REFLECTION #1

The Garcia article was quite intriguing. By providing pre-service teachers with a greater understanding of multilingualism, multiliteracy and multimodal strategies to raise multilingual awareness, can enhance the validation and self-worth of students who are monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual. Creating an environment where language brings people together rather than separating them, models to students, which is then transferred to their families, that education around language breaks down prejudices and increases linguistic understandings.

Knowledge about Language (KAL), though a great starting point for language awareness, only outlines a practice that focuses on the standard languages, which propelled the development of the Critical Multilingual Awareness (CMLA) project/program. I really appreciated that the emphasis was about seeing language use through a different lens, one of how language is interacted with, to see the social and historical developments of its speakers, to see “the fluid language practices of bilinguals” (Garcia, 2017, p. 269). Providing pre-service teachers opportunities to observe that students learn through using their whole language “repertoire” (Garcia, 2017, 270), helps them to understand that language is not used in isolated contexts, such as instruction.

Language has ultimately been used as a tool to create privilege for dominant language speakers and oppression for language minorities, it becomes even more critical to ensure multilingual practices are experienced and implemented to ensure students are empowered as much as possible through encouragement to utilize their language for full learning capabilities, especially in Canada where we are quite ethically diverse (some areas more than others), and “20% of immigrants to Canada are under the age of 15 [where they] not only have the right to attend school, but they are obligated” (Coelho, 2012, p. 20). Students immigrating to Canada already feel a lack of belonging in a new environment so it becomes of the utmost importance that their ways of living, being and speaking are valued by their new educators.

The many pedagogies that pre-service teachers learn and are expected to install upon classroom time, feels like a lot to live up to. One cannot simply be efficient in all of them. This project has many benefits for multilingual students, as well as, monolingual students (and surrounding audiences/participants), and I feel that this program would almost need to be taken twice. Taken as a pre-service teacher and once later on, after a few years of experience. This program serves to build multifaceted consciousness around language use and since language is always changing, I think retaking critical multilingual awareness course could only solidify its practices and applications. And being able to take this course more than once would make me feel a lot less scared with my language understandings in a multicultural, multilingual classroom.