Rethinking Language Planning and Policy from the Ground Up: Refashioning Institutional Realities and Human Lives

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Rethinking Language Planning and Policy from theGround Up: Refashioning Institutional Realities andHuman LivesVaidehi Ramanathan aa Linguistics Department , University of California , Davis, USAPublished online: 22 Dec 2008.

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Rethinking Language Planning and Policyfrom the Ground Up: RefashioningInstitutional Realities and Human Lives

Vaidehi RamanathanLinguistics Department, University of California, Davis, USA

At a time when connections between English and globalisation seem stronger thanever, and at a time when the ‘dominant’ status of English vis-à-vis other languagesis very prominent, it seems imperative for the LPP scholarship to make room forgrounded explorations regarding English and its relationship to vernacular languagesin non-Western educational contexts. Drawing on an eight-year ethnographic study ofEnglish-and-vernacular-medium education in Gujarat, India, this paper argues that itmay be time for language planning and policy studies to adopt a situated approach thatbegins addressing issues around language planning- and policy-related inequities byfirst focusing on what is on the ground.1 By gaining insight into how divides betweenEnglish and other languages are perpetuated by the enforcement of particular policiesand by understanding how institutions and humans refashion and re-plan theirs andothers lives by countering language policies, such an orientation opens up a way for usto go beyond thinking of language policies as entities that ‘happen to’ humans byallowing us to view language policies as hybrid entities that draw their force and move-ment from the lives of real peoples and their motivations. Such an approach is partiallyintended toward countering the top-down tendency of much LPP scholarship.

Keywords: vernacular education, vernacular literacy, refashioning languageplanning and policy, globalisation, non-western contexts

. . . what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the considered practice offreedom . . . Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is theconsidered form that freedom takes. (Rabinow, 1984: 25)

Increasing discussions around world Englishes and English as a global languageforce us to take stock of the dominating role of English in current globalisingsurges. Scholarship in this realm ranges from researchers questioning medi-ums-of-instruction policies, to ways in which English operates to create innerand outer circles in different countries (Matsuda, 2003), to how it gets positionedvis-à-vis local, vernacular languages (Alidou, 2004). Regardless of how scholarsare positioned in the debate, much of the research seems to draw from and isconnected to issues in implicit and explicit English language policies –state-wide, nation-wide, and institutional – and ways in which they impact avariety of teaching and learning contexts. Such views, while valuable, can beseen to run the risk of rendering language policies around English and localvernaculars as abstract entities partially formulated behind closed doors, andformalised in documents without paying much heed to local realities.

However, we also know that language policies are living, dynamic forces thatfind their viability and articulation in the most local of spaces: in institutions,

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pedagogic practices, school settings, teacher-education programmes, and disci-plinary orientations (Ramanathan, 2005b; Tollefson, 1991; Tsui & Tollefson, 2004;Wiley & Wright, 2004). Indeed, recent research is increasingly moving in thedirection of viewing language-in-education policies around English and localvernaculars as hybrid entities that necessarily have to be understood in terms ofhow they get translated into actual practice (Ramanathan, 2005b), includingways in which policies about languages sometimes reproduce, legitimise andcounter social stratifications on the ground (Lin, 2000; Pennycook, 1998), espe-cially those relating to gender, ethnicity, caste, and home language(s)(Blackledge, 2003; McCarty, 2002; Mazrui, 2002; Jung & Norton, 2002; Norton,2000; Ramanathan, 2005b). Adopting a situated approach – with language poli-cies being starting points for possible reconceptualisations, this paper arguesthat it may be time to address language-in-education policy and planning forvernacular language and literacy education by considering realities on theground: how teachers recognise socio-political inequities (Morgan, 1998) andseek to question and side-step policies that exacerbate them, how institutionsjoin particular political struggles and find back-door ways of encouraging alter-nate, more democratic policies to counter hegemonising ones, how extra-curricular activities become spaces whereby non-mainstream, vernacular waysof being are validated and encouraged. In cases such as these, humans and insti-tutions are taking early ethical steps by creating alternate (‘third’) spaces (Crozetet al., 1999) whereby students’ identities and backgrounds are validated.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic work done in a variety of educationalscenes in the city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat India (cf. Ramanathan, 1999, 2003,2005a, 2005b; more details on this evolving set of raw materials follows), thispaper highlights some of the above points to underscore how language-in-education policies are embedded in and part of local political power structures thatlegitimise serious social stratifications, and ways in which institutions and humans takenote of inequalities by rethinking their ‘unplanned’ language plans (Eggington,1997; Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997). As will be seen, various aspects of these emphasesget framed and highlighted in different ways, in different settings, given localconstraints in the divergent Indian educational scenes to be discussed. Whilepower does flow disproportionately across groups of peoples, languages, insti-tutions and polices (Tollefson, 1991), there are humans who work at re-planningand refashioning the ‘ethics’ around their language-related plans in these gener-ally unequal scenes,. This paper, then, attempts a partial integrated understand-ing of not only how language and literacy policies stratify people, but also of howpeople counter policies so as to improve human lives.

