Lydiah Kananu Kiramba, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

I grew up in a multilingual rural community in Kenya and, together with my siblings, attended public schools. Long before we began kindergarten, my parents taught us literacy skills, including how to write the Roman alphabet, making letter shapes using locally available materials, as well as reading and writing in Kimeru—our mother tongue (MT) Evenings were a time for storytelling. Within these stories were songs, poems, riddles, proverbs, and other forms of African traditional wisdom. We often sang choruses, which were usually poetic and rhymed.

The key characters in the narrated stories were humans and ogres. Ogres were mythical creatures with exaggerated features. They were gigantic and mostly mean and would often punish disobedient children or take away the community's wealth. After the storytelling, we would draw the characters from the stories and each of us would explain why, for example, we thought ogres looked like the drawing we made. We had lots of fun visualizing not only how the ogres in the stories narrated to us looked but also competing for who could draw the ugliest ogre. Drawing these creatures based on oral description required a deep sense of imagination. During storytelling, Dad would prompt us to predict what would happen next. We enjoyed, and looked forward to the storytelling sessions and would stay engaged, asking questions and singing along to the songs and poems within the stories. Each story narrated by Dad and Mum always seemed new and more interesting each time. The songs and tunes of the songs were different. My brother and I in particular would ask questions as the story progressed. We expressed our worries and wonders.

Before I began formal schooling, I had accumulated cultural knowledge and literacy in Kimeru. I learned to read and write in my MT way before other languages, including Kiswahili (the lingua franca of Kenya) and English, the language of instruction (LOI). Out of these stories narrated at home, we had developed several literacy skills—including oral narration, telling and retelling, poetry and rhyming, questioning, making predictions, and visualization—prior to any formal schooling. In fact, these are some of the key comprehension strategies taught in schools during literacy instruction. At school, however, these same skills we already knew were presented to us in an unfamiliar language.

Our transition from home to school was disrupted and our accumulated knowledge became invisible at school because of the language barrier. Though my elementary school required us to be taught in MT from K–3, this did not happen because of strong ideological orientations for English. However, being taught in English at school meant that I no longer had the opportunity to predict stories, to visualize, to narrate, or to re-create my own stories like Dad and Mum had taught us to do. I memorized English words and phrases from the teacher in a context where the teacher’s word was authoritative and where the knowledge presented at school was not to be contested (Kiramba & Harris, 2019). It was presented as the written and only valid truth and was never compared (perhaps was not to be compared) with my lived experiences. As such, the vast knowledge I had acquired at home was not recognized in school. I needed to learn the “school language” in order to narrate my stories and sing my poems. I became a passive recipient of knowledge that rejected or bracketed out and disregarded my lived experiences and cultural richness.

This is simply an example of how school languages can contribute to epistemic exclusion of marginalized populations and others that do not already have the LOI.

By third grade, I had learned to read in English without comprehension. I memorized English poems to participate in district cultural festival competitions without a complete understanding of the meanings of the words, phrases, and sentences spoken. My teachers taught me how to make the facial expressions to accompany the memorized words. I imitated the voices of others and won poetry competitions. Even so, I dared not change a single word, nor could I write my own in English. Though I spoke, my voice was absent.

Looking back to my earliest years, I realized that I had an advanced knowledge of literacy in my MT that was not valued or developed (or even drawn on) at school. I had so many stories, songs, and poems that went untold. My voice was silenced, because it was in an undesirable language. I was alienated from self and subjected to mimicry and inauthenticity. Mchombo (2017) refers to this experience as conceptual incarceration, whereby indigenous knowledge systems are devalued or silenced despite their significance.

Years later, my experiences as a K–8 teacher trainer in Kenya placed me in a similar situation. I was training teachers to teach multilingual children in rural schools. These are children who had not mastered the LOI (English). My role as an instructor and practicum observer/assessor was to encourage my student-teachers to get children engaged in the learning process even as the student-teachers were required to follow the mandated (English-only) language policy. In those moments, my challenges and fears were rekindled; I remembered my own experiences of silence, inauthenticity, and mimicry. Moreover, practicum sessions with the preservice teachers indicated that there were unresolved issues in the pedagogical strategies used for emerging multilingual students. I saw how my students were alienated as I had been. They were passive professionals-in-training, working within a government-mandated policy that prescribed their actions.

