Helping schools respond to linguistic and cultural diversity

Weston Fellow Gail Prasad is an expert on plurilingualism in children. In an increasingly global society, it's a trend which teachers and education administrators are watching closely.

"Canadian schools today are increasingly filled with students who speak different languages at home, in their communities and at school," says Prasad. "Students’ home languages, however, have traditionally not been valued and at times even discouraged from use at school."

The result: students lose proficiency in their first language - a loss which affects intergenerational and transnational communication with family members, cultural identification, and students’ and family literacy practices. But, through her research, Prasad may change all that.

With the help of a Weston Fellowship, Prasad is now exploring plurilingualism in Montpellier, France. Aimed at developing globally oriented thinkers and innovators, the W. Garfield Weston Doctoral Fellowship Program provides 16 Canadian graduate students from the University of Toronto with a travel award to further their research, broaden their skills and expand their networks in an international setting

U of T News asked Prasad to discuss her research and the impact of the Weston Fellowship.

Tell us a bit about your work.
My research looks at how children make sense of their plurilingual practices and identities across English and French schools in Canada and France. Plurilingualism views individuals as developing a diverse network of linguistic and cultural resources that they draw on in different contexts for different purposes with different levels of proficiency. I collaborate with classroom teachers in English, French immersion and French-language schools to carry out a classroom intervention that adopts an inclusive plurilingual approach to teaching.

Whereas much research has been done on teachers’ and parents’ adult views of students’ language development, my research endeavors to shift from researching about children to researching with children from their perspectives. In each school, students collaborate as co-researchers of their plurilingual practices at home and at school by drawing on creative multimodal arts-informed methods that allow culturally and linguistically diverse students to represent and express their perspectives and experiences through diverse media.

The goal is to understand plurilingualism from children’s perspectives and to contribute to the development of research-based plurilingual classroom practice that will help schools respond to the linguistic and cultural diversity that increasingly pervades their student populations.

What drew you to this field – and to this focus in particular?

During my time as an elementary English teacher in a French International school, I became fascinated particularly by my kindergarten to grade 2 students who were developing literacy practices in at least 2, if not 3 or 4 languages simultaneously. Perhaps I was so struck by their fluid transition between languages because I myself felt like I was constantly struggling to develop my own French proficiency as an adult. 

Although my research questions grew out of my teaching practice, my interest in cultural and linguistic diversity at both the individual and societal level has much deeper personal roots. My father was originally from India and immigrated to Canada via Germany. He spoke Hindi, other Indian languages, German and then developed his English proficiency when he settled in Canada. My mother is Japanese Canadian and after her family were interned during WWII, they were relocated from the West Coast to Quebec. She then grew up speaking Japanese and learning French and English at school. 

When my parents married and moved to Ontario, they were advised when they had children to raise them in English if they wanted them to succeed academically. What parent wouldn't heed the advice of the school -- particularly while trying to integrate into Canadian society? As a result, I grew up as a monolingual anglophone and tricultural Canadian. Given my rich heritage, I’ve always had a fascination with diverse cultures and languages. As an adult, I’ve been trying to learn my “first” languages but the process is a challenging one. As new parents ourselves, my husband, an Irish-American-Canadian, and I are mindful of raising our son as both a pluricultural and plurilingual Canadian. As a doctoral candidate, teacher and graduate student, I’m keenly motivated to understand how we can help schools become inclusive spaces where students are welcomed and encouraged to bring all of their identities, histories and trajectories into their learning and development. 

What drew you to U of T?

I was fortunate to continue into my PhD directly following the completion of my MA. Over the course of my MA degree, I had developed a strong relationship with my supervisor, Dr. Normand Labrie, and he was extremely influential in my decision to pursue a PhD at the University of Toronto. I was accepted at other strong institutions but I greatly valued the opportunity to work with a supervisor who intuitively challenges me to be thoughtful, rigorous and creative in my work and who is supportive of me taking risks in and through my research. 

