Students and faculty played language trivia games and celebrated their linguistic diversity at an event on Wednesday.
AACC hosted the Mother Language Day event, celebrating International Mother Language Day, a worldwide holiday recognized by the United Nations General Assembly in 2002, for the first time in the history of the college.
“AACC has such a wide diversity amongst the students and the staff,” Health Sciences Admissions Coordinator Valerie Bardhi said. “[There is] a lot to learn about our current students and how to support them.”
According to Owen Silverman Andrews, an instructional specialist for the English Language Learning department, students such as AACC alumnus Mohammed Reza, a former ELL student wore traditional Bengali clothing for International Mother Language Day back in 2018 when he attended AACC, celebrated the event before the college “recognized” it.
“Our students were really the first ones who put it on the record,” Andrews said. “It’s no surprise that our students are awesome.”
Bardhi said the event “gauges interest” for language justice on campus.
“It was an opportunity for us to have a collective and collaborative discussion,” Bardhi said. “We’re doing a lot of work as faculty and staff to hear from our students what’s happening and how we can be better.”
Bardhi said the event was an opportunity to be her “true self” on campus as a staff member.
“I have … a background of being [a] first generation American. My mother language is not English, it’s Albanian,” Bardhi said. “When I’m with my family, my extended family … my speaking is very sharp … they thought it was quite charming that I had such an American accent.”
First-year physics student Matt Bacho said the event gave him a “new perspective.”
“[The event is] bringing to light that since this is an institution of higher education, you know, we get very caught up in the mindset of … you need to write your papers in a specific way [or] you need to speak this specific way to be a functioning member of society,” Bacho said. “I think we should have some ways to sort of challenge the inherent bias that comes with expecting very American English westernized terminology as being equivalent to intellect.”
Second-year transfer studies student Maria Isabel Catot said the event shows appreciation for “all kinds of languages and dialects within America and all over the world.”
Catot added: “Wow, they actually appreciate not just English, but they also appreciate Spanish, Portuguese, Filipino, Italian [and] even sign languages.”
