Policy Plan

Joy Kreeft Peyton, PhD, is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) and President of the Coalition of Community-Based Heritage Language Schools. She has over 35 years of experience working in the field of languages, linguistics, and culture in education. She has been working on issues of heritage language and mother tongue education for many years. She was a founding member of the Alliance for the Advancement of Heritage Languages, hosted at CAL. She is co-editor of Heritage Languages in America: Preserving a National Resource and Handbook of Heritage, Community, and Native American Languages in the United States: Research, Educational Practice, and Policy. She has worked in Ethiopia, Nepal, and The Gambia (on projects funded by USAID and the World Bank) to develop educational materials, including leveled readers, in children’s mother tongues, for individual and group reading. She is a Senior Advisor for the EU-SPEAK project (Newcastle University), whose mission is to enhance the knowledge and skills of teachers of adult immigrants who have limited education and literacy in their native language (LESLLA adults).

Ken Cruickshank is Professor of Education and Languages at Sydney University Australia. He was a teacher for many years and then was a teacher educator, training teachers of English. He has worked with community languages schools (i.e., heritage language schools) for over 30 years. As a member of the Community Languages schools Board he lobbied for recognition and funding for the schools. In 2017 he established the Sydney Institute for Community Languages Education (SICLE) which conducts research and provides professional learning and resources for community languages schools.

Dr. Ellen-Rose Kambel is founder and director of the Rutu Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Amsterdam that promotes intercultural multilingual education. The Language Friendly School is a school label and global network founded by the Rutu Foundation that unites schools who welcome and value all the languages spoken by their students. Dr. Kambel is a human rights lawyer and an experienced trainer, public speaker and author of several articles and books on human rights, education and multilingualism. Her latest book, co-edited with Prof. Orhan Agirdag, Multilingualism and Education: Dutch Plus was voted second best educational book of the Netherlands in 2018. Dr. Kambel most recently joined the Supervisory Board of the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands.

Geert is one of the founding board members of HLE Network and served for three years as Vice-Chair. Geert has a BA in Education from KHLim (Belgium) and a MA in International Management from the University of Liverpool. He has work experience as an expert consultant on local integration policy and as both, teacher and manager, in international education and in heritage language programs (in Nigeria and in the Middle East). Recently he was the founding head of SALTO International School in Eindhoven (NL) and he served as the Director-CEO of the Proominent Foundation, a group of 11 schools in Ede (NL). He is currently the Director-CEO at St Andrew's international school in Turi, Kenya.

Dr Sabine Little is a Senior Lecturer in Languages Education at the University of Sheffield, UK, where her work focuses on the links between multilingualism, identity, and belonging. She works holistically with families, heritage language schools, and mainstream schools to better understand the needs of multilingual children. Through this work, she aims to improve our understanding of how children growing up multilingually develop their identities, as well as the emotional and pragmatic links to their respective languages. When working with schools, she helps teachers to develop strategies for engaging children’s multiple languages meaningfully in the classroom, to develop their full linguistic repertoire. Some of this work is available on www.multilingualism-in-schools.net. She also works on literacy development – her work in establishing a multilingual children’s library was awarded the International Brenda Eastwood Award for Diversity and Inclusion.

Frederike Groothoff, PhD, is an expert on multilingualism. After years of teaching newly arrived migrant children she changed her activities to teaching teachers and advising pedagogical and educational organizations on the subject of multilingualism. After teacher college Frederike was a primary school teacher in Aruba and upon her return she studied language and culture studies in Utrecht and did a research master Language and Communication.in Nijmegen. From 2014 until 2020 she carried out a PhD project about the Dutch language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners. Nowadays besides working for Utrecht University, she gives taks throughout the Netherlands with her own compagny LangWhich in which she encourages educational professionals to incorporate home languages into daily school practice. She also encourages teachers to advise parents to keep talking in their home languages and to stimulate children to attend heritage language programs. Frederike supports HLE Network since she sees it as a great opportunity for HL teachers to gather and share knowledge with each other. Her wish for HLE Network is that their organization will be used not only by HL teachers and parents, but that they will also reach and inspire mainstream school teachers to cherish heritage languages as well.