"Translanguaging in ECE, a project designed to create safe environments where children can feel proud of their identity, express their ideas in multilingual and multimodal ways while making meaning of their world.”
Aligning with ECE approaches
Since the beginning of the last century, some passionate educators, such as Maria Montessori, Rudolph Steiner, and Loris Malaguzi, started to consider different ways in which children could be educated, by challenging the ideology of the usual educational system, they designed their own methodologies (the Montessori Method, the Waldorf system and the Reggio Emilia approach), prioritizing the physical, emotional and spiritual dimensions of their students. (Montessori, 1964; Smith, 2016; Alamillo, Yun, & Bennett, 2017).
All of them considered that education should go beyond the individual limits, therefore their approaches fostered a sense of community as well. Moreover, they believed that the teachers’ role was a key factor for students’ success, they knew that the guidance teachers provided inside the classrooms impacted differently in each student and consequently they must be competent enough to support them (Montessori, 1964; Smith, 2016; Alamillo, Yun, & Bennett, 2017). These educational systems continued growing slowly with the pass of time and nowadays we can find many schools following their principles.
The good news is that translanguaging fits perfectly in these types of approaches! While promoting diversity and freedom of expression in multisensory and multimodal ways, it supports young learners in exploring the world through multiple perspectives (Li, 2018). It recognizes that each student has personal interests and talents to communicate with others. And as one of the main interests of these methodologies is to work as a team with parents, involving them in activities and events inside schools, it is easier to bring alive all the home languages of children in the institution!
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In the following chart, I describe ways in which these approaches blend with the translanguaging mindset, making it easier to implement at schools:
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References:
Alamillo, L., Yun, C., & Bennett, L. H. (2017). Translanguaging in a reggio-inspired spanish
dual-language immersion programme. Early Child Development and Care, 187(3-4), 469–486.
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Li, W. (2018) Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30.
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Montessori, M., & George, A. E. (1964). The Montessori method. New York: Schocken Books.
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Seltzer K., Ascenzi-Moreno L., Aponte G.Y. (2020) Translanguaging and Early Childhood Education
in the USA: Insights from the CUNY-NYSIEB Project. In: Panagiotopoulou J., Rosen L., Strzykala J.
(eds) Inclusion, Education and Translanguaging. Inklusion und Bildung in Migrationsgesellschaften.
Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28128-1_3
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Smith, M. K. (2016). ‘Nel Noddings, the ethics of care and education’, The encyclopedia of informal
education.
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"Taking up a translanguaging lens on the language and literacy education of young emergent bilinguals means starting with the idea that these children are gifted language users: creative, highly aware, adept, and flexible." (Seltzer & Ascenzi-Moreno Aponte 2020, p. 36).
