Our collection of voices from inside the “Education in Contemporary Society” PhD program continues with an interview with Petar Lefterov, enrolled in the 38th cycle.
What are you researching in your PhD course?
I do research on multilingualism in Italian schools. I am now in my third year and my doctoral path has gradually become twofold: on the one hand, I am studying practices to support the acquisition of Italian as a second language (L2) in children with migrant backgrounds; at the same time, I have implemented, together with Prof. Luisa Zecca who is my tutor, a project aimed at enhancing, in the school context, the language and culture of origin of their families. In my thesis I am integrating the two fronts.
How did you approach the topic of multilingualism?
Because of a personal interest of mine, my family is in fact from Bulgaria: we have lived in Italy for more than 20 years now and I studied in Italy, graduating from UniMiB. It must be remembered, however, that when we talk about multilingualism in schools, we do not only mean the protection of the so-called alloglot languages (idioms from outside Italy), but also the enhancement of the so-called minority languages that are spoken in the national territory, the twelve languages currently recognized and protected by Italian law: these are the languages spoken by the Albanian, Catalan, Germanic, Greek, Slovenian and Croatian populations, to which are added French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian. For example, a Ladin or Sardinian family moving to Lombardy carries a linguistic and cultural heritage that must be preserved in its school-age children. The school, also in accordance with ministerial guidelines, must protect this wealth because it is a component of the individual's personal history, which contributes in all respects to his or her identity development.
You mentioned a project to enhance multilingualism in schools. It sounds like research to be done in the field, as indeed many are done in the Department.
Yes, and indeed, from the point of view of methodology, it is a research-training project, a type of empirical research that relies on the direct collaboration of teachers. The goal of research-training is to bring innovation by transforming the actions of teachers themselves, who through participation in experimentation develop new professional skills and improve reflexivity about their own role. With research-training, it is not just a matter of testing and transferring a cookbook of best practices, but of working further upstream, on the so-called mental habitus of the teacher (a term used in sociology to indicate an individual's thinking patterns and behavioral predispositions, ed.) so that he or she internalizes a different attitude and sensibility, in my case on multilingualism. For my project, we involved twelve teachers from an elementary school in the San Siro district of Milan to implement multilingual education practices that we then experimented with 111 girls and boys in the first and second year of the institution. Take geography for example: we asked ourselves how the teacher can enrich the teaching of this subject by involving the various linguistic and cultural baggage he finds in his classroom, so that it is integrated, and not removed, in the development of multilingual boys and girls. When I was admitted to the doctoral program, I had proposed a different project, on school dropout in children with migrant backgrounds. During the first year I did a scoping review, that is, a literature review, to frame the phenomenon of dispersal, but during that work I became interested in the use of multilingual education as a strategy to support the educational pathway of foreign children, and so I slowly veered toward this topic, as I often do during the doctoral program.
Is this your first research experience?
Actually no, before the PhD I had already obtained a research fellowship, it was an almost fortuitous landing. After the three-year degree, I had enrolled in the master's program, also here at UniMiB, in the course of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (as of today that degree is called Cultural and Social Anthropology, ed.). One of the courses I had included in the curriculum was Pedagogy and Cultures of Education, which at the time was taught by Prof. Susanna Mantovani, now an honorary professor in the department. I wanted to do my master's thesis in Japan, where I had already spent a period between my bachelor's and master's degrees, and when I heard a talk by Prof. Mantovani on education in Japanese society, I decided that that would be the thesis topic that would allow me to return to Japan. Unfortunately, I could not get a visa for Japan, so I had to abandon that plan: I stayed in Italy and chose instead a master's thesis on teaching English in kindergarten (3-6 years old) as a second language, with Mantovani as the supervisor. Once I got my master's degree, it was she who encouraged me to continue the research I had started for the thesis, so I applied for a three-year fellowship, which I finally got. When the fellowship was over, it now seemed natural to continue by enrolling in the doctoral program in ESC, and here I am at the end of my third year.
Would you like to continue your research career?
I am more interested in the part of the job that involves designing interventions that aim to produce change in schools and society. I will probably move in this direction, veering from research to tasks related to the third sector. Unfortunately, it seems to me that nowadays the most prosperous economic channel for this kind of project is European calls for proposals. In this regard, I have already been participating for some time in the C4S - Communities for Science project, designed by Prof. Zecca to train teachers on practices of inclusive science teaching aimed at children from 0 to 12 years old. This project has already received funding from the European research and innovation program Horizon 2020, and to continue it we are looking for new funds through the Erasmus+ KA220 program, which funds cooperation initiatives for innovation and good practices.
When you say that multilingual education can be a useful teaching strategy in children with migrant backgrounds, what benefits are you talking about?
I can say, with the due caution that is needed when one is still at the data analysis stage, that with the intervention in the San Siro school we have seen improvements from the point of view of involvement, both of students and families. Prior to the intervention it had emerged from a special focus group with teachers that in general parents with migrant backgrounds participate little in their children's schooling and tend to be disinterested in opportunities to meet with school staff. After the intervention, we did a second focus group to detect any changes, and it turned out that the initiative had piqued the interest of mothers and fathers, brought them closer to the school, and led them to inquire about their children's schooling. Some of them even offered to come into the classroom to give input on topics that concerned their home country. Involvement increased in the children as well: the novelty brought by the multilingual homework assignment gave a jolt to participation and proactivity in the classroom; moreover, it was interesting to see how the multilingual approach awakened even in the native Italian-speaking children an unprecedented interest in their family's local dialect, as if they had decided to discover a hitherto ignored linguistic heritage. Finally, the teachers reported to us that they have changed their attitude toward children who resort to using their native language. If before they tended to discourage these communicative devices, because of the experimentation they have learned to use them as supportive communicative channels. In essence their sensitivity seems to have changed, just as predicted in action-research interventions. We also received thanks from teachers who were already employing informal multilingualism practices but had no methodological awareness of them: in the second focus group some teachers told me that they had received a kind of validation of certain techniques whose effectiveness they had long suspected.
