Pluriversal Multilingual Childhoods at Home and School
Based on my personal experiences with my own young grandchildren growing up in bilingual homes, as well as my fifty years’ professional experience educating children bilingually in New York City schools, I reflect on how the children´s languaging is differently performed and perceived at home and at school. Looking closely at the children´s own language production, I consider what educators might do to open spaces in language classrooms to enable children to leverage their own repertoire and develop it, in ways that they do at home. I start with showing two video clips of a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old growing up bilingually at home. After explaining the language allocation policy in one bilingual school, I then describe two school scenes where teachers are opening up translanguaging spaces that are expanding the children’s repertoire. I focus on two teacher-led projects — one in a kindergarten class with 5-year-olds, and one in a fifth-grade class with 10-year-olds. I end by reviewing principles to leverage the children’s own translanguaging to extend their repertoire.