From the Schools
Identity Languages
Building a Program for Students to Maintain their Complex Cultural Identities By Daniel Cowan and Luiza Marie Razeto
T
his article is in two parts, written by two teachers centrally involved in different aspects of the introduction of an Identity Language Program at Frankfurt International School.
Daniel Cowan Imagine if one of the first questions your new international school asked you, as a family, was which languages are important to your child? Moving from Japan to Egypt had us, as a family, trying to reconcile the notion that our two children had spent five years developing some proficiency in Japanese, alongside an affinity for Japanese culture, but would no longer be able to deepen, or even just maintain, this connection. We repeated the same process four years later, moving from Egypt to Germany. Now it was Arabic that would need to make way for German, Spanish and French. At each stop, I thought about ways to continue their development in the language they’d left behind, but the demands of the schools’ language programs meant that this would be done in addition to adding a new language. The two barriers to allowing students to continue to develop their existing language skills in a new country are lack of access to opportunities (resources, teachers) and having to meet the new school’s language requirement. I also did not have a conceptual
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framework for what this language was for a child. I had toyed with terms like ‘foothold language’, but when I came across the term ‘identity language’, this matched my children’s (and many other internationally mobile students’) experience. In essence, an identity language is any language with which a person has developed both proficiency and personal connection. The International School of the Hague has created an Identity Language Program that asks the provocative question ‘Who are we to decide for a student what their cultural identity should be?’ (McCracken et al, 2018: 32). I visited the International School of London in the winter of 2019, and had the opportunity there to see a vibrant language learning program that offered tremendous flexibility and a wide range of language classes in small classrooms taught by peripatetic language teachers. These two examples inspired a model for Frankfurt International School (FIS). At FIS, this issue arose during a whole school language policy review in 2018. We recognized that each student is on a unique language pathway and that while FIS has many language options for students, we could not meet all students’ needs within our language programs. Once we recognized that this concept was worth addressing, we developed a framework for a program that will allow students to
