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

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A Case Study of Critical Pedagogy in an ESL Setting

As I mentioned earlier, much of the best work in critical pedagogy for ELT has been done in ESL settings, especially in adult education. From Auerbach and Wallerstein’s (1987) practical teaching materials to empirical research and program descriptions by Morgan (1998), Rivera (1999), Frye (1999), and many others, there has been a sustained effort to build a theo-retically sound and practically viable critical approach to the teaching of English to adults in ESL contexts. For this reason, as I explained earlier, in order to best examine the political dimension of language teaching, and to explore its moral substrate, I focus here on an example of critical pedagogy in action in such a context. The example I have chosen is the work described by Brian Morgan (1997) in his article entitled “Identity and Intonation: Linking Dynamic Processes in an ESL Classroom.” I feel that this will be an effective way of exploring the moral dilemmas and conflicts of values that dwell in critical pedagogy and, more broadly, in any attempt to deal with political matters in the ESL classroom. In presenting Morgan’s work I set aside his (very interesting and well-presented) discussion of sociolinguistic and phonological theory and focus on what he actually did with his class. Morgan (1997) described a 2-day pronunciation activity he conducted with a group of adult learners in a community ESL program in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The learners were all Chinese speakers and were predominantly older female immigrants from Hong Kong. The first day of class began with the following vignette from the students’ textbook: Yuen-Li is the wife of Chian-Li. They have been in the United States for two years. Chian-Li is very traditionally minded, believing that a wife should stay at home, make herself beautiful for him, and look after their two teenaged children, Steve and Sue. The family always speaks Cantonese at home, and Yuen-Li doesn’t know any English. Chian-Li has attended English classes because sometimes he needs English in his job. Values and the Politics of English Language Teaching 50 He is an importer. Yuen-Li feels very isolated. (Bowers & Godfrey, 1985, p. 25, cited in Morgan, 1997, p. 440) The rest of this first class was devoted to a group activity that involved ranking a number of different solutions to Yuen-Li’s “problem”, including the following: Solution No. 1: Try to explain to her husband that she, too, would like to take English classes. Solution No. 2: Ask her children to try to convince Chian-Li that she should go to English classes. Solution No. 3: Explain to Chian-Li that her lack of English will have a bad effect on the family. Solution No. 4: Go to English classes during the day, and hope that Chian-Li will be pleased when he discovers that she has learned the language. (Morgan, 1997, p. 441) Morgan (1997) reported that this discussion was very lively and included a number of interesting dynamics. For example, two of the four men in the class said they would be angry if their wives chose Solution 4, whereas half the women in the class felt that this was the best solution. During the discussion the participants, both men and women, expressed various views on the social position and status of women—one of the men, for example, believed that in Canada women have “more power” than men. For the following day, Morgan (1997) decided to build a pronunciation lesson around Solution 4 “because it had generated the most discussion and opposing viewpoints the day before” (p. 442). He brought to class the following dialogue he had prepared: Yuen: Sue, would you mind helping me cook dinner? Chian: Yuen, you’re speaking English. How did you learn those words? Yuen: Oh, I’ve been studying at a community center for several months. I really enjoy it, and the teacher is very good. Chian: You should have told me first. You know that the customs here are different and you might cause some trouble for us. Yuen: I’m sorry, Chian. But you’re so busy, and I didn’t want to trouble you. Besides, the lessons are free, and many other Chinese housewives are in the class.
Chian: Well then, I think everything will be fine as long as you don’t forget your duties for the family, (p. 442–443) Morgan used this dialogue to practice different options for intonation, explaining the import of each option in terms of the relationship between Yuen and Chian—for example, the different ways the word oh could be pronounced to indicate uncertainty, fear, or covert resistance (p. 443). Students practiced the dialogue in pairs; each pair then produced a new dialogue on the same theme and presented it to the rest of the class. 