Bottom-up educational leadership and policy-making through storytelling : language policy in practice at a Canadian institute

• Main Author: Sackville, Patricia
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/42220

This research focuses on storytelling as bottom-up educational leadership and policy making. The researcher examines language policy in practice at a Canadian post-secondary institute, following an institutional ethnographic approach and using discourse analysis tools. Stories about everyday experiences with English language placement testing, communication course marks reassessments, plagiarism, and prior learning assessment and review (PLAR) of communication skills are collected from 9 students, 6 instructors, 5 program heads, and the researcher herself as an associate dean. The researcher’s own identity negotiation as an insider at the institute is explored through discussion of tensions around the handling of people’s stories and the role of reflexivity in shaping the research. The research links the personal to the institutional while exploring connections between everyday experiences and processes of administration and governance. Exploration of policy moments in participants’ stories uncovers a discourse of control and homogeneity where difference is constructed negatively, several language myths operate as forms of domination, and storylines suppress conflict. Exercises highlighting dilemmas that people face at the institute are presented to enable dialogic politics. It is argued that storytelling proved to be a powerful method for surfacing everyday struggles, and the sharing of stories led to a new awareness for participants. Storytelling proved to be a generative form of talking back to policy and policy making as it repositioned policy review as a bottom-up exercise and captured moments of policy as struggle and change. Dialogic exercises are presented as tools for reconstruction of language practices that are more equitable and humane.