Diane Dagenais

Accessing Imagined Communities Through Multilingualism and Immersion Education

In this article I apply constructs of language as economic and symbolic capital, transnationalism, investment, and imagined community to an analysis of interviews with immigrant parents living in Vancouver, Canada. These parents promote multilingualism by maintaining their family language and enrolling their children in French Immersion programmes. I argue that they view multilingualism as capital and invest in language education as a means of securing their childrens access to various imagined language communities. Referring both to a transnational perspective and a national context of official bilingualism, they imagine that French Immersion education will enable their children to participate in a Canadian French-English bilingual community while maintaining the family language will ensure affiliation with their heritage language communities in Canada and abroad. In addition, they imagine that multilingualism will equip their children with valuable language resources that help transcend national borders. This discussion highlights the overlap and distinctions of theoretical constructs and raises questions about the objectives of language education and immersion programmes in an increasingly mobile and multilingual society.

A Multilingual Child's Literacy Practices and Contrasting Identities in the Figured Worlds of French Immersion Classrooms

In this paper, we explore the intersection of practice, identity, resources and literacy central to the New Literacy Studies and recent second language research informed by sociocultural theories of learning and language. Drawing on the construct figured worlds of literacy that describe how representations of literacy practices invoked in relation to certain people frame their social position and the construction of their identities, we discuss literacy practices and teacher discourse documented in our classroom research. We present data excerpts that illustrate how a multilingual child is variously constructed as ‘literate child’ in the figured worlds of elementary school French Immersion classrooms. In particular, we consider how her literacy practices are shaped and her identities mediated in different ways socially, materially and linguistically. We argue that the mediation of her identities in classroom literacy activities is tied to teacher expectations of her future educational progress. Finally, we suggest that partnerships between researchers, educational practitioners and policy makers aimed at documenting classroom literacy practices may highlight how interpretations of multilingual childrens identities can serve to fix or change their social relations and educational paths.

Promoting Multilingualism through French Immersion and Language Maintenance in Three Immigrant Families.

In this paper, we examine the language practices in three immigrant families of South Asian ancestry who reside in Canada and have chosen French Immersion education for their children. Basing our discussion on interview data, we present a profile of the inter- and intra-generational language interactions that distinguish each family. Also, we describe their reasons for maintaining their family language and their interest in French Immersion. The findings reveal that parents adopt language maintenance strategies that vary from one family to another and they attribute value to French and English as official languages of the country and important languages internationally. Drawing on sociocultural theories of language learning that view language as inextricable from context and critical constructs of language exchanges, we argue that these parents support language maintenance and opt for French Immersion education as part of a family project aimed at developing child multilingualism. Multilingualism is viewed as a means of securing advantages for their offspring nationally and internationally.

Grappling with social justice: Exploring new teachers’ practice and experiences

This qualitative study examines the narratives of 27 new teachers as they grapple with social justice in the context of their classrooms. Informed by pedagogical perspectives regarding social justice education and new teacher mentorship, this research is framed by theories of communities of practice and professional knowledge landscapes. At the time of fieldwork, the participants had all graduated from a teacher education program focused on issues of social justice and were in their first, second or third year of teaching. Analysis of the participants’ narratives, gathered in semi-structured interviews indicates that the realities of teaching assignments, curriculum constraints and professional support either encourage or discourage new teachers from incorporating social justice into their practice. Thus, the extent to which new teachers are able to incorporate social justice into their practice can be related to the material and social conditions in which they are situated.

Second Language Learners Making Video in Three Contexts

We describe videomaking projects in Canada, India , and Mexico in which second language learners were asked to show the children in the other countries what their lives were like. We consider how this form of expression might contribute to second language learning and allow children to make use of in and out-of-school resources. We also raise questions about the affordances and constraints of the videomaking process and explore how teachers might approach such multimodal literacy activities with children.

A Socio-cultural Perspective on School-based Literacy Research: Some Emerging Considerations

Much research on reading and writing in schools continues to focus on individual cognitive skills. In contrast, investigations of literacy-learning in out-of-school settings have often taken a socio-cultural perspective, situating reading and writing in social relations and cultural institutions. The last 20 years have seen a proliferation of studies documenting the ways in which printed texts are taken up in a wide variety of settings from after-school clubs and community-based adult literacy programmes to workplaces, the Internet, and ‘everyday life’. Increasingly, there have been calls for sociocultural literacy researchers to begin directing their attention to mainstream educational contexts. In this paper, we join in and seek to contribute to such calls by drawing out some of the complexities and caveats that also need to be kept in mind. After briefly reviewing what it means to define literacy and learning in relation to socio-cultural context, we explore some recent arguments for conceptual and methodological refinements. We then turn our attention to schools and to what a socio-cultural definition of literacy has to offer in terms of addressing diversity and educational inequity, and we draw out several issues that require closer consideration.

Theories of Representation in French and English Scholarship on Multilingualism

Abstract Researchers have examined language learning and intercultural contact in multilingual contexts from diverse epistemological and ontological stances. In some cases, the contrasts or incompatibilities in approaches leave little room for joint initiatives and in other cases, the underlying theoretical assumptions converge in several ways, allowing researchers to explore possibilities for interdisciplinary and intercontextual collaboration. In some instances, studies undertaken in different areas share commonalities but they are not explored because of linguistic, disciplinary or geographic barriers. Although only a handful of researchers reference French and English work undertaken in multilingual contexts, there is much to be gained by taking into account what has been written in both languages as it can reveal where there are differences and commonalities in constructs often cited in the literature. We attempt to bridge this gap by highlighting theoretical links that have heretofore been underexplored. We begin by reviewing definitions of social representation and then describe how Francophone sociolinguists drew on this construct to propose the notion of linguistic representation in their studies of multilingual practices. Following this, we discuss related concepts of representation, discourse and identity that have been taken up in English language work.

Multilingualism in Canada: Policy and Education in Applied Linguistics Research

Increasing multilingualism in Canada has captured the interest of applied linguists who investigate what it implies for policy and educational practice. This article provides a review of recent discussions of Canadian policy in the literature, current research on multilingual learners, and emerging innovations in multilingual pedagogies. The literature on policy indicates that some researchers treat policy as text and identify disjunctions between policy documents and the reality of a linguistically and culturally diverse population, while others view it as discursive practice and document how policy is constructed locally through language in response to a changing environment. The research on multilingual learners is based primarily on field-based reports that reveal how multilingual language practices are complex, dynamic, and ideological, and are tied to identity construction. The growing number of innovations in multilingual pedagogies suggests that more educators are beginning to see identity work and multimodal literacies as central to teaching students of diverse origins. This article concludes that there is a gap between official language policy and research on multilingualism in Canada.

Videomaking as sociomaterial assemblage

In this paper, we present excerpts from ethnographic data collected when a diverse classroom of children, some of whom were multilingual and others monolingual in English, used iPads to make videos. We discuss the practices, social relations, objects and material conditions that emerged as the children engaged in this production, with special attention to one child participating in the process. Drawing on New Literacy Studies, theories of the material and the construct sociomaterial assemblage, and another construct, production pedagogies, we analyzed the particular interactions this child engaged in while videomaking. These theoretical lenses helped us identify the challenges she faced and some of her strengths that might have been obscured from view during classroom negotiation of textual language, but were revealed when she interacted with digital technologies and multimodal texts. Video production allowed her to position herself and be positioned as knowledgeable, creative and as a legitimate peer with something to contribute.

Video Making, Production Pedagogies, and Educational Policy.

The promise of “21st century learning” is that digital technologies will transform traditional learning and mobilize skills deemed necessary in an emerging digital culture. In two case studies of video making, one in a Grade 4 classroom, and one in an adult literacy setting, the authors develop the concept of “production pedagogies” as complex multiliteracies embedded in video production oriented to meaningful social ends. Drawing upon concepts of translation in Actor Network Theory (ANT) and the “workaround,” the authors trace how in spite of the imaginary of “21st Century Literacy,” policy regimes privileged networks oriented to “minimal proficiency” print literacy. They theorize that the workarounds in which practitioners engaged illuminate three nodes or sites of action to strengthen production pedagogy networks: how learners are defined or problematized in literacy projects, how people get access to powerful digital literacy tools for learning, and how time-space regimes of traditional schooling are reconfigured.