Good morning, everybody. Good afternoon, wherever you are, everywhere. Welcome. Embracing Challenges, Researching Paths. Summer Educational Weeks on Basic Education and Violence is a project from Das Kollektiv, kritische Bildungs-, Beratungs- und Kulturarbeit von und für Migrantinnen in cooperation with MAIS and the financial support of the Integrationsstelle Oberösterreich, die Österreichische Gesellschaft für politische Bildung, RD Foundation Vienna, Frauenreferat Land Oberösterreich and Frauenbüro der Stadt Linz. Thank you all for being here and for making the collective researching of paths possible. Thanks to the technical support from MEB Veranstaltungstechnik and Mariceli Barrea-Garcia for the graphic design, to Verena Kovari and Birgit Sinkewitz for the translation and to all the colleagues supporting and working for this event on different levels. The contributions and the discussion between the speakers will be recorded. During this time, the cameras can be switched off if it is uncomfortable for someone. The recording only fixes on the speakers during the lectures and comments. The subsequent plenary discussion will not be recorded and we would ask everyone who can imagine to do so to turn their cameras on. Despite the use of Zoom for this event, we want to enable dialogue above all. Please allow the technology to promote you as a discussion participant. This is a request from Zoom so that you can switch on your cameras and microphones. Everyone can then turn on their microphones and cameras themselves when they want to speak. For the rest of the time, it would be good if the microphones remain switched off. If annoying noises occur, the technical support will mute you. You are welcome to cancel this yourself as soon as the noises have been eliminated. This event will be held in English with simultaneous interpretation in German available through the Zoom interpretation feature. To access interpretation, please click on the globe icon to the right of the chat icon. A menu will appear and you can select the audio channel for German to hear the translated audio as well as the option to mute the original audio instead of hearing it in a lower volume with the interpretation. If you don't need interpretation, please ignore this instruction. In the final discussion, questions can be posted either in German or in English, whatever you feel more comfortable with. If you need a confirmation for your participation, please write an email to svetta at daskollektiv.at. We would also like to invite everyone to ask questions or post comments on the topics discussed using the chat function. We will discuss them in the final discussion. Please also use the chat if you have any problems, comments or critique. Before we start, I'd just like to add a quick recap of yesterday's talks by Martha Young-Scholten and Rubia Salgado, titled Research on Literacy with Migrant Women. It has been quite an intensive two weeks packed with ideas, amazing insights and inputs from many different people. Yesterday we heard Robia and Martha speak about the challenges and questions and the positive aspects of using literature in our teaching practice. We heard about abstraction and metaphors and ways to provide opportunities and space for course participants and teachers alike to read the world as it is and to write the world as it could be. Daring, taking risks, making mistakes, and of course reflecting and learning and embracing new paths and culminating in a call to action. A call to action to teachers thinkers and researchers so now i'll pass you over to our moderator for today natasha kakua natasha kakua works on language school and racism as well as on other theoretical and methodological questions in the context of hegemonic language and speech relationships. She is currently completing her doctorate at the Freiburg University of Education, which is supported by a scholarship from the Hans Brückler Foundation. Before that, she worked in the department of German as a second language at the University of Vienna. Natascha, please. Thank you very much Kim for your kind introduction and of course a special thanks to Yulia, Ghana and Rubia for organizing this format of summer education week and especially for bringing to back together this great panel we are about to start. I'm very happy to be moderating this session today. We have two great colleagues here with their inputs, Brigitte Busch from the University of Vienna and Julie Choi from the University of Melbourne, both of whom I will introduce to you in more detail later. Before we hear the two inputs, I want to give you just a very brief introduction to the panel, Pedagogic Reflectivity from the Bottom of Our Heart or the Heart. What are we talking about? The title as it is now is one of the outcomes of our Zoom meeting that Gagana and Rubia organized in the beginning of June. And the meeting was very very inspiring not only because of the high regards for the colleagues involved, but also because common interest and a certain common field of questions became visible, which will be deepened in the both contributions from different contexts. But what we came back again and again in our discussion or rather what questions we were circled around there were two of them one what is the object of pedagogical reflection so what is it we can should or must think about and the second what is the medium of this reflection? How do we get or through what do we get into thinking or maybe also feeling? Of course, these are both questions about which there would be a lot to say and discuss. I just want to formulate a few questions out of our discussion that seems to be interesting to me. So questions about the object of reflection. From the perspective of teaching, of teachers, I believe that the topic of neutrality of educational setting remains a big issue. So it is really not a new question, but it's gaining importance again and again. Firstly, because it's strategically positioned in education policy. For example, when as happened in 2019, the Globalization Critical Association, ATTAC, in Germany, was deprived of its non-profit status, which is necessary in order to apply for state funding. The reason given was that ATTAC did not provide neutral education, but prospered, I quote, general political goals. At the same time, we have seen in Austria for some years that the so-called value courses are linked to German courses in which supposed Austrian values, whatever that may be, are taught, which are also very much reminiscent of a civilization mission. This brings me to the issue of a collective reflection on whose neutrality is in question in the discourse on education policy and to what effect for whom. But also secondly, and this would turn the direction of the question towards oneself, how am I actually involved in social power and domination relations with my teaching? If we assume that pedagogical as well as researching practices are always involved practices, if there is no outside of power and domination, where do we stabilize relation of inequality for example with our teaching, with our research? Where do we have maybe some spots where we are not able to think about because we just are not able to see? Or where does it become uncomfortable to think about our own involvement? This brings me to the second point, the medium of reflection. This brings me to the second point, the medium of reflection. Here in our discussion, we have always come to one instance, the body. So we will hear a few things about the body too, but not understood as a biological entity, but rather in a way to understand it as constructed in races, sexes, and other relations of violence. As racialized, gendered, but also languaged bodies, as Rachel puts it. With these bodies, we stand in the world, but we also stand in the classroom. bodies we stand in the world but we also stand in the classroom. Here one question could perhaps be how can we take the body into account in our practices of reflection but also our effects affects and emotions without proceeding into individualization and essentializing patterns. So what about the body? With these few questions in mind, I'm now very excited about the two inputs and the joint discussion. Each input will last for about 25 minutes. And after we have heard both, we will go into a short break for around five minutes. And then we will come back together for the general discussion. But now I'm particularly pleased to introduce our first speaker, Professor Brigitta Busch, researches and teaches at the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Vienna and Stellenbosch University, South Africa. In 2009, she was awarded a Bertha Kahnik Professorship for the promotion of excellent female scientists. Since the beginning of her academic career, which she completed via the second educational path, she has devoted herself to questions of multilingualism initially in Carinthia and South Eastern Europe, where she has also became active for the Council of Europe. International recognition is given to the further development of the language biographical approach and the creative visual method for surveying and analyzing linguistic repertoire. And the input today will be on reflecting on displacement and the bodily dimension of language. And I'm very happy to hear your input. Brigitte, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Natasha, for this kind introduction. And thank you, everybody, for inviting me to participate in this fantastic activity. I will now share my screen as I've prepared a little presentation. So let's see. Well, should. Oh, we tried it before, but very interesting now. I can't see. Oh. I'm sorry, somehow I'm not sure whether it still works. Markus? Hat sich an den Einstellungen etwas geändert? Interessant. Ich weiß nicht, was passiert ist. Markus? Have the settings changed somehow? No. It's interesting. I really don't know what happened. Does it work now? Yes. Okay, perfect. So no idea what happened, but something happened. So let's go back to the beginning. Right. I think we are there now. Now it's perfect, isn't it? Yes. Yes. So Natasha already announced the title of my presentation, it's reflecting on displacement and the bodily dimension of language. So, as you all know, in linguistics today, we rather embrace the notion of the communicative repertoire than the notion of languages as separate entities and of individual monolingualism as the norm. Just for a short reminder, this communicative for semiotic repertoire as we prefer to call it is acquired along the life trajectory in specific social spaces. It comprises not only the named languages, but also dialects, sociolects, all kinds of ways of speaking and communicating. And of course, also the rules and conventions of language use. It is influenced by language ideologies. And this is quite important because this is where social discourses and political power relations come into play and have their impact on what potential resources we actually use and can use in situated interactions. So these language ideologies influence attitudes towards way of speaking and of course towards groups of speakers. Natasha just mentioned the language body. I mean we all know that we have have these descriptions and that very often people are, there are in registered persona that are linked to certain ways of speaking. And so, and stereotypes mobilized attached to certain ways of speaking. So the language repertoire is not neutral, but actually very much influenced by these social power relations on diverse levels of social life. But the repertoire has also a subjective dimension and it is linked to bodily and emotionally lived experience of language so this is something that is very important to me because we all make our experiences in daily life with language and this experience that we make when we are recognized as a legitimate speaker or dismissed as a non-legitimate speaker or misrecognized as a language body, then actually this has an emotional impact on us. And this is what is very often overlooked in, well, I mean, it has made its way into a lot of research work, but in political discourse and in social discourse, it's certainly often overlooked. I just want to remind briefly that emotions like feelings of shame are very much something that turns up in lived experience of language. out of place and even sometimes even it's active language shaming we are confronted with and immediately we react with this feeling of shame ourselves and the kind of seclusion so we can talk maybe about this bodily emotional dimension than more in the debate. But what I want to come to now in my talk is that this linguistic repertoire is somehow always there. How we use it and what we use out of our linguistic repertoire very much depends on the situation and the interaction. What happens when we change place, when there is relocation, when there is displacement, then we have this experience that the repertoire does not fit all of a sudden. This experience can be something very mundane like i don't know traveling from vienna to ford lubeck just a few hundred kilometers and you see actually the repertoire i'm used to in vienna over there it doesn't fit quite fit so it's maybe a question of local dialects and the question of people are not sure where you come from, etc. But it can be a displacement for holidays, but it can be very serious displacement, like being obliged to leave and go somewhere else. But this, I mean, I would claim that this experience that the repertoire does not fit, everybody has made it at some point or another. What does this experience consist of? There is a higher awareness of one's repertoire and of one's communicative practices that usually go quite unnoticed. I would like to introduce here Bigotsky's notion of perigyvanie, experiencing, I tried to translate it, because I think this is really crucial for our context. Even if we know this basic experience of displacement and non-fitting repertoires, we must be aware that different people experience irritating, unsettling events differently. And Vygotsky gave the example of three siblings reacting very differently to domestic violence. The two younger children were very affected by it, whereas the eldest child somehow understood that the mother was completely overwhelmed by a really complex material situation and political situation, and she kind of passed this insecurity on and reacted violently. So the eldest child took a bit the role of trying to calm the mother down and so on. And what Vygotsky explains is that the social environment actually does not have a direct static impact, but it is mediated by emotional experience. That means that, for instance, with the three children, what was important was the age factor, the position in the line of the siblings. And also this idea that the eldest child already knew how to help himself outside the family a bit. So what he insisted on Vygotsky was that although the situation was the same, kind of on a superficial plan for all three, the experience of the violence was lived through differently. It was interpreted and processed on the basis of social, personal and situational resources. So if we