Multilingual Education and India

It was a tremendous privilege to give a SAMVAD lecture at NCERT on Multilingual Education. Thank you Dr Sandhya Singh and Rama Meganathan for the invitation and warm welcome. It was good seeing some old friends like Binay Pattanayak there ! The SAMVAD Lecture Series was hosted by NCERT(National Council of Education Research and Training) and is available on their official YouTube channel for public viewing on the 10th of January, 2024.  The presentation  was titled “ MLE developments across the world and the current India policies and National Education Policy 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework 2023.” Some of the main sections of the presentation looked at the Global picture, the Indian scenario in the development of Multilingual Education(MLE), and the current initiatives/resources that are available.  The lecture began by introducing the definition of MLE and the rationale behind using MLE in education. Recent research studies were described which support the benefits o

The Language Learning Foundation has been generous enough to share their  webinar series which discusses the complexities of Multilingual Education in the Indian linguistic context in light of the National Education Policy 2020 and NIPUN Bharat guidelines. These webinars were organised during the month of August - September, 2022 and are readily available resources accessible on YouTube. The webinar links have been provided in the titles below and in the Resources section.  Three webinars were organised. The first two were conducted in Hindi, and the third one in English. The links and details of each webinar are given below. The speakers’ contributions were very valuable as the speakers were experts in their fields belonging to institutions such as Harvard, NCERT, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, UNICEF, LLF, experienced teachers,  and MLE specialists.  Webinar 1: Inclusion of the Children’s Home Languages in Foundational Learning This Webinar discussed the importance of including the children’