Project Title: Translanguaging art: Multilingual practices of contemporary artists and their implications for language pedagogy.
What was your research about?
Migration and the global movement of people and languages have become significant factors in everyday life. Nevertheless, the monolingual paradigm prevails in the public debate, uptake of languages in UK schools declines, minority languages education receives limited governmental support, and misconceptions about multilingualism proliferate.
New pedagogical realities brought to the classroom by the cultural and racial diversity of the world call for new pedagogies. The urgent need to address this situation has been recognised by the AHRC Open World Research Initiative seeking to establish a new and exciting vision for languages research.
This thesis presents a research project that inscribed itself into this ambitious endeavour, exploring the possibility of using insights gained from researching how contemporary art engages with multilingualism to design new approaches to language learning. The research presented in this study was carried out in two stages. Stage one involved an analysis of how works by the Polish-born artists Małgorzata Dawidek, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Monika Szydłowska, through their engagement with languaging in multilingual and migratory contexts, could create different spaces of learning. Stage two built on the findings from stage one to develop and test a pedagogical model that aimed to unlock the transformative potential of contemporary art for language learning and teaching in multilingual, often migratory, contexts. This part of the research was carried out in two primary schools in Scotland with pupils aged 9-12 as my co-researchers.
The research is framed by theories informing contemporary discourses on migration and multilingualism (Gramling) and is anchored within the theory and pedagogy of translanguaging (Li Wei, Garcia). Its overarching methodological principles are drawn from critical pedagogy (bell), art-based linguistic ethnography (Bradley), exploratory practice (Allwright), and participatory research grounded in art practice (Marshall, Sullivan, Ingold). This approach enabled children’s lived experiences of languaging, minoritized languages and art to be kept at the core of the enquiry whilst bringing to the fore concepts of art-practice-as-research and art-as-pedagogy (Sullivan, Lucero).
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