Publications
Jeff Bale & Mayo Kawaguchi (2020): Heritage-language education policies, anti-racist activism, and discontinuity in 1970s and 1980s Toronto
This paper examines the intersection of heritage-language education advocacy with anti-racist activism in the 1970s and 1980s in Toronto. The province of Ontario initiated the Heritage Languages Program in 1977. By focusing on discontinuities in the policy’s implementation, the paper identifies multiple strategies that Black anti-racist activists used to expand the understanding of heritage language to be more inclusive of all forms of racial and linguistic difference. Although anti-racist activists may not have succeeded, we argue here, recovering their arguments can – and should – inform current efforts to deepen linguistically- and culturally-sustaining programs in Ontario schools. The first part of the paper describes the historical context in which heritage language became a social problem recognizable to Canadian society. It is in this context that the Heritage Languages Program emerged as a policy solution to the perceived problem of racial and linguistic difference in Ontario. The second part reports our analysis of the intersection between public deliberation over the HLP and advocacy against anti-Black racism in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Hyunah Kim, Jennifer Lynn Burton, Tasneem Ahmed & Jeff Bale (2020): Linguistic hierarchisation in education policy development: Ontario’s Heritage Languages Program
Building on the recent studies revealing that official bilingualism policies in Canada are often used to reinforce a specific racial and linguistic order, this paper addresses the impact of these federal-level policies on education policies at the provincial level. From the policy genealogy perspective, we examine Ontario’s Heritage Languages Program (HLP), a highly contentious provincial policy that is still in place today. By analysing the discourses circulating in public and within the Ontario Ministry of Education around a proposed bill in the legislature to bolster heritage- Ontario; Canada language instruction and a subsequent Ministry initiative, we argue that official bilingualism and policies of multiculturalism functioned as discursive vehicles for resisting an enhanced HLP and to heritage- language education per se in politically more tolerable ways. The first part of the paper describes the research design, and introduces the historical context which produced the HLP and the early conflicts over it. The second part discusses three specific findings: (1) a discussion of the Proposal and its relationship to Bill 80; and (2) the discourses present in the general public; and (3) the discourses present in Ministry-internal deliberations of the HLP in Ontario.