ABSTRACT
Urban schools in Belgium have become increasingly multilingual. This invites pedagogical challenges in both of Belgium’s largest linguistic communities, but it leads to ideological anxieties in Dutch-medium schools especially, where ample studies show that teachers have negative attitudes towards the use of other languages than Dutch. These attitudes are commonly explained as an effect of teachers’ ‘monolingual habitus’ and inspire calls for anti-bias training, but I argue in this chapter that classroom practice often wavers ambivalently between linguistic uniformity and diversity, because teachers associate both ideas with important educational purposes that they cannot radically ignore. Even though developing positive attitudes towards linguistic diversity is possible and can be desirable, I suggest that the effects of such an endeavour may be limited, and the expectations about what teachers are capable of unrealistic, if it is ignored that teachers will have to strike a balance between competing educational purposes. Advocates of linguistic diversity at school may be more effective if they associate their concern with several of these, rather than with a single purpose.
