Re-voicing conceptualizations of plurilingual education: ‘El plurilingüismo, este concepto de … ¿cómo se puede decir?’

ABSTRACT

Plurilingual education is usually viewed by its proponents as emancipatory. But is it really, and if so, how? For what kind of learning experiences, what kind of production of knowledge, what sense of identity and of community? In this contribution, we discuss collaborative inquiry and arts-based engagement as public and plurilingual pedagogy. We focus on a partnership between elementary school teachers, families, museums and university researchers established to investigate how multi-situated practices and ways of knowing can be leveraged as resources to inform our understandings of plurilingualism and plurilingual education. At the same time, we explore the role those actors can play to support engagement and reflexive inquiry through sensory and visualizing experiences in collaborative participatory research as powerful ways to cultivate reciprocity and relationality. The contribution aims to trigger a discussion about the importance of revoicing our conceptualizations of plurilingual education to include the discourses, multisensory experiences and stories of diversely situated social actors. Truthful, trustworthy pluri-dialogic and multilateral relations between partners open up a pathway to frame and claim alternative and transdisciplinary epistemologies of diversity, which can disrupt and displace the hegemonic Eurocentric matrix of Language Education.

KEYWORDS:

• Plurilingualism
• participatory and collaborative research partnership
• Uruguay

Rethinking plurilingual education through the lens of relationality

This contribution examines the collaborative development and implementation of an inquiry-based plurilingual and transdisciplinary project to encourage critical awareness of plurality in the context of elementary education in Uruguay. In particular, we will focus on how the discursivities circulating in an educational network point to new perspectives on concepts that so far remained mostly constructed within the academia.

Plurilingual pedagogies have been developed in many different socio-political contexts to address issues related to equity, power relations and social justice, inside schools and outside them (Piccardo, Germain-Rutherford, and Lawrence 2022). Plurilingual pedagogies are even more relevant in contexts of high linguistic and cultural diversity, like in Latin America, where many historical languages co-exist (indigenous, colonial, creole and migration languages, English as an international language) and are used in different contexts, ecosystems, and spheres of power, subordination, and resistance (Despagne 2022).

In Europe, a wealth of research describes various aspects and outcomes of plurilingual education in different contexts, with a focus on its value for metalinguistic and/or intercultural awareness, for learning languages, and/or for enhanced disciplinary knowledge (see for example Lüdi 2022). Like elsewhere in the world, the research also insists on the importance of relying on families’ local knowledges as a bridge to learning (Moore 2021) and on ways to best practice ‘inclusive engagement’ (Karsli-Calamak, Ece Tuna, and Allexsaht-Snider 2020). In the Americas, plurilingual education also gains momentum in certain contexts, but with a more distinct effort to foster the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies (for example Lemaire 2021), as a ‘means of creating relationships’ with the land, peoples and stories (Littletree, Belarde-Lewis, and Duarte 2020, 414).

This means the relationship between groups and persons, which includes people’s different ways of knowing and sensing and being/becoming in/with our world and with each other are central to how we learn and are connected to the land we live in. Cultivating the senses and inquiry place-based experimental co-learning are valued as shared experiences of learning (Virtanen 2022), which involve the necessity for us as educators to delocalize knowledge, question our positionalities, and negotiate new relationships and places/forms of learning and of (co)researching.

Within this ecological perspective, fostering relationality involves framing our research within a web of new collaborations between variously (pluri)situated educational actors (such as families, artists, museum educators, and teachers) in order to cultivate new forms of engagement and community building.

Our study therefore focuses on the collaborative inquiry and arts-based practices of a group of people gathered around children to enhance their learning experience. The educational project which emerged from long months of dialogue and collaboration, is anchored within a plurilingual and pluricultural approach to language and content learning through arts-based inquiry. We trace such practices across the contexts of the children’s families, their classroom, the street, the museum exhibitions they visited, and through the stories of the people they met and talked to, and the art they produced. We argue that, while schooling experiences are mostly rooted in the values of western knowledge, the multi-situatedness of such a collaborative project creates community connections, relational encounters and learning (Lin and Grauer 2017), embodied practices (Budach 2018), and opens up to everyday and alternative knowledges that exist outside mainstream academia to help us think transversally (Lin, Sinner, and Irwin forthcoming).

