What would it take? Exploring sustained language in education policy and implementation in Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Rwanda and Senegal

• In Event: Highlighted Session: New theoretical and empirical contributions to the politics of language in education: Understanding policy change and local appropriation in Africa

Proposal

Sustained implementation of language in education policy has always been tenuous for nations of the global South. No matter what the policy position is, opposition to its provisions is inevitable; attempts to implement it invariably meet with criticism and nonconformity from some quarters. This reality is a source of frustration for policy advocates, and it leads to significant cynicism regarding the likelihood of any policy-based social change actually taking place.

Part of the reason for this conundrum has to do with the range of expectations and interests around both the formulation and the implementation of language and education policy. National language policy is unquestionably about national identity and power; when it comes to setting language policy for the formal education context, what Apple (2019: 276) calls “the complex connections between education and the relations of dominance and subordination in the larger society” readily come into play.

Another part of the reason has to do with the range of actors who are actively invested in the outcomes of formal education in a given country. These range from local community members to international policy advisors, with myriad others in between. Not every actor maintains the same perspective over time; in fact, quite the opposite often takes place, as new knowledge and new interests modify actors’ perspectives on language and learning at a national level.

This paper addresses the politically variable, multi-stakeholder context of language in education policy, and explores the question: What would language in education policy - specifically local language-favorable policy, in the global South nations of Africa - require in order to be sustainably implemented over decades? This question will be explored in the highly relevant contexts of national language in education policy in five African countries: Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Senegal. All five countries have featured in the USAID-funded LITES study. In addition, over the last 1-2 decades, political and educational leadership in each of these countries have been intentional in the implementation of a particular national language in education policy choice. Conceptual frameworks used to address the question above will include Grin’s analysis of the links between language politics and the policy of identity construction (Kymlicka and Grin 2003), Bouchard and Glasgow’s examination of agency in language policy and planning (Bouchard and Glasgow 2018), and Hudson et al.’s framework of conflict, ambiguity and the implementation of public policy (Hudson et al., 2019).

References to the above text
Apple, M. (2019). On doing critical policy analysis. Educational Policy, 33:1, 276-287.

Bouchard, J., & Glasgow, G. (eds.). (2018). Agency in Language Policy and Planning: Critical
Inquiries. London, UK: Routledge.

Hudson, B., Hunter, D., & Peckham, S. (2019). Policy failure and the policy-implementation gap: Can policy support programs help? Policy Design and Practice, 2:1, 1-14.

Kymlicka, W. & Grin, F. (2003). Assessing the politics of diversity in transition countries. In Daftary and Grin, Nation-Building, Ethnicity and Language Politics in Transition Countries. Budapest: Open Society Institute. Pp. 5-27.

Author

• Barbara Trudell, SIL Africa Learning & Development