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Identity construction of multilingual parents in the context of parental engagement

Identity construction of multilingual parents in the context of parental engagement 1Research contextWith the rise of possibilities for mobility in the globalized world we live in, it is common to find families migrating across geographical borders due to various reasons. Recent social and technological changes have intensified mobility, contact and diversity, bringing new social configurations and changing discourses (Canagarajah 2017). These new more fluid forms of communities established by migrant groups are called “super-diverse” by Vertovec (2007, 1025), a term that intends to be multi-dimensional, considering factors such as origin (ethnicity, language, cultural values etc.), migration channel, legal status, human capital, access to employment, transnationalism, locality and interactions. Thus, pluralism has turned into the main characteristics of super-diverse societies, and language into an important form of human capital (Canagarajah, 2017). However, many societies remain committed to uniformity in many aspects, as it can be seen, for example, in the still strongly monolingual orientation of national educational systems (Paulsrud et al. 2017). In this context, multilingual families whose dominant language(s) is different from the language of instruction within these educational systems need to negotiate their identities in the school spaces in order to engage and support their children in their educational path.The importance of parental involvement in pupils’ educational life has been extensively researched (Hornby and Blackwell 2018; Gonzales and Gabel 2017; Clarck 2013; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2002) and pointed out by official reports (UNESCO 2017 b, 2017a). When it comes to super-diverse societies, family involvement plays an indispensable role in supporting pupils from multilingual backgrounds in their educational path, particularly in non-comprehensive education systemsA non-comprehensive education system is used by Schnell (2014, 2015) as opposed to a comprehensive education system. This means, a system with early selection (tracked lower-secondary education with low degree of upward mobility in education) and only half-day compulsory teaching. (Schnell 2015). However, although multilingual parents do engage with their children’s learning, these parents often experience challenges while trying to get involved with their children’s school (Antony-Newman 2019; Goodall 2013). This is usually caused by language issues, misunderstanding of the school system, misunderstandings of the concept of parental involvement, or other unequal power relations in the school space (Dahlstedt 2009; Gonzales and Gabel 2017; Good 2010; Kim et al. 2018; Turney and Kao 2009; Goodall 2013).This ongoing doctoral research addresses this problem and attempts to contribute for a shift from the dominant deficit point of view of parental involvement, usually present within educational systems, to a more comprehensive understanding of parental engagement. This latter concept is chosen here, as it tends to overcome prevailing ideologies to include perspectives of multilingual and other minority parents. Taking this into consideration, we aim to understand how multilingual parents invest (or perceive the necessity of investing) in practices and negotiate their identities, while seeking for membership in the school community and engaging with their children’s learning. Knowing this will help us also to understand how power relations and dominant ideologies act in the school space, and which role teachers and other school actors can have in empowering or undermining multilingual parents in their process of identity construction (Schörghofer-Queiroz 2020). Thus, besides contributing for further discussions on educational and applied linguistics, this study also intends to contribute to build a more responsive teacher education.Under the umbrella of the term “multilingual” many notions could be considered. A more comprehensive one understands for “multilingual” anyone (to different degrees) who uses different linguistic varieties, registers, styles, accents and other linguistic resources (Horner and Weber 2018), or considers multilingual any subject that is (or was) in contact with more than one conventionally defined language in their everyday life (Kramsch 2009). In this study, we do comply with these views, but for our concrete research purpose, we use the term “multilingual” for parents who migrated to a host country where the dominant language is not the same as their family language(s). In this sense, we also use the term “multilingual” to refer to their children, assuming that the family as a whole live in a culturally and linguistically diverse context and are in contact with different languages and linguistic registers in their everyday life.This paper is part of the AILA Europe special issue in the modality of short paper for Junior Researchers, which aims to give a short overview and briefly describe the status of this ongoing doctoral research. The following sections present succinctly the theoretical framework of this study, the research questions, the research design and methods of data analysis, as well as a brief discussion on expected results.2Theoretical framework2.1Parental engagementParental involvement is a socio-historical multidimensional construct (Antony-Newman 2019). One of its most prominent definitions is the one proposed by Epstein (1995, 2010), which comprises six dimensions: parenting (caring for), communicating (keeping the flow of information with school and family), volunteering, learning at home, decision-making and collaboration with the school community.Nevertheless, Goodall (2013) and Goodall and Montgomery (2014) propose a movement on perspectives from parental involvement (with school) to parental engagement (with learning), seen as a continuum, in which parents are gradually more actively constructed, while deficit views are deconstructed to give space to a more diversified picture of parental strategies and commitment with their children’s learning. According to Goodall and Montgomery (2014), in one extreme of this continuum, parental involvement is considered a concept in which the agency over children’s education predominantly lies with the school. Besides that, in parental involvement the view of the school on this concept is the main one considered. Positioned in the middle of the continuum, the concept of parental involvement with schooling already tends to a shared agency over children’s education by school and families. The focus in this point of the continuum, however, is still on the involvement with the school instead of considering the broad and diversified perspective of parents. In the other side of the continuum, parental engagement proposes a more equitable situation, in which parents have more agency, and both family and schools are seen as equally valuable in children’s learning process. In this sense, parental engagement is not considered anymore as an involvement only with school, but with children’s learning in general. It means, this concept englobes any effort from parents, families and communities towards improving any aspect of learning, even when it is not necessarily connected to school topics, activities or space, shifting from a point of view of deficit to a more inclusive one.This research adopts this concept of parental engagement, as it seeks to contemplate not only the dominant point of view of the school on the topic, but also the complexities of families’ constructions and individual experiences. Important to note is that, although the terms “parents”, “parental” and “family” are used, this research considers in these terms also any caretaker responsible for the child and their learning development2.2Identity constructionIn the field of language learning, Norton and Toohey (2011: 417) define identity as “the way a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future”. In consonance with this point of view, Norton (2013) develops a model to investigate the construction of language learners’ identities looking from the perspective of language learning as an investment. In a development of this investment model, Darvin and Norton (2015), considering the dimensions of identity, ideology and a fluid conception of capital, take into consideration not only microstructures of power in communicative events, but also the systemic patterns of control. This enables the analysis of the conditions from which learners claim their right to speak.In this model (Darvin and Norton 2015), investment is located in the intersection of these three dimensions, through which power flows. According to the authors, while ideologies shape learners’ habitus, it is through their desire that they are able to invest in practices to seek for a change. Learners invest in practices to acquire symbolic capital and benefits, but also articulate capitals that they already have in order to enhance their learning. In this sense, the value of their capital is related to their identity and legitimation in different contexts. However, a capital might lose its symbolic value or be difficult to reach in particular spaces due to dominant ideologies and structures of power (Darvin and Norton 2015: 46–47).For the authors, learners build their identities by the way they are positioned and position themselves and others, while by desire they are able to invest in imagine identities and, thus, gain from or resist these positions. Therefore, looking through the lenses of this model means to consider the agentive capacity of learners to evaluate and negotiate their possibilities, instead of positioning them by default as marginalized or resistant. However, this does not exclude the fact that they can indeed experience subjugation and constrains due to structures of power (Darvin and Norton 2015: 47).3Research questionsBuilt on the concepts of identity and parental engagement discussed here, we understand that multilingual parents, as well as learners, while engaging, are also in a situation in which they invest in practices to seek for membership and their right to speak in the school community in order to guarantee for their children what they understand as educational success. Particularly in the context of a non-comprehensive education system, such as the Austrian one (the context of this research), parental engagement is considered crucial for children’s good performance in school (Schnell 2015, 2014). Based on that, this research seeks to understand how multilingual parents with kindergarten- or school-aged children invest in practices and negotiate their identity as parents, while engaging with their learning; and how they articulate their capitals and seek for acquiring new ones, while dealing with dominant ideological constraints and systemic patterns of control in the educational institutions and other social spaces in their host countries.To be able to investigate these issues, the following research questions were proposed:–How do multilingual parents construct their experience of parental engagement?–How do they feel and position themselves as parents?–How do they position others and themselves while engaging with their children’s learning? How do they gain from and resist these positions?–How do they invest in present and imagined identities for themselves and their children?–How do they manage their possibilities of engaging with their children’s learning?–How do they engage with their children’s learning?–What do they construct as benefits of parental engagement?–Which capitals do they articulate or seek for acquiring?–How do parents invest (or see the necessity of investing) in learning the school dominant language in order to engage (or feel engaged) with their children’s education?–What are the power relations that are involved in multilingual migrant parental engagement?–What are the systemic patterns of control that avoid or enable them to engage and/or construct themselves as engaged?–How prevailing ideologies structure their possibilities of parental engagement?–How the right to speak is distributed in the school space?4Research designTaking into consideration the goals of this study, a methodological triangulation within the qualitative approach was chosen in order to address the research questions and look into the subject matter from emic and etic viewpoints. The empirical research design is based on case studies with three different strands, namely 1) diary studies, 2) participant interviews, and 3) observation of parent-school meetings, which are closely interrelated and sequentially organized.The participants gathered for the study were multilingual adults who migrated to Austria and are parents of kindergarten and/or school-aged children. These parents have Portuguese as their first language and/or use it in the family on a daily basis. The focus on Portuguese speakers was attached to the language and cultural repertoire of the researcher, as the participants had the option to fill in the diaries and make the interviews in their first language. Besides that, as it is a language not considered by the Austrian curricula nor cited as one of the important migrant languages, focusing on this group aimed also to give voice to a minority-silenced group. Having one language in common, however, does not make it a homogeneous group. The participants are from different socio-economical and educational background, and migrated to Austria under different conditions. The results of this research intend to go beyond issues just related to one group of individuals or language, but address challenges common to many multilingual families.For this study, 8 participants were recruited. They were contacted through two different ways: social media (e. g. Facebook groups of Portuguese speaking people in Austria, and groups of Portuguese as a heritage language in Austria); and via email sent by teachers of Portuguese as a heritage language in Austria to their pupils’ families. The reasons for participating in the research was particular for each participant, but all of them pointed out their interest in contributing with their stories and experiences to research that would give them voice and raise the awareness of multilingual families’ issues in the school environment. In addition, as a contribution, the researcher also offered assistance with eventual challenges in the school, if they would feel the necessity of it. One participant dropped out in the course of the research. Two participants are partners and parents of the same children (as indicated in the table below).In the following table, few details on the 7 remaining participants are presented in order to give a short overview of their profile in relation to gender, nationality, languages spoken (according to themselves), time in the host country since they migrated, as well as number of children and their school level. Further details about educational and socio-economic background will be explored in future publications.Table 1details on participants’ profileGenderNationality(ies)Language(s) spoken by the beginning of data collectionNumber of childrenSchool level of children by the beginning of data collectionIn the Austrian school system, Kindergarten is avaiable from the age of 3 years old and obligatory for children from 5 years old. Volksschule is equivalent to a primary school, composed usually by 4 years (1st to 4th grade), but can also have an additional year before its start for preparation of children to enter in school (Vorsschule). After this, the pupils are selected to either go to the Neue Mittelschule (NMS) or the Allgemein bildende höhere Schule (AHS), which are equivalent to a secondary school, and have different models, but are usually composed by at least 5 years (usually 5th to 9th grade).Time in Austria by the beginning of data collectionP1 femaleBrazilianPortuguese, English, French21st grade of Volksschule3,5 yearsP2 femaleBrazilian, LuxemburgishPortuguese, English, Italian2Kindergarten; 4th grade Volksschule1 yearP3 femalePortuguesePortuguese, German, English, French, Spanish1Kindergarten5 + 7 yearsP4 femaleBrazilianPortuguese24th grade Volksschule16 yearsP5 femaleBrazilianPortuguese, English2Kindergarten;6th grade NMS2 yearsP6 maleBrazilianPortuguese, English, German, FrenchP7 femaleBrazilianPortuguese, English2Kindergarten4th grade Volksschule5 monthsFor the period of two years the participants were asked to regularly produce diary entries (Dörnyei 2007) about their experiences with the school of their children and other everyday experiences that they would find crucial for their life in the host country. The entries should contemplate episodes that were critical or meaningful for the participants with focus on feelings, reflections, and descriptions of events in which they were in the position of parents. After 4 to 6 months narrative interviews (Flick 2009) were carried out focusing on episodes and topics that were significant for the research questions, i. e. their experiences when in position of a parent in contact or not with the schools or kindergarten of their children. Participant observations (DeWalt and DeWalt 2011) of parent-school meetings were conducted to complement the findings of the diaries and interviews, adding an extern point of view of situations of practice. In the observations, the focus lies on details related to the organization of the meetings and relationship stablished between parents and school staff, such as distribution of the room, language use, who has mostly the voice, who dominates the speech, how decisions are made, and how gender issues are involved.The diary study and the interviews are proposed in this study in order to address the view of the participants and gather data to look into their experiences and subjective constructions. This is so intended, because the participants’ narratives of episodes in this context allow researchers to explore linguistically how identities of social actors are constructed in the situations of practice, as well as how they understand parental engagement and find strategies to invest in it. The observation study, in its turn, allows the researcher to look closer into relations of power between parents and other school actors, and how they are constructed in these spaces.5Methods of data analysisAs there are data of three different data types, a triangulation for the methods of data analysis was also necessary.Firstly an inventory (Deppermann 2008) with the interviews has been conducted. The inventory has been helpful in providing an overview of the data and the main topics brought up by the participants. Therefore, after selecting passages that raise reflections related to the research questions, the interview excerpts have been transcribed according to GAT 2 (Selting et al. 2011).Considering the focus on identities and power relations in this research, in order to analyze the written data from the diary study and the transcribed texts from interviews, methods of text analysis that have been developed within this scope were chosen (Wodak et al. 1998; Wodak and Meyer 2001). More specifically, the data analysis has been conducted according to steps suggested by the Discourse-Historical Approach to look into discursive features and strategies, i. e. nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization, mitigation and intensification (Reisigl 2017; Reisigl and Wodak 2017, 2015). In relation to the data from observation notes, the approach considered to orient the analysis relies on the process of reviewing, summarizing, cross-checking, looking for patterns, and drawing conclusions in accordance to proposed by DeWalt and DeWalt (2011) and the ethnographic framework (Blommaert and Jie 2010).The data collection for this study has just finished and only rough corpus-driven analysis so far has been conducted in order to identify main topics addressed by the participants. Up to now, it is already possible to observe in participants’ narratives a construction of multilingual school children and families from a deficit point of view and in a disadvantaged position in the school system. In this context, teachers appear as being one of the main actors in either reinforcing this view and perpetuating structures of power, or resisting to it and empowering multilingual families in their identity construction.6Expected outcomesThe expectation for this study is to understand how multilingual parents invest in their children’s learning, by considering how they negotiate their identity in the process of engaging with their children’s education, how they position themselves and others, how they articulate their capitals or invest to acquire new ones, and how they are positioned within a dominant ideology. Diary studies combined with interviews and observations are proposed to analyze qualitatively how participants linguistically construct their world in situations of practice. These understandings will be helpful to point out the social and discursive challenges in the relationship of school and multilingual parents in the context of a non-comprehensive education system (such as the Austrian one), as well as strategies to overcome them. Thus, the outcomes of this research intend to contribute for paving the way for enhancing the possibilities of parental engagement by multilingual migrant parents, while empowering them in their process of constructing their identity as parents and as multilingual subjects. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png European Journal of Applied Linguistics de Gruyter

Identity construction of multilingual parents in the context of parental engagement

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de Gruyter
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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10.1515/eujal-2022-0011
