Video Discussion: Teaching and Learning Resources for Minority Languages

Transcript

Andreea Cârstocea: Hello and welcome to this ECMI online talk, which is based on the latest special issue published in the Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe. My name is Andreea Cârstocea and I am editor of this journal. I am very happy to host this session. Before starting, I would like to inform everyone that we will be recording this session.

Before introducing the moderator of this online talk, I would like to say a few words about the Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe — JEMIE in short. JEMIE is a fully online, fully open access academic journal issued by the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, Germany. We are indexed in the Web of Science, Scopus, the Directory of Open Access Journals and other major indexing databases. The journal publishes academic articles on minority issues from a variety of perspectives including ethnopolitics, democratization, conflict, diversity management, minority and human rights, and so on.

The webinar that we are presenting today is entitled "Teaching and Learning Resources for Minority Languages" and is based on the homonymous special issue published in JEMIE last month, guest edited by Maarit Jaakkola from the University of Gothenburg and Boglára Straszer from Dalarna University in Sweden. Maarit Jaakkola is with us today and will be moderating this webinar. She holds a PhD in social sciences in journalism and works as co-director at the Centre for Nordic Media Research, Nordicom, at the University of Gothenburg. She is also an associate professor at the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication at the University of Gothenburg and an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University in Finland. Maarit, many thanks for guest editing the special issue and for moderating this webinar today. You have the floor.

Maarit Jaakkola: Thank you very much, Andreea. We are happy to have four presenters today — contributors to our very fresh special issue. A warm welcome to all of you.

Let me briefly introduce the central ideas behind this special issue before we move to the presentations. "Teaching and Learning Resources for Minority Languages in Europe" was the topic of our special issue. The issue includes six research articles, two book reviews and an introduction. Together they cover eleven European minority languages — some more widely recognized as national minority languages, such as Basque, Catalan and Meänkieli, and others less so, such as Tatar and Ladino.

This special issue grew out of a research initiation project that took place in 2024, called the Production of Learning Resources of, for and by the National Minorities — LARMIN for short. The project was funded by the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation and consisted of three workshops held in three cities in Sweden. These workshops brought together researchers, educators and policy makers to discuss production perspectives — something we observed to be not very well conceptualized and often less visible in more pedagogically oriented discussions.

After comparing vocabulary across different languages and countries, we settled on the term "teaching and learning resources" or TLR as an umbrella concept to describe the wide variety of materials used for learning and pedagogies. There is an emerging area within educational sciences called materials development which provides a very good foundation for these studies. However, that research mostly deals with English, either as a second language, English for specific purposes, or foreign language learning. When it comes to minority or minoritized languages, this perspective is far less explored.

We often use terms such as pedagogical materials, curriculum or classroom materials, didacticized or authentic texts, semantic learning materials, or even educational media to describe these diverse materials. Each term emphasizes slightly different things. One key aspect is the direction of communication: is it interaction guided by the teacher, by the learner, or through peer learning? Sometimes the roles of the teacher and learner are mixed or blurred. We most often think of textbooks, but in the project and also in the special issue, we see quite clearly that almost anything can become a teaching and learning resource.

For example, one teacher told us in the workshops how they used fidget toys — those colourful handheld objects designed for stress relief. She had discovered one at home and took it into her classroom to teach numbers and colours. Teachers are very creative in coming up with different didactic arrangements. But it is very important to understand the conditions for these kinds of activities, material uses and production. It is important to understand the sociological structures behind what shapes the production, mediation and reception of materials, and how we can support this — especially for lesser-taught languages that do not necessarily have any professional textbooks.

For example, in Sweden, Finnish teachers often use textbooks from Finland, their kin-state, but those books are originally written for another group of learners in another society — for migrants living in Finland — and they are not culturally adapted to the Swedish context. Meanwhile, the Swedish government is struggling to find a domestic textbook producer who could create materials aligned with national curriculum goals for the national minority language. It is not easy at all. The study of these production structures is essentially interdisciplinary, spanning linguistics, education, pedagogy and minority cultural studies.

What we have been doing in this special issue is pioneering and exploratory work — conceptualizing, identifying and observing the uses and production of these different materials. We think it is crucial to distinguish between didactics and materials. They are closely connected but not the same. Rather than being a certain genre or being reduced to textual characteristics, TLRs are perhaps any kinds of products, processes or environments that can be harnessed for the interactional processes of teaching and learning.

