When the parish turns into a classroom: teaching pluriliteracies in regional collateral languages through place-based education (the case of Latgalian)

ABSTRACT

Our paper discusses ways of connecting the acquisition of a regional language with learning processes related to specific places. For this aim, we relate the investigation of the Linguistic Landscape (LL) to the pluriliteracies teaching approach and to place-based learning. As an example, we use the case of Latgalian in Latvia: How can local multilingual and sociocultural realities as identified in the linguistic landscape enrich disciplinary content in regional language teaching, while also enhancing language awareness and active engagement among the students? And how can place-based education be used for developing (pluri)literacy in regional collateral languages? To this end, the paper first provides the background to place-based education, before turning to roles of Latgalian in public space and a recent LL study in Latgale. Then, we provide suggestions of how to ‘turn the parish into a classroom’, but also of how ‘to bring the parish into the class’ by using digital resources, e.g. language corpora. Finally, we suggest a set of components that influence place-based education for developing literacy in a regional collateral language and which may be taken into consideration when preparing educational projects. This paper is complementary to two other papers on Latgalian in this special issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Place-based education
• regional collateral language
• Latgalian
• Linguistic Landscape
• language awareness
• pluriliteracy

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Research Programme “Digital Humanities” project “Towards Development of Open and FAIR Digital Humanities Ecosystem in Latvia” (DHELI) (No. VPP-IZM-DH-2022/1-0002).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Survey conducted in the framework of the European Erasmus+ project Ownership and Leadership: Pathway for (Endangered) Languages’ Use in School (https://owlplus.eu/) at Rēzekne Academy of Technologies in autumn/winter 2022/23.