INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON EDUCATIONAL LANGUAGE ISSUES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

DEVELOPING ALTERNATIVE AGENDAS FOR
MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION

September 27-28, 2000

<http://www.skeptron.uu.se/broady/sec/erdc-000927.htm>

A workshop at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University, Universitetsvägen 10 C, plan 5, Frescati
arranged in co-laboration by
the Network for Educational Research in Developing Countries, ILU, Uppsala University <http://www.skeptron.uu.se/broady/sec/n-erdc.htm>, and
the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University <http://www.biling.su.se/>

Stockholm, July 5, 2000

BACKGROUND

Within the framework of the Network for Educational Research in Developing Countries, specialised workshops are organised for different subject areas. This workshop focuses on the implications of multilingualism in education and related issues which are pertinent for most developing countries, not least in Sub-Saharan Africa. (See the appended discussion/project description for the specific issues to be addressed.)

AIM

The purpose of this workshop is two-fold. First, we will explore a number of questions related to issues of democratisation and participation of community members in the design, construction and implementation of multilingual educational programs.  The principal question is how we can move beyond acknowledging the potential of a rhetoric of change to a situation where people may directly empower themselves.  Related issues will be addressed by a number of papers that treat pertinent concerns within a specific case study format.

The second purpose of this workshop is to work out an agenda for cooperative research and development between African and Scandinavian institutions on the topic of language and education in Sub-Saharan Africa, building on the insights of the papers presented.

DISCUSSION THEMES

The following are examples of some of the issues that will be addressed in the case studies:

• How can management of the education system be decentralised so as to accommodate the different socio-linguistic, cultural, and economic conditions of local populations?
• To what extent is it possible or desirable to bypass existing institutional structures of educational decision-making, creating new organs that may ‘disempower’ existing state-oriented elites to the advantage of new decision-making groups with a more benevolent interest in issues of language and diversity?
• How can locally-based secondary discourses be generated in indigenous languages in specific localities under consideration?  What is the role of standardization, and what is the meaning of authenticity in this context?
• In which informal adult language settings would it be desirable to develop the indigenous languages in question?  What groups or networks in the community carry the greatest potential for revitalizing indigenous languages through contexts of socialization and caregiving?
• How can ‘activists’ be integrated into the school context (cf. Maori language nestsor Californian apprenticeship model)?  What structural hurdles need to be overcome?
• What is the role of local elites?  What is the relationship between political economies and intellectual agendas?  How do local language elites refute or dispute power structures?  What level of involvement do language elites typically have in a community?  What is the ensemble of social relations that producers of authoritative knowledge partake in?

 Agenda

The meetings will take place at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University <http://www.biling.su.se/>. Visiting address: Universitetsvägen 10 C, plan 5, Frescati.

INVITED PARTICIPANTS

From Sweden:

Donald Broady, Prof of Education, ILU, Uppsala University

Kenneth Hyltenstam, Prof of Bilingualism, Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University

Christopher Stroud, Prof of Bilingualism, National University of Singapore/Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University

Mikael Palme, Stockholm Institute of Education and ILU, Uppsala University

Carol Benson, Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University

Network members from ILU, Stockholm Institute of Education, Centre for Research on Bilingualism

Sida representatives

From other Scandiniavian countries:

Gustave Callewaert, Prof of Education, Copenhagen University

Vibeke Schroeder, University of Copenhagen

Birgit Brock-Utne, Oslo University

From African countries:

Mubanga Kashoki, University of Zambia/Stockholm University

Neville Alexander, University of Cape Town

Developing alternative agendas for multilingual education

Christopher Stroud
Prof of Bilingualism, National University of Singapore/Centre for Research on Bilingualism

Abstract

Although discourse around MT programs traditionally focuses on aspects such as the technical, pedagogical or economic provisions made for them, more recent theoretical analyses also underline the importance of a range of factors related to empowerment and local community participation in accounting for a program’s relative successes and failures. Issues of democracy are fundamental in accounting for the success and/or failure of bilingual or MT programs. The focus of this workshop will be on how we may more adequately incorporate these insights into educational language planning and program evaluation? Following on this, is the question of what institutional measures may be taken?

