Highlighted Session: Multilingualism and Education in "Post-Soviet", Post-Colonial Spaces

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper 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.
Benson and Kosonen (2014) go into more comparative perspective about policy and practice concerning the use of colonial, regional and local languages, including 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 some sociolinguistc groups and marginalizing others (Kamwangamalu , 2016; Stroud, 2007; Wolff, 2017).
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 varying in educational provision in those languages, and continuing 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 follows Kachru (1998) in treating World Englishes as varieties in their own right, and invoking social and sociolinguistic realism in postcolonial contexts to challenge sacred cows of English. 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). Our challenging sacred cows of Russian, national/titular languages, and non-dominant languages in post-colonial, ex-Soviet educational spaces this panel can contribute to the CIES 2026 conference theme “Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World”.
The panel includes pieces on language questions in education in Post-Soviet spaces: 1) “Language of the enemy”: Public discussions around teaching Russian as a foreign language in the Baltic states; 2) Beyond Colonial Residues: Russian as Cultural Capital in Kazakh-Medium Education; 3) Educational Spaces and Linguistic Hierarchies: A Decolonial Analysis of Russian in Kyrgyzstan); 4) Multilingual Transitions in Kazakhstan: Parents’ Voices on School Language of Instruction.

Sub Unit

• Europe and Central Asia SIG

Organizer

• Stephen A Bahry, OISE, University ofToronto

Chair

• Marina Antony-Newman, University College London, Institute of Education

Individual Presentations

• Beyond Colonial Residues: Russian as Cultural Capital in Kazakh-Medium Education - Assel Shakuliyeva, Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education; Sulushash I. Kerimkulova, Nazarbayev University

• “Language of the enemy”: Public discussions around teaching Russian as a foreign language in the Baltic states - Kapitolina Fedorova, Tallinn University; Natalia Tšuikina, Tallinn University School of Humanities

• Educational Spaces and Linguistic Hierarchies: A Decolonial Analysis of Russian in Kyrgyzstan - FERUZA SHERMATOVA, I. Arabaev Kyrgyz State University; Maksat Totobaev; Stephen A Bahry, OISE, University ofToronto