As international educators who have been interviewed and participated on interview committees, we have all been posed with the question: What does it mean to you when we say "every teacher is a language teacher?" It’s a nice question that offers opportunity for great sound bites, but too often the question stops there.
The majority of our international school student populations are multilingual, yet too many international schools continue to uphold outdated systems that fail to address the linguistic needs of their multilingual students; both students who are on their journey to acquire a new language and those who join us with a multilingual repertoire.
These antiquated systems might look like:
Either one English as an Additional Language (EAL) specialist or way too many EAL specialists at a school, where their sole responsibility is to “support” students in a class where they are pulled out of other learning experiences.
Uninformed and culturally biased multi-tiered systems of support that analyze data with a monolingual bias and treat acquiring a new language as an intervention or problem to be solved.
Implementing two teachers in a classroom, one “pushing in” with fuzzy expectations, strategy, or without professional learning and wondering why students learning is plateauing.
Treating multilingualism solely as an event to be celebrated on food and flag day or a really nice poster in the hall, but failing to acknowledge how it influences learning experiences.
What Is a Multilingual Ecosystem?
According to Collins and Guzman-Valierio (2015) A multilingual ecology can be described as a space where:
“The students’ language practices and cultural understandings are used in all classrooms as resources for deeper thinking, clearer imagining, greater learning, and academic languaging.”
My work (Beth) extends the metaphor by recognizing the elements of school as interdependent on their impact on a multilingual learners experience. Like any ecosystem in the natural world, elements are impacted by their relation to each other. Elements in a multilingual ecosystem include: students, systems, mindsets, curriculum, instruction, and assessment (Puma 2019). Focusing on only one element without addressing the others leads to stagnated and limited change for the multilingual learner experience.
A Case Study: An Elementary School in Asia Takes the Leap
My (Mayuko) school is in the beautiful, messy middle of systematic change. Alongside my multilingual learning (MLL) colleagues, I was once accustomed to teaching assigned EAL pullout classes and pushing in to several grade-level classrooms regularly. While the EAL students received personalized, small-group support, the substantial EAL program fee raised ongoing concerns about educational equity for many families. Teacher collaboration was alive and well throughout co-planning and co-teaching, but language development often became an after-thought in these collaborative endeavors. At times, my physical presence as another helping hand in the classroom mattered more than the purpose of my role itself.
After consulting MLL experts and researching the best practices, my school made a bold move: to shed our old identity and to evolve into an equitable multilingual ecosystem. The schoolwide MLL coordinator and the elementary school Principal spearheaded the effort to implement concrete changes to the way language was perceived and experienced across the school community – for the sake of student learning. Here is the summary of key shifts we have made, viewed through an equity and English language development (ELD) lens:
Alongside the physical changes came emotional turmoil and the need for adjustment. Presented with the school’s transformative plan, all EAL teachers were given a choice: to move on or to reapply for the newly redefined role of an MLL specialist. The message was loud and clear: EAL is no longer a program; it is an environment. This news challenged me to look inward and reflect on what I personally believed and valued as an educator. Was I all in, or was I out? Do I commit myself to take on a new identity as a leader of adult learning? In the end, I chose to stay on and become part of the new vision for our school, while others decided to opt out.
In hindsight, this process of unearthing my deepest, most profound convictions has been both terrifying and liberating. Slowly but surely, I am letting go of what has been the status quo for many EAL teachers – having my own caseload of students and simply following the set schedule to “support” my students. Resisting the status quo is not easy when you are used to staying in your comfort zone. However, what is the point of our comfort, if our individual and institutional practices do not serve multilingual learners well?
If I’m brutally honest, I am still grieving the loss of my former self as an EAL teacher who found joy in building relationships with students and co-teaching full time with colleagues. In fact, all of us on the team are experiencing grief collectively, regardless of our decision to stay or move on. I suppose this is what being human is all about.
I am full of contradictions – feeling empowered by a renewed sense of purpose, while simultaneously grieving the loss of the professional EAL tribe as I knew it. And yet, in the midst of change, I remain hopeful and deeply invested in our radical vision for a multilingual ecosystem. My expertise is beginning to be embraced as I take the lead in developing language targets, modeling the integration of language scaffolds and strategies across subject areas, and facilitating language-focused conversations during team meetings. My days are now filled with a different kind of joy – one marked by curiosity, small wins, and intentional collaboration. The work ahead is clear, and I am ready to take on the challenge.
Honest Reflection and Radical Dreaming
As a school embarks on this journey, it is important to reflect upon some questions with honesty in order to unearth elements of the current reality of a school that are holding them back from real, transformative change for multilingual learners. Some reflection questions might include:
What do I believe about language learning? What informs this belief?
What do I believe about our host country nationals who attend our school and the languages they bring with them?
What do I understand about language learning? What informs these understandings?
What systems are currently in place that help or harm the multilingual learners' experience at our school? Are they systematized or are they dependent on an individual?
Are we holding back from needed change because we are afraid of these questions?
The next brave step in cultivating a multilingual ecosystem is the act of shedding these biases and daring to try something that feels unfamiliar and perhaps scary. That’s the thing about radical dreaming, it invites us to build something that is new and founded on principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Some guiding questions:
Are we all in? No seriously, as a school do we all believe that we can make this change?
As a school, what are we willing to dedicate to this work (time, resources, talent)? Honestly, is it enough?
As a school, what might change look like in 10 years? In five years? In one year? In six months?
What are the human needs of faculty and staff to strengthen our collaboration and rumble in the complexity of this work?
How does the work of reimagining how we serve our multilingual learners get braided into other parts of our vision? (“Braided” is a key term here, not thrown on top of a too full plate.)
This work is not easy. Complexity never is. But it is the complexity where the beauty of interdependence thrives.
Reference
Mayuko Perkins is an elementary MLL specialist who teaches in an American international school in Asia with a large multilingual population.
Beth Puma is an MLL specialist and educational consultant who works with schools that are challenging the status quo, so that their multilingual learners are served equitably and inclusively.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bethpuma/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bethpuma.bsky.social
