RACHEL GRANT. The Pennsyvania State Universityâ. Harrisburg. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States. RYUKO KUBOTA. The University of North Carolina.
THE FORUM TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL profession. It also welcomes responses or rebuttals to any articles or remarks published here in The Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.
Women Faculty of Color in TESOL: Theorizing Our Lived Experiences ANGEL LIN City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong SAR, China
GERTRUDE TINKER SACHS Georgia State University Atlanta, Georgia, United States
RACHEL GRANT The Pennsyvania State University— Harrisburg Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States
STEPHANIE VANDRICK University of San Francisco San Francisco, California, United States
RYUKO KUBOTA The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States
SHELLEY WONG George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia, United States
SUHANTHIE MOTHA University of Maryland, College Park College Park, Maryland, United States Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. (Lorde, 1984a, p. 112)
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This collective writing project originated from our participation (including African-American, Asian, and White scholars) in the gender in TESOL colloquium at the 37th Annual TESOL Convention and Exhibit in 2003. Although researchers have shown an increasing interest in analyzing how gender affects second and foreign language education
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(e.g., Pavlenko, Blackledge, & Teutsch-Dwyer, 2001; Sunderland, Cowley, Rahim, Leontzakou, & Shattuck, 2002) and how colleges and universities have marginalized women (e.g., Bagilhole, 2002; Halvorsen, 2002; Hornig, 2003; Jackson, 2002; Luke, 2001; Morley & Walsh, 1995, 1996; Walsh, 2002), they have shown little interest in analyzing how institutions have marginalized women faculty of color working in TESOL and related literacy education fields. The dearth of published research on women faculty of color suggests that the field has largely ignored us. However, our sharing of experiences reveals consistent hierarchical patterns across different institutional contexts that require feminist theorizing to attend to issues not only of gender but also of race and social class. Additionally, in the fields of TESOL and literacy education, issues of nonnativeEnglish-speaking professionals, speakers of World Englishes, AfricanAmerican English and various pidgin and creole speakers must be addressed. Discursive practices of gender, class, and race must be connected to histories of conquest, slavery, and colonialism.
THEORIZING AS DIALOGIC, POLITICAL PRACTICE We feel a strong need to make deeper sense of our lived experiences by understanding and theorizing about the special ideological and institutional conditions underlying our lived experiences of marginalization and discrimination. This theorizing is, however, not meant to be merely private academic work but a dialogic, public, political practice. Although it starts as a textual practice (i.e., in the act of producing a textual product—an article), it is not meant to end there. As Hall puts it: I come back to the critical distinction between intellectual work and academic work: they overlap . . . but they are not the same thing. . . . I come back to theory and politics, the politics of theory. Not theory as the will to truth, but theory as a set of contested, localized, conjunctual knowledges, which have to be debated in a dialogical way. But also as a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect. (Hall, 1992, p. 286)
By engaging in this collective, dialogic writing project, we hope to draw attention to the situation of women faculty of color in TESOL and literacy education and to help build a wider community of TESOL and literacy education scholars and researchers (women and men, and both women of color and White women) that will continuously engage issues of marginalization, discrimination, social justice, and togetherness-indifference (Ang, 2001) as part of our dialogic, critical practice and political intervention. As feminist standpoint theorist Hartsock wrote:
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Women’s lives, like men’s, are structured by social relations which manifest the experiences of the dominant gender and class. The ability to go beneath the surface of appearances to reveal the real but concealed social relations requires both theoretical and political activity. Feminist theorists must demand that feminist theorizing be grounded in women’s material activity and must as well be part of the political struggle necessary to develop areas of social life modeled on this activity. (Hartsock, 1983, p. 304)
Following Hartsock, we are going to ground our theorizing in our lived experiences. We wrote our narratives and circulated them via e-mail so that we could respond to the emerging themes in one another’s writings. Using excerpts from our narratives, we summarize some emerging patterns and issues and analyze their underlying ideological and institutional conditions. With this analysis of our lived experience in mind, we suggest how TESOL professionals need to re-vision and reshape TESOL as a discipline.
