par Mayo Oyama, Danièle Moore, and Daniel Roy Pearce
In Japan, where the language of schooling is overwhelmingly Japanese only, and English the only widespread foreign language offered at all levels of education, elementary schools stand out as a particularly interesting context for observing the development of creative plurilingual pedagogies. Based on the documentation of local linguistic landscapes as ways to experience and reflect on plurality, and within a perspective where knowledge is grounded in experience and movement (Ingold, 2000), children's learning is contextualized through tools (like cameras and iPads). This inquiry process requires drawing on children's social imagination and the aesthetics of photography through walking explorations of the linguistic landscape to develop more complex understandings of locality and transnationalism (Moore & Haseyama, 2018; Haseyama, 2021), multilingual awareness (Melo-Pfeifer, 2015), and multilingual and multimodal literacies (Prasad, 2020). With this in mind, the exploratory research practice in this chapter was conducted with an elementary student who engaged in investigating linguistic landscapes during a self-directed research assignment. The inquiry-based methodology adopts a visual and sensory ethnography of/in movement (Pink, 2015; Vergunst & Ingold, 2008) anchored in a transdisciplinary plurilingual approach to research-based learning. Multimodal data sources include child-and researcher-initiated visual documentation and reflective journaling, digital photographs, and researchers' field-notes.