Challenging Social Injustice in Superdiverse Contexts Through Activist Languages Education

Abstract

In a current world of rapid change and immense global mobility, communities are experiencing unprecedented increases in population diversity that have dramatically heightened the challenge of ensuring social justice for linguistic minorities, including migrants, refugees, and people on the move, with implications for society as a whole. This chapter explores the rhetoric of related policies and practices and the ways in which they respond to the needs of superdiverse communities. The cases of the UK, Europe, and Australia, which all claim their multicultural status and multiculturalism as an important community resource, are discussed. Through an exploration of current research, the effectiveness of languages education policy and planning (LPP) is critiqued to provide a new paradigm that has the capacity to bring attention to and eliminate social injustice in linguistically diverse communities. The chapter argues for the nurturing of new spaces of language use that challenge the monolingual habitus and which can engage the collective autonomy of communities themselves. It conceptualizes how activist languages education can build community capacity and achieve socially just outcomes, thus simultaneously providing a better space for multilingualism and a foundation for peace.

Ethnic equity, Mapudungun, and CLIL

“…As a philosophy of education, social justice contests social, cultural, and economic inequalities and guarantees inclusive education for all (Goodwin & Proctor, 2019;Lamb, Hatoss, & O'Neill, 2019). Education thus constitutes a powerful tool of social change where teachers act as transformative intellectuals (Giroux, 2010) immersed in civic engagement (Freire, 1994) and action (Byram, 2008) to deconstruct and disrupt hegemonic systems.…”

Introduction: Arts integration and community engagement for intercultural dialogue through language education

“…This link between the children's language learning that occurred in the NGO and their community engagement in the here and now is a pillar in intercultural citizenship education (Byram et al, 2017). Furthermore, from the perspective of the teacher educators and student teachers involved, this project enacted a social justice basis in language education (Byram and Wagner, 2018;Lamb et al, 2019) and contributed to the teacher educators' professional development and the student teachers' development of a situated social justice praxis (Porto, forthcoming b).…”