Multilingualism and Quality Education in Post-Soviet Spaces and the Diaspora

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

A recent emphasis in comparative international and development education (CIDE) as a field is how to go beyond Education for All (EFA) to achieve QEFA (Quality Education for All). A further question is the role of language in providing quality education to all, especially speakers of non-dominant languages. CIDE literature has paid much attention to inequities between the Global North and South and decolonisation of education in post-colonial contexts (Crossley & Tikly, 2004; Takayama et al., 2017, May; Tikly, 1997).
This general literature touches on language issues, but does not go into detail. Beyond epistemological and cultural decolonisation, the field has seen much debate on linguistic decolonization of former colonies whereby some balancing of status, prestige and domains of use is sought among the former dominant colonial languages and the local languages, which often retain a non-dominant status long after the end of formal colonial rule.
Works such as Benson and Kosonen (2014) go into much more detail about policy and practice concerning the use of colonial, regional and local languages, which may in some cases be students’ mother tongues. Key questions arise from the interaction of education with societal multilingualism, recognition and misrecognition of power differentials, language hierarchies, (non-)negotiated identities, and continued postcolonial hegemony of the ex-colonizer’s language as the primary medium of instruction, advantaging those social groups with access to that language and marginalizing others.
CIDE’s emphasis on the Global North versus the Global South seems to leave out the former “Second World”, the post-Soviet space of the independent states that resulted from the break up of the USSR. Some of these states aspire to Global North status, with the ex-Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania having joined the European Union, while Ukraine is hopeful of doing so. In the meantime, independent Russia’s policy of “the Russian World” in the “near abroad”, based on the continued importance, perhaps dominance, of the Russian language in its former Soviet neighbours (Aref’ev, 2012), seems to see not only Russia, but the entire post-Soviet space, as neither part of the Global North or South, but something unique, with the Russian language as a defining feature.
Recent surveys of education in the post-Soviet space (Chankseliani, 2017; Hernández-Torrano, Karabassova et al., 2021; Silova et al., 2021) also mention language issues but not in detail. Hernández-Torrano, Karabassova et al. (2021) provide a very broad survey of research domains, including language and linguistics, language education, and teacher education as domains of research, but do not comment on individual research studies on language issues, such as models of education by language(s), including curricular models and related pedagogical approaches. Chankseliani, (2017) mentions language issues as primarily political in relation to promoting or damaging “social cohesion”, citing previous work by Silova et al. (2007) on disruptions to education resulting from rapid change in language-in-education policy, and by Kemppainen et al. (2008) on dilemmas of Russian-speaking population in choosing to send their children to Russian- or Estonian-medium education. Silova et al. (2021) provide a broad survey of trends that does not especially highlight language issues, but mentions them in connection with Russia’s “soft power” based on maintaining Russian language education in other countries in the region. They do mention that the status of the Russian language in the Baltic republics and Ukraine is problematic, and also mention a study on the status of the Russian language in Armenia.
Those in Russia’s “near-abroad” have faced the challenge of nation-building based on promoting the titular language of the republic, while handling the former dominant status of the Russian language in various ways, sometimes keeping official status as a Language of Wider Communication (LWC), sometimes treating it as a foreign language or minority language, while generally formally maintaining language rights in education of many other minority groups, often accompanied by reduction of educational availability in those languages, and continue to not recognize educational language rights of certain other minority languages.
In early United Nations’ debates, one proposal was that any domination of internal, contiguous, or distant peoples constituted colonization; the ultimately successful ‘saltwater thesis’, held that colonization was domination of non-contiguous territories separated by salt-water, including British, French and US overseas territories, but excluding internal US native peoples and Soviet minority ethnicities (Lightfoot, 2016). This panel is an attempt to focus on the gap in comparative education literature in dealing with the range of issues highlighted above in the post-Soviet space, where only recently have decolonization and recolonization become more commonly used to refer to changing language policies and practices in society and in education (Tlostanova, 2015).
The panel includes pieces on language questions in education: 1) of children of the post-Soviet diaspora using the case of Toronto, Canada; 2) of the use and choice of monolingual Estonian, Russian, and bilingual approaches in schools in Estonia; 3) on teachers’ perspectives on the use of monoglossic vs multi- and plurilingual approaches to language teaching in schools in Kazakhstan’s Aktobe district; 4) on language majors beliefs and practices towards multilingualism in Kyrgyz, Russian, foreign languages, and local non-dominant languages (Uzbek, Tajik, Dungan, Uygur, Korean, etc); and 5) the impact of Kazakhstan’s trilingual Kazakh-, Russian-, English-medium on speakers of other, non-dominant, indigenous languages of Kazakhstan.

Sub Unit

• Language Issues SIG

Organizer

• Stephen A Bahry, OISE, University ofToronto

Chair

• Kara Diane Brown, University of South Carolina

Individual Presentations

• “Discrimination” vs. “Equal access to education”: conflict discourses on the transition to Estonian language of instruction - Kapitolina Fedorova, Tallinn University School of Humanities; Natalia Tšuikina, Tallinn University School of Humanities

• Kyrgyzstanis' Multilingual Social and Educational Beliefs and practices among Kyrgyz, English, Russian, Uzbek and other minority languages - FERUZA SHERMATOVA, I. Arabaev Kyrgyz State University; Maksat Totobaev, Osh State University; Stephen A Bahry, OISE, University ofToronto

• Post-Soviet languages, and quality education in the Diaspora: The case of the Greater Toronto Area - Stephen A Bahry, OISE, University ofToronto; Johanna HELIN, OISE, University of Toronto

• Monoglossic vs Multi-/Plurilingual Language-Teaching Approaches in Kazakhstan’s Aktobe District: Perspectives of Key Stakeholders (teachers, school administrators, parents and students). - Stephen A Bahry, OISE, University ofToronto; Gulzhana Kuzembayeva, K. Zhubanov Aktobe Regional University