Promoting humanizing, meaningful, and just language instruction for multilingual learners and their peers: A pedagogical vision illustrated by examples from practice

Abstract

In this article, we engage with the question of how to create just and humanizing instructional conditions for learning through and about language at school. Rather than an empirical study, this article invites readers to rethink the role of languages in education by introducing and illustrating what we call Pedagogies of Voices (POV). Informed by research and practice, POV instructional approaches acknowledge and leverage the reality of multilingual and multidialectal repertoires in linguistically diverse classrooms, counteracting the tendency towards prescriptivism, which constrains what counts as language learning and teaching in schools. Through vignettes from middle-school multilingual classrooms implementing the TRANSLATE literacy curriculum, we illustrate how POV-inspired instruction transforms the conventions of classroom interactions by scaffolding language learning through relational activities that affirm and expand students’ multilingual repertoires and metalinguistic strategies for learning through and about language. These POV-inspired practices shift the role of teachers, who become learners of their students’ ways with language and shift the instructional goal from a narrow focus on teaching the language of school literacy to a concerted effort to foster flexible, resourceful, critical, and creative student voices—what we call Critical Rhetorical Flexibility. These two shifts, we argue, contribute to creating the enabling conditions to foster inclusive, humanizing communities in which students and teachers experience the joyful challenge of learning through languages together. We conclude with thoughts and considerations for theory, future practice-embedded research, and evidence-based educational practice.