Beset with on-going low academic results in its public schools, the Marshall Islands announced a “bold” change to its public school teaching strategy at the recent Pacific Educational Conference held here.
Public School System officials outlined the plan for a major change, which will replace the current kindergarten to third grade Marshallese language environment to extend bilingual education through the 12th grade. The presentation was delivered to the hundreds of educators from around the Pacific attending the conference in Majuro.
The new plan, adopted by the Public School System, says “Kajin Aelon Kein (Marshallese language) will be the language of instruction for all subjects other than English Language Arts from grades kindergarten through sixth. Kajin Aelon Kein will be the language of instruction in a near 50-50 bilingual arrangement from grades seven to 12.”
“This is a very bold step,” said Alfred Capelle, director of the country’s Customary Law and Language commission. “Our expertise lies here with us, not from outside experts looking down at us,” he said.
Capelle said saving the future for “our children and grandchildren…lies in our local knowledge and language.” But this is not an effort to simply translate a lot of U.S. textbooks into Marshallese language for teaching through 12th grade.
“I believe the most effective and economical way to accomplish our dual goals of educational effectiveness and to address linguistic and cultural human rights is through an innovative bottom-up community-based approach, which brings students, teachers, parents, knowledge holders and community members together so that we can write our own bilingual school materials and teach each other in the process,” said Capelle.
This “indigenous pedagogy” is “not concerned with Western classroom management techniques, not with how to mix group work with individual task-based assignments, not with movie from rote memorization to so-called critical thinking. Our pedagogy is much more inclusive, much more loving and is based on centuries of knowing how to bring community together to share stories and communal responsibilities, and to learn from each other inter-generationally. Western educational systems do not do that, cannot do that.”
He said through this bilingual approach, “what we can offer to each other is much greater than what the outside world can offer to us.”
Local educators acknowledged they have a huge task to implement the new policy as there are few textbooks in Marshallese language.