Language policy scholars as change agents: How do we analyze our own roles?

• In Event: Language-in-education policy change: Should we pay more attention to grassroots actors and actions on behalf of non-dominant languages?

Proposal

All of the contributors to Kosonen and Benson’s (forthcoming) volume interact critically with their 2021 language-in-education policy change framework, applying data and experiences from specific national or sub-national contexts to examine the role of key actors in bringing non-dominant languages into formal public schooling. They may reference or include their previous work in their analyses, providing some indication that they themselves have played a role in the policy change process in their contexts. This hints at a need to examine the role of these scholars as past, current and future actors in policy change, considering that they may have held positions at above, below and/or side levels at different points in their lives.

In this presentation I discuss the results of a meta-level study of the book authors themselves and the roles they have played in policymaking in their contexts, including but not limited to implementation, advocacy, evaluation and documentation. The data comes from semi-structured interviews conducted with each author on how they became interested in language issues in education, what their roles have been over time, how their roles and attitudes have changed, and how they see their contribution to policy development as well as scholarly discourse on language-in-education policy change.

The findings of this study are analyzed in terms of how the authors identify their own roles as having influenced change from above, from below and/or from the side, and how their perspectives contribute important nuances to the policy change framework. Findings are found to relate to educational equity, intersectional analysis and decolonization efforts, and there are implications for how scholars balance research and advocacy.

Author

• Carolyn J Benson, MLE International