Learn more about Family and school promoting multilingualism together

1. Parents as teachers’ “knowledgeable partners”

Parents are rarely considered as “knowledgeable partners” (Epstein & Hollifield, 1996), although they are key-informants for teachers and children on development and learning issues. In order to sustain children’s multilingualism,

• teachers need to recognize linguistically diverse parents and involve them as competent and knowledgeable partners; 
  
• parents’ linguistic experiences and backgrounds need to be recognized and made more visible and valuable at school as resources, rather than obstacles;
  
• parents need to have voice and being listened to as “experts” more than subordinated and marginalized actors as far as linguistic education is concerned;
  
• meaningful dialogue on the strength and challenges of educating multilingual children is needed to support children’s multilingualism.
  

2. Obstacles to parents’ involvement

Literature has shown that parental involvement is crucial for the proper social and cognitive growth of the child. However, not all parents are equally equipped to participate to school life. Minorities and immigrants often face additional barriers that prevent them from participate to their children’s school environment as others do. Participation itself is a problematic concept: language barriers may discourage them from engaging in their children’s early care and education, such attending parent teacher meetings and others opportunities. There is the need to promote a new perspective on parents’ active engagement. In fact, intercultural dialogical process and cultural negotiation’s experiences are rare in school’s contexts where a more asymmetric face-to-face model is dominant (Tobin, et.al. 2016). Research showed that immigrant parents have much to contribute to the dialogue of preschools practices when they were given an opportunity to share their concerns (Tobin, Arzubiaga, Adair, 2013; Mantovani, Bove, 2016).

3. Benefits of parents’ involvement

By being present and proactive, linguistically diverse parents can have a higher impact on children’s learning, well-being and school’s success. At the same time, a more meaningful participation of linguistically-marginalized parents in monolingual societies (such as Italy) could impact teachers’ attitudes towards them. This could change teachers’ paradigm of parent involvement from a school centred perspective to one that is more “family-centered”. Teachers are asked to cope with both the strength and the challenges of linguistically diverse families.

4. Main aims

 -       providing a visibility of different languages in the classroom/school, before starting to work language repertoires of children. Even if very limited, it helps children to feel safe and to feel ‘normal’ to talk about languages;

-      valuing all languages (languages of the school curriculum, languages of origin, minority languages, dialects, but you may also consider body communication, other codes communication), not only the languages more represented, but even if only a child speaks a language;

-       valuing families’ and children’s resources already present and enabling children as researchers and informants.

5. Guiding principles

• to arise parents’ strengths in developing positive linguistic environment for their children;
• to encourage them to take part in their children’s school experiences ;
• to strengthen the family-school connections on the challenges of multilingualism;
• to develop innovative-tools and methods for parents-teachers cooperation on children language development;
• to make the school’s learning environment more “visible” to parents who face many barriers in their participation.