The project

In 2019, an educational partnership was mobilized and coordinated by the first author, as part of her doctoral project on language teaching and plurilingualism. The subject stems from her professional and life trajectory, as a plurilingual lecturer of Portuguese as a foreign language in Uruguay at the University of the Republic over more than 16 years, and her own interest in art and her experience with museum educators and professional photographers. This experience has forged her personal identity, weaving in-between plural stories, cultural backgrounds, languages, and spaces. The partnership was set up to bring together teachers, museum educators, families, and researchers around a common aim: to co-design and implement a plurilingual project (PP) investing art, Indigenous knowledge and stories of migration through a multimodal and multisensory inquiry of their geographical space (the children’s neighborhood, the Ciudad Vieja) for children aged 6–12 attending a primary school in Ciudad Vieja, Montevideo (Uruguay). The PP proposes inquiry-based learning experiences such as taking pictures of their local linguistic landscapes, recording family stories of speaking heritage or foreign languages, and visiting museal exhibitions to understand and experience local and ancestral stories and art.

The school was thus the center of a web of interconnecting collaborations engaging local communities and four local institutions situated within walking distance from it: the Museum of Pre-Columbian and Indigenous Art (MAPI), the Migration Museum (MUMI), and the Cabildo Historical Museum (Cabildo), as well as the Montevideo Photography Center (CdF). Each of the participants (researchers, parents, teachers, museum educators and photographer) displayed multiple identities and professional profiles, with plural cultural background (Uruguayans, Chileans, Portuguese, Cubans) and with complex and diverse mobility trajectories and life experiences. More explicitly, the project included photographers who are also museologists and cultural managers, anthropologists who are also museum educators, museum educators who are also artists or teachers, teachers who are also researchers and cultural managers, and parents who are doctors, therapists, veterinarians, waiters, store clerks. Many had lived abroad for extended periods of time, others were immigrants, yet others still remembered their heritage cultures. All partners shared complex and mobile language biographies, with ties with a range of languages learnt as home and/or school languages (Catalan, Portuguese, English, Italian, French). Many also spoke Spanish Latin-American varieties, or other heritage languages (Galician, Mapudungun), as well as languages learnt as foreign languages (mostly English, but also Russian, etc.). Plurilingualism and intercomprehension were therefore important aspects of participation, as well as was the variety of social and professional experiences of partners.

The design and implementation of the PP highlighted the potentialities of multi-situated collaborations in the development of ‘community as participatory and relational practice’ (Kester 2011), i.e. collaborations that are socially engaged in participatory culture (Bergold and Thomas 2012). The creation of the PP within a frame of collaborative arts-based inquiry involving multiple actors across different sites was thus vital in guiding shared practices and critical examination of established ways of knowing, doing and seeing. For the three authors, the project also enabled an important reflection on ways of being plurilingual researchers-educators and collaborate across languages and learning sites to discuss our values and beliefs about plurilingual education.

Plurilingual education as interconnectedness and the weaving of voices

For us plurilingual education is foremost a holistic form of (public) education that values the importance of inter-relations and interconnectedness (between people, languages, cultural knowledges, places, land, art, etc.) that are not disconnected from power relations but in turn have the potential to challenge the status quo and shift how we weave differently situated voices to frame our theories and praxis of plurilingualism and plurilingual (civic) education.

We will position our epistemological theories on knowledge production in relation to how we envision participatory research: not as mere methodologies but as public (plurilingual) pedagogies weaving voices as ways to bridge theory and practice. As defined in Li and Moore (2020, 378), public pedagogy examines ‘various forms, processes, and sites of education and learning occurring beyond or outside of formal schooling’, aiming to ‘recognize the pedagogical value of public learning spaces, such as media, popular culture, arts, architectural spaces, museum exhibitions, in articulating and (re)constructing knowledge, discourses, images, and values’. In this article, we argue that participative (plurilingual) inquiry, by bringing together teachers, families, university-based researchers, and museum mediators, produces critical intercultural dialogues and awareness forged through the experience of arts-based visual/sensory approaches of learners’ local landscapes and their stories/histories.

