This book exists because of the determination of the leaders, teachers, and parents in five schools to enrich the linguistic and cultural opportunities of their children, and to do so from within. It tracks the story of five schools driven by a belief in the value of language diversity and transforming this belief into practice. The schools have negotiated and circumvented systems in order to do so, managing the multiple constraints of any schoolâinstitutional, local, national, and international. The specific contexts of the schools are very different. They include Waldorf schools in Hawaii, where the challenge is to revitalise a sense of place and heritage in conflict with the US mainstream curriculum; Europa School , Culham, Oxford, where the challenge is to give children the opportunity to study the whole curriculum in two European languages in order to become linguistically mindful citizens of Europe; the British School, Amsterdam, and the International School, Singapore, which have revisited the notion that these schools should be English-language-only zones and instead empowered the first languages of the children; the Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa, Kenya, which has re-energised local languages by offering the curriculum in both Kiswahili and English concurrently and with equal status . Whilst very different in location, each school has succeeded in brokering change by working inside systems and changing them from within. Their stories reveal the struggle to clarify values ; realise their practical meaning for schools, children, teachers, and parents; and negotiate often conflicting local, institutional, and national priorities. Each school offers evidence that âteaching through a multilingual lens entails a transformation in the ways in which teachers and students negotiate identitiesâ (Cummins & Persad, 2014, p. 35) and thus that language is a window into a much more profound change.
We have chosen these schools because they are distinctive in making choices that vary from the norm and have nursed their vision through from conception to implementation. In addition, our partial connections to each school have allowed us to track process in a relationship of trust and in close collaboration with the change-makers themselves. The schools offer not only examples of transformation, but detailed insights into the challenges of the change process, and the strategies by which these have been resolved in varied settings.
The Research Process
As teacher developers and educational researchers, we have worked with schools worldwide, but amongst these schools, we have selected five to showcase in this book as unique examples of change from within. Each of the schools has been driven by the collective vision of founding members and school leaders. They have negotiated multiple challenges to put this vision into practice. Whilst this change is varied in each of the five schools, they share several features. In each case school leaders have recognised that the needs and capacities of the children are not fully met by mainstream language policy . This may be, for example, the disappearance of local languages from the curriculum as in the Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa, or lack of mindfulness about place and its cosmology as in the Waldorf Schools, Hawaii. In the case of Europa School , Culham, English-only education for British citizenship is replaced by a bilingual curriculum preparing children for European citizenship. In the case of the British School of Amsterdam and the German European School of Singapore, we look at similar changes around home languages in school, through the lens of two very different school systems: British and International. Each of the case study schools has implemented their vision by recognising that deep change is slow and long term, bringing on board all stakeholdersâparents, teachers, the children themselves. Thus, our narratives reveal the collective action of the whole school community and the process by which responsibility is internalised and shared.
In addition, we have selected these schools because of our own insider/outsider relationship with them. Insider/outsider perspectives cannot be so easily polarised, but may more accurately be described as points on a spectrum. We deem ourselves to be outsiders in that we were not the agents of change, but observed and tracked it through the testimony of others. However, in each case study we have a degree of insider participation in the school culture. Eowyn Crisfield participated as invited consultant, supporting teacher development and policy-building in the three schools in Kenya, Singapore, and Amsterdam. As mentor and facilitator, Eowynâs role was outside any context of assessment, supervision or obligation, but inside a context of close collaboration with school leaders. Jane Spiro had a role on the Governing Body of the Europa School , Culham, as a co-opted educational specialist and a member of the Education Committee. Thus, as an insider she was able to observe classes and work alongside teachers in the governance of best practice, but as an outsider she was not herself engaged in the change process, nor involved with the school during the period of this research in either supervisory or reporting roles. In the case of the Waldorf Schools, Hawaii, the researcher was a partial insider in having family in schools on the Hawaiian Islands, but an outsider to the Waldorf Schools, working alongside its school leader Jocelyn Romero Demirbag as co-researcher and peer. Thus we acknowledge the potentially subjective lens through which we might read the data and have attempted to mitigate this by calling on multiple participants in each school community to expand, explain, corroborate and offer their own perspectives. Similarly, some of the change agents themselves considered their relationships to the schools as partial: for example, several school leaders in Kenya were not in fact Kenyan nationals or speakers of Kiswahili but were significant agents of change; the educator at the centre of the case study in Hawaii did not regard herself as indigenous Hawaiian, though born and raised on the islands. Each chapter explains this mixed positioning and aims to acknowledge complexity and mitigate subjectivity by including many voices. In this way, we hope to bring together the rich insights of what an insider sees and knows with the distancing and criticality of what an outsider sees and knows, and in some cases, both perspectives contained within the one narrator.
To track the process of change, we identified five questions which represent different milestones on the change journey. The questions were:
- What is the background of the school regarding languages?
- Who or what sparked the idea for change?
- What was the process of implementing change?
- What has the impact been on the school?
- What is left to do?
These questions have been approached in several ways according to the specific nature of the researcherâschool relationship. Three chapters (Chaps. 3, 4, and 6) use these questions in the form of semi-structured interviews with the participants in the school and a means by which data was gathered, collated, and narrated by the researcher. Those responding to the questions included school leaders and teachers in voluntary engagement with the research process.
Chapters 2 and 5 use the questions as starting points for a dialogue between the researcher and a single significant insider. Dialogue became a means by which the insiders expanded and developed their narrative of the change journey. As they developed their responses to the questions, they engaged with others in the change process to corroborate, verify, add other perspectives, review, or comment. In addition, the researcher responded to each stage with further questions, points for development, and observations . The resulting narratives appear unmediated as a central part of Chaps. 2 and 5. This dialogic approach to developing a narrative is described in Chap. 2 as layered storytelling and is a fresh contribution to the repertoire of data collection methods.
It is also important to ask why we have chosen a qualitative approach to information gathering, basing our understanding of change on personal narratives . Narratives can claim to share experience, and their specificity offers opportunity to relate. Ironically, the more specific the story, the more relatable it appears to be. Narratives of professional practice do gather an accumulative weight in relation to one another. Importantly, it is the combining of stories that offer a powerful collective voice in response to trends within the profession. For example, teacher stories provide examples of experienced teachersâ frustration with protocol, audits, and prescribed criteria (Bell, 1995; Day, Sammons, Kington, & Quing, 2007; Munro, 1998; Thomas, 1995). Teacher narratives such as Appel (1995) in Germany; Aoki, Sunami, Li, and Kinoshitta (2004) in Japan; and Doecke, Homer, and Nixon (2003) in Australia show teachers generating their own theories of good practice, often in contradiction to those externally imposed. Establishing culturally appropriate, finely tuned criteria is a starting point for teachers to take ownership of their own improvement, as d...