Countering decapitalisation: examining teachers' discourses of migration in Galicia

Abstract

Multilingualism in European classrooms is the norm, not exception, and while the management of linguistic diversity is increasingly at the fore of language policy debates, policy engagement with the multilingual realities of schools continues to be inadequate, and the linguistic habitus of present-day education systems remains largely monolingual [Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press.]. This article draws on a case study of Cape Verdean immigrants in the small fishing town of Burela in Galicia, Spain, to highlight the challenges associated with language education and immigration in a minority language setting specifically. The article presents an expansion of the concept of decapitalisation [Martín Rojo, L. (2010) Constructing Inequality in Multilingual Classrooms, De Gruyter Mouton.] as a framework for analysing how hegemonic ideologies in the Galician education system can contribute to social stratification and the marginalisation of the immigrant population. The article focuses specifically on discourses deployed by teachers to understand how processes of decapitalisation play out, and the grassroots initiatives taken to resist them.