Even though linguistic diversity in schools around the globe is increasing, teacher education still struggles to support teachers to meet the challenges of working with multilingual children. Pre-service teachers are seldom required to reflect on and engage with their own multilingualism, which can form the basis of a subjective and experiential approach to educating teachers multilingually. Therefore, it is important to explore and employ appropriate tools to initiate a transformative, subjective identity journey.
Although researchers have employed a variety of traditional tools, such as interviews, narratives, and discourse analysis, there has been a strong 'lingualism' (Block 2014) bias in investigating the multilingual phenomenon. The more recent focus on visual and multimodal/artefactual methods affords research into teacher education and multilingualism interesting new avenues. Whitelaw (2019) foregrounds the role of the arts in developing an awareness and understanding through sensory experiences that allow for thinking, seeing, feeling, and perceiving differently. Arts-based practices open up a safe, creative space for engaging with linguistic repertoires and exploring teachers' identity connections with their linguistic histories and biographies (Barkhuizen and Strauss 2020). They bring to the classroom different ways of being, which disrupt the verbocentric status quo (Kendrick and McKay 2009) and provide a transformative lens through which to re-envision language teacher education. Arts-based approaches personalise the learning process and provide more opportunities for inclusive practices, that encourage freedom, agency and spontaneity in appropriating the tools for self-expression related to experience, action, and emotion.
This paper heeds the call for arts-based approaches to research and pedagogy by embedding artefactual, multimodal practices in researching teacher education. In this case, pre-service teachers in an English course in Norway are engaged in creating concrete and visual artefacts of their language repertoires in the form of language maps and DLC artefacts (Ibrahim, 2022), constituting a powerful tool for delving into participants' feelings, attitudes and perceptions about the self.
A plurisemiotic analysis of the language maps and DLC artefacts highlights the following areas: they constitute identity journeys that attest to the unique biographical trajectories of individuals; they unpack the multilayering and simultaneity of teachers' everyday language practices and experiences; they visibilise teachers' full language repertoire and explore language connections, emotions, and identities; they impact positively on teachers' perceptions of classroom multilingual practices.
Barkhuizen, G. and Strauss, P. 2020. Communicating Identities. Abingdon: Routledge.
Block, D. 2014. Moving beyond 'lingualism': Multilingual embodiment and multimodality in SLA. In May, S. The Multilingual Turn. Oxford: Routledge, pp. 54–77.
Ibrahim, N.C. 2022. Visual and Artefactual Approaches in Engaging Teachers with Multilingualism: Creating DLCs in Pre-Service Teacher Education. Languages, 7, 152.
Kendrick, M. & McKay. R. 2009. Researching literacy with young children's drawings. In M. J. Narey (Ed). Making Meaning: Constructing Multimodal Perspectives of Language, Literacy, and Learning through Arts-Based Early Childhood Education. New York: Springer, pp. 53–70.
Whitelaw, J. 2019. Arts-Based Teaching and Learning in the Literacy Classroom: Cultivating a Critical Aesthetic Practice. Abingdon: Routledge.
