From policy to practice: the illusion of Polishness in Polish immigrant community language and culture education

Abstract

Increasing mobility of people across nation-state borders leads to cultural and linguistic diversification and raises discussions about the inclusion of immigrant minority languages and cultures in education. This contribution investigates possible discrepancies between top-down curricular policies and bottom-up practices at a Polish complementary school in the Netherlands. It focuses on the implementation of the school’s curriculum in times of globalization and superdiversity and explores the maintenance of linguistic and cultural values in a multilingual setting. In doing so it uses the curriculum domains as introduced by Goodlad and colleagues, i.e. the ideological, formal, perceived, operational and experiential curriculum, as an interpretive framework to analyze possible discrepancies between curricular policies and educational practices. The results reveal discrepancies between top-down policies and bottom-up practices. Classroom events and interviews illustrate the complex relationship between language and identity, showing that in a superdiverse classroom monolithic identity categories do not exist and therefore promoting Polish identity is like trying to hit a moving target. This study adds to a growing corpus of multicultural discourse studies on ethnic identity construction in education and raises awareness about the improper use of monolingual and monocultural policies in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms.