Language awareness is a key feature of the Finnish core curricula for students of all ages and language aware contributes to the transversal competence of multiliteracies (EDUFI, 2014). Research indicates the students can benefit from and contribute to their education more easily when their language resources and previous experiences are taken into consideration (Cummins, 2017). As educators and teachers it is important that we work together to build our understanding of language aware education to develop sustainable approaches to education. By engaging with research, sharing experiences and developing educational practices educators are better prepared to promote the equal participation, to benefit from and build on the resources students bring to school, to avoid discrimination and to enrich the educational journey of all students. This pathway runs throughout the class teacher education curriculum to ensure you have plenty of time to:

• develop your understanding of language awareness as an ethical, social and pedagogical phenomenon;
• recognise students as linguistic agents with a variety of linguistic resources;
• expand your own language aware pedagogy.

Language aware education recognises the value, possibilities and limitations of language. A language aware educator acknowledges how individuals and communities bring different language resources to school communities and the need to expand students' language repertoires.
 Language aware educators also recognise that their beliefs and conceptualisations, choices and actions have a real affect on students' experience of education and sense of self within the present community - and reaching into the future.

The real affect teachers have recognises the existential heart of education. Biesta (2022), drawing on Hanna Arendt (1954), outlines the importance of an 'eco-centred' approach to education. An eco-centred approach recognises that education introduces newcomers, that is children and students, into an already existing world. This world needs newcomers to keep going, to be rejuvenated, but the world is already full of different ways of being, relating, doing and knowing. Moreover, the world is also vulnerable - resources are limited, the living world needs to be respected, life is shared. Biesta suggests that school is a 'halfway house' between home and the world. Whereas home is a small safe place, the world is much larger, more demanding, less patient. An important purpose of education is to prepare students for independently encountering the demands of the world. Educators, therefore, share what has been with students and help students develop different skills, attitudes and understanding. Educators should help students notice things that would otherwise remain hidden. Educators should also open up for students where knowledge has come from and why something is regarded as true. Educators should also provide opportunities for students to encounter and explore, to build and respond to relationships, to deliberate and examine, to find out what it means to be a self.

In one of the first chapters of his book World-Centred Education, Biesta (2022) provocatively asks, what are going to do with the children? To answer this question as educators we need to interrupt existing practices and assumptions to check that they are appropriate and educational. We need to suspend our judgements and habits to carefully deliberate - how should we, could we teach and act? And we need sustenance to deepen our thinking, our understanding and our capacity to educate well. As emphasized in the current curriculum (OPS, 2014), language is an important part of this picture. Language is present across the curriculum, language informs individual and community development, language resources and/or restricts agency. Language is involved in sharing and building knowledge. Language is an important, but not the only part, of education. The aim of this pathway is to become far more aware of language as a crucial consideration in teaching, studying and the building of educational communities - halfway houses before students independently step out into the wider world.



For more information on an eco-centred approach to education see Prof. Gert Biesta's lecture on 25th October 2023 - What is world-centred education and why do we need it? https://m3.jyu.fi/jyumv/ohjelmat/erillis/ktl/tutkii-ja-keskustelee/2023/251023/recording-world-centred-education
Other key sources include: