Aim
The overarching aim was to produce new knowledge on recently arrived pupils as writers in and outside of school. Writing was understood as a set of translingual practices, where the prefix trans- moved us away from an understanding of language as a bounded and stable system, while practices stressed the individual’s use of language situated in a social, political and historical context. In other words, this understanding of literacy emphasised the translingual young person’s agency in relation to contemporary discourses in different writing spaces.
Design
The project was designed as a linguistic ethnography over the course of a school year, from September to June. Data collection involved linguistic ethnographic methods such as participant observation, interviews, audio recordings, and the collection of texts written by the pupils in and outside of school. The analyses searched for sedimented patterns and combined linguistic ethnography with critical discourse analysis.
Funding
The project was a three-year postdoctoral study from 2015 to 2018, financed by the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo.
Results
The study of young people’s writing outside school, their previous writing experiences and sources of inspiration provided analytical opportunities for understanding their school writing.
Dominant discourses at school acknowledged monolingual and independent text products. This contrasted with young people’s more dynamic leisure-time writing practices, both in terms of language choice and authorship.
Publications
- Dewilde, J., & Igland, M.-A. (2023). “No problem, janem”: En transspråklig tilnærming til flerspråklige elevers skriving [“No problem, janem”: A translingual approach to multilingual students’ writing]. In A. Golden & E. Selj (Eds.), Skriving på norsk som andrespråk: Vurdering, opplæring og elevenes stemmer [Writing in Norwegian as a second language: Assessment, teaching and students’ voices] (2nd ed., pp. 134–154). Cappelen Damm Akademisk.
- Dewilde, J. (2022). Negotiating minority language resources, practices and experiences in Norwegian writing instruction for migrant students. In A. Norlund-Shaswar & J. Rosén (Eds.), Literacies in the age of mobility – Literacy practices of adult and adolescent migrants (pp. 239-262). Palgrave Macmillian.
- Dewilde, J. (2019). How Islamic are young Muslim people’s poems? Apples - Journal of Applied Language Studies, 13(4), 71–87.
- Dewilde, J. (2018). “It’s just in my heart”: A portrait of a translingual young person as a writer of poetry. In T. O. Engen, L. A. Kulbrandstad, & S. Lied (Eds.), Norwegian perspectives on education and diversity (pp. 103-120). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- Dewilde, J. (2017). Translation and translingual remixing: A young person developing as a writer. International Journal of Bilingualism. doi:10.1177/1367006917740975
- Dewilde, J., & Kulbrandstad, L. A. (2016). Nyankomne barn og unge i den norske utdanningskonteksten [Newly arrived children and young people in the Norwegian education context]. Nordand ‒ nordisk tidsskrift for andrespråksforskning, 11(2), 13‒33.
- Dewilde, J., & Skrefsrud, T.-A. (2016). Including alternative stories in the mainstream: How transcultural young people in Norway perform creative cultural resistance in and outside of school. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 20(10), 1032–1042. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2016.1145263
- The following publication is aimed at educational practitioners:
- Dewilde, J. (2016). «I dine øyne er jeg fortapt»: Flerspråklig skriving i skolen [“In your eyes I am lost”: Multilingual writing at school]. Bedre skole, 2, 68–71.