Return to Chinese Sunday School?/! Digital heritage language learning at home and across the world

• In Event: Technological Orientations and Analysis: Digital Possibilities and Opportunities

Proposal

Title: Return to Chinese Sunday School?/! Digital heritage language learning at home and across the world
‘All earth dwellers are mutually entangled and always becoming, always intra-acting with everything else’ (Barad, 2007)-The ontology
This paper examines Mandarin as a heritage language in the context of digital and school-based learning for children from four intercultural families in Germany. Instead of examining digital and school-based learning simultaneously, this study adopts a longitudinal approach, first exploring how COVID-19 restrictions influenced digital learning for both children and parents. It then examines why, in the post-COVID period, some children returned to Chinese Sunday school (Li-Gottwald, 2022) while others continued with digital learning. By doing so, the study aims to uncover the motivations behind these choices and to better understand the rationale behind 'what we are doing and why we do things the way we do' in the context of children’s digital distance learning for heritage languages.
Drawing on Braidotti's (2013) posthuman approach, this paper challenges the traditional anthropocentric perspective in digital education by rethinking our relationship with the digital world. It shifts the focus to a more-than-human-centered approach to digital learning, highlighting the interconnectedness between the digital environment, learning processes, and human interactions. This perspective illustrates how "digital makes people happen" by shaping identities, social interactions, and learning experiences, emphasizing that digital tools not only enable but also actively participate in new forms of engagement, communication, self-expression, and the construction of individual and communal identities, playing a crucial role in shaping human experiences and relationships (Bayne, 2018; Gourlay, 2021; Turkle, 2011), and offering unique opportunities for learners, fostering new methods of learning and identity formation (Braidotti, 2013; Knox, 2016; Selwyn, 2022;).
This paper draws on some data from an ongoing ethnographic study (2020-2026) to explore Mandarin heritage language education through Chinese Sunday school and digital learning in four intercultural families in City S in Germany. The original ethnographic research, which spans a broad intercultural theme with various topics, places significant emphasis on heritage language learning (both non-digital and digital) as one of the key focuses revealed in the fieldwork data. The data comprises fieldnotes, sketches, photos, and video clips. By analyzing this data, the study aims to illuminate the reasons behind parents' and children's choices between digital learning and returning to Sunday school in the post-COVID period, examining the impact of online learning on their perceptions of Mandarin education and investigating why some families chose to return to Sunday school while others continued with online learning. It concludes by highlighting the active role of digital environments in shaping heritage language learning as an aspect of ‘ the posthuman child/childhood’ (Murris, 2016; Malone 2020) in the intercultural families (Brown 2024; and transcultural family identity/system (Crippen and Brew, 2014) formation.
(words 453)

Author

• Jiayin Li-Gottwald, Helmut Schmidt University