Exploring, thinking, and learning about languages and literacies with young people in super-diverse Australian classrooms

A changing global cultural and linguistic landscape has prompted educators to suggest that the lived and evolving reality of contemporary classrooms demands a re-examination of current curriculum, pedagogies and assessment practices. Current practices do not place cultural and linguistic flexibility at the center of teaching and learning and therefore hinder rather than facilitate equitable schooling for many young people. This chapter details ethnographic research undertaken in super-diverse (Vertovec, 2007) elementary and middle school classrooms in Western Sydney, one of the most socioeconomically, linguistically and culturally diverse regions in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016). In these classrooms, students and teachers were engaged as co-researchers, investigating the mobility of students and the school communities' cultural, linguistic and communicative resources. Attention is given to how research was undertaken with children as co-researchers and informants (Bucholtz et al., 2014) and the ways teachers and students learned about and with each other. Positioning young people as knowledge producers deepened both teachers' and students' understandings and awareness of students' languages and dialects and the plurilingual practices they used to navigate their multilingual worlds. Teachers and students were partners in learning that went beyond celebrations of cultural and linguistic difference to enhance and reimagine classroom teaching and learning.