Keynotes

Most children in pre-school and primary-level classrooms seem to thrive and enjoy most of the learning experiences we teachers have designed for them.  However, starting around age 11, students seem to leave their enthusiasm for learning outside the school gates, and this happens increasingly more frequently as learners progress through secondary-level schooling.  One explanation might be the fact that post-primary schooling involves increasingly more complex concepts, and rightly so: school-leavers must gain the knowledge needed to achieve their professional aspirations, be it to become electricians or electrical engineers.  However, as subject-specific concepts become increasingly more complex, so too the subject-specific language/discourse used to ‘formulate’ these concepts.  Since discipline-specific discourse is how subject experts ‘language about’ subject-specific concepts, this is the type of discourse that textbooks and teachers use when explaining these concepts.  Unfortunately for learners who are not (yet) experts of that discipline, even in our mother tongue, this way of using language seems to transform our mother tongue into a foreign language!  Realising that learners may struggle with this ‘way of languaging’, conscientious teachers unpack disciplinary discourse into more familiar language, enabling students to appreciate the discipline-specific concepts which so enthral disciplinary-experts.  However, once the complicated discourse has been deconstructed to reveal the beautiful concepts, we subject-experts must then help learners master the disciplinary discourse they need to (1) correctly organise information into accurate discipline-specific understandings, and (2) subsequently communicate their understandings in discipline-appropriate ways (e.g., ‘sound intelligent at a job interview’).  So, if a chemistry teacher does not help her students speak and write like a chemist, who will?  Yet we subject-teachers do not want to become language-teachers. During this interactive keynote, we will first ‘experience learning through CLIL-tasks’ before discussing how these tasks were designed to help students not only comprehend discipline-specific concepts but also master the complex discipline-specific discourse within which these concepts are embedded.

For those keen to explore this topic further, Teresa will run a practical workshop in Session 2.3, on Thursday afternoon. You can sign up for the workshop when registering.

Since its conceptualisation, CLIL has been shaped predominantly by European integration agendas and mobility discourses (Coyle et al., 2010), conceptualising multilingualism as additive and culturally enriching. The influential 4C framework (Content, Communication, Cognition and Culture) has provided a powerful pedagogical heuristic, yet remains largely silent on contexts where multilingualism is historically stratified and linguistically racialised. In the Caribbean Netherlands, language education unfolds within highly diverse post-colonial hierarchies that position Dutch, English and Papiamentu (as well as a plethora of other languages) within unequal symbolic and institutional orders. Building on inclusive and critical strands within CLIL research (Meyer et al., 2015; Llinares & Morton, 2017; Nikula et al., 2013), and drawing on translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014) and raciolinguistic critique (Flores & Rosa, 2015), our keynote argues for a decolonial reframing of CLIL.

We propose extending the 4Cs with a fifth dimension: Courage. Courage captures the affective and political labour required to legitimise minoritised languages, confront colonial language ideologies, and disrupt standard-language hierarchies within post-colonial schooling. It foregrounds teacher and student agency, linguistic emancipation and institutional risk-taking, dimensions insufficiently theorised in mainstream CLIL discourse.

Furthermore, we introduce a parallel 4C model for educational change: Content (multilingual epistemic renewal), Courage (counter-hegemonic leadership), Commitment (collective enactment), and Continuity (temporal sustainability). By making visible the power relations embedded in language education, the Caribbean case does not represent a peripheral exception but rather reveals structural tensions inherent in CLIL globally. We argue that for CLIL to become genuinely inclusive and multilingual, it must also become decolonial and courageous. Throughout the keynote we will give voice to various Caribbean educational practitioners and pupils who give first-hand accounts about their experiences in developing an own inclusive CLIL approach for the Dutch Caribbean.