Fostering Educational Change at the Intersection of Macro-Level Institutional Narratives and Micro-Level Classroom Experiences

Abstract

This study investigated the intersection between macro-level institutional narratives on plurilingualism and language education, and the increasingly complex linguistic repertoires that students bring to their school experience in South Tyrol (Italy). The paper first outlines the main specificities of this historically multilingual substate entity, and discusses how current educational guidelines celebrate linguistic diversity while failing to explicitly acknowledge the epistemic capacity of more recently settled minoritised language communities. Zooming in at micro-level classroom experiences, the paper then looks at the educational stances of one primary school teacher who took part in a participatory action research initiative aimed at the valorisation and mobilisation of students’ complex linguistic repertoires. Over two years, the initiative fostered collaboration among teachers and researchers to co-construct strategies aligned with the principles of pedagogical translanguaging. Through qualitative analysis of data generated through individual semi-structured interviews and a short reflective text, this paper shows how the selected teacher began to reconceptualise plurilingual education in more inclusive and equitable ways, i.e., supporting both institutional and non-dominant languages and legitimising the children’s diverse knowledge bases. By highlighting the role of teachers’ agency in challenging macro-level narratives from below, the study addresses the imbalances of power between institutionalised and non-institutionalised languages, and contributes to research framing plurilingual education as a socially engaged phenomenon in increasingly multilingual contexts.

1. Introduction

1.1. Defining Plurilingual Education

In this article, plurilingual education is understood as a socially engaged phenomenon (Erling & Moore, 2021) that rests on two main conceptual pillars: equity and inclusion. The former postulates that, for education to be equitable, all students should be provided with the necessary resources to achieve their fullest potential across various domains, including individual, social, intellectual, cultural, and emotional development (Jurado de los Santos et al., 2020). This principle emphasises that educational opportunities must be accessible to everyone, irrespective of personal characteristics such as gender, language, or ethnic background (Cerna et al., 2021; OECD, 2023). Closely related to equity, inclusion stresses the importance of reducing all forms of discrimination or barriers so as to favour children’s well-being and learning in ways that respond to their needs and valorise their unique capabilities and knowledge bases (Jurado de los Santos et al., 2020; OECD, 2008; Simón et al., 2019), including the competences they have in the various resources of their linguistic repertoires (Guarda & Mayr, 2024).

Understood in this way, equitable and inclusive plurilingual education entails the valorisation and strategic use of all the linguistic resources and knowledge bases that students bring to class, with the aim of enhancing learning and positive identity development (Little & Kirwan, 2020; Van Avermaet et al., 2018). As emphasised by Keddie (2012, p. 7), promoting pedagogies “that connect with the funds of knowledge specific to marginalised groups is seen to support greater participation, motivation and achievement for students from these groups”. Pedagogies of this kind encompass translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014; Cenoz & Gorter, 2022), an approach that encourages plurilingual learners to flexibly and strategically use all the resources of their linguistic repertoires for enhanced learning. By offering alternatives to traditional language separation, translanguaging not only legitimises and accommodates the identities and learning paths of plurilingual students, but also repositions them as competent knowers rather than inadequate non-natives in the classroom (García, 2009; Guarda, forthcoming; Robinson et al., 2018).

As Karpava (2024, p. 83) reminds us, translanguaging is “one means of implementation of linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogy and promotion of equality in diverse societies”. Similar to other transformative pedagogies, it calls for teachers to develop and mobilise linguistically responsive teaching competences, i.e., professional competences that support plurilingual students’ learning, particularly in contexts in which plurilingualism is not formally endorsed in all its forms (Fischer & Lahmann, 2020). Competences of this type include knowledge of one’s students’ linguistic repertoires and language biographies, the ability to identify and address the language demands of one’s discipline, the capability to provide students with appropriate scaffolding, as well as the ability to select tasks and topics that valorise, leverage, and expand pupils’ linguistic repertoires (Guarda & Hofer, 2021; Lucas & Villegas, 2011, 2013; Tandon et al., 2017; see also García & Kleyn, 2016 for specific reference to translanguaging). As emphasised in various publications, teachers’ professional competences do not only include knowledge and skills, but also a set of beliefs (Baumert & Kunter, 2011; Council of Europe, 2018), i.e., the values and assumptions that a given teacher accepts as true, through which they make sense of their experience with others, and which shape their attitudes towards specific phenomena (Borg, 2001).

Through the lens of teachers’ beliefs and attitudes, the connection between plurilingual education and social engagement becomes particularly clear: it is by perceiving all languages to be on an equal footing and by constructing them as linguistic, social, and cultural capital for the whole classroom (Cummins, 2021) that teachers can mobilise their knowledge and skills to act as social agents of change (Guarda & Hofer, 2021). The valorisation and use of non-dominant epistemologies and languages is among what Fraser (2008) would describe as necessary recognitive measures that challenge the cultural inequalities arising when the funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) of a subject or group are devalued or ignored (Catalano et al., 2019; García & Kano, 2014; Power & Taylor, 2013). In education, the reproduction of dominant homogeneous epistemologies configures schools as spaces “where students are expected to learn the skills and knowledge, including language, that is legitimized” (Phyak & Sah, 2022, p. 3). Such expectations can also be described as forms of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), i.e., injustices perpetrated through the misrepresentation and structural marginalisation against a subject or a community in their capacity as knowers and knowledge-makers.

