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Educational responses to multilingualism: an introduction

Linguistic and cultural diversity is a feature of most, if not all, modern societies, whether it results from historical processes of state formation, from the aggregation of colonial possessions and their subsequent independence or from human mobility. Diversity therefore shapes the context in which education occurs and the processes through which teaching and learning happen. However, educational systems understand and respond to diversity in different ways. This volume focuses on contemporary implications of linguistic and cultural diversity for education at school level and in higher education. It recognises that different countries and regions have experienced diversity in education at different times and in different ways. In some cases, diversity has become a new, immediate concern for education systems that are unprepared for it, while for others it is the age-old backdrop against which education has been developed. It also recognises that educational responses to diversity change over time and that different countries and regions have different histories of involvement with diversity. The recent increase of diversity in Europe, for example, has produced a sense of urgency, with European educational systems planning for some form of productive coexistence of different linguistic and cultural groups. Despite a parallel increase in diversity in Australia, a similar sense of urgency does not seem to play a role in the education system. In fact, in Australia educational responses to diversity have a longer history, but education seems to have refocused away from linguistic diversity towards a narrower monolingualism. On the other hand, while recognition of diversity in both Europe and Australia is relatively recent, countries in South Asia and Africa have been engaged with the management and mismanagement of diversity in education for centuries. Each of these contexts has a chance to learn from these different histories, trajectories and experiences of linguistic diversity in education. The articles in this volume survey the issue of educational responses to linguistic diversity from a range of perspectives. Each examines a different aspect of education and the role for languages within education. Some engage with general issues, while others examine specific cases. They show educational responses to linguistic diversity to be both complex and problematic and in so doing raise issues for consideration in framing debates around the relationship between linguistic and cultural diversity and education. In their article, Liddicoat and Curnow examine the issues that influence how policy documents position non-dominant languages in schooling. They argue that the curriculum is a space constrained by prevailing ideologies and discourses about languages that consign non-dominant languages to marginalised positions in schooling. These discourses find their origins in monolingual understandings of the nation state: as nation states view schooling as an instrument of state formation, monolingual understandings of the nature of the state inevitably shape education as a monolingual, or rather monolingualising, environment. They also argue that in any society prevailing language ideologies influence the ways that particular languages are seen as being valued or valid for particular purposes and that discourses that construct non-dominant languages as being less ‘useful’ International Journal of Multilingualism, 2014 Vol. 11, No. 3, 269–272, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2014.921174