In this final section I look briefly at a moral dynamic that is rarely if ever broached in education, and certainly not in ELT, yet which I see as playing an often considerable part in the negotiation of moral meanings in the classroom. I am referring to the tension between the teacher’s role as an individual versus her role as a representative of the institution for which she works and the broader educational and political systems within which that institution is located. A recent court case from the realm of general education illustrates the dynamic to which I am referring. An article in my local newspaper (“Court upholds firing,”, 2001) reported that an appeals court in Pennsylvania upheld the firing of Bob Brown, a professor at California University of Pennsylvania, for refusing to change a student’s grade when told to do so by the president of the university. According to Brown, the student in question “missed 12 of 15 class meetings and did not do most assignments” but was to be given a passing grade for political reasons. In the court case, Brown claimed that “he had a First Amendment right to grade students as he saw fit and to stick by his opinions.” The court, however, found otherwise, saying in its decision: Because grading is pedagogic, the assignment of the grade is subsumed under the university’s freedom to determine how a course is to be taught. We therefore conclude that a public university professor does not have a First Amendment right to expression via the school’s grade assignment procedures. I take up the question of grading and its moral meaning in chapter 4. For now, the aspect of this case I wish to highlight is the fact that the court’s decision underlines the teacher’s identity as representative of a broader institution—and this in an American university setting, where the independence of instructors is usually a point of pride. The professor turns out not to be a free agent; because of his position as a faculty member of a particular institution he is bound by the pedagogical mission of that institution. A few professionals in TESOL work by and for themselves and are not beholden to any immediate institution—I am thinking of freelance materials writers, those who run their own schools, and so on. Yet the vast majority of us work for institutions. These may be public or private schools, language schools, universities, community programs—the list is endless. In every case, however, the moral contours of our work are formed not in a vacuum but within the context of institutional rules, regulations, customs, and expectations that affect what we do and what we can do in the classroom. Of course, many teachers have a considerable degree of autonomy in various areas of their work: selecting materials, choosing classroom activities, and so on. In my own professional career, I have generally been lucky to have had this kind of independence. In many cases, this freedom has not been a deliberate policy (as it is in certain areas in American higher education, for example) but a by-product of the marginalization of the field of ELT; I have also heard many other teachers recounting similar experiences. The power and opportunities that come from living on the margins are not to be underestimated or scorned. Yet many, many other teachers find that their autonomy is limited in a range of different ways and that their freedom to act on their own part—that is, to engage in the teacher-student relation as themselves—is mitigated by the role they play as representatives of the institutions where they work. In fact, I do not have to go further than my own university for an example. I, as a faculty member, have considerable autonomy to determine the content and manner of my own classes, but many graduate students teaching foreign languages are not so lucky. In one foreign language department in particular, not only are textbooks chosen by the institution, but also the timetable for each day of the semester is firmly set to ensure that all sections of the same class move forward together, a policy that may make administrative sense yet ignores the fact that each learner or group of learners learns differently, and denies the graduate students teaching the classes any kind of autonomy in this regard. Although this example may seem extreme, I think that many teachers in many contexts will find that it sounds familiar. It is common for teachers to have little or no voice in the selection of course books; the choice of books, in turn, has a huge influence on what happens in classrooms, especially because, as mentioned earlier, course books often form a default curriculum. Furthermore, the institution impinges on classroom interaction in other ways. One powerful arena of influence is that of requirements for grading: While teachers (in most cases) get to determine what grades or marks are assigned, they generally do not have much of a say in overall patterns of evaluation—whether grades are issued at all, for example, or how they are reported. Other such areas include systemic requirements for checking attendance; it was this requirement, for example, that Joe ran up against in his minicourse class described earlier. What are the moral consequences of our dual roles as individuals and as representatives of our institutions? It seems to me that this duality constitutes another foundational moral dilemma of our work as teachers. We are committed to supporting our students; yet also, in accepting our job, we are committed to upholding the rules of the institutions for which we work. Most teachers can and do break these rules when they see fit, yet we cannot spend the whole of our lives at odds with our institution, for that would make nonsense of our work as teachers. This situation is made more complicated by the fact that, while human beings are moral agents, institutions are not (Maxwell, 1991), simply because they are not human beings and do not in themselves have agency. The rules and decisions of institutions can and do have moral consequences; yet these are moral only insofar as they affect individuals. Institutions themselves have no moral standing. This often places us in a peculiar position in relation to our students. For example, Proposition 227, a recently passed law in California, officially removes children from bilingual programs in public schools after they have had a year of bilingual teaching. However, many teachers see that, for a variety of reasons, their children continue to need bilingual education—for example, because they are still not strong enough in English to support education exclusively in that language. As a result, as Varghese (200la) reported, many teachers in California are still “doing” bilingual education but are having to do it surreptitiously, practicing it in their class without officially declaring they are doing so, and certainly without any funds to support it. I suggest that the decision made by these teachers to continue to teach bilingually is a moral decision: They are convinced that bilingual teaching is in the best interests of their learners and are prepared to break their (perhaps unspoken) contract with their school because the value of supporting the children’s needs is more important. Yet this also sets them at odds with the institutions in which they work, at the level of the school, the school district, and the state. Once again, teachers face complex moral decisions that they themselves must make. Precisely because they are moral agents and their schools are not, at each step they must think about the extent to which the ways the institution impinges on the teacher-student relation are in fact morally tolerable. We all have some wiggle room between the strict enforcement of instructions, rules and regulations that are handed down and what we actually do in our classroom (remember my description in chap. 1 of how I bent to the breaking point the deadline requirements for Hae-Young and her writing assignment), yet as I mentioned before, we cannot blithely disregard every one of these instructions and rules and regulations. Thus, we have to sift through them and decide where we agree with them, where we disagree and wish to take a stand (or simply act in accordance with our convictions, as the California bilingual teachers are doing), and also where we disagree but choose to knuckle down. In other words, some kind of compromise is inevitable, but it is up to each individual teacher to decide in each case what kind of compromise it will be. Whatever decisions are made, even the most dyed-in-the-wool anarchist among teachers cannot fail to acknowledge that she is also a representative of her institution and thus to some extent a carrier, willy-nilly, of its values.

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The final area of conflicting moral values in classroom pedagogy that I look at here is what is sometimes referred to as the process-product debate in writing instruction for college-level students. Some years ago, there was an exchange of views on the obligations of second-language writing teachers, in which two principal opposing positions were put forward. One side, which took its cue from research and theory in first-language writing (Elbow, 1973; Emig, 1971; Murray, 1982), argued that writing only had any meaning as expression, and that writing instructors should focus on encouraging writers to express their own views and ideas (Zamel, 1982, 1983). In essence, this movement aimed to give the students voice through writing. This approach is known as the process approach because among other things, it pays great attention to the writing process itself: the emergence over time of the writer’s ideas, using successive drafts, and seeing the expression of meaning as an emergent product of writing. The other camp argued that it is the primary duty of the college writing instructor to enable students to succeed in their chosen field by mastering its dominant discourses: that undergraduates in history, for example, need to learn to write like historians (Horowitz, 1986; Swales, 1987). This camp posited that the expectations of professors in the various disciplines are rather rigid, and that it is the job of writing instructors to train students in knowing these expectations and being able to meet them. There is relatively little room for personal freedom of expression, at least as far as form is concerned. Furthermore, in ELT such an approach is particularly needed, because students (e.g., ESL students in British or American universities) will have little prior exposure to the models their teachers expect and are in particular danger of getting it wrong and thus of suffering significant negative consequences. This approach is known as the product approach, since it focuses primarily on the formal qualities of the finished piece of writing. The process-product debate was first discussed some years ago in the ELT literature (Raimes, 1991). Yet the debate itself was never resolved, and it is still very much a central dynamic in the teaching of writing. I argue here that it is a moral dynamic, because the underlying opposition it represents is not merely a question of competing classroom methodologies but of values: of what is the good and right thing to do with and for one’s students. The process approach posits the value of voice, or of individual expression, as the most important thing (Taylor, 1992). Of course, teachers who adopt a process approach often emphasize the importance of considering one’s audience as one develops a piece of writing and of producing a formally acceptable piece of work at the end of the process. Nevertheless, the goal of the writing process is primarily to lead the writer to express her own ideas, tell her own stories, and give her own views. This approach values the voice of the student as a person and member of the community of the classroom and beyond who has interesting and valuable things to say. The product approach, however, also has the best interests of the students at heart. Individuals who favor this approach suggest that process teaching is overly idealistic and point out that in the real world, subject-matter teachers are less likely to be interested in the student’s voice and more interested in whether she can write in the ways expected in her discipline. This approach can also be said to be grounded in community—the discourse community of the discipline—and in a desire for the student to be able to participate in that community. Advocates of the product approach believe that the interests of the student are best served by enabling her to acquire the language of the academy in general and of particular domains in particular. Consider an interesting example that shows how one teacher resolved this tension. Xiao-ming Li (1999), a second-language writer of English, told the story of a piece of writing that she produced for a class with Don Murray, a legendary writing instructor at the University of New Hampshire, and then, at Murray’s prompting, successfully submitted to The Boston Globe newspaper. Li told of when she first gave her work to Professor Murray: As I handed in the paper at the end of the class, I was hoping that Murray would correct my writing, but he did nothing. The paper came back bare of any teacherly remarks, only his suggestion that I send it to The Boston Globe. That was not what I expected. I expected him to splash the paper with red ink, removing all signs of my foreign accent. I went to Murray’s office and insisted on him doing that, even insinuating that he would be seen as a delinquent professor if he did not correct my errors, which I knew were plentiful But Murray was equally adamant that he should not. What makes the piece interesting, he insisted, is your unique accent, a different perspective, and a different style and voice. And he asked why I should want to sound like a U.S. writer. He pointed out the best writers do not sound like others…. Unconvinced, I continued to pester Murray to go over my paper again and correct the errors. Finally, he changed a few articles and punctuation marks, but would do no more. In this example, the teacher takes an extreme position in terms of the dynamic mentioned earlier. What he is saying essentially is that Xiao-ming does not have to fit into existing conventions for writing; rather, the reverse is the case: The English language and its literature are enriched and expanded by her contribution. In essence, it is the same argument by which we would say that a writer writing in a dialect or regional variation of English is not writing “incorrect English” but rather is enriching the linguistic and literary culture of English. For myself, the more I think about this ar-gument the more I am convinced that Murray is right. Yet the argument is not always made in ELT and, even setting aside the matter of specific discourse conventions of disciplines, many teachers remain convinced that non-native speakers are unlikely either to make such a contribution or to be accepted in the way Murray accepted Xiao-ming Li as a writer. Thus, the two approaches outlined here are not merely competing sets of instructional practices; they represent opposing views of what is good and right for the student. The value of voice on the one side is balanced by the value of belonging on the other. My guess is that each individual teacher of writing will constantly weigh these values against each other in every different class. Certainly this is an opposition of which I am very conscious in my own teaching. At times, with particular students it seems to me that I focus on the expressive functions of writing; at others—for example, with the case of Hae-young, described in chapter 1—I decided that the student’s ability to understand and use the discourse conventions of the field is more important. In any event, as with the other moral dynamics I have examined in this book, the matter can never be simply resolved once and for all but must be recalculated at each step, with each new learner and each different emerging situation.

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Morality in Phonology

Some years ago, I knew a teacher of English in France named Hannah. Hannah was Scottish, and she spoke English with a marked Edinburgh accent; in conversation with me and with other teachers she vigorously defended the value of her variety of English against what today I would label the hegemony of RP or Received Pronunciation, the accent of the upper and upper middle classes of southeastern England which has long been considered the standard pronunciation of British English. Yet Hannah confessed to me at one point that when she taught her French students the pronunciation of English, she changed her accent and taught them RP. It seems to me that Hannah’s decision to teach RP, despite her own beliefs about the equal importance and validity of her own regional form of English, was a moral decision. Furthermore, I mention it here because it highlights a constant issue in our profession: the decision about which form of English we should teach. Although this dilemma extends to all areas of the language—including syntax, lexis, discourse, and pragmatic conventions—I confine my remarks to the area of phonology as being particularly salient and representative. It is commonly known in our field that the English language includes a bewildering diversity of varieties, especially accents. I was brought up in Lancashire in northwest England. When I was perhaps 8 or 9, during a visit to my grandparents on Tyneside in the northeast, only 100 miles from my own home (Britain is a very small island), I went to play soccer with some of the neighborhood boys. At one point one of them, a little younger than the rest of us, leaned toward his older brother, pointed at me and whispered: “Is he English?” Since those days, through travel and especially the media, speakers of English all over he world have become somewhat more familiar with different accents and dialects of their own language. Yet this familiarity has done little to change the accents themselves, or attitudes toward them. The problem in the field of ELT is to know which of these varieties to teach. My contention that this decision is moral in nature—that is, that it is grounded in values—stems from the fact that, as seen from Hannah’s own defense of her Scottish accent, language varieties themselves are not value neutral. Quite the opposite, in fact is true: The different varieties of English are highly value laden. Accents are closely linked to the identities of individuals and groups of people; to value one accent over another is, rather directly, to value one group of people over another. The fact that the English of the upper and middle classes of southeast England (the area around London) is seen as the British standard, while that of the working class in the north (where I come from), or of Ireland, or Scotland, or Wales, is not, reflects a broader social notion that the middleclass south is in other ways also the norm or the dominant social group. In other words, this choice of “standard” accent both reflects and reinforces a sociocultural and political hegemony. The same can be said, of course, about regional accents in the United States and other countries, and more broadly about the relationship between British English (or American English) and other varieties of English around the world that have not been accorded the same status—the English of Nigeria, India, or Jamaica, for example. At the same time, in the teaching and learning of English there are good moral reasons for selecting such a variety and sticking with it. It is probably objectively true that, because of the widespread adoption of RP as a standard (at least in areas where British English is preferred to U.S. English), a student who is taught RP will have fewer problems communicating than one who has been taught to speak with a Scottish accent. It is also probably objectively true that in many educational contexts teachers could get into trouble for teaching what departmental authorities would, rightly or wrongly, see as a marked form of English. Last, while at one level we may rightly wish to make our students aware of the great range of English accents across the world, for pedagogical reasons I would argue rather strongly that it is too much to expect all but the most advanced students to have more than a vague notion of different language varieties, and that for their own good they need to be taught a straightforward and consistent way of pronouncing the language they are learning, with the minimum possible number of variations. In light of this pedagogical fiat, though, we really do have to choose which variety will serve as the standard to be taught. And here we are faced with a serious moral dilemma. Which form of English are we going to value by making it the standard? How can we determine which variety it will be in the best interests of our students to know and use? This is what I call the morality of phonology. There is no easy solution; the matter needs to be given some serious, conscious thought. In many programs and contexts there are certain unspoken assumptions: for example, about the relative “superiority” of American or British English, of American or British “standard” forms over regional accents, or of “center” varieties over “periphery” varieties (Phillipson, 1992). I suggest that in considering the moral meanings underlying pronunciation teaching and the moral messages we send in our teaching it is important to bring these assumptions to light and question them rather than letting the matter be determined by instinctual, unspoken preferences that often arise under particular sociopolitical conditions. Yet at the same time we must acknowledge that by teaching one set of forms over another we may also be reinforcing existing hegemonic relations.

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Returning to the matter of personal reactions to turkey bowling, it is also striking to me that the responses of students are nowhere envisioned in this unit. The only activity involves a cartoon of a man throwing a live turkey at some glass bottles and asks the students to find which rules of turkey bowling he is breaking. The unit then moves on to other topics. The fact that student response is ignored is of considerable moral significance and recalls my earlier discussion of voice. What students bring to the activity is irrelevant, as are their own reactions to what they read. In terms of the teacher-student relation, one side is silenced; there can be no relation through these kinds of materials. My guess is that many teachers would choose to add an activity or at least a discussion asking the students for their responses to the text, precisely to recapture the human dimension of the teacher-student relation; but nothing like this is included in the materials themselves. The reason for this omission can be seen in the title of this unit. It is headed: “Have To/Don’t Have To.” Other units are called “Personal Descriptions,” “Past Tense of ‘To Be,’” “Object Pronouns/Making a Telephone Call,” and so on. In other words, the book is arranged primarily according to grammatical structures and linguistic functions, which provide the coherence within each unit; this means that substantive topics shift within the units. The passage on turkey bowling is followed by an activity that asks “Make a list of things that students in your school have to and don’t have to do”; then there is a listening passage on another sport; then students are asked to make parallel sentences about another sport; then to talk in pairs about their responsibilities at home; and so on, all within the space of two pages. There is little or no thematic coherence here or elsewhere in the book. This fact reflects a dilemma that is not peculiar to textbook writers but rather is endemic to the entire enterprise of language teaching. On the one hand, we are supposed to teach language, and the most natural instinct historically has been to make this manageable by presenting the different structures (and, more recently, functions) of the language in sequence. The advantage of this is that it ensures that all the important structures are covered; it is also an approach favored by many students used to such
syllabi from more traditional language teaching contexts. On the other hand, however, language is quite meaningless if it is only form and if we have nothing to say or do with it. Language without content is empty. Several recent philosophies of teaching and learning (for example whole language or process writing) have stressed the need for all language use, including language use in language learning, to be about something; in ELT, the content-based movement has championed such an approach. This allows us to focus on the students’ responses—for example, to the turkey bowling text mentioned earlier. Yet this approach also has a downside: By always focusing on content, aspects of form may be underemphasized or simply ignored. Students may get to the end of a course, for instance, without ever having looked at certain major grammatical or functional parts of the language. Thus, however much one embraces a philosophy of content, the balance between content and form always has to be considered, because it is in the interests of the students themselves both to have things to say and to have the forms with which to say them. Language teaching materials must also address this balance and take up some position in relation to it. Naturally, there is a whole lot more that can be said about the values inherent in this
textbook or in any other. I have said nothing about lifestyle norms regarding, for example, apartments, cars, and work, that are reflected in the texts and images of the book, or about the image of the student that it discursively constructs, nor about its ideological content; these aspects of ELT materials have been described and analyzed elsewhere (e.g., Canagarajah, 1993). I hope, though, that even in this brief analysis I have given an indication of the rich and conflicting moral messages inscribed in and read from the materials used in ELT classrooms every day across the globe.

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Values in the Textbook

Published materials are a major presence in ELT classrooms. First, teachers and students spend a lot of time with them. Second, in many places there is no formal written curriculum, and so materials such as course books constitute a de facto curriculum in themselves (Hutchinson & Torres, 1994; this, for example, was very definitely the case where I taught in Poland). Such materials, then, are a central component in classroom interaction. Furthermore, like everything else in classrooms, textbooks and other materials convey morally significant messages. It is beyond the scope of this book to provide a detailed analysis of moral meanings in textbooks in general; rather, in line with my argument that all materials carry moral meanings, I have selected for examination here one book at random from the shelves of the small library of our IEP. The book is Freeway: An Integrated Course in Communicative English, written by Cheryl Pawlik and Anna Stumpfhauser de Hernandez (1995) and published by Longman; I chose Student Book 2 to examine. I selected this book merely as an example; the kinds of comments I make about it here could be made of any published textbook. I deliberately took the first book I found from the shelf and did not look at other books there (though of course I am familiar with many of them from my own teaching experiences and those of my students). Even with just a single textbook (and, at 80 pages, a slim one at that), there is a vast array of issues that could be addressed. I focus on three things: the representation of American culture, the role of the learner, and content versus form. On page 12 of the book there is a short article, accompanied by a picture, about a “sport” called “turkey bowling,” which involves the player sliding a frozen turkey across the floor of a supermarket and trying to knock over 10 large plastic bottles of soda. The article gives the rules of turkey bowling and explains that it “is becoming a popular sport in California.” One question that occurs to me is: Should this kind of article be included? I ask this for a number of reasons. First, while some people might find this activity to be merely amusing and quirky, others will find it somewhat distasteful. Second, there is also a matter of representation (Buzzelli & Johnston, 2002; Harklau, 2000): What image of American society does this convey, and is that image accurate and fair? As someone who has lived in the United States for 11 years now, this activity strikes me as being rather an unusual one compared with the other ways in which Americans spend their time, yet it is the kind of thing that often finds its way into European newspapers (and perhaps others) and conveys the image of America as a land of the bizarre and the tacky. Do students understand this? Does it matter? At one level, I would definitely suggest that this is an improvement over generalized descriptions of “American culture” found in certain textbooks, yet on another level, it seems that its representation of American culture is questionable.

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Finding the Moral in Language Classrooms

As I mentioned earlier, the discussion here by no means exhausts the moral dimensions of classroom interaction. That has not been my intention. Rather, by showing the layers of moral meanings that can be discerned in even apparently unremarkable instances of classroom talk, I am suggesting that all aspects of classroom discourse are infused with moral significance. Furthermore, as I hope is clear from these examples, moral meanings cannot be simplistically mapped onto things that teachers and students say and do using some kind of rudimentary coding, but are crucially dependent on details of the specific teacher-student relations involved. Put another way, the same expression or action by different teachers with different students will carry very different moral meanings. Furthermore, whereas some words and actions are more morally desirable than others, it is also the case that all classroom discourse carries complex and conflicting values, and that much of what teachers are doing as they make decisions in the language classroom involves weighing up, usually rapidly and unconsciously, the values at play in particular circumstances in order to make their decisions. My message in this section has been that bringing this process to consciousness enhances the options we have as teachers in determining the good and right courses of action to follow in our teaching.


VALUES AND CURRICULUM IN ELT

Moral values are not only found in classroom interaction and in various aspects of the teacher-student relation; they also inhere in, and can be read from, the things that are studied in ELT classrooms across the world—what I refer to loosely as curriculum. In 1 The proverb appears in poem XXIX of a cycle entitled Proverbios y cantares (Proverbs and Songs) by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado y Ruiz (1875–1939). The poem contains the lines: Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. (“Traveler, there is no road; The road is made by walking”; Machado, 1941, p. 212) this section I examine three aspects of values in the ELT curriculum. First, I look at the moral meanings that can be found in a typical ELT textbook. Second, I consider the moral issues at play in determining which variety of English pronunciation is to be endorsed in the classroom. Last, I consider the moral dilemma that underlies the teaching of second language writing.

