Exploring the role of language for education and development
24-26 September
Bangkok, Thailand
The Inclusion, Mobility and Multilingual Education Conference represents an exciting opportunity to discuss, debate and develop critical issues around language and development facing the world in 2019.
About the Inclusion, Mobility and Multilingual Education Conference
This year, for one year only, two major conference series have been brought together to focus on these important subjects
The Inclusion, Mobility and Multilingual Education Conference brings together:
- The 13th Language and Development Conference (LDC) , which has been running for 25 years, supported by the Language and Development Trustees.
- The 6th Language and Education Conference , also known as the Multilingual Education Conference – this conference has been organized every two years by the Asia-Pacific Multilingual Education Working Group.
We are all presently witnessing unprecedented levels of human mobility. Alongside an increasingly mobile workforce and increased mobility for higher education, we are also seeing the highest levels ever of involuntary displacement, with over 68.5 million people forced from their homes, including 25.4 million refugees, over half of whom are under 18.
In the Asia-Pacific region, huge populations are moving for work and higher education, with internal displacement and cross border migration due to conflict, poverty, climate change and social injustice creating increasingly complex ethnolinguistic landscapes. Challenges of inclusion, social cohesion and peace-building are raised, for mobile populations but also stable but linguistically marginalized populations, including issues of access to civic participation, justice, health and information.
At a time when many more children are in school, but many are still not learning, and in particular in the context of the declared United Nations Year of indigenous languages, fundamental questions remain about the balance of local, national and global languages in education.
Objectives
The overall aim of the conference is to provide a space for practitioners, NGO staff, researchers and government representatives to explore and exchange on issues of language, inclusion, and mobility in education and development.
The Conference aims to:
- Explore how an open and inclusive multilingual approach, especially in the context of education and wider society, can maximise outcomes and well-being for different groups and for an increasingly mobile population;
- Create linkages between policy, practice and research on how multilingual approaches can be used to advance (civic) participation, access, and learning for children and adults from marginalised and mobile communities;
- Investigate the role of, and balance between, different languages – local, national, and international – in the context of diverse and mobile populations, and social and educational practice;
- Identify policy priorities for advancing multilingual approaches to social and educational policy-making, learning and development;
- Raise awareness among participants in key thematic areas.