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On Public and Private Spaces in the Classroom

المؤلف:  Tara Goldstein

المصدر:  Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School

الجزء والصفحة:  P30-C2

2025-09-24

383

On Public and Private Spaces in the Classroom

As she explains in the interview excerpt above, Mrs. Lo only used Cantonese and Mandarin in spaces that were "private," off what Canadian and British sociolinguists Monica Heller, Marilyn Martin-Jones, and Mukul Saxena have called the "center stage" of the classroom floor.¹ Mrs. Lo created such spaces by scheduling time for classroom practice, which allowed her to transform center stage into what I call a "shared stage." On the shared stage, students solved math problems collaboratively, using whatever language was most helpful to them. For Mrs. Lo, center stage was a public space for whole-group instruction and therefore a space where she only used English, the language of instruction at Northside. However, a shared stage where students instructed each other provided her with private spaces that could legitimately (with the support of the Language for Learning Policy discussed in the Introduction) become multilingual if students were stuck on a problem. The Cantonese and Mandarin counseling Mrs. Lo undertook with individual students took place "off stage," during the daily break or after class was over for the day. Mrs. Lo's creative use of time to create private spaces of instruction and assistance in her classroom not only allowed her to accept student multilingualism, but also allowed her to use her own trilingual set of resources to support student learning.

¹ See Heller and Martin-Jones (2001) and Martin-Jones and Saxena (2001), where the concepts of center stage and off stage are introduced.