Publication details
"Indigenous Heritage, War Refugees or LAP: Exploring language centres´ social justice and vulnerable communities empowerment potential"
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
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| Description | Global events of the last decades have brought dramatic changes to practices and policies of university language centres. While language centres have never existed in isolation from their universities (2018 Wulkow Memorandum), reflecting individual settings of their institutions, they have always performed a wide range of roles and tasks beyond pure language teaching provision (M. Ruane, 2003). The roles and tasks have changed especially once we “have entered an age of endless turmoil” (B. Clarke 1997). What this “endless turmoil” could have meant in the 1990s, however, has also changed dramatically. Today, we have been facing abrupt forced shifts from face-to-face to online teaching due to global pandemics, sudden need for educational support to thousands of refugees from war zones or extra-sensitive approaches to politically-driven changes of core structures of languages. In such contexts and despite appearances, language centres have the potential to play important roles in strategies that aim to reduce inequality and empower minoritized and vulnerable communities at universities and in society in general. Taking the example of the Masaryk University Language Centre (Centrum jazykového vzdělávání, CJV MU) in the Czech Republic, this talk will discuss both broad institutional perspectives and language centre’s everyday practical work issues and will address fundamental organisational challenges, complexity of the services provided, and manifold factors that enhance (or indeed restrain) language centres´ work. We will take a close look at three examples of how CJV MU has coped with specific tasks and explore roles language centres can play in support of social justice and inclusion. First, we will shed light on the specific position of Swahili among other languages taught at CJV MU with the ambition to draw attention to less-widely taught languages; then, we will identify strategies that led to a successful language support of hundreds of Ukrainian refugees in 2022 with the ambition to show steps to their swift inclusion into the Masaryk University Czech speaking programmes; and finally, we will present the ESPULA project with the ambition to show how a language-focused combination of enhanced technologies, education and cultural heritage preservation skills can improve situation of vulnerable indigenous communities in remote areas of Ecuador and El Salvador in an environment-friendly and sustainable way. The aim of this talk is to offer deeper understanding of what roles language centres can play and what challenges need to be addressed in order to position university language teaching and learning at the right place of social justice and vulnerable communities´ empowerment efforts. |