Diego L. Albuquerque
Emilee Moore- Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
In this article, we propose an aesthetic and plurilingual/pluriliteracies approach to additional (or second, foreign…) language teaching and learning. The research reported on took place in a secondary school in Barcelona where young people take on the role of teachers of the host languages (i.e., Catalan and Spanish) to adult migrants. We focus on a plurilingual poetry workshop offered in this program as an empirical foundation for the proposed approach. Data was collected ethnographically during the poetry workshop (i.e., through participant observation, field notes, conversations, video, photography) allowing the exploration of processes and outcomes. We consider, on the one hand, the opportunities for language learning made possible by incorporating arts-based methods and plurilingualism/pluriliteracies in the workshop. On the other hand, we ask what an aesthetic lens, combined with a recognition of plurilingualism/pluriliteracies, can offer to our understanding of language learning outcomes. Our results suggest that co-artistry is an opportunity for enhancing additional language learning in our aesthetic and plurilingual/pluriliteracies approach to additional language teaching and learning.
1 Introduction
The concept of aesthetic education foregrounds the significance of beauty and the arts in the development of the self (Denac, 2014). Among other aspects, aesthetic education aims to: foster beauty in interpersonal relationships; develop an aesthetic sense and the perception of beauty; and promote the experience, creation, and expression of the aesthetic. Historically, aesthetics and affect have been viewed as distinct from cognition. There is a need to further investigate the connection between aesthetics, affect and the learning of different subjects/disciplines (Wickman et al., 2022). Together with the other articles in this monograph, our contribution aims to help fill this gap, focusing on the field of additional language education.1
In the context of a service-learning project based at a secondary school in Barcelona, we focus on a plurilingual poetry workshop as an empirical foundation for an aesthetic and plurilingual/pluriliteracies approach to additional language teaching and learning. We ask, on the one hand, what opportunities for language learning are made possible by incorporating arts-based methods and plurilingualism/pluriliteracies in the workshop. On the other hand, we ask what an aesthetic lens, combined with a recognition of plurilingualism/pluriliteracies, can offer to our understanding of language learning outcomes. We focus on the aesthetic and plurilingual nature of the social interactions among program participants and on the collaborative processes and outcomes of the workshop. We frame these collaborations in terms of ‘co-artistry’, a concept we introduce below.
We continue this introductory section (1.1 and 1.2) by framing language teaching and learning as aesthetic, plurilingual/pluriliterate action and interaction, or co-artistry. Section 1.3 reviews scholarship on plurilingual poetry, to contextualise and justify the workshop at the centre of our empirical work. We then set out the main methodological considerations guiding our research (section 2). In section 3, we analyse the interactions and artefacts produced during the workshop, followed by the discussion and conclusions (section 4).
1.1 Language teaching and learning as aesthetic action and interaction
Piazzoli’s (2018) approach to action and artistry in additional language education, framed within her own work on drama in language teaching, is highly influential to our understanding of aesthetics in our disciplinary field (see also Moore et al., 2021). In her work, Piazzoli frames language teaching and learning as art forms, materialised in the design of lessons, in the improvised interactions between teachers and learners (who she refers to as ‘co-artists’), and between learners, in the artefacts used and produced, and so on. Piazzoli follows Eisner’s (1985, p.154) broad definition of ‘art’ as spontaneous, aesthetic activity: “the process in which skills are employed to discover ends through actions.” She also draws on Winston (2010), who develops beauty as an educational concept, examining the cognitive, affective, and moral consequences of the experience of beauty. Conceptualising language teaching and learning in terms of aesthetics, according to Piazzoli (following Immordino-Yang, 2016 and others), means recognising that the actions of teaching and learning “involve not only cognition, but also affect, imagery, sensation, different forms of memory, emotion and embodiment” (2019, p. 8).
Piazzoli’s understanding of language teaching and learning echoes previous calls in the field of additional language education to give greater recognition to learners’ experience, affect and emotions in research and practice (e.g., Kramsch, 2009; Dewaele, 2012). As Garret and Young (2009, p. 209) point out, “affect and emotion are terms that have been in the shadows of discussions of classroom foreign language learning, where the primary focus has been on the development of knowledge and use of the new language.” Piazzoli’s work also aligns with sociocultural understandings of language learning as situated action and interaction (e.g., Lantolf and Thorne, 2006), implicating other people, the material environment, and so on. Adopting a sociocultural approach, in the analytical section of this article (section 3) we consider the artefacts produced in the workshop, as well the collaborations between different actors (adult language learners, secondary school students acting as language teachers, adult facilitators), focusing on the importance of what we refer to as co-artistry in additional language learning.
In our research, we are also inspired by Cook’s (1997) work on the importance of language play (play being understood as related to aesthetics and affect) in language learning and in human life more generally; speakers and writers play with meaning, play on words, and so on. Such language play, according to Cook (1997, p. 230), might be considered “language for enjoyment, for the self, for its own sake.” Current communicative approaches to additional language education foreground the communicative objectives that language teaching and learning seek to achieve. Cook’s essay, however, invites us to recognise that language teaching and learning might sometimes not be strictly goal-oriented, but rather be “sometimes play and sometimes for real, sometimes form-focused and sometimes meaning-focused, sometimes fiction and sometimes fact” (Cook, 1997, p. 231). In the analytical section of this article (section 3), we will see examples of this language play as learners craft poetry through collage, mixing elements from poems in different languages to make their own.
Finally, we position our research and educational practice in the emergent field of creative inquiry in applied linguistics. Creative inquiry is frequently defined as “any social research or human inquiry that adapts the tenets of the creative arts as a part of the methodology” (Leavy in Jones and Leavy, 2014, p. 1). We, however, follow Bradley and Harvey’s (2019) identification of three categories of creative inquiry work in language education: working through the arts, with the arts, and into the arts. Language education research and practice enacted through the arts is broadly concerned with how arts-based methods promote language learning. Teaching and researching with the arts refers to how an aesthetic lens (e.g., that of the artist) can help understand language learning. Working into the arts refers to how the tools of applied linguistics might offer insights into artistic practices and processes (e.g., how language is used in the arts). In the analytical section of this article, we consider both the affordances of arts-based methods for teaching and researching language (i.e., working through the arts), and how adopting an aesthetic lens allows learning processes and outcomes to be understood in new ways (i.e., working with the arts).
Based on her investigations of children’s plurilingualism in schools in Canada and France, Prasad (2018) affirms that creativity, aesthetics, and plurilingualism are indissolubly connected. Prasad uses collage to ask: ‘how does it look and feel to be plurilingual?’. Her research integrates social theories of language representation and plurilingualism to explore not only the linguistic aspects of the children’s artwork, but also the aesthetic detail of their collages. Based on her analysis of the students’ collages and narratives, Prasad concludes it is impossible to separate their emotional experience from the cognitive process involved in language learning, and the aesthetical aspect of the process can expand one’s plurilingual repertoire. She argues that plurilingual repertoires can be viewed as a multi-layered collage of language(s) and linguistic activities, and the collage enables the students to create art that is aesthetically provocative, associating their feelings, ideas, experiences, and words.
