WISE organized a Panel at the 2020 Global Learning Festival (Sept 1-4), Wyndham and Melton cities, Australia.

During a globally challenging time, the Global Learning Festival seeks to provide unity and connection to communities all over the world by organizing digital learning events on a wide variety of topics, across time zones and languages. 

As a result of this recent pandemic, every community in the world is transforming its learning systems to ensure resilience, inclusivity and impact on a digital frontier. Building off the WISE research report titled “Language Policy in Global Contexts”, this discussion has explored how multilingualism challenges education systems to examine how they develop their communities to be cohesive and to value individual identities of their community members. Informed by the current global health situation, the panel focused on how the “superdiversity” of cities today changes the nature of policy responses, especially with regard to which languages to teach and teach in, in-person and remotely.

1. How can we break social barriers through language teaching? What are best practices in this regard? What should cities consider doing to promote this?

2. How does the “superdiversity” of cities today change the nature of policy responses, especially with regard to which languages to teach and teach in?

3. What impact does teaching immigrants/asylum seekers the local language have on their ability to integrate into a new society?

4. Has the COVID-19 crisis affected the way we use language to communicate? If yes, how? And what should schools/cities do differently in the post-crisis time with regards to language teaching?

WISE Panel: September 1st, 2020