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Constructing a common language-in-education policy? Portuguese, Brazilian and Timorese collaboration in the reintroduction of Portuguese in Timor-Leste

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Abstract

The final decolonization of Timor-Leste, in 2002, happened during an era characterized by intensification of globalization processes and, as a result, the reconstruction of the country involved diverse types of multilateral and bilateral cooperation. The cooperation projects of Portugal and Brazil took on the main role in the development of local language-in-education policies contributing, for example, to the construction of the legal framework for education, the national curriculum and the training of teachers. The first objective of this article is to present an analytic account of the trajectory of the Portuguese and the Brazilian cooperation initiatives in Timor-Leste in the field of teacher training. The second objective is to analyse the positionings of social actors who had an involvement in one specific project, in relation to the processes surrounding language policy implementation since Independence. The data to be analysed in detail in this article are from narratives emerging in interviews, conducted during fieldwork in Timor-Leste in 2012. The focus of my analysis is on the interviewees’ lived experiences and the ways in which they indexed the multiple language ideologies circulating in this context. The interviewees’ accounts brought to the fore different ways of accommodating tensions and achieving consent in the construction of language-in-education policies in post-colonial contexts such as this one, reminding the importance of looking, in close detail, at the constant negotiation and recasting of priorities even among social actors aligned in the same politically hegemonic field.

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Notes

  1. For more information about the legislation framing the use of the Petroleum Fund, see https://www.mof.gov.tl/budget-spending/petroleum-fund/. For a detailed analysis of 2012 Timor-Leste’s General State Budget, see the report of the local NGO La’o Hamutuk https://www.laohamutuk.org/econ/OGE12/10OJE2012En.htm. For a more recent analysis of the situation of the Petroleum Fund, see Scheiner (2018).

  2. In 2002, 75% of the Timorese State budget came from development assistance, in 2015, this amount was just 6% (Australia 2015).

  3. The Timor-Leste Development Partners Meeting event took place on 15 and 16 of May 2012. I participated of the event as invited researcher from the Embassy of Brazil, this quotation is from an unpublished handover discourse distributed during the event and it is part of the fieldwork set of documents collected in this year.

  4. This account was registered in the ethnographic field notes produced during fieldwork in 2012.

  5. During fieldwork, in 2012, 15 interviews were produced with Portuguese language teachers or teacher trainers from Timor-Leste, Portugal and Brazil.

  6. All the teachers signed an informed consent form before taking part in this study. All the interviews were conducted in Portuguese and were translated into English for the purpose of this article.

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Funding

The research for this article was made possible by different sources of financial support. These included the following: (1.) a doctoral study grant from CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico/The National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) in Brazil (Award No 142353/2010-4 and 143173/2011-1); (2.) a scholarship from CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior/Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) (Award No BEX 8816-12/3), and (3.) an award for research excellence from the University of Birmingham (Award No 1286500) to study in the United Kingdom.

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  1. Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), Rua Sena Madureira 1500, São Paulo, SP, CEP 04021-001, Brazil

    Alan Silvio Ribeiro Carneiro

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Correspondence to Alan Silvio Ribeiro Carneiro.

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Carneiro, A.S.R. Constructing a common language-in-education policy? Portuguese, Brazilian and Timorese collaboration in the reintroduction of Portuguese in Timor-Leste. Lang Policy 20, 53–75 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-020-09562-0

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