Pre-service teachers’ agency to enact multilingual pedagogies: A longitudinal case study

Abstract

Students with migrant backgrounds continue to underperform across European education systems, highlighting the need for teachers to be prepared for multicultural and multilingual schools. However, even teachers who are open to multilingual pedagogies report being restricted by monolingual language policies, language beliefs and assessment schemes. Hence, it is necessary to investigate the conditions for pre-service teachers to exercise their agency in enacting multilingual pedagogies within monolingual education systems. Through a longitudinal case study involving interviews with five pre-service teachers at the outset and completion of their teacher education in Norway, the study explores the following research question: To what degree has teacher education provided the necessary conditions for pre-service teachers to exercise their agency in enacting multilingual pedagogies within a monolingual education system? A thematic analysis comparing responses given at the onset and completion of their teacher education suggests that the pre-service teachers had altered their beliefs, acquired more knowledge and reported more skills in working with multilingual learners. Moreover, they had developed a greater ability to imagine alternative approaches to multilingualism and become more flexible in these approaches. The longitudinal and qualitative research design offers a detailed picture of pre-service teachers’ development over the course of their teacher education.

Keywords

Teacher agency teacher education multilingual pedagogies longitudinal case study multilingualism in education

Introduction

The achievement gap between students with migrant backgrounds and the general student population continues to be a source of concern for educational researchers across Europe (Álvarez-Sotomayor and Guitérrez-Rubio, 2024; Froehlich et al., 2018; Pomianowicz, 2021). Coupled with increased attention towards the significance of teachers for students’ learning (Biesta, 2017; Cochran-Smith and Villegas, 2015; Darling-Hammond et al., 2017), it is unsurprising that the task of preparing prospective teachers to engage with the multilingual realities of contemporary classrooms continues to attract significant attention from researchers (Acquah et al., 2015; Bergroth et al., 2022; Putjata et al., 2022). Although much research has investigated teacher beliefs related to multilingualism in education (Villegas et al., 2018), few studies have explored this in connection to teacher agency. Research suggests that many teachers are hesitant to implement research-based approaches to teaching in multilingual classrooms, which potentially contradict hegemonic language ideologies or explicit language policies (Bailey and Marsden, 2017; Cunningham and Little, 2022; Dražnik et al., 2022; Pacheco et al., 2019). Even when teachers are positive about multilingual approaches to teaching, structural obstacles prevent them from enacting them (Cunningham, 2024; Cunningham and Little, 2022). Consequently, teachers and policymakers are now attempting to close the achievement gap without questioning the validity and efficiency of monolingual pedagogies, language ideologies and language policies in education. Rather, policymakers are attempting to streamline education in line with performance-based and standardised criteria (Biesta, 2017, 2022).

Previous studies from Norway have found that early in their education, pre-service teachers generally express loyalty to official policies and are hesitant to challenge the hegemony of monolingual practices in the classroom (Iversen, 2021a, 2021b). These findings suggest that pre-service teachers, at the outset of their teacher education, have limited discursive and practical resources to engage with multilingualism in education and to imagine alternative approaches to working with multilingual learners. In the article at hand, I argue that teacher education must prepare prospective teachers to stand up for their multilingual students by enacting multilingual pedagogies that can support their academic and socioemotional needs.

In this article, I use the term ‘multilingual pedagogies’ to cover different pedagogical approaches that aim at supporting students’ multilingual development and capitalising on students’ multilingualism for the purpose of learning subject content in schools. Aligning with Bergroth et al. (2022: 803), I see multilingual pedagogies entailing a ‘paradigm shift’ away from the monolingual bias, or what Gogolin (2021: 298) termed the ‘monolingual habitus’, of public education in Europe. This alternative paradigm includes pedagogies, such as linguistically responsive teaching (e.g., Lucas and Villegas, 2013; Tandon et al., 2017) and pedagogical translanguaging (e.g., Aleksić and Bebić-Crestany, 2023; Li Wei and García, 2014; Pacheco et al., 2019). What these pedagogical approaches share is a commitment to socially just learning environments for all students, irrespective of their linguistic backgrounds.

In the current article, I investigate the following research question: To what degree has teacher education provided the necessary conditions for pre-service teachers to exercise their agency in enacting multilingual pedagogies within a monolingual education system? The research question is investigated through a longitudinal case study consisting of five pre-service teachers by comparing their discussions of a vignette dealing with multilingualism in education during two interviews: one in their first year and the second in their final year of teacher education. In the final interview, the pre-service teachers commented on their previous responses and reflected on the development of their beliefs about multilingualism in education. The findings contribute to our understanding of the degree to which teacher education can offer pre-service teachers the necessary conditions for them to assert their agency to enact what they see as appropriate approaches to teaching multilingual students.

Multilingualism and teacher education in Norway

Currently, researchers estimate that one in five learners in Norway speak a language other than Norwegian at home (Kulbrandstad, 2020). Nevertheless, the Norwegian education system is similar to other European education system in its monolingual habitus (e.g., Gogolin, 2021). For example, the Education Act asserts that Norwegian is the language of instruction in Norwegian schools. Learners with limited proficiency in Norwegian have a right to differentiated instruction in Norwegian until they are sufficiently proficient in Norwegian to follow the ordinary instruction of mainstream education. There is an explicit ambition for learners to transition into mainstream education as soon as they have achieved the necessary proficiency in Norwegian.

