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| Photo by Mia Seleccion |
Language is core to our identity, communication, social integration, education, and development. It reflects our history, traditions, memories, and perspectives in its own complex manner. There are over 7,000 languages spoken across the world and they all represent a diverse community of people. It goes without saying that language is extremely important in our lives, especially in how it connects with cultural and intellectual heritage. Thus, it deserves to be celebrated in order to promote linguistic and cultural diversity.
That’s why International Mother Language Day was proclaimed by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in November 1999.
Multilingual education – a necessity to transform education.
This is the theme for this year’s International Mother Language Day celebration, with the intention of promoting inclusivity and transformative education. Given how much language shapes and represents our society, our educational system should strive to include more languages in its curriculum, especially the languages of marginalized groups of people, not just for the sake of acknowledging diversity and multilingualism, but rather to cultivate our educational system further into the path of inclusivity where students can experience and learn different languages for better development and cultural awareness.
"We must strive for more, and work with a deeper commitment to strengthening our understanding. We [must] allow a deeper understanding of diversity to guide our practice,” says Paul Gorski in his article titled Equity Literacy: More Than Celebrating Diversity where he states that there are students who have been marginalized in their classrooms due to racially driven teasings and which where he also argues that simply celebrating wouldn't do anything. We must eliminate the problem by being inclusive in the curriculum and the environment.
If our classrooms, especially international schools are designed to cater to different cultures and languages where students are encouraged to share and learn from their own languages, we can accumulate deeper and broader perspectives that can develop more respect for all languages, accents, and dialects. If we are more inclusive, not only can we learn more, but we can also develop deeper relationships with each other where belonging and international mindedness will foster.
Celebrating diversity is not enough; in order to truly implement multilingual education, we must view multilingualism as an advantage rather than a predicament we must solve in a classroom. Additionally, we must stop viewing the English language as the only valid language in learning internationally as this only further isolates the minority—making them feel invisible not only in the curriculum but also in society as a whole.
However, multilingual education will not be successful and manifest on its own, we all have a role to play to make it possible. This prompts the question, “What can we do to make multilingual education possible?”
Here are a few courses of action that we can take according to Jacob Huckle, a writer in The International Educator:
- Educating ourselves about the languages and cultures of the students and learning more about pedagogical approaches like translanguaging (a practice in the classroom that empowers students to speak in their native language to support their learning of English) to explore how we can open up spaces for those languages and cultures in our classrooms.
- Creating opportunities for students to reflect on and share their own complex and dynamic language and cultural profiles using creative tasks like language portraits or identity collages.
- Working with organizations like Language Friendly Schools to create a development plan focused on how you will work to become more linguistically and culturally inclusive.
Most importantly, we must reflect and ask ourselves: How can we learn more about the linguistic and cultural identities of the people around us and how they feel about their languages and the space they are given (or not) in our classrooms?
