Page 91 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

reality in the Member States167. The ECML recognises the importance of pedagogical approaches that are differentiated according to learners' needs and specific language contexts (mother tongue/first language, second language, foreign language, regional, migrant, subject, etc.). It supports professionals to meet today's increasingly complex challenges and to adopt inclusive, multilingual, and intercultural approaches that use all languages in learners' repertoires as resources. Diverse pedagogical approaches include the Living Curriculum described in the previous chapter, which takes the learner as a co-creator of the learning programme. This idea is reflected in the language course I have written.
Learners play a key role in designing their learning programme and setting their learning pathways, emulating what lifelong learners do. This is in line with learning objectives derived from critical pedagogy and social constructivism, where the learner is supported in assessing what they already know and what they do not yet know, and how they can pursue their learning goals in the face of the inevitable difficulties and frustrations that are part of lifelong learning. The learner discusses their own learning pathways with mentors and others who support them in the process. This approach is in contrast to other forms of personalisation of the school curriculum, where learners are pawns rather than agents of change, where, admittedly, expectations of them are high, but the means to achieve them tend to be paternalistic and controlling, with content broken down into small chunks with external rewards (e.g., grades) (Grotzer et al., 2019). To engage individuals in the educational process, a pedagogy that addresses the resources of the lifeworld of individuals in the process of learning and collaborative knowledge production is needed168. Critical pedagogy, as it were, empowers learners to engage in dialogue to co-create meaning from learning materials and experiences through an enquiry- based approach. It includes a democratic pedagogy based on social constructivism169, emphasising the personal experiences of learners, a pedagogy of dialogue, in order to promote social justice and democratic ideals and to contribute to social change. At the core of social change is language, because in order to perceive and value social processes we need to activate conceptual categories related to the organisation of our knowledge of the world (Klebaniuk, 2012, p. 268). Languages, being a ticket to different visions of the world, can be a helpful tool in the pursuit of understanding between people. The ways in which languages are used in education, the design of teaching materials, and the organisation of education are social constructs, specific cultural texts, so they may foster the inclusion or exclusion of certain groups and individuals. This means that the training of plurilingual competences should be carried out in pedagogical sciences170, in a spirit of dialogue, tolerance, respect, and promotion of the rights and educational opportunities of those involved in the educational process.
I believe that contemporary education should strive for a new model of designing language education, which would be a response to the challenges facing the design of this education resulting from cultural and linguistic diversity in today's world. In my view, language pedagogy, drawing on critical pedagogy and educational linguistics to develop multilingualism, translingualism, multiliteracies, and intercultural competence among learners through multimodal practices, focused on text as a starting point for educational activities, could be used to co-design educational programmes in different
167 https://www.ecml.at/Portals/1/News%20articles/declaration-EN-final.pdf
168 Joldersma Deakin-Crick, 2012, p. 167.
169 Social constructivism, also known as social constructionism, was popularised in sociology by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge: "Society is the product of man. Society is an objective reality. Man is the product of society" (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 61). 170 In pedagogical science, the term "education" has a connotation indicating elements of planning and designing learning processes (Zamojska, 2010, p. 112).
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