Professor Kathleen Heugh

Kathleen Heugh, Professor of Language Education and Multilingualism, is a socio-applied linguist who specialises in language policy and planning, bilingual and multilingual education, and English Medium Instruction (EMI). She uses multilingual pedagogies including translanguaging and transknowledging in her teaching of applied, educational and socio- lingusitics . Kathleen works with several large transnational organisations (including various agencies of the UN, the EU and the African Union; transnational bodies such as the British Council, and international policy think tanks) located in Africa; Central, South and East Asia; Europe; and North America. Currently she focuses on policy and its implementation in bilingual and multilingual education for displaced, migrant and refugee students within mainstream systems.  

Kathleen has specialist expertise in system-wide and multi-country evaluation studies on languages and literacy in education in sub-Saharan Africa for international governments and development agencies (including UNESCO and UNDP). She was a Ministerial  advisor on language policy for the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996) and was subsequently appointed to two statutory bodies established through the Constitution. As a founding member of the Pan South African Language Board, Kathleen initiated and led the first Sociolinguistic Survey of South Africa (2000). She also led the design, development and administration of the first system-wide multilingual assessment of students in the world (2006). Her theoretical and field research in multilingual education in more than 30 countries informs UNESCO and UNICEF language education policy recommendations for countries in Africa and the Asia-Pacific, and for minority communities worldwide for the UN Human Rights Council. She focuses on the relationship between the languages of learning and school retention, particularly for marginalised, migrant and displaced communities; and also on the relationship between faith and literacies in education in urban, rural and remote settings. She is one of a few linguists with extensive fieldwork experience in  conflict and post-conflict settings of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in fragile border regions between countries.

Kathleen holds several honorary positions, including with the University of the Western Cape and the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa, and the National Multilingual Education Resource Centre, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She has been a distinguished Visiting Professor at Rhodes University and the University of South Africa; Visiting Professor at the Universities of Ghent and Geneva, and Visiting Scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the Universities of Antwerp and Louvain in Belguim. With Christopher Stroud (Western Cape and Stockholm) and Piet van Avermaet (Ghent), she is the Bloomsbury Series Editor of Multilingualisms and Diversities in Education. Together with Christopher Stroud, she is the co-founder of the Southern Multilingualisms and Diversities Consortium which contributed to initiating a new area of theoretical debate and research in 'southern sociolinguistics'. She serves on the editorial boards of ten international journals and book series, has over 140 peer reviewed publications and has authored 20 reports for government, international and transnational agencies

Kathleen has designed and taught at Masters’ Degree and Post-graduate Diploma levels in language policy and planning, and bilingual and multilingual education at the Universities of Cape Town and Antwerp. She received a BA (Hons) from Rhodes University; MPhil (Language Education, cum laude) University of Cape Town; and PhD (Bilingualism) Stockholm University. She supervises PhD students interested in bi-/multilingualism, decolonial and southern linguistics. She considers that it is necessary at this time to turn attention to how research in multilingualism and knowledge systems of post-colonial societies can contribute to the transformationation of education and academia in times of global anxiety and human displacement.

Extraordinary Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of the Western Cape, South Africa,Honorary Research Fellow, Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa,External Partner (Southern Hemisphere), Sustainable Development in a Diverse World [SUS.DIV, a European Union Network of Excellence]http://www.susdiv.org/,International Advisor to the National Multilingual Education Resource Centre(NMRC), Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhihttp://www.nmrc-jnu.org/,Ambassador, Minority Research Network, Erasmus School of Law,Erasmus University, Rotterdam http://www.frg.eur.nl/pub/sectie_staats_en_bestuursrecht/minorityresearchnetwork/,AILA Research Network: Language Policy,Consortium on Training in Language Documentation and Conservation,Literacy Expert, UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy (Bilingualism) Stockholm University

• Master of Philosophy University of Cape Town

• Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Rhodes University

• Bachelor or Arts Rhodes University

Work history

University of South Australia, 2008 to the present

The Human and Social Sciences Council of South Africa, 2005-2007

The Project for the Study of Alternative Education in Suth Africa, University of Cape Town, 1993-2005

The National Language Project, Cape Town, 1988-1993