Language ideology in Aruban secondary education: A nexus exploration

Aruban language-in-education policy is shaped by a tension between the dominant home language, Papiamento, and Dutch, the primary language of instruction in most schools. This presentation introduces a proposed analysis of three key policies, interviews with teachers (n = 8), focus groups with pupils (8 groups; n = 29) and pupils' survey responses (n = 221) across different schools. The study will adopt a nexus analysis approach to examine the links between policy and classroom practice in Aruban secondary education. Analytically, the paper focuses on (1) the language ideologies embedded in policy (“discourses in place”) and (2) how these ideologies shape and are reshaped through classroom practice (“interactional order”). A third lens attends to pupils’ lived linguistic trajectories (“historical bodies”), foregrounding how learners experience and are positioned within the Aruban educational system. These lenses constitute a critical analysis with context-specific insights into the interaction between practice and policy, and language ideologies. By exploring how these policies relate to practice, the study highlights the tension between policy intentions and real-world practice. Further, it is a window into the considerations of teachers who must balance using their pupils’ diverse language repertoire with the demands of a monolingual, educational system which has Dutch proficiency as a primary linguistic goal. It contributes to wider debates on linguistic justice and decolonial perspectives in language policy, assessing whether current policies promote or undermine linguistic diversity. The findings hold relevance not only for Aruba but also for other multilingual and postcolonial Creole settings. This research forms part of the Horizon Europe project Pluridentities.