Identity Construction Across Diverse Educational Contexts: Multilingual Children’s Narratives On Person, Place And Experience.

Author(s):

Nayr Ibrahim(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

21. Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)

Format:

Paper

Session Information

ERG SES G 03, Children and Education

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-02

09:00-10:30

Room:

FPCEUP - 117

Chair:

Maria Cristina Ribeiro Nunes de Azevedo

Contribution

In today’s globalised world children are catapulted into diverse language contact situations from a young age. They have mother tongues and learn foreign languages; they speak heritage languages at home while picking up an additional language at school; they start learning English in primary or even pre-primary settings. Despite the unsystematic approach to foreign and second language education and bilingual education policies across Europe (Language Rich Europe, 2012), and the focus on socialisation via one national language in some societies, parents are convinced that an early start is beneficial and seek opportunities to expose their children to their other languages in out-of-school activities. Research has shown that these multilingual experiences develop children’s linguistic skills, raise intercultural awareness and increase intellectual flexibility (Bialystok, 2001), but how do they impact on children’s developing sense of self, their understanding of their place in the world, their language identities?

This paper shares the results of a study, which investigates how children appropriate and display their multilingual identities across multiple educational contexts: an out-of-school English literacy course, their mainstream French classroom, and a heritage language programme. The study includes 13 children, ranging from ages 5 to 17, all of whom present a bilingual French-English profile, with a third, heritage language (Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, Sinhalese, Bangla, Russian, and Persian), crucial for maintaining a cultural/linguistic bond with their families, within and across national borders. The study explores the importance of these linguistic spaces in sowing the seeds for a solid linguistic and literate identity, thus creating these multilingual, multi-literate citizens of the future.

This study takes on a sociolinguistic perspective, as its fundamental concern is language use and languages in contact in educational contexts (Baker, 2008). Children’s access to the different linguistic worlds and academic contexts, via the agency of their parents, teachers and other significant adults and peers, affects their perceptions of identity, and their construction of the self. Hence, my research questions:

How do children in multilingual, multi-educational and multi-literate contexts apprehend and negotiate their multiple identities across educational and / or linguistic contexts?
What roles do the children’s family and educators play in nurturing the children’s multiple literacies and identities?

The qualitative case study is underpinned by a social constructionist position in understanding the nature of reality. This perspective stresses the active role of individuals in giving meaning to social phenomena, which they create in interaction with each other and across different social and cultural realities. Potter (1996) in Bryman (2004, p.18) writes: “The world … is constituted in one way or another as people talk it, write it and ague it.” In this case, children talk it, draw it and connect with symbolic objects in exploring their perceptions of their multilingual world, their diverse educational contexts and their emerging triliteracy: this constitute the basis for exploring their self-representations and choice of identity positionings. This study views ‘identity options as constructed, validated and offered through discourses available to individuals at a particular point in time and place’ (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004, p. 14). From this perspective, identity is a multifaceted and interactive process, which is negotiated through language and alternative means of communication, which are relevant to, and exist in the child’s world.

This study draws on a sociocultural perspective (Street, 1984; Vygotsky, 1978;) in examining children’s access to ‘pluriliteracy practises’ (Garcia, Bartlett, & Kleifgen, 2007). Pluriliteracies not only include different cultural contexts and social structures but are also integrated with multimodal practises, that is, ‘written-linguistic modes of meaning are intricately bound up with other visual, audio and spatial semiotic systems’ (Garcia, 2009a, p. 339).

Method

From a methodological perspective this case study is based on the Mosaic approach (Clark 2004), which espouses a participatory, multi-method and multimodal approach to investigating children’s lived experience. This methodology views children as confident beings, social actors in their own right, able to interpret their world and use their own unique knowledge to express what it means to be a child in a particular context. Even though children lack agency in the initial enterprise of multilingualism or multi-literacy: parents in the family environment, teachers in the educational context, and policy makers in a wider national and international stage control this factor; when given a voice children can appropriate and inhabit the situation in which they have been made first-hand actors, start exploring the complexities of their everyday lives and develop a sense of place in their world. This approach is flexible and sensitive to the social context and to the communicative styles of the individual child participants. Ultimately, it offers a multitude of techniques that best reflect children’s unique ways of communicating and acknowledges their creativity in conveying meaning. In gaining access to their world through images, words, movement and play, we are ‘listening’ to the whole child, and giving them the possibility of working in their ‘preferred language’ (Clark and Moss 2011:54). Consequently, my portfolio of data collection tools is multi-method in nature and includes: • participant observation of children’s lived educational experience generating fieldnotes; • group interviews of children, face to face interviews of parents, and focus groups with teachers, which will generate interview transcripts, for language and content analysis of attitudes and perceptions; • document analysis, for background contextual and organizational factors; • children’s production of written language and pictorial (drawings and photos) representations of their perceptions; • questionnaires to determine the sociolinguistic profile of this heterogeneous group of participants; • physical artefacts, which help anchor children’s imaginary in the concrete world and serves as a further trigger for discussion. This overall ‘mosaic’ gives children a voice in exploring their sense of place in this distinct learning context. Children not only interpret and make sense of their experience, but also actively participate in the data collection process.

Expected Outcomes

Children’s narratives demonstrate that they are able to identify the place their languages occupy in their educational and family contexts; the importance of having access to the corresponding literacy; and the affective connection that binds the language to a significant being in their lives: their friends and teachers in school and their parents and relatives in the family context. Initial findings from children and parent interviews indicate that children’s relationship with their languages and hence, their identity construction across languages and cultures, is anchored in real people, tangible places, and lived experiences, that have value for the children. It looks at the implications for classroom practise and teacher responses across educational contexts (Early Years, Primary and Secondary) in encouraging language maintenance, developing the heritage language, which contributes to the development of a multilingual Europe. It also examines the important role of the parents in nurturing children’s multiple literacies and identities. Finally, through their narratives, drawings and symbolic objects, children explore the importance of these linguistic spaces in building self-esteem, cementing a positive relationship with their languages, thus creating a linguistic and literate identity.

References

Baker, C. (1996) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Bialystok, E. (2001) Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bryman, A. (2004) Social Research Methods. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, A. (2004) The Mosaic Approach and Research with Young Children. In Lewis et al, (eds.) The Reality of Research with Children and Young People. London: Sage Publications Ltd. Clark, A and Moss, P. (2011) Listening to Young Children: The Mosaic Approach. 2nd ed. London: NCB. Extra, G. and Yagmur, K. (2012) Language Rich Europe: Trends in Policies and Practices for Multilingualism in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (on behalf of the British Council) García, O. (2009) ‘Education, multilingualism and translanguaging in the 21st century’, in A. Mohanty, M. Panda, R. Phillipson and T. Skutnabb-Kangas (eds) Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Pavlenko, A. and Blackledge, A. (2004) Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Street, B. (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, L. (1978) Mind in Society, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Author Information

Nayr Ibrahim (presenting / submitting)

University of Reading

Institute of Education

La Garenne Colombes

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