In this talk, I delve into the potential of adopting arts-based approaches(ABA) (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015) to explore the constitution and dynamics of plurilingual repertoires in foreign language teacher education programs. I claim that the use of ABA in language teacher education, particularly the writing of plurilingual poetry (Moore et al, 2022), can give us new insights into how student teachers reflect on their linguistic repertoires and how they construct specific didactic and pedagogical knowledge (Baumert & Kunter, 2013): the first type of knowledge relates to the methodologies of and knowledge about teaching and learning processes; and the second relates to learning motivation, evaluation processes or how to manage classroom activities. After reviewing the epistemological and didactic foundations of current research around the use of ABA as data generation tools, I present the potential of plurilingual poetry writing to explore plurilingualism as lived (Kalaja & Pitkänen-Huhta, 2020) and as constitutive of student teachers' didactic and pedagogical knowledge.
The data was collected in 2021/2022 in Germany, among future teachers of French (N = 15) and Spanish (N = 22), in two phases: a productive and a reflexive phase. In the productive phase, students produced a plurilingual poem, under the theme "living together". The instruction stated that they should write a poem using the languages from their linguistic repertoires. In the reflexive phase, students reflected on their plurilingual writing strategies and on the potential of the task for the foreign language classroom.
Results point towards three gains attached to reflexivity and the construction of pedagogical knowledge: i) the ability to reflect on their own plurilingualism and decenter from the "I"-dimension to the student sphere; ii) the ability to reflect on patterns of plurilingualism and seeing "plurilingual students" beyond a homogenized categorization; iii) the ability to envisage plurilingual pedagogies more attuned to meet plurilingual students' repertoires. To conclude I discuss how ABA support a more responsive foreign language teacher education, offering opportunities to professional development that challenges a monolingual mind-set and recognizes plurilingualism as an inescapable reality in foreign language (teacher) education (Melo-Pfeifer, 2021).
References
Barone, T. & Eisner, E. (2012). Arts based research. Sage.
Baumert, J. & Kunter, M. (2013). The COACTIV model of teachers' professional competence. In M. Kunter, J. Baumert, W. Blum, U. Klusmann, S. Krauss & M. Neubrand (eds.), Cognitive Activation in the Mathematics Classroom and Professional Competence of Teachers (25-48). Springer.
Kalaja, P. & Pitkänen-Huhta, A (2020). Raising awareness of multilingualism as lived – in the context of teaching English as a foreign language. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20:4, 340-355.
Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art. Arts-based research practice. New York: The Guilford Press.
Melo-Pfeifer, S. (2021). Exploiting foreign language student-teachers' visual language biographies to challenge the monolingual mind-set in foreign language education. International Journal of Multilingualism, 18:4, 601-618.
Moore, D.; Oyama, M.; Pearce, D. R. & Kitano, Y. (2022). Quand l'Éveil aux langues rejoint la poésie plurilingue. LeseForum, 2022 (1). URL https://www.leseforum.ch/.
