Youth radicalization is potentially triggered by a sense of disconnect from society, and experiences of belonging carry important implications for youth identity formation. Language ideologies, policies, and practices in educational contexts send messages for youth regarding their belonging and/or value in society: the voices heard by youth. In addition, youth communicate their sense of belonging and the belonging of others through their words and actions, including their language choices and social affiliations: the voices of youth. The languages used and preferred by youth may or may not correlate with their educational achievement and identity positions. To illuminate the role of language and education in the development of a sense of belonging by youth in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts, this study focused on multicultural schools in The Hague and addressed, first, how youth experience, enact, and define a sense of belonging and/or exclusion in their linguistic and educational contexts, second, how the language skills, language use choices, and linguistic affiliations of youth intersect with their educational achievements and sense of belonging, and third, the role of gender and ethnicity in the intersecting influences of language, education, and identity for youth in ethnically and linguistically diverse contexts.
These questions were addressed through three stages of research: (1) initial observation for contextual depth and adaptation of appropriate questions, (2) a questionnaire to quantitatively evaluate correlations among language, education, and identity, and (3) a final in-depth interview stage providing student perspectives and supporting the interpretation of the findings. A broader objective of this research was to inform policies and educational programs that serve ethnically and linguistically diverse youth, providing foundations for the development of more culturally responsive pedagogy in the Netherlands and throughout Europe.
Preliminary findings from the voices of both students and teachers highlight the multilingual realities in Dutch high school contexts, alongside the prevalence of monolingual ideologies. Young people at diverse high schools in The Netherlands learns multiple languages as a subject, and many students bring language knowledge from home, yet they are immersed in a primarily monolingual school environment, with the assumption of Dutch-only inside and outside of the classroom. The discourses and policies that normalize the school as a monolingual space, reflecting broader trends, are in tension with the multilingual realities of modern urban high schools and the multiple identities of students.
Within education, deficit discourses are evident in references to the “language disadvantage” of multilingual students, and language policies are developed to address this language diversity as a problem. Language policies, which are often implicit, tend to perpetuate the monolingual norm and deficit discourses regarding home language proficiencies. Well-meaning educators advocate Dutch-only policies and yet nuance their views and practices through experience in multicultural schools. Young people sometimes conform to and sometimes contest monolingual ideologies, using their multilingual repertoires and pushing back against a school system that tells them to lose their heritage languages. The voices of youth and their experiences of belonging show the complexity of their multiple identities and multilingual practices. Students and teachers offer nuanced reflections on the implications of language policies and the meaning of belonging in diverse high school contexts.
