In what ways does project-based thinking enrich the relationship between teaching and learning for teachers and children? ? When you were a young child, do you recall bei

Project-Based Community Language Learning: Three Narratives of Multilingual Story-telling in Early Childhood Education

Heather Lotherington, Michelle Holland, Shiva Sotoudeh, Mike Zentena

The Canadian Modern Language Review / La revue canadienne des langues vivantes, Volume 65, Number 1, September/septembre 2008, pp. 125-145 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/253982

FOCUS ON THE CLASSROOM / PLEINS FEUX SUR LA CLASSE

Project-Based Community Language Learning: Three Narratives of Multilingual Story-telling in Early Childhood Education

Heather Lotherington Michelle Holland Shiva Sotoudeh Mike Zentena

Abstract: At Joyce Public School (JPS) in the Greater Toronto Area, we are engaged in ongoing collaborative action research to develop pedagogical approaches to emergent literacies that engage multilingual, multicultural, and multimodal perspectives in complex interplay. Our research is grounded in the challenges children experience in acquiring literacy across home, school, community, and societal contexts in a culturally and linguistically diverse urban setting, given limited curricular opportunities for involving multiple languages in literacy education. Our research involves collaboratively designed classroom-based narrative projects that productively entwine multilingualism, English language discovery, and digital technologies in elementary literacy instruction. This article provides first-person perspec- tives on and an analytical discussion of the emerging pedagogies of three primary-grade teachers involved in our collaborative multiliteracies research who successfully engage multilingualism in English language and literacy education.

Keywords: multiliteracies, early childhood education, multilingual education, narratives, elementary education

Résumé : À l’école publique Joyce, dans la région métropolitaine de Toronto, nous menons actuellement une recherche-action collaborative visant le développement d’approches pédagogiques pour les littératies émergentes qui mettent en jeu des perspectives multilingues, multiculturelles et multi- modales dans des interactions complexes. Notre recherche est fondée sur les défis que pose pour les enfants l’acquisition de la littératie dans le contexte familial, scolaire, communautaire et sociétal, lorsque cette acquisition doit se faire dans un cadre urbain très varié sur les plans culturel et linguistique, et

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compte tenu du peu d’opportunités que présente le curriculum pour inclure multiples langues dans l’enseignement de la littératie. Notre recherche porte sur des projets de rédaction collaboratifs en salle de classe qui ont allié, de manière très productive, le plurilinguisme, la découverte de la langue anglaise et les technologies de l’information, dans l’enseignement de la littératie au niveau primaire. Cet article présente un récit à la première personne et une analyse des pédagogies émergentes de trois enseignants d’école élémentaire, dans notre recherche collaborative sur les multilittératies, qui ont réussi à intégrer le plurilinguisme à l’enseignement de la langue anglaise et de la littératie.

Mots clés : multilittératies, éducation de la petite enfance, éducation plurilingue, récits, éducation primaire

When children arrive at Joyce Public School (JPS) in northwest Toronto, they bring with them an array of language and cultural under- standings that span the globe. Upon entry to formal education, however, the language choices afforded these children are reduced to (1) English, the language of power and authority in Toronto, and of texts and tests and teachers’ expectations; (2) French, a second official language signifying national identity and offering enriched employ- ment opportunities; and (3) selected ‘international’ languages taught as continuing education in after-school programs. International language teachers in Ontario serve multilevel, multi-age groups, normally outside of regular school hours, and so are not able to link their lessons to the general curriculum or to ongoing work in the classroom.

At JPS, two international languages are taught in after-school classes: Cantonese and Vietnamese. French is taught during school hours. The default language of explanation in second and interna- tional language classes is English, which is the predominant language of education during the day and on the playground. However, neither English nor French is the language of pre-school socialization of the majority of children in Michelle Holland’s junior/senior kindergarten class, Mike Zentena’s junior/senior kindergarten class, or Shiva Sotoudeh’s Grade 1 class. These classes, like most in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), are linguistically heterogeneous.

