Page 66 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS
participatory, inclusive, and plurilingual, conducive to creating learning environments and taking social action. Education that draws on the humanities and social sciences can enrich the understanding of educational practice, indicating the possibilities of explaining more fully its own object of study (Śliwerski, 2012, p. 133). Pedagogy is a discipline of science encompassing the object of its research and application of both ideas and practice of education, the development and education (teaching and learning) of a human being in all phases of his/her life. It deals with the understanding of how people develop and learn throughout their lives, and the critical analysis of the essence of knowledge and understanding in the dimension of individual and social consequences (Śliwerski, 2012, p. 137). Z. Kwieciński (2016)97 refers to Aviram's words, saying: "Postmodernity requires the implementation of dialogicality, respect for differences, constant reinterpretation of cultures and other people's needs" (Aviram, 2010, pp. 203–207). According to the Polish researcher, teachers should be able to make an effort to make every pupil or student think at least once a day about what good they have done today for others, who they have helped, what they have done for their own development, what new things they have discovered, or what abilities they have raised to a higher level. It is therefore worth focusing on education to a certain universal minimum constituting humanity, common to all world-views or religious and ethical orientations. We must never deviate from our efforts to educate people who think for themselves and who are capable of interacting with others, of being ready to care for and support the weak98.
3.2.4 Language pedagogy as a sub-discipline of pedagogy as a science in a Polish context
In view of the above, the question I ask myself is whether we should not return to the roots of the notion of language pedagogy (Polish: pedagogica językowa) as proposed by Teodozja Rittel in her monograph of 199299, and create a coherent theory of language pedagogy as a sub-discipline of a science of pedagogy, whose research goals would be set by a science of pedagogy, and to enrich this concept with new meanings derived from diversity pedagogy, equality pedagogy, critical pedagogy, plurilingualism, translingualism, and multilingualism (critical).
My next question concerns the conditions that language pedagogy, seen from the above perspective, should meet in order to be called a scientific sub-discipline of a science of pedagogy in a Polish context? In answering this question, I will try to outline a certain direction that can be considered.
Pedagogical sub-disciplines can be basic or applied (Tchorzewski, 2019, p. 117). The names of pedagogical sub-disciplines are a consequence of specifying both their object of research and methodological specificity, and the content and scope of the phenomena they study are relatively narrow (Nowak, 2008, p. 63)100. Each change and emergence of pedagogical sub-discipline results either from social, economic, or cultural changes, or from developments in science, or from both these conditions (Chmaj, 1938). The specialisation of knowledge process contributes to the emergence of
97 Kwieciński, 2016.
98 Ibid., p. 33.
99 T. Rittel's later perspective reaching back to linguistics became an instrumental and simplified form of language teaching, similar in many respects to the European understanding of foreign language didactics, proposing practical ways of diagnosing language levels, dealing with language learnability, and focusing attention on ways of addressing this problem within individual language competences (1994, p. 9).
100 For example, pedagogy of special needs studies the process of educating people with disabilities, while social pedagogy studies the social context of education.
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