As Piller (2016) reminds us, injustices of this kind represent a universal social issue that puts certain speakers at a disadvantage compared to others. This is not only counter to the principles of equity and inclusion in education, but also undermines social cohesion to a larger extent. The latter is understood here as “the ongoing process of developing well-being, sense of belonging, and voluntary social participation of the members of society, while developing communities that tolerate and promote a multiplicity of values and cultures, and granting at the same time equal rights and opportunities in society” (Fonseca et al., 2019, p. 246). Because of their formative mission and the manifold interactions they have with various societal realities, educational institutions are at the forefront of the promotion of such ongoing process. The marginalisation of certain languages in schools, which—as Cummins (2001) poignantly reminds us—also implies the marginalisation of their speakers, clearly represents an obstacle for the promotion of key dimensions of social cohesion, including well-being, multiple belonging, access to resources, and social participation1. Research over recent years has shown that legitimising plurilingual repertoires in educational environments can, instead, bridge social divides, steer new norms and values, support epistemic and linguistic affirmation, and be conducive to enhanced social cohesion (Acker-Hocevar et al., 2006; Guarda, forthcoming; Guo, 2011; Kelly, 2011; Ratna et al., 2012). Equitable and inclusive forms of plurilingual education, therefore, do not only have consequences for individual students, but have a further reaching impact on the wider society. This illuminates the need, particularly in increasingly diverse communities, to promote activism and engagement among teachers, families, and students to orchestrate more socially just approaches to plurilingualism and language education.

To materialise alternative pathways to education as described above, an ecological view of language (Creese & Blackledge, 2010) should be promoted among stakeholders. From such a perspective, language and language education are historically, culturally, and ideologically embedded (Power & Taylor, 2013), and exist and unfold “in an ecosystem with other languages and within specific socio-political settings that produce particular (im)balances of power” (Makoe, 2018, p. 18). It is precisely these imbalances of power between institutionalised and non-institutionalised languages that this study sought to tackle, with specific reference to some of the current educational guidelines in force in South Tyrol (Italy).

1.2. Unveiling the Tensions: Plurilingualism and Language Education in South Tyrol

South Tyrol, an autonomous substate entity, is home to approximately 516,000 residents, of which, 68.61% identify themselves as German speakers, 26.98% as Italian speakers, and 4.41% as Ladin speakers.2 As Alber (2012, p. 405) observed, the institutional setting of the region consists of a delicate power-sharing system “based on strict separation and forced cooperation” between its language groups. Central to this is the declaration of ethnolinguistic affiliation that every resident is expected to make: introduced to determine the numerical strength of each group, the declaration serves as a basis for the proportional quota system that is applied in various domains of public life, including the allocation of public jobs and housing, and various other social contributions.3 The region’s 1972 Statute of Autonomy also establishes the equal status of all three institutional languages in education, where separate and locally administered school systems exist for each formally recognised language group, with the aim of preserving their cultural and linguistic identity. Despite its reputation for the protection of its German- and Ladin-speaking minorities, South Tyrol’s autonomy has been criticised for reinforcing ethno-linguistic divisions among language groups (Carlà, 2018), something which is believed to make the integration of its 10% non-Italian citizen population more challenging, particularly with regard to access to public resources and employment opportunities.

With regard to non-Italian residents and education, a recent survey indicated that 10.3% of students in German-language schools and 27.2% in Italian-language schools are foreign nationals (ASTAT, 2024). While official statistics do not provide any information on the linguistic resources brought to class by students, recent studies have identified that a growing part of the student population in South Tyrol can count on complex linguistic repertoires extending beyond German, Italian, Ladin, and English, i.e., the languages taught in the curriculum (Colombo et al., 2020). Languages brought in by students include Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, Punjabi, and Spanish, just to mention a few. Despite this richness, plurilingual education in the schools of the region remains primarily anchored in institutionalised languages (Engel & Hoffmann, 2016; Gramegna & Niederfriniger, 2021; Guarda et al., 2022), as also transpires from the local guidelines for schools. Since this article reports the experiences of a teacher working at an Italian-language primary school, attention to the guidelines for this level is believed to provide useful information to anchor the discussion on the cultural and ideological context that emerges from institutional documentation.

Issued in 2015, the guidelines for Italian-language primary schools in South Tyrol4 explicitly align themselves with the objectives of European education by setting the development of plurilingual and intercultural competences as priorities (Direzione Istruzione e Formazione Italiana, henceforth DIFI, 2015). An additional key objective is removing all sources of discrimination by promoting an appreciation of students’ competences, investing in their diversity, and conceiving the classroom as a “modifying environment” (ibid, p. 14)5 for all those involved. From this premise, the guidelines open up spaces for the valorisation of children’s diverse competences, which are seen as playing a transformative role for the classroom community. Reference to linguistic and cultural diversity is made at several points in the sections dedicated to the various disciplinary areas, yet with sometimes ambiguous results. In the section on civic education, for instance, a specific objective for second grade is that of promoting children’s ability to “share spaces and initiatives with peers from the other language groups, recognising, respecting and valorising their cultural specificities” (DIFI, 2015, p. 29, emphasis added). While this sounds promising, explicit reference to the traditions and customs “of the three language groups” (ibid., pp. 29 and 35) in several other descriptors clarifies that the focus is on the promotion of the dominant cultural values of the region. No explicit mention of the languages and cultures of groups other than the institutional ones is made in this section, perhaps leaving the reader to wonder why, in the context of education for active and democratic citizenship, openness to and awareness of (minoritised) language groups other than the historical ones of the region is not considered a means for enhanced participation in wider social networks.

More relevant in this respect is the chapter that preludes the language disciplinary area in the same document: here, emphasis is given to “the language(s) of the home” (lingua/lingue di casa; DIFI, 2015, p. 49), which the guidelines recommend using as a starting point for and an object of metalinguistic reflection and comparison with the “second language(s)” learnt at school. The final goal is to help students “recognise the linguistic and cultural richness present in their own language and to seek it out in other languages as well” (ibid., p. 50). In the document, the use of the phrase “language(s) of the home” opens up promising opportunities to reflect on and expand the range of linguistic resources brought to class by students. This is reinforced by a statement that specifies that dialects and minority languages (dialetti e lingue minoritarie; ibid., p. 50) also belong to the concept of “language(s) of the home”. While this represents a very significant move, the document remains vague in its description: the term ‘minority languages’, for instance, is commonly associated with German and Ladin, i.e., the languages of the formally recognised minority groups of South Tyrol. The term appears without additional clarification, failing to explicitly acknowledge minoritised languages, and more specifically those brought in through migratory flows, as part of the same concept. Once again, an attentive reader may find this description ambiguous and too vague to effectively orient the work of teachers or school principals. Ambiguity is found later on in the text, too: on the one hand, the document recommends choosing the didactic approach that best suits each given educational context in order to promote “open and innovative language teaching and learning” (ibid., p. 50). This recommendation is then, however, linked to the “long tradition” of South Tyrolean schools (ibid., p. 50), for instance with Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), something that seems to link back to the wealth of expertise local educational institutions have gained in teaching the institutional languages of the curriculum.

Perhaps more explicit are the guidelines for the teaching and learning of English, which in the document is described as a means to foster “the development of a plurilingual and pluricultural competence that propels the learner outside their own self towards an environment with multiple cultural aspects, making them aware of the presence of other languages in the linguistic repertoires of other peers, and enabling them to exercise active citizenship” (DIFI, 2015, p. 89). While reference to the linguistic repertoires of the class is an indicator of openness towards all forms of linguistic diversity, in the author’s opinion, it is unfortunate that this dimension is only explicitly mentioned in the section dedicated to English language teaching and learning, and more specifically in the descriptors of its objectives for intercultural competence (cfr. DIFI, 2015, pp. 91–92). In this light, the document seems to suggest three main ideas: first, that awareness of other linguistic repertoires is a natural byproduct of English language teaching and learning, an assumption that lacks supportive arguments and that would profit from concrete examples of pedagogical strategies and approaches. Second, the text seems to suggest that the teaching of Italian, German, or another subject does not necessarily have the same impact, as if English—being an international and almost ubiquitous language—had a somewhat special role in promoting pupils’ awareness of other linguistic resources. Finally, the document implies that such awareness is useful for fostering intercultural competence and active citizenship: however, no reference is made to the fact that such awareness could also be leveraged, for instance, to sustain the maintenance of non-dominant languages among their speakers as well as their learning among their peers.

This brief overview of core contents and messages contained in the local guidelines for Italian-language primary schools shows that, even in a context such as South Tyrol, where the development of plurilingualism is an explicit educational goal and is enshrined in policy guidelines, hierarchies of values determine the desirability of certain languages over others, so that “the specific linguistic repertoire developed through schooling is often valued over resources from paths of migration” (Erling & Moore, 2021, p. 526). In the context under investigation, language and educational policies recreate and reinforce hierarchies and hegemonies that favour dominant, institutionalised forms of plurilingualism, while failing to explicitly address the variety of other languages present in the region.

