A collaborative team of European and North American researchers has been examining the development of teachers of multilingual students and meaningful engagement with students in schools for several years. In 2019, we published a literature review examining the research literature on preparing teachers to work with multilingual students in content classrooms, suggesting three large domains that must be attended to: context, orientations, and pedagogy (Viesca et al., 2019). In 2022, we published a four-nation study (Finland, Germany, England, and the US) examining the quality pedagogies of teachers of multilingual students with a strong reputation for excellence (Viesca et al., 2022). In 2022, we also conducted an exploratory study with teachers in five nations (Finland, Germany, Norway, England, and the US) regarding positive orientations for working with multilingual students. We presented the initial findings of that work at ECER 2023 (Viesca et al., 2023). Grounded in these collaborations, this paper draws on research and theory to suggest a conceptual model for the purpose of generating humanizing pedagogies with multilingual learners in practice across myriad contexts, both through teacher development activities and classroom practices with multilingual students. 

In our work, we focus on a particular group of multilingual learners: students who live a multilingual life daily because they are learning content and the language of instruction simultaneously in school. With current migration patterns, this population is increasing across many nations (e.g., Arar et al., 2020; Seltzer & García, 2020). Yet, many school systems struggle to provide a quality education for such students (e.g., Anderson et al., 2016; Leider et al., 2021). Further, due to existing social hierarchies based on white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and classism, the experiences of multilingual students and their families are often shaped by poverty, discrimination, and marginalization (Howard & Banks, 2020). As such, multilingual students and their families are often dehumanized in schools and society, necessitating explicit efforts on behalf of educators and schooling systems to generate learning opportunities and community belonging grounded in the full embrace of the total humanity of multilingual learners (Salazar, 2013), or in other words through humanizing pedagogies.

Therefore, we conceptualize humanizing pedagogies as attending to the knowledge and skills educators need around context, orientations, and pedagogies (Viesca et al, 2019). We articulate this model through the metaphor of weaving of a tapestry, which includes materials (like the knowledge and skills related to context, orientations, and pedagogies) as well as the process of weaving (which we conceptualize as the processes of critical reflection and complexity thinking). Further, as the efforts to generate humanizing pedagogies with multilingual students are at their core about justice and equity, we assert that the processes of critical reflection and complexity thinking must attend to three lenses: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and systemic. Our paper weaves all of these ideas together to generate a model of humanizing pedagogies for multilingual learners grounded in theory, research, and pedagogy while also being meaningfully practical in how it can impact teacher development across myriad contexts.

This conceptual model was developed over years of collaborative research and engaging with research, theory, and practice. The iterative process that led to the development of this model has included a constant revisiting of humanizing pedagogies as researched and conceived by others while also seeking to make sense of the idea through our own research (both empirical and through literature review, discussed above) and practice. Years of collaborative conversations, empirical investigations, reading discussions, and literature reviews have led to the development of this model. The notion of humanizing pedagogies is often traced to originating with Freire (1994), who, in the 1970s, worked with minoritized groups in Brazil and illustrated how education, when humanizing, can be a liberatory praxis from oppression. In multilingual education, this has been furthered by various scholars, including Bartolomé (1994), who pushed for the field to move beyond a “methods fetish” and towards a humanizing pedagogy grounded in ideological clarity. In 2013, Salazar published an extensive review of the research literature documenting the principles and practices of humanizing pedagogies from myriad contexts around the globe. The tenets she offered as vital focus on the interconnected nature of humanizing practices and the need for holistic attention to all aspects of individual and collective humanity. She also specifically noted the need for critical reflection and action. We draw from these researchers and others in multilingual education to connect students’ core identities with the learning processes they experience in school. For example, Alim, Paris, and Wong’s (2020) exploration of culturally sustaining pedagogies promotes pluralist practices, requiring whiteness to be decentered to create space for other ideas and practices to exist. In this way, culture can be revered as complex; the purpose of teaching and learning can be for sustaining lives and reviving souls as well as for the creation of socially just, pluralistic societies where there is space for loving critique and critical reflexivity. Our conceptual work brings these lines of research together, along with theories guiding abolitionist social movements (e.g., Kabe, 2021) and the work of Indigenous scholars (e.g., Kimmerer, 2013; Simpson, 2017) to articulate all of the aspects of our model and their practical impact in classrooms: specifically to humanize every member of the learning community in order for equity and justice to be achieved.