As argued elsewhere (Ramanathan, 2003, 2004, 2005b), the relationshipbetween English and local vernaculars in post-colonial communities such asIndia, falls along socio-political lines of class and caste, with vernacular literacypractices, including ways of teaching, learning, living, reasoning, and believing,being marginalised. This marginalisation was cemented in place under the Brit-ish Raj in the form of two parallel tracks of education: English-medium education(EM) and Vernacular-medium education (VM). These two tracks constructed an‘English-Vernacular Divide’ (Ramanathan, 2005b) in education and literate prac-tice. The reasons for this marginalisation are numerous, complex and inter-twined, and have to be understood against a most complex landscape of colonial

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language-in-education policies, language ideologies, vernacular and Englishways of learning and teaching, pedagogic tools, classroom practices, and politi-cal struggles. What follows offers two examples of this divide between Englishand the vernacular education as well two instances in which the resulting gulfsare noticed and bridged. As will be evident, all of the examples have strongimplications for language policy and planning, both in India where this project isbased, and in the West, where this paper will be largely read becauseglobalisation currents of which English is a crucial component now force us totake second and third looks at grounded realities in other, divergent parts of theworld. The pool of raw materials on which the current discussion rests spanseight years and what is presented here is necessarily a most selective sample, andis not intended by any means to be comprehensive. The pool includes:

• close work with three institutional contexts: an EM middle-class Jesuitcollege, a private middle-class EM business college, and an inner-city poorVM women’s liberal arts college;

• 21 semi-formal interviews with faculty members across the three institu-tions, each of which lasted about an hour and a half long;

• 80 interviews with EM and VM students;• approximately 109 hours of classroom observations in the three settings;• a variety of written documents ranging from official bulletins, student writ-

ing, assignments, newspaper articles, exams;• a range of informal discussion meetings where teachers freely exchanged

ideas about teaching practices, workloads, institutional and state-leveleducational policies.

Needless to say, the present discussion rests on materials that have been selec-tively chosen to argue my points about language planning and policy studiesneeding to make room for grounded explorations which are likely to uncovervarious local kinds of ‘unplanned’ language planning in order that potentialpolicy changes can be better envisaged.

Instances of the English–Vernacular Divide

Vernacular-medium pedagogic practicesOne instance of the divide between English and the vernacular can be exem-

plified by the use of vernacular learning practices, especially the use of choralrecitation (Crook, 1996); a mode of learning frequently frowned upon by theWest. While this was not a practice that I grew up learning by in English-mediumsettings, I do remember engaging in it in Sanskrit classes, where the class wouldhave to chorally recite mantras from the Gita. Choral recitation is however, amode of learning and teaching frequently practised in vernacular-mediumsettings and can be considered a normal literate practice in such contexts, whereit is encouraged by teachers and teaching materials. Choral recitation is evidentin classroom interactions where teachers frequently elicit choral responses fromstudents. The following interactions from Sanskrit and English classes illustratethis:

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Sanskrit class excerpts(1) T: kaya text laavanu cche? 1

(Which text is to be bought?)Sts: (responding chorally): Kaadambari text laavanu cche. 2

(Kadambari [a Sanskrit play] is to be bought)T: kyan thhi laavanu cche? 3

(Where is it to be bought from?)Sts: Ratan pol maathi laavaanu cche 4

(From Ratan pol)

(2) T: tho eh vakhate Avanti eh, kone?(So at that time Avanti, who?) 1

Sts: Avanti 2T: Avanti eh kharraab laagyu. Su laagyu? 3

(Avanti felt bad. What did she feel?)Sts: (responding chorally) Kharraab laagyu 4

(felt bad)

English class excerpts(3) T: Kayaa form karvaana chhe ame? 1

(What form are we doing this year?)Sts: Comedy form (chorally in English) 2T: Ane kaaya playwright vaanchvaanu chhe? 3

(And which playwright are we reading?)Sts: Wild 4

(4) T: Tho, Millie eh light joyu. Suu joyuu? 1(Millie saw a light. What did she see?)

Sts: light joyuu 2(Saw a light)

As explained elsewhere (Ramanathan, 2005a, 2005b), in each of these excerptsthe questions on the part of the teacher are uttered in distinct ways: slowly in asing-song manner with an exaggerated rise at the end.2

The general explanations given by the language teachers for using suchvernacular education practices range from ‘classical languages like Sanskrit havealways been sung or chanted and “singing and chanting” allows you to memo-rise information’ (FI: 4:2) to ‘this is what they have been used to in school andother non-schooling areas’ (FI 4:1). As shown elsewhere (Ramanathan, 2005a),such choral recitations are a local literacy practice commonly used in valuedcontexts in the community, especially in discourse events such as kathas intemples, where priests take certain Hindu myths and explain their relevance toeveryday living (ameh katha maa kevi rithe kahiye cche? How do we speak inKathas?), and at key junctures elicit choral responses. Breaking off to ask ques-tions in the middle of extended narrative turns to get an audience to respondtogether serves the dual purpose of ensuring audience participation as well astesting attention.

One of the instructors, who also narrates Kathas in local temples (indeed, manyof the students had attended them), maintained that chorusing responses – a


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vestige of a strong oral, vernacular tradition (Crook, 1996) – allows novices toengage in learning without apprehension of being judged. Several of thestudents interviewed said they often picked up ‘answers’ from their friends insuch responses and that they could recognise the intonational cues of their teach-ers’ voices that prompted such responses because they were used to it in otherrelatively less non-academic, and non-institutionalised settings.

Choral recitation as a classroom practice is also promoted by textbooks as thefollowing excerpt from a Gujarati-medium textbook illustrates:

The instructions given in Gujarati (on page 9 of the excerpt in Figure 1) directstudents to, among other things: (1) repeat after the teacher, (2) to engage insingle and choral repetition with partners enacting the dialogues (on page 8 ofthe excerpt), and (3) to draw on the formulaic phrases (She is _____, She is ____)and to repeat them singly or chorally.

Localised instances of vernacular literate practice, such as that described here,underscore the ideological and communal aspects of literacy and demonstratehow literacy practices are saturated with ideology (Street, 1993, 1994) and howvalued practices in one context (VM) may be excluded from or stigmatised inothers (EM). Where one context has more prestige than the other, this valuesystem relating to literate practice becomes firmly entrenched and constitutes astrong element of an English–Vernacular divide.


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Figure 1 Gujurati medium textbook: Standard 5Source: Nataraj and Joshi (1999: 8–9)



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Divergent Pedagogic Goals in English and Vernacular-mediumClassrooms

In the Indian context, literacy in English is an important goal of educationregardless of the medium of instruction, and another very local instance of theEnglish–Vernacular divide in literacy education can be seen in the divergentpedagogic goals for English literacy for students in the two tracks of education.My efforts at understanding the struggles that vernacular-medium studentsencounter in English-medium colleges prompted me to examine the writingrequirements for both sets of students in K–12 settings. Called ‘Minimal Levels ofWriting’ (MLW), these writing requirements are mandated by the Gujarat StateBoard of Education, and are partially presented in Figure 2.

