Abstract
This chapter establishes some of the entry points and assumptions in beginning to think through language policy making in schools, and how policies are shaped by sets of overlapping language ideologies. It begins the genealogical approach which underpins the entire book, whereby policy initiatives framed as ‘new’ are shown to be resonant of ‘historical’ policies—which themselves are tethered to British colonial practices in which the speech of racialised communities was deemed to be deficient and in need of remediation. I provide a statement on my own positionality and begin to outline some of the key theoretical anchor points used in the remainder of the book.
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Notes
- 1.
The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills—the schools inspectorate in England. Ofsted carry out routine inspections of schools in which they are deemed to be ‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’.
- 2.
‘Special measures’ is a term used by Ofsted to describe schools who, following an inspection rating of ‘inadequate’, are deemed to require additional monitoring.
- 3.
See also Irvine and Gal (2000: 40) who write of how eighteenth-century European linguists described click sounds in African languages as animal like, such as hens clucking, magpies chattering and ducks quacking. Gilmour (2006) describes a range of representations of Bantu languages produced for English-speaking readers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and how this functioned as a mechanism of colonial power.
- 4.
I capitalise the B in Black/Blackness throughout this book but use lowercase w for white/whiteness. Whilst both Black and white are socially constructed categories, capitalising the w in white/whiteness risks following grammatical tactics deployed by white supremacists.
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Cushing, I. (2022). The Durability of Language Ideologies. In: Standards, Stigma, Surveillance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17891-7_1
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