The Radical Potential of Heritage-Language Education Research
In many ways, research focussing specifically on heritage-language education (HLE) in Canada might seem anachronistic. Dedicated government funding for HLE research dried up in the mid-1990s, leading to a sharp decline in Canadian scholarship on the topic (Bale, 2016). At a conceptual level, various scholars have identified the ideological baggage the term heritage language carries (e.g., García, 2005; Wiley, 2005). In Canada, its meaning is defined in the negative: heritage languages are not Indigenous languages, not sign languages, and not official languages (see Cummins, 2014). The theoretical propositions in translanguaging (e.g., García et al., 2021; García & Wei, 2014) and raciolinguistics (e.g., Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa, 2019; Rosa & Flores, 2017) pose an even sharper question. If separate, named languages (and by extension, separate, named language types) are constituent elements of colonialism and racism, then doesn’t research organized around a language type risk reinscribing this separation?
In this talk I critique my earlier scholarship (e.g., Bale, 2011, 2014, 2016) and discuss early findings from an ongoing, SSHRC-funded study of the first decade of the Heritage Languages Program in Ontario to (re-)consider how HLE research can help (1) keep our analytical focus on the people who speak racialized and minoritized languages, and not just on heritage languages as an abstracted unit of study; (2) identify possibilities for building solidarity across racialized and minoritized language communities; and (3) reveal the collaboration of racism and colonialism in defining the value of language learning, and in structuring access to and resources for language-education programs in Canada.
Jeff Bale is Associate Professor of Language and Literacies Education at the University of Toronto, and serves as Vice President, University & External Affairs of the University of Toronto Faculty Association. His research applies political-economic, anti-racist, and critical perspectives to educational language policy and teacher education. From 2021-2022 he held a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers at the Universität Bremen in Germany. He is PI of the project Language, Race, and Regulating Difference: The Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, 1977-1987, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is lead author of More Than “Just Good Teaching”: Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Racism in Canadian Teacher Education (forthcoming, Multilingual Matters) and co-editor with Sarah Knopp of Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation (Haymarket, 2012).
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated within the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).