a place that ‘is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ (Foucault, 1986: 25). Ros i Solé (2016) argues that:

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the extraordinary worlds of language learners are not necessarily spatially bound to particular objective and territorialised cultural formations. Rather, they may belong to an altogether different kind of cultural imaginary, one that is not based on abstract ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991), but rather on the ordinary and the banal of language practices, the lived experiences and the worlds of possibility that multilingual subjects create for themselves. (Ros i Solé, 2016: 72)

By seeking languaging opportunities in the context of their everyday lives and leisure time, LC participants repurpose and redefi ne the physical environment they live in to co-create alternative worlds of their own, in order to dwell – temporarily, at least – in different language spaces (Phipps, 2007). Thus, the language is not learned as an objective reality that exists at a distance (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004), but is integrated in their everyday lives. Furthermore, some participants recalled emotions and sensations experienced in past sojourns abroad, retrieving them through languaging with others in the co-constructed space of the LC: Me recuerdo de Sudamérica y hablando allá. (Ben’s interview, LC1) [It reminds me of South America and speaking there.] Es interesante, porque el language café me da estos sentimientos de inmersión que siento cuando voy al extranjero, porque hablamos de manera más natural. (Rachel’s interview, LC1) [It’s interesting, because the language café gives me these feelings of immersion that I feel when I go abroad, because we speak in a more natural way.]

While Ben and Rachel struggled to identify with the language of the classroom, the LCs evoked personal memories, past socialisation experiences, and the sensations impressed on their bodies as a result of them (Kramsch, 2009). Languaging in the here-and-now of LC events connects languagers with their historicities and their ‘nomadic and borderless lifestyles’ (Ros i Solé, 2013: 327). Languaging experiences abroad are sensations impressed in their memories and bodies because, like in the LCs, they involved the awkwardness of engaging the body in new tasks of translation, they included the misunderstandings and stumblings that characterise communication (Phipps, 2007), and they led to a sense of achievement of having experienced new connections with the language and the people who speak it. Sharing the Pleasures of Speaking Languages through Metalanguaging

A common topic of conversation among the participants in both LCs was what brought them together: languages. Participants talked about the

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languages they knew and their subjective relationships to them (Kramsch, 2009). In the fi rst excerpt, the group in LC2 discussed the difficulty of fi nding intermediate or advanced language courses for lesser-taught languages in the UK: Excerpt 1 Miguel: Mais ça c’est le problème de l’Angleterre, que … bon, ils pensent que avec l’anglais il n’est pas nécessaire de connaître des autres langues, parce que tu peux aller par tout le monde et utiliser l’anglais, mais on ne connait … on n’apprend une autre langue juste pour être utile, on l’apprend pour le plaisir de parler ou, par exemple, le français pour le plaisir de lire Albert Camus, ou des écrivains françaises, on l’apprend pour ça … [But that’s the problem in England, that … well, they think that with English it’s not necessary to know other languages, because you can go all over the world and use English, but you don’t know … you don’t learn another language just because it’s useful, you learn it for the pleasure of speaking it or, for instance, you learn French for the pleasure of reading Albert Camus, or other French writers, that’s what you learn it for …] […] Hugo: C’est vrai que parler une langue étranger, c’est un plaisir aussi … [it’s true that speaking another language is also a pleasure …] Nuria: Ouais, ouais, pour moi … [Yeah, yeah, for me …] Hugo: … ouais, ouais, de pouvoir exprimer quelque chose, de pouvoir raconter une histoire, de pouvoir faire une blague et que les gens te comprennent ou qu’ils rigolent quand on raconte une histoire, c’est un plaisir et … ouais, c’est agréable. [yeah, yeah, being able to express something, being able to tell a story, being able to tell a joke and be understood or make people laugh when you tell a story, that’s a pleasure and … yeah, it’s nice.] (Naturally occurring conversation in LC2)

And in the second excerpt, Rebecca recalls an interesting conversation from LC1: Excerpt 2 Hablamos de los idiomas que conocemos y de los usos de estos idiomas. Dos chicas que estudian el catalán dijeron que, aunque muchas personas dicen que no es un idioma útil, para ellas es útil porque tienen amigos que aprecian que hablen en catalán con ellos. Dijeron que la importancia de los idiomas es distinta para cada persona. Para mí, fue muy interesante

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porque nunca había pensado en los idiomas de esta manera antes. (Rebecca’s written reflections, LC1) [We talked about the languages we know and using these languages. Two girls who study Catalan said that, although many people say it’s not a useful language, for them it is because they have friends who appreciate that they speak Catalan with them. They said that the importance of languages is different for each individual. For me, it was interesting because I had never thought about languages this way before.]

These two excerpts illustrate how multilingual speakers in the LCs talked about languages as much more than ‘useful’ skills, and speaking as much more than information exchange. In Excerpt 1, when participants describe speaking languages as un plaisir, they index a type of empowerment that has to do with personal fulfi lment and a new sense of self in the world (Kramsch, 2009), pointing towards becoming ‘intercultural beings who laugh and cry and read and sing and love and learn in other languages’ (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004: 63). In Excerpt 2, Rebecca, a polyglot, recalls a conversation that led her to reflect critically on her language ideologies, particularly the utilitarian standpoint where some languages are considered worth learning over others. Again, contrary to instrumental arguments for learning languages, multilinguals in LCs tend to highlight the social enjoyment of engaging in new human connections through languaging over the accumulation of employability skills. These instances of ‘metalanguaging’ – languaging when the discussion is about language learning and languaging – were plentiful in our data. Some participants perceived this as a shortcoming because conversation topics could become repetitive in the LCs. However, many participants described the joy of meeting other multilinguals and engaging in stimulating conversations about their personal language journeys and the pleasures of dwelling in languages. Thus, participants did not necessarily regard metalanguaging as a positive or negative aspect of LCs, but one associated with the languaging experience, alongside the other two emergent themes discussed in this chapter: emotion work and creating alternative worlds. Conclusion

This chapter explored how the ecology of LCs facilitates languaging, and the participants’ experiences of languaging in these environments. The ecology of LCs stimulates the intersubjective co-construction of emotions, which play a crucial role in the social, embodied and lived experience of languaging, and influence how participants experiment with their multilingual social selves in these environments. We illustrated how, while grounded in the here-and-now of everyday leisure activities, LCs can be understood as ‘self-made worlds of escapism’ (Ros i Solé, 2016: 139) which

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enable individuals to dwell temporarily in ‘otro mundo’ through the experience of languaging. Also, we noted that ‘metalanguaging’ practices are embedded in the languaging experiences in LCs, where participants often share their personal language learning trajectories and language ideologies with a focus on pleasure, that is, beyond utilitarian perspectives. Underpinned by an ecological approach to research in additional language development (van Lier, 2004), this study adds to decentred views of language education by foregrounding LCs as contact zones with blurring boundaries between learning and leisure, and the importance of understanding the lived and embodied experience of languages beyond taxonomic competence models based on vertical levels of individual achievement. Furthermore, the study proposes a methodology where the ethnographic self is used as a resource (Coffey, 1999) throughout the research process. It also draws attention to the challenges and opportunities of researching multilingually, in particular the affordances brought to the research by the researcher’s multilingual identities in these environments (Holmes et al., 2013, 2016). In studying LCs, we do not intend to defend these environments over the classroom, but rather suggest how LCs may complement the valuable systematic and scaffolded learning of the language classroom. Many avid LC participants are also enrolled in language courses and strongly value their teachers, grammar books and classroom learning. Additionally, we acknowledge that in LCs located in cosmopolitan cities like London, where multilingualism is enmeshed in everyday public interactions, feelings of heterotopic dwelling (as experienced by our participants) may not be as prominent. Future research could investigate translanguaging practices in LCs through close-up analysis of data from naturally occurring conversations during the events. The affordances of LCs for intercultural development offer another line of inquiry. Finally, a critical sociolinguistic approach could shed light on what languages and voices are typically represented in LCs, and further inquire into the relationships between LCs, social class and cosmopolitanism. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) Should language teaching methodologies and curricula work towards fi lling the gap between what happens inside and outside the language classroom? (2) How can language education transcend the conceptualisation of language as a system and recognise the value of languages as lived experiences and human connections? (3) What teaching methodologies facilitate the development of learners’ sense of multilingual social selves and being in the world? (4) What are the methodological implications of conducting ethnographic research in more than one language?

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(5) How do linguistic repertoires available in the research field intertwine with researchers’ positionings and reflexivity, and how can that be reflected in the research outputs? References Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Balçıkanlı, C. (2017) The ‘English Café’ as a social learning space. In G. Murray and T. Lamb (eds) Space, Place and Autonomy in Language Learning (pp. 61–75). London: Routledge. Benson, P. (2011) Language learning and teaching beyond the classroom: An introduction to the field. In P. Benson and H. Reinders (eds) Beyond the Language Classroom (pp. 7–16). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Benson, P. and Reinders, H. (eds) (2011) Beyond the Language Classroom. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3 (2), 77–101. Coffey, A. (1999) The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity. London: Sage. Conacher, J.E. and Kelly-Holmes, H. (2007) New Learning Environments for Language Learning: Moving Beyond the Classroom? Oxford: Peter Lang. Corbin Dwyer, S. and Buckle, J.L. (2009) The space between: On being an insider-outsider in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 8 (1), 54–63. Cortazzi, M. and Jin, L. (1996) English teaching and learning in China. Language Teaching 29 (2), 61–80. Davis, P. and Holdom, S. (2009) The Language Café. See https://www.llas.ac.uk/ resources/paper/3230. Dewaele, J.-M. (2010) Emotions in Multiple Languages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Duff, P.A. (2017) Motivation for learning languages other than English in an English dominant world. The Modern Language Journal 101 (3), 597–607. Fisher, L., Evans, M.J., Forbes, K., Gayton, A. and Liu, Y. (2018) Participative multilingual identity construction in the languages classroom: A multi-theoretical conceptualisation. International Journal of Multilingualism 17 (4), 448–466. Foucault, M. (1986) Of other spaces. Diacritics 16 (1), 22–27. Gao, X. (2009) The ‘English corner’ as an out-of-class learning activity. ELT Journal 63 (1), 60–67. Holliday, A. (2011) Intercultural Communication and Ideology. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Holmes, P., Fay, R., Andrews, J. and Attia, M. (2013) Researching multilingually: New theoretical and methodological directions. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 23 (3), 285–299. Holmes, P., Fay, R., Andrews, J. and Attia, M. (2016) How to research multilingually: Possibilities and complexities. In H. Zhu (ed.) Research Methods in Intercultural Communication: A Practical Guide (pp. 88–102). New York: Wiley Blackwell. Kelly, M. (2018) Languages after Brexit: How the UK Speaks to the World. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Kramsch, C. (2002) Language Acquisition and Language Socialization: Ecological Perspectives. London: Continuum. Kramsch, C. (2009) The Multilingual Subject: What Foreign Language Learners Say about their Experience and Why it Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Kramsch, C. and Whiteside, A. (2008) Language ecology in multilingual settings: Towards a theory of symbolic competence. Applied Linguistics 29 (4), 645–671. Krashen, S. (1981) Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Pergamon. Littlewood, W. (1981) Communicative Language Teaching: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liu, M. (2013) English bar as a venue to boost students’ speaking self-efficacy at the tertiary level. English Language Teaching 6 (12), 27. Martin-Jones, M., Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (eds) (2012) The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism. Abingdon: Routledge. MEITS Project (ed.) (2019) How Languages Changed My Life. Bloomington, IN: Archway. Murray, G. and Fujishima, N. (2016) Social Spaces for Language Learning: Stories from the L-Café. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Murray, G., Fujishima, N. and Uzuka, M. (2017) Social learning spaces and the invisible fence. In G. Murray and T. Lamb (eds) Space, Place and Autonomy in Language Learning (pp. 233–245). London: Routledge. Mynard, J., Burke, M., Hooper, D., Kushida, B., Lyon, P., Sampson, R. and Taw, P. (2020) Dynamics of a Social Language Learning Community: Beliefs, Membership and Identity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Norton, B. (2000) Identity and Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and Educational Change. Harlow: Longman. Norton, B. (2013) Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation (2nd edn). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Nunan, D. and Richards, J.C. (eds) (2015) Language Learning Beyond the Classroom. London: Routledge. Pavlenko, A. (2013) The affective turn in SLA: From ‘affective factors’ to ‘language desire’ and ‘commodifi cation of aff ect’. In D. Gabryś-Barker and J. Bielska (eds) The Affective Dimension in Second Language Acquisition (pp. 3–28). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Phipps, A. (2007) Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival: Languaging, Tourism, Life. Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Phipps, A. and Gonzalez, M. (2004) Modern Languages: Learning and Teaching in an Intercultural Field. London: Sage. Probst, B. (2016) Both/and: Researcher as participant in qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Research Journal 16 (2), 149–158. Ros i Solé, C. (2013) Cosmopolitan speakers and their cultural cartographies. The Language Learning Journal 41 (3), 326–339. Ros i Solé, C. (2016) The Personal World of the Language Learner. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Swain, M. (2006) Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language proficiency. In H. Byrnes (ed.) Advanced Language Learning: The Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky (pp. 95–108). London: Continuum. van Lier, L. (2004) The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning: A Sociocultural Perspective. London: Kluwer Academic. Warriner, D.S. and Bigelow, M. (2019) Critical Refl ections on Research Methods: Power and Equity in Complex Multilingual Contexts. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

6 Language Studies as Transcultural Becoming and Participation: Undoing Language Boundaries across the Danube Region Eszter Tarsoly and Jelena Ćalić

Introduction

This chapter addresses the conventionalised separation of ‘language’ and ‘content’ in institutional discourse settings, particularly the informal but widespread division of academic subjects, and the kind of knowledge they aim to transmit, into the above two categories. In the language use of education committee meetings, departmental administration and, even, curricula, oft-repeated phrases such as content modules versus language modules and content subjects versus language subjects cement the ‘language’ versus ‘content’ divide. We shall argue that the binary opposition of ‘content’ versus ‘language’ in institutional discourses is underpinned by the cognitive representation of language as ‘container’ (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), rooted deep in people’s minds. Thus, the separation of ‘language’ (as ‘container’) and ‘content’ in institutional jargon taps into a more generic conceptual framing of the notion of language, which explains, in part, the tenacity of the ‘language’ versus ‘content’ binary in institutional settings. We shall argue that political notions of statehood, national entities, on the one hand, and institutionalised, seemingly impermeable disciplinary divisions, on the other, share their conceptual grounding with the framing of language as a bounded entity, reduced to the function of a receptacle for meanings, ideas and knowledge. In line with the purposes of this volume, our findings indicate that flexible language pedagogies which involve student collaboration and the simultaneous teaching of multiple languages are particularly well positioned to allow learners to recognise the permeability of borders between languages in society. 118

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Our study is based on research we have undertaken on a UK university course, Languages in Contact along the Danube: Intercultural Frictions and Flows (LCD), taught at University College London (UCL). The course invites students to explore linguistic and cultural contact situations in the wider Danube region, in order to probe common misappropriations regarding intercultural exchange in Europe, and to challenge trivial approaches to language and nation, language and identity, and historical and current migrations, in the face of local, areal and global interactions. Learning on the course builds on classroom interaction to which students bring different language skills, either as mono- or multilingual speakers or as students on modern language degrees. Building on students’ individual language repertoires and on the diversity of their personal experience as language users in multicultural settings, the course looks closely at data from languages spoken along the river Danube, including national, regional and local language varieties as well as minority and endangered languages. While analysing word lists, grammar and short texts in German, Greek, Hungarian, South Slavonic languages, Romanian and Balkan Romance, Romani and Yiddish, the LCD course presents language as content. From the language materials provided, students tease out conclusions about historic and present language-contact situations across political borders of nation-states which pride (or shame) themselves on their monolingual and monocultural traditions. In presenting data from Central and South-East European languages as content, the LCD course challenges the boundary between ‘language’ and ‘content’ courses. Furthermore, by tracing borrowing patterns across the languages discussed, it also probes the perceived impermeability of national ‘standard’ languages, replacing the concept of language-as-container (i.e. a bounded entity) with language as practice. In addition to the conventionalised separation of ‘language’ and ‘content’ in institutional discourse, on the one hand and, on the other, the imagined boundary between languages that served as the basis of national standards, there is yet a third kind of boundary the course challenges. This is the boundary between disciplinary divisions into which knowledge is ‘packaged’. Through extensive group work and guided interaction between students, LCD allows students to develop an understanding of interpretation as a process based as much on individual background and experience as on principles of research in academic disciplines in the humanities. In our research, we were interested in two different but interconnected questions. The fi rst of these concerns students’ pre-existing ideas about language, and whether the ‘language’ versus ‘content’ divide does, indeed, characterise their mental representation of language, on the one hand and, on the other, the kind of knowledge they expect to gain on a particular ‘language’ or ‘content’ course. We examined the first question through the analysis of metaphor and metonymy which occurred in texts written by the students as part of formative assessment on the course. The second

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question focused more specifically on how well the course achieves one of its most important learning objectives in the domain of ‘undoing boundaries’ between national ‘standard’ languages, ‘language’ and ‘content’ and, ultimately, disciplinary divisions of knowledge transfer. We were interested in finding out whether students might come to perceive language studies as the study of ‘content’, and whether the focus on authentic materials and the interpretation of data from the languages can function as a means of overcoming disciplinary boundaries. Our method of analysis for the second question was a survey that addressed the difference between ‘knowledge’ on language versus so-called ‘content’ courses in students’ experience and the ways in which conceptual linguistic and cultural boundaries can be undone in teaching language, languages and language contact. This chapter is divided into three main parts: the fi rst of these is an overview of the theoretical considerations, the context and the methods of our research. Secondly, we address students’ pre-existing ideas of language, language relatedness and language contact, based on an analysis of the metaphors and metonymy students used in short thought experiment exercises, collected as part of the formative assessment on the course. The analysis of data gained from these short student essays served as a baseline for a survey. In the third part of this chapter, we present our survey results about three aspects of teaching and learning on LCD. These are: (1) the use of authentic language material, its analysis, description and interpretation as ‘content’ on the course; (2) our attempt to question the ‘content’ versus ‘language’ divide in the labelling of courses in cultural and language studies; and (3) students’ motivation to enrol on the course and their reflections on intercultural, interactive and research-based learning as pedagogical approaches. As our teaching method was based on teacher-student and student-student interaction in equal measure, in this study one of our aims is to critically explore the pedagogical aspects of this simultaneous academic and social learning experience. Context of the Study

Languages in Contact along the Danube is a 15-credit course offered to both undergraduate and postgraduate students during one academic term. The course is taught by a team of five teachers from three different departments at UCL. While it explores language-contact phenomena in general, the course focuses in detail on five languages of the Danube region, which belong to two different historically related groups (IndoEuropean and Uralic), and one (Yiddish) bearing traces of a third group (Semitic); within Indo-European, three different sub-groups are represented (Germanic, Romance, Slavonic). The course uses authentic materials from these languages to explore language and cultural contact from both a purely linguistic perspective (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, language relatedness versus typological features of languages, etc.)

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and from a sociolinguistic point of view, in order to unpack phenomena related to cultural contact such as attitudes towards language, linguistic purism, language (re-)naming, and the use of script as a marker of national or political affiliation in linguistic communities (e.g. the choice between the Cyrillic or Latin scripts for Serbo-Croatian and Romanian; the use of the Hebrew script for Yiddish, a Germanic language, etc.). The method of delivery is envisaged through a variety of genres, including lectures and co-operative and research-based learning, in which four to five groups of students engage in discussions about secondary readings and primary data from the languages, giving feedback, providing explanations and helping each other to formulate and refi ne their research questions. The aim of the course is to expand students’ linguistic repertoire, on the one hand and, on the other, to focus on the study of language as a constituent part of exploring culture, history and politics. A secondary aim is to invite students to reflect on the ways knowledge is constructed (Scarino, 2014). This aim is addressed through course content which encourages students to challenge various popular ideas about language, including their own (cf. Leung & Scarino, 2016), such as associations between languages and national flags, countries or territories, and practices based on the assumption that there are ‘small’ languages, which are somehow less important – or ‘rich’ or ‘beautiful’ – than others, not usually qualified by a specific adjective such as small. The course raises students’ critical awareness of these topics in a bi-directional approach (Jean & Simard, 2013; Schaffer, 1989). One of the directions is, by and large, deductive: it starts out with theoretical considerations in the secondary literature of language contact (i.e. the study of lexical and grammatical borrowing and syntactic pattern copying across languages in general). Then, the course gradually zooms in on examples of borrowing and copying in the languages of the Danube region (e.g. the linguistic outcome of contact between speakers of Romanian and South-Slavonic languages, South-Slavonic and Turkish, Hungarian and Yiddish, German influence on other languages of the region, etc.). One of the questions we look at, for instance, is whether languages are similar because of historical relatedness (i.e. their belonging to groupings called ‘language families’, such as Yiddish and German, which are both Germanic languages) or as a result of contact between speakers, which resulted in similar structures in the languages (e.g. the resemblance between Hungarian and Slavonic horticultural terms, which Hungarian borrowed largely from Slavonic). Finally, Yiddish and Hungarian are used as two case studies about the historical and social-psychological factors underlying the views, widespread even among some specialists, which question the historic relatedness of these languages to other Germanic and Uralic languages, respectively (Comrie, 1991; Sherwood, 1996). The other direction is, mutatis mutandis, inductive. Approximately one-third of the sessions start with original materials from the languages,

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such as paragraph-length texts, sentence and word lists, idioms, proverbs, jokes, etc., which are provided with interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses for students’ perusal. These texts are used to compare lexical and structural features of the languages, and explain, if any similarity is discovered, whether it is due to language relatedness, contact or typological chance resemblance. The observations students make and their interpretation of the data lead on to a discussion of what one-to-one languagecontact situations are like (i.e. when the origin of a particular language feature can be attributed to a specific language, and the feature in question appears as innovation in other languages as a result of borrowing, which can be traced with relative clarity), and how they are different from Sprachbünde (lit. ‘speech-bonds’ or ‘linguistic convergence areas’, within which a number of languages exhibit similar language features but it is impossible to tell from which language a particular feature originated because contact between speakers and its impact on the languages is longstanding and intense). Language contact in the Danube region is compared to the oldest established Sprachbund on the Balkans. A thorough discussion of this topic necessitates an understanding of the difference between ‘standard’ language varieties, which serve as symbols for political communities, and actual language use in local speech communities. The idea of a Danubian (sometimes also called Carpathian or Central European) linguistic area has been proposed (e.g. Helimski, 2003; Lindstedt, 2016; Pusztay, 2015; Thomas, 2008) and duly rejected by scholars. Students come to understand that in order to establish a potential Sprachbund, a highly theoretical and abstract disciplinary construct, what needs to be studied is precisely the concrete: the intricate specificity of actual language use in all its detail. This includes, fi rst and foremost, an appreciation of the fact that what we think of as a language (i.e. what we call German, Serbian, Romanian, etc.) includes a range of regional and social varieties, which exhibit features absent from the ‘standard’ (cf. Berthele, 2010, on cognitive models underpinning speakers’ attitudes towards dialect and ‘standard’). Proceeding inductively from specific language features to theoretical-level abstractions, classroom discussions explore the way arguments are built and supported in a particular text, whether that be academic papers, popular publications about language, or politically mediated writings, for instance, about language naming (as in recent years in the South-Slavonic continuum on the Balkans).

Theoretical Considerations Content versus language

The theoretical considerations that guided the planning of both the LCD course and the present study are based on two paradoxical yet complementary trends: the exclusion of metalinguistic knowledge from language

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learning; and the bypassing of the study of language in academic disciplines such as literature and cultural studies. Kelly (2000: 84) claims that ‘the core of language learning and language use gives rise to two principal dimensions, first the study of languages, language use, and the processes of teaching and learning foreign languages, and second the study of foreign language texts (culture) and practice (society)’. It is the domain of sociocultural and area studies, on the one hand, and the domain of linguistics and languagerelated studies, on the other, that inform and support language learning. Kelly recognises that metalinguistic knowledge can have a reflective value for language learners both in their understanding of the way languages work and in their evaluation of the individual’s learning process (cf. Tarsoly & Valijärvi, 2011). Linguistic knowledge (i.e. knowledge about language as opposed to knowledge of a particular language), however, appears to have secondary importance in the study of language. The content in language teaching is primarily linked to the teaching of culture (or perhaps history and politics), while empirical linguistic inquiry plays a part merely at the initial stages of establishing language programmes. This means that language courses fail to improve students’ metalinguistic awareness of language structure, variation and register, thus missing an important opportunity to render knowledge about language explicit. The uncoupling of learning languages from knowing about language is reflected in the physical and administrative realities of universities: linguistics is often institutionally positioned outside language departments and possibly integrated with other disciplinary areas. The gradual marginalisation of linguistic inquiry in language pedagogy has been enhanced by theoretical developments in linguistics, which place theory building front and centre while the description of language data takes second place. Furthermore, increasing scholarly interest in the study of sociocultural and political factors that bring about particular ways of using language in various discourse settings inspired views that advocate that the systematic study of grammar is merely description without analysis. In disciplines contributing to area studies, theory building is necessarily place-bound, which assumes a detailed understanding of local perspectives available only in utterances and written texts produced in the local languages. Yet the recent decade has seen a progressive decline in language-based academic programmes and foreign language skills in Anglo-American academia (cf. Milutinović, 2019). Despite an increasing focus on intercultural education in language pedagogy, language and culture are still widely imagined as bounded entities (cf. Tarsoly, 2016), and their imaginary boundaries as coinciding with nation-state borders – a perception reinforced even in modern languages curricula (cf. Ćalić, 2018). This limiting view of language and culture, however, can be undone if educators and students actively engage with their personal multilingual and multicultural experience shaped by the transnational interactions and flows of today – and of the past. Ros i Solé’s

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(2013) recommendation for cosmopolitan language learning pedagogies suggests that classrooms should be the fora where students’ linguistic attachments to national cultures and their different worldviews could be problematised, re-examined, compared, and shared with other participants on the course. Students are ‘sophisticated cultural mediators who feel compelled to reject standard prêt-à-porter versions of culture’ (Ros i Solé, 2013: 327), and should therefore be encouraged to use their personal and educational experience, contingent on the place where learning happens, to unpack linguistic and cultural taboos, misconceptions and prejudice. Similar to Ros i Solé’s, the pedagogical model based on the idea of the intercultural being, inspired by Barnett (1994) and Byram (1997) and further developed by Phipps and Gonzalez (2004), favours the kind of student engagement which is ‘discovered in action, reflection and recursion’ over the approach based on intercultural competence which is ‘learned from and in a discipline’ and ‘defi ned by academic fields’ (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004: 29). The learning of, and about, languages (labelled typically as ‘foreign’ or ‘native’) is particularly well placed for such interaction-based, guided self-discovery and reflexivity. Knowledge about language, particularly, includes not only an understanding of methods of linguistic analysis and description, but also of components of communicative competence (Hymes, 1964), the sociopolitical and cultural contexts in which speech events are embedded, and the multimodality of experience, such as the impact of visual stimuli or elements of material culture, when using language (Ros i Solé, 2020). Thus, knowledge about language enables speakers and language learners to reflect on their own selfhood while observing the broader and multimodal contexts of language use. The exclusion of metalinguistic knowledge from language studies contributed to the now widespread perception of language learning as skills training and to the institutional separation of academic ‘content’ subjects from ‘language’ courses. With the principles of intercultural pedagogy in mind, both the LCD course and the study whose results are presented here were designed with two assumptions in mind. Firstly, metalinguistic knowledge, which enables students to learn about languages, can facilitate intercultural learning by providing ease of access to languages previously unknown to learners. Secondly, an understanding of the intricate specificity of local languages and cultural practices contributes to enhancing learners’ sense of self as transcultural mediators (Kramsch, 2013; Pennycook, 2006) while they compare, contrast and negotiate cultural difference between the speaker communities of the languages studied and ‘their own’ (or whatever they might conceive as ‘their own’ language and culture). This reflection leads to a criticality component, emerging as a by-product of learning (about) language and might, therefore, contribute to building students’ confidence to breach and overcome disciplinary boundaries in their independent discovery of whatever language or theoretical material they have in hand.

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Conceptual representations of language

The ‘content’ versus ‘language’ divide, explained above as an institutional practice, has its foundations in human conceptual processing. In the section that follows we shall look at some features of cognitive models, metaphor and metonymy. We illustrate with examples taken from students’ work and academic discourse the pervasiveness of the language is a container and knowledge is content metaphors, on the one hand and, on the other, the complex metaphoric representations of language arising from cognitive blends (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002). According to Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) classic work, metaphor is a cognitive process that allows us to understand one thing (the target domain) in terms of another (the source domain); for instance, time expressions in terms of space (e.g. in times of crisis, on Monday); psychological states in terms of bodily sensations (e.g. feeling low, sweet love; cf. Sweetser, 1987, 1992). Metonymy allows one entity (the vehicle concept) to stand for another (the target) from the same experiential domain, such as part for a whole, e.g. mother tongue (mother stands for ‘parent, ancestor’), and container for contained, e.g. the city was quiet or a country in unrest (city and country for ‘people living in it’, respectively). Metonymy has been shown to interact with metaphor (Kövecses & Radden, 1998) inasmuch as it provides the experiential basis (humans’ sensation of physical space) for primary conceptual metaphors such as low versus high, container versus contained, etc. Primary metaphorical concepts are based on such spatial and metonymic image schemata, and structure our understanding of physical realia, social interactions and abstract concepts. One of the most pervasive conceptual metaphors in our understanding of language is the well-known conduit metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Reddy, 1979), which suggests that ideas are objects, and linguistic expressions (words, phrases, clauses, etc.) are, in turn, containers, which provide a form for the packaging and transfer of ideas. This metaphorical structuring corresponds to the instrumentalisation of language as a means of communication (a ‘tool’), and suggests that pre-existing meaning is embedded in words and sentences. A particularly powerful instance of the pervasiveness of the conduit metaphor occurs in institutional discourses of education in the humanities, dividing university courses into language versus content courses. This division implies that language is separable from content in the practical sense, as in course listings and types of syllabi. The underlying metonymic image schema is that language is a container into which content (‘meaning’ or ‘knowledge’) is packaged to be transferred from one person (the speaker, usually a lecturer) to another (the hearer, typically a group of students). Hence, using language is no knowledge in itself in the discourse of education: knowing language requires only skills training (based on presentation, practice and repetition), while knowing ‘content’ (an

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academic subject) requires the transfer of knowledge proper (reading, analysis, interpretation). The LCD course highlights that understanding language, in both its structural and social aspects, is ‘content’ in itself, rather than merely ‘packaging’, and reflection on ‘content’ cannot be uncoupled from reflection on the use of language. Metaphor analysis is a well-established research method to better understand teachers’ and students’ educational experience and practices, their perceptions of the teacher’s role, of their own position in the process and of language learning in general (Block, 1992; Kramsch, 2003; Nikitina & Furuoka, 2008; Oxford et al., 1998). Our primary focus, however, was on students’ perception of language and languages, and not elements of learning per se. Hence, in our interpretation of the data taken from students’ thought experiment submissions, we draw on Lakoff ’s (1987: 74) cognitive cluster models and blending theory. The latter capture complex metaphoric domain mappings, which project additional structure simultaneously from several source domains to a target domain. In her papers on metaphors for language and speech in English and in an Indo-European framework, Sweetser (1987, 1992) convincingly argues that literary metaphors are possible precisely because they are new extensions to the existing domain mappings of conventionalised metaphors. Particular discourse contexts can favour one cognitive model over another and such culturally entrenched ways of construing language leave their traces in the minds of members of the speech community (Berthele, 2010: 275). The ‘discourse context’ in our study corresponds to the framing of language and knowledge described above, thus (unwillingly) reinforcing students’ pre-existing ideas of language as a bounded entity. Thomas (1991) taxonomised metaphors for language adopted in the discourses of linguistic purism, which provides an insightful background to our analysis. Methods and Research Questions

This chapter centres on three main questions: (1) What are the cognitive and semantic structures that shape widespread understandings of ‘language’ as a container? (2) What is the difference, if any, between ‘knowledge’ conveyed on language versus so-called ‘content’ courses in students’ experience? (3) What are the ways in which conceptual linguistic and cultural boundaries can be undone in teaching language, languages and language contact? To address the fi rst question, data were collected from a corpus of texts written by students as part of their formative assessment on the course. We collected thought experiments (max. 300-word reflection papers) from 25 students three times during an academic term on various topics (e.g. whether Yiddish is a language or a dialect of German, popular

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beliefs about the non-Uralic origins of Hungarian, languages as national ‘flags’ on the Balkans, attitudes towards Romani and Yiddish loanwords in other languages, Slavonic versus Romance influences on Romanian, etc.) which were covered in lectures and group discussions. Tutors read and analysed students’ submissions for not only the usual categories used in essay marking (structure, argument, subject knowledge, etc.) but primarily for use of language and presentation of ideas. After editing and marking the texts submitted by students, tutors selected the most typical metaphoric and metonymic representations of language that occurred in the thought experiments. Based on the analytical frameworks provided by Lakoff and Johnson, on cognitive models for language, and Thomas, on purist metaphors for language, we designed a typological classification of the metaphors most frequently used by students for language and specific languages (cf. the first part of the data analysis section below). The cognitive and linguistic processes underlying the ways in which language was conceptualised by students were discussed in class. For the purposes of our research, the representations of language, speech, resemblance of language elements and related phenomena in students’ writing uncovered overlaps in the conceptual framing of language in students’ thinking and institutional discourses. Our initial fi ndings from the analysis of metaphors for language were used as a baseline for the design of a survey, completed at the end of the course. Questions about course content were formulated in a way that explicitly addressed students’ preexisting assumptions about language, culture and the subject areas studying them. In the second phase of our study we used anonymised questionnaires to elicit students’ opinions on issues raised in the second and third questions above. The questionnaire, completed by students in the last session of the course, collected both quantitative and qualitative data; the analysis of the data was streamlined by the thematic areas covered within the questionnaire. We reformulated the course aims for the purposes of this study as three areas of investigation to focus on in the questionnaire. The three themes that thus emerged were the following: Students’ views on: (1) the extensive use of authentic target-language materials to introduce new theoretical points in the study of language contact and culture; (2) the ‘language’ versus ‘content’ divide in the labelling of academic courses and the study of language as content; (3) the inclusion of students’ own cultural and linguistic experience in the learning process as a potential for self-reflection and as a pedagogical approach. The study was conducted with the 28 students registered on the course in 2015. Twenty-seven students participated in the survey, of whom nine students were in their fi rst, eight in their second, two in their third and

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eight in their fourth year of study. Their first language varied, with English dominating (20 students); we had two bilingual English-Korean and English-Serbian students, three Hungarian native speakers, and for French, German, Romanian and Slovak we had one student for each language. Languages studied by the students prior to starting university were: English, 2; French, 9; German, 2; Greek, 1; Hebrew, 1; Hungarian, 1; Latin, 2; Russian, 4; Spanish, 5. Out of 27 students, four were studying politics and East European studies, one anthropology, and the remaining survey participants were students on various modern languages degrees, including East European languages. We used a questionnaire in a small-scale, exploratory study of students’ attitudes. With regard to thematic scope, the questionnaire contains four main parts as shown in Table 6.1. The questionnaire comprised 28 items in total: eight Likert items and 20 open-ended questions. Out of these 28 items, seven items in the first section were specific, open-ended questions aimed at gathering information on anonymised participants’ linguistic and academic background; the second section included six required Likert items with a five-point scale ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ with a neutral option included. The items in this

Table 6.1 Questionnaire sections and themes Parts of the questionnaire

Type of questions

Themes

A. Demographic [Questions 1–7]

Open-ended

– first language [Q1] – title of degree programme – year of study [Q3] – language(s) currently and previously studied – academic subject studied on the course [Q7]

B. Attitudes to studying foreign languages in HE and personal experience [Questions 8–13]

Close-ended

– teaching of linguistic terminology is of secondary importance in language study [Qs8–10] – language study involves topics such as historical and typological relatedness [Qs11–12] – language is studied only with reference to a country where language is spoken [Q13]

C. Languages in Contact along the Danube: Course material, content, feedback and personal experience of group work [Questions 14–20]

Open-ended

– use of authentic materials in this type of a course [Q14] – difference to content and language courses [Qs16–17] – group work [Qs18–19] – what has been learnt from feedback [Q20]

D. Comparison of the course content and methods to other academic subjects and learning (about) language on a language course [Questions 21–26]

Open-ended and closeended

– motivation to do the course [Q21] – content of the LCD course [Qs22–25] – content versus language course [Q26]

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section explored students’ attitudes towards the way in which foreign languages are (or should be) taught at a university in the UK and their own experience of language study at UCL. The seven open-ended items in the third section were sentence completion answers, which asked students more specifically about the Languages in Contact along the Danube course, the themes and materials covered, the teaching methods and the interaction with other students through group work. The fi nal section included two Likert items similar to the ones in the first section as well as six short-answer questions prompting students to compare the course content and methods to other academic subjects and learning (about) language on language courses. Table 6.1 shows that some themes are represented in more than one section of the questionnaire. The overlaps between the items listed in various parts of the questionnaire ensured that the core questions we wanted to examine were covered from various perspectives, and allowed us to attain detailed information on the three focal points of our research. Data Analysis Students’ metaphoric representations of language (Research Question 1)

The following collection shows the metaphoric clusters according to which language is conceptualised in the resumés written by students. Some of these are new extensions to existing conceptual structures while others are conventional. To save space, we use only the most typical examples per cluster as an illustration. (1) Language is a living being. Languages were often given agency in formulations such as the language moved into the territory of another [language]. Languages also form families, are born, named, and resemble each other: Yiddish and Judesmo seem like languages born from independent communities; if Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Macedonian [are] dialects of the same language, what do we then name the parental language; Hungarian [has] this kind of lost childhood effect. The conceptualisation of language as a living being or as members of families arises due to the combination of metaphor and metonymy: students understand languages in terms of their speakers; thus, languages ‘can do’ what speakers do, and names of languages can stand for speaker communities; e.g. Romanian came into contact with the Slavs. (2) Language is organic growth. Students often mention natural developments within languages (e.g. of a new language feature) but also of one language from another, e.g. Yiddish did not naturally develop from an Indo-European source. Horticultural metaphors pervade our thinking about language: an important set of purist imagery

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is from the horticultural field (e.g. the cultivation of language, weeding out of ‘bad’ language elements). Even in scientific contexts, the development of languages has been illustrated by tree diagrams and, more recently, rhizomatic multiplicity (Heltai, 2020). Students’ thinking about language seems to be characterised by the tree-image schemata, that is, stems (and branches) originating and diversifying from a single entity, rather than assuming diversity and multiplicity in every synchrony: e.g. Croatian and Serbian both stem from Old Church Slavonic; another Romanian word […] also stems from the same word. (3) Language is a bounded entity. This generic cognitive model for language has several sub-categories listed below. – Language is physical structure. Standardised languages, particularly, are framed as objects with physical presence in the world, with solid (or unchanging) inner structure and well-defi ned spatial limits. Students wrote about changes to [a language’s] linguistic fabric and variations within boundaries of languages. The following is an example of a complex blend in which the physical structure and living being cognitive models for language are brought together: the language of a nation can also often cage and limit the expansion of dialects. Contrasting this trend in representations of language with the organic growth imagery discussed above, there appears to be an opposition, in students’ minds, between languages with features that develop, and those that are developed, in other words, between primary ‘growth’ and secondary ‘construction’, deliberately provided with a solid structure and limiting bond, e.g. Yiddish was of course a constructed language. – Language is a treasure. The concept of language as a precious belonging is a less salient submodel for the category language, but it is nonetheless widespread in discourses of linguistic purism and in particular communities (often speaking languages perceived as ‘small’ or endangered), e.g. [l]anguage, however, is something that is used by and owned by humans. – Language is a territory. A typical and widespread mental representation of language, which arises, again, due to metonymy, e.g. [language] effectively lies under human control and Yiddish is definitely a language which lies very close to German. In these examples, names of languages seem to stand for names of political entities (countries), suggesting that languages are imagined as having physical presence in space, and this space may correspond to countries or geographic units. There is a clear association between nation-state and language, which is possibly explained by the close similarity in the names of languages (e.g. German) and nation-states (Germany). Furthermore, the Language is a

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territory model is applied to languages where such association between the name of the language and a political entity enclosed within physical borders is impossible (Yiddish, a diaspora language without a close association to a territory). Among the various cognitive representations for a linguistically formulated category, such as those listed above for language, a particular cognitive model can be more representative of the entire category than other models. For instance, mother tongue and standard language are typical and salient examples of the category language, and are thus easily generalised in people’s cognitive structuring of the notion of ‘language’ (Tarsoly, 2016). Standardised languages come about as a result of human intervention into language change and are therefore associated with the politics of national statehood, which reinforces the representations of language as living being or territory, respectively. These representations are, therefore, more easily applied to the concept of language on the whole. Institutional discourses of higher education reinforce, in particular, the language is a container model in their division of subjects into content versus language courses. The container metaphor further overlaps with, and is reinforced by, representations of language as bounded entity and territory. The container metaphor is pervasive in terms of our understanding of the world in general. Similar to the conceptualisation language as a container, academic disciplines are often seen not as processes of meaning-making, at highly abstract and theoretical levels, but as containers – entities with boundaries ‘containing’ knowledge about a particular ‘content’ (cf. Reddy, 1987; for economics, Alejo, 2010). The course unpacks the container metaphor in order to illustrate that boundaries of both language and knowledge are part of cognitive representations of these categories rather than real. This understanding is key to ‘undoing boundaries’, one of the key learning objectives on LCD. Our questionnaire-based survey examined how well the course achieves this goal. Students’ views on the ‘content’ of language learning: Survey results (Research Questions 2 and 3)

Learning about language through studying specific languages located in a well-defi ned geographic area enables students to develop a better understanding of the fundamentally metaphoric nature of our thinking which, in turn, allows them to discover the same metaphor in the differentiation between ‘content’ versus ‘language’ subjects as in the conceptual framing of language-as-container. We were therefore interested in fi nding out whether students might come to perceive language studies as the study of ‘content’, and whether the focus on authentic materials and the interpretation of data from the languages can function as a means of overcoming disciplinary boundaries in the humanities.

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1. Use of authentic materials

The sessions which follow an inductive approach to learning require the use of short texts and sentence and word lists in the five languages. Students discuss in groups the type and the extent of grammatical, syntactical and lexical similarities across the languages. This approach is also used on a session looking at the way in which linguistic phenomena, such as proverbs, collocations and ethnonyms, capture perceptions and stereotypes of the Other in various national and ethnic contexts, and the way in which jokes and humour are used to negotiate or subvert such stereotypes. Commenting on the use of such authentic texts initially, in the classroom, some students found the languages presented in the course material ‘unusual’, ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’ to them. As a result, they approached the language data with some reluctance, and some students resisted reading, analysing and understanding texts. Comments included ‘I don’t know this language’, ‘I don’t understand this, I only speak English’ and ‘this is too difficult and too intimidating’, showing a strong resistance to attempting linguistic analysis of a more abstract kind than in language classes. Discussions of stereotypes were also rather challenging at times, as the classroom interaction involved negotiating between different, and often opposing, ideological stances. Despite such resistance in class towards the use of authentic language material, the students’ response in the questionnaire to the open-ended question about these materials was predominantly positive. Nearly all survey participants found the analysis of data and the close reading of texts in different languages ‘interesting’, ‘fascinating’, ‘engaging’, ‘challenging but exciting’ and even ‘very interesting and very confusing’; some students observed that they found these materials ‘[q]uite useful and helpful to see differences/similarities in the syntax/lexicon of these languages’ and ‘[v]ery interesting and useful for illustrating concrete differences between the languages, rather than just theorising’. The use of linguistic terminology renders the presentation of authentic materials simpler and clearer. The use of terminology and technical apparatus, however, may be a hindrance for students unfamiliar with basic linguistic theory (cf. Dixon, 2010). Some students had surprisingly little awareness of the structural features of languages and linguistic terminology; for instance, a student justified her lack of motivation to engage with the materials by saying ‘when I study Italian, I do not have to understand [grammatical] cases’ (all languages studied on the course have a case system, of different kinds, whereas Italian has none). Often, students studying a language at degree level were taken aback when encountering a technical term (e.g. case, genitive, plural, etc.) and the matching linguistic phenomena in a new language, in which the technical label covers a language element which functions slightly (or even substantially) differently from the form and function in the language where the student

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originally encountered it (e.g. the Serbo-Croatian Accusative is different from the Hungarian Accusative both in the way it is marked on the noun and in its function; cf. Haspelmath, 2009). Yet, the survey shows that students had fundamentally positive attitudes towards metalinguistic knowledge. This theme is relevant to the discussion of students’ opinion of the ‘content versus language-subject’ divide, too, and it is discussed in more detail below. 2. Content versus language course and the study of language as content

In the survey, we were interested in fi nding out whether students saw any resemblance between LCD and, on the one hand, typical university language courses and, on the other, academic ‘content’ subjects, and what, in the students’ view, the content of language learning was. We present survey results regarding differences fi rstly from language courses and secondly from ‘content’ courses. Students’ responses to the Likert scale closed items (cf. Qs8–10) showed that they were undecided as to whether in language courses teachers devote too much time to teaching grammar. However, the distribution of results shows a preference towards the inclusion of grammar in language teaching. Additionally, almost half of the students (44%) believe that, when learning a foreign language, one has to learn linguistic terminology and 52% agree that it is important to know how to talk about languages. In response to the open-ended questions addressing aspects of teaching on the LCD course (Q20), the majority of students stressed that the feedback on thought experiments provided them with useful instructions on how to talk about language. They stated that they learnt ‘more about terminology and linguistics and why this is important’ and understood ‘the importance of using terms accurately’ or ‘… the mistakes I had made when discussing languages and how to correct them’. The survey showed that 85% of students are interested not only in the particular language they study but also in other languages and knowledge about language in general. Q16 and Q24 are two overlapping open-ended questions: the former asked students to address the difference between LCD and other language courses, the latter the difference between the type of knowledge about language conveyed on traditional language courses versus on LCD. From the collated responses the following main themes emerged. In students’ view, the LCD course is different from language courses and the kind of knowledge gained about language because: (1) LCD focuses on several, or a ‘wide range of’, languages: ‘it is about various languages in contact rather than how to speak a specific language’, ‘it focuses on more than one language in depth’, and ‘[it has a] focus on languages in relation, rather than just one’.

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(2) LCD includes linguistic methods in the study of languages: it focuses on ‘language development’, ‘the foundations of language’ and ‘understanding a language at a more theoretical level’. Some students saw it as a course in linguistics tout court: ‘it is basically linguistics’ and ‘it includes various areas of linguistics’. Some answers were more specifically about learning: ‘you don’t really learn a language […] you learn about language’ or ‘[h]ow to talk about languages rather than speak languages’ and, remarkably, two first-year students commented that, unlike language classes, LCD provides ‘[p]ossible explanations behind the structure’ and ‘it is very different from my oral and grammar classes’. Furthermore, many students stated that the languages on the course are studied in relation to each other, rather than as separate units, and in depth: ‘[LCD] doesn’t teach language per se, but provides understanding of how languages work in relation to each other’, ‘the languages are in some way linked to some degree’ and, unlike traditional language courses, LCD reveals that ‘[languages] can have many similarities’ as well as ‘cultural contact, influences from other languages’. In one answer, the fact that the course focuses not only on standard varieties but also dialects was also mentioned as a difference from other language courses. As one student put it, ‘we learnt about languages in a different way’. (3) LCD has a clearer historical, political and social focus than language courses: ‘more focus on history’, ‘[it offers] a lot more on the social, political, historical context’ and ‘on the origin of languages’ as well as on ‘how much [language] is socially and politically influenced’. (4) LCD explores an area (rather than, we infer, a country or nation): ‘more focus on a particular area of Eastern Europe’, ‘[it looked at] my area of interest’. (5) Guided self-discovery and the tools necessary for it: responding to the question concerning what students learnt about language which is different from what they learn in a language class, one of the students said that ‘[they have not] really learnt, but discovered by comparison the similarities between languages’. A second-year student on a modern languages programme, studying two major European languages, stated that ‘I had never been taught any linguistic terms before’, which echoes answers provided to the Likert scale questions (Qs8–10) cited at the beginning of this section. In order to better address the question of labelling courses as ‘content’ versus ‘language’, students were asked to describe how LCD is different from other academic courses (Q17), on the one hand and, on the other, what they learnt about culture that is different from the notion of culture presented on courses in anthropology, literature, cinema, etc. (Q24). From the collated responses, the following main themes emerged.