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Abstract

1Research contextWith the rise of possibilities for mobility in the globalized world we live in, it is common to find families migrating across geographical borders due to various reasons. Recent social and technological changes have intensified mobility, contact and diversity, bringing new social configurations and changing discourses (Canagarajah 2017). These new more fluid forms of communities established by migrant groups are called “super-diverse” by Vertovec (2007, 1025), a term that intends to be multi-dimensional, considering factors such as origin (ethnicity, language, cultural values etc.), migration channel, legal status, human capital, access to employment, transnationalism, locality and interactions. Thus, pluralism has turned into the main characteristics of super-diverse societies, and language into an important form of human capital (Canagarajah, 2017). However, many societies remain committed to uniformity in many aspects, as it can be seen, for example, in the still strongly monolingual orientation of national educational systems (Paulsrud et al. 2017). In this context, multilingual families whose dominant language(s) is different from the language of instruction within these educational systems need to negotiate their identities in the school spaces in order to engage and support their children in their educational path.The importance of parental involvement in pupils’ educational life has been extensively researched (Hornby and Blackwell 2018; Gonzales and Gabel 2017; Clarck 2013; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2002) and pointed out by official reports (UNESCO 2017 b, 2017a). When it comes to super-diverse societies, family involvement plays an indispensable role in supporting pupils from multilingual backgrounds in their educational path, particularly in non-comprehensive education systemsA non-comprehensive education system is used by Schnell (2014, 2015) as opposed to a comprehensive education system. This means, a system with early selection (tracked lower-secondary education with low degree of upward mobility in education) and only half-day compulsory teaching. (Schnell 2015). However, although multilingual parents do engage with their children’s learning, these parents often experience challenges while trying to get involved with their children’s school (Antony-Newman 2019; Goodall 2013). This is usually caused by language issues, misunderstanding of the school system, misunderstandings of the concept of parental involvement, or other unequal power relations in the school space (Dahlstedt 2009; Gonzales and Gabel 2017; Good 2010; Kim et al. 2018; Turney and Kao 2009; Goodall 2013).This ongoing doctoral research addresses this problem and attempts to contribute for a shift from the dominant deficit point of view of parental involvement, usually present within educational systems, to a more comprehensive understanding of parental engagement. This latter concept is chosen here, as it tends to overcome prevailing ideologies to include perspectives of multilingual and other minority parents. Taking this into consideration, we aim to understand how multilingual parents invest (or perceive the necessity of investing) in practices and negotiate their identities, while seeking for membership in the school community and engaging with their children’s learning. Knowing this will help us also to understand how power relations and dominant ideologies act in the school space, and which role teachers and other school actors can have in empowering or undermining multilingual parents in their process of identity construction (Schörghofer-Queiroz 2020). Thus, besides contributing for further discussions on educational and applied linguistics, this study also intends to contribute to build a more responsive teacher education.Under the umbrella of the term “multilingual” many notions could be considered. A more comprehensive one understands for “multilingual” anyone (to different degrees) who uses different linguistic varieties, registers, styles, accents and other linguistic resources (Horner and Weber 2018), or considers multilingual any subject that is (or was) in contact with more than one conventionally defined language in their everyday life (Kramsch 2009). In this study, we do comply with these views, but for our concrete research purpose, we use the term “multilingual” for parents who migrated to a host country where the dominant language is not the same as their family language(s). In this sense, we also use the term “multilingual” to refer to their children, assuming that the family as a whole live in a culturally and linguistically diverse context and are in contact with different languages and linguistic registers in their everyday life.This paper is part of the AILA Europe special issue in the modality of short paper for Junior Researchers, which aims to give a short overview and briefly describe the status of this ongoing doctoral research. The following sections present succinctly the theoretical framework of this study, the research questions, the research design and methods of data analysis, as well as a brief discussion on expected results.2Theoretical framework2.1Parental engagementParental involvement is a socio-historical multidimensional construct (Antony-Newman 2019). One of its most prominent definitions is the one proposed by Epstein (1995, 2010), which