During my MA, I was also very fortunate to work with my committee member, Dr. Jim Cummins, and with Dr. Diane Farmer, the director of the Centre de Recherches en Éducation Franco-Ontarienne (CRÉFO). I've been both inspired by both of these professors' work and, by completing my PhD at U of T, I have been able to hone my research skills and practices through numerous opportunities they have each given me  to collaborate in their projects.  My time, in particular, working at CREFO, has played an essential role in preparing me to conduct research in French schools in Toronto and now also in France. I have clearly found the best support for my work with culturally and linguistically diverse children across English and French schools at OISE, University of Toronto.

I was honoured to be accepted to complete a PhD in the Language and Literacies Education program and to continue building lasting relationships with these three scholars and now many more as well. Toronto provides a rich context in which to explore children’s plurilingualism both scientifically and personally. My husband and I, along with our two year old son, have been so thankful to be able to call Toronto home during my journey as a PhD student as it has also allowed us to be close to our extended family and to our diverse cultural communities. Being able to stay connected as a family and to our broader community while pursuing a PhD in an internationally acclaimed institution is a rare gift.

What does the Weston Fellowship mean to you?

The Weston Fellowship has great value for me both academically and personally. I couldn’t have imagined travelling abroad for eight to 12 months without the generous support of this award. I had originally thought that I would only be able to travel to France for four months with the support of a Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to work on the analysis of my French school case studies with Dr. Nathalie Auger, Université Montpellier III, Paul-Valéry. 

The Weston Fellowship has encouraged me to dream BIG and will now allow me to carry out a comparative case study in a local French elementary school in Montpellier during the 2013-2014 academic year and to network particularly with francophone scholars in France, Switzerland and Belgium as I integrate English and French scholarship on children’s plurilingualism and to develop my academic French proficiency for the purposes of disseminating my research. Each of these activities requires time and immersion; the required eight – 12 month travel period will enable me to realise each of my goals successfully. There has been a growing advocacy on the part of Canadian researchers to integrate scholarship in English and French, Canada’s two official languages. This fellowship will prepare me to be able to contribute both the Canadian research landscape in both English and French, as well as to the broader international scholarship on plurilingualism.

I remain indebted to the Weston Foundation for their outstanding support throughout my academic journey first as a Weston Loran scholar ’98 during my concurrent BAH/BEd, then through their support of Massey College, an interdisciplinary graduate college at the University of Toronto where I’ve been a Junior Fellow during my MA and PhD, and now through this Weston Fellowship to support my travel and research abroad. I appreciate the vision of the Weston Foundation to support university and graduate students to pursue their studies in Canada and to prepare them to contribute both to Canadian and international scholarship.

Their support has enabled me to overcome many challenges that could have prevented me from initially going away to university as an undergraduate student, to choosing to leave classroom teaching to pursue graduate studies and now to carrying out extensive fieldwork and study abroad as a doctoral candidate and new parent. 

The Weston Foundation has supported me not only financially but personally to balance my life as a student and an active community member wherever my studies have taken me. I know only too well that as a student it is at times a luxury to take on extra-curricular activities within and beyond the university community – a luxury that is not often afforded to students who need to work part-time or full-time to support their studies. Yet, so often extra-curricular activities yield significant encounters personally, socially and intellectually that enrich students’ academic work. 

I deeply value this Weston Fellowship because it provides me with the time and resources to devote myself simultaneously to conducting fieldwork, to gaining international research training, to building a dynamic research network and to being able to nurture a healthy marriage and family. Behind every dissertation is a complex narrative filled with a diverse cast of characters, and an intricate and at times unpredictable plot. This Weston Fellowship will certainly mark a significant, defining event in my PhD research and my life story both in this upcoming year and well beyond into the future.

Available to Canadian students across all fields—the humanities, as well as the social, physical and life sciences—The Weston Fellowship is Canada’s only fully-funded award program dedicated to international research at the doctoral level. A Weston Fellowship will cover a year’s tuition, the expenses of international travel, a living stipend, and travel within the destination country for U of T students who are entering the third or fourth year of their doctoral program, and plan to do research outside of Canada.

(Learn more about some of the 16 students at U of T receiving a Weston Fellowship this year. Read a Q & A with Rebecca Bartel. Read a Q & A with Shaun Cleaver. Read a Q & A with Carrie Demmans Epp.)