Communication and exchange with my peers have always been what I consider a significant gain in the EFI program. Our major’s students, come from various parts of the world with fewer students from the same region, which makes my classmates incredibly diverse. I have always been excited to learn and understand new things from people with different cultural and educational backgrounds, areas unknown to me.
I had communicated with Ramona a while back, as our graduation projects share similarities, and we have the same supervisor. I was delighted to have had the time to discuss the doubts I had from my last blog post with her in depth. Ramona provided me with very useful advice based on her experience and perspective, first about changing the target context of my project. She felt that since the government and educational institutions play a significant role in decision-making in my idea, I must emphasize the necessity of my project to persuade them. Merely relying on the theoretical diversity of culture and language is insufficient. Therefore, my project context might be shift from formal educational settings to informal ones. Placing the minority language preservation courses in more liberal, market-driven communities or institutions has several clear advantages:
1.Fewer policy restrictions and a more liberal context and background.
We can clearly see that after considering abandoning the idea of setting minority language modules in basic curriculum, I have a larger operational space. I can refer to more literature and projects and, based on existing theoretical and experiential foundation, make my project design more creative. This aligns very well with the creative thinking mode of the Edinburgh Future Institute. At the same time, during this semester’s intensive course setup, I have gained more nutrients and thought about the utility and content of storytelling and photo narratives, which I might consider as one of the final output methods.
2. Re-defining the scope of minority languages.
As a Tibetan, what I initially wanted to focus on was the Tibetan language. However, after literature search, I found that languages like Tibetan, which have a relatively large number of speakers, already have many excellent project cases for preservation and inheritance. I remember some languages that have oral traditions but no written forms, facing even greater difficulties and challenges in their inheritance. Shaping these less utilized and less popular languages in informal educational settings as an option for cultural inheritance might be more meaningful.
These insights and inspirations are the sparks of thought that emerged through communication and exchange with peers, a treasure for me, and important advice that further guides and clarifies my graduation project.
