Educational environments as contested multicultural discursive spaces: toward the enregisterment of identities into conditions of immobility

摘要

Classrooms and schools, whether falling in or outside regular education, endorse the task of presenting those who attend them with legitimate knowledge in a given historical context (Young 2009). Their main means for achieving this task is language, both as a means of instruction and a subject of education. Already back in the 1960s, working on the development of what later became 'language policy across the curriculum' (Corson 1990), Harold Rosen referred to schools as 'language saturated institutions' (published in Rosen et al. 1969). In the present time and age, i.e. in a historical phase driven by globalization and (im)mobility, classrooms and schools become 'combinatorial spaces' (Simone 2004). Schools as combinatorial spaces are sites that, although populated by gathering, convergence, encounters and co-presence continue to organize themselves as either presumed repositories or (aspiring) spaces of purity of conduct providing students with legitimate knowledge and unity while at the same time having to engage with diversity as a constitutive and permanent characteristic of present day societies (Arnaut, Karrebaek, and Spotti 2017, 10). As a consequence, schools face the question of what or whose language(s) and culture(s) can be considered legitimate educational content and through what or whose language(s) this content should be taught (Arnaut et al. 2016). Even more so now than in the 1960s, educational environments are meeting places of a multitude of languages and cultures that, echoing Rosen's maxim, represent 'heavily languagized spaces' (Jaspers and Madsen 2016) that are heavily culturized as well. That is spaces where languages and cultures are in motion both online and offline triggering relationships among the cultural and sociolinguistic repertoires of their users (Spotti and Blommaert 2017) and the expectations laid upon these users within the socio-cultural spaces they inhabit.