OUR LIVED EXPERIENCES IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS Because space is limited, we provide only key excerpts from our narratives. We hope to give readers a feel for how we experience the different institutional contexts where we work. We are from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds: African American, Bahamian of African descent, Chinese American, Chinese, Japanese, Sri Lankan Australian, and European American; pseudonyms are used.
Anne’s Story: The Paradox of (Hypo)Critical Pedagogy I am often positioned as an illegitimate faculty member in my department. In working with White women colleagues and administrators who project public images of being progressive, promoting ethics and social justice, endorsing critical pedagogies, and advocating for diversity, I have had the following disturbing experiences: being excluded from communication related to important decisions about the program that I work in, forced to do a large amount of work beyond my assigned duties, treated as if I were a teaching assistant by being deprived of decision-making power, blamed for students’ complaints about a program for which I am not primarily responsible, expected to do student-teacher supervision rather than teaching a graduate course, and given the lowest salary at my rank. Even worse, I was insulted by having my cultural and linguistic heritage devalued by a senior White female administrator: “I want you to do ESL [teacher education]; XXX [my native language] isn’t important” (even though I was originally hired to create a teacher education program for that language). The same
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woman criticized me as being “sulky” and flippantly advised me to say “Fuck you” [sic] to another White woman colleague who had mistreated me; she said this would improve the situation for me. The paradox of (hypo)critical pedagogy seems to lie in some White women colleagues’ struggle to maintain their status in the racial hierarchy of power while claiming their role as advocates for the colonized/ marginalized and promoting postmodern decentering of power as colonizers who refuse (Collins, 1998; Memmi, 1965). How can women faculty of color cope with this hypocrisy? How can they have a diplomatic relationship with professed progressive White women faculty who marginalize them?
Bertha’s Story: Exclusion of Women Faculty of Color From Tenure University X had been a segregated university until the 1960s. In the 1940s, Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court, applied to and was denied entrance to University X’s law school. In the entire history of my former department, only two African Americans and one Hispanic have been granted tenure. To this day, my former department has never granted tenure to an African-American woman. At the time I was denied tenure in my department, the last five men who had gone up for associate professor with tenure or full professor had all been promoted, and the last five women who had gone up for associate professor with tenure or full professor were all denied. I had the equivalent number of publications as a White male who had been promoted the year before. But although I had been supported by my department (19 for, 2 opposed) and the college (5 to 0), the university promotion and tenure committee voted 4 against, 1 for, with 2 abstentions. Though the committee deemed my teaching and service sufficient, they questioned the quality of my scholarship. The committee wanted to know why I had not published in linguistics journals and why they had never heard of the journals in which I had published. They considered my work to be “too applied.” In addition, they pointed out that letters from external reviewers came from institutions that were not among the top ten research institutions, although the reviewers are all prominent figures in applied linguistics and TESOL, and they did not understand why the letters came from different departments, such as English, linguistics, and education.
Catherine’s Story: The Great Divide in Asia I have spent more years of my professional life in Asia than in any other place. Although I received my professional credentials in North 490
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America, my only experience working in a university has been within the Asian context. As an assistant professor, I have developed preservice and in-service teachers in our bachelor of arts and postgraduate programs in TESOL. This work, for me, meant spending vast amounts of time in schools and working with teachers on a professional and personal basis. But working this way contravenes conventional university practice and standard assessment criteria, which require most professors to work in a laboratory or go into the field, collect and analyze quantifiable data, and then write a conventional report over a relatively short period of time. Academe still ascribes a very low status to the type of field-centered work that I do. I recall my profound happiness when a senior member of our faculty attended a conference session at which I, along with several teachers from my action research project, was presenting. The presentations by these busy teachers at an international conference validated my prolonged investment in supporting their professional development through action research. But at the end of the 90-minute session, the senior faculty member left without a question or an acknowledgment, and this faculty member has offered none since then. In a later meeting with TESOL colleagues and me, however, our senior faculty member, a linguist, mentioned “the trashy work we do in TESOL” when discussing our research publications and agenda.