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In the students’ view, the LCD course is different because: (1) LCD is more focused: most students commented that LCD was ‘more focused’ than other academic courses because of the presentation of data and texts from specific languages of a region, e.g. ‘it is more focused on the details, [and] history of the language itself’, ‘more focus on political attitudes than in [my] anthropology [classes]’. One student thought that the strong focus on particular languages and speaker groups provided ‘a more in-depth view of [the group’s] dynamics’. (2) LCD brings in multiple perspectives in the presentation of its subject area both in the sense that it is ‘more interdisciplinary than other courses’, which was mentioned by most students, and in the methods of delivery: most students mentioned that there were five lecturers contributing to each session, leading to various perspectives on each topic, e.g. ‘multiple teachers and perspectives, focus on interaction’, ‘lots of different topics covered and [by] different teachers’, and some mentioned that in terms of delivery LCD combined at least two genres as ‘[it was] a mix of lecture and seminar’. Furthermore, the notion of culture presented on the course was different, in most students’ view, from other courses because LCD had a clearer emphasis on ‘intercultural connections’. LCD showed that ‘[culture] transcends borders’ because of ‘the movement of people’ (discussed on the course as one of the factors explaining language contact). Students also commented that in comparison with other courses LCD ‘goes back to the roots of culture’; thus, it is ‘more cultural and overall rather than [covering] specific topics in a lit[erature] and fi lm class’. These remarks point to a shift in students’ understanding of culture: the course enabled them to move away from seeing culture as a homogeneous entity bound to a nation-state with its national standard language towards an interpretation of culture as practice, and as such heterogeneous. (3) LCD had a stronger thrust on interaction both in its disciplinary content (e.g. ‘how cultural interaction influence languages’ and ‘cultural contact [e.g. between semi-nomadic or itinerant groups and preindustrial European societies] and change [were covered] in relation to each other’) and the way this information was conveyed (i.e. the lecturers’ pedagogical commitment to group work and inductive approaches). As one student put it, ‘reflection [was the result] of not having theory as a starting point’, but rather data and texts from specific languages. Another student pointed out that studying on the course ‘felt like more of a collaborative learning and teaching process’ because there were five teachers and students interacted with them, too, in addition to group work. (4) LCD was described by several students as ‘unconventional’. It was seen as different from other courses because of ‘its unconventional

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structure’ and the ‘critical, scientific look at culture, more so than in lit/cinema classes’. Students also commented that it had a ‘very different approach to teaching culture’, suggesting, presumably, that the course focused on culture as humans’ everyday practice, experience and interaction, which can be analysed and interpreted through linguistic methods. One student thought that the attention to the intricate specificity of languages rendered the course ‘incredibly niche’. (5) Guided self-discovery and the methods of delivery supporting it: ‘[the course] encourages us to ask more questions and do our own research in any presentation’ and ‘it is new and covers (perhaps too wide) range of topics, and there is a great focus on independent research’. Finally, as the answers to Q26 show, 85% of students thought that LCD is a content and not a language course, which underlines the tenacity of this division and the pervasiveness of the container metaphor. The main reason stated by nearly all students who expressed this view was that they did not learn to speak or write any of the languages, which reflects the institutional approach to language learning as skills training. Students added that too many languages were studied on the course for it to be called a language course and that LCD put emphasis on speakers’ attitudes and historical processes. Some students, however, thought that the course was both a language and ‘content’ course. It is possible that students who were of this opinion were the ones who responded best to the course aim of offering language as ‘content’ and, more generally, of uncovering the metaphoric nature (and futility) of the content versus language divide. 3. Students as mediators of knowledge

In a London-based classroom setting, and in an English language classroom discourse, contact between the languages of the Danube region appears in a different light from the way it would appear in the ‘native’ environment of these languages, where most, if not all, students know at least one of the languages, and the cultural assumptions and attitudes projected by that language, as native speakers. The UK-based English language setting enables both teachers and students to explore ideas across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and assume, as a starting point, a certain (real or pretended) unawareness of received views of language-andculture embedded in national and institutional discourses. The difference between the native and UK-based locations paves the way for a particular type of classroom discourse which is independent from not only preconceived ideas and stereotypes often taken for granted in native environments but also the perceptions of language-and-culture promoted in English language settings (e.g. the content versus language binary). UK-based students with a broad range of linguistic, national, ethnic and religious backgrounds are encouraged to bring examples from, and reflect

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on, their own cross-cultural and cross-linguistic experience in the discussion of cultural and linguistic convergence and discontinuities in the Danube region. To encourage student-led, research-based learning, a part of the summative assessment on the course is a group presentation on a topic of the students’ choice. Students, while drawing on topics covered in class, are encouraged to formulate their own research question for the project. For students, working in a group might be intimidating at first, but most of them pointed out in the survey that they found the group work to be beneficial as ‘[p]eople with different linguistic backgrounds can bring very different perspectives to the discussion’. Several students observed that they can learn from classmates: ‘I can learn a lot from my peers, not just the teachers’ and that in group work one becomes aware of ‘others’ skills, and insights into languages’. Students found that learning in this way allows them ‘to look at different languages from a different point of view’. Furthermore, group work brought about reflections of an entirely personal kind (e.g. ‘[I have learnt] that I am stubborn and it can be tricky to work with others’ and ‘I’ve developed anxiety issues’), while difficulties of appreciating variation in attitudes and patterns of thought also came to light: ‘it can be difficult to motivate others to share their thoughts’, as one student observed, while others claimed to have learned ‘to appreciate other people’s interests and take on board their views’ and that ‘people can process information in very different ways’. In their answers to the open-ended Q21, which asked students about their reasons for taking the course, almost all students mentioned one of two reasons: either because the course sounded different from what they are used to or because they were interested in languages and linguistics. Looking at the answers in more detail, the following thematic groupings emerged: (1) Students chose the course because they were looking for something different in both the institutional and disciplinary sense, ‘outside of [their] home department’ and ‘as a change from strictly literaturebased modules I’d had at SSEES’. (2) More than half of the students mentioned their interest in languages and language in general as a motivating factor in their course choice, often combined with their intention to reach out from their usual course of study and disciplines: ‘I was attracted to the idea of learning several languages’ or ‘I wanted to [know about] other languages than the ones I study’, ‘because I am interested in languages but wanted to study them in a different way’, ‘interest in sociolinguistics’ and ‘[I am] interested in a wide range of languages, [and the course is] different to everything offered before’. (3) Approximately one-third of the students mentioned the areal focus to explain their course choice and, interestingly, the geographic

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specificity of the course appeared to be often intertwined with students’ personal stories: they were either interested in the region, had relatives there or came from there; thus, the Danube region provided a certain familiarity which students’ main subject of study or degree programme lacked. As one student put it, ‘as I am doing French, I was using good old Danubian languages [on the course], more of a home ground to me’. While some students had a specific interest in the Danube region, in the Balkans or in Slavonic languages, others, for instance an English native speaking, UK-born student, stated that they wanted to fi ll a gap in their knowledge about this part of the world: ‘I wanted to learn more about a group of languages I was very ignorant about’. These remarks support fi ndings in existing research (e.g. Phipps & Gonzales, 2004; Ros i Solé, 2013) regarding the experiential and biographical dimension of language learning, mentioned in the theoretical section of this chapter. Undoing Borders in Teaching Language, Languages and Language Contact: Concluding Discussion

This chapter is based on the discussion of a course which confronts both the institutional separation of language from content in education and the commonly held belief which assumes a clear-cut correspondence between language and nation-state. Language about language produced by the students in course work was used to describe the ways language is framed at the outset of the learning process and served as a baseline to our discussion of the progress of students’ thinking throughout the course. The pervasiveness of the ‘language-as-container’ metaphor was illustrated with examples both from students’ course work and from institutional discourses. In our analysis of survey results we focused on the two remaining questions raised by our study. These address the difference between ‘knowledge’ on language versus so-called ‘content’ courses in students’ experience, and the ways in which conceptual linguistic and cultural boundaries can be undone in teaching language and language contact. While the survey results show that the interactive and research-based learning methods as well as the use of authentic language materials were found to be difficult to different degrees by the students, most agreed that the pursuit of such methods is worthwhile precisely because they are challenging yet engaging and fascinating. The detailed and specific nature of authentic materials calls for a thorough and precise analysis, description and interpretation of texts, which enables students and tutors to zoom in particularly closely on language structure and lexis. Through this closereading perspective, similar to zooming in with a camera, movement and change are magnified and become easier to capture: similarity of language structure and lexis across languages becomes clear and features of borrowing patterns emerge. Once the narrow-angle lens captures the fi ne

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detail through a narrow focus, a wider perspective opens up again in the explanation of borrowing patterns, which are due to large-scale cultural, historic and political trends. The continuous switching of perspectives between narrow and wide angles, to further elaborate the visual metaphor, enhances the way the study of the intricate specificity of the local (languages and their speakers) provides a solid explanatory grounding for larger-scale processes. This dynamic not only allows the crossing of imaginary or real borders between nation-states, standardised ‘national’ languages and academic disciplines, but it also deconstructs those borders. One of the most important results of our survey is that most students learnt to cross (and cross out!) these borders because of their close engagement with several languages and multiple perspectives, facilitated by a team of lecturers and an interdisciplinary approach. While most students maintained a distinction between content and language classes in the survey, which was completed at the end of the course, some saw LCD as both a language and content course. Although some students questioned the language-as-container metaphor, and the institutional discourses based on it, they came to see LCD as a type of course in which the ‘content’ is a close analysis and description of language data and texts; thus, the ‘content’ of language classes is reshuffled from the semi-automated presentation and practice of language elements to the critical interpretation of what close analysis and description of language reveals. The survey results were particularly instructive in the domain of what we call ‘undoing boundaries’ on the course. Many students’ course choice is motivated from the outset by their desire to experience something different: to cross departmental, disciplinary and language boundaries (e.g. study a number of languages, all different from their degree programme; dip into the study of language contact and linguistics instead of more widely offered courses in literature; and, even, choose a course outside their home department). Many also pointed out that they enjoyed the crossing of boundaries between the individual teaching styles of the five lecturers and mixed methods of delivery (lecture, seminar and group discussions), while only a few students reported fi nding this confusing. Interestingly, for all the characteristics of the course that students described as ‘unconventional’, the success of LCD appears to be tied to a sense of intimacy and familiarity which plays a part not only in students’ course choice but also in the way they positioned themselves vis-à-vis the material taught. Many students reported personal stories (family or special personal interest in the region, personal desire to fi ll gaps in knowledge, keenness to learn linguistics or individual languages) behind their expectations from the course. Students’ desire for personal involvement was fulfi lled through, and furthered by, the ‘learning by doing’ approach adopted on the course. In group discussions with each other and tutors (and, presumably, also from having the opportunity to observe

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discussions between the tutors), students brought to bear their knowledge of their native language(s) and the various languages they study on linguistic material from the Danube region. They reported learning from each other’s knowledge of languages and from the way another person views language. Interaction as a means of learning encouraged a stronger personal involvement with the stakes of the course on the part of students. The fact that their individual pre-existing knowledge (and not only disciplinary knowledge but their personal experience of real-life language contact situations) is valued and validated as starting points for learning, allows students to guide themselves in the discovery (or, in Ros i Solé’s terms, ‘write their own script’) of Danubian languages, language contact, and areal features of history, culture and diverse patterns of life, irrespective of boundaries and borders, in the Danube region, or elsewhere. Therefore, an important lesson of our research for both ‘language’ and ‘content’ courses is that, even on courses with theoretical foci, such as critical area studies and comparative literature, it is well worth our while uncovering the complex yet regular patterns of the languages in which the textual materials under discussion were originally spoken or written. Among our survey participants, most students studied on language degree programmes with few exceptions, and yet approximately half of them reported that language and country bore a strong association with one another: a clear instance of the language-as-container metaphor, reinforced by institutional practices and (perhaps unintended) messages of courses that focus on particular, and usually a sole, ‘national’ literature and culture. Our study shows that a clear focus on the local, the specific and the detailed paves the way towards an understanding of (to use the students’ wording) ‘broader’ trends than national ones at the very ‘foundations’ of human culture. This is possible because the focus on the specific detail in multiple languages sheds light on the permeability of linguistic borders in society. Students’ active and collaborative engagement in discovering the detail allows them to gain hands-on experience in the negotiation of meaning, thus rendering language learning as a social and semiotic process rather than merely a classroom practice. Hence, the teaching both of languages and of academic ‘content’ is likely to benefit from a linguistically informed and interaction-based approach. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) What are the ways in which conceptual linguistic and cultural boundaries can be undone in teaching language, languages and language contact? (2) What are the cognitive and semantic structures that shape widespread understandings of ‘language’ as a container? (3) What is the difference, if any, between ‘knowledge’ conveyed on language versus so-called ‘content’ courses in students’ experience?

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(4) How does a collaborative learning approach contribute to students’ negotiation of meaning with regard to the view of languages as bounded entities with impermeable borders? (5) How do participatory research methodologies and team-based teaching and research contribute to crossing (out) departmental and disciplinary boundaries? References Alejo, R. (2010) Where does the money go? An analysis of the container metaphor in economics: The market and the economy. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (4), 1137–1150. Berthele, R. (2010) Investigations into the folk’s mental models of linguistic varieties. In D. Geeraerts, G. Kristiansen and Y. Peirsman (eds) Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (pp. 265–290). Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton. Block, D. (1992) Metaphors we teach and live by. Prospect 7 (3), 42–55. Byram, M. (1997) Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ćalić, J. (2018) The politics of teaching a ‘language which is simultaneously one and more than one’: The case of Serbo-Croatian. Doctoral dissertation, University College London. Comrie, B. (1991) Comment: Yiddish is Slavic? International Journal of the Sociology of Language 91, 151–214. Dixon, R.M. (2010) Basic Linguistic Theory, Vol. 1: Methodology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2002) The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Haspelmath, M. (2009) Terminology of case. In A.L. Malchukov and A. Spencer (eds) Handbook of Case (pp. 505–517). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Helimski, E. (2003) Areal groupings (Sprachbünde) within and across the borders of the Uralic language family: A survey. Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 100, 156–167. Heltai, J. (2020) Transzlingválás – Elmélet és gyakorlat. Budapest: Gondolat Kiado. Jean, G. and Simard, D. (2013) Deductive versus inductive grammar instruction: Investigating possible relationships between gains, preferences and learning styles. System 41 (4), 1023–1042. Kelly, M. (2000) Mapping culture in language degrees. In N. McBride and K. Seago (eds) Target Culture – Target Language? (pp. 81–92). London: Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research. Kövecses, Z. and Radden, G. (1998) Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9 (1), 37–77. Kramsch, C. (2003) Metaphor and the subjective construction of beliefs. In P. Kalaja and A.M.F. Barcelos (eds) Beliefs about SLA: New Research Approaches (pp. 109–128). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Kramsch, C. (2013) Culture in foreign language teaching. Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 1 (1), 57–78. Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Leung, C. and Scarino, A. (2016) Reconceptualizing the nature of goals and outcomes in language/s education. The Modern Language Journal 100 (S1), 81–95. Liddicoat, A.J. (2008) Pedagogical practice for integrating the intercultural in language teaching and learning. Japanese Studies 28 (3), 277–290.

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Lindstedt, J. (2016) Multilingualism in the Central Balkans in late Ottoman times. In M. Makartsev and M. Wahlström (eds) In Search of the Center and Periphery: Linguistic Attitudes, Minorities, and Landscapes in the Central Balkans (pp. 51–67). Helsinki: University of Helsinki, Department of Modern Languages. Milutinović, Z. (2019) Introduction: Area studies in motion. In Z. Milutinović (ed.) The Rebirth of Area Studies: Challenges for History, Politics and International Relations in the 21st Century (pp. 1–18). London: I.B. Tauris. Nikitina, L. and Furuoka, F. (2008) ‘A language teacher is like …’: Examining Malaysian students’ perceptions of language teachers through metaphor analysis. Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 5 (2), 192–205. Oxford, R., Tomlinson, S., Barcelos, A., Harrington, C., Lavine, R.Z. and Saleh, A. (1998) Clashing metaphors about classroom teachers: Toward a systematic typology for the language teaching field. System 26 (1), 3–50. Pennycook, A. (2006) Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge. Phipps, A. and Gonzalez, M. (2004) Modern Languages: Learning and Teaching in an Intercultural Field. London: Sage. Pusztay, J. (2015) Central Europe as a landscape of convergence. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 132 (3), 85–106. Reddy, M. (1979) The conduit metaphor. Metaphor and Thought 2, 285–324. Risager, K. (2007) Language and Culture Pedagogy: From a National to a Transnational Paradigm. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ros i Solé, C. (2013) Cosmopolitan speakers and their cultural cartographies. The Language Learning Journal 41 (3), 326–339. Ros i Solé, C. (2020) Lived languages: Ordinary collections and multilingual repertoires. International Journal of Multilingualism 1–17. doi:10.1080/14790718.2020.1797047 Ros i Solé, C. and Fenoulhet, J. (2011) Language learning itineraries for the twenty-fi rst century. In J. Fenoulhet and C. Ros i Solé (eds) Mobility and Localisation in Language Learning (pp. 3–28). Bern: Peter Lang. Ros i Solé, C. and Fenoulhet, J. (2013) Romanticising language learning: Beyond instrumentalism. Language and Intercultural Communication 13 (3), 257–265. Scarino, A. (2014) Learning as reciprocal, interpretive meaning-making. A view from collaborative research into the professional learning of teachers of languages. The Modern Language Journal 98, 386– 401. Sweetser, E.E. (1987) Metaphorical models of thought and speech: A comparison of historical directions and metaphorical mappings in the two domains. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 13, 446–459. Sweetser, E.E. (1992) English metaphors for language: Motivations, conventions, and creativity. Poetics Today 13, 705–724. Tarsoly, E. (2016) Pedantry, Preoccupation, and the Presentation of Self: An Interdisciplinary Study of Attitudes towards Language. London: University College London. Tarsoly, E. and Valijärvi, R.L. (2011) Linguistics in language teaching: The case of Finnish and Hungarian. Language Learning Journal 39 (2), 219–235. Thomas, G. (1991) Linguistic Purism. London: Longman. Thomas, G. (2008) Exploring the parameters of a Central European Sprachbund. Canadian Slavonic Papers 50 (1–2), 123–153.

7 The Textures of Language: An Autoethnography of a Gloves Collection Cristina Ros i Solé

Introduction Gloves and their materiality, their colour, shape and smell, have the power to connect me to my languages and my past. They hold memories of other places, other people and other skins. They remind me of who I am, of my grandmother and then my mother, their mother tongues, their bodies and clothes and how they all still inhabit me. Gloves take me back. They evoke feelings, a nostalgia for a particular time and place that, despite the distance, still touches me. The topography of the city centre in Barcelona in the 1970s and 1980s. A gloves shop at the end of Rambla Catalunya, not far from the shopping district, and the Bar Zurich where I met with my friends on Saturday afternoons. Gloves, colours, shapes, smells, drinks, they all mark the boundary between the old and the new town, the world of childhood and adulthood, the world of familiarity and everyday life and that of extraordinary events and new discoveries in the district of Ciutat Vella.

Not long ago, gloves were a key piece of one’s outfit. A smart attire would not be complete without the right shoes, hat and gloves. It was this, or one’s own worn coat, as much as one’s accent, that would give information about one's biography and one’s identity. The gloves collection I am talking about in this chapter not only evokes vivid memories of Barcelona and its geography, but also my life in today's multicultural and multilingual London. The historical specificity related above, the Barcelona city centre in the 1970s and 1980s, just around the time of the death of the Spanish dictator and infused with my personal memory of events, are as important to defi ne my place in the world as the people and everyday objects I met along the way. By using memory work, this chapter will weave in the sensual and the personal to approach a materially inflected account of subjectivity, language and multilingualism, and will discuss what this may mean for language education practices. This 143

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autoethnography of a gloves collection allows me to investigate the different layers of my own languagised self through time, but also through space. These experiences emerge, organically, through the materiality of language – not just reflected on, but created with, the careful assemblage of a gloves collection. While narratives of multilingualism tend to focus on the objective of languages, as separate from the people speaking them and their stories, this study aimed at investigating a ‘deviant’ story – one that delves into the personal aspects of the multilingual subject experience. This emphasis on the personal and the contingent allows me to connect with the affective in my multilingual experience in a way that is rare in more traditional ethnographical accounts. By reflecting on the materiality of my own artspractice project, I am able to access my subjectivity and a range of subtle layers evoked and uncovered by a different way into language. In focusing on the subjective experience, the use of autoethnography allows me to concentrate not only on the emotive and the experimental, but also on the biographical. In this way, my life is not seen as frozen in time, a snapshot, but rather as incomplete and as life-in-progress. As Muncey (2010: 23) has put it, life should be observed as ‘lives-in-motion’. The Wild in Language

Although the allure, joy and sensuality of foreign languages is a constant trope in discourses about languages outside academia (Jaworski, 2020; Piller, 2011), the multisensorial experience of the intercultural encounter and the materiality of languages, despite some exceptions (e.g. Coffey & Street, 2008; Kinginger, 2008; Kramsch, 2009; Phipps, 2007, 2019; Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004; Ros i Solé et al., 2020), has been little explored in language education and applied linguistics. Overall, the sensory aspects of language have mostly been confi ned to the margins of language learning theory and language education rather than integrated into current approaches to additional language education. Pedagogical approaches to language have tended to focus on the abstract of language at the expense of the sensory and visceral. This chapter attempts to redress this imbalance by bringing out the material and tangible in language while retaining the formal and abstract aspects. This is what MacLure (2013) calls ‘the wild in language’, the experience of language that is living in between rationality and sensation. I will be using an autoethnographic art project consisting of a gloves collection decorated with greetings in different languages to illustrate the potential of harnessing the materiality of different script writings on clothing for creating this multidimensionality of language. I will then conclude by calling for a different approach to language learning and pedagogy that engages with an ecological-semiotic approach to language that blurs the

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boundaries between the abstract and the material, while putting an emphasis on the so-far neglected material aspects of the language experience. As a number of scholars in applied linguistics have pointed out, a multisensorial and material approach to language is necessary for a more balanced and comprehensive understanding of language (Aronin et al., 2018; Busch, 2017; Canagarajah, 2018; Melo-Pfeifer & Kalaja, 2019; Pennycook, 2018). Over the last few years, there has been a move towards embodied communicative practices and the expanding of language towards semiotic repertoires that lie beyond the linguistic (Blackledge & Creese, 2017; Rymes, 2014). As Smythe et al. (2017: 19) state, ‘knowing begins in the body’. Such a body of literature argues that we should return persons to where they belong ‘to the continuum of organic life’ (Smythe et al., 2017: 20). Similarly, de Freitas and Curinga (2015) argue that language is full embodiment: a mangling of human bodies, vocal musculature, intensity, tone, rhythm, emphasis, pitch, mode of attack, discontinuities, repetitions, elisions and a potential for musicality quality that reaches its climax in human singing. (de Freitas & Curinga, 2015: 3)

Whereas recent research on the use of the arts in language education has discussed the saliency of the sensory in the experience of language, this is not new. An expanded view of language that includes other ways of meaning-making, such as the sensory, made its way into understandings of language at the beginning of the 20th century in Russian linguistics. Vološinov’s rebuttal of Saussurean linguistics in the 1920s questioned the langue/parole binary and its privileging of langue over parole. Such a separation of the abstract and the material has more recently been challenged in Kress’s understanding of language as multimodality (Hodge & Kress, 1988), which has expanded the meaning of language to a broader and richer range of semiotic repertoires and experiences. In a recent book, Pennycook (2018) contributes to this branching out of the meanings of language by devoting a chapter to the full gamut of the senses and its arguing that smells, identities, places and languages form a semiotic assemblage that goes beyond humans’ privileged ways of perceiving or communicating in the world. Some important examples of a sensory approach to language are also emerging that focus and appreciate the role of art and aesthetics in language (Abdelhadi et al., 2019; Gonçalves Matos & Melo-Pfeifer, 2020; Harvey et al., 2019; Hua et al., 2017; Jaworski, 2020; Parra & Di Fabio, 2016). In particular, there has been a recent interest in embodied interactions in markets or shops (Blackledge & Creese, 2017; Hua et al., 2017), the use of sensory metaphors to talk about language learning (Kramsch, 2009), or the sensory experience of getting immersed in intercultural

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everyday activities (Badwan & Hall, 2020; Phipps, 2007, 2011, 2019; Ros i Solé, 2016, 2020). But, as some authors have pointed out, aesthetic and multisensorial approaches to language learning are still in contrast to accounts of language education in the West that even now privilege the abstract of language and the written word. As Phipps (2019) argues: Words – black against a white page – are part of the flattened out hegemony of a text-based literacy within which the spoken word is so deprived of oxygen that it cannot live and there can be no pedagogy of the art of the vocal … (Phipps, 2019: 6)

In an attempt to engage with current discussions about the nature of language in applied linguistics which highlight the affective, embodied and multisensorial (Blackledge & Creese, 2017; Busch, 2017; Brigitta, 2020; Canagarajah, 2018; Coffey, 2013; Kramsch, 2009; Pahl, 2012; Pennycook, 2018; Ros i Solé, 2016, 2020), this chapter will side with a view of language education that brings together these two seemingly opposed poles, the abstract and the tangible, and suggests a meeting point: ‘the wild’ in language. I will do this by using the materiality of the writing of language to reject, on the one hand, language as a list of functional competencies and, on the other, language as a flexible repertoire of non-tangible abstract entities and codes. I argue that languages can also be seen as semiotic repertoires capable of tracing one’s lived materiality and embodied and sensory experiences. In doing this, I propose that pedagogical models for foreign language education should include not only conscious, planned and intangible ways of learning, but also ways of inhabiting languages that are unconscious, spontaneous and tangible. I will expand on the notion of the ‘wild in language’ by looking at the relationships that language establishes with memory, and how this is evoked and entangled in materiality. This will then be illustrated by looking at the semiotic assemblages that are constructed in the process of creating an art project consisting of a multilingual gloves collection – a collection of gloves decorated with writings in different languages that addresses the following question: What does ‘living languages’ through the materiality of clothing look like? This will, in turn, focus on the following sub-questions: • • •

What role do my senses play in this process? What body memories are involved in the experience of a gloves collection? How does the combination of the senses and body-memory contribute to my language trajectory and successive becomings?

I will then discuss the pedagogical possibilities that such a view of language entails and propose a set of questions to reflect on the ideas presented in this chapter.

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An Autoethnography of a Gloves Collection

This autoethnography not only enabled me to produce evocative stories, but also provided me with multiple layers of consciousness, connecting my personal and cultural aspects, the interior and the exterior, so much so as to shatter an illusion of a clear-cut bounded identity for myself. By choosing to use an autoethnographic methodology I was able to investigate the different layers of my own self and the variety of experiences and complex identities I had experienced through language. By reflecting on the gloves in my collection I was able to access memories and sensations that came out of my biography. They connected me to my own multilingualism and my mother tongue, Catalan. These gloves evoked vivid memories of the city I was born in, Barcelona, but also of my grandmother wearing and selling gloves in her shop, the gloves she gave me and which I still keep. But they also connect me to my mother and her own collection of gloves of different colours and materials in her special gloves drawer. I wanted to reproduce these memories of language in materiality with my experiences of multilingualism in London. Through a multilingual art project and the repurposing of a number of gloves, I charted my multilingual past and present at different times and spaces in my biography. The autoethnography of my gloves collection has allowed me to investigate the different layers of my own self through history but also through space – at the school gates, in the playground and in the local park: the group of Somali mums chatting at the gates, the mum from Guatemala who used to arrive on her bike, the chatting to a Polish mum about her language and culture in the park. All these experiences emerged, organically, in the gloves I decorated with multilingual writing, as well as the many places that, in an unplanned and unpredictable way, were evoked in the gloves. It all started four years ago when I ran a stall at my sons’ school Winter Fair. I had always been struck and impressed by the diversity of cultures and languages spoken by the parents and children at the school, but I was surprised by the invisibility of these languages and cultures. I decided to draw attention to this fact by devoting a stall at the school fair to the languages spoken in the school. This would consist of an arts project that would pay tribute to the school’s multilingualism. My intention was not only to raise the visibility of the languages spoken at the school but also to challenge how languages are usually represented in schools, as intangible and abstract. Instead, the gloves collection art project had the very simple objective of situating and connecting languages to their materiality and specificity through the repurposing of old gloves. While in many schools, like the one where this project took place, the multilingual diversity of the school population is a well-known fact, this usually stays at the level of statistical and anecdotal information and the organisation of school events where these languages are celebrated

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through the inclusion of ethnic foods and sometimes traditional dress. The presence of languages other than English in many London schools is one-dimensional and tokenistic. Indeed, multilingualism in Roundfield is rarely seen or heard and hardly ever felt or touched. Schoolscapes and the linguistic landscapes of the school mainly consist of isolated examples of these languages, usually through posters on the wall that depict greetings in different languages. These representations of languages are static and disembodied and make little reference to the people who use them and their histories. In contrast to this, this project set out to signal that languages are alive and embodied and that they can be an extension of ourselves and our bodies or even ‘body idioms’ (Ros i Solé, 2020). My project would present languages as evoking different senses as well as aesthetic qualities. Taking the cue from the often-celebrated costume parades at ‘international days’ at school, I came up with the idea of designing a gloves collection. This time, however, instead of representing a particular culture, the item of clothing would just bear a simple phrase, a greeting (replicating the language displays of the posters in the school). Since it was winter, I chose a piece of clothing that is worn on a part of the body that it is visible and expressive: one’s hands and the gestures that accompany speech. Moreover, gloves would add materiality and sensoriality to languages by adding colour, texture and smell. Since clothes have for a long time been conceived as a powerful expression of our individuality, our lifestyles and our identities, it would also be fitting to pair language with an object that is so close to our identities. The School’s Languages

The head teacher at Roundfield school informed me that at the last count there were 47 languages spoken at the school. I collected around 20 gloves and assigned each to a different language. I would write the equivalent of a short informal greeting on each glove in a different language and its corresponding script: ‘hola!’, ‘salom’, ‘marhaba’, etc. I checked with several mums at the school that the chosen phrase and spelling for my writing and scripts were correct. Figure 7.1 shows the note that I wrote with some of the greetings in different languages after I had checked the translations. I used 20 pairs of gloves I sourced from different vintage shops in London. These were not practical gloves for the cold weather; they were pre-loved gloves kept in old boxes that belonged to another era – gloves that evoked lived lives. They were gloves that had been gesturing in different languages and cultures; some, I imagined, had been to music halls, parties, weddings and other events. The gloves had different colours, shapes and textures. I found blue, white, black and red gloves, short and long gloves, cotton and polyester gloves. Once I had collected enough

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Figure 7.1 Handwritten note used to record greetings in school languages

gloves, I started the design of the writing and decorations on them. Due to the paint used, the writing consisted of tiny little dots that formed a line (see Figure 7.2). This added texture to the gloves as you could feel the dots with your fi ngers. These gloves were not only visually pleasing but they created an unexpected marriage of language signs and its materiality. The stall at the fair did not fulfi l a pragmatic function – it did not sell something useful – but became a platform for reflecting on the nature of the languages spoken in the school and their embodied nature. Instead, this stall intended to help children, parents and teachers raise awareness of the aesthetic and sensorial experience of languages and, in particular,

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Figure 7.2 Black long dressy gloves with greeting

‘home languages’. The multilingualism I wanted to invoke was a different one from that promoted in school contexts. One that highlighted the history, agency and materiality contained in language and the gloves, a version of language that indexed particular biographies and historicities (Kramsch, 2012). Like Busch’s (2017) understanding of language as spracherleben, ‘an experience of language’ and an experience of other lives, these gloves were not mere canvases for displaying languages; they were intended to show the different experiences contained in each glove. Each pair of gloves had its own smell, texture, shape and colours that spoke of other worlds and other horizons. The confluence of the abstract of language, its writing materiality and the gloves’ previous lives was manifested in each glove: e.g. a white pair of short gloves embodying Japanese language, red cotton gloves with writing in Igbo, a pair of long brown gloves with Thai script and a smart pair of light blue gloves in Brazilian Portuguese handwriting (see Figure 7.3). Like in Bakhtin’s (1981) well-known saying, ‘words that taste of other people’s mouths’, these gloves did not come to me free of their own stories and biographies. They were gloves full of history: they contained other people’s lives and voices. They evoked the smells, scenes and shapes of other bodies. The resulting message created by this gloves collection was one that spoke about language not as an abstract entity but rather as ‘experience’. This collection not only speaks about languages in the traditional sense, but it shows how languages can speak in silence by being present and

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Figure 7.3 White gloves with greeting in Somalian and blue gloves with greeting in Brazilian Portuguese

‘worn’ by clothes, layers or other marks that are left on our bodies. In this art project, languages became wedded to the materiality of the glove in the same way as languages stick to the skin and the bodies of their speakers. Discussion: A Multilingual ‘Deviant Story’

The key message in this art project is that these gloves did not ‘represent’ the realities of multilingualism in inner-London schools; instead, they have narrated a ‘deviant story’. This is a vision of multilingualism in school that does not fit the dominant disembodied ‘black-against-a-whitepage’ idea of language in language education. In contrast to this view, this art project was one that had an altogether different view of language, one that included an artefactual approach to language which added a new dimension to a multilingual schoolscape that connected language to a colourful materiality and aestheticism. What role do the senses play in such a process of ‘living into’ languages?

By looking at this ‘deviant story’ we can see that language could be conceived as something that is not easily assigned to a time-space juncture and put into an abstract ideological straightjacket. Instead, the writing on the gloves shows that languages can be read in many different ways depending on the sensations and feelings that they evoke in the person experiencing them: the colour, shape, script and design of each glove I created responded to a very personal view of the culture, one that was the result of a set of entanglements and relationships between the history of

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the gloves, their materiality, my biography and the trajectory of the gloves themselves (e.g. the people who owned them, the shops they had been sourced from, where they had been decorated, displayed and given as a gift). This ‘deviant story’ is built out of movement and relationship. It is a view of language that is not seen as static and tied up to a generic and abstract view of a culture. Rather, the word ‘hello’ carefully and lovingly inscribed on the gloves in different languages was open to new connections and associations, rather than fi xed and standardised with black ink on a white background. The greetings were open to change and to as many situations and owners of the gloves as possible; like somebody trying on different outfits in front of a mirror, the gloves and their materiality speak of possibility and change. The painting of the gloves and the resulting ‘gloves collection’ help us see another way of looking at language and multilingualism, the fact that language is like a craft, made out of the relationships and the affects built (Jaworski, 2020), as the different actors and materials are assembled and shaped together. Through their materiality, these gloves move from one place to another and they enter processes of becoming. Their trajectories are as unpredictable as they are unexpected. From a variety of London vintage shops to forming a small collection in a box stored

Figure 7.4 Gloves with Hindi greeting stored away in a drawer

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away in a drawer (see Figure 7.4), to being transformed into arts-practice after being carefully decorated with diff erent languages, and being admired and bought in the school hall. To the trajectories they took when the new owners put these gloves in new contexts; the school languages became a chain of semiotic embodiments ‘on the move’. But these gloves are not untouched by the experiences lived in their rich lives. These are not only chance encounters that leave no trace. As Busch (2014) has argued, meanings linger. We have ‘body memories’ that condition the way we perceive the world. These memory markings are multifaceted and language is one of these forms of markings. Languages are tangible traces of our pasts, our biographies and our everyday practices. Our lived lives are impregnated with linguistic and semiotic memories and markings that inform the way we will face our future linguistic lives. I started to reflect on such an idea and wondered what kind of ‘life’ and ‘experience’ these gloves and embodied languages had had in the last four years. As I formulated earlier on in this chapter: How is body memory involved in the experience of language of a gloves collection? Despite the lack of a clear purpose and use for this gloves collection, despite the lack of an owner who would speak for them and despite not representing an obvious voice and subjectivity, the gloves had led their own interesting lives. They had their own agency and their own life trajectories. From their sense of abandonment in the second-hand shops by their fi rst owners, to being purchased to become part of an art project and sold at a school fair as multilingual objects, their transformation was complete. They were transformed not only into ‘canvases’ for a linguistic message, but as an embodiment of an idea about multilingualism in a London school. They established relationships with the multilingualism of London’s primary schools through their contact with the materiality of the writing and the changing of hands from me to new owners. But these events did not happen in isolation; their writing and their decoration came out of a fusion of their lives and mine: their body memories of other times and other places (their shapes, colours and textures) and mine, my recollections of other languages and other lives that infused life into them. Indeed, these gloves were not dependent on the biographies and memories of one set of owners, like language does not belong to its speakers, but they were not free either from the markings and traces of those owners and those memories. The assemblage of all these trajectories and intensities is what created something new. The confluence of all these memories on the gloves stirred new affects and provoked new thoughts. Delving into my collection of gloves, we can see that clothes can be viewed as more than vain indulgences: these artefacts can also be seen as provocation to thought and materiality that links languages to time and space and the enactments of one’s historicity.

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How do the combination of the senses and body-memory contribute to my becomings in different languages?

In the same way as we play with new identities while trying on new clothes, the gloves in this collection allowed me to experiment with trying new languages and new selves by decorating the gloves with different scripts and patterns, seeing how the colours, the moods, the textures and the events I associated with each language and culture combined together. Each glove was a personal interpretation of the feeling of the culture, a particular arrangement of the semiotic chain.

A Way of Living Languages

The current model underlying language education and applied linguistics could be summarised as ‘a way of knowing languages’. This sits at the opposite end of a vision of language education that constructs it as ‘a way of being’ (Budach & Sharoyan, 2020; Canagarajah, 2018; Dagenais et al., 2020; Phipps, 2011). This chapter proposes stretching the latter approach by exploring how languages can also be seen as a ‘way of living’ the world. Here, the use and point of learning languages emphasizes the vitalist experience of language and its different ways of perceiving and feeling the world or, as Freire (1970) would say, ‘pronouncing the world’. Living additional languages then is not only a rational enterprise but a perceptual and affective endeavour that connects us to our bodies and creates intensity of feeling. One where not only do we read other languages with our minds, but we enter a dynamic process of bodily engagement: we breathe, we move, we touch, smell or adopt a body posture with each language we speak. In other words, we incorporate language experiences through the senses, so that languages are sedimented into our bodily history or, as Bourdieu (1984) calls it, our ‘bodily hexis’. Indeed, learning and speaking languages is not only about ‘investing’ in the outside world and the benefits and assets it can bring to us, but it can also contribute to a better understanding of the embodied self. Whereas much work in first and second language acquisition has studied how language affects and is processed by our minds, this chapter hopes to contribute to a more recent interest – how languages interact with our bodies and our perception. Such an understanding of language is rooted in philosophical approaches that have been expanding the remit and power of language. Indeed, language as sensation is full of possibility. In this view, language is organic, is set in motion and is pregnant with intentionality. Language does not only ‘represent’ life or ‘stand in’ for an abstract bounded idea of French, Spanish, German or Russian reality; it creates alternative realities too. In a Deleuzian view of language, language is not just reflection, but it has agency and a unique force, ‘the power to disrupt the world order and

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its materiality’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). Rather than being a reflection of life and society, language is agentive and capable of having its own causality. Language becomes radical and creative as it has the power to change things and create things anew. In such a wilful and intentional view of language, language does not act on its own, but it collaborates as it confederates with other semiotic systems and other agencies, as language acts in relationship with other beings and is contingent on our material and non-material experiences. There is no such a thing as a language but our relationship with language (Jaworski, 2020). In this relational and embodied view of language, the learning of a language, whether it is Mandarin, French or Urdu, it is not the acquisition of a set number of rules and a bounded code that we focus on, but the personally selected arrangement or assemblage of meanings that stand in for Russian, French, Arabic or Chinese worlds by a particular speaker. But it is not only that each language learner and speaker is unique, it is also that language itself changes with its speaker and locality. As Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 89) state, language is chameleonic and multiplicitous: it can be loud or discreet. It can wait in the margins of life and listen, such as the languages spoken at home but silenced at school. But it can also be a strong and authoritative force: it can compel obedience, e.g. the English spoken as the sole language used in the school, whereas for multilingual pupils in monolingual environments their languages will become vulnerable, weak and silent. Whereas for learners of ‘elite’, highly valued, standardised languages such as French, German or Spanish (Kramsch, 2014), language can empower and prompt the discovery of new aspects of the self and new worlds, students of less prestigious languages are faced with an altogether different experience, the humiliation of having to live a secret linguistic life. In other words, language is contingent on the political status of the language in a particular context, and the assemblages and constellations of languages that are formed as a result. Languages are not only attached to people. Language is in constant flow in the affect and ‘intensity’ that languages are part of. This is an intensity that pre-exists the individual and their control (Bakhtin, 1981; Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). Language as raw, in a ‘pre-verbal’ state, is separate from the agency of the individual and its articulation. It is visceral and irrational (Busch, 2017; Pennycook, 2018). In this state, before being conceived as abstract signs or just materiality, language is movement, flows and rhythms (Blackledge & Creese, 2017; Williams, 2017). The encounter with this visceral aspect of language affects how we feel and it compels us to perform. This ebb and flow of language help us see how we live language in the mundane and intimate of our lives. As MacLure (2013) puts it, language is actualized in the contingency of our lives; it ‘collides and connects with things’ (MacLure, 2013). Such a constant personal crafting of the language experience means that languages are not only experienced rationally but also affectively and viscerally.

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Conclusion: Making Sense of the ‘Wild’ in Language

One of the outcomes of the autoethnography of the ‘multilingual gloves collection’ is the realisation that there is an element of language that has been omitted in modern languages education: its relationality with our biographies, the spaces we inhabit, and the artefacts and materialities that populate our lives. This gloves collection project has intended to merge the ‘abstract’ (the code of the language, the history, the memories) and the ‘embodied’ (the senses involved in recalling those memories, the materiality of the gloves, the writing on the gloves). The experience of the different languages in the school – the chats with friends, their dresses, their smells, their greetings and the gifts that are exchanged – have all contributed to the meaning of language. MacLure’s (2013) formulation of a ‘sense’ in language captures this temporary constellation of non-representational aspects of language that swirl around. For me, the materiality of my multilingual gloves collection allowed for this new ‘sense’ of language to emerge. Through the shuttling of the writing on the gloves from the representational side of language to a ‘sensory ecology’ (Hua et al., 2017), this collection of gloves has highlighted the pre-verbal of language, the proliferation and intensity of meanings when language has not quite settled down, that phase in the encounter with language when things have not clenched yet. In this project, the gloves did not just embody a greeting, but layers of body memories about these languages that had been imprinted on my body in an unconscious way, through sensation and affect – an intensity that expressed itself and was embodied in the colours, the textures, patterns and decorations on the glove. Instead of being fi xed and tagged as something else, such as the abstract code of language and the different ways you can say ‘hello’, the writing on these gloves was ‘pure event’, caught up in the forward momentum of becoming – of matters spooling out without a predetermined destination. Indeed, the meanings of these gloves started as pure event and ended up going ‘beyond language’ by acquiring momentum. As Goffman (1963) marked, language is also made of ‘body idioms’: dress, bearing, movement, position and physical gestures. These ‘pre-verbal’ aspects of language live on our skins and leave to become ‘language-gifts’ for friends, body, movement, painting on gloves, gestures or touch – new body idioms and materialities that extend our bodies into language and that add to our evolving semiotic repertoires. The materiality of the writing on the gloves allows for the ‘wild’ and for the ‘sense’ in language to emerge – an in-between rationality and lived experience and the confluence of different trajectories: the pre-loved gloves, my multilingual trajectory and an inner-London school multilingual world. It is the combination of different senses, the aesthetics of writing, the texture of paint, but also the intuitions and perceived sensations, that liberate language from its representational stasis.

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Questions for Further Reflection

(1) If language is revealed as both abstract and embodied experience, what aspects of language do we need to introduce and develop in the language classroom that are at present neglected? (2) How can the pre-conscious and pre-verbal in language give greater agency to the language learner? (3) Could the recognition of the ‘wild’ and the ‘sense’ in language change the way languages acquire value in our society? References Abdelhadi, R., Hameed, L., Khaled, F. and Anderson, J. (2019) Creative interactions with art works: An engaging approach to Arabic language-and-culture learning. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching 14 (3), 273–289. doi:10.1080/175012 29.2019.1579219 Aronin, L., Hornsby, M. and Kiliańska-Przybyło, G. (eds) (2018) The Material Culture of Multilingualism. Cham: Springer. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (M. Holquist, ed.; C. Emerson and M. Holquist, trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2017) Translanguaging and the body. International Journal of Multilingualism 14 (3), 250–268. doi:10.1080/14790718.2017.1315809 Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brigitta, B. (2020) Message in a bottle: Scenic presentation of the unsayable. Applied Linguistics 41 (3), 408–427. Budach, G. and Sharoyan, G. (2020) Exploring ‘vibrant matter’ in animation making. Language and Intercultural Communication 20 (5), 464–481. doi:10.1080/14708477 .2020.1784912 Busch, B. (2014) Linguistic repertoire and Spracherleben, the lived experience of language. Working Papers in Urban Languages and Literacies No. 145. London: King’s College London. Busch, B. (2017) Expanding the notion of linguistic repertoire: On the concept of Spracherleben – the lived experience of language. Applied Linguistics 38 (3), 340–358. Canagarajah, S. (2018) Translingual practice as spatial repertoires: Expanding the paradigm beyond structuralist orientations. Applied Linguistics 39 (1), 31–54. Coffey, S. (2013) Strangerhood and intercultural subjectivity. Language and Intercultural Communication 13 (3), 266–282. Coffey, S. and Street, B. (2008) Narrative and identity in the ‘Language Learning Project’. The Modern Language Journal 92 (3), 452–464. Dagenais, D., Brisson, G., André, G. and Forte, M. (2020) Multiple becomings in digital story creation. Language and Intercultural Communication 20 (5), 419–432. doi:10. 1080/14708477.2020.1776309 de Freitas, E. and Curinga, M.X. (2015) New materialist approaches to the study of language and identity: Assembling the posthuman subject. Curriculum Inquiry 45 (3), 249–265. doi:10.1080/03626784.2015.1031059 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004) A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum. Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin. Goff man, E. (1963) Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press. Gonçalves Matos, G. and Melo-Pfeifer, S. (2020) Art matters in languages and intercultural citizenship education. Language and Intercultural Communication 20 (4), 289–299. doi:10.1080/14708477.2020.1786917

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Harvey, L., McCormick, B. and Vanden, K. (2019) Becoming at the boundaries of language: Dramatic Enquiry for intercultural learning in UK higher education. Language and Intercultural Communication 19 (6), 451–470. Hodge, R. and Kress, G. (1988) Social Semiotics. Cambridge: Polity. Hua, Z., Otsuji, E. and Pennycook, A. (2017) Multilingual, multisensory and multimodal repertoires in corner shops, streets and markets: Introduction. Social Semiotics 27 (4), 383–393. Jaworski, A. (2020) Multimodal writing: The avant-garde assemblage and other minimal texts. International Journal of Multilingualism 17 (3), 336–360. doi:10.1080/147907 18.2020.1766050 Kalaja, P. and Melo-Pfeifer, S. (eds) (2019) Visualising Multilingual Lives: More Than Words. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kinginger, C. (2008) Language learning in Study Abroad: Case studies of Americans in France. The Modern Language Journal 92 (S1). Kramsch, C. (2009) The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (2012) Culture in foreign language teaching. Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 1 (1), 57–78. See http://faculty.weber.edu/cbergeson/516/ kramsch.2012.pdf. Kramsch, C. (2014) Teaching foreign languages in an era of globalization: Introduction. The Modern Language Journal 98 (1), 296–311. MacLure, M. (2013) Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26 (6), 658–667. Muncey, T. (2020) Creating Auto-ethnographies. London: Sage. Pahl, K. (2012) Every object tells a story. Home Cultures 9 (3), 303–327. Parra, M.L. and Di Fabio, E.G. (2016) Languages in partnership with the visual arts: Implications for curriculum. In L. Parks, C. Ryan and S. Katz-Bourns (eds) Integrating the Arts: Creative Thinking about FL Curriculum Direction (pp. 11–36). Boston, MA: Cengage. Pennycook, A. (2018) Posthumanist applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 39 (4), 445–461. Phipps, A. (2007) Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival: Languaging, Tourism, Life. Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Phipps, A. (2011) Travelling languages? Land, languaging and translation. Language and Intercultural Communication 11 (4), 364–376. Phipps, A. (2019) Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Phipps, A. and Gonzalez, M. (2004) Modern Languages: Learning and Teaching in an Intercultural Field. London: Sage. Piller, I. (2011) Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ros i Solé, C. (2016) The Personal World of the Language Learner. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ros i Sole, C. (2020) Lived languages: Ordinary collections and multilingual repertoires. International Journal of Multilingualism 1–17. doi:10.1080/14790718.2020.1797047 Ros i Solé, C., Fenoulhet, J. and Quist, G. (2020) Vibrant identities: Finding joy in difference. Language and Intercultural Communication 20 (5), 397–407. Rymes, B. (2014) Communicating Beyond Language: Everyday Encounters with Diversity. New York: Routledge Smythe, S., Hill, C., MacDonald, M., Dagenais, D., Sinclair, N. and Toohey, K. (2017) Disrupting boundaries in education and research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vološinov, V.N. (1986) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. London: Harvard University Press. Williams, Q. (2017) Bark, smoke and pray: Multilingual Rastafarian-herb sellers in a busy subway. Social Semiotics 27 (4), 474–494.

Commentary for Part 2 Simon Coffey

Each of the three chapters in this part of the volume makes, in a different way, an important contribution to re-imagining the way languages are lived by subjects, and each suggests new avenues for the way multilingualism can be researched. For at least two decades now there has been a growing diversity in the ways applied linguistics is imagined. The call for expansion of the field through greater interdisciplinarity does not just refer to the scope of problems it seeks to investigate – problems which, by definition, require linguistics to be ‘applied’ to real-world situations – but to the articulation of the problems themselves and how these might be researched in new ways. These studies make an important contribution in presenting language(s) research that transcends disciplinary boundaries. As such, these papers, and indeed my reflections on these, form part of a wider conversation currently underway that proposes some fundamental reorientations in applied linguistics, including the turn to posthumanism which, Pennycook argues, ‘can help us think through a more distributed understanding of the location of semiotic resources and cognition’ (Pennycook, 2018: 456). There is also a dynamic discussion of how to integrate creative, art-based approaches into a broader, more critically engaged conception of linguistics research (e.g. Wright et al., 2019) and how to problematise some long-held premises of intercultural experience (e.g. Canagarajah, 2018; Coffey, 2013; Hua et al., 2017; Ros i Solé et al., 2020). In Ros i Solé’s chapter, we are presented with the materiality of language, a materiality that is emphasised and rendered tangible through a creative curation of artefacts. Through the incongruity of their assemblage, the physicality and historicity of the artefacts – vintage evening gloves ‘decorated with writings in different languages’ – challenge our preconceptions of how multilingualism is enacted by emphasising that languages intersect with and are enmeshed in complex semiotic ecologies. The creation and curation of these multilingual artefacts emphasise the way our relationship with objects both shapes and is shaped by our linguistic and cultural histories. Ros i Solé takes an autoethnographic approach in recording her own journey through the stages of the art project. Objects are clearly not extraneous, autonomous artefacts; they are integral to the way we interact and to how our subjectivity is constituted. The ‘materiality of languages’ goes beyond the ‘multimodal’ or even 159

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defi nitions of the ‘multisensory’, where these terms denote synchronic, unidirectional inputs rather than ‘entangled’ histories. Objects are depositories of meaning but only inasmuch as these meanings are interpellated by subjects in a bricolage of memories and emotional attachments. Today’s prioritising of the visual and the linguistic, the dominant tangible traces of our current communication networks, diminish other sensory triggers such as smell, taste and texture, which may also interact with language to lead subjects into Proustian meanderings of linguistic memory. Although we read this on a printed page, the materiality evoked in Ros i Solé’s study emphasises the complex narrativising interplay between human experience-objects-language and hints tantalisingly at the lingering impressions of other invisible senses. Ros i Solé proposes an ecological understanding of language as embedded in auto/biographical experience which is indissociable from our memories and dreams and how these connect to the material world, both through the retrieval of memories and the agentive reconfiguration of these. Tarsoly and Ćalić’s chapter challenges the conventionalised separation of ‘language’ and ‘content’ in institutional discourse settings, particularly in the longstanding division of study between academic ‘content’ and ‘language’ courses. This disciplinary distinction is deeply embedded (maybe especially in the Anglo-American academy), and not only points to the reductive instrumentalisation of language learning, but more broadly echoes the way disciplinary boundaries constrain the production and circulation of ‘knowledge’. Building on recent work on metaphors of language and learning (Coffey, 2015), Tarsoly and Ćalić draw on conceptual metaphor theory to explicitly challenge students’ bounded metaphors of language and place (language as a container) to emphasise fluidity and permeability. The course of study that is the focus of Tarsoly and Ćalić’s chapter is a module called Languages in Contact along the Danube: Intercultural Frictions and Flows, taught at UCL. In taking a geographical region to analyse multilingualism, the course proposes a radical transformation in the way language and languages are taught, through analysing languages and cultures in proximity. Major rivers are fertile, life-giving arteries that dissect continents and have always drawn peoples together. They constitute ancient topographical boundaries and, in defiance of imposed political boundaries, bring into relief the vibrancy of in-between spaces. Here, languages are not solid entities but are porous modes of communication that provide a framework for coexistence, and mutual linguistic and cultural reciprocity that results in an always evolving Sprachbund. Our relationship to place, both physical and symbolic, has been, somewhat paradoxically, underplayed – or at least under-theorised – in communication studies and language teaching scholarship. The relative erasure of our emotional connection to place may be explained by the ideal posited of the intercultural freewheeler who deftly navigates the

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complexity of new semiotic and linguistic codes. The intercultural ideal type is open minded and cosmopolitan, in contrast to those rooted to place who seem slow or parochial. In our fear of essentialising the bonds between cultural identity(ies) and place, interactional linguistics has focused on interpersonal communication from the view of exchanging linguistic, cultural and symbolic resources in situated contexts. Yet an exclusive focus on talk and other interactional practices glosses over the fundamental human dilemma of attachment to place and the rootedness of language. As Raymond Williams observed, ‘we are born into relationships which are settled in a place. This form of primary and “placeable” bonding is of quite fundamental and natural importance’ (cited by Hall, 1995: 39–56), and we remain emotionally connected to our physical contexts, not just those that we currently occupy, but those that we remember and imagine, and our memories and imaginings of place are inherently cultural and linguistic as well as deeply psychological. In Polo-Pérez and Holmes’ chapter, the authors present an ethnographic study of two language cafés, to show how participants create their own ‘alternative world’ where languagers ‘immerse themselves in the pains and pleasures of dwelling in another language regardless of geographical location’. In contrast to the preceding chapter’s focus on languages in physical space, here place is re-imagined through language(s) as deracinated and reconfigured in a new context, which is neither the formal setting of a classroom nor an immersion in a target language cultural setting. In common with the other two studies in this section, the authors are not concerned with measures of language proficiency or competence, but with perspectives on the lived practice of multilingual interactions that are underrepresented in research treatments of multilingualism. Participants in the language cafés take pleasure in ‘metalanguaging’, discussing their language use and their learning journeys, forging community through the mutual affirmation of their identities as ‘languagers’. This world-making constitutes participating in an explicit discourse of how languages work, how they compare and contrast, and metalanguaging becomes a pleasurable activity in its own right. The participants reproduce the widely shared indictment of monolingualism as a problem ‘of England’. This indictment does not, though, unpack the multilingualism which is increasingly prevalent ‘in England’ in new, often innovative ways. The language cafés themselves are testament to the variety of grassroots initiatives to learn and engage with other languages, which are often omitted from considerations of the linguistic landscape in England as elsewhere. Participants in the language cafés, the first of which is university based and the second, more intergenerational, in a pub, emphasise the value of languages beyond the instrumental. It is, of course, a given that participants can communicate in English, so other languages (languages other than English) have their own inventory of motivations: we see cited here

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the pleasure of reading Camus and other French language writers in the original. The ‘pleasure’ of languages is a theme that threads through this chapter, and to a certain extent the other two chapters in this section, even as pleasure inevitably contains a gamut of contrasting emotional colours, including wistfulness and desire. Each of the three studies presented in Part 2 brings to our attention the temporality of language. Each points to new ways of connecting language and the multilingual subject through a diachronic lens, where current practices, although fully alive here and now and full of potential, emerge also as residual threads reaching to past narratives of objects, places and persons. The historicising aspects of these studies stand in contrast to the ahistorical character of most research into multilingualism and second language acquisition. Currently, language teaching and learning are typically researched within the particular traditions of ‘education research’ or ‘applied linguistics’. In particular, applied linguistics, with its origins in the counter-cultural ideological landscape of postwar social sciences, identifies itself as a discipline that is inherently practical and seeks to solve problems through a recently formulated toolkit of methodological procedures which prioritise the current and the live. Notwithstanding the inspiring diversification of methodologies in recent years, those that adopt multifaceted and ethnographically oriented methods are legitimised in the social sciences inasmuch as they yield ‘data’, whereas more established humanities disciplines such as literary analysis and textual historiography deal with ‘artefacts’. These fundamental differences are not simply procedural but affect the context of research, its temporality, material and discursive circulation, and the synergies that result in new knowledge production. The chapters in this section each situate themselves at a disciplinary intersection which blurs defi nitional boundaries such as those between ‘data’ and ‘artefacts’, ‘learning’ and ‘experiencing’. While the three studies presented here deploy research methodologies established within the social sciences (autoethnography, questionnaires and interviews), they each bring a sensibility to the language enterprise being researched (object, place, person) which is profoundly historicised, in particular in its shaping of individual subjectivity, in ways that are rooted in a humanities tradition. This interdisciplinarity opens up an epistemological space that encourages the historicisation of language(s) across the lives of individual and collective subjects. References Canagarajah, S. (2018) Translingual practice as spatial repertoires: Expanding the paradigm beyond structuralist orientations. Applied Linguistics 39 (1), 31–54. Coffey, S. (2013) Strangerhood and intercultural subjectivity. Language and Intercultural Communication 13 (3), 266–282.

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Coffey, S. (2015) Reframing teachers’ language knowledge through metaphor analysis of language portraits. The Modern Language Journal 99 (3), 500–514. Hall, S. (1995) Culture, community and nation. Culcom Research Papers 1, 39–56. Hua, Z., Emi Otsuji, E. and Alastair Pennycook, A. (2017) Multilingual, multisensory and multimodal repertoires in corner shops, streets and markets. Social Semiotics 27 (4), 383–393. Pennycook, A. (2018) Posthumanist applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 39 (4), 445–461. Ros i Solé, C., Fenoulhet, J. and Quist, G. (2020) Vibrant identities and fi nding joy in difference. Language and Intercultural Communication 20 (5), 397–407. Wright, C., Harvey, L. and Simpson, J. (eds) (2019) Voices and Practices in Applied Linguistics: Diversifying a Discipline. York: White Rose University Press.

