Event overview
Teacher Agency in Multilingual Pedagogies: Pedagogical Spaces in the Primary School (Multilingual Matters, 2025) By Thomas Quehl
Teacher Agency in Multilingual Pedagogies: Pedagogical Spaces in the Primary School
(Multilingual Matters, 2025)
By Thomas Quehl
Discussants: Hannah King (London Metropolitan University), Christina Richardson (King’s College London)
Chair: Vally Lytra (Goldsmiths University of London)
Walking down our High Streets we hear a multiplicity of languages. Yet, strangely, the primary school that may be located just around the corner remains a monolingual space, where children’s multilingual voices are confined to school’s unofficial niches.
Normalising pedagogies that acknowledge and engage with children’s multilingualism need to be closely interwoven with teacher agency and everyday classroom practice and pedagogy. Based on an ethnographic inquiry, the book explores what constitutes, hinders and potentially facilitates teacher agency in multilingual pedagogies. It encourages us to listen to educators’ rich professional experiences and children’s multilingual voices and to build on both groups of experts in order to offer alternatives to the English-centric curriculum and schools’ invisible monolingual norm.
Set within a social justice context, normalising children’s multilingualism can contribute to our efforts to decouple everyday multilingualism from imaginaries of the ‘other’ or the ‘migrant’. As part of critical primary school pedagogy, it invites teachers, teacher educators and policymakers to embrace a more holistic view of children that responds to the normalcy of their linguistic experiences.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 12 Nov 2025 | 4:00pm - 5:30pm |
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