The linguistic ecology of education

grantor: University of TorontoThis work explores the implications of linguistic diversity for the organization of schooling, by developing and applying an original, critical-realist theory of language based on ecological psychology. Rather than carrying around in their heads comprehensive maps of the world or entire linguistic systems, individuals are portrayed as adapting their awareness and actions to different natural and linguistic environments, modifying those environments in the process. The particular importance of linguistic adaptation is shown to lie in its co-ordering effects on imaginative awareness: metaphoric and metonymic schemata that enable us to grasp forms of order that elude direct perception, but also frequently seduce us into mistaking ideas for reality. In the linguistic ecology of modern societies, knowledge and ideas are typically produced at sites distant from schools. It is shown that many of the imaginative skills cultivated in the linguistic traditions of the middle classes have in fact co-evolved with the formal education system and with the norm-governed use of texts as representations of reality. As a consequence, members of other cultural communities, whether they differ in terms of class, ethnicity, or other characteristics, encounter a linguistic order in schools that is integrated and co-evolving with a complex hierarchical system of social relations. Administrative and policy decisions which reinforce or modify this ecology of language have important constraining and enabling effects on school achievement. In particular, policies which exclude vernacular languages from schools not only confer unequal privileges but reinforce two contrasting tendencies in cultural negotiation: dynamic sublimation (whereby individuals come to see themselves and others in collective terms) and dynamic reduction (whereby individuals lose awareness of historical, social and ecological context). In order to limit such potentially dangerous effects, schools need to be founded upon the extended cultivation of a critical awareness of place, in which cultural and linguistic diversity are treated as carefully and systematically as natural diversity. The indigenous concept of the cyclic renewal of relationship is recommended as a model for learning, together with the use of critical ethnography to generate and share knowledge about and among such projects. It is argued that this would simultaneously provide the foundation for an emancipatory, research-based science of language and education.Ph.D