51 Values in English Language Teaching What most interests me as far as this chapter is concerned is something Morgan (1997) wrote in his Conclusions section: It would be inappropriate to tell students how to conduct their family lives in Canada. At the same time, I believe, it would be irresponsible not to teach them how to “say dangerous things” wherever and when-ever they need to do so. As an ESL teacher, I am keenly interested in the full yet unrealized potentials of language. Sometimes language is a thing of beauty, sometimes a model of clarity and precision, and sometimes a weapon. All local options of language should be made available to newcomers in our society—if not for personal use, then at least for scrutiny and recognition when their interests as newcomers are at stake. (p. 446) It is in this passage that Morgan (1997) touched on the moral meaning of his lessons. I would like to explore this dimension of his classes more closely. My students and I read Morgan’s (1997) article in my methods classes. Usually, a fair number of the students find it rather shocking, and they protest. They argue that Morgan is wrong to “mess with other people’s cultures.” From my point of view, however, the matter is much more complex. To begin with, as I suggested in chapter 1, it seems obvious to me that all ELT is “messing with other people’s cultures,” whether we like it or not. Especially in the case of ESL for immigrant and refugee students, a large part of what we do involves explaining, justifying, and engaging with the cultural practices of the students’ new homeland. Given this inevitability, the teacher always takes some kind of action, regardless of whether it is conscious or intentional. Furthermore, the action is usually based, consciously or otherwise, on values held by the teacher. A teacher who chooses not to raise matters of sociopolitical standing and power relations in the family is not being apolitical but is merely placing the value of noninterference above other values (Benesch, 1993). The interesting thing about Morgan’s (1997) work is that he makes this choice very explicit. His decision to raise these issues, and to do so in such detail, is a moral choice: He believes that it is the right thing for him as a teacher to do in this particular situation. Yet, like any choice, Morgan’s (1997) decision has complex and contradictory moral outcomes that he can only partly know. What will be the consequences of his decision for the women (and the men) in his class? To what extent can the teacher be held responsible for these consequences? Morgan has chosen to act on the world in a way that he believes to be right, yet his actions may—indeed, almost certainly will—have consequences both good and bad that he was utterly unable to anticipate. Furthermore, Morgan’s (1997) claim that he is not telling his students how to conduct their family lives is somewhat disingenuous, in two respects. First, Morgan does in fact make his own views rather clear. For example, when the male student mentioned earlier claims that women have “more power,” Morgan states that he attempted “to draw out opinions and experiences that would challenge his assumption and help indicate the constraints—the absence of power—that compel some women to stay in low-paying jobs” (pp. 441–442). Thus, like Jackie in chapter 2, Morgan made his own views known Values and the Politics of English Language Teaching 52 without having to explicitly state them, and he did so in the belief that it was the right and good thing to do. Second, while it is true that Morgan (1997) did not tell his students how to interact with their spouses, the very fact of bringing this matter up in class is a cultural act in itself. By doing so, he was supporting an open discussion of things that otherwise might remain unsaid; and such forms of discussion themselves constitute a value. It is important, on the other hand, to dispel two notions. First, the idea of the teacher influencing these—or any—students is a gross oversimplification. Especially when teaching adults, although on the one hand all that we do constitutes action on the world, students are agents in their own right and are not mechanistically manipulated by the teacher. Second, it is of limited use here to appeal to “Chinese cultural norms.” Such norms, as Morgan (1997) showed in the case of Yuen-Li, are in many cases contested sites for those subject to them. Far from being inexorable forces, these norms can be resisted in various ways. This is all the more true in ESL contexts, where, quite independent of teachers and education programs, the entire host culture represents a massive sustained challenge to many of the values brought in by immigrants. This, in turn, brings us back to one of the fundamental conflicts of values underlying ESL teaching (Edge, 1996a). On the one hand, like Morgan, we teachers of ESL and EFL profess a respect for alternative cultural values and undertake not to impose our own values on others. On the other hand, also like Morgan, we hold certain of our own cultural values so dear that we want them to guide our work: For example, Morgan (1997) believes in the value of dialogue and that he has a duty to teach his students how to “say dangerous things” and to prepare them linguistically to protect their own interests in their new country. Such linguistic behavior most certainly contravenes values of the other culture, as Morgan’s own work and my analysis clearly indicate. Thus Morgan—like every other ESL teacher—has to make complex decisions that require irreconcilable conflicts of values to be somehow overcome. Ultimately, decisions are always made; sometimes they are overtly and consciously based in values, as in the case of Morgan’s work, but they always have moral meaning, and they always involve moral dilemmas.