The value of this conceptual model is its ability to translate complex, abstract ideas from theory and research regarding justice and equity for multilingual learners into tangible tools and directions for moving forward. Both teacher educators and educators in practice will be able to see the next steps, opportunities for growth as well as impactful shifts that can move them towards humanizing pedagogies with multilingual learners in their practice. This conceptual model has been operationalized into a practitioner-oriented text, to be published in the summer of 2024 (Viesca & Commins, forthcoming). The value of this model is specifically in how it has been developed through years of collaborative international research across multiple varied contexts, thus generating concepts capacious enough to be relevant in varying social, political, and economic environments. Further, this conceptual model is impactful in research and practice. Ongoing research regarding the components of this model, as well as their relationship among components, is being planned and will continue for years to come as we continue to collect data and draw from research and theory to further understand the model’s value in practice. Thus, this paper is a foundational tool for future work across European and North American educational research and practice, with the potential to grow beyond into collaborations and understandings in other parts of the world.

Anderson, C., Foley, Y., Sangster, P., Edwards, V., & Rassool, N. (2016). Policy, Pedagogy and Pupil Perceptions: EAL in Scotland and England (T. B. Foundation, Ed.). University of Edinburgh and The Bell Foundation. Arar, K., Ӧrücü, D., & Waite, D. (2020). Understanding leadership for refugee education: Introduction to special issue. International Journal of Leadership Education, 23(1), 1-6. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13603124.2019.1690958 Bartolomé, L. I. (1994). Beyond the methods fetish: Toward a humanizing pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 64(2), 173-194. Freire, P. (1994). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum. Howard, T. C., & Banks, J. A. (2020). Why race and culture matter in schools: Closing the achievement gap in America’s classrooms (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press. Kaba, M. (2021). We do this til we free us: Abolitionist organizing and transforming justice. Haymarket Books. Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions. Leider, C. M., Colombo, M. W., & Nerlino, E. (2021). Decentralization, Teacher Quality, and the Education of English Learners: Do State Education Agencies Effectively Prepare Teachers of ELs? Education Policy Analysis Archives, 29(100): 1-44. Salazar, M. d. C., (2013). A humanizing pedagogy: Reinventing the principles and practice of education as a journey toward liberation. Review of Research in Education, 37, 121-148. Doi: 10.3102/0091732X12464032 Seltzer, K., & García, O. (2020). Broadening the view: Taking up a translanguaging pedagogy with all language-minoritized students. In Z. Tian, L. Aghai, P. Sayer, J. L. Schissel (Eds.), Envisioning TESOL through a translanguaging lens: Global perspectives (pp. 23-42). Springer. Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press. Viesca, K. M., Hammer, S. Alisaari, J., & Lemmrich, S. (2023). Orientations to embrace, Elevate, and sustain diversity/difference. Paper presented European Conference for Educational Research (ECER), the Annual Meeting of the European Educational Research Association (EERA). Viesca, K. M., Teemant, A., Alisaari, J., Ennser-Kananen, J., Flynn, N., Hammer, S., Perumal, R., & Routarinne, S. (2022). Quality content teaching for multilingual students: An international examination of instructional practices in four nations. Teaching and Teacher Education, 113, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2022.103649 Viesca, K.M., Strom, K., Hammer, S., Masterson, J., Linzell C.H., Mitchell-McCollough, J., & Flynn, N. (2019). Developing a complex portrait of content teaching for multilingual learners via nonlinear theoretical understandings. Review of Research in Education, 43, 304-335. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X18820910