Latinx curriculum theorizing is a constellation of curriculum scholarship rooted in the histories, knowledges, and everyday lives of peoples from across the Latin American diaspora. It is a framework that pushes back against demonizing stereotypes, caricatures, and colonial generalizations of an entire diaspora. Born out of resistance and liberation, it comes from the histories and practices of Latinx peoples in creating counternarratives, education reform, and activism. Specifically, Latinx curriculum theorizing includes the following: (a) Latinidad as a collective point of entry, (b) Latinx as a term, (c) history and circumstance as curricular knowledge, (d) counternarratives and testimonio as curriculum theorizing, (e) cultural knowledges of Latinx students and community as theory, (f) cultural knowledges of Latinx teachers, and (g) Latinx communities generating critical pedagogies and education initiatives.
Latinx curriculum theorizing draws from a variety of Latinx philosophical traditions, including critical race theory, Latina feminist philosophy, Latinx and Chicanx studies, and various strands of Latin American, Continental, Caribbean, and Africana philosophy. While scholars who do Latinx curriculum theorizing are trained in theories such as critical race theory, feminist theory, and post- and decolonial theories, because of the subject matter and the people, this framework is the next step up in putting such foundational theories into conversation with one another. It is therefore a newly emerging framework, in the early 21st century, because it draws upon all these perspectives to account for a very transitionary, contradictory, and messy Latinx experience.
What makes something distinctly Latinx curriculum is an engagement with a state of transition and liminal spaces, both pedagogically and epistemologically, with the varied and multilayered trajectories of Latin American-origin realities. Far from being a monolithic and static framework, Latinx curriculum theorizing is itself malleable, contested, and in transition. Just as Latinx itself is a contested term within academic and activist spaces, Latinx curriculum theorizing is a point of contestation that makes it a framework with porous boundaries that can explain and even redefine the Latinx educational experience. As such, Latinx curriculum lends itself to nuanced analysis and praxis for issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, language, migration, racial hierarchies, and colonial legacies. This type of curriculum theorizing also points to power structures from multiple social locations and offers pathways for social change and liberation.
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Latinx Curriculum Theorizing
Ganiva Reyes
Article
Leadership for School Desegregation
Randall B. Lindsey, Delores B. Lindsey, and Raymond D. Terrell
School desegregation efforts begun in the 1960s through to the 1980s persist into the 21st century. School leadership for desegregation began in the late 20th century. School leadership efforts began in the early 1960s with compliance-based responses focused on court-ordered and government directives in pursuit of equality with an eye to societal integration.
Leadership for desegregation is a legal response to de jure and de facto segregation as practiced in social, political, and economic systems throughout U.S. history. Efforts at more equal opportunities for historically marginalized students have, over time, evolved into an equity focus that holds a value for educating children and youth whether in integrated settings or not. By the turn of the 21st century, leadership efforts for equity began to recognize the need to provide access and opportunity to all students in all settings.
Four distinct chronological periods of school desegregation have evolved: desegregation leadership experiences, 1950s–1970s—mandated, minimum compliance; school desegregation leadership experiences, 1970s–1990s—supported by Emergency School Aid Act; school desegregation leadership experiences, 1990s–2015—Emergency School Aid Act and resegregation; and school desegregation experiences, 2015 to the present and predictable future.
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Leadership Practices and Managerial Accountability in Italy
Angelo Paletta, Christopher Bezzina, and Genc Alimehmeti
The changes that are affecting public education imply the need to incorporate into principal’s leadership practices two opposing forces: on the one hand, the accountability systems, which require responsibility for centrally managed achievement testing, compliance with standard procedures of self-evaluation, planning teaching improvement, and reporting of the results; and on the other hand, the expectations that come from within the school, namely those of teachers, students, families, and other stakeholders. This presents the challenge of coproducing authentic learning (problem solving, soft skills, civic knowledge, and citizenship) that is not easily measurable and therefore difficult to bring to light, rationalize, systematize, and report.