Clearly, such guidelines respond to the demands for language learning at school. What is problematic, in the author’s opinion, is that they do not consider—or only partially consider—the interplay between institutional languages and the rich linguistic resources many students now bring to learning, nor do they contemplate concrete ways in which such resources can be sustained. This means that teachers are left alone to devise their own strategies to deal with linguistic diversity in class, and some may not even see the need to sustain the development of non-dominant languages as a requirement for more equitable and inclusive learning. As a result, languages other than the ones taught in school remain structurally marginalised, and language and literacy development in these linguistic resources are implicitly left to informal family or community initiatives. All this is at odds with various recommendations and legislative frameworks of the Italian Ministry of Education and Merit (including the decree 286/1998, as well as publications contained in MIUR, 2014, 2015, 2022), which advocate for the inclusion, valorisation, and maintenance of students’ first languages, including the languages of more recently settled communities. It is also at odds, as remarked several times in this paper, with the more and more complex reality of many classes in South Tyrol. Within this field of tension, the agency of teachers, i.e., their intentional “will and power to act” (Piccardo & North, 2022, p. 30), seems to be the best response to start challenging the hierarchies of value across languages and to reimagine pedagogies that are more inclusive and equitable for all. This will be the focus of the next section.

1.3. Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Plurilingual Education Through Participatory Action Research

In the context described above, the project One school, many languages6 was launched in 2012 with the aim of promoting awareness and appreciation of students’ full linguistic repertoires in South Tyrolean schools. While the project activities were initially mostly targeted at students, in 2021, the project initiated COMPASS (Didactic Competences in the Multilingual Classroom), a two-year research and professional development initiative involving teams of primary school teachers. The aim of the initiative was to promote educational change through teachers’ agency in ways that mobilised and leveraged the epistemic and linguistic potential of all students. The teams participated on a self-selection basis: information on the initiative was spread among local school principals, and school teams that expressed an interest in participating subsequently met two researchers of the project team, who provided them with the necessary information while also capturing the needs, doubts, and expectations of the teachers. The teams were varied in terms of their size (the smallest one being of 8 teachers, the largest one comprising 21 professionals, for a total of 41 teachers involved over the two years), the municipality their school was located in, and the school system their school belonged to (Italian or German). Based on the concept that language/plurilingual education is a responsibility of all teachers (Beacco et al., 2016; Guarda & Hofer, 2021; Liyanage & Tao, 2020), the participants in COMPASS did not only include language teachers, but also teachers of other subjects, from mathematics to sports. This was a very important prerequisite for the project, whose medium- and long-term goal was to promote an overall school culture of openness, equity, and inclusion.

COMPASS adopted a participatory action research approach (McIntyre, 2008), promoting the exploration of concepts and the collaborative development of translanguaging-inspired instruments and strategies. Over two school years, the initiative consisted of ten 2.5 h workshops and moments of exchange with each participating teacher team. The researchers met each teacher team at their respective school to also critically reflect on the affordances and challenges of the physical spaces in fostering more inclusive and equitable learning environments. In the first year, the teams explored key terms and concepts related to language acquisition processes, experimented with strategies and tools to reconstruct and valorise their own and their students’ linguistic repertoires, critically analysed the linguistic landscape (Gorter, 2018) of their school, and familiarised themselves with concepts and examples of pedagogical translanguaging. In the second year, the focus was entirely on collaboration, implementation, and (re)evaluation: in pairs or small groups, the teachers designed translanguaging-informed activities and tasks, implemented them in class, and observed their efficacy and impact on the students. Throughout the two years, in addition to engaging the participants in hands-on activities through plurilingual exercises, games, and tasks ranging from the use of plurilingual literary texts to the analysis of translanguaging-informed lesson plans, all the workshops and exchanges sought to foster critical reflection in ways that could stimulate the teachers to take action in linguistically responsive ways. Through examples and informal discussions, the participants were prompted to develop and activate what García (2017, p. 263) calls “critical multilingual awareness”, i.e., a deep understanding of how language can be used to empower or discriminate. Activating such awareness implies an ability to question dominant ideologies, move away from monolingual educational mindsets, and understand one’s role as an advocate for the legitimisation of students’ diverse sources of knowledge.

2. The Study: Data and Methods

The concept of critical multilingual awareness is clearly related to teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, which were mentioned above as key components of teacher competence, and which were not only the focus of the professional development initiative, but also of the longitudinal study that accompanied it. Based on this, the present paper is guided by the following research question:

RQ. How do the participating teachers’ views and conceptualisations of plurilingual education—including their beliefs, attitudes, and ideological stances—develop over the course of a two-year professional development initiative on inclusive plurilingual education?

