Leadership and Values in Language Education - Al Akhawayn ...

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16Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual ConferenceIntroductionValues and value systems forthe Moroccan language education curriculumAbdellatif ZakiDepartment of Languages & CommunicationIAV – Hassan II, RabatThe rising interest in values in Morocco stems, perhaps, from the fact that oursociety is undergoing transformations both under internal and external pressures.However, although Moroccan society has always been very sensitive to values,the very closeness of Moroccans to these values has made them less aware of thepower of their hold on them. It is at times of critical developments in variousaspects of everyday life that awareness is awakened to the play of values. In fact,although most of us interested in language education in Morocco have actuallybeen for decades involved in local, regional and world educational values tradingin adjustments of ones to others, it is only when MATE has formulated the themefor this year’s annual conference that we started pulling ideas together to setframeworks for dealing with values in a systematic and disciplined manner in ourwork.I would like from the outset to highlight the pressing need for a systematic andcomprehensive survey of values with the purpose of identifying them, analysingthem in terms of the domains in which they are present, their effects on variousspheres of life, and their distribution among the population according to a set ofsocial, cultural, regional and demographic factors/criteria. For every identifiedvalue, a study to relate it to various age groups, gender and other factors wouldhave to be conducted. This analysis would also aim at identifying the variousattitudes and legal and administrative measures as well as any social behaviourassociated with these values. Among the domains that the survey would need toresearch for the incidence of values and that call for most immediate focus thereis religion, politics, culture, economy, knowledge, family, gender, innovation,change and resistance to change. In fact, as I will endeavour to highlightthroughout this paper, a value acquires its meaning and its legitimacy from theextent to which it can be – it is - translated into laws through the legitimatelawmaking institutions of a community. Three ultimate objectives of this surveycould be (i) the design of an instrument to sense, identify, depict and explain the
17Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual Conferencebehaviour of values including their rise and fall, their evolution, the expansion oftheir domains and the modification of their meanings for specific populationgroups, (ii) the construction of comparative criteria for in-country developmentand for developments elsewhere, and (iii) the elaboration of an index for theincidence of values.In this presentation, I would like to address the issue of defining the concept ofvalues in such ways as it would be useful for the language educationalist at thevarious stages of her/his intervention in the curriculum. I will give examples andillustrations to support the opinion that values are man-made instruments whosefunction is to install, perpetuate and reproduce specific living conditions but thatcan also be instruments for challenging, changing and introducing innovationsand transformations in given human relationships. I will also address the issue ofprioritizing or identifying hierarchies for values in / for a language educationsetting. To conclude I will reiterate the opinion that like any man-made service,commodity or ideal, values often end up overpowering the men and women whohave created them and assigned meaning to them in the process / cycle ofgenerating power, legitimating it, distributing it, exercising it and challenging it.Like any other lenses through which people perceive reality, values reduce thescope of plurality, heighten the selectivity of vision and determine both what isseen and how it is assessed. They posit themselves as self-sufficient and selfevident. Furthermore, they are posited as necessary for the achievement of thesocioeconomic and political equilibriums of communities. Values do not codifythe mechanisms of dominant systems but hypothesize potential conflict andcontradiction- free relationships.Questions to start with1. What legitimacy do teachers have to influence the values and valuesystems of their students?2. Which values of their students’ do teachers tend to want to influence andto modify?3. Whose values and value systems do teachers posit as alternatives?4. How efficient is it from the purely technical point of view to enhanceperformance, in our case that of learning, through the modification ofvalues and value systems; and how efficient is it to work with thestudents’ own values and value systems?
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