This paper presents findings from a participatory ethnography project that investigates translingual approaches that acknowledge the significance of multimodal, multilingual and transcultural practices that educators used in a middle-years EAL classroom in a third-tier city in Canada to better support plurilingual students from refugee backgrounds in K-12 classrooms.
In this presentation, I will share findings from a longitudinal participatory ethnography project that investigates trans'lingual' practices that educators used in a third-tier city in Canada to better support plurilingual students from immigrant and refugee backgrounds in K-12 classrooms. More specifically, this collaborative study explores multiple pedagogies and educational practices to support refugee students in one school division in Manitoba. Manitoba resettled 7,100 refugees, 410 of which settled outside the urban area of Winnipeg (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, 2017). In August of 2016, a Resettlement Assistance Program opened in the school's community. As a result of this, federally-funded, government-assisted refugees began to attend schools in this community for the first time in January 2017. Even though some English as an Additional Language (EAL) programming was available for English language learners in this school division, supporting refugee students was new for many of the schools and educators. As a first response to supporting these refugee students, in the 2017 winter term (January- June), a newcomer classroom was created, specifically for middle years students, age-appropriate for grades 5 to 8. Data collection for this study included student and teacher interviews, participant observation, teacher and student written reflections, artifacts created in classroom, and video-recordings of classroom-based practices. In this study, I drew upon intersectionality and poststructural theories of identity as explored in critical applied linguistics that caution us that analyses that focus on language, race, gender, or class independently are insufficient because these social positions are experienced simultaneously. The study revealed how these plurilingual students embodied and negotiated their different subject positions, languages, and literacies in school when educators moved beyond 'lingual' pedagogical approaches and built on students' funds of knowledge, multiple-modes of meaning-making and self-expression, and multiple linguistic repertoires.
