Pedagogy of Whole Languaging Hearts

Fostering Relational Ways of (Re)Connecting to the Land With Multilingual Refugee Children

Bibliographic Data

ID10219288
AuthorsSophia Thraya (0000-0001-5918-0390, Werklund School of Education University of Calgary Calgary Canada, corresponding author), Miwa Aoki Takeuchi (0000-0003-2640-7506, Werklund School of Education University of Calgary Calgary Canada, corresponding author), Jrène Rahm (0000-0001-8437-0620, Faculté des sciences de l'éducation Université de Montréal Montreal Canada)
Year2026
Volume63
Issue1
Pages22-39
Publication date2026-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Research in Science Teaching (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-4308 • E-ISSN: 1098-2736
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/tea.70018
OpenAlexW4413436829
LanguageEN
References cited59

Colonial monolingual norms are a present oppressive force within schooling spaces, with a direct assimilative target on the linguistic practices of historically marginalized peoples, histories, and knowledge systems. For racially minoritized multilingual refugee learners, the space of in‐school science learning can be experienced as an involuntary detachment from linguistic wholeness, intergenerational ways of knowing, and community practices. Our work offers a disruption of the deficit‐based narratives that leave the brilliances associated with multilingualism invisibilized. Based on facilitator reflections and video‐based interaction analyses, our findings shed light on the pedagogy of whole languaging hearts that actively resist colonial and racialized linguistic norms and center social interactions and relations transcending divides across languages, geopolitical locations, and species. The pedagogy of whole languaging hearts was enacted to embrace how children and teachers located themselves within land‐based networks of interrelated communities. We offer to look at this network intersectionally, lovingly, and relationally to imagine otherwise, refusing the predefined disciplinary possibilities for eco‐ and socially just science futures together. Extending further the literature on translanguaging, our article focuses on the transformative possibilities of languaging emerging from our work with diasporic refugee children hailing from the “Middle East,” which transcends the borders of the named languages of Arabic, Kurmanji, and English. With the pedagogical enactment of languaging with whole hearts, we demonstrate how teachers can open space for science teaching grounded in the lives and worlds of multilingual refugee children and in embodied interactions on the land. We argue that ways of coming to know sciences are inseparable from our sense of community, stories, and relations

Linguistics · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Political science · Refugee · Sociology · Translanguaging · Global Education and Multiculturalism · Indigenous and Place-Based Education · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology

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