Scaffolding Multilingual Education in Digital Times

Prof.Dr. Heather Lotherington (York University, Canada)

This presentation introduces a plurilingual approach to helping teachers and learners navigate superdiverse elementary school classrooms where linguistic and cultural pluralism have tipped the balance from the remedial few to the multilingual many. Traditional second language instruction models that remedially reshape newcomers for assimilation into the dominant society are not designed to welcome what the migrant student brings to the learning context, which, according to Cummins (2009) is critically important for teachers do.

Twentieth century school language learning focused principally on analogue technologies, and alphabetic literacies in the socially dominant language/s. The 21st century has been indelibly transcribed to a digital dimension that accommodates multimodal, hybridized literacies, interactive social media sites, collaboratively authored wikis, and digitally-evolved genres with their own grammatical and spelling conventions, such as Twitter. Digitally-mediated multimodal textual products can very simply embed and productively incorporate multiple languages, and customized bi- and multilingualism.

At Joyce Public School in Toronto, Canada, we created a learning community comprising teachers, researchers, graduate students, administrators and community members to engage theory-to-practice collaborative action research towards the shared goal of developing digital multimodal literacies pedagogies. Over the course of a decade, our work changed the culture of the school, introducing problem-based, cross-curricular, and even cross-age learning that embeds children’s community languages, welcomes newcomer populations into the school, encourages plurilingual learning, and scaffolds dominant literacies through customized plurilingual multimodal pathways (Lotherington, 2011; Lotherington & Paige, 2017).

Cummins, J. (2009). Pedagogies of choice: Challenging coercive relations of power in classrooms and communities. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 12(3), pp.261-271.

Lotherington, H. (2011). Pedagogy of multiliteracies: Rewriting Goldilocks. New York, N.Y: Routledge.

Lotherington, H., & Paige, C. (Eds.) (2017). Teaching young learners in a superdiverse world: Multimodal perspectives and approaches. New York, N.Y: Routledge.