There are two noticeable differences in the construction of literacy inherentin the respective MLWs shown in Figure 2: (1) writing for vernacular-mediumstudents is presented as a discrete skill and is addressed separately from read-ing, a feature that contrasts with writing and reading, which are presented as


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Excerpts from Minimal Levels of Writingfrom English textbooks used in theGujarati-medium:

Excerpts from Minimal Levels of Writingfrom English textbooks used in theEnglish-medium:

Grade 5 Writing: Gains control of the basicmechanics of writing in English likecapital letters, small letters, punctuation,writing neatly on a line with properspacingTranscribes words, phrases and sentencesin EnglishWrites cardinals up to fifty, telephonenumbers, road signsProduces words and spells them correctlyWrites numbers up to 50, telephonenumbers, road signs

Reading and writing: Reading textualmaterial and writing answers to questionsbased on and related to the textReading and interpreting and offeringcomments on maps and chartsReading children’s literature and talkingabout itWriting paragraphs on given topicsReading and writing simple recipesReading and interpreting labels onwrappers

Grade 6 Reading: Reads aloud simple sentences,poems, dialogues and short passages withproper pausesReads and follows given directionsReads numbers up to a hundredWriting: Writes with proper punctuationmarksWrites words and sentences neatly on aline with proper spacing, punctuationmarks, and capitalisationWrites answers to questions based on textmaterialWrites simple guided compositions in 4–5sentences on people, objects, or placesTranslates words and sentences fromEnglish into Gujarati and Gujarati intoEnglish

Reading and writing: Reading textualmaterial and writing answers to questionsbased on the textReading and interpreting simpleabbreviationsReading narrative prose and adventurestories and talking about themWriting/building stories based on givenquestions/pointsReading and using the telephone directoryWriting captions for given photographs,pictures, maps, charts, diagrams andgraphsWriting messages for telegramsReading and interpreting labels on bottles

Figure 2 Divergent minimal kevels of writing for GM and EM students



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conjoined entities for EM students; and (2) writing for EM students is essayist inorientation from early on, with a focus on text and communication, while forVM students literate practice in English is constructed as a lower level,decontextualised mechanical skill: for example, ‘writing paragraphs on giventopics’ (EM, Grade 5) vs. ‘gaining the basic mechanics of English writing . . . withproper spacing’ (VM, Grade 5); ‘writing essays based on the texts’ (EM, Grade 7)vs. ‘learning to write words and sentences neatly’ (VM, Grade 7). The MLW,therefore, construct literate practice in English, the more prestigious literacy, invery different ways for the two groups of learners.

Bridging the English–Vernacular Divide by Harnessing VernacularLiteracies

Such instances of the English–Vernacular divide necessarily force one to ask:what can be done to make language-education issues more equitable? How doresearchers, policy makers, teachers, institutions work at bridging such socio-political gulfs? The following section addresses ways in which two institutionshave found ‘back-door’ ways of circumventing English- and vernacular-relateddivides. While the efforts of people and institutions in this section do not pertaindirectly to literacy or teaching in the classroom, they do pertain to how vernacu-lar resources become ways by which perceived socio-educational gulfs getaddressed and demonstrate how literacies can be harnessed as forms ofoppositional practice giving new performativities to vernacular literacies.

Extracurricular activities emphasising civic responsibility in GujaratiAs discussed elsewhere (Ramanathan, 2005a), recognising that teaching their

largely low-income students English is not going to empower them (‘Teachingthem English is not going to do it; that has to come later,’ FI 8: 23), the VM teachersat the women’s college have found non-conventional approaches to refashioningtheir educational realities by enhancing both the vernacular languages and theself-esteem of their VM students. By doing so, they have thereby both empow-ered the students and reduced the sense of threat that many learners feel regard-ing English. Interpreting ‘empowerment’ and ‘pro-vernacular’ in terms ofaddressing local, community problems, some teachers in the VM college began alocal chapter of a nation-wide social service scheme called the National SocialService (NSS). This is a nation-wide volunteer organisation that trains studentsin the rudiments of social work and sends them out in teams to areas (primarilypoor, rural, villages and farms) on special projects that range from inoculatingbabies, to raising awareness about health issues, to doing investigations on thepurity of water.