A focus on this specific research question is due to the relevance of teachers’ beliefs, conceptualisations, and attitudes in the realisation of more inclusive and equitable learning environments: as Meier and Wood (2021, p. 2) observed, belief systems are “strong indicators of what teachers do in classrooms” and thus have an impact on their agency. In this article, the results from one teacher—Laura7—will be presented. Focusing on this RQ from the perspective of one participant is believed to be key to exemplifying how one professional appropriated the contents of the COMPASS initiative and started to imagine alternative ways to sustain both institutionalised and non-institutionalised languages in the classroom. While it is true that teachers do not take agentive actions in a void, but through “interactions and coordination between different members within the group” (Tao & Gao, 2021, p. 44), the choice of zooming in onto the experience of only one teacher is justified by the aim of highlighting the role of individuals’ agency in initiating educational and social change. Among her colleagues, Laura was selected because she had extensive teaching experience in South Tyrolean schools, and thus profound knowledge of the local educational system. The article thus captures the ways in which she addressed and reflected on the tensions and power hierarchies described above, tracing any changes in her stances towards the role of all languages and epistemologies in the classroom. The findings discussed in this article derive from the analysis of data generated by means of

• Two individual semi-structured interviews, conducted with Laura before the start of the professional development initiative, as well as at the end of it. The aim of the interviews was to capture the participant’s attitudes towards non-dominant languages in education, gain insights into her experiences with plurilingual education and, during the final interviews, explore the perceived impact of COMPASS on her attitudes, ideological positioning, and beliefs towards linguistic diversity and plurilingual education. The pre-interview lasted approximately 50′, while the second lasted 37′. Both were later transcribed with the support of the ELAN software (for transcript conventions, see the end of this paper). While the interviews took place in Italian, relevant excerpts were translated into English by the author of this article;
• A very short text written by the participant during the last encounter the teacher team had at the end of COMPASS. It was prompted by a question aimed at stimulating individual reflection (Has anything changed in the way you ‘think’ and ‘do’ plurilingual education in these two years? If so, what?) The aim was to gain emic insights into the teacher’s experience in COMPASS, particularly on the impact—if any—such experience had on how she conceptualises and implements plurilingual education.

All generated data were thematically analysed (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to identify and make sense of the wealth of beliefs and experiences shared by the teacher. The analytical process involved reading each transcribed interview, as well as Laura’s short reflective text, and identifying segments that were relevant to the research questions and labelling them accordingly. Related codes were then grouped into themes, i.e., higher-level categories that reflected significant patterns in the data. Two qualitative coding schemes8, one for the pre-interview data and one for the data generated at the end of the initiative, were developed and adopted for the analysis, which was supported by the NVivo 14 software.

3. Results

3.1. Laura’s Initial Stances

At the time of our pre-interview, Laura was teaching Italian, mathematics, history, geography, and science in a first-grade class at an urban, medium-size school where Italian is the main language of instruction. Born in South Tyrol to a family with roots in southern Italy, she views plurilingualism as “an enrichment”. In her words, having competences in more than one language gives access to a deeper understanding of life and creates multiple connections with one’s emotions and ways of thinking, because “a language is not just a series of words (.) is it? (..) that is (.) you acquire a way of thinking (..) a language goes deeper (.) it is really a way of living of feeling (.) An approach to life (..) the essence”. A passionate communicator, Laura considers herself a plurilingual person. During the pre-interview, she traces her linguistic repertoire as being composed of several resources: Italian, her first and strongest language; standard German, a language she learnt in school, through informal after-school activities and during short visits to other German-speaking regions, and which she tries to practice as often as she can; English, which she taught herself through songs and music; and one southern Italian dialect, which she can partially understand but not speak.

While her attitudes to individual plurilingualism are very positive, her feelings towards multilingualism in South Tyrol are mixed and reveal a general tendency to associate the region primarily with its historical forms of linguistic diversity. One of the challenges she believes makes coexistence across language groups complex is, for instance, that the German-speaking population uses one or more South Tyrolean dialects in everyday communication, thus making it harder for the Italian-language group—who traditionally only learns the standard variety in school—to feel connected and truly integrated. Conversely, Italian speakers cannot count on an autochthonous dialect since, as Laura argues, drawing on the history of the territory, “we are children of immigrants because Italians [Italian speakers] in South Tyrol are all immigrants” with origins from other regions. This, in her view, represents a personal and societal shortcoming: “we have unfortunately no dialect (.) this has always/this […] has been a bit of a shortcoming for me […] because it’s a really beautiful means of aggregation (..) I mean it gives you so much identity for example (.) and I miss this thing and I feel that I miss it (.) and I feel that we Italians miss it here”. In her words, language is linked to feelings of identity and belonging, insomuch as lacking the skills in the varieties used for everyday communication means “you will not integrate into that group and you will always be perceived as an outsider anyway”, with negative implications for social cohesion.

A teacher for over 30 years since obtaining her literature degree, Laura has gained experience with co-teaching in CLIL through German. At the time of our first encounter, CLIL at her school takes place from first to fifth grade in history, geography, and science. This means that Laura and a German-language teacher share some teaching hours and cover complementary contents that they have planned together. While Laura usually covers more complex topics in Italian, her colleague introduces the pupils to simpler terms and concepts in German. In their shared hours, Laura is ready to intervene in case the pupils struggle with German and cannot find adequate help from visual clues, and she usually does this by repeating unclear concepts in Italian. Talking about CLIL, and more in general about the teaching of German in Italian schools in the region, Laura shares a very sceptical view on the way it is implemented: one of her major concerns is that CLIL in subjects such as history and science requires that pupils acquire academic competences from a very young age, which go beyond purely communicative skills. This additional cognitive load detracts from the pleasure of learning another language and forces students into a “frenetic” learning pace that does not respect their individual needs and learning times. Due to the way plurilingual education is structurally conceived and implemented, Laura concludes, “we demand from them [the students] things that in the end are also somewhat extravagant (.) if we want to use a kind word”.

