"Sometimes children can be smarter than grown-ups": Re/constructing identities with plurilingual students in English-medium classrooms

• Main Author: Stille, Saskia
• Other Authors: Cummins, James
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: multilingual education; literacy; English as a Second Language (ESL); bilingualism; language education; language learning; 0282; 0515
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/43723

Monolingual, monocultural approaches to education in Canada overlook the tremendous cultural and linguistic resources present in our classrooms and communities. Connecting language teaching and learning with a politics of global location and broader social issues relating to migration and diversity, this dissertation explores how dichotomous understandings of ‘native’/’nonnative’ students neglect these interlocking and intersecting dimensions of experience. The dissertation employed Lather’s (2007) critical praxis methodology to generate data from a collaborative research project involving teachers, students, and university-based researchers. The purpose of this project was to explore the educational significance of engaging students in authentic forms of cultural production that drew upon their cultural and linguistic resources, diverse histories, and multiple modes of representation in classroom-based learning. While endeavouring to contribute to positive change in education practice, the dissertation directs a critical gaze toward the dominant and marginalizing practices and discourses that materialized during this work. Drawing upon ethnographic data gathered over the course of the project, including classroom observations, interviews with students and teachers, multimodal artifacts of student work, and researcher field notes, the dissertation maps moments of ‘otherness’ that marked nonnative ‘others’. Located where sameness and difference meet, these pedagogical pivot points became sites for negotiating understandings of cultural difference. The discoveries arising from the study are presented as two stories, offering what Lather (2007) calls a “double(d) reading” of the empirical work of the project. The first story articulates a critical analysis of the research, based on efforts to incorporate plurilingualism in education and meet the needs of students as plurilingual social actors. The second story deconstructs these aims, examining the desires of liberatory educators to create contexts of empowerment for immigrant students. The significance of the study is its contribution to expanding conversations about how educators and researchers interested in language learning might talk about difference and the social subject in education, adding greater complexity to address the multiple dimensions of students’ experiences in globalized educational contexts.