Part 3 Transcultural Journeying and Aesthetics

8 Visual Art in Arabic Foreign and Heritage Languageand-Culture Learning: Expanding the Scope for Meaning-Making Jim Anderson

Introduction

This chapter explores connections between visual art, language and culture and the significance that these might have for creative and more personally engaging language learning. Breaking free from the narrow, instrumental view associated with communicative approaches, the focus is on intercultural/transcultural, symbolic and aesthetic dimensions to language learning (Bernstein & Lerchner, 2014; Kramsch, 2009; Leung & Scarino, 2016; Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004; Ros i Solé, 2016), recognising that ‘Language learners are not just communicators and problem-solvers, but whole persons with hearts, bodies and minds, with memories, fantasies, loyalties, identities’ (Kramsch, 2006: 251). More specifically, the chapter looks at interaction around artworks as a stimulus for personal meaning-making and the development of an integrated understanding of linguistic, cultural and artistic processes. Following discussion of key theoretical perspectives, the chapter introduces an innovative, cross-curricular resource for teaching Arabic as a foreign/heritage language, entitled ‘Language in Art and the Work of Ali Omar Ermes’ (Abdelhadi et  al., 2018a) and the pedagogical approach underlying it. It then reports on a small-scale action research study (Abdelhadi et al., 2019) which investigated use of the resource referred to with an intermediate-level class (made up of both Arabic background and non-Arabic background learners) in a London complementary school. Findings provided strong evidence in general terms of the potential of visual art as a focus for Arabic language-and-culture learning and of its 167

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power to unlock personal, affective and multisensory responses and to extend appreciation of multimodal design. Moreover, related teacher professional development work offered through Goldsmiths Teachers’ Centre, based on the approach, has attracted considerable interest from colleagues teaching Arabic in different sectors both in the UK and overseas (Qatar Foundation International, 2021). Before going on, it is important to introduce the artist himself. Described as ‘one of the foremost contemporary artists from the Middle East’ (Porter, 2003: 13), Ermes has a worldwide reputation. Of Libyan background, he has lived for most of his life in the UK and several of his works are housed in the British Museum. A committed Muslim, his paintings fuse an Islamic perspective on art and literature ‘in one inseparable union of work’ (Ermes, 2020). Typically, his work features Arabic letters or short/abbreviated words in large format presented with dramatic force and a compelling sense of movement and energy. However, while celebrating the Arabic script in all its elegance and refi nement, it should be noted that Ermes is not concerned about following the rules of Arabic calligraphy in his work. Inscribed around the letters or words are quotes from Arabic literature over the ages, often poetry, in much smaller writing, and these reflect the contribution made by Arab writers in addressing important political, cultural and moral issues which remain relevant for the modern world. Porter (2003: 13) points out how the paintings ‘have many stories to tell’ and how ‘the stark beauty of the single letter at the heart of the composition transcends all boundaries’ since ‘they speak for universal human aspirations’ (see, for example, Figure 8.1 below). It is this

Figure 8.1 Harf al kaf

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universality, combined with the focus on language, as well as a remarkable power of expression, which constitute the particular value of bringing Ermes’ work to the Arabic language classroom and indeed to education more broadly. Transcultural, Symbolic and Aesthetic Perspectives

This section begins by defi ning two ways of understanding the term ‘culture’ and looks at synergies with language and art. It then goes on to examine the notion of transculturality and its central importance for the way meaning is made in an additional language as well as the influence this can have on identity construction. Next we look at the symbolic and subjective dimensions of language learning and the way they take us beyond seeing communication as a neutral exchange of information to a much fuller and more personal engagement with culture, which is where visual art has a significant contribution to make. This leads into considering the aesthetic dimension and the important role played by the senses in processes of communication. Language and art as expressions of culture

While few would deny that language and art are connected to culture, it is important to remember that the notion of culture itself can be seen in different ways. Most fundamentally, a defi nition derived from the humanities ‘focuses on the way a social group represents itself and others through its material productions, be they works of art, literature, social institutions, or artefacts of everyday life, and the mechanisms for their reproduction and preservation through history’ (Kramsch, 1996: 2), while another derived from social sciences refers to ‘the attitudes and beliefs, ways of thinking, behaving and remembering shared by members of that community’ (Kramsch, 1996: 2). The growing influence of an anthropological perspective has meant a shift away from elitist notions of notions of high and low culture and essentialist thinking to a more pluralistic view and to a recognition that ‘understanding culture is a process rather than an external knowledge to be acquired’ (Tseng, 2002: 13). With regard to language and art, each is seen to lie in symbiotic relationship to culture. Thus Agar (1994), who coined the term ‘languaculture’, explains that: … language, in all its varieties, in all the ways it appears in everyday life, builds a world of meanings. When you run into different meanings, when you become aware of your own and work to build a bridge to the others, ‘culture’ is what you’re up to. Language fi lls the spaces between us with sound; culture forges the human connection through them. Culture is in language, and language is loaded with culture. (Agar, 1994: 28)

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Along similar lines, Gonçalves, a visual artist, argues that ‘There is no culture without art and there is no art without culture’ and consequently that ‘art is a powerful instrument to foster intercultural understanding, communication and appreciation of diversity’ (Gonçalves, 2016: 6). Seeing art as a universal language that surpasses language, she explains how it is based on situated emotions and how its communicative intention is expressed through the ‘sensorial, imaginary and conceptual’ (Gonçalves, 2016: 4). Opening up new perspectives, questions and possibilities, ‘Works of art are views and voices, narratives of possible worlds, scripts for posterity’ (Gonçalves, 2016: 6). Intercultural/transcultural language learning

In the context of foreign and second language-and-culture learning, where a refashioning of linguistic and cultural relationships is involved, the situation becomes more complex. It is now understood that in seeking to engage with another language and culture we do not leave our own behind as though they were separate entities, for there are ‘inherent intercultural processes in language learning in which meanings are made and interpreted across and between languages and cultures and in which the linguistic and cultural repertoires of each individual exist in complex interrelationships’ (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013: 2). The dynamic and fluid nature of the relationship between languages and cultures in the process of meaning-making is captured in the concept of translingual-transcultural competence, presented in the Modern Language Association report (MLA, 2007) on culture teaching and learning in higher education, which refers to learners’ ability to ‘operate between languages’ (MLA, 2007: 3–4) and to ‘reflect on the world and themselves through the lens of another language and culture’ (MLA, 2007: 4). Arguing for a unifi ed language-and-culture curriculum, the report also recognised an important role for the arts in opening up the world of the imagination and in enabling students to ‘consider alternative ways of seeing, feeling and understanding things’ (MLA, 2007: 4). Understanding language and culture within the broader context of meaning-making and social experience reveals how they function as part of a much wider semiotic network which includes the visual (Mills, 2016). Referring to the creative and fluid processes of meaning-making in urban contexts captured in the term metrolingualism (Otsuiji & Pennycook, 2010), Jaworski (2014) argues that integrating verbal and visual resources in artistic work might be conceptualised as a natural expansion to heteroglossic communication and dynamic processes of languaging. Based on an analysis of recent examples of multilingual ‘text art’ by various artists (Laurie Anderson, Xu Bing, Wenda Gu, Song Dong, Zhang Peili and Claire Fontaine), Jaworski explains that:

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… when used as artistic material, language may be easily transformed from a singularly conceived, bounded and fi nite ‘code’ to an amorphous, fuzzy and disorientating process of languaging of unclear and contested origin, ownership and ambiguous ‘meaning’. (Jaworski, 2014: 151) Symbolic and subjective dimensions to language learning

The significance and value of bringing an arts dimension to language-and-culture learning lies in the way it moves beyond a notion of language as ‘reference and representation’ to one that recognises its ‘symbolic power’ (Kramsch, 2009: 10). Beyond neutral exchanges of information, communication is framed by social and cultural discourses and infused with deeply personal processes of meaning-making and desire. This subjectivation ‘is always mediated through symbolic systems, be they verbal, musical, or visual, that give meaning to what the senses perceive’ (Kramsch, 2009: 16). It engages both the conscious mind and the unconscious body’s ‘memories, fantasies, identifications and projections’ (Kramsch, 2009: 18). It re-establishes the potency of affective and sensory factors and the impact of the lived environment in the way in which we construct reality and in the making and remaking of a sense of self. While there are commonalities between linguistic and visual modes as rule-governed systems of communication, there are also significant differences including different underlying logics: the logic of speech, involving time and sequence; and the logic of the image, perceived as a gestalt, which is about the presentation of space and simultaneity (Kress, 2003). The power of the visual arts as a symbolic form lies in their ‘immediacy, memorability, and sensuality’ (Freedman, 2003: 1). In other words, they connect directly with the senses and emotions at the same time as stimulating thinking and this makes them more complex and subtle in their influence. However, they also hold a hidden and ambiguous quality which invites curiosity and an openness to multiple perspectives. As ‘embodied meaning’ (Danto, 2013: 37) they offer a tangible representation of cultural norms and values which contrasts with the more abstract nature of language. Pedagogically, this means that they can serve as a valuable trigger for reflection and discussion as well as for students’ own creativity. In the art of Ermes, the symbolic and subjective dimensions to language and art are powerfully reflected. In one of his most famous works Harf al kaf (153 × 123 cm in size; see Figure 8.1), a dramatic rendering in black of the letter ‘kaf’ dominates the page. Fitted around the base of the letter shape are tiny inscriptions taken from 8th century Arab poetry and related to injustice in society. There is no obvious communicative purpose behind the choice of letter nor between letter and inscription. The contrasting large letter shape and minute inscription invites the viewer to zoom in and out, noting detail but

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then seeing the whole. The boldness and elegance of the brushwork used in painting the letter shape draws the viewer’s attention and transforms an arbitrary linguistic sign into something much more significant aesthetically and culturally, leading the viewer towards deeper layers of meaning and towards a more sensitive and thoughtful response. On the one hand, how does the work affect me personally: what does it make me feel, how is it used in words, what does it embody, what connections can I make to my own experience, and how does that contrast with the way I view my own language and culture? On the other hand, how does the work reflect wider discourses around Arab culture, history and belief? And fi nally, what does the work tell me about identity and the way I see others as well as the way I see myself? It is by asking and engaging in dialogue around such questions that the work in its symbolic and subjective dimensions comes to life and gives meaning and purpose to the language-and-culture learning endeavour. Aesthetics and feeling the world

Bridging mind and body, thought and feeling, the subjective dimension to language and visual art entails recognition of the whole person and of the affective, sensory and aesthetic dimension to experience and meaning-making. In this context, aesthetics is understood as widening the scope of perception, seeing differently, broadening the comfort zone, developing empathy and playfulness. Unlocking imaginative and expressive potentials, it ‘opens a space for exploring the multiplicity of meanings, the openness and uncertainty of the interpretation and creation of meaning, and how historical and cultural references are encoded’ (Leung & Scarino, 2016: 89). In terms of language pedagogy this means viewing the linguistic mode as part of a wider semiotic repertoire, for ‘language learners apprehend the foreign language with all their senses; the sounds, the shapes, the tastes of words and other symbolic forms, and the meanings that each mode makes available’ and this includes an understanding that, especially for the younger generation, ‘The development of visual literacy can be a pathway into verbal literacy’ (Kramsch, 2009: 203). In this sense, learning another language involves acquiring a new skin, feeling the world anew and entering ‘the flow of embodied action’ (Phipps, 2007: 125). The primacy of the senses applies also to art which may be regarded as ‘a universal language based on situated emotions’ with the recognition that ‘its codes must fi rst be deciphered by the senses, and only then considered on an intellectual level’ (Gonçalves, 2016: 4). Recognising the affective and sensory aspects of communication in both verbal and visual language is intrinsic to the development of an aesthetic and poetic sensibility. What we see in Ermes’ work may be described as a combination of verbal and visual poetry enhanced by a sense of

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movement and musicality: ‘Arabic is an ideal visual form, and the musical entity in its movement of the letterform “as in poetry” not only in its literary expression but also in its silent music expressions, combines the use of space, colour and the power of shifting places in their quiet and noisy effects’ (Ermes, cited in Nourallah, 2003: 10). Synaesthesia, a sense of flow, rupture and continuity, affective assemblage, the search for spiritual essence are all part and parcel of the aesthetic embraced by Ermes. The sacred Arabic script and its use in poetic citations of profound eloquence are fundamental to the aesthetic whole. Worth noting here is how the combination of script/calligraphy, poetry and painting is deeply embedded in other cultures, most obviously in the work of Chinese and Japanese artists. In the context of language-and-culture learning, once the affective, sensory and spiritual dimensions are recognised, the contribution that poetry can make, including when it is combined with visual art, becomes clear. The impact of poetry comes through its emotional and expressive power. Like visual art it is open to multiple interpretations and can stimulate reflections on culture and language, as is frequently the case in the work of Ermes. It can develop students’ sensitivity to the colours, textures and cadences of an additional language, enabling them to capture nuances of meaning. Perhaps most importantly, it can engage the imagination and open up new transcultural-translingual ways of being and new possible worlds (Graham et al., 2020; Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004). The sensory and aesthetic perspective also highlights the significance of interactions with the material world. As ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, 2010; Ros i Solé et al., 2020), objects or artefacts (which include artworks) represent an active agent in the way discourse and reality are constructed. What has been referred to as the ‘sociality of objects’ refers to emotions and feelings that do not lie in the object but are rather produced inbetween (Ahmed, 2014). Pedagogically, this fits with an inquiry-based and dialogic approach, in which questioning and talk around objects and artworks can reveal hidden connections and meaning-making potential. Indeed objects frequently ‘open up stories and give opportunities for telling stories’; moreover, they ‘connect worlds, as they travel between worlds’ (Pahl & Rowsell, 2012: 50). Bridging experience and imagination, the aesthetic makes space for exploration and experimentation, allowing us to break with what has been taken for granted, to engage with alternative realities, to project ourselves into figured worlds (Holland et al., 2001), in which the boundaries of the self can be redrawn. Leading into a detailed description of pedagogy, the next section provides an outline of the resource developed for working with works by Ali Omar Ermes, focusing in particular on the trio, La – Kalla – Wa Lan, which students worked on in the study presented here.

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Overview of the Resource ‘Language in Art and the Work of Ali Omar Ermes’ and the Works La – Kalla – Wa Lan (‫)ﻻﻛﻼوﻟﻦ‬

This resource (Abdelhadi et al., 2018a, 2018b) was developed as part of a collaboration between Goldsmiths and the British Museum (2015– 2017), aimed at exploring how interactions around museum artefacts can become a focus in foreign and heritage language learning. The combination of language and art has been practised in different cultures over many centuries and this contextual framing is provided briefly in the fi rst two sections of the resource, focusing down from international to Arab perspectives. This leads on to a much longer third section focusing on eight selected works by Ermes. Supporting the material for students, the resource contains a teacher’s guide and additional material. The broad structure is as follows: A. Blendings: when language meets art B. Arabic calligraphy: then and now C. Ali Omar Ermes (1) Familiarisation and fi rst responses (2) Background to Ali Omar Ermes (3) Interactions with works by Ali Omar Ermes 1.1 Harf al Kaf (‫)ﺣﺮف اﻟﻜﺎف‬ 1.2 As-Ssad (‫ﺼ ﺎد‬ ّ ‫)اﻟ‬ 1.3 Shadda (‫)ﺷ ﺪّة‬ 1.4 Ahaje Juha (‫)أﺣﺎﺟﻲ ُﺟ ﺤﺎ‬ 1.5 Peace Means Justice (‫)اﻟ ﺴّﻼم ﯾﻌﻨﻲ اﻟﻌﺪل‬ ّ ،‫ ﻻ‬:‫)اﻟﻌﻤﻞ اﻟﺜﻼﺛﻲ‬ 3.6/7/8 Trio work: La, Kalla, Wa Lan (‫ وﻟﻦ‬،‫ﻛﻼ‬ The unit to be discussed here focuses on the trio of works La, Kalla, Wa Lan (‫‘( )ﻻﻛﻼوﻟﻦ‬No’, ‘Never’, ‘Nevermore’), set out from right to left in Figure 8.2. Addressing the theme of resistance to injustice in the world, the artworks are dominated by dramatically formed letter shapes complemented by vivid colours which intensify across the three works. Under a bold heading in black (‫ ﻻ ﻛﻼ وﻟﻦ‬- La Kalla wa Lan), in each of the works is a ‘nathr’ (‫( )ﻧﺜﺮ‬lyrical prose piece) in small handwriting composed by Ermes around the central theme of resisting injustice in the world. The following three lines, selected by Fatima Khaled, the teacher-researcher in the study referred to, as an introduction for her class, are taken from the ‘nathr’ and give a flavour of the piece: No to injustice, oppression and horror to mankind Never to destruction of nations with debt and bribery Never more will we accept, nor will the just.

‫ﻻ ﻟﻠﻈﻠﻢ واﻻﺳﺘﺒﺪاد وﻗﮭﺮ اﻟﻌﺒﺎد‬ ‫ﻛﻼ ﻟﺘﺪﻣﯿﺮ اﻟﺸﻌﻮب ﺑﺎﻟﻘﺮوض واﻟﺮﺷﺎوي‬ ‫وﻟﻦ ﻧﻘﺒﻞ ﻧﺤﻦ وﻟﻦ ﯾﻘﺒﻞ ﻛﻞ اﻟﻤﻨﺼﻔﯿﻦ‬

Elsewhere around the large letter shapes in each work are short extracts from Arab poetry in small handwriting. Among many famous

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Figure 8.2 ‘La’, ‘Kalla’, ‘Wa Lan’ (‫( )ﻻ ﻛﻼ وﻟﻦ‬actual size 1.5m x 1.2m)

writers included are: Al Nabigha al Dubyani (‫( )اﻟﻨﺎﺑﻐﺔ اﻟﺪﺑﯿﺎﻧﻲ‬Al Jahiliya era, pre-Islam), Al Mutanabi (‫( )اﻟﻤﺘﻨﺒﻲ‬Abasi era) and Ibn Muklah) ‫)اﺑﻦ ﻣﻘﻠﺔ‬ (Abasi era). Their poetry represents voices from the past which have stood up to injustice in the world in its different forms. Floating in space, yet as if moulded around the letter shapes, they appear as fragments in a labyrinthine landscape within which the viewer is invited to roam. Aesthetically, the works resonate strongly with the notion of affective assemblage in the way they invoke relationality and transformative power (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). They are ‘multimodal ensembles’ (Kress & Leeuwen, 2001) composed of various visual/spatial and textual elements but capturing also a sense of movement and flow. Indeed Ermes (Faruqi, 2011: 175) likens a painting to a ‘theatre performance on a stage’, speaking of how ‘many elements can work together within that space’. The works reflect strong emotions through the colours used but also through ruptures in some letter shapes together with seepages and splashes. It should also be remembered that permeating this ‘performance’ is a powerful cultural dimension embodied in the script and in the sounds, rhythms and associations evoked by Arabic poetry. Pedagogical Framework

Effective introduction of a resource such as this in the classroom requires careful planning but also flexibility. The structure proposed to achieve this is comprised of three broad developmental stages with activities related both to language and to visual art learning embedded in each (see Table 8.1). Particularly for teachers new to cross-curricular work, the framework is intended to provide a general structure and to ensure that an appropriate balance is maintained between language and content. However, the framework should not become a straightjacket. Its purpose is to overcome the artificial separation of language and content and to pursue a pedagogy in which they operate in symbiotic relationship. Moreover, some movement across the stages is to be encouraged and a leaning towards creative thinking is encouraged throughout the process.

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Table 8.1 Three-stage pedagogical framework 1

Approaching

• • • •

Linking to previous learning and experience Sharing and discussing ideas in pairs/groups Formulating questions Building up key words

2

Exploring

• • • •

Researching Connecting and comparing Analysing and interpreting Developing language knowledge and skills across genres

3

Creating

• • •

Re-imagining Re-mediating Re-presenting

The broad purpose behind each stage, in relation to content and language, is summarised below. (1) Approaching. Here the focus is on enabling students to fi nd ways into the appreciation of artworks or artefacts, to make links to previous learning and personal experience, to share initial responses and to note questions that arise. There are no ‘correct’ answers so the focus is on dialogue and questioning. There is an important opportunity both to recycle previously taught language and to introduce new language, in particular subject-specific terminology, needed to carry out related activities. The glossary included in the resource may be useful for teachers in planning. (2) Exploring. In this phase students develop their responses to the subject matter, incorporating transcultural, emotional and aesthetic perspectives. They do this to a large degree collaboratively through research and problem-solving activities. These have been designed partly by adapting guidance from art educators, for example where group discussion is prompted by questions looking at artworks from different angles: content, form, process, mood (Taylor, 1987), or other approaches including word associations, sketching a detail from the artwork, annotation, creating a shape poem, interviewing the artwork, becoming an art critic (Charman et al., 2006). These involve work across the four skills and across a range of functions from describing and comparing to expressing and justifying opinions, analysing, critiquing and interpreting. In relation to becoming an art critic, a writing frame is provided to give a possible model or starting point for structure and style. (3) Creating. This is the transformative process whereby students, collaboratively or individually, take inspiration from the artwork or artefact to produce a new visual art and language piece reflecting personal or shared experience as well as evolving cultural and aesthetic viewpoints – a piece, moreover, in which identities may be reshaped and confidently affirmed. To achieve this, it is considered important that

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students’ work be presented or performed to others through live presentations, exhibitions or performances and/or online. The resource provides suggestions for types of creative work that might be attempted, including collage and poetry writing. One suggestion made involves creating a bilingual digital story inspired by the artwork(s). Interested colleagues may refer to Goldsmiths’ longstanding work around multilingual digital storytelling and the handbook developed with project teachers to guide colleagues wishing to embark on a project in this area (Anderson et al., 2014). The approach overall embraces many aspects of a critical socioconstructivist approach with an emphasis on student agency, active learning, process and contextualisation (van Lier, 2007). This implies various scaffolding strategies including links to prior experience (situated meaning), structuring of learning, collaboration and modelling. An advantage in teaching visual art through a foreign/second language, compared with other more language-heavy subjects, is that much can be understood through demonstration and this makes it more accessible even for beginners in the language. However, verbal interactions of different kinds can be important in developing understanding of artworks as well as gradually gaining confidence in the use of subject-specific terminology (Nancarrow, 2019: 37–39). As with all cross-curricular work, careful planning is required to meet the dual content and language demands. Detailed guidance and exemplifi cation is provided in the Planning Toolkit created to support teachers in using the resource (Abdelhadi et al., 2019). While some scaffolding can be useful, teachers must always seek to move students towards independence and this is expected particularly in the creativity phase of the framework. Promoting creativity and a nomadic, aesthetic sensibility requires more open-ended work and freedom to experiment and make mistakes (Craft, 2010). It is about providing an open space in which students can move freely across different modes, different aspects of experience and environment and different linguistic and cultural frames. This means that, rather than a rigidly monolingual approach to classroom discourse, a degree of translanguaging is seen as desirable in terms of the development of metalinguistic skills and general literacy as well as serving a scaffolding role at times. Activities such as translation and bilingual/multilingual collage with both textual and visual elements as well as activities that provide a stimulus in one language with the response expected in another all have their place. As ‘nomadic subjects’, translators may be viewed as ‘intercultural mediators’ occupying ‘a floating territory between languages, cultures and disciplines’ (Cronin, 2000: 6). Moreover, a critical dimension is displayed in the way multiple perspectives are invited as well as in the performance of identities and the confidence students develop through this to make their voices heard.

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Practice and Discussion

Having outlined important features of the pedagogical approach upon which the resource is based, we go on now to look at how a unit was received by an intermediate class at the Peace School, a successful Arabic complementary school in North London. The class concerned was a group of 14 students, aged between 11 and 17 years old. Of these, 10 were from Arabic backgrounds and four from non-Arabic backgrounds. All were at an intermediate level of proficiency in Arabic (pre-GCSE), although this covered a range of levels. Generally the Arabic background students showed superior oracy to literacy skills. However, two students displayed a good level across the four skills. The class teacher, Fatima Khaled, is an experienced and well-qualified teacher of Arabic, who is open to new approaches and keen to make the study of Arabic relevant and attractive to young people growing up in the modern world. She was supported by several older students who acted as mentors and assisted particularly in catering for the range of ages and proficiency levels in the class. For lessons of 80 minutes over a period of 13 weeks the class worked mainly on the section of the resource dealing with the trio of works, La – Kalla – Wa Lan. Alongside this, students continued with lessons that were more textbook based and oriented around the GCSE exam specification. As mentioned above, fi ndings from an action-based study of the unit in practice with this class have already been reported on (Abdelhadi et al., 2019). The study drew on qualitative data (lesson plans, observations, interviews and work samples) and employed a thematic analysis approach to uncover salient strands. Here these fi ndings are developed by re-examining the data from a broader perspective, focusing in particular on symbolic, subjective, multisensory and aesthetic dimensions to meaning-making. The unit of work on La – Kalla – Wa Lan was planned according to principles of thematic project-based language learning (PBLL), based on crossing curriculum boundaries, making connections and promoting student agency. While a central focus was on language and visual art, learning links were made to other curriculum areas, in particular social studies, citizenship (Osler & Starkey, 2015) and media studies. The decision to introduce visual art into the Arabic language classroom was negotiated with students and brought about significant change in classroom dynamics and activities. In place of a transmission-based approach in which all knowledge is seen to reside in the mind of the teacher, a democratic, collaborative and personalised way of working was adopted. Underpinning this, a safe and flexible space was established, based on trusting and respectful relationships and personal investment in a shared journey of discovery. Ermes’ artwork is unusual in the way it combines text and poetry with visual art in a multimodal, affective assemblage which carries powerful

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cultural and aesthetic resonances. The work invites responses which are multisensory and emotional as much as they are intellectual and students found themselves drawn in by this. Asked whether introducing art in a language lesson was a good thing, students were unanimously positive in their response. One boy, who was also studying art at his mainstream school, commented that ‘It helps you know what language is really about’, and with his classmate he went on to explain: S1:

S2:

Like language is not just words. Everything has a meaning behind it. Even one little word like ‘La’, just two letters, but it has a big meaning and creates a big picture …. There’s hidden stuff and we have to like analyse it … … and fi nd a meaning. (SI)

There is an emerging awareness here of the way in which language not only represents objective realities but also works more subtly to construct ‘perceptions, emotions, attitudes and values’ (Kramsch, 2009: 7), uncovering further layers of meaning. It is the embedding of the word ‘la’ in a piece of visual art that brings to life its sensory and affective dimensions, stimulating curiosity, encouraging dialogue and opening up a ‘big meaning’ and a ‘big picture’. Reflecting on the impact of La – Kalla – Wa Lan on herself and her classmates, one student commented that ‘When you look at this, you want to develop it more, see what the meaning behind it is. It’s just more interesting and it interests everyone as well’. Compared with regular language learning which students perceived as taking place largely in a vacuum, the artworks acted as a ‘medium’ and ‘something that they can use to help their learning’. Having something worthwhile to talk about, where connections can be made to feelings, beliefs and personal life-worlds, was also seen as important. In the words of one student in the group, ‘… it just helped me to express my feelings more because it talked about injustice and all that, because it brought … something more interesting than the traditional Arabic language approach where you don’t really learn about the big issues, the global issues, you don’t really learn anything that might have to do with yourself’. An important feature of visual art is its ambiguity (Hickman & Eglinton, 2017: 147), and this means that it can express different things to different people. In other words, there is no single correct interpretation or perspective and this encouraged careful listening. One student noted how ‘because we have different views, so we can hear their opinions and also understand them and compare it to others’ (S5). Another, contrasting visual art with a piece of writing, emphasised how ‘you can get so much from it, like it’s more than a paragraph and a text. There’s more you can think about’ (S6). Students were interested in the way language and visual art worked together as complementary elements within a multimodal, multisensory

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ensemble. At a basic level this facilitated understanding of the Arabic text since ‘Even if you don’t understand the words themselves, you can get the impression of what he is trying to say […] as you can feel whether it’s angry, whether it’s frustrated’ (S4). This affective dimension brought a deeper engagement with the artwork which in turn supported linguistic development and provided fertile ground for Fatima Khaled to revise and extend structures and vocabulary related to agreement and disagreement. Moreover, she noticed how students retained language better because it had been introduced within a meaningful context and was enabling them to express views that mattered to them. The sense of agency and empowerment generated was reflected in comments regarding both spoken and written skills: ‘We’re all more capable of talking about a topic’ (S3); ‘… now in my writing I can use words that I didn’t know. I can write the project about conflict and I can understand things that I didn’t understand before’ (S8). Regarding the affective, multisensory and aesthetic dimension to the integration of language and visual art in Ermes’ works, students developed their appreciation of what contribution different elements could make semiotically. One student observed that ‘You don’t often see text in art. It’s really nice. It’s something new’. A second student probed further, commenting that ‘the visual factor of it gives the feeling to the text, to the words’, adding ‘It showed us how colours have emotions’. Also referring to the use of colour, another student highlighted its metaphorical function: ‘… You can see how it starts off quite mild and, as it goes to Kalla, it intensifies and Wa Lan is very intense because the red and black, it’s like blood and darkness and evil’ (S4). The same student went on to articulate how the visual and textual flow into each other and how this fusion of modes conveys a richer, more powerful message since: ‘… if it were just the text and no painting, it would lose some of its significance and vice versa. If we had just the letter without text it would lose some significance because they both give depth to each other, because the text without the painting, you wouldn’t really know the severity of what he is trying to say, but the letter without the text, you wouldn’t really know what he’s so angry about’ (S4). The space that was opened up for personal, affective, multisensory and aesthetic responses within the integrated visual art and language learning approach provided a powerful stimulus for students’ creative and critical thinking. This manifested itself most strongly in the fi nal phase of work on the unit, where students were invited to produce and present/ perform an original piece of work of their own inspired by La – Kalla – Wa Lan. Various ideas emerged related to students’ concerns, including standing up against bullying, discrimination and poverty. One student was pleased to ‘have an opportunity to express my feelings about bullying … I used to think there wasn’t much I could do about it, but now that I can express it, I think it’s a great opportunity to show how many people

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feel about bullying’ (S10). The message about bullying was conveyed through a short bilingual Arabic-English digital story made up of four sections. Two are related to bullying, where dramatised scenes are framed by powerful statements making links to the artworks. In the third section students, speaking directly to camera, protest against different forms of injustice in the world. The fourth contains a general reflection on Ermes’ artwork and its influence on their own creative output. The digital stories produced by students within the Creativity phase of the unit were examples of embodied cognition in the form of affective, translingual-transcultural and multimodal assemblages. As such they reflect a performative approach to teaching and learning applied in the context of language learning and drawing on different art forms including drama (Mentz & Fleiner, 2018). Fatima Khaled was impressed by the degree to which students took ownership of the process, noting their ability to ‘think beyond’ and to relate the artworks to their own lived experience and values (Busch, 2015). This imaginative and transformative process meant that students were able to invest deeply in their learning and to form a new sense of self in the process, to see themselves as cosmopolitan citizens with a voice and something important to say to the world. Within the context of bilingual fi lmmaking (voiceover in Arabic, subtitles in English), translation activity was found to be engaging and valuable in developing students’ awareness of similarities and differences in the way meaning is expressed in Arabic and English as well as the cultural connotations of words. Another way in which students responded creatively to the artworks was through poetry. Using the ‘nathr’ (prose poem) composed by Ermes and presented in the artworks as a model enabled students to write their own poetic pieces in a similar style within an artistic design (Abdelhadi et al., 2019). Stimulating the literary imagination in this way extended students ‘symbolic competence’ as language learners by fostering its three major components, namely ‘the production of complexity, the tolerance of ambiguity, and an appreciation of form as meaning’ (Kramsch, 2006: 251). From an aesthetic perspective, poetry represents a powerful way of using language in a way that is closely connected to visual art. Breaking with existing structures, both can bring together disparate elements in new assemblages; both can enable new playful ways of seeing and feeling; both can broker between cultures. Conclusion

This chapter has explored synergies between visual art, language and culture and the significance of this for the learning of Arabic as a foreign/ heritage language (although principles apply to other languages). We have seen how the visual art focus, developed through a learner-centred, interactive pedagogy, can stimulate deep engagement with language and culture and this is consistent with a growing number of studies in this area

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(Bradley et al., 2018; Parra et al., 2016). This means that, in contrast to the narrowly conceived communicative approach, students are able to experience symbolic and subjective aspects of communication within a transcultural context. Here much greater emphasis is placed on affective, multisensory, embodied and aesthetic dimensions to meaning-making, attributing due significance to interactions with the material world, artworks in this case. Moreover, we have seen clearly from student responses how bringing the visual art dimension to language-and-culture learning can support personal and social development, build students’ sense of agency and ownership of their learning and instil a sense of responsibility for global issues. It is hoped that the integrated model of visual art and additional language-and-culture learning explored in this chapter may contribute to the development of a languages curriculum that overcomes the damaging divide that exists currently between language and culture learning, fosters translingual-transcultural meaning-making and takes serious account of profound changes in the semiotic as well as broader social, cultural and political landscapes. This has implications at the levels of policy and curriculum planning. It means crossing subject boundaries and, where possible, opening up dialogue between languages and visual art specialists. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) In what ways can interactions around artworks contribute to the language-and-culture learning experience? (2) What scope is provided within the approach described for students’ personal and affective experience to be expressed and why is this important for language learning? (3) How does a concern with symbolic and subjective features of language learning contrast with the instrumental approach? (4) What is the significance of Ermes’ works as multimodal texts and how can this support aesthetic and transcultural understandings of communication and culture? (5) How is student agency fostered within the pedagogical framework proposed and how has this influenced student confidence and engagement in their language learning journeys? Acknowledgements

The resource referred to in this chapter arose from a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, the British Museum and the Museum of London to explore how interactions with museum artefacts could contribute to an interdisciplinary, translingual-transcultural approach to language learning. This was linked to Goldsmiths’ Critical Connections: Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project.

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Discovering the work of Ali Omar Ermes was a great inspiration. I am deeply grateful to him for his support and encouragement and for permission to use images of his artworks, Harf al kaf and La – Kalla – Wa Lan, in this chapter. Warmest thanks go to Reem Abdelhadi, Luma Hameed and Fatima Khaled, key members in the project team at Goldsmiths, University of London, who worked with me on the creation of the resource referred to in this chapter and on subsequent teacher professional development work. I could not have wished for a more inspired and dedicated team. I am particularly grateful to Fatima Khaled for allowing me to observe and carry out interviews with students at the Peace School. Finally, I am most grateful to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and to the Qatar Foundation for funding the project. References Abdelhadi, R., Hameed, L., Khaled, F. and Anderson, J. (2018a) Language in Art and the Work of Ali Omar Ermes. London: Goldsmiths, University of London. See https:// mdstmr.wordpress.com/arabic/a-resource-pack/. Abdelhadi, R., Hameed, L., Khaled, F. and Anderson, J. (2018b) Language in Art and the Work of Ali Omar Ermes: Planning Toolkit. London: Goldsmiths, University of London. See https://mdstmr.fi les.wordpress.com/2018/10/planning-toolkit-english. pdf. Abdelhadi, R., Hameed, L., Khaled, F. and Anderson, J. (2019) Creative interactions with art works: An engaging approach to Arabic language-and-culture learning. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching 14 (3), 273–289. doi:10.1080/175012 29.2019.1579219 Agar, M. (1994) Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation. New York: William Morrow. Ahmed, S. (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd edn). New York: Routledge. Anderson, J., Macleroy, V. and Chung, Y.-C. (2014) Critical Connections: Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project. Handbook for Teachers. London: Goldsmiths, University of London. See https://goldsmithsmdst.com/handbook/. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bernstein, N. and Lerchner, C. (eds) (2014) Ästhetisches Lernen im DaF-/DaZ-Unterricht: Literatur – Theater – Bildende Kunst – Musik – Film. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag (= Materialien Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Band 93). Bradley, J., Moore, E., Simpson, J. and Atkinson, L. (2018) Translanguaging space and creative activity: Theorising collaborative arts-based learning. Language and Intercultural Communication 18 (2), 54–73. Busch, B. (2015) Linguistic repertoire and Spracherleben, the lived experience of language. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies No. 148. London: Kings College London. Charman, H., Rose, K. and Wilson, G. (2006) The Art Gallery Handbook. London: Tate Publishing. Craft, A. (2010) Creativity and Education Futures: Learning in a Digital Age. Stoke-onTrent: Trentham. Cronin, M. (2000) Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation. Cork: Cork University Press. Danto, A.C. (2013) What Art Is. London: Yale University Press.

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Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Ermes, A.O. (2020) Ali Omar Ermes. See https://www.aliomarermes.co.uk/. Faruqi, S. (2011) An interview with Ali Omar Ermes. Contemporary Practices: Visual Arts from the Middle East 8, 138–143. Freedman, K. (2003) Teaching Visual Culture: Curriculum, Aesthetics and the Social Life of Art. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University. Gonçalves, S. (2016) We and they: Art as a medium for intercultural dialogue. In S. Gonçalves and S. Majhanovich (eds) Art and Intercultural Dialogue (pp. 3–23). Rotterdam: Sense. Graham, S., Fisher, L., Hofweber, J. and Krüsemann, H. (2020) Getting creative in the language classroom. In K. Kohl, R. Dudrah, A. Gosler, S. Graham, M. Maiden, W. Ouyang and M. Reynolds (eds) Creative Multilingualism: A Manifesto (pp. 151– 176). Cambridge: Open Book. Hickman, R. and Eglinton, K.A. (2017) Visual Art in the Curriculum. In M. Fleming, L. Bresler and J. O’Toole (eds) The Routledge International Handbook of the Arts and Education (pp. 145–158). Oxford: Routledge. Holland, D., Skinner, D., Lachicotte, J.R. and Cain, C. (2001) Identity and Agency in Cultured Worlds. London: Harvard University Press. Jaworski, A. (2014) Metrolingual art: Multilingualism and heteroglossia. International Journal of Bilingualism 18 (2), 134–158. Kramsch, C. (1996) The cultural component of language teaching. Zeitschrift für interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 1 (1), 1–10. Kramsch, C. (2006) From communicative competence to symbolic competence. The Modern Language Journal 90 (2), 249–252. Kramsch, C. (2009) The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge. Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold. Leung, C. and Scarino, A. (2016) Reconceptualizing the nature of goals and outcomes in language/s education. The Modern Language Journal 100 (S1), 81–95. Liddicoat, A.J. and Scarino, A. (2013) Intercultural Language Teaching and Learning. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Mentz, O. and Fleiner, M. (eds) (2018) The Arts in Language Teaching. International Perspectives: Performative – Aesthetic – Transversal. Vienna: Lit Verlag. Mills, K. (2016) Literacy Theories for the Digital Age: Social, Critical, Multimodal, Spatial, Material and Sensory Lenses. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. MLA, AdHoc Committee on Foreign Languages (2007) Foreign Languages and higher education: New structures for a changed world. Profession 234–245. Nancarrow, P. (2019) The language of art. EAL Journal, Summer, 37–39. Nourallah, R. (2003) Reflections on the art of Ali Omar Ermes. In Ali Omar Ermes in Context (Exhibition Catalogue) (pp. 6–12). London: Art Advisory Associates. Osler, A. and Starkey, H. (2015) Education for cosmopolitan citizenship: A framework for language learning. Argentinian Journal of Applied Linguistics 3 (2), 30–39. Otsuiji, E. and Pennycook, A. (2010) Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism 7, 240–254. Pahl, K. and Rowsell, J. (2012) Literacy and Education: Understanding the New Literacy Studies in the Classroom (2nd edn). London: Sage Publications. Parra, M.L. and Di Fabio, E.G. (2016) Languages in partnership with the visual arts: Implications for curriculum design and training. In L. Parkes, C. Ryan and S. KatzBourns (eds) Issues in Language Program Direction: Integrating the Arts: Creative Thinking about FL Curricula and Language Program Direction (pp. 11–36). Boston: Cengage.

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Phipps, A. (2007) Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival: Languaging, Tourism, Life. Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Phipps, A. and Gonzalez, M. (2004) Modern Languages: Learning and Teaching in an Intercultural Field. London: Sage. Porter, V. (2003) Ali Omar Ermes. In Ali Omar Ermes in Context (Exhibition Catalogue) (p. 13). London: Art Advisory Associates. Qatar Foundation International (2021) Resources for Teachers. See https://www.qfi .org/ for-teachers/teacher-resources/. Ros i Solé, C. (2016) The Personal World of the Language Learner. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ros i Solé, C., Fenoulhet, J. and Quist, G. (2020) Vibrant identities and fi nding joy in difference. Language and Intercultural Communication 20 (5), 397–407. Taylor, R. (1987) Educating for Art: Critical Response and Development. London: Longman. Tseng, Y.-H. (2002) A lesson in culture. English Language Teaching Journal 56 (1), 11–21. van Lier, L. (2007) Action-based teaching, autonomy and identity. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching 1 (1), 46–65.

9 Creating Pedagogical Spaces for Translingual and Transcultural Meaning-Making and Student Agency in a London Greek Complementary School Maria Charalambous

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Ouranos: Kleio: Thaleia: Iasonas, Ploutonas: Thaleia: Iasonas: Teacher: […] Polymnia: […] Iasonas: Polymnia: Iasonas: Kleio: Iasonas: Polymnia: Kleio:

Why don’t we make our own animation? Is that possible Miss? Yeah, that would be great! Yeah! What do you think about this? (to the teacher) I think it is a good idea … It is a good idea. What is the animation going to be about? We can make us!! A Greek person … Yeah, there should be someone who has all the emotions. Or there could be a brainless guy? Guided just by emotions … Or να είναι η Ειρήνη? [or to be ‘Peace’] […] (personification) But no one is just one thing (has one emotion). Kανένας δεν είναι πάντα calm. [No one is always calm.] Mmm … yes, but it could be someone who enjoys peace … among other things. 186

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The above extract occurred while I was observing a class at a Greek complementary school in London. The students took the initiative of suggesting to the teacher a new direction for the development of their classroom literacies: creating multimodal designs themselves. This event changed the design of the planned pedagogical steps, helping me realise the potential of a reflexive multiliteracies pedagogy as articulated in a ‘Learning by Design’ pedagogical framework (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, 2015a). I began to see how working within the above pedagogical framework can increase the engagement and agency of the students, by creating the space for dynamic and jointly constructed literacy events across languages, embracing various simultaneous negotiations of culture and identity. In multiliteracies, the initiatives learners take and the designs they create with their teacher indicate the agency of the students and of the teacher. Depending on the context, agency ‘might take a variety of shapes, including appropriation of some dominant discourses and practices, and many forms of resistance against those practices or discourses’ (Perry & Purcell-Gates, 2005: 3). The students in the above extract proposed creating their own animation about ‘Peace’. In so doing they negotiated their school literacy practices. They were inspired by their previous engagement with analysing functionally and critically multimodal designs, to negotiate the notion of peace as part of the theme ‘Feelings and emotions’. The students showed agency, expressing their desire to create an animation and to engage with the ‘applying creatively’ process (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). Furthermore, they negotiated the content and the concepts they would present in the co-creation of their animation, which I will discuss in this chapter. They built connections between their conceptual schemas, critical knowledge and their real-world contexts and purposes to design their literacies creatively. The students’ suggestion went ahead because the school acknowledged the importance of students developing the skill of producing media texts. The data presented here are part of my doctoral dissertation (Charalambous, 2019) which has offered new understandings of the theory and pedagogical approach of reflexive multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, 2015a) by studying this approach in a new context: complementary schools. The study reported on a case study conducted at a Greek complementary school in London catering to children of Cypriot Greek and Greek heritage, who have different migration histories and language repertoires and therefore can be described as a heterogeneous student population. The study provided evidence on multilingualism as part of a reflexive multiliteracies theory. In this chapter, I seek to address the following research questions: (1) What is the significance of learner agency and links to personal experience in translingual-transcultural meaning-making and how can learner agency be enabled pedagogically through the knowledge processes of experiencing and applying creatively within the reflexive multiliteracies

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framework? (2) How can storying around artefacts support translingual and transcultural learning and what role can digital media play in this? The literacy events build on previous interactions in the class, in which the students and the teacher, by enacting weavings between the different learning processes, namely experiencing, conceptualising, analysing and applying (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015a), had engaged with different multimodal representations and in creative learning. In the complementary school context, the exploration of the process of translingual and transcultural meaning-making or of linguistic and cultural weavings (Cazden, 2006; Luke et al., 2003), as described in the pedagogical framework of reflexive multiliteracies, becomes particularly important. This is because third- and fourth-generation heritage language students may experience language learning and heritage differently from previous generations and might be reluctant to invest in learning the heritage language through monolingual and narrow instrumental approaches (Charalambous, 2019). Instructional strategies that incorporate design activities which entail multimodal and multilingual representations, such as the practices I describe here, indicate a shift towards more inquirybased, learner-centred pedagogy for language learning. Additionally, pedagogical approaches such as the thematic approach, which is used here by the teacher, make room for holistic meaning-making tasks which draw on students’ prior experiences and involve deeper engagement with cultures, languages and identities. In such pedagogical spaces, students can negotiate their identities, rather than adopt essentialised identities, and fi nd a voice. Greek Complementary Schools and Greek and Greek-Cypriot Communities in London

According to Creese et al. (2007: 23), ‘complementary schools are voluntary schools which serve specific linguistic or religious and cultural communities, particularly through community language classes’. Complementary schools reflect the needs of their communities; they ‘exemplify the variety and complexity of possible contexts for language teaching and minority education’ (Issa & Williams, 2009). The school under study addresses the needs of Greek and Greek Cypriot diasporic communities in the learning of the Greek language and culture. The main aim of Greek complementary schools is to teach the Standard Greek language (although the Cypriot Greek variety is also used) and maintain Greek and Cypriot Greek cultures by teaching culturally relevant subjects such as history, geography, dance, music, etc. The sociolinguistic profi le of the Cypriot Greek community appears to be complex and fluid across generations. Gardner-Chloros et al. (2005) suggest that members of the Cypriot communities in London regard both Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek as part of their cultural heritage and

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want to preserve these varieties. However, English has become the default choice, as Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek varieties have come to occupy a much more limited role in the diaspora than in their homelands because of the different market forces at work within the diaspora (GardnerChloros, 2008). As generations succeed one another, linguistic and cultural diversity is apparent in individual diasporic biographies. As Damanakis (2010) states, it is heterogeneity rather than homogeneity that typifies the sociocultural identity of Greeks in the diaspora. Today, individuals in diasporic contexts use their distinct language repertoires to interact with people in diverse networks and negotiate their membership of different groups. With regard to the Greek complementary schools’ population, today most students are British-born Greek Cypriots (mainly third and fourth generation). There are also some first- and second-generation Greek and Greek Cypriot students (primarily immigrants from the Greek mainland). The Greek and Greek Cypriot communities fear the loss of their languages and also that younger generations might not be willing to invest in learning the heritage language (Charalambous, 2019). The participants in the present study are in the majority third-generation students, with a few being fourth- or second-generation students. While complementary schools (including Greek ones) are not set up with the explicit goal of full bilingualism and do not actively encourage the use of the pupils’ full linguistic repertoire, in practice both the teachers and pupils use a wide range of linguistic resources. Greek complementary schools, in reviewing their teaching practices as well as the curriculum, behave in an increasingly multilingual manner (Charalambous, 2019) and support students in the negotiation of their identities through language learning (Charalambous, 2019; see also Li & Wu, 2009; Lytra, 2011, for similar fi ndings in other complementary school settings). A Reflexive Multiliteracies Pedagogy

Literacy today is dynamic, developing in interactions in linguistically, culturally, socially and ethnically heterogeneous contexts. Therefore, literacy takes various forms, which are complex, personal and fluid. Reflecting the dramatic sociocultural changes that relate to the increasing diversity and dominance of multimodal resources, the pedagogy described in this chapter aligns with what García and Sylvan (2011: 386) defi ne as teaching for ‘singularities in pluralities’, referring to the teacher’s inclusion of every child’s literacies in response to the multilingual and multicultural classrooms of today. I use reflexive multiliteracies as a conceptual framework to describe a reflexive pedagogy within a ‘Learning by Design’ framework as defi ned by Cope and Kalantzis (2015b) in the context of complementary school education. In the above framework, students learn while engaging in a

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series of knowledge processes, using multimodal media as thinking tools. Reflexive multiliteracies have refocused the emphasis of pedagogies on more participatory and flexible aspects of learning practices. Nevertheless, the possibilities created within a multiliteracies pedagogy that is also reflexive remain underexplored (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, 2015a). A reflexive multiliteracies pedagogy takes into account the suggestion made by Cope and Kalantzis (2015b: 17) that teachers, while designing pedagogies, need to reflect on the activity types in order to supplement existing practice, by broadening the range of activity types and planning their sequence carefully to respond to their students’ needs and engage their class. Following this, I take the construction of reflexive multiliteracies as having two distinct characteristics: the investment in cultural and linguistic diversity and the use of different communications channels and media (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000: 5). Cope and Kalantzis (2015b) emphasise the need for pedagogical approaches to shift from developing skills to developing ‘knowledge processes’ or ‘things you can do to know’ as curriculum orientations. In their framework of a reflexive multiliteracies pedagogy they refer to these processes as ‘experiencing’, ‘conceptualising’, ‘analysing’ and ‘applying’. As suggested in the reflexive multiliteracies framework of Cope and Kalantzis (2015a), teachers and students work across the knowledge processes and bring into play their cultural and linguistic capital in their classroom practices, using diversity and multimodality as resources and thinking tools. In the context presented here the students fi nd the space to negotiate in interaction their multi-layered identities through linguistic and cultural weavings. Despite considering the knowledge processes as always in interplay, this chapter focuses on the ‘applying creatively’ process and weavings with the ‘experiencing’ process. ‘Applying creatively’ refers to transferring knowledge from one context to another, resulting in generated hybridity, divergence and originality (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000); it is about making an intervention in the world that is truly innovative and creative. ‘Applying creatively’ involves ‘experiencing’, analysing prior and present experiences through dialogue and collaboration, to bring to bear students’ attitudes and desires. In the context of this study and similarly to Anderson and Chung (2011: 7), interpretations of creativity concern four aspects: (1) seeing new or other possibilities, including different linguistic or cultural perspectives; (2) active participation in the collaborative process of generating, shaping and evaluating ideas by drawing on prior knowledge and experience as well as ‘funds of knowledge’ at home and in the community; (3) personal investment and self-expression – taking ownership, in other words; and (4) pursuing meaningful goals and presenting to others, thereby affirming identity. Creativity stresses the personal and affective dimensions of the learning process (Anderson, 2011) and relates to selfexpression and cultural engagement during meaning-making.

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Additionally, creativity has an aesthetic and multisensory dimension relating to judgement and perception through emotions, experiences and imagination. These defi nitions of creativity align with an ecological approach to language learning. Learning languages involves the heart, body and mind to leverage from experiences, senses, memories and identities. Nowadays the learning experience aims to develop symbolic competence, usually involving interpreting and creating in a variety of symbolic forms – embodied experiences, emotional resonances and moral imaginings (Kramsch, 2006: 251). A multisensory approach to literacy (Mills, 2016) pays attention to a range of modalities and the choices that people make when using and/or creating different assemblages of modes during meaning-making. Hence, this chapter seeks to trace the important role of the digital media in inspiring learning that entails stimulating creativity and increasing the interest and agency of the students. The outcome of creative and innovative learning might be a text, a multimodal composition, an artefact or a performance which carries the creator’s voice. In a reflexive multiliteracies pedagogical framework, learners use their available resources, including digital means, to contribute to shaping their own learning. I analyse and interpret how extending a multilingual approach to being multimodal can: … change the classroom dynamics and allow[s] the students access to identity positions of expertise, increasing their literacy investment, literacy engagement and learning. (Ntelioglou et al., 2014: 1)

The emphasis put on reflexivity in the revised reflexive multiliteracies framework by Cope and Kalantzis (2009) is important for the teacher to leverage the emerging agency of learners, allowing them to reconstruct their educational frameworks of working together. The chapter illustrates how, by using their prior experiences as a reference point, the students can co-construct new knowledge and gradually develop cognitive ownership. Methodology: Investigating Literacy in Context

To holistically explore the complex language and literacy ecologies in the school under study I chose a case study methodology (Stake, 1998). For the collection of data, I adopted a multimethod approach, using ethnographic tools such as classroom observations and collection of pedagogical documentation. I complemented these with oral reflective discussions with the participants throughout the duration of the data collection, a tool that I borrowed from action research. Working as a participant researcher allowed me to obtain close insights into teaching and learning practices while engaging in classroom interactions. My research

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was collaborative, participatory and sensitive to the students’ needs, hence grounded upon ongoing dialogue and reflection between the researcher and the researched. Bezemer and Jewitt (2010) support the view that a combination of analytical approaches is necessary to interpret interactions that focus not only on multimodality (separate or weaved modes) but also on communicative practices. My data analysis focuses on the ‘experiencing’ and ‘applying creatively’ knowledge processes (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009) in students’ interactions that indicate the participants’ linguistic and cultural capital in cultural weavings, as well as the participants’ agency and creativity. These are complemented by the concepts of ‘translanguaging’ (Li, 2011) and ‘investment’ (Norton, 2010) to illuminate the multilingual repertoire of the participants and aspects of their identity in relation to their language use. To examine my research questions, I focused on literacy events (Pahl & Rowsell, 2006) and observable literacy actions, as students negotiated and co-created their animation on the topic of ‘peace’. Sequences of literacy events exemplified the agency and creativity of the participants. These significant moments of agency helped the researcher to indicate change by exploring connections between individual agency, social interactions in class and contextual changes that relate to a reform of institutional practices towards reflexive multiliteracies. Findings: Creating Transformative Designs

The analysis of the interactions that follow describes how learners can work together and benefit from reflexive and flexible pedagogies by selecting themselves which linguistic resources, literacy practices and cultures they adopt and transform. Their dedication and enthusiasm while working with a sense of ownership on their multimodal designs foretells how they will excel as learners to accomplish remarkable pedagogical outcomes. Investing in learners’ personal experiences

I observed the students taking their fi rst steps in creating their own animation. They were working around key concepts within the notion of ‘peace’. Each student used a card to brainstorm ideas and represent in pictures and words what peace meant for them. One of the teacher’s aims in this activity was to ‘gain access to student agency, cultural memory and home and school learning within context’ (Jewitt, 2008: 255). In other words, the teacher encouraged the students to weave prior knowledge from their out-of-school experiences and school literacies and apply it to create their own designs.

