Language teachers and their multiple responsibilities: How to accommodate war-fleeing Ukrainian students in Polish language classes

• In Event: Diverse Methodological Perspectives on Language in Sociopolitical Context

Proposal

Polish national identity has been shaped by a complex history of geopolitical shifts, cultural traditions, and social transformations, oscillating from its pre-World-War-II reputation of a diverse ‘melting pot’ (Paradowski & Bator, 2018) to its description as ‘extremely homogeneous’ (Komorowska, 2014). The Polish language has traditionally always been a crucial marker of national identity (Janion, 2006) and is transmitted as such through education (Wierzbicka, 2003). The influx of migrants and refugees, especially in recent years, partly triggered by Russia’s first attack on Ukraine in 2015 with the annexation of Crimea and then on the entire country in 2022, has brought individuals to the country who are in dire need of help in all spheres of social life. The ongoing war in Ukraine has shaped Poland’s local linguistic and cultural landscape and made migration a prominent concern for the education sector. The many newly arrived students, with their individual needs, traumas, feelings of in-betweenness, hopes, and academic trajectories, have brought significant changes and challenges for language teachers who are at the frontline of receiving these individuals and often one of the first contact points they have in the new society. This presentation aims to explore the specific challenges that Polish language teachers encounter as they navigate the multiple responsibilities of fostering national identity and Polish language learning while promoting multilingual education in a globalized educational environment. Through ethnographic classroom observations at Poland’s most international higher education institution–the University of Warsaw–and semi-structured, in-depth interviews with language teachers of Polish, this presentation zooms in on an under-researched geographical context and area of research. It sheds light on teachers’ identities and their needs and concerns in an increasingly complex and uncertain new world; a new world we have inherited post-COVID, which has witnessed rapid instability in mental health, technological advances, social polarization, political upheavals, violence and war, environmental disasters, mass migration, economic volatility, and informational chaos, all at a global scale. Preliminary findings show that teachers are ill-equipped to handle the special needs of war-traumatized students, even adult students, and do not have the training or materials to properly accommodate them. That said, there seems to be a greater understanding and empathy for those migrant students given the linguistic, cultural, and geographic proximity between Poland and Ukraine so that students’ concerns and well-being are taken serious. For the researched context (and arguably others), this is a new development since migrants from other ethnic, cultural, and geographical backgrounds have largely been marginalized or ignored (Magno et al., 2024). We advocate for more emotional, physical, administrative, and financial support for teachers in fulfilling all their (perceived) responsibilities, adequate professional development, and flexible teaching practices that can be adjusted to ongoing social developments. Finally, this study showcases our own human biases, as individuals and researchers, and how we categorize people based on their linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and social background, which results in a different treatment of those. We ‘other’ people for their differences to the detriment of the most vulnerable and create hierarchies of nationalities, which are ultimately socially constructed or imaginary (Anderson, 2006). This presentation would like to serve as a reminder of this and counteract such tendencies so that all individuals, regardless of their nationality, migrant or resident status, or linguistic, cultural, ethnic, or social background can be treated fairly and equitably.


References

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities. Verso.
Janion, M. (2006). Niesamowita słowiańszczyzna [Uncanny Slavdom]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.
Komorowska, H. (2014). Analyzing linguistic landscapes. A diachronic study of multilingualism in Poland. In A. Otwinowska & G. De Angelis (Eds.), Teaching and learning in multilingual contexts: Sociolinguistic and educational perspectives (pp. 19-31). Multilingual Matters.
Magno, C., Becker, A., & Lötscher, S. (2024). Decolonial archeology of migration spaces. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies. https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086241256071
Paradowski, M. B. & Bator, A. (2018). Perceived effectiveness of language acquisition in the process of multilingual upbringing by parents of different nationalities. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 21(6), 647-665. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2016.1203858
Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction. Mouton de Gruyter.

Author

• Anna Becker, Polish Academy of Sciences