Norway’s teacher education programmes for primary and secondary school teachers are five-year master’s programmes regulated by national guidelines and regulations. This contributes to streamlining teacher education programmes across institutions. In response to increased immigration to Norway over the past decades, the latest teacher education reform from 2017 introduced new guidelines and regulations which emphasise the importance of multiculturalism and multilingualism. Despite the monolingual habitus of Norwegian education, the regulations for teacher education require pre-service teachers to acquire comprehensive knowledge about children’s development in different social, linguistic and cultural contexts (Ministry of Education and Research, 2016). Moreover, the guidelines have a clear emphasis on the multilingualism found in Norwegian primary and secondary education. For example, all institutions are obliged to describe how they will include ‘the multicultural and multilingual aspect’ (Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions, 2016: 12, my translation) in their teacher education programmes.

Despite the objective to educate teachers responsive to the needs of multilingual learners, recent studies have suggested that Norwegian teacher education is still unsuccessful in preparing pre-service teachers for working in multilingual classrooms (Tavares, 2023; Thomassen and Munthe, 2021). These findings confirm similar outcomes from previous works (Dyrnes et al., 2015; Randen et al., 2015; Skrefsrud and Østberg, 2015). However, these studies lack a longitudinal perspective and do not consider how pre-service teachers’ capacity to enact multilingual pedagogies develop over the course of their teacher education. To address this gap, the current study contributes new insights into Norwegian teacher education’s ability to prepare pre-service teachers to teach in multilingual classrooms by interviewing them both at the outset and at the completion of their teacher education. The findings can also be relevant for teacher education programmes beyond the Norwegian context.

Previous research on teacher education and multilingualism

Pre-service teachers’ preparation – or lack thereof – for teaching multilingual students has attracted significant attention in recent research (Acquah and Szelei, 2020; Acquah et al., 2020; Bravo et al., 2014; Tandon et al., 2017; Villegas et al., 2018). Some studies have produced promising findings regarding in- and pre-service teachers’ attitudes and beliefs concerning multilingualism in education (Duarte and Günther-van der Meij, 2022; Paulsrud et al., 2023; Schroedler et al., 2023; Thoma, 2022). Evidence also indicates that pre-service teachers’ positive beliefs tend to lead to more multilingual practices in the classroom (Kirsch et al., 2020; Schroedler and Fischer, 2020). However, many studies have drawn attention to the ways in which teachers are restricted by official language policies, curricula or assessment schemes to comply with a monolingual approach to education (Bailey and Marsden, 2017; Cunningham and Little, 2022; Dražnik et al., 2022; Gogolin, 2021; Pacheco et al., 2019).

Recent studies have demonstrated that teacher education, in fact, can successfully change in- and pre-service teachers’ beliefs and teaching practices related to multilingualism (Aleksić and Bebić-Crestany, 2023; Döll and Guldenschuh, 2023; Duarte and Günther-van der Meij, 2022; Kirsch et al., 2020; Schroedler et al., 2023). Some studies have found that even courses spanning one or two semesters lead to altering negative beliefs about multilingualism (Aleksić and Bebić-Crestany, 2023; Schroedler et al., 2023), while other studies have found that long-term changes in beliefs and teaching practices require more time and sustained effort (Duarte and Günther-van der Meij, 2022; Kirsch et al., 2020). In preparing teachers to work in linguistically diverse classrooms, the content of the coursework in teacher education matters. Döll and Guldenschuh (2023) recently found that a teacher education course on multilingualism in education was unable to significantly alter participants’ negative perspectives on multilingualism. However, after the course content was revised to focus more on pedagogies of migration and different models of multilingual education rather than second language acquisition and educational disadvantages, the participants’ negative perspectives on multilingualism were successfully changed. These findings indicate that teacher education can contribute to the preparation of prospective teachers to enact multilingual pedagogies.

However, other studies have highlighted the pressure that both pre- and in-service teachers are under to align their teaching practices with monolingual pedagogies, language ideologies and language policies in education (Bailey and Marsden, 2017; Cunningham and Little, 2022; Gogolin, 2021; Pacheco et al., 2019). Based on her research about multilingual pedagogies in mainstream schools in the UK, Cunningham (2024: 3) concluded that ‘something or someone is stopping teachers from working with the intrinsic positivity that they initially bring to the classroom’. The researcher identified a complex of political, ideological, sociological and structural obstacles contributing to the prevention of the enactment of multilingual pedagogies. Therefore, it seems critical that pre-service teachers achieve the necessary agency to enact multilingual pedagogies.

Teacher agency

Since teachers operate within educational systems often guided by monolingual language ideological beliefs (Gogolin, 2021; Li Wei and García, 2014), teachers might not have room to enact multilingual pedagogies (Cunningham, 2024). Multiple studies have found that teachers might have positive beliefs about multilingualism. Nevertheless, they are restricted by official language policies, curricula or assessment schemes to comply with a monolingual approach to education (Bailey and Marsden, 2017; Cunningham and Little, 2022; Pacheco et al., 2019). This highlights the pressure to enforce monolingual teaching methods under which many teachers work. In an attempt to describe this situation, Cunningham (2024) used the metaphor of a flower press to describe how the power of multiple factors prevents teachers from enacting the teaching they believe is beneficial to multilingual learners. Thus, teacher agency emerges as a relevant factor in the investigation of teachers’ preparedness to enact multilingual pedagogies.

