Abstract
Discourses about, policies for, and practices of multilingualism are often deeply rooted in histories of migration, colonialism and enslavement, the historical coexistence of multiple communities, or combinations of these. Linguistic diversity in a given context is often framed in terms of binaries such as locals/foreigners, indigenous/exogenous populations, autochthonous/allochthonous languages, or even a combination of these. These discourses about social, linguistic, and/or ethnic groups also involve any number of (well-aligned or contradictory) ideals or goals about language maintenance, the integration of new arrivals, social equity, and/or language revitalization, with some aiming to unify ethnolinguistic groups and others aiming to create or maintain distinctions between them. The dynamic processes of “languaging” and “ethnifying” (García 2010, p. 520)—and the ways that these processes interact— are highly mutable and context-dependent. Thus, there are a range of etic and emic definition(s) and lived experiences of ethnolinguistic groupness: at times these can create solidarity, e.g., inspiring acts of linguistic citizenship (Williams & Stroud 2015), and at other times they can be detrimental, e.g., resulting in ethnolinguistic cornering (Møller 2022) or unchecked raciolinguistic ideologies (Alim 2016).
In schools, the divvying up of the local population based on socio/ethnolinguistic affiliation—whether real or perceived, fleeting or durable—is further compounded by categorizing devices specific to the project of education and instruction. Proficiency tests, teacher certifications, individualized education plans, mastery of so-called academic language (Flores 2020), and the pervasive concept of the word gap (Cushing 2022) are some of the gatekeeping devices that create groups of insiders and outsiders for educational, social, and political purposes (van Avermaet 2022). Such discourses about achievement, proficiency, and dis/ability are thus laminated onto discourses and policies about societal multilingualism and individual plurilingualism in locally specific ways (Holland & Leander 2004). Teachers—the most influential arbiters of language policy (García and Menken 2010, Hornberger & Johnson 2007)—must contend with realities on the ground that are not considered in “big data” approaches to understanding language diversity in a given community (c.f. Moore, Pietikäinen & Blommaert 2010). Thus, a potential solution is to turn an ethnographic lens on “language as a crucial tool for redressing social inequality and promoting emancipation” (Jaspers 2018, p. 718), centering educational institutions and their communities as the major players in effecting social change.
The four empirical contributions in this Special Issue examine the language ideologies, practices, and policies of teachers and students, as well as the ways in which they are informed by, constrained by, in tension with, or pushing back against broader sociopolitical discourses about “types” of people, their (imagined) communities, and where (or if) particular languages and their speakers belong. This Special Issue builds on the active discussion currently underway in the international educational linguistics and sociolinguistics community(ies) about raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa 2015; Alim, Rickford, & Ball 2016), linguistic racism (Dovchin 2020), the exclusionary aspects of ‘academic language’ (Valdés 2004; Jensen & Thompson 2020; Thompson 2021), linguistic discrimination in assessment (Schissel & Khan 2021), and inclusive education for language learners with disabilities (Veck, Dovigo, & Proyer 2021; Migliarini & Cioé-Peña 2022), as well as the need to examine these complex questions with the appropriate rigor. Taking an intersectional, international, comparative perspective on the role of language education and education research, this collection of papers illustrates how alliances, groups, and categories are made and unmade by exploring how language policy arbiters in schools engage with (ethno/socio)linguistic group labels alongside the categories created by the contemporary education system. The contributions to this Special Issue interrogate how the groups that are produced by social and educational institutions overlap with or are durably laminated other types of “groupness,” and how such overlaps and laminations may be problematic, for whom, under which circumstances. The international cases presented here aim to address this issue as it arises in different sociopolitical contexts, at different levels of education, and at various points along the policy-to-practice continuum.
After a brief Introduction written by the guest editor, Platzgummer, Thoma, and Telser open the Special Issue by discussing the ways in which teachers in German-language Kindergartens in an officially trilingual region of Italy are grappling with the enrollment of children who do not “belong” to any of the region’s long-institutionalized ethnolinguistic groups, but whose families have opted for German-language education for their children. Anzures Tapia continues with an ethnographic exploration of early childhood education in an
Indigenous pre-school in the Yucatan peninsula, where the bureaucratic and training demands on the school’s only teacher—while meant as a means of bolstering Maya-language education—diminished both her time resources for teaching (in) Maya and her perception of herself and others as Maya speakers. Leone-Pizzighella’s contribution moves the discussion to the secondary education level, exploring how students in an ethnically diverse urban middle school in Northeastern Italy explicitly and implicitly orient to social, linguistic, ethnic, and educational categories by policing each other’s language during a group work session, as well as how the students’ teachers reflected on how to mitigate such interactions in the future. Puranen’s contribution moves on to upper secondary contexts with an examination of vocational education and training (VET) in Finland, where the paper examines through interview and discourse data the stances and practices of vocational educators against raciolinguistic stances in their schools. De Korne’s contribution continues the discussion outside of K-12 education and explores via the lens of linguistic citizenship how adult migrants create alternative discourses and spaces for their existence in Norwegian society. The empirical contributions to the Special Issue are then discussed in a commentary piece written by David Martin Block, Professor of Sociolinguistics who has published widely on the effects of late-21st century capitalism, neoliberalism, and internationalization on education.