School-Based Minority Language Revitalization on Corsica:
Democratic Models of Bilingual Identification and Educational Practice
Alexandra Jaffe
Since 1996, bilingual (French-Corsican) education has been integrated into
the Corsican public school system in the effort to revitalize the minority
language, which is learned in the home by only a very small percentage of
Corsican children. The first wave of bilingual educators was recruited from
a cadre of highly motivated teachers who were already linguistic and
cultural activists who tended to define bilingual education as having
different cultural, political and ideological underpinnings than monolingual
French education. This paper looks at the connection between two of these
teachers' ideologies of language, citizenship and cultural identity and the
"cooperative" structure they used to organize learning and social life in
their school, including a particular kind of interactional event that will
be examined in detail ÷weekly "cooperative" meetings. Data for this paper
was gathered during a year of ethnographic research that included
observations, classroom recordings and interviews with teachers, students
and parents in a bilingual village elementary school as well as
participation and observation of other classrooms and bilingual teacher
education training programs and workshops.
The focus is on the tension between the democratic ideals of teachersâ
pedagogical philosophies and the exigencies of day-to-day practice in a
bilingual classroom in a context of language shift and revitalization. The
teachers in the focal school were adherents to the "Freinet" school of
pedagogy, and organized their whole school as a "cooperative" in which
children elected officers and were involved in the choice of collective
projects, the prioritization of work and the organization of class time.
This ideal of schools as participatory democracies was connected a model of
individual motivation, and of relationships between the individual and the
collectivity that resonated with language activists' readings of the
Corsican sociolinguistic context. That is, in the face of language shift,
collective claims to cultural identity depend crucially on individual acts
of identity; using the minority language being one of those critical acts.
Once language shift has taken place, however, making the choice to learn and
speak Corsican requires considerable personal effort in a context of little
social support (both moral and practical). Viewed from the teachers' Freinet
perspective, Corsican language education was thus about creating the
conditions in which the individual student would be motivated to learn
Corsican. These conditions involved both an attention to individual
choice/freedom, and to the benefits of a shared agenda (an ethnolinguistic
identity). Thus, for them, bilingual education was not just about
reinforcing a "given" cultural identity, but about promoting the process of
individual identification with Corsican and corsicanness.
Analysis of weekly cooperative meetings and of everyday interactions in the
school reveals a tension between voluntary, democratic and elective ideology
of school functioning and linguistic/cultural identity and the authoritarian
nature of the school as an establishment which inevitably establishes
hierarchies among available identities, languages and ways of being. On the
one hand, students were seen making decisions independent of the teachers
about school projects and the languages they were to be done in. Teacher-led
and sanctioned patterns of language choice in the school also gave children
considerable leeway in their choice of codes, since the teachers often
allowed children to respond in French to Corsican questions (or vice versa)
and to mix languages. However, despite the spaces for linguistic freedom
offered by this bilingual program, school practices inevitably established
language hierarchies. I explore evidence of these hierarchies÷and children's
knowledge of them÷through reference to the following data:
1) children's linguistic and interactional choices in two cooperative
meetings, chosen for analysis because they took place in contrasting social
contexts: one ordinary and one extraordinary. The extraordinary meeting was
one the children conducted while they were being filmed by a regional
television station for a documentary on bilingual education in which they
were all aware that they were supposed to be on their "best" bilingual
behavior;
2) how children responsed interviews/surveys about language competence and
preference;
3) teachers' evaluative practices in response to mixed-language
conversations and utterances.
My argument is that many aspects of the school experience undermined the
democratic ideal of freely-chosen linguistic and cultural identity. These
included the fact that teacher language choice and evaluative practice
privileged Corsican over French and "pure" over mixed codes. An additional
factor is the general scholastic emphasis on language as an authoritative
code with clear-cut standards. And finally, I make the point that children's
understandings of the meaning of school language are also informed by their
knowledge of how school practices articulate (and in this case contrast
sharply) with wider societal patterns of language use and choice.