Multilingual Education and India

Dear MLE friends, Safe the Children has become a strong advocate for MultiLingual Education (MLE) . SC UK just produced a good publication called “ Steps Towards Learning: A guide to overcoming language barriers in children's education ” The intro says: This guide summarises and explains what is known worldwide about the difficulties that children experience with unfamiliar school language. It offers evidence, arguments and practical steps to help stop language preventing children from learning. The guide focuses on developing countries, as this is where the majority of children who do not speak the language of school live. It offers strategies to help improve children’s chances of doing better in school, even when it appears very difficult to change the way language is currently used in education.

Dear MLE friends, The latest issue of Indian Folklife is focused on MLE. The guest editor, Dr Mahendra Mishra, writes in his editorial: This newsletter contains articles contributed by practitioners and policy makers on indigenous education and multilingual education across the globe. Tove Skutnabb Kangas is a well known advocate of Multilingual Education and Linguistic Human Rights. David A. Hough is a Liberatory Pedagogist and his focus is on Nepal Multilingual Education Project to promote tribal education through bottom up approach, empowering the indigenous community. Iina Nurmela’s paper is based on the experiential part of David’s work in Nepal . Susanne Perez’s article explores the indigenous education system of Peru . Dhir Jhingran has suggested appropriate educational strategies for implementation arrangements referring some feasible models drawing from the successful models from different countries where indigenous education has been made successful.