Review_Author: Attahirou Dogo
Book_Author: Monica Heller and Marilyn -Jones
Book_Title: Voices of authority
Reference: Westport, Conn. :Ablex Pub. , 2001
Date: 5/7/2002
Time: 3:51:45 PM
Remote Name: 128.175.100.33
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This volume addresses social and political issues that most work on the provision of effective and democratic education under conditions of increasing sociolinguistic, cognitive and change has failed to address. It argues that these issues are central to understanding the significance and consequence both of educational policy and practices in multilingual settings and of language policy and practices as they manifest themselves through education. The authors specifically argue that language practices in these settings reveal struggles over the establishment of authority and legitimacy; they can be interpreted as voices expressing a variety of social positions and interests with respect to the resources distributed through educational institutions and processes. They reveal what is at stake and for whom in choices made at state, institutional, school, and other levels regarding both language of instruction and assessment, as well as regarding language teaching and learning and evaluation of linguistic proficiency.
The book is a collection of close ethnographic analyses of socially and historically situated cases from a wide range of settings. In putting together this collection, the authors has aimed “(1)to highlight the role played by educational institutions in multilingual societies in the construction of cultural identities, in the production and distribution of prestigious cultural and linguistic resources, and in the reproduction of social inequalities and (2) to show that they (the authors) can develop a fuller understanding of these processes of production and reproduction of education by investing the communicative practices of learners and educators in the daily cycles of life in educational settings.”
The authors argue that insights from the situated accounts mentioned above are essential to theory building and to substantive generalization. The cases include a variety of educational sites in postcolonial, indigenous, and immigrant settings in various countries around the world. Te different chapters in this book show how complex the issues surrounding education in multilingual setting can be. Educational choices in such settings, whether regarding structures, programs, practices or materials, are clearly much more than choices about how to achieve linguistic proficiency. They are choices about how to distribute linguistic resources and about what value to attribute to linguistic forms and practices. They are choices that are embedded in the economic, political, and social interests of groups and that have consequences for the life chances of individuals as well as for the construction of social categories and relation of power.
Upon perusal of these chapters, it is possible to make a number of generalizations and at the same time raise a number of questions. After I read these chapters I realize that there are some lessons to be learned from the cases presented.
The first theme to emerge from the studies reported in the book concerns what the authors call “the ritualized ways” in which participants in educational encounters draw on linguistic resources to collaborate with, or to contest, the interact ional and institutional order of the school or other settings. These more-or-less ritualized practices have consequences for the construction of social categories and for the use o those categories as ways of organizing the distribution of resources through education. The second theme concerns the extent to which the interactional and institutional orders of education in multilingual settings are in fact unified. As Marilyn says, “Both may be traversed by a number of different, possibly competing, possibly contradictory, sets of interests and ideological orientations.” Communicative and organizational practices in such complex settings may be primarily focused on coping with tensions. Such tensions might include those between the authority of the dominant language and the solidarity of the vernacular; between pedagogical and commitments to group work and assessment pressures to monitor and facilitating access to school- based knowledge; and so on.
The third important theme concerns the relationship between what happens in educational settings and what happens elsewhere, in other arenas. The author argue that “it is necessary to link the interaction and institutional order of schools and other educational institutions to the social order of communities and therefore to link the consequences of practices in educational settings to other social categories and processes. As we can see, in most of the multilingual setting considered in these chapters, especially postcolonial and neocolonial ones, the language of instruction does not correspond to the language of the learners. This is not, to borrow Marilyn’s words, “necessarily a problem in and of itself.” Chapters on Hong Kong, Burundi, and Kenya all show that middle-class or elite members of society have the symbolic and material resources for investment in the language of instruction outside and inside school. They also have an interest in doing so.; their class position is linked to the use of multilingual resources that permit them to link to sources of power outside their own communities and also to control local production and distribution of resources. The use of former colonial language of instruction in these settings is a way of maintaining privileged access to linguistic resources and to educational credentials. Many of the papers in this collection have showed classroom interactions that give the appearance of constructing knowledge under conditions that actually make it impossible for such teaching and learning to occur. This is what happens to those who are not located near the sources of power in the communities. One can notice the frequent use of codeswitching and interactional practices to help students gain access to school knowledge. As the authors say, ‘ironically, they have the effect of masking the real marginalization processes that can go in such situations, precisely because it does make it seems as though teaching and learning are occurring. It is here that we can see symbolic domination working most clearly”.
One of the most exciting aspects of the book is the way many of papers it contains show that the advancement or marginalization of interests in the context of social hierarchization is usually not a matter of simple dichotomous oppositions. The elites retain their position also through the legitimacy accorded by the mastery of the local, authentic variety. So they must in some ways, deal with the contradictions flowing from their ambivalent position with respect to local and colonialist varieties. The chapters here have focused mainly on processes of social stratification and social categorization and on the ways in which these processes unfold in daily life. This makes it difficult to see clearly what their consequences may be for what happens in other arenas, for individual life trajectories or for long-term social structuration. The authors have showed the reader how participants in educational settings are positioned, or try to position themselves, with respect to the legitimacy of languages and speakers. The chapters also point to the linkages made between educational achievement categories and social organizational principles (e.g., immigrants, refugees, class, race), although how these linkages are actually constructed has not been addressed in this book. According to the authors, “these and other chapters begin to illuminate the ways in which linguistic legitimacy is tied to the definition of nation, state, and citizenship, since legitimate participation in the school entails legitimate participation in an institution of the state.” The authors have privileged spoken-language practices as a way of understanding the central issues they have addressed in this book. However, it is clear that other forms of communication are equally implicated in multilingual educational settings, indeed in ways that are closely intertwined. This is an exciting book that deals with the question of whose language is to be spoken and heard in the public and private life spheres. Policy makers, teachers, parents and students in multilingual settings should read it because it addresses head-on educational issues of fundamental importanc
Review_Author: a affordable
Book_Author: american
Book_Title: price quote
Reference: hometime Insurance
Date: 2/25/2007
Time: 9:10:10 AM
Remote Name: 148.244.98.138
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