Openness, Creativity, Collaboration and Narrativity Paving Our Road Towards Critical Multilingual Practices in the Classroom

Abstract

When asked to provide this commentary for Learner Development Journal (LDJ) Issue 5, Engaging with the Multilingual Turn for Learner Development: Practices, Issues, Discourses, and Theorisations, I felt privileged and intrigued. The call focusing on narrative accounts and practice-related reviews matched with my interest and needs as a university language teacher educator and researcher in applied linguistics. To me, in promoting multilingual teacher education and multilingual languages education, we need ideas and support from other members of the teacher community. This is important especially since tackling new paradigms necessitates challenging our habitual agency that often conveniently matches with our experiences and our students’ expectations (Conteh & Meier, 2014; Dewey, 1983; Moate & Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2014). In her review, Gabriella Meier (2017) defnes the multilingual turn as part of a critical movement in education, and calls for students and teachers to refect together to tackle the challenges of translating it into mainstream practice. This issue of the LDJ on multilingualism provides exactly this: refective narrative accounts and practice-related refective reviews of seminal work in multilingualism research, which all have the potential to help us as teachers and researchers to better address this complex phenomenon. Therefore, in my commentary, instead of referring to the content of the individual contributions separately, I aim at a refective analysis of the contributors’ conceptualizations of multilingual practices in the classrooms. In what follows, I will raise four important issues that, to me, seem to pave the way towards more multilingual and critical language education, and are also valid for multilingualism research. These are collaboration, openness, ethical consideration and creativity. At the end of my commentary, I will also refect on the role of narratives in developing multilingual practices around the world.