How a Heteroglossic Policy Becomes Monoglossic in Context: An Ethnography of Paraguayan Bilingual Education Policy

• In Event: Ethnographic Research in Multilingual Contexts: Microlevel Perspectives on Macrolevel Policies

Abstract

Educational language policy (ELP)—or policy about the use and instruction of languages in education—can be used as an instrument of power over others and also as an instrument for empowerment by and for marginalized groups (Johnson, 2013). While some policy texts may seem more clearly restrictive and others more clearly counter-hegemonic, policy texts are always polyvalent, and only detailed analyses of how a policy is practiced in context—or appropriated—reveal its degree of restriction or affordance for speakers. Recent ethnographic work on language policy provides a nuanced picture of the ways that ELP takes shape through the actions of teachers, administrators, children, and community members (Hornberger, 2005; Hornberger & Johnson, 2007; McCarty, 2011; Menken & Garcia, 2010), often in unexpected ways. This work is important for understanding why policies succeed or fail (Collins, 2011). The purpose of this research is to advance our understanding of how large-scale ELP is appropriated in local contexts and, in particular, how and why some appropriations of a potentially empowering policy fail to have an empowering effect. In Paraguay a national policy for universal bilingual education in Spanish and Guarani ordered the use and instruction of both languages for all students—upending a long history of exclusion of Guarani and its speakers from formal education. By requiring that Guarani-dominant students be provided with instruction in the language they understand best while developing both Spanish and Guarani throughout their education, the policy is potentially empowering. However, practices have yet to yield this promise. This ethnographic study documents how the policy was appropriated in two schools—one rural and one urban—and it uses the concept of sociolinguistic scales (Blommaert, 2007, 2010; Collins, Slembrouck, & Baynham, 2009) to analyze the effects these appropriations had for rural, Guarani-dominant students and urban, Spanish-dominant students. Data come from participant observation over one academic year; interviews with teachers, students, parents, administrators, and Ministry of Education supervisors; videotaped classroom interaction; and school and policy documents. While Guarani language was taught in both schools, differences in the varieties of Guarani used and how they were used implied uneven benefits for the rural and urban children. Urban, Spanish-dominant students gained experience using a purified, academic register of Guarani useful for scale-jumping—indexical moves that serve as a source of power in interaction. In contrast, rural, Guarani-dominant students learned in a translanguaged variety of Guarani that, while aiding comprehension, predominantly indexes lower scales, leaving Spanish as their only resource for scale-jumping. I argue that this inequitable pattern occurred because a national policy built on assumptions of language separation as the norm and insensitive to complex sociolinguistic variation was appropriated by actors in contexts with high sensitivity to intra-language variation and language mixing. Scholars increasingly advocate a more complex, heteroglossic conceptualization of language in research (Blommaert, 2010; Collins, 2011). I argue that ELP must, likewise, assume a more heteroglossic construction of the multiple varieties subsumed under ‘language’ if it is to fulfill goals of greater equity and inclusion for marginalized students.

Author

• Katherine Mortimer, The University of Texas - El Paso