ID: 33725
Nowadays, it is difficult to preserve one's own languages, culture, and identity because of displacement; migration; wars happening in some parts of the world; the long-term effects of COVID-19; and the dominance of major world languages in educational and media spaces. Yet for many children who speak minority, heritage, or otherwise underserved languages, access to meaningful literacy resources remains limited. Children thrive when they can see, hear, and read themselves in the materials around them. Books, audio materials, digital stories, and other juvenile resources are often unavailable in the languages they use at home and in their communities due to the aforementioned factors. This lack of access is not simply a matter of missing materials; it also affects language maintenance, educational participation, cultural continuity, and a child’s sense of identity and belonging. When young people do not have access to their languages in spaces of learning, they may begin to see those languages as less valuable, less visible, or less worthy of preservation. Creating inclusive multilingual resources is essential for children and families who speak underserved and heritage languages to have meaningful access to literacy, learning, and cultural representation. In many communities, the shortage of books, digital stories, audio materials, and other juvenile resources in local or heritage languages limits not only educational opportunities but also identity, belonging, and long-term language maintenance. This proposal focuses on how open education and collaborative community-based practices can support the creation and sharing of multilingual resources that are accessible, culturally relevant, and responsive to the needs of underserved language communities. Drawing on the ongoing work through Indiana University Bloomington’s Books & Beyond and Multilingual Minds projects on Yoruba and Burmese-speaking communities in Indianapolis, this session highlights how community building, collaboration, and open educational practices can help writers, educators, illustrators, translators, and community members work together to produce resources for children and families. By centering open educational practices, this proposal asks how multilingual resources can be created in ways that are adaptable, shareable, and responsive to community needs. Open approaches make it possible to think beyond access in the narrow sense of cost alone. They allow us to consider who gets to create knowledge, whose language practices are recognized, and how communities can build resources that reflect their histories, values, and aspirations. In this way, open education becomes a means of supporting equity, accessibility, and participation rather than simply distributing materials more widely.The proposal also considers how broader issues such as linguistic dominance, limited funding, displacement, and unequal access to publishing opportunities shape the production of multilingual materials. We choose to prioritize accessibility, equity, and inclusion and invite participants to think about multilingual resource creation as both an educational and community-building practice that supports heritage language maintenance and strengthens identity and belonging.
