Participation, equality and social justice through a plurilingual arts-based approach: Responsive foreign language teacher education

Arts-based approaches to teacher education are far from integrating the mainstream foreign language teacher education programs, despite their innovative potential. Among their possible innovations is the way arts-based approaches uncover beliefs about plurilingualism, multilingualism, and language acquisition, teaching and learning. Because beliefs are not easily put into words, arts-based approaches such as drawings, portraits or poetry can prove to be more adequate methods to reveal them and thus start a reconstruction path, necessary to teacher professional development. Because they avoid a lingualist approach to research or combine to language-based research, such as interviews or questionnaires, arts-based approaches offer new modes to self-expression. In this presentation, I will highlight how arts-based approaches can support a more responsive foreign language teacher education, offering opportunities to professional development that challenges a monolingual mind-set and recognises plurilingualism as an inescapable reality in foreign language (teacher) education. After presenting the theorethical bases legitimizing these approaches, I will present and discuss empirical examples, such as plurilingual poetry, student-teachers’ self-portraits and visual linguistic autobiographies that I have been using at the University of Hamburg (Germany), in Spanish and French teacher education. I will then reflect about their potentialities and limitations and reveal the lessons I have learnt while resorting to arts-based approaches, both in teacher education and as research methods.