International Perspectives on Critical Pedagogies in ELT

Editted by

Mario E. López-Gopar

Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca

Oaxaca, Mexico

ISBN- 978-3-319-95621-3 (eBook)

Reviewed By: - Ramji Acharya

Presentation Link

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ng0Z7zqOyuNiMXLT7fQiyexPL5vdY7v7kzsDQK_daF8/edit?usp=sharing

Submitted to Prof. Dr. Jay Raj Awasthi

About the Editor

The editor holds a Ph.D. in Second Language Education from OISE/University of Toronto. He is a professor in the Faculty of Languages of Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca. Mario’s main research interest is the intercultural and multilingual education of Indigenous peoples in Mexico. He has received over 15 academic awards. His latest book is Decolonizing Primary English Language Teaching.

This volume entitled ‘International Perspectives on Critical Pedagogy in ELT’ represents a refreshing look at international critical pedagogy and English Language Teaching (ELT) that moves beyond the usual teaching approaches that have a tendency to frame the casual and traditional teaching ground. While English language teaching is one of the big practices all over the world and is a growing area of both pedagogical and research projects, it is mainly driven by practical goals that see the learning of English as a solution for economic and social mobility. The editor tries to bring ELT closer to bilingual and multilingual areas. This collection explores ELT in 12 chapters that follow the editors’ sharp and coherent introduction in three parts: ‘Teaching Beyond Language’, ‘Dialoguing with Teachers’ and ‘Questioning the Critical

The first Part of this book looks at how the language classroom unsurprisingly intersects with larger social, political, and cultural realities. As a whole, it speaks to the dilemma of how English language pedagogy has long been isolated as a subject without a critical focus on the policy of language teaching and learning. The beginning of the book (first part) provides important insights into what it means to be a critical and self-reflexive instructor involved in highly emotional pedagogical discourses. The chapter by Andrea Sterzuk and Simone Hengen, looks at the issue of colonial legacies in teaching English in Canada as a settler context as the opening chapter. This chapter exhibits how the white settler values that marginalize indigenous communities and devalue their social and cultural identity continue to manifest themselves as part of the hidden curriculum. However, Sterzuk and Hengen also establish that critically self-aware teachers can use the ELT classroom as a transformative space to inspire students to challenge such implicit and deep-seated cultural assumptions.

Chapter 3, by Osman Z. Barnawi, directly focuses on how apparently radical practices of critical pedagogies can become empty signifiers in contexts such as Saudi Arabia where neoliberal obligations frame education implicitly and explicitly. This is a situation not confined to Saudi Arabia but a reality in many contexts where governments see education primarily as a tool for economic development. In such contexts, ELT operates in a particularly prepared manner where mastery of language skills is seen as the primary goal as it is seen in Nepali context, at the cost of intellectual engagement – even when the context is higher education where students have the intellectual expertise and desire to do so. This chapter exhibits a case study in a higher educational context where a read, reason and respond model was used to enable critical engagement and reflection. However, the chapter also demonstrates the enormous challenges faced within a neoliberal context where the students themselves fight with such critical pedagogical models and favor more utility and employment-oriented approaches.

The fourth chapter, by Jayson Parba and Graham Crookes, turns the main target to second teaching when the language isn't English. At the same time, it looks at how a mix-model that includes English might be important in teaching a heritage language. The chapter shows how the teaching of heritage languages can be made meaningful and relevant to students’ lives and realities and how a critically reflexive model of teaching-learning can achieve this objective. The authors indirectly pose translanguaging as a progressive practice that will be useful during a context like this. They offer flexibility to allowing students to use their dominant language (English) to communicate effectively. The focus shifts to Hong Kong in Christian W. Chun’s chapter, where the utilization of critical pedagogy during a university ELT context and a subsequent expression of political dissent by an equivalent group of scholars in Hong Kong’s much publicized ‘umbrella movement’ is explored.

The second part of this book, ‘Dialoguing with Teachers’, looks at teacher practices in reference to critical pedagogies in several contexts. This section is outlined by the area of teacher's identity. Chapter 6, by Edwin Nazaret Leon Jimenez, William M. Sughrua, Angeles Clemente, Vilma Huerta Cordova and Alba Eugenia Vasquez Miranda from the Mexican context, looks at the dynamics of teacher identity formation in a group of student teachers working in marginalized settings. In these settings, the student teachers were encouraged to question and reflect critically on settled hegemonic views they indirectly held, ranging from national to middle-class family values. The next chapter, by Navan N. Govender, extends a similar set of concerns in the context of South Africa. It looks at how the English classroom can become a critical space to explore issues of gender and representation. The underlying theme connects to the overall thrust of the book that ELT is not just about language but includes a much wider range of concerns. The chapter discusses how pre-service teachers used a critical literacy approach to style materials that engage with mainstream representations of gender. However, the materials developed by these pre-service teachers sometimes attended reproduce heteronormative assumptions, this very exercise provided a crucial space for novice teachers to reflect critically on their gender assumptions and to see how they can engage with such assumptions through the process of learning English.

In Chapter 8, Maria Dantas-Whitney explores the use of ethnography among teacher trainees to generate critical consciousness within the US education system that is becoming 95 increasingly centralized and restricting the ability of teachers to respond to specificities of their local context. Through an innovative project which involves graduate teachers conducting an ethnographic inquiry about their learners, the chapter demonstrates how teachers are often changing agents instead of technicians. The last chapter of Part II, by Amparo, Clavijo-Olarte and Judy Sharkey, also looks at how teachers can answer local realities and become critical and self-reflexive practitioners. Looking at the ELT experience of Colombian teachers the authors demonstrate how such pedagogical approaches can enrich teacher professional development. The second part of the book as a whole illustrates aspects of how ELT can become part of an endeavor for transformation and social justice when combined with a locally responsive approach to critical pedagogy.

‘Questioning the Critical’ is the title of the final part of the book that extends the focus on teachers and their engagement with critical pedagogies in particular contexts to look at the restrictions and possibilities of critical educational practices in relation to ELT. Chapter 10, by Christine Helot, Masahito Yoshimura and Andrea Young, investigates how strong reasonable language policy and planning in Japan and France adversely impacts linguistic pluralism. In both of those contexts, English is pushed into the education system through a top-down model ignoring the language repertoires of scholars. The chapter traces two activities designed to make critical awareness about multilingualism: encouraging teachers to reflect on their own learning and demonstrating how linguistic diversity is often converted into a teaching resource. The authors conclude that despite the constraints of top-down policies, teachers have a certain degree of freedom and agency in adopting a multilingual approach in their ELT practices.

Chapter 11 presents Anne Swan’s examination of educational learning (ALL) within the context of Australia in terms of the perspectives of international students and every one practitioner and the way their critical perspectives have shaped ALL. Swan’s study is primarily a review of existing literature and data on this topic and accomplishes that Australian universities have been largely sensitive in incorporating critical perspectives in designing ALL programs. Paul Hudson’s chapter that follows has a very different take on ELT in Arab states in the Persian Gulf region.

Having said that, Lopez-Gopar’s edited volume gathers a striking, committed and politically conscious body of ELT research against the framework of critical pedagogies. Considering its wide geographical representation, the book captures the range of critical pedagogies and ELT discourses from around the globe and provides refreshing insights into ELT as a situated practice. This volume is innovative in a way in which it brings all the theory and practices in a single skeleton to describe how these can be transferred to classrooms across a wide variety of global contexts.

Thank You.