BY PETER MAKWANYA YESTERDAY, February 21 2021, was International Mother-Tongue Day and this year’s theme is, “Fostering Multilingualism for Inclusion in Education and Society.” This discussion focuses on indigenous language education and how the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) convened a committee of experts to consider the question of language of education on a world-wide basis. The 1953 indigenous education report ushered a new era towards the educational linguistic matters ever since. Special emphasis was given to the essential role played by mother tongue instruction. This is important especially in the face of shortages of textbooks, teaching children using their vernacular at early stages of their academic careers would not scare them away, especially in the context of climate change education. Zimbabwe, as part of the global community of nations, regards climate change as a top priority in its development efforts. The country is witnessing intensity of severe weather events, particularly droughts, prolonged dry spells, and recently extreme storms associated with wide-spread hail and flash flooding. This also includes increased incidences of heat-waves, and related health challenges. The knowledge attitudes and practices (Kap) for Zimbabwe’s National adaptation plan (Nap) survey of 2018, shows that information, knowledge, education and action on climate change is low in this country and southern Africa generally. This can only succeed if climate change education is delivered in the mother-tongue across the board. Climate change discourses have not been found to be inclusive in scope, content and representations. This comes as a result of climate change information being presented in the foreign medium of expression. To date, no efforts have been made to make this language user-friendly through engaging expertise in mother-tongue instruction. For this reason, climate change discourses remain elusive, problematic and non-inclusive, thereby presenting procedural and structural challenges in community-based adaptation practices. In 2017, the UNDP report on Zimbabwe climate change and education, cited climate change as having a direct impact on education. Despite evidence of physical climate change impacts such as heavy rains accompanied by flash floods, strong winds and hail-storms, among others, the language issue is a major concern and has had negative impacts on climate change literacy. For this reason, there appears to be a deliberate exclusionary effect which places the ordinary person who invested a lot in the mother-tongue in a dilemma. Therefore, this deliberate lack of mother-tongue inclusion creates information and knowledge gaps especially to the citizens of developing countries who lack technical expertise and resources to articulate climate change issues. Lack of inclusion of the mother-tongue aspect in climate literacy programmes, exposes glaring linguistic differences tantamounting to communicative and scientific-linguistic gate-keeping. The inherent lack of
