In Hungary and in Slovakia, several hundreds of thousands of people consider themselves to be Roma. A significant part of this population uses language resources and practices linked to Romani. In both countries, Romani appears at schools merely as a school subject (Romani as a second language, home language, or foreign language) and even in this way it is seldom included in the curriculum at all. Translanguaging (García 2009) is not only a notion of contemporary sociolinguistics which describes bi- and multilingual ways of speaking, but also a pedagogical approach. By offering a holistic approach to communication (Gorter-Cenoz 2017), translanguaging pedagogy emphasizes the development of the entire and unique linguistic repertoire instead of the development of competences in several languages or varieties. Our project is to build on approaches laid down in translanguaging research in order to study Romani-speaking children’s linguistic practices in primary school settings and to introduce new pedagogical stance and principles in their education (cf. Wei 2014, 2017; García-Kleyn 2016, García et al 2017, García-Wei 2014, Paulsrud et al 2017, Heltai 2019). The project is carried out in cooperation with University College London, University of Jyväskylä as word-leading centres in translanguaging and research on multilingual education, with the Károli Gáspár University in Budapest, Hungary and the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia as regional and local centres of research in the fields of translanguaging and issues of multilingual education, and from two elementary school institutions from highly disadvantaged schooling areas in Hungary and Slovakia. The aim of our project is to explore the possibilities of integrating the children’s Romani language resources in monolingual primary school settings and curricula. Our approach challenges the tradition which associates school with monolingual and standardized ways of speaking, which dominates discourses of education in Hungary and Slovakia to this day. Instead of developing Hungarian or Romani language skills, our approach supports social equality and competitiveness through the development of the whole repertoire. This is achieved by building on home-language practices of the speakers: everyday ways of translanguaging in out-of-school domains become parts of learning activities. This enhances the feelings of intimacy and continuity in the pupils, as a result of which they feel more secure and confident in class. The project’s multi-layered intellectual outputs consist of a video repository and an accompanying e-volume for the teacher training. Deliverables are developed in the cooperation of students in teacher training, researchers with more theoretical approaches and teachers innovating education in highly deprived and disadvantaged schools. The outputs are developed through a close cooperation of these participants in joint staff and learning activities. The video recordings exemplify translanguaging classroom moments. Each recording includes introductory reflections and commentaries by educators, researchers and/or other participants (presentation of context, purpose and practices). The accompanying e-volume analyses the emergence of the video repository and expands the scope of the project by providing an opportunity for the use of the repository and the handbook in varied educational contexts, including non-Roma settings, such as migrant community-schools across Europe. References García, Ofelia – Johnson, Susana Ibarra – Seltzer, Kate 2017. The translanguaging Classroom. Leveraging Students Bilingualism for Learning. Caslon. Philadelphia. García, Ofelia – Kleyn, Tatyana 2016. Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments. Routledge. New York. García, Ofelia – Li Wei 2014. Translanguaging. Language, Bilingualism, and Education. Palgrave Macmillan. London. García, Ofelia 2009. Education, Multilingualism and Translanguaging in the 21. Century. In: Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove et al. (ed.): Social Justice through Multilingual Education. Multilingual Matters, Cromwell. 140-158. Gorter, Durk – Cenoz, Jasone 2017. Language education policy and multilingual assessment. Language and Education 31: 231–248. Heltai, János Imre 2019. Translanguaging instead of standardisation: Writing Romani at school. Applied Linguistics Review, ahead of print. Li, Wei 2014. Translanguaging Knowledge and Identity in Complementary Classrooms for Multilingual Minority Ethnic Children. Classroom Discourse 5 (2), pp. 158-175. Li, Wei. 2018. Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics 39. 9–30. Paulsrud, BethAnne – Rosén, Jenny – Straszer, Boglárka – Wedin, sa 2017. New Perspectives on Translanguaging and Education. Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 108. Multilingual Matters, Bristol
Millions of people in Europe speak Romani as their home language but nowhere is it used as a language of education in schools. Ways of speaking Romani are diverse. Our project aims to preserve this diversity while introducing Romani in schools as one of the languages of learning, but without attempting to standardise it. The most important methodological commitment of the project is that it regards members of all participant groups as co-constructors whose contributions enrich the outcomes with a variety of perspectives. Our commitment to representing various forms of knowledge, including academic and local knowledges, meant that all contributors were involved in the complementation of the video repository and in the writing process of our volume; their writings are part of the main body of the text.
Our project presents translanguaging as an opportunity for speakers of Romani, a language with only sporadic literacy, to enhance their success at school. Romani is the home language of hundreds and thousands of students across Europe. These students are always taught in another language, depending on the country or region where they live. Romani is neither an official language nor the language of public administration or school system anywhere in the world. This situation is in some respects similar to contexts of the global south, where students often speak a local non-standardized language different from the language of the school system. The book and the video repository made during our project is intended to support researchers, postgraduate students, pre- and in-service teachers of Romani speaking students in Europe and, more generally, experts working with students whose home language practices are different from the teachers’ and/or the school curricula.