Gabriele Budach

Objects and language in trans-contextual communication

In their recent book titled How Matter Matters, Carlile et al. (2013) cite Barad (2003, 801) who lamented that: “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in...

From language choice to mode choice: how artefacts impact on language use and meaning making in a bilingual classroom

This paper investigates the interplay of languages and artefacts as resources for meaning making in bilingual education. While previous research on classroom interaction concentrated on either code switching or multimodality, here, I integrate both perspectives and propose a framework for the study of multimodal interaction embedded in a multilingual environment. The paper draws on research in a German–Italian two-way-immersion classroom in Frankfurt, Germany. The focus of the analysis is on objects and their role in shaping language practices and social interaction. The analysis sheds light on two dimensions of a biliteracy teaching and learning event that centres on objects brought to class by learners: first, it shows how the presence of objects intersects with the conventionalised language choice practices of this classroom. Second, it looks at how interactions around objects alter habitual ways of using languages for both the purpose of teaching and for identifying people, material culture and bodies of knowledge. To conclude I argue that interactions around learner-centred objects can modify pedagogical practice and thereby challenge monolingualising language ideologies. Rather than reifying monolithic identities, social roles and bodies of knowledge, learner-centred objects invite the creation of semiotic spaces in which the multiple life worlds of multilingual learners can thrive.

Talk around objects: designing trajectories of belonging in an urban Inuit community

In this study, we present findings from a collaborative ethnographic study with urban Inuit in Ottawa, Canada. We investigate “talk around objects” as a meaningful learning activity and a prism of human-object relationships. Focusing on Inuit clothing – namely the Inuit-made parka (winter coat) and amauti (a traditional Inuit baby carrier) – we examine the impact of everyday objects on social interaction, with a particular emphasis on the effects of materiality on talk. More specifically, we explore the role of objects and object design in mobilizing particular forms of narratives, which project meaning across contexts of time, space, activity, and generations. Accordingly, we conceptualize the impact of objects as “joins” in trans-contextual meaning-making and point to their significance in Inuit learning and in serving to shape human-object relationships. We see the contribution of this article to this special issue as twofold. Not only does it explore “talk around objects” as an instance of co-agency, in which humans and objects contribute jointly to the shaping of talk; but it also emphasizes the role of objects as “joins”, enabling and sustaining the connection of people with each other and with the environment, within and across contexts. Such a perspective relates to post-human theory, which considers the agency of things in social interaction, while acknowledging an Inuit worldview, which rejects anthropocentrism.

“Urban-Rural” Dynamics and Indigenous Urbanization: The Case of Inuit Language Use in Ottawa

The establishment of cities in Canada has played a pivotal role in the displacement, dispossession, and marginalization of Indigenous peoples. Yet, more than half of the Indigenous population now resides in cities, and urbanization continues to increase. This paper addresses a specific aspect of Inuit mobility—namely, migration and the dynamic use of Inuit language and knowledge in the city of Ottawa. Drawing on community-based participatory research in collaboration with an Ottawa Inuit literacy centre, we investigate a range of Inuit-led educational practices that emerged from collaborative work with a group of Inuit women. Suggested activities drew on semiotic resources—including objects and language—that involved retracing the migrational trajectories of Inuit between cities and between nonurban communities, particularly those in their Arctic “homelands.” Such practices appear to cut across the “urban-rural divide,” particularly since cities were rarely mentioned, a fact that seems to signal the irrelevance of this dichotomy for urban Inuit. In this context, the exploration of artifactual literacies—more specifically, speaker interactions that unfold around culturally meaningful objects—led to the following conclusions: (1) multilingual oracy is key to complex transcontextual meaning making; (2) spatiotemporal reference is anchored both in individual experience and in connectivity with members of a newly constituted community; and (3) there is a sharing of cross-generational horizontal knowledge, which includes the abstention from any enforcement of a linguistic norm.

Educational trajectories at the crossroads: The making and unmaking of multilingual communities of learners

Abstract This article investigates the educational trajectories of young multilingual learners in Germany. Drawing on previous ethnographic research in a primary bilingual German-Italian Two-Way-Immersion classroom, this study examines the continuity and fragmentation of multilingual learning as they occur in the transition from primary to secondary education. Scrutinizing conditions and ideologies which underlie these processes, I argue that, in this context, multilingualism as an educational resource undergoes a fundamental meaning shift. While in primary school multilingualism is valued as capital for social inclusion, permitting the emergence of a temporary, spatio-temporally confined bilingual community of practice (Budach 2009), secondary education emphasizes multilingualism as a form of capital for social mobility and individual distinction, which undermines the conditions for a joint multilingual endeavor. The paper demonstrates how multilingual learners cope with this educational and societal imperative, locating their own position and navigating educational options available to them.

Learning Around Iconic Buildings: Maps of Experience in the Making

This chapter focuses on engagement with iconic buildings as a type of place-based learning. Engagement is here understood as multimodal interaction which involves seeing, talking, listening, walking or handling things in the material world. Two sites of engagement are under examination. First is a guided tour through the city of Frankfurt during which parents, teachers and researchers were led by a tour guide who highlighted the generally unrecognised contribution of Italians to the city’s development and wellbeing. Second is a bilingual project which involved primary school children drawing from their engagement with the world of commercially produced toys, as a background for creating their own interpretations of time, place, space and history in action. We see how the engagement of individuals with iconic buildings can disrupt dominant meanings, such as those circulated by tourist industries and toy manufacturers. While the city walk emphasised the possibilities of embedding alternative narratives into local spatial movement, the second activity showed the fragmented nature of trajectories of experience that draw on a variety of semiotic resources in line with the experience of many immigrant children whose family ties and identity orientations spread transnationally.