Multilingual policies put into practice: co-participative educational workshops in Mexico

Ethnography of language planning and policy

“…With continuing calls for ELPP, and ethnography as a larger project, to move more firmly into not only describing and analyzing, but also driving policy (Davis 2014b), we have seen that LPP ethnographers are urged to take critical and transformative actions on how LPP is designed and discussed not just in academic circles, but in real-time political policy-making (Léonard et al 2013) --to act, and not just write, conference and report, to influence the sites they are reporting upon (e.g. Nagai 1999;Canagarajah 2006;Hammersley & Martyn 2007;Hornberger 2015).…”

“…Bottom-up LPP studies underscore how artifacts, semiotic resources, writing, and Indigenous multimodal literacies can be mobilized to support co-participatory development of authentic educational materials for bilingual intercultural education (BIE) in Mexico (Léonard, Gragnic & González 2013) and of storybooks based on Cree elders’ oral histories (Schreyer 2008); to facilitate intergenerational bonding and dialogue and potentially shape language use in urban Inuit families (Patrick et al 2013); and to contribute to raising the status of the Cree and Tutchone languages in their respective speech communities by the use of place names and linguistic landscapes with an Indigenous language matrix (Schreyer 2008; Ferguson 2010). Moreover, Lin & Yudaw (2013) show how choices regarding the type of semiotic resources to be used may frame who can participate in community-based language revitalization initiatives and how, while also providing a detailed example of grassroots LPP negotiation leading to a re-centering from use of print literacy and the Romanized alphabet to use of local resources such as seeds, agricultural tools, and embodied knowledge (in contrast to top-down imposition of Indigenous literacy; see Paciotto 2004).…”

“…Important to an understanding of the top-down/bottom-up dynamic, studies of bottom-up LPP activities and processes have served to highlight how implementational activities in one LPP level or layer, e.g., an Inuit family literacy center (Patrick et al 2013) or BIE teacher workshops (Léonard et al 2013), can and do influence language education and choices across other LPP levels, e.g., homes and classrooms, respectively. Moreover, Schreyer describes how promising Cree language planning activities started as a ‘serendipitous outcome’ (Schreyer 2008: 458) of land planning activities in Cree territory in Canada, showing the possibilities of joint language planning across diverse disciplines.…”

“…Reciprocally, Nagai (1999) describes a case in which a collaboratively developed vernacular educational model in Papua New Guinea was recognized at the national level by the government as a model school for vernacular education and also as a formal elementary school. Nevertheless, one of the remaining challenges in bottom-up LPP work, as described by Léonard et al (2013), is how to reconcile and make heard solutions developed at the grassroots level with regional and national planning. This observation points to an important lingering question in ethnographic LPP research, that is, how can ethnographic research findings inform LPP decision-making and processes not only on particular research sites but also beyond those sites.…”

“…), and the roles grandparents and younger siblings play in the language use and socialization patterns of children in Chinese-English bilingual families in Singapore(Ren & Hu 2013).Important to an understanding of the top-down/bottom-up dynamic, studies of bottom-up LPP activities and processes have served to highlight how implementational activities in one LPP level or layer, e.g. an Inuit family literacy center(Patrick et al 2013) or BIE teacher workshops(Léonard et al 2013), can and do influence language education and choices across other LPP levels, e.g. homes and classrooms, respectively.…”