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Figure 9.1 Representation of ‘Peace’ from one of the students

The syntheses of their texts and pictures appear to draw from the students’ previous engagement with multimodal representations, during which they negotiated meanings of peace. They were also possibly inspired by personal experiences which they had previously narrated about ‘places near the sea’, ‘near nature’ where they ‘go for holidays’ and moments they share with members of the family. Some of the words and drawings that came up were θάλασσα [sea], ουρανός [sky], σύννεφα [clouds] and οικογένεια [family]. They were representative of ‘the literacy worlds of the students and their interests and desires’ (Jewitt, 2008: 261). For example, see Figure 9.1. As reported in my fieldnotes, the student commented that: ‘This is Peace as nature; she feels peace when she looks at the blue sky (lady’s hair) and the white clouds (lady’s dress) or when being at a place near the sea in Cyprus (lady’s shoes)’. Creating space for transcultural meaning-making through agency and collaboration

The significance of learner agency in translingual-transcultural meaning-making was often made visible when the students were provided with time and space to work collaboratively. Here, they were working together on scripting and drawing. The students showed agency, deciding how to choose the core elements of the story and what these elements might be. They were working in synergy, which according to Gregory et al. (2004)

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means measuring how, when and what each of them could contribute to maximise their group’s potential. During their discussions, one of them suggested to use the five Ws in English (they had used them before as the four Π in Greek) to fi nd the main elements of the story. ‘So, we know who [the characters] are’, Thaleia said. Then Kleio followed by asking a new question ‘But where are they?’ Polymnia then made a suggestion: ‘Shall we say that they are in Cyprus, στην παραλία Φοινικούδες [at Finikoudes Beach] where we usually go για τα holidays μας [for our holidays]?’ Thaleia also asked a question, this time about the plot: ‘And what is happening?’ Everyone paused for a moment and then Kleio stood up and said with confidence: ‘Aha! The girl has a dream; she is dreaming about Peace!’ (Fieldnotes during observation of group work)

As shown in the fieldnotes, the students thought alongside each other to design their plot and set-up, expressing their thoughts out loud so that others could pose new questions. When juxtaposing the students’ ideas about what the animation would be about in the above fieldnotes (a ‘girl (who) has a dream …’, ‘dreaming about Peace!’) against their previous conceptualisations of peace during their classroom activities, we understand how the initial conceptualisations worked as starting points which could then be woven together with other signs. A previously analysed poem contributed to the development of the representation of peace as a dream. Moreover, the words that were brainstormed and related to peaceful concepts such as θάλασσα [sea], ουρανός [sky] and σύννεφα [clouds] in the brainstorming activity, combined with students’ memories of a beach with palm trees, provided stimuli for the visual representations of the students’ animation setting (the Finikoudes beach). The interactions among the students illustrate the interrelationship between agency, language and culture. Here, in alignment with the multiliteracies framework, agency is understood through notions of ‘investment’ (Norton, 2013), ownership, engagement and collaboration. The students’ interactions demonstrate every student’s engagement and contribution to conceptualising the animation plot. They highlight the students’ investment (Norton, 2013) in their learning as a result of personal inquiry, a desire and commitment to engage with areas of learning that inspire them emotionally. A positive transformation in the way students leverage their cultural experiences occurs when social interactions in the class have an authentic purpose. The students leveraged each other’s experiences to generate new perspectives and unique ideas. They brought their learning back to their real-life experiences through fresh and creative forms of action and perception relating to their interests, experiences and aspirations (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). Their ways of working reflect the endless possibilities for meaning-making when navigating literacies flexibly and collaboratively. Through constructive interactions and inspired by the various resources available to them, the students became able to engage

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creatively in translingual and transcultural meaning-making, weaving together their in-school and out-of-school experiences and cultures. Metacognition and agency in translingual interactions

The students’ plot had to be translated into designs on the storyboard. The extract below provides evidence of the students’ metacognition and agency, in terms of their initiatives to organise their thinking, choosing to use real-world tools such as list making, and to plan for the cut-outs they need for their animations. The data also reflect the teacher’s role in fi nding opportunities to connect the students’ languages and way of working with the linguistic concepts they needed to learn. In the extract below, ‘VA’ refers to a visual artist interacting in Standard Greek and English with the students while providing technical expertise. 1 Polymnia: I am going to write down everything we need to do in Greek 2 and English. I am not good at spelling, but I will try and write 3 it down. 4 Thaleia: We need a palm tree. 5 VA: A palm tree is? 6 Polymnia: Φοι-νι-κού-δες [Foi-ni-kou-des] like the name of that beach 7 in Cyprus. 8 Teacher: Yes, I’ve been there too! Φοίνικας αλλά βάλτϵ δέντρο ή 9 φοινικόδϵντρο που ϵίναι σύνθϵτο, δυο λέξϵις μαζί. [palm tree 10 but write tree or palm tree which is a compound word, 11 two words together] 12 Kleio: It’s the same as in English, palm tree and φοι-νι-κό 13 –δϵντρο. 14 Teacher: Yes, but in Greek it is written as one word. 15 Polymnia: We need a van… (talking while writing a list) an ice-cream 16 man, τσάντα – a bag, an illusion. 17 VA: How do you say van in Greek? It’s so easy!… Βαν [van]…but 18 use the Greek accent. 19 Thaleia: Βαν… πού ϵίναι το βαν; [Van … where is the van?] 20 VA: Yes, this is how you say it, but you spell it differently. 21 Polymnia: Here it is… βαν [van]. (Cypriot Greek variety in bold/Standard Greek in italics bold)

In the selected extract, Polymnia has the idea of making a to-do list in Greek and English – a list of cut-outs that they need to create to complete their storyboarding. Listing things is a metacognitive process for organising thoughts and is used often in both school and home contexts. She suggests organising their ideas in Greek and English (Lines 1–3) and in this way she shows her intention to improve her linguistic skills while reflecting on the process of making the animation. The teacher, the VA and the students, using all their available languages, participate in a

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metalinguistic discussion, making comments on language and comparisons across languages (Lines 8–11, 12–13, 14, 17–18, 20) such as ‘in Greek it is written as one word’ or ‘you spell it differently (in Greek)’ to encourage metacognitive competence. Everyone contributes to both the fi nal design of the storyboards and the language learning. They appear to ‘interthink’ (Littleton & Mercer, 2013), being creative and productive together and capitalising on each other’s knowledge. In addition to cut-outs, the students decided to create speech bubbles for their animations to tell their stories, using vocabulary that was not part of the curriculum. To expand their linguistic skills beyond the expected range they used all the available resources. They showed increased agency to become more than passive recipients or, at best, agents of reproduction of available language forms and engaged instead in language use for meaning-making as an active and transformative process (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). Meaning-making was transformative because it created opportunities to reflect on students’ learner identities; the participants appeared competent to make decisions on what connections and weavings they would make across languages, as well as on how they would use languages for their multimodal text making. Inspiring engagement and creativity

The students engaged in creative interactions to create their animation. In the selected example, they engaged in storyboarding – designing, scripting and drawing to sketch out and develop a visual representation of the story, screen by screen (still images) (Macleroy, 2016: 168). They decided on the narrative structure and coordination between the plot and the modes to be used on their storyboards. In multimodal discourse, and particularly in relation to digital stories (see Belmonte & Molina, 2016: 116), ‘every semiotic mode can be seen as a different input space’, all of which interconnect and blend through cross-mappings until the final story is constructed. In the example provided, the multilingual language users’ creativity is illustrated in their linguistic performances. While considering the plot of their story, the students analyse the symbolic representations in their multimodal compositions. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Polymnia: Είδεν όνειρο about την θάλασσα και είδεν την ειρήνη και εφόρεν άσπρον και εξύπνησεν [she had a dream about the sea and she saw Peace wearing a white dress and she woke up] Thaleia: Oh, we need to make the girl and her mother, then. Kleio: Not necessarily την μητέρα … , την Eιρήνη [not the mother … but Peace]. Polymnia: Shall we make ένα κορούδα με άσπρο dress? [Shall we make one girl in a white dress?] Kleio: She can hold her τσάντα [bag], a bag with the peace sign on

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11 it … and then we need to see what she would say … 12 Thaleia: I could do that. You do the others and then we’ll talk again if 13 what we created is clearly recognised as Peace. (Cypriot Greek variety in bold/Standard Greek in bold italics)

The students here, by drawing from their diverse experiences and using all the languages they have available, are interconnecting heterogeneous elements, creating ‘assemblages’, multimodal designs that carry the creators’ identities. They discuss how they will represent Peace in their animation. The language surrounding the creation of their animation includes the use of translanguaging (García, 2009) (Lines 6–7, 8–9) to communicate and think across languages while expressing their ideas freely with their peers. According to Li and Zhu (2013: 6): Translanguaging practice includes the full range of linguistic performances of multilingual language users for purposes that transcend the combination of structures, the alternation between systems, the transmission of information, the contextualization of the message, and the representation of values, identities and relationships. (Li & Zhu, 2013: 6)

As evidenced in many other examples of students’ interactions, in the literacy event above, the students fi nd the space to self-represent and negotiate their identities through the languages they choose to use with their peers. Lines 6–9 exhibit translanguaging practice which constituted the norm in communication in the classroom I observed. In Lines 6–7 Standard Greek and English are in use. In Lines 1–4 and 8–9, the Cypriot Greek variety, which is usually used at home and in community contexts, is used in the classroom context in weavings with the English language to create meaningful sentences. All varieties are used naturally in conversations among the students’ diverse repertoires, which include Cypriot Greek, Standard Greek and English or English and Standard Greek. In their interactions around the artefacts they are creating, the students use their full repertoire of language when communicating meanings and expanding each other’s ideas (Lines 5–9). A space is created within the multiliteracies framework in which the Cypriot Greek linguistic variety is used with equal importance to the dominant and the standard language. It appears that the students here do not adopt any of the labels that sometimes exist in complementary schools or within the community that describe the Cypriot Greek variety as a ‘rural’, ‘heavy’ or even ‘broken’ form of Greek (Karatsareas, 2018). This reflects how complementary schools can play a key role in deflecting such attitudes through a reflexive multiliteracies pedagogy in which multilingualism is an integral part. Evidence is given by Matras and Karatsareas (2020) on how pupils’ motivation increases when they engage in literacy practices that involve communicating in everyday speech varieties – their different dialects and varieties. Gains extend from developing formal aspects of the heritage

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Figure 9.2 Animation snapshot representing the peaceful setting

language to communicating meanings in everyday settings and across generations. According to Giampapa (2010), affirming students’ identities and linguistic forms of capital increases their confidence regarding the ways in which they engage in language and literacy. The analysis of the students’ process of negotiating their work, as well as their multimodal composition, demonstrates the inventiveness of the learners, the connectedness of the languages in students’ minds – the students’ multicompetence (Cook, 2008) – and their holistic understanding of the use of languages and modes. The students used stop-motion techniques to negotiate different interpretations, generated by weavings between the movement of the cut-outs and linguistic structures. The data show how meaning-making is achieved through the application of the principles of the grammar of visual design (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006: 201–204). As stated by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: 2), ‘like linguistic structure, visual structures point to particular interpretations of experience and forms of social interaction’. According to the students’ animation plot: A girl is sleeping in her room when she has a dream. She dreams that she is at a peaceful place, and that she is lying down at a beach. A bag with the (international) sign of peace is left next to her and an ice-cream van is passing by. Then Peace (a woman with a white dress) appears and says that she will reward the girl with a peaceful life because she has been good. The dream ends and the girl wakes up and calls her mother. When the mum replies to her, the girl tells her that she had the weirdest dream.

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In the students’ work, it appears that there are interconnections between their illustrative representations of peace and the visual and imaginative representations of peace in resources used previously for their school literacies, e.g. peace was represented as a dream in a monolingual poem they had analysed in class. They also drew from pictures in their textbook that are relevant to the heritage culture that the school aims to maintain. In accordance with the standardised representations of peace in their school resources, in their designs Peace is figured as a lady in a white dress, a representation that follows the traditional symbolism of a woman in harmony with the natural world. However, the notion of peace is also explicitly reinforced by the lady’s bag with the international sign of peace, placed in a setting next to a child at the beach. Peace can therefore be seen as an ‘assemblage’, an amalgam of heritage and international symbols, indicating a remaking of culture. The signs that were used to create the animation were drawn from memory and experience and relate the identity text to the history of the person making it. The interweaving between these elements demonstrates how language learning became a transcultural journey; the notion of peace was negotiated through the animation plot by drawing on the multiplicity of the students’ real-life experiences. Students are portrayed as multiliterate learners, able to combine multimodal signs and language to achieve meaning-making. Students reflected on the degree to which their representation would communicate certain interests and cultural purposes to their chosen audiences in and outside school when shared via digital technology. Drawing on aesthetic and affective, as well as cognitive and linguistic capacities, they suggested that Peace should also be holding a bag bearing the international symbol of peace. The design they created, incorporating elements from their heritage with global symbols, reflects how the students were able to stand back from the design process to functionally and critically analyse the purposes, context and connections of their own transformed designs (Kalantzis & Cope, 2005: 21). In their animation setting there is a palm tree. This – as they indicated previously when making a list of the animation cut-outs – was part of their memories of ‘Fi-ni-kou-des from that beach in Cyprus’ where there were many palm trees. Meanwhile, the presence of an ice cream van was related to their positive experience of peacefully eating ice cream at the beach during holidays. As one of the students had commented: παγωτό [ice cream] is part of what I love … όταν πήγα στην Κύπρο [when I was in Cyprus] this man came along in the sand with the trolley and kept shouting παγωτό, παγωτό [ice – cream, ice – cream]. It was as if I was in a dream … και ήμουν ήρεμη [and I was calm]; that is why I draw it here. (A student’s reflection in action while working on the animation)

The design of the setting shows the affective, cultural and multisensory affiliation of the students with Cyprus and Greece. Cyprus and Greece are

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portrayed as places where they can find peace during their holidays, which fits with what they discussed previously in their stories in class. The students’ creations indicate connections between formal texts and cultural capital from their real-life experiences. The students reflected on their work. Their own judgement on collaboration and creativity regarding their learning is illustrated in their own words: ‘… this is more like creating’; ‘It’s like … making something new with friends’; ‘It is defi nitely fun and something we don’t really do here but we love doing for example in our free time … it is part of what we would like to do more’. The students’ words demonstrate how they would like their complementary school to invest in creative and collaborative activities which they fi nd similar to their learning practices in informal contexts. Conclusion

In this chapter I have explored language development in interrelationship with cultures, affect, cognition and aesthetics to provide insights into my two research questions. With such a lens applied to language learning, I responded to my first question: ‘What is the significance of learner agency and links to personal experience in translingual-transcultural meaningmaking and how can learner agency be enabled pedagogically through the knowledge processes of experiencing and applying creatively within the reflexive multiliteracies framework?’ My findings illustrate the significance of a flexible pedagogical design. As suggested by the extract opening this chapter, the teacher prioritised the students’ interests, experiences and aspirations while designing activities, allowing the students to apply their multicompetence (Cook, 2008) to voice their own multimodal stories. Additionally, in alignment with Anderson and Macleroy (2016), students made creative and critical decisions; this activated their agency and enhanced their confidence and engagement. The students’ agency was highlighted in their initiatives when planning and creating their animations, e.g. to make a list of their cut-outs and to use the five Ws to design the plot and set-up. Two factors were found to increase the students’ engagement and agency in activities. The first of these was the degree of authenticity of activities; the students decided to share their animations with real audiences. The more purposeful and practical an activity is, the more it will ‘absorb students in actions of practical and intellectual value’ and ‘foster a sense of agency’ (Anderson, 2016: 204). The second factor concerns the degree to which activities are passion led and within students’ interests; the students chose to discuss through their animation the notion of peace, demonstrating its importance for them. Building on these insights, multimodal learning can create a sense of agency and empowerment, which in the literature is defined as ‘the collaborative creation of power’ (Cummins, 2001: 16). The students’ creations portray them as multicompetent learners and confident

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language users, and ‘this transformed identity fuels further literacy engagement’ (Cummins et al., 2015: 577). Findings regarding my second research question on ‘How can storying around artefacts, support translingual and transcultural learning and what role can digital media play in this?’ highlight how the students’ journey in designing ‘something new’ created new translingual and transcultural dynamics. By using their linguistic repertoire efficiently and purposefully, the students excelled as multiliterate learners. The students were willing to use different forms of Greek, alongside other languages, as part of translanguaging practices, and other modes as mediators for communicating meanings, despite their fear of making language mistakes. ‘Language served as a vehicle through which thinking was articulated and transformed into an artefactual form’ (Swain, 2006: 97). I have also portrayed how a multiliteracies pedagogy can accommodate and amplify learners’ culture. The filtering and negotiation of the students’ and teacher’s cultural capital, the ‘cultural weavings’ (Cazden, 2006; Luke et al., 2003) were evident in the text-making processes as well as in the learning outcome. Design activities motivate students to take ownership of the media and content they transform into their new creations (Lawanto et al., 2013). The students used the available modes and means as cognitive tools to interpret and synthesise information creatively when scripting and storyboarding. The creative engagement with different modes develops the students’ abilities to compose and engage in text making to communicate with different audiences (Anderson et al., 2014). Overall, the pedagogic potential of creative activities within a reflexive multiliteracies framework extends beyond language development, to include competence in multiliteracies and exploration of identities. Through flexible pedagogies that activate learners’ agency, draw from students’ experiences and encourage creative and innovative learning, educators can create engaged, multicompetent and empowered individuals who can potentially become active agents in contemporary social contexts. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) How can reflexive multiliteracies in different educational contexts be investigated? (2) How do teachers from diverse backgrounds and training address the challenges of activating the agency of the students in their school classrooms? (3) Which multimodal research methods can be used to investigate the students’ agency? (4) Which enabling structures can increase the students’ agency and facilitate engagement with the process of applying creatively within the reflexive multiliteracies framework?

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García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. García, O. and Sylvan, C.E. (2011) Pedagogies and practices in multilingual classrooms: Singularities in pluralities. The Modern Language Journal 95 (3), 385–400. Gardner-Chloros, P. (2008) Bilingual speech data: Criteria for classification. In W. Li and M. Moyer (eds) The Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Bilingualism and Multilingualism (pp. 53–72). Oxford: Blackwell. Gardner-Chloros, P., McEntee-Atalianis, L. and Finnis, K. (2005) Language attitudes and use in a transplanted setting: Greek Cypriots in London. International Journal of Multilingualism 2 (1), 52–80. Giampapa, F. (2010) Multiliteracies, pedagogy and identities: Teacher and student voices from a Toronto Elementary School. Canadian Journal of Education 33 (2), 407–431. Gregory, E., Long, S. and Volk, D. (2004) Many Pathways to Literacy: Young Children Learning with Siblings, Grandparents, Peers and Communities. London: Routledge. Issa, T. and Williams, C. (2009) Realising Potential: Complementary Schools in the UK. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Jewitt, C. (2008) Multimodality and literacy in school classrooms. Review of Research in Education 32 (1), 241–267. Kalantzis, M. and Cope, B. (2005) Learning by Design. Melbourne: Victorian Schools Innovation Commission in association with Common Ground Publishing. Karatsareas, P. (2018) Attitudes towards Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek in London’s Greek Cypriot community. International Journal of Bilingualism 22 (4), 412–428. Kramsch, C. (2006) From communicative competence to symbolic competence. The Modern Language Journal 90 (2), 249–252. Kress, G.R. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd edn). London and New York: Routledge. Lawanto, O., Butler, D., Cartier, S., Santoso, H., Lawanto, K. and Clark, D. (2013) An exploratory study of self-regulated learning strategies in a design project by students in Grades 9–12. Design and Technology Education 18 (1), 44–57. Li, W. (2011) Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (5), 1222–1235. Li, W. and Wu, C.J. (2009) Polite Chinese children revisited: Creativity and the use of codeswitching in the Chinese complementary school classroom. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 12 (2), 193–211. Li, W. and Zhu, H. (2013) Translanguaging identities: Creating transnational space through flexible multilingual practices amongst Chinese university students in the UK. Applied Linguistics 34 (5), 516–535. Littleton, K. and Mercer, N. (2013) Interthinking: Putting Talk to Work. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Luke, A., Cazden, C., Lin, A. and Freebody, P. (2003) The Singapore Classroom Coding Scheme. Singapore: Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice. Lytra, V. (2011) Negotiating language, culture and pupil agency in complementary school classrooms. Linguistics and Education 22 (1), 23–36. Macleroy, V. (2016) From literacy to multiliteracies. In J. Anderson and V. Macleroy (eds) Multilingual Digital Storytelling: Engaging Creatively and Critically with Literacy (pp. 68–86). London and New York: Routledge. Matras, Y. and Karatsareas, P. (2020) Non-standard and Minority Varieties as Community Languages in the UK: Towards a New Strategy for Language Maintenance. Position Paper, University of Manchester and University of Westminster. Open access: see http://mlm.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/wp-content/

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uploads/2020/03/Non-Standard-and-Minority-Varieties-as-Community-Languagesin-the-UK-Position-Paper.pdf. Mills, K.A. (2016) Literacy Theories for the Digital Age: Social, Critical, Multimodal, Spatial, Material and Sensory Lenses. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Norton, B. (2013) Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation (2nd edn). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Norton, B. (2010) Language and identity. Sociolinguistics and Language Education 23 (3), 349–369. Ntelioglou, B.Y., Fannin, J., Montanera, M. and Cummins, J. (2014) A multilingual and multimodal approach to literacy teaching and learning in urban education: A collaborative inquiry project in an inner-city elementary school. Frontiers in Psychology 5, 1–10. Pahl, K. and Rowsell, J. (eds) (2006) Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies: Instances of Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Perry, K.H. and Purcell-Gates, V. (2005) Resistance and appropriation: Literacy practices as agency within hegemonic contexts. In B. Maloch, J.V. Hoff man, D.L. Schallert, C.M. Fairbanks and J. Worthy (eds) 54th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (pp. 272–285). Oak Creek, WI: National Reading Conference. Stake, R.E. (1998) Case studies. In N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds) Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry (pp. 86–109). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Swain, M. (2006) Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language learning. In H. Byrnes (ed.) Advanced Language Learning: The Contributions of Halliday and Vygotsky (pp. 95–108). London: Continuum.

10 Opening Spaces of Learning: A Sociomaterial Investigation of ObjectBased Approaches with Migrant Youth in and beyond the Heritage Language Classroom Koula Charitonos

Introduction

This chapter presents an exploratory study undertaken in two community schools in the UK with young people from the Greek diasporic community. The study drew on methods of inquiry learning (e.g. observation, data collection, reflection) and object-based approaches to learning combined with the use of web and mobile technologies to facilitate young people’s engagement in citizen-led inquiry (Herodotou et  al., 2017). Inquiry-based learning is a learning process by which participants pose questions about the natural and material world, collect and analyse data to address these questions, and make and test hypotheses (de Jong, 2006). The term ‘citizen inquiry’ draws on this process and was coined to describe ways in which members of the public can learn by initiating or joining shared inquiry-led scientific investigations (Sharples et al., 2013). It usually merges learning through scientific investigation with mass collaborative participation exemplified in citizen science activities, altering the relationship most people have with research from being passive recipients to becoming actively engaged. What is distinct for the study presented here is that it shifts the focus of the investigations from natural science to social and cultural issues. The overall aim of the study was to examine how migrant youth can engage with web and mobile technologies through a series of in- and 205

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out-of-classroom activities and grasp challenging concepts such as identity and heritage. This study built upon formal instruction in the language classroom extended with activities in spaces beyond the classroom and gave attention to the blend of the physical and the digital contexts. Through the presentation of the study, the chapter seeks to address the following questions: How can connections between heritage language, culture and technologies in the context of the lived experience of heritage learners be realised in practice? How does a sociomaterialities lens help us develop a better understanding of how to make arrangements for language learning that is based on principles of dialogue, meaning-making and intercultural exchange? The focus of the study was on a language programme that took place in Greek supplementary schools, which largely operate as language schools and cater for the Greek diaspora community in the UK. Along with the term community language, the term heritage language (HL) and heritage language learner are used in this chapter to mark a distinction from the field of fi rst or second language acquisition. According to Valdés (2000: 1), a heritage language speaker is someone who has been ‘raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken’ and ‘who speaks or merely understands the heritage language, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language’. It is these particular learners’ unique needs and special sociolinguistic complexity that were at the centre of the study presented in this chapter. An explicit aim of the study was to move beyond a view of language as simply related to acquiring grammar and vocabulary (see, for example, Kramsch, 1998) and instead consider the learners’ own environment, and the ‘lived experience’ (Anderson & Chung, 2012: 262) of their language and heritage as a resource upon which they draw to create and share meanings of their everyday social and cultural engagements. Similar to Carreira (2004), the study foregrounded that the learner’s personal and cultural connections to their language should be at the core of HL education to allow them to become meaningfully involved in their learning. Furthermore, also in light of significant developments in the field of web and mobile technologies, the study was set to explore the idea of cultural citizen inquiry (Charitonos, 2017) as a method that may: (i) allow young learners to situate themselves in relation to other learners and places (i.e. school, home, community); (ii) allow young learners to create and articulate meanings attributed to actions, objects and places; and (iii) facilitate young learners’ engagement with their social and cultural contexts. Particularly within community language education, this method was seen as validating young heritage language learners’ search for identity, usually intertwined with heritage and culture, and also as supporting them to engage critically with their everyday experiences. A direct implication of this method is that educators need to make particular arrangements in their HL classroom for their students to become more attentive, not only

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to the ongoing interconnection between heritage language learning and identity but also to spaces where learning is negotiated and enacted. Borrowing from Orlikowski (2010), this chapter seeks to trace these arrangements – the ‘entanglement’ of material and social forces which are implicated in enriching possibilities and producing the actions that are identified as learning in the HL classroom. The chapter is structured as follows: first, a brief outline of sociomaterial approaches in teaching and learning is provided, followed by an overview of the project, context and method. Two stories are next presented that illustrate points of interest and where evidence collected in the study is analysed through a sociomaterial lens. The chapter concludes with a discussion around the role of the educator and how to enact pedagogic practices in ways that enable learners to benefit from the opening of learning spaces in community language education. Sociomaterial Approaches in Teaching and Learning in the Heritage Language Classroom

The chapter draws on a sociomaterial approach (Fenwick et al., 2011) as it is concerned with the relationships between humans, artefacts (i.e. technology, objects) and texts and what these relationships may produce – how they are shaped and are shaping what is happening in the classroom. Objects and humans, according to Fenwick and Nerland (2014), act upon one another in ways that mutually transform their characteristics and activity. As any educator will have noticed, the content and process of learning change dramatically with particular situations and students, the tools available, technologies, social relations and other environmental dynamics. In educational practice the materials available in an educational setting like the HL classroom, and the importance attributed to them, fundamentally shape practice and knowledge. However, in educational research, priority is given to human actors and social structures and, as a result, materials tend to be ignored or disappear into the background and context; thus they become taken for granted, resulting in a tendency in research to underestimate the role and significance of technological artefacts. Therefore, in line with Zukas and Malcolm (2019), forms of learning such as individual acquisition of knowledge, skills, behaviours or learning as participation still retain their legitimacy. Yet the chapter adopts the view that learning is also ‘a materialising assemblage’ (Fenwick & Edwards, 2013: 54). ‘It [learning] is not only a product of some process (as in the acquisitive view); nor is it solely the human activity of participating (as in the participatory view); instead, the focus here is on the networks of humans and materials through which learning is enacted’ (Zukas & Malcom, 2019: 261). Given that the concern in this study was to move beyond a narrow view of language learning towards one which is more personal, more culturally

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connected and more engaging for learners, taking a sociomaterial perspective allows us not only to observe what is present in a situation but to understand how both human and non-human, things and people, come together, form relations and networks and manage to stay together in networks and webs of practice that intersect with pedagogical processes and practices and allow them to come into being. ‘It is through the being-together of things that actions identified as learning become possible’ (Fenwick & Edwards, 2013: 54). What a sociomaterial perspective offers to educational research are resources to systematically consider how the unpredictability built into the entanglements of the different material objects is managed in order to make educational activity possible (Gunter et al., 2020). In exploring the concept of entanglement, Hodder (2014: 20) offers a useful defi nition of this term as ‘the dialectic of dependence and dependency between humans and things’. All things, he argues, depend on other things along chains of interdependence in which many other actors are involved – human, institutional, legalistic, bureaucratic and so on. This chapter reflects my attempt to gain a better understanding of the human– thing dependence, which is rendered visible in learning entanglements in the language classroom. Drawing on Carvalho and Yeoman (2018), the notion of learning entanglement used here includes the artefacts, resources and tools available to teachers and learners, the choice of tasks and pedagogical models and the social roles and divisions of labour governing any given learning situation. The chapter further reflects an attempt by myself, the author-educator, to become much more attuned to how learning entanglements are produced and to what effects, and how materials limit or enhance possibilities for practice (Fenwick, 2014). In doing this, I stress the importance of understanding knowledge and knowing practices through material arrangements or, as expressed in Fenwick et al. (2012: 11), ‘the sociomaterial webs through which the important moments of professional action and decisions emerge’. In examining this I also recognise that choices made or tools used in my teaching and learning practice are never neutral. They reveal values and highlight actions taken in accordance with these values. Method and Context of Study Close-up on the Heritage Language Learners project: Aims and objectives

The research design involved an intervention in the HL classroom to examine the integration of objects as well as mobile and web-based citizen inquiry technologies in teaching and learning. The aim of the project was to engage young people with methods of citizen inquiry and give them access to cultural experiences such as object-based activities in a museum and in the school, with the aim of capitalising on these to develop speaking and writing skills.

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Participants and context

The participants were learners of Greek language attending preGCSE, GCSE and A Level lessons (13–17 years old) in two Greek supplementary schools in Buckinghamshire (n = 11) and Leicestershire (n = 10). The participants were attending language lessons once a week for an average of three hours in total. All the participants had personally owned mobile devices or had access to tablets owned by their parents. An initial assessment determined that their perceived familiarity with their use was ranked from good to excellent. The Greek supplementary schools are run under the auspices of three institutions: the Cyprus High Commission in the UK (as a branch of the Ministry of Education and Culture in Cyprus); the Embassy of Greece in the UK; and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain. There are approximately 70 Greek supplementary schools in the UK, which follow a course of study that is based on a curriculum for Greek language teaching and learning in diaspora. Tools

The online Citizen Inquiry platform, nQuire-it, developed by The Open University in the UK,1 was used in the study. The aim of the platform was to assist members of the public in conducting their own science investigations, enhancing the social investigation aspect and promoting scientific thinking and exploration of the world. The nQuire-it platform offered three types of mission to its users which made use of different methods of data collection: (i) Spot-it missions used uploaded pictures as the method of data collection; (ii) Win-it missions had a research question that requires text as an answer; and (iii) Sense-it missions were connected to the Sense-it Android application and required sensor-based data from mobile devices. In the study presented in this chapter, only the first two types of mission were used. For the purposes of this project, the platform interface was translated into Greek. Activities

The study consisted of a series of designed lessons involving face-toface and online activities at participating schools with specific goals that spanned over several sessions. Whole-class sessions in the classroom focused on aspects of the curriculum (e.g. vocabulary, i.e. nouns, connectives, adjectives; speaking, i.e. talk about routines and habits, describe objects) (see Figure 10.1). The study also involved the organisation of an intergenerational object-handling workshop run by educators based at the British Museum at each of the two participating schools around the theme of ‘Object Journeys’. This involved a joint visit to the British Museum

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Figure 10.1 Missions on the nQuire-It platform

around the theme of ‘People’s Journeys’. A number of online missions were created on the nQuire-it platform, including questions related to learners’ everyday lives (e.g. ‘#ItsAHabit’), their material environment heritage (e.g. ‘Looking for #AllThingsGreek’, ‘My very own museum’) or their immediate environments (e.g. ‘#PicturingCultures’). These missions were initiated by the two teachers. Given the low-resource community classroom settings, the project capitalised on devices in the students’ pockets and homes to complement and enrich in-class learning. Data collection and analysis

The study presented in this chapter is firmly located in the realm of being of the author-educator and demonstrates an ‘inquiry-in action’ (Reason & Bradbury, 2008), where my own examination and problematisation of the teaching and learning process within this study, and through my own research, are used to closely examine the use of mobile technologies and methods of citizen inquiry within language learning and teaching in order to scope the potential of the cultural citizen inquiry method in this particular setting. Therefore, the contribution to this volume draws on evidence that was gathered but also on the many ways of knowing as an educator to open up and share my learning. In doing this I acknowledge, as others have done, that this study ‘had different purposes, is based in different relationships, has different ways of conceiving knowledge and its relation to practice’ (Reason & Bradbury, 2008: 8) compared to conventional academic research. In this chapter the analytic attention is on the actions of objects, i.e. ‘what things do’ (Verbeek, 2005), which are often left out of educational accounts. In other words: Which actions are made possible by an object? Which ones are hindered? How do objects open up possibilities for action? In doing this, I sought to understand my practices against these actions

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and how my work in the classroom came into being, ‘not only to observe what is present in a situation but to understand the relations, networks and webs of practice … to study the assembling (and reassembling) of [my] work’ (Zukas & Malcolm, 2019: 265), and to suggest ways in which such assemblages might be supported, disrupted or even broken. This admittedly came with challenges, given that a classroom is a very familiar site for me and shifting from a ‘human-centred’ to a human-object perspective was rather demanding. The two stories that are shared below are based on: my observations (e.g. teaching and research activities, events, meetings, emails, interactions), plus recording and analysis of visual data (e.g. photographs generated by both the participants and the teacher, artefacts such as museum postcards); video-recordings from the museum visit and the intergenerational object-handling workshop; feedback forms from the workshops; and classroom documents/textual objects. The stories draw on data generated in two key ‘spaces’ of the study: the classroom space and the community space in the school in Buckinghamshire. Both examples provided below serve as vehicles for exploring issues of interest. Although not included in this chapter, online spaces and the museum space were equally important spaces in the study. In the analysis the three-phase process for the transformation of qualitative data suggested by Zukas and Malcom (2019) was used, consisting of description, analysis and interpretation. Following the description of a specific event, further analysis followed with the following themes in mind: community and school; pedagogy; objects (including technology); and language use. As a result of this, specific interpretations are provided to show how these assemble work in the language classroom and beyond. In the remaining part of the chapter, two stories are selected as they illuminate issues of concern: one pertains to teaching practice, and the other to engagement with the school’s wider community. The examples that are foregrounded here demonstrate the potential of the cultural citizen inquiry method, while also revealing some of the tensions and difficulties that might be encountered in pursuing such an approach. The First Story: ‘Looking for All Things Greek’

As part of the project activities, an inquiry was created with the title ‘Looking for All Things Greek’. This was related to students’ material environment and spanned four lessons over six weeks. All lessons lasted approximately one hour, apart from the fi nal lesson which was two hours long. A detailed discussion around this series of lessons and the fi ndings is provided elsewhere (see Charitonos, 2017). The lesson-in-focus here was the second in this series and took place in the classroom, which was set up as one big group with all students (n = 7) sitting together (see Figure 10.2). I brought to the classroom a

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Figure 10.2 Activities in the classroom based on an object brought in by the teacher

replica of an iconic cruciform figurine from Cyprus representing Cypriot prehistoric art – an object that had travelled with me from Cyprus when I moved to England. The figurine was hidden in a bag, and given that the students were sitting together, it was passed around for each student to say a word in Greek describing what they felt after touching the item in the bag. I also placed a big fl ipchart in the middle of the group where I noted down all the words (i.e. adjectives) shared. After a couple of rounds, the figurine was fi nally revealed and some information about this object was shared with the group. I asked the students if they had seen it before but, as no-one had, I noted that this idol appears on two of the Cypriot Euro coins; hence I also passed around a 2-Euro coin for the students to see. Based on the words generated which were written down on the fl ipchart, the students were then asked to form sentences describing this object. The next task was related to a sheet that had been handed out to the students the week before, including some instructions about the mission ‘Looking for #AllThingsGreek’. My original plan was to directly implement this task online in the nQuire-it platform. However, delays in the development of the platform prompted me to go ahead with an ‘offline’ activity fi rst which would resemble the online one. As shown in Figure 10.3, what this mission entailed was the students taking a photograph of an object that they had in their house that reminded them of Greece or

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Cyprus. Most students brought a photo or two into the classroom as a printout. Two students opted to save their photos on their mobile phones and for this reason their phones are on their desks (see Figure 10.2). The students’ photos included, among others, an olive tree from the garden of one student, a Greek flag, a cross, a church smoker used in houses (‘kapnistiri’), Cyprus cheese (‘halloumi’) and a charm (‘mati’). These are all common objects among people of Greek origin but despite their familiarity the students were still excited to see each other’s photos and a few reacted with questions in English (e.g. Where did you get this from?). In what followed, the teacher noted on a new fl ipchart the names of the objects that were shown in the students’ photos (i.e. nouns) (see Figure 10.2) and each student was asked to describe his/her object by considering the questions in Figure 10.3. Students kept their descriptions short (i.e. one to two sentences long), mainly looking at characteristics of the objects such as colour, shape/size or use. They were arguably challenged by questions such as ‘Why did you choose this object?’ due to their limited knowledge of vocabulary and of the past tense in the target language. In hindsight I could have allowed the students to share their descriptions in

Spot-It

#1 Looking for #AllThingsGreek

. . .

English translation Mission #1 Looking for #All Things Greek

In our bedroom we have things that have something ‘Greek’. In our home we have many things that have something ‘Greek’. In our garden we may have several things that remind us of Greece or Cyprus. Find and take photos from different objects that ‘have something Greek’. Name these and describe them.

.

;

;

. ;

What’s their story? Why they are in your house? Who brought it? When?

;

Why? .

Share the story of one object with your classmates. ;

; #AllThingsGreek / #Close-Up

What will you need in order to do this activity? What might help you?

Figure 10.3 Paper-based activity for the mission ‘Looking for #AllthingsGreek’

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English. However, it was only during one of the following lessons that I realised that unless I showed flexibility with the use of English the students would not be able to engage with the citizen inquiry process (Charitonos, 2017). I was also keen for these stories to be shared in the online space when the platform became available, hence I quickly moved to the next activity which involved creating the plural form of the nouns on the flipchart and also identifying the article in singular and plural (i.e. male, female, neutral). This allowed me to introduce some of the rules regarding this grammar phenomenon. The fi nal activity was consolidating this as students worked on a worksheet and filled in articles and plural forms of nouns. Following this lesson, two weeks later came the launch of an online Spot-It mission on the nQuire-it platform (see Figure 10.1), joined by students in both schools. The online activity resembled the activity described above, and students could upload photos on the platform, write captions in Greek and like or leave comments on other photos. Facilitating Young Learners’ Engagement with Objects and Places

The small sculpture that I brought into the classroom became the focal point of the fi rst part of the lesson. This was a way for me to open up to my students with an object of personal meaning to me, while also using this as an introduction to the classroom activity and the online mission. Interacting with and about objects is regarded as key to museum learning (Hooper-Greenhill, 1999), and this task also sought to provide links to future activities in the study, including the one described in the next section. Treating photos as an object and allowing students time and space to make visible and ‘restore the “missing” (hidden) contexts that shape the meaning of the[ir] object[s]’ (quoted in Bain & Ellenbogen, 2002: 162) was deemed important in the study. There was some evidence that photographs became ‘an object’ for social interaction. Despite their potential to allow students to embrace personal memories, express ownership of the experiences and potentially share their stories with others (Paris & Hapgood, 2002), complications such as time, knowledge of the target language and my own intentions in the teaching process did not make this possible in the context of this activity. Students needed more support in order to articulate the meanings attributed to their objects and in this way to situate themselves in relation to their classmates as per the cultural citizen inquiry approach. It could be argued that the online space, such that created following this classroom activity, offered an opportunity for students to achieve this by drawing on and extending the classroom activity. That said, interpreting objects involves engagement in a range of practices, such as decoding objects, reading the stories of the objects and engaging in the shared reading of the objects (Allen, 2002), which arguably would not have been straightforward, particularly for younger people

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attempting to do so in a target language. This might be seen as one of the tensions one might have when using cultural citizen inquiry in the language classroom. The space and resources available also had an impact on the activity. The lack of a whiteboard in this environment prompted the teacher to use two flipcharts at the centre of the group, so it was accessible to and visible by all students. The proximity of this served to direct the students’ attention to specific vocabulary that emerged through the activity, as well as to visualise knowledge. The space occupied by the two fl ipcharts created during this lesson was associated with more traditional representation of knowledge, that is, through text. On the other hand, by being asked to take photos of objects with special meaning to them, the students were also figuring out how to draw on and participate in fluid and mobile knowledges. Their photos, in either printed or digital format, moved beyond such a traditional representation. They linked physical objects in their home environment to their digital/printed depictions, and they became entangled in an array of human and non-human networks such as, for example, the photo of an olive tree that a boy’s grandfather from Cyprus planted at their home in Milton Keynes. In addition to gaining knowledge around grammar, students were also learning about learning practices that shifted attention to other material spaces and knowledges in the language classroom. Due to delays in the development of the platform, I could neither demonstrate the platform to the students at the time of this lesson nor ask them to directly engage with the online space as I was intending. Hence, some of my practices were configured and reconfigured in practice. For example, this delay was instead used as an opportunity to introduce the activity first in a paper-based format. The instructions on the worksheet (Figure 10.3) were translated into an online task so that students who took part in this lesson would be familiar with what was asked of them. In hindsight, this was valuable because it marked that the online environment was not disconnected from what was happening in the classroom and notably this became a pattern for all the activities that came next in the project. It was observed, though, that the delay, but also directly replicating a face-to-face task online, might have affected the students’ participation. A few never revisited this task in its online form – beyond what happened in the classroom – while others only contributed online the photos that they brought in the classroom, without engaging with other content posted by their classmates. In hindsight, I could have revisited the mission in the classroom in order to initiate discussion around students’ contributions and clarify potential uses of and actions in the online space. I could have worked with students in framing questions to post online or in drafting descriptions of their objects so they could feel supported in creating and articulating meanings attributed to objects. I could also have added a different element to the online activity to make it

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distinct from the classroom one. In other words, pursuing the cultural citizen inquiry approach required a combination of targeted offl ine and online work to help students address the various challenges that emerged in the process. In terms of language use, in the activity described, Greek was the language used, with some limited use of English. Specific grammar phenomena were covered during the lesson, such as adjectives and nouns in singular and plural. Rules were set up for the online environment where students could only use Greek. The classroom (and eventually the online environment) became a representation of different knowledge resources generated by the students, objects and relations. The Second Story: ‘Object Journeys’

As part of the project activities, an intergenerational object-handling workshop took place at each of the two participating schools around the theme of ‘Object Journeys’. These workshops were organised by an educator based at the British Museum in collaboration with the two teachers and lasted 90 minutes each. Prior to the workshop, in the invitation distributed to students, parents and other members of the community, a request was included for each participant ‘to bring one object that means something to you, your family or your culture. Your object does not have to be exotic or expensive or very old, but it’s important that there is a story behind it’. Despite this, there was some uncertainty as to whether participants would respond to this request. The event at the school in Buckinghamshire took place on a Sunday in the school hall, on a date that was selected because it coincided with the ‘Greek Letters’ celebration; hence a service would take place in the Greek church adjacent to the hall. This was seen as increasing the likelihood of more students and parents taking part in the workshop. The seating arrangement was in groups and although no particular instructions were given in terms of group formation it was observed that a few groups were a mixture of students and adults. In total, 31 people took part in this workshop, a number that exceeded our expectations. The museum educator started the workshop by introducing the meeting and explaining its purpose, namely to think about museums and objects – the British Museum (BM) in particular – but also their own objects and the stories that these tell. She went on to introduce the participants to the BM by distributing photos of the museum building and collections. Not everyone had been to the museum before. In their groups, they were then asked to examine one Greek object that appeared in these photos and consider its journey from its creation until it arrived the museum. Each participant was prompted to say a sentence related to the object’s journey (e.g. ‘I was made in ancient Athens by …’; ‘I travelled in a boat’). A decision made by both myself and the museum educator prior

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to the workshop was that the participants would be given the option to speak in Greek or English during the session, but that when Greek was used I would translate for the museum educator. It was observed that young people opted for English, while adults predominantly used Greek. While I translated on a few occasions, the translation in general did not work very well, especially as when engaged in group activity the museum educator and I were roaming in the space separately. The next activity was entitled ‘Our Museum’ and was related to the objects that the participants had brought with them. A couple of participants were given the opportunity to describe their object to the whole group and tell its story, including what it was, why they brought it with them and what it said about the person/owner. The fi rst story shared was associated with a bank note from the Bank of Greece during World War II (see Figure 10.4). This parent stood up and, while holding the object in his hands for everyone to see, he explained in Greek that this was a note that his great-grandfather had passed on to his grandfather before the latter emigrated to Latin America in the late 1940s. This note was then passed into his hands by his father who brought it with him to England, so it was viewed as a very precious object for his family. His story triggered lots of interest in the room, with other participants requesting to see his object, while everyone applauded at the end of the story. Another person who shared his story was the priest of the community, who also spoke in Greek and referred to the ‘seal’ (‘sfragida’ in Greek) that is used when making a special bread that is offered in the church during the service (‘prosforo’ in Greek). He described the features

Figure 10.4 Sharing the story of a bank note

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Figure 10.5 Sharing the story of a church ‘seal’

of this object and how it was used (see Figure 10.5). The older participants were more familiar with this object compared to the younger ones. Despite bringing objects with them (e.g. donkey figurine, souvenirs), no young participant shared a story of their object in the assembly. This might have been due to the pressure of having to follow on after the first two adult participants and feeling that their stories were not as significant as their predecessors’ were. However, given the intergenerational aspect of the workshop, this is viewed as a missed opportunity. In hindsight, we should have asked young people to go fi rst. Following this, the museum educator asked each group to document (in text or drawing) on a flipchart and share with everyone what objects they would include in their own museum. This activity was seen as the beginning of a specific mission on the nQuire-It, titled ‘Our Museum’. What followed next was an activity around objects from the BM’s ethnographic collection. The museum educator distributed these objects to each group in no particular order, also handing out some prompt questions, such as ‘How would you describe this object?’, ‘What do you think it is made from?’, ‘What do you think it is used for?’, ‘Who do you think made it?’ and ‘Where do you think it is from?’. Laughter and noise were observed during this activity, and some annoyance was even expressed by one group of young people who felt that their parents/adults were too noisy. The objects triggered different reactions such as the wearing of the textiles (see Figure 10.6). The museum educator offered some information about each of the objects and fi nally asked the participants to revisit their own collection and consider if they would add these objects to their museum: ‘Do you

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Figure 10.6 Handling objects from the British Museum’s collection

Figure 10.7 Group discussion about ‘Our Museum’

need to rearrange?’, ‘What is your museum about now?’, ‘What story does it tell?’. Groups could speak and write in Greek or English. As is shown in Figure 10.7, this particular group of students opted to write in English. Pedagogic Arrangements for Young Learners’ Engagement with their Social and Cultural Contexts

The story described above was not a routine session in the school. Quite the contrary, hence many comments received on the feedback forms

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requested more similar sessions to be organised in the school. It shows how the work in the classroom was extended to include actors, closely associated with the school but from a different generation, and also to bring museum artefacts into the fore. Importantly it valued young students’ own material enactments through their objects, stories, notes and contributions (e.g. in the ‘Our Museum’ activity). This raised critical questions about whose knowledge and authority are traditionally valued in the community schools and how other knowledges are overlooked. This story illustrates how material objects, either those owned by members of the community or the museum objects, become a pedagogical device forming the sociomaterial organisation of processes through which teachers, students, their parents and others engage in, develop and visualise knowledge. Particular knowledges such as personal knowledge of an object (i.e. the story of the bank note) and practices around them (i.e. the story of the church ‘seal’) or the ‘scientific’ knowledge from the museum curators co-existed and became powerful in this context through carefully crafted interactions between humans-objects and other networks (e.g. mixed groups of adults and young people). The young participants, in particular, were shown how to engage with and inquire about the material objects around them: tracing their journeys in the ways that humans, including themselves, can become part of these networks may produce new knowledge and new possibilities of action (e.g. creating their own virtual museum). In this particular workshop, materiality was brought to the foreground of my practices as a teacher through collective arrangements made by myself, the museum educator and the participants themselves through their objects and their stories. In doing so it served well in facilitating young learners’ engagement with their social and cultural contexts, albeit with some challenges such as the intergenerational issues that were raised in the previous section. As a means of representing students’ and other participants’ bilingual repertoires and making participation in the workshop accessible to everyone, a decision was made to allow both languages to be used. Although in most guidelines by the authorities, exclusive use of Greek in the school is advised, in practice both the teacher and the students mixed two languages as part of their experience in the school (e.g. see example in Charitonos, 2017). It has been reported elsewhere (Anderson & Macleroy, 2017) that there is evidence that some flexibility in language use or ‘translanguaging’ can support learning, hence this was the approach followed in the activity shared above where, depending on levels of proficiency, students could choose which language to use. While the adult participants seemed to use predominantly Greek language, the young students moved across languages in the course of the workshop depending on the context of the activities, the immediate group they were interacting with and broader interactions they had with others in the room. For example, moving across languages was noticed more prominently in mixed

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intergenerational groups compared to one group that consisted only of young people. Finally, thinking about pedagogy in this context, this was uncertain and fluid. Although the overall approach drew on a particular pedagogical perspective around object-based learning, it is true that objects are intertwined with interpretations of their meanings and significance. The perceived value of the church seal, for example, such as the one encountered by participants of this workshop, is highly dependent upon the context in which it exists, as well as its relationship to the viewers. Participants’ age also seemed to play a role in this. In fact age as a material element became part of the pedagogic arrangements, given how prominently the intergenerational aspect was featured in the design of the workshop and how it was highlighted at various moments during the workshop. Encounters with objects evoke personal reactions, and often these cannot be predicted by the teacher or the museum educator. Much was dependent on participants showing up, bringing their objects and engaging and contributing in the activities planned for them, particularly concerning their participation in mixed groups with young people, parents and community members which is not a usual practice followed in the school setting. Pedagogy was not a pre-existing object but became itself a network effect of constant negotiations, accommodations, and materialisations (Fenwick & Edwards, 2013). The idea of following up on this workshop through the mission ‘Our Museum’ on the nQuire-It platform was not realised in the end, showing how unpredictable engagement in the online space can be. A reason for this might have been what a participant included in her feedback form (Q: What was less useful and why?): ‘Looking at our own museum – this was a challenge and if I’m honest not as interesting as discovering the objects’. In hindsight, and even though as a teacher I was following the pattern established through the previous story (i.e. extend the offl ine into the online space), replicating online an activity that had already taken place and been completed in a face-to-face situation might have limited or indeed broken the inclusion of the online space in this assemblage. Finding the appropriate balance between face-to-face and online arrangements was difficult for me to achieve. Conclusion

This chapter set out to explore how connections between HL, culture, objects and technologies in the context of the lived experience of heritage learners can be realised in practice in order to create rich and holistic learning experiences for the students. This approach to a ‘learning ecosystem’ is consistent with what Pea (2009) argues: ‘we need to treat the activities and life experiences of the learners throughout the day as our units of learning design, description and explanation’ (quoted in Chen et al., 2010:

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46). In order to understand and open up new learning spaces in community language education, learners and teachers and their contexts and practices should be our point of departure instead of what is technologically possible. The chapter remains true to this and shares two stories, in the classroom and beyond, where technology is not at the centre of what is happening but rather is at the periphery. Through these shared stories, the chapter demonstrates the potential of the cultural citizen inquiry as a method, while also revealing some of the tensions and difficulties that might be encountered in pursuing such aims. It also recognises that one of the major challenges of today’s education is ‘designing learning environments that respond to students’ lives and reconfiguring spaces and places of learning to address the disengagement and disconnection from … education that is experienced by an increasing number of students’ (Kumpulainen & Sefton-Green, 2012: 9). To address this challenge, the chapter drew on sociomaterial approaches and placed attention on the various actors that may be found within an educational environment in order to trace the web of relations that constitute work in the HL classroom. These were treated as integral to the enactment of learning and teaching practices rather than as simply background context or tools. The analysis of the two stories illuminated decisions made and practices developed as well as concerns raised by me as the teacher and how specific practices and meanings of my work are negotiated, configured and reconfigured within and beyond the classroom itself. The analysis also traced assemblages of knowledge and practice as they are brought into being, and showed ways in which such assemblages were supported or led to disruption. Especially in relation to pedagogy, as shown in the analysis, this is an outcome of relations between the material, the social, the technical and the human: ‘such relations are not stable but always in flux, connected and disconnected, accommodated and resisted, negotiated and rejected in the everyday practices of work’ (Zukas & Malcolm, 2019: 264). The analysis finally highlighted the important role of the educator and how the strategies and pedagogies that I followed allowed me to create ‘safe spaces for the students and the community in which they could draw on their funds of knowledge to foster learning’ (Mary & Young, 2017: 463) and facilitate connections across settings, and thus promote appreciation of heritage as well as the development of language competencies. The use of material artefacts in the classroom, either mobile and web technologies or museum objects, poses continual practical challenges for educators, while failure to use these in their practice relies on a host of material factors (e.g. expertise, time, infrastructure, school policies). This work marks an attempt by myself, as the author-educator, to reflect on arrangements made in my practice and respond to views regarding language learning that are underpinned by principles of dialogue, meaning-making and intercultural exchange. A commitment to this perspective

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of language learning relies on recognising existing actors and/or introducing new actors in the HL classroom to be enrolled into new configurations that create opportunities for engagement in language learning. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) How can connections between community/heritage language, culture and technologies in the context of the lived experience of heritage learners be realised in practice? (2) How does a sociomaterialities lens help us develop a better understanding of how to make arrangements for language learning that are based on principles of dialogue, meaning-making and intercultural exchange? (3) How is stability achieved in (teaching and learning) practices characterised by multiple knowledge sources, strategies and concerns, while enabling innovation in community language education? (4) Whose knowledge and authority are traditionally valued in community schools? In what ways are other knowledges overlooked within these environments? Acknowledgements

I give special thanks to the British Academy for providing the funding for this study through the British Academy Schools Language Awards. I am grateful for the support that was provided by the British Museum in London, and particularly the museum educator, Lorna Cruickshanks. The parents, teachers and children in the two Greek supplementary schools also deserve my greatest appreciation. My deepest thanks also go to my collaborator at the school in Leicestershire, Marina Charalampidi. Note (1) A new platform, called ‘nQuire’ is now available at https://nquire.org.uk/. This has been developed by The Open University in partnership with the BBC. The nQuire-it platform has been archived.

References Allen, S. (2002) Looking for learning in visitor talk: A methodological exploration. In G. Leinhardt, K. Crowley and K. Knutson (eds) Learning Conversations in Museums (pp. 259–303). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Anderson, J. and Chung, Y.-C. (2012) Community languages, the arts and transformative pedagogy: Developing active citizenship for the 21st century. Citizenship Teaching & Learning 7 (13), 259–271. Anderson, J. and Macleroy, V. (2017) Connecting worlds: Interculturality, identity and multilingual digital stories in the making. Language and Intercultural Communication 17 (4), 1–24. doi:10.1080/14708477.2017.1375592

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Bain, R. and Ellenbogen, M. (2002) Placing objects within disciplinary perspectives: Examples from history and science. In S.G. Paris (ed.) Perspectives on ObjectCentered Learning in Museums (pp. 153–169). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Carreira, M. (2004) Seeking explanatory adequacy: A dual approach to understanding the term ‘heritage language learner’. Heritage Language Journal 2 (1), 1–25. Carvalho, L. and Yeoman, P. (2018) Framing learning entanglement in innovative learning spaces: Connecting theory, design and practice. British Educational Research Journal 44 (6), 1120–1137. Charitonos, K. (2017) Cultural citizen inquiry: Making space for the ‘everyday’ in language teaching and learning. In C. Herodotou, M. Sharples and E. Scanlon (eds) Citizen Inquiry: Synthesising Science and Inquiry Learning (pp. 176–194). Abingdon: Routledge. Chen, W., Seow, P., Hyo-Jeong, S., Toh, Y. and Looi, C.-K. (2010) Connecting learning spaces using mobile technology. Educational Technology 50 (5), 45–50. de Jong, T. (2006) Computer simulations: Technological advances in inquiry learning. Science 312 (5773), 532–533. Fenwick, T. and Edwards, R. (2013) Performative ontologies: Sociomaterial approaches to researching adult education and lifelong learning. European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults 4 (1), 49–63. Fenwick, T. and Nerland, M. (2014) Sociomaterial professional knowing, work arrangements and responsibility: New times, new concepts? In T. Fenwick and K. Nerland (eds) Reconceptualising Professional Learning: Sociomaterial Knowledges, Practices and Responsibilities (pp. 1–7). Abingdon: Routledge. Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. and Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging Approaches to Educational Research: Tracing the Sociomaterial. London: Routledge. Fenwick, T., Nerland, M. and Jensen, K. (2012) Sociomaterial approaches to conceptualising professional learning and practice. Journal of Education and Work 25 (1), 1–13. Gunter, A., Raghuram, P., Breines, M. and Prinsloo, P. (2020) Distance education as sociomaterial assemblage: Place, distribution, and aggregation. Population, Space and Place 26 (3). doi:10.1002/psp.2320 Herodotou, C., Sharples, M. and Scanlon, E. (2017) Introducing citizen inquiry. In C. Herodotou, M. Sharples and E. Scanlon (eds) Citizen Inquiry: Synthesising Science and Inquiry Learning (pp. 1–6). Abingdon: Routledge. Hodder, I. (2014) The entanglements of humans and things: A long-term view. New Literacy History 45 (1), 19–36. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1999) The Educational Role of the Museum (2nd edn). London and New York: Routledge. Kramsch, C. (1998) Language and Culture (1st edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kumpulainen, K. and Sefton-Green, J. (2012) What is connected learning and how to research it? International Journal of Learning and Media 4 (2), 7–18. Mary, L. and Young, S.A. (2017) Engaging with emergent bilinguals and their families in the pre-primary classroom to foster well-being, learning and inclusion. Language and Intercultural Communication 17 (4), 455–473. Orlikowski, W.J. (2010) The sociomateriality of organizational life: Considering technology in management research. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (1), 125–141. Paris, G.S. and Hapgood, E.S. (2002) Children learning with objects in informal learning environments. In S.G. Paris (ed.) Perspectives on Object-Centered Learning in Museums (pp. 37–54). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (2008) The SAGE Handbook of Action Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sharples, M., McAndrew, P., Weller, M., Ferguson, R., FitzGerald, E., Hirst, T. and Gaved, M. (2013) Innovating Pedagogy 2013. Open University Innovation Report No. 2. Milton Keynes: Open University.

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Valdés, G. (2000) Introduction. Spanish for Native Speakers: AATSP Professional Development Series Handbook for Teachers K–16 (pp. 1–20). Orlando, FL: Harcourt College Publishers. Verbeek, P.-P. (2005) What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Zukas, M. and Malcolm, J. (2019) Reassembling academic work: A sociomaterial investigation of academic learning. Studies in Continuing Education 41 (3), 259–276.

11 Translanguaging Art: Exploring the Transformative Potential of Contemporary Art for Language Teaching in the Multilingual Context Dobrochna Futro

In this chapter, I discuss the concept of translanguaging art and its affordances for language teaching in the multilingual context. The study described here is Stage 3 of my research which seeks to explore how contemporary art advances our understanding of the nature of multilingualism and considers the implications for language pedagogy. Stage 3, depicted in this chapter, was preceded by my investigation of how multilingualism is showcased and researched through the range of types of multilingual artworks (Stage 1) and my observations of MFL classes in selected primary schools in Scotland (Stage 2). My Stage 1 fi ndings pointed to the importance of the arbitrary nature of linguistic and semiotic signs, the role of symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2006), the sensory and embodied in language learning (Fleming, 2018; Schewe, 2013), multilingual subject emergence (Kramsch, 2009; Kristeva, 1984), and the relationship of identity and language learning (Norton, 2000; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004). In Stage 3, discussed here, I explored, together with the primary school pupils participating in the project, how my Stage 1 fi ndings can be used to create a pedagogical model that will support language teaching and learning in Scottish schools and beyond. The study was an ethnographic art-based exploration of the use of translanguaging art in teaching and learning Polish in a multilingual context. It consisted of a series of workshops in which I introduced basic Polish through art to a small group of 9–12 year-old pupils. It was conducted from April to June 2019 in the framework of an after-school club 226

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in an urban mainstream primary school in Scotland. The languages present in the classroom apart from Polish were English, Arabic, Yoruba, Urdu, Punjabi, Scots, French, Italian and Spanish. The languages used in the workshops reflected an increasingly diverse population of Scotland and the languages traditionally taught in Scottish schools. At the time, a total of 154 languages were spoken as the main home language by pupils in publicly funded schools in Scotland. Other than English, the top five home languages were Polish, Urdu, Scots, Arabic and Punjabi (Scottish Government, 2020). The Scottish Government was in the fi nal stages of implementing the ‘1 + 2 Approach’ policy (Scottish Government, 2012). The policy aims to offer every child in Scotland an opportunity to learn an additional language from the age of five and a further language from the age of nine. It recognises that the mother tongues of children attending Scottish schools may vary and recommends that, while the fi rst additional language should be selected from a limited range of languages in which children can later gain formal qualifications (French, German, Spanish, Italian, Gaelic, Urdu, Mandarin or Cantonese), the second additional language could be one of the languages spoken in the community. This provided both a context and a supportive framework in which I explored my proposed art-based translanguaging approach to modern foreign language teaching. As I will show below, this approach acknowledges the dynamic and fluid nature of language and the complex, personal, social and symbolic nature of language learning, and emphasises creative, affective and multimodal aspects of the languaging process. At the same time it is tailored to fit the requirements of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence and its 1 + 2 language policy (Scottish Government, 2012) and, as such, it offers a situated practical response to the call for the reconceptualisation of the goals of language learning as expressed by Leung and Scarino in 2016.

Theoretical Framework Translanguaging

I positioned my study within a framework of translanguaging (García & Li, 2014), art practice-as-research (Sullivan, 2010) and art practice-aspedagogy (Lucero, 2011). Two conceptualisations of translanguaging that most significantly informed my research are those offered by Ofelia García and by Li Wei, respectively. In the fi rst approach, translanguaging, seen as the act of ‘dissolving’ borders between languages, becomes the means of re-politicising languages in an attempt to establish equality between speakers no matter what named language(s), register(s) or dialect(s) they use (García, 2016; García & Kano, 2014; García & Kleyn, 2016; Otheguy et al., 2015; Sherris & Adami, 2018). In the latter, proposed by Li Wei, translanguaging is ‘a

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practice that involves dynamic and functionally integrated use of different languages and language varieties, but more importantly a process of knowledge construction that goes beyond language(s)’ (Li, 2018, emphasis added) or, as he and Ho reiterate elsewhere, ‘beyond different linguistic structures and systems and different modalities’ (Ho & Li, 2019: 539). Seen from this perspective, the prefi x trans refers not only to multilingual practices of multilingual speakers challenging boundaries of socially constructed named languages, but also to the ability of humans to think beyond language. Translanguaging space

Central to Li’s defi nition of translanguaging is the concept of a translanguaging space, which is created when language users bring together dimensions of their multilingual, multisensory and multimodal existence ‘into one coordinated and meaningful performance’ (Li, 2018: 23). In a translanguaging space, language users are not restricted to one named language or one modality, but agentively draw on their full range of resources and modalities (including visual) to construct meanings in interaction. By extension, such a space embraces learners’ inner spaces, their personal journeys and aesthetic sensibilities (Abdelhadi et  al., 2019; Phipps, 2010, 2019; Ros i Solé, 2016). In a translanguaging space, the target language ceases to be a new isolated system that needs to be learned from scratch, but becomes an expansion of an existing semiotic repertoire that allows learners to build on already known varied semiotic resources (including visual), personal experiences, dreams and concepts grounded in their fi rst languages. In the project discussed below, I did not see my aim as transmitting a new language to the students but as facilitating their development of their (trans)languaging selves. I could not teach them my Polish as it is entangled not only with other languages I know but also with all my memories, dreams and experiences. Equally, I could not teach them their Polish, as from the very beginning it was part of their own idiolect (Otheguy et al., 2015), entangled with their past experiences, present attitudes and projections for the future (Kramsch, 2006). What I could do instead was to facilitate their journeys towards their own Polish speaking selves. I argue that such a holistic, translingual-transcultural approach to language learning, encompassing aesthetic and multisensory perspectives, can decentre dominant functional approaches to language teaching traditionally embraced in Western and Westernised education systems (Gramling, 2016; Leung & Scarino, 2016; Phipps, 2019; Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004; Phipps & Guilherme, 2004; Ros i Solé, 2016) and decentre the power dynamics inherent in deficit views of bilingualism. All artworks explored in my study were chosen for their ability to create translanguaging spaces. They were the artworks in which I

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identified, quoting Li Wei, ‘dynamic and functionally integrated use of different languages and language varieties, but more importantly a process of knowledge construction that goes beyond language(s)’ (Li, 2018:15). They also had a capacity to offer ‘a multilingual, multisensory, and multimodal [language learning] experience’ described by Li and Ho (2018: 550), providing an opportunity for educators to create tasks derived from the material itself. Such tasks, as I show later, have a potential to enable the process of language learning as embodied participation and resemiotisation (Li, 2018) that allows for new insights and learning (Marshall, 2007). Translanguaging art

In the study of semiotic systems, visual art is often perceived as one set of signs and language as another. However, translanguaging art juxtaposes and merges the two. In translanguaging artworks, language is one of the many semiotic systems through which meaning is constructed. If translanguaging means – as Li Wei proposes – ‘transcending the traditional divides between linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive and semiotic systems’ (Li, 2018: 20), then translanguaging art becomes an epitome of this process. Translanguaging artworks are both sites and agents of translanguaging activity. The term translanguaging art refers to art that translanguages (as in: ‘it is translanguaging’), but also to the process in which it is translanguaged (as in: ‘we are translanguaging it’). This double agency is purposeful as it combines the process of art practice-as-research (Sullivan, 2010) and art practice-as-pedagogy (Lucero, 2011). The artworks I selected created translanguaging spaces through the act of translanguaging: in response to my applying language-based categories to them, they allowed me to experience the process of decentring language and to recognise the value of other semiotics and art-based approaches. In other words, in response to my attempt to translanguage them, the artworks translanguaged – produced effects on me (Rose, 2016). In this process, my epistemological frame was transformed, and the meaning of artworks was not only negotiated and co-created but experienced in-the-making. In the multidimensional translanguaging space that arose from this interaction, the dichotomies between language(s) and visual art were broken down (Li, 2018: 23). The ability of an artwork to produce effects on viewers was well understood by a Russian formalist, Viktor Shklovsky (1917/1965: 12), who coined the concept of ‘ostranenie’ – often translated as e(n)strangement or defamiliarisation. He wrote that ‘the technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and the length of perception’.1 He pointed out that art can draw the attention of the viewer to the aspects of a presented object that are often overseen or taken for granted, enabling de-automatisation of perception (and experience).

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Translanguaging art, by equating language with other semiotics, allows us to see language anew. To understand the meaning of ‘ostranenie’, one only needs to recall the experience of entering a contemporary art gallery. Many visitors will remember the initial feeling of displacement, confusion or at least decontextualisation. In many ways, this kind of confusion is experienced by migrants and members of the contemporary superdiverse society interacting across languages and cultures (Kramsch, 2006). It is because in order to deal with the complexity of both the artworks and the contemporary world one needs not only communicative but also symbolic competence with its three major components: the production of complexity, the tolerance of ambiguity, and an appreciation of form as meaning (Kramsch, 2006). While these skills are often practised in art schools, they are rarely acknowledged in language classrooms (Leung & Scarino, 2016). However, to be successful in multilingual interactions, language learners, similarly to art students, need competence in manipulating symbolic systems – they have to learn not only how the meanings are exchanged or negotiated but how they are made (Kramsch, 2006; Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008; Leung & Scarino, 2016). This focus on the language-in-the-making is also reflected in Li’s conceptualisation of translanguaging. In his foundational paper from 2018, he refers to Ortega y Gasset who argues that language should not be regarded ‘as an accomplished fact, as a thing made and fi nished, but as in the process of being made’ (Gasset, 1957, in Li, 2018: 16, emphasis added). Li’s defi nition of translanguaging crosses paths here with Shklovsky’s writing, that ‘[a]rt is the means to live through the making of the thing, what was made does not matter in art’2 (Shklovsky, 2017, emphasis added). According to Shklovsky, art experience is the means to experience and, by extension, to understand the making process. Combining language learning with art making accentuates the role of a learner as a maker, a creator, someone actively participating in the process of creative manipulation of language. It aligns with what Li (2018) calls ‘linguistics-of-participation’ and his understanding of language learning – as a multilingual, multisensory and multimodal semiotic process (Li & Ho, 2018: 550; see also Sherris & Adami, 2018).

The Study Aims

An aim of this project was to explore what contemporary works of art communicate about language use and meaning-making practices in linguistically and culturally diverse communities, and to consider the potential of translanguaging artworks as pedagogical tools activating translanguaging spaces in primary language classrooms.

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Study design

The study was run in the framework of after-school club provision in one of the Scottish primary schools. I offered an hour-long workshop once a week for the duration of a term, and invited pupils aged 9–11 (P5–P7) to attend the club for free. No previous knowledge of art or Polish or any other languages was expected. I invited a Polish heritage speaking pupil aged six attending the school to work as my assistant. Five pupils aged 9–11 signed up to the club, of whom four attended. Pedagogy

In the pedagogical model I employed in this study I drew on my preliminary analysis of the selected artworks and, conceptualised by Lucero (2011), the process of ‘gathering permissions’, during which students, inspired by the artworks, are opening up to the new ways of working. The process consists of four steps: seeing (experiencing) an artwork; recognising in it or its effect on a viewer something new – an opportunity for learning; recognising it as an inspiration that may have an impact on one’s practice or life (permission); and using it or storing it for future use. Each workshop started with an introduction to the artist and their artwork. Subsequently, workshop participants were invited to discuss the work presented. This was followed by an art-making activity – children created their own art inspired by the artwork introduced in the first part of the workshop. My approach was cross-curricular, scaffolded, entailing progression from more teacher-centred to learner-centred creative work with an emphasis on learner agency and ownership. The workshops were multilingual – children were encouraged to respond in Polish and their other languages when I greeted them in Polish and English, and to use any language they wanted in their artworks. I provided basic Polish words and greetings, identified or translated relevant words in the artworks, and introduced the works in a way that supported progression from single Polish words to more complex sentences (within the framework of translanguaging). I encouraged students to keep a language glossary. This model combined the traditional perception of art practice as selfexpression, representation or object making with an understanding of art as exploration and creation of knowledge where, in transforming ‘ideas, concepts and information into visual images, objects and experiences’, new insights and learning are produced (Marshall, 2007: 23).

Research methods

I employed creative inquiry (Kara, 2015; Leavy, 2015, 2018; Lenette, 2019) combined with main principles of exploratory practice (Allwright,

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2003; Hanks, 2015, 2017) and participatory research (Eckhoff, 2019; Horgan, 2017; Pahl & Pool, 2011) as my methodological frame. In advance of taking part in the workshop, pupils received the project description and an invitation to become my co-researchers (Carlile, 2016). Although the topic of each session was centred around the artwork of my choice, the subsequent discussion and artmaking were, to a great extent, directed by my young co-researchers (Eckhoff, 2019). During the workshops they (a) watched, analysed and discussed translanguaging artworks, (b) explored them through art-making, and (c) reflected on the process. The core of our inquiry was art-based research producing knowledge arising from ‘thinking in a medium, thinking in a language, and thinking in a context’ (Sullivan, 2010: 123). Although we did not follow the specific procedure recommended for exploratory practice (Allwright, 2003; Hanks, 2015, 2017), we followed its principles and ‘adopted an Exploratory Practice perspective on trying to understand classroom life’ (Allwright, 2003: 122). This stream of the research focused on exploring multilingualism, languaging and language learning in and through art. I also conducted participant observation, reflected on the workshops in writing, and audio-recorded and photographed both the workshops and the artworks created by children, which I subsequently analysed (Braun & Clarke, 2013; Rose, 2016). The final workshop also included an informal focus group of workshop participants. This research stream focused on exploring the implications of art-based research for language pedagogy. Discussion

The series comprised eight workshops. The first two were designed as ‘warm-up’ exercises. The following six were based on artworks by Monika Szydłowska, Małgorzata Dawidek and Krzysztof Wodiczko – Polish-born visual artists who in their practice engage with languaging (Li, 2018) in a migratory context and offer a range of different types of work: an artist’s book (Szydłowska, 2015), performance-based video (Dawidek, 2016), an installation (Dawidek, 1997), a site-specific multichannel video projection (Wodiczko, 2009) and participatory performances (Wodiczko, 1988). Lived experience of language

In the fi rst workshop I invited participants to create ‘language portraits’, the method often employed to explore language awareness in multilingual children, stimulate language reflection and study research participants’ lived experience of language (Bradley et  al., 2018; Bush, 2018; Galante, 2019; Kusters & De Meulder, 2019). I used language portraits to scaffold the children’s visual thinking and life-size body outlines to allow my co-researchers to make an embodied, sensory connection

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with their painting. I asked the children to draw the outline of their bodies and visually represent their communicative repertoires within it. The children needed considerable support and painted slowly but, while doing so, they relaxed and shared that they spoke Arabic, Urdu, Polish and English at home, and also knew some French, Italian and Spanish – languages learned at school. They represented languages with different colours, which sometimes related to the colours of national flags. Interestingly, while most portraits reflected blurred boundaries of languages, one – created by G., who introduced herself as a monolingual English language speaker – did not (Figure 11.1). After further conversation, we established that she knew words and phrases from several western European languages, as she told us that she had studied Italian, Spanish and French but, although these languages were part of her linguistic repertoire, G. did not initially perceive them as part of her embodied linguistic make-up. On the contrary, K. did not hesitate to include her heritage languages within her portraits even though she later stated that she did not really know these languages. This difference reflects the identity work and different value afforded by language speakers to heritage languages (Kagan, 2005; Lee, 2005; O’Rourke & Zhou, 2018) and languages learned at school.

Figure 11.1 Language portraits created by Z. (top) and G. (bottom) Source: Workshops 2019

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A perception of a clear division between native/ heritage speakers and modern foreign language learners is deeply rooted in the monolingual paradigm and the ideal of a native speaker. Although in different ways, it negatively affects both foreign and heritage language learners, the former, like G., by creating a tension between their identity and languages spoken, and the latter, like K., by applying monolingual performance expectations. Although proficiency in a language is rarely considered a valid criterion for perceiving oneself as a heritage speaker (Lee, 2005), the lack of self-efficacy is, according to Potowski, what most often leads to demotivation in heritage language learning (Potowski, cited in O’Rourke & Zhou, 2018). While G.’s portrait was the most colourful (linguistically diverse) of all, it differed from the others in the sharpness of borders between the horizontal bands of colours that ran across the body (Figure 11.1). It is tempting to interpret the difference between G.’s depiction of languages in her body and those of other participants as the opposition between the organic acquisition of home/community languages and the formal, classroombased learning of foreign languages but, equally, such a design might have been the reflection of her personal preference for clarity and sharpness, or the fact that she was the oldest participant (Davis, 1997; Noble, 2015). More evidence is needed to draw any definitive conclusions. Interestingly, at the end of the workshop some children, when asked about the portraits, changed the colour and language associations. For example, Urdu, which was initially orange, swapped places with French and became purple, only to become orange again a week later. The languages did not sit stable in children’s representations of their bodies, nor did their inclusion reflect the deep relationship children had with the languages. The Czech language appeared in several portraits thanks to the loan-word ‘robot’, while an ‘African language’ (‘afrykański’) in the portrait of Z. came from a book she read with her mum, which was set somewhere in Africa. Dreaming about blue almonds

In the second workshop, pupils, inspired by Chagall’s paintings (Lvovich, 2015), were invited to select two idioms – one Polish and one from any language they wanted (a large selection of idioms and their translations into English was provided) and to combine two idioms in one painting so as to create a meaningful whole. In this workshop, G. decided to combine an English idiom ‘to be in the same boat’ with Polish ‘dreaming about blue almonds’ (‘marzyć o niebieskich migdałach’/daydreaming), where the boat representing ‘being in the same boat’ was placed within a big blue almond, the shape of which resembled a thought bubble (Figure 11.2). Other participants represented idioms that meant ‘running away’ or ‘going from bad to worse’; there was ‘an elephant stomping on one’s ear’ depriving them of musical hearing,

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Figure 11.2 ‘Dreaming about blue almonds (daydreaming) – being in the same boat (being in the same position)’. Artwork created by G. Source: Workshops 2019

and ‘dreaming about blue almonds’ combined with the call to say things directly. No-one selected ‘easy as cake’ or its Polish equivalent, ‘bułka z masłem’, which were also provided. The choice of idioms indicated the children’s emotional response to the work conducted during the workshops (Lewis & Green, 1983) as well as an ability to construct complex works manipulating symbolic resources from several languages and cultures (Kramsch, 2006; Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008; Leung & Scarino, 2016). In the context of G.’s previous work, her painting in which she wishes to ‘be in the same boat’ might be interpreted as an expression of a division between the modern foreign language learners and the heritage language learners. However, it was during this workshop that the group started showing signs of collaboration and agency – the responses to pupils’ questions started coming not only from the adults but also from their peers. This is consistent with Janks’ reflection that while replacing the monolingual norm with a multilingual one may shift the dynamics of power relations, it does not have to exclude anyone (Janks, 2004). The multiplicity of semiotic resources seemed to lead to increased agency and collaboration.

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Mobilising resources

It was also in this workshop that G. asked whether she could use felttipped pens for the task rather than the paint provided, that is, to use an available but not prescribed resource. This is precisely what multilingual speakers do when they translanguage in a monolingually ordered context – they add to a pool of authorised resources (for example, English phrases and gestures) other resources (for example, words and phrases formally belonging to another named language) that are not prescribed (and often not authorised) in a monolingual context. The decision to seek a different resource (felt-tipped pen) may be driven by the lack of skills (ability to paint or speak the language) but equally, as it was in G’s case, by the need for this particular resource that suits their needs better (e.g. allows for more precision). This ‘translanguaging attitude’ subsequently expanded towards lingual resources. It was being consistently developed by the children and significantly grew towards the end of the project. In the last workshop, two participants (R. and M.) creatively and purposefully amended the evaluation exercise they were given. After being asked to interview each other on the content of the workshops while making sure they used as many Polish words as they could, R. and M. proceeded to the full radio interview in which they pretended to be celebrities who were learning Polish. Several recordings of this session show numerous attempts deemed by my co-researchers as ‘not good enough’ at the production stage, as well as self-imposed pronunciation exercises in which R. and M. practised, corrected and practised again several Polish words with great enthusiasm and lots of laughter. Translanguaging in practice

In the following workshop, the group explored translanguaging expressions and dialogues (e.g. ‘Bonjour! Comment ça va?’, ‘I am from Poland’, ‘I do not know any Polish words’) in Szydłowska’s work (2015, 2016). After discussing her work, they were asked to select an image and use it as a starting point for their own comics (Figures 11.3 and 11.4). Interestingly, during the initial discussion participants denied that they had any experience of using, or even hearing, utterances in which two languages are mixed. Only after an intervention from a teacher who provided examples of her own use of Spanish in school did some pupils start giving examples of translanguaging with parents and other members of the family. In the practical part of the workshop, G. selected a drawing in which the protagonist is spoken to in French and on her explanation that she is from Poland is told that the interlocutor does not know any Polish words. G. continued the story, drawing the protagonist teaching a Polish greeting to her interlocutor (Figure 11.4). A character drawn by R. responded to: ‘Kupiłam pumpkina!’ (‘I bought a pumpkin’) with: ‘To jest Halloween’

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Figure 11.3 ‘Kupiłam pumpkina! To jest Halloween’. Artwork by R. inspired by Szydłowska’s work Source: Workshops 2019

(This is Halloween’), therefore responding to a translanguaging, nonnormative ‘Ponglish’ expression, with a normative sentence identical in structure, where the only difference was that the word ‘Halloween’ has been an officially accepted loanword in Polish. K. also selected a drawing with a French text but in the following scene her character responded to

Figure 11.4 ‘Bonjour! Comment ça va?’. Artwork by G., inspired by Szydłowska’s work Source: Workshops 2019

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it with a question: ‘What are you talk a B?’. In her work, one nonnormative language action of using one foreign language in place of another was met by a response written in non-normative English where ‘talk a B’ can be likened to a texting language as it stands for ‘talking about’. M., in contrast, did not pay attention to the mixture of languages in the statement: ‘mmm … pyszny bread’ (‘mmm …delicious bread’). She simply presented a logical follow-up – drawing a protagonist without the bread in her hand, saying: ‘Finished my bread’. In the context of the discussions about translanguaging carried out during this workshop, M.’s action seems to call for focusing on the meaning and not on what language the words happened to be told/written in: the bread was delicious so it got eaten. This approach may also explain pupils’ initial denial, and perhaps lack of recognition, of their translingual practices, and suggests that it does not have to be necessarily interpreted as children’s resistance to admitting it due to the societal pressure valuing linguistic purity. Languages and languages

My co-researchers also experimented with written translanguaging in the workshops inspired by Dawidek’s work. In her performance-based video, Wheel of Emotions (2016), Dawidek wrote the names of emotions in English into a big circle drawn on a wall, and placed outside the circle words in other languages. Following her example, each participant drew their own circle using their body as a drawing compass, thus creating a series of overlapping circles (Figure 11.5). We talked about emotions and shared words that describe them, firstly in English and then, prompted by me, in Arabic, Yoruba, Polish and Punjabi. Children wrote them into the circle, often translating an emotion from one language to another, and then they asked for permission to draw and placed images and emoticons with their translations into English outside the circle. Through this decision, they showed a preference for a non-prescriptive space where they could represent emotions as they wished. In this workshop, beyond Polish and English, the children used three heritage languages – Arabic, Yoruba and Punjabi. In the following one, inspired by Dawidek’s installation, A Brief Story of Chance (1997), besides Polish and English, the participants used only Spanish. In her installation, Dawidek displayed each page of a book separately on the gallery wall and connected them by a thread that indicated the flow of the narrative. Children received template pages with some prompts, a ‘Polish word bank’, and were asked to write a story in pairs using as many languages as they wished. Both pairs decided to include the participants of the workshop in their stories. This symbolic act of writing the readers into a book was an expansion of what Dawidek implied by the formal structure of an artwork, literally inviting the readers to ‘step in’ between the pages. The use of Spanish was initiated by G. (who was absent from the previous

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Figure 11.5 Collaborative Wheel of Emotions inspired by Dawidek’s Wheel of Emotions (2016) Source: Workshops 2019

workshops when we drew the circle) and R., and later picked up by M. and K. None of the participants decided to use their heritage languages. Voiceless, voice-full and stuttering

This was consistent with language choices made by G. and K. (English, Polish) and R. (English, Polish, ‘made-up language’) in the following workshop. In this workshop, we explored Wodiczko’s installation, Guests (2009), in which visitors to the gallery watched figures talking in several languages through the seemingly semi-transparent windows in the gallery walls. Workshop participants were invited to talk about three important moments of their lives from behind the semi-transparent screen (Figure 11.6) while others watched them. When I asked about their language choices, K. responded that she used English and Polish because ‘it’s easier’ than Urdu and Punjabi. It was striking because she had only just started learning Polish, and in the same workshop she claimed she knew ‘lots of words’ in Punjabi, giving examples of ‘khus’ (happy) and ‘tousi’ (you). M., although she used Yoruba, responded that speaking English was easy, while ‘Yoruba, I am not that advanced, I am still learning’. As I discussed above, heritage speakers’

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Figures 11.6a and 11.6b Workshop inspired by Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Guests Source: Workshops 2019

language skills can vary, but what further complicates the picture is that their assessment of their language skills is subjective, subject to larger societal forces (Ballinger et al., 2017; Janks, 2004). Commenting on this workshop, the children also emphasised the value of other, non-lingual ways of meaning-making – they found it crucial to their understanding of a speaker and the curtain was an obstacle because ‘It was hard to see what she was doing’ [emphasis mine]. This and several previous activities emphasise the need to broaden the perception of language learning to include ‘an active engagement with embodiment and multimodality’ (Anderson & Macleroy, 2016; Block, 2014: 56), while simultaneously pointing to the individual differences, and the role of a teacher in scaffolding children’s learning (Vygotski, 1984) towards the active ‘translanguaging attitude’. The autonomy that followed from this attitude allowed for greater involvement, agency, motivation and investment in language learning. There were also many instances during the workshops when art became a device for children to visualise and explore their language practices and attitudes (Iedema, 2003; Marshall, 2007) and expand their language awareness, linked not only to the increased competence in (any) language use but to linguistic tolerance, increased awareness of connections between languages/cultures and curiosity about languages (Finkbeiner & White, 2017; Hawkins, 1984; Janks, 2004). In the fi rst and second workshops, a clear distinction was drawn between heritage languages and languages learned at school. The fi ndings also pointed to the diversity of sources of languages children were exposed to as well as the flexibility and momentary nature of such bodily representations of languages. This calls for closer attention to how various languages and their speakers are perceived in contemporary multilingual society, and the way current educational policies may strengthen, resist and blur the traditional division between the powerful and less powerful languages (Hawkins, 1984; O’Rourke & Zhou, 2018; Phipps & Fassetta, 2015).

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In my study, children seemed to be more inclined to use their heritage languages when the languages were part of a larger mix of semiotic resources, for example, when they were written on fabric. Even when the activities were part of art making, when they resembled situations where languages were used in a more formal context, such as in book writing or making a speech, participants showed a preference for languages validated by school such as English, Spanish and, in the context of my workshops, Polish. While it suggests that treating language as on a par with other modalities can prevent privileging any one semiotic system and that the focus on the situated and momentary process of multi(trans?)modal knowledge creation can prevent automatic backgrounding of other semiotics (Iedema, 2003), the impact of personal, social and institutional context cannot be disregarded. The role of personal and sociopolitical factors in language choices made by speakers has recently been discussed in the context of translanguaging pedagogy by Ballinger and colleagues (Ballinger, 2019; Ballinger et al., 2017). They point out that encouraging students to draw on their overall repertoire can have very different implications depending on their language background, for example encouraging students to use features of the dominant language of the society reinforces an existing societal imbalance. However, in their 2014 study, García and Kano showed that students use several different strategies while translanguaging, and the frequency, amount and purpose of using one or another named language can, depending on the student, vary significantly (García & Kano, 2014). My study seems to confi rm that. While the bias towards speaking languages to which a higher value is attached was evident in my study, when children showed the preference for English or languages taught at school, it seemed to be linked to the type of activity that they habitually associated with a school environment – formal speeches and writing. Embodied, multisensory activities such as painting or using pastels on fabric seemed to facilitate more inclusive responses. To achieve this, however, languages had to be an inherent part of an activity perceived by children as predominantly all senses-oriented, embodied and material (Fleming, 2018; Schewe, 2013), different from what they described as their experiences of language learning classes: sitting at the desk and repeating words after their teacher (Figure 11.7). Conclusion

The fi ndings from this study support claims of the potential of translanguaging (García & Baetens Beardsmore, 2009; García, 2016; García & Kleyn, 2016; Ho & Li, 2019; Li, 2018) for increasing pupils’ agency (Kinchin & Kandiko Howson, 2019) and confidence (Deci & Flaste, 1996), emergence and development of language awareness, metalinguistic

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Figure 11.7 My visualisation of children’s opinions and recommendations expressed verbally during the last workshops in response to my question about their view about the best way of teaching languages Source: Workshops 2019

and metacognitive skills (García & Kano, 2014; Hawkins, 1984), supporting critical and creative meaning-making (Bradley et al., 2018; Li, 2018). They also suggest its positive role in increasing students’ motivation, and support the process of building balanced bilingual identities (Anderson, 2016; Anderson & Macleroy, 2017). More importantly, however, they point to the potential of translanguaging art for creating translanguaging spaces in a school environment. They suggest that combining art with language learning activities can enable the shift, or at least a suspension, of the societal imbalance between less and more powerful languages that implicitly prevents children from making use of their full repertoires, and can create a context in which they fi nd translanguaging – the use of all available resources, including the non-prescribed means of expressions, such as their heritage languages – valued (García, 2016; Janks, 2004). They indicate that translanguaging art can both authorise translanguaging in the classroom (Lucero, 2011) and offer the focus for exploring multilingual and multimodal communicative practices without privileging any one semiotic system. They also suggest that, although the focus on the situated and momentary process of multi(trans?)modal knowledge creation activated by translanguaging art can prevent automatic backgrounding of other semiotics (Iedema, 2003) or indeed any other languages, the personal, social and institutional context can have a significant impact on this process. In this study, translanguaging art by foregrounding personal, cultural and affective aspects of language learning (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008),

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authorising and normalising multilingualism (Janks, 2004) and the diversity of sources learners draw upon to create their own language learning worlds (Ros i Solé, 2016) created spaces in which language learners did not have to ‘rely on borrowed clichés’ (Hawkins, 1984: 69), but became active agents of their language learning, critically and creatively creating meaning across languages, modalities and cultures. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) What does the focus on non-lingual ways of knowledge creation and translanguaging imply for the language learning process? (2) What is the impact of wider social discourses and institutional policies on introducing translanguaging art in the language classroom (and vice versa)? (3) What are the necessary conditions for teachers to introduce translanguaging art in their language classrooms? What are the barriers? (4) Is translanguaging art suitable only for an introductory stage of language teaching or could be sustained throughout language learning, with both children and adults? (5) What are the essential ingredients of the pedagogical approach advanced by the use of translanguaging art, can they be transferred to other approaches and, if so, how? Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [Grant No. AH/L503915/01]. Notes (1) ‘приемом искусства является прием остранение вещей и прием затрудненной формы, увеличивающий трудность и долготу восприятия, так как воспринимательный процесс в искусстве самоцелен и должен быть продлен.’ (2) ‘искусство есть способ пережить деланье вещи, а сделанное в искусстве не важно.’

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Sullivan, G. (2010) Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts (2nd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage. Szydłowska, M. (2015) Do You Miss Your Country? London: Centrala. Szydłowska, M. (2016) ‘MMM … PYSZNY BREAD’. Na Emigracji, Facebook post, 13 February. See https://www.facebook.com/259304500883225/photos/a.25930995 7549346/593258487487823/ (accessed 14 January 2019). Wodiczko, K. (1988) Instrumentations. See https://www.krzysztofwodiczko.com/instrumentation/ (accessed 18 November 2018). Wodiczko, K. (2009) Guests. Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. See https://labiennale. art.pl/en/media/krzysztof-wodiczko-goscie-dokumentacja-wideo/ (accessed 22 October 2021). Vygotsky, L.S. (1984) Interaction between learning and development. In Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (pp. 79–91). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Commentary for Part 3: Liberating Language Learning through Art: The Imperative of Cultural Justice Alison Phipps

Openings, New Possibilities

‘Art opens a space’. These words run like a mantra through the four contributions to this section of Liberating Language Education. The visual arts ‘hold a hidden and ambiguous quality which invites curiosity and an openness to multiple perspectives’, says Anderson, in his consideration of the poetic and artistic potential for pedagogy in the artist Ermes’ work: The impact of poetry comes through its emotional and expressive power. Like visual art it is open to multiple interpretations and can stimulate reflections on culture and language.

In turn, Charitonos leads the title of her piece with ‘Opening spaces of learning’ and has ‘How do objects open up possibilities for action?’ as a key question. She also focuses on the emotional openness in a teacher in a Greek complementary school, describing how a teacher ‘opened up to her students with an object of personal meaning to her’, before concluding: In order to understand and open up new learning spaces in community language education, learners and teachers and their contexts and practices should be our point of departure instead of what is technologically possible.

While not focusing specifically on ‘opening’, Charalambous is concerned to identify ‘new possibilities’ and ‘flexibility’ in her work with animations in a Greek language complementary school. Finally, Futro uses analysis and rubrics as part of her research design, introducing Polish contemporary

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artwork to multilingual primary children ‘during which students, inspired by the artworks, are opening up to the new ways of working’. Several contributors cite Leung and Scarino to underscore their insistence on the potential for art to ‘open[s] a space for exploring the multiplicity of meanings, the openness and uncertainty of the interpretation and creation of meaning, and how historical and cultural references are encoded’ (Leung & Scarino, 2016: 89) This focus is in no way surprising. The literature on language and intercultural studies has influenced the key reports (Council of Europe; MLA) on languages and language pedagogy in the academy over the last two decades. The reports themselves rest on a scholarship, including my own, which has insisted on a tolerance of ambiguity, ethics, creativity, political empathy and critical reflection. In order to accomplish such approaches within language pedagogy a range of approaches have been suggested, from the teaching of ‘critical incidents’ through ‘rich points’ (Agar, 1994; MacDonald & O’Regan, 2013) through ethnographic approaches (Phipps, 2009; Roberts et al., 2001) to the use of literary texts and drama (Byram & Fleming, 1998; Corbett, 2003, 2010; Corbett & Phipps, 2006; Frimberger, 2016; Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004). What the arts are able to enact, it is claimed by the arts and humanities, is nuance, subtlety, a place to learn to go travelling in the imagination and to practise the philosophy, critical or otherwise, of hermeneutics (Attridge, 2004; Bassnett, 2002; Phipps, 2010) – in short, openness to other worlds, other languages, other ways of expressing oneself across a range of genres, formed culturally, into more culture. Anderson notes in his chapter that the term culture has taken on two meanings, both present throughout the work in this section of the book. These are, following Williams, famously that of ‘high art and culture’, that is, the work that is seen to symbolically encapsulate the highest capacities of expression in time and place and, secondly, ‘everyday life’, i.e. the work of the people in crafting and dwelling through traditions and modes of existence. These definitions are further complicated by UNESCO’s rubrics of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, whereby the historical dimensions meet those of living culture. What the contributions here represent, however, are both/and. There are examples of ‘contemporary art’ in Futro’s case, where the work of Polish-born visual artists Monika Szydłowska, Małgorzata Dawidek and Krzysztof Wodiczko meet the cultural work of multilingual children in an after-school group as they make their own meanings. In Charitonos’ chapter there are objects from everyday life practices and traditions – the Greek cross or the bank note – being met in the museum, the house par excellence for symbolically defi ning what should be preserved. Anderson brings in the lettered artwork of Ermes, the famous contemporary Arabic artist, to provoke enactive cognition in the pupils, and Charalambous uses

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animations to situate Peace as a character from the imagination. Her work here draws on the pupils’ imagination of calm and safety, which they chose to represent with holidays on beaches. Each chapter demonstrates the way in which bringing visual and tactile artistic material into the classroom, as a ‘third term’ in an encounter with the students, decentres the focus on language as the object, and allows the children to language, or translanguage. While this is significant, what is more significant, it seems, is the way this encounter between culture in the first sense, and culture in the second sense, enables a fusion of the two to come into view. Something is made. And what is made is not the same as what was present, artistically and culturally, in the encounter. The encounter has ‘unlocked’ or ‘opened’ the students up to ‘new possibilities’. Closings

I am, as my own work has shown, convinced not just by the argument that arts can be used productively to open students out into language worlds, thought worlds and intercultural encounters – that the mediating power of art as a third term has powerful potential. It is clear from all the work undertaken by the four contributors to chapters here that there is considerable skill involved in selecting suitable venues and materials, formulating questions, scaffolding encounters and ensuring a sense of safety. This latter point is important as the arts are troublers, resisters, they can be vulgar and profane and obscene, they can also be used subtly and overtly for propaganda purposes and, like translation, they have long been the subject of philosophical suspicion in the Western tradition (Scarry, 2001). How one uses arts, and how trustworthy are the mediators, teachers and artists is important. And yes, this is important in the encounter between the artwork and the cultural worker-pupils, teachers and enablers, where work is. But it is also true that anything does not go. Critical insight is a vital part of the hermeneutic circle’s turning. Dialogue and debate can and should co-exist in the classroom alongside the desire to open up, unlock, create new possibilities. New possibilities might not be desirable in and of themselves. They may be exclusive, racist, misogynist, classist. The world in which we live and breathe today uses the arts for all such malign purposes. And for good. Within the contributions to hand there is, then, a further point to be made which relates to what is happening in the cultural moments of making through the encounters between the artwork and the cultural lifemaking work of the students, scaffolded by institutions, enablers and teachers. For these moments are always, just as they are opening up, unlocking and creating new possibilities, at one and the same time closing down, locking and choosing to drop certain other possibilities. Whereas the work of learning a language, or other subjects for that matter, is to a large degree cumulative, additive, the work of art making from and

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through languaging is a different matter. To make art, certain things will never appear on the canvas. Peace only came because the palm trees and beach took precedence over the woods, or rivers or birds, in Charalambous’ study. ‘The stark beauty of a single letter’ still needs the single letter to be selected above the other letters, still needs Arabic to be the script and not, say Ge’ez. The blue almond only came into existence because the red walnut did not. Selection is vital, what to put in and what to take out, and the way this morphs and changes and comes into being is itself part of the pedagogical process of teaching discernment – be it for colours, associations or ethical choices. When Futro writes: Urdu, which was initially orange, swapped places with French and became purple, only to become orange again a week later. The languages did not sit stable in children’s representations of their bodies, nor did their inclusion reflect the deep relationship children had with the languages.

She is articulating something of the way in which a critical discernment, made of artistic and intercultural encounter, might be language, in a moment, and a rehearsal for a moment to come. Again, in my own work I have written of language learning as being like a rehearsal in safe spaces whereby the way in which play and orderings might be discovered and practised until sense-making is possible (Phipps, 2007). So, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, in the end is also the beginning, in the opening is also the closing. In the intensifying interest in arts and their potential to serve the liberal democratic agendas of tolerance, equality and diversity it is important that, in the idealism utopianisms which tempt us all, a tempering is also needed. This strand of pedagogy is ripe, and full of the rush that comes when transformational potential is witnessed. But this is only half the story and a maturing field of arts and liberating language learning will need to probe more deeply in future, building on this important work here, to ponder the things that do not open up, to consider the complicity of both art and language in oppression, in destruction (Gramling, 2016). For art requires exclusion, discipline, constant correction to undertake the deep work society has always needed art to do – the work of ceremony, the work of gathering, the work of memorial, of celebration and praise, of rituals which announce the opening up of life, and its closing down. Death. References Agar, M. (1994) Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation. New York: William Morrow. Attridge, D. (2004) The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Bassnett, S. (2002) Is there hope for the humanities in the 21st century? Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 1 (1), 101–110.

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Byram, M. and Fleming, M. (1998) Language Learning in Intercultural Perspective: Approaches through Drama and Ethnography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corbett, J. (2003) An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching (1st edn). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Corbett, J. (2010) Intercultural Language Activities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corbett, J. and Phipps, A. (2006) Culture, language and technological control: Virtual intercultural connections. In G. Linke (ed.) New Media – New Teaching Options (pp. 157–178). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag. Frimberger, K. (2016) Enabling arts-based, multilingual learning spaces for young people with refugee backgrounds. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 24 (2), 1–15. Gramling, D. (2016) The Invention of Monolingualism. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Leung, C. and Scarino, A. (2016) Reconceptualising the nature of goals and outcomes in language/s education. The Modern Language Journal 100 (S1), 81–95. MacDonald, M.N. and O’Regan, J.P. (2013) The ethics of intercultural communication. Educational Philosophy and Theory 45 (10), 1005–1017. doi:10.1111/j.14695812.2011.00833.x Phipps, A. (2007) Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival: Languaging, Tourism, Life. Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Phipps, A. (2009) Ethnographers as language learners. In P. Collins and A. Gallinat (eds) The Ethnographic Self as Resource: Writing Memory and Experience into Ethnography (pp. 97–111). Oxford: Berghahn Books. Phipps, A. (2010) Drawing breath: Creative elements and their exile from higher education. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 9 (1), 42–53. See http://ahh.sagepub. com/content/9/1/42.abstract. Phipps, A. and Gonzalez, M. (2004) Modern Languages: Learning and Teaching in an Intercultural Field. London: Sage. Roberts, C., Byram, M., Barro, A., Jordan, S. and Street, B. (2001) Language Learners as Ethnographers. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Scarry, E. (2001) On Beauty and Being Just. London: Duckbacks.

Part 4 Voices, Identities and Citizenship

12 How Weird is Weird? Young People, Activist Citizenship and Multivoiced Digital Stories Yu-chiao Chung and Vicky Macleroy

I took my camera with me all the time wherever I went. I didn’t pay any attention to my surroundings and my life like this before. (Student, FSHS, Taiwan)

What happens when young people begin to frame stories from their communities through the lens of a camera? How can critical engagement with digital technology enable young people to construct alternative narratives and capture the languages and voices of their communities? In what ways can digital storytelling contribute to translingual-transcultural learning within global learning networks? In this chapter we look at how the process of digital storytelling is rooted in the community and how communities can be viewed as a ‘space for collective learning, action and change’ (Packham, 2008: 8) and as a space for reciprocity. Transforming personal and cultural stories into a bilingual film pushes young people to imagine other viewpoints, reconceptualise identities and put across their ideas to a wider audience. As digital storytellers, young people start to think about how the lives of people in their community are understood and how the sharing and shaping of digital stories can be viewed as a political act (Hill, 2014). Young filmmakers are encouraged to engage in a form of activist citizenship (Isin & Neilsen, 2008), opening up new ways to represent and reimagine their communities and advocate new kinds of citizenship. Despite advances in digital technology, much school-based learning around language and literacy seeks to control and contain language and provides little opportunity for innovation and creativity, or an openness towards uncertainty. This chapter explores the power of putting digital technology in the hands of young people to construct their own narratives of freedom and social justice and the appeal to both teachers and students of this approach: ‘It is Critical Digital Storytelling’s ethos and approach 255

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to storytelling as life-affirming and transformative as much as it is their technological savvy and expertise that continues to draw newcomers’ (Pleasants & Salter, 2014: 5). Digital storytelling has been connected with active citizenship and the politics of doing good (Hill, 2014), global citizenship education (Truong-White & McLean, 2015), a pedagogy of Human Rights (Benick, 2011), and as a site for resistance and restoration (Stewart & Ivala, 2017). However, there is a lack of research in the field making links between digital storytelling, active citizenship and language learning. Drawing on the work of our Critical Connections Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project (Anderson et al., 2018), this chapter looks at the way digital storytelling enables young people to develop and share other ways of knowing and experiencing language-and-culture. International partnerships with schools were an integral part of the project from its outset (2012–ongoing) and we have developed particularly strong links with primary and secondary schools in Taiwan due to personal connections forged by the co-author of this chapter, Yu-Chiao Chung. Creating and sharing a bilingual digital story with a genuine global audience brings authenticity and purpose to language learning while supporting broader transcultural and citizenship aims (Chung, 2016). The research presented here focuses on the case studies of two Taiwanese schools (primary and secondary) in the project that made space for young people (aged 10–11 and 15–16 years old) to construct ChineseEnglish digital stories about fairness and belonging. The young people become researchers and documentary fi lmmakers walking through their communities to uncover local stories and reflect upon what it means to be a citizen in the places where they live. Language learning and citizenship are examined through focusing on the different stages of the digital storytelling process and how young people crafted these digital stories to make sense of and shape their views of community. The digital stories present ideas of protest, reflection and reconnection with language-and-culture and a decentring of knowledge, what counts for knowledge, and who speaks for whom (Campbell et al., 2018). Building on our experience as language teachers, digital storytelling workshop leaders and researchers into language learning and digital storytelling, the following section explores the complexity of bringing together digital storytelling, language learning and citizenship. Identities, Digital Storytelling and Citizenship

How democratic is digital storytelling? Can the process of digital storytelling open up new spaces for young people to explore identities and think about citizenship and language in the digital age? In defi ning digital storytelling, Lambert talks about having agency: ‘Being the author of your own life, of the way you move through the world, is a fundamental idea in democracy’ (Lambert, 2013: 2). Digital storytelling is viewed as a form

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of cultural activism and a digital tool to explore lived experiences and create stories that matter. In reflecting on the emergence of the digital storytelling movement alongside the development of the internet, Lambert (2017) looks back to the former belief that open access to digital media production tools and distribution opportunities of the web could ‘promote global democracy and liberation’ (Lambert, 2017: 22). Opening up access to digital media production became linked with an emergent movement of media justice and media activism. Digital storytelling, as well as being based in local communities, began to bring into being new communities and stories. However, access to media production is not enough in itself and these notions of open access and production link closely to concepts of critical literacy and how it relates to social action. In talking about power, language and social change, Janks in conversation (Turner & Griffin, 2019) connects the process of design/redesign closely with social action as it ‘helps us to consider how we would produce that text differently. How would you produce that practice differently? What’s your agency in relation to those processes?’ (Turner & Griffin, 2019: 319). This question of agency is central to the digital storytelling process and to understanding critical literacy. Janks puts forward an interdependent critical literacy framework that identifies four dimensions of critical literacy (power, diversity, access and design/redesign) and argues that ‘while the dimensions themselves are not new, what is new is the theorisation of their interdependence’ (Janks, 2013: 225). In examining the process of digital storytelling, as well as looking at young people’s access to media production and design/redesign, we will also be looking at questions of power and diversity in relation to the digital stories that are produced. In creating texts such as digital stories with an ‘ethic of social justice … to protect our own rights and the rights of others’ (Janks, 2010: 98), young people have to navigate the tensions existing within cultures, languages and communities. When young people become both consumers and producers of digital narratives there is a shift in perspective and power (Macleroy, 2016), and young people are motivated to interrogate these tensions and decide how to represent their lives and the lives of others. Negotiating these tensions, making decisions and deciding how to frame their digital stories about lived experiences fosters agency and opens up the space where the digital stories emerge: ‘located in the field of tension between their own and others’ lifeworlds’ (Erstad & Silseth, 2008: 219). In the process of digital storytelling in schools, teachers have to think of ways of carrying out digital storytelling linked to citizenship that enables young people to ‘understand their own sense of agency, that they are not powerless, that they can change things’ (Janks, cited in Turner & Griffi n, 2019: 321). Hartley (2017) links digital storytelling with citizenship, leadership and communication and an expression of a common humanity and human rights: ‘our storytelling is our unique kind of

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advocacy as a citizen’ (Hartley, 2017: 223). Digital storytelling is seen as not about the grand narratives of confl ict and conquest, but connected with alternative narratives of hope, justice and compassion and how new forms of political association can be created in contemporary digital culture by digital storytelling: ‘what kind of political narrative is this; for what polity and what kind of citizen?’ (Hartley, 2017: 221). Lambert (2017) perceives digital storytelling as a form of emotional self-examination and as deeply rooted in a sense of identity. In crafting a story, young people are able to start interrogating how ‘identities are influenced by social structures too, and how this impacts upon their everyday lives’ (Habib, 2018: 144). In their digital stories, young people have the space and the media platform to critique aspects of society and imagine how things could be different. Their digital stories can become a powerful medium for social change: ‘Empathy and desire for social change begin with an understanding of others; to listen to their stories and to share one’s own’ (Darvin & Norton, 2014: 60). What happens when digital storytelling is combined with citizenship education? There is a growing concern that citizenship education is becoming, not about diversity and exploring and discussing cultures, identities and communities, but about a ‘common national identity, advocating assimilation and conformity, not inclusion based on the rights which should be central to citizenship’ (Packham, 2008: 94). The concept of citizenship informing our digital storytelling work views children and young people as having the rights and the ability to be active citizens ‘within their everyday lives, including school, not merely preparing them for a future role in society’ (Packham, 2008: 95). This social justice approach towards citizenship runs counter to assimilationist approaches to citizenship frequently advocated in schools which tend to control and smother individual and group differences through focusing on responsibilities, social control and preparedness for work. Can digital storytelling affect the ways in which young people engage with concepts of citizenship and promote critical dialogue and a ‘commitment to a critical, inclusive perspective’ (Packham, 2008: 110)? In this chapter, we argue that through digital storytelling young people are provided with the media tools to investigate the rights of citizens within their communities, develop ‘critical cultural awareness’ (Byram et al., 2001: 7) and think about: ‘in what ways can the sharing, bearing witness to and shaping of stories be construed as a political act?’ (Hill, 2014: 24). In becoming actively engaged in the construction and reconstruction of lived experiences and stories, the young people begin to realise that ‘transformation is an unpredictable, emergent process’ (Nucera & Lee, 2014: 88). In the digital stories shared in this chapter, the young people reflect upon how crafting and framing their stories becomes a ‘process of learning with and through difference’ (Phipps, 2019: 11). These young people raise the question that frames one of their digital stories about how weird

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is weird. This questioning of ‘normativity’ links to research in the field of community-based digital media projects: ‘there are so many people who share that feeling of “otherness” – whether because they’re mixed-race or adopted, or just “weird” in the context of where they were raised’ (Nucera & Lee, 2014: 93). Nikolajeva (2009), in discussing ‘discourse on the other’ in relation to juvenile literature, proposes the concept of ‘aetonormativity’, critiquing adult normativity in relation to children’s literature and concluding that perhaps in the future ‘the term children’s literature will only be reserved for literature by children’ (Nikolajeva, 2009: 23). The digital stories by young people discussed in this chapter embrace these ideas and build on the notion of ‘identity texts’ (Cummins & Early, 2011) that foster young people’s agency, languages and identities. Technology is seen as an ‘amplifier to enhance the process of identity text production and dissemination’ (Cummins & Early, 2011: 3). Voices, Digital Stories and Activist Citizenship

In imagining a decolonial multilinguality, Phipps (2019: 89) argues that we have ‘to work to share the power of representation and presentation’. In shifting the focus of language learning to the different voices within communities, Phipps advocates a decolonial multilinguality that ‘would take to the streets and learn from many patient speakers; it would be part of a befriending, community practice, a purposeful consideration of how the world around us is shared in speech’ (Phipps, 2019: 92). It is these indigenous voices and this precarious knowledge that the young people seek out during the storytelling process and in their stories provide space for ‘indigenous peoples who know all about the loss of land and languages’ (Phipps, 2019: 5). Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of multivoicedness is used to describe these stories to emphasise the ‘living dialogical threads’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 276) of these voices and communities and how ‘each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 283). A key characteristic of community learning is identified as ‘active selfdirected engagement’ (Packham, 2008: 110), and in creating their stories the young people actively sought out knowledge in their communities and shifted perspective to these voices. These young people realised the potential of digital stories to become tools for advocacy (Crisan & Bortun, 2017) when storytellers were located and fi lmed in their communities. In connecting digital storytelling with a pedagogy of human rights, Benick (2011) discusses the emergence of new concepts of citizenship and belonging which include human rights discourse around the right to one’s culture within and without national borders. Digital stories can act as a catalyst for young people to research their communities and uncover untold stories: ‘Digital storytelling, then, can be an effective mechanism for preserving a culture of one’s own, an opportunity not only to collect invisible histories but to authenticate them’ (Benick, 2011: 40).

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In discussing transformative global citizenship education, TruongWhite and McLean (2015) point out that although digital storytelling is firmly situated within an ethic of social justice, there is a ‘paucity of literature explicitly connecting digital storytelling with classroom practices of global citizenship’ (Truong-White & McLean, 2015: 7). The classroom practices reflected upon in this chapter are starting to link the process of digital storytelling with global citizenship as the young people share their stories across the globe and teachers recognise that digital storytelling has ‘the potential to support teaching from a global perspective’ (TruongWhite & McLean, 2015: 7). Teaching global citizenship through the process of digital storytelling can also ‘offer counter-narratives to negative ideas and perspectives’ (Truong-White & McLean, 2015: 21) and critique relations of power. Young people are not told what they should think or do, the focus is on historical/cultural production of knowledge, and ‘notions of power, voice and difference are central for critical citizenship education’ (Andreotti, 2006: 49). In a project ‘Through Other Eyes’, Andreotti and Souza (2008) focused on indigenous perceptions of global issues and invited participants to examine their own perceptions and cultural values to ‘reevaluate their own positions in the global context and to learn from other local ways of knowing and seeing’ (Andreotti & Souza, 2008: 4). In analysing the programme ‘Bridges to Understanding: Digital storytelling and problem solving for youth – worldwide’, Truong-White and McLean (2015: 3) investigated the extent to which such ‘technologybased initiatives could support a transformative approach to global citizenship education’. Digital stories were seen as reproducing dominant ideologies as well as creating spaces for activism and challenging how things stand and that ideological tensions within digital stories ‘can be used as starting points for further dialogue’ (Truong-White & McLean, 2015: 20). In thinking about citizenship in relation to activism, Peutrell (2019) reflects upon relationships between individuals, communities and the state and the highly contested debates about ‘status, rights, responsibilities, identity … and what it means to participate as a citizen’ (Peutrell, 2019: 46). Citizenship should be approached as a lived experience whose ideas and practices are open to change: ‘citizenship learning should be participatory, ethnographically informed and grounded in students’ real experiences of and capacities for citizenship’ (Peutrell, 2019: 56). Activist citizenship is about contesting citizenship norms and demanding new citizenship rights and identities. These public ‘acts of citizenship’ may involve demonstrations and protests but they ‘can also be found in everyday practices, such as community building, cultural production’ (Peutrell, 2019: 57). The young people in the case studies explored in this chapter research what it means to be a citizen in their communities and debate representations of citizenship within their stories.

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The older students (15–16 years old) are also learning English as a foreign language (EFL) through creating their digital stories, and this participatory approach to language learning ‘not only assists students to develop competence and confidence as users of English but also, by enabling them to shape their own learning, their sense of agency as citizens’ (Peutrell & Cooke, 2019: 231). Creating digital stories in order to learn English contrasts with the pedagogical approaches that these young people are used to in Taiwan’s high schools where teaching is heavily reliant on EFL textbooks. These EFL textbooks are a product of large international markets and tend to support a ‘dominant cultural hegemony and ideology’ (Su, 2016: 394). In our case studies, the young people move beyond the EFL textbooks used in their classrooms and use the process of creating bilingual Chinese-English digital stories to explore a range of diverse groups holding different values and beliefs and experiencing ‘other ways of knowing and being’ (Su, 2016: 404). Recent research in Taiwan found that primary school teachers wanted a ‘shift from competition to co-learning’ and for students to learn in ‘interaction with peers, family members, and real society’ (Chen et al., 2020: 49). The younger students (10–11 years old) in our research were developing literacy through real situations and their dialects and languages. A Critical Ethnographic Research Approach towards Digital Storytelling

The case studies presented here were part of the international Critical Connections Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project (MDST) (2012– ongoing) which connects children and young people with a new pedagogical approach to learning languages and fosters an active, critical and creative engagement with digital technology (Anderson & Macleroy, 2016). Critical ethnography was adopted as the overarching methodology as we wanted to understand different classroom contexts through a qualitative, context-based, participatory, multiperspectival and interpretive approach and take a critical stance towards language pedagogy in schools. Our research methodology embraced both the pedagogical and the political, placing social justice as a core principle in relation to language-andculture learning. The critical ethnographer is seen as contributing to discourses of social justice and other ways of knowing and the research process is viewed as a dialogical performance (Madison, 2005). This collaborative research approach created a research paradigm that was responsive to the local contexts of teachers and students and flexible in its approach. This chapter focuses on the case studies of two Taiwanese schools. The Taiwanese students’ digital stories are viewed as embodied objects of study (Alexandra, 2017). Research data were collected from a range of sources (audio-recorded interviews with students and teachers; videoed presentations for fi lm festivals; digital stories on the project

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website), capturing the three stages of the digital storytelling process (preproduction, production, post-production). We have set out to look at the extent to which digital storytelling enables young people to explore notions of democratic citizenship and the ways in which people use language to make sense of and shape the world. Research Context: International Partner Schools in Taiwan

In this section we discuss the MDST carried out in two mainstream schools in Taiwan: Fengshan Senior High School (FSHS) and Laonong Elementary School (LES). Both were key international partner schools in the project which was implemented in an EFL class in the high school and a cross-curricular context in the elementary school. The project lead teachers at FSHS were university friends of Yu-chiao Chung (co-author of this chapter) and have been actively involved in the project in Taiwan. The partnership with LES was facilitated by collaboration with the National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. Fengshan Senior High School: The Digital Story How Weird is Weird? Yu-Chiao asked me if I would like to join this project of making digital stories. Little did I know that from the moment I said yes to her, an interesting and rewarding journey had begun. (Peggy, EFL Teacher, FSHS)

In Fengshan Senior High School, comparable with many other mainstream secondary schools in Taiwan, the prime goal of students (15–17 years old) is to be admitted to a good university. A student’s academic achievement in English plays a decisive role in their admission to higher education and English is considered one of the most important school subjects. English is taught as the main foreign language from junior high school (aged 12–15). Mainstream schools in Taiwan follow the National Curriculum and are allowed to choose a set of textbooks authorised by the Educational Bureau. The EFL textbooks only consider the culture and environment of the English speaking world. Due to time constraints and the volume of material in the National Curriculum, EFL teachers are normally only able to cover the specified content. The learning and teaching environment in EFL classrooms is exam oriented, not learner centred. Teachers lecture on grammar, vocabulary and reading while students are asked to sit and listen. The EFL teachers at FSHS took the opportunity to implement the project in their classes, hoping that their students would benefit from the project and from collaborating with children in other parts of the world. The overall theme of MDST (2015–2016) was Fairness. The class at FSHS explored fairness in the Taiwanese education system: inequality between teachers and students; prejudice towards those of different appearance; and biased gender identity.

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Pre-production: Deciding collaboratively on the citizenship/ identity topic and storyline for digital storytelling

The digital story on gender identity – How Weird is Weird? – was created by a group of six students (15–16 years old). It was based on the true story of a 15-year-old student who died in his school toilet block in 2000. This boy, Yung-chih Yeh, was also called the ‘Rose boy’ because, unlike the other boys in his class who liked playing sports outdoors, he preferred to stay in the classroom reading, drawing and sewing. Biased gender stereotyping caused him great trouble; he was bullied at school. To avoid conflict, he adopted the rule of going to the toilet before break time. On the day he died, his body was found in the toilet block. This incident is now well known in Taiwan and is included in the Citizenship Education curriculum which, among many other topics, covers human rights and justice. Our citizenship teacher told us about this ‘Rose boy’. He was the same age as us. We are lucky that it didn’t happen to us. When we knew that the theme of the digital storytelling project is ‘Fairness’, we thought this would be a good topic to present, to remind people not to be biased. (Student A, FSHS)

When the students were choosing the topic and forming their story, they went through several stages: participating, mind-mapping, discussing, disagreeing, debating, voting and fi nally reaching an agreement. One of the students recalled the process. We were in the same group because we were good friends. We still are. We always like to work with friends because it is easier. Not all of us agreed to use this story as our topic. I didn’t want to work on this topic because people didn’t like to talk about it. Finally, we voted and agreed on this topic. It was good for us to be able to express different ideas. (Student B, FSHS)

This group of young people decided to pose the question: ‘How weird is weird?’. There were many other questions that they wanted to explore in their digital story: • • • • •

What would be different if the boy’s fellow students had acted differently? What was the boy like at home? What did his mother think about her son? (Figure 12.1) What was the reaction of his mother to this terrible incident? How did his mother cope and continue her daily life after her son’s death?

Production: Doing citizenship and designing (selecting semiotic resources and exploring modalities) the English-Chinese digital story

The young people showed their creativity and skills in designing their fi lm. They re-imagined what it would be like to be Yeh and his fellow

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Figure 12.1 Screenshot of Yeh’s mother in the digital story How Weird is Weird?

students and acted out their roles. The scene of Yeh’s death, depicted in black and white with English subtitles and voiceover, shows their empathy and sadness. • What kind of boy was he? The story turned to colourful moving images of Yeh’s mother riding her motorbike to work on a farm. The mother spoke warmly, yet sadly, about her son and how he had been considerate and gentle. She referred to other farm workers complimenting Yeh for his kindness and helpful nature. Her statement clarified the students’ question and left the audience in no doubt as to how kind Yeh had been. While she was talking, photographs of him as an innocent, carefree little boy were shown. • Did you know your son was different? The young people cleverly addressed the main theme of their fi lm. They showed Yeh’s mother quoting the psychiatrist to whom he had been referred by his teacher: I have to tell you that your son is entirely normal. If anybody thinks he is weird, this is the one who is abnormal. (Psychiatrist quoted by Yeh’s mum)

The film revealed that although Yeh’s mother had visited his school several times to report the bullying, neither the school nor the teachers had reacted. The film suggests that this might have precipitated the tragic incident. This group of young people advocated in their story: ‘We should never let such a tragedy happen again’. The MDST project also opened up spaces for them to imagine and hypothesise: ‘What if people fairly treat those who are different from us?’. They acted out a scene in which Yeh’s fellow students engaged positively with him, included him, and invited him to play basketball during break time. They imagined how the story could have been very different.

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Figure 12.2 Screenshot of Yeh’s mother at the Pride March in How Weird is Weird?

• Epilogue: Be yourself The students included live footage of Yeh’s mother speaking out at a Pride march in 2010 (Figure 12.2). She bravely made a stand for her son and for others being stereotyped: ‘My kids, God created people like you. There must be a light to fight for your human rights. Be yourself!’. She further expressed her determination in the interview and the group of students made their strong and heartfelt appeal at the end of the film. Though Yeh’s mother lost her beloved son, she devoted her love to all of those being stereotyped or discriminated against. So do we. So, will you? (Subtitles, How Weird is Weird)

On being asked the reason for the use of a rhetorical question as the ending of their fi lm, one of the students reflected: We had a lot of debate about the ending. In the end, we felt that inviting and including our audience was the best way. It was better than just telling them what to do. (Student C, FSHS) Post-production: Activist citizenship and voices (editing, reviewing, peer-assessing and redrafting) in their digital story

The class had a weekly presentation to show their progress and for peer-assessment. Peter, EFL teacher and project lead teacher, reflected on his experience of mutual learning from those weekly presentations. For myself, I have learnt the importance of ‘process’. Every draft that the students finished and showed me during every stage was not the end product. There were always some things that needed to be amended and

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improved. Through discussion with me, or between themselves, they always found problems requiring them to do more, deeper research, to change their way of presenting the story, or to record some part of the story again. (Peter, EFL Teacher, FSHS)

Peter mentioned that he always expected the submitted work to be perfect. However, he witnessed that through the making of the digital story and through the ongoing process of peer review and discussion, the students learnt what they needed to improve and redraft. The ongoing process of peer-review and redrafting was a significant opportunity for the students to practise activist citizenship: taking responsibilities, being actively involved in the community, tackling problems, bringing about change or resisting unwanted change. They developed the skills, knowledge and understanding to be able to make decisions and to vote in democratic processes. Peter commented that the MDST project was not just an opportunity for his students to learn but also for himself: ‘This process has overturned my attitude towards teaching’. I previously had a lot of conflict with the students. As a teacher, I tended to give the students suggestions which I thought would be the most efficient way for them to tell the story and complete the project. Sometimes, I got worried because I could see them going around in circles, taking a long time. However, not all of them would accept my suggestions. They insisted on telling the story in their own way – since it was THEIR story. (Peter, EFL Teacher, FSHS)

He recalled a serious confl ict he had with the students designing How Weird is Weird? After their weekly presentation he provided some ideas. The students were stressed and embarrassed by his suggestions. One of them shouted angrily: ‘What do you want Our story to be like?’: I asked Yu-Chiao for her suggestions in dealing with this confl ict. She told me to ask them questions and not just give them suggestions – How do they feel about this part? Do they think they can improve it by doing something else? I suddenly realised that this was something I had to learn. I always gave feedback and expected them to accept my comments. I should have respected their ownership of their story and raised questions when I had doubts. I should have allowed them time and space to review their story and consider whether any improvements were needed; just as I expected they would do with their classmates. I had forgotten I should have done the same. (Peter, EFL Teacher, FSHS)

The digital story How Weird is Weird?, completed in 2016, continues to have an impact on the teacher and the students. Peter reflected that it was the fi rst project his students had carried out and completed from the initial stage to its fi nal presentation. This digital storytelling project provided an opportunity to combine learning EFL with citizenship. The students used English in meaningful contexts and for specific purposes. Peter commented on the profound and long-lasting influence of the project:

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It is like you have planted seeds in our heart and they keep growing. The students became very sensitive about ‘fairness’ around them. During the years following completion of the fi lm, I often heard them commenting on their surroundings and on news, saying ‘this would be a good topic for the digital storytelling project’. (Peter, EFL Teacher, FSHS)

One of the students who created the digital story How Weird is Weird? is now studying at university and reflected on the project three years later. He was very proud to be able to talk about their film and about Yeh and Yeh’s mother: ‘it seems we have been in the battle together’. He admired Yeh’s mother for her bravery and persistence and her strong, loving and caring attitude: ‘We saw her at the Pride Parade cheering people and shouting firmly to them – We have to face the sunlight. To fight for our rights!’. Taiwan became the first nation in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage on 24 May 2019. Laonong Elementary School: The Digital Story The Indestructible Belonging I hope one day my pupils have the ability to create their own stories independently. They are able to tell people their stories about their life and their hometown. (Jimmy, Teacher, LES)

The second digital story, The Indestructible Belonging, was created by children in Year 5 (10–11 years old) at Laonong Elementary School. Lao Nong is a small village in the mountains of Southern Taiwan. It is in a financially and educationally deprived area with poor connections to the outside world. Most of the residents there are of aboriginal ethnic origin and speakers of various dialects. Adults tend to leave to fi nd work in the cities, leaving children and the elderly in the village. LES is a small, rural school for children (6–12 years old). The teacher turnover rate is high; most teachers only stay for a year. The children working on the MDST project were all of aboriginal ethnicity. Some of them lived with their grandparents (or other non-parental relatives); some of them were under the care of social services. The lead teacher, Jimmy, was the children’s Humanities teacher with expertise in ICT, photography and digital storytelling. He was concerned that this group of children lacked motivation to learn and had a poor record of school attendance. The MDST project was embedded in the ‘Local Culture’ curriculum, where primary schools have flexibility to design the curriculum to explore and incorporate the resources in their local communities. Jimmy integrated the digital storytelling project with his Local Culture Humanities class, exploring the traditional culture of the PingPu (or Taivoan) Tribe. This project was interdisciplinary, combining language, art, ICT, history, geography, music and citizenship education. In 2016, the first year in which LES participated in the MDST project, Jimmy’s Year 5 class designed a digital story, Fairness in Ethnicities. They

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introduced the history of their local ethnic groups, wearing traditional dress, and proudly presented their rich cultures. Their message was a plea for people to respect minorities and treat them as equals. In 2017, the next Year 5 group at Laonong Elementary School designed The Indestructible Belonging – a prologue to Fairness in Ethnicities. The 2017 fi lm covered how the PingPu/Taivoan people fought for recognition as an aboriginal tribe. As in the previous digital story, the children spoke to tribal elders and scholars. Pre-production: Exploring citizenship and identity (doing fieldwork within communities using digital media tools)

Although most of the children were from families with poor living conditions, they considered the local community to be their extended family. In order to motivate the children to attend school, Jimmy engaged them in rediscovering their traditions and the culture surrounding them and to make a digital story. The children enjoyed doing fieldwork in the village. They liked to listen to the older generation to talk about the olden-times. It was like stories from a different world. We started from Kuma, the temple where the Pingpu/Taivoan Tribe held sacred rituals to worship the spirit of their ancestors. It was also a place where people settled arguments or fights within this community. The children walked past these places every day but only in their fieldwork did many discover what these places were for. I think this reconnection with community is powerful in engaging the children to reinforce their local culture identity. (Jimmy, Teacher, LES)

The children also attended the traditional night-time sacred ritual which celebrates a peaceful year within the community. After this oral history from the elders, the pupils visited Professor Jian, whose research interests are in cultural anthropology and Taiwan Pingpu/Taivoan ethnic history. He gave the pupils a detailed, lively introduction into how the Pingpu/Taivoan Tribe was forced to leave their land. Another precious experience was the contribution of a researcher/bookshop keeper, Mr Yu, who worked with the pupils at weekends and later wrote John Thomson Formosa: The Discovery of Taiwanese Cultural Heritage, 1871(Yu, 2019). Thomson was a Scottish photographer – one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East and document the people, landscapes and artefacts of Eastern cultures. He travelled to Laonong and took many photographs. Mr Yu showed the pupils around by following in John Thomson’s footsteps and comparing the present with past photographs. The fieldwork built their understanding and connection to the community. Based on these stories, we started to work on the storyline, hoping to document the fascinating history of the people and the land. (Jimmy, Teacher, LES)

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During the fieldwork, the children were provided with mobile electronic devices to capture their work in still and moving images. They learnt how to shoot from different angles to achieve the effects they wanted. The pupils were encouraged to be critical and creative to frame and focus the theme they wanted to illustrate. Production: Activist citizenship and voices (discussing the storyline, scripting, acting, filming and creating) in a digital story

• Where do we belong? The children worked in groups, fi lming and uploading the still or moving images. They selected images based on Jimmy’s training: clearly focused images that illustrated ideas and fitted the storyline. This process helped the children to be critical, to provide positive suggestions and to listen to different opinions. The film started with a scene of children wearing traditional clothes and singing the traditional chant of the Pingpu/Taivoan Tribe in front of Kuma. They cleverly linked their fi lm with Fairness in Ethnicities; their film starts with the same firm declaration with which the previous fi lm ended: ‘We will keep fighting’. They stated that the 2016 lawsuit brought by the Pingpu/Taivoan people for tribal recognition had failed. This failure had become increasingly upsetting for the children as they learnt more about their tribe. This complicated political disagreement led to their question: ‘Where do we belong?’. • Our struggle for survival Drawing on their talk with Professor Jian, the children explain how their ancestors originally lived on the plain but were forced to move to the mountains by foreign invaders and the Chinese government. They created call and response poetry to illustrate how their ancestors struggled for survival. The children dressed in tribal costumes, acting out the poem with the call of the invaders and the response of their ancestors (Figure 12.3).

Invaders

Ping Pu Ancestors

We need land to live on

We lost our land

We need women to marry

We have lost our daughters

We use the Min-nan language

We have lost our language

We gave you Han names

We have lost our own names

Our culture is expanding

Our culture is diminishing

We have more and more people

We have fewer and fewer people

We need more land

We are forced to move We are fighting for survival

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Figure 12.3 Screenshot of the conflict in their digital story The Indestructible Belonging

The children came up with the idea of the drama, but Jimmy helped with composing the poem and the use of repetition to remember the lines. Family assistance in school work almost doesn’t exist here. The pupils’ Mandarin ability is very low due to lack of linguistic input. In this story, improving their language ability was one of my main aims; the other was to raise their sense of belonging to their community. (Jimmy, Teacher, LES)

• A dangerous balance – left with no choice In this part of the story, the children continued to describe and hypothesise about their ancestors’ lives: how the Pingpu would have lived after they were forced to move to Laonong. To support their description, the children showed Thomson’s photographs of their ancestors (1871), and compared the location of the photographs with 2017. We saw an old photo of the house we always walk past. It was taken 150 years ago. It is very interesting that we saw our ancestors standing in front of that house. The old house, the old people, the way they look and their clothes. I just cannot imagine the time that long ago. It is fascinating. I think it is very important for us to record what the Tribe is doing now. Our descendants will have something to trace back. (Student A, LES)

The children continued their story, introducing how their ancestors lost their official identity and citizenship which would have allowed them to keep their original names and culture. Our ancestors had to use the Han culture to disguise themselves so that they would not be discriminated against. Just as we mentioned in our story. I didn’t realise how hard their life was at that time. This is very sad but they were left with no choice. Thanks to them, we still have some tradition left. (Student B, LES)

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Figure 12.4 Screenshot of the children at the end of their story The Indestructible Belonging

• The indestructible belonging At the end of this story, the lens turned to the traditional night-time sacred ritual that the children attended and documented. They stated that people were still fighting for the official recognition of their name. The children also acknowledged that they were the descendants of the Pingpu and they should learn their heritage culture and history and recover their long-lost identity. They wore traditional Pingpu dress and sang a traditional song, ‘Tat a Heng’, about a running competition at their annual night-time ritual. The film ended with an encouraging message: ‘We are The Tavioan Tribe from Taiwan! Our culture needs to be passed down; it cannot be forgotten!’ (Figure 12.4). During the entire production process, through constant questioning and research, the children uncovered the history of their ancestors. They collaborated in small groups to incorporate various art forms – drama, dance, singing and artefacts – to depict their story. Post-production: Activist citizenship and voices (editing, reviewing and peer assessing) in their digital story

The children were taught to use an app to edit their fi lm. With ongoing reviewing, peer-assessing and editing, they participated in discussion, gave and accepted suggestions and became flexible towards making changes. The children participated in group discussion and gave feedback actively. In the past, local community classes only occurred during a few weeks in the whole academic year. Most of the class was lectured by the teachers, not allowing students any time to contribute their ideas. This year, because of the digital storytelling project, the children were given space

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to contribute their thoughts. I could see ownership shifted to the students and I am very pleased with the outcome. The local community is their community after all. They should feel close and related to it. (Jimmy, Teacher, LES) Citizenship and the digital story: The Indestructible Belonging

The Indestructible Belonging is a touching, motivational fi lm which took the children a year to complete. It is a story about their ancestors and, for the children, it is a reflection of their past, a reconnection with their present and anticipation for their future. In order to create this digital story, the children started to pay attention to their community and culture. It raised their awareness of public affairs related to them, such as the legalisation lawsuit of the Pingpu Tribe and the annual traditional night-time ritual. The MDST project helped these children to understand what it means to be a citizen with rights. We are very pleased to see the local children interested in our community and its culture. The school children came here with their teachers to investigate the history. We did our best to help. I think this is a good connection and it has mutual benefits. Their excellent fi lms have been sent to different places to be watched by the people who care about our tribe. (Mrs Yang, Community Director of Laonong)

In the MDST project, the children were given the opportunity to present their story abroad which was a very precious experience for them. This experience also gave them a sense of participation in a global community. Both the teacher and the children felt very proud of their digital story. I set up a big screen in the middle of our school field to project the fi lm festival in London on the day our fi lm was shown. All of us were very excited, every staff member and every child in our school. These children had hardly been to the city, let alone abroad. This project linked many disciplines: the humanities, local culture, language and citizenship. (Jimmy, Teacher, LES) Conclusion: Representing Communities and Advocating Multivoiced Citizenship

In arguing that a decentred view of language and literacy learning can enable young people to engage with new ways to represent their communities and advocate new kinds of citizenship, we have drawn on our digital storytelling work, focusing on two case studies in the context of Taiwan. The research fi ndings from these two contrasting school contexts demonstrate the transformative power of putting digital technology into the

How Weird is Weird? 273

hands of children and teenagers to tell their multivoiced community stories. These young people raise vital questions about what it means to be a citizen and the tangible difference between learning about others’ lives and becoming activist citizens and walking in others’ lives in their communities. In creating these digital stories, the young people have skilfully shifted power to their communities and liberated knowledge and what counts for knowledge. The young digital storytellers are beginning to understand their own sense of agency and teachers are learning to trust their students and give them time to move through their stories. The question that arises out of project-based learning is whether an approach that links language learning, digital storytelling and activist citizenship can be fostered and sustained within mainstream elementary and secondary schooling. For me, since we fi nished this project, I have run an elective English module every year and continue applying MDST in every single one of them. (Peter, EFL Teacher, FSHS)

Creative teachers are key to opening up classrooms to experiences and learning that matter to their students, and the EFL teacher and Humanities teacher in these two case studies recognised a sharp shift in their role: ‘overturned my attitude towards teaching’; ‘I could see ownership shifted to the students’. This points to the need for teachers to ‘take seriously the use of both non-mainstream and mainstream knowledge to engage students in grappling with multiple viewpoints’ (Truong-White & McLean, 2015: 18). These case studies demonstrate the importance of activist citizenship and participative, experiential learning (Brownlie, 2001) to prepare young people to act and contribute to local, national and global communities. In crafting their digital stories, the Taiwanese students were developing an intercultural competence seen in their curiosity, openness and ‘ability to decentre’ (Byram et al., 2001: 5). Stewart and Ivala (2017), researching digital storytelling in a South African higher education classroom, noted that ‘students broke down barriers of both language and culture and walked away from the project having changed the way they perceived each other – at that moment in time’ (Stewart & Ivala, 2017: 1172). In this chapter we have made a point of capturing more sustained self-reflection on the effects of using digital storytelling for language-and-culture learning with a focus on citizenship. Reflecting on the digital story How Weird is Weird? three years after the classroom practice, one young person remembers the process intimately. Our group chose a very powerful topic to illustrate fairness. We are very sympathetic and empathetic for Yeh. Anyone of us can fi nd themselves in a minority and be called weird one day. Everyone has the right to be treated fairly. (Student, FSHS)

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Questions for Further Reflection

(1) How would you plan and set up a digital storytelling project in your local community and ensure that local voices and stories were told? (2) How can young people be encouraged to frame their digital stories from a critical standpoint and be encouraged to think of alternative narratives? (3) How do you think digital technology and online learning networks can open new spaces for activist citizenship and translingual-transcultural learning? Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to the students and schools cited in the case studies and the lead project teachers (Peter Lo and Jimmy Chen). We would also like to thank the Paul Hamlyn Foundation for funding our work (2012–2017). Notes How Weird is Weird? – https://vimeo.com/169446882 The Indestructible Belonging – https://vimeo.com/221545542 Project website – https://goldsmithsmdst.com/

References Alexandra, D. (2017) Reconceptualising digital storytelling: Thinking through audiovisual inquiry. In M. Dunford and T. Jenkins (eds) Digital Storytelling: Form and Content (pp. 167–182). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, J. and Macleroy, V. (eds) (2016) Multilingual Digital Storytelling: Engaging Creatively and Critically with Literacy. Oxford: Routledge. Anderson, J., Chung, Y.-C. and Macleroy, V. (2018) Creative and critical approaches to language learning and digital technology: Findings from a multilingual digital storytelling project. Language and Education 32 (3), 195–211. Andreotti, V. (2006) Soft versus critical global citizenship education. Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review 3 (4), 40–51. Andreotti, V. and Souza, L. (2008) Through Other Eyes. Derby: Global Education. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (M. Holquist, ed.; C. Emerson and M. Holquist, trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Benick, G. (2011) Digital storytelling and the pedagogy of human rights. Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education 29, 37–46. Brownlie, A. (2001) Citizenship Education: The Global Dimension. Guidance for Key Stages 3 and 4. London: Development Education Association. Byram, M., Nichols, A. and Stevens, D. (eds) (2001) Developing Intercultural Competence in Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Campbell, E., Pahl, K., Pente, E. and Rasool, Z. (2018) Re-imagining Contested Communities: Connecting Rotherham through Research. Bristol: Policy Press. Chen, M.-J., Fan, H., Guo, C.-Y. and Kang, J.-L. (2020) How do they transform? The story of two primary schools about curriculum leadership and development in Taiwan

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curriculum reform. International Journal of Social Sciences & Educational Studies (online), 7 (1). Chung, Y.-C. (2016) Culture, international partnerships and active citizenship. In J. Anderson and V. Macleroy (eds) Multilingual Digital Storytelling: Engaging Creatively and Critically with Literacy (pp. 178–187). Abingdon: Routledge. Crisan, C. and Bortun, D. (2017) Exploring the potential of digital stories as tools for advocacy. In M. Dunford and T. Jenkins (eds) Digital Storytelling: Form and Content (pp. 155–165). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cummins, J. and Early, M. (eds) (2011) Identity Texts: The Collaborative Creation of Power in Multilingual Schools. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Darvin, R. and Norton, B. (2014) Transnational identity and migrant language learners: The promise of digital storytelling. Education Matters 2 (1), 55–66. Erstad, E. and Silseth, K. (2008) Agency in digital storytelling: Challenging the educational context. In K. Lundby (ed.) Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: SelfRepresentations in New Media (pp. 213–232). New York: Peter Lang. Habib, S. (2018) Learning and Teaching British Values. Palgrave Macmillan. Hartley, J. (2017) Smiling or smiting? Selves, states and stories in the constitution of politics. In M. Dunford and T. Jenkins (eds) Digital Storytelling: Form and Content (pp. 167–182). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hill, A. (2014) Digital storytelling and the politics of doing good: Exploring the ethics of bringing personal narratives into public spheres. In H. Pleasants and D. Salter (eds) CommunityBased Multiliteracies & Digital Media Projects (pp. 21–43). New York: Peter Lang. Isin, E. and Neilsen, G. (2008) Acts of Citizenship. New York: Zed Books. Janks, H. (2010) Literacy and Power. London: Routledge. Janks, H. (2013) Critical literacy in teaching and research. Education Inquiry 4 (2), 225–242. Lambert, J. (2013) Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community (4th edn). New York: Routledge. Lambert, J. (2017) The central role of practice in digital storytelling. In M. Dunford and T. Jenkins (eds) Digital Storytelling: Form and Content (pp. 22–26). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Macleroy, V. (2016) From literacy to multiliteracies. In J. Anderson and V. Macleroy (eds) Multilingual Digital Storytelling: Engaging Creatively and Critically with Literacy (pp. 68–86). Oxford: Routledge. Madison, S. (2005) Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. London: Sage. Nikolajeva, M. (2009) Theory, post-theory, and aetonormative theory. Neohelicon 36 (1), 13–24. Nucera, D. and Lee, J. (2014) I transform myself, I transform the world around me. In H. Pleasants and D. Salter (eds) Community-Based Multiliteracies and Digital Media Projects (pp. 87–107). New York: Peter Lang. Packham, C. (2008) Active Citizenship and Community Learning. Exeter: Learning Matters. Peutrell, R. (2019) Thinking about citizenship and ESOL. In M. Cooke and R. Peutrell (eds) Brokering Britain, Educating Citizens: Exploring ESOL and Citizenship (pp. 43–61). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Peutrell, R. and Cooke, M. (2019) Afterword: ESOL, citizenship and teacher professionalism. In M. Cooke and R. Peutrell (eds) Brokering Britain, Educating Citizens: Exploring ESOL and Citizenship (pp. 227–233). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Phipps, A. (2019) Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pleasants, H. and Salter, D. (2014) Introduction: Writing oneself into the story. In H. Pleasants and D. Salter (eds) Community-Based Multiliteracies and Digital Media Projects (pp. 1–17). New York: Peter Lang.

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Stewart, K. and Ivala, E. (2017) Silence, voice and ‘other languages’: Digital storytelling as a site for resistance and restoration in a South African higher education classroom. British Journal of Educational Technology 48 (5), 1164–1175. Su, Y.-C. (2016) The international status of English for intercultural understanding in Taiwan’s high school EFL textbooks. Asia Pacifi c Journal of Education 36 (3), 390–408. Truong-White, H. and McLean, L. (2015) Digital storytelling for transformative global citizenship education. Canadian Journal of Education 38 (2), 1–28. Turner, J. and Griffi n, A. (2019) Power, language, and social change: A dialogue with Hilary Janks about critical literacy in a ‘post-truth’ world. Language Arts 96 (5), 318–324. Yu, Y.-F. (2019) John Thomson Formosa: The Discovery of Taiwanese Cultural Heritage, 1871. Taipei: Walkers Cultural Enterprises.

13 ‘Animating Objects’: Co-Creation in Digital Story Making between Planning and Play Gabriele Budach, Gohar Sharoyan and Daniela Loghin

Objects are ‘active life presences’ that bring together thought and feeling. Turkle, 2011

Introduction

Every mode of working has its benefits and challenges, whether we work alone or together with others – humans, objects and technologies. This chapter explores the process of digital story making as it unfolded for Master’s students at the University of Luxembourg around an approach called ‘animating objects’. This involved the making of short animated digital stories, based on exploring personally meaningful objects that were co-created by humans, objects and technology through using a stop motion app on a tablet. The chapter looks at different ways in which such a process can be approached, organized, nurtured and driven forward. Many educational researchers in digital storytelling suggest a sequentially scripted process including the production of a storyboard (Campbell, 2012; Chan et al., 2017; Chung, 2006; Lambert, 2013; Robin, 2016) to clarify ideas before starting to film, or to help learners develop their writing (Sylvester & Greenidge, 2009) and media skills (Kearney, 2011; Kordaki, 2013). This text reports on a more flexible methodology and use of storyboarding, combining elements of two approaches, applied to animation making. One aims to enhance (1) conceptual thinking and the discovery of ideas through techniques of visualization and their fi xation on paper or screen, such as in storyboarding or other scriptural practices. 277

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Another approach aims to explore animation making as a creative practice to foster (2) thinking and reflective meaning-making through esthetic practice (Johnson, 2007, 2008), which is nurtured by the co-creation of humans and objects as co-acting entities (Barrett, 2002, 2007) and enhanced through playful engagement with material objects. Esthetic in this chapter refers to a complex experience that draws on the multisensory – notably the haptic and the visual, alongside language – and that involves both the conscious and the intuitive/unconscious as drivers for creation. Esthetic here is linked to a process by which a piece of language and literacy work – a digital story in this case – emerges from the playful encounter with the object in view of producing a short animation movie. The process we describe here relied on both the pre-planned and the spontaneous, which shaped the projects of students, the collective effort of group members and their collaboration in particular ways. At times, when spontaneity prevailed, the process of collaborative creation could be compared to what Deleuze and Guattari (2019 [1987]) call ‘rhizomic growth’. This was when the process seemed driven by the unintentional, accidental, inadvertent and exploratory, accounting for the affordances of what an object can do – how it can move, fold, bend and act – rather than relying predominantly on rational planning and thinking. Whenever such ‘rhizomic growing’ sustained the group’s collaboration, it seemed to spark and nurture the human capacity to form affective bonding between humans and objects and among those involved in the creative action, at least for the duration of that action. We argue that combining both approaches can foster creativity and stimulate language and literacy work in a beneficial way, by decentering from existing normative models of language and literacy, and by opening a new space for collaborative work. This space is shaped by and takes inspiration from the in situ co-creative process rather than from preconceived ideas that co-creators would acquiesce to outside of the process of creating an animation. Such an approach can be liberating for individuals and can foster collaboration in a group, enabling new combinations of individual creative resources and ideas made available for language and literacy work. The text engages with the hypothesis that rather than insisting on a predesigned model of multimodal literacy production, and a step-by-step framework of digital story making to be executed in a particular order, there is benefit in exploring more flexible approaches that facilitate the emergence of a ‘creative flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, 1996, 1997) among learners working together in a group. Allowing more flexibility can strengthen the connectivity between people by accruing benefit from both the established, more scriptural techniques of planning and the exploratory, playful, discovery-driven encounters with materials including the esthetic choices such playful encounters suggest. In that, the chapter builds on existing research on artifactual literacies (Pahl & Rowsell,

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2010, 2011) that looks into the role of objects and materiality to stimulate talk, listening and creative literacy work. It also aligns with previous work on objects shifting power dynamics in the classroom (Budach, 2013) and fostering community bonding (Budach et al., 2015). We also draw from new materialist research exploring the power of things, materiality and objects, as potentially ‘vibrant’ agents and co-creators (Bennett, 2010) that can play a distinct part and role in enabling literacy work (LenzTaguchi, 2014; Thiel, 2015) which is achieved less easily through solely language-based forms of engagement. Taking this angle, we aim to contribute to educational research on multiliteracies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) and to current work on digital storytelling, engaging with the role of objects in particular (Macleroy, 2019). We seek to show how ‘animating objects’ as a specific form of digital story creation unfolds as a transforming literacy practice for students that enables ‘flow’ in group work, and that is generative of: (1) a shared understanding of complex ideas; (2) a (special temporary) bond between group members, for the duration of the project and possibly beyond; and (3) the discovery of new knowledge, about oneself and about the co-creators in this process, including human and non-human contributors. The text reports on the experience of Master’s students at the University of Luxembourg involved in a course on digital story creation which has been taught by the first author since 2015 and seeks to explore the making of complex, multilayered identities. The main players in this chapter are the two co-authors who both experienced two scenarios of animation making: (1) a summer school on ‘Multilingual Identities in the Making’ held in September 2018 at the University of Luxembourg under the guidance of London-based fi lmmakers Bo Chapman and Zoe Flynn; and (2) a course entitled ‘Exploring Digital Creation’ taught as part of the Master’s (in Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts), which took place right after the summer school experience in October/November 2018. The two contexts were similar in the sense that they used the same approach of ‘animating objects’, involving the creation of short digital fi lms around a personally meaningful object, using a stop motion app on a tablet. They were different in that the summer school offered a space for students to create an individual project. The course context, in contrast, invited students to create a digital story by working in a group. The reason for this shift in approach was motivated, fi rstly, by the limited number of technical devices available to conduct individual projects. Secondly, it proved interesting from a pedagogical and research perspective to understand how human co-creators, objects and technology would interact in the two different settings. Of course, it is clear that (human) individual work is fundamentally different from group work. However, we considered it worthwhile discovering how animation making unfolded in both settings and what role human-object interaction would play in each of them. For the course project, the two

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co-authors worked with one other student for whom it was their fi rst experience of digital creation. The present text explores data collected with the two co-authors in a series of individual and group interviews, as well as from ethnographic observation and written reflections that have been explored collectively in a team writing process (Budach & Sharoyan, 2020; Budach et al., 2020). Their experience is contrasted with the views of students who took the same course in Fall 2019 and wrote about their story creation experience in a reflective comment. Students from the later context had not participated in a summer school previously and therefore could not compare the experience with that of creating a project individually. However, the comparative angle of both settings permits capturing and more clearly delineating the specific nature of animation making, regardless of whether an individual or a group of humans is involved. The text is part of a larger exploration of how ‘animating objects’ impacts on students’ language and literacy learning. This endeavor investigates how, in a broader sense, animation making decenters the parameters of learning by shifting them from a formalized, language and norm-focused approach to one that spurs creation and self-discovery, thereby generating a sense of (shared) ownership in individuals and between members of a group. The Experience of the Summer School

The conceptual focus of the summer school was on exploring ‘objects of the contact zone’, the notion of the contact zone being suggested by Mary Louise Pratt (1991) as a space in which cultures meet, mingle and struggle. The brief sent to the students beforehand required them to read the text (Pratt, 1991), engage with the concept, and come up with a personally meaningful object that would speak to that notion and possibly form the starting point for a story and animation project. Daniela

During the five-day summer school project, Daniela had been using storyboarding extensively. It represented a major engagement for her, intellectually and emotionally, and for the entire course of the week: I think I’ve worked on this not only in class but 24 24 hours [laughs] […] I did the practical work in class where I had the material and then I went home and I was going in my head over ideas […] I have probably five storyboards at home because I was always changing them […] so it was a continuous work for 24 hours and for almost five days. (Interview, October 2018)

During the day she was working on the film set, experimenting with materials, technology and ideas. In the evening she was going over the day’s

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experience and thinking about how to plan the next steps. She was pondering options of material places and frames for filming – as she was working in the library and in the classroom – and making sense of the intensive memories emerging from the work she did. Storyboarding was a way for her to grasp and interpret these complex relationships and planning demands, occurring anew at every step in the process. Imaging became a path to clarify her emotions and find visual expressions for them. Daniela: I was trying to send my emotions through the images I was creating […] and I still feel it was a very very personal experience. (Interview, October 2018)

Her way of working contrasts with what Chung (2006) advises about storyboarding and how it should be used in digital storytelling. The author writes: Storyboarding is the process of visualizing how a movie, animation, or digital story will look. In other words, a storyboard is a sketch or blueprint for a movie production, theatrical performance, multimedia digital story, or animation. Storyboarding involves planning the sequence of scenes, transitions, and special effects, as well as the interaction of the incorporated media components. When making a digital story, creators use storyboards to help them efficiently organize the development or evolution of a story and keep it focused within certain parameters (e.g. time duration, image transitions, special effects, and planning out of types of music, imagery, audio and video to be used). Indeed, the storyboard is the place to tentatively figure out what media to use and how they might best work together to depict an important, engaging, and informative story. Ways of drafting storyboards vary and can be done on paper or computer. […] The instructor should encourage students to fi nalize their working scripts as much as possible before making storyboards to avoid making major changes later (this will be time consuming). Ideally, a fi nal script should be ready before sketching a storyboard. (Chung, 2006: 40)

As we read, Chung advises story creators to proceed in the ways fi lm professionals do – to write and fi nalize a script (with ideas in textual form) as much as possible before making a storyboard and to have ideas in place, in order to proceed to fi lming in an efficient, time-saving fashion. This approach contrasts with Daniela’s experience who uses storyboarding as a tool to drive her story forward alongside the filming. It becomes part of a circular process in which she explores and deepens her emotional connection with the object and with the person who gave it to her, shifting between the fi lm set and the time without fi lming. For Daniela, storyboarding is a tool to continuously mediate the emotional connection with her object and to seek ways to visualize it within what is technically possible in animation making. The goal hereby is not to learn how to do a professional animation, but to explore – in a grassroots-like fashion as practiced by amateurs (Lundby, 2008) – the means that animation offers to stimulate thought, critical thinking and the creative process.

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Gohar

For Gohar the process of story creation during the summer school unfolded quite differently. She did not use a storyboard and explains: Gohar: I prefer going with the flow and letting ideas and imagination pop up and express themselves during the process of the digital story creation. This was basically the way I worked during the summer school.

She created a movie around a carrot, called gazar in Armenian, and built her story entirely around exploring, playing and experimenting with the carrot and its materiality. This engagement in a relationship with a material object became the major affective force driving her story. It produced new and unexpected meaning under conditions of design ‘out of time’ (Leander & Boldt, 2013) that could not have been foreseen or predesigned through pre-filming storyboarding. We explored her creative process from a new materialist angle (Deleuze & Guattari, 2019 [1987]) and as unfolding among elements of an assemblage. Assemblage here is defi ned as a non-permanent arrangement of ‘specific temporary relations’ (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013) between agents (Latour, 2004) including humans and non-human parts, people, objects and technology, that become players in a co-creative process (Barrett, 2002, 2007). (For a detailed exploration of Gohar’s process, see Budach & Sharoyan, 2020.) Both Gohar and Daniela experienced the summer school as an immensely rich, emotionally deep and intensely immersive experience (Budach et al., 2020). For both, the process had its beauty and challenges which they remembered now at the start of the second project in a group, raising new hopes and expectations. Gohar: I recollected memories about my carrot experience and remembered how badly I wanted to work with a partner. Now, I was given the opportunity. (Reflective comment, January 2019) Daniela remembers: … for my second project I was part of a group, together with two of my colleagues. […]. Gohar is not only my colleague but also a close friend, we have much in common and we both thought that it would be easier to agree on a topic if we worked together. (Reflective comment, January 2019)

Both remembered the experience of the summer school as positive and as a place for learning about visual methods and the effects of haptic engagement. The haptic is a vital element in animation making in the way we did it, as human hands need to get involved to move objects in small incremental steps – a long and repetitive procedure – to produce a short strip of film. From what the co-authors and other participants reported, the repetitive moves and use of (human) hands manipulating material objects and thereby creating movement had a strong effect on the human creators, connecting bodily and cognitive activity. This connection seems to have

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enabled new insights for the human creators. Now, for this second experience, both Daniela and Gohar welcomed the prospect of working in a group of three. For the third person, animation making was a completely new experience. However, what was expected to be easier turned out to be challenging in unexpected ways. Getting Started on a New Project: Daniela and Gohar Involved in Group Work

Every pedagogical project needs a brief or framing that serves as a starting point from which to begin work. For the last three years, the fi rst author who teaches the class on digital story making has proposed exploring the conceptual notion of ‘boundary objects’ (Star & Griesemer, 1989), which is widely used in social sciences and is an excellent entry point into thinking about the complexities, possibilities and limitations of communication, and under what conditions they could be overcome. Boundary objects are defi ned as to: … both inhabit several intersecting worlds and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them … [They are] both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual site use. (Star & Griesemer, 1989, cited in Akkerman & Bakker, 2011: 134)

To prepare for the fi rst class of the course, students were asked to read some texts about boundary objects, and to bring a material thing that represented a ‘boundary object’ for them and to share it with the group. This required the students to make sense of the reading, and to select an object incorporating a materialization of the concept they judged suitable and a story they were willing to share with others. The task proved to be quite demanding but thought-provoking, since the concept is not easy to grasp. After struggling with the notion for some time, students brought a wide range of different objects to class. These included their mobile phone used for communication among very diverse groups of people, while others brought a diary or planner they used to organize their different life-worlds juggling the competing needs of study, work and leisure time. Others brought small items such as a key chain, a bookmark or pieces of jewelry that had travelled with them from their home country and that connected their owners geographically and emotionally to the different spaces they inhabit. One student from India had brought homegrown cardamom seeds her mother had given to her before leaving for Luxembourg. It had helped her in her new place to make friends by introducing them to Indian cooking and spices. Students presented their objects in class, followed by a discussion raising a number of questions: about how we

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communicate and what kinds of boundaries we experience while we travel across countries and cultures; about how we address and overcome these boundaries; and about how objects, as part of these negotiations, become tokens enabling new ways of understanding. The next step was for students to gather in groups – they could self-organise – and to start thinking about a topic for a story. Stimulation could come from reading the text or from the objects and stories that would lend themselves to developing a digital story. Starting from Text and Concept

After forming their group, Gohar, Daniela and her colleague met in the University Learning Centre to discuss their way forward. Daniela remembers from that first meeting: The most difficult and time-consuming part was agreeing on the topic of our project. So, here we were, in a private room in Luxembourg Learning Centre analysing the defi nition of boundary objects projected on a big screen. (Reflective comment, January 2019)

With the defi nition projected on a big screen in front of them, the three tried to interpret what a boundary object meant and how to agree on what they understood. Their understanding was then to be matched onto an object (or selection of objects) that would be the starting point for their story and animation project. For the summer school project, based on Pratt’s (1991) notion of the ‘contact zone’, Daniela had found her object immediately. She worked with a metal bookmark that reminded her of her grandfather who had given it to her when she was a young girl. It had opened to her the world of books. Given the ease of choosing the object for her fi rst project, she expected the task to be similarly straightforward this time. However, the process turned out to be difficult and quite complex, for a number of reasons. The three women set themselves a particularly tough task which was to select one common topic represented in one shared object that would fit three requirements: (1) it should fit the idea of a ‘boundary object’ that all three of them would agree on; (2) it should fi t a shared experience that would make a good topic for a story; and (3) all of them should have an emotional connection to the object that made it feel right to them – not too random and not too intimate to be shared with others. Daniela remembers: it’s actually a very complicated part because we wanted to fi nd something that everybody could identify with and we were three and there was always … ok this is amazing for me I came with three ideas that for me was perfect and then Gohar said … ok but I don’t know if I can work on that because I don’t have a connection with this … so it is very difficult. (Interview, October 2018)

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Gohar adds: We would all suggest different and interesting ideas, however, none of them felt to be right for some reason. Genuinely, we wanted to come across an object that would provoke thought and emotion for all of us and play equally important roles in our lives. (Reflective comment, January 2019)

The three women couldn’t agree at the fi rst meeting, but the next day the third colleague came up with an idea that Gohar commented on as: … absolutely fascinating … how simple but at the same time genius it was! The student card! This is an object we all have and we all, undoubtedly, attach certain meanings, feelings and emotions to it.

This object helped Gohar to connect in a direct way. It reminded her of a line she had read in a text by Hlubinka (2011: 79), where the author speaks about her lost ‘datebook. I felt as though I had lost my life’. Gohar writes: ‘This line impressed me, especially […]. More than once did I have a similar feeling when I thought I had lost my student card or whenever I forgot it somewhere’. She also remembered her reading of Turkle (2011) on Evocative Objects: Things We Think With and what Turkle calls objects of transition and passage, mourning and memory, objects of desire and discipline, etc. ‘While reading those stories, I was trying to associate our student cards with one of those categories.’ The student card became an opportunity for the three to reflect on their experience as Master’s students at the University of Luxembourg. As a shared angle they decided to focus on the general idea of ‘life transitions’. The student card seemed to be the perfect choice, satisfying all the requirements they had set for their collaborative project, conceptually, experientially and emotionally. (1) It seemed to fit the definition of a ‘boundary object’ all of them shared: Daniela: … a student card can satisfy the informational requirements of many intersecting worlds. For example, it is used when we want to borrow a book from the library as it informs the librarian that we are university students. It is used in the public transportation area as it informs the train/bus controller that we are allowed to travel on that means of transportation. Finally, it is used as a method of payment for university printing services as well as in the university canteen. (Reflective comment, January 2019)

(2) It seemed to fit a shared, yet individually nuanced, symbolic experience: Daniela: We live this studentship differently and we engage with our student card in different ways. For me, the student card meant gaining a new experience. For Gohar, it meant losing that part of her that remained in Armenia. For Vik it mostly represented a transformation, as she went back to the times when she was a student. (Reflective comment, January 2019)

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(3) The object of the student card allowed the incorporation of the three perspectives, of losing, gaining and transformation, that would be visualised in the digital story. Daniela: We agreed that instead of choosing one of the three ideas above, we would incorporate all three experiences in our work. (Reflective comment, January 2019)

This very conceptual approach seemed time-consuming and required a lot of discussion before settling on ‘the right object’, finally. Still, the process of brainstorming felt rewarding in the end, despite being long and difficult. Gohar comments: … the deliberate thinking around a subject opened some themes and topics to me that were at the back of my mind but that were never given an occasion to reveal. […] this activity was food for thought to me, since I was asking myself why I came up with this or that object. Daniela explains that after agreeing on the topic: … we proceeded with the creation of a storyboard. As there were three of us, there were many ideas […] We decided to write them all down and later, discarded the ones that would prove to be less meaningful for our story. (Reflective comment, January 2019)

In the group setting, storyboarding became an important tool to collect, share and organize ideas. It helped to create a common understanding and focus, and it facilitated the selection of suggestions – to discard the ones which raised disagreement and to keep the ones that worked for all. For Gohar, this was the fi rst time she had ever engaged with storyboarding as she had worked without one for her first project. Very differently, Daniela had worked and explored storyboarding extensively during her first project, an experience which now overshadowed her second experience. She even felt slightly disappointed and found it much less emotionally engaging to deal with the student card – an object to which she sensed no particular personal connection – compared to the bookmark which felt extremely close to her. Daniela: [at the summer school] yeh yeh yeh I started with a very high emotional engagement there […] the second one felt less personal […] I felt a little bit less connected […] it is still important but it was not something I choose if I was alone […] it would feel different. (Group discussion, February 2019)

Up to this point no concrete objects had been involved in the deliberation. All exchange of ideas had been based on abstract (objectless) discussion. Starting from Objects and Play

In the Fall of 2019, the fi rst author planned her course on digital creation slightly differently. For the first session, students were asked to read

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some texts about ‘boundary objects’, to bring an object that fitted their idea of the concept and to share it in class. Students brought objects that were similar to the ones mentioned earlier in this chapter. Unlike the course in earlier years, this time the presentation of objects was followed by a first animation exercise that gave the students some first-hand experience in animation making. In hindsight, it is noticeable that this opened a space for approaching the process in an entirely new way. It invited play and allowed the students to discover their first ideas for a story, not from discussion based on conceptual reflection, but as emerging directly from experimenting with real objects. Students gathered in groups of four to six and started exploring with the objects they had brought. This also included some extra material the first author had sourced – colored paper, cardboard plates, pencils, buttons – and the camera. Students working together in the same group on that day later reflected on this experience. One student remembered: At the beginning, we did not know what to do. Thus, we just started playing with what we had at that moment and the camera […] to fi nd some sort of starting point of a story. We did not fi nd it. However, after some short discussion, the airplane idea became a rocket …

Another student noted: On that day we worked all together [in a group of six] experimenting with the material we had and the framing techniques we just saw, letting our creativity develop a story: a blue paper airplane getting close to the sun, starting an interstellar journey across a made-of-buttons universe, which ended with the encounter of an alien paper plate spaceship. […] The objects, so different and colourful, created a playful atmosphere. We were touching them, trying their sounds, playing with them and with each other.

