Ideologies on multilingual practices at a rural Catalan school

Sols vol 3.1 2009

ISSN: 1750-8649 (print) ISSN: 1750-8657 (online)

Sociolinguistic Studies

L O N D O N

doi : 10.1558/sols.v3i1.37 37–60 ©2009, equinox publishing

Article

Ideologies on multilingual practices at a rural Catalan school

Maria Sabate Dalmau

AbstractThis ethnographic study analyses ideologies on multilingualism and attitudes toward cultural diversity in a rural Catalan school located in a semirural locality which is undergoing a series of changes linked to the dynamics of globalisation. Firstly, it describes the demolinguistic processes that are affecting this small school dedicated to the teaching of and in Catalan at the turn of the century. Secondly, the study links these processes to the current linguistic and social orders of the school by looking at both the local and global social values indexed by the languages that now circulate within the institution. Thirdly, it examines the ideologies on multilingualism of the educational agents involved in the schooling process (teachers, students, parents), and attempts to understand where the historically-informed institutional stance of the school comes from. Finally, it examines how the defence of the teaching in a minority language-only and the investment in depicting the school as a Catalan monolingual monocultural space is legitimised in a largely unexplored arena: the rural Catalan schooling of the global era.

Keywords: minority language schooling, catalan, ideologies of language, globalisation, multilingualism

Affiliation

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

email: [email protected]

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1 Overview of the study: aims and theoretical underpinnings

This paper aims to complement other ethnographic studies that examine ideologies on multilingualism and migration in other schooling contexts in Catalonia (e.g., Woolard 2003, Unamuno and Codó 2007, Rosselló i Peralta 2003). Research has centred on students that were the children of the second generation of migrants who arrived mainly from Southern Spain during the migration movement of the 1950s. These studies focus on schools located in the urban area surrounding Barcelona, and some had as an objective the assess-ment of the success or reception of bilingual educational policies after their implementation during the 1980s (cf. Woolard 2003). Other work has focused (or partly focused) on the schooling of newly-arrived children from countries outside Spain during the migration flows at the turn of the century, analysing urban areas where the linguistic market is not secured as Catalan (Boix i Fuster 1993, Woolard 1989, Unamuno and Patiño 2009).

The school presented in this study tries to provide a further look at the educational experience in Catalonia. Firstly, it provides a perspective of the rural schooling process in a non-metropolitan area with a remarkably short history of migration movements. Secondly, it is located in a Catalan-dominant zone where all the classes are conducted in Catalan, except for the compulsory two-hour-per-week Spanish class and the two-hour-per-week English class, and where the majority of the students are Catalan monolinguals when they first begin schooling. Thirdly, the educational actors are simultaneously key members of the town, students’ parents, and political activists in the local town council that implemented schooling in Catalan as part of the explicitly antifrancoist Catalan project, uniquely blurring the boundaries between what shapes the institution and what shapes the locality surrounding it.

Following the proposals outlined by other researchers who have analysed the schooling processes of minorities and the circulation of social identities in the classrooms of the global era from a critical sociolinguistic perspective (cf., e.g., Heller 2006 [1999], Wortham 2006), in this paper I understand discourse as an indicator in social contestation, reproduction and change, and social categories as resources through which we interactively organise and (co)construct our societies and, in turn, negotiate ongoing relationships of power and social difference (Barth 1969). By ideologies I mean those indices of the norms, judge-ments, positioning and interests which govern our sociolinguistic behaviour (cf., e.g., Blommaert 1999, Jaffe 1999). In other words, ideologies are practices that lead to concrete (social, linguistic, political) action and therefore have a direct impact on our daily life. In this paper I suggest that the institutional thinking of the school (that is, its institutional practices) and the historically-informed individual trajectories of the social actors involved in it are mutually

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Ideologies on multilingual practices at a rural Catalan school 39

constitutive (Heller 2007). Moreover, I argue that globalising dynamics can become tangible through the systematised observation of the local happen-ings in a discursive space or institution, and through the interrogation of the ordinary practices of our everyday life (Cicourel 1974). Finally, I believe that the school is the backbone of any society, the most important institutional arena to create and regulate citizens. It is a site of struggle where categories become institutionalised and where inequality is transmitted and reproduced under the umbrella of meritocracy (Bourdieu 1977).

The qualitative data employed in this study includes participant observa-tion in the only rural school and the only kindergarten in the locality under study, conducted between 2004 and 2007, and several interviews with the educational agents of the town as well as their students, apart from official dossiers and other ethnographic materials. 1 Demographic details are taken from the Institute of Statistics of the Catalan government (Idescat 2001, Idescat 2007), and from the population records and youth forums of the locality, here named Llabona.

2 The dynamics of globalisation in non-urban Barcelona: Llabona

Llabona is a semirural town at the periphery of Barcelona with less than 1,400 2 registered inhabitants. It is undergoing a series of changes linked to several globalisation processes: migration flows, urbanisation and demise of the local industry. In turn, this locality organises itself along closed networks and strong ties of kinship that date back to the fourteenth century, despite the two main migration movements that had a demolinguistic and socioeconomic impact in Catalonia, the first during the 1950s (with the arrival of two million workers from Southern Spain) and the second at the turn of the century – in Barcelona, legal foreign residents accounted for 5.3% of the total population in 2004 (Codó 2008:19).

Although the arrival of people from Southern Spain was noticeable in Llabona, Catalan locals have remained to this day an overwhelming linguisti-cally homogeneous Catalan majority with a strong sense of community. In 2001, for instance, more than 75% of its inhabitants were born in Catalonia, and, in 1996, about 74% of them were born in the very same town. In 2001, 44%–55% of those who had arrived during the first migration movement affirmed that they spoke Catalan, and 45%–57% could read it. Virtually all of them were working in local industry, and some in construction, transporta-tion and, to a lesser extent, local commerce. Commerce, housing, education, and other jobs with a higher rank were mainly in the hands of people born in Catalonia, most of them born in the very same town. Remarkably, more than three quarters of the total amount of teachers in the school under study were

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born in the town or nearby (Idescat 2001). In the same year, 50%–62% of the registered inhabitants who had gone to elementary school, non-university oriented highschool or training schools could write in Catalan (Idescat 2007). The percentages for those who had an applied university-bound training degree or a BA were around 75%–85%. Higher education and access to the variety of jobs that highschool or university educational levels provide required an investment in Catalan.

In short, the political economy of linguistic exchanges (Bourdieu 1991) described herein seems to shed some light on why Catalan and Spanish gar-nered and keep garnering class and ethnic connotations. Catalan, far from being heard as public or unclassed, is associated with an elite who was a majority in the locality and had the gateway to socioeconomic success and upward mobility during the 1950s, and Spanish is at times seen as being a new form for carrying out and legitimising the old imposition upon a minority language. This might partly explain why the locality organised itself along polarised ethnolinguistic lines: the ‘us Catalans’ from town and the ‘them Castilians’ from outside during the first migration flow of the 1950s.

More recently, the twenty-first century migration flows that are creating increasingly diverse communities at very local levels in Catalonia (Pujolar 2007a) have arrived in Llabona. In 2002, the town population totalled less than 1,100 registered inhabitants. In five years it has received around 300 newcomers and has experienced, for the first time, a quick increase of registered foreign residents (7.3% of the population) from countries outside Spain (30 Latin-Americans, 30 Armenians, and 30 Moroccans). This represents relatively sudden growth because the percentage of people with nationalities other than officially Spanish in 2001 was of 4%. Between 2006 and 2007 there arrived a fourth group of approximately 70 persons from urban Barcelona, the majority of them Spanish-speaking with no previous ties to the Catalan locals.

These migration movements and the effects of the new economy have brought about several important changes in town. Firstly, urban restructuring and a shortage of housing facilities have become a major issue of concern among Catalan locals. The newer houses have been built by well-known construc-tion companies with no links to Llabona. These luxury, semidetached and unifamiliar, houses are mostly affordable for the newly-arrived inhabitants from the metropolitan area of Barcelona only. In 2004, the Catalan locals officially reported a housing shortage and scarce renting options in two official documents, one of which read: ‘No hi ha cases ni pisos de lloguer i les cases de nova construcció són excessivament cares’ (There are no houses or flats for rent, and the newly-constructed houses are excessively expensive) (Youth Forum Report).

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The second change regarding the social restructuring of Llabona concerns employment, which is currently remarkably scarce. In 2003, the textile industry represented almost 60% of employment, and it is still the most important source of income nowadays. Perhaps as the first symptoms of the shift toward an emergent tertiarised economy, one of the three main local industries shut down in 2005, leaving approximately 80 Catalan locals unemployed, and opening up a process of forced massive dispersal of job seeking in the neighbouring villages, leading to a present day unemployment rate of 9%.

These changes bring about new structures of feelings that translate into narratives of uprootedness and uneasiness (Giddens 1991) regarding the socioeconomic and linguistic future of the locality. These include shared deep anxieties about the breaking down of older family structures, fear of the loss of ‘Catalan’ or ‘rural’ values, and sharper struggles for accessing resources such as housing, schooling and employment. These feelings also circulate among the educational agents in town. Anna, a 40-year-old, Catalan-born local activist, who has been the director of the only kindergarten for about 12 years, when interviewed about the four groups of newcomers affirms 3 in excerpt (1):(1) Jo recordo la meva mare deia ‘coi això sembla l’Hospitalet!’... Mil

dos-cents estem ara? Doncs clar mil cinc-cents ja són molts! Pensa que sempre hem lluitat pels mil...

(1) I remember my mother saying ‘gosh this looks like l’Hospitalet!’ [a mostly Spanish-speaking urban city]... A thousand and two hundred [inhabitants] we have now? So see a thousand and five hundred is already a lot! You’ve gotta think that we have always fought for the thousand...

The globalising processes have also affected the school under study. During the academic year 2006–2007 it welcomed about 100 students, 15 (overwhelmingly female) teachers and 7 migrant students: 3 from Armenia, 2 from Morocco and 2 from Latin-America. It is now using a transitory accommodation block due to the increase of students, although the average number of children per class is 12–13. Recently, it had to leave a Zona Escolar Rural (Rural Schooling Zone), a network of rural schools with which they could formerly share the scarce educational resources (e.g. educational specialists), because the enrol-ment limits required in order to be a member of this network were exceeded. Moreover, the school cannot request an Aula d’Acollida (welcome room) for the newcomers, because they do not meet the official requirements yet. 4 Instead, they have created an informal pool of in-group mediators, normally composed of the newcomers’ relatives. Finally, anxieties about the growing difficulties in accessing resources on the face of demographic growth have now become part of the institutional thinking of the school, as seen in the ‘Parents Dossier.

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Enrolment for Academic year 2007–2008’, an excerpt of which is presented in example (2):(2) Els grups han anat creixen en nombre de nens i el centre s’ha anat

omplint fins que en aquest moments els espais que disposem són insuficients (...) Tampoc disposem de cap espai per a fer el desdo-blament de grups i aules d’idiomes, música, psicomotricitat. És per això que des de fa temps estem demanant una ampliació de l’escola. Aquest curs comença a ser urgent.

(2) The groups have increased in number of children and the centre [the school] has been filled in such a way that now the spaces that we have to work with are insufficient (…) We do not have enough space to feasibly divide groups according to educational level, nor do we have language, music, or psychomotor activity classrooms. For this reason we have been applying, for a period of time now, for an enlargement of the school. This year it is becoming urgent.

The lack of material resources and the impossibility of accessing the facilities that were formerly provided by the Zona Escolar Rural have a direct impact on the ways in which the management of linguistic diversity is currently dealt with, as will be analysed in section 4, after a brief explanation of the institutional trajectory of the school under study, presented in the following section.