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The Dilemma of Voice in Classrooms

The three categories of Jackson et al.’s (1993) framework that I have examined convey some of the richness and complexity of the moral dimensions of classroom interaction, but they by no means exhaust the possibilities for morally significant events and exchanges in classes. Many other areas of classroom discourse can be shown to have a moral substrate. As a single example, I look briefly at the moral dilemma of voice in the language classroom (Bailey & Nunan, 1996; Jaworski, 1992; McElroy-Johnson, 1993; Tsui, 1996). As before, I ground this discussion in a piece of classroom data. This time the data come from a second study my colleagues and I conducted in the spring of 2000 (B.Johnston, Ruiz, & Juhász, 2002). In this study, we took a more detailed look at a single classroom, that of Mary, a highly experienced teacher and many-year veteran of the same IEP, whose upper intermediate class was entitled “Communication” and was primarily intended to provide opportunities for spoken practice. In the following extract, from the penultimate week of the 7-week session, Mary is negotiating with her students which topic from the book they would rather look at next: sleep, or abnormal psychology. It focuses on Young, a Korean student and the only woman in the group.

Teacher: Can [Turkish name], I think is going with Abnormality. [Laughs; looks around and waits for answers or suggestions. Nobody says anything for a few seconds.] Yasuo, which would you prefer to talk about, abnormal behavior or sleep?
Yasuo: Abnormal behavior.
Teacher: Abnormal behavior. Young? [Young doesn’t look up, avoiding eye contact; she looks at her book. There is silence for 12 seconds.] If you had a choice, which would you talk about, sleep or abnormal behavior? [Waits for 3 seconds; there is no answer from Young. She turns to the next student] Diego?
Diego: Sleep.
Teacher: Sleep. Okay, you know where you stand. Marcio?
(class of 2/17/00; B.Johnston, Ruiz, & Juhász, 2002)

Young was a shy and quiet Korean woman in a small group dominated by talkative men from countries such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, and Argentina. In most of the classes we observed, Young managed to say something, but usually it seemed to be an effort for her. In this class, for whatever reason, she failed to respond to Mary’s prompting and extended wait time, to the point where Mary moved on to the next student without a contribution from Young.
We can only speculate on the reasons for Young’s silence at this time, and on her thoughts and feelings as she waited out what must have seemed a terribly long 12 seconds of silence in an otherwise noisy class. These are important matters, too. However, since my focus in this chapter, as in the book in general, is on the teacher, I wish to consider for a moment the moral dilemma faced by Mary. It seems to me that at this point in the class Mary is caught between two opposing sets of values regarding voice in the language classroom. On the one hand, there is respect for a student’s right to be silent and for the very human difficulty of shyness; this, in turn, springs from our more general concern that each student feel comfortable and stress-free in class. Protecting students from stress is a general response aimed at the well-being of the student, coming from our care for the student in our role in the teacher-student relation; it is also a more purely educational value, since many teachers (myself included) believe that stress, at least too much of the wrong kind, is counterproductive—a belief expressed in Krashen’s (1981) notion of the affective filter. Last, allowing the student to remain silent also conveys respect for the student’s right to choose when she does or does not have something to say—that is, it acknowledges her agency and empowerment in the matter of voice. On the other hand, however, powerful values move the teacher to do her utmost to get Young to say something. Balancing the student’s right to silence is her right to voice: the right for her opinion to be heard and to count in the collective of the class. In this understanding, “silence” is a negative value, associated with the notion of “silencing” and “being silenced” (Delpit, 1995; McLaughlin & Tierney, 1993; Weis & Fine, 1993). In light of this value, Mary attempts to bring Young into the community of the class as a fully fledged member, with all the rights this brings, including the right to participate in the negotiation of the syllabus (Breen, 1984; Irujo, 2000). In addition, there is a good educational reason to encourage Young to speak: As mentioned earlier, we know from both research and our own experience that producing language significantly enhances acquisition—that, in the words of the Spanish proverb, “we make the road by walking.”1 For this reason too Mary encourages Young to speak. I believe the dilemma just outlined underlies any attempt by a teacher to draw speech from reluctant students. No two students are alike; each brings a different level and kind of anxiety or shyness to class. Some students talk far too much, silencing others. Yet in each case, and at each moment of the class, the teacher must weigh the competing values of voluntary silence versus enforced speech in deciding what is in the best interests of the learner concerned and the best interests of the other learners in the class. In each case, this will be a moral decision regarding what is good and right for the students.

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Expressive Morality in ESL Classrooms

The third teacher in our study, Jackie, also had several years’ experience and had completed her master of arts degree a few years before we conducted the study. She was teaching an elective course for advanced students in which she focused on issues in American life through the medium of film. One of these issues was male-female roles and relationships. The class in question comprised a small group of Koreans and one Taiwanese; the class was all women except for two Korean men. The following extract was taken from a class discussion concerning working women.

Teacher: What about you? Will you work after you return [to Korea]?
Student 1(female): No, I don’t know.
Teacher: Why? What will determine whether you work? Your husband?
Student 1: There’s an idea that if a wife works, it shows a failure of the husband. Some kinds of jobs of the husband can support a wife.
Teacher: Guys? Do you want your wife to work?
Student 2 (male): If she wants a job, I’II allow her to work.
Teacher: You’ll allow her?
[General laughter]
Teacher: So how will you decide yes or no?
Student 2: [???]
Teacher: Would you like her to work? What kind of job? Business jobs?
Student 2: No, business is too hard and she would have to work too many hours. (class of 4/16/96; B.Johnston et al.,1998, p. 176)

In this extract, what was of most interest to us was the matter of expressive morality, the subtle ways in which what the teacher does or says sends moral messages. Specifically, it seemed to us that powerful and complex messages were contained both in the clash of values the situation reveals and in Jackie’s response to the male student: “You’ll allow her?” At first glance, the situation looks like one of the cross-cultural clashes of values that occur with some frequency in language teaching (Scollon & Wong Scollon, 1995). Yet there is more to this than meets the eye. The Korean male student’s statement that he would allow his wife to work, though it seems initially to be a classic case of a patronizing attitude, can also be read differently: Given that he is in a position to not allow her, he chooses to let her find work—in other words, he is choosing to be liberal, within the Korean context, that is. Also, it seems that the students do not hold this belief blindly but can see it from the outside, as it were, from the perspective of an American
such as Jackie—hence their laughter at her response. Jackie’s response to the student is also interesting. Jackie herself is a militant believer in the equality of the sexes; she is also an ESL teacher. In her response, she refrains from any explicit judgment of what the student said, and in so doing, she is adhering to the value of respect for students and their views which, I have argued at several points in this book, is one of the cornerstones of the ELT profession (Edge, 1996a; Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, 2001). At the same time, however, another moral imperative—that of being true to one’s own values, and of acting on the world in ways that one believes are right—leads Jackie to encode her view not in her words but in her stress and intonation: Her obviously ironic (though equally obviously restrained) echoing of the student places heavy stress on the word allow and a rising (questioning) intonation on the sentence as a whole. The students’ laughter indicates that they have “got it”—that the moral judgment has come across loud and clear despite its being conveyed so obliquely. Yet the briefly quoted continuation of the extract, in which the students continue to discuss the matter, imply strongly that the other side of Jackie’s message—her refusal to condemn explicitly, and her receptiveness to what the students have to say regardless of whether she supports it—has also been understood. The great moral complexity of even such a short and simple passage reveals the rich and difficult nature of expressive morality. Even the slightest and subtlest things that we do or say in the classroom have moral significance and convey complicated and oftencontradictory moral messages. This process is not merely unavoidable but desirable, because it reinforces the fundamentally moral character of classroom teaching, and especially that of the teacher-student relation. While we cannot and should not avoid it, I would argue that it is in our interest to become aware of the moral meanings our words and actions may convey and to sensitize ourselves to this usually invisible but always important dimension of classroom interaction.

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The Curricular Substructure of ESL

Damon, another teacher whose classroom we studied, had taught in Japan for some years before taking a position in the IEP while he completed his master’s degree in the United States. Damon was teaching a low-intermediate reading class. In one class, Damon was leading his students through a general-knowledge quiz about what to do in particular driving situations.

