#LoveOurLanguages Part 3: Family & Community
**This is the 3rd part in the #LoveOurLanguages campaign series!**
You've made it to Part Three! Now that we've had time to have conversations with students and teachers about languages present in our lives, and we've discussed ways to actively incorporate languages inside of our learning spaces and schools, you may be wondering what's next!
This post will help us to start thinking beyond the walls of our schools. After we have posted our languages in the hallways, take a moment to notice what happens the next time we invite families into the building.
I'll never forget when I attended an event after one school participated and displayed their posters outside of their classroom doors. I watched as a father took his son's hand after exiting their classroom. He paused to look at the languages on the poster, and he nodded. Then they turned to exit the building, but the poster across the hall caught his eye. He stared hard at the poster and then exclaimed, "Wait- there's a kid across the hall from you that speaks Lithuanian, too? Do you know who it is? Do you know the kid?" I watched this whole conversation unfold, and the boy told his dad that he wasn't sure but that he'd start asking around. I couldn't tell you how excited I saw the dad become to know that there was a shared language in the community, just across the hall! What a cool moment to witness!
We don't have to wait until our next family event, though. Let's take to social media and post pictures of these on our school's social media feeds. Let's boast about our languages! After all, they are absolutely something to be proud of!
How can we invite the languages of the community into the school? As we consider special events and opportunities like Guest Readers or Guest Speakers, or Author Visits- those are all excellent times for us to be actively looking for language. In fact, I'd challenge us to be sure that for every monolingual speaker, we match with a multilingual speaker. When you do a call for guest readers or "mystery readers," be sure to tell families and community members that they can share a book in another language, or orally tell a story (they don't necessarily have to read a book). Having bilingual authors, illustrators, and artists front and center is important. Do a quick analysis of speakers your school has had in the last few years. How many were monolingual?
As you study the weather, link up with multilingual meteorologists. We were blessed to have made "friends" with Erika Pino, a Univision Chicago meteorologist who put our class photo on the news every year as the photo of the day (my incoming parents eventually started requesting this, ha!). It all started because we sent her an e-mail! She even made us a bilingual video tour of the news studio. It was the COOLEST. As you embark on your next STEM project, interview a multilingual engineer. Ask folks about their language journeys, their language identities, and how they use their language(s) in their lives (career, family, friends, faith, etc.)!
As your students start to actively notice languages all around them, discuss it! My third grade students were always so excited to share with me when they received bilingual flyers in the mail. One student excitedly came in to class with the name of a local Chevy dealership that she wrote down because in their commercial they boasted about having staff that spoke a total of 13 languages! We decided to look them up and send them an e-mail to celebrate their language skills. Imagine how sweet an e-mail like that was for the manager of a large dealership- a bunch of 8 and 9 year old kids expressing how proud they are of them! They wrote to multilingual politicians about issues that were important to them. One student even encouraged a congressman to "speak your language more in your meetings on the TV because kids should know you speak that language."
As we studied careers, resumes, and even business cards- the students started taking note of language both inside and outside of the school walls. This led to lots of great conversations, lots of great learning opportunities, and lots of action! We polled the teachers in our school about the languages they knew (or wish they knew) and the languages they studied once upon a time.
Our local police department sent us a multilingual holiday video one year. They asked all of their multilingual officers and staff to express a holiday wish in their heritage language. They even used this on their own social media accounts. Of course, the kids couldn't wait to post that on our own classroom's social media feeds, thanking them for highlighting the languages that make us all richer. The kids felt like their passion for language was spreading across the community.
We talked about access to multilingual books in our school library, our local libraries, and even in free little libraries. We talked about multilingual papers and forms at the doctor's office. We talked about our own language rights as kids, and the rights of our family members. We also asked questions about why so many family events were only offered in one language. Why did this library offer a Polish story time but the library closer to us did not? Why are Board of Education meetings only held in English? It was one thing to ask each other these questions, and it was another thing to actually send these questions to the direct parties! Kids always have the best ideas and the best inquiries, and they deserve answers.
What else can you imagine doing with students, colleagues, families, and community members? How can we collectively recognize linguistic assets, elevate the languages that are all around us, advocate for linguistic inclusivity, and engage others to do the same?
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