3 The institutional trajectory of the only rural public school, Joan Maians

The only rural public school is named after a Catalan antifascist who was forced into exile in 1939, during the Spanish ultranationalist dictatorship led by Franco after the Spanish Civil War. The school Joan Maians was born in the context of a linguistic recovery after Francoism, when the Llei de Normalització Lingüística (Law of Linguistic Normalisation for the recovery of the Catalan language), legally formalised in 1983, was finally implemented with the specific aim of promoting the use of Catalan at school as the main vehicle for its progressive recovery after at least forty years of being completely banned in every sphere of the public arena and its institutions – Catalan did not become an ‘optional’ subject until 1975 (Guibernau i Berdún 2004). In Llabona, the law of linguistic normalisation (i.e. language recovery) became the priority for the then members of the town council (members of the Partit Socialista de Catalunya, PSC). These councillors actively worked hand in hand with the present day educators (with whom they had and have ties of kinship) to formally lead the initiative until practicalities made it possible for that newly-elected local government to implement it, in 1984–1985. According to the five then-councillors that were interviewed, a Catalan farmer and four

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factory workers from Spanish descent, there were no major problems in the implementation of schooling in Catalan, due to the ‘determinació irrevocable’ (irrevocable determinacy) of the town council, as the Catalan farmer phrased it. Three of these factory workers had come from other parts of Spain and spoke Spanish in our interviews. For them, Catalan normalisation was part of the town councils’ and the school’s joint fight against Francoism. The members of these two institutions had witnessed the painful traces of the Civil War and had shared experiences of being forced to be educated in Spanish in a minority setting during a dictatorship.

These teachers are at the same time currently implementing a policy of symmetrical bilingualism, a Canadian-inspired ‘model’ which aims at avoid-ing segregation and polarisation along ethnic lines at school (Roller 2001). This model requires students to be able to understand, speak, and write both official languages, Catalan and Spanish, by the end of primary school. At the turn of the century, the project of linguistic normalisation was updated by the same educational agents that first implemented it, because it was then when the Students’ Parents Association joined the FAPAC, the Federation of Mothers and Fathers of Students of Catalonia, which was created to provide support for the public educational system and to implement a linguistic project in which Catalan is the language of education. For these educational agents, schooling in Catalan is part of the explicitly antifascist Catalan nation building project which they started twenty years ago based on their lived experience with the imposition of Spanish. Excerpt (3) summarises how Marta, the director of the school who first implemented Catalan normalisa-tion and who has been teaching in Llabona for more than twenty years now, felt about this imposition:(3) Nosaltres hem crescut parlant en castellà. Vull dir, no hem crescut

parlant en català a l’escola... A més en castellà m’expresso... mira, no sé, suposo... mira, és una llengua que vaig estudiar i que em van obligar i... i la vaig aprendre.

(3) We’ve been brought up speaking Castilian. I mean, we haven’t been brought up speaking Catalan at school… and, in Castilian I express myself… look, I don’t know, I guess… look, it’s a language that I studied and that I was obliged and… and that I learned.

Apart from her role as an educator in Llabona, Marta has also been very involved in Catalan schooling at a personal level. After Francoism, for instance, she decided to school her children in the school of Llabona, the place were she was and is still working, and mentioned her children’s opportunity to be fully taught in Catalan as one of the main reasons for taking this decision as a mother in rural Catalonia.

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4 The management of diversity at school

In this section I will present the data by focusing on (1) the school’s legitimate language and the ideologies on Catalan-Spanish bilingualism in the frontstage (Goffman 1967) of the school; (2) the social values of Spanish; (3) ideologies on other non-elite codes, and (4) the institutional treatment of ‘multilingualism’.

4.1 The legitimate language and ideologies on Catalan-Spanish bilingualism

The first finding that came out of the interviews with the educators is that, in times of internal diversity when the Spanish linguistic market is increasing rap-idly, the school is depicted as a monolingual monocultural Catalan discursive space where the legitimate language is Catalan only. The director illustrates this point in excerpt (4):(4) Des de l’escola tot és en català menys en les hores que has de fer

castellà... La llengua de l’escola és el català, la llengua vehicu-lar de l’escola és el català. Nosaltres ho fem tot en català: els comunicats, el no sé què...

(4) From the school everything is in Catalan except for the hours in which you have to do Castilian… The language of the school is Catalan. The language of transmission of the school is Catalan. We do everything in Catalan: the notices, whatever…

In observing their beliefs, I suggest that these teachers think of themselves as Catalan monolinguals and seem to be thinking of Catalan as a homogeneous code, a positioning that only makes sense within the discursive regime of the nation-state. That is, the institution is ideologically habituated as unilingually Catalan. Consequently, one of the biggest puzzles that the social actors face is that in taking this positioning, they are reproducing the discursive regime against which the school was founded, just with another code (i.e. against Spanish unilingualism during the dictatorship).

The realities of bilingual practices, codes-contact, or hybridity are generally presented as ‘temporary messiness’ or ‘slips of tongue’, and are avoided or said not to be part of the frontstage of the school. On some occasions, bilingual practices can also be explicitly sanctioned. The institutional agents’ ideologies in this regard range from bilingualism as cultural deficit, where students are categorised as semilinguals (Martin-Jones and Romaine 1986, Romaine 1995) who do not know Spanish or Catalan well enough ‘to sustain the advanced cognitive processes which enable them to benefit from mainstream educa-tion’ (Milroy and Muysken 1995:3), to bilingualism as the coexistence of two linguistic systems, serial monolingualisms (Heller 2001), where students are asked to keep the two parallel codes separate and to frontstage Catalan only at

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school. Excerpt (5) shows how the director of the kindergarten, Anna, glided between the two notions:(5) A mi se m’hi dirigeixen tots, en català. Millor o pitjor, o sigui

amb alguna castellanada o d’allò però tots se’m dirigeixen, vale?… Tinc un nen que és allò català, català, català en el sentit de que pares i avis, familiars més directes [parlen] català i clar el primer dia que van venir allà, que amb castellà, pues vas sentint l’altre llengua, no? És com una mica nou i els fa gràcia i llavors van repetint tot lo de l’altre, no? Diuen ‘¿Qué (es) eso? ¿Qué(es) eso?’, i quan descobreix ‘qué(es)eso’ pues tan aviat parlen l’un com l’altre, no?