For the VM teachers, the primary aim for starting this project was to involvestudents in local, community issues, and as discussed elsewhere (Ramanathan,2005b), while none of these projects are directly related to questions of English orvernacular teaching, they are crucial to the pro-vernacular sentiments of theschool and constitute a socially significant domain of vernacular literate practice.One of the teachers who started this social service project at this college specifi-cally mentions the need to ‘awaken in students the spirit of self-reliance’ (FI 14:3). As he says:


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Having them engaged in an extra-curricular project such as this makesthem really strong citizens. They are learning to take pride in so manydifferent things at the same time: their background, their home language,their communities. These students have a lot of [low] self confidence issues.Most of them want to be like you: they would have liked to have gone to EMschools and done well. Now they are beginning to see that being in the VMis really valuable: many of them will not be able to do the community workif they did not know Gujarati. Some of them have even told me they are notas crazy about English anymore. Suddenly they are realizing that they canbe self-reliant with their mother-tongue. (FI 14: 5)

While ‘empowering’ students at this college takes partial form in extracur-ricular activities (such as the NSS) related to deploying literate practices,‘re-awakening’ seems to be pursued directly through classroom practice. Herethe focus seems to be more on being pro-vernacular as opposed to anti-English.The following views of a lecturer in Gujarati literature (at the women’s college)illustrate this point:

See, I begin with what they already know, and that is Gujarati. For most ofthese students, Gujarati is their mother-tongue. And once they havelearned to appreciate Gujarati literature, once I have re-awakened theirinterest in stories in their mother-tongue, other kinds of literature open up.Slowly, I get them reading English literary texts, and we draw connections.Recently, I assigned Sophie’s Choice and they really really loved it. Weworked really hard and at the end of it, one of them talked to me about whatshe had learned from this text and the Gujarati novel we had just finished,about how complex life’s choices are and we cannot make simple judg-ments about where people end up in their lives. I almost cried when shesaid that. For an 18 year old to say that with feeling meant that something inour class had clicked. Just sparks like that make everything in this placeworthwhile . . . Some of these students, by the time they come to the secondyear have become more thoughtful and by their final year are genuinelyinterested . . . I am convinced we have to start with Gujarati [the vernacular]and move outward from there. Imposing English from the outside is notgoing to do anything for them, except make them more frustrated. (FI 19:1)

‘Reawakening’ for this teacher, then, is not a matter of removing English asmuch as it is a matter of using vernacular and vernacular knowledges as ethicalstarting points for engagement and literate practice.3 While this teacher is notactively anti-English, as she explains in the quote above, she very clearly stressesvernacular literatures as a way to re-awaken and empower her students. Whenasked if the grass-roots activism upheld by some members of the college (whoare strongly pro-vernacular and also anti-English) ran counter to her Englishteaching, she said:

See, I am a literature person, first. My job is to awaken in these students aninterest in all of literature. I happen to believe that the best way to do that isby stressing vernacular ways of thinking, reasoning, and believing. That iswhat I meant when I said English has come later. Gujarati definitely has tocome first . . . you have to keep in mind how using your mother-tongue


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allows you to experience things in a way that can be quite different fromEnglish. Gujarati, the way I see it, empowers . . . English does not do thathere. . . . (FI 19:2)

A general sense that emerges, then, from quotes such as the above is that manyVM teachers view their ways of teaching, learning, and living as being opposedto English and its general associations, the implication being that English tendsto ‘suppress’, ‘disempower’ and ‘devalue’ and that vernacular literacies are ameans of oppositional practice which confront the inequalities of theEnglish–Vernacular divide.