Principals react differently to the demands of centralized policy-making initiatives. Some see them as opportunities for growth and only formally adopt them, whereas others entrench themselves into particular practices aimed at focusing on the immediate, on being conservative and minimizing risk taking and setting less ambitious goals that can take their schools forward. Managerial accountability can end up “colonizing” the organizations (and those who lead them), with the consequence that time and attention is devoted to what is being measured or observed by the central administrative systems. The “colonized” leaders develop or bend their managerial practices primarily in response to the expectations of accountability systems. On the opposite side, accountability systems can produce the effect of “decoupling”: the actual activities are separated from the rituals of accountability requested by the central or local government. In this case, school principals conform only formally to the demands of accountability systems. Other school leaders can capture opportunities from an accountability system, integrating it into a comprehensive management approach that balances opposing requests and organizational principles into a “systemic” model.
Thus, the accountability practices in the field of education introduced in Italy can leave both a positive or negative impact on the way school principals lead their organizations. Studying the impact that the introduction of such policies can have on individuals as a result of the way leaders execute such directives are deemed important as they shed light on the link between policy and practice, and help us gain deeper insights into the so-called theory and practice divide. The move toward greater forms of accountability presents an ideal opportunity for policy makers and educational leaders working at different levels to appreciate the importance of systemic leadership and engage in a discourse that enlightens its value to school improvement initiatives. Rather than focusing on the self, on merely following directives and working independently, the school principal that is able to understand how things and people are connected and can come together to transform their schools can make a difference to school development and school improvement. Bringing policy makers and implementers together can help in understanding the realities faced by educators at the school level, the former often oblivious to the challenges educators face on a day-to-day basis.
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Learning To Teach Diverse Learners: Teachers and Teacher Preparation in the United States
A. Lin Goodwin
The question of what teachers should know and be able to do endures, given the central role teachers play in the development of young people into wise and contributing citizens for world societies. Research has demonstrated the relationship between teacher preparation and competence, and that quality teachers achieve better academic outcomes for learners. Moreover, the issue of quality teachers has become even more salient in the 21st century as forces of globalization blur boundaries, heightening both competition and cooperation among nations. These forces include: (a) massive global migration as a result of war and other political disruptions, such that countries around the world are receiving newcomers, many of whom are school-aged and bring with them new cultures and languages; (b) increased attention to human rights, with a focus on inclusion, equity, poverty reduction, and social uplift for all children, regardless of their circumstance or backgrounds, through universal education; and (c) international benchmarking assessments such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) that are driving international conversations about quality education and educators. The demands on teachers have increased, and definitions of quality emphasize the ability to capably teach children who represent multiple diversities (race, language, national origin, gender identities) and multiple vulnerabilities (poverty, dis/ability, immigrant status).
Preparing teachers for diverse students has long been relevant to the U.S. given its history as a country of immigrants, juxtaposed against a devastating legacy of enslavement, genocide, and imperialism. But the 1970s was when educators began to more seriously attend to educating diverse children who had been uniformly ignored because of racism, discrimination, and segregation. This was on the heels of civil rights legislature, activism on the part of people of color, people with disabilities, and indigenous people for better schools for their children, and large waves of immigration from Latin America and Asia, versus primarily European countries as in the past. As the proportion of non-white students increased in U.S. schools, preparing teachers for diversity became imperative, especially since the majority of teachers were white, and the achievement gap between mainstream children and diverse children remained stubbornly wide. Researchers also documented the inequities diverse learners faced in schools—poorly funded schools, less qualified teachers, limited access to academic curriculum, excessive disciplinary practices, and so on—as well as the teaching practices that made a positive difference in the educational experiences and achievements of diverse children. These included Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP), meaningful learning that honors diverse students’ culture and communities, high academic standards supported by excellent teachers, and multiple access points into the curriculum. The solution to inequitable education requires that all teachers instruct and advocate for every student as if she or he mattered, that all students receive the same care and attention as the richest, most advantaged. This solution is deceptively simple because it requires teachers to examine and revise their own biases and misconceptions, and actively resist the persistent messages that depict diverse children as deficient, so as to see them as worthwhile, full of capacity, and on the brink of greatness.
