Multilingual authors ‘standing taller’ in multimodal arts-rich translanguaging spaces
Submitted by:
Rafaela L Cleeve Gerkens
Abstract:
Viewed through the monolingual English-only lens characteristic of many Australian schools (Cross et al., 2022), plurilingual students are often positioned as being in deficit as language and literacy learners and struggle to find their way into a writer’s identity. The importance of creating a ‘translanguaging space’ (Li, 2018) to support plurilingual learners is well established in the literature. The case study shared in this paper involved a class of Year Four students from a school in Melbourne who took part in six-week arts-rich book-making experience. We addressed a gap in the literature through our research question that explored the elements of a ‘translanguaging space’ that interact to support students to come to see themselves as resourceful multilingual writers.
Grounded in a post humanist worldview, using assemblage theory (Pennycook, 2017), this research challenges monolingual and monomodal assumptions about young children’s learning, by investigating the possibilities of using arts-rich pedagogies to develop children’s multilingual practices and identities. Assemblage theory enables us to take an interdisciplinary approach which considers the dynamic relations among various semiotic, material, spatial and embodied properties to understand the complex role of the arts in developing multilingual literacies and identities.
Using Activity Theory, we analysed researchers’ reflective journal entries, photographs of students and their works, students’ feedback from a survey, and video and audio recording of classroom interactions with teachers and students including interviews. Through this analysis, we found that the elements that supported the development of students’ multilingual writers’ identities. These elements included: the creation of a translanguaging space, the use of arts experiences to lead language interactions, the explicit introduction of translanguaging in a multimodal arts-rich space, and opportunities to apply translanguaging as multilingual writers. In opening up multimodal pathways to meaning making for children, the use of arts-rich pedagogies in conjunction with multilingualism can break down the monolingual assumptions of educators and institutions and transform children’s language and literacy learning pathways. We argue that the playful multimodal opportunities for meaning making facilitated by arts experiences can support all students to build identities as resourceful writers by providing a variety of multimodal entry points to that identity.