Epistemological approaches to plural knowledge production: a multi-layered discussion linking theory and experience/practice

A network as a community of peripheral thought and participation (Lave and Wenger 1991), leads us to reflect on the possibilities presented by this type of collaboration for the development of new perspectives on plurilingual education.

As we stated before, plurilingualism is aligned with certain forms and pathways of scientific knowledge in the Human and Social Sciences that allows plural systems of knowledge (Suraweera 2022) anchored in a discourse based on philosophies that call for epistemological diversity (Guilherme 2019; Santos 2018). These philosophies can creatively contribute to enrich ways and paths to develop less universal, less centralizing, less hegemonic and less linear research, with reflexivity as the source to ‘pluriversal, multisided understandings’ (Bagga-Gupta and Carneiro 2021, 321). This stance aims to make visible and problematize why knowledge is produced in a certain way, and who, when, where, for whom and with whom it is produced which embeds communication in space and time. Consequently, it also calls for researchers and academics to mediate and cross different intercultural, interepistemic and pluri-dialogical spaces (Bagga-Gupta and Carneiro 2021; Guilherme 2019), thereby creating in-between (safe) spaces of reflexivity. This issue is particularly relevant for plurilingual education. Seeking to forge such safe spaces of reflexivity, it is important to reclaim the diversity inherent in the actor’s perspective – with and within the actor’s own historic, social, geographic and institutional stances – reclaiming plural interpretations, investments and positionalities (Goï, Huver, and Razafimandimbimanana 2014).

In other words, different epistemological circles will produce different perspectives on the same concept or idea, expanding or restricting its semantic reach (Liddicoat 2018; Liddicoat and Zarate 2009). However, the international circulation of ideas and concepts constitutes a set of constraints (or affordances) as to the translatability of those perspectives across time and space (Liddicoat and Zarate 2009). Whereas the question of translatability has often been understood as embarrassment or difficulty, from an inter-pluricultural perspective the dialogical interactions triggered by encounters between epistemological schools, geographical contexts, disciplinary lenses, linguistic and semiotic practices and discourses open new affordances to enrich and complexify our experience and our understandings of concepts and ideas (Liddicoat 2018).

Participatory and alternative ways of ‘doing’ research in education

Researching from a decolonial epistemological perspective engages us in reflecting on methodological and ethical questions regarding processes of knowledge production in education. Building a PP with an educational partnership led us to reflect upon the concept of participatory research (Anadón 2007; Bergold and Thomas 2012).¹ The plurisituational and multiperspectival construction of pedagogical thinking progressively led us to exploring alternative and participatory ways of looking at research rooted in participants’ perspectives and experiences. We approach here the concept of funds of knowledge (González, Moll, and Amanti 2005). For us, ‘People are competent, they have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge’ (González, Moll, and Amanti 2005, ix–x). We state that those funds of knowledge unfold research practices, theories and conceptual thinking.

It is relevant to mention that the researcher’s own positions towards research, their postures and attitudes, acquire a specific relevance and centrality in participatory processes. This is because participatory research implies a destabilization and de-centered positionalities on the part of the researcher (Laaroussi 2007). The researcher must be capable of facing the uncertainty derived from the social reality of which they are a part, and be willing to rethink the relational dynamics between themself and the other social actors participating in the research (Freire 1981), whether these are adults or children, as co-producers of knowledge (Anadón 2007). Therefore, participatory research is a process that focuses on listening as a predisposition for meaning-making.

A participatory research approach necessarily induces an active and co-constructed relationship of knowledge towards reality (Freire 1981), in which practical and experiential knowledge, as well as linguistic-semiotic and cultural codes, are valued and in which the object of study is constructed as multireferential and multiperspectival (Anadón 2007). Contemplating objects of the world from various, multifaceted and more connected points of view, and therefore assuming intersubjectivity, also requires the valorization of implicit dimensions related to nonverbal communication and behavior. There are numerous issues that arise in the investigative processes – such as actions, gestures, corporality – and it is vital and necessary to take them into account. Participatory research is, therefore, a performative social action in relation with someone other.

A relational approach to research implies to question our ethics and positionality and to engage our social responsibility as educational researchers (Freire 1981). Following Freirean thought, if participatory research aims to reduce the hegemony of elite academic knowledge and epistemologies, then our responsibility as researchers is to strengthen the empowerment and social action of all participants as co-research actors. These research actors are also taking over this collective dimension of social responsibility and ethical issues of research through shared attitudes of openness, mutual respect, interest for the other, the search for meanings and, even, humor (Laaroussi 2007).

Methodology for data co-analysis

In this contribution, we focus on data sources obtained from the dialogues that shaped the partnership around a collaborative inquiry into the development of a multi-site PP. They include audio-recordings of network reflective meetings and communications with the partners when discussing the design of the pedagogical scenarios, the material developed, and the onsite implementation (in the streets, the school, the museums). The data also includes the field notes and reflexive journaling of the principal on-site researcher. We highlight for the purpose of this discussion the complex and original weaving creative dimensions around plurilingualism and plurilingual approaches in education that emerged from the partners’ collaborative dialogues. Five interconnected topics emerged from this analysis: (i) linguistic aspects of plurilingualism and plurilingual and pluricultural repertoires; (ii) community aspects, attached to social groups and their mobile trajectories; (iii) experiential aspects, related to partners’ trajectories and life experiences; (iv) spatial aspects, related to the spaces that we inhabit and how they are perceived to contribute to shape understandings of plurilingualism and plurilingual education; and (v) pedagogical aspects, related to the collaborative design and implementation of plurilingual scenarios for the project. As we will discuss later, these five key interconnected components shaped the shifting conceptualizations and experiences of the partners around plurilingualism, as a lens to understand and navigate their world and contributed to build a sense of community around a common goal: the development of plurilingual approaches to enhance children’s learning experience and civic engagement across contexts.

El plurilingüismo, este concepto de … ¿cómo se puede decir? Weaving local voices on rethinking plurilingualism

How do teachers, families, museum-based mediators, and university-based researchers understand the value of plurilingualism for (civic) education and infuse plurilingual pedagogies in their praxis? In this section, we try to unveil the ways in which the research actors re-appropriate the concept of plurilingualism. As mentioned earlier, the research actors are multiple and heterogeneous and only the academics are (plurilingual) language educators and specialists of plurilingualism and plurilingual pedagogies.

To introduce ourselves and our own stories, we first talked about how we understood plurilingualism and plurilingual education from our own experiences as European and Canadian-based educators. People attending (prospective participants) then shared their own understanding and stories of plurality, immigration, Indigeneity, mobility, and being parents, artists and/or educators in Montevideo in Uruguay. As described below, these initial discussions were first strongly anchored within the epistemological and plurilingual academic stories and trajectories of the three university researchers, who work together navigating four languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English. Raquel, Maria Helena and Danièle explained why they believed plurilingual approaches could provide holistic ways to connect disciplinary and language learning, families and schools, and plurilingual education’s potential to stimulate (civic) interest in other languages and other ways of thinking and being, and overall improve children’s learning and sense of belonging. A slide (Figure 1) was shared to present the cognitive and social benefits of such approaches through the lens of plurilingual and pluricultural competence, its dimensions, features, and modalities (Andrade et al. 2003; Coste, Moore, and Zarate 2009).

Figure 1. Slide presenting the project during initial meetings. Source: Author 1.

Diagram showing the four components of plurilingual competence: management of learning repertoires, management of communicative linguistic-cultural repertoires, management of interaction and management of the socio-affective dimension.

Recorded discussions revealed how these initial descriptions were too academic and initially appeared too deeply rooted in European conceptualizations of (language) competence (and participants’ representations of academia as a site of unchallenged and unattainable knowledge), and failed to resonate with the present participants in Uruguay, as some of the following excerpts illustrate:

(1) A primeira reação [da diretora da escola] foi ‘No entiendo nada de lo que es el plurilingüismo. He escuchado por ahí, pero no sé lo que significa verdaderamente’. (DI/27/02/2019)

The first reaction [of the school principal] was ‘I don't understand anything about what plurilingualism is. I've heard out there, but I don't know what it really means’. (Our translation)

(2) N. [diretora da escola] cumprimentou-me com um abraço e disse-me ‘Te están tomando el pelo. Me preguntan si sos plurilingüísta’. (DI/21/03/2019)

N. [school principal] greeted me with a hug and told me ‘They're kidding you. They ask me if you're *plurilinguistic’. (Our translation)

