The teacher and the instruction: A moral Dynamic in ESL class

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.