Bridging the divide: Institutional efforts at opening doors for GujaratiDalit students

Previous research on the tracking of students into various streams of educationhas shown how language proficiency and control of valued literacies can serve asgatekeeping measures that determine ways in which students gain access toparticular avenues to which they may seek entry (Anyon, 1997; Kalantzis & Cope,2002; Shuman, 1985). In many cases mastery over the standard variety of alanguage (Gee, 1990), including its literacy practices and varied academic registerswhich are entailed, serve as instruments by which students’ ‘intelligence’ and‘aptitude’ are assessed – instruments that often have the unfortunate effect of slot-ting students into damaging grooves. In the Indian socio-educational context suchmeasures can be seen to feed into the English–Vernacular chasm, which, as I havepointed out elsewhere (Ramanathan, 2005b), is to a large extent, held in place bypolicies cementing divergent and unequal literacy practices. While the generalpoints regarding tracking issues are applicable for most VM students in the city, Iaddress these issues in one particular institutional context that has recentlyadopted a highly activist orientation.

The institution under discussion is run by the Jesuit community based inAhmedabad. The priests who run the school have in recent years under theauspices of their social justice doctrine committed themselves to joining the polit-ical struggle of Dalit4 people, who have been historically marginalised because oftheir caste status. The college, like other colleges in the state, has to follow univer-sity-wide mandates5 to track VM students entering EM colleges. VM students aretracked into different ‘streams’ depending on the years of English they have hadthrough their K–12 schooling, and because VM students have the option of‘dropping’ English after the 9th grade, there is one set of students that arrives atthe (EM) college scene with only five years of English instruction (i.e. from5th–9th grades). This set of students is tracked into the b stream, while those VMstudents that have had English from 5th to 12th grade get placed into the astream.6 Students in this a stream are assumed to have a moderate grasp on thelanguage, and are, according to the Teacher’s Handbook issued by the centraluniversity, considered to be placed at the intermediate level. Most a streamstudents are generally from middle-class homes, and their literacy levels in Guja-rati are relatively high. The b stream students, in contrast, typically come fromfarming communities outside Ahmedabad, and most have attended municipalschools. For these students standard Gujarati may be a second language or asecond dialect, with English constituting a third (sometimes fourth) language


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and their Gujurati literacy may be less well developed than that of the a streamstudents.

The b stream students in the Jesuit college (but not necessarily in othercolleges) are primarily Dalit students with rural backgrounds, and it is primarilythrough enrolling Dalit students that this institution partially begins to addresssome of the caste-related inequalities which face them. By opting to reserve allplaces in the b stream for Dalit students, the college is doing what it can to open itsdoors to students who otherwise would not get a chance to get in. A generalunderstanding among the managerial staff is that the problems represented andencountered by these students are complex and that the English–Vernacular gulfthey experience is a surface manifestation of a range of other issues. They relatetheir views to the Ignatian idea that faith and charity are to have social dimen-sions: ‘the chief purpose of the Society of Jesus today is that the Society shouldstrive not only for its own salvation and perfection, but for that of its neighbor aswell . . .’ (Mwijage, 2002: 2). As the principal of the college explains it, ‘thisdoctrine can be adapted according to their mission in the world’ (FI 7: 1). In otherwords ‘ . . . it was a matter of finding the seeds in the kingdom of God and thencollaborating in the transformation of the world’ (Albrecht, 2002). For this insti-tution, the policy of supporting the Dalit students became one ethical and politi-cal way by which to join the Dalit political struggle and put their social justicedoctrine to practice.7 The institution has also committed itself to empowering theDalits in a variety of non-academic and academic ways, including buildingspaces for extra-curricular support and assisting in organising regular groupmeetings wherein Dalits share their experiences with discrimination and thinkabout avenues for change. As with the teachers at the women’s college, they toohave found ways of refashioning and replanning their policies to improve thelives of their (Dalit) students by using literacies and education as a vehicle forengagement.

