A worksheet, a whiteboard, a teacher-learner: leveraging materials and colonial language frames for multimodal indigenous language learning

Engman explores the relationships between teacher-learners, multilingualism, classroom materials, and print literacy in an Ojibwe kindergarden class in the Great Lakes Region. She is especially interested in how English can be used to cultivate Ojibwe literacy in an English-majority environment. She comments on the challenges of providing high quality immersive language education within an English-majority classroom given a lack of time for planning, schedulaing constraints, and the presence of other instructional staff. She learns that using English may allow students to experiment across languages, and that the presence of an Indigenous language in a classroom, no matter how ineffectual in promoting proficiency, disrupts colonial education norms.

Engman, M. M. (2021). A worksheet, a whiteboard, a teacher-learner: Leveraging materials and colonial language frames for multimodal indigenous language learning. Classroom Discourse, 12(1–2), 75–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2020.1856696