Is language a barrier for multilingual parental engagement?: An investigation of multilingual parents’ identity construction in educational contexts

Abstract

Parental engagement is a multidimensional construct, which is often related to pupils' good school performance. When it comes to super-diverse contexts in non-comprehensive education systems, research shows that, particularly for multilingual families, the involvement of parents in schools plays an indispensable role (Schnell, 2015). However, this can be a challenge for multilingual parents with migrant background due to prevailing structures of power and dominant ideologies in the school space (e.g. Turney & Kao, 2009), which reinforce inequalities in the school system. Considering identity from a poststructuralist perspective (Darvin & Norton, 2015) and an inclusive approach to parental engagement (Goodall, 2018), this ongoing dissertation intends to understand how multilingual parents construct their identities while seeking to engage with their children’s learning in the host society, and how capital and ideology intersect in this process. Case studies with 7 participants were carried out, in which data from diary studies and episodic-narrative interviews with parents were collected, and observations of school-parent meetings were conducted. The data has been analyzed from the lenses of the Critical Discourse Analysis (Reisigl & Wodak, 2017). A glimpse into preliminary results suggest that while language does appear as an important capital for the construction of multilingual parents’ identity in the educational context, monolingual bias and deficit models circulating in the institution seem rather to have a bigger impact in how parents negotiate their possibilities of engagement in their children’s learning than a so-called language barrier.