Multilingual pedagogies ― towards more equitable education?

Abstract

I scrutinise six multilingual pedagogical approaches (MPA), such as translanguaging pedagogy, language awareness and linguistically responsive teaching, which promise to make education more equitable by encouraging students to employ all their linguistic resources. Equitable education enables the same opportunities and access for everyone and it is reached through practices guided by the principles of social justice, but whether and how these aims are concretely achieved varies from MPA to another. In the analysis, I examine their strengths and weaknesses and ask whether multilingual pedagogy can make education more equitable. For the MPAs, representation of languages, acknowledging students’ language skills and scaffolding access to the academic register are the main instruments in advocating for a socially just school. Some of them acknowledge aspects of cultural or racial inequity, but in general they focus mainly on language(s). Power, empowerment, and criticality are frequently mentioned, but comprehensive discussion on how to address them in school is not provided. Therefore, there is a danger that the multilingual pedagogies will be implemented as supporting celebratory multilingualism. Thus, I argue that the multilingual pedagogical approaches cannot effectively promote equitable practices unless the question of equity is centred and other categories for inequity are recognised.