Plurilingual classes are nowadays the normal case in Italian schools. However, despite a general positive attitude toward plurilingualism (Solerti 2021), teachers struggle to exploit the pupils' plurilingual background as a resource for a real plurilingual education. Teachers' education have rarely taken plurilingualism as a base in school activities and curricula (Duberti 2019), and top-down training approaches proved to be ineffective in changing teachers' practices (Macias 2017; Fiorentino 2009)
In this paper we present a case study taken from a teacher training experience developed in a plurilingual school and designed in a bottom-up perspective, according to a PAR approach (Reason & Bradbury 2008).
In the year preceding the training, an Eveil aux langues workshop, designed and carried out by external personnel, had been proposed to the school. The teachers showed great sensitivity to the pedagogic potential of the activities proposed, but were also sceptical about their ability in further carrying on the experience. In the following year, the training was therefore dedicated to enhance the teachers' autonomy in designing and realising plurilingual classroom activities (Sims & Fletcher-Wood 2021). A PAR approach in the training was implemented, through different activities aiming at co-costructing pedagogical practices between the teachers and the researcher (Horner 2016, van Schaik et al. 2019): focus groups, microteaching sessions (Bell 2007), face-to-face and group discussions. Among the eight teachers that took part in the training, the paper will focus on a primary school teacher who had been particularly (pro)active in designing and autonomously carrying out similar activities. Through the analysis of data coming from the training sessions, the potential of a PAR approach to teacher training will be investigated, focussing on signs of changes in teachers' perspectives and beliefs, which could form a base for effective transformations in pedagogical practices.
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