In social theory, agency has often been conceptualised as the individual’s capacity for autonomous social action, while opponents have instead emphasised structural constraints to the individual’s agency (e.g., Calhoun et al., 2022). Taking into account both individual agentic capacities and structural constraints, Biesta et al. (2015: 626) argued that ‘agency denotes a quality of the engagement of actors with temporal-relational contexts-for-action’. To study teacher agency, Biesta et al. insisted on understanding the context in which teachers work because teachers do not simply act in a specific environment. Rather, the environment provides the conditions upon which teachers can act (Biesta et al., 2015). Hence, agency is understood as something teachers achieve, rather than something teachers possess. This is what is sometimes referred to as an ecological perspective on agency (Biesta and Tedder, 2007; Priestley et al., 2015a). In my analysis of pre-service teachers’ agency, I followed this conceptualisation.

Building on the works of Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 971–972) and their ‘chordal triad of agency’, Priestley et al. (2013) developed a conceptual model for understanding the achievement of agency. In their model, they distinguished between three temporal dimensions of agency providing the conditions upon which teachers can act:

Iterational dimension: Pre-service teachers’ capacity to reactivate past patterns of thought and action, based on past experiences, including their personal and professional biographies and professional knowledge and skills.

Projective dimension: Pre-service teachers’ capacity to imagine alternative possibilities, inclusive of short-term and long-term perspectives and goals, and to reconfigure past patterns of thought and action to achieve these goals.

Practical-evaluative dimension: Pre-service teachers’ capacity to make practical judgements based on their cultural ideals, values, beliefs, discourses, languages, social structures (relationships, roles, etc.), material resources and physical environment.

The objective for developing this model was to account for ‘the importance of both agentic capacity and agentic spaces in shaping agency’ (Priestley et al., 2015a: 135). Furthermore, the model draws attention to the situated enactment of agency, in which it is simultaneously constrained and supported by the resources available to teachers. In their discussion of this model, Biesta et al. (2015: 636) concluded that ‘teacher agency is highly dependent upon the personal qualities that teachers bring to their work’. Personal qualities that prepare pre-service teachers for enacting multilingual pedagogies involve their prior experience with multilingualism and linguistic discrimination before enrolling in teacher education (Iversen, 2022; Thoma, 2022).

Materials and methods

The current study investigates the degree to which teacher education has provided the necessary conditions for five pre-service teachers to exercise their agency in enacting multilingual pedagogies within a monolingual education system. Byrne and Callaghan (2014: 257) argued that:

When we approach the complex social we need methods that can take account of context, agency, and temporality. We have these in the social sciences in the form of narratives, process tracing, and systematic comparison. All involve a turn to case rather than variables.

In my investigation of pre-service teachers’ conditions for asserting agency, I am interested in tracing developments over time and comparing conditions at the outset and completion of their teacher education. To answer the research question, I designed a longitudinal case study in which I compared five pre-service teachers’ interview responses from the outset of their teacher education and in the final semester of their teacher education. In what follows, I present the five participants, the data collection procedure, the method of analysis, ethical considerations and limitations of the study.

Participants

The pre-service teachers in this study commenced their teacher education in the autumn of either 2017 or 2018. All the pre-service teachers participated in a focus group interview during their first year of teacher education and volunteered to meet with me in their final year of teacher education for follow-up interviews. Originally, 24 pre-service teachers were recruited based on their participation in field placements at schools characterised by significant linguistic diversity in the student population to ensure that the pre-service teachers had gained some experience with teaching in multilingual classrooms. Out of the 24 original participants, five agreed to participate in individual follow-up interviews. They chose the following pseudonyms: Håkon, Nora, Olivia, Pernille and Stine.

All participants were enrolled in a government-regulated teacher education programme aimed at educating teachers for grades 1–7 within the Norwegian education system. Due to the strict regulation of teacher education programmes in Norway, there is minimal variation between teacher education institutions with regard to structure and content. The participants were recruited from two different teacher education institutions in Norway: Håkon, Nora and Olivia attended one of the teacher education institutions, whereas Pernille and Stine attended the other. All of them were in their twenties, had been born and raised in Norway, and had grown up with Norwegian as their home language.

Data collection

The first round of data collection in the autumn of 2017 and 2018 consisted of seven focus groups with 24 pre-service teachers. The focus groups took place either on campus or at the school where the participants were completing their field placements. The focus groups were conducted in Norwegian and followed a semi-structured interview guide. The interview guide covered three topics: Their perspectives on the role of multilingualism in education in general, their field placement experiences, and their reactions to hypothetical vignettes about multilingual students in mainstream education. The vignettes contained descriptions of scenarios in a hypothetical sixth-grade classroom. The participants were instructed to comment on the students’ and teacher’s actions and consider how they would have handled the same situations. A translation of the vignettes into English is as follows:

Vignettes

6th grade is learning about the Viking Age. They will work in groups. First, they are supposed to collect information and then make a PowerPoint presentation on the topic. The teacher has decided that all students have to speak Norwegian in order for them to cooperate most efficiently.

Heja is in this class. She has a Kurdish background and an irregular educational background. She came as a refugee two years ago and recently finished the introductory programme. There is another Kurdish student in the same group as Heja, and they work together in Kurdish, so the other students in the group cannot understand what is being said.

In the same class is Weronika. She has a Polish background and a coherent educational background from Poland until she moved to Norway with her family four years ago. When collecting information about the Viking Age, Weronika reads Polish Wikipedia and takes notes in Polish. Once in a while, she uses Google Translate to translate the words into Norwegian, but most of the time, she contributes information in Norwegian to the rest of the group.

