THE SPANISH LANGUAGE IN BORDER SCHOOL CURRICULA FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF ADMINISTRATORS

UNA MIRADA GLOTOPOLÍTICA

Abstract

The border is marked by the coming and going of people who carry with them different histories, cultures and languages that intertwine, relate and constitute the subjects who live there. In the case of the southern border between Brazil and Argentina, language exchanges are constant, so that Spanish is no longer a foreign language. The aim of this paper is therefore to reflect on how the secretaries of education in border towns assess the teaching of Spanish in schools. To do this, we consider the concept of border enunciation space, defended by Sturza (2006, 2010), since it legitimizes the border as a place of unique linguistic exchanges and reverberates the teaching of Spanish as a language of circulation and social constitution. In addition, we rely on the Glotopolitical perspective (GUESPIN; MARCELLESI, 2021; Lagares, 2018) in order to understand the presence of the political in language, especially with regard to the particular linguistic exchanges of the border and the evaluation of the secretaries of education, glotopolitical agents, on the teaching of Spanish. We therefore undertook a case study in which data was collected using electronic questionnaires sent to municipal education departments located on the border. In general terms, the responses from the education secretaries show a certain disregard for the inclusion of the Spanish language in school curricula, which suggests that these municipalities either see it as a foreign language that doesn't belong to them, or as a language similar to Portuguese, which is therefore easy to understand and doesn't need to be included in schools. In any case, we emphasize that even if there is social contact with Spanish, this is not a reason to exclude it from the school system; on the contrary, it would be a way of valuing and promoting the social and linguistic reality of this border.