Implementing Policies for Heritage Language Education in the Toronto Board of Education

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

Abstract

Objectives
This paper analyzes the gap between the Heritage Languages Program (HLP) as a top-down policy of the provincial government and a local school board’s policy development as influenced by public deliberations over heritage language education. The paper focuses on how the Toronto Board of Education implemented the HLP by re-articulating the provincial regulations within the context of local policy deliberations as the program was first announced in June, 1977.

Theoretical framework
This paper is part of a larger genealogy (Foucault, 1977; Garland, 2014) of heritage language education in Ontario. The study asks what historical conditions continue to shape the rationales behind present conceptions and practices of heritage-language learning. I have analyzed the history of HLP to investigate how the segregation of languages-other-than-English-and-French (i.e., heritage languages) has been generalized in the context of elementary education. This paper considers a school board as “an ideological and implementation space” (Hornberger, 2005) and discusses how various policy processes (Compton, 2013) converged within that space to shape the local condition of heritage language education in the late 1970s.

Methods and data sources
In this paper, I analyze two types of archival documents: 1) reports, meeting agendas, and minutes produced in the Toronto Board in relation to the policy discussion before the HLP and their implementation plan for the HLP, and 2) memoranda and correspondences from the records of the Ministry of Education about the HLP. I focus on the interrelationship among the texts and discourses (Wodak, 2015) from different levels to examine the gap between their approaches to heritage language policy.

Results
The Ministry of Education established the HLP as a new program, but they introduced the program in a way that did not require modifying the existing school curriculum. This caused debates among various stakeholders over whether to include heritage languages as part the curriculum in the Toronto Board of Education. Prior to the HLP, the Toronto Board struck its own task force to study how it should implement new federal policies of multiculturalism. The task-force process and resulting report established a local ideological and implementational space in which the board might implement heritage-language education, although doing so was not free from conflict. The Ministry’s intervention with the HLP exacerbated these conflicts because the policy failed to provide either pedagogical or ideological guidance for the Board to support its rationale of heritage language education. While the Board implemented the HLP, the ideological debates about the value of heritage language learning remained unresolved, and required the school board to reconsider their own policy within the new constraints of the HLP.

Scholarly significance
The HLP, which now operates as the International Languages Program, is still the only place for elementary students to learn “other languages” within publicly funded schools. This genealogy is useful for reconsidering the rationales used currently to justify the ongoing segregation of linguistic diversity at school, and for revealing alternative discourses for multilingual education in schools.

Author

• Mayo Kawaguchi, University of Toronto