Negotiating Language Policies in Schools

Educators as Policymakers

Kate Menken, Ofelia Garcia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135146207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Educators are at the epicenter of language policy in education. This book explores how they interpret, negotiate, resist, and (re)create language policies in classrooms. Bridging the divide between policy and practice by analyzing their interconnectedness, it examines the negotiation of language education policies in schools around the world, focusing on educators' central role in this complex and dynamic process.

Each chapter shares findings from research conducted in specific school districts, schools, or classrooms around the world and then details how educators negotiate policy in these local contexts. Discussion questions are included in each chapter. A highlighted section provides practical suggestions and guiding principles for teachers who are negotiating language policies in their own schools.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Kate Menken and Ofelia García

A diverse array of language education policies are put into practice in schools around the world, yet little research exists about the complex process of language policy implementation within educational contexts. At each level of an educational system, from the national ministry or department of education to the classroom, language education policies are interpreted, negotiated, and ultimately (re)constructed in the process of implementation. Both in countries with highly centralized educational systems and in those with decentralized systems, where language policies in education are explicit or in others where they are covert (Shohamy, 2006), the policy implementation process is defined by its dynamism; ultimately, a language education policy is as dynamic as the many individuals involved in its creation and implementation.

Educators are at the epicenter of this dynamic process, acting on their agency to change the various language education policies they must translate into practice. As Cochran-Smith (2003) so aptly noted, this is part of what she terms the “unforgivable complexity of teaching,” a reality we both acknowledge and embrace in this volume. Regardless of the type of policies or the educational context in which a policy text comes to life in the classroom, there is typically space for policy negotiation in classroom practice, as it is ultimately educators— particularly classroom teachers—who are the final arbiters of language policy implementation. As such, policies often have different results from those intended by policymakers.

In spite of this dynamism and complexity, however, most language policy research remains national in scope, focusing on top-down policies and analyzing written policy statements (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997; Ricento, 2005; Spolsky, 2004), overlooking the central role of classroom practitioners. Researchers in language policy are just beginning to explore questions of agency and local resistance (Canagarajah, 2004). Policy documents are thus presented as static and dead (Shohamy, 2006), without significant attention paid to the ways that they actually come to life in the classroom.

In this book, we dive into the complex and often contradictory arena of policy implementation. The purpose of this book is to bridge the gap between research and practice by exploring the negotiation of language education policies in schools around the world and to provide educators with deeper understandings of this process to guide their implementation of language policies in schools and classrooms. Using research conducted at the level of local school districts, schools, or classrooms as their point of departure, contributors to this edited volume examine how language education policies come to life in schools. Specifically, researchers contributing to this edited volume were asked to go into schools and classrooms to answer the following research question within their different contexts:

• How are language education policies interpreted, negotiated, resisted, and (re)created in classrooms?

We find that entirely new policies are often created in the process of policy negotiation and enactment in schools. Thus, in this book, we argue that implementation by definition involves policymaking, with educators acting as policymakers. Likewise, we find it insufficient to discuss a language policy as singular, but rather in this volume we discuss language education policies in the plural.

The New Wave of Language Education Policy Research: A Focus on Agency in Implementation

According to Spolsky (2004), language policy encompasses all of the “language practices, beliefs and management of a community or polity” (p. 9); the field examines such topics as which language(s) will be official or national languages, which language(s) will be taught in school, as well as ideologies about language. Because schools are primary sites for the implementation as well as contestation of language policies (Cooper, 1989; Corson, 1999), in this volume we focus specifically on language education policies.¹

Within the evolution of the field of language policy, earlier research focused first on top-down national language planning and the resolution of language “problems” (Fishman, 1979; Haugen, 1972), and more recent critical approaches explored the ways that language policies can create and/or perpetuate social inequities (Corson, 1999; Phillipson, 1992; Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996; Tollefson, 1991). Characterizing these approaches as neoclassical and critical, respectively, Ricento and Hornberger (1996, p. 408) noted that both obfuscate the complexity of the policy process. As they write,

None offers a model that can predict the consequences of a particular policy or show a clear cause/effect relationship between particular policy types or configurations and observed (often undesirable, from the perspective of critical theorists) outcomes.

In other words, little attention was previously paid to understanding how a given policy was actually implemented and any changes it may have undergone in the implementation process. Moreover, the neoclassical and critical research approaches have been criticized for underestimating human agency in policymaking (Canagarajah, 2005; Hornberger & Johnson, 2007; Ramanathan, 2005).