The frenetic pace through which German is taught in CLIL is, according to Laura, mostly due to the pressure that the Italian-language group feels to learn the other most dominant variety of the region. In her view, German is “now experienced by many of us (.) by the Italians by the Italian-speaking group (.) truly with anxiety (..) we have these children from families that are gripped by panic (..) so there’s no appreciation for language for communication for/as a means of opening up (.) no (.) language is important because otherwise you won’t be able to stay here (.) you won’t find work”. The pressure “to Germanise schools”, as Laura describes it, seems to be associated here with the advantages of living in a region where German occupies a socio-economically relevant position favoured not only by historical circumstances but also by neoliberalist ideologies. The prestige of German clearly emerges from her words when she sarcastically concludes “you won’t even be able to raise a human being if they [the children] don’t learn this language”. This statement implies two interconnected ideas, which Laura sharply criticises through her ironic tone: first, that German is widely perceived as essential for children to become fully realised human beings, and second, that responsible parenting is often conflated with creating opportunities for language acquisition.

The anxiety characterising the teaching and learning of German seems to make the presence of other languages completely invisible in schools. This is amplified by the lack of a shared variety of identitarian values among the Italian-speaking community, a phenomenon that—according to Laura’s pre-interview—normalises language loss among the youngest generations. While the interviewee indeed has students with parents from other, mostly Eastern European countries, she confirms that their linguistic repertoires never find space in the classroom. She also seems hesitant to suggest ways in which languages other than those of schooling could be leveraged for teaching and learning: her experience so far has in fact been focused on fostering competences in and through Italian, which she has always performed by adopting a monolingual approach. Only in a few cases, at a school she previously taught at, did she use German to facilitate understanding for some German-speaking children. No such effort has been made so far with other varieties, partly because of her lack of proficiency in those very languages, as well as because of the awareness that acquiring the languages of schooling is the main objective of the school. In this light, her experience appears to mirror the tensions between the traditional conceptualisation and enactment of plurilingual education in the region and the more complex reality of an increasing number of classes in South Tyrolean schools. Despite this—or precisely because of this—however, Laura shows interest in participating in COMPASS, an initiative that she describes as “far-reaching” due to its focus on all forms of plurilingualism. She hopes this will alleviate the pressure on German and help the school reappropriate the pleasure of teaching and learning languages for communication: “I believe that any language is a treasure (..) it’s just that perhaps we here have lost this thing (.) this purity”.

3.2. Tracing the Development of Laura’s Stances

In the short text she was asked to write at the end of COMPASS, Laura concisely addressed how the two-year initiative influenced her conceptualisation or implementation of plurilingual education: “I have broadened my perspective beyond the ‘classical trilingualism’ that consists only of German, Italian, and English”. Later on, this answer is elaborated upon during the final individual interview. Here, Laura details the change in perspectives she has experienced over time by acknowledging that, before COMPASS, “it was somewhat taken for granted that yes (.) there were some children who had/who had a different mother tongue at home right? […] And yet (.) I don’t know/we didn’t talk much about their backgrounds or what they spoke at home”. Prior to participating in the project, therefore, information on the students’ linguistic repertoires was not deemed very relevant to didactics. The reflective process the teacher initiated over the course of the two years, instead, made her realise that there were other languages in class that remained silent and unexplored. These included Albanian, Moroccan Arabic, Spanish, Romanian, and a variety of Italian regional dialects that were still spoken in the children’s families. With her German colleague, she had therefore started reconsidering their pedagogical choices by selecting topics and tasks that, while still fitting within their teaching plans, could support the overall aim of creating a linguistically responsive and language-friendly environment. In her view, educational change should provide all students with opportunities to appreciate linguistic diversity and learn from it. Based on this, her students were invited to draw on their diverse linguistic repertoires and share words and short phrases related to the pedagogical contents of Laura’s Italian, mathematics, or history lessons with the rest of the class. They were also stimulated to teach each other such words and phrases, and to search for similarities and differences across languages.

Reconceptualised in this way, plurilingual education serves as a means to sustain the children’s home languages while simultaneously promoting the learning of contents and of the languages of schooling. Anchoring both dimensions is, according to Laura, something “the children benefit from […] because it is something that enriches what they are learning”. It also helps resize and redefine the role of Italian and German by means of a less “frenetic” approach to language learning, one in which a plurality of languages find their own place and support each other. Creating spaces for all languages within an already existing teaching plan further enhances the educational experience: as Laura notes, “I think that this year we have done something enriching for them (.) because it wasn’t something out of the blue you know (.) just floating in the air”. Rather than being part of a sporadic and disconnected project, inclusive and equitable plurilingual education has started to become rooted in daily practice.

