Building bonds through storytelling a qualitative study of a multilingual family-school partnership project

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a school-family partnership programme that has been implemented in French schools to prevent learning difficulties among migrant children, taking their specific needs into account. It consists of a series of three to four sessions, gathering migrant parents, their children and members of the teaching staff, one interpreter (or several) and one mediator, where each participant is invited to talk about their own personal history of migration and share stories and narratives in different languages. The content of the sessions is analysed to show the impact and the processes of change, both for the children as well as for the parents and the educational staff. It seems that such sessions reinforce relationships between the educational teams and the families, helping children of migrants build bridges between their native tongue and the language used at school. By valorising their own language and culture, the programme ultimately stimulates learning at school. These sessions are also useful to help children become more familiar with their parents’ life stories, thus contributing to the transmission of trans-generational elements that are often undermined by migration. The sheer pleasure of storytelling contributes to reinforcing children’s narrative skills.