The focus of this paper is multilingual staff's beliefs guiding their pedagogical choices as they relate to traditional ideologies of multilingualism and multilingual education in adult basic education in Norway, sometimes challenging entrenched ideologies and at other times reinforcing them when teaching newly arrived learners.
In adult basic education in Norway, there is a recent shift towards more multilingual pedagogies, including the employment of multilingual staff. The empirical starting point for this paper is a collaborative study designed as ethnographic monitoring in adult basic education for recent immigrants to Norway. The purpose was to implement translanguaging pedagogy in a highly diverse setting over a period of a school year. Data collection included participant observation and video recording in three (partly online) classrooms, workshops with five teachers, and collecting artefacts provided by teachers and learners. In this paper, we focus on four multilingual staff, together covering Arabic, Kurdish Sorani, Pashto, Somali and Thai.
In line with critical sociolinguistic understandings of language as social constructions and language users as social agents, we will describe and interpret the orientations that guide the multilingual staff's pedagogical choices as they relate to traditional ideologies of multilingualism and multilingual education in their local context, sometimes challenging entrenched ideologies and at other times reinforcing them. We argue that translanguaging pededagogy requires reflection on teacher collaboration and on underlying assumptions of communication in multilingual settings.