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Listening to Students in Schools
Marilene Proença Rebello de Souza and Silvia Helena Vieira Cruz
Access to education has generally been recognized as a human right. There is a consensus among the various sectors of civil society and government regarding the importance of schooling from the earliest years of life. But only recently have the fields of humanities and education begun to consider the importance of children’s perceptions, representations, and meanings attributed to the school and the educational institutions offered to them. Listening to children at school has drawn the attention of researchers when the right to a democratic school has been extended to more children, aiming at assuring them access to the knowledge socially constructed by mankind as well as access to social and cultural activities. Knowing what children think and feel during the process of schooling and in educational practices is today an important aspect of educational research. The qualitative approach has been shown to be fundamental in listening to very young children on various aspects of their school experience, thus promoting the expansion of knowledge about differing school contexts. However, this listening process presents several challenges for research, including the development of strategies that favor a child’s multiple ways of communicating and the search for solutions related to potential ethical issues. Researching children’s perspectives can provide a basic foundation for better pedagogical practices and public policies with regard to children.
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Marginalizing Palestinians in Historic Palestine (Israel) Through Education
Ilham Nasser and Mohammed Abu-Nimer
The article is an analysis of the Palestinian Arab education system, in particular the curriculum, and ways it was dealt with after the Nakba (Catastrophe) and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The relevant Israeli government policies that impacted the Palestinian minority who remained in historic Palestine are introduced. The authors delve into methods in which the Israeli state managed, and is still managing, the education of this national minority within a Zionist ideological framework embedded with Jewish religious and national values and themes. We describe the mechanisms through which Israel maintains a tight grip on the Palestinian minority through a security management apparatus employed in the education system to monitor teachers’ employment and staffing of those who are friendly and submissive to the policies of the government. Evidence for the continuous attempts to erase the Palestinian national and cultural identity through the curriculum, and textbooks is provided in content such as history, civics, and Arabic language. The authors address the initiatives taken by the Palestinian minority allies to react, resist, and organize. These include efforts to claim back the education space, as in the case of parents offering alternative schooling and nongovernmental entities and initiatives with a purpose of moving the community into a Palestinian self-steering education system. Recommendations on steps and initiatives to elevate the educational experiences and academic attainment of the next generations of Palestinian youth are provided, without denying them their right to learn their national and cultural heritage.
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Mathematics and School Reform in India
Farida Abdulla Khan and Charu Gupta
Initial efforts toward reform in mathematics education in India evolved out of a more general concern for educational reforms as they assumed a pivotal role in the agenda of modernization and development after independence. Mathematics as a foundational aspect of science and technology assumed a privileged status with recommendations to keep up with developments in technologically advanced countries. This led to the creation of an unduly loaded curriculum with little attention to children’s cognitive and developmental capacities and other more social and humane aspects of a well-rounded education. The early decades after independence were largely focused on providing access, and other than the rhetoric of equality and quality and overarching recommendations, little investment was made into researching the more nuanced aspects of learning and teaching and the social implications of schooling.
Several important national commissions and two major policies put forward important recommendations for reform in mathematics education with suggestions for both curriculum and pedagogy. The early decades after independence saw a greater commitment to higher education, especially in the sciences and technology, and this began to shape the school curriculum, with mathematics as a major concern. Although critiques of the system were never totally absent, efforts at intervention in schools and at the ground level were initially made by smaller groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOS), and then also nationally and regionally, to transform processes of schooling and learning with a focus on the learner rather than the content alone. A particularly large and comprehensive national effort at reforming school education in all subject areas was the National Curricular Framework, coordinated and initiated by the National Council of Educational Research and Training in 2005. This was a radical attempt at framing an alternative idea of schooling and learning, focused on the child, but with an acute awareness of the larger social, economic, and political structures within which schools, classrooms, teachers, and students are implicated.
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Mentoring Epistemologies Beyond Western Modalities
Carol A. Mullen
Commitment to mentorship, while necessary to benefit mentoring parties, is insufficient to work with the complexities of contemporary educational settings, especially in pursuit of engagement and learning for all. Mentoring that makes a profound difference for all participants, worldwide, is oriented at the outset to call into question such organizational constraints as hegemony, hierarchy, and culture. Traditional versus alternative approaches to mentoring is a critical binary that can be differentiated in the abstract. However, context and culture are existing organizational realities for which mentoring forms, enactments, and activities (such as mentoring circles) either perpetuate the status quo or produce significant change. Thus, alternative mentoring approaches work within both the traditional view of mentoring and any alternative to it.