When constructing the vignettes, I included students belonging to different linguistic and migrant groups, capitalising on their multilingualism in divergent ways in order to highlight whether certain multilingual practices would be preferred over others and whether the students’ background would influence the pre-service teachers’ assessment of the practices. By using this vignette, I was interested in analysing how pre-service teachers would respond to the students’ strategies in the two specific and unique situations. Moreover, it was interesting to consider whether the pre-service teachers would criticise the teacher’s instructions or whether they would remain loyal to them. Decisively, I was curious to explore the rationale behind their position. As such, I hoped to highlight iterational, projective and practical-evaluative dimension of the participants’ agency. I recorded, transcribed, and analysed all focus groups. The findings from these initial focus groups have previously been published (see Iversen, 2021a, 2021b).

After four years, the same 24 pre-service teachers were invited to participate in a new round of interviews. Five pre-service teachers accepted this invitation. By coincidence, none of these five pre-service teachers had participated in the same focus group four years earlier. The pre-service teachers were interviewed individually. The interviews followed a semi-structured interview guide inquiring about what the pre-service teachers had learned about multilingualism as part of their teacher education on campus and through their field placement. Finally, the pre-service teachers were presented with the exact same vignettes they had discussed four years earlier and asked to comment. When I disclosed that they had discussed the same vignettes four years earlier, they indicated that they did not remember them. The individual interviews were conducted on campus and recorded, transcribed and analysed by me. The individual interviews were conducted in Norwegian.

After the second round of data collection in 2022 and 2023, the data consisted of five recorded and transcribed focus group interviews from the participants’ first year in teacher education and five recorded and transcribed individual interviews. An overview of the data can be found in Table 1.

Table 1.

Overview of data.

Participants	Focus groups (2017–2018) (minutes)	Individual interviews (2022–2023) (minutes)
Håkon	60:00	39:06
Nora	45:54	35:34
Olivia	62:41	29:10
Pernille	49:13	48:26
Stine	47:32	38:09

Analysis

Taking the model for understanding the conditions for achieving agency developed by Priestley et al. (2013) as a point of departure, the first cycle of coding involved a thematic coding of all the participants’ statements in the initial focus group interviews from 2017 to 2018 and the complete transcripts of the individual interviews from 2022 to 2023 (e.g., Saldaña, 2013: 84). All relevant segments were categorised according to the iterative, projective and practical-evaluative dimension (e.g., Saldaña, 2013). In the second cycle of coding, I conducted an open and data-driven coding of the segments within each category to analyse commonalities, differences and relationships between the initial and final interviews (e.g., Saldaña, 2013). This resulted in seven pairs of codes operationalising the concepts presented by Priestley et al. (2013):

Iterative dimension: From little to more experience; from little to more knowledge; from few to more skills.

Projective dimension: From limited imagination of alternative possibilities to greater imagination of alternative possibilities; from problem-oriented beliefs to resource-oriented beliefs.

Practical dimension: From problem-oriented action to solution-oriented action; from rigid approach to flexible approach.

Based on this inductive coding, it was possible to analyse how the pre-service teachers’ conditions for asserting agency had developed since the outset of their teacher education. To illustrate these findings, exemplary excerpts from the data were selected for presentation in the article. I translated these excerpts from Norwegian into English.

Research ethics

The study was reviewed and approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. All participants provided their written consent for participation and were informed about their right to withdraw from the study at any time. To secure the participants’ anonymity, specific teacher education programme, ages and names are not mentioned in this article. All recordings were deleted after transcription, and all transcripts were anonymised.

Limitations

Although the current study documents changes in pre-service teachers’ ability to achieve and assert agency, it is much more complicated to explain what has caused these developments. Even with the pre-service teachers’ own reports on what caused these developments, it is necessary to exercise caution when interpreting these reports. Four years is a long period of time, and the pre-service teachers have naturally acquired experiences outside their teacher education, and they have also matured. Furthermore, the study was limited by the small number of participants and the differences between the two data collection settings. Whereas the first round of data collection was conducted as focus groups, the second round was conducted as individual interviews. Nevertheless, the developments I have identified confirm previous research showing that teacher education can make an impact, which contributes to the reliability of the findings.

Results

The thematic analysis of the transcripts revealed interesting developments for all five pre-service teachers. The iterative dimension of the pre-service teachers’ conditions to achieve agency invariably developed through the acquisition of more knowledge and reported skills to work with multilingualism in education. Moreover, the projective dimension consistently developed into a greater ability to imagine alternative approaches to multilingualism in education. Lastly, the practical-evaluative dimension of the conditions for achieving agency developed into a more flexible and pragmatic approach to multilingualism in education. In what follows, I demonstrate these developments through empirical examples. Although the three dimensions of teacher agency are partly overlapping, I present the analysis of the distinct dimensions separately.

Iterative dimension: Evolving experience, knowledge and skills

The iterative dimension of the pre-service teachers’ agency is related to their capacity to reactivate past patterns of thought and action based on past experiences, knowledge and skills related to multilingualism (e.g., Priestley et al., 2015a). Initially, the five pre-service teachers had limited experience with multilingualism from their own upbringing (Iversen, 2022). Although they had learned English and a second modern language in school and had acquaintances who spoke a language other than Norwegian at home, they did not report that these experiences informed how they worked with multilingual learners during their field placement (Iversen, 2021a). However, at the completion of their teacher education, all of them reported in-depth knowledge about multilingualism in education. This knowledge reflected the instruction they reported to have received on campus and experiences they reported to have gained from field placements. Nora also reported that working as a substitute teacher was an important learning arena.

