St Margaret’s College’s International Baccalaureate Co-ordinator, Val Eves, has spent the past year on the curriculum development team, building a higher-level option for IB Language and Culture.
Language and Culture already runs at SMC as a standard-level subject, examining, through sociolinguistics, how language shapes how we understand different societies and one another. Val describes it as a course that trains students to notice things about the world they would otherwise take for granted, while asking them to reflect on their own linguistic and cultural backgrounds along the way.
As part of the development team for this project, Val will travel next term to The Hague, home to one of the IB’s curriculum headquarters, to finalise the higher-level curriculum alongside academics, assessment specialists and curriculum managers from other subject areas. Once the redesign completes a final round of piloting, likely in the next year or two, schools worldwide will be able to offer Language and Culture at both the standard and higher levels.
This is not the first time Val has shaped IB curriculum at this level. She was also part of the recent global refresh of the IB History course, work she had begun earlier, and that is being released this year.
At St Margaret’s, Language and Culture has built a reputation among students for changing how they see the world, and themselves. Assessment includes an autoethnography, in which students examine their own experience through the lens of the course, alongside a running language and culture diary. Several recent graduates have gone on to study linguistics or related fields at university.
St Margaret’s is proud to support teachers like Val in contributing at this level. Their involvement in international curriculum design brings direct benefit back to the classroom, keeping our programmes at the leading edge of what the IB offers.
Learn more about the IB at St Margaret’s here.
