Identity construction of multilingual parents in the context of parental engagement

Parental engagement is a multidimensional construct closely linked to pupils’ success at school. Despite this relevance, multilingual families often face challenges in the process of engaging with their children’s learning, since they might deal with barriers and constraints in the school space due to prevailing structures and dominant ideologies. In order to support their children in their learning process, however, multilingual parents seek to invest in practices and negotiate identities to gain membership in the school community. Considering this context, this ongoing research aims to analyze how multilingual migrant adults with kindergarten and school-aged children construct their identity while engaging with their children’s education. To achieve this goal, case studies have been conducted with multilingual parents in Austria, collecting data from diary entries, narrative interviews and observations of parent-school meetings. This triangulation of methods intends to provide an emic and etic overview of the data, which will be analyzed according to steps proposed by the Discourse Historical Approach and the ethnographic framework. Within this scope, this study aims to contribute to enhance parental engagement by multilingual families in the context of migration, by suggesting a shift from a dominant point of view to a more comprehensive understanding of parental engagement. Besides that, this research also contributes to broaden discussions in the research areas of Educational Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, as well as Teacher Education. This paper is part of the AILA Europe Special Issue in the modality short paper for Junior Researchers, which intends to give a slight overview of an ongoing research.