Opening up new spaces for languaging practice in early childhood education for migrant children

ABSTRACT

This paper explores language practice in early childhood education for children new to the majority language, discussing how language practice can be transformed through actions such as reflexive dialogues with educators. In a Swedish action-research project, educators and researchers collaborated in reflexive dialogues to develop language practice in a preschool with large linguistic diversity. Various activities forming the basis of the dialogues were implemented, including photography by children enabling them to share their experiences. The results indicate that the educators positioned themselves between two common approaches to language practice for migrant children, i.e. multilingualism and monolingualism, a positioning evident in their language practice. Although striving for a multilingual approach, the educators’ daily activity structure and talk about the children recalled monolingual norms, assuming that people with access to several languages must master one before learning another. Through implementing actions including children’s perspectives and introducing ‘translanguaging’, language practice developed towards multilingualism, focusing increasingly on language as a process for expression and meaning-making rather than a tool for mastering the majority language. This approach turned educators away from deficit assumptions, instead emphasising children’s skills and agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• migrant children
• translanguaging
• practice architectures
• transformation

Introduction

This paper addresses how early childhood education (ECE) practice for migrant children, based on unspoken traditions and norms of language and children’s needs, can be challenged and transformed. How the children are seen and how the notion of language is conceptualised are crucial for how educational practice is organised, because it is based on these often implicit norms. The view of language greatly affects how teaching and learning are structured and how multiple languages are to be mastered. In Sweden, ECE – or preschool as it is generally called – has undergone considerable expansion over the last 30 years. Preschool is available to all children residing in Sweden from the age of one year, and most children under age five now attend it (Pramling Samuelsson and Johansson 2009; Skolverket 2017). Since the 1970s, preschool has played an important role in Swedish integration policy (Lunneblad 2013, 2017), and an intercultural and multilingual approach is emphasised in the curriculum (Skolverket 2018). However, even though Swedish preschool is central to the integration process, migrant children often find themselves confronting an educational system that tends to problematise their language and culture. This is connected to monolingual as well as monocultural norms in which educational challenges are often perceived as problems stemming from differences in the culture, ethnicity, and language of the migrant children (León-Rosales 2010; Wernesjö 2012; Lunneblad 2013; Nilsson and Bunar 2016; Åkerblom 2019). How educational practices are actually formed and organised is therefore interesting to consider regarding migrating children. The view of preschool education as a promoter of intercultural values, coexisting with implicit monolingual and monocultural norms and values, puts educators in a complex position. This circumstance, and the fact that Sweden has experienced an increase in newly arrived children entering all levels of the school system in recent years, leaves preschool and preschool educators with the challenge of offering purposeful pedagogical practices that can help migrant children attain educational objectives. Consequently, there is a demand for new perspectives on the study of ECE’s contribution to the social integration of migrant children. The ECE institution, as the first stage of the educational system, plays a central role in such integration, and this paper explores the challenges of pedagogical language practice to improve our understanding of how this practice can be transformed. We do this by exploring one case of language practice in one preschool setting formed around a group of migrant children. The following questions are asked here: How can the challenges of educating migrant children be understood based on an analysis of practice? How can pedagogical language practices be transformed through reflexive dialogues with educators?

The paper is organised as follows. First, the research approach and background on which this paper is based are introduced. This is followed by a discussion of language and language use that introduces the ‘translanguaging’ concept and approach (García and Wei 2014). The third section addresses the challenges identified in the studied case regarding language practice in relation to migrant children’s education, and the fourth section analyses the transformation of the language practice through collaboration between educators and researchers. Finally, the transformation of language practice is discussed in relation to the introduction of new perspectives.

Research approach and background

The results presented here emanate from a three-year (2017–2019) action research project aiming to explore conditions for teaching and learning by identifying the challenges facing preschool education in a world of migration, and to develop ways of organising such education. The research was conducted by the authors in a preschool section with considerable linguistic and cultural diversity. The section, situated in a culturally heterogeneous neighbourhood in a medium-sized city in southern Sweden, accepts children three to five years old who do not speak Swedish. It has a long history, having been established in the 1990s as part of a process of supporting and promoting the integration of refugee children arriving in Sweden, who would move on to regular preschool groups after one year. The separation of children to provide extra support has been a major aim of the section from the outset, but the approach differs from that of current ordinary preschool education, in which the direct integration of immigrant children is more common.

When the project began, the preschool section was expressing a need to review its organisation, in terms of both internal and external structure, and transform its pedagogical practice. The section agreed to work in a participatory way to explore the strengths and challenges of their daily pedagogical work. The research implementation followed the typical action research cycle, which comprises planning, action, observation, and reflection (McNiff 2002). The identified strengths and challenges, leading to action, were viewed from different perspectives, and group discussions were conducted involving researchers and participants of different types (e.g. educators, leaders, parents, and children).

The empirical material analysed here was retrieved from reflexive group dialogues involving the researchers and four educators working at the preschool section. The participating educators have worked 6–15 years at the section, and they all applied for positions there because of its focus on the integration of newly arrived children and families. Three of the educators had experience of migration, arriving in Sweden as refugees during different periods and from different countries. The aim of the reflexive dialogues was to reflect on the daily practice at the section and on the words used to describe it. The dialogues occurred once a month for two years, and during this time, based on action research characteristics (Kidd and Kral 2005; Braye and Mcdonnell 2013), the researchers and educators together explored challenges and possible actions in this dialogic space in which all were free to express their points of view. The focus was on facilitating knowledge and change through shared exploration and analysis, rather than the researchers being the ones telling the educators what to do.

The notion of practice was central to the dialogues, being comprehended through the discourse of the practice (‘sayings’), the activities that are part of the practice (‘doings’), and how people relate to one another and to the objects that are part of the practice (‘relatings’) (Kemmis et al. 2014; Kemmis and Edwards-Groves 2018). Since a practice is delimited as the answer to the question ‘What are you doing?’ (Salamon et al. 2016), the goal of the reflexive dialogues was first to explore the strengths and challenges of the educators’ work in relation to this question, and then to identify the practices to be changed. One challenge stood out, namely, the pedagogical efforts needed to reinforce the children’s language development. The analytical focus here has therefore been to identify the pedagogical language practice at the section, and the needed changes in practice reinforced by the reflexive dialogues. This means that we have analysed the intersubjective spaces of the pedagogical language practice in relation to the cultural–discursive (i.e. language and meaning), material–economic (i.e. activities and resources), and socio–political (i.e. ways of relating to one another) arrangements that constitute them (Kemmis et al. 2014; Kemmis and Edwards-Groves 2018).

Theoretical conceptions of language

Language means different things in different contexts, and how language is understood greatly influences how teaching and learning are structured, including ideas about how multiple languages are to be mastered. The language philosopher Wittgenstein (1968) distinguished two very different ways of understanding the function of language: as a structural conception and an expressive conception, or language seen as structure and as expression.

The theory of practice architectures is based on an expressive view of language (Kemmis and Edwards-Groves 2018) that saying and doing are interconnected in practice, because it is in practice that language arises. The structural view of language is more directed towards an individual view of language in which the main function of language is naming and describing. Every word contains a meaning that is the object for which the word stands, and learning to understand entails establishing the correct relationships between objects and words. The common sense understanding of language is largely in line with the structural conception, which also influences how languages are taught.

On the other hand, when seen as expressive, language is understood as activity, and language meaning is seen as constituted in use rather than existing beforehand. Language as expression is viewed as dynamic and open (Åkerblom 2011), and the notion of ‘languaging’ is often used to emphasise the activity of using language. Languaging includes the processes of making sense, communicating, and shaping experience through language (Lewis, Jones, and Baker 2012). In that conception, language is learnt while engaging and living in the world; it arises in practice and is both subjective (understanding) and intersubjective (communication).

One’s conception of language also influences one’s view of multilingualism and of how multiple languages are mastered. Jørgensen (2008) discerned different language norms concerning multiple languages among those who are multilingual. When he studied linguistic practices among young urban language users with several languages at their disposal, he observed that they would combine sets of linguistic features (i.e. languages) in their linguistic production, something he called ‘polylingual languaging’. The polylingual norm is the idea that ‘language users employ whatever linguistic features are at their disposal to achieve their communicative aims as best they can, regardless of how well they know the involved languages; this entails that the language users may know, and use, the fact that some of the features are perceived by some speakers as not belonging together’ (Jørgensen 2008, 163). Jørgensen contrasted this idea to the ‘monolingual norm’, the underlying idea of which is that a person with access to more than one language must master one of them before starting to learn another. The polylingual perspective on language is in line with the ‘translanguaging’ approach (García and Wei 2014), in which speakers use various language assets to communicate. Translanguaging refers to a pedagogical practice that aims to maximise learning in multilingual settings (Wei 2018). Besides moving between different linguistic structures and systems, translanguaging also involves different modalities such as speaking, writing, and aesthetic expression (Wei 2018). The notion also refers to the use of language as a unitary meaning-making system, in which a language user can select linguistic features from his or her own language repertoire (García and Wei 2014). According to Wei (2018), translanguaging can also be seen as a theory of language practice. The conception of language is then not an object, but rather a process. Children who are new to a language do not ‘acquire’ it; rather, they adapt their bodies and brains to all the languaging activities that surround them (Wei 2018). Vogel and García (2017) present translanguaging as a theoretical lens that offers new views of multilingualism that have attracted interest in education, but also disagreement. The debates are between scholars who have embraced the translanguaging approach and those who do not agree with its premises (Vogel and García 2017).

Challenges related to the practice of language development

During the reflexive dialogues, two main challenges regarding language development were identified. One challenge was that the educators perceived their practice as positioned between the norms of monolingualism, in which their role is primarily to promote the Swedish language, and those of multilingualism, in which their role would instead be to promote linguistic diversity as an asset for them and the children. The challenges of being in this position were often discussed in the dialogues based, among other things, on the educators’ own backgrounds. Three of them are bilingual and their views of language were based on their own experiences of bilingualism and having been new to the majority language. This was mirrored in their view of pedagogical practice regarding children’s language development. On one occasion, for example, when reflecting on the work of the section, one of them, whose experience included working in other preschools, mentioned the difference between the section, where all the children share the same experience of being new to the majority language, and other sections where children who do not speak Swedish are in the minority:

They ask [us], why gather all the children who don’t know Swedish in one place? … They believe that the use [of Swedish] is the most important – but how? When children who don’t know Swedish come to a group with Swedish children they regress – [they think] I can’t say anything, I can’t play with them … they are afraid to express themselves. Too much responsibility is put on the children to learn from one another … but when all are the same, at the same level, they start to build foundations together under the same conditions. (Mouna)

Here the educator defends the principle of the section of only admitting children new to the majority language. This differs from the general approach in Sweden, which is based on the direct integration of children who are new to the country and to the majority language. One argument for direct integration is that the children who do not speak Swedish will learn it from their friends at the preschool. The approach of the quoted educator, and of the other educators at the section, was contrary to the norm that mixing languages would be problematic (Wei 2018) and that the majority language is learnt primarily by imitating native speakers (ideas closely connected to a monolingual norm).

However, they all agreed that they were expected to organise the language development practice based on monolingual assumptions. This could explain why, although multilingualism and multiculturalism were considered assets both at the preschool and in the municipality in general, support for intercultural education that would foster multilingualism was weak in the pedagogical practice. Although the educators strove to use a multilingual approach in their activities, their language practices were still based mainly on the assumed superior role of the majority language (Swedish), with the mother tongue seen merely as providing support for learning Swedish. In the dialogues, it became clear that this was due to preschool traditions in general. The idea of intensive teaching of Swedish is closely connected to a particular discourse in preschool institutions, as in the rest of society, of languages and how they function. This discourse tends to see the Swedish language as the norm and other languages as exceptions (Lunneblad 2013, 2017; Kultti, Pramling, and Samuelsson 2017; Cekaite 2018).

Another identified challenge was the discourse around the migrant children as ‘lacking the language’ and being seen from a deficit perspective regarding their language development. At the beginning of the research project, the structuring of the daily activities and the talk about the children in the section were generally more in line with the monolingual norm. This was underlined by the idea that people with access to more than one language must master one of them before starting to learn another. This norm was identified by the researchers and reflected on with the educators in relation to an idea evident in the section, that because the children do not understand Swedish, they should be provided with clearly structured days:

So, this section, because it is really structured here … and the basis for doing that is to provide security, so that they know exactly what will happen during the day – because they don’t know the language, you cannot explain to them. So we have pictures that help, so that they see what a day looks like. There can be a lot [of activities] – sometimes cleaning, tidying up … we will do a new activity – but it is also to indicate the start of something new. And with photos or pictures we help them to know how the day will be structured. (Vina)

Here the educator describes how pictures and signs are used to help the children know what will happen during the day, to compensate for the children’s difficulties following the spoken instructions and explanations in Swedish. Vina also notes the importance of having clear indications of the beginning and end of activities. This is aligned with a structural conception of language, in which learning to understand coincides with the establishment of the correct relationships between objects and words (Wittgenstein 1968). The structural conception was reflected in the organisation of the section’s activities. They were strongly framed and mostly directed and initiated by the educators, for example, with the children organised in small groups in different rooms, led by one educator in each room. The section also had a special needs teacher who came once a week for intensive Swedish training with a small group of children in a separate room. The training focused on word acquisition, suggesting that a structural perspective on language underlay how the activity was conducted.

