Resumen de Nurturing critical multilingual awareness with pre-service (pre)primary teachers through an interdisciplinary, project-based approach
Latisha Mary, Andreas S. Young
Teachers in France working with (emergent) bilingual pupils often not only feel ill-equipped to provide the specific support these learners require, but also find it difficult to accept that languages other than French have a right and role as learning resources in the classroom. Challenging such monolingual mindsets whilst helping teachers to understand, experience and experiment with the linguistic and cultural diversity of their classrooms requires innovative and creative approaches (Mary, Krüger & Young, 2021). In this paper, we present and analyse data collected from 14 students during 2019–2020 (pre & post-course questionnaires, student portfolios, written reflections and working group minutes) during an elective course offered to future (pre)primary teachers in France (N = 40). The course was project-based and interdisciplinary, incorporating techniques, concepts and insights from the visual arts, new technologies, language acquisition and development, psychology and sociolinguistics. A key objective of the course was to empower student teachers to become agents of change or ‘language activists’ (Shohamy, Citation2006) through the implementation of creative projects for and with their (emergent) bilingual pupils. Students developed projects ranging from the creation of bilingual books and story bags to multilingual music collections, in collaboration with the children and families who frequented their schools.
