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.

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The final area of conflicting moral values in classroom pedagogy that I look at here is what is sometimes referred to as the process-product debate in writing instruction for college-level students. Some years ago, there was an exchange of views on the obligations of second-language writing teachers, in which two principal opposing positions were put forward. One side, which took its cue from research and theory in first-language writing (Elbow, 1973; Emig, 1971; Murray, 1982), argued that writing only had any meaning as expression, and that writing instructors should focus on encouraging writers to express their own views and ideas (Zamel, 1982, 1983). In essence, this movement aimed to give the students voice through writing. This approach is known as the process approach because among other things, it pays great attention to the writing process itself: the emergence over time of the writer’s ideas, using successive drafts, and seeing the expression of meaning as an emergent product of writing. The other camp argued that it is the primary duty of the college writing instructor to enable students to succeed in their chosen field by mastering its dominant discourses: that undergraduates in history, for example, need to learn to write like historians (Horowitz, 1986; Swales, 1987). This camp posited that the expectations of professors in the various disciplines are rather rigid, and that it is the job of writing instructors to train students in knowing these expectations and being able to meet them. There is relatively little room for personal freedom of expression, at least as far as form is concerned. Furthermore, in ELT such an approach is particularly needed, because students (e.g., ESL students in British or American universities) will have little prior exposure to the models their teachers expect and are in particular danger of getting it wrong and thus of suffering significant negative consequences. This approach is known as the product approach, since it focuses primarily on the formal qualities of the finished piece of writing. The process-product debate was first discussed some years ago in the ELT literature (Raimes, 1991). Yet the debate itself was never resolved, and it is still very much a central dynamic in the teaching of writing. I argue here that it is a moral dynamic, because the underlying opposition it represents is not merely a question of competing classroom methodologies but of values: of what is the good and right thing to do with and for one’s students. The process approach posits the value of voice, or of individual expression, as the most important thing (Taylor, 1992). Of course, teachers who adopt a process approach often emphasize the importance of considering one’s audience as one develops a piece of writing and of producing a formally acceptable piece of work at the end of the process. Nevertheless, the goal of the writing process is primarily to lead the writer to express her own ideas, tell her own stories, and give her own views. This approach values the voice of the student as a person and member of the community of the classroom and beyond who has interesting and valuable things to say. The product approach, however, also has the best interests of the students at heart. Individuals who favor this approach suggest that process teaching is overly idealistic and point out that in the real world, subject-matter teachers are less likely to be interested in the student’s voice and more interested in whether she can write in the ways expected in her discipline. This approach can also be said to be grounded in community—the discourse community of the discipline—and in a desire for the student to be able to participate in that community. Advocates of the product approach believe that the interests of the student are best served by enabling her to acquire the language of the academy in general and of particular domains in particular. Consider an interesting example that shows how one teacher resolved this tension. Xiao-ming Li (1999), a second-language writer of English, told the story of a piece of writing that she produced for a class with Don Murray, a legendary writing instructor at the University of New Hampshire, and then, at Murray’s prompting, successfully submitted to The Boston Globe newspaper. Li told of when she first gave her work to Professor Murray: As I handed in the paper at the end of the class, I was hoping that Murray would correct my writing, but he did nothing. The paper came back bare of any teacherly remarks, only his suggestion that I send it to The Boston Globe. That was not what I expected. I expected him to splash the paper with red ink, removing all signs of my foreign accent. I went to Murray’s office and insisted on him doing that, even insinuating that he would be seen as a delinquent professor if he did not correct my errors, which I knew were plentiful But Murray was equally adamant that he should not. What makes the piece interesting, he insisted, is your unique accent, a different perspective, and a different style and voice. And he asked why I should want to sound like a U.S. writer. He pointed out the best writers do not sound like others…. Unconvinced, I continued to pester Murray to go over my paper again and correct the errors. Finally, he changed a few articles and punctuation marks, but would do no more. In this example, the teacher takes an extreme position in terms of the dynamic mentioned earlier. What he is saying essentially is that Xiao-ming does not have to fit into existing conventions for writing; rather, the reverse is the case: The English language and its literature are enriched and expanded by her contribution. In essence, it is the same argument by which we would say that a writer writing in a dialect or regional variation of English is not writing “incorrect English” but rather is enriching the linguistic and literary culture of English. For myself, the more I think about this ar-gument the more I am convinced that Murray is right. Yet the argument is not always made in ELT and, even setting aside the matter of specific discourse conventions of disciplines, many teachers remain convinced that non-native speakers are unlikely either to make such a contribution or to be accepted in the way Murray accepted Xiao-ming Li as a writer. Thus, the two approaches outlined here are not merely competing sets of instructional practices; they represent opposing views of what is good and right for the student. The value of voice on the one side is balanced by the value of belonging on the other. My guess is that each individual teacher of writing will constantly weigh these values against each other in every different class. Certainly this is an opposition of which I am very conscious in my own teaching. At times, with particular students it seems to me that I focus on the expressive functions of writing; at others—for example, with the case of Hae-young, described in chapter 1—I decided that the student’s ability to understand and use the discourse conventions of the field is more important. In any event, as with the other moral dynamics I have examined in this book, the matter can never be simply resolved once and for all but must be recalculated at each step, with each new learner and each different emerging situation.

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Morality in Phonology

Some years ago, I knew a teacher of English in France named Hannah. Hannah was Scottish, and she spoke English with a marked Edinburgh accent; in conversation with me and with other teachers she vigorously defended the value of her variety of English against what today I would label the hegemony of RP or Received Pronunciation, the accent of the upper and upper middle classes of southeastern England which has long been considered the standard pronunciation of British English. Yet Hannah confessed to me at one point that when she taught her French students the pronunciation of English, she changed her accent and taught them RP. It seems to me that Hannah’s decision to teach RP, despite her own beliefs about the equal importance and validity of her own regional form of English, was a moral decision. Furthermore, I mention it here because it highlights a constant issue in our profession: the decision about which form of English we should teach. Although this dilemma extends to all areas of the language—including syntax, lexis, discourse, and pragmatic conventions—I confine my remarks to the area of phonology as being particularly salient and representative. It is commonly known in our field that the English language includes a bewildering diversity of varieties, especially accents. I was brought up in Lancashire in northwest England. When I was perhaps 8 or 9, during a visit to my grandparents on Tyneside in the northeast, only 100 miles from my own home (Britain is a very small island), I went to play soccer with some of the neighborhood boys. At one point one of them, a little younger than the rest of us, leaned toward his older brother, pointed at me and whispered: “Is he English?” Since those days, through travel and especially the media, speakers of English all over he world have become somewhat more familiar with different accents and dialects of their own language. Yet this familiarity has done little to change the accents themselves, or attitudes toward them. The problem in the field of ELT is to know which of these varieties to teach. My contention that this decision is moral in nature—that is, that it is grounded in values—stems from the fact that, as seen from Hannah’s own defense of her Scottish accent, language varieties themselves are not value neutral. Quite the opposite, in fact is true: The different varieties of English are highly value laden. Accents are closely linked to the identities of individuals and groups of people; to value one accent over another is, rather directly, to value one group of people over another. The fact that the English of the upper and middle classes of southeast England (the area around London) is seen as the British standard, while that of the working class in the north (where I come from), or of Ireland, or Scotland, or Wales, is not, reflects a broader social notion that the middleclass south is in other ways also the norm or the dominant social group. In other words, this choice of “standard” accent both reflects and reinforces a sociocultural and political hegemony. The same can be said, of course, about regional accents in the United States and other countries, and more broadly about the relationship between British English (or American English) and other varieties of English around the world that have not been accorded the same status—the English of Nigeria, India, or Jamaica, for example. At the same time, in the teaching and learning of English there are good moral reasons for selecting such a variety and sticking with it. It is probably objectively true that, because of the widespread adoption of RP as a standard (at least in areas where British English is preferred to U.S. English), a student who is taught RP will have fewer problems communicating than one who has been taught to speak with a Scottish accent. It is also probably objectively true that in many educational contexts teachers could get into trouble for teaching what departmental authorities would, rightly or wrongly, see as a marked form of English. Last, while at one level we may rightly wish to make our students aware of the great range of English accents across the world, for pedagogical reasons I would argue rather strongly that it is too much to expect all but the most advanced students to have more than a vague notion of different language varieties, and that for their own good they need to be taught a straightforward and consistent way of pronouncing the language they are learning, with the minimum possible number of variations. In light of this pedagogical fiat, though, we really do have to choose which variety will serve as the standard to be taught. And here we are faced with a serious moral dilemma. Which form of English are we going to value by making it the standard? How can we determine which variety it will be in the best interests of our students to know and use? This is what I call the morality of phonology. There is no easy solution; the matter needs to be given some serious, conscious thought. In many programs and contexts there are certain unspoken assumptions: for example, about the relative “superiority” of American or British English, of American or British “standard” forms over regional accents, or of “center” varieties over “periphery” varieties (Phillipson, 1992). I suggest that in considering the moral meanings underlying pronunciation teaching and the moral messages we send in our teaching it is important to bring these assumptions to light and question them rather than letting the matter be determined by instinctual, unspoken preferences that often arise under particular sociopolitical conditions. Yet at the same time we must acknowledge that by teaching one set of forms over another we may also be reinforcing existing hegemonic relations.

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