The playful engagement with objects and their exploration seemed to help students fi nd a starting point for their story. It also seemed to create a playful atmosphere that contributed to forming a bond between members of the group. This resonates with what Deleuze and Guattari (2019 [1987]) say about the effects of ‘exploration’ and the affective connection that emerges when bodies – human and non-human ones – engage with each other: We know nothing about a body [in our context, objects and human participants engaged in co-creation] until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2019 [1987]: 257)

Hence, it seems that experimentation with the objects and collaboration towards a story was less about interpreting the meaning [of objects] in real

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life, but rather to ‘palpate’ (Masny, 2016) and get a sense of how a body works and functions with(in) an assemblage (Bangou & Flemming, 2014). In our context, students and objects became human and non-human ‘bodies’ forming such an assemblage by entering into a temporal bond and becoming active players, driving the story, story making and project further, jointly. It was so inspiring and exciting to take every little thing and to try to reimagine it in the context of the video, with a different function and meaning. It was exciting for me to see how quickly ideas emerged as soon as we started to try out different camera angles. The experimenting with the different fi lming techniques and materials fi nally led to the fi lm in its fi nished form.

The quotes illustrate that starting from playing with objects and technology, touching and moving the different bits, with the aim of experiencing their affordances – shapes, colors, surfaces, material qualities and angles of vision – enhances bonding between human and non-human entities, thereby helping inspiration, facilitating discussion and fostering the creative process. However, textual practices also played a part in the process. One group developed a storyboard at the beginning and decided to stick to it for the whole story-making process. Others worked completely without a storyboard, relying on play and improvisation as their main source for driving the creative process. Still, even this group made occasional use of sketching and drawing to represent ideas visually and to facilitate communication and shared understanding in the group: We did not do a storyboard nor did we have a strict plan at all. Our process was to a great extent improvisation. We just did a quick sketch on a piece of paper, just to have a general idea regarding the different scenes … we did not dedicate too much time to it, we just followed the general ‘guideline’ and improvised. [Zag] sketched a storyboard with the setting and the fi rst 5 scenes on a piece of paper, but it was only when we started to select the objects and preparing the stage, that the project took its own form. We selected a few instruments (initially each representing a different planet) and grouped the Lego toys according to their colours, forms, stories, e.g. the astronauts, the Star Wars characters, Batman and other black figures, etc. These would become the inhabitants of the planets, i.e. an Earth-shaped ball, a Rubik cube, a wrapping Madrid map and an orange decoration ribbon.

While the sketching of ideas through writing and drawing played a significant role in setting up an initial plan, this seemed less central in the detailed execution of the story. More important here proved to be the

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playful engagement with material things. This included the sorting and arranging of objects for ‘seeing the beginning of a scene’, and the exploring of material qualities ‘to imagine movement and see how the story could unfold’, providing a visual display on which members of the group could agree (or disagree) more easily, by making corrective hand movements, moving objects and trying out alternative positions or directions of movement. As for the use of languages, group members drew quite widely on their varied individual repertoires. In accordance with the shared available resources in the group, there was vivid use of English, French, German and Luxembourgish – the first three being languages of instruction in (the trilingual) Master’s program – which students study and are encouraged to use and engage with. In one group, unexpected language learning occurred among students while creating a dialogue with their vegetable characters depicting a love story, starring Romeo and Juliet. The female character – a potato – was named in Russian (КАРТОШКА [karto∫ka] – potato) and the male counterpart – a tomato – was named in Italian (pomodoro – tomato). Students repeated the words’ pronunciation and were corrected by their peers. Hearty laughter propagated through the room. The playful approach towards creating a story while handling, decorating, manipulating – and naming – objects thereby also seemed to encourage students to bring in linguistic resources that were less called upon in other course situations and to approach language in a more playful way. Creating Harmonious Flow

All students, without exception, reported on the noticeably haptic nature of the process. It played out the strongest during fi lming when objects were moved in small incremental steps, each position captured in a picture, taken with the camera of the tablet installed on a tripod and forming, with every new shot, a longer sequence of images, which was later played back as a fi lm. Gohar notes about that process: In contrast with the experience I had during my Gazar fi lm, this one [the collective project] was outstanding in terms of its collaboratively haptic nature. That is to say, we were all involved in doing something physically such as pressing the shooting button, moving the objects, putting them in the right order or place, etc. This process was fi lled with an amazing feeling of harmony and balance between the three of us as well as the objects we were interacting with. (Reflective comment, January 2019)

Students the following year report: Each group worked harmoniously and efficiently together regardless of how many members it had and how different they were.

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Another student says about the group process: [it] allowed me to experience different mind-sets and flawless teamwork in order to achieve that shared vision.

Interestingly, the group that had worked with the storyboard and tried to follow it quite strictly pointed out in hindsight unanimously that: We noticed that it was easier for the group dynamic to enter directly into the fi lming process, as we had a rough plan in our heads. We selected the multimodal resources we used partly consciously, and partly intuitively. [We noted] that our very structured approach left little room for spontaneity. Some unplanned effects that appeared during the fi lming let us diverge from our original script. Later these turned out to be the highlights of our movie and made the most effect when we showed the fi lm to the class. We needed many attempts to make the mandarin flip over with the help of a piece of thread. This sequence emerged from the process as we did not know how to move the mandarin into the cocktail blender. In the end we managed to create a funny point [punch line], by adding a different music to that scene. Thus, our motto changed to ‘create, fail, recreate and problem solve’. (Macleroy, 2016: 176) At hindsight, I think we should have bothered less with questions of logic and plausibility and more with visual and creative aspects. I would conclude that it is useful to have a rough storyboard in your head, but that one should not cling to it too tightly and be ready to abandon previous ideas and to decide in the moment.

From the experience of the students, there is evidence that storyboarding ‘supports the organizing of the team within complicated actions and gives understanding of the whole set before the actual filming takes place’ (Hart, 2008). In starting the storying process, ‘storyboarding actually stimulates creativity and opens up for idea generation in addition to spotting the opportunity for innovation’ (Wilkström & Verganti, 2013: 8). On the other hand, as Wilkström and Verganti explain further: storyboarding can bring fi xation into the process and […] this fi xation can be accepted. […] Storyboarding actually creates a fi xation of the idea early in the process. This could leave ideas inadequately explored, which in the end could lead to ideas not corresponding directly to the opportunity spotted. […] This indicates how storyboarding is connected with the human-centered design approach since the stories told involve human emotions and are developed on a basis formed by activities and situations concerning human interaction with products, services, or systems. (Wilkström & Verganti, 2013: 8)

Here is where the potential of playing with non-human elements, objects, materials and infrastructures can unfold important inspirational powers.

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This, however, would be excluded from a planning approach that relied on abstract, ‘unembodied’ thinking only, leaving aside the creative forces emerging from haptic experience and sensory exploration. The power of non-human elements to stimulate cooperative group dynamics seemed to unfold to its fullest, as students reported, when they reached a state of ‘flow’: I felt that everyone contributed to the project and once we had established the story and gotten into a state of flow every group member naturally and instinctively fell into their role. There were times where the process moved so smoothly and where our creativity built upon each other.

Flow and being in a state of flow have been described by Shernoff et al. (2014) in these terms: Individuals in this state perceive their performance to be pleasurable and successful, and the activity is perceived as worth doing for its own sake, even if no further goal is reached (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002). The individual functions at his or her fullest capacity, and the experience itself becomes its own reward. Highly creative artists and scholars have reported the experience of flow when engaged in their best work (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). (Shernoff et al., 2014: 476)

Flow was experienced by the students in both contexts – doing an individual project and co-creating a fi lm as a group with others. The nature of the two experiences being naturally different, the ‘flow’ students felt in individual projects was more directed towards introspection and selfreflection, while the sensation of ‘flow’ in the group project was more directed outwardly and towards working together, harmoniously and ‘in tune’ with other members of the group. The result of that ‘flowing’ process also shows in the fi lm as a fi nished result. Daniela comments on it: I am particularly satisfied with the way we managed to merge our experiences as students in a continuous flow and give it a form of unity. (Reflective comment, January 2019)

In the fi nal scene of the fi lm we see the three student cards appearing one after the other, organising themselves in a circle around ‘stuff ’. This ‘stuff ’ – made from paper cuttings – represents the things that the authors had created previously to represent their losses, gains and experiences of transformation. The authors then cut up the originally representational objects into geometrical forms, suggesting the mixing and mingling of their different types of experiences. In the fi nal scene of the fi lm, the student cards and (mixed) experiences slowly organise themselves in another circle that connects the authors – represented by the student cards – creating a bond between them, marked by the colored paper bits symbolising their shared, yet individually specific experience (see Figure 13.1). Gohar notes her impression of the working process:

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Figure 13.1 Objects aligning in a joint vision

Emotions and memories that raised during the process of working with the objects would boost what Barrett (2007) calls the aesthetic dimension of thinking. We were navigating through a large atlas of emotions; emotions that would blur the line between the self and the other; emotions that collected us all into one complete being expressed in the form of our digital animation.

From this description, it appears that working in this way brought about both (1) a process of individual introspection – as reported by Daniela and Gohar about their individual projects – and (2) harmonious collaboration with others, as experienced now in the group project. It seems that an exploratory approach including the sharing of objects, stories and initial ideas combined with exploring and experimenting around materials presented an interesting combination able to stimulate the esthetic dimension of thinking, as an individual and a collective process. Connecting with Objects Esthetically

Drawing attention to what was most remarkable in the animation process, one student noted: ‘fi rst, the harmonious collaboration and active participation of each member of the group; second, the fundamental role of the objects for the development of the story’. Another student’s remark reads: ‘We allowed the ideas to flow and the given materials to guide us’, which points to what Johnson (2006, 2007) has explored as the ‘aesthetic dimension of human thinking’ (see also Lundby, 2008; Nyobe & Drotner, 2008, in relation to work on digital storytelling). Johnson says that ‘meaning is not just a matter of concepts and propositions, but it reaches down into the images, sensorimotor schemas, feelings, qualities and emotions that constitute our meaningful

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encounter with the world. Adequate account of meaning must be built around the esthetic dimension of our experience and its distinctive character and significance’ (Johnson, 2007: 3). He states that meaning-making is fundamentally esthetic, and that therefore ‘studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning’s bodily sources’ (Johnson, 2007: 3). It is therefore important to ‘understand emotion as not external to ideas and reason, and to see aesthetic, which concerns the “qualities, patterns, feelings, and emotions” as a dimension that makes meaning possible for us, providing the key to understanding how humans can experience anything as meaningful in their lives’ (Johnson, 2007: 3). Ways Forward with Planning and Play in Animation Making

Throughout the text, we have heard student voices providing evidence for the importance of planning and play in animation making. What emerges from the students’ experience, however, is that while fi nding agreement on ways of working together remains central to any collaborative process, the playful and exploratory engagement with materials is a very powerful alternative to pre-thought and previously scripted process, enhancing the stimulation of ideas, talk and agreement. This is not to say that a process, starting from text and conducted through objectless discussion only, is necessarily less thought-provoking, instructive or fruitful. Yet, there is evidence that exploratory engagement with objects and technology can enhance harmonious and efficient collaboration in group work to a noticeable extent, and help the creative process leading to both a collectively built story and the experience of successfully working in a group, with a transformative impact on the individual and the group, as a particular bonding experience. The chapter has traced the collaborative creative process of Master’s students coming from international, multilingual and multicultural backgrounds. Animation making seems to have provided a space for ‘imagining, hyphothesising and transforming knowledge’ (Anderson & Macleroy, 2017: 501) and for bringing together ideas for literacy work, collectively and collaboratively. The co-creative process focusing on manual movement and the handling of objects has enabled students to experience a ‘flow’ which helped them to open up, exchange, and bridge diversity and different views. Through playing with objects and experimenting with movement it seemed easier to discover ideas jointly, rather than having to verbalise them to the group. Joining that process took away some of the pressure to say things with language and allowed for decentering from the linguistic mode, diving into haptic and manual work instead. This felt enjoyable and liberating for the students, enabling them to create and harmoniously co-construct with hands accompanied by words – not the other way around – and helping to overcome some hardship or disagreement felt

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during more language-centered deliberation at the beginning of the process. Our experience with animation making supports other work that points to the importance and value of interdisciplinary approaches and collaboration between colleagues in language education, the arts and the humanities. We believe that animation making adds to research looking at the worth and significance of creative work in the classroom, here through stimulating constructive interactions around objects. Our hope is that animation making, as we reported on it in this chapter, can inspire other colleagues and have a positive impact on creative task design and the development of educational resources in contexts of multilingual and multicultural education. We hope it can be useful in the professional development of teachers, shedding new light on ways in which student-centered, autonomous learning can be encouraged. This work also speaks to broader institutional policy and ways we imagine teaching and learning in contexts of diversity. It highlights the role of objects, technology and the physical, mental and emotional engagement with materiality as a source for learning and meaning-making. ‘Animating objects’ can create connections between learners that are unforeseeable by teachers and only emerge from the midst of the creative process. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) How can playful engagement with objects impact and transform literacy education and language learning? (2) How can haptic engagement – in animation making and other creative approaches – enable new ways of learning through reconnecting bodily and cognitive experience? (3) Where is the (appropriate) place of esthetics, emotion and exploratory approaches in language and literacy education in the 21st century? (4) Is it responsible to trust methods that challenge logic, plausibility and rationality in times of crisis, rising populism and deepening social and political uncertainty? (5) How can we promote pedagogies that foster criticality AND innovation, sustaining social justice and the envisioning of convivial, socially diverse societies? References Akkerman, S.F. and Bakker, A. (2011) Boundary crossing and boundary objects. Review of Educational Research 81 (2), 132–169. Anderson, J. and Macleroy, V. (eds) (2016) Multilingual Digital Storytelling: Engaging Creatively and Critically with Literacy. New York: Routledge. Anderson, J. and Macleroy, V. (2017) Connecting worlds: Interculturality, identity and multilingual digital stories in the making. Language and Intercultural Communication 17 (4), 494–517. doi:10.1080/14708477.2017.1375592

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Bangou, F. and Fleming, D. (2014) Deleuze and becoming-citizen: Exploring newcomer fi lms in a Franco-Canadian secondary school. Citizenship Teaching & Learning 10 (1), 63–77. Barrett, E. (2002) Knowing and feeling: New subjectivities and aesthetic experience. Critical Psychology: The International Journal of Critical Psychology 5, 113–123. Barrett, E. (2007) Experiential learning in practice as research: Context, method, knowledge. Journal of Visual Art Practice 6 (2), 115–124. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Budach, G. (2013) From language choice to mode choice: How artefacts impact on language use and meaning making in a bilingual classroom. Language and Education 27 (4), 329–342. Budach, G. and Sharoyan, G. (2020) Exploring ‘vibrant matter’ in animation making. Language and Intercultural Communication 20 (5), 464–481. Budach, G., Patrick, D. and Mackay, T. (2015) ‘Talk around objects’: Designing trajectories of belonging in an urban Inuit community. Social Semiotics 25 (4), 446–464. Budach, G., Efremov, D., Loghin, D. and Sharoyan, G. (2020) Exploring affect in stop frame animation. In K. Toohey, S. Smythe, D. Dagenais and M. Forte (eds) Transforming Language and Literacy Education: New Materialism, Posthumanism, and Ontoethics. New York: Routledge. Campbell, T.A. (2012) Digital storytelling in an elementary classroom: Going beyond entertainment. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 69, 385–393. Chan, B.S., Churchill, D. and Chiu, T.K. (2017) Digital literacy learning in higher education through digital storytelling approach. Journal of International Education Research 13 (1), 1–16. Chung, S.K. (2006) Digital storytelling in integrated arts education. International Journal of Arts Education 4 (1), 33–50. Coleman, B. and Ringrose, J. (2013) Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996) Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997) Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2019 [1987]) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hart, J. (2008) The Art of the Storyboard: Storyboarding for Film, TV, and Animation. Oxford: Focal Press, Elsevier. Hlubinka, M. (2011) The datebook. In S. Turkle (ed.) Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (pp. 78–84). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson, M. (2007) The meaning of the body. In W. Overton, U. Mueller and J. Newman (eds) Developmental Perspectives on Embodiment and Consciousness (pp. 35–60). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Johnson, M. (2008) The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kearney, M. (2011) A learning design for student-generated digital storytelling. Learning, Media & Technology 36 (2), 169–188. Kordaki, M. (2013) On the design of educational digital stories: The Ed-W model. In Proceedings of 5th World Conference on Educational Sciences, 5–8 February, Sapienza, University of Rome. Lambert, J. (2013) Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. New York: Routledge.

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Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (2006) New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning (2nd edn). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Latour, B. (2004) Politics of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leander, K. and Boldt, G. (2013) Rereading ‘A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies’: Bodies, texts, and emergence. Journal of Literacy Research 45 (1), 22–46. Lenz-Taguchi, H. (2014) New materialism and play. In L. Brooker, M. Blaise and S. Edwards (eds) Handbook of Play and Learning in Early Childhood (pp. 79–90). London: Sage. Lundby, K. (ed.) (2008) Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-representations in New Media. New York: Peter Lang. Macleroy, V. (2016) Multimodal composition and creativity. In J. Anderson and V. Macleroy (eds) Multilingual Digital Storytelling: Engaging Creatively and Critically with Literacy (pp. 163–177). London: Routledge. Macleroy, V. (2019) Object narratives, imaginings and multilingual communities: Young people’s digital stories in the making. In International Digital Storytelling Conference, 21–23 September, Zakynthos Island, Greece (pp. 202–214). See https:// dst.ntlab.gr/2018/proceedings/. Masny, D. (2016) Problematizing qualitative research: Reading a data assemblage with rhizoanalysis. Qualitative Inquiry 22 (8), 666–675. Nakamura, J. and Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002) The concept of flow. In C.R. Snyder and S.J. Lopez (eds) Handbook of Positive Psychology (pp. 89–105). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nyobe, L. and Drotner, K. (2008) Identity, aesthetics, and digital narration. In K. Lundby (ed.) Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories (pp. 161–175). Bern: Peter Lang. Pahl, K. and Rowsell, J. (2010) Artifactual Literacies: Every Object Tells a Story. New York: Teachers College Press. Pahl, K.H. and Rowsell, J. (2011) Artifactual critical literacy: A new perspective for literacy education. Berkeley Review of Education 2 (2), 129–151. Pratt, M.L. (1991) Arts of the contact zone. Profession 1991, 33–40. Robin, B. (2016) The power of digital storytelling to support teaching and learning. Digital Education Review 30, 17–29. Shernoff, D.J., Csikszentmihalyi, M., Schneider, B. and Shernoff, E.S. (2014) Student engagement in high school classrooms from the perspective of flow theory. In M. Csikszentmihalyi (ed.) Applications of Flow in Human Development and Education (pp. 475–494). Springer, Dordrecht. Star, S.L. and Griesemer, J.R. (1989) Institutional ecology, translations and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science 19 (3), 387–420. Sylvester, R. and Greenidge, W.L. (2009) Digital storytelling: Extending the potential for struggling writers. The Reading Teacher 63 (4), 284–295. Thiel, J.J. (2015) Vibrant matter: The intra-active role of objects in the construction of young children’s literacies. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice 64 (1), 112–131. Turkle, S.E. (2011) Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilkström, A. and Verganti, R. (2013) Exploring storyboarding in pre-brief activities. In DS 75–7: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED13), Design for Harmonies, Vol. 7: Human Behaviour in Design, Seoul, Korea, 19-22.08.2013. See https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=s toryboarding+methodology&oq=storyboarding.

14 Visual Representations of Multilingualism: Exploring Aesthetic Approaches to Communication in a Fine Art Context Jessica Bradley, Zhu Hua and Louise Atkinson

Introduction

In this chapter we reflect on the process of engaging with artists and creative practitioners to explore ideas of multilingual communication. We focus on a project, ‘Visual Representations of Multilingualism’ (2018– 2019), through which we invited creative practitioners to submit work that responded to multilingualism as a broad theme. The project sought to stimulate debate about how we understand the concept of multilingualism and to raise awareness of multilingualism as normal, unremarkable everyday practice (García, 2009). Moreover, as scholars working within the area of multilingualism, we wanted to incorporate a wider range of voices and perspectives and explore how the arts might add to, augment and disrupt our understandings of multilingualism as applied linguists. Here we seek to contemplate the challenges and opportunities of engaging in transdisciplinary dialogue through the visual arts and consider how applied linguists might work productively with these innovative methods. The chapter offers the perspectives of the three authors, approaching from applied linguistics (Jessica Bradley and Zhu Hua) and arts practice (Louise Atkinson). Background to the Project

The Visual Representations of Multilingualism project, as the focus for this chapter, was initially framed as a competition and became a longer term project. It was initiated by the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL), represented by a member of the Executive Committee, 297

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Zhu Hua (chapter co-author), as part of a drive to represent multilingualism within the organisation. One of the project’s original objectives was to bring together a series of images of artworks engaging with multilingualism for an exhibition to elicit debate and to showcase widely, including on BAAL’s website and other digital spaces. We describe the process and development of the project, as we want to foreground the ways in which it evolved, showing the opportunities for smaller scale public-facing projects at the intersections of applied linguistics and the arts (Bradley & Harvey, 2019). Early on in the process, Zhu Hua asked Jessica (chapter co-author), as co-convenor of the International Association for Applied Linguistics (AILA) Research Network on Creative Inquiry in Applied Linguistics, to co-facilitate the project. Both Zhu Hua and Jessica had worked together on a number of arts-based research initiatives which had emerged from the ‘Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating Linguistic and Cultural Transformations in Superdiverse Wards in Four UK Cities’ research project (TLANG, AHRC, PI Angela Creese). In addition, Jessica had worked extensively with creative practitioners for her doctoral research which had considered translation and translanguaging practices in community arts production and performance (Bradley, 2018) and the idea for the competition fitted well with the intellectual focus of a number of her own research projects. Jessica invited Louise (chapter co-author), an artist-researcher with whom she had collaborated on a series of arts-based language-focused projects, including participatory research around linguistic landscapes (Bradley, 2019–20; Bradley & Atkinson, 2020; Bradley et al., 2018) through which they were exploring the intersections of language and the arts in educational contexts. Louise was interested in being involved in the competition as it represented a way for artists and applied linguists to work together on shared, interdisciplinary projects. It also acknowledged current collaborations between artist researchers and applied linguists, and the practice of artists with personal experiences of multilingualism. Louise is the director of CuratorSpace, an online platform for artists and curators to advertise opportunities in the creative industries. We agreed with Louise that we would use CuratorSpace to promote the project and to manage the submissions, as a way to open up the competition across arts networks internationally. CuratorSpace was interested in the opportunity to open up new avenues of research to artists and to showcase these works to researchers in order to develop new collaborations and projects. Our collaborative work together has shown us that many artistic practices and languagefocused research processes align across the fields and practices, and this project could shed on these alignments and ways in which artists and applied linguists might develop their ideas together. We developed a call for artists to send in images of artworks of any genre, with around seven months between the first call and the fi nal deadline. We received over 90 entries from artists and creative practitioners

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from all over the world. The artworks were highly diverse, as was the arts practice represented by those who submitted work. The theme was explored in multiple ways, ranging from weaving and collage (e.g. Gail Prasad) to socially engaged immersive experiences (e.g. Elina Karadzhova and Linda Persson). In this chapter we expand on the processes involved and establish some areas of development for future directions for research into multilingualism at the intersection of language and the arts. Art and the Multilingual/Post-monolingual Paradigm

Multilingualism in everyday life has been considered by researchers in many different ways, and in recent years there has been an increase in interest in novel approaches to understanding multilingualism as dynamic rather than additive (Li, 2018). Translanguaging (García & Li, 2014), as one of these approaches, has emerged as an increasingly prevalent term, often used to conceptualise the fluid deployment of multiple ‘named’ languages in interaction. Although it is outside the scope of this chapter to offer a full analysis of the multiple theoretical concepts in circulation, we include a short theoretical discussion in order to contextualise our own understandings of multilingualism which underpin this project. For a broader mapping of the field, Alastair Pennycook (2016), in his critical assessment of the multiple and multiplying concepts which he calls collectively ‘trans-super-poly-metro’, gives an overview of the field, and recent useful clarifications of translanguaging have been offered by Li Wei (2018) and Ofelia García (2019). Important for our argument here and our project rationale is that this way of communicating is not new: it reflects the ways in which humans communicate every day and have always communicated. In this sense, translanguaging is not a new phenomenon – far from it – although the term itself has only been in circulation for under 30 years (Lewis et al., 2012). And, in this sense, neither are translanguaging’s sisters, brothers or distant cousins (super-poly-metro) in any way ‘new’ (see also Reyes, 2014, ‘Super-New-Big’). Translanguaging as communicative practice is very much ‘normal and unremarkable’ (García, 2009) and, as Ofelia García and Ricardo Otheguy (2020: 17) state, people have always ‘languaged in ways that do not fit the definition of named languages’. Translanguaging originated in education and is attributed to Welsh educational linguist Cen Williams (Lewis et al., 2012). In an educational context it has multiple possibilities for linguistic social justice, not least in countering damaging narratives around monolingualism in the classroom (Blackledge & Creese, 2009). A translanguaging pedagogy in the classroom pays attention to the historical nature and embodiedness of language, and how named languages relate to constructions of nation and therefore power (Otheguy et al., 2015). Translanguaging as pedagogy also seeks to address the hierarchies often both implicit and explicit in education which separate ‘elite multilingualism’ from what might be called

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‘multilingualism from below’ (Baynham & Lee, 2019). Our use of translanguaging within the context of this project also stems from its possibilities of moving beyond language to incorporate the visual and the embodied (Bradley & Moore, 2019). However, the risks associated with the increasingly wide and interdisciplinary application of translanguaging are highlighted by many authors (e.g. Jaspers, 2018; Li, 2018), who suggest that caution is necessary. These risks range from the theoretical, in terms of the risk of ontological confusion as multiple understandings and reframings emerge, to the societal, in terms of the risk of damage to the emancipatory potential of translanguaging pedagogies, as being ‘a journey of transformation to a new politics that embraces the practices of minoritized lives’ (Creese, 2020: 251), should its fundamental aspects relating to language and inequalities be undermined. Recent turns in applied linguistics towards the arts (see Bradley & Harvey, 2019, for an overview of this area) explore this tension. On the one hand, expanding and extending the translanguaging lens towards multimodality and embodiment might offer opportunities for transformation (Moore et al., 2020). This can include creative dissemination and alternatives to the more traditional academic article, chapter or monograph. For example, in Voices of a City Market (2019) Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese exemplify the creative affordances of the arts in communicating and disseminating research fi ndings around translanguaging through a poetic and dramatic reading of data from ethnographic research conducted in Birmingham’s Bullring Market. But, on the other hand, the role of language in identity and positioning in society is central and, as García states, any kind of creativity must be combined with criticality: The aesthetic has an important role in opening up a translanguaging space where these bodies gain legitimate action, but the aesthetic cannot simply be rooted to an emotional reaction. (García, 2020: xx)

Our project, therefore, sits at this critical and arguably uncomfortable intersection and seeks to explore the aesthetic and ethical intersections of languaging and the arts. Artistic responses to multilingualism have the potential to enable us to delve deeper into these complexities. And yet, they also risk reinforcing the very boundaries they seek to break down. Transdisciplinary approaches to multilingualism are necessary in order to interrogate the concepts which are often taken for granted and essentialised. Writing from the perspective of comparative literature, Yasemin Yildiz (2012) uses the example of a conceptual artwork Wordsearch: A Translinguistic Sculpture (https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/15747/), created by a German artist, Karin Sander, sponsored by Deutsche Bank. Yildiz chooses this particular work to exemplify how what she describes as monolingualising forces frame multilingual practices. Sander, as Yildiz explains,

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documented the languages spoken in New York City in 2002. She found 250 ‘native speakers’ to offer one word from their ‘mother tongue’. Each word was then translated into the other 250 languages. The resulting 62,500-word artwork was published as a newspaper insert in the New York Times and seeks to represent the multiplicity of languages co-existing in the hustle and bustle of a vibrant New York City in the early 2000s. Yildiz argues that this artwork presupposed that multilingualism is a new development. It suggests that this new phenomenon – that of multilingual realities – is perhaps iconic of our globalising, globalised times at the turn of the century and the start of the new millennium. Yet, as Yildiz states and as we also argue, it is in fact monolingualism not multilingualism which is the new idea, closely associated as it is with contested and arguably problematic concepts such as ‘mother tongue’ and linked to ethnicity, culture and nation (Yildiz, 2012: 2). This artwork, Wordsearch, although theoretically ‘representing multilingualism’, according to Yildiz ‘still functions according to the central precept of the monolingual paradigm’: in Wordsearch, the individual becomes the scale at which the mother tongue concept is preserved, while the global city on which it draws – New York – is imagined as multilingual via the side-by-side coexistence of undisturbed ‘mother tongues’. In this way, Wordsearch may be multilingual but it does not go ‘beyond the mother tongue’. (Yildiz, 2012: 207, emphasis in original)

The artwork, following Yildiz’s logic, embodies the complexity of ‘lingualisms’ or ‘monolingual biases’. The languages, although multiple, retain intact: ‘undisturbed’. Translanguaging, as with other conceptualisations of multilingualism and everyday multilingual practices, seeks to move us beyond the (recent) monolingual paradigm. And yet, as with this artwork, the risk exists that despite this theoretical emancipation from named languages, linked to nation-state building and ingrained in inequalities, we continue to operate in a monolingualising context and within a monolingual paradigm. To this is added an additional transdisciplinary risk: that the aesthetic, although steeped in possibilities for extending and expanding beyond monolingual frameworks, simply reproduces these namings of language(s) and their incumbent social injustices. García asks: How do we permanently destroy the walls/muros that keep bodies positioned differently, with the powerful in order, and with disorder, chaos and marginality created among the others? (García, 2020: xxi)

We therefore add to García’s important question by asking what role the arts might have in this emancipatory linguistic project. Across the mainstream media we frequently hear the concept of ‘English’ being used in a particular way, to support a particular ideology, to exclude, to ‘other’ (Wright & Brookes, 2019). In the aftermath of the European Union (EU) referendum in the United Kingdom (UK) in 2016 and following the UK’s

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initial departure from the EU on 31 January 2020, an upsurge in languagerelated hate crime was observed, including media reports of a poster displayed in a housing block in Norwich, stating that residents should now use the ‘Queens English’ [sic] (Weaver, 2020). The place of language in positioning difference seems ever more prominent as the UK enters an unknown political landscape (Simpson, 2019). Aims of the Project

But what role do the arts have in countering these damaging narratives? What role might they have? Using Yildiz’ framework for reading Wordsearch: A Translinguistic Sculpture, our theoretical questions when considering the body of artworks collected for the competition are two-fold: (1) Does it push against the monolingual paradigm? And how? (2) Does it help us to move further as we theorise the everyday communicative practices (across media) of the post-monolingual paradigm? And how? These questions have clear practical implications and served as initial background to the idea of the project. As explained, the BAAL committee had discussed ways of increasing multilingual representations within the association and its external communications. These discussions had focused on how it might represent multilingualism and multilingual diversity as a global reality – or in García’s words as ‘normal and unremarkable’ – in a way that was inclusive and inspiring, offering an alternative to negative and xenophobic media discourses. The project was therefore instigated to explore the ways in which the broad concept of ‘multilingualism’ might be represented. In doing this, we also wanted to stimulate debate about what it means to be multilingual or to be, in Yildiz’s terms, ‘post-monolingual’. Our starting point relates to the Wordsearch artwork mentioned previously. How might we represent multilingualism? Often this is done, as with Wordsearch, through select (or 250 selected …) languages which are co-present. But, as we have seen, this raises multiple questions. These include which languages are represented (and therefore privileged) and why? Meanwhile, the rise in interest in conceptualising multilingualism, in broadening the post-monolingual lens and aligning to a sociolinguistic focus on social justice questions traditional views of languages as discrete systems. Likewise, the human capacity to draw from a linguistically diverse repertoire to achieve meaning requires a rethinking of language, as bounded by nation-states and histories. Therefore, visual representations, as with ‘textual’ representations, risk reductivism: they risk reinforcing these boundaries with which theorists want to do away to varying degrees. But they also present an opportunity to think creatively and critically about multilingualism and to stimulate discussion through the process.

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The Process

We now consider the process for the project, starting with explaining the initial idea in more detail. We wanted to be clear from the outset that the focus was not solely on outcomes, but also about the process of open dialogue around multilingualism (Table 14.1). We launched the competition via CuratorSpace on 11 October 2018, with a deadline of 29 March 2019. The call text was as follows: Table 14.1 Original call for contributions published on CuratorSpace, 11 October 2018 BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics), in partnership with CuratorSpace, Multilingual Matters, and the AILA Research Network for Creative Inquiry and Applied Linguistics, is looking for applied linguists and visual artists to submit visual representations of multilingualism as part of an international competition. This competition aims to provide a creative opportunity to explore new ways of representing multilingualism through visual means and to stimulate debate and raise awareness about innovative ways of thinking about multilingualism. Multilingualism has often failed to be represented, or – when it has been represented – this has been done through the co-presence of a select number of languages. However, this raises the question of which languages are represented and why, while recent research about multilingual practices, for example translanguaging, has questioned traditional views of languages as discrete systems. This research has also highlighted the multilingual language user’s capacity to create an apparently seamless flow between named languages and language varieties to achieve effective and meaningful communication in everyday social interaction. Our interests are in how applied linguists and artists represent these new ways of thinking about multilingualism creatively and visually and how these images communicate the message about dynamic multilingualism to the public.

As part of the initial call for contributions we put together a list of resources to situate the project, offer some possible avenues of exploration and inspire potential contributors. However, we were conscious of not setting these up as examples to follow or objectives for people to work towards: it was not intended to be prescriptive. We suggested a number of papers and projects – from artistic works to applied linguistics research – in order to showcase a range of different projects and papers. We included Tong King Lee’s (2015) article on translingual practices in literary art, in which he conceptualises translanguaging in the work of two artists as a tool for artists’ linguistic creativity. Lee (2015: 463) states that ‘a translanguaging perspective on literary art, by conjoining applied linguistics with visuality, locates the study of language use beyond the usual comfort zone of linguists’. We anticipated that the artworks submitted would take us beyond our comfort zones as linguists, foregrounding the non-linguistic and the affective. ‘To Act To Know To Be’ (McCartney, 2016) was an exhibition of works created by artist Ella McCartney during her Leverhulme residency working with Zhu Hua, working with ideas around multimodality and translanguaging, translating them into dance and sculpture. Artist Alicia Reyes McNamara’s (2017) exhibition,

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‘Nowhere Else’, was created as part of a graduate in residence programme at South London Gallery. She worked with the experience of being multilingual, drawing on concepts of identity and diaspora, challenging notions of what she describes as ‘two-dimensional ideas of Latino culture’. We also gave the example of the Wellcome Trust (2016) exhibition, ‘This is a Voice’, which explored the notion of voice, as something embodied and flexible. Another artist undertaking creative work in this area is Nicoline Van Harskamp, who has created a series of fi lms around the theme of ‘Englishes’, exploring ideas around ‘Global English’, showcasing the myriad variations of English spoken as a lingua franca. For this she worked with linguists including Jennifer Jenkins at the University of Southampton and Barbara Seidlhofer at the University of Vienna. These examples represented a snapshot of practice and research around language, voice and identity undertaken by researchers and artists in recent years, including collaborative and co-produced work. In the context of the turn towards the arts in applied linguistics, Jessica Bradley and Lou Harvey (2019) ask what the shared ethos might look like for research and practice across these boundaries and how this kind of work might be seen as relevant for researchers and artists alike (and all those in between, and for whom these categories are too narrow). Similar to García (2020) and Creese (2020), they suggest that caution is required that this ‘creative turn’ does not result in an incoherence which might reduce the potential for work in this area to unsettle our understandings of ‘research’.

The Creative Response

While the call for artworks was open, we considered how artists might respond, the possible scale of the response and the kinds of work that might be submitted. Midway through the submission period, we published a follow-up blog post via CuratorSpace, which offered more background and asked a number of questions to stimulate debate: What does multilingualism look like? We can perhaps understand what it sounds like. But what do we picture when we think about multilingualism? And what role might artists have in visualising what it means to be multilingual and to live in a multilingual world? (CuratorSpace, 21 January 2019)

In the blog post we drew on the following points made by Penelope Gardner Chloros about multilingualism and art: (1) Artists often use different languages creatively as a resource within their work. (2) Artists sometimes represent the idea of multilingualism, perhaps as a characteristic or as something symbolic. (3) Multilingualism might be used as a political statement in artists’ work, for example using languages which are marginalised.

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(4) Multilingualism might be a new part of an artist’s own life and this might affect their practice in a certain way, or potentially be something they want to explore through their work. (5) The effects of multilingualism on creativity and cognition might have specific effects on artistic practice. (Gardner-Chloros, 2014: 95) As before, we did not wish to impose any particular framework on the artists, instead offering some ideas for how artists have been understood to draw on multilingualism as a creative tool. We encouraged people to submit their work for the competition and it was widely circulated on social media, including Twitter and Facebook. By the deadline we had received over 90 entries. As we began the process of working through the submissions we were struck by the range of artworks, the different media used and the ways in which the artists had interpreted the theme. Often the works were highly personal, and the explanation or exegesis offered interesting insights into the artists’ thought processes and practice, including their engagements with multilingualism as a concept and as a lived experience. Our judging panel, which included the organising team (representing BAAL, the AILA Network on Creative Inquiry in Applied Linguistics and CuratorSpace) and art historian and art education expert Abigail Harrison Moore as external advisor, followed a set of criteria for the artworks and individually ranked the entries. For the judging we used a numerical ranking system, adding up the fi nal scores to arrive at a longlist, and then the panel convened a meeting to agree the three winners. Each panel member selected their top five, ranked in order, and offered a short explanation for their choice. The panel met in early April, discussed the shortlist and recommended the three winners. Louise and Abigail brought expertise gained from being involved in judging panels for artistic projects, for example through Abigail’s work with the ARTiculation project for schools. Once agreed on behalf of the competition team, Louise (through CuratorSpace) communicated with the three winners and also with the longlisted entries, which would form part of the digital exhibition. We developed judging criteria which were negotiated with BAAL and communicated initially in the original call. As we worked with the criteria, we engaged critically with the parameters of the initial project and with the artists’ work. Here we offer a summary of our experiences within these criteria which, we argue, shed light on the complexities of transdisciplinary research. We include these because we want to show how our approaches evolved through engagement with the artistic works and with the process, therefore expanding the project. (1) Close engagement with the theme, i.e. creative ways of representing multilingualism Our fi rst criterion related to engagement with multilingualism as a concept. Broadly, the majority of the entries addressed the core theme

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of the call, in ways that ranged from interpretation to more conceptual pieces. However, our original iteration of this raised important theoretical questions for us about ‘representation’ – what we meant by this and how it might be interpreted – demonstrating that there is scope for future work in this area to interrogate this further as we continue to write and reflect on the artworks and engage with the process. Is it possible, or even desirable, to seek to ‘represent’ in this context? Instead, should we be considering ways to engage with ‘performing’ multilingualism, ‘conceptualising’ or ‘disrupting’ multilingualism we explored how we might rethink and rework our initial ideas, for example through engaging more widely with theoretical work emerging around post-representationalism (e.g. MacLure, 2013). (2) Effective communication: Clear and compelling in communicating dynamic multilingualism to the public The second criterion pushed us towards interesting theoretical debates around art as communication. It has long been accepted that art does not necessarily speak for itself (Barthes, 1967). So, this prompted us to ask ourselves what we were trying to achieve in asking for artistic representations. Did we anticipate that the artworks would communicate multilingualism in different ways from applied linguistics research, the fi ndings of which are usually communicated through written academic texts? Would these complement research in this area, disrupt it or challenge it? And by representations, did we mean the artworks or the descriptions, the explanations or the theorisations? (3) High-quality digital image (300 dpi) There was a practical dimension to the third criterion, as high-quality images would enable us to review the artworks in their best light. However, as we prepared the exhibition we asked the longlisted artists to submit additional information, including more images of their artworks if we felt that those submitted did not do justice to the ideas presented. For socially engaged and immersive experiences this was particularly the case, as an image failed to communicate the complexity and affective dimensions of the artworks. (4) Relationship between medium and content: Providing clear reasons for using a particular medium in the production of the work The fourth criterion relates to the explanations submitted by the artists to accompany their artworks. Reading these opened up ideas for future projects around artistic engagements with multilingualism, for example around fi lm and video making as possible media foci, therefore moving away from the ‘image’ or ‘representation’. It made us question, as judges, why we might be drawn to work in a particular medium (or not). And it also highlighted again the challenge of judging multimedia work by an image (in some cases a photograph taken on a phone of a piece of immersive video art).

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Collectively we came to a decision about the winning artworks. The fi rst prize went to Light and Language by Linda Persson, a collaborative piece with Wongatha women Geraldine Hogarth and Luxie RedmondHogarth, with parts of the community of Leonora Western Australia Goldfields desert area. We thought this was a fascinating collaborative project that highlighted lesser heard languages and ways of speaking, as in the case of indigenous communities in Australia. The use of media enabled community partners to fully engage in the process of visualising multilingualism. The second prize went to (Inter)weaving Repertoires by Gail Prasad, a researcher of plurilingualism whose work is at the intersection of arts practice and language. We agreed that Gail’s piece was a very clear articulation of the complexity of multilingualism, using weaving and the process of making as a way of evidencing the relationship between repertoires framed by her vision and theoretical engagement. Elina Karadzhova took third place with her (2018)piece, Language: Time Dreams Avatars. This was another example of a socially engaged piece of work, in this case with multilingual children. We considered this to be an incredibly thoughtful and provocative community project working with multilingual young people, with striking visuals.

Representing Multilingualism through Art

We now turn to a selection of the artworks and discuss these with reference to the post-monolingual turn introduced earlier in the chapter. Many of the works explored languages other than those spoken by the artists. In some cases this was a result of their general interest in multilingualism, and in the text that follows we draw on the statements, biographies and video diaries provided by the artists, as well as the email and direct conversations we had with the artists themselves to explore this further.

Light and Language

Linda Persson’s work Light and Language (Figure 14.1) was co-created with Wongatha women Geraldine Hogarth and Luxie RedmondHogarth and parts of the community of Leonora, Goldfields desert area, Australia. Persson, a Swedish artist based in the UK, has undertaken a series of long-term residencies which seek to explore concepts of people and place and the relationship between these. Her work considers how female and indigenous knowledges can be tools for understanding colonial histories and language. Her work questions Western patriarchal narratives. Collaborating with communities on a long-term basis, she explores different ways of making art to share and amplify stories.

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Figure 14.1 Light and Language

The Western Australia Goldfields desert area was the location of the Light and Language project. The project included working with the Tjupan, Ngalia and Wongatha people – the traditional owners of the land  – and with fi rst- and second-wave migrants from Greece, Italy, Scandinavia and the Baltic regions. Lesser known Aboriginal languages, including those of Geraldine Hogarth and Luxie Redmond-Hogarth, the last speakers of their language, formed the project focus. The resulting work was produced using bendable LED lights that could be powered by solar cell or AA batteries. The lights were made into meaningful words, using a mix of conglomerate and traditional words which were chosen and spelled by the community involved. As Persson explains in her statement, the artwork was displayed for one night across three roads linking the ancient site of the Dingo Dreaming, the old goldmine village and the new small town of Leonora. The work explored ideas of languages via light and darkness, sun and water – elements that are related to both desert environs and Scandinavia – and attempted to make something ‘invisible’ visible: language as landscape. Over 100 local members attended the event, which is a large audience in a rural place of this kind. Persson’s project highlights the challenges of using a single image to represent the years of conversation, the experience of driving four hours to a sweltering desert for the closing event, or the resulting sense of community between those involved. However, through inviting and exhibiting these images, we were able to learn about and reflect on the lessons and conversations generated and documented by the artist.

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My Dream Is…

The work My Dream Is… (Figure 14.2) is a series of images created by artists Muhamad Nakam and Chloé Chritharas Devienne in collaboration with the Greek Language and Multilingualism Laboratory at the University of Thessaly. Both artists identify as multilingual, with Nakam describing himself as being of Kurdish descent from Iraq, and Paris-born Devienne identifying as Greek-French. The Greek Language and Multilingualism Laboratory is a team of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics researchers who research and teach language issues through a sociolinguistic and a critical pedagogy lens. Since 2011 the Lab has delivered a series of educational and research projects which focus on social, educational and linguistic empowerment of social groups with a refugee or migrant background. The artist statement explained that the project My Dream Is … was created in the context of the art exhibition ‘Find Refuge in Art’, which aimed to develop intercultural dialogue between refugees and local artists who worked in pairs representing their views on the ‘refugee crisis’. The work consisted of a multi-level assemblage of photography and drawing, depicting 36 people with diverse linguistic-cultural identities. The artists met with the participants to share conversations and specifically to discuss their dreams. Devienne photographed the participants, before Nakam translated these conversations into drawings onto the portraits. As they explained, these artworks integrated concepts of ‘west and non-west, verbal and non-verbal, artistic and scientific perspectives, [to bridge] the private and public sphere’ (Artist statement, 2019).

Figure 14.2 My Dream Is …

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Language: Time Dreams Avatars

Dreams were also a focus of artist-researcher Elina Karadzhova’s work, Language: Time Dreams Avatars (Figure 14.3). Karadzhova’s art practice focuses on languages and their impact on our sense of belonging, memory and identity. Her experience in motion graphics, video and projection mapping enabled her to explore this through art-based participatory research which was presented through animation, fi lm and art installations. She is particularly interested in the experience of multilingualism as ‘living in-between languages’. The images she submitted for the project depicted a video installation created with words and drawings by multilingual children aged 6–15 years old during art workshops which she had devised and delivered. The workshops aimed to enable children to analyse their own linguistic experiences, focusing on the boundaries (or lack thereof) between languages and the experiences of ‘switching’. The workshops explored three themes: languages and time, languages and dreams, and languages and avatars. The fi rst theme explored the experience of using different languages in daily life and the activities were related to the switching of language. To depict this, the children created clocks with annotations to map their daily linguistic patterns. The focus for the second theme was the relationship between the languages we speak and the languages in which we dream. Through working with the young people, Karadzhova learned that bilingual individuals often dream in mixed languages. The third theme asked the children to imagine language as someone or something,

Figure 14.3 Language: Time Dreams Avatars

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and as a persona or character. This sought to give language a completely different quality and to re-think it through a creative process. In her artist statement she explained: as a researcher and an artist, I am intrigued in the capacity of art to give shape and tangibility to our inner worlds and to what cannot be simply articulated by words. I often seek inspiration in surrealism and adopt surrealist techniques as a means of liberating our inner-experiences without fear of the outcome. Voices

Victoria Casillas’ (2018) work, Voices (Figure 14.4), was produced in response to the UK’s EU referendum. She used her own experiences as an EU national to connect with other EU nationals living and working in the UK. Although the work was inherently political, she did not wish to take a polemical stance and instead chose to focus on the personal stories of people, highlighting the fact of the rich diversity of language and culture from across Europe in British cities. The artwork was produced using organza fabric, embroidered with red and blue thread, and elements of text were highlighted with embroidery hoops. The fabric was hung in a maze-like structure so that people could walk through the work and was supplemented by an audio montage.

Figure 14.4 Voices

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In order to produce the work, she first wrote her own story of living in the UK. This determined the questions that she decided to ask of others, which aimed to focus on the everyday experiences and realities of living in the UK. The project began by connecting with friends and colleagues who were EU nationals, who shared their stories and then offered to connect her to people they knew from other EU countries. This developed into a conversation network resulting in one story from each of the 28 member-states. Casillas embroidered each story in red thread in the language of the speaker, which was then also translated into English. The UK contribution was embroidered in blue thread. As each story takes over 30 hours to produce, this is an ongoing process where the maze grows every time it is exhibited. Worldmaking Threads

Finally, Sonia Tuttiett’s work draws on her 20 years’ experience working as a textile artist and designer. She combines her skills in pattern cutting, sewing, embroidery and textile screen printing with community art through various projects and in 2016 received a commendation from the Embroiderers’ Guild for helping to produce greater community cohesion. The work she submitted was an image of the Worldmaking Threads coat and headwrap (Figure 14.5), which she conceived and developed with East

Figure 14.5 Worldmaking Threads

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London Textile Arts for the ‘Who Are We?’ exhibition at Tate Modern in 2018. This exhibition was co-produced by Counterpoints Arts and The Open University and featured an artistic-academic collaboration who asked the question ‘who are we?’ to encourage discussion around migration and belonging. The exhibition was presented as a ‘durational work, combining participatory engagement, collective-making, performance and film’ (who are we? project https://whoareweproject.com/open-learning/making-of-astitch-in-time-grinning-like-a-cheshire-cat). The statement elaborated on the methodology, explaining that some of the exhibition’s 5000 visitors sat at a co-production table and contributed to an interpersonal exchange with over 30 language teachers alongside the two artists and more than 20 embroiderers, with an emphasis on sharing sayings and stories across different languages and cultures. About 120 sayings in 15 languages, with maps of various cities from around the world, were embroidered in patchwork pieces to form the final colourful coat and headwrap that came out of the event. The work was based on research into language teachers as creative mediators between languages and cultures carried out by the Diasporic Identities and the Politics of Language Teaching strand of the AHRC’s OWRI Language Acts and Worldmaking project. These five examples offer a small insight into the richness of the works submitted for the project, showing how the artists engaged with multilingualism in different ways, and how the choice of materials and processes involved also intersected with the concept. Returning to our understandings of translanguaging, these artworks offer insights into the multimodal and embodiedness of multilingualism. Possibilities for Art in the Multilingual/Post-monolingual Paradigm

We fi nish this chapter by reflecting on the process of undertaking the project and returning to the theoretical arguments we made initially, in particular to Yildiz and the ‘post-monolingual’ paradigm. The questions we asked initially were: (1) Does it push against the monolingual paradigm? And how? (2) Does it help us to move further as we theorise the everyday communicative practices (across media) of the post-monolingual paradigm? And how? The three ‘winning’ artworks demonstrate the complexity of pushing against a monolingual paradigm. Persson’s work shows the impossibility of an image in terms of representing the affective and embodied experience of an immersive community-led artistic event. To some extent this impossibility stands counter to the monolingual paradigm as we accept the unknown and the unknowable, allowing ourselves to become entangled in the partiality of what we can know through the image. Prasad’s

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collaged woven piece dissects and disrupts the languages as whole and as countable, in contrast with Wordsearch. We do not know the pieces that are intertwined, although we catch glimpses of Le Petit Prince and other texts, which serve as fragments of literary memories, for which language is both centre and periphery. And as with Persson’s images, the unknown and the unknowable are foregrounded in Karadzhova’s immersive piece on being in-between languages for which the image submitted is clearly insufficient. All three works go beyond quantifying languages as symbolic of multilingualism, instead serving to deconstruct named languages and create something unrecognisable and which cannot be reproduced. Going back to García’s challenge around the emancipatory linguistic project and the role of the arts, we can see that, in a number of these artworks, the underpinning philosophies are co-productive, with an ethical stance towards participation by those who are so often excluded. The artworks, and the project itself, brought together different ideas of multilingualism, demonstrating the rich opportunity the project had created for transdisciplinary dialogue. But they also foreground a process which has been described as ‘hospitality’, for example, in the work of Alison Phipps (2012) and Lou Harvey (2017). In this context, and with related transdisciplinary projects, we have been thinking about it as generosity. Generosity in the sense of inviting people from both outside and inside the field of applied linguistics to offer reflections, interpretations and rethinkings of some of the core concepts of research into multilingualism. Generosity in terms of agreeing to disrupt the ideas of inside and outside. And generosity from the perspective of the creative practitioners sharing their work in order to engage in discussion about multilingualism. This goes beyond the ethically problematic notion of working with artists to disseminate or to ‘represent’ our ideas (see Pool, 2018), and instead opens up spaces to challenge us and to continue to theorise, opening up our own repertoires, both individual and shared. Across the submissions, and as demonstrated in this chapter, there was a strong tendency towards participatory and collaborative work. This enabled a perspective on the artists’ creative process and the stories behind the artworks, while also shedding light on the ways in which the artists worked around the limitations of the single visual modality required for the project. The meaning and significance of the media, the symbols and the codes are brought in and brought about, and through the process they take on new meaning. And, returning to Yildiz, the artworks offer rich and complex insights into multilingualism and perhaps, in some ways, move beyond the monolingual paradigm. Following this argument, they also go beyond ‘representation’, instead offering affective engagements which are far more unsettling and ambiguous. If we take multilingual practice, or living multilingually, as normal and unremarkable, we then shift to thinking about how we can widen our lenses and paradigms, including working with artists and creative

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practitioners in ways that allow us to not only ‘represent’ multilingualism but also rethink our own understandings through the artworks created. Developing the line of inquiry within this project enabled us to make connections between what we might consider ‘research’ in applied linguistics and how this aligns with artistic practice. It raises questions about who gets to do research and whose research might be less visible. The project therefore opened up avenues for us to rethink our own research processes and continues to do so. It also offers insights into how language educators might engage with these wider methods and methodologies and the opportunities for collaborative approaches to language education. Questions for Further Reflection

(1) What is meant by ‘monolingualising forces’ and why might attention to these be important in a language(s) education context? (2) What kinds of insights do these artworks offer to our understandings of living multilingually? (3) What are the opportunities for the arts in developing our approach to language(s) education and deepening our understandings of social justice oriented language learning classrooms? (4) How might research in languages and linguistics inform arts education and creative pedagogies? Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the contributing artists, in particular Victoria Casillas, Elina Karadzhova, Yasmin Nicholas, Linda Persson, Gail Prasad and Sonia Tuttiett. Thanks to Abigail Harrison Moore for being a critical friend and competition judge, BAAL for initiating the project and Multilingual Matters and CuratorSpace for their support. The exhibition was launched at the Annual Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University in August 2019, artist attendance at which was funded by the School of Education of the University of Sheffield. Thanks are due to conference organisers Gee McCrory and Kate Pahl and also to James Charnock for technical support. The ideas discussed in this chapter were presented as part of the BAAL 2019 Invited Colloquium on Multilingualism, organised by Khawla Badwan, at Jyväskylä University for a seminar on art and language led by Sari Pöyhönen, and as part of the AHRC LILA Network, organised by Lou Harvey, Emilee Moore and Cristina Aliagas Marin. References Barthes, R. (1967) The death of the author. In Image, Music, Text (pp. 142–148). London: Fontana. Baynham, M. and Lee, T.K. (2019) Translation and Translanguaging. London: Routledge.

