Mother Tongue

One way to build community is to ensure schools and communities support, preserve, maintain and promote their members' mother-tongue and mother-culture. Supporting students' mother-tongues and home culture is a requirement at International Baccalaureate Schools but many educators ask for clarification on what it means, why is it important, and how we do it. I worked with a librarian who works in Dubai and she provides services to students who speak over 80 different languages. Building community and a sense of home is essential at here school where almost all families are from outside Dubai. Developing a sense of community in individual classrooms or school is essential for students and families to feel safe and accepted. In a community we may not all agree but we can develop understandings that can lessen conflict and encorage friendship and collaboration. Ingenuity and creativity also flourish where students feel valued, heard, and appreciated. Here are some ideas: Find ways to capture stories from the past and present. Students can interview family and friends, even if they aren't here, if they are in their home countries, utilizing technology. Students can choose to all focus on a theme like "form of expression" or a topic like "idioms". They can share these  documents with each other to learn more about their classmates. They can use these documents to write compare and contrast essays or use photos to create case studies of the theme. Students can explore the discipline of history, civics, geography, language acquisition, photography, and writing by soliciting, documenting, organizing and sharing their own and their family's  stories, especially with capturing Heritage Languages that a school might not offer. What Can Kids Do has published his/her-stories with many different perspectives, topics and themes collected by teens and shared online, in print and in photo essays in English. Sometimes they offer grants for students so keep an eye out. Another inspiration is the National Archives which provide a well-organized physical as well as digital library of topics and documents that range from music clips to signatures that show how we leave our mark on history. You may get ideas that you can bring into your own communities and school and/or family archives. A simple idea is to have students keep an online journal or create a video-timeline of someone in their family describing an event in their native language. As a student transcribes the narrative he/she may learn a lot about what words have a different meaning after translation, or how some words simply can't be translated and start to ask questions about, what's in a word or why some languages have a lot of words to describe something and no word for something else. Students can photograph or create a short video of a week in their life and start a video-archive or school time capsule. Students can design a service project where they give lessons each week on how to speak their language at lunch and document the planning, completion and reflection of their IB Community Project or present it at exit exhibitions. A school in L.A. aims to provide instruction in Nahuatl to children that are and will be the future transmitters of language and culture. They have children from all walks of life learning about the importance and priviledge of maintaining a Heritage Language. Their students are taking action to answer the question of who should have responsibility to save a language. What they are doing is very unique but it shouldn't be. I just had the priviledge of attending an incredible mariachi opera in San Diego, "El pasado Nunca se termina" "The Past is Never Finished." It was an amazing marriage of two powerfully moving traditions (Opera abd Mariachi music) as it chronicled a family's journey through the history of pre-revolutionary Mexico into the present. In the Director's Notes, Leonard Foglia noted that his collaboration with Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán's José "Pepe" Martinez began with questions: "What is home?" "Where did we come from?". "We wanted to explore the feeling of displacement..." A wonderful novel for exploring these questions in middle-school is "Seedfolks" by Fleichman. In short vignettes Fleischman gives voice and insight into many different people in one neighborhood who come together to transform a lot full of trash into a community garden. By giving voice to our youth and their stories and their family's stories we are bringing their languages, their cultures, and their stories forward. We are giving their stories a chance to transform our community and grow a garden that is bountiful and beautiful. Our educators and community and family leaders have the responsibility to give opportunities for our youth to share, preserve, and promote their own mother-tongue and what they and their family identify as their mother-cultures. Give them the venue to do so and your community will be a richer and more caring and open-minded place to live, play, work and grow.