García (2009) argues that language shift or language maintenance occurs when certain societal conditions are present, such as “difference in power” (p.90) and “pressure in political, economic or social forms from one or two language groups” (ibid). In light of this understanding, one can argue that the question of language maintenance through education, and bilingual education in general, is inevitably a question of societal power relations.
The group of educational researchers7 who have focused on these issues, have contributed massively to the development of what has now become a well-established critical approach to bilingual education. This approach focuses on “the ways in which educational policies and classroom practices contribute to the reproduction of asymmetries of power between groups of different social and linguistic resources” (Martin-Jones, 2007, p. 171). Through ethnographic interaction investigations of communicative practices and classroom relations between children from linguistic minority groups and teachers; educational scholars have
7Cf. Heller, 1995; 1999; 2001; Blackledge, 1999; 2000; Hornberger, 1988; Hornberger & Ricento, 1996;
21 provided understandings of how education is linked to wider political language ideologies. They argue that it is within these contexts that social identities are constructed and unequal power relations are maintained. Ultimately, the institution of education has come to be understood as the domain in which nation-states implement their political interests related to linguistic authority and legitimacy. As previously mentioned, the writings of the sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu (1986; 1991; & Passeron, 1990) have provided an important foundation for this understanding of education8.
In Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Bourdieu and Passeron introduce the notions of ‘symbolic power’ and ‘symbolic violence’ (1990). According to the authors, the unified interests of the nation-state and the labor market govern public institutions, such as the educational system. This unification, which constitutes the social elite, has a ‘symbolic power’ to construct and generalize a standard and dominant language. The exercise of symbolic power takes place by the elite imposing and transmitting their culture and language as legitimate; in a way that conceals the actual power relations that allows for this to take place. In other words, they create an ideology of what constitutes legitimate languages and cultures through processes of hegemony, that is, “power is retained by elites not through force but by their ability to project their own way of seeing the world onto those whom they subordinate” (Cook & Simpson, 2012, p. 117). This exercise of symbolic power is inevitably connected to social recognition. That is, when the symbolic order and official language is recognized and adhered to by the dominated as the legitimate order (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990, p. 53). This phenomena is what Bourdieu and Passeron refer to as an act of symbolic violence, which is realized through the elite’s control over valued material and symbolic resources in society.
Bourdieu and Passeron argue that the dominant position of the elite and their definitions of what constitutes societal legitimacy is sustained and reproduced through society’s public institutions; whereby the educational system functions as the most essential mediator. They explain this as follows: “[a]ll pedagogical action [...], is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power” (op.cit., p. 5). The role of formal education in these processes is twofold: on the one hand, it controls individual
8
Despite its common acceptance and application to critical studies, Bourdieu’s theory has faced some critiques. Heller and Martin-Jones (2001) have argued that the theory does not take into account the interactional nature of class-room interaction in the definition of symbolic domination in education. Kathryn Woolard (1985) has showed that there is a weakness in Bourdieu’s understandings of the educational system being unified with the labour market in her studies of the position of Catalan in Spain.
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students’ access to valued material and symbolic resources, while on the other hand, it sustains and reproduces the hegemonic power by imposing recognition and adherence to what is defined as cultural and linguistic legitimacy. These two instances are inevitable interrelated as the former feeds the latter and vice versa. Consequently, educational institutions function as facilitators and mediators of the elite’s definition of valuable and legitimate culture and language. At the same time, it concordantly devalues and excludes other forms.
In terms of language specifically, Bourdieu and Passeron explain that “[i]n the process which leads to the construction, legitimation and imposition of an official language, the educational system plays a decisive role” (op.cit., p. 48). By teaching the standard language, and by assessing student performance on the basis of adherence to this standard; the educational system devalues the every-day languages of students, while at the same time imposing a recognition for the official standardized language. Students and the parents regard education as a key facilitator for social and occupational mobility, and ultimately comply with, submit to and recognize the dominant power and their definitions of what constitutes legitimate culture and language. Bourdieu and Passeron argue that this ultimately leads to identity formations that are framed by the elite. In this way, the social order and the hegemonic power is reproduced.
In this study, Bourdieu’s theory will be employed for a discussion of how the notions of symbolic power and symbolic violence are relevant in the way Kurdish language functions and domains within the larger Swedish and Norwegian language contexts are perceived by the participants. In other words, Bourdieu’s theories will be used in the discussions of how symbolic power influences the way the relevance of MTI is perceived.