Teacher: OK, so the first one: [reads from the book] “Every time you turn on your windshield wipers you should also turn on your headlights.” What do you think? True or false?

Student 1: False.

Teacher: False? Anybody else? M. says false. Tell me what you think. Tell me what you think. OK? P. says false. Only two of you are going to answer? Tell me what you think. I don’t care. You can be wrong. Or you can be right. Or it doesn’t matter. When it rains, do y—ah, let me ask you this: when it rains, do you turn on your headlights?

Student 2: Yeah.

Teacher: Yeah?

Student 2: Yeah.

Student 3: Sure.
[…]
[Teacher and class work through the second question]

Teacher: Next one. [Reads from the book] “If you think you’re going to run head on into another vehicle, it is better to drive off the road than to crash.” Right, so you’re in a bad situation; you think you’re going to run on, head on into someone or something; it’s better to drive off the road than to crash. What do you think? True or false? Who thinks it—

Student 4: Highway?

Teacher: Yeah, drive off the highway, don’t have the crash. It’s better to drive off the highway? Who thinks it’s true? One. Two. Three. Only three? Who thinks it’s false? One. [Students laugh]

Teacher: [laughing] You guys! Last one. You can, it doesn’t matter, just saysomething. (class of 4/1/96; B.Johnston et al., 1998, p. 173)

In this passage, Damon is struggling to get his students to respond to the items of the quiz. In analyzing the extract, my colleagues and I were partiularly struck by the complex and contradictory moral messages encoded in what Damon says to his students. It seemed to us that the passage reveals a certain moral paradox at the heart of communicative language teaching regarding the nature and purpose of student participation.

One of the most basic underlying tenets of communicative language teaching is that language is not merely a set of forms (words, grammatical structures, etc.) but is used for something: to convey information, maintain relationships, and act in and on the social world (Finocchiaro & Brumfit, 1983; Halliday, 1978). In all of these ends, the substance of what is said is the important thing. In the context of Damon’s class, this means that the students’ opinion about the right answer is most important—more important, for example, than forming that opinion in a grammatically faultless way. Thus, Damon urges his students: “Tell me what you think. Tell me what you think.” The message that the individual learner has to convey is paramount; in the language of communicative teaching, the classroom is meaning centered and learner centered (Finocchiaro & Brumfit, 1983; Nunan, 1988). Yet there is also another side to this. Much communicative teaching involves games or relatively trivial topics—for many people, the driving quiz Damon is using might fit into the latter category. There is a sense that the content of the class is in fact not important and that it is simply engagement with the language that matters. Indeed, second language acquisition scholarship has shown that fluency can be achieved only by actually speaking and that it is important to maximize the time that each student has for production—hence the widespread use of pair work in communicative language teaching, which multiplies the opportunities each student has to produce the language (Brown, 1994). In light of this, it is pedagogically important to urge the students to produce as much language as possible. Damon does this by saying: “Just say anything,” implying that it is the making of language that matters, not its content. Yet these two values are incompatible. On the one hand, what learners have to say is the most important thing; on the other hand, it is irrelevant, and mere production is what matters. Yet both values stem from the same goal: to make the language learning process
more effective. This is the paradox that underlies Damon’s struggle in the previous passage. At one level he is urging the students to make their contributions individual and meaning based: “Tell me what you think. Tell me what you think.” The moral message implicit here is that he wants communication of ideas: that is, the teacher-student relation is paramount. Yet simultaneously he is sending the message that the most important thing is simply to practice fluency: “Just say something.” Here, the moral subtext is that the students have a moral duty—based on the assumption of participation, another part of the curricular substructure—to participate, and that this participation is in fact in their best interests, because it is the most effective way for them to achieve their goal of learning English. The moral dilemma is captured when Damon says: “I don’t care. You can be wrong. Or you can be right. Or it doesn’t matter.” The phrase “I don’t care” in particular encapsulates the ambiguity: It can mean both “I will accept any answer” and yet also “I
am indifferent to what you say,” both of which meanings impinge on the teacher-student relation.
It is this paradox and this ambiguity that Damon is wrestling with in the extract quoted earlier; one could also argue that the same paradox contributes to his students’ unwillingness to participate. In any case, the double meaning of participation in language classrooms is not Damon’s problem alone but a complex and contradictory moral issue all of us face in our teaching. This is perhaps the most fundamental moral dilemma at the heart of the curricular substructure of the communicative classroom.

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Classroom Rules and Regulations

The IEP in which our research took place had an enrollment of about 300–400 students at the time of the study. It offered classes in general English but with an emphasis on preparation for higher education. Most IEP classes were small (10–15 students). One class, however, known as the “mini-course,” had a much higher enrollment and was a content-based class intended to offer students the experience of a larger lecture course to prepare them for what they might experience on enrollment in regular university classes. In the session in question the teacher of the mini-course was Joe, a doctoral student with several years’ teaching experience. Joe had taught the same class in the previous session and had had significant problems with attendance, among other things, which was very difficult to check in a class of 50 or more students. This led Joe to devise a scheme whereby each student was assigned to a numbered seat in the large lecture hall where the class was held; this system made it much easier to be able to check quickly who was present. On the first day of the new class, Joe presented his syllabus. Part of the syllabus read as follows, in bold print:

ATTENDANCE:
Your participation is essential for this course. Student input will be of particular importance and your attendance will be vital to your success in the course. THERE ARE NO EXCUSED ABSENCES UNLESS APPROVED BY THE INSTRUCTOR OR THE IEP PROGRAM. IF YOU ARE ABSENT MORE THAN 10 TIMES FOR THIS CLASS, YOU WILL BE GIVEN A “U” FOR THE COURSE. Each student will be assigned a seat in the classroom and he/she must sit in the given seat for attendance. If the student is not in his/her seat, he/she will be marked absent and given a “U” for participation.

Tardiness:
Please do not be late for class. If you are more than 10 minutes late to class, you will be considered absent. (B.Johnston et al., 1998,p. 168)

From the point of view of values and morality, a number of interesting observations can be made about this passage. Perhaps most striking is its tone, which sets particular expectations for the teacher-student relation, more or less defining it as a matter of power relations between them and not only ignoring but counteracting the less confrontational, more supportive caring relation envisioned by Noddings (1984; see chap. 1). Second, it presupposes a lack of trust on behalf of the teacher, an issue I discuss in more detail in chapter 4. The lack of trust, moreover, arises from the fact that this group of learners, whom the teacher has never met before, are being prejudged on the basis of a previous, different group of learners—another denial of the unique relation between teacher and student. Last, and also impinging on the teacher-student relation, students are iden-tified only by their seat number; thus, a further dehumanizing of the students seems to be taking place. On the other hand, it is vital not to leap to premature condemnation of Joe or his methods. Joe was attempting to minimize class time spent on checking attendance—a program requirement—and thus maximize student engagement with the material. Furthermore, few teachers would disagree with the idea that attendance in class is highly desirable, and, in language learning, often essential, or with the suggestion that, much as we might have general respect for the freedom and agency of others, without some form of coercion certain students will simply not do what they are supposed to and what it is in their best interests to do. Last, I want to stress that Joe is not one of nature’s authoritarians; he is a warm and caring teacher whose strictness in this syllabus was occasioned by real problems encountered in the previous session. Indeed, as we reported in the study (B. Johnston et al., 1998), immediately after going over this part of the syllabus in class, Joe apologized to the class for its severe tone, sensing its dissonance with his own internal notion of the teacher-student relation. He explained this dissonance in a journal entry: This apology was one of those “moments” when the instructor senses hidden dimensions underlying classroom speech acts. At the time of my apology, I seemed compelled to rebel against the very rules I had established as a part of the classroom discourse. […] At the instant of the apology, I attempted to take a milder tone for fear of breaking a bond between myself and the class. In other words, the discourse of communication was clashing with the discourse of classroom rules. (B.Johnston et al., p. 170) The conflicting messages being sent in this case exemplify the terribly complex moral dilemmas that underlie the enactment of rules and regulations, that is, the exercise of power and authority in the classroom. Much as we may condemn authoritarian approaches such as that exemplified in Joe’s seating arrangement, in many cases such actions arise from entirely understandable moral reasoning. In this case, Joe wished to create the conditions for the best possible learning and teaching to take place in his class; to this end, however, he found that he needed to exercise a firm hand—so firm, in fact, that it went against other values he held deeply (the “bond” between teacher and student that he wrote about). More generally, we can say that the exercise of power constitutes moral action, yet the values encoded in particular acts of power and authority are complex and contradictory and are open to multiple and conflicting understandings.

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Searching for the Moral in Classroom Discourse

In this section I share some data from a study my colleagues and I conducted in an Intensive English Program (IEP) at a midwestern university in the United States. (Johnston, Juhász, Marken, & Ruiz, 1998). In this study we examined transcripts from the classes of three ESL teachers for moments of moral significance. I mentioned above that in English language teaching (ELT) very little empirical research has been published looking at the moral dimensions of classroom discourse. In fact, to the best of my knowledge the study I will describe here was the first of its kind. However, my colleagues and I were very fortunate to have access to comparable work in general education. We were particularly influenced by a book by Philip Jackson, Robert Boostrom, and David Hansen (1993) entitled The Moral Life of Schools. This book describes the results of a 2.5-year study involving intensive observation and analysis of classroom interaction in a variety of public and private schools and focusing on the teacher’s role as moral agent. On the basis of their observations and analysis, Jackson et al. proposed eight “categories of moral influence” (p. 2), which fall into two sets. The first set involves overt reference to moral principles, of the kind associated with the “teaching of morality”: teachers exhorting children to behave in particular ways, posters with motivational slogans, and so on. The second set of categories of moral influence, on the other hand, constitute the “morality of teaching”; they are the ways in which the processes of education in general, and the actions of teachers in particular, send subtle, implicit moral messages in and of themselves. Jackson et al. proposed three such categories: (a) classroom rules and regulations, (b) the curricular substructure, and (c) expressive morality (pp. 11–42). The rules and regulations “deemed to be essential for the conduct and well-being of the [class]room’s inhabitants” (p. 12) include rules of conduct such as how to ask questions or participate in classroom events. Jackson et al. (1993) suggested that such rules come close “to constituting an explicit moral code that all of the students in the room are expected to obey” (p. 12). The curricular substructure comprises “conditions that operate to sustain and facilitate every teaching session in every school in every subject within the curriculum” (Jackson et al., 1993, pp. 15–16). These condi-tions thus underlie the form and content of curricula in different subjects. According to Jackson et al. (1993), these conditions have two outstanding qualities: they are “seldom explicitly acknowledged by either teachers or students” (p. 16), and they are imbued with moral meaning. The curricular substructure can be thought of as “enabling conditions” (p. 16). Jackson et al. described them as “an elaborate amalgam of shared understandings, beliefs, assumptions, and presuppositions, all of which enable the participants in a teaching situation to interact amicably with each other and work together, thus freeing them to concentrate on the task at hand” (p. 16). They include the assumption of truthfulness—that what teachers and students say in class is true—and the assumption of worthwhileness—that there is inherent value in the topics and materials covered in class. Expressive morality describes the often extremely subtle ways in which moral judgments about what is good and bad, right and wrong, are conveyed in the classroom. Expressive morality resides not just in the words teachers use but also in their tone of voice, in their facial expressions and gestures, and in elements such as the arrangement of hairs in the classroom or the decor on the walls. Jackson et al. (1993) wrote of “vaporlike emanations of character” (p. 34) that carry moral meaning and described moral judgments as being “embedded” (p. 35) in actions and objects. The act of analysis consists of a sensitization to the particular moral meanings inherent in these emanations.

Because this set of categories emerged from long and careful observation of classrooms, we decided that it would provide a very useful way of framing our own study. Thus, we used this set of three categories of moral influence as our conceptual framework. In the rest of this section I share some examples of classroom data illustrating each of the categories and discuss the moral meanings that we found to be encoded in the discourse.

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I begin this chapter in the place best known to teachers and where many of us feel most comfortable: the classroom. My claim in this book is that all aspects of teaching are value laden, and it seems to me that if what I say is to have any validity, I must first and foremost show how values and moral dilemmas are played out in the minute-to-minute business of classroom teaching, At this point I also wish to make two foundational points. First, I want to emphasize that, while there are better and worse courses of action that teachers can take in particular circumstances—that is, that their decisions matter—these decisions are always complex and polyvalent. Thus, as I consider the moral meanings inherent in the things teachers say and do in classrooms I wish to underline the fact that I am not standing in judgment over the teachers concerned but merely trying to understand the values underlying their actions and decisions. Second, one of the reasons for the moral complexity of classroom interaction is that it is not only the moral agency of the teacher that is at play but also the moral agency of each learner. In this chapter, as in the book as a whole, I focus primarily on the teacher, because this is my main topic of interest; however I acknowledge that in all contexts, the students are active and equally important participants in the teacher-student relation. To best illustrate the complexities and intricacies of the moral dimensions of classroom interaction, I focus on three aspects of interaction in English language classrooms: the moral dimensions of classroom discourse, values implicit in curricula, and the moral underpinnings and moral consequences of the teacher’s de facto role as representative of an institution.

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1. Consider the three stories I tell in this chapter: Peter’s story about the Palestinian student, my story about Hae-young, and the adult literacy teacher’s story about the Russian student. In each of these stories, the teacher could have taken a different decision. What other options were available? How do you think you would have handled the situation? Most interestingly, what values or moral beliefs would have led you to your decision?

2. Peter’s story ends with the teacher giving a student a grade different from the one the student really deserves. Have you ever given a student a grade different to the grade he or she really deserved based on performance in class? Why did you do what you did? What values or moral reasons were behind your decision? If the same situation occurred today, would you do the same thing?

3. Have you ever had a case of plagiarism in your class? How did you handle it? What factors about the context—the student concerned, the nature of the plagiarism, the stakes involved—played a part in deciding what you should do?

4. Have you ever made comments on a student’s physical appearance, way of dressing, or personal hygiene? In the context in which you teach, to what extent are such comments expected or frowned on? Do you agree with these expectations?

5. What values inform your own teaching? Where do these values come from? To what extent do you feel that your values agree with widely accepted national, cultural, religious, or political norms? To what extent do you feel that your own personal values run counter to these norms?

6. Think of one incident in your teaching in which you had to make a decision that involved conflicts of values such as those described in this chapter. If you are working with others, first tell the story of this incident. What conflicting values were at stake? How did you resolve the dilemma? What values led you to the decision you made? Continue Reading

In addition, although a lot of English teaching goes on in national educational systems, an exceptionally large percentage is conducted outside of primary and secondary public education: In private schools, in university programs that themselves are marginalized, in community programs, and so on. Many teachers (myself included) do not hold a teaching qualification recognized by the state, and for all teachers, including those in public K–12 education, the knowledge base of English language teaching is fundamentally different from that of content subjects such as history or chemistry. Whereas in these subjects a major part of knowledge involves knowing facts, knowing a language primarily involves a skill—it is a process-centered knowledge base. In many contexts this sets teachers apart from their colleagues, for they are often judged not so much on the basis of their specialized knowledge (and much less their teaching ability) but on their own skill in using the language. All these things set ELT and its teachers apart from general education. This fact, too, has a significant impact on the moral dimension of language teaching. Such factors, then, lend the moral dimension of language teaching a particular character, one that colors our work and our moral analysis of it in highly complex and polyvalent—that is, multi-valued—ways. Though this complexity and polyvalence cannot be avoided or ignored, it does matter what position one takes on moral matters. I wish to make my own position clear. I believe firmly in the dignity of all learners, and in the need to support the empowerment of learners both inside and outside class. Like many teachers, I found myself drawn to this occupation because I find it fascinating and invigorating to work with people from different cultures, and I feel a moral duty to be their advocate. However, I also feel a moral duty to acknowledge and face up to the ambiguity and polyvalence of what we do—in other words, that blithely accepting “empowerment,” for example, as an uncomplicated and unalloyed good serves neither our own cause nor the interests of our students. It is only by confronting the moral complexity and ambiguity of our teaching that we can hope to identify the good and right things to do in any given set of circumstances, that is, to know the right way to teach. I realize that this is an unpopular position to take, yet I believe it does reflect the truth. It certainty captures my own experience—1 have frequently felt like a child in radically different cultural settings. However, I wish to emphasize that this view of students in no way justifies infantilism in classroom methodology or materials. I believe very firmly that adult students must at all times be treated as adults. Our difficulty as teachers—another moral dilemma that we face—is finding ways to do this with students whose linguistic proficiency runs so far behind their intellectual abilities.

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Although second language teaching is in many other ways like all other teaching, the morality of this form of teaching also has certain qualities unique to our field. For example, to an extent not usually experienced in general education (or at least not acknowledged in its literature), values in second language teaching are virtually by definition negotiated across cultural boundaries. Given the centrality of values in culture, this fact becomes a huge influence on the moral contours of the classroom. Second, profound ambiguities attend this cross-cultural meeting of values in various
contexts. Though these ambiguities are present in all language teaching, they are often particularly salient in English language teaching in both ESL and EFL contexts. In EFL, we are faced with the problem of presenting, explaining, and, in many cases, justifying cultural practices that we ourselves often believe to be either superior or inferior to those of the students’ culture. Native speakers become unwitting representatives for their own “national culture” as perceived by others (Duff & Uchida, 1997; B, Johnston, 1999a). In other cases they are called on to fulfill roles that run counter to their own culture: An American colleague of mine who taught in a Japanese middle school, for example, found himself constantly wrestling with the expectation in Japan that schoolteachers intervene consciously and overtly in the moral lives of the children—for example, upbraiding the children for transgressions of behavior in ways that in the United States are reserved for the parents of the children concerned (see also Hadley & Evans, 2001), Non-native
speakers, on the other hand, who constitute the great majority of the world’s teachers of English, find themselves called on to act as representatives of the cultures they teach. In ESL we have the problem of balancing respect for the home cultures with our responsibility as teachers to facilitate integration into the new cultural environment (I present an example of a moral dilemma arising from this problem shortly). Third, for many of us who work primarily with adults, there is the additional fact that our learners should not be treated as if they need to be overtly educated in moral matters but should be assumed to be in charge of their own moral development. The overt moral instruction that accompanies the teaching of children is absent. At the same time, for immigrant and refugee learners in particular we may believe that they do need to learn different values. Let me share with you an example of this dilemma: I once spoke with an adult literacy tutor in a small Indiana town who found herself having to explain to one of her Russian students that in America one is expected to wear a clean shirt to work each day and not to wear the same shirt 2 or more days running. While this is, objectively speaking, true about “American culture,” it also constitutes an infringement of another basic American rule: that one does not comment on the personal hygiene and habits of other adults. The teacher found that she felt morally obligated to transgress this second law in the interests of supporting her student’s success and acceptance in the new environment. I find this example particularly telling because it reveals not just the moral underpinnings of ELT but also the complex and ambiguous nature of those underpinnings. In this case, the teacher’s moral duty to do well by her students as students is balanced by her moral duty to treat them with respect as human equals; the infantilism always lurking beneath the surface of adult ELT is all the more problematic because while in an abstract, humanistic sense our learners are fully fledged adults, in many practical ways—especially their command of the language and their grasp of cultural norms of the target culture—they do in fact resemble children.3 (In chap. 5 I look at another example of the moral complexities of teachers “interfering” in the personal lives of students.) Last, the very nature of the language teaching profession is often significantly different from that of general education. Unlike many occupations, it is international virtually by definition and thus cannot comfortably rest its morality on conventional national cultural models (even setting aside the problematic nature of such models).

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My principal motivation for writing this book is the fact that, though many teachers I have spoken with acknowledge the profoundly moral nature of teaching, it has hardly ever been discussed in the professional literature of ELT. Rather, language learning has almost exclusively been treated as a matter of psycholinguistic acquisition, while language teaching is a matter of techniques, activities, and methods. Although recent changes in these approaches—for example, recognizing the sociopolitical dimension of language learning (see chap. 3) and the fact that language teaching is a much more individual, complex, and idiosyncratic process than the notion of “method” allows (Kumaravadivelu, 1994; Prabhu, 1990)—have made our understanding of our work richer and fuller, these developments still have not explicitly addressed the values underlying much of what we do and the morality that I believe inheres in our work as teachers. This book, then, articulates a view of ELT that sees it as fundamentally and primarily moral in nature. Though very little literature has addressed the morality of ELT in so many words, there have been the beginnings of such a discussion. This has mostly been couched in terms of ethics: the ethics of research (DuFon, 1993), of writing (Silva, 1997), and of testing (Hamp-Lyons, 1998; Shohamy, 1998), for example; see also Hafernik, Messerschmitt, and Vandrick’s (2002) exploration of ethical issues in ESL teaching generally in the light of social justice concerns. While this literature represents a step in the right direction, I believe that the use of the term ethics also leads us astray somewhat. Certainly writers have associated it with the conception of ethics mentioned earlier: that of a code of professional practice rather than anything relating directly to moral beliefs and values. The discussion still lacks a direct engagement with beliefs about what is good and right.
To my knowledge, other than my own research (e.g., B.Johnston et al. 1998; B.Johnston, Ruiz, & Juhász, 2002) which I discuss in chapter 2, the only piece of writing in the field that addresses this topic directly and in detail is Edge’s (1996a) article mentioned earlier, a written version of a plenary address Edge gave at the 1995 TESOL convention. In this article, which has been one of the most important and influential in my own professional development over the last few years, Edge (1996a) presented what he called three paradoxes (and what I might label moral dilemmas) of the field of TESOL. These are as follows:
• Paradox 1: Sociopolitical context—the clash between what Edge called TESOL culture and the inimical values of the broader national educational cultures in which it is situated.
• Paradox 2: Liberation and domination—the paradox that “to be involved in TESOL anywhere is to be involved in issues of liberation and domination everywhere” (p. 17).
• Paradox 3: Foundations and fundamentalism—the clash between the “respect for the right to be different” (p. 21) that our profession embraces and the intolerance that is sometimes a part of the views of our students that we have committed to respect.

