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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