The reshaping of teacher identities within CLIL contexts in Castilla La Mancha schools: Linguistic ideologies, power and labour.
The impact of globalisation processes and neoliberal discourses have underpinned a shift in the desire for and commodification of English as a global language and as a form of linguistic capital that guarantees social, economic and educational success (Block 2017; Bourdieu 1977; Heller 2003). This has played out sharply within the Spanish context where there has been a proliferation of Content-and-Language-Integrated Learning (CLIL)/Bilingual programmes in Spanish schools. This has, in turn, led to a restructuring of these educational spaces as sites of linguistic and cultural reproduction and as discursive spaces where social relations, identities and dynamics of power have repositioned diverse social agents and their access material and symbolic resources (Heller 2007). Drawing from a series of ethnographic interviews conducted as part of a large co-ordinated project on English and CLIL programmes, I focus on how teachers’ (i.e., local Spanish teachers and ‘native’ English language assistants (NLAs)) labour and professional identities (Giampapa 2010 ) have been reshaped and revalued by institutional discourses that privilege particular forms of knowledge, pedagogy and practice in order to maintain their competitive edge as providers of ‘bilingual’ programmes. This has also led to the de/re-skilling of teachers’ and NLA’s work and the creation of precarious conditions of work for some educators who struggle with the tensions and complexities of being/becoming (re) positioned as ‘CLIL/bilingual’ teachers.