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Mestiza Methodology as a Hybrid Research Design
Amanda Jo Cordova
Chicana feminists such as Maylei Blackwell, Cherrie Moraga, and Anna Nieto-Gómez of the 1960s Chicano Movement called for a gendered critique of racial activism mired in the stultification of Chicana leadership, ultimately galvanizing epistemology and theory grounded in a Chicana way of knowing. In particular, the introduction of a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in the 1990s to the field of education centered the reconciliation and healing of education, knowledge, and knowledge holders dehumanized by the exclusionary logics of colonialism pervasive in educational spaces. Consequently, crafting research methodologies of a Chicana hybrid nature, both locating and healing the fractured embodiment of knowledge educational actors draw upon, is critical to the groundwork of a more socially just educational system. Focused on the hybridity or the duality of knowing and the damage created by the colonial separation of such knowledge from knowledge holders, methodologies must be curated to locate and fuse back together what was torn apart. Mestiza Methodology was developed to locate the liminal space in which Chicanas collectively recount experiences leading to the separation of who they are and what they know in the academic arena as a means to recover, reclaim, and reconcile oneself to the pursuit of an education decolonized.
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Meta-ethnography in Education
George W. Noblit
Meta-ethnography is a very popular method for the synthesis of qualitative research. It was designed for the field of education but has been exceedingly popular in the health sciences. In education, slow growth has given way to almost furious development. Meta-ethnography is a method for synthesizing qualitative studies. Studies are identified as related to a phenomenon of interest and these are reviewed and read repeatedly, leading to both a reduction in the number of relevant studies and further specification of the phenomenon of interest. The synthesis is a translation of the complete interpretive storylines of each study into the others. There are three types of translation: reciprocal (the storylines are commensurate and reinforce each other), refutational (the storylines critique each other), and line of argument. Each study contributes something distinct to a new storyline that characterizes all the studies taken together. Effecting these translations remains a challenge for most who conduct meta-ethnographies. The work in the 21st century in education has established meta-ethnography as an interpretive and critical endeavor, moving well beyond the original proposal.
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Metalinguistic Transfer
Guofang Li, Zhuo Sun, and Haoyun Li
Metalinguistic awareness is a cognitive process that allows a person to explicitly think about structural features of language such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic features and use this knowledge base to monitor and control his/her use of language. Metalinguistic awareness is strongly associated with monolingual children’s early literacy skills. The concept of metalinguistic awareness has also been used to explore the possibility of any paralleled mechanism that metalinguistic awareness operates in predicting bilingual children’s early literacy learning, especially between two languages that are orthographically distant such as Chinese and English. Research on Chinese-English bilingual children in both Chinese as a first language context (e.g., Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) and Chinese as a heritage language context (e.g., Canada, United States, and the United Kingdom) confirms some cross-language facilitation of early literacy skills mediated by metalinguistic awareness in general, but overall research findings reveal a variance in terms of the directionality of transfer and aspects of transfer in predicting literacy skills in the two languages within the respective phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness domain. Several linguistics-external factors such as individual children’s language proficiencies in the two languages and their exposure to formal language instruction mediate patterns of metalinguistic transfer in phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness across the two different language contexts.
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Mindfulness Matters in Leadership
Maria Guajardo
Mindfulness and leadership come together as a model for arriving at solutions in the field of education. Two approaches, Eastern and Western, present perspectives on mindfulness that are distinct, however both aim towards the same goal of enhancing awareness. Originating in the East, mindfulness is at the core of Buddhist philosophy and includes enhanced attention and an attentiveness to the present. Conversely, the Western approach to mindfulness gained traction in the 1970s in the field of cognitive and social psychology. Within the field of education in the United States, mindfulness has contributed, primarily in the classroom, as an activity to foster better classroom management and improved focus on learning. Mindfulness has also been applied to mindful learning, aimed at revealing enhanced approaches to learning.
