Performing pluralism: Language policy and mediatized state hypervisibility in Morocco

• In Event: The Visibility and Invisibility of State Governance: A Critical Analysis of Educational Policy and Development Educational Initiatives (Panel 1 of 2)

Proposal

Morocco’s Ministry of Education has long been the target of searing critiques over its ability to provide quality education for all, as well as reasonable working conditions and sufficient pay for teachers. While social media has amplified these critical voices, it has also created a platform for the Ministry to cast its work in a more positive light. Producing shareable images of functional schooling has thus emerged as an important task in the Ministry’s effort to defend its agenda to the public. This paper explores the tensions that teachers—as state agents, employees, and members of their local community—face in assisting with the production of such images. As a part of a long-term ethnographic study in Morocco’s Middle Atlas, I worked with a team of teachers responsible for helping a rural school prepare for a visit from Morocco’s Minister of Education. This visit was meant in part to inaugurate a newly built dormitory facility, but it was also intended to create and distribute images of an immaculate and well-furnished school in a context of a contemporaneous social media campaign criticizing the Ministry for the poor physical state of Morocco’s schools. While builders and event-planners hurried to transform the facility from construction site into a state-of-the-art school worthy of a ceremonial visit, the teachers focused on transforming the students into performers of school language ready to participate in the mediatized ritual. I argue that over the course of the week-long preparations, teachers were in the process of discursively cementing a particular role vis-a-vis these performances: they positioned themselves as a ‘hinge’ between the ceremonial performance of state competence on one hand (made of bureaucratic protocol, gleaming new facilities, and highly entexualized bits of standardized language); and on the other, what they see as the real world of these children’s language use (as comprised of non-standard Darija-Tamazight bilingualism, and institutional obstacles to their schooling). In coaching students on their performances, teachers drew on a broad linguistic repertoire that not only evinced expertise in state protocol, but also the ability to be playful, relatable, and comforting for children in a context of stress and pressure. More broadly, this paper reflects on the nature of language policy in education. While language policy is often imagined—both by officials and scholars—as an instrument of social change, I argue that language policy in Morocco needs to be understood equally as a signifier within a contentious politics over the nature of the postcolonial state and its responsibility to Moroccans.

Author

• Gareth C Smail, College of Charleston