In Catalonia (Spain) –as well as in other urban and rural areas around the world–, intensive migration, mobilization and globalization phenomena have transformed schools and high schools into multilingual and multicultural spaces, where students with very diverse socioeconomic situations, educational trajectories and ways of communicating coexist. This situation has necessitated a revision of two main pillars: first, a move from monolingual towards plurilingual educational policies and pedadogies (Conteh & Meier, 2014), promoted in a large part through the European framework document and recommendations (European Comission, 2019) and, more locally, the national and regional curricula. In parallel, there have been initiatives to adapt teacher training programs to better equip future educational agents to be linguistically and culturally sensitive professionals. Nonetheless, despite these efforts, recent research indicates that there is room for improvement regarding future teachers' task in managing linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms (e.g. Birello, Llompart & Moore, 2021).
With the aims of responding to this need, the CULT project (Constructing a Collaborative Understanding of Learning and Teaching for the XXI century, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, PID2020-115446RJ-I00) was developed. TheCULT project has been designed to foster dialogue and collaborative investigationbetween teacher educators and future educational agents (teachers, pedagogues and social educators), a Service-Learning office at the UAB and a non-formal education program already carrying out successful plurilingual teaching with migrant origin families (AFEX-AFFM program, Casa Asia). The general objective of the project is to offer a new understanding of plurilingual education and inclusion in the development of future educators, as well as providing grounds for mutual growth towards a more equitable education and social life. In order to accomplish that the project also aims to establish and evaluate collaboration through a multidirectional learning space and to collaboratively explore and develop strategies and methodologies for plurilingual teaching and learning.
In this paper, we will present and analyse data collected during the ethnographic phase of the project based on the collaboration between a future Primary Education teacher of Catalan origin and an AFEX-AFFM facilitator originally from Pakistan, working together to design a teaching unit. Following the premises of conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis we will analyse the collaborative sessions and project preparation and development. Our analysis will offer insight into the mutually-collaborative teacher identity construction and development of key competences for a plurilingual and inclusive teaching and learning from the 21st century.
References
Birello, M., Llompart, J., & Moore, E. (2021). Being a plurilingual speaker versus becoming a linguistically sensitive teacher: contradictions in the discourses of initial teacher education students. International Journal of Multilingualism, 18(4), 523-533. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2021.1900195
Conteh, J. & Meier, G. (eds.) (2014). The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education:
Opportunities and Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
European Commission. (2019). Council Recommendation of 22 May 2019 on a
comprehensive approach to the teaching and learning of languages (2019/C 189/03). Official Journal of the European Union 5.6.2019 C189, 15– 22.