Denise’s Story: A Local Classroom Person Since I was hired I have been constituted as a local classroom person and designated to do the labor-intensive work of supervising the students’ practicum and coordinating school placement. Although I have extensive training in research methodology, including qualitative, ethnographic methods and sophisticated statistics and measurement theories and techniques, my employer focused on me as a local classroom person, which has provided my superiors a rationale for assigning me to the labor-intensive, administrative-heavy workload that the senior White members avoid. They also rationalize my position by arguing that they need someone who speaks the local language (and preferably a woman— isn’t a woman traditionally most suitable for a PR job?) to solicit practicum positions from the schools for our students. Whenever I counterargued that the local school personnel did indeed speak English, my superiors would respond that it was better to have a local person who is “more familiar” with the local schooling system when liaising with school personnel. This argument assumes that first, senior faculty members from overseas do not need to learn at least some local language, and second, they do not need to become more acquainted with the local educational issues and schooling system. THE FORUM
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Ellen’s Story: Establish Yourself as a Scholar, Not a Minority Scholar The memberships I hold in two historically oppressed and disempowered groups, African American and female, has clearly been a critical factor in my emerging voice as a teacher educator. Race and gender have influenced my interest, my perspective, my experience, and my struggle. My experience as a literacy teacher educator has been that the silenced voice of Black females and other marginalized groups has been amplified. The policy has been, “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t deal with it.” I recall occasions early in my career when the well-meaning White females told me that I should “work to establish myself as a scholar, not a minority scholar.” For a time, I took this advice to heart, and I took great pains to mirror in my writing and teaching the objective (i.e., indifferent, disinterested, dispassionate, and value-neutral) stance (Ladner, 1987). For me, this approach meant that in the academy I was a singular, voiceless individual. It is within the context of a profession composed overwhelmingly of White, middle-class teachers and teacher educators that I have struggled against the value-neutral, color-blind, objective implementation of literacy used to prepare teachers and to teach children. The challenge for me has been to find opportunities to include my voice and the voices of marginalized groups by incorporating linguistic and cultural diversity into conceptions of literacy.
Frances’s Story: Silencing Discourses We need to problematize the discourses of risk, safety, and vulnerability that surround discussions about diversity. I hear constant reminders about the comfort levels and safety of students from dominant groups. I hear that talking about oppression means taking a risk and therefore making students feel vulnerable. These warnings privilege the interests of dominant groups over the project of social justice. I challenge this construction of unsafe. Classroom discussions about race do not make students from dominant groups unsafe. Do they increase the likelihood of their being sent to jail, put to death, denied employment or housing? These are the consequences for minority children when discrimination is not challenged. Using the language of safety and vulnerability in discussions of diversity, the same language that is used to challenge discrimination, minimizes the experience of discrimination—the experience of truly being unsafe—and redirects our focus from subjugated groups, who have historically been left out, back to dominant groups. I do not discount the importance of creating appropriate spaces where members of all groups, including dominant groups, can safely deconstruct 492
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their biases; I simply suggest that concerns for safety must not disrupt work against oppression. In one assignment for a diversity class, I tried to problematize the notion of privilege by asking students to read Peggy MacIntosh’s essay, “Unpacking the Knapsack of White Privilege,” and to then unpack their own invisible knapsacks containing any facet of their identities that they believed afforded them privilege. White, male, able-bodied, Christian, heterosexual Wayne turned in a paper about how he did not have privilege because he considered himself to be poor. He embraced meritocratic ideologies that coupled work ethic and race, and he implied that I had been hired on the basis of my skin color and regardless of my qualifications. I was terrified that if I showed anger or impatience, I would alienate him and lose any opportunity to be heard. Between conversations with Wayne, I sought the advice of the other faculty teaching the cohort (all White), who were caring and supportive. But I noticed that that the overwhelming focus was reaching Wayne: “If your intention is transformation, you shouldn’t let him turn you off because then he’ll never hear what you have to say.” I have become increasingly troubled by discourses that feed the fear of disturbing dominant groups and by practices that charge minority groups with responsibility for reaching and raising the consciousness of members of dominant groups.
