Language Might (Dis)Order
Given that orders are accompanied by powerful norms and claims to validity that are difficult to dislocate, it seems to be a welcome opportunity for crises to produce disorder. The lecture is about linguistic orders of school – in the German context known as monolingual habitus – and disorder brought in by pupils. I want to analyze disorder as transformative potential for school and teaching.
We encounter increasing cross-border migration, understood as a response to global inequalities and growing opportunities for self-determined change of life circumstances. Hence, pupils’ language practices are characterized by diversity and translingualism. Nevertheless, their schools perpetuate national order as a linguistic narrative, presenting pupils monolingual narratives in teaching materials and practices (Heidrich et al. 2021; Karakayalı 2020; Steinbach et al. 2020) – permanently weaving the ‘thread of the nation’ (Duval 2016) into the structures of the institution. Knowledge about the reproduction of inequalities is being accumulated for decades, however, inequalities persist immensely, fundamentally contradicting the claims of a society to be a just society.
Raciolinguistic perspectives criticize inequalities that are (re-)produced via language-related orders of school as racializing practices (Dirim 2010). The way schools deal with inequality, however, is ‘supporting’ pupils with the aim of compensating what is seen as lack within a regime of normalization. The logic hence is this: Raciolinguistically othered are supported with the aim of aligning them with those whose legitimate language validity claim is not being questioned. While schools are responsible for the lack of linguistic fit, it is the pupils who are demanded to create solutions by working for compensation. That this compensation is sometimes unrealistic, that it remains structurally permeated by classism, and, even if successful, does not work to protect the subjects from discrimination against them, remains un-discussed, as does its cost for the subjects, who have to submit to the hierarchizing language order.
Meanwhile, the multilingual, ethnolectic, and translanguaging practices of pupils have long disrupted the mighty language order of schools. The lecture looks at research from the more established Asian (Gube/Gao 2019) and US-American (Buchholtz/Casillas/Lee 2018) raciolinguistic field and asks for conceivable postnational transformations of schools beyond assimilative language learning in Germany.