transfer that to today's context or our context, we must keep in mind that displacement and non-fitting repertoires can be lived in very different ways, depending on what the conditions are. So this experience of the non-fitting repertoire can be lived as a challenge, as a negative experience of linguistic insecurity, loss of self-confidence, feelings of shame, loss of voice, misrecognition, exclusion. It can be lived as a positive experience, as the desire to expand one's repertoire, to identify with a new social environment, or to escape from restricting surroundings. Mostly this experience of a non-fitting repertoire is lived in an ambivalent way, a mixture of sometimes positive, sometimes negative conflicting feelings. So to maybe repeat again, the determining factors are social, symbolic, material resources. And what I think is very important is a recognized stance from where to speak, which means status, legal status, status in society, in the sense of having a secure position in society. And I'm drawing here a little bit on Hannah Arendt's idea that when you don't have a stance from where to speak, no matter what you say, it just can't be heard. And then other determining factor is acceptance or rejection by the social environment. I don't think I need to insist on this last point because this acceptance or rejection, I think is a factor that is often identified. I just would like to remind of Julie Joyce's fantastic book Creating a Multivocal Self, which was published some five years ago. And she explains in this book about her own personal experiences with different changing repertoires and with all these social factors that had a strong impact on it. So most of you know and most of you expect probably that when I give a talk that the language poetry will appear and it does appear. So it has become a method quite common in pedagogical contexts and in research contexts. And participants visualize and discuss their communicative resources with reference to the outline of her body silhouette, the language portray. And I think what is important, it's not only the drawing, it's not only the artifact, but it is the process and the presentation of the project in a group and the discussion in a group about linguistic resources and about, well, all kinds of factors that impact on that repertoire. As we understand the production of this language portrait, it is a situational and context bound co-production. So it will look a certain way in a certain context on a certain day, and it will look quite differently, the portrait from the same person in another context a little bit later, etc. So we don't take the artifact of the portrait as a representation of the individual repertoire resources or in a school, when I come along, other resources will be emphasized than in a more informal context, for instance. But what I think always works and is really interesting is that it encourages participants to engage in a meta-linguistic reflection on their communicative practices and resources. And that if employed in a way that tries to kind of smooth down the hierarchies that are always given in a teaching learning context, then if it tries to kind of enable encounters, eye to eye encounters, then it can be really productive and participants can also really monitor in how far they go when they talk about their linguistic repertoire and their lived experiences. So I think it can be an approach that it is not intrusive as long as it is monitored in a way that is kind of careful, let's say. So the language portray can serve as a point of reference for thinking in and with metaphors. And I'm drawing here on Lakoff and Johnson, who actually said that our metaphorical world or the metaphors we use in daily life, they are always with reference to the body. Even if we use metaphors like up and down, it is with reference to the body that we determine what is up and down usually. So the body silhouette kind of gives this point of reference that helps to structure a space of metaphors that enable us to speak about repertoires and as I said it's not necessarily body parts but it can be up and down and left and right and inside, things like that. Another point that seems important to me is that it suggests to consider one's communicative resources as a whole. It kind of favors the repertoire approach because in linear In linear presentations like writing a CV or a short bio outline, we usually follow a linear path, whereas in the drawing, we can show a more relational picture. It invites us to take the perspective of the perceiving and acting subject body and relates languages to bodily emotionally lived experience. So I recently worked quite a bit on the question of the body image. That's a notion developed in the 1930s already in psychology and further developed by Francois Stolto in the 80s. It's an imaginary self-evaluating representation of one's body in interaction with others. Unfortunately, we don't have enough time to go into details about it, but might be interesting for you to go further in this in this idea i would like to come now to um well to an example from a workshop we had some six years ago workshop we had some six years ago in Austria. It was a language portrait done by Mrs. L. It was a portrait done in a session where we were two researchers and Mrs. L. She was born in an Eastern European country and her husband already worked in Vienna when they married, but had two children together. And then eventually she decided to come to Austria and lived in this semi-legal position of tourist visas or without visas. And she fought for 10 years for herself and her daughter to obtain a residence and working permit, while her husband and astonishingly also her son had an official residence permit. Now, I will be reading the quotes in English, but you can read them in German on the screen. She, in, during the presentation of her portrait, she said, I was always afraid that I will be expelled. Yes. And always I looked around if a police car or so comes along I was at the window always that was over 10 years. Then she continued in the she continued and said we were mobbed by the neighbor. We were mobbed by the neighbor. Sorry. We were mobbed by the neighbor. And that was difficult. Because I was at home all the time with the children. He shouted, damned foreigners. And you go away. And he had so many keys here. Locked everything. Controlled 10 times. And then I had to go every now and then. away and he had so many keys here, locked everything, controlled 10 times. And then I had to go every now and then in the garden with the children because it does not work. No, only inside, curtains closed, windows closed. What is interesting maybe is to see actually that this being excluded and this having no status, no legal status for her really was having no position to speak from. She was mobbed and she had to seclude herself. She had to stay inside and just couldn't counter the xenophobic attacks she had to hear from the neighbors. On the other hand, she started to develop during her life in suspense, communicative resources. On the one hand, she developed translanguaging practices with women in the neighborhood. And she says about that. And then I did the little Ukrainian and this was mixed and it worked we could how does one say communicate you can see in the portrait she has a few small dots these were different languages she used with the neighbors chunks of languages. And this was really important for her. But then she also said, and also the chant in the church that I liked that. So from hearing, because the words are there, the