Heritage Language Education and the Regulation of Racial Difference in 1970s Ontario

• In Event: 81.013 - Genealogical Perspectives on Bilingual and Heritage Language Education as Sites for Regulating Racial Difference

Abstract

Objectives
This paper analyzes how heritage language (HL) education policies regulate linguistic and racial difference in Ontario. The paper stems from a larger genealogical study of the Heritage Languages Program (HLP), a policy initiated in June 1977 and still in place today. While the HLP provided public monies to support HL education, it also positioned those programs at the margins of school life. Consequently, the HLP was the site of a decade of intense conflict over whose languages and cultures would be central to school life, and who had the authority to decide.

This paper focuses on anti-racist activism led by Caribbean-descended parents, educators, and students for the HLP. It examines how anti-racist advocates leveraged the HLP to make their own demands for Black Cultural Heritage programs, and how they navigated Ministry of Education resistance to their demands.

Theoretical Framework
This paper adopts a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017). Raciolinguistic analysis seeks to understand how language ideologies circulate in society, how race and language interact to organize society materially, and how racialized people have resisted these ideological and material conditions. This theoretical perspective works to reveal how heritage-language education policy-making served as a key site both to (re-)articulate and challenge the racial and linguistic constitution of 1970s Ontario. From this perspective, the paper asks how salient language was in HLP deliberations (versus serving as a proxy for race), but also how salient language was in anti-racist advocacy for the HLP?

Methods and Data Sources
As a genealogy (see session overview), this paper draws on archival records from the Ministry of Education, the Toronto Board of Education, several Black advocacy/activist groups, media reports, and secondary literature written by policy-actors.

Results
This paper makes three arguments. 1) The HLP sharpened the hierarchy of racialized and minoritized languages in Ontario, rather than undermining it. This is evidenced by the Ministry’s ongoing refusal to allow HLP monies to be used to fund Black Cultural Heritage programs. 2) Anti-racist activists did not always make explicit demands around language. Their activism more often focused on the racism manifest in Ontario’s curriculum, streaming/tracking of Black youth into vocational programs, and disciplinary and hiring practices. 3) When anti-racist activists did attend to language, they advanced a profound rethinking of the relationship between language, identity, culture, and heritage. Their advocacy provided a terrain on which to build solidarity among various racialized/minoritized groups to continue to transform schooling in Ontario.

Scholarly significance
HL policies were implemented across the country in the 1970s, subsequent to new federal policies of official bilingualism and multiculturalism and as immigration transformed the Canadian population. Because schools are a provincially run in Canada, provincial HL policies function(ed) as the main policy mechanism for regulating increasing linguistic and racial difference at school. This study makes an important contribution by examining an overlooked era in Canadian language education policy-making, and scrutinizing a policy that continues to shape how schools respond to linguistic and cultural diversity.

Author

• Jeff Bale, University of Toronto - OISE