What if education stopped asking multilingual children to fit into a ready-made world and started building a world ready for them?
When I think about the power of language and education, I often think of a story—not from a book but from my life.
I once taught a young student, a recent immigrant, who spoke little English but possessed a gift for storytelling. In his first assignment, a personal narrative, he drew pictures instead of writing sentences. His story, told through images, unfolded in astonishing detail: his journey across borders, the faces of family left behind, the dreams he carried with him. When he presented his work to the class, the room was silent—thick with reverence, the kind that stretches out when the ineffable is revealed. Though not fluent in English, his voice resonated louder than any words could.
This memory anchors me in an enduring truth: Education, at its core, is a radical act of imagination. It is not merely about transferring knowledge or mastering skills but about reimagining the world. To teach is to dwell in possibility, to design spaces where voices long silenced can rise. Nowhere is this possibility more urgent, more profound than in the education of the multilingual child.
But who is the multilingual child? Anzaldúa (1987) reminds us, “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language.” To deny a child’s language is to deny their humanity. Thus, the multilingual child is an evolving articulation of human possibility—both who our children are and all they can be. Their being is expansive, rooted in languages and cultures that resist the confines of borders or definitions. They move fluidly across linguistic landscapes, their tongues shaped by the music of many worlds. Yet, in our schools, these children are often reduced to the limits of the dominant imagination—seen as problems to be fixed, their brilliance dulled by systemic inequities and deficit-based thinking.
How do we dismantle these systems and disrupt this thinking? How do we reimagine education to embrace the multilingual child and unlock the possibilities they hold? The challenge lies not in the multilingual child but in our refusal to accept them as they are—our insistence on “fixing” them, on reshaping how they speak, behave, or conform to a ready-made world that does not account for their multiplicity or proclivity to reshape the world in a new, more dynamic image. This refusal stems from deeply entrenched ideologies that privilege monolingualism and sameness over diversity and authenticity.
What if, instead of focusing on changing the multilingual child, we turned our attention to designing spaces that they not only deserve but spaces that deserve them? What if we intentionally designed spaces where they belong? What if education became a sanctuary of acceptance, a site where linguistic and cultural differences are celebrated rather than erased? As Brené Brown (2017) asserts, “True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.” Imagine an educational system that required the multilingual child to be nothing more—and nothing less—than themselves. What transformations might such a system unleash, not only for multilingual learners but for all of us?
To fully embrace the multilingual child, we must conceive of a pedagogy of linguistic belonging—an approach that does more than include but affirms and uplifts. In keeping with scholarship in critical linguistic traditions in education (e.g., García, 2009; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Paris & Alim, 2017), the pedagogy of linguistic belonging must encompass at least three essential domains: affirmation, integration, and transformation.
Affirmation is the foundation. It involves recognizing and valuing the linguistic and cultural assets that multilingual children bring to the classroom. Rather than framing their home languages as barriers, affirmation views them as strengths, as tools for learning and connection. Affirmation requires educators to create spaces where students’ full linguistic repertoires—what García and Wei (2014) term translanguaging—are not merely permitted but encouraged. This practice shifts the experience of the multilingual child by affirming their identities and fostering confidence in their unique contributions.
Integration moves beyond recognition to action. It requires embedding linguistic diversity into the fabric of teaching and learning. This means designing curricula that reflect and respect the multilingual realities of our students, drawing on their languages and cultures as central to the learning process. Integration also calls for systemic changes: hiring bilingual educators, developing dual-language (or multilingual) programs, and providing professional development that equips teachers to work effectively with multilingual learners. Integration shifts the multilingual child’s experience by ensuring their languages and cultures are not add-ons but integral to the educational process from its inception.
Transformation is the ultimate goal. It involves reimagining education itself as a project of justice, equity, and belonging. Transformation challenges the implicit hierarchies that privilege monolingual norms and dominant cultural narratives. It calls for a disruption of raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) that marginalize multilingual learners, replacing them with practices that affirm the dignity and humanity of every child. Transformation shifts the multilingual child’s experience by creating schools that are not merely sites of inclusion but spaces of liberation.
