| Since 1994, Mali has embraced a nation-wide effort to incorporate the Peagogie Convergente (PC) reform, a transitional bilingual education method, into all primary schools. Many teachers considered this a top-down reform and misunderstood its theoretical objectives, which led to ambivalent attitudes and hybrid practices. The postcolonial and education reform theories that guided my analysis, however, suggest that hybridized attitudes and implementation practices are to be expected and even respected. I thus focused mainly on Malian teachers' attitudes and practices with the PC reform. My research design consisted of interviews and classroom observations with teachers from both PC and "regular" Classique schools in three regions of Mali: Bamako, Koulikoro, and Djenne. While Bamanankan, the majority language, was used in the first two regions, Fulfulde, a minority language, was the medium of instruction in Djenne. In order to triangulate the data collected in schools, I also attended the teacher training for the method and interviewed regional education directors who were involved in its organization and administration.; I discovered that due to the entrenched idea of what constitutes a "real school," and given Mali's history with imported kinds of formal education, change was hybrid and occurred slowly. Mali's approach to policy formation fell somewhere in-between a top-down and a bottom-up approach, despite the hierarchical nature of the education system. Indeed, teachers were not consulted before adopting the PC method, but their concerns about the PC method were reflected in subsequent reforms, such as the most recent Curriculum reform. Yet this hybrid approach appeared to affect teachers' confidence in the method. Their misunderstanding of the theoretical objectives concerning the language component of the method, in particular, resulted in ambivalent attitudes and hybridized implementation. Based on quantitative data collected during this research, teachers incorporated Malian languages more than the recommended percentages in the first four years of primary school while they prioritized French in the last two years. In the multilingual community of Djenne where a minority language was the medium of instruction, a higher percentage of French was used, due to teachers' view that learning French would create opportunities beyond the local environment. |
