Multiculturalism Through Multilingualism in Schools: Emerging Places of “Integration” in Toronto

Abstract

School spaces are imbued with meaning and foster sensibilities of justice, belonging, and identity from an early beginning. Aside from the educational mandate of schools, they are places where the exercise of neighborhood integration and the fostering of civil society are explored. In multicultural societies, publicly funded schools are also institutional places where state ideologies of social cohesion are apparent. Recent neoliberalization of education in Ontario, as in parts of other Western democracies, has posed a number of challenges to these themes. Underlying hegemonic notions of universality and accountability increasingly percolate through such neoliberal discourses and render in turn a homogeneous conception of “integration” that more often than not leads to assimilationist views and increased alienation. Despite these barriers, paradoxical spaces emerge in different school communities that redefine locally specific meanings of integration. Within such planned and unplanned spaces, social and cultural differences are explored, negotiated, and compromised in multiple ways. Drawing from various ministry and school-board policy documents, the mapping of school data, and conversations with school-board language officers, I present the diverse patterns of linguistic policy in Toronto's elementary schools. The unpredictable tapestry across the city invokes a very different landscape of “integration” as imagined and practiced by Toronto citizens.

Los espacios escolares están imbuidos de significado y estimulan desde sus inicios sensibilidades de justicia, pertenencia e identidad. Aparte del mandato educativo que se otorga a las escuelas, estas son lugares donde se exploran el ejercicio de integración de vecindarios y el fomento de la sociedad civil. En las sociedades multiculturales, las escuelas que dependen de fondos públicos son también lugares institucionales donde pueden detectarse ideologías oficiales de cohesión social. La reciente neoliberalización de la educación en Ontario, lo mismo que ha ocurrido en partes de otras democracias occidentales, impuso un número de retos a estos temas. Estos discursos neoliberales cada vez con mayor frecuencia dejan salir a flote ocultas nociones hegemónicas de universalidad y preocupación, al tiempo que hacen notar una concepción homogénea de “integración” que, más que nada, suele desembocar en visiones asimilacionistas y en creciente alienación. A pesar de estas barreras, han estado emergiendo espacios paradójicos en diferentes comunidades escolares que redefinen localmente significados específicos de integración. Dentro de tales espacios, planeados o no, se exploran las diferencias sociales y culturales, o son negociadas y comprometidas de muchas maneras. A partir de variados documentos de políticas ministeriales o del consejo directivo escolar, la cartografía de datos escolares y de conversaciones sostenidas con los oficiales que manejan cosas del idioma en el consejo, presento los diversos patrones de la política lingüista de las escuelas elementales de Toronto. El tapiz impredecible que se puede encontrar en la ciudad, invoca un muy diferente paisaje de “integración” a como lo imaginan y practican los ciudadanos de Toronto.

Key Words:

• critical geographies of education
• multiculturalism
• neoliberalism
• Toronto

关键词:

• 教育的关键地域
• 多元文化主义
• 新自由主义
• 多伦多

Palabras clave:

• geografías críticas de la educación
• multiculturalismo
• neoliberalismo
• Toronto

Acknowledgments

Special thanks are due to the anonymous referees and to Audrey Kobayashi, for their invaluable comments and critical insight that greatly helped improve the article. Thanks to Alyson Eamer, Lei Wang, Ann Marie Murnaghan, and John Saunders for their research assistance on the larger project. Earlier versions of this article were presented as a visiting scholar at the Center for Cities and Schools at the University of California, Berkeley, and at research forums at York University. Feedback from these audiences helped hone the arguments on multifariousness. Funding from CERIS, the Ontario Metropolis Centres, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (410-2005-2452) is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. See http://www.pch.gc.ca/progs/multi/inclusive_e.cfm (last accessed 7 September 2008).

2. South Asian at 298,372 or 12.0 percent of our population; Chinese at 283,075 or 11.4 percent; black at 208,555 or 8.4 percent; Filipino at 102,555 or 4.1 percent; Latin American at 64,860 or 2.6 percent. See http://www.toronto.ca/toronto_facts/diversity.htm (last accessed 22 February 2011).

3. Heritage/International Language Programs are offered as “continuing education” courses during after-school hours in the TDSB and during school hours in the TCDSB.

4. I am grateful to the reviewer for highlighting the importance of exploring this distinction and its problematique. In this article, I have thus chosen to include both terms.

5. Exchange with program officers in charge of international languages in the TDSB, June 2009.