Through affirmation, integration, and transformation, the pedagogy of linguistic belonging creates the conditions for multilingual children to thrive. It moves beyond the narrow confines of the dominant imagination, opening up spaces where they can be fully themselves. Such a pedagogy does not merely enrich the lives of multilingual learners; it redefines education as a whole, reminding us that learning is at its best when it is relational, creative, and just.
What, then, does linguistic belonging look like in practice? It looks like classrooms where different dimensions of knowing, thinking, and being interact and converge, where the multilingual child is not asked to silence parts of themselves but is invited to bring their full linguistic and cultural selves into the learning process. Consider the potential of a project-based learning environment where multilingual students document their family histories using a mix of languages, photographs, and oral storytelling. Such an approach not only affirms their identities but also deepens their understanding of history, literacy, and community. It is an education that speaks to the heart as much as the mind, rooted in the sense that knowledge is co-created, that learning is relational.
This is not merely an instructional strategy but a profound reimagining of what education can be. In practice, the pedagogy of linguistic belonging asks us to see the multilingual child as a potentiality—a being who holds the power to expand our collective understanding of language, culture, and justice. This potentiality is not a fixed state; it is a dynamic process, one that grows as children navigate, negotiate, and reconstruct their worlds through language.
This pedagogy also challenges the myth of linguistic hierarchies. It disrupts the idea that certain ways of knowing—those aligned with whiteness and monolingual norms—are inherently superior. As Lisa Delpit (1995) argues, “We must teach in a way that honors the language children bring with them, allowing them to achieve success without demanding that they reject their cultural identity.” This principle calls for policies that support dual-language (or multilingual) immersion programs, multilingual teacher training, and equitable funding for language services.
The stakes are high. When we fail multilingual learners, we fail ourselves. We diminish the possibilities of what education can be—a site of creativity and liberation. The multilingual child reminds us that education is never neutral; it either reproduces hierarchies or disrupts them. We must ask ourselves: What kind of world are we preparing our students to shape and inhabit?
The multilingual child, thus, challenges us to expand our understanding of what is possible in both education and the world. They remind us that belonging is not about conformity but connection— creating a world where every child feels seen, valued, and empowered to bring their whole selves to the table. And in so doing, they compel us to reimagine education itself, not as a means of reproducing hierarchies but as a tool for reducing hierarchies.
This is what the pedagogy of linguistic belonging is about, about reconfiguring the very fabric of education to honor the multilingual child as a creator, a bridge-builder, and a storyteller. In the end, the pedagogy of linguistic belonging reminds us that to teach is to hope, to believe that change is possible, to imagine a world where language is not a barrier but a bridge. And so, we return to the multilingual child—not as a problem to but as a gift to behold, a testament to the boundless potential of humans to adapt, connect, and create.
References
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
Brown, B. (2017). Braving the wilderness: The quest for true belonging and the courage to stand alone. Random House.
Delpit, L. (1995). Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. The New Press.
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171.
García, O. (2009). Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Wiley-Blackwell.
García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Palgrave Macmillan.
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press.
Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. Teachers College Press.
Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 46(5), 621–647.
Suárez-Orozco, C., & Suárez-Orozco, M. (2001). Children of Immigration. Harvard University Press.
Valdés, G. (2001). Learning and Not Learning English: Latino Students in American Schools. Teachers College Press.
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Suggested citation: Kirkland, D.E. (2024). The Multilingual Child: Toward a Pedagogy of Linguistic Belonging. forwardED Perspectives, https://www.forward-ed.com/post/the-multilingual-child-toward-a-pedagogy-of-linguistic-belonging.
David E. Kirkland, PhD, is the founder and CEO of forwardED. He is a nationally renowned scholar of education equity and the author of Pedagogy of the Black Child. He can be reached via email at: david@forward-ed.com.
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