Building on and sustaining multilingual children’s cultural and linguistic assets in superdiverse early childhood education

Australia is characteristically a super-diverse nation. This superdiversity includes varieties of cultural, linguistic, social, and religious practices that operate simultaneously within contexts of economic mobility, ethnicity, income, education, and immigration. Young children and their families living in super-diverse post-multicultural societies, such as Australia, encounter new potentialities and multiple experiences of identity negotiation, affirmation, and connection across diverse cultural, linguistic, and social landscapes. Growing up multilingual with diverse cultural practices means that identity is fluid and multiple, often changing and influenced by contemporary global issues. This chapter argues that educators can acknowledge this fluidity through representing children’s cultural, linguistic, and social experiences that are contextual and reflective of their everyday life. In highlighting the significance of superdiversity, frameworks of critical intercultural theory and cultural literacy are used to examine data from two studies, the first of which examines discourses of deficit that are applied to Indigenous families and immigrant multilingual communities’ approach to (dis)ability. The second study examines the impact of culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogies that position multilingual children and their families as capable, and agentic communicators. Conclusions highlight the importance of superdiversity, interculturality and cultural literacy that enable pedagogies to build on and sustain the diverse linguistic and cultural assets of young multilingual children and their families.