Professor Mila Schwartz has made it her mission to encourage bilingualism in Israel, and years of research inspired by her personal experiences have made a difference. Schwartz will discuss the changes in Israel's language education policies on October 5 at UCLA.

UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, October 3, 2016 - Shortly after immigrating to Israel from Russia in 1993, Dr. Mila Schwartz gave birth to her first child. Her hope was to raise her first son to be fluent in Hebrew, Russian, and even English and Arabic. But numerous educators advised Schwartz to focus solely on Hebrew, the language of national unity.

Official policy has shifted since Schwartz, now an Associate Professor in Language and Education at Oranim Academic College of Education in Tivon, Israel, immigrated to Israel. On October 5, she will discuss changes in language education policy, and the influence of massive waves of immigration from the former Soviet Union, in her talk at UCLA entitled “Linguistic Coexistence and Bilingual Education in Israel.”

Some of the changes are thanks to Schwartz’s personal experience as a mother and linguist; her moments of success and failure in supporting her sons’ heritage language learning; and her desire to raise her children in a multilingual environment. These dynamics inspired her research interest, which resulted in the development of a novel research domain, Family Language Policy.

The current head of the MEd Language Program at Oranim College was born to a doctor of physics and an engineer. As she tells it, the common joke in Jewish families at the time was that a Jewish child would either be an engineer or a musician. However, Schwartz jokes that she “had no ear for music and wasn’t good at engineering or math, so I took up literature and language.”

She was first exposed to English at the age of 5 and developed a deep interest in language that took her to the Pedagogical State University of Leningrad. Schwartz pursued her interest in languages while completing her BA in Russian Language and Literature and Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language.

Two years after completing her degree and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Schwartz made the decision to immigrate to Israel. After giving birth to her first child, she “decided consciously to struggle to bring up bilingual and trilingual children” despite the lack of support and even outright opposition from educators she encountered.

In 1995, shortly after the birth of her second child, she pursued an MA in Special Education at the University of Haifa. As part of her research, she began to follow the development of her two sons as they grew up in a multilingual environment.

“My children sometimes felt like experimental rabbits,” Schwartz laughs.

In 2003, she began a three-year PhD program with the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa, where her thesis focused on the relationship between linguistic behavior and psychological processes, the transfer of skills from Russian to Hebrew and English, and advantages for bi-literacy and tri-literacy.

After obtaining her PhD, Schwartz continued her research on psycho and social linguistic development in bilingual education as a postdoctoral fellow at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Today, she focuses specifically on preschools and early bilingual development in Arabic and Hebrew, linguistic and non-linguistic strategies for development, and cross linguistic influence. She is currently the sole preschool bilingual education expert in Israel and is editing a book which will compare models of preschool bilingual education systems in Europe. Schwartz will contribute a chapter on Israel’s own teaching strategies and language policies.

This expertise has put her in a position that today she advises Israel’s Minister of Education on bilingual education.

But this research and Schwartz’s advocacy for bilingual education is not just rooted in simple linguistics and the benefits she sees in exposing children to multiple languages. It’s also about the complexity of Israel, a country which has experienced waves of immigration since its birth and the coexistence of two official languages, Hebrew and Arabic, with English as semi-official language.

“Alongside our deep devotion to Israel and feeling of patriotism and belonging to the Jewish people, we have multiple identities and roots in Israel because we come from all over, and it is a fascinating and complex social phenomenon,” Schwartz explains. “Language is just one reflection of this complexity.”

For more information about the event or to RSVP, click here or use the RSVP button below.
Date: Wednesday, October 5
Time: 4:30-6 PM
Place: Bunche Hall 10383