(3) Comecei, então, a exposição, perguntando se as professoras sabiam o que era isto do plurilinguismo e se já tinham ouvido falar. Responderam-me que não, a ambas as perguntas e a N. reafirmou: ‘Nos tenés que enseñar’. (DI/21/03/2019)

I then started the exhibition, asking if the teachers knew what plurilingualism is and if they had ever heard of it. I was told that no, to both questions and N. reaffirmed: ‘You need to teach us’. (Our translation)

The partners, not having had previous contact with the concept, associated the image of being ‘plurilingual’ with the researchers who were talking, that is as an expert in plurilingualism who will transmit her academic wisdom (excerpt 2), a wisdom dutifully accepted by the core partners in the project (excerpt 3).

Despite initial reluctance, participants quickly felt familiarity with plurilingual practices and strongly adhered to the contextual value of plurilingual pedagogies (excerpt 4).

(4) (…) al tener mis alumnos que hablan otro idioma / también tuve niños que hablaban en francés / en otros momentos / en portugués / entonces el plurilingüismo siempre lo tengo muy presente. (D/RR/06/09/2019)

(…) having students who speak another language / I also had children who spoke in French / at other times / in Portuguese / then plurilingualism is always very present to me. (Our translation)

Relationships based on the value of partners experiences forged during those first meetings were essential to further develop a space of mutual listening and reciprocity in knowledge production practices on plurilingualism. Hence, discussions show plurilingualism is positively associated with the presence and mobilization of several languages. Several partners advance on the possibility that different varieties of Spanish, whether in Latin America (excerpt 5), or within the Uruguayan territory itself (excerpt 6), could be relevant, valuable, and included into a plurilingual pedagogical scenario to valorize diversity and encourage cultural awareness:

(5) Claro, ahí está. Aparte si el plurilingüismo involucra también las variedades lingüísticas se nota que esos niños no eran uruguayos, porque acá se dice ‘selva’ y ‘jungla’ dicen más los del Caribe. (DI/07/03/2019)

Sure, there it is. Besides, if plurilingualism also involves linguistic varieties, it is clear that these children were not Uruguayan, because here we say ‘selva’ and ‘jungla’, those from the Caribbean say more. (Our translation)

(6) L. contou uma pequena anedota sobre as pessoas de Rocha, e o uso do tu. (DI/07/06/2019)

L. told a little anecdote about the people of Rocha, and the use of tú (you). (Our translation)

However, these initial clarifying dialogues gradually trigger a shift for all members present, including the on-site researcher involved in these discussions. Memories and experiences are stirred, and participants begin to share glimpses into their (plurilingual) everyday lives, capturing how disempowering trends around plurilingual practice in the wider society trickle down into their own beliefs and recreate invalidation in their own discourses. This collective process of sharing and creating connections and relationality, that gradually unfolded over time, was key for all of us participants in deconstructing ideologies, and opening up to possible change in positionalities, the readiness to welcome other visions and willingness to reshape common understandings around theory and praxis.

Later in the process of implementation of the PP, during the first field experiences with the children, those activities resonated with the partners who could connect them with their own complex plurilingual experiences and stories of mobility, which in turn strengthened their engagement in the collaborative project (excerpt 7).

(7) yo tengo incorporado el gallego por los años que he vivido en Galicia / mis hijos hablan falan galego / claro / para mí es muy natural / o sea yo lo siento muy natural el tema del plurilingüismo y para mí no es ninguna traba / ni trabajar ni convivir con eso. (D/RR/06/09/2019)

I have incorporated Galician for the years I have lived in Galicia / my children speak falan galego / of course / for me it is very natural / that is, I feel very natural the issue of plurilingualism and for me it is not any obstacle / neither work nor live with it. (our translation)

Walking the streets to take pictures and record the sounds and stories of people inhabiting the neighborhood, visiting exhibitions, and co-making art (through bodily experiences, pictures or paintings, as described below) also opened the door to a bodily/sensory experimentation of plurilingualism and interculturality. This was mentioned by one mother in the network’s first meeting, shown in excerpt 8, taken from the research’s journal, referring to tastes and flavors.

