The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and particularly Lamberto Zannier, High Commissioner on National Minorities, announced the launch of The Regional Expert School on Multilingual and Multicultural Education for Integration and Sustainable Development, on 1 July 2019. This initiative aims to create useful tools for the development of multilingual education in Central Asia.
The Expert School is a group of teachers, researches and industry leaders from around the world (Estonia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, and Tajikistan), whose focus is primarily set on multilingual education. The Expert School sessions will take place this week – between the 1st and 5th of July 2019. This initiative is a joint project between the OSCE, the Kyrgyz Republic Ministry of Education, and UNICEF Kyrgyzstan.
The main goal of the expert group is to produce a variety of teaching manuals, methodology breakdowns, and support materials for teachers in Central Asia, who are working in the sphere of multilingual education. To provide accurate and useful teacher’s guides, the Expert School will go through a detailed analysis of the current state of education in the region, focusing on language courses.
The OSCE expects the Expert School to work on bettering all spheres of multilingual education, so towards the end of the sessions, the groups should have come up with:
- instruction guides for facilitating a working relationship between different communities
- a plan for launching a multi-lingual education program in pre-schools
- a comprehensive online course on Content and Language Integrated Learning.
The Expert School sessions are part of the OSCE’s continued efforts to improve multilingual education in Central Asia ever since 2012 when the Central Asia Education Programme commenced.
