Where multilingualism and transnational education meet

Abstract

This final paper contextualizes the presented empirical, theoretical, and methodological reflections in a broader European and international perspective. It formulates implications for further research on language and education as well as language policies in transnational contexts.

Where do multilingualism and transnational education meet? By exploring the transnational trajectories of the participants in this research, based on the approaches of multilingualism and transnational education, the authors of this issue highlight the transdisciplinary perspective both as a challenge and as a necessity. With respect to the first, relevant issues that are being addressed include commonalities and points of divergence. Regarding the latter, the emerging questions relate to what each field brings to the discussion from a theoretical and methodological point of view and how we can learn from each other.

Inspired by postcolonial perspectives that seek to understand power relations through the narratives of participants in transnational migration situations, the studies cover contexts as diverse as Austria, Norway, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Cameroon. Most of the articles in this special issue rely on narratives of migration-related experiences, providing a fascinating vantage point at the cross-road of multilingualism, transnational, and memory studies. Study participants reread their experiences related to the migratory journey. As the readers progress, they discover that these narratives of lived and perceived events in the past lead the narrators to renegotiate their identities in light of the interaction in the present (Blommaert, 2009; Radar and Le Pichon, 2019). In the context of these studies, the researcher becomes a benevolent listener allowing this process of reconstruction to occur. This is particularly pertinent in light of previous experiences of negative interactions with contrary effects, that is, blocking the reconstruction through a lack of recognition of lived experiences (Ricoeur, 2000).

In doing so, each of the authors, as attentive and respectful audience to the participants in these studies, becomes an instrument of this mediation, facilitating identity reconstruction and even the development of a sense of belonging to the host country. In other words, the interlocutor plays the role of co-constituent of the narrated identity. Thus, migration narratives reveal the dynamic processes at work when people tell their stories, allowing them to establish themselves as social actors. Many authors from different fields, for example, Ricoeur, mentioned above, or Zarate et al. (2008), have emphasized the crucial role of these approaches’ opening perspectives on reciprocal knowledge (see e.g. Eco, 2011), and a search for social harmonization, or “harmony in diversity” (Zhao, 2011).

Through the accounts of the participants in their research, the contributions collected in the special issue may be considered a manifesto that exposes the political attempts to homogenize and standardize situations and experiences of diversity and plurilingualism, in the face of a diverse and multiform reality. They point out the potentially negative consequences of assimilation measures on socialization processes (Purkarthofer), on linguistic identity (Belibi and Pape), and on identity formation (Thoma and Draxl, Schnitzer), while proposing ways out of the homogenization impasse. It is the experiences of the participants that counteract the political pressure acting through various means of influence (access to work vs forced labor, access to a social life vs social barriers, access to education vs forced (language) education). Their experiences reveal acts of resistance as well as periods of discouragement. As readers delve into these stories, they discover the importance of mother tongues in the lives of these people, and the obstacles they encounter throughout their slow reconstruction. The readers are then led to go beyond the deficit perspective of cultures and languages and to distance themselves from an ethnocentric approach to migration.

Ultimately, it is the power of lived experiences of migration, related to us in personal encounters, that forces us to adjust what we previously perceived as unavoidable. The intersubjectivity of these shared narratives with researchers- listeners causes us to re-evaluate the value of heteroglossic discourses compared to existing monoglossic ideologies. In 2021, Passerini (2020) emphasized the role of intersubjectivity as a “powerful promoter of multidisciplinary connections” (p. 3).

In Latin, the prefix trans refers to beyond and expresses the idea of change, of crossing. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, we can find this prefix in two of the titles in this study: transnational biographies (Thoma and Draxl) and transnational families’ social spaces (Purkarthofer). In both cases, the prefix is added to the word “national” to indicate the importance of looking beyond borders, thereby insisting on the processual nature of the transnationalization phenomenon. Transnational studies focus on people on the move, while their experiences are being presented in a negotiated present between participants, requiring a willingness to meet across different perspectives.

One of the primary spaces for language negotiation is the school space, in particular in the context of language brokering experiences. Nadja Thoma and Anna-Katharina Draxl examine the in-between spaces created by these experiences of newly arrived refugee children in Austria. Amongst others, this work shows how their perceptions of these experiences reveals complex power relations. The combination of these power relations conveyed by an unequal distribution of target language proficiency among participants raises complex ethical issues. It leads the authors to propose the establishment of interpretation services to circumvent conflicting roles, the professionalization of pedagogical and administrative staff in schools and school boards in a manner that intermediation processes can be framed by an awareness of interactional issues and complex power relations.