Pulling Back, Looking Ahead: Implications for LPPEach of the above local instances – whether they be around the English-

Vernacular divide or around instances where educational and socio-politicalgulfs are bridged – are spaces of unplanned language planning, the micro realmsthat Eggington (2002) argues need to be part of ‘formal’ language planning.Understanding the value and prominence of local literate practices, such aschoral recitation, is a first step in reconceptualising many language teachingmaterials, especially those around English language teaching. TESOL, in itsenthusiasm for promoting communicative language teaching, has not only beenuninterested in vernacular literacy practices (Bruthiaux, 2002), but has devaluedthem, and has typically characterised them as promoting rote learning and as notfacilitating critical thinking. Localised perspectives such as those discussed inthis paper force a rethinking of, among other things, how scholarship in the Westwrites about learning and teaching practices in very different parts of the worldand how this constructs a value system around local practices. This has verydirect implications for several aspects of language policy and planning, espe-cially those relating to institutional policies, and the ‘standards’ by whichstudent performance is judged, and of nation- and state-wide policies both in the


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West (that receives a lot of international students who have had their school-ing in diverse mediums of education and have developed different local liter-ate practices) and in India itself. Divisive language policies create problemsbut the localised instances of individual teachers and institutions reflectingon gulfs created through policies and finding ethical responses to counterthem by tweaking, side-stepping, or refashioning language policies pointpartially to how they are creating new modes of being and living together. Ofrelevance here is Foucault’s (1991) notion of governmentality, which he definesas ‘the relationship of the self to itself . . . the range of practices that constitute,define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in theirfreedom can use in their dealing with each other’ (Foucault, 1984: 300). The teach-ers at both the low-income women’s college and the Jesuit institution seem to beengaged in precisely such efforts: in the former teachers are attempting toharness their students’ vernacular resources and literate practices heighteningtheir civic and vernacular sensibilities by engaging them in community-relatedprojects, or by teaching English literature by first drawing on the home/Gujaratibackgrounds of the students, while in the latter priests and teachers have foundways of remaining true to their activist orientation by reserving one of the‘streams’ for Dalit students thereby refashioning a policy mandated by the state.In both cases, teachers and institutions have not only taken stock of their relation-ships to themselves (cf. Foucault, 1984) but have found ways of re-planning theirworlds.

In terms of language planning and policy scholarship, then, attention togrounded, local realities, especially those around how humans rethink languageand literacy-related policies moves us collectively toward a space in which tobegin to make room for scholarship that addresses how humans and institutionsclaim authority to re-think, re-envision, re-enact their realms. This shift in thediscourses of our discipline toward addressing not just how the rules of formation(Foucault, 1972) happen to humans, but how these rules get re-constructed offersus not only an ‘enriched conception of the historical interaction of logical,epistemological and social relations,’ (Gordon, 1980: 244) but also one wherehumans, while acknowledging these relations work towards moving themselvesand others to more equal grounds.

Notes1. This paper is a reworking of ideas and arguments that have appeared in varied forms

in Ramanathan, 1999, 2003, 2005a, 2005b).2. The English and Sanskrit classes had eight to 10 such interactions, as opposed to an

average of two such interactions per class in the content-area classes.3. I thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me notice the irony in this segment.4. Dalits (the word means ‘oppressed’ or ‘crushed’) are outside the caste system and are

placed very low in the social order. Since Independence they have been recipients ofmany affirmative action programmes (Ramanathan, 2005b).

5. All public colleges in the state are affiliated to Gujarat University. Mandates related tosyllabi, curriculum and teaching come down from the university to local colleges, afact that many teachers – both in this college and the two others – feel constrains theirautonomy.

6. All VM students – a and b streamers – fall into the A division. All EM students fall intothe B division.


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7. Dalits who convert to Christianity lose the rights to the reserved quota earmarked forthem, and get classed as ‘OBC’ in Gujarat (for whom also there are some reservedplaces, but not as many).

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Vaidehi Ramanathan, Linguistics

Department, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA ([email protected]).

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The AuthorVaidehi Ramanathan is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Califor-

nia, Davis. Her research interests include all aspects of language learning, teach-ing and teacher-education in multilingual communities


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Documents

Rethinking Language Planning and Policy from the Ground Up: Refashioning Institutional Realities and Human Lives