Inspired by work such as Prasad’s connecting aesthetics and plurilingualism, we now turn to our understanding of language teaching and learning as practices which necessarily implicate teachers’ and learners’ plurilingualism/pluriliteracies.
1.2 Language teaching and learning for plurilingualism/pluriliteracies
The sociolinguistic complexities of the 21st century are well documented in academic literature (e.g., Blommaert, 2010). ‘Historical’ forms of plurilingualism2, as well as those resulting from demographic mobilities and transformations in communication technologies, are a reality of (especially urban) social life (Appadurai, 1996; Castells, 1996; Blommaert, 2010) and of language classrooms (García, 2009; Conteh and Meier, 2014; May, 2014). In recent years, researchers and teachers have considered how to harness the affordances of plurilingualism for enhancing language teaching and learning. Different terms have been proposed to this end, including didactics of plurilingualism (Gajo, 2007, 2014; Llompart et al., 2019), pluralistic approaches to languages and cultures (Candelier et al., 2013), translanguaging pedagogies (García and Li, 2014; Cenoz and Gorter, 2022), or the multilingual turn in language education (Conteh and Meier, 2014; May, 2014).
These approaches share two common principles: the first is the need to de-privilege monolingual ways of ‘languaging’ in language education. The monolingual ‘native speaker’ (e.g., as reflected in Chomsky’s (1965) classic notion of the ‘ideal native speaker’) has traditionally been the benchmark against which language competence has been measured. Heller (1999) used the term ‘parallel monolingualisms’, while Cenoz and García (2017), following Cummins (2008), used the term ‘multilingual solitudes’, to refer to the traditional understanding that individuals should learn and their languages in isolation from the others in order to attain and display competence. More recently, the notion of plurilingual competence (e.g., Coste et al., 2009; Council of Europe, 2001, 2020; Lüdi and Py, 2009) has been proposed to reconceptualise the full range of knowledge, skills and attitudes (as well as the contextual affordances/restrictions) which allow plurilingual people to mobilise their whole linguistic repertoires to communicate and to learn, including to combine resources from different languages to build meaning.
Similar to this approach to plurilingualism, in recent years what counts as being literate in current contexts of increasing linguistic and cultural diversity, and of transformations in communication technologies, has been called into question. The notion of pluriliteracies accounts for the ways plurilingualism comes into people’s lives in their language practices across media and modes (García et al., 2007; Moore and Vallejo, 2018), including in their writing of poetry, the focus of this article. The pluriliteracies perspective places the integration of language systems and the hybridity of language practices at the forefront of theory and practice, and builds on scholarship from traditions such as New Literacy Studies (Heath, 1983; Street, 1984, 2003), multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996; Cope and Kalantzis, 2000, 2009), biliteracy and multilingual literacies (Hornberger, 2000; Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester, 2000; Martin-Jones and Jones, 2000).
The second principle common to recent approaches to plurilingualism in language education is the need to overcome the simple separation of languages into different (school) subjects. Different languages are commonly treated as distinct disciplinary sub-fields; they are taught (and researched) in isolation and learners’ competence is considered in terms of their ability to ‘know’ and perform in their different languages separately. So-called integrated approaches (e.g., Candelier et al., 2013; Gajo, 2014; De Britos, 2016; Masats and Noguerol, 2016) have been offered as a holistic alternative to traditional language teaching and use learners’ whole language repertoires for developing new plurilingual competences.
The poetry workshop at the focus of this article set out from an integrated, plurilingual/pluriliteracies approach to additional language teaching and learning by mobilising learners’ whole repertoires for producing poetry. We now discuss previous scholarship on the use of poetry in language education which has inspired the design and interpretation of the workshop.
1.3 Plurilingual poetry
Poetry is commonly part of school (first) language arts curricula; however, it is often approached in an instrumental way (e.g., to enhance writing and reading comprehension) (Simecek and Ellis, 2017).3 In additional language teaching, poetry is often overlooked (Hanauer, 2014; Kuru Gönen, 2018). Like first language education, when poetry is considered, it is mainly described as a useful genre for promoting reading and writing skills in the additional language (e.g., Seargeant and Greenwell, 2013), disregarding its aesthetic value. Hanauer (2011, 2014), however, developed the concept of meaningful literacy in relation to writing poetry in the additional language classroom, referring to phenomenological experience and personal meaning construction. Other scholars have since built on the meaningful literacy learning approach, including Chamcharatsri (2013), Garvin (2013), and Iida (2016).
Hanauer points out that learning a language is embedded in the physical, intellectual, and emotional lives of the individual language learner. The author considers the individual learner to be socially and culturally contextualised with an extended history of personal experience. Hanauer uses poetry as a way of teaching language because it not only motivates the learner to learn a new language (including figures of speech, rhythm and rhyming, relations of signs and symbols, functions, among others), but it also supports an emotional association with that language. Hanauer proposed four principles to frame his meaningful literacy approach: (1) autobiographical writing; (2) emotional writing; (3) personal insight; and (4) authentic public access. The first principle supports creative writing to explore and comprehend oneself by drawing on memory, imagination, and personal experience. The second encourages students to write in a way that stimulates their emotions and those of the reader and supports the expression of students’ feelings. The third integrates a reflective process that results in higher comprehension of the human situation in the long run, as well as deeper appreciation and understanding of one’s own experience. The final principal places writing in the context of a social process that involves communicating personal views, understandings, and emotions to others in the language learning classroom and with individuals and communities that are meaningful for the writer. In the analysis section of this article (section 3), we will see that the poetry workshop uses themes that help participants write poems based on their personal experiences, and the poetry is meant to be shared with the broader community. Unfortunately, due to time restrictions, we were not able to reflect with the participants on the process, but our analysis considers the emotional, social, and cultural context of the language classroom.
It is important to note that the aforementioned scholarship is concerned with using poetry to teach a particular language, while our plurilingual poetry workshop was also concerned with using poetry to engage learners’ full linguistic repertoires. Following Niaz (2021), we define plurilingual poetry as that in which a poet may use their different languages (and/or their different language varieties) in a single composition. Plurilingual poetry is not new; so-called ‘macaronic poetry’ by Anglo-Saxon poets in the late 15th century mixed Latin and local vernaculars (Demo, 2018). Arboleda Toro (2017) affirms that plurilingual poetry was also produced during decolonisation processes in the 19th and 20th centuries. More recently, the academic literature includes examples of contemporary plurilingual poetry crafted by diasporic and linguistic minority poets, among others. Domokos (2013), for example, analyses translanguaging (plurilingualism) in poems written by Cia Rinne, a contemporary poet born in Sweden from a Finnish family and raised in Germany. Moore and Tavares (2020) analyse their conversations around Ginalda Tavares’ use of dialogue in non-standard varieties of English in her poetry. As Teterina (2014) highlights, plurilingual poetry is not debate-free, with linguists, literary critics, poets, educators, and so on contributing different perspectives on it. Niaz (2019), for example, points to the challenge of understanding poems written in multiple languages. The interpretation of plurilingual poems is a methodological challenge for our research and we thus return to this point in section 2.2.
