Engaging teachers with multilingualism in pre-service teacher education: DLCs as a visual and artefactual approach

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 are seldomly required to reflect on, and engage with their own multilingualism, which forms the basis for a subjective and experiential approach to educating teachers multilingually. This paper reports on a study of teachers’ engagement with own multilingualism in a pre-service teacher education context. Embedded in an arts-based visual methodology this study uses the concept of Dominant Language Constellations (DLCs) as both a theoretical underpinning and a creative qualitative tool for collecting data. It includes 14 DLC artefacts of future teachers of English in Grades 1-7 and Grades 5-10 in northern Norway, and is supported by oral and written narratives. Plurisemiotic analysis of teachers’ DLC artefacts indicate that teachers ‘see’ or perceive themselves as plurilingual individuals for the first time. Their artistic choices in terms of colour, shapes and layout divulge their complex relationship with their languages. 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 potentially their learners’ multilingual identities.