As the teacher recalls during the final interview, this process was supported by the children’s families, who were asked to act as language informants by sharing their knowledge and competences with the school. Adopting an inclusive translanguaging approach had an impact both at the level of the educational community and at the individual level. As for the former, it “prompted a kind of wave of: [joy]/I mean (.) because they [the children’s caregivers] felt: considered probably (.) right? Not just (.) well let’s do Italian German English (.) let’s adapt”. This quote is key in illuminating the role of inclusive and equitable plurilingual education in promoting epistemic justice through the active involvement of speakers that, as noted above, are often marginalised by institutional discourse, structures, and practices: rather than simply “adapting” to the existing educational system, the pupils and caregivers in Laura’s experience felt the teachers were genuinely “interested in their culture (.) in their origins”, that is, in their linguistic and knowledge bases. Their agentive repositioning in their capacity as resourceful informants and knowers also seems to have promoted or reinforced “weak social networks” (Meier & Smala, 2022, p. 23), i.e., networks that bring together people from diverse social groups—in this case, the teachers and the children’s families—and that represent one of the key dimensions of social cohesion (for similar findings, see Guo, 2011; Guarda, forthcoming).

At the individual level, the adoption of an inclusive approach engaged Laura in a multilayered reflective process. As she recalls in the final interview, it has helped her better understand her students and their language biographies, which have now become more central to the planning of her pedagogical activities. What also emerged through the promotion of translanguaging was “the connection to one’s roots (.) which is very important”. Legitimising a variety of languages in class prompted the teacher to reflect once again on her difficulty in feeling like she belongs to the place she was born in, mostly due to the lack of a shared dialect among the Italian-speaking community: “This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about it (.) but right now particularly (.) I’ve realised that I miss this sense of belonging (..) I really feel a little void (…) I don’t know how to explain it (.) I feel like a guest”. From a reflection centred around her own experiences and self, Laura projects her struggle with finding a sense of belonging onto her students and their families, particularly those with trajectories of long-distance migration: “so this work has made me reflect a lot right? Therefore (.) I thought of a person who comes from abroad […] so I thought my goodness (.) think about these people who come and completely uproot themselves you know? (.) they are completely uprooted (.) already those coming from Eastern Europe which is quite close (.) not to mention Africa or North Africa (..) but even people coming from Eastern Europe (.) which is right here just around the corner (..) this has made me reflect a lot”.

Laura’s reflection process was not limited to identifying struggles with identity and belonging in a complex and changing multilingual region, but also extended to the acknowledgment of her students’ linguistic challenges and needs. This was centred in particular around pupils whose language they use at home differs from the one promoted at school. One episode from Laura’s final interview illustrates this point well: the teacher recalls how, earlier that morning, one of her students—a girl whose parents had migrated from Morocco—handed in the draft of a short text she wrote which contained several errors. Laura, for the first time in her 30 years of teaching experience, stopped to reflect on the fact that the child uses another language in her family environment. This reflection made her empathise with the young girl; as she shares in the interview, “this experience made me stop and say (.) well (.) today I had this sheet of paper in my hand (.) I was correcting it (.) and she [the student] was looking at me (.) I thought to myself (.) yes, that’s fine (.) she needs to pay more attention (.) but but but Laura be careful (.) who are you talking to huh?”. The experience with COMPASS thus seems to have initiated a process of enhanced awareness, not only of the linguistic and epistemic potential of all students, but also of the potential challenges they face in a context that promotes certain languages over others.

4. Discussion

Laura’s experience exemplifies how one teacher initiated a reflective process that helped her reconceptualise plurilingual education and linguistic diversity in more inclusive and equitable ways. This is particularly significant in the context of South Tyrol, where—as shown above—macro-level educational policy guidelines reinforce hierarchies favouring dominant, institutionalised languages while silencing others. While Laura’s journey has clearly not ended with the conclusion of COMPASS, the data generated in the project indicate that she was able to take some important initial steps away from reproducing dominant homogeneous epistemologies. Among these steps, Laura showed that she could activate critical multilingual awareness (García, 2017), e.g., by shifting from a conceptualisation of South Tyrolean multilingualism as solely comprising the formally recognised languages of the territory, to a more inclusive and critical view of linguistic diversity. Such an awareness stimulated her to slowly move away from a monolingual educational mindset and take on a role in the legitimisation of children’s diverse funds of knowledge.