Different educational projects have used poetry to promote plurilingualism. For example, the Mother Tongue Other Tongue (MTOT) project, originally developed by staff in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University and Routes into Languages North West, aimed to value cultural diversity and the various languages used in UK schools (Britos De Britos, 2016). The multilingual poetry project had two distinct sections: Other tongue, allowing young people to write poetry in a language they were learning in school, and Mother tongue, inviting non-native English speakers to compose poetry in their mother tongue. The main objectives of MTOT were to celebrate and promote plurilingualism, encourage the use of mother tongues, and foster poetic expression. Also in the UK, Frimberger et al. (2018) used poetry with adult English as a Second or Other Language (ESOL) students from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds. Their project used an affirmative approach through poetic mappings of the process of creating what they called ‘identity boxes’. The purpose of creating an identity box was to get to know participants: who they are, their desires, and so on. While the adult learners were crafting, the project team (including college educators and researchers) interacted with them through conversations, poetic reflections, etc. Beyond language, the project thus focused on the aesthetics of the making process. Considering some parallels with our workshop, we also foreground the aesthetics of processes and outcomes.
2 Methodology
2.1 Context
2.1.1 Research site
The research reported on in this article is part of a larger research project entitled constructing a collaborative understanding of learning and teaching for the XXI century.4 The project, which runs from 2021–2024, is part of an ongoing collaboration with the AFEX-AFFM5 program led by Casa Asia6 and involves different sites at schools in and around Barcelona. AFEX-AFFM is an intergenerational, plurilingual, and inclusive language education project aimed at promoting adult migrants’ learning of the local languages (Catalan and Spanish) and literacy. AFEX-AFFM sessions are generally led by a facilitator who shares linguistic and cultural origins with some of the adult participants. In this article, we focus on an experience carried out at a secondary school in Barcelona in which 9th grade students (i.e., 3rd year of compulsory secondary education, approximately 15 years old) act as language teachers for the adults as part of a service-learning project, accompanied by an AFEX-AFFM facilitator and teachers from their school. Spanish was the main language that the adult learners at the site wanted to learn, although Catalan was also present.
Every year, the AFEX-AFFM program proposes different activities for World Poetry Day. Participants need to create plurilingual poems around a specific theme, which are collected in what is called the Mostra de Poesia Plurilingüe (Plurilingual Poetry Display) hosted by Casa Asia and shared with the public. Each year the event has a different theme; in 2022 (when the workshop we report on here took place), it was El meu primer dia (My first day). As part of this event, a plurilingual poetry workshop was developed by one of the co-authors of this article (Diego L. Albuquerque), two language teachers from the school and the AFEX-AFFM facilitator at the site. Ten young students from the school participated in the implementation as student ‘teachers’. A second researcher (Claudia Vallejo) assisted with data collection during the workshop.
The adult language learners in the workshop included ten women and one man. The participants were originally from Pakistan (7 people), India (2 people), and Morocco (2 people). Darija (the Moroccan variety of Arabic), Standard Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, English, Spanish, and Catalan were spoken. Some of the languages spoken or being learned by the adult learners — i.e., Urdu, in addition to Spanish and Catalan — were spoken also by the participating secondary school students acting as teachers. The AFEX-AFFM facilitator at the site spoke Urdu, Punjabi (Pakistan), Catalan, Spanish, and English, and she could read some Arabic.
2.1.2 Plurilingual poetry workshop
A four-day poetry workshop was designed to help the adult learners write their poems on the theme of El meu primer dia (My first day). The activities were:
1. First words: Learners were asked to divide an A4 sheet of paper into four parts and write different words as per the instruction given (see Table 1). Then, learners were asked to write a sentence that connected all the words. They were also invited to represent their sentence with an illustration.
2. Collage: Poems were selected in the languages that the learners spoke and were distributed to them. Learners read the poems and cut out sentences or words they would like to use to compose their own poems, creating a collage. This activity aimed to encourage the leaners to use their full linguistic repertoires to create poetry and to play with the aesthetics of language.
3. Writing own plurilingual poem: Learners wrote their own poem, using the collage poem as a model, but adapting it and incorporating their own words and ideas.
Table 1. Instructions for the First words activity.
It is important to highlight that in the writing process participants were free to write their poems in the way they wanted. They received no intructions on how to compose a poem, although the collage activity afforded examples of poems that the participants could use for their own writing.
One of the problems faced during the workshop was the lack of attendance by learners (a regular problem at the site). However, this was anticipated by planning activities that could be done without having done others. A shared reading activity and a conversation about the process were planned, but unfortunately could not be carried out due to time constraints. None of the learners completed all the activities, and only four of them wrote poems due to the others missing sessions. The analysis in this article will examine the written poems completed by these four adult learners and the processes of their creation.
2.2 Methodology
The research presented in this article adopted the principles of collaborative linguistic ethnography in the data collection and analysis (Lassiter, 2015; Ballena et al., 2020; Creese and Blackledge, 2023). Prior to the workshop, researcher/facilitator/co-author (Albuquerque) participated as participant observer at the site for approximately 4 months, during which time he established relationships, carried out informal interviews, participated in activities and kept fieldnotes. Furthermore, the design and implementation of the workshop allowed ethnography to be more than a method of data collection; the school teachers, the AFEX-AFFM facilitator, the researcher and the secondary school student ‘teachers’ worked together to design the sessions and/or support the adult learners in the process. The data collected during and after the workshop include audio and video recordings of the sessions, interviews, photos, and the poetry collages. Informed consent was obtained prior to the data collection based on procedures approved by the ethics board at the authors’ university.
The project also uses creative inquiry or art-based methods, as introduced in section 1.1. Research through the arts was used in the project, aiming to inform us about the affordances of the creative activities done in the workshop for promoting plurilingual language learning. This research also works with the arts by exploring how an aesthetic lens allows learning processes and artefacts to be interpreted in new ways. Linking arts-based approaches and (linguistic) ethnography has attracted scholarly interest in recent times (Creese and Blackledge, 2023), particularly in educational research (see, among others, contributions to Ferro and Poveda, 2019; Moore et al., 2020). The idea, following Pahl (2014, p. 48), is to understand “the way in which the collaborative space of inquiry that crosses the boundaries of arts practice, ethnography and education can open up new epistemological spaces.” Creese and Blackledge [(2023), essay 2] discuss the challenges of incorporating what they call an ethical-aesthetic perspective in linguistic ethnography, writing:
For the linguistic ethnographer, it is a challenge ‘not to know’ when working with language. […] we are used to tracing language through actions to wider ideologies. In language we categorise, label, position, judge, name and know. […] Now, however, we find ourselves moving away from a position in which we claim to be able to explain the lives of those who are the subject of our research. An ethnographic perspective claims to understand the perspective of the ‘other’ through their eyes. Linguistic ethnography aims to make audible the voices of those who participate in research. A creative approach to ethnography allows us to stand with those whose voices we represent, to stand beside them but not above them, resisting the urge to say ‘I know’.
