Teacher Sensemaking of Curricular Tools for Mapping Plurilingual Identities: Examining the Power and Potential of Language Portraits

Abstract

This study investigates teacher sensemaking through a promising curricular activity for surfacing students’ plurilingual identities easily implemented in K-12 school settings: the language portrait. The language portrait activity serves as a linguistic inventory for teachers, foregrounding students’ language resources in ways uncommon in curriculum. However, limited literature examines how different educators—with their distinct instructional stances—interpret the information provided by the language portrait activity. To add to this literature, we use qualitative methods rooted in a grounded theory approach to analyse semi-structured interviews with U.S.-based elementary grade teachers, extended classroom engagement, and student work. Our findings demonstrate that language portraits are a fluid tool. All teachers recognized language portrait’s potential to make visible the communicative resources of students, surfacing out-of-school communities as valuable contexts for language learning. However, the flexible nature of language portraits—which we examine as “boundary objects”—made visible differences in what constituted a language resource across and within various classroom communities. Some teachers considered technological tools part of students’ communicative repertoires, but others did not. While language portraits are widely used in classrooms serving plurilingual students, our findings reveal that the meaning teachers make of this activity differs from classroom to classroom in ways that have the potential to shape instruction.

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