Visual and artefactual approaches in engaging teachers with multilingualism: creating DLCs in pre-service teacher education

This paper reports on a study of teachers’ engagement with own multilingualism in a pre-service teacher education context, in Norway. As linguistic diversity in society and schools around the globe is increasing, teachers are required to meet the challenges of teaching children who live with multiple languages. However, teachers rarely identify as multilingual due to monolingualizing processes that have penetrated and structured education systems and ideologies (Ibrahim, 2022). Also, they are seldomly required to reflect on, explore and engage with their own multilingualism, which forms the basis for a subjectively lived (Kalaja & Melo-Pfeifer, 2019) and experiential approach to educating teachers multilingually. This personal and subjective approach constitutes key first steps in raising the critical awareness amongst teachers and teacher trainers of their own multilingual background, their own language trajectories as well as their attitudes toward multilingual pedagogical practices in their classrooms. Embedded in an arts-based visual methodology, this study uses the concept of Dominant Language Constellations (DLCs) (Aronin, 2006) as both a theoretical underpinning and a creative qualitative tool for collecting data. This study expands on Aronin’s DLC mapping and modelling (2021) and gives student teachers agency, through creativity, in creating an artefact that represents their multilingual identities. It includes fourteen DLC artefacts from three groups of future teachers of English in Grades 1-7 and Grades 5-10 in northern Norway, supported by oral and written narratives. From a quantitative perspective, analysis of the artefacts identifies the number and the groups of languages that constitute the student teachers’ language repertoires and DLCs. From a qualitative perspective the artefacts and the written reflections are analysed as multimodal meaning-making, where the object, the image and the written narratives interact to create one message around subjectively lived multilingualism. It includes an analysis of materials, shapes, colours, positionings that constitute the DLC artefact as a metaphorical object, chosen for representing multilingualism from a biographical, educational, relational perspective. The findings highlight the following areas: the interrelatedness of the language repertoire and the DLCs; DLC artefacts as creative and discursive pedagogical tools for engaging with multilingualism in teacher education; the visibilizing of the full language repertoire for exploring language connections, emotions and identities; and the potential impact on, and issues related to classroom practice of multilingualism and plurilingual practices. Aronin, L. (2006). Dominant language constellations: An approach to multilingualism studies. In M. Ó Laoire (Ed.), Multilingualism in Educational Settings (pp. 140–159). Schneider. Aronin, L. (2021). Dominant Language Constellations in Education: Patterns and Visualisations. In L. Aronin & E. Vetter (Eds.), Dominant Language Constellations Approach in Education and Language Acquisition (pp. 19-42). Springer International Publishing. Ibrahim, N. (2022). Mainstreaming multilingualism in education: An Eight-D’s framework. In A. Krulatz, G. Neokleous & A. Dahl (Eds.), Theoretical and applied perspectives on teaching foreign languages in multilingual settings (pp. 33-46). Multilingual Matters. Ibrahim, N. (forthcoming). Visual and artefactual approaches in engaging teachers with multilingualism: creating DLCs in pre-service teacher education. In A. Krulatz, E. Lorenz & G. Neokleos (Eds.), Learning and Teaching of English in the Multilingual Classroom: English Teachers’ Perspectives, Practices, and Purposes. Special Issue of Languages. MDPI. Kalaja, P. & Melo-Pfeifer, S. (Eds.). (2019). Visualising Multilingual Lives: More Than Words. Multilingual Matters.