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An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy is an approach to teaching that not only acknowledges the political dimension of education but places that dimension center stage in calling for a politically committed pedagogy. Critical pedagogists believe in “the centrality of politics and power in our understanding of how schools work” (McLaren, 1989, p. 159). Pennycook (1994) summed up critical pedagogy as “education grounded in a desire for social change” (p. 297). Critical pedagogy calls for the “empowerment” of learners. This is achieved through a variety of means. One is a commitment to student voice. Another is an ongoing process of helping learners to understand that the “knowledge” they are taught in school is not necessarily objective and neutral but “interested” and socially constructed, and to support students in becoming producers, not merely consumers, of knowledge. Another means is the use of class activities that encourage the process of “conscientization” (Freire, 1972, p. 15), that is, making students aware both of the political dimension of their situation and of their capacity for acting on that situation politically and working toward a vision of a better world. It is thus a pedagogy not merely of discussing the political but of taking action. Furthermore, as is implicit in this brief description, it is a pedagogy that calls on teachers to be open about their political views and engaged in political activity. Once again, we need to remember that political activity means not working for a political party but rather becoming aware of the ways power operates in the world and taking action to redress inequities. Critical pedagogy has its roots in the teachings of Paulo Freire (1972), who used this approach to teach literacy to Brazilian peasants and simultaneously to lead those peasants to reflect on their situation of op-pression and subsequently to work to improve it. Freire’s ideas were embraced in Western K–12 teaching by Henry Giroux (1988), Peter McLaren (1989), Ira Shor (1996), and many others. Over the last 10 or 15 years, they have become part of the discourse of ELT: Pennycook (1994, 2001) and others have developed theoretical arguments, while teachers and teacher educators such as Auerbach (1993), Morgan (1998), Benesch (1993), and Crookes and Lehner (1998) have attempted to flesh out the theory and develop appropriate classroom practices. Thus far critical pedagogy has been most widely practiced in North American adult ESL classrooms; however, there have been repeated calls for critical practices in EFL contexts and elsewhere (e.g., Pennycook, 1994, pp. 295–327). To conclude this very brief overview, I wish to point out that critical pedagogy is of interest to me for two reasons. First, as already mentioned, it is the only approach in ELT that has made any sustained attempt to address the undeniable political significance of the field. Second, whatever else one might say about it, it is an approach that is profoundly and overtly anchored in values. I argue that the underlying implication, or perhaps assumption of the theoretical literature is that teachers should be led to embrace critical pedagogy because of their own values, that is, for moral reasons. I am struck by the fact that both Paulo Freire and Nel Noddings, two otherwise very different thinkers, assign 49 Values in English Language Teaching central importance to dialogue—that is, the moral relation between teacher and student—in educational relations (Freire, 1972; Noddings, 1984). Also, of the nine principal features of critical pedagogy that Pennycook (1994) cited from Giroux (1991), the second is that Ethics needs to be understood as central to education, suggesting that the issues we face as teachers and students are not just questions of knowledge and truth but also of good and bad, of the need to struggle against inequality and injustice. (Pennycook, 1994, p. 298) As I explain later, I believe there is what might be termed logical slippage in this argument. I do not practice critical pedagogy myself, but I have a high regard for this approach, and in the following discussion I attempt to examine some of the moral dynamics underlying the practice and theory of critical pedagogy.