meaning is, it doesn't matter. So this is something I heard very often that this language or using or hearing languages that are kind of free from the pressure of meaning making, but kind of being together with other people, that this can be really extremely important in discovering resources. it the semiotic language this way of communicating that relies more on the on the form that relies more on rhythms intonations uh on um not not so much on the symbolic and this semiotic language language, as Chris Deva says, is re-actualized when, I mean, it is there with children, with small children, but it is reactivated, re-actualized in poetic discourse and creative means of expression. So we hear that quite often when people present their language portraits that such poetic or semiotic means play an extremely important role. The third element she brought up, she said, "'Yes, German, that is dear to my heart without German language I could not imagine living here I think that without the language in your country it is very difficult I'm glad that I learned the language I'm not yet satisfied I would like that I do that almost perfectly. I find it very important because I live here with my children and my family and I like to do it. So I mean, we're good only about this last quote. Talk about an hour because you can see very clearly here this ambivalent position. I mean, she made huge efforts to learn with her children because she could not attend an official course as she was in this uncertain legal position. So she tried to learn with her children and to pick up a maximum around her. tried to learn with her children and to pick up a maximum around her. But keep in mind that she actually did not leave the house very much because she was afraid of being caught by the police. But I mean, you can see this ambivalent attitude. On the one hand, she thinks it's very important. So she follows that discourse that Germany is important for integration. She knows that this discourse is very powerful. But on the other hand, she always thinks that she's not perfect enough and she wants to be perfect. She feels the pressure of having to be perfect. So yeah, maybe that's another point that would be interesting to discuss because what kind of German do we want, do we need? So to summarize here, unfortunately, a bit quickly, this life in suspense is a denial of fundamental rights that goes hand in hand with conditions of displacement and precarity experienced on different levels. So if we take the language level only here, it's experienced on the level of discourse by xenophobic and racist discourses, and of course, legal regulations and bureaucratic practices that express policies of exclusion. It's experienced on the level of language use, the experience of being judged on one's competence in a single language, the official language of the country of arrival, disregarding all the other resources developed that enable us to lead this daily life. And on the level of voice, it's the refusal of a legitimate position within the social world that makes it extremely difficult to position oneself as a speaker with regard to others. And this was lived by Mrs. L as a long lasting painful traumatizing stress. After 13 years she managed eventually to get this residence permit and she managed to get to join a German course and eventually to find a job, but still a very difficult situation for her. So, yeah, now to come back maybe to working, because I'm speeding up, because I'm seeing that time, I'm running short of time, so to go back maybe to the language portrait, it offers the possibility to develop an evaluative, interpretive gaze on one's own language trajectory and repertoire and just in brackets when using the method I mean one must leave enough space for people to do so and one when we use it I think we must also accept when people just don't want to say more and reflect for on their, or maybe come up days later with reflections that turned in their heads. But still, and what I think is very important is that the portrait also helps to develop awareness of one's sometimes unexpected communicative resources, like the importance of semiotic poetic language, or maybe of third languages, or things that are kind of outside the dichotomy of the official language one must learn and the lost language maybe that one is mourning for. Yeah, so I would like to thank you for your attention and I'm very much looking forward to our discussion and I will stop sharing my screen now. discussion and I will stop sharing my screen now. Brigitta, thank you very very much for your very inspiring input. I'm sure there's a lot to talk about so if you have comments or questions feel free to share it in the chat because now we will just continue with the import of truly joy which will i think will you know fit very well together so i'm very happy to introduce dr julie choi she is a senior lecturer in education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. and has led multiple research projects in primary, secondary, tertiary, and emergent literacy adult, migrant, and refugee background sectors. language and literacy learning, storytelling, reflective and reflexive academic writing using autoethnographic approaches and language teacher education. She is the core editor of the books Language and Culture, Reflective Narratives and the Emergence of Ident identity and plurilingualism in teaching and learning, complexities across contexts, and the sole author of Creating a Multivocal Self, Autoethnography as Method. We heard about it in Brigitte Bush's input. heard about it in Brigitta Bush's input. The title of her input is uncomfortable reflexivity and acts of love in teaching and learning relationships with emergent literacy refugee background women in Melbourne, Australia. I'm looking forward. I'm looking forward. Oh, thanks so much, Natasha. I've just tried and share my screen and see how we go from there. Okay. I'll just put this on presenter's view. Can everybody see that okay? Yes? Okay, cool. Okay, so I'd really like to start with a big thank you to the organizers for this opportunity to speak about one of the first projects I embarked on since moving to Melbourne here in Australia. So the particular project that my then colleague Ulrika Najjar and I opened up in 2016 began because our graduate teachers wanted more pedagogical guidance on how to teach low literacy adult refugee background learners. So there were many challenges and teachers spoke about including some comments often about how they sensed that their learners' bodies were in the classrooms, but their minds and spirits were somewhere else. And this may resonate with some people, you know, who is in here today. I've observed something very similar, too, in a recent study in this sector, different but recent study, using multimodal tasks, such as face poems, where we use certain parts of the face to draw out information about what learners are thinking about or what they are seeing, what they are smelling, hearing, and feeling every day. And there was plenty of evidence of this, you know, mind and body separation that we saw in the learners. And their minds were really filled with worry for the family members who were located in other faraway places. So we might see here some examples of, hey, what are you thinking about? This person says, you know, my son, you know, we would think that the son is probably in Kenya. I'm thinking about my parents, my father, who is sick in Tibet, my son, who is sick in Sudan. And we also heard a lot of people talk about, you know, pain in their