The Politics of Language Teaching in Morocco

• In Event: Middle East SIG Highlighted Session:The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same? Education Across the MENA After the Uprisings

Abstract

I propose to examine language teaching in Morocco from an historical and sociological perspective. My paper looks at how teachers of English and Arabic conceive of good language teaching, and what relation these conceptions have to Morocco’s intensely political linguistic history. Based on interviews and observations with secondary language teachers in the Khenifra province, I show that changing conceptions of good teaching in both languages reflect a contradictory political agenda. This agenda seeks to progressively distribute the benefits of education through improved pedagogical techniques in all languages. Because of thinly stretched resources, however, such classroom environments remain exceptional in public schools, and more accessible to privileged classes through informal privatization. Moreover, this agenda is not linguistically neutral as it purports to be: English in particular enjoys better professional development networks than other languages, particularly Arabic. My paper aims to provide a contextual framework for understanding current efforts to improve Arabic teaching, both in Morocco and elsewhere in the Arab world.

My paper begins with an historical and sociological account of language teaching in Morocco, using secondary literature. In dialogue with Bourdieu’s conception of education as an act of symbolic violence, I show that beginning in the French Protectorate, language teaching within mass education has served an instrumental function of creating and maintaining social distinction. After independence, a nationalist, anti-colonial narrative emerged that envisioned de-colonization through the use of Arabic language, and upon independence led to a massive effort to ‘Arabize’ school curricula and bureaucratic administration. Yet in this project too, language teaching became a means of creating distinction, as evidenced by the persistence of linguistic hierarchies between and within French and certain registers of Arabic, as well as the marginalization of Amazigh dialects.

A second section seeks to apply this historical and sociological argument to my fieldwork conducted with public secondary teachers and inspectors of English and Arabic in Morocco’s Khenifra province, specifically in the city of Khenifra and two rural towns in its environs. Consistent with the theoretical discussion, I find that most teachers of both English and Arabic recast the sociological changes of Morocco’s public school system as pedagogical issues. In order to keep up with the changing role of education in Moroccan society, teachers must be innovative, adaptive, learner-centered, technology-oriented, etc., yet according to many teachers, the resource constraints of the system make this a nearly insurmountable task, leaving ‘good teaching’ as something ad hoc and based on individual effort.

Interestingly, the direct implication of this good teaching scarcity has not, as I would have thought, meant the categorical marginalization of instructional quality in rural areas for the benefit of those in the urban center. To explore this, I link my discussion of conceptions of good teaching with Khenifra’s specific geography, focusing on the movement of teachers between rural and urban areas throughout their careers. In doing so I show that within public schools, many teachers see the possibility of ‘good teaching’ as reliant on a confluence of factors more readily available in a rural setting: young and passionate teachers, few distractions for students and teachers and opportunities for learning outside the classroom. I argue that this ideal conception of good teaching exists in a tension with the common measure of success in Morocco’s public schools (high marks on standardized exams), what it takes to achieve this (private tutoring), and where this is more readily available (urban areas).

Finally, I explore the possibility of ‘good teaching’ within English and Arabic relative to one another, given that the changing conceptions of good language teaching appear to be common across both subjects. The professional support networks for English teachers far outweigh those of Arabic, and despite recent – and promising – efforts to alleviate this disparity. This dynamic highlights that while the prospect of building a universally literate Arab state still guides the curricula of the Ministry of Education, as well as many teachers, forces beyond its control are shaping the linguistic horizons for Morocco’s students.

Author

• Gareth Smail, Georgetown University