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“Walking in Two Worlds” in the Plurilingual Classroom: Learning from the Case of an Intergenerational Project

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Plurilingual Pedagogies

Part of the book series: Educational Linguistics ((EDUL,volume 42))

Abstract

This chapter considers the importance of plurilingual pedagogies to First Nations through the case of a remote community school in Canada, where students enter Kindergarten with a strong oral use of the Indigenous language, Naskapi. Using the example of a Grade 3 intergenerational project involving grandparents, the authors illustrate how teachers created spaces for translanguaging and employed critical literacy approaches as students produced identity texts in multiple languages. Over the course of the project students began to take ownership of their learning of English; they experimented with ideas, took risks, engaged in peer mentoring and showed signs of developing metalinguistic awareness. As they began to create their own strategies for learning English, they revealed a confidence and resourcefulness that countered broader deficit discourses in the school. With the project, the teachers disrupted the predominance of monolingual practices, fostered teacher and community collaboration, and drew attention to how language, culture, power and identity intersect in the school setting. While projects such as the one described in this chapter may not lead to immediate changes in how Indigenous language is characterized by all within the school, it brings diverse stakeholders together to observe, discuss and celebrate what can be accomplished when students’ plurilingualism is centered.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For over 100 years, until 1996, the Canadian Government maintained residential schools for Indigenous students to solve what the government called the “Indian problem.” Children were forcibly taken, often at a critically young age, to live in custodial institutions. Residential schooling was the “central element” (TRC, 2015, pp. 1) of systemic legal processes that focused on “dispossession and dismantling of Aboriginal societies” (TRC, 2015, pp. 258).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada

    Avril Aitken

  2. Conseil en Éducation des Premières Nations – First Nations Education Council, Wendake, QC, Canada

    Loretta Robinson

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  1. Avril Aitken
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Correspondence to Avril Aitken .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada

    Sunny Man Chu Lau

  2. Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Saskia Van Viegen

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Aitken, A., Robinson, L. (2020). “Walking in Two Worlds” in the Plurilingual Classroom: Learning from the Case of an Intergenerational Project. In: Lau, S.M.C., Van Viegen, S. (eds) Plurilingual Pedagogies. Educational Linguistics, vol 42. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36983-5_4

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