The structuring of the days and the visit by a special needs teacher can be characterised as compensatory pedagogy (Sleeter 2007), a strategy to manage social and cultural diversity by providing extra resources or special treatment for groups or categories of children conceptualised as lacking something or having special needs. Newly arrived children are often spoken of as having deficits, usually linked to their ability to manage the majority language and culture (Tobin 2013; Nilsson and Bunar 2016; Åkerblom and Harju 2019). The deficit view can also be related to the practice of caring, which is deeply embedded in many ECE practices (Salamon et al. 2016) and commonly expressed regarding newly arrived children. In the preschool section, the practice of caring was strongly connected to making the children feel safe. This practice emanated from the original aim of the section, namely, to receive refugee children, around whom there is a discourse of trauma, i.e. the children are assumed to have traumatic experiences from having fled their home country. In the dialogues, this was often combined with a view of the children as having needs and lacking security:

Those children have a … many of them have really great needs. And they are traumatised and receive a really good introduction. We have a special needs teacher attached to the section, which is needed considering the children who are there … and that is unique, one might say, that there are specially trained staff who work a lot and intensively on language, who are used to dealing with children who don’t know Swedish at all. (Alexandra)

The idea of compensatory pedagogy is made explicit here. The sayings about the children were in this case based on assumptions that the children have great needs and the section has the right professional competence to address these needs. However, in the reflective dialogues between the researchers and educators, it became clear that the educators themselves found their work too strongly framed by compensatory pedagogy, and they reflected on the fact that the children’s agency was limited.

To conclude, analysing the language practice formed around the children through the lens of practice architecture (Kemmis et al. 2014; Kemmis and Edwards-Groves 2018) shows that the sayings about the children display a deficit perspective, affecting the doings based on strong structure and Swedish word training. The relationships between the children and educators were characterised by teacher-governed activities and allowed the children little agency. Following the challenges identified and expressed by the educators and researchers, plans to restructure and develop the daily activities in the preschool section were formulated and new activities related to language and literacy were introduced.

Opening up new spaces for languaging practice

To help the educators conceptualise and verbalise their implicit notions and their professional approach to languaging practice, the concept of ‘translanguaging’ was introduced into the reflective dialogues. Translanguaging can be framed as both a practical theory of language and an approach to multilingual learning (Wei 2018). This way of conceptualizing language was much more in line with what the educators experienced among the children and with how the children actually used various linguistic assets to express themselves, which is more in line with a polylingual language norm (Jørgensen 2008). Since the theory of translanguaging foregrounds language use (languaging) and the different ways users employ language to communicate, it has consequences for the practice of teaching languages. This pedagogic approach is aligned with the approach to ECE in the Reggio Emilia preschools in Italy (Rinaldi 1998). In Reggio Emilia preschools, the concept of ‘the hundred languages of children’ relates to the idea that children explore the world and express their understanding in multiple ways, which is facilitated by providing opportunities to represent their experiences in various ways (Alamillo, Yun, and Bennett 2017).

Plans were made, through the collaboration between researchers and educators, to restructure and develop the daily activities according to a translanguaging approach. Besides offering a different way to conceptualise language, the translanguaging approach has consequences for how the children and their language competences are viewed. To get closer to the children’s own perspective and provide latitude for them to express themselves, an activity inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach (Alamillo, Yun, and Bennett 2017) was carried out. In it, the children were given disposable cameras and asked to visually document their everyday life and experience in the section. The 16 children in the section were each offered a camera that allowed 12 pictures to be taken. They were told that they could photograph anything from the everyday practice of preschool and were shown how to use the camera. When the pictures were developed, the children were asked about the pictures and what they had wanted them to show. One researcher initiated the project and conducted the dialogues with the children, but later in the process the educators started to use the methodology in their daily work. The children’s pictures became tools with which the educators could discern aspects not otherwise evident, for example, the children’s communicative and literacy competences. When the first dialogues between children and researcher were analysed, it became evident that the children were very aware of what they were doing and why, challenging the understanding of the children as lacking something and needing compensatory pedagogy. This could be illustrated by a dialogue between the researcher and Amina, a child of five, who at the time had spent just a few months in Sweden.