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Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2019) Voices of a City Market: An Ethnography. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bradley, J. (2018) Translation and translanguaging in production and performance in community arts. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds. Bradley, J. (2019–2020) Multilingual Streets: Translating and Curating the Linguistic Landscape. AHRC Open World Research Initiative Cross Language Dynamics. Bradley, J. and Atkinson, L. (2020) Translanguaging beyond bricolage: meaning making and collaborative ethnography in community arts. In E. Moore, J. Bradley and J. Simpson (eds) Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities (pp. 135–154). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bradley, J. and Harvey, L. (2019) Creative inquiry in applied linguistics: Language, communication and the arts. In C. Wright, L. Harvey and J. Simpson (eds) Voices and Practices in Applied Linguistics: Diversifying a Discipline (pp. 91–107). York: White Rose University Press. Bradley, J. and Moore, E. (2019) Resemiotisation and creative production: Extending the translanguaging lens. In A. Sherris and E. Adami (eds) Making Signs, Translanguaging Ethnographies: Exploring Urban, Rural and Educational Spaces (pp. 91–111). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bradley, J., Moore, E., Simpson, J. and Atkinson, L. (2018) Translanguaging Space and Creative Activity: Theorising collaborative arts-based learning. Language and Intercultural Communication 18(1), 54–73. doi: 10.1080/14708477.2017.1401120. Casillas, V. (2018) Voices [Installation with organza, thread and audio]. Canterbury. Creese, A. (2014–2018) Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating Linguistic and Cultural Transformations in Superdiverse Wards in Four UK Cities. Birmingham: Arts and Humanities Research Council Translating Cultures (AH/L007096/1). Creese, A. (2020) Afterword: Starting from the other end. In E. Moore, J. Bradley and J. Simpson (eds) Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities (pp. 251–254). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. García, O. (2019) Translanguaging: A coda to the code? Classroom Discourse 10 (3–4), 369–373. García, O. (2020) Foreword: Co-labor and re-performances. In E. Moore, J. Bradley and J. Simpson (eds) Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities (pp. xvii–xxii). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. García, O. and Li Wei (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. London: Palgrave. García, O. and Otheguy, R. (2020) Plurilingualism and translanguaging: Commonalities and divergences. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 23 (1), 17–35. doi:10.1080/13670050.2019.1598932 Gardner-Chloros, P. (2014) Multilingualism and the arts: Introduction. International Journal of Bilingualism 18 (2), 95–98. Harvey, L. (2017) Adapting intercultural research for performance: Enacting hospitality in interdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 17 (4), 371–387. Jaspers, J. (2018) The transformative limits of translanguaging. Language & Communication 58, 1–10. Karadzhova, E. (2018) Language: Time Dreams Avatars [Digital projection]. Edinburgh. Lee, T.K. (2015) Translanguaging and visuality: Translingual practices in literary art. Applied Linguistics Review 6 (4), 441–465. Lewis, G., Jones, B. and Baker, C. (2012) Translanguaging: Origins and development from school to street to beyond. Educational Research and Evaluation: An International Journal on Theory and Practice (18) 7, 641–654. doi: 10.1080/13803611.2012.718488.

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Li, W. (2018) Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics 39 (1), 9–30. MacLure, M. (2013) Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26 (6), 658–667. McCartney, E. (2016) ‘Ella McCartney: To Act To Know To Be’ [Exhibition]. 11–17 March, Lychee One, London. Moore, E., Bradley, J. and Simpson, J. (eds) (2020) Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Nakam, M., Chritharas Devienne, C. and Greek Language Lab. (2017) My Dream Is … [Photography and hybrid gel pen]. Thessaly. Otheguy, R., García, O. and Reid. W. (2015) Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages Applied Linguistics Review, 6 (3), 281–307. doi: 10.1515/ applirev-2015-0014. Pennycook, A. (2016) Mobile times, mobile terms: The trans-super-poly-metro movement. In N. Coupland (ed.) Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates (pp. 201–206). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Persson, L., Hogarth, G., Hogarth, L. and the community of Leonora (2018) Light and Language [Solar powered LED lights, wooden frames, chicken-wire, photography]. Desert of Eastern Goldfields, Australia. Phipps, A. (2012) Voicing solidarity: Linguistic hospitality and poststructuralism in the real world. Applied Linguistics 33 (5), 582–602. Pool, S. (2018) Everything and Nothing is Up for Grabs: Using Artistic Methods within Participatory Research. Bristol: Connected Communities Foundation Series. Reyes, A. (2014) Linguistic anthropology in 2013: Super-new-big. American Anthropologist 116 (2), 366–378. Reyes McNamara, A. (2017) ‘Alicia Reyes McNamara: Nowhere Else’ [Exhibition]. South London Gallery, London. 7 April–11 June. Simpson, J. (2019) Policy and adult migrant language education in the UK. In M. Cooke and R. Peutrell (eds) Brokering Britain, Educating Citizens (pp. 25–42). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Wellcome Trust (2016) ‘This is a Voice’ [Exhibition]. Wellcome Collection, 14 April–31 July, London. Tuttiett, S. (2018) Worldmaking Threads [Cotton, organza, embroidery thread, fabric paint, beads, sequins]. London: Tate Modern. Van Harskamp, N. (2018) ‘Nicoline Van Harskamp: Englishes’ [Exhibition]. Project Arts Centre, 15 February–31 March, Dublin. Weaver, M. (2020) ‘Speak only English’ posters racially aggravated, say police. The Guardian, 2 February. See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/01/ police-called-in-after-poster-tells-residents-of-flats-to-speak-english. Wright, D. and Brookes, G. (2019) ‘This is England, speak English!’: A corpus-assisted critical study of language ideologies in the right-leaning British press. Critical Discourse Studies 16 (1), 56–83. Yildiz, Y. (2012) Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Post-Monolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press.

Commentary for Part 4 Kate Pahl

Each time we perceive, and as our conceptions become alternatively sedimented and fluid, what – norms, cultural practices, social inclusions and exclusions, assumptions about meaning, stories (of migration, education, justice, incarceration …) – are we cultivating and nurturing into and out of existence? What is to become of what we do not see? That we are unable to see? Unwilling or unprepared to see? That we do not want to see? As we strive to see, what do we allow ourselves to recognize? As we fi nd comfort in the familiar, how might we see in the unfamiliar a glimmer of recognition? (Vasudevan, 2011: 1158)

‘Imagining otherwise’ is a key part of multilingual scholarship and authoring. The condition of multilingualism is to think otherwise (Phipps, 2019). Increasingly, a focus on young people as agents of change and hope has become important in concerns about the climate emergency and the condition of many who fi nd themselves at the mercy of global capitalism and its resulting inequities. When movements such as Black Lives Matter swept the globe, the need for scholarship that responded to this was urgent. The relationship between academic theories and the on-theground lived realities of young people is increasingly troubled by the everchanging conditions of young people’s lives. Writing about this work, it is clear that we need to fi nd a way of listening. These chapters attempt to do this. These are stories located in a process-led view of life, one that recognises failure and understands the complexity of experience. This work celebrates complexity, going round and round in circles, hesitancy and uncertainty – aspects of curricular learning that are less recognised. Multilingualism as a stance opens itself out to not knowing; as we fumble for words in each other’s language, we fall over ourselves in an attempt to fi nd meaning. Instead, images can carry weight as we attempt to reach each other. In Chung and Macleroy’s description of young people’s attempts to use digital stories as a mode of communication, these qualities come to the fore. The stories continue to resonate long after they have been made and told, and the arc of history that was in their making continues to unfold. These moments of opening are significant, as they can create spaces for different kinds of agency to unfold. I write this having just listened to Kamala Harris describe how her mother would feel if she knew her daughter had become Vice President of the United States. 318

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These becomings are implicit in the careful attention the teachers and the students gave to the process of telling stories together. Children as active researchers and investigators of their world are a key part of this enlarged way of seeing research and practice as intertwined. As the children in Chung and Macleroy’s second example so cogently illustrate, concepts of belonging and identity echo through the centuries and their work illustrates the intergenerational nature of storytelling. Their struggle to gain recognition as members of the Pingpu tribe is deeply moving. As with Finnegan’s (2015) insight that language is just one mode in which to make meaning, the multimodal and multilingual nature of the young people’s stories offers an expansive view of multilingual communicative practices. Past, present and future are rolled up together in the resulting film. These productions are both aesthetically and contextually situated across and between existing ways of knowing and doing and new productive possibilities. Budach, Sharoyan and Loghin draw on the concept of the ‘contact zone’ from Mary Louise Pratt (1991) and reanimate it by thinking about digital productions. These animated stories become reanimated and revitalised through the process of making and creating. Here, the concept of ‘design out of time’ was helpful in understanding the way in which the material artefacts propelled the meaning forward. This is space that is shaped in the moment of creation. Literacies and languages are animated, and co-created, in ways that acknowledge the stories of their creator but also the creative impulse behind the work, the flow that moves through this process. Bradley, Zhu Hua and Atkinson’s chapter further emphasises the need to work in new ways that encourage collaboration and creative uncertainties. This also applies to theoretical ideas within multilingualism. For us to be alive to change, it is important to enable change. Disruption and dislocation are part of the lexicon of this experience. By describing artistic approaches to multilingual scholarship, the concept of multilingualism itself becomes open to change. The ways in which language and disciplinary constructs within universities have tried to fi x things become unstuck and more open and tentative ways of knowing emerge, which challenge colonial concepts of language and identity in new ways. For me, these three chapters illustrate the way in which meaning-makers themselves create the need for new theories. These vital knowings push at academically constructed disciplinary boundaries and burst across these domains, to celebrate the complex and irreverent world of the present, but with an eye on the past and the future. This then presents a challenge to more formal concepts from sociolinguistics. The world that children and young people inhabit is radically different from those gone before but, at the same time, inherits enduring struggles and concerns that arc across generations.

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Theory that takes account of these complex becomings has to become ragged at the edges for new ideas to seep in. Translanguaging has become a way of looking at the world that recognises the day-to-day lives of children and young people who live across languages and who, in crossing borders of belonging, become part of new moments of realisation and creation. When these new modes of being are recognised and inscribed into academic discourse, they also seep beyond the page and become affectively significant. All these chapters draw attention to affect, and imply ‘something more’ in the story of the child who died in the toilet, in the protest at being rendered invisible, in the dancing carrot. These stories exceed the boundaries of what is tell-able and make it new, once again. This creative impulse in multimodal multilingual digital productions is a pointer to new configurations of disciplinary and interdisciplinary workings. This kind of work emphasises speculation and affect, emergent modes of thinking that push at autonomous accounts of literacies (Truman, 2019). This kind of multilingual, multimodal research helps us to see the many threads that connect young people across languages and across countries but also disrupts a stable entity that endures across time, and frees language and therefore literacy from its fi xedness. Timescales are disrupted, and move both to amplify the now, and to recursively explore the ‘then’. The effect of this kind of scholarship is a creative, innovative approach to scholarship, that involves change, both for researchers and for practitioners working in the field of literacy. This leads to risk taking but also involves living with theory a bit more dangerously. When theoretical ideas are new, the work feels different. As Brian Street argued, ‘We all have to live with the psychological and social consequences of the new theories’ (Street, 1997: 52). But these chapters show the strength of this approach, and their new-ness is part of the story that unites them and makes them exciting to read. References Finnegan, R. (2015) What Is Language? London: Routledge. Phipps, A. (2019) Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pratt, M.L. (1991) Arts of the contact zone. Profession 1991, 33–40. Street, B. (1997) The implications of New Literacy Studies for literacy education. English in Education 31 (3), 26–39. Truman, S. (2019) Inhuman literacies and affective refusals: Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and secondary school English. Curriculum Inquiry 49 (1), 110–128. Vasudevan, L. (2011) An invitation to unknowing. Teachers College Record 113 (6), 1154–1174.

Conclusion: Language Education Collages Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy

This book has brought home the idea that language education is about listening – listening to what happens on the ground: the work of language teachers, educators and literacy specialists, and the connections that are made in between. It aligns with ways of doing that move away from ideal, disembodied and abstract processes that are applied top-down. In doing this, it has shown that language education fi nds its temporary shapes and contours by identifying with particular localities, inhabiting particular practices, and connecting with the different voices and relationships taking part in it. Language education in this book listens to the needs and wishes of each actor and voice in this self-organising ensemble of meaning-making, all dependent on each other in a interdependent ecosystem. It argues that language education works best and more creatively when questioning hierarchies and linear paths while at the same time acknowledging the pull of ideology and its constraining structures. Indeed, the political and critical aspect of the empowering role of language education to combat and fight hegemony, power and inequality is not something that this volume shies away from. It recognises that not all languages and all speakers are on a level playing field, as the recent pandemic has made apparent. As we write the conclusion for this book in the midst of the pandemic, it has become evident that we do not have as much control over our environment as rational epistemologies in Western thought assume. How we relate to the world and the way our agencies work is relational and contingent on how the world changes around us. The pandemic has reminded us that we need to be open to new possibilities and unforeseen circumstances and be adaptable to change as one thing leads to another in a complex web of connections and relationships. Similarly, the individual personal aspects of language education, with their biographical and historical aspects, are unpredictable and contingent on a myriad of events. But above all, they are in tension with the political. It is only by acknowledging the power of social structures that the personal is able to unfold and function. So it is 321

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through the inter- and intra-relationships between the two that there is the possibility of change and creativity, and of fi nding new ways of doing language education. While there is more than one direction to go in, there is also more than one voice to be taken into account. Each context, history and confederation of circumstances and agencies is made up of different collages of literacies and language learning. But we also listen to silence. We listen and acknowledge the richness that other semiotic processes bring to language within an expanded view of meaning-making. We listen to the silent manifestations of language: the aesthetic and the sensory. As the different parts and chapters in this book have shown, language can be conceived in a variety of ways and in combination with the other noise, the cacophony of multisensory and multimodal expressive modes: whether it is through the visual arts, crafts, textures or smells. This vision of language education is therefore one that emerges out of both verbal and non-verbal, purposeful and intuitive relationships and connections. These are junctures that often clash, grapple and subvert unequal power relations while at the same time engendering creative processes and unexpected becomings. Whereas a harmonious language ensemble and coherent linguistic repertoire is often the end-goal, we recognise that there is crisis and catharsis, pain and pleasure along the way, and the lingering feeling that external forces and constraints prevail. There will be compromises, and dialogue with other agencies, some limitations and influences. This, however, does not mean that it has not worked, but rather that the task of liberating language education is never fi nished and is always at work, open, full of possibility and in movement. Indeed, liberating language education is not a free-for-all, an unmoored pedagogy with no anchors. It just means that fi xtures are temporary, contingent on the local circumstances in which they fi nd themselves, and always susceptible to change. We also hope to make a call for liberating language education from a particular way of researching language education. One that is not subject to the hegemony of theory and exclusively rational approaches to language. Instead, we propose different ways of working with theory that emphasise dialogue and collaborative approaches: a way of working with theory that listens to both researchers and participants and the meanings that emerge as a result of such collaborative work. This liberatory language education vision is one that hopes to be enabling rather than constraining. One that not only encourages us to listen to and hear new voices but that also hopes to create new ones. It is theoryin-progress, unfinished and open to new possibilities, new landscapes and new forms of knowledge. It listens to and observes every classroom, every context and circumstance and, in doing so, it focuses on the nexus of time and space and the textures, colours and shapes that give it form. The vision of language education exposed in this book is not an example of language education that is conjured up and imagined in our minds

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out of some grand plan. Rather, it seeks to trace the particular, an infi nite collage of scraps of real-life events, formal and informal, histories and biographies that form constellations of agencies, practices and eduscapes while providing the starting point for new creative formations. This is no theory of language education to be transferred and applied to any context, but rather a way of educating our sensibility to pick up the frequencies and directions that language education can branch out into.

Where Do We Go Next? […] When the children return to school, they will have returned with a new history that we will need to help them identify and make sense of. When the children return to school, we will need to listen to them. Let their stories be told. […] Greet them with art supplies and writing materials, and music and dance and so many other avenues to help them express what has happened to them in their lives during this horrific year. Greet them with stories and books that will help them make sense of an upsidedown world. […] Resist the pressure from whatever ‘powers that be’ who are in a hurry to ‘fi x’ kids and make up for the ‘lost’ time. The time was not lost, it was invested in surviving an historic period of time in their lives – in our lives. The children do not need to be fi xed. They are not broken. They need to be heard. […] (Thayer Snyder, 2020)

As we draft the conclusion to Liberating Language Education, the pandemic has disrupted and changed (language) learning for millions of learners and their families and for language educators around the globe. The extract above is from a Facebook post by Teresa Thayer Snyder (former superintendent of the Voorheesville district in upstate New York). The post urges us to rethink and reimagine the purposes, practices and processes of (language) education, using as our compass the experiences, narratives and socioemotional needs of the learners themselves. Dominant monolingual discourses and exclusionary cultural practices can ignore, alienate and silence learners’ voices, their rich histories, heritages, languages, ways of knowing and being that do not fit neatly in established educational models and benchmarks. Rather than succumbing to deficit representations and understandings of children as ‘need[ing] to be fi xed’, Teresa Thayer Snyder advocates an alternative narrative that children ‘need to be heard’. She stresses that learning stretches well beyond the narrowly defi ned academic curriculum, achievement measurements and physical boundaries of schools and classrooms. Children bring to academic knowledge valuable ‘funds of knowledge’ (González et al., 2005) they have acquired and developed in their homes and communities, as they participate in often intergenerational social networks with a range of significant mediators, such as parents, grandparents, siblings, peers, pets. Teresa Thayer Snyder emphasises the emancipatory potential of the arts, storytelling and books in unlocking children’s worlds and experiences.

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This potential builds on learners’ existing funds of knowledge but also creates new possibilities, new funds of knowledge ‘for creating new futures through the work of critically understanding and re-imagining their cultural-historical present’ (Zipin et al., 2012: 188). Teresa Thayer Snyder’s words amid the second lockdown, school closures and home schooling across many countries worldwide ring with a sense of urgency that powerfully speaks to insights offered in this book. The chapter authors bring to the fore, individually and collectively, new possibilities and reimaginings of how languages and cultures can be lived and how language learning environments that capitalise on learners’ extant and new funds of knowledge can be nourished. In doing so, they create ‘openings’ (Alison Phipps, Commentary for Part 3); they strive for ‘a new way of listening’ (Kate Pahl, Commentary for Part 4). In the current context of the pandemic, they urge us to consider: How can new possibilities for new listenings be activated and sustained during and after the pandemic? Making sense of this moment of rapid change calls for radically re-envisioning language learning environments and for harnessing inclusive language pedagogies. There has been an explosion of blog posts and blog series since the beginning of the pandemic dedicated to insights, challenges and opportunities for teaching and learning (see, for instance, the Teaching and Learning during a Pandemic blog series of the Albert Shanker Institute and Learning from Lockdown). Blog posts have sought to challenge the ‘learning loss’ narrative and redirect the conversation towards possible futures that are grounded in participatory and dialogic ways of knowing and being (McKinney de Royston & Vossoughi, 2021). The authors of these blog posts position learners as ‘knowledge producers and co-contributors to knowledge communities’ with the purpose of developing ‘critical, creative and design thinking’ (Kalantzis & Cope, 2020). They decentre the educator as the sole keeper of authoritative and legitimate knowledge that deposits a predetermined body of knowledge in the minds of learners, what Paolo Freire (1972) has referred to as the ‘banking model of education’. Instead, they advocate for culturally and emotionally responsive learning environments where teachers and students ‘co-construct curricula and knowledge’ (Madkins & Patterson Williams, 2020). These learning environments foster partnerships and reciprocal relationships between educators, learners and their families and communities and support core values of equity and ‘being part of a wider nurturing culture’ (Shindler, 2020). The chapters and commentaries in this book can contribute to these conversations by pointing to new ways in which new listenings can be made possible. They provide theoretical and methodological tools to interrogate how the pandemic is reshaping language learning and teaching in the present and long-term. In the remainder of this section, we outline three indicative projects that investigate the lived experiences of educators, learners, their families and communities during the pandemic and that can open up new

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possibilities for listening to what is happening on the ground. These projects remind us that learning happens everywhere and at all times. The first project is a new virtual events series called ‘Re-imagining Language Education during and after Covid-19: Opportunities, Challenges and Possible Futures’. It seeks to bring together a wide range of stakeholders, including language educators from formal and non-formal educational settings, parents, researchers, policy makers and other interested parties to share stories of change and collectively reflect on the impact of the pandemic on language learning and multilingualism in the UK and beyond. The events series is a collaboration of language educators, researchers and policy makers working in the fields of multilingualism and heritage/community/world languages education from UCL BiLingo, the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning, Goldsmiths, University of London and Healthy Linguistic Diet (hld). The inaugural panel discussion focused specifically on the impact of the pandemic on community/heritage language learning, asking the following questions: How have language educators, parents and students experienced the increased role of new technologies and remote learning? How has online teaching facilitated (or not) student and parental engagement and learner-centred instruction? How has community building been supported during the restrictions? What are the gains and what are the losses and for whom? What issues of inclusivity and social justice might they raise? What new visions of community languages education might be emerging during and after the Covid-19 pandemic? The second project is a small-scale qualitative study on ‘Making Sense of Online Teaching and Learning in the Covid-19 Pandemic’. Vally Lytra probes into language educators’ and parents’ experiences of the digital mediation of teaching and learning in Switzerland. Between July and September 2020, she conducted 20 reflective interviews with language educators and mothers of children attending different forms of Greek community language education. She explores what new possibilities and constraints for sustaining community languages and cultures in the diaspora might be emerging in the present and long term (Lytra, 2020a, 2020b). The third project, ‘Language in Multilingual Families during the Covid-19 Pandemic’, is a larger, longitudinal study using surveys and interviews. It investigates how school closures and social distancing measures during the Covid-19 pandemic may have affected beliefs about multilingualism and language use in multilingual families in the UK and Ireland. It is led by researchers at the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism and Bilingualism Matters@Reading at the University of Reading, in collaboration with researchers from CamBilingNetwork at the University of Cambridge, UCL BiLingo at UCL, the University of Oxford and NALDIC, Mother Tongues Ireland and We Live Languages (Serratrice et al., 2020). Taken together, these projects open spaces for critical dialogue and can provide directions for future research and community engagement in language education post-pandemic.

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Implications for Curriculum Policy, Pedagogy and Research

The chapters in this book reflect the complex ecosystem in which language education operates and point to a range of ways in which language education can be revitalised. For purposes of clarity we have summarised them under five broad headings below, but there are many connections and overlaps and this needs to be borne in mind. •

Develop an integrated and inclusive multilingual approach to language education by: recognising and supporting multilingual repertoires; encouraging dialogue and collaboration between colleagues working in different areas of language and in different sectors of education (mainstream and complementary); drawing on opportunities created by a multilingual approach to develop literacy and foster critical metalinguistic awareness. Give greater emphasis to intercultural, experiential and personal perspectives on language education by: opening up translingual/transcultural spaces and encouraging translanguaging; fostering affective, multisensory and aesthetic aspects of language and language learning; supporting learning beyond the classroom; fostering learner agency and voice. Draw on interdisciplinary approaches by: supporting arts-based approaches to language-and-culture learning; encouraging collaborations between Languages and Art & Design teachers; incorporating an activist citizenship strand within language education policy and pedagogy; developing interdisciplinary courses/schemes of work drawing on content and language integrated learning (CLIL)/thematic/projectbased language learning (PBLL) approaches; exploiting opportunities for creative and critical use of digital media; collaborating with museums, galleries and other organisations. Adopt an approach to research which recognises different ways of knowing and supports a range of methods refl ecting different perspectives by: extending the range of research methods to take account of the shift towards multimodal, spatial, material and sensory conceptual lenses in language and literacy research; valuing practical and processual as well as propositional modes of knowledge;

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where appropriate, engaging with participants in more democratic, collaborative and personalised ways. Ensure a critical and decolonising stance towards language education by: challenging monolingual discourses; supporting collaborative power relations in school policy and in the classroom; implementing principles of democracy and social justice; developing critical digital literacy.

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Liberating Language Education in Relation to Local and Global Issues of Diversity, Inclusion, Citizenship and Communication

How does the research presented here open up new ways of viewing language education? In the final section of this book, we look at how these new perspectives on language education lead into the wider language debates around diversity, inclusion, citizenship and communication. We argue for a change in the way in which language education is perceived and the need for flexibility, creativity and openness in the ways we approach language and culture. Diversity

Diversity matters, and the ideas, projects and research brought together in these chapters add to new and diverse ways of representing the multilingual speaker. Liberating Language Education’s collective engagement with a diversity of multilingual speakers and new forms of learning, representing and performing languages contributes to the growing debate about decolonising multilingualism and the challenge of ‘breaking the politics of representation and presentation’ (Phipps, 2019: 91). Our desire to liberate language education and open up access is part of the wider debate around new forms of communication, opening our classrooms to diverse ways of learning, and connecting offline and online networks and communities. We recognise the blurring of boundaries between formal and non-formal education and add our collective voices to the demand for digital technology to be used in more creative and critical ways within language education. Herrero (2019) points out that new media literacies is an underdeveloped area in the language curriculum that calls for new research projects, and argues that ‘the rise of participatory culture in the 21st century has also shifted the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement’ (Herrero, 2019: 189). Our research leads the way in recognising that language education must be personal, aesthetic and political to engage learners and educators across languages and cultures.

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Inclusion

Liberating and opening up spaces for language education is about how we perceive and value languages and cultures, and the research in this book contributes to new debates and critical perspectives on inclusion. Project-based language learning is prominent across the chapters in this book, and an approach to learning that values agency, collaboration and creativity. These new practices of inclusion struggle against fragmented and inadequate language policies and demand more inclusive, engaging and exciting ways to learn languages. These ideas contribute to the wider debate on multilingualism and education and the importance of showing new ways forward and how actuality implies possibility in new practices of inclusion (Mary et al., 2021). Collaboration is at the root of this book and our approach towards research and innovation. As well as thinking about an inclusive approach to language learning and education, it is about an inclusive approach towards researching and sharing knowledge and new ways of thinking about languages. This book contributes to the collaborative construction of new linguistic realities (Moore et al., 2020). The debate here is also about making connections across local and global communities and how we can foster inclusive, intercultural and transformative conversations, disrupting divisive and elitist forms of knowledge. Liberating Language Education adds to the debate on ways of knowing and the importance of valuing community literacies (Pahl & Rowsell, 2020) and connecting different sites of learning. Citizenship

An ethic of social justice runs through the ideas, projects and research brought together in this book and contributes to how we perceive and what we mean by liberating language education. As editors of the book, we thought carefully about our own positions as local and global citizens and defi ned how we encountered and learnt languages as the weaver, the fool, the traveller and the activist. In the fi nal pages of this book, we now look at how researching and writing this book, bringing together new and experienced researchers, opening up new opportunities to understand languages and cultures has strengthened our determination to frame language education as a fundamental human right. The ideas presented here contribute to arguments around literacy and power and how an ethic of social justice in our research is vital ‘to protect our own rights and the rights of others’ (Janks, 2010: 98). In so doing, we have added to the wider debate that citizenship has to be approached as a lived and participatory experience whose ideas and practices are open to change (Peutrell, 2019). Liberating Language Education contributes to this debate on how we want this change to happen and the role languages will play within these wider debates about ways of living locally and globally.

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Communication

At the root of communication is the need to share and make common our ideas and to be open to new ways of knowing. In Liberating Language Education we have integrated and embraced multisensory and multimodal approaches to language learning and sought to show how these approaches connect learning across different spaces. Experiencing the pandemic has shown the stark need to enable learners to navigate these different online and offline spaces and find new forms of expression and connection. This debate about language education contributes to the fundamental idea that learning is about communication and that communication is dialogic. Communication is also noisy, disruptive and messy, playing and experimenting with contradictions and tensions and slowly allowing meaning to emerge out of dialogue and connection. It is this connection and relationship and ‘the play of different voices in dialogue together’ (Wegerif, 2013: 3) that makes teaching and learning possible so that learners can ‘find their own voice in a new and unfamiliar situation’ (Wegerif, 2013: 35). Communication opens up possibilities, and the discussion here contributes to research looking at how digital technology can offer new ‘unbounded contexts’ (Wegerif, 2013: 3) for language education and how the arts can offer ‘new ways to engage with people’s complex communicative repertoires and represent the open-endedness of changing lives’ (Creese, 2020: 253). Finally, Liberating Language Education is about taking a critical stand and arguing for ways in which language education can be transformed. It is about how learners and educators can access and share resources and ideas across different online and offline spaces. It is about why language education matters and why it is important to (re)connect with ‘the lost words’ (Morris & Macfarlane, 2017) and new words in multisensory, multimodal ways and better understand our communities, languages and cultures. References Beckett, G. and Slater, T. (eds) (2019) Global Perspectives on Project-Based Language Learning, Teaching, and Assessment: Key Approaches, Technology Tools, and Frameworks. New York: Routledge. Creese, A. (2020) Afterword. In E. Moore, J. Bradley and J. Simpson (eds) Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities (pp. 251–253). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (M. Bergman Ramos, trans.) London: Penguin. (Original work published 1968.) González, N., Moll, L. and Amanti, C. (eds) (2005) Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Herrero, C. (2019) Conclusion: Present and future directions for video, fi lm and audiovisual media in language teaching. In C. Herrero and I. Vanderschelden (eds) Using Film and Media in the Language Classroom: Refl ections on Research-led Teaching (pp. 188–197). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

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Janks, H. (2010) Literacy and Power. London: Routledge. Kalantzis, M. and Cope, B. (2020) After the COVID-19 crisis: Why higher education may (and perhaps should) never be the same. Scholar. See https://cgscholar.com/community/community_profi les/new-learning/community_updates/114650 (accessed 31 January 2021). Lytra, V. (2020a) Making sense of online teaching and learning in the Covid-19 pandemic: Emerging themes. Paper presented at the webinar Community Language Education before and after the COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Innovations – The New Normal for Languages at Home, School and in the Community. Bilingualism Matters, 4 September. Lytra, V. (2020b) What can we learn about pedagogy and community building from language teachers’ and parents’ experiences with online teaching and learning in Switzerland? Panel discussion on Community/Heritage Language Learning during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Lessons for Pedagogy and Community Building, 10 December, UCL BiLingo, the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning, Goldsmiths, University of London and Healthy Linguistic Diet (hld). Madkins, T.C. and Patterson Williams, A. (2020) We choose to reimagine education: Centering on love and emotionally responsive teaching and learning. Shanker blogpost,14August.Seehttps://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/we-choose-reimagine-educationcentering-love-and-emotionally-responsive-teaching-and-learning (accessed 31 January 2021). Mary, L., Krüger, A.-B. and Young, A. (eds) (2021) Migration, Multilingualism and Education: Critical Perspectives on Inclusion. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. McKinney de Royston, M. and Vossoughi, S. (2021) Fixating on pandemic ‘learning losses’ undermines the need to transform education. Truthout blogpost, 18 January. See https://truthout.org/articles/fi xating-on-pandemic-learning-loss-underminesthe-need-to-transform-education/ (accessed 31 January 2021). Moore, E., Bradley, J. and Simpson, J. (eds) (2020) Translanguaging as Transformation: The Collaborative Construction of New Linguistic Realities. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Morris, J. and Macfarlane, R. (2017) The Lost Words. London: Hamish Hamilton. Pahl, K. and Rowsell, J. (2020) Living Literacies: Literacies for Social Change. London: MIT Press. Peutrell, R. (2019) Thinking about citizenship and ESOL. In M. Cooke and R. Peutrell (eds) Brokering Britain, Educating Citizens: Exploring ESOL and Citizenship. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Phipps, A. (2019) Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Serratrice, L., Flynn, N., Joseph, H., et al. (2020) Language in Multilingual Families during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Report Phase 1 Study – July. See https://research.reading. ac.uk/celm/wp-content/uploads/sites/105/Unorganized/2020-07.20_Multilingualism Pandemic_ReportOne.pdf (accessed 24 October 2021). Shindler, D. (2020) In search of imagining what it means to be a teacher. Learning from Lockdown blogpost, 1 June. See https://bigeducation.org/learning-from-lockdown/ lfl -content/in-search-reimagining-what-it-now-means-to-be-a-teacher/ (accessed 24 October 21). Thayer Snyder, T. (2020) Teresa Thayer Snyder: What shall we do about the children after the pandemic? Diane Ravitch’s Blog, 12 December. See https://dianeravitch. net/2020/12/12/teresa-thayer-snyder-what-shall-we-do-about-the-children-after-thepandemic/ (accessed 31 January 2021). Wegerif, R. (2013) Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age. London: Routledge. Zipin, L., Sellar, S. and Hattam, R. (2012) Countering and exceeding ‘capital’: A ‘funds of knowledge’ approach to re-imagining community. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 33 (2), 179–192.

Index

1 + 2 approach 227, 243, 246 action research 11, 17 activist citizenship 259, 265, 266, 269, 271, 273, 274 activism 2, 7, 10, 17, 326 actors 207, 208, 220, 223, aesthetic 2, 11, 16, 167, 172, 173, 175, 179, 200, 322, 326 affect(-ive) 10, 11, 15, 144, 146, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 168, 171, 172, 180, 182, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 200, 201, 202, 278, 287, 326 agency 2, 10, 17, 57–59, 63, 68, 150, 153–154, 155, 157, 256, 257, 259, 261, 273, 275, 326, 328 ancestral capital 42 land 49 languages 42, 43, 49 religion 92 Anderson, Jim 190, 200, 201 Arabic 227, 233, 238, 243 animating objects 279, 280 area studies 123, 140, 142 artefacts 2, 3, 11, 151, 153, 207, 208, 211, 220, 223 artifactual literacies 151, 153, 278 art(s) 2, 8, 16, 17, 170, 226–232, 235, 231, 237, 238, 240–247, 326 arts-based research 11 artworks 167, 169, 249–250 assemblage 2, 10, 153, 155, 173, 175, 191, 197, 199, 211, 222, 224 authenticity 200 autoethnography 6, 11, 15, 78–79, 143, 144, 147, 156, 162 available resources 191, 196 BAAL 297, 298, 302, 303, 305, 315 Balkan Romance 119

Bakhtin, Mikhail 150, 155, 259, 274 becoming 146, 152, 154 beyond language 228, 229 biography 5, 26, 143, 147, 152 Blackledge, Adrian 76 Blackledge, Adrian and Creese, Angela 9, 93, 145, 155 Black Lives Matter 318 bilingualism 55, 64, 66–67 Block, David 92 Blommaert, Jan 26 Blommaert, Jan and Backus, Ad 76 body idioms 148, 156 borders (political, national, linguistic) 118, 119, 123, 131, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141 boundaries (cultural, linguistic, disciplinary) 118, 120, 123, 124, 130, 131, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141 boundary object 283 Bourdieu, Pierre 24, 25 bricolage 160 British Academy 223 British Museum 209, 216, 217, 219, 223 Busch, Brigitta 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 76, 181 Buchlotz, Mary and Kira, Hall 76–77 calm and safety 250 Camões (institute) 55–56, 59–61, 63–66 Campbell, Elizabeth and Lassiter, Luke 79 Cantonese 227 ceremony 251 Chagall, Marc 234, 246 Charman, Helen et al. 175 Charalambous, Constadina 78 citizen-led inquiry 17, 205, 208, 209, 210, 213, 225 citizenship 178, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 327, 328

331

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classroom 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 220, 222, 223, 225 closing 178, 250–251 Clyne, Michael 60 collaboration 11, 17, 55, 57–58, 61–62, 65–67, 328 collection 143–144, 146–148, 150–156 colonial/colonisers 41, 42, 47, 48, 49, 50, 328 community 18, 205, 206, 211, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 223, 255, 256, 259, 260, 266, 268, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275 community language 13, 61, 63, 66, 206, 207, 210, 222, 325 community school 13, 86, 205, 220 communities 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 267, 268, 272, 273, 274 complementary school 1, 9, 16, 73, 93, 94, 95, 167, 178, 187, 188, 189, 197, 200 conduit metaphor 125, 142 container metaphor 131, 136, 139, 140, 141 contact zones 319 Conteh, Jean and Meier, Barbara 19, 75, 94 content 176 Content and Language Integrated Learning 326 context 206, 207, 208, 209, 215, 220, 221, 222, 223 Cook, Vivian 198, 200 Cope, Bill and Kalantzis, Mary 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 196 Craft, Anna 177 creativity 170, 190, 191, 192, 196, 200 creative inquiry 298, 303, 305, 316 Creole 13, 40–54, 92 critical 56, 58, 255, 256, 257, 258, 260, 261, 269, 274, 275, 276, 328 Critical Connections 256 critical literacy 257, 275 critical metalinguistic awareness 81, 85 cross-curricular 167, 175 cultural citizen inquiry 206, 210, 215, 216, 222 culture 169, 175, 248–251 Cummins, Jim and Early, Margaret 259 Cyprus 209, 212, 213, 215 curricular knowledge 81, 85

Darvin, Fred and Norton, Bonny 258 Dawidek, Małgorzata 232, 238, 239, 244 decolonisation 8, 10 decolonial 259 decolonising 327 Deleuzian 154, 175 design activities 188, 201 dialogism 173, 328 diaspora 51, 188 digital 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276 digital media 7, 16, 18, 326, 327 digital storytelling 177, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 266, 267, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276 digital stories 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 273, 274, 275 digital story 256, 262, 263, 264, 265, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274 digital technology 255, 261, 272, 274 disembodied 14, 148, 151, 321 discourse 13, 50–52, 56–59, 61, 63–64, 69 diversity 1, 12, 327 internal diversities 73, 74–75, 76, 87 Douglas Fir Group 75 dwelling 101, 103–105, 110–111, 114–115 ecology 15 ecological 57, 58 ecological approach 101, 103, 115 embodied 101, 103, 108, 114–115, 145–146, 148–149, 151, 153, 155–157, 171, 172, 226, 232, 233, 240–241, 245 embodiment 2, 3, 6, 11, 15 emotion work 99, 102–104, 107, 110, 114, 173, 179 empathy 172 empowerment 180, 200 engagement 187, 191, 194, 196, 198, 200, 201 English 227, 231, 233, 234, 236, 238, 239, 241, 245 enslavement 13, 40–54, 13 entanglement 151, 207, 208, 224, 225 Ermes, Ali Omar 167, 168, 173, 174 esthetic 292, 293, 294 ethnolinguistic 58

Index

ethnoreligious 43 ethnography 11, 15, 28, 57, 59, 63 Ethnography of Language Policy 59 experience of language (the) 153, 154 experiment 177 feeling 2, 10 figurine 212, 218 Finnegan, Ruth 319 flow 278, 279, 289, 290, 291, 292 foreign 167 foreign language 56, 60–61, 63–64, 66–67 folktales 83–85 Freedman, Kerry 171 French 227, 233, 234, 236, 237 funds of knowledge 323, 324 Gaelic 227 gathering permissions 23 German 119, 121, 122, 126, 128, 130, 227 galleries 326 García, Ofelia 77, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 93 García, Ofelia and Li, Wei 9, 86 global citizenship 256, 260, 274 Gonçalves, Susana 170 González, Norma et al. 323 Graham, Suzanne et al. 173 Gray, John 92 generosity 314 Grandia, Liza 78, 80 Greek 13, 119, 128, 206, 209, 211, 212, 214, 221, 224 community 85–87 community school 73, 74–75, 79, 85–87, 94 culture 83, 85 ‘new’ Greek migration 74–75 haptic 282, 289, 291, 293, 294 Harris, Kamala 318 hegemony 8, 321, 322 Heller, Monica 76 Herrero, Carmen 9, 327 heritage language 13, 167, 188, 189, 197–198, 241, 233–234, 238–239, 240–241, 242, 243, 245, 246, 325, 205, 206, 207, 208, 222, 223 heritage school 73 heterogeneity 189 heterogeneous 187, 189, 197 heterotopia (heterotopic) 111, 115 historicised (epistemology) 162

333

Hobsbawm, Eric 24 home language 13 Hornberger, Nancy 58 Hornberger, Nancy and Jonson, David Castles 57, 59, 61, 63, 68 humanities 162 human-object-interaction 279, 288, 290 human rights 256, 257, 259, 263, 265, 274 Hungarian xiv, xv, 119, 121, 127, 128, 129, 133, 142 identity 1, 2, 14, 18, 19, 76–77, 92, 143, 147, 157, 172, 177, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263, 268, 270, 271, 275 expert identity 82, 86 linguistic identity 85, 86 identity work 101, 106–107 identities 255, 256, 258, 259, 260 ideology 2, 9, 14, 24–27, 29, 33, 36, 75–76, 57–58, 61, 64–65, 68–69, 94 idiolect 228 idiom 234–235 imagination 170 inclusion 327, 328 inequality 1, 5, 8, 321 informal language learning 1 inquiry-based 17, 173, 205, 224, 225 inquiry-in action 210 intercultural 16, 100, 103, 105, 114–115, 167, 170, 326 intercultural encounter 250 intercultural education 123, 124 interdisciplinary 12, 19, 326 intergenerational 209, 211, 216, 219, 221 intuition 2 ‘imagined community’ 33 immigration 23, 37 implementational spaces 58, 61, 68 Italian 227, 233 investment 181, 190, 191, 192, 194 Janks, Hilary 257, 275, 276, 328 Jaworski, Adam 142, 152, 155 Johnson, David Castles 56–59, 62–64, 67–69, 94 Kalantzis, Mary and Cope, Bill 199, 324 knowledge 207, 208, 210, 213, 215, 220, 222, 223,

334

Liberating Language Education

knowledge processes 187, 190, 192, 200 applying (creatively) 187, 188, 190, 192, 200 experiencing 187, 188, 190, 192, 200 Kramsch, Clare 8, 76, 101, 103–104, 110, 112–114, 167, 171, 172, 179 Kress R. Gunther and van Leeuwen Theo 198 Kroskrity, Paul 25, 26 Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark 118, 125, 126, 127, 141 Lambert, Joe 256, 257, 258, 275 language as resource 67, 69 language café (LC) 99–103, 105–115 language choice 239, 241 language contact xiv, 120, 121, 122, 126, 127, 135, 138, 139, 140 language internationalisation 60, 63–64, 66–68 language learning 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 234, 240, 241–243, 246 language maintenance 56, 60–61, 63, 68 ‘language of the month’ 29, 34 language boundaries 86 language portrait, language portraits 232–233, 244, 245 language practices flexible 82 language separation 82 Language Planning and Policy (LPP)14, 92, 93, 94, 95 languaculture 169 language policy 55–60, 62–65, 67–69 policy appropriation 55–60, 62–63, 65, 68 policy creation 57–59 policy interpretation 57–59, 63, 67 policy mechanism 62, 68 policy processes 57–59 language teaching 226, 227, 228, 243, 244 languager 105, 110, 112 languaging 14, 15, 99, 101–110, 112, 114–115, 170 learning 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 213, 215, 221, 222, 223 Leung, Constant and Scarino, Angela 167, 172 lived experience 103, 105, 112, 114–115 Li, Wei 77 liberating 248, 251

linguistic and cultural diversity 189 cultural and linguistic diversity 190 linguistic and cultural weavings 188, 190, 192, 201 linguistic fixity and fluidity 77, 86 linguistic schoolscapes 24, 28, 29 listening 323, 324, 325 literacy 7, 8, 11, 17, 19, 172, 255, 257, 261, 272, 274, 275, 276 literacy events 187, 188, 192, 197 Mandarin 227 MacLure, Maggie 155, 156 malaise 41, 42, 51 marginalized 40, 41, 42, 43, 50, 51 Martin-Jones, Marilyn and Jones, Helen 11 Maroons 44, 48, 49, 53 material 14, 15, 17, 173, 182, 205, 207, 208, 210, 211, 215, 220, 221, 223 materiality 3, 6, 15, 143, 146–147, 149–153, 155–156, 159–60, 220, 274, 282, 294 meaning-making 170, 171, 230, 240 metacognition 195 metacognitive process 195 metacognitive competence 196 metaphor 119, 120, 125, 126, 129, 131, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142 metalanguaging 99, 102, 112, 114–115 metalinguistic knowledge 9, 122, 123, 124, 133, 177, 196, 326 metonymy 119, 120, 125, 129, 130, 141 Mauritius 41–54 meaning-making 321, 322 Menken, Kate 93 metrolingualism 17 migrants 41 Mills, Kathy 170 minority 41, 51, 52, 53 medium of instruction 42, 43 mobile 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 213, 215, 223, 224 modern foreign language (MFL) 227, 234, 235, 246 Modern Language Association 170 monolingual 60, 69, 233, 234, 236, 245, 327 monolingual bias 91 monolingual norm 24, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36

Index 335

monolingual paradigm 301, 302, 313, 314 monolingualism 93, 94 multicompetence 198, 200 multilingualism (multilingual) 1, 9, 10, 41, 53, 58, 60–61, 67, 69, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 235, 236, 240, 242, 244, 245, 246 ‘multilingual turn’ 75, 91, 95 multiliteracies 16 multilingual social selves 101, 110, 114–115 multilingualism 91, 93, 94, 95 ‘multilingualism light’ 24, 35–37 multicultural 41, 50, 51 multiethnic 41 multimodal 168, 175, 180, 227, 228, 229, 230, 240, 242, 244, 245, 322, 328 multisensory 2, 11, 14, 15, 144–146, 168, 180, 328 multivoicedness 18 museums 208, 210, 211, 213, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 326 museum educator 17, 219, 220, 221, 224 narrative(s) 3, 255, 257, 258, 260, 274, 275 non-human 208, 215 Norton, Bonny 101, 104, 109, 192, 194 nQuire-it 209, 210, 212, 213, 219, 221, 224 object 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225 object-based 205, 208, 221 object-handling 209, 211, 216 online 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 222 online teaching 325 The Open University 209, 224 opening 248–251 Osler, Audrey and Starkey, Hugh 178 ostranenie 229–230 ownership 190, 191, 192, 194, 201 Pahl, Kate and Rowsell, Jennifer 173, 328 Patterson, Timothy 40, 44, 45, 50 Pavlenko, Aneta 96 Peutrell, Rob 260, 261, 275 pandemic 321, 323

pedagogy 16, 176, 211, 221, 223, 224, 326 perception 2, 172 performance 181 storytelling 83–85 personal 227, 228, 234, 241, 242, 246 phenomenological interviews 59 Phipps, Alison 101, 103–105, 108–110, 112, 114, 146, 172, 324, 327 Phipps, Alison and Gonzalez, Mike 9, 124, 142, 167, 172, 258, 259, 275, 318 place (relationship to …) 160–162 platform 209, 210, 212, 213, 215, 221, 224 play/-ful 6, 10, 16, 278, 279, 282, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 293, 294 pluralism 1, 2, 169 plurilingual 13 poetry 7, 8, 168, 172, 174 policy 3, 14, 227, 246, 248 Polish 228, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 241 political 18, 249, 255, 258, 261, 269, 328 Porter, Venetia 168 Portuguese 13, 55–57, 56, 58–60, 63–64, 67–69 Portuguese classes 59–68, 93 post-humanism 16 post-monolingual 299, 302, 307, 313, 317 power 328 Pratt, Mary Louise 319 primary school 93 classroom 25, 28, 37 production 257, 259, 260, 262, 263, 265, 268, 269, 271, Project Based Language Learning 178, 273, 326, 328 Proustian 160 Punjabi 227, 238, 239 Rampton, Ben 12 rationalism 2, 10, 14, 16 rationality 322 reflecting 189, 195 reflexive multiliteracies 187, 188, 189, 190, 197 reflexive multiliteracies pedagogy 187, 189, 190, 197, 202 reflexive multiliteracies pedagogical framework 191, 200, 201 reflexivity 191

336

Liberating Language Education

repertoire 1, 13, 14, 187, 189, 192, 197, 201, 228, 233, 241, 242, 245, 326, 328 communicative 76, 82, 86 linguistic/language 25–27, 30, 32, 33, 35, 75–76, 82, 76 representation 35, 37, 40, 41, 42, 44, 50, 52, 53, 56 representations 188, 193, 297, 299, 302, 303, 306 research-based learning 120, 121, 137, 138 researching multilingually 106, 115 resistance 43, 45, 48, 49, 50 rhizomatics 2 Ricento, Thomas 63 Ricento, Thomas and Hornberger, Nancy 57 rights 328 rituals 251 Romani xv, 119, 127 Romanian 119, 121, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130 Ros i Solé, Cristina 101, 103–104, 109, 111–112, 114, 167 Ruiz, Richard 67, 69 Rymes, Betsy 76 scaffolding 177 school (classroom) 226, 227, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246 Scotland 226, 227, 246 Scots 227 semiotics 1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 15, 16, 172, 180, 226, 228, 229, 230, 235, 241, 242, 245 sensory 2, 10, 14, 15, 171, 172, 226, 228, 229, 230, 232, 241, 322, 326 Serbian x, 122, 128, 129, 130 Serbo-Croatian x, 121, 133, 141 situated meaning-making 2 Shohamy, Elana 62 Shuttleworth, Jay 40, 44, 45, 50 Sneddon, Raymonde 93 social justice 18, 19, 255, 257, 258, 260, 261, 327, 328 sociality of objects 173 socio-material 207, 208, 220, 222 South Slavonic languages 119, 121 Spanish 227, 233, 236, 238, 241 spiritual 173

Sprachbund 122, 142, 160 Spracherleben 150 stance shift 82 stancetaking 29, 30 Star, Susan & Griesemer, James 283 stigma 50 storyboard/-ing 277, 280, 282, 282, 286, 288, 290 Street, Brian 320 subjectivity 16, 171 supplementary school 206, 209, 224 Sweetser Eve 125, 126, 142 symbolic competence 167, 171, 181, 191, 226, 230, 245 synaesthesia 173 Szydłowska, Monika 232, 236, 237, 247 Taiwan 255, 256, 261, 262, 263, 267, 268, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276 tangible and intangible cultural heritage 249 teacher education 95 technology 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 221, 223, 224, 225 text art 170 textbooks 40–54, 92 texture 2, 15, 143, 145, 147–150, 153–157 thematic 178 third term 250 tolerance of ambiguity 249 Tollefson, James 57 transdisciplinary 297, 300, 301, 305, 314 translation 77–78 practices 81–82, 85–87 literary translation 83–85 translanguaging 9, 17, 298, 221, 299, 300, 301, 303, 313, 315, 316, 317, 320, 326 lens 77 pedagogy 86 perspective 84–85 space 86, 94 third space 9 transcultural 1, 9, 15, 16, 167, 170, 199, 326 transformative 196, 256, 260, 272, 276, 328 translanguaging 177, 192, 197, 201, 226–232, 236–238, 240–246 translanguaging art 226, 229, 230, 242, 243 translanguaging attitude 236, 240

Index 337

translanguaging space 228, 229, 230, 242, 244 translation 13, 74, 77–78, 80–86, 177, 181 translingual-transcultural 1, 9, 17, 170, 187, 188, 193, 195, 200, 255, 274, 326 Truman, Sarah 320 UNESCO 249 Urdu 227, 233, 234, 239 van Lier, Leo 10 Vasudevan, Lalitha 318 virtual spaces 10 visual art 16, 17, 297, 322, 198, 248 voice 1, 2, 7, 10, 11, 18, 19, 177, 322, 326, 328 voices 255, 259, 265, 269, 271, 274

weavings 188, 190, 196, 197, 198 Wegerif, Rupert 329 ‘whole child’ 33 wild (the) 15, 144, 146, 156, 157 Williams, Raymond 161 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 232, 239, 247 wordsearch 300, 301, 302, 314 workshop 209, 211, 216, 217, 219, 220, 221 Yiddish 119, 120, 121, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 141 Yoruba 227, 238, 239 young people 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 272, 273, 274 Zipin, Lew et al. 324