Along a similar vein, applications of mindfulness in the leadership field, encourage the approach of focused attention to individual leadership development, problem-solving, and self-reflection. Resonant leadership and authentic leadership are two of the primary leadership models that include the strategy of mindfulness. Moving beyond the individual perceptions of mindfulness in leadership development, a more collaborative approach of mindfulness has emerged, where social change emerges from interdependence and mutuality amongst a number of individuals. Whether at the individual or collective level, mindfulness is impacted by cultural influences. Educational leaders are tasked with leading ethnically diverse learning communities by necessity, as demographics change and ethnic minority populations become minority majority populations. Thus, awareness of one’s cultural mindset, both limitations and strengths, can contribute to one’s leadership abilities. Mindfulness, when directed inward, can paradoxically enhance one’s ability to better understand others and to breakthrough stereotypes. This perspective could foreseeably foster cultural competence and greater levels of cultural integration, but as a function of greater self-awareness. Thus, mindfulness and leadership, as a creative combination of self and other, come together as a promising model of leadership for educators. Whether integrated as a necessary element of existing leadership theories, or identified as an important process of reflection in leadership development, mindfulness opens a pathway to greater insight and awareness. Aspects of mindfulness can therefore contribute to leadership, in particular, at the intersection of these elements relative to culture.
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Mixed Methods Approaches and Qualitative Methodology for Higher Education Policy Research
Nidhi S. Sabharwal and C. M. Malish
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.
The complex nature of the higher education system in India demands a nuanced understanding of its functions, outcomes, and impact on various stakeholders, the economy, and society. Policy research aims to develop such an understanding through generating evidence-based perspectives for higher education planning and development in national contexts. Equity is one of the major domains of inquiry in higher education, and institutionalizing equity in the higher education process and its outcomes is therefore a major concern in policy discourse. A multi-sited study confirms that integrating quantitative and qualitative methods yields vital insights about the nature and forms of social exclusion and discrimination on campuses as well as about how institutional policies, structure, and practices contribute to the shaping of the lived experiences of students from diverse backgrounds. While a quantitative approach helps to assess the magnitude of the prevailing practice of discrimination and social exclusion on university campuses in an era of massification and increasing student diversity, a qualitative approach facilitates the understanding of how and why discriminatory practices continue to prevail on campuses. These insights are critical in developing an equity perspective in national and subnational contexts and formulating policies, strategies, and practices for institutionalizing equity in higher education.
The strength of the qualitative approach, including focused group discussions, has the capacity to generate evidence on collective experience and shared values, assumptions, and perceptions of the student body sharing common social belonging and life chances. It helps to unveil group-specific issues in a comparative framework. Because interviews with teachers and institutional leaders were conducted alongside focused group discussions with students, the contradictions and similarities of perceptions on each issue could be taken forward for further probing and cross checking. It was actually helpful to unravel multilayered narratives on diversity and discrimination in higher education contexts.
Focused group discussion, for example, helped to bring out the voices of the “invisibles,” or those who are not part of the mainstream. The contradiction observed between dominant narratives and counterculture further contributed to a nuanced understanding of the issues of diversity and discrimination. Issues like gender stereotyping and micro-aggression against marginalized social groups hitherto unknown to dominant discourse could not have been adequately captured with survey methods alone. Therefore, field work as a process not only generates experiential evidence but also serves a political purpose by giving voice to the silenced or to those student groups who remain on the margins of campus life.
It may be argued that qualitative and quantitative approaches are complementary rather than conflicting approaches, and the limitations of methodological monism in understanding social phenomena can be triumphed over by integrating quantitative and qualitative methods. Undoubtedly, there are challenges in integrating insights from data collected through quantitative and qualitative methods, and the overall research process is labor intensive and rigorous. One may, however, conclude that the critical insights developed through a mixed methodology are robust. While making a significant contribution to the body of knowledge on the system of higher education, a mixed methodology approach also makes a substantial contribution to developing new perspectives in policy discourses and directing transformations in the system to institutionalize equity.
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Model Minorities and Overcoming the Dominance of Whiteness
Nicholas D. Hartlep
Stereotyping Asian Americans as successful or model minorities is not positive. Instead, it is a form of racist love that reinforces White supremacy. How can a positive stereotype reinforce White supremacy? Because the process of revering Asian Americans as model minorities leads to other groups of people, such as people of color and Indigenous people, being reviled. But if the model minority characterization of Asian Americans is inaccurate, what should curriculum studies scholars do? Disproving a “stereotype” is impossible. Curriculum studies scholars and theorists should not attempt to disconfirm something that is untrue, or something that is racist, but instead should narrate the reality of being Asian American. The model minority stereotype of Asian Americans has been studied and contested over 50 years within the context of the United States. Over these 50 plus years, the model minority stereotype has taken on a transcendent meaning. Overcoming the dominance of Whiteness requires Asian Americans to transcend “positive” stereotypes via critical storytelling. This will require curriculum studies as a field to continue to interrogate: What are the realities of living in racist Amerika for Asian Americans?
