5-6 August 2014

The mother-tongue in multilingual education

The overarching aim of the two-day workshop is to sketch out how research on language and literacy policy development and its implementation in East Timor can contribute to the building of new perspectives on education in multilingual settings in the global south. The workshop aims to initiate discussion about how we might construct new research pathways that link globalised policy-making processes and ideologies of language and pedagogy to everyday practices on the ground, in different research sites.

Some of the questions that we will address are as follows: What are the challenges and tensions involved in this process and how can we take account of globalisation in our sociolinguistic research in East Timor? What are the urgent questions to be addressed in research on language and education in East Timor? What can we learn from the controversies and pedagogic challenges in mother-tongue schooling in this multilingual setting? What spaces are available for productive researcher-practitioner collaboration and dialogue about different aspects of language-in-education policy?