Multilingual Education: Indian Folklife: Series No. 32

This issue of the quarterly newsletter of the National Folklore Support Centre is on the topic of multilingual education (MLE) in India, Nepal, Peru, and Hawai‘i, United States. It includes articles on the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as it applies to MLE, and strategies for education in language-diverse situations and in indigenous communities.

Articles by topic include:

• "Multilingual Education for Indigenous Communities" - As stated here, "folklore as a body of community knowledge and a mode of communication contributes much towards creating a culturally responsive curriculum for children in different socio-cultural contexts." Oral lore and traditions of craft are preserved by groups including women, marginalised groups, and tribal people. They can become windows of understanding and "kernels of ideas, skills and capabilities ...[F]olklore as a community system has become gradually acknowledged at the national level as curricular framework and the language of the children as the pre-requisite for child-centred education. More dialogue is necessary to explore the Indian knowledge system in the school system where children can get their experiential life reflected in the school curriculum." 

• "Linguistic Genocide: Tribal Education in India" - This paper argues that when children are educated exclusively in a non-mother-tongue language, they are prevented access to education because of the linguistic, paedagogical, and psychological barriers created. Thus, these exclusively non-mother-tongue programmes violate the human right to education as expressed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, among other human rights conventions. The author illustrates the argument using various education programmes as examples. 

• "The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Applications for MLE from Nepal to India and Beyond" - From the Abstract: "This paper explores how multilingual education (MLE) programmes for indigenous peoples in Nepal and worldwide can benefit from adapting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into their national language and planning structures. In particular, it notes how Articles 13 and 14 can be used to design MLE programs which are controlled from the bottom up by local indigenous communities."

• "Step Behind to Make Indigenous Voices Heard: Education in Hawai‘i" - This article discusses eliminating "oppression both inside and outside" of the schools due to "racism that has caused indigenous languages to be seen as frivolous." The authors describe Pïnana Leo (“language nest”) schools that have the overall goal of revitalising and sustaining the Hawaiian language and culture through the creation of a new generation of native Hawaiian-speaking children. The success of these schools resulted in the Kula Kaiapuni Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Surrounding Environment School), a K-12 language immersion public schools programme and a PhD programme  - which means that a student may go through all levels of education in the Hawaiian language. 

• "Intercultural Bilingual Education: Peru’s Indigenous Peoples’ Answer to their Educational Needs" - This article considers the role of bi- and multilingual education in post-colonial societies. It considers teacher training and the aim of improving the education of groups whose mother tongues are not the colonial language. However, it recognises that the perception by policymakers of the indigenous population group and of assimilation dictates content, methods, and activities. It identifies problems that surface when the Spanish curricular materials are translated into Quechua. It asks questions including: "[I]s bilingual education just a tool in an acculturation process or is it a tool that can lead to a multicultural state and intercultural citizenship? If so, which other aspects of society need to be reformed in order to make this happen? It is apparent that the concept of interculturality is not only a methodology in education, but rather can potentially reopen discussion of the colonial conditions that remain in place in many post-colonial societies." To that end, teachers in Peru participated in a project in 2005 to plan and implement a school project under the following conditions: "the project should use the communal calendar and be based on a local (mainly agricultural) activity; the pupils should be participants in the local activities, and members of the community should be integrated in the project as knowledge persons and teachers". Projects were recorded using photography and video to produce educational material for schools. An interactive CD-ROM was produced. The aim of the programme, as stated here, was: "to restore many teachers’ identity, as they had abandoned Quechua and rural identity due to discrimination throughout their life and the absence of alternatives to Western thinking about ‘the good life’; to re-establish the relationship between school and community, making school part of the community and redefining the school’s role in it and in society in general; to actively involve teachers in community life and to create space for communities to influence the kind of school they want; and to open up for communities to participate on equal terms in other public spaces." 

• "The Story of Elders in Mother Tongue Education in Nepal Built Upon Notes from my Field Journal" - Iina Nurmela tells of the experience of inviting teachers, parents, school management committee members, community members, and representatives from Indigenous Peoples Organizations and the District Education Office to discuss possibilities, benefits, and challenges of mother tongue (MT) and multilingual education, and their interest in beginning to pilot the programme in Nepal, first as a community-based model of material development through storytelling. Because community members expressed sadness that the speakers of their own language were falling behind and that they had lost their voice, a plan was implemented using mother tongues as the media of instruction. Communities began having their own cultural content in teaching and learning activities and being responsible for the design of their own model of education. They began with children responding to community elders ("IK holders") by drawing and writing about stories they heard in their MT. These became the printed readers, along with photos of each child whose work was included. Stories were audio- and video-taped. Further, "[t]he teachers, IK holders, parents, representatives from Indigenous Peoples Organizations, and other implementers have participated in regional and national workshops. They joined a study tour to visit MLE programs in India. They have interacted with representatives from other pilot schools, government officers and international experts in the field of MLE and have shared their hopes, opinions and ideas." 

• "Appropriate Education Strategies in Diverse Language Contexts" - According to this article, the ideal primary school strategy, from the point of view of the child’s social, affective, and cognitive development, would be instruction in the first language until as late an educational stage as possible. This means that teachers need to be bilingual and materials need to be in the child's first language. Appropriate first and second language teaching methods might vary depending on: distance of the children’s first language from the school language; status of child’s home language in the society; the motivation of the children, parents, and society for the learning of the second language; the socio-economic and literacy status of the social group and the exposure to the standard language; and multilingual or mixed language background situation at school, i.e., children with different first languages in the same classroom. Current strategies implemented in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Orissa include: MT instruction until grade 4 with MT language maintenance instruction until grade 5; motivation of local communities supporting this process; child-centred curricular development using local knowledge and cultural materials, including teacher development and supplementary materials; and programme sustainability through use of materials in state-owned schools and state-run Education For All (EFA) programmes.