Multilingual and mother tongue educational programmes: From technical manufacturing to democratic participation

 The types of problems that foil many attempts at implementing mother tongue (MT) programs in African languages are well-documented in the bilingual education literature.  The following are but a few of those discussed in the literature:  language policies which encourage ”avoidance, vagueness, arbitrariness, fluctuation and declaration without implementation” (Bamgbose, 1991); negative attitudes towards the use of African languages as teaching media due to pre-colonial prejudice or postcolonial perceptions that they are not useful on important markets; problems in choice and description of the variety to be taught;  lack of teaching materials; problems with curricula that are so overloaded and oriented towards the promotion and valuation of content taught through the metropolitan languages as to provide little space for national languages or cultures.

Many of the suggestions given for coming to grips with such problems also have a familiar ring to them.  The majority of the proposals seek solutions in the improvement of techniques of program construction or in the allocation of more and better resources, and they tend to share the conviction that answers to problems in MT programs are to be found in a management oriented approach to program diagnosis and remediation.  Policy-making is to be made more efficient, market management of materials is to be improved, curricula are to be made more attractive through better time-tabling and administration, and languages and identities are to be upgraded and peddled by means of a more relevant packaging.  However, although all of the solutions proposed offer plausible solutions, it is becoming clearer that the problems that beset MT programs will not disappear by tinkering with the economic and technical nuts and bolts of program design.  In fact, a case could even be made for claiming that solutions that deal with management and resource features of bilingual programs consolidate the very trends that were responsible for the negative situation of African national languages in the first place.  For example, many of the ideas on how to increase markets for teaching materials, such as limiting the number of subjects in primary schooling, or producing less detailed manuals for teachers that emphasize generic pedagogical strategies at the expense of subject methodology, lean in the same direction; they all lead ultimately to a de facto impoverishment of cognitive-academic content for pupils from groups which have already been disadvantaged by being denied full access to elite knowledge forms.

 Another example is the translation of materials from metropolitan languages into African languages, which has the disadvantage of hindering generation of local materials that may be seen as more relevant and meaningful, and stifling development of innovative linguistic resources to cope with the expressive demands of subject materials in the languages concerned.  This in turn reinforces the stereotype that African languages cannot be used for education.

Focusing on technical linguistic solutions to readying national languages for use in classrooms also tends to implicitly endorse teaching practices and views on language that have been transplanted through formal education since colonial times.  Pennycook (1998) has pointed out how techniques of metropolitan language teaching were worked out in the colonial context, serving as much to define and delimit the colonial ‘Other’ through the teaching of language as enhancing actual language proficiencies.  As Pennycook says, in the case of English language teaching (ELT):

 The history of the ties between ELT and colonialism has produced images of the Self and Other, understandings of English and other languages and cultures that still play a major role in how English language teaching is constructed and practised: from the native speaker/non-native speaker dichotomy to the images constructed around English as a global language and the assumptions about learners’ cultures, much of ELT echoes with the cultural constructions of colonialism. (Pennycook, 1998: 19)

In addition, tuning up the curriculum so that it is more in line with what a local community needs from the first few years of primary education is of little consequence as long as metropolitan languages retain such a strong position at higher levels of the education system.  Curriculum content will continue to remain elitist and oriented towards metropolitan values and forms of knowledge, and this in turn will reflect negatively on how teachers and parents perceive the viability of using African languages at lower levels of primary education. If knowledge of a metropolitan language is the sine qua non of being able to continue to higher education, then why “waste time” on national languages?

