Critical Pedagogy and Politics in EFL Contexts

Critical Pedagogy and Politics in EFL Contexts

The politics of ELT is one thing in ESL settings. It is quite another in EFL contexts, that is, in contexts where English is not the ambient first language but is a foreign language. Again using the lens of critical pedagogy, in this section I examine some of the moral consequences of addressing the political dimension in EFL education. I begin from my own context. For me, the question of critical pedagogy in EFL raises moral issues in my own work as a teacher educator. In my methods classes my students and I read about critical pedagogy, and I explain my reasons for saying that all education is political in nature. In many (though by no means all), cases students find the arguments persuasive. However, I immediately find myself faced with a series of moral dilemmas. First, to what extent should I recommend to international students that they consider embracing critical pedagogy in their teaching in their own countries? On the one hand, I myself remain unconvinced that a critical approach is defensible (B.Johnston, 1999b). On the other hand, I acknowledge the importance of political issues in education and thus the 53 Values in English Language Teaching impact that this inevitably has on one’s pedagogy; to date, at least, critical pedagogy is the best option we have. Furthermore, in considering what to say to the international students I wrestle with another incarnation of the same moral dynamic that crops up over and again in this book. As one who professes respect for other cultures and values, I am reluctant to make recommendations regarding the ways members of other cultures should behave within their own cultural settings. On the other hand, not only is everything I do indirect action on their worlds, but also it is my job to influence my students and to change the way they teach—if I did not do so, my work as a teacher educator would not be successful. Many of these students come to the United States precisely because they are dissatisfied with aspects of their own teaching, and they turn to me for guidance. If I believe that teaching in any context must be somehow politicized, I would be selling myself and them short if I did not bring this up in class. Last, while I have respect for other cultures and their values, like Brian Morgan in the previous section, I also have a set of beliefs that I personally hold to be universal, including the equality of men and women and of people of different races, the right of peoples to self-determination, and the right of individuals to self-expression. There is often a fine line between respecting other cultures and transgressing the integrity of one’s own views, yet there is also a fine line between being open about one’s views and treating those views as if they are, or should be, universal. These, however, are my own personal moral dilemmas as a teacher educator. As I mentioned earlier, many critical pedagogists have called for critical pedagogical approaches to be extended to EFL situations. I was recently asked to contribute a talk about critical pedagogy in EFL settings to a colloquium on critical approaches to ELT. I decided that while my own moral misgivings were all very absorbing, it would be much more interesting to hear the perspectives of my students. In the fall 2000 semester, after the classes in which my students and I had discussed critical pedagogy, I asked them to write a journal entry about whether and how critical pedagogy could and should be applied in the national setting with which they were most familiar. I saw this as a kind of thought experiment in which they imagined what would happen if they used a critical pedagogical approach in their home country. The responses were indeed very interesting and represented a wide range of arguments and positions. I now look briefly at three responses, all by female teachers, from Japan, Thailand, and Brazil. Given the traditional argument that expatriate teachers should be particularly cautious about introducing new ideas and approaches in contexts with which they are not familiar, I found it particularly striking that Harumi, the Japanese teacher, argued quite the opposite: that in Japan it would be more culturally acceptable for a foreigner than for a native Japanese teacher to engage in critical pedagogy. Harumi observed that because in Japan “foreigners are treated as outsiders” and “can never be society members,” this paradoxically makes it easier for them to take innovative approaches, although “[o]f course, an individual effort by foreign teachers is too small to change the mainstream.” However, Harumi presented a series of reasons why it would be difficult for a Japanese teacher to introduce critical pedagogy. Foremost among these was that “it would have conflict with teacher-student relations.” There were several aspects to this. Harumi explained that “in Japanese culture, there is a clear boundary between teachers and students, and the teachers are supposed to have dignity enough to keep the boundary Values and the Politics of English Language Teaching 54 existing.” She anticipated that critical pedagogy would run counter to this expectation. In addition, a teacher introducing critical pedagogy is likely to run into conflicts with other teachers, who expect their colleagues not to stand out by using a different methodology and who might resent it if the students showed a preference for the new method (and thus for that teacher). Last, she felt that “since many Japanese children are told to respect their teachers, they would be confused by too much freedom in [the] Critical Pedagogy classroom.” In thinking about Harumi’s commets, I was struck by the fact that moral concerns seemed to underlie her response. First, her objections are couched primarily in terms of teacher-student relations, and these relations, I have repeatedly argued, are moral in nature (see chapter 1). Second, Harumi’s remarks once again place us, as ELT professionals, in a cross-cultural moral quandary. Do we want to say that freedom is an absolute good? If so, what do we have to say about respect? Do we want to claim that Western ways of doing things are better than the Japanese ways? It seems to me that for those who