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Moving Toward Inclusive Education in Ethiopia Through Itinerant Teachers at Resource Centers
Sulochini Pather, Aemiro Tadesse, and Solomon Gizachew
In light of policy reforms in Ethiopia, which emphasize a more inclusive education system catering for children with disabilities and special needs, schools struggle to embrace this new concept in practice. The role of the itinerant teacher within a resource center model, to promote and support inclusive education in the Ethiopian context, is key. Their roles are new to the system and require a coordinating position at resource centers, supporting the assessment and support for children with special educational needs. Perceptions of itinerant teachers on a project in Ethiopia reveal that they are adequately qualified and envisage that mainstream schools become child-friendly and welcoming of children with disabilities. Barriers identified by itinerant teachers to achieving this vision relate to the lack of a career structure with a formal job description for itinerant teachers, negative attitudes of communities and teachers, and lack of capacity at the Ministry of Education to provide support and funding.
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Multicultural Education in Japan
Tomoko Tokunaga
As Japanese society diversifies with an influx of foreigners, multicultural education has a critical role to play in achieving educational equity and affirming cultural diversity of students from various cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. Since the 1980s, Japanese scholars and educators have introduced, interpreted, and reappropriated multicultural education from the West, and have developed the field in conjunction with different education genres (e.g., human rights education, Dowa education, Zainichi Korean education, and education for international understanding). Scholars often use the term multicultural coexistence education (tabunka kyosei kyoiku) to discuss the role of education to realize a society of multicultural coexistence. Contemporary debates and controversies regarding multicultural education focus on the “3F” (namely, food, festival, and fashion) approach, the absence of social justice perspectives, its narrow scope, and the invisibility of majority Japanese.
Although the concept of multicultural education was imported from the West relatively recently, when the number of newcomer students increased in public schools during the early 1990s, Japan has its own versions of multicultural education, such as Dowa education and Zainichi Korean education. These forms of multicultural education policies and practices, which were primarily developed in the Kansai area, take a somewhat progressive approach toward achieving educational equity and reducing discrimination against minorities. Today, multicultural education is often associated with education for newcomer students.
Although the national government has provided remedial education (e.g., Japanese language and adaptation classes) under the notion of equal treatment, numerous nonformal education sites have played critical roles in achieving equity and empowering newcomer students. Multicultural education policies and practices remain peripheral in Japan at the national government level; nevertheless, grass-roots movements have emerged where local governments, nonprofit organizations (NPOs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), concerned teachers, researchers, minority youth and parents, and community organizers are attempting to transform assimilative education policies and practices into more equitable and inclusive ones. With the rise of multicultural coexistence (tabunka kyosei) discourse, Japanese society is taking incremental steps toward achieving the goals of multicultural education.
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Multilingualism and Identity in Hong Kong Education After 1997
Michelle Mingyue Gu and Ho Kin Tong
Multilingual settings are regarded as ideologically, culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse social contexts where tensions exist among different groups and individuals, and in which language users’ multilingual competence can be utilized as repertoire for communicative, identification, and learning purposes. Multilingualism and identity have been widely explored from different theoretical orientations in diverse educational settings. The major research findings from the postmodernist perspective reflect that (a) identity, reflecting an individual’s relationship with the external environment, is dynamic, multiple, and fluid; (b) individuals’ identities are continuously shaped in multilingual interactions, and the multilingual settings provide affordance for the language users to identify themselves through the lens of cultural memories, embodied history, subjectivity of themselves and others, during which the new identities and relationships are established; and (c) the multilingual speakers can shape the multilingual settings through negotiating power relations between languages as well as cultures, and modifying as well as reconstructing social discourses. As such, the exploration of multilingualism and identity, and their complex interplay with educational discourse, history, and sociopolitical realities, have both theoretical significance and practical implications for transferring diversity into recourses and constructing new spaces and opportunities for identity, language, and education in an era of increasing hybridity and mobility.