In many ways, this article of Edge’s is the starting point for my own analyses in this book (chap. 3, e.g., constitutes an exploration of Paradox 2). I thank Edge unreservedly for giving me direction. Edge prefers the word values to morality; but the spirit of his (1996a) article is very much consonant with my thesis in this book, and I feel he would agree with me that values and morality refer to the same thing. What he writes supports the idea, confirmed by many, many teachers I have worked with and spoken to, that ELT teaching is indeed a profoundly moral undertaking. First, all that I wrote in the previous section about the moral dimensions of teaching in general education applies to language teaching. Like any form of teaching, ELT crucially involves relations between people, and relations, as explained earlier, are fundamentally moral in character: The intimate relationship among who we are, how others see us, and how we treat and are treated by those others, is above all a question of human values. Second, ELT involves efforts to change people; we assume that such change is meant to be for the better, and thus it is a moral endeavor. Last, as with any kind of teaching, our actions as teachers can only ever partially be derived from “objective” or “scientific” principles: What science (in our case, e.g., the scientific study of second language acquisition) can tell us is inadequate; it is of only limited help in the design of materials and none whatsoever in matters such as how to deal with unruly students, administrations who impose books and syllabi on us, or classrooms with furniture bolted to the floor. Inall these matters and many more, the courses of action we choose as teachers cannot be based in scientific knowledge but must spring from a sense that the materials we select for our students and the ways we interact with them are right and good.

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The moral dimension of teaching has long been recognized in general education. The education of children often involves conscious, explicit attention to inculcating particular values and character traits, but there is also a sense in which teachers unconsciously act as moral agents. Dewey (1909) was one of the first to draw attention to this aspect of morality in education; he distinguished between what is often referred to as “the teaching of morality”—explicit moral instruction—and “the morality of teaching”—the ways in which what teachers do in classrooms has inherent moral significance in itself. It is very much this latter meaning of morality with which I am concerned in this book. In recent years, both theoretical and empirical research has explored the morality of teaching. Writers such as Tom (1984) and Noddings (1984, 1992) have developed a philosophy of education in which the teacher’s role as moral agent is placed at center
stage. Investigations of empirical data, on the other hand, have explored the ways in which moral issues and moral agency play out in classrooms and schools (Buzzelli & Johnston, 2002; Jackson, Boostrom, & Hansen, 1993; Noblit & Dempsey, 1996). I have much more to say about this literature, especially the theoretical framework proposed by Jackson et al. (1993), in chapter 2, in which I look at the moral substrate of classroom interaction in ELT. There is in fact a large and growing empirical and theoretical literature of the moral in teaching. One may summarize its main findings and ideas as follows, while bearing in mind that all of these authors agree on one thing: Teaching is always and inevitably a profoundly value-laden undertaking, and one whose moral foundations are complex and deserve to be continually reflected on. First, following Dewey’s (1909) seminal work, teaching itself is seen as involving moral action (Tom, 1984). Teachers are moral agents (Bergem, 1990; Johnston, Juhász, Marken, & Ruiz, 1998), and education as a whole, and classroom interaction in particular, is fundamentally and inevitably moral in nature (D.L.Ball & Wilson, 1996; Goodlad, Soder, & Sirotnik, 1990). From the teacher’s point of view, teaching involves constant and complex moral decision making (Tippins, Tobin, & Hook, 1993), and also a sensitivity to possibilities in contexts and individuals that Simpson and Garrison (1995) called moral perception. Second, it is widely recognized that the ways in which values and moral issues are realized in the classroom are complex, subtle, and all pervasive. What Jackson et al. (1993) refer to as the expressive morality of the classroom includes what teachers and students say and how they behave but extends to every aspect of the situation, even the layout and decor of the classroom (see also B.Johnston & Buzzelli, 2002). The moral layeredness of classroom teaching (Hansen, 1993) must thus be acknowledged as a constant feature of educational contexts. Third, there will always exist discrepancies among the various moral values played out in the classroom. These discrepancies may be seen as conflicts (Colnerud, 1997; Joseph & Ephron, 1993), moral dilemmas (D.K.Johnston, 1991), or as contradictions of values (Placier, 1996; Whitehead, 1993), or in terms of moral relativity (Willett, Solsken, & Wilson-Keenan, 1998), but in any case the notion of a single set of moral values for the classroom is highly problematic (Applebaum, 1996). A degree of uncertainty and ambiguity must always accompany discussion and analysis of the moral in classrooms and in education. Last, there is also an ongoing debate in the area of moral eduction—an area that increasingly is seen as including the morality of teaching as well as the teaching of morality—between two opposing positions. One is that of care, as explicated in the work of Noddings and others. The other is the perspective of justice, based indirectly on the work of philosopher John Rawls (1971), in which equity—for example, equal attention to and equal opportunities for every child—is seen as the central principle. Although attempts have been made to resolve this apparent opposition (e.g., M.S.Katz, Noddings, & Strike, 1999), the very opposition itself presents a series of tough moral dilemmas.

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The most serious limitation of philosophy in terms of this book arises from its goal, which is different from my own. The goal of philosophy is usually to extract general truths from reflections on life, whereas my own purpose is to seek to understand specific moral situations and dilemmas. Even more than a practical philosophy, what I really need might be termed a philosophy of practice. The most useful approach of this kind is to be found in the work of educational philosopher Nel Noddings. Second, for my own purposes I need an approach that moves away from the generalities of traditional philosophical schemes and takes into consideration the agency of individuals, especially in a postmodern world in which overarching philo-sophical programs are a thing of the past and in which cultural and individual values are likely to come into conflict. Such an approach is offered by philosopher and social scientist Zygmunt Bauman. Nel Noddings’ (1984) book Caring, subtitled A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, has been one of the most important influences on my own thinking. Noddings sees morality as inhering not within individuals but in the relation between them. She examines the nature of what she calls the “caring relation,” the moral relation rooted in the “human affective response” (p. 3). Noddings takes relation as “ontologically basic” (p. 3), that is, “human encounter and affective response” are “a basic fact of human existence” (p. 4). She sees the caring relation as comprising an essentially unequal pair of the “one-caring” and the “cared-for” (p. 4), a relationship instantiated both by the mother-child relation and the teacher-student relation. In her book she explores the fundamental question of “how to meet the other morally” (p. 4). Many aspects of Noddings’ work appeal to me. She recognizes the morally colored nature of human relations while also acknowledging that in our efforts to do the right and good thing, “we shall not have absolute principles to guide us” (p. 5). In fact, she rejects the idea of ethical (i.e., what I call moral) principles and rules as “ambiguous and unstable” things that “separate us from each other” (p. 5); rather, she seeks to recognize and “preserve the uniqueness of human encounters”: “Since so much depends on the subjective experience of those involved in ethical encounters, conditions are rarely ‘sufficiently similar’ for me to declare that you must do what I must do” (p. 5). Yet, in order to escape relativism, she maintains that the caring attitude is “universally accessible” (p. 5). Finally, her account of the caring relation is what she describes as “an essay in practical ethics” (p. 3), and I personally have found her conceptualization of the caring relation, in all its complexity, to be of more practical help in approaching the moral issues of my own profession than anything else I have found in the literature of moral philosophy. A second writer, on whom I draw somewhat less, has also been a strong influence. In a series of books and articles, Zygmunt Bauman (e.g., 1993, 1994, 1995) has considered what has happened and may happen to morality in the postmodern age—an age in which the “grand narratives” and overarching moral and philosophical schemes have all been called into question, and the world “has lost its apparent unity and continuity” (Bauman, 1994, p. 16). Interestingly enough, Bauman believes that the end of the moral certainties offered by institutionalized moralities such as those of religion and politics does not mean the end of morality but instead is a liberating develop-ment that serves to “reinvigorate moral responsibilities” (p. 40) and allows us the freedom to reach for our own inner,
personal morality while fundamentally rethinking the role of values in the public sphere. I find in Bauman’s work strong support both for my own belief that ELT is a postmodern occupation par excellence (B.Johnston, 1999a, 1999b; see also Hargreaves, 1994) and for my continuing belief in humankind’s fundamental moral sense.

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