From early childhood and into formal schooling, epistemic injustice and coloniality work to exclude multilingual students in Australia. While all children entering early education settings bring an abundance of linguistic and cultural knowledge, educational systems designed from a monoglossic, Eurocentric mindset fail to take this knowledge into account and instead position multilingual children and their languages in deficit from their first interactions with schools and centres. Indeed, education systems have always played a strong role in perpetuating notions of language deficit, standardisation, and boundaries, in what Mignolo (1994) describes as "academic colonization".
While early education is widely recognised as having the potential to provide significant educational, social, and emotional benefits for children and their families, as well as for the wider economy (e.g. HCDC, 2010; PWC, 2014), the research available on language and multilingualism in early education shows that this potential is not being met for all students. Multilingual children studying under a monolingual yoke are systemically denied the well-proven, long-term benefits of early learning experiences that build on their linguistic repertoires.
This presentation will explore key early education policy documents in Australia, particularly from the state of Queensland, to show the ways that languages and their speakers are "problematised". Using Bacchi and Goodwin's (2016) post-structural "What's the problem presented to be" tool, it will unpack the ways language is constructed (or problematised) in Australian early years policy. It will show how these problematisations work to naturalise hegemonic language ideologies, thus undermining linguistically diverse students from their earliest encounters with formal schooling
This approach to policy analysis aims to both critique dominant ideologies and representations of problems, but also to think "otherwise" (Mignolo, 2007); or as Bacchi and Goodwin (2016) describe, "to destabilize an existing problem representation by drawing attention to silences, or unproblematized elements, within it … it opens up the opportunity to be inventive, to imagine worlds in which a specific confluence of circumstances is either not problematized or problematized differently" (p. 22). Therefore, this presentation will both expose the contradictions and ideologies in early education policy in Australia, but to also (re)imagine a possible future where the linguistic and cultural strengths of all students are recognised and sustained.
References
Bacchi, C., & Goodwin, S. (2016). Making politics visible: The WPR approach. In C. Bacchi & S. Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis (pp. 13–26). Palgrave Macmillan US.
HCDC. (2010). The foundations of lifelong health are built in early childhood (p. 32) Center on the Developing Child at Harvard (HCDC). https://developingchild.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Foundations-of-Lifelong-Health.pdf
Mignolo, W. D. (1994). Afterword: Writing and recorded knowledge in colonial and postcolonial situations. In E. H. Boone & W. D. Mignolo (Eds.), Writing Without Words (pp. 293–313). Duke University Press.
Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Introduction: Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 155–167.
PWC. (2014). Putting a value on early childhood education and care in Australia (p. 42). PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). https://www.pwc.com.au/pdf/putting-value-on-ecec.pdf
