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Johan Leman, 11 June 2022

In the 1980s, Integration of education in One’s Own Language and Culture was an educational model applied in Limburg, Ghent, Antwerp and, in its Foyer variant, also in Brussels, but also in some places in the French speaking community in Belgium. The original idea was that keeping in touch with one’s mother tongue (at that time understood to mean the language of the country of origin) would keep the contact with the country of origin open and would also be useful when returning. In the Foyer variant, the emphasis was not on that, but on the usefulness of acquiring multilingualism and on hte importance of some relative self-identification for young children.

After 30 years, the Foyer variant (and for that matter every such model in Flanders) was discontinued. I remember that the criticism on the Foyer model was that the children did not do better than the average of all non-Dutch speaking pupils in the Dutch-speaking schools in Brussels. The fact that they did not do worse was not positively appreciated, nor was the fact that in the meantime they mastered another language (their so-called mother tongue), showed great school loyalty and all appeared to be working after their time at school.

Meanwhile, Foyer’s expertise in multilingualism was redirected in another direction, namely language advice to multilingual families in the use of communication languages at home. But recently some people contacted me with the question whether I did not think that such a model with the use of Ukrainian was not imposing itself on the reception of the children of Ukrainian refugees? My thoughts on this? Evidently yes. We are dealing with people of whom many are not sure whether they will stay or not. And in any case, there is a shortage of teachers. If Ukrainian teachers can be found, they can help to solve the shortage of teachers in a meaningful way. And there is the fact that these are teachers who can be integrated and are not employed on temporary contracts through embassies, which allows to avoid one of the problems of the former OETCs. All that is needed is to find good teachers from Ukraine, to have a team and a direction willing to support such a project and to have some policy makers in the education sector willing to temporarily set aside their dogmas. And then such a project cannot fail.

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