We also want to suggest, at least through this special issue, that TLRs play a central role in the maintenance, revitalization and documentation of lesser-spoken languages and minority and minoritized cultures. With this special issue, we have embarked on a journey that is expected to continue in future. Areas for further exploration include open educational resources and the manual work of teachers, which became very visible in many of the articles.

Now we move on to our guest speakers. You can leave your questions in the chat box and we will take them up at the end of the session. Our first case explores Minecraft — which is not a textbook, not a product, not even a process. It is an environment: the world's most popular gaming environment, created by the Swedish company Mojang. A fun fact: its founder, Marcus Persson, actually has a mother of Finnish origin, and Sweden Finns are one of the country's official national minorities.

The game has been translated into Northern Sámi by Lehmet Mahtte, who is one of our speakers and a student at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Norway. We will also hear from Rauni Aarela-Vihriälä from the University of Lapland and Line Reichelt Foreland from the University of Agder, who will discuss how Minecraft can function as an indigenous teaching and learning resource. Please, the screen is yours.

Rauni Aarela-Vihriälä: Thank you. It is nice to be here to share our work on using Minecraft as a Sámi learning resource. Today we are presenting our article "Building Indigenous Futures with Minecraft: A Sámi Educational Perspective." We have written this article together with Lehmet Mahtte, a Sámi language Minecraft translator, teacher, student and project worker from the Sámi University of Applied Sciences, and Line Reichelt Foreland, a teacher educator and PhD researcher at the University of Agder.

I myself have previously worked as a teacher educator at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences and am currently working as a doctoral researcher at the University of Lapland in the Finnish part of Sápmi. Our article is based on a joint development project carried out at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences and the University of Agder. In our presentation today, Lehmet Mahtte will start by talking about the use of the Sámi language in Minecraft, and Line will then discuss teaching Sámi-related content through Minecraft in connection with the Norwegian curriculum reform which requires that all children in Norway learn about Sámi topics. She will also present our development project. After that I will present the use of Minecraft and its possibilities in indigenous educational and research contexts. Please welcome Lehmet Mahtte.

Lehmet Mahtte: Good day and thanks. I grew up with games, and one game that specifically caught my attention when I was younger was Minecraft, because of the endless possibilities it offers for exploring your creativity. It is a learning environment where you can learn basic natural science — how to collect wood, what you can make from it, how to build, how the nature around you is affected if you use it too much, and how to collect and use resources sustainably. That is just a picture of what I saw in Minecraft as a child.

I had always wanted to play the game in Sámi, because I thought it would be wonderful to play it in my mother tongue. It would also connect me more closely to the environment. But there was no option for that. Luckily, I had a friend who wanted to learn Sámi — he is Sámi himself — and he suggested he had used Minecraft to learn Norwegian. I suggested he use it in Sámi, and he replied that it was not available in Sámi. I said that was true and offered to translate it for him. So I sat down and began translating, which took eight months to complete, because I had school and other things to do at the same time. It was entirely of my own initiative and I did not receive any payment for it.

Some time later, Line contacted me about the project that Rauni has presented. She wanted to collaborate with the Sámi community in making a teaching and learning resource for the Sámi community, but also for non-Sámi communities to learn about Sámi culture, and she needed help with Sámi perspectives. I was one of those who contributed. This is quite important in a lot of work connected to minorities — that it is a genuine collaboration with the minority community.

During the project, we added resources to the game that made it possible to see Sámi cultural materials and objects normally connected to Sámi culture. But it was also important to me that the language was visible, and that this resource was available for Sámi communities. We have made the game world available in Northern Sámi and are also working on completing it in Southern Sámi, which represents an even smaller group.

On the left side of our slides you can see one example where you can actually meet my game character, who speaks Sámi and tells about the translation work I did. The Sámi Parliament of Norway gave me a language award for contributions to making the language more visible in society. On the right side you can see some examples of things I translated. That is a brief overview of the translation work and the presence of Sámi in our resource.

Line Reichelt Foreland: I want to underline the importance of what Lehmet Mahtte has done, because translating this game is not just the first words you see — there are thousands of words and terminology that need to be translated in order to play the game fully in Northern Sámi. It is a huge piece of work, and this project would not have been possible without his previous effort.

I work in mainstream teacher education — Norwegian teacher education — and we recently had this curriculum reform. Sámi topics were included before, but now they are more integrated. They are part of the overall descriptions in the curriculum which all teachers need to include, and are mentioned in all subject plans except mathematics. But the problem is that many teachers do not know how to do this.

I had an idea that using games could allow people to encounter Sámi topics. It was vital, however, that a project like this also gives back to the Sámi communities — that it is playable not just for the Norwegian curriculum, but also for the Sámi curriculum used in Norway. It has to be available for both. I cannot demand something for my own use without giving something back, and of course collaborating closely with the Sámi community to know what to include and how to do it.

The idea was to create a game world — a game platform environment — with a wide range of topics playable in both Norwegian and Sámi schools, available in Norwegian and Sámi. As Lehmet Mahtte said, we now have Northern Sámi, it is partially playable in Southern Sámi, and it is also playable in Norwegian and English. We are continuing to add languages. We created this to address Sámi topics directly but also to create teaching and learning resources for Sámi communities and to expand language domains. It is important to have resources available in your own language. This game platform that so many children and young people are using should also reflect something beyond the majority — children should be able to encounter Sámi culture in the digital environments they already use.

We have created this large game platform, using the Sámi Parliament on the Norwegian side as a starting point, from which you can be teleported to diverse locations important in Sámi communities. We now have many thousands of downloads per year, so it has had a significant impact.

I want to briefly show two ways this project can move forward. The two pictures here are from master's projects at my university. On the left is an art project where a student collaborated with Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara to recreate his artwork in Minecraft. If you jump through a portal in the game you arrive on the other side where the artwork is laid out as a landscape you can walk through — an example of how you can interact with artwork. On the right is another master's project, where a student of mine used our Minecraft world as an example and inspiration. Students read a book about Sámi topics and then recreated parts of the scenery in Minecraft to demonstrate their understanding. The project on the left demanded somewhat more technical knowledge, and Lehmet Mahtte was very helpful there. The one on the right required no additional technical knowledge beyond what students were able to do themselves in the classroom. That is a brief overview of how this gaming platform can be used to further both Sámi topics in mainstream education and in indigenous communities.

Rauni Aarela-Vihriälä: In Sámi education, Minecraft offers many possibilities due to its sandbox nature, allowing the creation of materials that support culturally and linguistically grounded teaching. There are already many guides and resources in minority languages that Sámi teachers can draw on to develop their own contexts and versions suited to Sámi education. Minecraft encourages playfulness and collaboration, values and methods used in Sámi pedagogies, and it can be integrated as part of broader thematic units that connect traditional Sámi topics with digital learning. For example, students might work outdoors or in traditional learning environments with Sámi themes, and then continue exploring the same topics within the digital game world. Teacher students at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences have designed learning models integrating both approaches as part of their teaching practices.

One of the goals of our joint development project was also to develop digital teaching skills for Sámi teacher students in Sámi teacher education. During the project years, teacher students had several Minecraft tasks in their practice placements. Teacher students at Sámi University of Applied Sciences — known as Sámi Allaskuvla — come from four different countries, reflecting the whole of Sápmi, which we understand as a single area encompassing our different languages.

Looking at this through a research lens, Minecraft offers particular potential when exploring themes such as sustainability, justice and indigenous knowledge. In my current work in the REBOUND project, funded by the Strategic Research Council within the Research Council of Finland, we examine the justice of the green transition from an intergenerational perspective in northern Finland. As part of this, we have used Minecraft to visualize sustainability actions in northern Finland. We hired young people as summer workers to create Minecraft content based on both old and new map models. Last summer, we had the opportunity to participate in the Arctic Forum of Indigenous People's Dialogue and Arctic Youth Dialogue in Levi, Finland, where we presented a Minecraft world depicting sustainability and recycling opportunities in the Levi area, built on a real map of the area. Young people participating in the Arctic Forum played in this world, and it served as a starting point for discussions about the green transition.

Digital game platforms can act as meaningful tools for youth participation, and teaching through these platforms is particularly important in indigenous contexts, approaching technology from the perspectives of indigenous languages, cultures and ways of knowing. We have a great deal of resources available in several languages — if you are interested, you can visit our website, where there is an English button in the top right corner to download everything available. The project has officially concluded but we are still adding teaching and learning resources.

Maarit Jaakkola: Thank you very much. You have demonstrated very concretely, and with examples, the versatility of this gaming environment. Some researchers in gaming studies suggest that Minecraft is not a traditional game — it is an environment for play and interaction — and that may well be its greatest benefit. We will come to questions and answers at the end of the session. Thank you to Lehmet Mahtte, Rauni and Line for a very inspiring presentation.

Our next language has no recognized role in society and represents a much smaller community of speakers, but it also has a rich variety of teaching and learning resources. Our next speaker will talk about the Finnish Tatar community. She is Sabira Ståhlberg, an independent researcher and textbook author with roots in the Finnish Tatar community. Welcome, Sabira.

Sabira Ståhlberg: Thank you. The Tatar minority in Finland comprises today fewer than a thousand speakers. The minority was formed mainly between the 1860s and the 1920s. Mişar Tatar traders from the multicultural western Volga region first established themselves in the capital, St. Petersburg, and from there they began exploring markets in nearby Finland, which was an autonomous part of the Russian Empire until 1917.

By 1900, the men had brought their families to Finland and needed to educate their children. The Tatars were literate and had a positive attitude towards learning. As reformist Muslims, they also sent girls to school. They knew several languages already when they came to Finland and became even more multilingual there. Today all Tatars in the world are multilingual, because they live in minority situations everywhere — both in Russia and in the global diaspora.

The Tatars used Arabic script for their Turkic language in Finland until the 1960s, and many elderly community members never stopped using it, even as children and youth were taught the Latin script from the 1960s onwards. In Russia, the Tatars were forced to use the Cyrillic script and continue to be, but it has not been used in Finland.

The Tatars in Finland share a language and cultural sphere with Kazan Tatars, but their western Mişar language is strongly influenced by the neighbouring Finno-Ugric and Slavic languages. Kazan Tatar is usually seen as the normative Volga Tatar language. A footnote is needed here: there are several Tatar groups in addition to Volga Tatars — there are Crimean Tatars, Siberian Tatars, Qasim Tatars and others. The Tatars in Finland also share networks and a common linguistic and cultural sphere with other Turkic speakers — not only Turks, but also Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, and several groups in Siberia, the Caucasus and elsewhere in Central and North Asia and Eastern Europe.

A few words about Tatar education. Before the 1920s, Tatar children did not attend Finnish or Swedish schools. They had their own school taught by the imam, and a kindergarten was established around the same time, in the 1910s. Attempts to formalize the school structure failed, and only in 1948 was a public school established in Helsinki. This school had a Tatar and a Finnish teacher and pupils learned both languages alongside all usual subjects in the Finnish public school curriculum. It had to close in 1969 due to declining enrolment.

Tatar children and teenagers in Finland have learned language, culture and religion in the Tatar kindergarten and weekend school, through many courses taught by international and local teachers, and at summer and winter camps. Traditions and cooking are also taught. There are religious congregations in Helsinki and Tampere, and there is a cultural and sports association that arranges celebrations and all kinds of educational, cultural and sports events. During these events, Tatars of all ages participate with presentations, performances, songs, recitations of poetry and texts. There have also been theatre groups, choirs, pop music and rock bands performing regularly. The Tatars also support new parents with a baby box containing Tatar-language CDs, DVDs, books and games for young children.

The Tatars are keen writers and publishers of all kinds of material. There have been over 300 publications printed during the past century. Most deal with language, religion, culture and heritage, history and food, and they come in all kinds of formats and genres from drama and poetry to prose and memoirs. There have also been several magazines and bulletins, which are very popular and still read by all ages. In terms of teaching and learning materials, a special category are the photocopied informal materials — fairy tales and stories created for the kindergarten and the Tatar weekend school. In recent years, easy-to-read literature has also been translated and the world's first Tatar easy-language materials have been created. The amount of online materials and digital formats is growing, and there is now a web dictionary for Finland Tatar, today recognized as a specific variation of Mişar.

All this has been achieved because the Tatars have well-organized communities. They could be seen as a middleman minority — highly educated, possessing their own financial resources, with solid multilingual and multicultural experience. They came from a multilingual and multicultural minority situation into another minority situation, and they have a large international network.

Looking at teaching and learning resources over the past century, what stands out first is the influence of pedagogical developments in Finland and internationally, in the Tatar and Turkic worlds, along with international inspirations from other languages and cultures and a great deal of adaptation, openness and flexibility in creating materials for learners. The formal and printed works mostly deal with language, culture and religion — religion being largely a male sphere, as most of the writers have been imams. Guest authors and teachers have also adapted, for example, Turkish language readers to Tatar.

