Multiculturalism through multilingualism in schools: Emerging places of 'integration' in Toronto

摘要

School spaces are imbued with meaning and foster sensibilities of justice, belonging, and identity from an early beginning. Aside from the educational mandate of schools, they are places where the exercise of neighborhood integration and the fostering of civil society are explored. In multicultural societies, publicly funded schools are also institutional places where state ideologies of social cohesion are apparent. Recent neoliberalization of education inOntario, as in parts of other Western democracies, has posed a number of challenges to these themes. Underlying hegemonic notions of universality and accountability increasingly percolate through such neoliberal discourses and render in turn a homogeneous conception of "integration" that more often than not leads to assimilationist views and increased alienation. Despite these barriers, paradoxical spaces emerge in different school communities that redefine locally specific meanings of integration. Within such planned and unplanned spaces, social and cultural differences are explored, negotiated, and compromised in multiple ways. Drawing from various ministry and school-board policy documents, the mapping of school data, and conversations with school-board language officers, I present the diverse patterns of linguistic policy in Toronto's elementary schools. The unpredictable tapestry across the city invokes a very different landscape of "integration" as imagined and practiced by Toronto citizens.