comprises six dimensions: parenting (caring for), communicating (keeping the flow of information with school and family), volunteering, learning at home, decision-making and collaboration with the school community.Nevertheless, Goodall (2013) and Goodall and Montgomery (2014) propose a movement on perspectives from parental involvement (with school) to parental engagement (with learning), seen as a continuum, in which parents are gradually more actively constructed, while deficit views are deconstructed to give space to a more diversified picture of parental strategies and commitment with their children’s learning. According to Goodall and Montgomery (2014), in one extreme of this continuum, parental involvement is considered a concept in which the agency over children’s education predominantly lies with the school. Besides that, in parental involvement the view of the school on this concept is the main one considered. Positioned in the middle of the continuum, the concept of parental involvement with schooling already tends to a shared agency over children’s education by school and families. The focus in this point of the continuum, however, is still on the involvement with the school instead of considering the broad and diversified perspective of parents. In the other side of the continuum, parental engagement proposes a more equitable situation, in which parents have more agency, and both family and schools are seen as equally valuable in children’s learning process. In this sense, parental engagement is not considered anymore as an involvement only with school, but with children’s learning in general. It means, this concept englobes any effort from parents, families and communities towards improving any aspect of learning, even when it is not necessarily connected to school topics, activities or space, shifting from a point of view of deficit to a more inclusive one.This research adopts this concept of parental engagement, as it seeks to contemplate not only the dominant point of view of the school on the topic, but also the complexities of families’ constructions and individual experiences. Important to note is that, although the terms “parents”, “parental” and “family” are used, this research considers in these terms also any caretaker responsible for the child and their learning development2.2Identity constructionIn the field of language learning, Norton and Toohey (2011: 417) define identity as “the way a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future”. In consonance with this point of view, Norton (2013) develops a model to investigate the construction of language learners’ identities looking from the perspective of language learning as an investment. In a development of this investment model, Darvin and Norton (2015), considering the dimensions of identity, ideology and a fluid conception of capital, take into consideration not only microstructures of power in communicative events, but also the systemic patterns of control. This enables the analysis of the conditions from which learners claim their right to speak.In this model (Darvin and Norton 2015), investment is located in the intersection of these three dimensions, through which power flows. According to the authors, while ideologies shape learners’ habitus, it is through their desire that they are able to invest in practices to seek for a change. Learners invest in practices to acquire symbolic capital and benefits, but also articulate capitals that they already have in order to enhance their learning. In this sense, the value of their capital is related to their identity and legitimation in different contexts. However, a capital might lose its symbolic value or be difficult to reach in particular spaces due to dominant ideologies and structures of power (Darvin and Norton 2015: 46–47).For the authors, learners build their identities by the way they are positioned and position themselves and others, while by desire they are able to invest in imagine identities and, thus, gain from or resist these positions. Therefore, looking through the lenses of this model means to consider the agentive capacity of learners to evaluate and negotiate their possibilities, instead of positioning them by default as marginalized or resistant. However, this does not exclude the fact that they can indeed experience subjugation and constrains due to structures of power (Darvin and Norton 2015: 47).3Research questionsBuilt on the concepts of identity and parental engagement discussed here, we understand that multilingual parents, as well as learners, while engaging, are also in a situation in which they invest in practices to seek for membership and their right to speak in the school community in order to guarantee for their children what they understand as educational success. Particularly in the context of a non-comprehensive education system, such as the Austrian one (the context of this research), parental engagement is considered crucial for children’s good performance in school (Schnell 2015, 2014). Based on that, this research seeks to understand how multilingual parents with kindergarten- or school-aged children invest in practices and negotiate their identity as parents, while engaging with their learning; and how they articulate their capitals and seek for acquiring new ones, while dealing with dominant ideological constraints and systemic patterns of control in the educational institutions and other social spaces in their host countries.To be able to investigate these issues, the following research questions were proposed:–How do multilingual parents construct their experience of parental engagement?