bodies. And there was a lot of people who are suffering from that that as they were in their classrooms. So something like this, I'm thinking about my leg being really sore. And a lot of people who talked about, you know, thinking about the doctor's appointments that they have missed. So we know that these spaces of teaching and learning are never spaces where teachers just teach. That's never a possibility in these spaces. And everything that happens in these spaces are entangled with intense forms of affect. So very much the kinds of the language portraits, what those bring out, I think that you really see a lot of that, those kinds of stories in these spaces. But just to come back to the project and to give you some contextual information, Ulrika and I had plenty of experience teaching low literacy adults with refugee backgrounds. So we found the community, well, yeah, we had a lot of experience, but we didn't have a lot of experience with low literacy learners. So we found the community and gained permission to work in a housing estate located in one of the northern suburbs in Melbourne, where there are many refugee background families. And the housing estate offered us a classroom on the ground floor. And we had a modest little setup of an area where children could play, and there were desks and chairs, whiteboard, free internet, which is really all we really needed. The classroom was right in the center of the housing complex, so it made it very easy for learners to come and go. But although we were very much in tune with all the logistics, and we were very well prepared in this regard, and we had all our tea, coffee, you know, everything that you can think of, pens, handouts, we seem to neglect exactly the thing I just talked about, affect, that really important aspect of affect, and the emotional consequences of our literacy expectations. So even just to give you one example, the very first day, we have a questionnaire like this, okay? So although a lot of women, mostly from African and Middle Eastern backgrounds did show up, we lost the majority of them in the first day. Why? Well, just consider how naive we were in going in there trying to learn about who low literacy learners were by issuing a questionnaire that was not only so long, but was, you know, solely done through writing. So, of course, we did anticipate to support them. And, you know, we had all the right intentions. But we didn't think critically enough about how sitting there, being forced to write, and not just write, but struggle to write the language of the oppressor, you know, what that might have felt for them and how humiliating that experience might have been for them. So this particular example, it took the woman, well, this one here took the woman an hour to do even with our support. So realizing that we were going to make many mistakes here, we built in a research method called duo ethnography. And I think this might actually be very helpful for teachers anywhere in this kind of space. This might be a good tool. So basically a good tool. So basically, it allowed us to keep ourselves accountable throughout the project. And basically, the method was to record discussions about critical moments or dilemmas that happened in class immediately after class. So immediately after class, we turn on the audio recorders and we start recording our own reflections. So the method helped us to step into our own uncomfortable moments, to interrogate assumptions and our mistakes, and talking to a trusted colleague, you know, with the intention of learning, just really helped turn our fears into something we could work on. turn our fears into something we could work on. So this is an extract about this particular questionnaire incident that we later published in a book, and I think we can make it available for the organization to, you know, give to everyone. But basically, what we're talking about in the extract is exactly, you know, this incident and what happened. So, you know, I recall how the women didn't even want to, in a sense, hold their pens to write their names, and they shifted the pens back to us. And really, it was a radical wake up call and encouraged us to find more creative ways to come to know these women, who they were and what they would need English for. And yes, if we were smarter, we would have done things going back to the face poems. These types of multimodal tasks would have been much more, would have been much better for us to do, but we didn't know that at the time. And so ultimately it really made me think a lot about how easy it is for those of us who say we are doing social justice work or working towards the decolonization of colonial languages. But it's so easy for us to reproduce these power relations through such ordinary and mundane teaching and learning practices. I mean, you know, questionnaires, you don't think much about them, or we shouldn't. So unsurprisingly, out of the 20 something people who came in the end there were four regular attending learners, and these were the four women. So who are all, they all considered themselves low literacy, though I think some of them are very expressive speakers. And as is very common in such contexts, there's a great diversity of statuses, age range, educational histories, and language abilities in the room. So it's almost impossible to cater to any one language level. We had a total of 12 lessons, two to three hours per week. And we really, what our intentions were, were to build with them the topics that would be interesting to talk about. So in a sense, we wanted to use a participatory approach where we could engage in the project together with the women, rather than do research on them or teach at them. teach at them. And we discussed with them our interest in investigating their English language and literacy needs, and that we could maybe make the decisions together about what they wanted to learn and how they wanted to go about it. So it sounds really nice, right? But even in this regard, I think we were so naive. So in reality, we quickly learned that they didn't see their roles as people who could or should make those decisions. We were the teachers, we were supposed to know what we were doing. And so in the end, the topics were decided more or less by us. were decided more or less by us. And we combined some grammar points to focus on for each lesson. And we encouraged everyone to use anything they saw as a resource to communicate their ideas. Of course, we did our homework looking at the literature for best pedagogical practices. We learned a lot about the different kinds of approaches that we could use. But, you know, we also wanted to involve them, continue to involve them. So no matter what, what, no matter what we tried, and how many times we asked them what they wanted, and how they wanted to go about, go about the teaching and learning, the answer would always lead back to grammar. And grammar in that very traditional sense of having the rules and filling in the blanks and drilling and repeating and all the, you know, repeating the formula 100 times. And I could see how satisfied they were when using rules and examples were written up, you tables, in rows, and in columns that they could then meticulously copy from the board to their notebooks. And of course, this sense of satisfaction made perfect sense too, given their images of schooling or learning are of teachers in the front dictating, learners sitting and taking notes down in their notebooks. And having learned many languages myself, of course, I know there's a sense of security in learning