Fostering Educational Change at the Intersection of Macro-Level Institutional Narratives and Micro-Level Classroom Experiences

This study investigated the intersection between macro-level institutional narratives on plurilingualism and language education, and the increasingly complex linguistic repertoires that students bring to their school experience in South Tyrol (Italy). The paper first outlines the main specificities of this historically multilingual substate entity, and discusses how current educational guidelines celebrate linguistic diversity while failing to explicitly acknowledge the epistemic capacity of more recently settled minoritised language communities. Zooming in at micro-level classroom experiences, the paper then looks at the educational stances of one primary school teacher who took part in a participatory action research initiative aimed at the valorisation and mobilisation of students’ complex linguistic repertoires. Over two years, the initiative fostered collaboration among teachers and researchers to co-construct strategies aligned with the principles of pedagogical translanguaging. Through qualitative analysis of data generated through individual semi-structured interviews and a short reflective text, this paper shows how the selected teacher began to reconceptualise plurilingual education in more inclusive and equitable ways, i.e., supporting both institutional and non-dominant languages and legitimising the children’s diverse knowledge bases. By highlighting the role of teachers’ agency in challenging macro-level narratives from below, the study addresses the imbalances of power between institutionalised and non-institutionalised languages, and contributes to research framing plurilingual education as a socially engaged phenomenon in increasingly multilingual contexts.