Exploring cross-language collaboration in four different settings in Finland

Beskrivning

Paperpresentation på CARN:s (Collaborative Action Research Network) årliga konferens i Dublin, Irland

Tilläggsbeskrivning

Abstrakt:
In education, language has an important mediating role when it comes to accessing, processing and communicating information and knowledge. In an increasing multilingual and multicultural society, cross-linguistic pedagogy concerns all educators at all levels and thus research is needed that helps highlight how cross-language practices function and how these can be effectively developed and scaffolded to enable all students to successfully participate.
The presentation draws on a three-year action research-oriented project where teachers and researchers collaborated to develop innovative pedagogical methods in cross-language practices and language-aware teaching. In four different settings, ranging from early childhood education to upper secondary school, teacher teams from Swedish- and Finnish medium schools in a bilingual city in Finland co-operated and taught across languages and curriculum.
The presentation explores how issues of safety, language, activity and content are addressed as teachers and researchers in different settings collaboratively plan and reflect on cross-language practices. How do these factors contribute and interact to create a shared space for cross-language communication?
The theoretical framework builds upon cross-linguistic pedagogy which refers to pedagogical practices where languages meet and interact in a dynamic fashion and where students are encouraged and supported to use their their full linguistic repertoire (Ballinger et al., 2017; Cummins, 2021).
Data for the study was collected during three semesters and consists of audio-recorded teacher– researcher discussions from all four settings, amounting to 23 hours of recorded material in total. As data was analysed by means of thematic analysis, we identified three common themes that surfaced across the entire data set (all four contexts), namely 1) safety, 2) language and 3) activity & content.
The results highlight how the three themes contribute and interact to create shared spaces of cross-language interaction and communication. In connection to the themes, potentially enabling and disabling factors will be discussed.

Period	29 okt. 2022
Händelsetitel	CARN Conference 2022: Changing lives through action research
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	Dublin, IrlandVisa på karta
Omfattning	Internationell