Schoolchildren play a crucial role in maximizing the multilingual potential at schools. This presentation discusses the development and implementation of interactive sessions in which schoolchildren engage in discussions about multilingualism and multilingual using data they helped generate. During the presentation the audience is encouraged to explore the main pedagogical tool used in the sessions: digital data visualizations. Taken together, the sessions and the visuals represent an effort towards more structured, systematic pedagogical interventions aimed at raising schoolchildren's awareness of their potential multilingual identities, while providing researchers with broader insights into multilingual schooling.
Schoolchildren should play an important part in debates aimed at maximizing the multilingual potential at schools. Besides being the ultimate beneficiaries of any educational policy, pupils are also actively involved in their enactment at a micro, interpersonal level (Baldauf Jr., 2006) and their voices can provide invaluable insights into multilingual schooling. In this presentation, we discuss the development and implementation of interactive sessions in which 114 schoolchildren engaged in discussions on multilingualism, multilingual identity and language learning using research data they helped generate. The interactive sessions are part of the Ungspråk project, a three-year, mixed methods study that investigates multilingualism in Norwegian lower secondary schools. After introducing our exploratory, participative approach to multilingual identity, we discuss the ethical, epistemological and pedagogical principles that underpin the interactive sessions in which researchers and participants engage with research data in a dialogical manner. The talk then focuses on the development of the main pedagogical tool used in the sessions: interactive data visualisations. The visuals represent the answers of 593 students to the prompts «to be multilingual means…» and « are you multilingual?», taken from an online questionnaire used in the first phase of the project. During the presentation, the audience is encouraged to explore and interact with the visuals used in the sessions. We conclude with a discussion of the data collected during the interactive sessions and the participants' reflections on the multiple possibilities involved in the construction of a multilingual identity. Taken together, the sessions and the visuals represent an effort towards more structured, systematic pedagogical interventions aimed at raising schoolchildren's awareness of their potential multilingual identities, which in turn might have a positive influence on the pupils' language learning trajectories.