(8) M. aproveitou para dizer que, da sua experiência, os nomes dos vegetais têm significados diferentes dependendo do país da América Latina onde nos encontremos ou comem-se de forma diferente, como a mandioca e o abacate. (DI/14/06/2019)

M. took the opportunity to say that, from her experience, the names of vegetables have different meanings depending on the country of Latin America where we meet or eat differently, such as mandioca and avocado. (Our translation)

Our findings emphasize the need to envision the (re)appropration of concepts (such as plurilingualism or plurilingual competence) not just as intellectual endeavors but as embedded and embodied explorations and experiences that connect people with one another and with their social worlds, through their different expressions and materialities.

The (pluri)sensoriality is also linked to a more spatial categorization of plurilingualism linked to urban experiences and sensory stimulation. As Borer (2013) states, lived experiences within places and spaces highlight the significance of actions and interactions between individuals and their relationships to and with urban places. Interactions thus show the relevance of experiential and sensory levels in meaning-making processes as stated by Borer (2013, 966): ‘Cities are dense sensory environments full of distinctive smells, sounds, and tastes, as well as visual and tactile stimuli, each needing interpretation and subsequently endowed with a range of symbolic meanings’.

The following excerpts further illustrate how plurilingualism is gradually perceived by several partners, urban social actors, as connecting all their bodily senses through their experience of the sensescapes (Borer 2013) of Ciudad Vieja, historical neighbourhood of Montevideo as well as touristic, political and economic hub of the city.

(9) R. menciona que associa diferentes nacionalidades – cubana, venezuelana, coreana, peruana – a diferentes espaços da Ciudad Vieja pelas vozes e os sotaques que vai escutando. Os coreanos na zona portuária, os venezuelanos na Plaza Zavala e mais perto da zona do terminal de autocarros, associando, por exemplo, as bicicletas Uber aos imigrantes venezuelanos. (DI/07/06/2019)

R. mentions that she associates different nationalities – Cuban, Venezuelan, Korean, Peruvian – with different spaces of Ciudad Vieja by the voices and accents that she hears. Koreans in the port area, Venezuelans in Plaza Zavala and closer to the bus terminal area, associating, for example, Uber bikes with Venezuelan immigrants. (Our translation)

(10) L. mencionou também que o facto de o Uruguai receber pessoas de diferentes nacionalidades, as mercearias do bairro começaram a variar as frutas e os legumes, ‘¿Cuándo es que ibas a una verdulería y tenías mandioca? Es muy bueno haber diferentes nacionalidades en el mismo barrio, porque hasta tu alimentación es más variada’. (DI/14/06/2019)

L. also mentioned that the fact Uruguay receives people of different nationalities, the grocery stores in the neighborhood began to vary the fruits and vegetables available: ‘When did you go to a greengrocer and have mandioca? It is very good to have different nationalities in the same neighborhood, because even your diet is more varied’. (Our translation)

As illustrated above, R., the director of one of the museums of the network, associated different languages, accents and cultures to the soundscapes of certain places in the neighborhood (excerpt 9). R. even mentions certain objects and their evocative role, such as the fruit and vegetables existing in the neighborhood's grocery stores (excerpt 10), and the evocative role of other material objects mentioned by L., which, although not representative of a particular culture, perform their own trajectories and experiences of mobility, such as Uber backpacks and Uber bikes associated with the people in charge of delivery services, in their majority Venezuelans (excerpt 9).

In this sense, figurations of plurilingualism stem from a bodily and sensory experimentation of the city, in our examples around the different local migrant cultures that inhabit the neighborhood. Reflecting further on what plurilingualism is and feels like, one immigrant mother of Chilean and Indigenous ancestries resorted to interesting metaphorical mechanisms to question the notions of identity and place:

(11) me interesó inmediatamente la idea … el plurilingüismo / este concepto de / ¿cómo se puede decir? / de recibir y acunar las distintas nacionalidades y culturas que/ están llegando al país / y que al final / todos somos inmigrantes en todas las partes. (C/RR/06/09/2019)

I was immediately interested in the idea … plurilingualism / this concept of / how can you say? / to receive and cradle the different nationalities and cultures that / are arriving in the country / and that in the end / we are all immigrants everywhere. (Our translation)

Plurilingualism emerges, in this excerpt, as a supporting concept (‘acunador’), which welcomes and embraces, as a mother, the cultures that are coming to and nurturing the country. The pluricentric and fluid appropriation, in relation to mobility and migration, valorizes the concept becoming directly relevant for the partners and for the PP itself.