All the pre-service teachers explained that multilingualism had been discussed across several, although not all, of the subjects they had studied as part of their teacher education, including Norwegian, pedagogy, English, music, and, to some extent, mathematics. However, there was agreement among the five pre-service teachers that most of what they had learned about multilingualism on campus came from the Norwegian subject. As such, it was unsurprising that the pre-service teachers emphasised how to support the acquisition of Norwegian as a second language. They had acquired many useful strategies for working with students in the process of acquiring Norwegian as a second language. Both Olivia and Stine mentioned comparative grammar exercises and knowledge about syntax, phonetics and pronunciation as useful for working with multilingual learners. Olivia claimed that knowledge about these topics enabled her to identify and understand the mistakes made by students in the process of acquiring Norwegian as a second language. Stine also highlighted the benefit of including children’s rhymes and songs to compare sounds and grammar with Norwegian grammar.

Furthermore, the pre-service teachers developed an understanding of multilingualism as a resource. For example, Nora, Pernille and Stine reported learning about the importance of developing strong competence in one’s ‘mother tongue’ and about the benefits associated with multilingualism, such as enhanced metalinguistic awareness. Nora and Pernille argued that students should be able to use their ‘mother tongue’ as part of learning, and teachers should appreciate students’ proficiency in their mother tongues for future language learning and academic development. Moreover, Nora and Olivia mentioned translanguaging as a useful strategy. Olivia and Pernille explicitly stated that unless the teacher wants to test language competence, teachers should be open to using assessment tools other than written tests. For instance, they mentioned that it could be useful to let students make videos or respond orally instead of submitting a written assignment.

During field placements, Nora and Pernille perceived that some students were ashamed of their ‘mother tongue’ and unwilling to share their multilingualism with their peers. Hence, they concluded that it was necessary to respect students’ boundaries and not force them to use a language with which they could feel uncomfortable. Håkon emphasised that it was important to avoid exotification or instructing students to ‘perform’ their language repertoire in front of their peers. Nora pointed out that it was important for teachers to articulate positive attitudes. She explained:

Nora:

I felt that at university, people argued that multilingualism is something very good, that it should be acknowledged, and that we should let students use their languages in school. And I think that’s really nice, but I experienced something concerning. For example, we asked a class, ‘Is there anybody who can count in other languages?’ I knew that there were many nationalities in the room, but nobody wanted to (. . .). (Individual interview with Nora, 7 April 2022)

Based on this experience, Nora wondered about the culture at the school that made students uncomfortable about sharing their multilingualism with their peers. She speculated that many students might feel different and prefer to ‘fit in’ with their peers. This made an impact on Nora, and she realised that it was necessary to work systematically over a long period of time to develop a culture where multilingualism was considered a resource. However, she had not seen any examples from field placement about how she could develop such a school culture. Nevertheless, she had her own ideas about how she could achieve this, for example, by establishing good relationships with her students, getting to know their linguistic repertoires, and how they would like to use their languages in school.

Notably, field placement was frequently mentioned as a crucial arena for gaining first-hand experience with multilingualism in the classroom. Nora, Olivia and Pernille mentioned being met with different flags and welcome signs in different languages and observing how students worked with identity texts. Nevertheless, they did not perceive that multilingualism was much emphasised during field placement, despite completing several field placements in schools with a linguistically diverse student population. Although their observations reinforced what they had learned about multilingual learners on campus, most of the strategies they reported to have observed were aimed at supporting multilingual learners’ acquisition of Norwegian, for example, using visuals and concretes, creating individual dictionaries and different outdoor activities aimed at giving learners real-life experiences of the topic they were working on, and defining and explaining new key terminologies. Nevertheless, there were other experiences that gave them new perspectives on multilingualism. Stine mentioned one experience that had been eye-opening to her:

Stine:

I remember during field placement, there was this student who we thought was pretty average. Then, they had a poster in the classroom with a bunch of words in different languages, written in the different scripts, and he knew a lot of them! He even pointed out spelling mistakes. It turned out he could speak four or five languages. And then I was just like, well . . . So, we thought you were average, and then it turns out you speak more languages than me. (Individual interview with Stine, 28 March 2022)

Through their field placement, Pernille and Stine had experiences that made them understand that students might speak several languages that were rarely visible in school. They also discovered how students who initially seemed to be proficient in Norwegian could lack everyday vocabulary associated with the home, such as a knife, fork or spoon. Hence, they reported learning about the importance of incorporating everyday vocabulary into their teaching.

In summary, all the pre-service teachers reported that they had learned much about multilingualism through their teacher education. Nora, Olivia, Pernille and Stine also reported that the knowledge they had acquired had enhanced their confidence in facing the challenge of teaching multilingual learners:

Jonas:

In summary, it seems like you experienced that multilingualism was a recurrent topic throughout your teacher education, then?

Nora:

Yes, it was. And before I started teacher education, that was not something I was very aware of. I mean, of course, you kind of know that society is diverse, but I don’t think I thought much about it. (Individual interview with Nora, 7 April 2022)

Nora explicitly reported that she had more research-based arguments and had acquired more knowledge about multilingualism as a result of her experiences from teacher education. Specifically, she highlighted the understanding of the connections between language and identity.

Projective dimension: Evolving imaginations and beliefs

In the analysis, the projective dimension of the pre-service teachers’ agency was primarily expressed through their capacity to think otherwise about the teacher’s Norwegian-only policy in the vignettes and to identify alternative policies and ways of organising the group work. In addition, their beliefs about the role of multilingualism in education were analysed (e.g., Priestley et al., 2015a). Upon their entrance into teacher education, most of the five pre-service teachers articulated loyalty to current language policies in education (Iversen, 2021b). When discussing the vignette, only Nora questioned the teacher’s instruction (Iversen, 2021a: 428), while the others tended to agree with the teacher. When they were encouraged to envision alternative approaches, the pre-service teachers were often hesitant and vague. However, during the second interview, towards the end of their teacher education, they had developed a more clearly formulated belief about how they saw the role of multilingualism in education. Stine’s statements offer an example to illustrate this shift in perspective. In the first interview, she had the following understanding of the teacher’s decision:

Stine:

I would imagine that there is a reason why the teacher chose Norwegian. For example, if I had said, ‘You have to speak Norwegian throughout the whole assignment’, it would be because ‘now we’re practising speaking Norwegian’. And then it’s a shame if they use Kurdish (. . .). (Focus group interview with Stine, 15 March 2018)

In the first interview, Stine tended to deem the students’ use of Kurdish as a sign of reluctance to speak Norwegian or even laziness. However, when I interviewed her the second time, her attitude had shifted, although she remained confident about the students’ need to practice their Norwegian:

Stine:

I might think that the ideal is to ensure that everyone is working in Norwegian (. . .) You often improve on things you do a lot of. So, I can understand that the teacher kind of wishes for that. But maybe not be so rigid about it if it ends up preventing collaboration and learning more than it promotes it. (Individual interview with Stine, 28 March 2022)

Although Stine remained understanding of the teacher, she nevertheless characterised her language policy as ‘rigid’ and expressed concern for the Kurdish-speaking students’ opportunities to collaborate and learn content matter. She voiced concern about Weronika’s strategy in the first interview; however, in the second interview, she assessed the same strategy as ‘appropriate’, and she was critical of the potential negative consequences the teacher’s strict language policy could have for Weronika’s learning.

Olivia’s stance provides a second example to confirm this pattern. In the first interview, Olivia was also primarily concerned with the students’ acquisition of Norwegian. In the second interview, however, she had a more nuanced understanding of the needs of multilingual learners. Although Olivia could understand the teacher’s reasoning behind the Norwegian-only rule, she was critical. She questioned the purpose of the group assignment:

Olivia:

It might be that their language skills slow down their understanding of what they’re supposed to learn about, which is the Viking age. That it might be easier to learn – well, she can understand more if she collaborates with the other student in Kurdish. At the same time, it can make collaboration with other people in the group more difficult. They are kind of segregated (. . .) Heja could’ve learned something from the others in the group. (Individual interview with Olivia, 30 May 2023)

Olivia argued that the students could learn more of the content through the medium of Kurdish than Norwegian, although she argued that the Kurdish-speaking students should eventually be able to demonstrate their knowledge about the Viking age in Norwegian. Olivia suggested that the Kurdish-speaking students should have the opportunity to work on key terminology with a Kurdish ‘mother tongue teacher’ in preparation for the lesson, which could enhance their participation in the group work. In Weronika’s case, Olivia pointed out that her strategy could even be an opportunity for her peers to learn some Polish vocabulary. Thus, Olivia emphatically stated that students should be allowed to draw on their complete linguistic repertoire in the classroom. She mentioned a specific exercise she had learned about, and I returned to this exercise later in my interview with her:

Jonas:

You mentioned something about pictures, where they could write things in their own language too. What’s the idea behind that? Why should they be allowed to do that?

Olivia:

[Giggles] Good question. It’s not certain – it’s important that – at least the youngest might have more languages to learn. It’s important that they’re not only learning Norwegian, but that they’re actually supposed to learn other languages they have–languages they use at home, for example. So, it’s important that they learn these languages. (Individual interview with Olivia, 30 May 2023)

Olivia also mentioned the right to so-called mother tongue education and argued that teachers should not ignore other languages students speak beyond the official language of instruction. In a similar vein, Nora argued that the teacher in the vignette should be ‘more open’ and explicitly mentioned translanguaging as a useful strategy to support all the students described in the vignette.

The pre-service teacher who had been the most critical of multilingual approaches to teaching in the first interview was Håkon. As demonstrated in this excerpt, he found Heja’s strategy particularly problematic:

Håkon:

I think it’s pretty harmful to Heja’s language development if she continues to collaborate in Kurdish. It can also be harmful for how much work they get done in other subjects, like science and things like that. But I think it’s crucial to get the language in place for later. So, I think it’ll be harmful to Heja if she continues with this kind of collaboration in Kurdish. (Focus group interview with Håkon, 21 November 2017)

By ‘the language’, Håkon referred to Norwegian and the importance of quickly developing advanced language skills in Norwegian to secure Heja’s future academic success. When confronted with this statement in the second interview, he considered himself somewhat rigid. Now, his perspective was more nuanced:

Håkon:

If it’s difficult to collaborate in Norwegian, I consider it positive that they can collaborate in Kurdish. But they also have to try to communicate it in Norwegian. (Individual interview with Håkon 30 March 2022)

Håkon was sympathetic to the teacher’s ambition that the students in the vignettes should eventually be able to present what they had learned through the medium of Norwegian. However, he questioned the teacher’s prohibition of other languages in the classroom. Instead, he compared Heja’s and Weronika’s strategies to his own use of resources in English whenever he researched a topic. He could not see himself introducing a Norwegian-only rule in his own class, but he would instead encourage the Kurdish-speaking students to engage with the rest of the group. He speculated that the other Kurdish-speaking student could potentially function as a mediator between Heja and the rest of the group. As such, he agreed with the other pre-service teachers, who all concurred that the students finally had to demonstrate their competence through the medium of Norwegian, although there should be great flexibility in students’ language use as they developed this proficiency.