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Multilingualism in Monolingual Schools and the German Example
Ingrid Gogolin
The majority of European countries consider themselves as monolingual nation-states. Some exceptions are countries composed of different linguistic territories, such as Belgium and Switzerland. Another form of exception is countries where certain territories are inhabited by linguistic minorities who are granted particular linguistic rights. Monolingualism with exceptions for special constellations or cases is therefore considered the “linguistic normality” in European nations. This understanding of normality is also reflected in the nations’ public institutions and is particularly pronounced in the national education systems.
The linguistic reality in Europe, however, contrasts with this notion of normality. Since time immemorial, the regions that have become European nation-states have been characterized by linguistic diversity, not only across but also within their boundaries. Since the second half of the 20th century, however, the number of languages that are vital and used daily has considerably increased. The most important driver of this development is international migration. Some European countries—Germany in particular—belong to the most attractive immigration destinations of the world. Despite of this reality, European national education systems largely persist in their monolingual mindset—or in other words: in a monolingual habitus.
This ambiguity can be amply illustrated by the example of the German education system. Education research shows that it belongs to the causes of educational disadvantage for children from immigrant families. This is precisely why innovation initiatives have been launched to mitigate the risks to teaching and learning associated with multilingualism, while making the best use of the resources offered by linguistic diversity to all children—be they growing up in monolingual or multilingual families.
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Multiliteracies in Professional Education
Kathryn Hibbert, Mary Ott, Christopher Eaton, and Lin Sun
Multiliteracies theory is part of a growing and evolving body of research tangled up with multiple, intersecting fields: literacies, technologies, pedagogies, socio-materiality, and semiotics, to name a few. It is a theory that has been taken up largely in the professional practice of teacher education but is rapidly emerging as a useful way to think through the complexities of practice in multiple professions such as medical education, or engineering. As learning has come to be understood and framed in ways that acknowledge the temporal, spatial, material, and embodied layers of understanding, practice-based professions are finding ways to investigate and support knowing in practice.
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Multiliteracies in Teacher Education
Tala Michelle Karkar Esperat
Multiliteracies is an inclusive literacy approach that extends traditional print-based literacy (reading and writing) to integrate a wide range of modes of communication. These modes of communication include linguistic (words, text, speech), visual (images, pictures, video, color), audio (music, sounds), spatial (placement, location), gestural (movement, sensuality), and synesthesia (multimodal design). In addition to communication modes, multiliteracies integrates technologies (e.g., new literacies; digital media) in the classroom and is characterized by four pedagogical practices (situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice) and cultural and social practices. Multiliteracies in teacher education includes the understanding of nature, theory, and pedagogical practices to inform curriculum decisions to meet the needs of all students.
The concept of multiliteracies was developed as a new approach to literacy pedagogy by the New London Group in 1996. This provides a pedagogical space for learners to interact with information by using different modes of text forms to accommodate language, culture, context, and social effects to connect to the local and global world. Since the constitution of multiliteracies (1996–2024), the conversation of adopting multiliteracies as a pedagogical approach has evolved to identify the need for urgent and equitable educational change. It advocates for multilingual students’ learning experiences using modalities that support their individual learning. One way to ensure this is using tangible tools in teacher preparation, such as the pedagogical holistic model of the new literacies framework and pedagogical content knowledge of the multiliteracies survey instrument, which allow preservice teachers to continue to reflect on their teaching delivery.
Educators use multiliteracies in the classroom to engage students in learning, embrace students’ diverse cultures, and help students form their identities. Multiliteracies education can be used as a tool for the empowerment of marginalized students. It supports the development of multimodal literacy skills and enables learners to communicate their identities in authentic ways, which fosters a more inclusive and equitable society. Multiliteracies aims to promote social justice through education, inspiring learners to think critically and become active participants in understanding the world by engaging in dialogue, developing more profound understanding, and appreciating other cultures.
The use of multiliteracies is crucial in the diverse classroom. Teacher education programs must respond to the growing need by addressing the following questions: What do preservice teachers need to know about multiliteracies? Why do preservice teachers need to adopt multiliteracies? How can multiliteracies be used to prepare preservice teachers to integrate multiliteracies in multilingual classrooms?
