Connection, culture and communication: Disparate teacher narratives from a Vietnamese community language school
5, Boulevard de la Tour-Maubourg
75007 Paris
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Talk by Katrin Ahlgren, Associate Professor of language education at Stockholm University, member of the MIRCo Research Center at the Autonomous University of Madrid and 2024-2025 research-fellow at the Paris IAS (Riksbankens Jubileumsfund Research Chair), as part of the international conference Disparate Narrative Worlds: Crisis, Conflict, and the Possibility of Hope organized by the American Univeristy of Paris and the Université Paris Cité.
Onsite event, open to the public with registration here.
Conference in English.
Presentation
This presentation is based on narratives from two teachers working at a Vietnamese community language school in Australia. A positioning analysis sheds light on what they perceive as the purpose of teaching Vietnamese and how they situate themselves concerning their new lives in Australia. The results reveal disparate narratives: while the teachers express feelings of isolation and disconnection in the broader context, these experiences contrast with their descriptions of involvement and connection within the local community after joining the community language school. As noted, Australia is a multicultural and multilingual society, yet it has been identified as having a monolingual mindset. This mindset affects the use, learning, and teaching of languages other than English. While it is possible to shift this monolingual perspective, such change requires mainstream, monolingual Australians to reconsider the value of multilingualism for society and to reflect on their own positioning of speakers with broader linguistic repertoires than their own.
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 Polyphonic voices: representations of lived and imagined experiences of language in exile 01 September 2024 - 30 June 2025 |
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