Practical-evaluative dimension: Evolving orientations and approaches

In the analysis, the practical-evaluative dimension of the pre-service teachers’ agency was expressed through discussions of their capacity to make practical judgements in relation to teaching in multilingual classrooms and identifying concrete strategies that could serve to promote multilingual students’ learning. The pre-service teachers’ practical-evaluative agency was informed by the two other dimensions of teacher agency, namely the iterational and projective dimensions (e.g., Priestley et al., 2015a). Although they agreed that multilingualism had been clearly present as a topic throughout their teacher education, there was greater disagreement among them about the degree to which they were prepared to work with multilingual learners. As already demonstrated, all of them had acquired more nuanced beliefs about the role of multilingualism in education. Nevertheless, they were pessimistic about their limited familiarity with specific teaching methods to employ with multilingual learners.

When asked whether they generally felt prepared to work with multilingual learners based on the instruction they had received on campus, Olivia, Pernille and Stine confirmed that they did so. They were studying at two different teacher education institutions. Olivia responded:

Olivia:

I feel like it’s something they have promoted, this about multilingualism and how to do it in teaching. So, what I’m left with, which I can remember now, is just really positive. Working with it and its importance, too.

Jonas:

Do you experience that teacher education, both on campus and in field placement, has prepared you for working with multilingual students?

Olivia:

That part has been – Yes, I would say I have actually learned a lot. I think those who haven’t studied Norwegian have missed out. Because much of it is important for those who don’t teach Norwegian, really. Yes, so I would say that I have acquired more ways to work and (. . .) another understanding for it (. . .) I would definitely say that I have learned much about it.

Jonas:

You feel prepared.

Olivia:

Yes, I do. (Individual interview with Olivia, 30 May 2023)

This excerpt shows that Olivia felt well-prepared to work with multilingual learners. Despite her in-depth study of different language systems, she nevertheless missed more knowledge about practical ways to work with multilingual learners in the classroom.

Both Håkon and Nora stated that they did not feel that their teacher education had prepared them to enact multilingual pedagogies. Both used the metaphor of an empty, or at least dissatisfactory, ‘toolbox’ when describing their preparedness to teach multilingual learners:

Nora:

I don’t feel that I kind of have a really large toolbox, with ‘oh, I can use this!’ and ‘I can use this!’ and ‘I can use this!’. I don’t really feel that. Although I know, for example, that translanguaging is really nice, it doesn’t work for everyone. I think you need to start by talking to your students. (Individual interview with Nora, 7 April 2022)

Nora reported two reasons for her insecurity about enacting multilingual pedagogies. First, she reported that her own limited proficiency in languages beyond Norwegian and English made her hesitant to take a multilingual approach to teaching. Second, she was uncomfortable asking students questions that could be considered invasive or inappropriate. Håkon also reported that his ‘toolbox’ was rather empty, but he was confident that he would acquire more strategies when he transitioned to school teaching. Nevertheless, at the time of the interview, he was not confident that he would be able to support multilingual learners in his future class, unless he had the support of bilingual teaching assistants or teachers of Norwegian as a second language. Even Pernille, who reported being well-prepared to enact multilingual pedagogies, still acknowledged being ‘a bit afraid’ of teaching multilingual learners in the future.

Discussion

The premise for this study is that pre-service teachers need the right conditions upon which to exercise agency and enact multilingual pedagogies once they transition into teaching (Biesta et al., 2015; Priestley et al., 2013). These conditions include the capacity to reactivate past patterns of thought and action, to imagine alternative possibilities, and to make practical judgements based on their ideals, values, beliefs, material resources and physical environment. Although recent research suggests that teacher education can be successful in developing positive beliefs about multilingualism among pre-service teachers (Aleksić and Bebić-Crestany, 2023; Döll and Guldenschuh, 2023; Duarte and Günther-van der Meij, 2022; Schroedler et al., 2023) and that pre-service teachers are open to multilingual teaching strategies (Bailey and Marsden, 2017; Cunningham and Little, 2022; Pacheco et al., 2020), most European education systems continue to operate according to monolingual language ideologies (Gogolin, 2021). This can be seen as a consequence of European politicians’ attempts to streamline education in line with performance-based and standardised criteria (Biesta, 2017, 2022). Unless pre-service teachers dare challenge this ‘prescriptive, top-down teacher-proof curricula’ (Priestley et al., 2015b: 188) and the associated monolingual pedagogies, language ideologies, and language policies in education, there will be limited space for multilingual pedagogies in European schools.

