Florian Znaniecki's humanistic sociology in Australian studies on cultural and linguistic diversity and the implications for education

Abstract

Florian Znaniecki’s humanistic approach to sociology was introduced into the Australian context and extended by Jerzy Smolicz, from the School of Education at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. Humanistic sociology has been used to investigate social and cultural life from the perspective of human beings as active participants in the dynamic process of creating and maintaining the cultural values of their group. The main aims of this paper are to review some key humanistic sociological studies related to Australian cultural and linguistic diversity approach and consider their implications for languages education in Australia. Smolicz and his research students began to use Znaniecki’s humanistic sociological approach to investigate the attitudes of minority individuals from communities, such as Polish, Italian, Ethiopian, Indian, Arabic and Uighur, toward maintaining their cultural values, especially their ethnic language. The attitudes of individuals from the mainstream Anglo-Celtic Australian group towards cultural and linguistic diversity has also been studied. A more recent study has focused on the diverse cultural identities and home language use of year 11 students from six secondary schools. The findings from these studies provide support for the most recent draft of the Australian curriculum on languages and its plans to develop curriculum in nine key languages.