Guest Lecture: Parents’ agency in interaction with children and teachers
1st September 2022
15:30 - 16:30
Location: K-207, Stakkahlíð - Menntavísindasvið
About:
A successful encounter with a novel language is inevitably connected to such ecological conditions as creating a low-anxiety and secure atmosphere that will be conducive to target language perception and production (Schwartz, 2018; 2022). In this talk I will explore the role of language ecology and family language ideology, practice, and management in interaction with children and teachers as agents. Specifically, I will discuss both how family members enact their agency at home by the analysis of key strategies and practices of home language maintenance, and how they manage the child’s linguistic development and education out of home, by searching for a supportive sociolinguistic environment. Moreover, attention is paid to the reciprocal relationships between parents and children as agents in shaping family language policy. Further, I will address challenges in the interaction between parents’ cultural and linguistic expectations and mainstream ECEC ideologies. Drawing attention to ecology of early language education, I will close the talk with an argument, claiming that research with families and teachers is necessary to increase the quality of pedagogical support for teachers and families, to create partnership in promoting this educational context (e.g., Hickey, 2021; Ragnarsdóttir, 2022).
Mila Schwartz is Professor in Language and Education and a Head of Research Authority in Oranim Academic College of Education (Israel). Her research interests include studying language policy and models of early bilingual education; linguistic, cognitive, and socio-cultural development of early sequential bilinguals/multilinguals; family language policy; and bilingual teachers' language-conducive strategies and pedagogical development. In this research her focus is on two unique populations: second generation Russian-Hebrew speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Arabic and Hebrew-speaking children enrolled in bilingual bi-national education in Israel. He academic distinction at the international level is based on 21 years of extensive research and exemplary achievements in academia and at top-tier research organizations such as the International Symposium of Bilingualism, where she held the position of Secretary of the Steering Committee from 2015 to 2019, the European Early Childhood Education Research Association network and Multilingual Childhoods, where she acted as Convenor from 2019 to 2022. She edited seven book and has recently completed an editing of the First Handbook of Early Language Education. Recently, she has proposed and elaborated on the following theoretical concepts: language-conducive context, language-conducive strategies, and child language-based agency.
