Conference Agenda

While diversity of both people and forms of making meaning in a globally networked world are central to the concept of multiliteracies and the work of the New London Group (1996), questions surrounding how to centre learners’ diverse languages, cultures and identities in formal systems of schooling continue to challenge scholars around the world. Among the promising, evidence-informed approaches that could support children’s multiliteracies learning, while embracing cultural and linguistic plurality, is making (author et al., 2022; Calabrese Barton et al., 2017). Indeed, a renewed interest in making, the profound way that children create artifacts that reflect and enable them to share their identities (Papert, 1980), includes a particular focus on blending hands-on traditions to create with digital tools, including robotics, textile crafts, and digital storytelling as but a few examples (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014; Schad & Jones, 2020).

Fundamentally, who makes, whose ideas, languages and cultures matter is part of both making and meaning making. While the capital-M Maker Movement that emerged in the mid-2000s has been criticized for advancing a narrow view of making focused heavily on engineering and technology, representing white, male, dominant middle-class Makers (Vossoughi, Hooper & Escudé, 2016), there is a growing body of researchers calling to shift towards conceptions of agentive (Clapp et al., 2016), culturally situated making practices (Castek, Hagerman & Woodard, 2019; Vossoughi, Hooper & Escudé, 2016) that are embedded in students’ identities (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014) and meaningful for them and their communities. Indeed, this paper seeks to explore the potential of making multiliteracies in classrooms with a central focus on (re)centring the stories, languages and cultures of youth in schools.

Building on previous research on the development of traditional, disciplinary and digital literacies through making (author, 2019; author, 2022), this paper proposes the application of the concept of ‘multiliteracies’ (New London Group, 1996) to explore the possibilities and tensions of equity-oriented maker education for celebrating children’s cultural and linguistic diversity. To do so, this paper will draw from data collected in two phases of a larger study on maker education. In phase 1, to address some of the gaps in the emerging field of maker education (Rouse & Gillespie Rouse, 2022; Schad & Jones, 2020), a scoping review of the literature was conducted to carefully map existing literature on physical and digital making activities in grades 4-8 classrooms around the globe.

In the ongoing second phase of the study, 41 school teams were invited to participate in a year-long case study exploring maker activities in grades 4-8 classrooms across Canada. As migration-related diversity increases rapidly in schools in Canada, a country where immigrants represent nearly one quarter of the country’s population (Statistic Canada 2022a), we investigate the potential for making to enable all students to see their cultural and linguistic repertoires better reflected through maker multiliteracies. Moreover, this study includes 10 French minority-language schools, a sociolinguistic context that has yet to be explored in the field of maker education. While Canada has both French and English as its official languages, this language is only spoken by between 1-3% of the population in all provinces but Québec and the number of citizens who speak this language is consistently decreasing across the country (Statistics Canada, 2022b). This paper will make connections between findings from the scoping review and particular cases in Canadian schools to explore how educators around the world can leverage making to create meaningful multiliteracies learning opportunities that embrace diversity, promote language revitalization for minority languages, and are connected to students’ languages, identities and lives.

Across European classrooms, there is a shared challenge regarding quality teaching and learning for students who are still learning the language of instruction. In a review of the research on the complexities of preparing quality teachers in general content classrooms to work with multilingual students, Viesca et al. (2019) argued that teacher orientations, context, and pedagogy are major domains for teacher learning and practice for improving quality multilingual/multicultural teaching. This study builds on that conceptualization to focus on orientations that elevate, embrace, and sustain diversity/differences.

Orientations, in our work, is a capacious notion that captures attitudes, ideologies, beliefs, perspectives, etc. Similar to how one can orient themself in a direction (e.g., east, north, etc.), we suggest that in classrooms, teachers can orient themselves in a variety of directions, some that limit the possibilities of diversity being positive. However, teachers can also orient themselves in directions that elevate, embrace and sustain diversity. The direction, or orientation, that decisions, actions, policies, and practices move in impacts the learning community and teaching/learning within it broadly. Therefore, we assert that orientations are at the core of multiliteracies in intercultural and multilingual education and, thus, worthy of empirical investigation.

