Stances toward education in multilingual contexts
Stances Toward Education in Multilingual Contexts (STEMCo) transforms findings from ethnographic engagement with multilingual school communities into research-driven and policy-informed teacher-education materials. Ten months of ethnographic and participatory action research in middle schools—one in Bolzano, a historically multilingual context, and the other in Verona, a newly multilingual context—will support data-driven teacher reflection on classroom practices (WP1). These data are then analyzed in light of communicative repertoires, multilingualism, pedagogy, and language ideologies and findings are disseminated to academic stakeholders (WP2). These findings are then exploited for the professional development of teachers throughout Europe via a sustainable, Open Access online course (WP3). The overall aim of STEMCo is to develop data-driven and research-based approaches, and associated training materials, for accommodating community multilingualism and individual plurilingualism in school communities throughout Europe. The objectives of WP3 will be bolstered by a secondment at the Italian National Institute for Documentation, Innovation, and Educational Research (INDIRE), a short visit to the New York Initiative for Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB), and another to the European Centre for Modern Languages. My collaboration with Eurac’s Institute of Applied Linguistics, and my supervisors Lorenzo Zanasi and Andrea Abel, will augment my interdisciplinary training with methods and theories in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, language pedagogy, and Italian education policies, as well as professional skills related to project management, data management and analysis, and community engagement. This project will help me reach professional maturity by growing my interdisciplinary experience, international networks, and intersectoral collaborations in order to gain a tenure-track position oriented to teacher-education and community multilingualism.