A Critical Ethnography of Igbo Language Education Policy Implementation in South East Nigerian Secondary Schools: Actors, Structures, and Resistance

This dissertation employs a critical ethnographic methodology to investigate the implementation of Igbo language education policy in secondary schools across the four states of South East Nigeria, examining how macro-level policy mandates are translated, negotiated, resisted, and transformed by school-level actors operating within specific structural constraints. Language education policy implementation research in Nigeria has overwhelmingly adopted survey and experimental designs, leaving the lived institutional processes through which policy is enacted and contested almost entirely undocumented. The study is grounded in a two-year critical ethnographic fieldwork programme conducted across twelve secondary schools in Anambra, Imo, Enugu, and Ebonyi states, combining sustained participant observation, life history interviews with forty-eight teachers and eighteen school heads, analysis of school policy documents, and critical incident documentation. Critical theoretical tools including Bourdieu's field theory, critical policy studies, and postcolonial education theory frame the analysis. Findings reveal a complex implementation landscape characterised by structural isomorphism at the policy-declaration level masking wide intra-school variation in actual practice. Teacher professional identity, head teacher ideological orientation towards Igbo, parental pressure dynamics, and community-school boundary management emerge as primary school-level implementation drivers. Structural factors including university admission requirements and WAEC examination prestige hierarchies systematically undermine policy intent at the classroom level. The dissertation generates a grounded theory of Igbo language education policy enactment. Keywords: Igbo education policy, critical ethnography, implementation, South East Nigeria, policy enactment.