Across Australia, approximately 100,000 students are taught outside the mainstream education system in any one of 60 community languages offered in schools organised by communities. Community Languages Teachers (CLTs) and instructors teach in these ‘margins.’ CLTs are a diverse and often invisible teacher group with unique experiences and support needs. Community Languages Teachers bring diverse educational, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds to their work and routinely face novel and complex challenges with physical classrooms, informal learning spaces, curriculum materials and differentiation strategies needed for multi-level classes. In this paper we present an overview of a four-year longitudinal study representing 98 CLTs who developed action research projects as part of a 10-week Methodology course. With ethical approval and participant agreement, we analysed these projects. We focused on how the CLTs made visible the challenges that they encountered teaching in community languages schools and captured and their creative and aspirational solutions for teaching and learning.  

The concept of Heritage Language (HL) is not new. It arose in Canada in the 1980s, and it has increased in visibility in the last 35 years. Heritage languages, in their most common definition, characterize a minority language associated with the presence of immigrant/refugee/foreign communities in a majority host society. Additionally, HL are better known as immigrants’ languages (García, 2005), the language of the community (Melo-Pfeifer & Schmidt) or even ethnic and minority languages (Valdés, 2005). These designations carry a certain derogatory connotation, with strong implications at the level of its transmission, maintenance, legitimacy and interaction with the host language (García, 2005).

Empirical study: research questions, methodology and context of study Research question: What are the challenges of community languages teachers teaching their HL to children in Victoria Australia? The study is qualitative capturing the lived experiences of marginalised teachers using action research as a vehicle for the participants to document their main challenge in the classrooms where immigrant languages are taught. The theoretical model used was an Action Research structure adapted from Ferrance (2000) and Seberova and Malcik (2014). Teachers proactively worked to address their challenge whilst simultaneously developing reflective practitioner skills.. Scope of the Study: 31 Languages, 98 teachers across Early Years, Primary (Elementary) and High Schools were participants in the study. Methodology: The study draws on qualitative research which attempts to interpret and document phenomenon from an individual’s viewpoint or frame of reference (Creswell, 1998; Leininger, 1985; Mason, 2006). Greenhalgh and Taylor (1997) contended that researchers who employed qualitative research sought deeper truths while aiming “to study things in their natural setting, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings that people bring to them” (p. 740). The researchers used participatory action research (PAR) considered a subset of action research, which is best understood as the “systematic collection and analysis of data for the purpose of taking action and making change” by generating practical knowledge (Gillis & Jackson, 2002, p. 264). Ideally, the purpose of all action research is to impart social change, with a specific action (or actions) as the ultimate goal (Greenwood & Levin, 1998; McNiff & Whitehead, 2006).

It is important to understand how communities from a linguistic and cultural minority know, organise, use, recognize and value their HL and culture(s). It is relevant and essential to acknowledge the phenomenon of societal multilingualism (even if evidence exists that major European cities are essentially monolingual and monoglossic spaces), individual multilingualism and intercultural coexistence, as well as to reflect on the best ways to integrate these students. Multilingualism is part of the very fabric of the European Union and, therefore, an essential component of any iteration of European identity. Europe’s linguistic diversity in multicultural Europe is a consequence of international migration and minorization. Multiple transnational identities and affiliations will ask for new competences of European citizens in the 21st century. These include the ability to deal with increasing cultural diversity and heterogeneity. Multilingualism can be considered as a core competence for such ability. In this context, processes of both convergence and divergence occur. Like Australia, Europe has a rich diversity of languages, illustrated by reference to the eleven national languages of the EU. However, similar to Australia there are many more languages spoken by the inhabitants of Europe such as Arabic and Turkish. These languages are usually referred to as ‘minority languages’, our research offers one example of how minorities can maintain and sustain their languages and cultures building a multilingual, multicultural society. There is a great need for educational policies in Europe that take new realities about transnational multiple identities and multilingualism into account. Processes of both convergence and divergence can be dealt with. The former relate in particular to the increasing status of English as lingua franca for international communication, the latter to the emergence of ‘new’ minority languages next to ‘old’ and established ones across Europe.

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