grammar rules, particularly if you're right at the early stages of learning a language, and the pleasure in demystifying how a language operates. So yeah, we learned a lot about the fact that they wanted to focus on grammar. And I guess that was okay. But I guess what we wanted was to open up our exchanges in ways that were more communicative than the things we find in textbook English, you know, like, you know, how are you? I'm fine. Thank you. And you, you know, we want to do more than that. But in a sense, that is precisely what they wanted. So if we look at this extract here that, you know, we had recorded and we later got published, in one lesson, I'm saying, okay, so today, we're going to be talking about stereotypes. And here's Yana and Kutra, two of the women, and they are talking to each other in Kurdish. And I'm saying, you know, what did she say? And Kutra says that, oh, well, she says, why are you talking about stereotypes? I need to learn. Hello, how are you? I want more grammar, right? And, you know, that actually really kind of threw me off. And I, at the minute that she said it, I thought, well, of course, why am I talking about stereotypes in this room? Like, obviously, they would want to, yeah, know the basics and so on. But also in this recording, as you see, my colleague, Lorica, says, well, you know, Yana, it's good to learn about other things than just saying hello, to speak about your life in Australia and what you can, what you find difficult can help you every day. So yeah, I don't know, I'm looking at these things these days, and I'm thinking, oh my god, we were so stubborn, I don't know. I'm looking at these things these days and I'm thinking, oh, my God, we were so stubborn. I don't know, pigheaded maybe about what we believe, what we believe to be good for them. You know, we continue to say that, oh, no, we want to do things for you. But in the end, yeah, it made us wonder a lot about and we wrote a lot about this, whether we were teaching more for us or the women themselves. So these were the things that we precisely with duosnography that we became very conscious of through our post-class discussions. And we really became super conscious of our motives and our actions through these dialogues. We talked a lot about how we ask students to voice their opinions, but then silence them if they don't fit our plans. And it happens all the time, even when we don't have such intentions. The learners may not tell us directly, but they do know what they want and what they need. And even when they do speak, it's not always clear that we have the right kind of disposition or we have the right kind of economy of listening. However, though, I would also say that this particular incident about voicing their opinion or what they wanted to learn was a turning point for us too, because we saw less desire of their desire for grammar, and in fact, more enthusiasm to express themselves through conversations. So the topic of stereotypes led to a discussion on discrimination, and they all had so much to say about their injustices in Australia. And that was one time their whole body, mind, spirit, a thousand times present in that room. And that class then led to other heavy topics such as religion and religious beliefs, which they were all passionate about as Muslim women, but they were also very diverse in their views. So here's one instance where Yana, the one who is quite critical about us not doing more grammar and more basic topics, is trying to express how Muslim women have different ideas of what is acceptable or unacceptable in relation to body bodily coverings. So she's actually the weakest in terms of her speaking abilities amongst the women, but she uses everything she has to participate in these heavy discussions. And in this particular dialogue, she uses a lot of gestures. So what she's saying here is, you know, that, you know, here in Australia, like Muslim women are different, they behave, they may behave differently, they may think differently. In Iran, they will be different. If the covering. So, you know, she says here in Australia, Muslim woman, and she's gesturing to her ankle, you know, they may need to cover up to their ankle, or they may need to cover up to their calf. And some women will think that you need the sleeve up to your wrist, or it will go up to your forearm, or it will go up to your elbow. And the point here is that every person is different. So there's so much criticality in what they can say and what they can do, right? But the women often, of course, like usually speak of their linguistic abilities in such deficit ways, because probably that is how they have been positioned for so long. But when we open up these high challenge topics, they show us they can do more than what they and what we think, you know, they can do with language. And many teachers don't want to go near these critical pedagogies or critical thinking activities with low language and literacy adult learners, of course, sometimes for many understandable reasons. But I not only think that they are possible, but I also think they are really desirable as it gives opportunities to the learners to speak as experts of their own experiences and knowledges. So I give you another example from a lesson where we were talking about the usage of words and we were using, we're talking about the differences between choice, choose and chose, which is often very difficult in English for learners to grasp. So one of the women, Samira, she wants to talk about heaven and hell, and she is asking me what my thoughts are. So here's what she says. So we're talking about judgment day. And, you know, she says, you know, do you believe that day? And I say, no, I don't believe in any religion. I'm not religious. And she says, you know, she says, you know, do you believe that day? And I say, no, I don't believe in any religion. I'm not religious. And she says, you know, I believe the day of judgment after someone died, the life is starting. Why don't you want to believe this, right? So then I try to move the conversation to something else. And I'm trying to avoid this, but she continues to press me. So she says, oh, you know, so if you don't have a uh here in a religion what should you do and I say that's okay I don't mind and she says well if it's like a fire you know so like hell um how come you don't mind and you know I say yeah I understand why people believe in it but I don't it's my choice I'm starting to bring the length choice. I'm trying to move the conversation back to the classroom, back to grammar, maybe something safe. And I just remember thinking how uncomfortable I was getting in this interaction and just kept thinking to myself, oh, my God, this isn't going to end well. And ultimately, this is how it ends. So I'm trying to move the conversation again. I said, okay, well, let's come back to the lesson. She says, no, anyway, read something. I was really taken aback. I felt really challenged. And she said, well, I say, what should I read? She says, well, you have to know, you know, and I, I say, I read many things and, and that I've made a choice and, and it's at that stage where she says, okay, well then that's good. That's fine. You know, like if you're reading, um, so I, I guess in reflection to this, I don't think it was so much about religion or beliefs that were making me feel discomfort, but I don't think it and I don't think it was the act of being challenged. But but more just the feeling that I was being pushed into a corner, or put on the spot without any preparation. Of course, in reflection, though, being