Critical perspectives on plurilingual students' identity performance in sustainability education

The purpose of this critical video-ethnographic study is to gain new perspectives on how the open, dialogic structures in an alternative high school setting afford plurilingual adult students’ to take agency and the development of a positive student identity. With this goal, the study seeks to contribute to the research literature on plurilingual adult students and on nontraditional students learning about sustainability. The overarching question that guides this study is how does the figured world of multilingual sustainability education based on socioscientific issues mediate plurilingual adult students identities as competent science students? This study is multi-theoretical, multi-method, and multi-level, and as such, the manuscriptstyle dissertation presents several case studies of students as they participate in an interdisciplinary unit on sustainability. Situated in a superdiverse context, the data collection took place at an alternative high school, where students who dropped out of the traditional school system have the chance to get a leaving certificate. Data resources include video data, audio data, student artefacts, fieldnotes and photographs. Multimodal discourse analysis based on Gee (1996) was used to reveal the structures at the micro, meso and macro level that mediate learning for students in the alternative educational setting and afford them to make connections to their everyday lives. Three individual manuscripts examine three separate case studies regarding students’ use of transmodalling, students’ engagement in socio-scientific issues, and students’ perspectives on the holistic teaching and learning approaches in their school. Drawing on dialectic understandings of learning, the three case studies each illuminate holistic approaches to learning focusing on students’ multimodal means of expression, emotions and identity development that afford them with opportunities to take agency and create solidarity in the class and school community. This study concludes that dialogic pedagogy as space of possibilities mediates student’ development of identities as competent science learners, which has implications for their identities as agents positioned for transformative actions.