Is there a body of multilingual practices in the academic literature?
In the literature, yes, so much so that for my doctorate I drew heavily from the strand of translanguaging pedagogy, which can be described as the dynamic and creative use of all of a bi/ multilingual individual's language resources to communicate and learn. In practice, translanguaging involves the use of different languages, or elements of different languages, in a fluid and integrated way, thus eliminating the boundaries of using each. In Italy, translanguaging has never had too much of a following, but I point out a translanguaging experience carried out a few years ago in the province of Siena and documented in the essay "Imparare attraverso le lingue" by Valentina Carbonara and Andrea Scibetta (2020, published in Italian by Carocci). Translanguaging, on the other hand, is already a well-established practice in English-speaking countries. The term itself was coined by a Welsh teacher, Cen Williams, to describe the techniques he had developed with some colleagues to recover the Welsh language in the United Kingdom, where the hegemonizing use of English still threatens the survival of the languages of the individual kingdoms. Translanguaging has also been very successful in Canada, so much so that today the leading exponent of this practice is probably Canadian Jim Cummins, who moreover wrote the preface to the book I mentioned. However, while it is true that I took my cue from translanguaging, perhaps after a few years of research on the subject I have developed a more cautious opinion about its teaching effectiveness. For example, practices such as code-switching (the act of switching from speaking in one language to speaking in another) and code-mixing (speaking by adopting words from different languages in the same sentence), which are widely expected in translanguaging, could undermine the goal of achieving high proficiency in each of the individual languages used. Translanguaging, for example, might authorize a pupil to obviate the difficulty of expressing a concept in Italian by resorting to English, but in doing so the pupil circumvents that difficulty and in the long run runs the risk of not attaining a sufficient level of Italian to be truly expendable in society, for example in the professional world.
As a researcher, what perspective can you give us on the promotion of multilingualism in Italian schools?
The ministerial draft of the new 2025 directions for kindergarten and First cycle education came out a few weeks ago, and although it contains almost poetic passages about the importance of multilingualism in today's multicultural society, in reality it is clear that the efforts in this regard have in fact been scaled down to the bare minimum, at least if we compare the draft circulated by the Ministry of Education and Merit with the current directions, which date back to 2012: according to what is written in the draft, for MIM, multilingualism would be concretized at most in the development of language competence in English, and the only references to other languages are reserved for the so-called second European Community languages, French, Spanish and German, which in any case have been gradually disappearing from school curricula in recent years. All other languages, both EU and non-EU, seem to no longer exist, at least from what we read in the draft circulated by the ministry. My perception is that the issue is not felt at all by the current government, and the disappearance of the pluralistic and multicultural approach that the 2012 directions take to multilingualism seems to confirm this. For example, compared to the 2012 directions, all reference to native languages and their enhancement has disappeared in the new draft. In essence, in the multilingual society envisioned by the current Italian policy line, mastering English would be sufficient, and I tend to link this narrow-mindedness to the general Anglophone hegemonization in the Western world, which goes hand in hand with the cultural hegemonization of the United States. It is troubling for me to reread Tullio De Mauro's research, or GisCel's Ten Theses for Democratic Language Education, published in 1975, and observe that 50 years ago there was a much more developed awareness of the importance of multilingualism.
Italy’s current political phase does not seem to be propitious for your research. What other elements of difficulty can you bring back from your doctoral journey?
Data collection in our school-based intervention was the most challenging part for me. The twelve teachers I involved showed great enthusiasm and willingness and made the recruitment part very encouraging but being in a sense the director of the project, with all that it means in terms of logistical coordination, negotiation of goals, and assignment of tasks, was at times very tiring. Perhaps it was due to the age difference between me and the teachers, which may have penalized my authority, but during some of our interactions I could not be sure that the teachers were actively following the project and sharing its goals. I feared that in their hearts they were merely going along with my requests so as not to hinder my academic goals. At some junctures, for example, it was difficult to demand quality standards for the data collection done by the teachers; I felt a kind of mistrust about the actual usefulness of following the method developed by me and my mentor. After all, to extract information from a context of people one must first be able to establish trust and listening to each other, and this task certainly fell to the researcher, that is, me. Overall, however, I can be satisfied with the data collected; we managed to work well together.
No simplification meant, but could this distrust perhaps be due to the difficulty of translating pedagogical research into actual change of teaching practices?
Questioning one's way of acting and thinking as a teacher is not taken for granted; in general, no process of personal revision is immediate. One cannot generalize by talking about a widespread reticence of teachers toward innovation, also because, as I said, from my small sample of teachers I received, if anything, interest and enthusiasm regarding the experimentation we brought. However, I also know that today educational research, abetted by the political climate, does not always succeed in proposing change without appearing to bring complications to the craft of teaching. If this distrust exists, and I have no data to confirm this, it cannot, however, be attributed solely to an alleged a priori rigidity on the part of teachers; I think that would be a hasty interpretation. If anything, it would be one more reason to make it clear, to teachers but in general to all agents of the school-system, that educational research does not drop solutions from above, conceived according to who knows what abstruse theoretical construct, but rather offers a structured and intersubjective way of analysing the challenges of today's school, and bases the validation of its innovation bearing not only on the opinion of the academic community, but also on that of the teachers themselves. The teacher who understands this message inevitably approaches our research with curiosity, critical sense and a desire to learn.