In a constantly changing world we are frequently reminded that as educators we need to provide students with opportunities that will encourage them to think creatively and critically in order to find solutions outside the box. There seems to be a consensus among students, parents, teachers, researchers, school administrators and politicians that these skills are essential to do well in the 21^st century, however the question how to develop them causes many disagreements among interested parties.

This paper discusses the use of students´ plurilingual repertoires in art-based activities in L2 classroom as a tool to further develop their creative and critical thinking skills.  Students´ collaboratively prepared plurilingual literary writings (using students´ linguistic biographies to define the languages) are analysed.  The objective of this analysis is to determine if Choi´s (2016) argument that ¨allowing students to use their entire range of linguistic resources, and to mix codes and modes, is a way to encourage creativity¨ can be further supported. By encouraging students to use their plurilingual repertoires in one text, they are asked to find ways to make different languages work together in order to create a coherent message. This promotes creativity which Jones (2010, p. 477) defines as:  ¨a matter of finding our way around constrains or limitations placed on us by the discourses within which we operate.¨ For the purpose of this study, I draw on Beyer’s (1985) definition of critical thinking (CT): “critical thinking is the assessing of the authenticity, accuracy and/or worth of knowledge claims and arguments" (p. 271).

Using students´ artistic products created in L2 classroom as data source may allow a deeper understanding of students´ L2 and other languages´ use.  According to Barone, Eisner and Barone, arts-based research ¨broadens our conception of the ways in which we come to know¨ (2011, p. 4). 

This study is formulated as a practitioner´s research: it is conducted by an individual with dual roles of both practitioner and researcher in order to enhance and improve the practice under question (Campbell and Groundwater-Smith 2009; Ergas and Ritter 2020). The data analysis is based on Silbey’s (2021b) adaptation of Grounded Theory, “where the theory is built ostensibly from ground up (relying entirely on the data)”. This approach stems from the compilation of empirical data (observations, the respondents’ words, or documentary evidence) together with the “use of some concepts from the existing literature and theoretical resources as possible codes” (Silbey 2021a, n.p.). According to Tavory and Timmermans (2014), some categories may emerge directly from the data while other categories or concepts may be imported from elsewhere, if they are relevant to what is observed in the data.

This paper has two goals: to support the use of students´ plurilingualism as a tool to promote their creative and critical thinking skills, and to upkeep the notion that art-based research ¨addresses complex and often subtle interactions and that it provides an image of those interactions in ways that make them noticeable¨ (Barone, Eisner & Baron, 2011, p. 3).

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