Odisha promotes multilingual education

The government of Odisha has just issued orders (JPGs, six pages) on implementing mother-tongue based multilingual education (MLE) for Indigenous (Tribal) children.

"In order to address the language gap faced by the tribal children in the educational process...", Odisha is making the following provisions:

- MLE will be extended to all Indigenous children in Odisha
- the mother-tongue will be the medium for the first 5 years (list of languages)
- Odia in class 2 and English in class 3 as language subjects
- teachers fluent in the children's language will get priority in recruitment
- a long-term plan to attract Indigenous people into teaching jobs
- intensive teacher-training for MLE pedagogy.

There's more. Until the orders are available online on the NMRC or OPEPA websites (see below), see the government orders here as JPGs.

"I am happy that years of persistent effort finally materialized. With this notification, Odisha is the first state in India to have a clear set of policy proclamations for MLE for tribal children", says Prof Ajit Mohanty, Chairperson of the committee that made the recommendations. The National Multilingual Education Resource Consortium (NMRC) collaborated with Odisha Primary Education Programme Authority (OPEPA) to prepare the policy document, "MLE Policy Implementation and Guidelines for Odisha" (DOCX, 37 pages).

The policy document is itself worth reading for the wealth of evidence it gives in support of MLE from studies worldwide. It is also notable for the care with which it suggests measures to make MLE work in Odisha. The document concludes: "The question is not whether Odisha can afford MLE, rather it is WHETHER ODISHA CAN AFFORD NOT TO IMPLEMENT MLE."

Let us hope that this Odisha government initiative serves as a template, and inspires other governments in India and elsewhere.

Multilingual education in Nepal - Report

"Policy and Strategy for MLE in Nepal" (PDF) is a 2009 report authored by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Ajit Mohanty. In 67 pages, it takes you through

• the rationale for mother-tongue based multilingual education (MLE), especially for ITM (Indigenous/Tribal and [linguistic] Minority) children
• the catastrophic costs worldwide of not implementing it
• the various effective and ineffective strategies that have been tried
• the successful implementations worldwide
• how Nepal might go about implementing MLE

If you are interested in the subject at all, do read at least the section, "Summing up and recommendations" (p. 36 onwards). The authors conclude:

Keeping in view the present levels of linguistic competence of children and different groups associated with school education in Nepal, it is recommended that high competence in the mother tongue must be targeted for quality learning as well as for fostering sense of identity and self-confidence. In respect  of Nepali, school education must aim at high level of final competence, fit for higher education and effective participation in the democratic, political, economic and social processes in Nepal.

However, somewhat lower expectations for competence in English may be a realistic short- and middle-term target in view of the present circumstances where teachers, school administrators and teacher trainers do not themselves have high competence in English, neither in Listening/Speaking nor in Reading/Writing. Since requirement of high international levels of reading and writing competence in English is unlikely in the near future for most people in Nepal, a solid basic knowledge in English that can be expanded later might be a more realistic mid-term goal. The goals in respect of English could be increased later when English competencies of teachers and educators in Nepal become higher. (p. 37)

The report sketches the policy and pedagogic conditions necessary for MLE in Nepal. It ends on this optimistic note: "Nepal has made a very good start with the MLE project and activities around it. As Appendix 2 (Concept paper; one of the results of an earlier consultancy by one of us) and Appendix 6 (working group report, chair professor Yadava) show, there is a wealth of knowledge, enthusiasm and commitment. This knowledge was also eminently presented in the Yadava & Grove (eds, 1994/2008) report. This makes us hopeful in relation to the future in Nepal's attempts to maintain and develop further its enormous riches of diversities." (p. 40)

Indian survey records 630 languages so far

The People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) has already listed and described 630 languages in 27 states of the country. The Survey's Chairperson, Ganesh Devy, reported this at a workshop held here in Hyderabad on 31 May 2012. We have met Dr Devy and PLSI before in this blog.

In the workshop there were about 10 speakers of various indigenous (tribal) languages of Andhra Pradesh. They have been working with the state wing of the national universal elementary education program, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). Working with indigenous communities, these resource-persons and their colleagues have collected information on 16 indigenous languages, which they have rendered into Telugu. The task of the 10-or-so English-speaking Telugus in the workshop is to translate the Telugu information into English. The PLSI team will later translate into Hindi as well. Thus PLSI envisages diverse information on Indian languages in the language itself, the dominant regional language, Hindi, and English. (The PLSI website lists publishers in English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Odia.)

The SSA resource-persons raised many issues regarding multilingual education (MLE). Several spoke of the apathy in the bureaucracy, once one leaves the village-level and goes upwards through the education department: unfulfilled promises to develop learning materials in the mother tongue; warehouses filled with textbooks which have not been distributed to the schools; primary schools teaching in Gondi side-by-side with schools teaching in Telugu -- but the examinations are only in Telugu!

They said that the range of official attitudes to MLE ranged from ignorance to indifference to hostility. Indeed, Dr Devy remarked that "even in the highest circles of bureaucracy in Delhi" he has heard MLE being described as "mother language education"! But Dr Devy also announced that for the first time, the Government of India has set up a committee specifically for education of indigenous peoples.

He said that the PLSI data will help policy-makers a great deal.

Indian Folklife issue on multilingual education

The April 2009 issue of Indian Folklife (IFL) has been guest-edited by Mahendra Kumar Mishra. Dr Mishra is the author of Oral Epics of Kalahandi (review here [PDF]). He also writes an Education Diary, an excerpt from which is on the net - "The Magic of the Mother-Tongue".

The theme of this issue of IFL is multilingual education (MLE). In his editorial Dr Mishra acerbically speaks of the poor education that indigenous children receive: "Looking at tribal education in the Indian context, it is evident that not much effort has been made for the education of tribal children, except providing them inappropriate education." He argues for the important role folklore can play in the school curriculum.

The next essay is Tove Skutnabb-Kangas's hard-hitting "Linguistic Genocide: Tribal Education in India":

"subtractive dominant-language medium education for ITM [indigenous/tribal and minority] children can have harmful consequences socially, psychologically, economically and politically. It can cause very serious mental harm: social dislocation, psychological, cognitive, linguistic and educational harm, and, partially through this, also economic, social and political marginalisation. It can also often result in serious physical harm, e.g. in residential schools, and as a long-term result of marginalisation - e.g. alcoholism, suicides and violence."

She cites examples from Orissa, Nepal and Ethiopia of successful "additive" mother-tongue based MLE programs to show both their pedagogic effectiveness, and to show that even relatively resource-poor education systems can deliver more just and inclusive education.

David Hough in the next essay describes the Nepal Multilingual Education Project and its efforts to build a curriculum "bottom-up" in close consultation with the community:

"In order to make MLE sustainable nationwide by 2015 – the UN mandate for Education for All – local communities must take control of curriculum development, teacher training and methodology. If each community, after developing their own program, goes on to train five new communities, the goal can be reached. This approach is known as Cascading."

His essay ends with a very useful set of Frequently Asked Questions about multilingual education.

Iina Nurmela's article too is based on the Nepal experience. She fleshes out her field-notes into an absorbing essay on transgenerational cultural transmission:

"We have walked a long way since the first visit in the hot month preceding the monsoon. That day, no one thought their language or culture had a place inside the school. In seven months since, they are implementing their own mother tongues as the media of instruction in grades 1 to 3 through models they devised themselves."

Of the other essays in the issue, one focuses on mother-tongue revitalization in Hawai'i, and asks: "What can outsider non-Natives do to be helpful for realising these rights, then?" Citing another researcher, it answers: outsiders should

"... work collaboratively with Native allies, listen carefully to our wisdom as well as our concerns, interrogate unearned power and privilege (including one’s own), and use this privilege to confront oppression and “stand behind” Natives, so that our voices can be heard."

Another essay in this issue is on the Intercultural Bilingual Education program in Peru. This essay ends with the very interesting observation that:

"Thus bilingual education does not in itself guarantee a break with colonial social structures. On the contrary, Peruvian history shows that bilingual education from the 1950s until today has mainly served to assimilate the indigenous population to the dominant political, economic and social order. The introduction of the concept of interculturality by indigenous organisations in the 1970s was crucial, and has resulted in a permanent focus on the cultural hidden curriculum in teaching methods, educational materials and curricular content and on the ways in which formal schooling reproduces colonial power relations."

The issue ends with Dhir Jhingran's essay "Appropriate education strategies in diverse language contexts".

A rich issue indeed. Do read it!