Our research collective at JPS includes both university researchers and teachers working together to build multiliteracies pedagogies in elementary literacy education. This pedagogical exploration is inspired by the New London Group’s social critique of language and literacy education, subsumed under the rubric ‘multiliteracies’ (NLG, 1996). The methodology we use is coordinated action research: teachers con- sult theory and collaborate with researchers to explore, develop, pilot,

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refine, and share pedagogies that introduce young learners to literacy – which, in our understanding, includes interpreting, contributing to, and engaging in our multimodally encoded world – in a way that welcomes multiple languages and contemporary digital technologies (Lotherington, 2007, 2008). The particular pedagogical and curricular goals that engage participating teachers are welcomed into the creative and developmental process of the multiliteracies project.

This article provides narrative accounts by three teachers (Shiva, Michelle, and Mike) of their development of multilingual stories with young children who are at varying stages of acquiring English language and literacy. Each teacher describes the practices and technologies she or he has used in class projects to incorporate multilingualism into literacy teaching. The teacher narratives are followed by interpretive comments by the researcher (Heather Lotherington) and a theoretical discussion.

Toward a project-based model of language and literacy education

This is a global environment which is deeply multilingual, deeply about

crossing discourses, deeply about dealing with difference. All that is

happening in this third space is about working in a way where you can

communicate across language, cultural, human differences. Arguably

schools weren’t very well engaged with the world ever, but this ups

the ante in terms of the kinds of engagement and the kinds of human

beings, sensibilities and dispositions you have to build in a classroom.

(Cope, Kalantzis, & Lankshear, 2005, p. 202)

Our multiliteracies research is complex and multifaceted. A major aim is to develop a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) for multilingual literacies in a school system that, at present, does not accommodate students’ prior language learning in literacy education.

According to principles of ‘additive bilingualism’ (Lambert, 1974), and ‘additive multilingualism’ (Cenoz & Genesee, 1998), second and additional languages can be added to a child’s linguistic repertoire when these languages are valued by school and society. As Cummins has shown (1979, 1981, 1991, 2000), children learn a second language (L2) more effectively in situations where their first language (L1) is supported. For minority-language children in heterogeneous class- rooms in Ontario, however, this support is neither recognized nor realized in the public school curriculum, where only English and French are timetabled.1

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Cummins’ work champions the micro- and macro-social benefits of maintaining familial bilingualism in addition to its cognitive benefits: ‘not only does maintenance of L1 help students to commu- nicate with parents and grandparents in their families, and increase the collective competence of the entire society, it enhances the intellectual and academic resources of individual bilingual students’ (2000, p. 38). As Wong Fillmore (1991, 2000) illustrates, the social price of not maintaining children’s home languages can result in a tragic situation of L2 gain at school translating into L1 loss in the home.

Scholars in countries around the globe have advocated the supportive involvement of minority languages in education (Clyne, Isaakidis, Liem, & Rossi Hunt, 2004; Gutiérrez, 2001; Martin-Jones & Saxena, 2003; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2002). In the context of the GTA, numerous researchers have described ways of bringing children’s home languages into the classroom for productive literacy learning (Coelho, 2004; Cummins, 2006; Cummins et al., 2005; Goldstein, 1997, 2003; Lotherington, 2007, 2008; Schecter & Cummins, 2003; Stagg Peterson & Heywood, 2007). These projects provide models of possibility for incorporating minority languages in the culturally diverse classroom.

No classroom teacher, no matter how polyglot, could be expected to converse in every child’s language in the typically linguistically heterogeneous classes of the GTA. Therefore, our research proposes a project-based model to provide access to multilingual exposure and learning. This model acknowledges and works with the linguistic heterogeneity of the urban classroom, where the inclusion of a third language in teaching would not adequately respond to all students’ needs.

Our understanding is that children in contemporary urban societies bring to school multilingual backgrounds that are not only important to their learning and sociocultural identity but also represent valuable resources in our globalized economy. At present, these rich language resources are not well respected in the curriculum. Rather than being connected to language and literacy learning in the majority languages in the classroom, children’s multilingual backgrounds are left to wither, submerged by the economic and political needs for English and French. Our research project strives to include the linguistic and cultural capital of the entire school community in curricular learning and to connect children’s varied language socialization as a facilitating and humanizing resource. In a heterogeneous classroom, this is a challenging aim.