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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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ELT and Politics

How, then, is ELT political, exactly? There are many ways in which teaching can be thought of as political in nature. In this section I briefly outline five clearly political aspects of ELT: the part played by language education in the processes of colonization and decolonization, the effect of the spread of English on indigenous languages, the political dimension of teaching immigrant and refugee learners in ESL contexts, the dominance of English in the media and in computer-based technologies, and the role of English in globalization. The spread of English has been intimately associated with the processes of colonization and decolonization and the vast machineries of economic, political, and cultural hegemony that have attended it. Phillipson (1992) and Penny cook (1994) both have offered detailed accounts of the ways in which the teaching of English in African contexts and in southeast Asia, respectively, were a vital part of the mechanism of colonialism. Other writers have explored similar relations in various colonial and postcolonial contexts. Furthermore, English has also been a constant feature in the subsequent processes of decolonization in countries from South Africa (Eastman, 1990) to Sri Lanka (Canagarajah, 1993): The English-speaking powers that be have been anxious to maintain the ascendancy of the English language as colonial paternalism is replaced by more subtly hegemonic relations. Thus, while present-day teachers are not living in the “bad old days” of untrammeled colonialism, it is still very much the case that the teaching of English is one important mechanism whereby the old subservient relations are de facto maintained and perpetuated. The predatory action of English is nowhere more evident than in the effect of the spread of English on indigenous languages. As a direct result of the imposition of English, literally dozens of languages are dying in the United States alone as I write this paragraph. The shift from the hard power of boarding schools and banned languages to the soft power of neglect and what Michael Krauss called the “cultural nerve gas” (1992, p. 8) of television and other media has done little to halt, let alone reverse, this process. The figures are appalling: Krauss estimated that in the next 200 years up to 90% of the world’s languages could be irretrievably lost (see also Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). From everything I have personally seen and read, I cannot regard this estimate as an exaggeration. Although at an intellectual level the loss of whole languages and cultures is a terrible thing, from a moral perspective one of the most appalling aspects of this situation is the devastating effect of the process of language shift on actual individuals and their familial and social relations. Another domain in which politics blatantly enters the language classroom is that of teaching English to adult and child immigrants in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. Here there is little danger that the Values and the Politics of English Language Teaching 44 Spanish or Vietnamese or Polish languages will disappear wholesale. Yet, as with the case of indigenous languages, a moral standpoint reminds us that it is actual people who matter, not languages as abstract things; and individual people suffer greatly at the jerking shift from their first language to English, the language of the new country (Igoa, 1995). When children are educated exclusively in their second language or in a bilingual system of the subtractive or replacement kind in which the first language is gradually faded out, they literally lose contact with older generations of their family and community. The parents and grandparents, on the other hand, also find themselves not merely culturally but also linguistically at odds with their children. The rapidly growing importance of computer-based technologies, and especially of the Internet and the World Wide Web, has constituted another area in which the spread of English has considerable political significance. An inordinate percentage of websites and electronic communications are in English. There are people, of course, who argue that the Web represents a democratization of communication and that it is capable of actually reversing the spread of English (Wallraff, 2000). This may be a theoretical possibility, but the present reality is that the Web is contributing to the same forces of social, economic, and cultural inequality as those of colonialism and postcolonialism mentioned earlier. The very use of, and access to, computers serves to separate rich and poor ever more; those who have access to them are in the vast majority of cases speakers of English or another dominant world language (Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Arabic). These processes affect ELT in several ways, at least two of which are worth mentioning here: the increasingly widespread use of computers for tests such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the consuming obsession many teachers, teacher trainers, and materials writers have developed with using computers to teach English. The use of English on the Internet is one example of a much broader process that is usually referred to as globalization (Giddens, 2000; Mittelman, 2000); this process is also profoundly political in nature, and ELT is also profoundly implicated in it (Phillipson, 1992; Spring, 1998). This is true if only because globalization is forever being appealed to as a motivation for learners in EFL contexts to learn English. At the same time, for good or for bad, globalization is possibly the most significant political force of the present age. Within all of this, the business of ELT goes on in increasingly globalized ways. First, there is more physical mobility: More and more native speakers are traveling to teach abroad, while increasing numbers of non-native speaker teachers are able both to travel to Eng-lish-speaking countries and to get training there. Second, there is what might be called economic mobility: With the gradual erasure of national boundaries in economic terms, a process aggressively supported by the financial powers that be (e.g., GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades), Western companies are increasingly able to exploit foreign markets (the reverse, of course, much less frequently being the case); this allows American and British textbook companies to market their wares much more extensively and intensively than ever before, in a rapidly growing number of countries (witness, for example, the invasion of former Eastern bloc countries by companies such as Longman, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, or Heinemann in the years immediately following 1989). Third, there is virtual mobility: the increasing ease of communication by various hi-tech means. The overall result of this is that computer users have to use English to access and connect with the rest of the 45 Values in English Language Teaching world (often meaning the United States), while television viewers in pretty much any country in the world can watch CNN and MTV in English (whereas in the United States, with a few regionalized exceptions, it is, virtually, impossible to watch television in other languages). In all these areas, then, English, the spread of English, and the teaching of English can be seen to have profound political significance. In each case I have either hinted at, or indicated outright, some of the moral underpinnings of this political significance. In the rest of this section I suggest the complexity and depth of the politics of language teaching by exploring one of the areas in detail I look at two stories regarding the teaching of indigenous languages: one experience of my own and another recounted to me by a former student.