–How do they feel and position themselves as parents?–How do they position others and themselves while engaging with their children’s learning? How do they gain from and resist these positions?–How do they invest in present and imagined identities for themselves and their children?–How do they manage their possibilities of engaging with their children’s learning?–How do they engage with their children’s learning?–What do they construct as benefits of parental engagement?–Which capitals do they articulate or seek for acquiring?–How do parents invest (or see the necessity of investing) in learning the school dominant language in order to engage (or feel engaged) with their children’s education?–What are the power relations that are involved in multilingual migrant parental engagement?–What are the systemic patterns of control that avoid or enable them to engage and/or construct themselves as engaged?–How prevailing ideologies structure their possibilities of parental engagement?–How the right to speak is distributed in the school space?4Research designTaking into consideration the goals of this study, a methodological triangulation within the qualitative approach was chosen in order to address the research questions and look into the subject matter from emic and etic viewpoints. The empirical research design is based on case studies with three different strands, namely 1) diary studies, 2) participant interviews, and 3) observation of parent-school meetings, which are closely interrelated and sequentially organized.The participants gathered for the study were multilingual adults who migrated to Austria and are parents of kindergarten and/or school-aged children. These parents have Portuguese as their first language and/or use it in the family on a daily basis. The focus on Portuguese speakers was attached to the language and cultural repertoire of the researcher, as the participants had the option to fill in the diaries and make the interviews in their first language. Besides that, as it is a language not considered by the Austrian curricula nor cited as one of the important migrant languages, focusing on this group aimed also to give voice to a minority-silenced group. Having one language in common, however, does not make it a homogeneous group. The participants are from different socio-economical and educational background, and migrated to Austria under different conditions. The results of this research intend to go beyond issues just related to one group of individuals or language, but address challenges common to many multilingual families.For this study, 8 participants were recruited. They were contacted through two different ways: social media (e. g. Facebook groups of Portuguese speaking people in Austria, and groups of Portuguese as a heritage language in Austria); and via email sent by teachers of Portuguese as a heritage language in Austria to their pupils’ families. The reasons for participating in the research was particular for each participant, but all of them pointed out their interest in contributing with their stories and experiences to research that would give them voice and raise the awareness of multilingual families’ issues in the school environment. In addition, as a contribution, the researcher also offered assistance with eventual challenges in the school, if they would feel the necessity of it. One participant dropped out in the course of the research. Two participants are partners and parents of the same children (as indicated in the table below).In the following table, few details on the 7 remaining participants are presented in order to give a short overview of their profile in relation to gender, nationality, languages spoken (according to themselves), time in the host country since they migrated, as well as number of children and their school level. Further details about educational and socio-economic background will be explored in future publications.Table 1details on participants’ profileGenderNationality(ies)Language(s) spoken by the beginning of data collectionNumber of childrenSchool level of children by the beginning of data collectionIn the Austrian school system, Kindergarten is avaiable from the age of 3 years old and obligatory for children from 5 years old. Volksschule is equivalent to a primary school, composed usually by 4 years (1st to 4th grade), but can also have an additional year before its start for preparation of children to enter in school (Vorsschule). After this, the pupils are selected to either go to the Neue Mittelschule (NMS) or the Allgemein bildende höhere Schule (AHS), which are equivalent to a secondary school, and have different models, but are usually composed by at least 5 years (usually 5th to 9th grade).Time in Austria by the beginning of data collectionP1 femaleBrazilianPortuguese, English, French21st grade of Volksschule3,5 yearsP2 femaleBrazilian, LuxemburgishPortuguese, English, Italian2Kindergarten; 4th grade Volksschule1 yearP3 femalePortuguesePortuguese, German, English, French, Spanish1Kindergarten5 + 7 yearsP4 femaleBrazilianPortuguese24th grade Volksschule16 yearsP5 femaleBrazilianPortuguese, English2Kindergarten;6th grade NMS2 yearsP6 maleBrazilianPortuguese, English, German, FrenchP7 femaleBrazilianPortuguese, English2Kindergarten4th grade Volksschule5 monthsFor the period of two years the