Legitimizing and resistance identities in immigrant students' school essays: Towards a culturally sustaining pedagogy

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show that the ambivalent identities projected by immigrant students could serve the goals of a culturally sustaining pedagogy which seeks to perpetuate cultural pluralism at school. In our view, language teaching should not limit itself to correcting their lexicogrammatical "errors", but could also concentrate on the content of immigrant student essays, so as to bring their identities to the surface. To this end, we investigate the ways young immigrants living in Greece position themselves towards the dominant assimilationist discourse in Greek society. We discuss immigrant students' ambivalent identities showing their wish to legitimize themselves as members of the host community and simultaneously to resist its monoculturalist pressures. We finally argue for the exploitation of immigrant students' texts involving their experiences and identities: such texts could enhance all students' critical language awareness and could foster multiculturalism and multilingualism at school.