Connecting children’s worlds: Creating a multilingual syncretic curriculum through partnership between complementary and mainstream schools

Abstract

2 Connecting children's worlds: creating a multilingual syncretic curriculum in partnership with complementary schools Abstract Children from minority language backgrounds have multiple sites of learning: home, community, mainstream school, and in some cases complementary school where they study their mother tongue after school or at weekends. However, due to the institutional constraints of an education system based on monolingual principles, mainstream teachers are often unaware of the contribution that complementary classes make to children's learning, or unsure of how to draw on their pupils' linguistic knowledge in the curriculum. Children's multilingual identities and their other worlds of learning therefore remain invisible in mainstream school. This paper describes an action research study with teachers from complementary and mainstream schools in East London, in which they jointly planned lessons around topics that were then taught in both settings. The complementary teachers brought a holistic perspective based in the linguistic and cultural knowledge of their communities, which enabled these resources to be brought into mainstream learning, thus creating a syncretic curriculum that led to an increase in agency of children and their families as well as teachers themselves. We argue that collaboration between complementary and mainstream teacher colleagues can play a crucial role in constructing a space for multilingual learning in a monolingualising society.

At the boundary of school: Continuity and discontinuity in learning across contexts

“…The descriptions of these initiatives suggest that this periphery of schooling affords more freedom for teachers to adapt to particular students. This reasoning is supported by Kenner and Ruby (2013) who, among others, stress that these initiatives "operate in marginalized spaces that, precisely because of their exclusion from mainstream discourse, give teachers greater flexibility to create a curriculum responsive to their students' needs" (p. 3).…”

Designing for diverse classrooms: Using iPads and digital cameras to compose eBooks with emergent bilingual/biliterate four-year-olds

“…The majority of emergent, bilingual students in the U.S. attend low-income schools and may have fewer opportunities to use new technologies at school (García and Kleifgen, 2010; Martínez-Álvarez et al., 2013). At the same time, many children from linguistic minority backgrounds have considerable experience with digital tools that their families use for entertainment, transnational networking and viewing multilingual content (Kenner and Ruby, 2013). This suggests that children’s familiarity with the technologies used in their homes and communities can become resources for school learning and points of connection between home and school.…”

The Effect of the Family Type and Home Literacy Environment on the Development of Literacy Skills by Bi-/Multilingual Children in Cyprus

“…The New London Group (1996) proposed a "pedagogy of multiliteracies" with four principles: situated learning, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice, which were later revised to experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing and applying Kalantzis 2009, 2015;Kirsch 2021). A multiliteracy teaching approach has become popular; it draws on children's and parents' funds of knowledge and expertise (Kenner and Mahera 2012;Martínez-Alvarez and Ghiso 2014). Children and parents can read dual/bi-/multilingual books, with multimodal texts, pictures and illustrations, tell stories in the majority and home languages, and create their linguistic and cultural identities (Cummins 2004(Cummins , 2009Naqvi et al 2012;Taylor et al 2008).…”