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Values and the Politics of English Language Teaching

HOW ELT IS POLITICAL
Unearthing the Politics of ELT

There are several reasons why the political nature of language teaching went largely unnoticed for so long. First, classrooms do not look at first glance like “political” places. It seems that what is going on in them is simply the learning of another language, a process that at worst is neutral and at best positively benign, bringing all kinds of new benefits to the learners. Furthermore, most teachers do not think of themselves as political creatures, and many do not believe that classrooms are places where their own political views should be aired. Indeed, many teachers will go out of their way to avoid “sensitive” topics, that is, topics which could lead to serious disagreements among members of the class. This set of topics includes many that are thought of as “political,” for example, women’s rights, abortion, and capital punishment. Teachers’ own instinctual avoidance of difficult subjects such as these has been supported by trends in communicative language teaching. The vast majority of activities and materials prepared for the communicative classroom are restricted to personal topics such as family, hobbies, and work, or to rather trivial matters. This restriction, in turn, is driven not merely by discomfort but also, as pointed out in chapter 2, by the underlying belief that language teaching is a purely psycholinguistic process and that so long as “communication” is occurring and language is being spoken and heard, it does not really matter what that communication is about (so long as a variety of grammatical structures, lexis, and pragmatic functions are being used). It is also reinforced by the reluctance of publishers of ELT textbooks and course books to include any materials that might be deemed offensive by certain populations of learners. A final reason why teaching was long seen as apolitical is that the people who benefited most from the political role of language teaching were not those directly involved in it. While teachers, administrators, teacher trainers, and researchers may make a living from language teaching, most of them are not wealthy. On the other hand, individuals whose interests are served by particular practices in language education—politicians, businesspeople, and religious leaders—do not take part in the day-to-day work of teaching languages. Part of the invisibility of the politics of language teaching arises from an overly narrow understanding of the term political. For most people, this term applies only to the making of laws by national and local officials, the election of those officials, the credos and actions of political parties, relations among national governments, and so on. Yet in fact the term political has a much broader field of reference. It refers to anything that has to do with power and the control of resources of every conceivable kind. In this understanding, a great many things about language teaching are political. In fact, there is an interesting parallel with morality: Just as in chapter 1 I discussed the distinction between the teaching of morality and the morality of teaching, so here we can think in terms of the teaching of politics versus the politics of teaching. 43 Values in English Language Teaching Yet another problem is the fact that teachers are rarely encouraged to reflect on the broader sociopolitical context in which they work. As we see in a moment, an important aspect of the political nature of ELT inheres in its role in large-scale societal processes, such as colonization and globalization, yet teachers are not often urged to conceptualize their work at the level of its relation to national political, economic, and cultural processes.

