A decade ago, Hornberger & Johnson proposed that the ethnography of language planning and policy (ELPP) offers a useful way to understand how people create, interpret, and at times resist language policy and planning (LPP). They envisioned ethnographic investigation of layered LPP ideological and implementational spaces, taking up Hornberger's plea five years earlier for language users, educators, and researchers to fill up and wedge open ideological and implementational spaces for multiple languages, literacies, identities, and practices to flourish and grow rather than dwindle and disappear. With roots going back to the 1980s and 1990s, ethnographic research in LPP had been gathering momentum since the turn of the millennium. This review encompasses selected ethnographic LPP research since 2000, exploring affordances and constraints of this research in yielding comparative and cumulative findings on how people interpret and engage with LPP initiatives. We highlight how common-sense wisdom about the perennial gap between policy and practice is given nuance through ethnographic research that identifies and explores intertwining dynamics of top-down and bottom-up LPP activities and processes, monoglossic and heteroglossic language ideologies and practices, potential equality and actual inequality of languages, and critical and transformative LPP research paradigms.

Resumo: As políticas de responsabilização têm o objetivo de melhorar a qualidade educacional; porém, muitas vezes, interferem na qualidade da educação, inclusive na educação bilíngue. Com base em dezoito meses de trabalho etnográfico em uma pré-escola indígena multisseriada na península de Yucatán, no México, descrevo como Elisa, professora, diretora e zeladora, cumpria as exigentes tarefas administrativas enquanto implementava diferentes programas governamentais que impunham sobre ela uma significativa carga burocrática. Isto também a levava a deslocar sua atenção de uma cultura de responsabilização por ensino-aprendizagem para uma cultura de responsabilização burocrática. Este estudo mostra que a educação infantil em comunidades indígenas no México depende da perspicácia e da preparação de trabalhadores da linha de frente, como professores e supervisores escolares, pois cumprem com habilidade a cultura da responsabilização burocrática imposta pelas políticas governamentais enquanto tentam não sacrificar uma responsabilização frente ao seu próprio dever junto aos estudantes.

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Language revitalization efforts have been critiqued for creating and reproducing linguistic, epistemological, and pedagogical hierarchies that might run counter to a community’s needs and interests. Drawing on a seven-year ethnographic and collaborative research with the Maya cultural promoters of the Caste War Museum in Tihosuco, Mexico, we describe the dynamics of our Maya language reclamation partnership focusing on the creation of bilingual comic books and summer workshops for children. These experiences show a slow but steady language reclamation approach based on the concern for younger generations to feel comfortable to claim their right to speak and learn Maya and on their fondness for Maya language and culture. We argue that the construction, negotiation, and assertion of linguistic and pedagogical authority among all participating actors is central to reclamation projects, and that these processes are impacted by outsider researchers-collaborators in ways that can support but also potentially harm these language efforts. This paper sheds light on the various tensions lived in long-term language reclamation projects, recognizing the need for outsider researchers to turn our reflexive gaze inwards and consider how we can bring to the fore practices we can celebrate as well as address and transform those that cause discomfort and uncertainty.