Visual and artefactual approaches in pre-service teacher education: DLCs as a pathway to multilingual classrooms

In an increasingly multilingual Norway teachers need to develop an understanding of multilingualism and develop techniques for managing the plurilingual resources and identities of the children in their classrooms. Even though the curriculum in Norway embraces multilingualism, it lacks specific guidelines for integrating multilingual teaching practices into language classrooms and teacher education programmes. Teachers feel they do not always understand plurilingualism and therefore do not engage with this linguistic diversity. Based on the theoretical perspective of multilingualism as ‘subjectively experienced or lived’ (Kalaja & Melo-Pfeiffer, 2019), and embedded in an arts-based visual methodology, this paper reports on a study that used the concept of Dominant Language Constellations (DLCs) (Aronin, 2021) as both a theoretical underpinning and a creative qualitative tool for collecting data (Ibrahim, forthcoming). The study included fourteen DLC artefacts created by future teachers of English in Grades 1–7 and Grades 5–10 in northern Norway, supported by oral and written narratives. Plurisemiotic analysis of teachers’ DLC artefacts indicates that teachers ‘saw’ or perceived themselves as plurilingual individuals for the first time. They engaged positively with this visual/artefactual activity, which rendered their language repertoires and DLCs concrete, visible and tangible. Furthermore, they reflected on the classroom implications of including multilingual practices in a context of increasing linguistic diversity in Norway, through capitalizing on their own and eventually their learners’ multilingual identities. References: Aronin, L. (2021). Dominant Language Constellations in education: Patterns and visualisations. In Dominant Language Constellations Approach in Education and Language Acquisition. Edited by Larissa Aronin and Eva Vetter. Cham: Springer, pp. 19–42. Kalaja, P. and Melo-Pfeiffer, S. (Eds). (2019). Visualising Multilingual Lives: More Than Words. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 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. 30-46). Clevedon: 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 and G. Neokleos. Learning and Teaching of English in the Multilingual Classroom: English Teachers’ Perspectives, Practices, and Purposes. Special Issue of Languages. MDPI.