A More-Than-Language Approach to Inclusion of Indigenous Children in Education: Reflections on Cambodia’s Multilingual Education Plan

• In Event: VIRTUAL HYBRID PANEL: Multilingual Education to Promote Peace and Preserve Indigenous Knowledges About Life in an Interconnected World

Proposal

Among the most excluded in education worldwide, Indigenous children are facing monumental changes in their environments, social structures, livelihoods, services, and opportunities to learn culturally-based knowledge and the languages that embody and communicate this knowledge. In Cambodia, the government is implementing multilingual education (MLE) to increase Indigenous children’s participation in school. Building on path-finding work by CARE, the government began in 2014 to implement the first five-year plan to deliver MLE in five threatened Indigenous languages. In 2018, we were commissioned to evaluate implementation of the plan. This presentation explores differing goals on the parts of government and Indigenous Peoples that surfaced during our evaluation. Similar divergences can be found around the world when governments agreed to allow non-dominant languages in public education.

Government support for including Indigenous languages during the first three years of primary school in Cambodia is unprecedented in Southeast Asia. Our evaluation found that the government’s MLE plan is seen as a positive step by Indigenous children, parents, school support committees, village leaders and MLE teachers, and by some non-Indigenous members of ethnically mixed communities. Indigenous children and parents, and some education officers, want MLE to continue to Primary 6 or beyond. Indigenous participants, Indigenous People’s Organizations (IPOs), local language groups, and community forest associations share a common goal to increase Indigenous language literacy and to ensure intergenerational transmission of distinctive, locally specific knowledge about how to protect land-based resources and earn livelihoods through sustainable forestry and farming practices.

In Cambodia, Indigenous rights holders have not been identified even peripherally as essential actors in implementation of the government plan for MLE. Why? One explanation offered in Cambodia is that the government sees itself and its downstream education officers as the instruments of change and Indigenous people as the beneficiaries, on the bottom. Another explanation is that Indigenous people are over-burdened by the urgency of protecting their land resources, livelihoods and languages and cannot afford to divert attention to the government’s limited vision for MLE. Our additional interpretation is that the rationale for MLE in Cambodia, as in so many other locations, is largely antithetical to the goals of Indigenous people. The government’s explicit rationale is to speed young Indigenous children’s assimilation into mainstream, monolingual (Khmer) education by Primary 4.

Across the globe, dominant languages are overwhelmingly marketed to parents and policy-makers as the best media for education. Indigenous people are often faced with accepting any concessions to include Indigenous content or languages. Yet, meaningful inclusion of Indigenous children requires Indigenous-collaboration in education reforms that support Indigenous-specified goals that encompass and go beyond the medium of instruction and offer more than an equal opportunity to participate in the education system of the dominant society. Indigenous knowledges, transmitted through languages, are a key to re-situating human-kind within the relational flow of life where education and chances of survival on a damaged planet are fully and responsibly engaged in a more-than-language approach to MLE.

Authors

• Jessica Ball, University of Victoria

• Mariam Smith, Learning Loop Inc.