This position of ‘not knowing’ is relevant to the process of interpreting the plurilingual poems included in this article. Niaz (2019), writing from the field of translation, refers to the ‘extra processing effort’ required when part of a poem is written in languages unknown to the reader. Our extra processing effort meant seeking transliteration and translation assistance from speakers of the languages used,7 and paying attention to the authors’ use of different languages and rhetorical devices. Furthermore, our interpretations of the poetry foreground the aesthetic qualities of plurilingual poetry and the co-artistry of the process.
The data are presented in section 3 as brief, situated stories or case studies of four adult learners (Norton, 2000; Schwandt and Gates, 2018). The adult learners who are the protagonists of these cases were those who completed a poem as part of the workshop. Broadly speaking, their stories are presented in the form of narratives or vignettes, together with transcripts of the video data, and photographs and transliterations of the learners’ work. Bloom-Christen and Grunow (2022, p. 2) link the renewed interest in using vignettes in ethnographic writing to what they call the ‘affective turn’, which is coherent with the aesthetic approach we take. According to these authors: “Affective scholarship has induced focus on how writing not merely seeks to transport lived affects from the field onto paper, but how it aims to evoke a sense of these affects in the reader.” In some cases, we are also able to reconstruct part of what Kell (2009, 2015) refers to as the trajectories of the poems (see also Bradley and Moore, 2018; Moore and Bradley, 2019), by identifying poetic resources, themes or ideas that travel across workshop activities.
Before focusing on the analysis in section 3, we would like to briefly summarise the role of the co-authors in the study. Albuquerque, as we have already mentioned, co-designed and co-delivered the workshops. He also collected the data, transcribed it, and translated it with the support of different collaborators named in this section. Moore acted as advisor during the design, delivery, data collection and treatment phases. She led the integration of the theoretical and methodological frameworks used to approach and interpret the data in this article. Both authors contributed to the analysis of the data, which we now present, and to writing and editing the article.
3 Analysis
In the following sections we present the case studies of four adult learners: Zaya (3.1), Aram (3.2), Zakia (3.3), and Hasbia (3.4).8
3.1 Zaya
Zaya is a student of Pakistani origin who speaks and writes Urdu, Punjabi (Pakistan), English, and is learning Spanish. She was present for two of the 4 days of the poetry workshop. In the First words activity, Zaya had the support of Bete (a secondary school student ‘teacher’). Bete identified as speaking Spanish and Catalan and she sought the help of the program facilitator (Mara) to explain the activity and offer translations to Zaya using her other languages. Recalling the First words activity described in section 2.1.2, students divided a piece of paper into four parts and in the different sections wrote: their favourite word in their mother tongue; the first word they learned in Spanish/Catalan; a word describing themselves in their second language; and a word describing the best day of their lives in any language. In the end, they had to create a sentence using all the words and ideas. Figure 1 is of Zaya’s completed activity.
Figure 1. Zaya’s completed First words activity.
As can be seen in Figure 1, Zaya’s favourite word is “Ub” in Urdu, which translates to “mother.” This is interesting because, as we will see, she uses her connection to her mother and her country in her final poem. The word that she uses to describe herself is “active,” which she wrote in Punjabi. Not only Zaya, but also other participants chose “hola” as the first word they learned in Spanish/Catalan. At one point, Mara helps Zaya to spell “hola” (see Extract 1). We assume that Maya names the letters “h,” “o,” “l” and “a” in the extract in English, a language that she shares with Zaya. Extracts 1–3 in this section are representative of the collaborative nature of Zaya’s process.
<monospace>01 MAR: h ((/</monospace>
<monospace>eɪtʃ</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>/)) o ((/o:/)) (.) l ((/əl/)) (.) a ((/e:/))</monospace>
</bold>
Moments later in the session (see Extract 2), when Diego (facilitator/researcher/co-author of this article) approaches the pair, Mara explains to him that Zaya had translated the sentence in the final box, “el mejor día es el día del Eid” (the best day is the day of Eid), from Urdu to Spanish. She explains to Diego in the exchange (line 4) that Eid is a “fiesta” (party”), and claims that the word “Eid” should be kept in the translation. Zaya listened on to the conversation between Mara and Diego.
<bold>
<monospace>01 MAR:ha escrito (.) que el mejor día de su vida (.) sí (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>she has written (.) that the best day of her life (.) yes (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>02el mejor día de (.) ha puesto que el mejor de día de su</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>the best day of (.) she put the best day of her</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>03vida es el día del eid (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>life is the day of eid (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>04bueno (.) es una fiesta (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>well (.) it is a party (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>05 DIE:vale (.) no passa res (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>ok (.) that’s ok (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>06 MAR:y (.) entonces (.) yo supongo que la palabra (.) sería eid</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>and (.) then (.) I suppose that the word (.) would be eid</monospace>
In doing the final part of the First words task, Zaya needed to write a sentence in Spanish linking her words. As Bete did not know how to help Zaya, she asked another secondary school student ‘teacher’, Jessica, to assist. Jessica identified as speaking Spanish and Catalan. The conversation in Extract 3 takes place between Bete, Jessica, and Zaya in Spanish:
<bold>
<monospace>01 BET:yo no sé cómo ayudarle (.) a hacer una frase (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>I don't know how to help her (.) make a sentence (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>02cómo la ayudo?</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>how do I help her?</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>03 JES:((incomprehensible))</monospace>
</bold>
<bold>
<monospace>04 BET:pero cómo se las explico?(.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>but how do I explain them to her?(.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>05no se lo puedo escribir yo (.) tiene que escribir ella (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>I can't write it for her (.) she has to write it (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>06 JES:qué palabras son? (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>which words are they? (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>07 BET:éstas (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>these ones (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>08 JES:vale (.) vale (.) sí (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>ok (.) ok (.) yes (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>09hola (.) madre (.) activa (.) es el día de (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>hello (.) mother (.) active (.) it is the day of (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>10 BET:eid(.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>eid(.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>11 JES:eid (.) eid.(.) qué es eid? (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>eid (.) eid.(.) what is eid? (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>12 BET:una cosa de su país (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>a thing from her country (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>13 JES:ah vale vale (.) hola mi madre es activa (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>ah okay okay (.) hello my mother is active (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>14 ZAY:fiesta (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>party (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>15 JES:ah una fiesta vale (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>ah a party okay(.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>16hola (.) madre activa (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>hello (.) active mother (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>17soy activa no? (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>I’m active right? (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>18hola (.) soy (.) activa (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>hello (.) I’m (.) active. (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>19 BET:hola soy activa (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>hello I’m active. (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>20 JES:y celebro (.) el (.) día (.) de (.) eid con mi madre</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>and I celebrate (.) the (.) day (.) of (.) eid with my mother.</monospace>
We see in Extract 3 how the two secondary school student ‘teachers’ actively take on the role of supporting Zaya to write her final sentence in Spanish. At the same time Zaya, who carefully listens to the conversation in Spanish between them, speaks up to explain that Eid is a “fiesta” (line 14) — seemingly taking up the description she had heard Mara previously give to Diego — which in turn helps Bete and Jessica to suggest incorporating the idea of a celebration in the sentence.
