Multilingual Education in Classrooms with Multiple Mother Tongues: A Case Study of Pedagogical Possibilities

This dissertation describes a collaborative action research project undertaken with Grades 1 and 2 children and parents from two Adivasi communities in a multiple-language classroom in a remote area of Odisha, India. The children came from Santali, Ho, and Odia home language backgrounds but were taught in Odia, the dominant state language. Classroom interactions were observed over a 7-month period in order to understand how students and teachers negotiated the teaching of academic content and initial reading skills. The study built on the extensive research that has emerged in recent years supporting mother-tongue based multilingual education (MTBMLE) in countries as diverse as Ethiopia, India, and the Philippines. These studies have provided evidence for cross-linguistic interdependence and transfer of conceptual and academic skills across languages. However, these initiatives were implemented in contexts of linguistic homogeneity involving children from a single mother tongue, whereas the majority of the classrooms in Odisha have children from multiple linguistic backgrounds. In addition to classroom observations, data were gathered by means of interviews with eight parents, two teachers, and five students. These interviews took place both before and after the creation by parents of a multilingual children’s book in Ho, Santali, and Odia. The interviews with parents and teachers prior to the creation of the book focused on participants’ own educational experiences, their linguistic identities, and their views on medium of instruction in education. The interviews after the community book creation project focused on these issues and how participants’ perspectives were affected by the inclusion of the two Adivasi languages in the book and in classroom instruction. The student interviews were conducted after the book was used within the classroom and focused on the impact of this initiative on their attitudes towards their home languages and the dominant school language. The findings of the study suggest a positive impact of a community created multilingual storybook on the parents, the students and the community. The project demonstrated that the multilingual repertoires of parents can be used as a powerful resource for implementing multilingual education in linguistically diverse Adivasi contexts.Ph.D