The Future of Education

Around the world, minority communities are leveraging schools to revitalize their heritage languages, despite Fishman’s (2001) warnings of the school’s limitations. Teachers of endangered languages (ELs) face daunting challenges, including deficits in instructional materials, in student motivation, and in opportunities to practice the language in real life. Too little attention has been paid to their unique opportunities, however. Once these teachers move beyond the rudimentary methods offered by documentary linguists (Penfield & Tucker, 2011), they are able to teach outside of rote, standardized, teacher-centered traditions because their field is less beholden to both institutional tradition and administrative monitoring. This makes EL classrooms the ideal site for innovation. Project-Based Language Learning (PBLL) (Beckett, 2006) is the most promising innovation in developing 21st century skills, engaging traditionally marginalized students, and providing real-world applications as learning contexts. PBLL is inherently interdisciplinary and content-integrated (Naves, 2009), so it provides an ideal starting point for restructuring the school to be learner-centered. PBLL is particularly well-equipped to address the transcultural and multilingual skill set that EL speakers must develop (Hornberger & Link, 2012). To prepare teachers for this innovative method, trainings must be intensive, transformative, and followed by extensive support. These have been developed with two very different EL communities, one a diasporan Indo-European language with a strong literary tradition, the other an indigenous American language that is primarily oral. Through several iterations of the program, challenges have been overcome and teachers’ needs have been better understood. Significant challenges include identity factors, lack of previous pedagogical training, lack of exposure to immersion and communicative methods, and a lack of administrative support that is the result of multiple cultural elements (al-Bataineh, 2015). This paper will discuss the needs, challenges, and opportunities involved in training EL teachers in PBLL, and will present a framework for doing so globally.

Keywords: heritage language, endangered, project-based, teacher training, student-centered;

References:
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