Multilingual and Multicultural Educational Space: Creative Writing of Russian–speaking Children in the UK

Abstract

This article presents the qualitative study of bilingual children from Russian-speaking families living in the UK. Our findings offer novel insights and contribute to existing theoretical, methodological, and empirical research on multilingual and multicultural educational space through a new lens of study process of bilingual children imagination. It brings a new focus to existing work in this area through its consideration of creating writing as a reflection of complex educational space in post-literacy era. We collected the creative stories which were written by children who participated in concurs “Once it dreams for me”. The narrative and content analysis show popular topics based on specific cultural tradition and habitus of migrant families. We argued that these children stories have both cultural elements British and Russian, which were formed in the British mainstream and the Russian Saturday schools. One of the main points of children’s stories is the “Internet in their everyday life”. It shows how children learn and go through the process of acquisition of cultural knowledge in post-literacy era using new technologies. Also, the findings contribute to the discussion of the epistemology of children behaviour and motivation at a time when visual and creative reflection have begun more important that direct answer to explicit researchers questions. Expanding on the existing literature in this area, the article investigates creative story writing as a two-way process influencing both the transnational cultural and the transnational education space.
 Keywords: bilingual children, multicultural educational space, Russian-speaking families