(5) They all address me in Catalan. For better or worse, that is with some castellanada [pejorative term for Spanicisms] or stuff but all of them address me in it, ok?… I have a kid who is, say, Catalan, Catalan, Catalan in the sense that the parents and grandparents, close relatives [speak] Catalan and so the first day that they came there, with Castilian, then you go hearing the other language, right? It’s like a bit new and they find it funny and then they keep repeating everything the other says, right? They say ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ [in Spanish], and when they discover ‘What’s that’ then they can speak either one [language] or the other, right?

These discourses show that at times bilingual and multilingual children are seen as a hindrance for the development of the communicative skills of Catalan-born students, who are institutionally conceptualised as the default legitimate students of the school. In turn, non-Catalan monolinguals seem to end up being non-legitimate or inauthentic bearers of ‘Catalan identity’. More specifically, Catalan-Spanish bilinguals are seen as a challenge to the institution’s project of Catalan normalisation, and Spanish-dominant students are backstaged or, at times, left unmentioned. In excerpt (5) we also witness the ethnification of Spanish-speaking students’ talk and the reproduction of stereotypes through dialect performance. Dialect performances directly portray a particular social kind of person (Rampton 2006). That it, when Anna utters ‘¿Qué (es) eso?’ (What’s that?) with no linking verbs (es) and with a mock intonation in Spanish she seems to be reproducing the Southern Spanish accent with which those from Spanish descent tend to be stereotyped.

In the linguistic order outlined in this section, where an abstract normative standard Catalan devoid of Spanish interference is established as the legitimate language, non-Catalan users and bilinguals are considered not to be doing well at school. This seems to follow the patterns observed by Woolard among teenagers in the schools of Sabadell (urban Barcelona) in the 1980s, where none of the non-users of Catalan was considered to be doing well in school by their teachers (2003:98). Excerpt (6) 5 is an interview with Joana (*JOA), a 13-year old

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Catalan girl schooled in town, and shows that a very similar ideology circulates in rural Catalonia:(6) %com: 05/01/07. Joana’s house. Catalan, Spanish or undecidable1 *RES: els que treuen millor nota <#> [>] <en què parlen> [?]. %tra: those who get higher marks <#> [>] <what do they speak> [?].2 *JOA: <català> [<]. %tra: <Catalan> [<].3 *RES: i els que treuen mala nota +... %tra: and those who get a bad mark +...4 *JOA: castellà. %tra: Castilian.5 *RES: però no tots,, <no> [?]. %tra: but not all of them,, <right> [?].6 *JOA: no però jo ## a la meva classe tots els que parlen castellà n’han suspès almenos alguna. %tra: no but I ## in my class all of those who speak Castilian have failed at least some.

It should be clearly stated, however, that it is not that the educational agents feel systematically negative about the students’ Catalan-Spanish bilingualism. Neither does this mean that teachers close the doors to Spanish – excerpt 7, analysed in section 4.2, provides support for this claim. Rather, it should be emphasised that their position as educators in rural Catalonia is much more complicated and goes beyond mere personal or individual practices, as will be explored in more detail in section 5: teachers in Llabona seem to be torn between the school’s official position and their personal and professional commitment to the Catalan language in a moment of sociolinguistic change, on the one hand, and their awareness of bilingualism as being an asset, on the other hand.

4.2 Ideologies on ‘Spanish’

At the local level, Spanish indexes a dominant language which subordinates Catalan and is increasingly and quickly taking the public floor of the school. Its local social values also bring about feelings of a present day imposition and attempts towards maintaining a centralist and uniformly Spanish image of Spain by the contemporary conservative and centrist forces in the Spanish state (cf. Blommaert 1999:16). Excerpt (7), taken from the interview with the school’s director bears witness to the aforementioned indexicality of local Spanish:(7) El que passa que veus que si abans s’utilitzava molt més el català

a l’escola, hi ha una tendència al castellà, i jo no sé... quan veig nens doncs que els seus avis són de Llabona, els seus pares són de Llabona, han parlat en català, tota la vida que parlen en català amb els nens, i veus aquell nen... que a lo millor s’està

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adreçant amb un altre i li està parlant en castellà i li dius ‘Per què li parles en castellà?’ Aquell nen que és català està fent un sobre esforç per parlar-li en castellà. Bueno pos això és el que em sorprèn. El que passa és que no és sempre però sí que en moltes ocasions ho veus. I a veure a lo millor amb aquest nen li va molt bé perquè està aprenent el castellà però... A lo millor en aquest nen li va molt bé perquè ja està bé però no afavoreix um a que con-tinuï perdurant el català.

(7) What happens is that you see that before Catalan was much more used at school, and there is a tendency toward Castilian, and I don’t know… When I see kids whose grandparents are from Llabona, their parents are from Llabona, they have spoken Catalan, they have spoken Catalan to the children all their lives, and you see that kid… who is perhaps speaking to another [kid] and he is speak-ing Castilian and you tell him ‘Why do you speak in Castilian to him? That kid who is Catalan is making an extra effort to speak Castilian to him. Well so this is what surprises me. What happens is that this is not always the case but you can see this on many occasions. And perhaps for the kid this is really good because he is learning Castilian but… Perhaps for this kid this is a very good thing because it is all right but it doesn’t favour um that Catalan continues to persist.

