Translanguaging course for preschool teachers to disrupt inequalities

The highly linguistically and culturally diverse reality of Luxembourg and its school system pose a great challenge to students, families, and teachers alike. This reality tends to produce one of the largest differences in reading performance between Luxembourgish and language minority children compared to other countries (PISA, 2019), which creates inequalities in students’ academic trajectory. Translanguaging as a pedagogy has been established to overcome these inequalities by disrupting language hierarchies and giving language minority children a space and voice to learn and prosper (García, 2019). To address the inequalities and help implement a translanguaging pedagogy in preschool, our project : (1) offered a professional development course in translanguaging to 40 teachers, (2) involves children’s parents to foster home-school collaboration through questionnaires and interviews, and (3) cultivates children’s linguistic, cognitive, and socio-emotional engagement in the classroom through linguistic tests and video observations. We also used focus groups and questionnaires at the beginning and the end of the course. The 18-hour course in Translanguaging (June to December 2019) aimed to challenge the teachers’ perception about multilingualism and equality in their classroom. Through the preliminary results of the focus groups, questionnaires and field notes, we were able to observe some positive changes in the teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about their language minority children such as realizing that language is a tool of communication. Teachers were also more positive about home-school collaboration. However, despite our continuous creative efforts, some teachers still maintained their traditional monolingual stance and conviction of parents’ lack of education and interest. Most of the teachers did, however, not completely overcome a monolingual bias and this remains our main focus in the remaining points and follow-ups of our project. References García, O. (2019). Translanguaging: a coda to the code?, Classroom Discourse, 10(3-4), 369-373, doi: 10.1080/19463014.2019.1638277 OECD (2019). PISA 2018 Results (Volume I): What students know and can do. PISA, OECD Publishing: Paris. doi: https://doi.org/10.1787/5f07c754-e