Judith Purkarthofer offers the reader a further examination of these complex power relations with regards to the interaction between institutional spaces such as schools and family spaces. She shows that institutional spaces overtly or covertly impose changes in language practices on families, revealing the transcendence of these spaces. The author deciphers the intentions, decisions, and relations of belonging of parents and their children through the lived experience of languages, exploring the expectations, linguistic ideologies, and perspectives of its participants. The social space constructed through social practices within schools and families gives rise to constant negotiations between students, teachers, and parents as well as (school) community members. Intermediate spaces or “third spaces” are then constructed because “multilingualism is not what individuals have or do not have, but what the environment, as structured determination and interactional emergence, allows and prohibits them to deploy” (Blommaert et al., 2005: 213).

In Anna Schnitzer’s study, the struggle for social positioning of participants with immigrant backgrounds is characterized by uncertainty and binding restrictions of rights. While the acquisition of the country’s language and corresponding certificates may be well intentioned as opening opportunities for access to work, it can also easily become a crushing obligation. Adults suddenly find themselves in the position of “failing” students: “my father is going to school now.” Their enduring struggle to acquire the country’s language becomes a constant source of pressure, failure, and humiliation. The feelings of powerlessness, disappointment, denial of belonging, and frustration at the heart of family memories highlight the complexity of participants’ experiences and their impact on intergenerational family relationships.

Bringing the discussion full circle, Alexis-Bienvenu Belibi and Elise Pape revisit the history of Cameroon through a postcolonial lens, introducing their work by discussing the role of languages in power negotiations based on the prestige of the languages in question. Their participants share how languages have been used as a powerful weapon of both oppression and resistance, alternating between strengthening and oppressing local languages. They share how researchers have risked their lives for these languages, and how, historically, it was through the schools that the policy of local languages oppression was implemented.

Today, the economic appeal of certain languages threatens the transmission of local languages. However, resistance is now fostered through research and education as new programs are implemented. The authors point out that as a counterpoint to history, the challenge for language educators and researchers in Cameroon today is the high demand for learning these local languages in emigration countries such as France, where families seek to transmit their values through their mother tongues without finding the resources to do so.

A central theme guiding this issue was the active involvement of participants in the research presented, highlighting a perspective of participants as actors in their own lives rather than victims of circumstances. These explorations have allowed the authors to highlight situated linguistic practices, far from formatted political discourses, which evolve in social, geographical, and virtual spaces. Transnationally situated people, often represented as torn between cultures and languages, are denied agency as authors of their own lives. However, through these fluid and shifting stories, the reader can begin to understand the encounter of diverse languages and how research can contribute to the legitimacy of the transnational person by opening up possibilities for open exchange in a spirit of reciprocal knowledge (Le Pichon et al., 2023). The context of the interactions establishes a dynamic border-space that modifies the relationships of domination, becoming a place of identity reappropriation.

Even if the role of shared memory through narratives is not new (see the fields of anthropology, philosophy, medicine, or education), the research collected here once again shows that intersubjectivity allows for the identification and elucidation of educational, linguistic, political, and social practices while combining different fields of knowledge. The research practice of the authors of this volume in collaboration with the participants resonates with the findings of these other fields by showing the links woven between different types of mobility—geographical, linguistic, social, economic, emotional, chosen, forced, individual, or collective.

How can these research findings be put into practice? The articles in this special issue shed new light on the processes of devaluing and valuing languages and cultures, deconstructing or reconstructing identities, powerful contrasts that allow readers to better understand their respective roles in the process of social harmonization. Having potentially experienced significant loss and insecurity, participants in transnational migration situations are allowed to reposition themselves through these self-narratives. In some cases, their discourse offers helpful venues toward concrete institutional changes, which may represent good places to start implementing change.

In conclusion, the authors call for a refocusing of research on the importance of transnational migrants’ funds of knowledge in managing identities in a migratory context from a linguistic, educational, and language policy perspective. It would be urgent to take their results into account in order to curb discriminatory policies under the guise of language courses and integration policies.