Fostering Educational Equity through Linguistically and Culturally Responsive Education

Tentative completion schedule:

• Abstract submission deadline: 15 June 2024
• Notification of abstract acceptance: 15 July 2024
• Full manuscript deadline: 20 January 2025

Dear Colleagues,

We are excited to present you with the opportunity to contribute to the following Special Issue.

Scope and Focus

As is well documented, educational contexts around the world are becoming increasingly diverse due to globalization, economic and forced migration, as well as improved infrastructure (Eurydice, 2019; Herzog-Punzenberger et al., 2017; Mufwene, 2002). A further common issue for school systems globally is that learners from ethnic and linguistic minorities, including learners with a migration background for whom the educational system is not designed, are experiencing low academic achievement (OECD, 2018). In formal school contexts, these learners are also more likely to be experiencing behavior issues and have a higher representation in settings needing increased support compared with their peers (Gregory & Weinstein, 2008; Moore, 2008; Strand & Lindorff, 2021). It is well understood that when learners’ languages and identities are not recognized and positioned as resources in educational settings, this can have long-term consequences for them in terms of success and inclusion more broadly (Duff, 2015). Unfortunately, exclusion, inequity, linguistic and cultural repression and raciolinguistic ideologies can be found in various settings around the world when it comes to multilingual speakers of minority languages (Flores & Nelson, 2015; Ndhlovu & Makalela, 2021).

With this in mind, linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogies, influenced by a range of factors such as historical, social, political and economic contexts, have been developed and proposed for decades to support inequities in education resulting from ethnic, linguistic and social disparities (Gay, 2018; T. Lucas & Villegas, 2011). Moreover, translanguaging pedagogies have become increasingly recognized as means to support educational equity for multilingual learners (García & Kleyn, 2016; García & Wei, 2013). Such pedagogies have been found to have the potential to contribute to improving students’ level of academic achievement as well as their social, cultural and linguistic development (Hammond, 2014; Jensen & Valdés, 2021).

However, it is also recognized that in many contexts, monolingual monoliths dominate educational and school systems (French & Armitage, 2020); thus, ideologies persistently uphold the dominant/national language of education and its importance for learning (Lippi-Green, 2012), working against the inclusion of multilingual practices and epistemologies (Jaspers, 2018; Kerfoot & Bello-Nonjengele, 2023). Moreover, (misinformed) perceptions about speakers, their (migration) backgrounds, languages and language practices proliferate. Small or (regionally) ‘low-prestige’ languages are regularly positioned as deficient and non-valuable for learning (Erling et al., 2022b); are regularly dismissed in face of the pressure to learn more dominant/’valuable’ languages in the hierarchy, e.g., the languages of the school and English (Piller, 2016); and strong perceptions dominate about the obligation to strictly abide by standardized ex-colonial languages (Erling et al., 2021; Saldi, 2010). However, even when speakers have limited (literacy) competences in their identity/first languages, and therefore might only have limited value for the cognitive aspects of learning, these languages have highly important cultural and identity values for their speakers (Buchholz & Hall, 2012). Therefore, their inclusion in education can have wide-ranging psychological and motivational effect (Weidl et al., 2022).

Evidence of “good practice” in inclusive, high-quality language education is unfortunately often ignored by policy makers and educational leaders (Collier & Thomas, 2017; Erling et al., 2021b). This can, in part, be because of perceptions that such initiatives are resource-intensive and may inadvertently disadvantage learners from national/linguistic majority groups. Adding to this is the lack of knowledge about and misconceptions of multilingualism and multiculturalism, which are often shaped by Western epistemologies. So, despite such pedagogical approaches being appropriate for their contexts and necessary for their learners, they are not always well codified or widespread in the application.

Purpose

With this knowledge, this volume seeks to bring together existing research and promising practices which are already taking place in various global contexts, highlighting what can be done to produce more positive and beneficial learning experiences for multilingual learners in marginalized positions in various formal and informal educational contexts. Drawing on our experience of focusing on “pockets of possibility” (Erling et al., 2022a) and implementing evidence-based good practice in multilingual learning despite resource and ideological challenges (Erling et al., 2021a), we seek insights from how linguistically and culturally responsive education has been successfully carried out and makes clear what can be achieved using learners’ cultural and linguistic resources. The volume takes into account the many challenges faced in implementing such approaches at the individual and structural levels and discusses how such challenges have been addressed within individual projects. We aim to include accounts of (small-scale) multilingual communities developing appropriate and sustainable systems and pedagogies to deal with manifold diversities while simultaneously preserving languages, cultures and identities (Singer & Harris, 2016; Weidl, 2022).

This Special Issue seeks to address the following questions:

• What types of linguistically and culturally responsive education programs are being implemented globally to better foster social integration and (language) learning in schools? How do they support learners’ achievement in education generally and/or language education more specifically?
• How are educational programs successfully addressing challenges around demands for language learning at school, i.e., learning the language of education, achieving in required “foreign” languages and sustaining “first/identity” languages?
• How can linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogy support inclusion and whole-school improvement? How are conceptions of “multilingual identity” (Forbes et al., 2021) and/or a “collective multicultural consciousness” (Halse, 2022) being harnessed in such initiatives?
• What are the ways that linguistically and culturally responsive education is being interpreted and implemented at the level of courses, the classroom, teacher education, and educational/school leadership and policy?

Submission

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400-600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send them to the Guest Editors (miriam.weidl@univie.ac.at) and to the Education Sciences Editorial Office (languages@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References

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Erling, E. J., Brummer, M., & Foltz, A. (2022). Pockets of Possibility: Learners of English in Diverse, Multilingual Secondary Schools in Austria. Applied Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amac037

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Weidl, M., Lüpke, F., Mané, A.N. and Sagna, J.F. (2022). LILIEMA: A Sustainable Educational Programme Promoting African Languages and Multilingualism According to the Social Realities of Speakers and Writers. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2022.2118754.

Dr. Miriam Weidl 
Dr. Elizabeth J. Erling
Guest Editors

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• multilingual education
• culturally responsive pedagogy
• translanguaging
• education equity
• inclusive practice