The Linguistic Ecology of Education

by

Mark Fettes

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Theory and Policy Studies in Education

The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

© Copyright by Mark Fettes, 2000

This work explores the implications of linguistic diversity for the organization of schooling. For this purpose it develops an original, critical-realist theory of language, based on the epistemological framework of ecological psychology. Replacing the Cartesian image of a mind-in-a-brain-in-a-body with a concept of the organism-in-environment-in-time is shown to entail a shift from representational to relational models of both knowledge and language. Rather than carrying around in their heads comprehensive maps of the world or entire linguistic systems, in this approach individuals are viewed as adapting their awareness and actions to different natural and linguistic environments, modifying those environments in the process. The particular importance of linguistic adaptation is shown to lie in its co-ordering effects on imaginative awareness: metaphoric and metonymic schemata that enable us to grasp forms of order that elude direct perception, but also frequently seduce us into mistaking ideas for reality.

In modern societies, knowledge and ideas are typically produced at sites distant from schools, so that much learning is expected to take place through individual adaptation to the practices of "facticity" or the norm-governed use of texts as representations of reality. Many of the imaginative skills required by these practices are cultivated in the linguistic traditions of the middle classes, which have co-evolved as cultural communities with the public education systems of the industrialized nations. The standard national languages are essentially constituted by cultural negotiation within these large literate communities, in which many genre-discourse boundaries divide the social space and simultaneously set the language itself apart from others. As a consequence, members of other cultural communities, whether they differ in terms of class, ethnicity, or other characteristics, encounter a linguistic order in schools that is integrated and co-evolving with a complex hierarchical system of social relations.

Administrative and policy decisions which reinforce or modify this ecology of language have important constraining and enabling effects on school achievement. The use of a single standard national language in schools privileges one particular cultural community which may even be a minority in many educational settings. Within that community itself, an exclusive reliance on standard language reinforces two contrasting tendencies in cultural negotiation: dynamic sublimation (whereby individuals come to see themselves and others in collective terms) and dynamic reduction (whereby individuals lose awareness of historical, social and ecological context). These characteristically modern processes of alienation can best be counterbalanced through ecological schooling, involving the extended cultivation of a critical awareness of place in which cultural and linguistic diversity are treated as carefully and systematically as natural diversity. The indigenous concept of the cyclic renewal of relationship is recommended as a model for learning, together with the use of critical ethnography to generate and share knowledge about and among such projects. It is argued that this would simultaneously provide the foundation for an emancipatory, research-based science of language and education.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

First Turn: Traditions and Directions

Second Turn: The Subject and the World

Third Turn: Communities and Schools