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Possibly the most significant development in the field of English language teaching (ELT) in the 1990s was the acceptance of the idea that ELT is and always has been a profoundly and unavoidably political undertaking. Since the beginnings of empirical research and theory building in second language learning and teaching in the 1940s and 1950s, there had been an emphasis on language learning as an individual psychological phenomenon. Though proponents of communicative language teaching, the dominant force from the 1970s, acknowledged the importance of communication in the classroom, they still viewed that classroom as an isolated group of individuals whose broader social and political context was irrelevant to the processes of language learning. It was not until the 1980s that researchers, beginning to feel frustrated with the limited understandings of language learning that experimental approaches were yielding, began to turn to ethnographic and other qualitative research methods in an attempt to grasp the fuller realities of language classrooms. The ethnographic approach, in turn, opened our eyes to the myriad ways in which social and political context crucially influences what goes on in classrooms. At the same time, developments in other disciplines were also leading researchers in language teaching and learning to the “discovery” of the political dimension of language teaching. In philosophy, Michel Foucault’s exposes of the socially situated nature of knowledge and of the ways in which knowledge is bound up with the play of power in societal settings, summed up in his concept of “power/knowledge” (Foucault, 1972, 1979, 1980), became a major influence on many social scientific disciplines, including education (e.g., S.J.Ball, 1990; Middleton, 1998; Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998). Elsewhere in education, the work of Paulo Freire (1972) led to the development of critical pedagogy (Giroux, 1988; McLaren, 1989), an approach which I will deal with at greater length later in this chapter. Scholars in the fields of anthropology and sociology
began to re-evaluate the apolitical nature of their respective traditions. In linguistics, meanwhile—another doggedly apolitical domain—there was a growing realization of the need for linguists to engage politically, if only to save the object of their inquiries: indigenous and other minority languages, which were disappearing at an alarming rate (Fishman, 1991; Krauss, 1992; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). Although in the 1980s a few individuals did work in critical pedagogy and the politics of language teaching (e.g., Auerbach & Wallerstein, 1987), a much wider awareness of the politics of the field of ELT began with Alastair Pennycook’s (1989) article in TESOL Quarterly in which he wrote of the “interested”—that is, politically engaged—nature of knowledge and critiqued the distribution of power in the field. This article was ahead of its time; it was not until a few years later that writings on the politics of ELT established themselves as a significant presence in the field. These included Auerbach’s (1993) persuasive argument against an English-only policy in the classroom, Benesch’s (1993) critique of the “politics of pragmatism” in English as a Second Language (ESL), Canagarajah’s (1994) “critical ethnography” of resistance to English in a Sri Lankan classroom, and Willett and Jeannot’s (1993) description and analysis of resistance to a critical approach in a teacher education course. Work such as that of Auerbach and Canagarajah also pointed up the links between broader sociopolitical forces and what happens inside the classroom, a theme that has subsequently been taken up more extensively by Coleman (1996), Hall and Eggington (2000), Morgan (1998), Wink (2000), and others. Of central importance in this line of work are books by Penny cook (1994) and Phillipson (1992) that explored in great detail the ways in which English teaching worldwide is saturated with political meaning. More recently, a special issue of TESOL Quarterly in the fall of 1999 devoted to “critical approaches to TESOL” placed the politics of ELT center stage in the professional dialogue of the field. The introduction of the political dimension into our discussions about language teaching has also meant the introduction of a language of values to the field: Where before there was only really the question of what, psycholinguistically speaking, was the most efficient way of acquiring a language, now there are matters of ideology, that is, beliefs about values and about what is good and bad, right and wrong, in relation to politics and power relations. At the same time, the values involved, the relations among them, and especially the attitudes toward them of the individuals writing, are rarely made explicit (though see Edge’s, 1996a, Paradox 2, referred to in chap. 1). The purpose of this chapter, then, is to uncover and explore the moral issues that are raised by the realization that language teaching is a political business and by our attempts to address this realization in our work as teachers. First, I outline the specific ways in which teaching is inherently political and examine some of the values at play in this reading of the field. Next, I look in detail at what is probably the single most influential and important response to this reading: critical pedagogy, particularly in its incarnation in ELT. My examination begins with an analysis of the moral issues raised by a particularly interesting case study of critical pedagogy in action: that of Brian Morgan’s (1997) article on the politics of pronunciation teaching in an ESL context. After considering the ESL context, I look at the moral questions brought up by the introduction of critical pedagogy in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings—in other words, in countries where English is not a first language. I then offer a critique of critical pedagogy from the perspective of values. Finally, I attempt to sum up the discussion in this chapter by isolating the central moral issue that has been raised and by considering what can be said about the responses of individual teachers to this central dilemma.

