Re-voicing conceptualizations of plurilingual education: ‘El plurilingüismo, este concepto de … ¿cómo se puede decir?’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Plurilingual education is usually viewed by its proponents as emancipatory. But is it really, and if so, how? For what kind of learning experiences, what kind of production of knowledge, what sense of identity and of community? In this contribution, we discuss collaborative inquiry and arts-based engagement as public and plurilingual pedagogy. We focus on a partnership between elementary school teachers, families, museums and university researchers established to investigate how multi-situated practices and ways of knowing can be leveraged as resources to inform our understandings of plurilingualism and plurilingual education. At the same time, we explore the role those actors can play to support engagement and reflexive inquiry through sensory and visualizing experiences in collaborative participatory research as powerful ways to cultivate reciprocity and relationality. The contribution aims to trigger a discussion about the importance of revoicing our conceptualizations of plurilingual education to include the discourses, multisensory experiences and stories of diversely situated social actors. Truthful, trustworthy pluri-dialogic and multilateral relations between partners open up a pathway to frame and claim alternative and transdisciplinary epistemologies of diversity, which can disrupt and displace the hegemonic Eurocentric matrix of Language Education.