• How can teachers maximize engagement among multilingual students?
•  What are some effective ways to integrate multilingual instructional strategies into classrooms?

The topic for this week’s content brought my attention to situations in our school systems that can create passive exclusion and isolation. Language and literacy are crucial throughout schooling because they are the basis for how people communicate. Often it is easy to default to the single story of “all students in my classroom understand English and they are all at the same academic level in all subjects”. This single story unintentionally undermines the intelligence of students who are in the process of learning English and require more support.

I think teachers can maximize engagement and a sense of belonging among multicultural students by specifically acknowledging shortcomings in the classroom related to multicultural inclusion, and by actively deconstructing our personal internalized racism and biases. This can be done by integrating aspects of multiple holidays from a variety of cultures into classroom activities and learning opportunities based on events and occurrences beyond North American culture and media.

A multicultural instructional strategy that I’ve seen within my community includes highlighting a word in a different language each day and facilitating a small activity including that word. The Regina Public Library Sunrise branch displays a new Cree word or phase each day, which I think is a good starting point for integrating multicultural values into a space or classroom.

https://www.edcan.ca/articles/multilingual-students/

https://www.edcan.ca/articles/multilingual-students/