Several years have elapsed since I completed my elementary education; however, the same questions remains in today’s globalized world, particularly as it pertains to teaching multilingual children: Are the linguistic and cultural needs of multilingual students being effectively addressed at school? (Is there a will to?) Are multilingual children’s literacies still being silenced by the education systems? (And if so, why?). It is very likely that my upbringing and experiences are quite similar to many children now growing up in rural settings whose literacies are made invisible (Kiramba, 2017).

I recount my experiences through primary school and as a teacher educator here to highlight the importance of multilingual education. Refusal to recognize the many literacies that students bring to school and overlooking the chance to draw upon them as strengths continue to result in educational inequality and missed opportunities to understand and meet the needs of multilingual populations in the classroom in many parts of the world. I use my multilingual experiences as a student and teacher-educator to grapple with issues of communicative practices in a multilingual setting. My intention is not to assign blame but, rather, to create a space for dialogue around the role of language that highlights the immense wealth of knowledge and literacies that students bring to school—a wealth often left or made invisible. As a consequence, a disrupted systematization/connection between students’ spontaneous knowledge and schooled knowledge arises that affects both academic performance and students’ sense of identity.

This prompts the following recommendations for educators working with children whose LOI is not their language of nurture.

First, home languages should be recognized as valuable resources both in themselves as cultural resources and also as facilitators for current global languages. As such, even parents who are not literate in LOIs can support their children through everyday home literacy practices, while students can tap their cultures, knowledge systems, and communities already coded in home languages (Kiramba, 2018).

Second, recognition of invisible (unacknowledged) literacies will potentially benefit all educational stakeholders by enabling them not only to find the strengths of learners not aligned with school norms but also to reposition them from a strengths-based view. Capturing the multilingual and multimodal literacies of students and putting them to use in classrooms will enable better educational outcomes overall in the LOI and MT alike (Kiramba, 2017). Use of unfamiliar languages to teach tends to lead students to discard their own cultural identity and to adopt the terms of the power dynamics within dominant culture in order to succeed in school, but often without success (Kiramba, 2018).

Third, curricula are needed that not only address the needs of multilingual students but also provide meaningful opportunities and support for multilingual students to actively engage in knowledge creation, problem-solving, higher order thinking, and reflection on real-world challenges and experiences. Such curricula would take into consideration the students’ prior experiences, including those acquired in a language that is not used for instruction in school.

Fourth, I call for a heteroglossic multilingual pedagogy marked by both the inclusion of the students’ languages in education (as a resource for enhancing learning outcomes) as well as the use of multimodalities in the portrayal of knowledge (e.g., singing, storytelling, and visualization). Such a pedagogy would take a view of languages as both complementary and as enriching each other when guiding students to master the language forms that are valued at school for academic and professional success. Such heteroglossic multilingual pedagogy rests on the empirical understanding that language stratification derives from the historical character of state formation and is connected to ideologies. Simply on the grounds of social justice, students must be allowed to develop their own language practices and thus affirm their multiple identities. Heteroglossic multilingual pedagogy acknowledges that different languages index varying viewpoints, challenges the stratification of language that tends undesirably toward oppressive universality (rather than liberating heterogeneity), and holds the feasibility of making informed decisions to support and enable the multiple voices of children. Numerous modalities of expression, such as drawing, storytelling, and translanguaging, all resonate with such a heteroglossic ideology for education ( Bakhtin, 1981).

Fifth,it is important to acknowledge the child’s socialization process in the construction of meaning and of literacy development. Local literacies and languages are too substantial to be merely tolerated or, worse, denigrated. Local languages should be used to enrich literacy learning and acquisition of school languages and literacies. Education systems need to challenge the colonial (and ongoing neocolonial) legacy and discourses that devalue indigenous languages and cultures. Instead, they could (and should) affirm students’ identity through language use.

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Kiramba, L. K. (2017). Multilingual literacies: Invisible representation of literacy in a rural classroom. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61(3), 267–277. doi:10.1002/jaal.690

Kiramba, L. K. (2018). Language ideologies and epistemological exclusion. Language and Education, 32(4), 291–312. doi:10.1080/09500782.2018.1438469

Kiramba, L. K., & Harris, V. J. (2019). Navigating authoritative discourses in a multilingual classroom: Conversations with policy and practice. TESOL Quarterly, 53, 456–481.  

Mchombo, S. (2017). Linguistic rights and conceptual incarceration in African education. Alternation, 24(2), 191–214. doi:10.29086/2519-5476/2017/v24n2a10