Greek heritage language teachers as emergency grassroots policy makers: reconciling learner centred responses with textbook heavy pedagogies during COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

This paper addresses the paucity of research on policy agents ’ responses to the shift to teaching online during the fi rst lockdown in heritage language education and pedagogy. Collected in the context of a small-scale exploratory study, it focuses on the re fl ective accounts of a group of heritage language teachers in a Greek school in francophone Switzerland. The paper builds on a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language education (Lytra et al., 2022, Liberating Language Education. Multilingual Matters) and investigates language teachers ’ emergency grassroots policy making through a critical ethnographic lens (Martin-Jones & da Costa Cabral, 2018, The critical ethnographic turn in research on language policy and planning. In J. W. Tollefson, & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning (pp. 71 – 92). Oxford University Press). It demonstrates how teachers leveraged children ’ s developing digital abilities and expanded their semiotic repertoires. Concerned with delivering the curriculum, meeting language and literacy objectives and managing parental expectations, teachers simultaneously exploited children ’ s familiarity with established textbook heavy pedagogies which they adapted to di ff erent degrees. The acknowledgement and incorporation of children ’ s digital abilities, and experiences to support Greek language learning did not encompass an integrative multimodal and multilingual approach.