Project-Based Community Language Learning: Three Narratives of Multilingual Story-telling in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Abstract: At Joyce Public School (JPS) in the Greater Toronto Area, we are engaged in ongoing collaborative action research to develop pedagogical approaches to emergent literacies that engage multilingual, multicultural, and multimodal perspectives in complex interplay. Our research is grounded in the challenges children experience in acquiring literacy across home, school, community, and societal contexts in a culturally and linguistically diverse urban setting, given limited curricular opportunities for involving multiple languages in literacy education. Our research involves collaboratively designed classroom-based narrative projects that productively entwine multilingualism, English language discovery, and digital technologies in elementary literacy instruction. This article provides first-person perspectives on and an analytical discussion of the emerging pedagogies of three primary-grade teachers involved in our collaborative multiliteracies research who successfully engage multilingualism in English language and literacy education.