Acceso usuarios
Barcelona, España
Medium of instruction (MOI) policy often takes form in diverse and creative ways. In the primary schools of the Aran Valley, Spain, Aranese (a variant of the minoritized language Occitan) is the official MOI, in coexistence with the other official languages of the region: Catalan and Castilian Spanish. In such cases of language revitalization, much of the agency for effecting sociolinguistic change is assigned to educators, who are expected to be linguistic models for students and families. What does this agency mean as it pertains to teachers' determination of MOI practices in a plurilingual context with two minoritized languages? This paper posits this agency as a distributed force among the policy assemblage at play, which encompasses official texts and the human and non-human actors of a given policy space. Through an analysis of official policy discourse, classroom observations and interview data, this article shows how educators at an Aranese primary school constructed MOI policies through their sociomaterial interactions, alignments and positionings within the policy assemblage. An understanding of language-in-education policy as agential enactments in situated learning spaces can shed light on the processes that result in discrepancies between official policy outcomes and everyday classroom realities.