Research supports our assertion, suggesting that a positive diversity climate at school can improve students’ well-being and life satisfaction (Aldridge et al., 2018). It has also been shown to reduce minoritized youths’ personal experiences of discrimination (Heikamp et al., 2020), making it imperative to create. Specifically, research shows that perceptions of a positive diversity climate buffer against personal experiences of discrimination and thus predict better belonging among minoritized students (Baysu et al, 2016; Heikamp et al., 2020; Lee, 2017). Further, a positive climate, including contact and cooperation among students, multicultural values, and emphasis on a common humanity, is positively associated with the intercultural competence of both immigrant and non‐immigrant background students (Schwarzenthal et al., 2020).

Despite such clear benefits of embracing diversity and creating a positive climate for it in classrooms, many teachers, students, and school communities struggle to create the opportunity for diversity to be positive and productive. In schools, there is often a dominant cultural narrative that difference is deficit (Mitchell, 2013), as identified through research on race, language, social class, ability levels, religious backgrounds, culture, gender, sexuality, and other identity markers that can minoritize and “otherize” students, teachers, and other members of school communities (Spencer et al., 2020). These issues impact students’ perceptions of belonging (Lee, 2017). They can play a role in violent and deeply troubling bullying issues (Siperstein et al., 2022) and impact academic achievement. Further, the pandemic has exacerbated many issues for students and teachers from minoritized groups (Meinck et al., 2022). Poor mental health is dramatically rising (Theberath et al., 2022), and there is an increasing call for attention to social and emotional learning and well-being in schools (Heineke & Vera, 2022).

Therefore, creating a positive diversity climate in schools is necessary, though there are myriad barriers to overcome to develop such a climate for schools across Europe. Yet, for cultural hybridity and multimodality in classrooms to be possible, differences must be grappled with and sustained in positive ways, especially in classrooms committed to innovative, deep learning in inclusive learning environments. This study uses five orientations to examine challenges and possibilities for improving how teachers embrace, elevate, and sustain diversity in their learning environments to benefit their multilingual and multicultural students.

The paper derives from the research project Language policies and practices of diverse immigrant families in Iceland and their implications for education (LPP). The project aims at critically exploring the language policies and practices of diverse immigrant families (Curdt-Christiansen, Schwartz & Vershik, 2013), how these impact their children’s education and the relationships between these families, their heritage language communities, their teachers, and principals.

The aim of this paper is to explore teachers and principals’ opinions and actions to meet everyday challenges in teaching and supporting well-being amongst their students with immigrant background, in compulsory schools in Iceland. Also, to bring forth teachers and principals professional experience of the educational policy in Iceland with regards to implementation and practice in relation to the same student group.

Migration to Iceland has grown rapidly in recent years and the changing demographics have had an impact on society as well as the education system. Immigrants in Iceland were 61,148 on 1 January 2022 or 16.3% of the total population, compared to being less than 8% in 2020. People born in Poland were the largest group of immigrants on 1 January 2022 as in the previous years, 20,896 or 34.2% of the total immigrant population (Statistics Iceland). Preschools and compulsory schools have developed reception plans and some teaching strategies to welcome children of immigrant origin. The need for support from educational authorities has been different between schools and communities. In general, the challenges have been very diverse, and so is the response and support schools have got.

The theoretical framework here builds on new policy documents regarding education in Iceland, set to act upon changes and challenges in Icelandic society and guide the development within the school system in near future. These include New education strategy 2030 approved by the parliament in March 2021, and its First action plan 2021-2024 published in September same year. Icelandic school staff, teachers and principals, have expressed concern for students with immigrant background (Jónsdóttir, 2021). Their worries are supported by for example results in PISA, as children with immigrant background in Iceland perform less than children with non-immigrant background (Education for all in Iceland: External Audit of the Icelandic System for Inclusive Education, 2017).