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.
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.
Thanks for great share