Language and education policies across scales: policy processes in the institutional order of German-language ECEC in South Tyrol, Italy

Platzgummer, Verena. Language and education policies across scales: policy processes in the institutional order of German-language ECEC in South Tyrol, Italy. Ethnography and Education, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2025.2464128

Abstract

Despite a long tradition of ethnographic research on language and education policy processes, these have remained underexplored in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). This paper draws on a one-year sociolinguistic ethnography of a German-language kindergarten in the Italian province of South Tyrol to trace how language and education policies travel across spatiotemporal and institutional scales. It shows how educators set goals for their kindergarten, reflect on their practices in light of these goals, and make use of evaluation documents to negotiate policies with the District. The paper argues that institutionalised requirements of goal setting and evaluation bring policy texts into focus on the level of the individual kindergarten and create feedback loops with the district. By revealing how educators come to adopt framings that implicitly equate ‘language’ with ‘Standard German’, the paper contributes to elucidating the reproduction of linguistic hierarchies within educational institutions.

Publisher

Taylor and Francis Group

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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School of Education (Scholarly Articles)