ABSTRACT
The critical participatory action research project discussed in this chapter was situated in three communities in Fiji. Across three years, children, families, community leaders and mentors, research partners, and university researchers collaborated to build community capacity for fostering preschool children’s multilingual literacies in their home languages and English. An agreed goal was to co-create multilingual texts with participating children that represented their lives, experiences, and aspirations—noting Fiji’s three official languages are Bauan (associated with Fiji’s iTaukei people), standard Hindi (connected with Indo-Fijians) and English (Fiji’s language of government, schooling, and media). We begin this chapter by sharing details about our project and project participants. Next, we use the dialogic structure of talanoa to explore OfL that were generated in the three project communities. We close the chapter by considering insights about OfL in community settings.