The analysis of the iterational and projective dimensions of the pre-service teachers’ agency indicated that teacher education had provided them with experiences leading them to become more open to multilingualism in education than at the outset of their teacher education. Hence, the Norwegian teacher education programme for grades 1–7 does not seem to fall short of other teacher education programmes in Europe, which have been found to have a positive impact on pre-service teachers’ beliefs related to multilingualism (Aleksić and Bebić-Crestany, 2023; Döll and Guldenschuh, 2023; Duarte and Günther-van der Meij, 2022; Schroedler et al., 2023). The analysis shows that the five pre-service teachers had, indeed, developed more resource-oriented beliefs about multilingualism in education and acquired new knowledge and skills relevant to the teaching of multilingual learners.

Despite the promising findings related to the iterational and projective dimensions of the pre-service teachers’ agency, they had not completely abandoned their previous problem-oriented beliefs. Rather, their beliefs about language use in education had become more nuanced, acknowledging the complexity and contextual nature of teaching in multilingual classrooms. Nevertheless, the five pre-service teachers still did not challenge basic assumptions about the privileged position of Norwegian as the sole language of instruction (e.g., Gogolin, 2021), in which the students eventually had to demonstrate their skills through the medium of Norwegian. Thus, indicating limited development in their projective dimension of their agency in this regard from the outset of their teacher education (e.g., Iversen, 2021b).

The analysis of the iterational dimension of the pre-service teachers’ agency demonstrated that they had acquired new knowledge about the benefits of being multilingual, the importance of developing language skills in their ‘mother tongue’, and the interconnectedness of language and identity. Still, they had acquired significantly more knowledge about supporting the acquisition of Norwegian. In fact, the pre-service teachers all associated the concept of ‘multilingualism’ with Norwegian as a second language, hence suggesting that Norwegian teacher education might, in fact, inaccurately present theories and strategies for working with Norwegian as a second language under the rubric ‘multilingualism’. All pre-service teachers also pointed out that the Norwegian subject in teacher education had been the primary subject in which ‘multilingualism’ had been discussed. Hence, multilingualism was associated with a deficit in Norwegian language skills. Döll and Guldenschuh (2023) found that greater attention to the pedagogies of migration and different models of multilingual education were more effective in altering pre-service teachers’ negative views about multilingualism. These findings suggest that a greater focus on other aspects of multilingualism beyond Norwegian as a second language in Norwegian teacher education could have contributed to an even stronger resource orientation among the five participants of the current study.

Nevertheless, the ecological model for understanding the achievement of agency (Priestley et al., 2013) indicates that the iterational and projective dimensions are not sufficient to create the necessary conditions for teachers to act. Indeed, the analysis of the practical-evaluative dimension of the pre-service teachers’ agency suggest that they had not sufficiently developed their capacity to make practical judgments related to teaching multilingual learners. This finding confirms previous research from other contexts, suggesting that pre-service teachers might develop appropriate beliefs about multilingualism, although they are often unprepared to enact a multilingual pedagogy (Dražnik et al., 2022; Schroedler et al., 2023). Researchers have pointed out that there is an overemphasis on beliefs in studies on teacher education and multilingualism (Villegas et al., 2018), a tendency that is still prevalent in recent research within the field (e.g., Aleksić and Bebić-Crestany, 2023; Döll and Guldenschuh, 2023; Duarte and Günther-van der Meij, 2022; Paulsrud et al., 2023; Schroedler et al., 2023; Thoma, 2022). According to the ecological model of teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2013), teachers depend on material resources and physical environments to exercise agency. Håkon and Nora claimed that their ‘toolbox’ was empty; this metaphorical toolbox can be interpreted as a lack of the necessary practical resources for implementing multilingual pedagogies. Moreover, professional skills are a crucial element of the iterational dimension of teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2013). Thus, teacher education also needs to emphasise the practical side of multilingual pedagogies (Dražnik et al., 2022; Schroedler et al., 2023).

Conclusion and implications

To conclude, I return to the research question: To what degree has teacher education provided the necessary conditions for pre-service teachers to exercise their agency in enacting multilingual pedagogies within a monolingual education system? The study demonstrates that the iterative and projective dimensions of the pre-service teachers’ agency were strengthened through their teacher education. However, the practical-evaluative dimension of their agency does not seem to have been developed to the same extent as the other two dimensions over the course of their teacher education. This constitutes a potential challenge when the pre-service teachers transition into teaching and will face monolingual language policies and beliefs. Based on these findings, Norwegian teacher education programmes need to strengthen their focus on the practical-evaluative dimension of pre-service teachers’ agency for them to be able to exercise their agency in enacting multilingual pedagogies within a monolingual education system.

This study clearly highlights the value of longitudinal studies on pre-service teachers’ development of knowledge, skills and beliefs about multilingualism. Longitudinal approaches provide a more nuanced understanding of pre-service teachers’ developing agency than what a snapshot through a survey or a single interview can provide. Furthermore, the current study also highlights the advantages associated with qualitative research into pre-service teachers’ preparedness to work with multilingual learners, as it offers a more detailed and complex picture of the situated nature of pre-service judgements of the appropriateness of multilingual pedagogies. Although some studies from other contexts seem to confirm the findings presented in this article (e.g., Dražnik et al., 2022; Schroedler et al., 2023), more research is necessary to explore whether the findings of the current study can be transferable to other teacher education programmes and national settings.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jonas Yassin Iversen

Author biography

Jonas Yassin Iversen is a postdoctoral researcher in education at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. His research is focused on multicultural education, multilingualism in teacher education and schools, and minoritised language education.

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