Education has long been framed in terms of preparing youth for the future.  We prepare kindergarteners for first grade, elementary school students for middle school, high schoolers for college, college for the work force.  At each stage, educators make assumptions about what the future will entail, and what will be needed to be successful in it. These particular visions of the future are then brought into the present, shaping what we value, cultivate…as well as what we ignore. 

In the normative, standardized approach to preparing for a presumed, certain future, the cultural and linguistic competencies of students from non-dominant cultural groups is often rendered invisible or erased, or treated as a problem to be overcome, as students are assimilated to a standard English speaking, monoglossic and monocultural norm.  Our project takes a different approach. We see the cultural, linguistic and epistemological diversity of new immigrant and “super-diverse” (Vertovec, 2007) communities as offering exciting possibilities for reimagining teaching and learning, and for addressing critical issues of the future. We ask: What kind of future might we forge if we recognized the rich lived experiences of students living in multilingual, multicultural communities - and supported, sustained and expanded them in schools? How might we build on the plurilingual, transcultural and epistemological versatility that abounds in contexts of superdiversity in order to prepare students for possible, deeply transformative futures – ones that we might imagine together? We underscore the imperative of this work in order to respond to the cultural, ecological, and social crises facing the planet, and to forge futures that might otherwise not come to be. Our work responds to the global educational policy and practice initiatives promoted by UNESCO (2017), which include the promotion of cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue as well as a broad international 

To address these questions we examine the design and implementation of innovative pedagogies in two learning environments: classrooms serving multilingual immigrant youth in Sydney, Australia, and an informal learning context that brings together undergraduate students and K-5 participants from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds in California (Orellana, 2015). Through participant observations and participatory design research (D'warte, 2016) we identify how youth engage with curriculum that deliberately builds on their lives and experiences as well as invites their creative re-imagining of social worlds. We examine artifacts (drawings, maps, and writing) produced by youth in the two contexts to consider how they understand and represent their linguistic and cultural repertoires, and what they learn from each other. Informal conversations and written documents produced by the teachers and undergraduates were examined to consider what adults learn from working with diverse youth, how they are reconsidering their own educational experiences, and how they are re-imagining teaching and learning for multilingual and transcultural social futures. Our approach is undergirded by many years of working with and listening to youth in homes, communities, after-school programs and classrooms: valuing their perspectives and creating room for their visions in pedagogical processes.

Findings reveal engaging, authentic curriculum centered on the cultural and linguistic repertoires of diverse students and communities, and that leveraged those cultural and linguistic resources to imagine new social worlds. Positioning diverse young people as active agents in their own learning placed local diversity and global connectedness together in support of expansive learning for youth, teachers, and undergraduates. We identify approaches to designing and implementing program activities that disrupted monolingual, monocultural assumptions about teaching and learning and that served both to sustain (Paris and Alim, 2017) and expand (García-Sánchez and Orellana, forthcoming) young peoples’ multicultural, multilingual knowledge. Listening to youth allowed us to identify principles for sustaining and expanding the cultural and linguistic versatility of youth living in multilingual and multicultural contexts.

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