Professor Michael (מיכאל) Singh (ਸਿੰਘ)

Bionote

A postmonolingual teacher-researcher, Professor Singh’s work focuses on extending and deepening teacher education students’ literacy skills through using their full repertoire of languages-and-knowledge; equipping them to meet the demands of teaching Australia’s multilingual students, and increasing their confidence in the added value postmonolingual skills provide graduating teachers. He enjoys watching movies that make postmonolingual practices visible, such Bastille Day and The Great Wall (长城), and the xenolinguistics of Arrived. Having an interest in polyglot programming he is able to write, incorrectly in 11 languages, “I am not a terrorist.”

Re: Conceptualising learning futures

The concepts we use in education are important. Concepts express educational values, assign status to the students with whom we work, and provide the basis for rules for governing the moral enterprise that is education.

Now and then, it is important to pause in our busy working-life to think critically about the concepts we use in education. Against the technologically driven speeding up of education, it is desirable to slow down, to contemplate if some concepts have accumulated unwarranted baggage that poses risks we might have overlooked.

Currently, I am using the method of concept analysis (Walker & Avant, 2005) in a project that is exploring ways of making better use multilingual students’ repertoire of languages-and-knowledge (Singh, 2019).

Concept analysis provides a framework that educators can use to analyse existing labels related to our working-life so as to develop guidelines for leading students’ learning futures. Findings from my research employing this method are presented below (Singh, 2017; 2018).

The aim of this conceptual analysis was to determine how the concept of ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ (CALD) was constructed and is interpreted in education.

In determining the defining attributes of CALD, the intellectual roots for this concept can be located in the sociological theory of labelling. Where diversity is framed as a social pathology it is equated with deviance, and standing as against the stability of the prevailing cultural-linguistic order in education.

Adusei-Asante and Adibi (2018) indicate that CALD is attributed to students who are framed as problems. They ‘fail’ to meet the requirements of the cultural-linguistic order because they have limited proficiency in a particular version of English.

A historical antecedent for CALD is Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act 1901 which prohibited the educational use of languages from beyond Europe in Australia’s colleges, schools and universities. The dictation test in Section 3(a) of the Act was designed to be failed by persons who spoke languages originating outside Europe and thereby to exclude them and their languages from Australia.

In the 1970s the concept ‘Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) was applied to persons in Australia who spoke languages originating from elsewhere than Europe. However, this concept proved inappropriate for measuring linguistic diversity, overly simplistic in its approach to providing educational services, neglectful of the intellectual value of students’ linguistic diversity, and loaded with negative connotations. In its Standards for Statistics on Cultural and Language Diversity (McLennan, 1999) the Australian Bureau of Statistics stated that this concept and related terms should be avoided.

Consequently, CALD began to be used. CALD drew attention to students’ cultural-linguistic characteristics, did not label them based on what they are not, and enhanced professionalisation of those working in this field.

However, CALD is now a borderline concept because it has taken on the negative connotations of NESB (Adusei-Asante & Adibi, 2018).

CALD is now associated with the negative portrayal of students as learning problems. Further, CALD marks students as having the inability to relate to the prevailing cultural-linguistic expectations of Australian educational institutions. Specifically, CALD is the category for students having difficulty with writing in English; some are said to have no hope of learning English outside academic English literacy programs.

What are the implications of this conceptual analysis for decolonising Australia’s learning futures?

First, Australian educators who speak languages from multilingual Ghana and Iran (e.g. Adusei-Asante & Adibi, 2018), are contributing to the transformational leadership required for decolonising Australia’s learning futures.

Second, from time-to-time it is necessary to question our taken-for-granted use of concepts to explore the challenges they present, rather than treat them uncritically.

Third, to provide more precision in educational terminology there is a need for multiple concepts, rather than looking for a single concept to replace NESB or CALD.

Fourth, the century-old prohibition on the using languages from outside Europe for knowledge production and dissemination in Australia’s colleges, schools and universities must be reversed.

To illustrate the possibilities for postmonolingual education and research let us briefly consider concepts related to International Women’s Day (8th March 2019). To add educational value to the capabilities of students who speak English and Zhōngwén (中文) they could make meaning of issues relating to ‘thinking equal, building smart, innovating for change by:

1. thinking marriage equality through Li Tingting (李婷婷) and Li Maizi (李麦子).
2. using the cross-sociolinguistic sound similarities of Mǐ Tù (米兔) to explore what it means for sexual harassment regulations.
3. building knowledge in METALS — mathematics, engineering, technologies, arts, language and science — through using the concept chìjiǎo lǜshī (赤脚律师) for critical thinking
4. building research smarts through theorising population policy using the concept of shèngnǚ (剩女)

Slowing down to decolonise Australia’s learning futures reminds us that a source of educational knowledge is internal to student-teacher themselves and is to be found in their repertoire of languages-and-knowledge.

 

Acknowledgement

Thanks to the Decolonising Learning Futures: Postmonolingual Education and Research Research Cohort for their feedback on this post.

References

Adusei-Asante, K., & Adibi, H. (2018). The ‘Culturally and Linguistically Diverse’ (CALD) label: A critique using African migrants as exemplar. The Australasian Review of African Studies, 39(2), 74-94.

McLennan, W. (1999). Standards for Statistics on Cultural and Language Diversity. Canberra, Australia: Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Singh, M. (2017). Post-monolingual research methodology: Multilingual researchers democratizing theorizing and doctoral education. Education Sciences, 7(1), 28.

Walker, L. & Avant, K. (2005). The Strategies of Theory Construction in Nursing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Prentice Hall.