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My aim in this chapter has been to give some indication of the myriad complex ways in which our actions and decisions in the classroom carry moral meaning. The moral significance of classroom interaction cannot be avoided; it is a foundational part of what we do as teachers. Furthermore, we are not the only moral agents in the classroom: Our students also act in morally meaningful ways, and it is in the interplay between our agency and theirs that the moral essence of the teacher-student relation lies. I wish to end this section by saying two things. First of all, I believe that reflection on the moral dimensions of classroom interaction offers a vital source of professional growth and understanding for teachers. What emerges for me from this chapter is that the interplay of values in the classroom is always more complex than I might at first imagine; it is crucial to gain some conscious awareness and understanding of the ways in which values and moral judgments are subtly encoded in what is said and done in class. Second, though I have throughout been emphasizing the complex, ambiguous, and contradictory nature of moral decision making, I do believe firmly that there are better and worse decisions to be made; in other words, that what teachers do and say matters deeply. I have been in too many good and bad classrooms—as a student, as a teacher, or as an observer—to think that all of this uncertainty renders our work meaningless. The problem is not whether our work makes a difference—it does—but that it is never possible to apply blanket rules to situations to determine simplistically what our course of action should be. In every case, we have to re-examine our values and how they play out in the given circumstances; the morality of our decision making lies in the encounter between our own values and the complex details of particular contexts and cases. It is this that makes our work so difficult; yet it is also this that makes it profoundly human and profoundly meaningful.


QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. What rules for attendance and participation do you have in your classroom? What values underlie these rules? What moral messages might be sent by them? How else might the rules be set up?

2. In discussing the extract from Damon’s class, I argued that there is a tension of values between the desire to listen to what students actually have to say and the need for them to “say anything”—to simply keep talking to practice their fluency. What is your perspective on this tension? In your own classes, how do you balance the need to encourage fluency with the need to listen to your learners as people?

3. Have you experienced a situation like the one from Jackie’s class, in which a student voices an opinion that is profoundly different from your own values? How did you handle it? What would you have done in Jackie’s position? What other ways did she have of responding to the student in question?

4. The following “letter” and “reply,” both in fact written by an ESL teacher in the IEP of a midwestern university, appeared in the IEP newsletter aimed at students: Dear Ms. Manners: I am often homesick and my mother tongue makes me feel warm inside. I love to talk with people who speak my language during the classroom breaks. Sometimes the teacher is still in the room and he tells me to talk in English. The other students seem to agree with him. Nobody seems to understand how hard it is for me here. My teacher made me really angry once by asking me to speak in English at the coffee hour. He does not understand the purpose of the coffee hour. Sincerely, Stranger in a Strange Land. Dear Stranger, Although Ms. Manners hates to be disagreeable, she must disagree with your criticism of your teacher. Is it possible that you do not understand the purpose of the coffee hour? In the IEP, the coffee hour provides an opportunity for students to practice English in a comfortable atmosphere. That’s why the coffee hour is held during class time, If you do not want to speak English, you might try visiting a country where nobody speaks English. Now, about your homesickness… Ms. Manners would like you to remember that most everyone is homesick at some time or another. Ms. Manners misses her mother terribly! Your fellow IEP students are as homesick as you are, and they can help you adjust to life here in B. Try talking about your friends and family at home with your new friends here. You will find that everyone shares a similar problem, and that talking about it in a common language, like English for example, is a great way to feel better. Save your mother tongue for when you call…well, your mother. What is your view on what the writer says? How can this advice be reconciled with what was said earlier about voice in the classroom? How might you have responded to a student who raised the question expressed in the letter?

5 Take a look at the coursebook you are currently using. How does it position the learners: To what extent does it encourage their active participation, and to what extent does it treat them merely as passive receivers of information? What moral messages are encoded in the way the units or chapters of the book are presented?

6. Think about the rules and regulations in force in your classroom that come from your department, school or institution, school district, state, and so on. Do you ever go against these rules? In what circumstances? Do you ever find your own values at odds with the values implicit in the rules you are obliged to follow? What happens in such situations?

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