Prognostication and literacy education: cave humans in the 21st C

The power of education lies is its grand ability to skill the mind to project and reflect experiences.  Outside of these twin-goals for education, it is apparent that the classrooms can only serve to re-create the dark ages 'caves' suitable to arrest human development. One's ability to look into the past in order to see the future- prognostication- is assumed to be a trait that comes naturally to all human beings, not a specialized skill reserved for a few. Literacy education is best suited to harnesses this skill and to bring it to live! We increasingly find that bad education based on oppressive-one-language norm, on the other hand, teaches multilingual people to stay in 'the here and the now' mental state--a trait well-known among children and other animal species.This assisted oblivion  also happens when we ask learners/students to regurgitate information and memorize answers in ONE  language  (information is stored in the short term memory space).  

There is no doubt in my view that prognostication is a strong feature among human beings. In Ghana, for example, there is a saying called "Sankofa", meaning you go back and fetch! Not only are we able to predict what is coming, we are also able to 'create' the future provided we have a glimpse of what it might look like. That is why there is a conventional wisdom that history is a good teacher. Yet, it only teaches some people as others  are not able to learn from it. Here's a question and answer session:

Q:  Is it possible to develop highest levels of foresight and hindsight if a language is taken away from you in schools?

A: Impossible. Language is the enabler of deeper levels of thinking. It enables our infinite intelligence  to be at work.

Q: So what happens to students/learners who don't understand the language the teacher uses? 

A: I and my Norwegian language education scholar believe that this is  a 'stupification' exercise for the children. The real education challenge facing Sub-Saharan Africa (more than any another region in the world) is that children do not understand what teachers are saying. Neither do most teachers understand deeply what they say to the learners.

Q: So there won't be reflection in this situation?

A:You are right. Education here creates an assisted oblivion.

Q: What about their foresight?

A: Impossible in the same way that  prognostication is?

Q: Are these children then made to be like animals? 
A:  I leave this to your imagination.
Q:  But are  you saying that students  taught for 12 years in schools are made to be like cave men and women trapped in the moment?

A: Language damage is more than that of armed  forces. I leave that question for you to answer.

An education that fails to ignite this power of imagination only creates cave men and women as the case was in the dark ages. The good news is that we can work to change the situation. 

As a student of life, it would serve one better  to sit back at the end of the day and visualize how the day has been. Taking some time once a week to flash back offers unmatched advantages on self engagement, knowing oneself, and reflecting on one's growth path. All great people in the world do this and then develop better insights on what is next and take charge of the next. Simply put, they are always intentional about tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year--some even go to the next 20 years. When one flashes back for the same amount of  the foresight time, the magic sparks! When you habitually do this (even when you don't feel like it), you become unstoppable and stay on your way to earning a life of prognostication! Not moment paralysis and procrastination. Every parent should know that the language, literacy and prognostication are related and interdependent. And see the argument for literacy as both a cognitive trait and social practice beyond the ink and paper.

Related links: 
www.leketimakalela.co.za

Twitter: @leketimakalela

Languages and literacies in the 21st Century

Languages and literacies in the 21st Century

23 January 2017 - Deborah Minors

Professor Leketi Makalela chairs a research programme on complex multilingual encounters, a growing field attracting increasing numbers of PhD candidates.

Makalela is the Head of the Division of Languages, Literacies and Literatures in the Wits School of Education. His research explores the interface between languages and literacies in the 21st Century. He is intrigued by the prospect of alternating languages of input and output to enhance identity construction and epistemic access for multilingual students.

His research challenges the validity of boundaries between languages and literacies and it ‘disrupts’ monolingual bias in classroom interactions and language policies. His research highlights the fact that monolingual bias is the root cause of high failure rates among multilingual learners and that it reproduces social inequalities.

In light of these theoretical limitations, he has developed a multilingual literacies framework that is based on the African value system of interdependence – ubuntu – to define complex multilingual encounters.

Using ubuntu ‘translanguaging’ to explain cultural competence that is embedded in the logic of incompletion (i.e., one language is incomplete without the other) and interdependence, Makalela argues that all global multilingual encounters are characterised by the constant disruption of language and literacy boundaries and the simultaneous recreation of new discursive ones.

This research shifts epistemological lenses from the North to the South and proposes practical methodologies that are anchored in the cultural competence of multilingual speakers for increased access to knowledge, ways of knowing, and identity formation/affirmation.

“I believe this is the most effective way to bring about transformed school practices in South Africa and other comparable contexts worldwide,” he says.

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Hub for Multilingual Education and Literacies in the Wits School of Education invites papers for the 4th International Conference on Language and Literacy Education. Email your 250-word abstract to matlakala.moagi@wits.ac.za by 31 March 2017.

Read more about research at Wits in Wits Research Matters

- See more at: http://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/research-news/2017/2017-01/languages-and-literacies-in-the-21st-century-.html#sthash.nxDMYZjy.yqnvKq1o.dpuf

Education in the new world order: Multilanguaging frontiers- I

I gave a public lecture at the University of Seychelles on the topic that preoccupies me as I ask the world: why do we use monolingual (aka. colonial) lens if we need to maximize human potential to know and to be. Several realities ring true and they are concerning:

1) Majority of the primary school readers are at least 3-4 years below their expected proficiency levels
2) There is a vast Matthew effect in reading development: the poor are getting poorer and it seems like a journey of no return.

Our new world order is that of discontinuous continuities where there is a constant disruption of orderliness and simultaneous recreation of new ones. Many more children learn to speak and succeed in more than one language and the vast majority would have proficiency in at least 3 by the time they are 6 years old (a threshold age for language acquisition). Our contemporary children do not have 'mother tongue'; they have a repertoire that contains many languages that 'leak into each other'. The boundaries cannot hold! Besides, these have always been artificial in many complex multilingual spaces such as South Africa. One needs to stress that these new generation of speakers make sense of the world in which they live and of who they are. There is no mental or identity confusion as the old stories imposed on natural human gift: multilingualism. In terms of use, I have termed this versatile way of using at least three languages in the same speech context  as multilanguaging. More articles are forthcoming to explain this phenomenon.

The questions are: Why do we still stick to monolingual norms when the majority of the world populations are multilinguaging? Why are textbooks written in one language when readers can speak more than the language of writing?  However way one looks at it, we seem not to tap into the full potential for human capacity. Even more, we frustrate the speakers and question the nature of their being. The real problem is our thinking that language is the tail end of our teaching instead of a means to learning. Once language teacher forego their focus on what languages look like to what speakers do with their languages, we will have reached a milestone in this journey for multilingual education and literacies---an age of multilanguaging.

Related sites:
 @leketimakalela
www.leketi.makalela.co.za