To highlight the complexity of language education policy with a spotlight on the critical role of educators within the process of policy creation and implementation, Ricento and Hornberger (1996) offered a metaphor of language planning and policy as a multilayered “onion.” The layers they explored, ordered from the outer layers to the center, include legislation and political processes (at the outer layers), states and supranational agencies, institutions, and classroom practitioners (at the heart of the onion). Within this construct, agents across national, institutional, and interpersonal levels are engaged in a process wherein they interact with and are impacted by one another to enact language policies (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996, p. 419).

This book is part of a newer wave of language education policy research that refocuses our attentions from governments to local school administrators, teachers, students, parents, and community members—the so-called bottom of the educational policy structure—and which views language policies as far more multidimensional than written policy statements. Now that the onion is over a decade old, we still see the urgent need to heed the call for a more multilayered and textured exploration of language education policies. A central tenet of this volume, which unifies its diverse chapters, is the view that language policies cannot be truly understood without studying actual practices. As described in our conclusion, the authors of this volume thus stir the metaphorical onion.

About This Book

Although as editors we did not request that authors contributing to this volume prescribe to a specific methodology, most used qualitative methods in their explorations of how language education policies are negotiated by teachers at the classroom level. Hornberger and Johnson (2007) in fact promoted what they called the “ethnography of language education policy” to extend research in this area. As they write,

[E]thnographies of language policy offer unique insights into LPP [language planning and policy] processes through thick descriptions of policy interpretation and implementation at the local level. Historical and intertextual analyses of policy texts can capture the confluence of histories, attitudes, and ideologies that engender a language policy but, alone, cannot account for how the creation is interpreted and implemented in the various contextual layers through which a language policy must pass. (Hornberger & Johnson, 2007, p. 511)

For the authors whose chapters appear in this book, qualitative methods were favored as the most effective to delve into language education policy implementation, to gain the rich understandings of language policy processes that we sought. From the contributions of the authors in this volume, we find that language policies can be explicit or implicit, de facto or planned, and that educators at the local level hold as much responsibility for policymaking as do government officials. Just as a policy statement can either open up or restrict “ideological and implementational” spaces in schools for multilingualism (Hornberger, 2005), so too can educators either carve out or close off these spaces. Although teachers can simply serve as what Shohamy (2006, p. 78) termed “‘soldiers’ of the system who carry out orders by internalizing the policy ideology and its agendas,” they are often found instead to play a far more powerful and active role, changing and redefining policies, or creating entirely new ones.

In this way, we move beyond top-down, bottom-up, or even side-by-side divisions to a conceptualization of language policy as a far more dynamic, interactive, and real-life process (García, 2009). Hence the authors use terms like policy appropriation (Johnson & Freeman, [this volume]), negotiation (Creese, [this volume]), interpretation (Valdiviezo, [this volume]), contestation or resistance (Shohamy, [this volume]), challenges (Bloch et al., [this volume]; Mohanty et al., [this volume]), responsiveness (Berryman et al., [this volume]), and reconstruction (Zakharia, [this volume]). Within this perspective, “policy implementation” and “policymaking” go hand in hand.

In our view, variations in policy implementation are not a problem that creators of language policies should avoid. Instead, we need to gain deeper understandings of this variation so that we can offer theoretical constructs that will help educators negotiate this complex terrain when faced with their own policy decisions.

Organization of This Book

Contributors to this volume come from all over the world and share in this book their findings from classroom research within the different regional contexts in which they specialize. A striking finding that cuts across the chapters of this volume is that educators always seem to negotiate the language education policies they enact in their schools, even in countries where the ideological and implementational spaces for resistance or change are small. A distinction between the chapters can be drawn, however, in the driving force(s) that guide educators’ decisions about how to implement policy. These fall into two main categories, into which we have divided the book chapters. In some cases, authors analyzed internal, individual forces—how teachers’ or school administrators’ prior experiences or personal identity shaped their interpretations and enactment of language policies. In other cases, authors analyzed external forces shaping educators’ language policy negotiations, based on the situation or context (e.g., political, community, region, etc.) within which their school or district is nested. These two forces— internal and external—are dialectical in that educators are shaped by their situations as they, in turn, influence them; also, these external and internal forces are not mutually exclusive. However, they offer a helpful a way for thinking about how educators ultimately translate policies into classroom practice.

Unlike research in language policy, there already exists a significant body of research about general education policy implementation, which offers helpful...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I Negotiation of Language Education Policies Guided by Educators’ Experiences or Identity (Individual)
• Part II Educators’ Negotiation of Language Education Policies Influenced by Situation/ Context/Community (Social)
• Part III Moving Forward
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index