The exploration of bilingual education in Brazil reveals a landscape filled with significant challenges and promising possibilities. Inequalities between private institutions and the public sector perpetuate socioeconomic gaps and limited access to it.

Despite the increasing presence of bilingual education, many programs continue to operate under a monolingual mindset that emphasizes strict separation between languages and prioritizes linguistic accuracy over communicative practices. This perspective limits students’ opportunities to engage dynamically with multiple languages and hinders their development of linguistic mobility. To move beyond these limitations, it is crucial to foster intercultural competences. To do so, creating spaces where students can appreciate and interact with cultural and linguistic diversity becomes essential.

Central to this discussion is the concept of “funds of perezhivanie”, which integrates various theoretical and practical elements, encompassing experiences, knowledge, potentials, values, and emotions of individuals or groups accumulated throughout their lives. By recognizing these diverse experiences, educators can create a more inclusive and responsive educational environment that values the cultural and experiential diversity of students.

The concept of “interculturality” is also significant for our context. By exploring strategies for intercultural education, we conceive bilingual education as a possibility for the formation of subjects with an intercultural stance and with greater willingness and knowledge to face the inequalities imposed by our society. Crafting bilingual identities, in this sense, means forging spaces for the construction of intercultural and critical curricula. So interculturality, from the perspective we adopt, is not a theoretical position or a dialogue between cultures or philosophical traditions but a “position” or “disposition, ” a “way of life”. An attitude of willingness to live “our” identity references in relation to “others” that opens the human experience toward a process of relearning and of cultural and contextual relocation, which allows us to perceive cultural illiteracies.

This leads us to the second challenge faced by public bilingual schools that can contribute to the formation of empowered and agentive global citizens: the need to move toward heteroglossic perspectives.

Heteroglossia is here understood in a broad sense, drawing on Bakhtin’s view of language as inherently plural, layered, and dynamic. According to Busch, this concept encompasses three interrelated dimensions: 1) Multidiscursivity refers to the coexistence of distinct speech types or discourses associated with particular social spheres, time periods, professions, or communities; 2) Multivoicedness highlights the presence of diverse individual voices within these discursive spaces. Every utterance is situated on the boundary between self and other and becomes meaningful only when appropriated and reaccentuated by the speaker; and 3) Linguistic diversity points to the multiplicity of languages and language varieties shaped by social differentiation.

Framing bilingual education through heteroglossic lenses challenges dominant monolingual and homogenizing ideologies. It invites schools to cultivate spaces where varied discourses, voices, and languages can coexist, interact, and contribute to the construction of knowledge.

Internet: <jstor.org/stable> (adapted).