Carrie's post:

Language Policies and (Dis) Citizenship: Rights, Access, Pedagogies

I found this challenging to read, to asses and at times to follow.  Perhaps not aided by the fact I do a lot of my reading early in the morning at work, before the day begins.  I wanted to be ‘into’ the article the early discussion of the female point of view because “Women around the world share the knowledge, historically and currently, of what it is like to not be able to fully participate as citizens due to their gender”.  The thought of examining or using the article to examine First Nations issues, ones I am familiar with from living on a reserve (which by no means are al of them by a long shot) that the political borders the Europeans created here in North America, in Canada do not function with their traditional ways of life.  While I am not saying the First Nations did not have boundaries, they did, political and linguistic and cultural, some were more fluid than those imposed by the Europeans. “how language policies in the various realms of our existences serve to draw borders and exclude.”  -- Within Canada the European ‘settlers’ created boundaries with no regard for the already existing population and their boundaries.  The paragraph discussing First Nations and the chapter that addresses it made the most sense to me.  Perhaps because I can centre myself more easily in that situation than in others discussed in this introduction. 

The paragraph that introduced the chapter with the teachers of English language in the United States, of citizenship and their different views and approaches.  I find that ESL discussion focuses so much on the immigrant population, which is valid, however, not all ESL learners in Canada are immigrants and that is something I often had trouble finding information and background on.  That being said, how will people “buy into” the ‘citizenship system’ if their language and what is daily life for them is working against them joining the society of which they are trying to become citizens? 

I then got on a thought side track, if people who speak a different language are “historicized” there are people consciously making that decision.  In the case of North America, it was the people who “discovered” it doing the historicizing, not those who actually lived here. 

As an introduction to a text it did not leave me wanting to pursue the text further.  The point made that resonated, or stayed with me the most was the statement: “translated text resides in the gap between the language, culture and history that is translated and the language, culture and history that does the translating.”  To this I began to think of social, geographical and political changes and influences but quickly lost interest in continuing the reading.