Linguistic and Cultural Collaboration in Schools: Reconciling Majority and Minoritized Language Users

This article extends the work of culturally sustaining pedagogy by moving towards the conceptualization of linguistic and cultural collaboration (LCC) in classrooms through reconciliation of majoritarian and minoritized language users. Whereas attention in mainstream educational research has been given to students’ cultures, this article underscores that explicit attention to diverse languages and language varieties is essential to reconfiguration of power relations in schools and reconciliation among culturally and linguistically minoritized and dominant groups. Drawing on scholarship regarding plurilingual and multilingual practice, the authors conceptualize LCC as both a process and a product that expands all students’ critical multilingual language awareness. They draw on an ongoing research‐practice partnership (RPP) with a U.S. school district experiencing growing cultural and linguistic diversity. The article focuses on a single school to illustrate how LCC has been taken up as a whole‐school approach to leveraging students’ and families’ cultural and linguistic resources as vital to learning and living together in a multicultural and multilingual world. After outlining development of the RPP following a social design–based methodology, the authors discuss how in practice reconciliation is forged as teachers, students, and their families engage in collaborative multilingual bookmaking. They focus on three aspects of reconciliation (collaboration, restoration, living together) that support students in becoming more language‐aware and in moving towards multilingual activism.