Greek heritage language teachers as emergency grassroots policy makers: reconciling learner centred responses with textbook heavy pedagogies during COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the paucity of research on policy agents’ responses to the shift to teaching online during the first lockdown in heritage language education and pedagogy. Collected in the context of a small-scale exploratory study, it focuses on the reflective accounts of a group of heritage language teachers in a Greek school in francophone Switzerland. The paper builds on a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language education (Lytra et al., 2022, Liberating Language Education. Multilingual Matters) and investigates language teachers’ emergency grassroots policy making through a critical ethnographic lens (Martin-Jones & da Costa Cabral, 2018, The critical ethnographic turn in research on language policy and planning. In J. W. Tollefson, & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning (pp. 71–92). Oxford University Press). It demonstrates how teachers leveraged children’s developing digital abilities and expanded their semiotic repertoires. Concerned with delivering the curriculum, meeting language and literacy objectives and managing parental expectations, teachers simultaneously exploited children’s familiarity with established textbook heavy pedagogies which they adapted to different degrees. The acknowledgement and incorporation of children's digital abilities, and experiences to support Greek language learning did not encompass an integrative multimodal and multilingual approach.