Her efforts, which she orchestrated with her German colleague, to reconcile the learning of the languages of schooling with the need to give voice to and sustain her students’ marginalised languages are examples of “language activism” (Shohamy, 2006, p. 182), i.e., the activation of that “will and power to act” (Piccardo & North, 2022, p. 30) that challenges hierarchies of value and repositions languages and their speakers in the classroom. Notably, by doing so, Laura is responding to the call to invest in students’ diversity, valorise their competences, and use their languages as a starting point for metalinguistic exploration, as recommended by the local guidelines for Italian schools. Through translanguaging, however, Laura is actually expanding the scopes and ethos of her institutional guidelines—albeit ideally—to make them more contextually appropriate: instead of solely promoting openness to and awareness of the three formally recognised language groups of the region, in fact, she is opening her classroom to a variety of additional language communities, a much more suitable goal in the promotion of active and democratic citizenship. Interestingly, she does so in a variety of subjects, including Italian, mathematics, and history, showing that any subject—and not just English, as seems to transpire from institutional documentation—can be conducive to the appreciation of diverse linguistic repertoires. While, as suggested above, local guidelines for schools remain too vague concerning the inclusion of languages other than those of schooling, it is precisely through actions such as Laura’s that the classroom can start to take shape as a truly “modifying environment” (DIFI, 2015, p. 14). As such, Laura’s first translanguaging initiatives can be described as occasions that create “pockets of resistance” (Erling & Moore, 2021, p. 526) in response to local language issues, and which establish and reinforce participation in social networks across diverse groups, potentially contributing to enhanced social cohesion.

With reference to social cohesion, the findings presented above also confirm that language in education is intertwined with issues of belonging, a key dimension of cohesive processes in complex societies. For Laura, giving voice to her personal struggles to belong in a multilingual society, and projecting these struggles onto other speakers with long-distance trajectories of migration, were both a product of and a catalyst for legitimising non-dominant linguistic resources, both standard varieties and dialects. It also illuminated the struggles that speakers of non-dominant languages experience when learning in a language that is not the one(s) they use at home. This, it is hoped, can sow the seeds for increased advocacy efforts aimed at leveraging plurilingual students’ competences while also meeting their educational needs.

5. Conclusions

As Liyanage and Tao (2020) observed, the presence of speakers from non-dominant-language communities is not naturally conducive to teaching that is grounded in plurilingual pedagogies. An example for this is South Tyrol, a territory where significant tensions are tangible in the intersection between macro-level institutional narratives celebrating plurilingualism and plurilingual education, and the increasingly complex reality of many classrooms where a variety of non-dominant languages are still too often silenced and excluded. Within this field of tension, the present paper has showcased how one primary school teacher started to navigate and challenge the existing structural and ideological limitations by engaging in a process of critical reflection about plurilingual education. Overall, the findings suggest that Laura’s participation in a professional development initiative geared towards the principles of translanguaging prompted her to rethink her pedagogical choices and didactic practices in more linguistically sensitive, equitable, and inclusive ways, i.e., ways that support her students’ learning while at the same time leveraging and valorising their non-dominant languages. The findings also show that Laura’s first translanguaging initiatives repositioned her students and their caregivers as competent knowers in the classroom, and enhanced opportunities to strengthen social networks across diverse social groups.

Laura’s experience is an example of how one teacher can orchestrate a contextually appropriate response to local tensions and imbalances of power between institutionalised and non-institutionalised languages. Clearly, the study reported here also has significant limitations. First, the paper reports the experience of only one teacher, and therefore provides limited access to understanding the phenomenon. However, other publications on COMPASS (e.g., Guarda & Mayr, 2024; Guarda, forthcoming) looked at how whole teams of teachers approached translanguaging in their specific contexts, and thus offer a more comprehensive view of the affordances and complexities of promoting inclusive and equitable plurilingual education. The focus on the experience of one individual may also make it difficult to apply Laura’s approach to other contexts. Clearly, teacher agency is enacted within situated contexts, i.e., specific language ecologies as well as historical, political, and educational structures and constraints. Laura’s trajectory within COMPASS, however, serves as encouragement for educators in the same and other contexts to engage in critical reflection to determine what supportive actions are most relevant for their students within their specific educational environments.

Finally, a further limitation of this study is that it only captured Laura’s experience within a limited time frame—the two years of her participation in COMPASS—and did not look at how her stances towards plurilingual education developed over time after that. This is unfortunate, as one of the main goals of the initiative was to promote a school culture of openness and inclusion in each participating team in the medium and long term. Informal communication with Laura after the end of the project did take place, however, and suggests that further engagement with inclusive and equitable forms of plurilingual education is indeed possible. Yet, to be sustainable, educational change must receive full support from the rest of the teacher team and, perhaps even more importantly, from their school principal. If projects with apparently differing goals are added, teachers may feel overwhelmed and struggle to reconcile the demands and expectations of their professional environment. While language activism is the responsibility of each individual, it is through collective support and engagement that plurilingual education can be truly transformative. A task for further research is therefore exploring the potential of participatory action research on the agency of a variety of stakeholders, not only teachers, but also school principals and educational policymakers, for the promotion of educational change. Sharing the findings of such research initiatives should also help stimulate more critical exchange and discussion among stakeholders, fostering “collective agency” (Tao & Gao, 2021, p. 5) that extends beyond the school classroom into the broader society.