As of the 2024-2025 school year, Normal West High School’s Foreign Language department officially changed its name to the Modern Languages department.
Department chair, Val Higby, known to her students in all of her German classes as Frau Higby, initiated the conversation to get rid of the word “foreign” from their title.
This change in title came from wanting to be more representative of languages that are common in the community, as well as a constant effort to be more inclusive.
“This word ‘foreign’ has more of a negative connotation associated with it. For example, Spanish is not a foreign language here,” Higby says. “There are so many people that live here that speak Spanish, and even if you don’t, maybe your neighbor does…it isn’t really this foreign concept to be speaking another language.”
The NCWHS Modern Language department followed a trend to transition from their old title.
Frau acknowledges that “a lot of universities were the ones to really kick it off, and then the High School foreign language department started making this shift to either World Languages or Modern Languages.”
In order to encourage more people to take language classes, because “we…don’t value it as much as a society as a lot of other countries do,” Higby states “we wanted to make it feel a bit more welcoming.”
The name change was not a brand new idea. In fact, “It has been floating around [the] department at West for… the last five years [or so],” Higby acknowledges.
However, big changes like this take some time to get officially changed bureaucratically.
Part of the process included West’s department meeting with Normal Community High School to discuss what a title change would mean for both schools.
“We thought maybe there would be a little bit of debate back and forth,” Higby says. “But, they were totally on board too so that was cool.”
The motion to leave behind the word “foreign” was agreed upon, but what word to replace it sparked some more conversation between the schools.
West originally offered the word “world,” but “Community brought up ‘modern languages,’” Frau says. “We are pretty agreeable here at West,” so the compromise was easily made for the “Foreign” Language department to become “Modern”.
To finalize the switch, Higby contacted the Secondary Education director in Unit 5, Director Diedra Ripka, who got the motion passed free of School Board debate.
Because the department is so young, in terms of having multiple first year teachers, (in both high schools), the new title marks “a starting point” for their careers.
There is also a new “feeling of unity” within the team. “I think change is good,” Frau notes “It’s often hard so it was… nice that it was so easy and…the start of making collaboration easier across town.”
Name changes, such as this one, “sort of [fly] under the radar,” because the only noticeable difference is on documents, but the words represent more than a title — they are significant to the growth of the department improving the culture around secondary language learning.