During the workshop sessions, the secondary school student ‘teachers’ who helped the adult learners in the process of co-artistry were not always the same for all the activities. In writing her poem (untitled), Zaya had the support of a different student, Arial. Arial’s parents were from Morocco, and Arial identified as speaking Spanish and Catalan. Figure 2 is a photograph of Zaya and Arial’s completed poem. Below the photographs of all the poems we have included transliterations and translations of them.
Figure 2. Zaya and Arial’s poem (untitled).
Transliteration of Zaya’s poem (untitled):
میری ماں بہت پیاری ماں ہے۔.
Mi madre tierna, tú eres mi centro en centro en este mundo.
میرا ملک پاکستان بہت اچھا ہے۔.
Pakistan mi hermoso país natal del cual me fui.
پاکستانی بہت پیار کرنے والے لوگ ہیں۔.
Son personas humildes y alegres.
پاکستانی بہت محنتی لوگ ہیں۔.
Son personas muy trabajadoras.
Translation of Zaya’s poem (untitled):
My mother is a very sweet mother.
My tender mother, you are my centre in this world.
My country Pakistan is very good.
Pakistan my beautiful birth country which I left.
Pakistanis are very loving people.
They are humble and cheerful people.
Pakistanis are very hardworking people.
They are very hardworking people.
The first thing we might notice about Zaya and Arial’s poem is that it is untitled, which might have different explanations (e.g., she could not think of an appropriate title, or she forgot to add one). Interestingly, we find traces of Zaya’s response to the First words activity in the poem: Zaya’s poem describes her mother, her country of origin (Pakistan), and Pakistani people. Zaya’s poem does not describe a specific first day, in accordance with the theme of the Mostra de Poesia Plurilingüe (Plurilingual Poetry Display). Rather, Zaya’s poem expresses her emotions and makes connections to her roots.
While Zaya is fluent in English and Punjabi, she only uses Urdu and Spanish in her poetry. The poem is written in two different scripts, with lines in Urdu (bold font in the translation) followed by ones in Spanish (standard font). Zaya first wrote her poem in Urdu; however, the activity was to write a plurilingual poem. Arial thus helped her to express her ideas in Spanish. As Arial did not speak Urdu, she and Zaya called on the facilitator (Mara) to translate lines from Urdu to Spanish. However, the translation is not a literal one, with the lines in Spanish adding ideas, actions, and emotions to the Urdu original (e.g., compare “My country Pakistan is very good” in Urdu with “Pakistan my beautiful birth country from which I left” in Spanish). The plurilingual poem was thus the result of collaboration between the adult learner, the secondary school student ‘teacher’, and the facilitator. In incorporating Urdu and Spanish in the poem, the co-artists engaged emotionally and aesthetically with the task, going beyond the literal, word-for-word meaning of the lines to jointly craft the plurilingual poem.
3.2 Aram
The day of the collage activity (activity 2 of the workshop, see 2.1.2.) was the first day for the Moroccan siblings, Aram and Safira, in the AFEX-AFFM program. They joined the sessions to learn Spanish. They decided to do the collage activity together with the help of Arial (a secondary school student ‘teacher’ introduced in section 3.1). Arial suggested that Aram and Safira complete the collage activity by cutting out letters from the poems provided in different languages to make sentences about their first day in their new country and in the program:
<bold>
<monospace>01 ARI:eh (.) recortamos así las frases y (.) vamos (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>eh (.) we cut the sentences like this and (.) we go (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>02cortando las letras (.) para</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>cutting the letters (.) to</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>03poder hacer palabras (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>be able to make words (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>04 SAF:sí (.) mejor letras (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>yes (.) better letters (.)</monospace>
Safira, in Extract 4 (line 4) agrees to Arial’s suggestion as to how to do the task. As there were no other Arabic speaking adult learners in the group, and Aram and Safira were not expected, the workshop leaders had not prepared poems in Arabic. Thus, Aram and Safira had to write their own words in Arabic to complete the plurilingual collage task. Their completed collage is depicted in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Aram and Safira’s completed collage.
Transliteration of Aram and Safira’s collage:
el primer dia me seti.
في أول يوم أحسست بكل شيء غريب.
Translation of Aram and Safira’s collage:
the first day i felt.
On my first day everything felt strange.
We deduce that the first line of the collage, in Spanish (standard font in the translation), means “the first day I felt,” although the “n” is missing in Spanish (i.e., the collague reads “seti” instead of “sentí”). The second line, in Arabic (bold font in the translation), reads: “On my first day everything felt strange.” We do not know whether Aram and Safira were reflecting on the strangeness of their first day in their new country, or on the strangeness of their first day in the AFEX-AFFM program, although their collage would probably adequately describe both situations for them.
When it came to writing their own poems, Aram and Safira were put in different groups. Safira decided not to continue her writing process, claiming that writing poetry was difficult for her, and instead chose to do more traditional language learning exercises provided in the AFEX-AFFM sessions. Aram did continue and was assisted by two secondary school student ‘teachers’, Madu and Karina, who crafted the poem Primer dia en Barcelona (First day in Barcelona) with him. Madu identified as speaking Spanish and Catalan. In some sessions, he was very quiet. Working with Aram and Karina, however, he contributed ideas and wrote the poem with the other participants. Karina was born in Barcelona, but she identified as being from Ecuador. She spoke Spanish and Catalan. The poem is depicted in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Aram, Madu and Karina’s poem (Primer dia en Barcelona).
Transliteration of Aram’s poem (Primer dia en Barcelona):
Le gusta la ciudad.
أعجبتني المآثر السياحية في برشلونة.
Me gusta los monumentos.
També el ambient,
وأيضا أعجبني الأكل.
La Calle es muy tranquila.
En la noche hay poco.
ruido.
تعدد الثقافات.
Los Supermercados.
Me gustan.
El centre de Barcelona.
es molt mogut.
الجو في برشلونة معتدل.
Las Casas son muy bonitas.
Translation of Aram’s poem (Primer dia en Barcelona):
He likes the city.
I liked the tourist monuments of Barcelona.
I like the monuments.
Also the atmosphere,
and I liked the food too.
The Street is very quiet.
At night there is little.
noise.
Multiple cultures.
The Supermarkets.
I like.
The centre of Barcelona.
is very busy.
The climate is mild.
The Houses are very beautiful.
Primer dia en Barcelona (First day in Barcelona) was not only the topic, but also the title of Aram, Madu and Karina’s poem. The poem is written in Arabic (bold font in translation), Spanish (standard font) and Catalan (italics) and, as we can see in Figure 4, there are three different scripts. Each participant was responsible for writing in one language: Karina wrote the lines in Spanish, Madu in Catalan, and Aram in Arabic. Of the four poetic processes examined in this article, this one was the most collaborative. Indeed, the poem carries includes three voices in a single description.
Primer dia en Barcelona is a description of Aram’s first day in Barcelona: the atmosphere, the monuments, the supermarkets, the food, and so on. Linguistically, there are some interesting features. The first line, in Spanish, talks about a third person who likes the city: the object pronoun “le” in Spanish indicates that “he (or she) likes.” In the second line, in Arabic, the author is placed in the poem, affirming “I liked the tourist monuments.” The third line, in Spanish, reads “I enjoy the monuments.” It is interesting to observe that in three lines of the poem, both the indirect object pronouns (third- and first-person singular) and the tense (present and past) change. We do not know for sure, but the poem appears to be a conversation between three people. In the fourth line of the poem, the Catalan language appears for the first time to allude to the atmosphere of the city (note that “el ambient” should be written as “l’ambient,” but this is not relevant to our analysis). The fifth line, in Arabic, reads “I liked the food,” once again in the first person and in the past. The next stanza of the poem, written in Arabic and Spanish, includes a description of the streets, noises, and cultures of the city of Barcelona. The third stanza, written in Spanish, Catalan and Arabic, combines aspects of the previous two, including both affirmations of what the poet(s) like, and a description of the city. The last line of the poem, in Spanish, describes the city’s houses.
The poem thus manifests a trialogue between the participants and their languages. Aram needed to collaborate with the secondary school student ‘teachers’ to help him include Spanish, the language he wanted to learn, in his poem, as well as Catalan. The incorporation of Catalan is also meaningful, both linguistically — as it exposed Aram to the other (official) language spoken in the city — and aesthetically, as it affords the reader a more realistic visualisation of the city of Barcelona, where at least two languages are constantly present.
3.3 Zakia
On the day of the collage activity, many of the secondary school student ‘teachers’ went on a school field trip, and activities needed to be adapted for the adult language learners who attended. Thus Diego (facilitator/researcher/co-author) partnered with Zakia. Zakia is originally from Pakistan and spoke Urdu, Punjabi (Pakistan), Arabic, English, and Spanish, while Diego is originally from Brazil and spoke Portuguese, English, Spanish and Catalan. Working together, the pair discovered they had several commonalities: both are English teachers, have a master’s degree in English, and are writers and poets. Conversations between the two alternated between Spanish and English. Zakia commented to Diego that she joined the AFEX-AFFM program because she needed to learn Spanish to get her Spanish citizenship, for which she needed to take a language proficiency test.
In her collage, which Zakia worked on mainly independently, she mixed poems by Shakespeare, the English poet (underlined in the translation), Joan Maragit, the Catalan/Spanish poet (standard font in the translation), and two Urdu poems by the Pakistani poet Allama Iqbal (bold italics in the translation), as depicted in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Zakia’s completed collage.
Transliteration of Zakia’s collage:
Las ventanas, de noche, con luz amarillenta,
La luna hacer brillar los cables negros.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
دیارِ عشق میں اپنا مقام پیدا کر.
.نیا زمانہ، نئے صبح شام پیدا کر
.خدا اگر دل فطرت شناس دے تجھ کو
.سکوتِ لالہ و گل سے کلام پیدا کر
ہو مرا کام غریبوں کی حمایت کرنا.
Translation of Zakia’s collage:
The windows, at night, with yellowish light,
The moon makes the black cables shine.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Create your place in the land of love.
Create a new age, a new morning and evening.
If God grants you a heart that can understand nature.
Create words out of silence.
May my work be to support the poor.
When combining the poems, Zakia created a collage in which she portrays an event that occurs on a moonlit night. Later, in conversation with Diego (Extract 5), Zakia explained how she connected the poem with the day of her son’s birth:
<bold>
<monospace>01 DIE:eh (.) este poema es sobre qué? (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>eh(.) this poem is about what? (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>02 ZAK:eh (.) explico? (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>eh (.) shall I explain? (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>03 DIE:sí (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>yes (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>04 ZAK:ok (.) las ventanas (.) este del castellano sí (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>ok (.) the windows (.) this from Spanish yes (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>05 DIE:no (.) pero (.) es sobre qué primer dia? (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>no (.) but (.) it’s about what first day? (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>06 ZAK:ah (.) este (.) eh (.) yo (.) I was thinking of my son (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>ah (.) this (.) eh (.) I (.)</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>07when I was having (.) and I was thinking (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<bold>
<monospace>08what is he doing in this world (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<bold>
<monospace>09what (.) I wish for him? (.)</monospace>
</bold>
Zakia explains in Extract 5 that as she was doing the collage, she remembered giving birth to her son and was thinking about her hopes for him. It is interesting to observe in this short extract of conversation, when the researcher asks questions in Spanish, Zakia tries to answer in Spanish, and changes to English when she can no longer continue. Later, when naming the collage, the following exchange takes place between the pair (Extract 6), in which Zakia asks Diego how to translate “wish” from Spanish to English, after which Zakia writes the title Deseo on her the collage:
<bold>
<monospace>01 ZAK:eh (.) how (.) do you (.) write wish in castellano? (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>spanish</monospace>
<bold>
<monospace>02wish (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<bold>
<monospace>03 DIE:deseo (.)</monospace>
</bold>
<monospace>wish</monospace>
As mentioned, Zakia identifies as a poet and usually writes poems in Urdu. Zakia’s final poem, which she also entitles Deseo (see Figure 6), does not describe the day of her son’s childbirth, but the feelings and wishes that she has for him. The poem projects the future that she imagines for him and her role as a mother. Of all the poems crafted by the participants, Zakia’s is the most plurilingual, combining five languages. In writing her poem, she also had help from a secondary student ‘teacher’, Míriam, who assisted her to write lines in Spanish (standard font in the translation) and Catalan (italics in the translation).
Figure 6. Zakia’s poem (Deseo).
Transliteration of Zakia’s poem (Deseo):
I want to the world to be happy.
Para Todo el mundo.
کیسے اپنا حصہ ڈالوں۔.
Puc fer de tot.
مینوں سب کجھ کرنا آنداں۔.
سأقوم بنشر السلام.
I can see a day in future.
Felicidad, paz, Tranquilidad.
جب سب رکھیں گے خیال دوسروں کا۔.