Excerpt (7) seems to bear witness to how Spanish is gradually colonising the playground, and to how students are making the switch to Spanish in that discursive space, regardless of the teachers’ efforts to make students aware of their specific linguistic behaviours and the possible negative consequences for the future of Catalan. It also exemplifies that for some educators ‘speaking Catalan’ is equated to ‘being Catalan’, and that ‘Llabona’ and ‘Catalan’ are used interchangeably. It in turn illustrates that while the presence of Spanish is acknowledged and while there are explicit attempts at respecting its use (indeed, Catalan-Spanish bilingualism is also conceived of as an asset), the consequence of trying to counterbalance the power of Spanish in the playground is that the Spanish language gets, in the end, backstaged. Catalan-only perform-ances are then legitimised by the institution in terms of their pragmatic use, as exemplified in excerpt (8) when, in an institutional public display of linguistic competence during the Christmas party, students sing their songs in Catalan and in English (none in Spanish), and Marta justifies this decision in terms of its practical use:(8) Per exemple, el concert de Nadal. Nosaltres fem per exemple els

nens que fan anglès doncs ho fan en anglès. Però molt puntualment doncs han dit ‘ostres com és que feu una cançó en català? Feu-ne una en castellà’. Bueno pos no. Perquè, mira, el castellà és una llengua molt més propera a nosaltres. Es treballa i s’aprèn a l’escola però no has de fer un treball tan intens com hagis pogut fer amb l’anglès que... i que a més a més no és tan fàcil trobar-te situacions en anglès...

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(8) For example, for the Christmas concert. We do for instance, the children who take English then they do it in English. But on very few occasions [they] have said ‘come on why do you do a song in Catalan? Do one in Castilian’. Well no. Because, look, Castilian is a language which is much closer to us. It is worked on and learnt in school but you don’t have to do such intense work on it as you might have done with English that… And besides, it is not as easy to find situations in English…

Quite a different picture emerges when these informants talk about the social values of Spanish as a global language. Through that prism, Spanish is an index for an internationally powerful second and/or foreign language that is part of the pool of languages that constitute a global elite multilingualism associated to key social groups and to upward mobility. As such, it indexes values of transnationalism, modernity and welcoming, and it is presented as an anonymous, politically aperspectival and unclassed language. In other words, Spanish becomes a ‘lengua intercultural’, ‘lengua posnational’, or a ‘lengua sin patria’ (an intercultural postnational language without a fatherland) (Woolard 2006, Pujolar 2007b, Del Valle 2007).

However, the acceptance of the presence of Spanish with these global values within the international arena on the part of the educators is done through English and in the regimented discursive space of the English classroom. In their school’s magazine, last-year students usually write a page in English as part of their English lesson, to practice their writing skills with Montse, a Catalan educator who lives in a nearby rural town and who has been teaching English in the school (where she enrolled her children, too) for fifteen years. Excerpt (9) is one of the students’ English pages reproduced verbatim (i.e. it is the students’ English):(9) OUR AMERICAN PENFRIENDS

The students of years 5 and 6 exchange mails with students from X, in the New York State. They go to a small, private, catholic school called ‘Jesus’. We study English as a third language and they study Spanish as a second. We write emails sometimes in English and some-times in Spanish and they do the same. This way both schools can practice the foreign language.

In (9) Spanish becomes a second language at school. Besides, the statement sup-ports the thesis that serial learning of communicative skills and investment in parallel monolingualisms are beneficial for the children. By choosing English, the global language which is judged to be a ‘neutral’ language devoid of socio-political connotations in Catalonia (Huguet 2007), the institution legitimises and publicly circulates the relegation of Spanish to second position. In turn, the English language turns an ideologically motivated metacomment about language learning into an ultimately legitimising ‘expert argument’ or ‘academic

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truth’. Overall, the school welcomes Spanish as a global language, while Spanish is in turn officially relegated to a lower rank in the local linguistic scale of the school in this specific case. It should be stressed that both local and global social values are indexed simultaneously and within the same discursive space, where they cohabit and compete. Excerpt (9) also illustrates the ambiguities of the institution. For the sake of going global they contact a private, Catholic school, in spite of the fact that they are active defenders of public, Catalan and secular schooling. Besides, making transnational ties through the use of the new information and communication technologies (i.e. ICTs) has as a consequence a process of opening up a possible window for the penetration of Spanish into their daily activities at school, since with these new kinds of computer-mediated interactive lessons Catalan has no official presence in the fronstage.

4.3 Ideologies on non-elite codes: the need for ‘resocialisation’

Other linguistic codes such as the Armenian language are conceptualised as ‘short term’, temporary languages which are increasing the Spanish-speaking market, to the detriment of Catalan, the assumption being that newcomers first learn Spanish upon their arrival. These codes fall into the label ‘multilingualism’, and, as such, they altogether seem to index meanings similar to those of the local values of Spanish: they are conceived of as a threat. Frequently, when it comes to non-elite non-intelligible codes for the teachers, the migrant students’ multilingual practices are sanctioned and pathologised, and at times legitimate citizenship or parenthood of the adults in charge of these students is put to question.

When they talk about their linguistic practices, teachers tend to see the students’ ‘lack’ of verbal skills as a consequence of ‘linguistic deprivation at home’. The educational actors thus glide between cultural deficit assumptions (Gumperz 1986) and cultural and language difference notions (Ogbu 1993), positioning themselves in the role of the expert and seeing newcomers as in need of ‘reeducation’ and ‘resocialisation’, stressing that students should be socialised into the dominant norms of that Catalan space. Excerpts (10) and (11), taken from interviews with the two directors under study, illustrate these claims. In (10), Anna, the kindergarten teacher, is talking about newly arrived Spanish-dominant students from urban Barcelona. In (11), Marta explains her concerns about the situation of Zarah, a girl born in Morocco. In both cases, non-Catalan-speaking newcomers are dispossessed of cultural and linguistic capital:(10) Amb algun dius ‘amb aquest castellà, castellà, castellà i ni papa

de català, per l’ambient en què s’han mogut... No sé, digues-li Hospitalet, digues-li on vulguis. Fins on arriben els pares ho fan,

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i fins on no, pues, pobres, doncs o pregunten o... simplement amb la seva llengua.