A complementary perspective to a management-oriented view is one that traces the source of the problems with MT programs into the very social fabric of the postcolonial community itself. It is quite clear that in the majority of cases, the programs that fail most dismally are those that seek to use the ‘minority’ languages of the most marginalized speakers as media of instruction. Languages which are spoken by very marginal and poverty-stricken populations are perceived by their speakers as educational dead ends and basically valueless on official labour markets.  Those languages which suffer the greatest lack of materials or appropriate grammars are also the ones which have historically been so politically insignificant as to not merit any attention from textbook writers or linguists. In other words, this perspective acknowledges that problems in MT programs are basically problems of deprivation, marginality and poverty of the speakers of the languages.

One theoretical perspective which has the merits connecting a wide range of the issues confronting MT programs into a uniform framework that engages with notions of power and marginality takes as its point of departure a transnational developmental perspective on language and education (e.g. Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 1994; 1998; Sreberny-Mohammadi 1997; Mazrui, 1997).  According to such a perspective, the peripheral position in the global economy into which postcolonial Third World societies have been pushed, and the enforced subservience of these economies to demands made by institutions representing world markets, has led to an increasing displacement of African local and regional institutions and ways of life. At the national level, these global tendencies are reinforced through the collusion of local elites.  Because world markets are also indigenous markets with tightly integrated local elites who are supportive and reproductive of the values that dominate these markets, metropolitan languages come to constitute an important form of symbolic and valued capital with which these elites can vie for a spot in this gobal economic arena.  Mazrui (1997) also claims that the process of spreading metropolitan languages, spearheaded today by institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, is part of a “wider economic agenda intended to meet the labour requirements of foreign capital” by helping to constitute the “creation and reproduction of /this/ labour hierachy”, noting that “[i]n essence, the World Bank’s proposed educational configuration in Africa demonstrates the continued role of instruction in Euro-languages in creating and maintaining an economy dominated primarily by foreign economic interests and, secondarily, by a small aspiring African bourgeosie” (Mazrui, 1997:44). This is one important factor behind the entrenchment of metropolitan languages in many post-colonies.

These global developmental tendencies have had clear and indisputable implications for the increasing economic dependence of postcolonial nations on the First World. But they have also contributed to the cultural, academic and political dependence that many African nations still have on their previous colonial metropoles (Srebedny-Mohammadi, 1997).

From the point of view of education, Sreberny-Mohammadi (1997) provides a good summary of the tensions and contradictions of the deep-rooted cultural impact of imperialism:

Educational provision, curricula content and teaching materials are thus important sites of inherited economic dependency, complicated policy making and deep-rooted cultural conflicts, which mainly centre upon the language of instruction, or the nature of the ‘knowledge’ imparted, or the very purpose of an educational system within its national, socio-economic and political frameworks. (Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1997: 60)

It is in this context that we need to situate problems in MT programs. The global developments which discriminate against indigenous languages, and the traditional role of the school in repressing diversity of indigenous languages and cultures,  converge in the workings of MT programs.  MT programs from around the world provide clear cases of how the school mediates inherited economic and political dependencies.  Hidalgo (1994: 186), referring to Mexico, says that ”[b]ilingual education serves as an educational strategy directed toward the linguistic and cultural assimilation of ethnic minorities. Mexico has a rich history of bilingual education which is worthy of study as a model of assimilation of language and ethnicity”.  Cerrón-Palomino (1989: 27) on Peru claims that ”[b]ilingualism does not support Quechua or Aymara; on the contrary, it erodes them: this is the natural consequence of the struggle between unequally equipped languages and societies”.

 In this view, the problems that haunt African MT programs are not primarily those of inadequate resourcing. In fact, they are not primarily about education at all.  They are fundamentally about who is to exercise the power and privilege of deciding what social and symbolic capital should accrue to different languages.  Neither are the problems primarily of a technical nature; rather, they are about the nature of institutional structures and local tradition, where schools reinforce tendencies already prevalent in outside society to marginalize minority languages and their speakers.  Problems of economic and technical resourcing are consequences of marginality and failure rather than causes of them. The problems that beset MT programs, then, are more specific instantiations of a more comprehensive complex of issues that centre on problems of participation and peoples’ empowerment.

 Other evidence in support of this claim follows from an analysis of how relatively successful MT programs actually function.  Reviewing a number of case studies from around the world, Stroud (forthcoming) shows how substantial participation of the local community in the running of MT programs often leads to greater success.  From contexts as diverse as Latin America and Papua New Guinea (see Stroud, forthcoming), we can see how problems in implementation such as the extendability of a program to contexts other than those in which they originated clearly benefit from a greater sensitivity to local conditions and local input.  Likewise, greater grassroots participation in the writing and production of language materials not only increases the cultural relevance and authenticity of materials, as well as their availability to a wide range of readers, but also helps restore community ownership of languages, and facilitates the spread of varieties available for use in literacy. There is also evidence that materials that are produced locally and that connect into adult community networks of local and regional economic activities are more sustainable than materials that are produced for schools alone. From a linguistic viewpoint, the means that local communities themselves employ for extending their repertoire, such as developing local lexical equivalents, or adapting existing vocabularies and registers to new communicative demands, gain currency. This contributes positively to the maintenance of situated varieties of these languages.  Locally adapted curricula, instead of the nationally uniform version, also engages local populations more adequately.

 We can understand the way in which these successful strategies impact on language at  three levels. First of all, they are a form of disempowerment of the secondary discourses of metropolitan languages in favour of indigenous narratives and local knowledge systems.  They afford alternative presentations of reality on which to base a curriculum. Secondly, the strategies rely on the expertise of local activists and language experts. This therefore facilitates the re-construction of official, secondary discourses in the indigenous language, while at the same time reintegrating it into the social contexts of its speakers.  This is important, as it has been shown that the success of an indigenous language program depends upon the existence of sufficient informal language settings for adults (and particularly for the women of the community) where the language may be used productively. Thirdly, these strategies align with the insights of Fishman (1996), who notes that “the interaction of children and their parents or other affectionate socialisers in natural, daily, home-family-neighbourhood-community life” around an indigenous language is one of the most fundamental parameters for its survival and use.  In other words, the use of language in education is part of a larger sociopolitical and democratic and participatory agenda.

Program for workshop

Following from the above reasoning, we may note that the school is not only the forum where language programs are implemented;  it is also an arena where macro-level sociopolitical ideologies and structures simultaneously constitute, and are constituted by, micro-level, individual, family and community level language behaviours and conceptions.  It follows that what goes on in school in relation to language programs has the potential to impact on local community behaviours and attitudes. In other words, changes in the direction of democratic and participatory educational institutions can be catalysts for more general sociopolitical transformation at the community level.

Bibliography

 Bamgbose, A. 1991. Language and the Nation: The language question in Sub-Saharan Africa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Cerrón-Palomino., E. 1989. Language policy in Peru: a historical overview. In International Journal of Sociology of Language, 77: pp. 11-35.

Fishman, J. 1996. Maintaining languages: What works? What doesn’t? In G. Cantoni (ed.). Stabilizing Indigenous Languages, 181-198. Flagstaff: Centre for Excellence in Education.

Hildago, M. 1994. Bilingual education, nationalism and ethnicity in Mexico. In Language Problems and Language Planning. 18 (3); 185-208.

Mazrui, A. 1997. The World Bank, the language question and the future of African education. In Race & Class, 38 (3).

Pennycook, A. 1994. The cultural poltitics of English as an international language. London: Longman.

Pennycook, A. 1998. English and the discourses of colonialism. London: Routledge.

Phillipson, R. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Sreberny-Mohammadi, A. 1997. The many cultural faces of imperialism. In Golding, P. and Harris, P. (eds.).

Stroud, C. forthcoming. Bilingual education programs in developing countries. The state of the art.

Back to SEC home page
Back to Network for Educational Research in Developing Countries <http://www.skeptron.uu.se/broady/sec/n-erdc.htm>

URL of this page is http://www.skeptron.uu.se/broady/sec/erdc-000927.htm
This HTML version created by Donald Broady. Last updated 11 Aug 2011