Context Matters: Historical, Political, and Pedagogical

• In Event: Imagining Possible Worlds With Young Children, Families, and Teachers: Sustaining Language/s and Family Pedagogies

Abstract

The long history of failures to support Indigenous languages has impacted loss of children’s identities, languages and learning in our countries (Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand). In this paper, we briefly describe the historical, cultural, and pedagogical contexts of the respective systems and provide exemplars from each country of an innovative research initiative that disrupts these downward trajectories and offers possibilities for young children, their families and teachers. Our paper highlights the need to consider local contexts, and at the same time, to share the wealth of knowledge and research that exists around the world, when designing initiatives focusing on early childhood to revitalize and sustain Indigenous languages. We propose that these initiatives be underpinned by a sociocultural view of language as foundational to all learning (Vygotsky, 1978). As they interact with others using multiple modes of communication, young children construct meaning of the objects, actions, situations, and relationships in their world. They become socialized to the routines and ways in which they and more powerful others are positioned within each situated activity (Boyd & Galda, 2011).

We also propose that these initiatives recognize that when languages are lost, world views and cultures are also lost (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2008). In formal early learning contexts such as day care and early child centers, preschools, and elementary classrooms, communication practices are part of “the silent curriculum of Eurocentric knowledge transmission and instructional pedagogy” that have led to Indigenous linguistic and cultural loss and the destruction of Indigenous peoples’ self-esteem and cultural pride (Battiste, 2008, p. 89).
In New Zealand, the Māori language was banned in schools, in the 1900s, which led to generations of Māori children being deprived of a fundamental aspect of their identity. The decline in speakers of the Māori language was marked, and by the 1970s there was a danger that the language would become extinct. Language is a means of transmitting customs, valued beliefs, knowledge and skills, and reflects the cultural environment and ways of viewing the world. It is a source of power and a vehicle for expressing identity (Barlow, 1991). An ability to speak the language and possess knowledge of cultural values, protocols and histories impacts on one’s sense of belonging and acceptance by others. Conversely, one’s inability to speak the language can impact negatively on the development and maintenance of a sense of belonging, identity and acceptance.

In Canada, federally controlled residential schools operated from 1880 to 1996. Indigenous children, taken from their families and forced to attend these schools, did not experience adult-child nurturing or the intergenerational transmission of key cultural teachings (Hare & Anderson, 2010). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) concludes what is well documented in the literature: that Canadian residential schools and other assimilationist and genocidal policies and practices have led to the marginalization and in many cases the erasure, of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and ways of teaching children.

Authors

• Lesley Kay Rameka, University of Waikato

• Shelley Stagg Peterson, OISE/University of Toronto