The pedagogical dimension of plurilingualism is most evident throughout our narrative. Thinking about and collaboratively co-designing plurilingual pedagogical scenarios highlights how the concept itself becomes co-constructed and reappropriated by the various members of the partnership, to become a collective focus and a locus of a new emerging and connective identity, as shown in the three following excerpts.

(12) C. mencionou que o MAPI tem imensos talleres em que a temática do plurilinguismo está muito presente: o taller com os instrumentos musicais, o do barro. (DI/07/06/2019)

C. mentioned that MAPI has many workshops in which the theme of plurilingualism is very present: workshop with musical instruments, the other one with clay. (Our translation)

(13) Uma das professoras […] disse que também tinha feito uma atividade com os jogos […] em que eram as próprias crianças as peças dos jogos e que aí tinham de trabalhar com a relação com o corpo do Outro. (DI/21/03/2019)

One of the teachers […] said that she had also done an activity with the games […] in which the children themselves were the pieces of the games and they had to work with the relationship with the body of the Other. (Our translation)

(14) A. disse que, após a nossa reunião em parceria, tinha tido uma ideia em relação aos relatos: pais e filhos relatam as suas experiências migratórias, mas em momentos de gravação diferentes e depois através da técnica de contraplano (técnica cinematográfica) esses relatos são confrontados. ‘Ahí nos damos cuenta de cómo esas experiencias son vividas de formas distintas por la misma familia’. (DI/27/03/2019)

After our partnership meeting, A. had an idea in relation to the personal narratives: parents and children report their migratory experiences, but at different recording times and then through the technique of contraplano (cinematic technique) these narratives are confronted. ‘There we realize how these experiences are lived in different ways by the same family’. (Our translation)

These three excerpts illustrate how different partners share their stories and experiences and propose activities to create new pedagogical spaces for plurilingual education. Experiential learning, integration of place, experience and criticality in educational practice are highlighted in the context of the collaboration with museums. In excerpt 12, C., the MAPI educational mediator, talks about two art-based workshops that integrate indigenous knowledges, teachings, and practices of the Americas: one focused on musical instruments, and the other on bodily engagement with clay objects. In both workshops, children are invited to experience and bond with Indigenous ways of knowing and being, using their senses and body.

These plurisensorial and embodied experiences of plurilingual voices are again evidenced in the other two examples. In excerpt 13, a teacher shares a pedagogical experience: a human game in which each child, like a piece of a puzzle, needs to engage with their own body and connect with the body of others to reconstruct an interconnecting whole. In excerpt 14, A., a freelance photographer, explains how her previous experience with migrant populations inspired her to propose an activity with photography, video production, and digital recording of storytelling.

In all the excerpts shown, children are engaged in arts-based critical inquiry, where learning is achieved through doing and feeling, and experiences are grounded in local and community-based collective and social histories and emotions. Community connectedness and active participation are key to develop an understanding of the interrelations between the ecologies of their communities, reclamation of languages and variously situated knowledges, empowerment, agency and (political and cultural) awareness. The project triggered new interpretations of plurality (of voices and languages) for the participants (including the researchers). Performing research as a collaborative endeavor that values participants’ perspectives, ways of knowing and being, and collaborative knowledge production infused for all a deeper understanding that ‘plurilingualism is not about languag(ing) alone’ (Lüdi 2022, 34).

Final thoughts

Our findings, or rather our learnings through this research, helped frame new questions, draw new forms of relations and relationships, and question our actions, postures and ideologies as researchers who believe in plurilingualism and plurilingual education as an empowering and emancipatory process for all. For example, what do we call and consider data in the production of knowledge, how do we delocalize voice and authorship, how do we story research to connect place and people together, reflexivity and lived experience, and how do we foster ‘relational accountability’ (Davidson 2019).

Reflecting on plurilingual pedagogical scenarios with a heterogenous and intercultural partnership involves interpreting and creating meanings collaboratively and between languages, cultures and cosmovisions. This process is not linear, and it is itself an experience of learning grounded upon a third space. It requires a conception of participatory research as an experience of learning ‘that must be critically reflexive of the power relations between different groups, and that must be able to imagine the possibilities of learning between different contexts’ (McFarlane 2006, 1420).

