Reseña en relación con propuesta unesco

Identifying information

Artículo: “Quality multilingual and multicultural education for lifelong learning.” De Hassana Alidou, Christine Glanz y Norbert Nikiema.  Publicado en el 2012 en  Springer Science + Business Media B.V.   Int Rev Educ (2011) 57: 529-539. Con DOI 10.1007/s11159-011-9259-z

Research design and

Methodology

Bearing in mind the special needs that cultural minorities may have in certain contexts, the authors of the article propose a “political and technical response to the educational requirements of learners” (p1.)  The idea is including the multilingual context in order to acquire multicultural competences that will lead their lifelong learning as established by UNESCO 1993.

This is a theory-based article in which in a concrete way the Pillars of Education are briefly but accurately presented in order to let the reader know the steps followed by UNESCO to present a responsible program that leads XXI century education in the world.  

Interpretation of

findings

Learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together and learning to be become the four aims to get by any language learner, being the development of these competences the main goal to reach in order to acquire the needed attributes to be part of the XXI century society.

According to the above mentioned idea, effective communication and  bi/multicultural competence will be attributes reached by users of language in contact that will make out of them multicultural learners.  

Later on, the text yields a definition and broadens the above mentioned terms in order to clarify concepts, which is quite necessary taking into account the complex of the proposal, presenting the following results:

1. Learning to know is what Delors et al. 1996 P. 86 define as “the pleasure of understanding, knowing and discovering” and invites learners to include their cultural background and their common practices to enhance academic achievements.  This is a first attempt from UNESCO to use multicultural personal background to expand in a respectful way different languages used in education.
2. Learning to do is a process that helps users to carry out what they know in different settings, taking into account future requirements of this knowledge in the society.   Solving tasks is the used method to focus education more on students than on the teachers; this includes at the same time, ways of giving solution to actual problems in the culture that acquires the language.
3. Learning to live together is the pillar that helps the learner to understand other´s situations in multicultural settings, while fosters solidarity through the study of English in education and society.
4. Learning to be is the aspect that involves the whole transcendent and critical thinking of the learner to avoid blind knowledge that may lead him/her to become alienated, placing the learner’s development “at the centre of assessment.”

Writing quality, clarity,

& style, and the

organization of

information

On the one hand, the ideas found in the text are a kind of summary extracted from the proposal of UNESCO to project education to the XXI century; this is an advantage to the reader who finds an accurate text with the amount and quality that he/she may require.

On the other hand, certain terminology coined in the text may require more information from the source, this fact makes it look incomplete –or we could see it as an appetizer to face the whole document from UNESCO. -  Anyway, for purposes of the current personal project, more and deeper information must be researched.

The value of the study

From the point of view of policies to be carried out in multilingual areas, the article shows an interesting way to take into account the student as a holistic formative being, which is an approach that had to be taken into account by policy-makers and clearly stated by researchers from an international institution.   Nevertheless and although it was told that the way it works and criteria to bear in mind are part of different articles on the issue, I would say that a deeper explanation on how to get the expected aims was a lack of the document.

To avoid misconceptions or to clearly understand the goal of UNESCO, this document presents an overall idea that may help us to clarify ideas such as “…the clash of ignorances…”  formerly found in our research course; however more information is needed in order to get what I personally expect from terms such as “…conducted in bottom-up processes..” or “…children experience linguistic resources…” among others, that may give me deeper information about bilingual children processes in Foreign Language context.