In fact, local female teachers have produced the bulk of informal materials. They have taught at the kindergarten from the very beginning, at the school, and at camps, and have prepared events for over a century. These women have little or no formal pedagogical training. Instead, they have learned while teaching, and they are very engaged — letting their creativity flow into texts, exercises, drawings, games, songs, recitations of poetry, and so on. Their contribution far exceeds any other contribution to teaching and learning materials, whether by guest teachers or male teachers.

Today, the challenges facing the Tatars include an increasing need to produce more web-based materials for multilingual learners. The group is also diminishing rapidly — not only because of mixed families and a society where Finnish and other languages dominate, but also for demographic reasons. The political situation of the Tatars in Russia and globally also influences the Tatars in Finland and their possibilities to network and receive teaching and learning materials from other countries.

I would like to wrap up by showing some teaching and learning materials produced by Tatars in Finland. From the top right there is a certificate from the Tatar school in 1917, printed in Kazan. Below it are religious books. In the top middle are fairy tales and stories prepared by female teachers for the kindergarten and the school. Top left is a modern multilingual word learning book for children adapted from Kazan Tatar. And in the left corner are Latin script and Cyrillic script easy-to-read books. Thank you for your attention.

Maarit Jaakkola: Thank you, Sabira. Fascinating how many different teaching and learning materials there are despite the small size of the speech community. Thank you for describing the possibilities and opportunities that are available. Now we can move to questions and answers. If any of you in the audience have questions or comments, please leave them in the Q&A box and we will address them.

Let us start with Minecraft, as there is a comment in the chat about the opportunities it offers. If we go back in the history of media and virtual learning environments, we also had Habbo Hotel, which was used quite widely in the Nordic countries — a virtual room where young people could create an avatar and interact with others. There was also Second Life, where universities established their own lecture halls to reach new audiences, and then it suddenly disappeared. So we are now at a new stage of development. What seems truly new in what you have presented is the playfulness and the constructive idea — that you can concretely do something, you can create whole worlds.

I actually saw this in my own son's activities: when he and his friend were eight years old, they were constructing a city called Shapon, a combination of China and Japan, and they were reading about Japanese and Chinese culture, traditions and architecture, and they really constructed a whole country where people could interact and live. So using creativity is a genuine benefit. We also have a comment from Björn Rehnström, who shares that they have been using Minecraft for the small Swedish dialect Elfdalian — spoken by 3,000 people in Älvdalen in Sweden and recognized by the Council of Europe and UNESCO — for five years, with many identified benefits. Minecraft has helped make the language more popular among young people. They have also produced podcasts in Elfdalian, YouTube films, and translated several psalms for church use. Very much creativity around there. So Minecraft is being used for many minority languages. But I was thinking about findability — how do you find these different materials that might be out there, if you are not already playing Minecraft as an adult?

Line Reichelt Foreland: That could be a real challenge, because people create things often in different groups. Minecraft communities are very much about sharing. In Norway, many schools have access to the education version of Minecraft through their Microsoft 365 package and have gathered quite a few resources in their library. Otherwise, you do need to search. I will mention as an example that one of the reasons we did this Minecraft project was because I saw a presentation about a Māori world that is available in the Minecraft library — you can just search for it on the education platform. There are things to find, and it is a question of how well you search and how connected you are to relevant communities.

Rauni Aarela-Vihriälä: Exactly. The education game accessible through Microsoft 365 offers a library that is public for each user. However, we may not yet have taken the opportunity to place our resource there, so for now you need to go through our link — by word of mouth or through reading an article about the game. That is certainly a way forward: gathering such materials in one place.

Maarit Jaakkola: Exactly. We also saw in our project that, to circulate the products of very small-scale production, teachers and educators in non-formal and informal settings who create teaching and learning resources should embrace a culture of openness and sharing. Many educators are doing good work and producing good materials, but how to make them findable, how to make them really circulate among the relevant groups — that is a real challenge. I would like to ask Sabira as well: how are teaching and learning resources in Tatar found? I imagine many of them are only available in print.

Sabira Ståhlberg: If you are looking at the printed materials, they are usually sent out to members of the congregations and community. The online materials are partly only available for members and partly open. For instance, the easy-to-read books are free and open to everyone. Journals published for the community are usually only for community members. Today, there is also the challenge that many people are no longer members of the congregation. Until the beginning of the 2000s, most Tatars were members, but now many distance themselves from Islam because they feel it has been shaped by more recent migrants and is no longer something they want to identify with. That is why it is increasingly important to have freely available materials for everyone.

Maarit Jaakkola: Reaching out to community members is one challenge. But how to reach the majority? I think we need to try to integrate available materials into majority structures. You have good conditions for that in Norway, since Sámi topics are now in the curriculum and everyone must learn about them. Have you also been thinking of producing teachers' materials to guide the use of the Sámi Minecraft for those who are not members of the Sámi community?

Line Reichelt Foreland: We have a great deal. On our website, we have teaching resources and suggestions on how to use each piece of content in the game world. Of course people can use it as they wish, but there are suggestions available. Small videos show what the content is and how it can be used. Creating those accompanying resources is an important part of the project — not just creating digital resources but also creating guidance on how to use them.

Rauni Aarela-Vihriälä: To continue from that — overall in Sámi teaching materials, the amount of available material has been growing across all of Sápmi, in Norway, Sweden and Finland. For example, the Sámi Parliament in Finland maintains a full overview of Sámi teaching materials that can be shared with schools, and that situation has been improving steadily. In our courses for minority teacher students, including those about Sámi cultures and languages, students develop projects where they use different kinds of materials to teach about Sámi topics. Raising teachers' knowledge about Sámi education is very timely in the educational field right now, and that applies not only to Sámi education but to other minority cultures and languages as well.

Maarit Jaakkola: It is good to know the situation is improving and that majority actors are supporting you — both in producing and circulating materials and in improving their findability. As we can see from the work described today, it is often a double task: creating materials for learners and then also creating accompanying commentary and guidance for teachers. When talking about the production of teaching and learning materials — Sabira, you have been producing easy-language Tatar materials yourself. Can you say something about that?

Sabira Ståhlberg: Yes. I have been working with easy language in Finland Swedish. The books were originally written in Finland Swedish. We started by producing new easy-language versions — in Bulgarian and in Serbian. I then met Fazile Nازin, who is a translator and also a former teacher at the Tatar school. We started in 2018 working on translations of books and also preparing new material in Tatar, because creating an easy-language version means simplifying the standard language and finding words and ways of expression that are easy to understand — shorter words, simpler vocabulary and short sentences.

We faced the challenge that Tatar is spoken in various ways. There are not only Mişar Tatars but considerable diversity within the community, and we also wanted to make the materials available in Cyrillic script so that Tatars in Russia could use the literature. What we did was create an international easy-language Tatar, using Finland Tatar words but also explaining them in various ways. For example, when repeating a word, we could use another word from Kazan Tatar, or a word that is more internationally recognizable.

Maarit Jaakkola: This relates to a question left in the chat by Victoria, who wanted to know more about your statement that all Tatars are multilingual. You have already answered her in writing, but Victoria also highlights that in Ukraine, for example, young people around 35 to 40 years old speak only Russian and have little or no knowledge of Tatar. Is there a need for multilingual teaching and learning materials?

Sabira Ståhlberg: Absolutely. It depends on how we define multilingualism. If we look only at native tongues — what people have learned as children at home — many people are nowadays monolingual because of nationalist politics and the suppression of the Tatar language. But if we look at what people have learned throughout their lives, and use a broader definition of multilingualism, we see that people are multilingual. If we count languages learned later in life as well as at home, then most people in this context are multilingual. So yes, we need multilingual materials, but it is very difficult to create them because every person is multilingual in their own way — every individual has a personal multilingualism.

What we are trying to do is create materials in the languages we know people are using. In Finland, we are creating the Ibakar website in Tatar, Finnish and English — because we know that most Tatars in Finland also know English, as do many readers around the world who can use the English version. We are also creating the materials in Finnish so that Tatar children attending Finnish school can understand. We are making word lists and working on expressions and proverbs, trying to reach all ages — both those who have not yet learned English and those who already have.

Maarit Jaakkola: You are all doing a really great job today — as practitioners and producers of teaching and learning materials, but also as researchers. We are very happy to have heard about your experiences and very glad you are part of the special issue. Please take a look at our special issue, which is completely open access online, and please do share the link in your networks. We want to say a big thank you to the European Centre for Minority Issues for hosting this online talk — thank you Andreea and all your colleagues — and thank you for the fantastic collaboration on the special issue. We look forward to further research on this topic. Thank you.