AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS
Standard 1: Know students and how they learn
This chapter develops understandings of bi/multilingual children's and families’ experiences of growing up bi/multilingual, identity negotiation and hybrid cultural practices. It highlights the ways in which children's bi/multilingual identities are closely linked to their use of languages in everyday life, within contexts of diversity, difference and marginalisation.
Standard 7: Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community
This chapter supports educators to engage with colleagues and families about the importance of bi/multilingualism and the new potentialities of multiple identity negotiation of cultural and linguistic practices across family, community and educational settings.
At the beginning of the year they would talk a lot more in Spanish/Vietnamese/ Cantonese and now they express themselves in English, they avoid their home language.
(Early childhood educator, questionnaire response)Introduction
In Australian educational contexts, there exist silences around bi/multilingual children's experiences of learning and using a minority language and identity negotiation. These silences mask our understandings of children's decreasing capacity to retain adequate levels of bilingual/multilingual proficiency due to the early exposure to dominant English-only early childhood and primary education. This is also shaped by global, political, social and economic factors in which English as a global language has a major impact on children's emerging identities, which are a ‘work in progress’, constantly negotiated, renegotiated and constructed within social and linguistic contexts.
The data examined in this chapter are based on a study that attempts to disrupt some of these silences by documenting Latin American Australian children's and families’ views about their bi/multilingual experiences, identity negotiation and hybrid cultural practices, often ignored or dismissed by educators. The findings demonstrate ways in which the children's bi/multilingual identity is closely linked to the use of languages in everyday life, within contexts of difference and marginalisation in growing up bi/multilingual. By drawing on conceptual frameworks of cultural studies, I examine concepts of cultural hybridity, diaspora and Bhabha's (1994) ‘third space’ to show how interracial/interethnic families negotiated their use of languages and constructions of identity in a globalised world in which English dominates social institutions, cultural discourses and linguistic practices.