in this presentation, I share findings from a participatory ethnography project that explores community-based and plurilingual practices with explicit focus on fostering agency and engagement of plurilingual students and their parents.
Drawing on multimodal data, and plurilingual approaches in language learning (Garcia, 2009; Garcia & Wei, 2014; Hornberger & Link, 2012; Sayer, 2013), this presentation shares findings from a participatory ethnography project that explored an intergenerational and plurilingual teaching and learning initiative with explicit focus on participation, engagement and agency of plurilingual students and their parents. For this initiative, families were invited to co-create multimodal, multilingual texts with their children. Data collection included participant observation, artifacts and photos and video-recordings of pedagogical practices. To create connections with the parents, and to receive their feedback and ideas about best ways to support their children, the parent engagement initiative which we called ‘Sharing our Voices’ was organized. The goal was to partner with the immigrant and refugee community and hear the voices of the refugee parents through a survey and to invite refugee families to co-create multimodal, multilingual texts with their children. Instead of the typical family literacy event, where parents are provided with information about how to read and write with their kids, this collaboration was an effort to prioritize plurilingual parents’ voices and engage them in a family story telling activity using modes that they valued and were comfortable with. The findings from this project reveal the significance of creating school engagement opportunities to the parents of our plurilingual students through community-based plurilingual approaches. Intergenerational composition of text between parents and all siblings allowed for every interested family member to contribute to the plurilingual family storytelling. In addition, the findings highlight that the parents hold a great deal of valuable information about what is best for their children, and about how the collaboration between teachers and parents can build strong relationships that will foster trust, agency, respect and engagement in the students.