prepared is a very silly thing, since it is precisely these unknowing, unarmed moments that give us an opportunity to transform our thinking. saying and her her core argument um is that one needs to be informed you know really which is really the position that we take as educators so I actually just started to you know with really like good good reflection and reflexivity and thinking about these things really kind of got to see myself more and more in them and that we were more alike than anything else. So an accumulation of so many of these raw moments I think made the women feel safe to say what they thought with us and I could feel that our connection was getting stronger and stronger as the weeks went by and in in particular, in this last lesson. So for the final lesson on cooking and cultural recipes, I brought in photos of my mother making Korean pickled cabbage. And food is, of course, a great instigator for bringing people together. But there is, I think, also something so endearing in looking at photos of mothers cooking. And one by one, the woman started pulling out their phones and shared these intimate photos of their mothers on their Facebook apps. So often the mothers in the photos, you know, were cooking and the woman would explain that their mother struggles spending all their lives hunched over preparing meals in poorly insulated or furnished homes without much emotional or physical support from the men at home. And as someone who has a very soft spot for my own mother and understands the culture of women laboring away as caretakers in patriarchal societies. It's really hard not to get teary in hearing their stories. So this is how we began to show our vulnerabilities. And I think it is this openness and sharing of vulnerability that I think I would like to start wrapping up here. So, of course, I am not suggesting that we all need to cry together. But I think there is so much fear about saying or doing something not politically correct, or not doing what everyone else is doing, or becoming so institutionalized, that we're forgetting how to connect in human ways in classroom spaces and showing. And I think part of those human ways is doing things like sharing stories and showing our vulnerabilities and engaging in dialogue and deep listening, where we listen to understand and rethink our ideological beliefs and pedagogical intentions. So I see these acts as acts of love, more like the way in which Paulo Freire talked about love, which wasn't really about romanticized love or unceasing sweet words, nor was it even about, you know, more generosity from teachers or more pastoral care, but a commitment and a willingness to fight and struggle together with purpose and not with intention that any one person can liberate somebody else, tension that any one person can liberate somebody else, but inviting each other to liberate themselves together. So if we act or love from this place, then I do not think, as Judith Butler once put it, that we will be irresponsible. And if we are, we are surely to be forgiven. are, we are surely to be forgiven. So I think what is important here, and Natasha brought this up a bit in the introduction of, so what do we need to do? What is it that we need to be thinking about? I think what is important for teachers is to build the capacities to express a lovingness rooted in a commitment to consistently reflect on our practice and to consider the consequences of our thoughts, words, and actions within the classroom and beyond. And to do this, I think one needs to be more than just reflecting, which may not require us to think relationally. A critical reflexivity would be useful. A critical, I think, reflexivity will be useful, but adding the critical isn't just about self-analysis of political awareness or power dimensions, but thinking about doing things differently. And this would mean in our case, you know, doing things differently in relation to teaching and research. So what am I doing differently in my work as a result of all of this? I think what I'm doing differently is both in my teaching and researching is leaning into these spaces of discomfort as an opportunity. Okay, so to make uncomfortable reflexivity part of your pedagogy, nothing for you to fear about that. It's actually something that can help you. And we do that work because it's an opportunity for us to become undone in relation to others, which constitutes our chance of becoming human. As I've tried to show here, despite all of our best intentions and efforts to be ethical, we are fallible creatures. And engaging in critical self-examination is not to beat ourselves up, is not to confess. But as a way of, as Rosie Bredotti says here, it's a way of connecting up and out. It's an affirmative becoming intimate with the world, with otherness, and with diversity. So I don't know that we can, you know, be ethical all the time. But even as fallible creatures, I think it matters how we create and share an ethics of vulnerability, of humility and ethical responsiveness. And that still matters. And sometimes that is the only thing that matters. So I'll finish off here. But if anyone is interested in looking up more resources or pedagogical ideas for vulnerable refugee background communities, you might want to look up some of these links. And some of this is for younger learners, but they can be interesting to listen to and to learn from. So indeed, there is something called Pedagogy of Mind, Body, and Spirit. A lot of the culturally responsive teaching work is very much geared towards these vulnerable communities. And we, there's a lot of resources in the refugee education special interest group. The rest of the references are here and I can make whatever I have available available to the organization. Thank you. Wow, okay, truly, thank you very much for this inspiring, but also touching insights and thoughts. Thank you very, very much. and thoughts. Thank you very, very much. I think it might be good if we go into a break right now for a few minutes and then we come together again and Brigitte will have the opportunity to respond to your input and vice versa. And then we open the discussion. So are five minutes okay for you? So it will be 26. Is it okay? Or yeah? Okay, so very short break. I'm looking forward to get into discussion. Thank you very much again. Thanks. Thank you. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you Thank you. Okay. Okay, I think we are trying to find our ways back into the Zoom session. So we have half an hour left now. Now it's time to get into discussion and I would first like to give you Brigitte an opportunity to react, response or I don't know, and thank you, Julie, for your fantastic input. I was sure that we were going to hear amazing things about your work. I mean, we don't have much time, so I just pick out a few things that were so striking for me and that I thought fitted so nicely with what I was trying to bring through. I mean, one element was this plea for really seeing the learners or the participants in the course as communicating subjects and not as deficient learners and of encouraging that one uses all possibilities that are there to communicate things that matter. And I thought this was kind of in a nutshell, a really fantastic pedagogical plea that I liked very much. And it was also for me very interesting to hear how you could manage in the sessions to get the message through to the participants. But also what was striking for me was that you acknowledge or that you take serious this idea that people want to be perfect. Sorry. Because they