The evolution and practice of multilingual education: From The Hague recommendations to the digital era
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The webinar will aim to showcase best practices in multilingual education initiatives, including the development of supporting digital tools. It will provide a platform to discuss how to support minority youth to gain the linguistic skills necessary for cross-community communication and equal access to opportunities.
Background
Paragraph 34 of the Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE (1990) provides guarantees related to the possibility for national minorities to learn their mother tongue or receive education in their mother tongue. Minority education, in particular minority language education, is an OSCE priority for national minorities. This is linked directly to the protection and promotion of the identity of persons belonging to a national minority, and their participation in public life - as stipulated in The Hague Recommendations regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities (1996).
Supporting children to learn their mother languages in school also leads to better and faster learning of the State or official language(s), enabling them to make greater contributions to the societies in which they live. Over the years, the HCNM has initiated activities supporting multilingual education in a number of participating States. This is meant to highlight the benefits of multilingual education and provide examples of how it can be implemented in practice - including an extensive and long-term regional programme in minority schools in Central Asia.
We also see how rapid evolution of digital tools in education - which are being implemented widely to support remote schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic - can offer new opportunities to further integrate multilingual education into practice.