(10) With some you go ‘with this, Castilian, Castilian, Castilian, and no clue about Catalan’, ‘coz of the environment in which they have moved… I don’t know, call it Hospitalet, call it whatever you want. They get as far as their parents can get and, where they can’t, poor things, they ask or… simply [use] their language.

(11) Aquesta gent no té els mateixos valors que tu, ni li està donant el mateix valor a l’escola que tu li estàs donant. Per tu és imprescindible que aquesta nena vingui a l’escola, que aquesta nena tingui una formació, que aquesta nena pugui tenir pos uns aprenentatges... Però ells no ho consideren així. Ells ho viuen segons els seus esquemes. Clar jo crec que aquests esquemes jo penso que són vàlids en el seu món perquè hi ha més gent que viu d’aquesta manera, però aquests esquemes aquí? (...) Com que la seva religió no permet que les dones s’exposin públicament i tal tal, pos aquesta nena tot i que participa de la preparació quan arriba el dia de final de curs pos no pot actuar. Per això difícil-ment anirà amb un agrupament escolta... perquè no li permetrà mai la seva religió ni la seva estructura de vida, no a menos de que s’alliberi.

(11) These people don’t have the same values as you and don’t give the same value to school that you do. For you it is essential that this [Moroccan] girl comes to school, that this girl has an educa-tion, that this girl had access to say learning… But they don’t consider it this way. They live this according to their schemes. Of course I believe that these schemes I think are valid in their world because there are more people who live in this way, but these schemes here? (…) Because her religion doesn’t allow women to make public appearances and so on and so forth then this girl, even if she has participated in the preparation, when it comes to the day of the end-of-course party then she can’t play. For this reason it is unlikely she will participate in scouts… ‘coz her religion and her life structure will never allow her to do so, unless she frees herself.

Although the themes ‘multilingualism’ and ‘diversity’ are very frequently brought up at school, the institution conceives of itself as dealing with issues of Catalan-Spanish bilingualism and employs a transnational rhetoric of multilingualism as a way out to show acknowledgement of an abstract (or not-fully understood, or misconceived) linguistic diversity. ‘Multilingualism’ is a floating global label, emptied of meaning, that has nothing to do with real local multilingual practices on the ground. In the next section I will try to exemplify that the debate on the management of multilingualism is a cover-up term for the older fights dealing with opposed ideologies on Catalan-Spanish bilingualism. That is, to claim that the institution is managing multilingualism indexes modernity, inclusion and meritocracy. To acknowledge that the institu-tion is perhaps stuck in debates on how to deal with bilingualism indexes older,

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more archaic, institutional functionings trapped within ideologies that have at their core nation-state debates where languages are ethnolinguistic emblems: it is more adequate to depict languages as learnable economic assets that can cross socioeconomic, political and linguistic boundaries than to use them as emblems of the students’ essentialised identities.

4.4 Institutional treatment of ‘multilingualism’

The school’s rhetoric on ‘multilingualism’ puts an emphasis on the added value of linguistic diversity, and it is placed squarely at the centre of the school’s public debate. The students were taken to the Fòrum de les Cultures (Forum of cultures) in 2004. They also participate in the project Escuelas Viajeras (Travelling Schools) around Spain to promote contact with other communities. Their visit to Madrid, for instance, became a front cover of their magazine, with a picture of the students reading, in Spanish, ‘Espacio de palabras. Más cercanos’ (The corner of words. Getting closer). I believe that bringing up the topic of diversity is a way of conducting inclusive nationalism based on civic conceptions of citizenship and of implementing progressive, tolerant pedagogy.

However, behind its celebratory rhetoric, the actual meaning of ‘multilingual-ism’ is left unspecified. For instance, in the space where the students conduct their gymnastics class, the students who go to the girl and boy scouts made a wall painting with partly naked ungendered children (the global citizens in the family-like metaphor) holding a world globe without territorial borders (the global village). It reads: ‘Totes les persones somriuen en la mateixa llengua. Mou-te per la interculturalitat!’ (Everybody laughs in the same language. Make a move for interculturality!). It acknowledges and shows respect for ‘differ-ence’ and in turn it stresses our commonness: there is unity in diversity. In actual practices, this type of discourse is reflected, for example, in the students’ compositions for the school’s 2004 magazine, dedicated to the topic ‘multicul-turalitat’ (multiculturality). Their narratives speak of inclusion, human rights, solidarity, peace, and social justice, and they include short stories of disad-vantaged children from (unspecified countries of) Africa and Latin-America being helped and supported by ‘white’ friends – titles include ‘La Isabel arriba a Barcelona’ (Isabel [originally from Colombia] comes to Barcelona) or ‘Un nou món de diversitat’ (A new world of diversity). This is a strategy of neutrality to avoid having to deal with issues of identity. Similar rhetoric on ‘unity in diversity’ seems to be circulating internationally as a transnational discourse of the global era (cf., Jaffe 2007, for Corsica, Heller 2006 [1999], for French language minority schooling in Ontario).

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In turn, talk on pluralism is a resource to invoke European citizenship and modernity. This is seen more poignantly when the school has to name and label ‘Spain’ or to deal with issues of nationality explicitly. Then the institutional discursive strategy that is most frequently encountered is to ‘go European’. This resource can be seen in the students’ magazine. Once again, multiculturality and pluralism are praised and circulated in town in English and through the patrolled discursive space of the English classroom. Last-year students described countries of the world as part of their English lesson, to practice their writing skills with Montse, the English teacher. Excerpt (12) shows how they defined ‘Spain’ (i.e. it is the students’ English, reproduced verbatim):(12) Spain

Spain is a country of Europe […] The money is the euro. Some cities in Spain are Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla, Bilbao… In Spain people speak some languages: Catalan, Spanish, Basque, and Gallec [Galician]. The president of Spain is José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero. The Spanish banner is red and yellow. The most important rivers are the Ebro, the Llobregat, the Duero, the Tajo… There are very impor-tant mountains as Pyrenees, the Picos of Europe or the Monte the Toledo.

Excerpt (12) seems to be an amalgamation of terms. By claiming that ‘Spain’ is ‘a country of Europe’ the school seems to suggest that it is moulding postnational citizens of the world. By placing the Catalan language, Catalan rivers, and Catalan cities first, they are foregrounding some ‘differential traits’ of Catalonia. And by mentioning a Spanish invented tradition (Anderson 2006 [1983]), the Spanish banner, they cannot be blamed for conducting exclusionary practices. The use of English seems to allow for the school to index openness, tolerance and multicultural competency. English also allows for sensitive labels dealing with identities to remain somehow ambiguous. Finally, this strategy could be seen as part of the way in which the school conducts civic, inclusive nationalism as a way to ratify its commitment to democratic models of citizenship.

5 A closer look at the educational agents’ difficult position: managing contradictions

The institutional ideologies on multilingualism analysed cannot be understood without taking the educational actors’ trajectories into account. This is even more so because they have been both teaching and actively participating in the activities in the locality for at least fifteen (and in some cases, twenty) years. In this section I attempt to understand some of the many factors that may explain

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where their ideologies may come from, with two aims in mind. Firstly, I try to demonstrate and to emphasise that many of the consequences of the ideologies that were presented in the previous sections are unintended. Secondly, I wish to highlight that in having to manage with the contradictions of the institution, the educational agents’ position is clearly a difficult one.

Firstly, the teachers seem to be reacting against the ‘the post-post Franco hangover’ (Woolard 2006), which consists of a diminished interest in the defence of a minority language, to the detriment of Catalan. This includes a loss of a sense of linguistic conflict (i.e. a sense of a minority language being in conflict with a dominant and dominating language) among the youngest social actors in Catalonia, which can signal an unnoticed atrophy of this minority language. Secondly, these educators are working against the stigma they themselves have long carried with them. This stigma is that using Catalan to address non-Catalan users is at times a sign of rudeness, a linguistic practice which is routinely mocked of as a sign of conservatism, irredentism and snobbism. Thirdly, the educational agents conduct militancy against systematised linguistic convergence to Spanish on the part of Catalan speakers. Linguistic convergence to Spanish by Catalan speakers addressing non-Catalan users has become a habitus, the unmarked language choice in urban Barcelona (Boix i Fuster 1993). Catalan speakers have systematised the switch to Spanish to the extent that they use it unconsciously, even when it is apparent that the hearer understands, or speaks, Catalan. At times teachers force Catalan students to use Catalan, the ticket to town membership, on the grounds that for the newly arrived it could mean having a powerful resource that should theoretically give them access to the local job marketplace, and to a type of cultural capital that ensures access to powerful networks as well (Pujolar 2007b). On other occasions, penalising language contact or a switch to Spanish and insisting in speaking Catalan can be read as a fight for the loss of secured Catalan spaces, especially in liminal zones such as the playground. This reinforces the view that the Catalan language has a privileged relation-ship with the Catalan-born locals to whom linguistic ownership is granted, and therefore fosters the assumption that Catalan students may also have privileged access to Catalan town membership. The frequently unintended consequences (cf. Giddens 1993) are that Catalan is fostered as an intraethnic language of communication, resetting the boundary between Catalan and non-Catalan speakers.

The fourth reason has to do with the official status of Catalan within the Spanish state. 6 The teachers I interviewed showed a discomfort with symmetric bilingualism and co-officiality policies, which are perceived as another strategy of dominance by the nation-state. To those Catalan educational agents who devote their professional and political lives struggling for the teaching of (and

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teaching in) the Catalan language, Catalan is still in an asymmetrical legal status, and the official discourses promoting Catalan-Spanish bilingualism, an open door for the penetration of Spanish in Catalonia: the latest law (included within the Estatut d’Autonomia de Catalunya – Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia – and passed and approved in referendum on 18 June 2006 under Article number 6 7) only recognises the right of Catalan speakers to use their language, but it does not demand Spanish speakers understand it in Catalonia. This fourth reason makes it apparent that, indeed, the debate is centred on bilingualism, and not on the present day realities of multilingualism.

In the fifth place, there is a discomfort with some of the demolinguistic globalising processes as they spread from urban to rural Catalonia. For instance, the directors are aware that in some schools in the metropolitan area of Barcelona Catalan pupils employ Catalan only when other Catalan students are present (Rosselló i Peralta 2003). This means that polarisation along ethnolinguistic lines through the use of the two local languages is being circulated through the language practices of the young players and that the project of Catalan normalisation has not fully normalised the use of this language in Catalan schools. I finally suggest that some of the teachers’ discourses come from the contradictions and stressful situations that they face on a daily basis. On the one hand, they tirelessly try to cope with the growing scarcity of resources to properly manage diversity, at a stage when they are officially no longer rural but cannot apply for urban resources either. On the other hand, there is a personal sense of failure to erase polarisation and to implement civic linguistic normalisation, a project in which they have invested their lives and risked their positions in times of sociopolitical convulsion. This may touch directly on their role as educators responsible for and committed to providing a mechanism for ensuring equal and universal access to schooling.

6 Conclusions

I have tried to highlight some of the globalising dynamics that are affecting rural schooling in peripheral Catalonia and have sought to link them to the sociolinguistic order of a specific school. The indexicalities of the languages that circulate in the classroom have been the point of departure from which I have described some ideologies on multilingualism of the institutional actors involved in the schooling process.

In defending a frontstage in Catalan-only in times when the linguistic market in a key institution of the locality is no longer secured as unilingually Catalan, the institutional ideology of the school is reproducing discourses against which the school was founded, and educational agents are left with the difficult task

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and the dilemma of strategising with the many contradictions that this implies. Catalan at times is presented as an economic asset for the facilitation and democratisation of access to the now shaky local job marketplace, for instance. More often than not, however, Catalan is conceptualised as an ethnolinguistic emblem for privileged access to ‘Catalan identity’. Overall, this hegemonic configuration confers Catalan monolingual students the privilege of being the default legitimate students.