are obviously aware that they need a certain English. And it's always so difficult for us to find a way between acknowledging all means of communication and this knowledge and desire to be able to communicate the way it should be or the way kind of ideologically we think it should be. So another point I liked very much was where your ideas about the dual ethnography. I wish we could have heard more about it. And I was wondering whether you spoke to the participants in your course about that, whether the dual was kind of also including them in comments or how this would be possible. Yeah. And of course, I mean, the multimodal approach that is something I think that unfortunately is kind of developing more and more. But yeah, on a personal level, really happy to see that we are moving still along the same lines. And yeah, I hope we'll have more occasion to share ideas, but I don't want to eat too much time up from the general discussion. everything really is really inspired by the language portraits. I first saw them at the sociolinguistics conference. I just thought, I have to do that. I don't know how to do that. I have to do that. And it was just, I mean, we did the language portraits and we learned so much from it. But then we also learned that going about in that multimodal way really does work with these communities. And particularly because like in those face poems you don't need whole sentences you just need some words right and and it tells you about their everyday life their everyday practices we cannot go into their homes we cannot do all that stuff but they can tell us what they are seeing every day what they are hearing every day which language are you hearing it from and it was so oh that when we're trying to do it in the normal dominant way, it's the struggle, the struggle. And then when we do it in a way where it's just human to human, you know, like, just tell me what you're seeing. What are you thinking about? What's in your heart? What's in your body? Then, you know, people can talk, right? So the multimodal really, I, and I was so, so happy to be able to contribute to your, your book on the kind of multimodal, and I've tried to develop more and more of my own as well, because just find that finding that history is the most incredible and wonderful thing to be doing. I guess one of the questions I had for you, Birgitta, is even as a teacher, using these methods in my own classrooms, there are lots of times I think, am I using them in the correct way? Like, you know, am I, am I, am I, you know, doing something bad with these or I just wondered if there was any instances or things that you know of, or how others might have used it, where you where you thought, Oh, no, this is not the intention. This is no good. This is this isn't the way that we originally thought about these portraits. I mean, I think when the methods are, when these multimodal methods are embedded in the approach you sketched out, to be humble and to accept participants as participants on the same eye level, then I think it's fine. But once, I mean, these things are employed in a very hierarchical way, then I think it becomes really questionable because, I mean, people unpack a lot of their really deep thoughts and their deep concerns. And I mean, this can be misused. can be misused. And I think it only works on a basis when there is trust among the people and when there is trust that people can keep the control of what they are saying, what they are disclosing, what they are bringing into the debate. And I'm quite unhappy, you know, when it becomes a kind of exercise where you quickly think about your repertoire and draw your languages, and then you count the languages, and then, yeah, it's happy multiculturalism. I mean, that throws us back to the 80s when actually ethnicizing and doing exactly the things we want to undo appear again. Yeah, I mean, I think the multimodal approaches, they find an extension nowadays via all the technical means that we've got. And yeah, I mean, I like the way you're pushing these things forward. things forward. I think also, I mean, what I read out of your work now is that actually you try to keep as close as possible to what people actually want to get out of the course. And for me, it was really touching in one of the courses I did. Well, that's already quite some years ago. We tried to find out what participants wanted to get out immediately of the course and in the longer run. And I was really touched. One the women she said, what she would really love is being able to go to the doctors without an interpreter. And then we thought, OK, yes, this is a good idea, actually, to take that as an immediate aim of a course because that's attainable, it's feasible, it's possible. And I think, I mean, the trying to find out what is feasible in the immediate and what is a name in the long run, I think is a good thing, really. I mean, it sounds very simple but it's not simple at all no no i think one of the problems we have here is the teachers and this is part of the reason why i said that the you know there's the generosity of teachers a lot of teachers think about that as the love you know we need these people are traumatized or they've been to all these you know they have all these issues and we don't want to add to it and the way that we show our love is to do things for them we will take them to the doctor's appointment we will make the call and and it it just it it it becomes you know they some of these people have been there for 10 years and cannot make the phone call so this over reliance on yeah on others and you can never have the opportunity to become independent um i don't know what the situation in australia is like but here i mean we are very much under pressure that people have to take these exams the pressure becomes bigger and bigger. And actually, I think this makes the life of teachers, I mean, even school teachers, you know, in primary school, this idea of permanently having to learn for a test administered from the outside is something that in my feeling completely spoils the teacher-learner relationship and spoils what can be done but I don't know what what it's like in very similar and and really meaningless tests very meaningless I mean if it was even meaningful that you could say something but completely meaningless so teachers are basically um you know doing the compliance stuff and it's more ticking of the boxes and before they used to be like okay I would just tick the box anyway but now I think um they are they are so overwhelmed with so many more boxes that even in itself becomes impossible to do. So the situation is not good. No. I mean, here it begins in primary school already. My grandson, when he started school, I mean, before the idea was you had two years to learn how to read and write, first two years of school, which seems very reasonable to me. And when my grandson started school, the first test was, he started in September, the first test was administered in December. And he was tested for knowing how to read and write eight words. That was the standard. I mean, I couldn't believe it, but the whole system is kind of geared towards that. But I see Natasha wanted to introduce maybe another topic no no i'm i was just wondering if this might be a good point to open the discussion because i'm sure there are questions and some some remarks because i think you raised so many interesting questions we have the methods in practices, we have grammar versus discrimination. I think we have covered so many topics. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you