Paper short abstract:

　This presentation proposes educational practices that value and further develop mediation competences and critical thinking of children living with multiple cultures and languages, helping them find meaning in learning Japanese and become active citizens to create peaceful communities and world.

Paper long abstract:

　This presentation explores the meaning of learning "Japanese as a heritage language (JHL)" for children who are growing up in a multicultural and multilingual environment. With the influx of refugees, school-aged children in Germany are now living increasingly in their community/school, with pupils of diverse backgrounds, meditating between different cultures and languages. Their competences - not only of language but also to connect people through their awareness and attitudes/ behavior as well as to mediate diversifying values - are exactly what is needed for creating a peaceful community/society. These children can thus be regarded as the very citizens practicing peaceful co-existence that Europe has been pursuing.

　One of the tasks given to "heritage language education" is to support children to find meaning in target-language learning (Nakajima 2010). The presenter asserts that such finding can be achieved by shedding light on children's mediation competences and that JHL could be a pedagogy for the next generation with potentials for realizing a social peace.

　To propose a new pedagogical approach to JHL, the "politische Bildung (political education)" in post-war Germany will be first introduced. Aiming to rebuild a democratic nation in response to rumination on war, German school education has been reiterating practices of political education. Consequently, the foundation has been built to accept/respect different views and to develop own opinions through dialogues. Further, "Critical Cultural Awareness" (Byram 1997) is observed in the footings of awareness for appreciating plural cultures, consciousness for relative perception and tolerance for diversities. This is also correlated to CCBI (Sato et al., 2015) which questions social and conventional premises subsisting in the present as prima facie and accentuates significance of nurturing awareness, perspectives and attitudes/behavior for active involvement. All these competences indeed are indispensable for creating a peaceful community/society.

　Secondly, drafting of practices for JHL education will be proposed by incorporating the above-mentioned viewpoints. In addition, practices that enhance children's mediation competences and critical thinking will be suggested for helping them make their own future and create a peaceful world.