Ningú no dominará els altres.
آوے گا جلدی اے دن۔.
كل العالم سيكون في ذلك الوقت قريبا.
Translation of Zakia’s poem (Deseo):
I want the world to be happy.
for Everyone.
How do I contribute?
I can do everything.
I want to do everything.
I will spread peace.
I can see a day in the future.
Happiness, peace, Tranquility.
When everyone takes care of others.
No one will dominate others.
The day will come soon.
All the world will be there at that time soon.
Zakia’s poem is divided into two verses, and every line is written in a different language. The two verses follow a pattern in terms of languages used: English (underlined in the translation), Spanish (standard font in the translation), Urdu (bold italics in the translation), Catalan (italics in the translation), Punjabi (bold, italics, underlined in the translation), and Arabic (bold in the translation). All the verses converse with each other, narrating the author’s desire for her son and the world. Zakia introduces her poem desiring happiness for everyone, asking what she can do to make the world a peaceful place for her son. She projects a future with happiness, peace, and tranquillity where no one will dominate others. The poet reassures the readers that this day is coming. It is interesting to note that the poem communicates in different languages without losing connection with the main topic. In short, in her poem, Zakia uses the languages she knows, including both Spanish and Catalan, thanks to the support of her co-artist Míriam.
3.4 Hasbia
Hasbia is originally from Pakistan, and she speaks and writes Urdu and English, as well as being a learner of Spanish. Her process during the workshop was very independent, and she did not seek help from the secondary school student ‘teachers’, only recruiting assistance briefly from a student named Rasheed for the collage task. It is interesting to point out that Diego (facilitator/researcher/co-author) tried several times to communicate with her in Spanish during the workshop, but she answered in monosyllables and appeared to be very shy. It was only when Diego discovered that she spoke fluent English that he was able to establish conversation with her.
In addition to Shakespeare’s and Allama Iqbal’s poems (also used by Zakia), Hasbia’s collage (Figure 7) includes parts of a poem by Lope de Vega, a Spanish poet. She also includes a photo of the Allama Iqbal because he reminds her of her home country. Hasbia explained to Diego that the poet is very famous in her homeland, and she likes his poems.
Figure 7. Hasbia’s completed collage.
Transliteration of Hasbia’s collage:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
.نیا زمانہ، نئے صبح شام پیدا کر
mostrarse, alegre.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
.خدا اگر دل فطرت شناس دے تجھ کو
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
.سکوتِ لالہ و گل سے کلام پیدا کر
So long lives this, and give life to thee.
Translation of Hasbia’s collage:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Create a new age, a new morning and evening.
Show oneself, cheerful.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
If God grants you a heart that can understand nature.
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
Create words out of silence.
So long lives this, and give life to thee.
Hasbia’s collage seems to be a description of a person. While most of the sentences are in Urdu (bold italics in the translation) and English (underlined in the translation), the languages she feels more confident using, there is one sentence in Spanish (standard font in the translation). In her final poem, however, Spanish disappears, and she composes a bilingual poem in Urdu and English. Hasbia completed her poem without assistance. The topic of her poem (Figure 8), entitled My baby my whole world, was her daughter Issa:
Figure 8. Hasbia’s poem (My baby my whole world).
Transliteration of Hasbia’s poem (My baby my whole world):
The Day that Dreams come true.
خوشگوار وقت میری زندگی کا۔.
The Whole World like.
Chairs.
یوں لگ رہا تھا پرندے گنگنا رہے ہیں۔.
And every weare declines.
پوری دنیا ایک مسکراہٹ میں سمٹ گئی۔.
My universe complete after that.
Pleasure.
اور اپنے وجود کو مکمل سمجھا۔.
When a soft like a tedy come.
میں اس احساس کو کبھی نہیں بھول پاؤں گی۔.
For my hands.
My soul complete with my lovely.
Issa میرا چاند جیسا، baby شہزادہ۔.
Translation of Hasbia’s poem (My baby my whole world):
The Day that Dreams come true.
Happy time of my life.
The Whole World like.
Chairs.
It seemed like the birds were humming.
And every weare declines.
The whole world turned into a smile.
My universe complete after that.
Pleasure.
And considered his existence complete.
When a soft like a tedy come.
I’ll never forget this feeling.
For my hands.
My soul complete with my lovely.
Issa is like my moon baby princess.
In her poem, Hasbia narrates her feelings about the birth of her daughter. The narrative intercalates verses in English (underlined in the translation) and Urdu (bold italics in the translation). She describes the day of her daughter’s birth as the happiest day of her life. It is interesting to observe that she makes a comparison between the world and chairs sounding like birds singing. This sentence could allude to a hospital visiting room full of chairs, and her family was happy about her dream coming true. In the sentence “and every weare declines” (which could be an adaptation of Shakespere’s “every fair from fair sometime declines” used in her collage; note that the misspelling of “wear” is not relevant to our analysis), Hasbia seems to be referring to the exhaustion of childbirth vanishing when she saw her baby, and the shared happiness with other people (“The whole world turned into a smile”). She continues by describing how her life and universe are complete now. She compares her daughter to a soft teddy bear (the misspelling of “tedy” is not relevant to our analysis) arriving in her arms. She finishes claiming that her soul is also complete and tells the readers her daughter’s name: Issa, her moon, and her baby.
Hasbia did not use the host languages, Spanish or Catalan, in her poem, writing instead alone in the languages in which she felt confident. Her poem is heavily symbolic; the moment she describes is unique and personal to her and writing it with others was perhaps less meaningful to Hasbia than doing the activity alone.
4 Discussion and conclusions
The above analysis traces processes of crafting poetry by adult migrant learners, in a program aimed at teaching host languages (Catalan/Spanish), and the outcomes of this process. Reflecting on the case studies, the argument we will put forward here is that co-artistry — following Piazzoli (2018) — was central to promoting language learning. We see this co-artistry operating in two closely linked ways:
1. In the design and enactment of the workshop activities by the teachers, facilitator, researcher, and student ‘teachers’.
2. In the improvised ways that the adult learners sought assistance and others supported them to incorporate the host languages in the workshop.
Regarding the first point, we see co-artistry operating in the collaborative design of the sessions, which drew on different professional and life experiences of those involved, encouraging the adult learners to use their full linguistic repertoires to make meaning, and foregrounding emotion and affect as educational resources. We also see it emerging in the ways the proposed artefacts were used in carrying out the activities. Arial, for example, suggested that Aram and Safira do the collage activity by cutting out letters from the poems provided in different languages to make sentences, which was different from the process followed by others, who used full words or lines, and resulted in a different collage.
