Grassroots talk back on social media: an analysis of public engagement in Vanuatu’s language-in-education policy

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the participatory space for political debate opened up by social media in Vanuatu with reference to the implementation of a recent language-in-education policy, jointly funded by the governments of Vanuatu, Australia and New Zealand. Although Vanuatu appears to have been debating the same language issues for several decades, what is new is the level of participatory engagement in political matters, with the Facebook group Yumi Toktok Stret (YTS) providing one platform through which democratic citizenship is established and negotiated. Analysis of a debate that erupted in the group in March 2016 reveals significant disquiet and confusion about a change to the medium of instruction in early primary education. I argue that social media provides an invaluable insight into the extent to which the general public understands, feels consulted about and supports policy change. The debate on YTS also shows that the Government, its international development partners and technical advisors would be well advised to pay attention to such debates, and engage with social media as a new mediated “think tank” through which new policies can be democratically debated.

KEYWORDS:

• Language-in-education policy
• social media
• development aid donors
• civil engagement
• Vanuatu
• Bislama

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the admin of the Yumi Toktok Stret Facebook group, and the author of the original post, for giving permission to use the content of the debate for this article. I also acknowledge all the members of the group on whose contributions the discussion is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Fiona Willans is a lecturer in Linguistics at the Laucala Campus of the University of the South Pacific. Her research interests include language-in-education policy in postcolonial, multilingual settings, language ideologies and critical approaches to English Language Teaching. She is currently conducting research into effective training for teachers working in multilingual classrooms.

Notes

1 The question is posed in Bislama. Three non-standard features of Bislama (following Crowley, 2004) are present: the conjoining of the subject marker “i” and the adjective “gud” into a single word, the clipping of the preposition “blong” to “blo”, and the English spelling of “or” instead of “o”. The Facebook data presented throughout the paper reveal a variety of non-standard features in both Bislama and English. I present these examples faithfully (using italics for directly quoted material, regardless of language, and translating Bislama excerpts into English), without commenting from this point forward on non-standard usage.