Facilitating agency and engagement in super-diverse classroom contexts: Engaging young people as linguistics ethnographers.
In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been joined by people from countries around the world. Census data reveals that 49% of Australians were either born overseas or have at least one overseas born parent (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017). Classrooms include students who speak many different languages and dialects of English and like many young people around the world they are increasingly mobile and connected across time and space. Sustaining and extending the linguistic and cultural competencies needed for a rapidly changing world is central to the educational endeavour. Scholars call for student agency and autonomy in learning, Canagarajah's (2011) and Busch (2012) amongst others suggest learners must be encouraged to become reflexive about classroom learning and in turn become reflexive about themselves. However, building on and extending young peoples' individual linguistic and cultural resources continues to prove challenging for many teachers.
This paper details research undertaken as part of regular classroom work in super-diverse (Vertovec, 2007) Australian classrooms. Informed by culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris & Alim, 2017) and the promotion of reflexivity in teaching and learning, this research involved teachers and students as researchers of their own language and literacy practices. Data includes interviews, visual mapping, and student work samples to explore and analyse the ways the experiences and biographies of students underpinned the development of authentic, engaging, language curriculum. Findings reveal positioning young people as knowledge producers, enhanced language learning and placed cultural and linguistic flexibility at the centre of teaching and learning. As partners in learning teachers and students enhanced their understandings of the plurilingual practices students used to navigate their multilingual worlds. Perpetuating and fostering a pluralist present and future (Paris and Alim 2017) is fundamental to facilitating equitable education for culturally and linguistically young people and their families.
References
Australian Bureau of Statistic (2016) Cultural Diversity: Who We Are Now. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/
Busch, B. (2012). The linguistic repertoire revisited. Applied Linguistics, 33(5), 503–523.
Canagarajah, A.S. (2011). Translanguaging in the classroom: emerging issues for research and Pedagogy, Applied Linguistics Review, 3(2), 21–26.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal 32(3), 465–491.
Paris, D. & Alim, S. (2017). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies. Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. New York: Teachers College Press.
Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024-1054.
