Linguistic Climate of Early Grade Classrooms in Multilingual Contexts: Sites for Passive Protests

• In Event: Roundtable Group 15
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Language, Interaction, and Agency in Educational Settings

Proposal

The second sentence in the Call for Proposal description states that “Protest allows people facing injustice to generate power through collective action.” However, whenever the word protest is mentioned, it is hardly ever associated with children ages 5-8yrs old. Yet, many young children in Africa remain vulnerable to poor school/classroom climate without the possibility of being able to actively stage a collective protest against the injustices that permeate their academic development in schools. For instance, linguistic climate in early grade classrooms, especially in poorly resourced multilingual settings continue to have implications for early grade literacy development in sub-Saharan Africa (Ohakamike-Obeka, 2016).

Although little can be done to control the physical developmental process of children, educators and policy makers can do more to “shape the intellectual, social, emotional, and physical aspects of the classroom climate in developmentally appropriate ways” to ensure that children continue to develop the full range of their emotional, intellectual, and social skills (Ambrose, et.al, 2010:6). Hence, scholars have argued that improving classroom climate has become a central goal of educational reform initiatives across multiple countries, signifying internationally, a consensus on the importance of classroom climate in promoting children’s academic and psychological wellbeing (Cohen, 2012; Thapa et al., 2013; Wang and Degol, 2016; Wang, et.al, 2020). One can therefore submit that the linguistic climate of any classroom is critical to the central goal of educational reform initiatives, especially in multilingual settings.

This round-table paper therefore draws on qualitative data, including classroom observations to examines how children in early grade multilingual classrooms respond to the linguistic climate of their classroom and how such response(s) are interpreted and appropriated by their teachers. I argue contextually that children in early grade multilingual classrooms in poorly resourced public primary schools in Nigeria engage in passive protests through acts of resistance against the linguistic climate of their classrooms, which disfavors familiar local languages to the benefit of a global hegemonic language- English. Moreover, I claim that such acts of resistance by children are often mislabeled as disciplinary behaviors requiring disciplinary actions from authorities.

Findings from this study suggest that the poor linguistic climate of early grade multilingual classroom have emotional, intellectual, phycological, and social implications for early grade literacy development among young children. It is therefore recommended that it is high time that education stakeholders began to pay more close attention to the linguistic climate of early grade classrooms both in terms of making adequate provisions for learning materials in the language(s) that children are most comfortable with and ensuring that teachers are professionally equipped to understand these passive protests as cry for help rather than acts of classroom disturbances. Such recommendations, if adhered to, will produce classrooms that intellectually, emotionally, and socially foster children’s early grade literacy development. The study therefore contributes to the ongoing debate about the significance of intentionally improving classroom climate for the purpose of ensuring children’s all-round wellbeing.

Author

• Olayinka Olagbegi-Adegbite, University of Wisconsin Madison