Negotiating and Navigating Plurilingual Classroom Citizenship

Abstract

This chapter adopts the lens of social cohesion to explore the practices and perspectives of primary school pupils in Brussels, Belgium, when they were allowed to use their home languages in the classroom for the first time. Drawing on ethnographic data, the authors document how the pupils and teachers negotiated and navigated new sociolinguistic norms, generating novel forms of inclusive practice that reached across difference. Nonetheless, the introduction of a multilingual approach also destabilised feelings of class cohesion as the perceived benefits were unevenly spread across the group. The data highlights the complex terrain of multilingual insults, which fuelled pupil scepticism about an open language policy in the playground. This suggests that plurilingual classroom cohesion is best supported by approaches which openly embrace the potentially disruptive elements of a multilingual community, thereby enabling meaningful social learning.