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Narrative learning

Narrative comprehension is a general feature of young children’s thinking

that is critical for cognitive development and early literacy. (Paris & Paris,

2007, p. 34)

The importance of narrative learning as a scaffolding experience in early childhood education (ECE) is undisputed. Paris and Paris (2007) explain that narrative learning is an embedded, authentic, and consequential experience in young children’s cognitive, social, and linguistic development. Bruner (2004) states that the stories children learn to tell scaffold perceptual experience and organize memory.

JPS principal, Cheryl Paige, is involved integrally as a collaborator in the research grant. Her particular stake in this project has funda- mentally shaped one of the cornerstones of our research: teachers’ multiliteracies action research projects are based on narrative learning, which Cortazzi and Jin (2007) define as ‘learning from, about and through stories, and learning through reflecting on the experience of narrating and the narrating of experience’ (p. 645). Our project uses traditional children’s literature as a fulcrum for children’s story retellings involving community language resources, pop-culture influences, and digital technologies. Below, three teachers describe the ways in which they have introduced community languages into their class narrative projects.

Shiva’s narrative: The Three Little Pigs (Grade 1)

I chose The Three Little Pigs for my Grade 1 class because it ties in very well with curricular aims, seamlessly linking art, math, language,

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social studies, science, and technology. Some of the children did not know the story, as it was not usually told in their cultures. We had about 10 students in Grade 1 who were designated English as a second language (ESL), out of a class of 23; several of them were really at the kindergarten level.

I promote children’s home languages in my classroom every day. For example, when I take attendance, I ask them to say ‘hello’ in their home language instead of saying ‘present’ or ‘here’ in English, so we are learning the different languages we speak in our class and the students are aware that we are living in a multicultural and multilingual society. We now have 10 different languages that we can say ‘hello’ and count in.

S���� had told us in class, ‘I am from Africa and my language is Yoruba.’ When I asked if she knew how to tell us the story of The Three Little Pigs in her language, she said, ‘I’m going to get help from my mother.’ Her mother was happy to become involved with the children in school life. This was a wonderful connection because, as an educated parent, she wanted to know more about education here in Canada.

Some of the children worked from their home language to English. Parents were highly supportive: a boy used Japanese, helped by his mother; a girl began in Cantonese and eventually learned to tell the story in English. She recited the whole story in Cantonese for us in the classroom. I did a Farsi version. I even thought about involving the high school students I teach in international language classes to do the translation as an exercise.

We have retold the story in several different ways over a couple of years now. The story becomes the theme tying together learning across the curriculum. It also gives us a chance to talk about language and cultural differences. For instance, the children always think the three little pigs are boys, because they are strong and daring. So we made a fourth little pig who was their little sister, and she was strong and gave them guidance, and this was amazing in my class because in some of their cultures, girls are not seen as strong. So The Three Little Pigs also gave us the chance to talk about sexism and to look at prejudice.

The first year, we built the pigs’ three houses with different materials, using straw, popsicle sticks and Lego blocks. We talked about characters (see Figure 1a) and settings, and the children learned how to structure a story. I made a storyboard of The Three Little Pigs that they could follow. We brainstormed different settings and characters, and I talked about adjectives with them. The children

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chose their own characters and wrote the story modelled after the original, building the story sequences and then storyboarding their own versions using the template.

This year we tried an iMovie.2 The children re-created their story in plasticine in boxes divided into sequences of action, following the storyboard template (see Figure 1b). I photographed each segment and programmed the photo sequences in iMovie. Then, to narrate their movie versions, the children read their stories in sequence to the pictures they had created. We had some difficulties synchronizing multiple languages with the pictures,3 but we are working on this for the future.

Like all teachers, I am always looking for what motivates my students. We have used different methods to produce a finished story, including Kid Pix4 and Hyperstudio;5 we also made a video with a soundtrack in the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) lab, and an iMovie claymation. The children loved the different language versions and the different cultural versions that they all created. They were very motivated, always asking me, ‘When are we going to work on our stories?’

I think one of the beauties of this project is that we can bring everybody together in this community – students, parents, and

FIGURE1 (A) Learning characterization (B) Claymation storyboard

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teachers – when the children can bring in their cultures. The project is about connection; through this work children are connecting to their families, culture, prior knowledge, personal experiences, and life back home. The project benefits parents, too, because they have lots of knowledge but they don’t know how to mobilize it in this society. Inviting their home culture and language into the classroom and involving them in this story-writing project makes parents feel good about themselves.