One of Amina’s pictures showed part of the floor of a preschool room and was initially thought to be a mistake. When asked about the picture, she answered that it was ‘her place’ (the photo showed her permanent place during the circle time in the preschool). It was clear that this photo was important to her, as was the place where Amina positioned herself as a child who belonged. As the dialogue unfolded in the room, Amina showed where the spot was and told the researcher about the places of all the other children. She also read the names of the children from the name tags on the floor, showing that she had mastered the reading of Latin letters, which the educators had so far been unaware of.

When the pictures taken by Amina and the other children were discussed and reflected on with the educators, the photo activity became an important turning point that eventually led the educators to reframe how they spoke about the children. Besides this aspect of the activity, many of the children showed that they were very competent in communicating and depicting what was important to them. The educators’ conception of the children was challenged when they, and the researchers, realised that the children were more competent than they were thought to be. This challenged the discourse of the children as in need of something assumed to be lacking, as the children were revealed as competent agents and competent users of multiple languages.

Based on the insights that reframed the educators’ sayings about the children, and inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach, languaging activities focusing on both verbal and aesthetic expression were introduced by the educators. For example, the children were to make their own books based on their pictures and stories and to express themselves in aesthetic forms, such as music and dancing. Besides those activities, they were also invited to take part in multilingual language games, organised by one researcher to enhance metalinguistic awareness of the constituents of language and to contrast different ways of expressing the same content in different languages. All these activities would give the children latitude to express themselves and communicate in diverse ways. The work on metalinguistic awareness and children’s expression was also connected to literacy development (Heath 1983) using signs and letters, and based on the children’s own insights into their literacy competence.

When the sayings about the children and the doings, in the form of new arrangements, changed, this meant that the socio–political arrangements, i.e. how the social relationships were constructed, also changed. Whereas the relationships between the children and educators were formerly characterised by teacher-governed activities, the children’s agency now increased, as did their ability to take active part in the activities of the preschool section. When the children’s voices were heard, it became obvious that their linguistic competences as well as their abilities to be agents of their own activities differed from what was previously assumed. This created new understanding among both the researchers and educators, leading to a new aim of maximising learning and development in the multilingual setting, that is, to make it into a translanguaging practice. New meanings of the language practice became possible and the practice was now framed as ‘we support translanguaging’ instead of ‘we support the children’s language development’.

Discussion

This paper explored challenges regarding pedagogical language practice related to the education of migrant children in one research setting. One main question was how new perspectives on language practices can be developed, and we illustrated how this can be done by the inclusion of children’s perspectives. The results indicate that one challenge related to language practice is that educators working with children new to the majority language find themselves between competing norms. The educators examined here, for example, found themselves acting as mediators of the dominant language and culture, whereas in an increasingly globalised world, they are expected to promote values such as multiculturalism and tolerance, including multilingualism. Both these discourses are evident in the Swedish preschool curriculum and practice, as well as in other parts of the western world (Tobin 2013; Allemann-Ghioda 2015; Eisenchlas, Schalley, and Guillemin 2015; Mavroudi and Holt 2015; Kultti, Pramling, and Samuelsson 2017; Åkerblom and Harju 2019). It can be difficult for educators to know where to position themselves in relation to both these discourses. In the studied setting, at the beginning of the research process it was clear that, although a multilingual approach was highlighted, the language practice was based more on controlled pedagogy aiming to compensate for the children’s lack of Swedish language competence. However, during the course of the research, the educators developed an approach more in line with translanguaging, introduced by the researchers.

When viewed from the perspective of practice architecture (Kemmis et al. 2014; Kemmis and Edwards-Groves 2018), analysis of the arrangement of the transformed practice shows that the sayings about the children changed from a dominant deficit discourse into one treating children as competent possessors of multiple linguistic and other competencies, such as body language and aesthetic expression. In addition, framing the pedagogical content with sayings about the practice as ‘language development’ changed, the content instead being framed as ‘languaging’ and ‘translanguaging’ focusing more on languaging as a process of expression and meaning-making rather than as a tool for naming. This new conceptualisation of the function of language led to changes in the material–economic space that altered the activities and aims (i.e. doings) of the practice. The transformation of the practice arrangements was enabled by the action research process, but two activities in particular reinforced the possibility of transformation and enabled change: one, the children taking and talking about their photos revealed the children’s perspectives when they were afforded means to express them; two, the reflexive dialogues gave the educators a new way of understanding and theorising about the language function in a linguistically diverse group of children. The theoretical concept of translanguaging became a tool for perceiving what was going on in a new way. Those changes led to different doings as well as different relatings. One educator noted after the change that ‘now it is the children’s preschool’, meaning that the relatings had changed so that the children’s agency and opportunities to participate in the practice had increased.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Swedish Institute for Educational Research.