Politics and Values in the Practice of Language Education: Two Examples
I wrote earlier that teachers are, generally speaking, not encouraged to think about the political meaning of their work in language teaching. However, it has consistently been my experience that when teachers are asked to reflect on this issue they find themselves faced with conflicts of values, that is, with moral quandaries. If one hangs around in universities and at conferences of applied linguists, the notion of supporting the revitalization of indigenous languages usually seems, as my teenage daughter would put it, a no-brainer. Of course we applied linguists support programming in indigenous lan-guages, just as we support bilingual education and other multicultural practices. We have all seen “Dances With Wolves”; we all agree that Indians, and other indigenous groups around the world, have suffered terribly at the hands of European colonists; of course the teaching of indigenous languages should be supported. However, when one is, so to speak, on the ground, it is often far from clear what the good and right course of action is, even when one’s views are firm and strong. In fact, the matter of teaching indigenous languages, like any other political area of language teaching, is fraught with moral dilemmas and conflicts of values. One of my former students, Kay, is currently working for a church organization setting up village schools in rural areas of the Central African Republic. While Kay was in Bloomington, we spoke of the vital importance of maintaining indigenous languages not just in the United States but all around the world, and of the predacious effects of the unchecked teaching of colonial or postcolonial languages. Yet now that Kay is in the Central African Republic, she finds that there is hardly any support locally for such values and that, given the staggering lack of resources, it is a colossal struggle even to institute French-language schooling. As she wrote to me in a recent e-mail: What can I even say about the language issue? There is an overwhelming push (“overwhelming” is even an understatement) for French in the schools—practically speaking, I am centuries away from getting anyone to hear anything about mother tongue education or even literacy. All I am hoping for now is for a way to use the MT [mother tongue](orally) to help and not hinder French acquisition as well as other content. I think classes here are and always have been “bilingual” in reality—no teacher can really make do with TOTAL French immersion here. How do I train these Values and the Politics of English Language Teaching 46 teachers to promote French language skills, French reading skills, and all other skills supposedly in the French medium, so that all these nonfrancophone little kids actually learn something in the end? Kay faces an ongoing moral dilemma: How much of her limited time, energy, and resources should she devote to a cause that she knows is right but unlikely to produce results in that particular context—that of promoting indigenous language education? To what extent should she compromise and concentrate on establishing education in a European language, knowing on the one hand that this will probably be the villagers’ only hope of access to any kind of education for their children, yet on the other hand that she is participating in a global process which sooner or later may well have highly deleterious consequences for the local culture, and that furthermore, though everyone is free to hope, for these villagers even access to French may not necessarily mean access to a better life (Rogers, 1982)? This is what I mean by the moral complexity of language teaching, for it is with dilemmas such as this that language teachers have to wrestle every day. My second example comes from some work I myself did in the area of indigenous language revitalization; I described this work in more detail elsewhere (B.Johnston, in press). From 1998 to 2000,1 worked with a Dakota community on an Indian reservation in Minnesota as they developed a preschool immersion program for the Dakota language. I was profoundly committed to this program, because it embodies values that I held, and still hold, very dear both professionally and personally. Like many in our field, I strongly support efforts to stabilize, maintain, and revitalize indigenous languages. I further believe that as an applied linguist I have a professional duty to engage in this work whenever I am given the opportunity and that I have some knowledge, skills, and understanding that may be helpful. The program opened in October 1999. Though on a small scale, it appeared to be about to take off. The program was run in a highly professional manner by a Dakota educator named Angela Wilson, who had gone to great efforts to ensure both that the school embodied Dakota cultural values and that, pedagogically speaking, it was structured to maximally encourage language acquisition. The teachers in the program were Dakota elders, supported by younger non-Dakota yet Dakota-speaking aides. Through the first 6 months of the program, the children, aged 1–5, gradually grew in their receptive and spoken ability in the language. However, the program was also riven by political conflicts. Several of the teaching elders resented the fact that the program was being run by a younger person, and a woman to boot; furthermore, they found it difficult to enact some of the pedagogical strategies Angela and I suggested, and claimed that certain aspects of the program—for example, the process (which Angela encouraged) of creating new words to avoid the use of English for modern technological inventions and other things—were un-Dakota. There was also a strong undercurrent of resentment against the White teacher’s aides. To cut a long story short, the atmosphere became intolerable and, lacking the crucial support of the Tribal Council, Wilson resigned as director at the end of March 2000, thus effectively bringing about the end of the program. The most important and tragic aspect of this affair, of course, is the fact that the children in the program no longer have access to education in their own ancestral 47 Values in English Language Teaching language. For my purposes here, though, I wish to fo-cus for a moment on the moral underpinnings of the story, specifically as these relate to my role in it. I already explained that my involvement in this program—as a consultant and teacher trainer—was based in values that I hold dear: the nobility and vital importance of the struggle to prevent languages from disappearing from the face of the earth. Yet in the real context of the Dakota reservation where I was working, I found a much more complex moral landscape emerging. First, although I thought I was committed to “the Dakota,” I found many of the people with whom I worked and interacted resented, to a greater or lesser extent, my role as a White “expert” brought in from outside. In one sense, to be true to my own belief in the rights of indigenous peoples to self-determination, I should simply have left, respecting their wishes and allowing them to rely on their own expertise. Another way of putting this is to say that, while I believe I know something about how to organize the learning of languages, I also have a belief in the value of alternative ways of knowing, and I would not claim that the Western or White forms of knowledge in which I trade at the university are superior to other forms of knowledge. On the other hand, from everything I have both read and experienced about language growth and language learning, I do believe that I was right—for example, to argue for interactive ways of working with the children and for the value of helping the language to grow by consciously creating new vocabulary. I believed, and still believe, that the approaches. Angela and I were suggesting offered the best chance for the Dakota language to survive. In the end, though, I remained in the project because Angela and other Dakota continued to ask me to be involved. This presented another quandary: Which Indians were right? I knew who I sided with, but there was no clear-cut sense in which I was supporting “the Dakota.” The community was divided; the romantic image of the tribe as a single group united behind the goal of reviving the language was a fiction. What was I to do, then? Ply my wares and push for an interactive approach when I knew this ran against the expectations of many of the participants? Or accept in a spirit of respect what was claimed to be the “Dakota way,” which I believed would not lead to effective language learning? These dilemmas were cut short by the termination of the program, but I continue to mull over them as I reflect on White involvement in community programs of this sort. The brutal truth here, at least as I see it, is that this program represented by far the best opportunity the community had to keep the Dakota language alive. The values of maintaining the language and of respecting the culture and its most important bearers, the elders, come into terrible conflict here: To this day I do not know how that conflict can be resolved, even by the Dakota themselves, let alone by White experts from outside. My overall message is that the two examples mentioned here are not isolated or unusual cases, but on the contrary that the field of indigenous language programming, like any area of teaching, is played out amid difficult and deep-reaching moral conflicts and clashes of values. A common element to these two stories is the clash between what insiders believe to be the right and good thing to do and what the outsider teacher considers to be good and right. This conflict is echoed in various forms throughout the different contexts of language teaching.
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