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The Multilingual Edge of Education pp 191–210Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Double-Edged Valorizations of Urban Heteroglossia

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Abstract

Teachers’ opinions about pupils’ home languages are often in tune with official language policy. Also in Flanders (Belgium), survey and case study research frequently demonstrates teachers’ negative attitudes towards pupils’ non-standard and non-Dutch home languages. This chapter however reports on ethnographic research at an ethnically mixed Brussels secondary school where at least one teacher could be observed valorizing his pupils’ home languages in and out of class. These valorizations facilitated a positive classroom climate, but they were also indebted to longer-standing representations of language and thus embedded in larger stratification patterns. Pending structural changes, I suggest this is the fate of much behaviour at school that negotiates the current language political status quo. Careful attention to these negotiations is vital for understanding contemporary education.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Data collection involved five months of participant observation (September through December 2011 and May 2012, three days a week), individual audio recording (35 hours), classroom audio recording (35 hours), interviewing and retrospective interviewing (10 hours), taking pictures and befriending pupils on Facebook through a special research account. All names are pseudonymized.

  2. 2.

    Flemish Community commission statistics: http://www.vgc.be.

  3. 3.

    Neither could their proficiency in home languages as Arabic, Berber or Turkish be taken for granted.

  4. 4.

    Fieldnotes were written in Dutch. Participants’ use of French was noted in French.

  5. 5.

    I will use different fonts hereafter for the various source languages: French, Dutch, Arabic, Turkish, unless stated otherwise.

  6. 6.

    3OS were taught by two different teachers of religion and Dutch since both positions had to be refilled in the middle of the year.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Literature, Translation and Communication, Center of Research in Linguistics, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium

    Jürgen Jaspers

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  1. Jürgen Jaspers
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ghent University, Gent, Belgium

    Piet Van Avermaet

  2. Ghent University, Gent, Belgium

    Stef Slembrouck

  3. Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Koen Van Gorp

  4. Ghent University, Gent, Belgium

    Sven Sierens

  5. Ghent University, Gent, Belgium

    Katrijn Maryns

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Jaspers, J. (2018). Double-Edged Valorizations of Urban Heteroglossia. In: Van Avermaet, P., Slembrouck, S., Van Gorp, K., Sierens, S., Maryns, K. (eds) The Multilingual Edge of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54856-6_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54856-6_9

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54855-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54856-6

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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