Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 326

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

The world in our classrooms: Using language diversity as possibility in the urban classroom

Authors: Lotherington, Heather
Submitted by: Lotherington, Heather (York University, Canada)

For over a decade, a small group of researchers at York University has been working with classroom teachers in urban elementary schools, centred at Joyce Public School in northwest Toronto (Lotherington, 2011). In the greater Toronto area, linguistic heterogeneity is the norm in all schools, making every classroom teacher a teacher of ESL. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, formal education in Ontario treats language diversity as a problem. Linguistic pluralism confounds the lock-step expectations of the elementary curriculum, which builds on an assumed middle class pre-school literacy socialization - in English - and a systematic progression into French as a second language at school. However, given that Canada has been an officially multicultural country since 1971, a reported 53% of the children in the Toronto District School Board enter school speaking a language other than English at home (Toronto District School Board, 2011). According to recent census figures, native speakers of French make up less than 2% of the population of Toronto.

In collaborative school-university research based in the school, researchers and teachers have forged pathways that connect the classroom with the community - both physically and digitally configured - to mobilize our urban diversity towards glocal education that is exciting, current and linguistically inviting. The educational intention is bi-directional. Teachers report a disturbing turn to English trumping home languages in immigrant parental values. Educating children towards appreciating the diversity that schools are covertly leaving at the school doorstep, is as important for intergenerational linguistic awareness conducive to maintenance as for children’s contemporary learning. In Canada, we invite the world to immigrate, laud our diversity, then put children in schools that have curricular spaces for only English and French, ignoring the language wealth families have brought with them to Canada.

In our venture to create exploratory multiliteracies pedagogies, we have drawn routes for engagement and appreciation of local languages in class learning, equally welcoming major world languages, such as Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish, and smaller, less prestigious languages, including nonstandard creoles, such as (Guyanese) Creolese, and Jamaican Patwa. Through systematic classroom interventions, teachers have devised project-based pedagogies that create third spaces both textually (Bhabha, 1994), and in classroom interaction (Gutierrez, 2008; Kramsch, 2009), where the children’s languages are welcomed and shared, establishing language awareness and anti-racism as classroom values. The paper will highlight children’s multilingual project work, and teacher discussions around language inclusion in the linguistically heterogeneous classroom.

Bhabha, H.K. (1994). The location of culture. London, U.K: Routledge. Gutierrez, K.D. (2008). Developing a sociocritical literacy in the third space. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 148-164. Kramsch, C. (2009). Third culture and language education. In L. Wei & V. Cook (Eds.), Contemporary applied linguistics: Vol. 1. Language teaching and learning (pp. 233-254). London: Continuum. Lotherington, H. (2011). Pedagogy of multiliteracies: Rewriting Goldilocks. New York, N.Y: Routledge. Toronto District School Board (October, 2011). Fact sheet. Retrieved from: http://www.tdsb.on.ca/_site/ViewItem.asp?siteid=308&menuid=4721&pageid=4131

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

The world in our classrooms: Using language diversity as possibility in the urban classroom