Heather’s interpretation: Linking home and school languages

Shiva uses many identity-affirming practices in her classroom, such as asking the children to answer to roll call in their home languages and inviting parents to share their home-language versions of children’s stories during the story-construction process (see Cummins, 2006). These actions foster respect for and exposure to multilingualism.

Like most ECE teachers, Shiva uses multimodal expression imaginatively, which enhances story comprehension (Cortazzi & Jin, 2007). Her Three Little Pigs narrative projects incorporate a plethora of multimodal story-telling devices, within which home language use is one of many ways of telling a story. Shiva’s incorporation of multilingualism and cultural learning (e.g., creating a little sister pig to counter the sexism of characterizing the three little pigs as male) is threaded into the fabric of the project, as are science and art goals. Her approach is holistic.

The children produced claymation versions of their person- alized stories, using a combination of digital photography and iMovie software, yielding a sophisticated, contemporary product. The creation of personalized multilingual versions met a stumbling block at the programming stage, where the skills needed to syn- chronize multilingual retellings with the digital storyboard required literacy and programming skills beyond those of children in Grade 1, just learning to read in any language, and multilingual competencies beyond the ken of any individual teacher. However, this problem provided the research collective with a trouble- shooting goal that generated beneficial exploration, and in Michelle’s class, a method of synchronizing different voices to frame changes in the storyboard was worked out as an instructive solution.

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Michelle’s narrative: The Lion and the Mouse (kindergarten)

At JPS, the majority of children who come into kindergarten do not speak English. During my first year of participation in this project, I was fascinated by the number of different languages the children spoke. Some of these languages I had never heard of. I compiled a list of home languages, other than English, that totalled 16, none of which were French, Italian, or German, the second and international languages usually taught in Toronto.

I chose The Lion and the Mouse, an Aesop fable, as our scaffolding narrative. The story was short, accommodating the limited attention spans of four- and five-year-olds, and several versions were available. Importantly, this fable has an easily identifiable beginning, middle, and end, and it has only three characters. The students were able to understand the central conflict in the story, and they liked the happy ending.

The goal in kindergarten is to teach the students to tell a story. The children had to become familiar with the story and then embed themselves in it. I read several different versions of the fable to them, comparing similarities and differences. The children were encouraged to chime in when they recognized parts of the story (e.g., making the lion’s big roar).

Students then performed the parts of the lion, the mouse, and the hunter with the big net for the class. A dramatic play centre was set up so that they could act out the story during activity periods. The children often became discouraged when they couldn’t remember the words used in the text of the fable, and it was difficult to convince them that it was fine to use their own words to tell the story. We made little stick puppets of the characters so that the children could dialogue

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the story between the lion and the mouse more easily, since their focus was on the puppets in their hands rather than on the text of the story. As they became more familiar with the story, many were able to do very simple retellings with their puppets, using their own words supplemented by vocabulary learned from the story.

We then moved on to shared writing. The class was divided into small teacher-determined mixed groups, each of which included both junior and senior kindergarten students and children with varying levels of English. The groups worked together to choose characters that would be used in their story; most groups chose characters of opposite sizes, as in the original story. Once the characters were chosen, the students were taken out of the classroom, one group at a time, to create their shared stories with me. It was wonderful to see how eager they were to be the story-tellers. Taking turns, the students in each group began to weave tales about the characters that they had chosen, as I wrote down their ideas. With small groups of four to five, each student felt that he or she was an important contributing member, even though some contributions were very limited. In order to keep the students on track, I provided simple prompts (e.g., ‘What happened next? What did the character do next?’), which allowed them to work their way through the story. Each group was eager to share their finished story with the class.

Students created their stories in Kid Pix, which met curriculum expectations for information and communications technology (ICT) while facilitating a beautifully artistic presentation of their retold stories. For several months the students explored the tools of Kid Pix, working in pairs at the computers, one providing the other with the expertise and advice needed to create their pictures and to solve any problems they encountered.

Each story had four pictures: a title page, which included the story title, the names of the authors and illustrators, and a picture of the characters from their story, and three pages with images representing the beginning, middle, and end of the story. Each group’s series of four pictures was published using either a Kid Pix slide show, with audio attachments of the students telling their story, or a PowerPoint slide show with accompanying text boxes. I typed in the text from my notes of their shared writing.

