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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