Regarding the second point, we refer to how spontaneous interactions during the sessions supported language learning. The above analysis suggests the assistance provided by others (co-artists) supported the incorporation of the host languages in the learners’ poems, alongside those already known, as in the case of Zaya, Aram and Zakia. These three learners actively sought and received linguistic assistance. Hasbia’s process was different from her peers in that she mainly worked alone, and she did not include the language(s) she was learning in her final poem. Thus, while we see point (1) above as being a fundamental starting point for supporting the aesthetic and plurilingual/pluriliteracies approach to additional language teaching and learning put forward in this article, in that it accounts for different ways of knowing and doing, we see point (2) as enhancing opportunities for learning new language within existing plurilingual repertoires.
It is vital to note that these improvised human interactions not only supported language learning, but also contributed to poetic production. Mara (the facilitator) and Arial (the secondary school student ‘teacher’), in working with Zaya on her poem, built upon the concept and mood of Zaya’s words, in addition to translating the Urdu lyrics into Spanish. They were able to comprehend, recognise, and interpret Zaya’s thoughts and feelings in helping her to incorporate Spanish. In the case of Aram’s poem, Madu and Karina not only assisted Aram in incorporating the Spanish and Catalan languages, but they also actively contributed to the poem’s creation by contributing ideas and lines in a type of poetic conversation. When reading these two poems, we see different scripts connecting ideas and emotions, suggesting the collaborative nature of their artistry.
As we highlighted in the introduction to this article, our approach to teaching and learning languages as plurilingual and aesthetic practices responds to calls in the field of additional language education to foreground learners’ experience, affect, and emotions. It is also consistent with Hanauer’s (2011, 2014) concept of meaningful literacy in writing poetry in the language classroom, which emphasises how people’s emotional lives play a role in how they encounter a new language. It is worth noting that the adult language learners’ reactions to each activity making up the poetry workshop, and the trajectories of their texts (Kell, 2009, 2015), varied. We notice Zaya’s ties to her mother and country in the First words activity; these ties re-appear in her final poem. In the collage exercise, we feel the strangeness and unease that Aram and Safira experience upon entering a new environment, whether it be the AFEX-AFFM program or their new city, followed by a more positive description of the new city in Primer dia en Barcelona.
In the analysis, we also see how Safira decides not to continue with the poetry writing, claiming the activity was too difficult for her. Chamcharatsri (2013) and Iida (2016) also observed the challenge for some students of using poetry to express their emotions in a language they are learning, and this is a point for continued consideration. We believe that our aesthetic and plurilingual/pluriliteracies approach to using poetry might offer some ways forward. On the one hand, learners can be encouraged to use their full linguistic repertoires, not limiting them to the languages they are learning. On the other hand, in our interpretation of the poems, we have foregrounded meaning over linguistic accuracy.
We would finally like to reflect on the position of ‘not knowing’ inherent to Creese and Blackledge’s [(2023), essay 2] ethical-aesthetic ethnographic perspective, and the need for co-artistry also as researchers. In interpreting the poems written in languages unknown to us for their linguistic and aesthetic qualities, following Niaz (2019), ‘extra processing effort’ was required. This extra processing meant collaborating with speakers of those languages, without whom our research would not be possible, but it also meant accepting gaps in our understanding as an inherent part of working with and through the arts.
Bringing these different discussion points together, our aesthetic and plurilingual/pluriliteracies approach to additional language education proposes: (1) active collaboration (co-artisty) in the design and enactment of language teaching and learning, both by those acting as teachers and by learners; (2) going beyond the teaching of languages in isolation from others to support learners’ existing plurilingualism/pluriliteracies and their use of new languages; (3) a holistic approach to learners’ linguistic repertoires which foregrounds aesthetic/meaningful use of the languages they know and are learning; 4) as researchers, reflecting on what we do not know, and being willing to engage also in co-artistic processes of building knowledge with others.
Data availability statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
Ethics statement
The study involving humans was approved by Comitè d'Ètica en la Recerca (CERec), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The study was conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study. Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s) for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article.
Author contributions
DA: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. EM: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal Analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
Funding
The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research was supported by grant PID2020-115446RJ-I00 funded by MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and grant SGR2021-00084 funded by AGAUR.
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the AFEX-AFFM program for facilitating this research. We also express our gratitude to Eqraa Arif and Loubna Hassak for their invaluable support with the Urdu, Punjabi and Arabic transliterations and translations. Finally, we acknowledge Claudia Vallejo for her support with data collection. In the case of author DA, this work has been produced as part of the PhD programme in Education at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
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Footnotes
1. ^We prefer the term ‘additional’ language over others such as ‘second’ or ‘foreign’ language as we believe the former best represents the diversity of language socialisation processes.
2. ^We use the notion of ‘plurilingualism’ to refer to people’s knowledge and use of resources from different named languages. Researchers use notions including ‘bilingualism’ and ‘multilingualism’ to refer in a similar way to the communicative repertoires of linguistically diverse people, and ‘translanguaging’ to refer to the use of this repertoire.
3. ^As pointed out by one of the anonymous reviewers of this article, who we thank for their input, this is the case, for example, of the National curriculum in England: English programmes of study, which contains 17 mentions of the word ‘poetry’ but does not mention enjoyment or appreciation. See: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-english-programmes-of-study).
4. ^Funded by MCIN/ AEI (/10.13039/501100011033), grant PID2020-115446RJ-I00.
5. ^AFEX stands for Aprenem Famílies en Xarxa (‘We learn as networked families’). AFFM stands for Activitats Formatives per a Famílies Migrades (‘Training Activities for Migrant Families’).
6. ^Casa Asia is a public consortium including the Spanish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, the Government of Catalonia and the Barcelona and Madrid City Councils. It aims to strengthen institutional, economic, cultural, and educational relationships between Asian and Pacific nationals and Spain. The AFEX-AFFM program is run by Casa Asia in collaboration with FAPAES, the federation of family associations linked to public schools in Catalonia.
7. ^We especially acknowledge Eqraa Arif whose provided invaluable support for interpreting the texts in Urdu and Punjabi, and Loubna Hassak, for her support with texts in Arabic. Note that in both the transliterations and in the translations, we have consciously avoided correcting non-standard language use to be as true as possible to the original.
8. ^All names used for all participants (adult learners, secondary school students, AFFX-AFFM facilitator) are fictitious, except for the facilitator/researcher/author of this article (Diego L. Albuquerque), whose real name is used.
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Keywords: plurilingualism, pluriliteracies, creative inquiry, language education, poetry, adult migrants, co-artistry
Citation: Albuquerque DL and Moore E (2024) Foregrounding co-artistry in an aesthetic and plurilingual/pluriliteracies approach to additional language teaching and learning. Front. Educ. 8:1296658. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2023.1296658
Edited by:
Steph Ainsworth, Manchester Metropolitan University, United KingdomReviewed by:
Huw Bell, Manchester Metropolitan University, United KingdomJessica Bradley, The University of Sheffield,United Kingdom
Copyright © 2024 Albuquerque and Moore. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Diego L. Albuquerque, Diego.Albuquerque@autonoma.cat; Emilee Moore, Emilee.Moore@uab.cat