A Decolonial Southern Reading of Ghana’s National Language Policy Archive

• In Event: Histories of International Education: Social Justice, Identity, and Decolonization

Abstract

This paper presents a Southern perspective of language policy (Author, 2024) summarizing results from a multimethod qualitative study using policy historiography (Gale 2001) to show how the bifurcation of Ghanaian language policies informing biliteracy pedagogy might be understood in their evolution across specific policy periods beginning from pre+/ colonial educational to the present era. This paper’s historical findings are from a multimodal doctoral study anchored in the theoretical notion of African personality (Quaison Sackey, 1963; Nkrumah, 1967) that argues for multilingual realities and practices of persons of African heritage to be conceptualized as a genius within language policy interpretation for literacy and multiteracy pedagogy in multilingual classrooms. The study incorporates a film showing the historical development of language policy in Ghana.

Author

• Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, McGill University