The students were extremely proud of their accomplishments. We asked the educational assistants (EAs) in the classroom (each of whom spoke a second language) and parents who spoke languages other than English to help us translate the children’s The Lion and the Mouse stories. In all, three different languages were used in telling the

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stories that the students created: Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Russian (see Figure 2 for a page in Tagalog). These translations gave the contributors a sense of pride and emphasized the value of the languages spoken in our community.

To celebrate the accomplishments of the students and the culmi- nation of the project for the year, parents were shown the students’ slide-show stories at the school’s kindergarten graduation ceremony.

Heather’s interpretation: Learning language awareness and respect

Michelle provides collaborative support for children in her class who are just developing oral as well as literate English competencies by scaffolding their story-telling in mixed-ability groups. She enhances opportunities for children’s participation in story-telling by involving onomatopoeic sounds that are independent of vocabulary demands (e.g., the lion roaring). Giving children the freedom to create their own characters renders the story relevant to their lives and reinforces connections for language learning (Cortazzi & Jin, 2007).

Michelle engages community support, including class EAs and par- ents, to translate the children’s work into three languages: Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Russian. She explains that children understand and respect that people speak many different languages and that, although not everyone can speak each of these languages, they are all important.

While thinking about the Russian translation for one little boy’s story, our research collective sourced out alternative digital possibi- lities, discovering that if community resources are not available for

FIGURE 2 The Dinosaur and the SnakeinTagalog

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language translation and support, we can easily link to a global translation community using Internet connections and simple word- processing software (Lotherington, 2007).

Michelle’s multilingual slide shows were a response to Shiva’s technical difficulties in programming multiple languages: she taught her EAs the shifts in the timed slides of the four-page story structures her children were creating (i.e., title page, beginning, middle, and end) so that they could co-program the story in a combination of languages. This required close translation work in telling the story that benefits and honours the competencies of the EAs as valuable classroom resources.

Mike’s narrative: The Little Red Hen (kindergarten)

At the school where I taught before coming to JPS, there was a big focus on equity. We had a lot of workshops that made me realize that respecting language differences should be part of the curriculum rather than something we do as a special project, especially at this grade level, where children typically giggle or point and laugh when they hear another language. We decided to count the children every day in roll call using their home languages. The giggling soon stopped, and the children started coming to class exclaiming, ‘I learned how to count in my language!’

We chose The Little Red Hen for our multiliteracies project, which is a procedural story. The story is highly repetitive; it is a dialogue. We approached it as a hands-on project. We started in English, with an interactive felt board where the children could pin up the dog, the duckling, and the pig, but as we went along our board evolved into

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a learning wall of different languages, and we built generatively on the ideas (see Figure 3). There are two multilingual full-time EAs in the room who speak Cantonese and Vietnamese, and each of them taught and wrote The Little Red Hen in her language. Soon our interactive felt board became a multilingual story. The particular languages the EAs knew also made us aware of children whose languages we knew little about. These children were also invited to come up to the front of the classroom and count to 10 in their language; this teaches them that their language is important, too.

There were great follow-ups to the story that invited parents’ participation in their children’s learning, such as coming in to cook the foods the little red hen prepares in the story. Our multilingual storyboard literally invited parents into the classroom, whereas before they would pick up their children from a distance. I was excited by how this display of community languages welcomed parents into the classroom.

I used very simple technologies – a digital camera and a camcorder – to document in-class oral and written language use. With these technologies, I captured the EAs introducing the different languages to the children, the children recognizing and learning the languages, and the enthusiasm they showed for multilingual story-telling.

Visually, it is important for the children at this age to see different languages. It was wonderful to have our story written in Cantonese, which looks so different, and to learn that the story is still the same. One little girl, who came in speaking only Cantonese,

FIGURE 3 The Little Red Henas a multilingualwordwall

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absolutely blossomed. She learned the story in Cantonese at home with her mother, then brought it back to the classroom, and she could follow along in the other languages.

The children had fun with languages; they taught me some Spanish that they learned from watching Dora the Explorer6 on television. Some of them even started to make connections, such as &#

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