Our analysis highlights other ways of conceptualizing plurilingualism, based on alternative, peripheral and interactive processes of knowledge creation, anchored in embodied knowledge, personal and collective experiences, multiple identities and life trajectories. In such a process, knowledge is a creative and a pluri-dialogic action. This participatory research generates new understandings of plurilingualism, showing that it is not a bounded concept. Conceptualizations of plurilingualism are constructed in liquid, multidimensional and multireferential ways in which the topics identified in the analysis are not closed in on themselves, but dialogue with each other.

The importance of re-conceptualizations and reappropriation of the grounded concept through innovative ways of researching methodologies, anchored in multisensory arts-based plurilingual experiences, embodied practice, and shared personal stories, emerged as a catalyst of change in our analysis. Intercomprehensives postures and shared spaces on the one hand, and the vital connections and relationships between humans, and between humans and everything in their environments (Wilson 2008), on the other, emerged as key concepts in this collaborative research. They invite to expand our understandings, and think transversally (Lin, Sinner, and Irwin forthcoming) or rather relationally (Wilson 2008).

These aspects give translatability to the concept of plurilingualism, in terms of relationality, mobilities, and resonances – between languages, between people, between objects, bodies, and stories, between the oral, the visual, the senses, feelings, being and doing, together. Plurilingualism also challenges how we design and report on research, distributing voice, and how we maintain accountability in research relationships (Davidson 2019). As Wilson (2008) states, this shifting paradigm encourages us to view educators and learners as researchers and ‘knowledge seekers’, together.

As one of the partners, the school principal, pointed out during a meeting with one researcher:

estamos en un proyecto de plurilingüismo y tratamos de rescatar que la comunicación va más allá del lenguaje escrito u oral, hay comunicaciones que tienen que ver con el abrazo, con la mirada que tiene que ver con el sentir, con el dejarse sentir y dejar que lo perciban. (García González 2020, 45)

We are in a plurilingual project, and we are attempting to recapture that communication goes beyond written or oral language, there are communications that have to do with the embrace, with the gaze that has to do with the feeling, with letting oneself feel and allowing others to perceive it. (Our translation)

Transcriptions conventions

/ – pause

// – long pause

… – silence

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank all the actors in this research (partners, families and children). The authors wish also thank Dr. Filipe Mourão for language review and his helpful comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raquel Carinhas

Raquel Carinhas is a lecturer of Camões – Institute for Cooperation and Language at the University of Republic in Uruguay. She is Doctor in Education by the University of Aveiro where she is also a researcher at Research Centre on Didactics and Technology in the Education of Trainers (CIDTFF). Her main interests are plurilingualism, hope-based collaborations between school, families, communities, museums and cultural institutions, participatory and ethnographic research, creative and visual research methods, Portuguese Foreign/Second Language learning and teaching, Portuguese as border language.

Maria Helena Araújo e Sá

Maria Helena Araújo e Sá is a Full Professor at the Department of Education and Psychology of the University of Aveiro, Portugal. She is the Scientific Coordinator of the Research Centre on Didactics and Technology in the Education of Trainers (CIDTFF) and she is the Director of the Doctoral Programme on Education. Her main research domains are intercomprehension, plurilingual and intercultural communication across contexts, with a focus on teacher education and researcher development.

Danièle Moore

Danièle Moore is a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada and a Research Director at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, France (EA2288-DILTEC). Her research interests in educational sociolinguistics cover the study of plurilingualism in societies, endangered languages and language reclamation, diasporas, language policy, and plurilingual education and curriculum development, with a focus on teacher training. She favors inquiry methods blending visual, narrative, performative, poetic (auto)ethnography, language biographies, and participatory action research that engage collaborations between teachers, learners, families, communities, and museal institutions, locally and across contexts.

Notes

1 Inspired by plural epistemological/methodological perspectives of multiple geographic contexts and their resonances, we will use the expression participatory research simultaneously with others, like recherches participatives or collaboratives (Anadón 2007), participative action-research (Anisur Rahaman and Fals-Borda 1991), in ways strongly inspired by indigenous researchers, such as Wilson (2008).