Genevieve’s Story: Privileged Majority Member? Much of my published writing has been on issues of gender, race, social class, and sexual identity as they relate to ESL pedagogy. Through writing about these subjects, I am able to bring together my teaching, my scholarship, and my social and political beliefs. As a middle-class, heterosexual, White woman, however, I experience marginalization due to gender but not marginalization due to race, ethnicity, class, or sexual identity. For some others, such as women of color in TESOL, writing about these topics entails the possibility of negative consequences. For me, such writing is much less dangerous; in fact, to choose to write about such topics with little or no risk is a kind of luxury. If I have any personal knowledge of marginalization, it comes from being female. In addition, and closely related, however, it comes from being a member of a low-status discipline: ESL. Further, the marginalization of the discipline interacts with other forms of marginalization based on race, gender, class, and sexual identity, with a multiplying effect. So, given my protected position, is it my responsibility to speak out on racism, classism, and homophobia? Or is it presumptuous of me to do so? All I have to guide me is my belief that it cannot be wrong to speak out against prejudice and discrimination. But it is my responsibility to THE FORUM
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educate myself, to listen to people of various backgrounds, to be reflective, to work collaboratively when possible, and to accept constructive criticism. It is my responsibility to keep trying to understand how various forms of privilege and oppression intersect and interact and to support TESOL colleagues of all identities.
EMERGING PATTERNS OF SYSTEMATIC MARGINALIZATION It is important to note that gender and race are relational and not categorical, and that they do not invariably determine types of social experiences for persons to whom they apply; moreover, race and gender can sometimes be negotiated (Ng, 1995). Thus, we will refrain from essentializing our experiences. Nevertheless, although our narratives show a diverse range of experiences, some clear, common patterns of systematic marginalization and silencing emerge, indicating that these experiences are not isolated, random, individual happenings. As we analyze these structures, we will refer to some additional experiences that we have not yet mentioned.
Gendered and Racialized Task-Labor Segregation Almost all of our lived experiences point to a common pattern of gendered and racialized task and labor segregation; that is, women faculty of color are often assigned to labor-intensive administrative and teaching duties. For instance, Denise was consistently asked to do the heavy administrative work of liaising with schools for students’ teaching practicum. Bertha and Ellen were asked to do the paperwork and revise the syllabi for the accreditation review. Anne was consistently excluded from communication related to important program decisions and was assigned a large amount of work beyond the assigned responsibilities. Feminist standpoint theorists pointed out 2 decades ago that modern academia segregates labor based on gender. For instance, Smith (1974, 1987) argued that the notion of women’s work frees men from everyday, practical chores, enabling them to immerse themselves in abstract concepts and theories. Moreover, the more successfully women perform their work, the more invisible it becomes to men. Denise’s experience supports Smith’s point. Without Denise’s heavy administrative work to secure places for students’ practicum every year, her department’s TESOL program would not be viable. The male faculty enjoys the benefits of her labor: They can teach the privileged theoretical courses and write research papers or take up departmental leadership roles. Anne was likewise excluded and exploited by her senior colleagues, White female faculty. Similarly, until Ellen left the university without receiving tenure, she had been shouldering a labor-intensive reading clinic. 494
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Given the experiences of these women faculty of color, we want to extend the feminist standpoint theorists’ model to recognize that academia very often segregates labor based not only on gender but also on race. Task segregation in modern academia parallels the welldocumented racialized task and labor segregation in the United States during the nineteenth century (Liu, 2000). We argue that such an invisible internal colonial model also operates in today’s academia, especially in TESOL, which seems to have a pecking order of tasks. This task hierarchy and task segregation has epistemological and political consequences.