believe critical pedagogy is right for EFL settings, this claim must eventually be made; yet it immediately places the critical pedagogist at odds with the most deeply ingrained values of the profession. The moral foundation of Harumi’s response to critical pedagogy can also be seen in the two other responses I look at here. In her reply to my request, Panida, from Thailand, told me a story from her experiences as an EFL teacher at a new university in Thailand. She wrote about a class of students who took part in a special program which, though it did not constitute critical pedagogy, contained certain key elements of it: Going clearly against the grain of traditional teaching in Thailand, this program emphasized critical thinking, the need to challenge written authority, and the importance of being able to express one’s own views. The program had considerable success in its goal of improving the students’ language abilities and self-confidence. However, it also led to complaints by other teachers (who did not teach English), who found the students overly critical of anything and everything in their courses and not sufficiently respectful, that after “their close contact with their American teacher…they treated teachers as friends on all occasions.” Panida observed that the root of the problem lay in what she saw as a failure on the part of the program: “Not only we would like our students to be good at English, but also we hoped for them to be a good and responsible person in our Thai cultural contexts.” In reflecting on the students’ tendency to pick fault, Panida asked herself:“Have we trained them to be too expressive?” And she concluded that “we did a sufficiently good job in language training, but failed the morality part.” Once again, we see in general how matters of language teaching are linked so deeply and in such a complex fashion with questions of values and specifically how these questions of values arise from the politics and power relations of cultural settings. The third teacher, Ana, from Brazil, was more hopeful about the applicability of critical pedagogy. Speaking of the increasing presence of English and English-language cultural phenomena (such as McDonald’s restaurants) in Brazil, she concluded: The massive presence of English in everyday life and the fact that it is practically mandatory for economic and social ascendancy trig-gers a negative feeling of oppression that my students, particularly the adolescent ones, have many times talked about informally outside of 55 Values in English Language Teaching class. In such a situation, it seems more than timely to apply critical pedagogy in English teaching, as it gives the learners a voice with which they can talk back and position themselves as active participants in society. Here, while Ana’s conclusions about the appropriateness of a critical approach are quite different from those of Harumi and Panida, her reasoning is also rooted in moral relations: In this case, her belief in the need to engage in political issues arises from a belief in the moral rightness of giving the students voice and thus supporting their empowerment. The moral underpinnings of her position are confirmed later when she views the situation from her own perspective as teacher. She wrote: “As teachers we have to analyze our ethics, and given the social, economic and political situation of my EFL experience, I cannot assume a neutral position and ignore the context in which English is situated in Brazil.” Here again it is a moral imperative that leads the teacher to take a particular stand on the role of politics in the English classroom, even though, as can be seen, Ana’s response in the Brazilian context is entirely different from that of Harumi in the Japanese context or Panida in the Thai setting. The politics of English teaching in EFL settings is a complex and problematic business in which cultural and individual values loom large, and although acknowledging the political dimension of language education in such settings is relatively easy, it seems to me that the decision about whether, and to what extent, each individual teacher feels it right to embrace critical pedagogy is above all a moral question—that is, a matter of values—that can and must be left only to that teacher. As a kind of coda, I would like to add that as I worked on this section I found myself reflecting on my own experience in Poland, where during the 1980s I worked for the best part of 6 years under the Communist regime. Our lives both in and out of teaching were highly politicized in those days; we felt the sting of power relations in everything from the ration cards we had to use to buy meat, sugar, and other basic goods, to the outrageous prevarications of the government during the Chernobyl crisis of 1986, when radioactive rainclouds passed over the city where I was living with my wife and children. Furthermore, outside of class my students (who were university faculty) and I talked politics a great deal, and I knew many people involved with the outlawed Solidarity organization, including a large number who had served jail time under martial law just a couple of years earlier. Yet in class it would have been both foolish and pointless to address political is-sues with the fervor and commitment that we had in our private conversations. At the time I had not heard of critical pedagogy; but I think that if I had, I would have seen it as an idealistic and dangerously oversimplified approach to a very complex problem. People in Poland knew full well what the political score was: It would be both ridiculous and insulting to suggest that they were unaware of their own oppression. Furthermore, all of us sincerely believed in the importance of social change. Under those conditions, however, only a certain amount of action was possible. The reason I did not “do politics” in class was that it would be dangerous for myself and, above all, my immediate and extended family. Today, certain of my students come from regimes not entirely dissimilar to that of Communist Poland or repressive in ways that are different yet equally difficult to deal with. I find it very hard to urge these teachers to take an overtly political line in their teaching. Values and the Politics of English Language Teaching 56