In general, Spanish is pushed outside the official frontstage of the school, and at times it is presented as the historically dominant language imposed by the nation-state – the Spanish state still defines itself under the ‘one language-one culture-one nation paradigm’ (Pujolar 2007a). In turn, in the very same discursive space, this code indexes a powerful global language worth investing in for making transnational ties and for making claims on inclusiveness and modernity. English becomes the ‘neutrally-depicted’ terrain through which the relegation of Spanish as a second language is legitimised. It is also a code that helps justify the defence of Catalan-only performances or spaces.

These practices are also complex and contradictory and at times can become counterproductive for the project of Catalan normalisation and for the defence of a generalised use of a minority language. For instance, in the new virtual spaces where teaching is mediated by the information and communication technologies (for example, the teaching of English through the use of emails) Catalan seems to be losing its place in the institutional frontstage, for the sake of ‘going global’.

Multilingual practices are not fully integrated into the repertoire of the school, which is coping with how to go about Catalan-Spanish bilingualism. Rather, non-elite codes fall into an unspecified label called ‘multilingualism’, employed (at times in the global language, too) to make claims on multicultural competence, and to implement a civic and progressive pedagogy, for which educational agents are daily fighting both at a professional and at a personal level.

Frames of reference have perhaps shifted, and newer discourses, especially those that make use of ‘Europe’, have poignantly emerged. Overall, many of the aspects of the management of multilingualism described herein seem to help the frequently unintended reproduction of social inequality at school among the social actors that have an important piece of tomorrow’s social cake.

Acknowledgement

This project was funded by research grant PIF 429–01–1/07 (Universitat Au-tònoma de Barcelona) and by the research project grant La Gestión Del Multi-lingüismo en el Ámbito Institucional HUM2007–61864/FILO (MEC), directed

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by Dr Melissa G. Moyer. I also want to express my thanks to the Department of Anthropology and CRÉFO OISE at the University of Toronto, whose teaching and support are here acknowledged.

About the author

Maria Sabaté Dalmau is a PhD candidate at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She conducts research on intercultural communication and language uses and ideologies in multilingual and migration contexts, within the field of linguistic anthropology. She has completed her Masters in Applied Linguistics at the UAB and her postgraduate education in Linguistic Anthro-pology at the University of Toronto. She has been a junior lecturer at the UAB and has published her research internationally.

Notes

1 The data presented in this paper were selected from a larger set of eth-nographic materials that were gathered for a study on sociolinguistic categorisations and identities in rural Catalonia at the turn of the century, conducted between 2004–2007. During the three years of fieldwork vari-ous discursive spaces in the locality under study were observed, includ-ing not only the rural school, its kindergarten and playground but also the bar, the main square, the open-air market, the health clinic, the town council, the groceries, and the girl and boy scouts’ club. The researcher actively participated in the main cultural and political events of the local-ity (the most important celebrations and festivities in town – festes majors –, religious events, concerts, children’s and youth’s activities, ‘Elderly Day’, and the Theatre’s Association, to mention but a few). 21 interviews were conducted between 2004 and 2007, in the informants’ place of choice (in their homes, at the workplace, at the bar, or in the main square) and in their languages of preference: 12 interviews to key social actors of the town (the director of the school, the director of the kindergarten, town council members, the doctor, the priest, schoolchildren, boy and girl scouts) in order to investigate their language practices and ideologies, on the one hand, and the sociolinguistic orders of the main institutions in town over the span of three years, on the other hand. Five interviews were conducted to five families who arrived in the locality during the late fifties from other Autonomous Communities in Spain (Andalucía, València), first, second and third generation migrants, males and females, in order to understand the characteristics and ideologies of the first migration movement; and four more, to recently arrived persons from Latin-Amer-ica, Armenia and Morocco, of different ages (18 to 65), and with differ-ent migration trajectories, to dwell on the migration movements of the twenty-first century. Another set of data which includes tape-recorded

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situated language practices among different members of the town, as well as further details on the social categories circulating in the locality, can be found in Sabaté Dalmau (2008).

2 Due to privacy reasons, exact percentages or numbers that could allow for the identification of the locality or the informants are not provided. Like-wise, all names are pseudonyms. I assume that identification is not neces-sary so long as the results only attempt to reflect upon particular ideologies as they were encountered in that particular space at that given time within rural Catalonia.

3 Quoted excerpts from the interviews are reproduced verbatim in non-stand-ardised codes, followed by their translations into English.

4 Catalan Aules d’Acollida, implemented by the Department of Education of the Generalitat de Catalunya (the Catalan Government), aim at managing linguistic diversity in schools by providing a specific Catalan language teach-ing program to migrant students (cf. http://www.xtec.cat/lic/ for a sample of the activities conducted in an Aula d’Acollida). Newly arrived children leave their classroom for a number of hours a week (normally from 6 to 9 hours, depending on each school, on the students’ age and on their language com-petence) to attend the Catalan language program, conceived of as extra (and initial) support for their reading, writing, speaking and listening skills, the assumption being that it facilitates (quicker) access to mainstream schooling for non-Catalan-speaking newcomers, not without controversy and heated debate. For further information on Aules d’Acollida, see Generalitat de Cat-alunya. Instructions for the Academic year 2007–2008. http://www.ec.cat.

5 Transcriptions of the interviews (also reproduced verbatim in non-stand-ardised codes) were conducted by using the CHILDES system (http://www.childes.pvs.cmu.edu). In %tra the translations into English are provided.

6 For an explanation of the current political projects in Spain – the centralist model, the administrative model, the federal model, and self-determination – see Moyer and Martín Rojo (2007:157).

7 The full version of this law can be accessed in Estatut d’Autonomia de Catalunya (Generalitat de Catalunya 2006:11–13), issued by the Catalan Government, or online in their official webpage http://www.parlament.cat/porteso/estatut/estatut_angles_100506.pdf (English version).

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Ideologies on multilingual practices at a rural Catalan school

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