The Great Theory-Practice Divide As an applied discipline, TESOL has borrowed extensively from the theories and research methodologies of other pure disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, and Chomskyan linguistics. Although the discipline’s top journals have more recently become receptive to research done using postpositivist, sociocultural, or critical paradigms, mainstream TESOL theoretical and research canons still follow the parent disciplines, which were established in the tradition of Enlightenment rationality and philosophy. Modern disciplines born of the Enlightenment subscribe to specific sets of ontological and epistemological assumptions. Under Enlightenment assumptions, the ideal agent of knowledge, the ideal scientist, is a transhistorical, unitary, individual, and disembodied mind whose scientific endeavours are not shaped or constituted by their historical, social, cultural, and institutional contexts. Their discoveries, their theories and findings are likewise eligible to claim the status of transhistorical, universal truths. (For a summary of feminist standpoint critiques of Enlightenment epistemology, see Harding, 1996.) In practice, mainstream TESOL research largely follows the paradigm of positivism and physicalism. Researchers using this paradigm seek to operationalize and quantify (i.e., define and measure in numerals) human and social phenomena (e.g., language learning and teaching) in terms of variables and to verify hypotheses about the relationships (e.g., causal or correlational relationships) among different variables. (For a theoretical alternative to physicalism and positivism in understanding human actions, see Taylor, 1985.) It is not trivial to note that the Enlightenment philosophers were men who occupied privileged social and economic positions at a time when slaves and serfs attended to their everyday practical needs, thus freeing them to do their theoretical work. The shadows of this gendered and racialized division of labor appear in academic disciplines such as TESOL, a discipline that models itself on applied linguistics and second language acquisition. In TESOL, those who teach future ESOL professors THE FORUM
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and researchers are at the top, those who teach future ESOL teachers come next, and those who teach ESOL are at the bottom. Furthermore, ESOL teachers are disproportionately part-time, adjunct, or temporary, and females (and among whom many women of color) typically fill the bottom ranks. Feminist standpoint theorists have shown the unfortunate epistemological consequences of segregating labor based on gender. They hold that movements for social liberation advance the growth of knowledge: [Feminist standpoint theorists] explicitly call for women of color, workingclass women, and lesbians to be present among the women whose experiences generate inquiry. They all discuss the limitations of sciences emerging only from white, western, homophobic, academic feminism. (Harding, 1996, p. 311)
It is precisely this gendered and racialized theory-practice divide in our discipline that has generated inadequate theories of practical knowledge concerning the work of frontline TESOL practitioners. Frontline TESOL workers (typically female classroom teachers) do not have a chance to incorporate their experiences and activities into prestigious mainstream theories and research because they are rarely given the institutional resources and time to theorize, share, and publish their experiences in the discipline’s prestigious journals. And when frontline TESOL professionals do engage in research, mainstream researchers often criticize their research agendas and projects as soft ethnographic work that does not qualify as hard science. For instance, Catherine’s 2-year, labor-intensive, action-research project with frontline EFL teachers participating as the key researchers culminated in presenting their research findings during an academic conference session, but Catherine’s senior faculty member criticized and dismissed their research efforts as “trashy work.” The senior faculty member, a Chomskyan theoretical linguist, could not see the value of teachers’ action research nor the theoretical value of knowledge generated by that research. Apart from the silencing effect of this kind of derision and the negative epistemological consequences of devaluing teachers’ knowledge embedded in teachers’ practice, this gendered and racialized theory-practice divide has grave political consequences. Because the knowledge created from the experiences and practices of female researchers and teachers, women of color, and women from different social classes and sexualities is not allowed to contribute to the discipline’s knowledge base or its curricula, students from these excluded groups are consistently denied knowledge and theories that speak to and value their own lived experiences. For instance, Bertha and Ellen were both silenced when they carried out research on minority groups; Bertha’s superiors 496
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discounted her research on multiculturalism and minority issues as “repetitive” in her work appraisal, and Ellen’s superiors saw her research as “trivial” when it focused on issues pertaining to marginalized groups. As junior faculty, Ellen was in fact often pressured not to pursue those issues (“Establish yourself as a scholar, not a minority scholar”). This kind of systematic, institutional suppression of research and teaching on minority and diversity issues has dangerous implications not only for the education of minority students but also for the education of White students: The result will be students who are cultured to hate; yet who still think of themselves as very, very good people; who will be deeply offended, and personally hurt, if anyone tries to tell them otherwise. I think this sort of teaching, rampant throughout the education system, is why racism and sexism remain so routine, so habitually dismissed, as to be largely invisible. (Williams, 1991, p. 87)
Williams’s observation brings us to a recurrent theme in our experiences that requires analysis: We are often seen as angry women of color who make our White colleagues and students uncomfortable.
Relations With White Faculty and Students: Problematizing the Angry, Sulky Image of Women Faculty of Color In “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Lord writes: “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change” (Lorde, 1984b, p. 127). Frances’s being advised by her well-intentioned colleagues to avoid looking like an angry woman of color shows how difficult it is for a woman of color to protest her marginalization without being seen as incessantly narrating her suffering. Anne’s White female colleagues have called her “sulky.” When someone perceives that he or she has been treated unfairly, anger (or indignation) is an understandable response in many cultures. When women faculty of color express this feeling, it is often seen as evidence of their emotional instability, their lack of reason, or their inability to enjoy themselves or engage in fruitful argumentation. Invoking the unsmiling, angry woman of color stereotype is a discursive ploy that silences and subordinates these women’s voices. For instance, when Denise protested against unfair work arrangements to her Chinese male superior and gave a well-grounded reason—his act reinforced the dominant perception that native speakers are more capable than nonnative speakers—he accused her of starting a “nonfruitful argument” and implied that she was not willing to sacrifice for the good THE FORUM
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of the program. Women of color are frequently expected to sacrifice for the larger good, and when they protest against being treated unfairly, they are frequently accused of being unreasonable or emotional, and thus they are pushed to the margins and silenced. We are also painfully aware, however, that expressing anger can close down communication between people in very different social and political positions. Answering anger with anger only ensures that communication will breakdown. For instance, some colleagues have concluded that women faculty of color have unfairly taken jobs that should belong to them and that they are victims of universities’ unfair affirmative action policies. One of us saw this attitude played out after a conference presentation relating to race, when a White woman approached to express her anger that a woman of color had been given a faculty position for which she had applied. The White woman believed that the university had not considered her application seriously because she is White. How to respond to her anger raises the issue of how to communicate an ethic of togetherness-in-difference (Ang, 2001). Does a radical relativist version of postmodern discourse offer any common ethical grounds for discussing social justice, diversity, and mutual respect when everyone claims to be a victim based on his or her own experiences?
TOWARD A COMMUNICATIVE ETHIC OF TOGETHERNESS-IN-DIFFERENCE How can we achieve a constraint-free understanding between differently positioned subjects, between colleagues who feel that affirmative action is an unfair policy and colleagues of color who think that it is a small step toward redressing the serious ethnic, racial, and gender imbalance in U.S. higher education faculties, especially in light of increasingly diversified student populations? Although we have not found a perfect solution, we believe that alternatives exist between the dichotic poles of Enlightenment transhistorical rationality and radical relativist forms of postmodernism. These alternatives can provide common ethical grounds for communicating between subject positions and cultures, for understanding social justice, minority, and diversity, and for recognizing and respecting difference.
A Communicative Ethic of Risk Welch (2000) attempts to overcome the limitations of both Enlightenment universality and postmodernist fragmentation by proposing a communicative ethic of risk. Drawing on Foucault, she argues that dialogue across difference should be achieved not by searching for objective consensus but by “recognizing the differences by which we 498
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ourselves are constituted and . . . by actively seeking to be partially constituted by work with different groups” (Welch, 2000, p. 151). We add that the dialogue must continue even though successful communication is never guaranteed. A communicative ethic of risk demands that participants commit to the risk involved in communicating across different social positions even if that means making someone uncomfortable (e.g., by challenging one to rethink deep-rooted, takenfor-granted beliefs or one’s implication in social injustice). Welch (2000) points out that our society operates on “an ethic of control” (p. 23) that seeks to protect people from any risk or discomfort resulting from uncertainty or ambivalence when they interact with others who are different from them. Frances analyzed this point insightfully when she noted in her story that trying to make students “safely uncomfortable” might work against encouraging them to become aware of issues of privilege and power: I once heard a professor from another institution say: “We must talk about this [issues of diversity and social justice]. I want my students to be uncomfortable.” To which another educator replied: “Safely uncomfortable.” The problem is that adding “safely” to “uncomfortable” runs the danger of not only mitigating the point, but nullifying it.
A communicative ethic of risk challenges people to enter into an often unsafe, uncomfortable dialogue, to open themselves up to different ideas and values of others, to make themselves vulnerable by engaging in the dialogic process of mutual challenge and mutual transformation. It is only through such a risky, dialogic communicative process that students and teachers can expand their knowledge, transcend their location- and privilege-induced blind spots, and become enriched both culturally and ethically. Welch (2000) points out the deep satisfaction and liberation that comes from saying no to the ethic of control and refusing to hold on to privilege or to allow privilege to become one’s sole identity, blinding one to social injustice. We add that middle-class women of color need to listen to working-class women (of color), and straight women of color need to listen to lesbian women (of color). Under the communicative ethic of risk, no one is exempt from the obligation to dialogue with others to discover and transcend the blind spots inherent in their respective subject positions. But this process must go beyond mere words; otherwise, it will degenerate into (hypo)critical pedagogy, as Anne’s story illustrated. The communicative ethic is also an ethic of accountability and respect. It demands that participants commit to accountability and give up privilege when they realize that their privilege perpetuates social injustice: “Accountability entails recognition of wrongdoing and imbalances of power and leads to self-critical attempts to use THE FORUM
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power justly. Respect is not primarily sympathy for the other, but acknowledgement of the equality, dignity, and independence of others” (Welch, 2000, p. 15).
Policies and Practices We call for comparative analysis of the different sociopolitical contexts (Wiley, 1999) in which women of color practice and the policies that support their continued oppression. The many overlapping dimensions of difference mean that being hired as a teacher in higher education and being selected for promotion and tenure is a complex and life-long struggle. Although academia seems to be recruiting more women of color into entry-level positions, certain institutional policies (awaiting further research and comparative analysis) seem to obstruct these women’s long-term success. We therefore advise the following policybased strategies. • Educational and administrative leadership should vigilantly support individual minority women’s research agendas by instituting policies that grant these women at least as much release time and graduate student support as their male and White counterparts. • Leadership should also monitor minority women’s advising, teaching, and practicum supervision loads to protect them from serving on too many committees. • Because scholars of color are often not privy to information that dominant groups consider common knowledge (e.g., Bertha was not afforded the same informal guidance about the academic publishing process as her White male peers), they need support to redress discriminatory and exclusionary practices, whether these be conscious or unintentional. They need thoughtful and supportive senior colleagues to help them negotiate the gap in cultural capital as well as guide them toward appropriate publishing forums. • They should also be paid as much as their male and White counterparts for equal work. Most of us have been paid less and for heavier workloads than other members of our departments. • In addition to the sexual harassment workshops that are raising the consciousness of academicians, universities need workshops to address other forms of discrimination, including harassment on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, race, immigration status, and language minority status. • Hiring and retention policies should ensure that more than one person of color is recruited within each department because the pressure of being singular marks scholars of color and subjects them to higher scrutiny. 500
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Within each institution, the processes whereby policies become accepted practices and are adopted by those in the next tier of leadership should be examined critically to ensure that the policies are carried out as defined.
Re-visioning TESOL’s Disciplinary Goals The TESOL discipline likewise needs to be re-visioned and reshaped to fit an increasingly globalized world. Instead of looking for certain (as opposed to situated, uncertain) knowledge of the most effective technology to teach English to speakers of other languages, our disciplinary goal should be the more urgent task of finding situated, dialogic ways of teaching and learning English (or literacies in the field of literacy education) for relatively constraint-free understanding and communication among people coming from very different locations (both geographical and social) and with very different sociocultural experiences (see Wong, in press; Lin & Luk, in press). The discipline needs to expand its traditional technicalized goals to include equally important concerns about how to value linguistic and cultural diversity and promote social justice as English spreads (often as the dominant language) to different parts of the world. In embarking on this collective, dialogic writing project, we are not aiming at “narrating our suffering” nor are we “invested in rewards” (Velez, 2000, p. 325). This project has given us a sense of community, and in this community we have drawn strength for healing and transformation. We are not alone in this world. What gives meaning to this job and profession of ours as we continue to work as women faculty of color in TESOL and literacy education? It is the hope that our work will contribute to a world with greater intercultural understanding and social justice, a world in which education affirms minority children’s and students’ races, ethnicities, classes, genders, and sexualities, values their experiences, and develops their potential. THE AUTHORS Angel Lin is an associate professor in the Department of English and Communication, City University of Hong Kong. With a background in ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and social theory, her theoretical orientations are phenomenological, sociocultural, and critical. She serves on the editorial advisory boards of Linguistics and Education, Critical Discourse Studies, and Critical Inquiry in Language Studies. Rachel Grant teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in literacy education at Pennsylvania State University–Harrisburg. Her research focuses on critical interpretations for second language reading, urban education, and multiculturalism within teacher education. THE FORUM
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Ryuko Kubota is an associate professor in the School of Education and the Department of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is involved in foreign language teaching and second language teacher education. Her research interests include second language writing, culture and politics in second language education, and critical pedagogies. Suhanthie Motha’s research explores the complexity of identity, power, language, and pedagogy in second language learning. Her work has been published in TESL Canada Journal and Educational Practice and Theory, and she serves on the editorial review board of TESL Canada Journal. She also teaches in the TESOL and the teacher education graduate programs at the University of Maryland–College Park. Gertrude Tinker Sachs teaches in the language and literacy unit of the Middle Secondary Education and Instructional Technology Department at Georgia State University. Her research interests include ESOL, and language and literacy development. She has investigated and published research on cooperative learning, literaturebased approaches in teaching ESL/EFL, and inquiry-oriented teacher development in EFL/ESL contexts. Stephanie Vandrick is a professor in the Communication Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. Her research areas include ESL writing and critical and feminist pedagogies. She is co-author of Ethical Issues for ESL Faculty: Social Justice in Practice; co-editor of Writing for Scholarly Publication: Behind the Scenes in Language Education; and author of several articles and book chapters. Shelley Wong is an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. She has taught ESOL in secondary, adult, and university settings in Los Angeles, New York, and the Washington, D.C., area. Her research interests include critical and dialogic approaches to teaching English to speakers of other languages, emergent literacy, and multilingual and multicultural education.
REFERENCES Ang, I. (2001). On not speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. London: Routledge. Bagilhole, B. (2002). Against all odds: Women academics’ research opportunities. In G. Howe & A. Tauchert (Eds.), Gender, teaching and research in higher education (pp. 46–56). Hampshire, England: Ashgate. Collins, P. H. (1998). Fighting words: Black women and the search for justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, S. (1992). Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P. A. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 277–294). New York: Routledge. Halvorsen, E. (2002). Gender audit. In G. Howe & A. Tauchert (Eds.), Gender, teaching and research in higher education (pp. 9–19). Hampshire, England: Ashgate. Harding, S. (1996). Feminism, science, and the anti-Englightenment critiques. In A. Gary & M. Pearsall (Eds.), Women, knowledge, and reality: Explorations in feminist philosophy (pp. 298–320). New York: Routledge. Hartsock, N. (1983). The feminist standpoint: Developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism. In S. Harding & M. Hintikka (Eds.),
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Addressing Gender in the ESL/EFL Classroom BONNY NORTON University of British Columbia Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada ANETA PAVLENKO Temple University Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States ■
During the past 2 years, while coediting a Case Studies in TESOL Practice book titled Gender and English Language Learners (Norton & Pavlenko, 2004), we have had the welcome opportunity to consider the diverse ways in which TESOL colleagues worldwide are addressing gender issues in their language classrooms. In this article, we share the insights we have gained not only from the contributors to the case study collection, but also from our engagement with the broader literature (e.g., Casanave & Yamashiro, 1996; Norton & Toohey, 2004; Pavlenko, Blackledge, Piller, & Teutsch-Dwyer, 2001). Rather than seeing gender as an individual variable, we see it as a complex system of social relations and discursive practices, differentially constructed in local contexts. This approach, situated within a poststructuralist framework, foregrounds sociohistoric, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic differences in constructing gender. We do not assume, for example, that all women—or all men—have much in common with each other just because of their biological makeup or their elusive social roles, nor do we assume that gender is always relevant to understanding language learning outcomes. Instead, we recognize that gender, as one of many important facets of social identity, interacts with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, (dis)ability, age, and social status in framing students’ language learning experiences, trajectories, and outcomes. In this article, we discuss how English language teachers worldwide address gender in the classroom in four ways: curricular innovation, that is, creating new programs and classes that address the needs of particular
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