Multilingual Education and India

    The new National Curriculum Framework 2023 that came out this week has a strong focus on multilingualism. It wants to ensure that, by age 15, students achieve academic proficiency in at least three languages. Multilingualism is seen as a way to enrich the classroom environment and broaden the thinking of the children. Good! Of course I was particularly interested to see how it deals with the local language. As this new framework came out this week, Upasana and I had a look at what it says about the use of the local language in the classroom. The National Curriculum Framework 2023 (NCF 2023) was released on the 23rd of August 2023. It has been building on the NCF for Foundations Stages that came out last year. (See our blogpost on the NCF for Foundations Stages from November 2022.) According to the address of K. Kasturirangan, the chairman of the National Steering Committee for National Curriculum Frameworks, this document is the first integrated Curriculum Framework for childre

In my report on the Multilingual Education Conference in Bangkok in 2019, I mentioned a presentation from Anjela Taneja from Oxfam. I was very glad to note that Anjela has now taken the time to turn her findings into a paper so that we can all benefit from it. Upasana Lepcha has written below a helpful summary of the paper. Oxfam India has released a comprehensive paper on Multilingual Education (MLE) The Right to Mother Tongue-Based Education in Tribal India: A Comparative Perspective by Anjela Taneja. The paper  examines already existing Mother-Tongue-Based-Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) programmes in India for tribal populations. It brings to light the gaps and challenges facing MTB-MLE and makes recommendations on how to overcome them. The first part of the paper addresses the severe underuse of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction in India and how this is especially crippling for the tribal children. Although tribals  constitute 8.6 percent of the total population (20

It is always good when things move from talking to action : In Assam new textbooks have been developed and distributed for the early grades that are in line with the New Education Policy. It is good to note that they have been produced in several local languages. Still it would be interesting to learn why certain languages are included while others are  not. According to the ANI Report , the Education Minister of Assam last week officially dispatched vehicles with 87.6 lakh  textbooks in local languages of Assam. The languages included are Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Manipuri, Garo, Hmar, and English for Classes 1 to 3. This initiative comes under the NIPUN Assam Mission for the Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) programme from the NEP or New Education Policy with special emphasis on teaching children in their mother tongue so as to promote Multilingual Education.  NIPUN is a flagship scheme under National Education Policy 2020 which seeks to achieve the foundational literacy and n

Odisha is often ahead of the game in comparison with other states when it comes to Multilingual Education. That is no surprise, given the heavy investment in that state by people like Prof D. P. Pattanayak, Prof Ajit Mohanty, and Dr Mahendra Mishra! It is good to note that, in the latest initiative, attention is given not only  to the language , but also to the relevance of the content for the children. The New Indian Express reports that tribal children in Odisha will be taught their indigenous knowledge systems such as their indigenous rituals, cropping methods, and much more along with their mother tongue. The multilingual approach will include their indigenous language along with the state language, Odia. These two initiatives come from the  Scheduled Caste & Scheduled Tribe  Development, Minorities and Backward Classes Welfare department under the guidance of the National Education Policy (NEP)-2020 .  P. Patel from the  Academy of Tribal Languages and Culture (ATLC)