participants were asked to regularly produce diary entries (Dörnyei 2007) about their experiences with the school of their children and other everyday experiences that they would find crucial for their life in the host country. The entries should contemplate episodes that were critical or meaningful for the participants with focus on feelings, reflections, and descriptions of events in which they were in the position of parents. After 4 to 6 months narrative interviews (Flick 2009) were carried out focusing on episodes and topics that were significant for the research questions, i. e. their experiences when in position of a parent in contact or not with the schools or kindergarten of their children. Participant observations (DeWalt and DeWalt 2011) of parent-school meetings were conducted to complement the findings of the diaries and interviews, adding an extern point of view of situations of practice. In the observations, the focus lies on details related to the organization of the meetings and relationship stablished between parents and school staff, such as distribution of the room, language use, who has mostly the voice, who dominates the speech, how decisions are made, and how gender issues are involved.The diary study and the interviews are proposed in this study in order to address the view of the participants and gather data to look into their experiences and subjective constructions. This is so intended, because the participants’ narratives of episodes in this context allow researchers to explore linguistically how identities of social actors are constructed in the situations of practice, as well as how they understand parental engagement and find strategies to invest in it. The observation study, in its turn, allows the researcher to look closer into relations of power between parents and other school actors, and how they are constructed in these spaces.5Methods of data analysisAs there are data of three different data types, a triangulation for the methods of data analysis was also necessary.Firstly an inventory (Deppermann 2008) with the interviews has been conducted. The inventory has been helpful in providing an overview of the data and the main topics brought up by the participants. Therefore, after selecting passages that raise reflections related to the research questions, the interview excerpts have been transcribed according to GAT 2 (Selting et al. 2011).Considering the focus on identities and power relations in this research, in order to analyze the written data from the diary study and the transcribed texts from interviews, methods of text analysis that have been developed within this scope were chosen (Wodak et al. 1998; Wodak and Meyer 2001). More specifically, the data analysis has been conducted according to steps suggested by the Discourse-Historical Approach to look into discursive features and strategies, i. e. nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization, mitigation and intensification (Reisigl 2017; Reisigl and Wodak 2017, 2015). In relation to the data from observation notes, the approach considered to orient the analysis relies on the process of reviewing, summarizing, cross-checking, looking for patterns, and drawing conclusions in accordance to proposed by DeWalt and DeWalt (2011) and the ethnographic framework (Blommaert and Jie 2010).The data collection for this study has just finished and only rough corpus-driven analysis so far has been conducted in order to identify main topics addressed by the participants. Up to now, it is already possible to observe in participants’ narratives a construction of multilingual school children and families from a deficit point of view and in a disadvantaged position in the school system. In this context, teachers appear as being one of the main actors in either reinforcing this view and perpetuating structures of power, or resisting to it and empowering multilingual families in their identity construction.6Expected outcomesThe expectation for this study is to understand how multilingual parents invest in their children’s learning, by considering how they negotiate their identity in the process of engaging with their children’s education, how they position themselves and others, how they articulate their capitals or invest to acquire new ones, and how they are positioned within a dominant ideology. Diary studies combined with interviews and observations are proposed to analyze qualitatively how participants linguistically construct their world in situations of practice. These understandings will be helpful to point out the social and discursive challenges in the relationship of school and multilingual parents in the context of a non-comprehensive education system (such as the Austrian one), as well as strategies to overcome them. Thus, the outcomes of this research intend to contribute for paving the way for enhancing the possibilities of parental engagement by multilingual migrant parents, while empowering them in their process of constructing their identity as parents and as multilingual subjects.

Journal

European Journal of Applied Linguistics – de Gruyter

Published: Sep 1, 2022

Keywords: Parental engagement; Parental involvement; Multilingual families; Multilingual subject; Identity; Elternengagement; Elternarbeit; Mehrsprachige Familien; Mehrsprachigkeit; Identität; Engajamento parental; Envolvimento parental na escola; Famílias multilíngues; Sujeito multilíngue; Identidade

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