On 29th October, 10.30-12.30 we (Julia Sexton and Ester Ehiyazaryan-White) are offering a free interactive in-person workshop suitable for families with children in the 4-11 age range in which they will design and make their own multilingual comic strip. The workshop will include pre teaching on how to create a story board and develop characters for the comic.
The event is part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science and funded by Sheffield Hallam University. Through making and creative activities we situate learning in a storytelling context, enabling children to express and reflect on evolving and hybrid identities. Understanding these practices better and building on them in contexts beyond the home seems imperative to understanding the barriers and enablers to a racially just and inclusive society.
What’s it about?
Globally, the mixing of languages and cultures is becoming increasingly prevalent as multicultural and superdiverse societies evolve. Our current and future working lives are influenced by increasing international mobility and require linguistic flexibility and cultural awareness.
Such work on shaping linguistic flexibility and cultural awareness begins in early childhood. However, for plurilingual families, supporting home language learning and fostering cultural knowledge is often an uphill struggle as institutional education policies rarely emphasise multilingualism as a strength.
In turn, this results in marginalising valuable multilingual home literacy practices and silencing multilingual forms of expression. Research has shown that multilingual parents often use arts based, making and creative activities to introduce home languages and cultural knowledge to their children.
Such making and creativity situates learning in a storytelling context, enabling children to express and reflect on evolving and hybrid identities. Understanding these practices better and building on them in contexts beyond the home seems imperative to understanding the barriers and enablers to a racially just and inclusive society.
This workshop builds on research of translanguaging and multimodality in early childhood classrooms, part of my early careers fellowship at Sheffield Hallam University. As part of making this research more open and public facing, we aim to engage multilingual families from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in the practices underpinned by translanguaging theory and multimodality and developed in early childhood classroom contexts as part of the project.
Facilitated by Ester Ehiyazaryan-White and Julia Sexton, Senior Lecturers in Childhood Studies at Sheffield Hallam University