Negotiating Multilingual Education in Morocco: Policy–Practice Tensions, Ideology, and Social Justice

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Policy-practice interface in multilingual education: Ideology, agency, and social justice in the Global South

Proposal

Multilingual education in Morocco provides a lens on how language policies in the Global South are shaped by colonial legacies, recognition struggles, and globalization. The constitution recognizes Arabic and Tamazight, while French remains dominant in education and administration, and English is increasingly promoted as a language of internationalization. This paper asks how these overlapping de jure (official) and de facto (lived) language policies are enacted and contested in practice, and how the ideologies surrounding them advance, or obstruct, social justice.

The study draws on ‘ethnography of language policy’ (Johnson, 2013) and ‘anthropology of policy’ (Shore & Wright, 1997). Ethnography of language policy conceptualizes language policy as mechanisms that shape the structure, function, use, and acquisition of language across scales—from global to classroom. This lens distinguishes between de jure provisions, such as Tamazight’s constitutional recognition in Morocco’s case, and de facto realities, such as the expanding role of English. It also highlights the interplay of management, practices, and ideologies that define how policies are enacted or resisted in daily life. Complementing this, anthropology of policy treats policy as discourse and governance technology: cultural texts that create “policy worlds,” produce categories of citizens, and align institutions through tools such as curricula, standards, and performance metrics. Medium-of-instruction reforms in Morocco are thus understood both as governance devices and as lived practices appropriated, contested, and reinterpreted by teachers, students, and administrators.

Methodologically, the paper adopts an ethnographic design combining classroom observations, interviews with teachers and students, and analysis of policy documents and curricular reforms. This multi-scalar approach enables tracing disjuncture between official discourse and local enactments. Findings reveal that Morocco’s multilingual reforms are marked by paradox and uneven enactment. Arabic is seen as a language of identity and religion but undermined by the institutional resilience of French. Tamazight’s 2011 recognition represents a milestone for Indigenous rights, yet implementation has been hindered by teacher shortages, limited resources, and bureaucratic barriers that reduce recognition to symbolic inclusion. French persists as both colonial residue and gatekeeping language of access and opportunity, even as discourse emphasizes diversification. English is celebrated as liberatory and future-oriented, but access remains stratified by class and geography, reinforcing inequalities under a competitiveness logic.

Taken together, these findings demonstrate that Morocco’s multilingual reforms, though discursively framed as inclusive, often reproduce stratification. The paper contributes to debates on the policy–practice interface by showing that multilingual education in the Global South is not merely a pedagogical reform but a political project. By combining ethnographic attention to practice with a critical anthropology of policy, the analysis shows how colonial inheritances, neoliberal agendas, and local agency converge to shape the extent to which multilingual education advances, or obstructs, social justice.

Author

• Amine Mechaal Mechaal, TEACHER COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNI