Reflection 3 : More important than norms

            Tupas’s article catapulted the privileged (or cursed?) role of the English teacher in making proactive decisions in choosing pedagogical norms to be taught in class. What I like most about the article is its sea-changing stance on teaching norms. Tupas argued for situating the debate on norms in the complexities of the classroom and in the needs of the local communities in general. I must say that I agree with the Filipino teachers’ stance on choosing and teaching the “right” norms in their class.

            First, I agree that they still choose to teach the American English norms to “recognize the economic imperative of teaching and learning SE [Standard English]” (p. 570). For me, the norm that will help bring food to the Filipino table will be the norm or one of the norms to be taught in my classroom. People need food to live; other concerns are secondary. If Standard American English is what companies and employers in the Philippines and in the world want, then, I think it must be taught to my students. Anyway, I will let them be aware of the presence of Philippine English. I will also let them use it in the class as long as they know the consequences. I will tell my students that I am teaching them SE because there are just things that are beyond our control right now such as the “whims” or requirements of the companies (although I personally think that research is needed to investigate what are the consequences in the workplace for teaching both PE and SE and whether English norms really have significant impact on the job application and employment of my students). Teaching SE is not passivity; it’s being realistic.

            Second, beyond the economic necessities, I really like the stance of Filipino teachers saying that they can teach localized content to teach SE. I agree that the cultural content of the English class is more important than norms. When I taught ESL writing for one semester, the talk of norms was not really central in my class (although of course, I do think now that it is important). But what mattered more for me are the essays that we read about being a good Filipino citizen, being a good student, and being a good person in general. These are the content that we talked about as we tried to discuss the composition and organization of our sample essays. My students also wrote about self-awareness, specifically their own history, their own personal stories, and their future personal goals. In other words, the content of the lesson is more important than being stuck with what norms to teach. The personal, communal, and nationalistic values that they developed in my English class were the things that mattered the most.

            At the end of the day, my students will be “judged” not so much on how well they used English norms in whatever variety. They will be appraised on how well they used their communication skills to further the good of their community, the good of their country, and the good of humanity. Amen.

Reflection 2 : History, Politics, My ELT Classroom

Since I read articles written by Canagarajah and Pennycook on ELT as a political enterprise and on the need to be critical in the profession, I cannot not look at any ELT textbook the same way again. Everytime, I skim pages of textbooks and reference materials I come across with, I cannot help analyzing at the back of my mind the various ideologies and discourses embedded in them and whose interests were forwarded by the said ELT materials. This is really disturbing! But at least, I am conscious of these things happening.

Ang hirap pa lang ma-colonized. It is really unfortunate to be colonized. This is what I realized after reading Canagarajah and Pennycook for week 2. First, a colonized country would have to be denied of its natural resources. Second and more importantly, the colonized people would have to be denied of its identity, its own history, and its consciousness as a nation. Colonized countries such as the Philippines were conditioned to think that their colonizers are better, the ideal. Little wonder, a lot of Filipinos dream of a White Christmas, or fairer white skin, all for the sake of mimicking the West’s lifestyle. At this point I recall, Ambeth Ocampo’s lecture at the Ateneo saying that history is political. History as stories always carries with it some hidden agenda of its storytellers. For example, I learned from that talk that the notion that it was the Spanish who brought civilization to the Philippines was false. The notion was just part of Spain’s colonial project to make the Filipinos believe that they need Spain to be “civilized”. The country had already its own functional civilization even before the Spanish came.      

In ELT, this translates to the colonized being led to believe that their local language and their local knowledge are irrelevant. Pennycook and Makoni even applied this to language studies and claimed the concept of language is actually invented by the colonizing West, a process charged with political and ideological agenda. I find it fascinating that terms like mother tongue education, multilingualism, codeswitching and many more are terms which are not neutral and random terms but they were actively constructed and invented by the colonizers to pursue some agenda. 

    

            Given this, Canagarajah urges fellow scholars to be engaged with what he calls deconstructive and reconstructive project. This deconstruction entails showing the biased nature of dominant discourses toward western communities while investigating the validity of dominant discourses in its context of origin. On the other hand, reconstruction means considering how local knowledge is relevant for the contemporary needs of the local community and of the changing social and geopolitical domains. For me, this means that there is still value in consuming materials and scholarly works produced by the West. However, these materials and concepts should be utilized with critical and questioning attitude. For instance, I will still use the references and books on curriculum development that I have collected (eventhough they are published by Cambridge or Oxford), maybe the key is just to modify the concepts presented to suit the local needs of my teaching context.

  

            This also has implications for my research. Because some of these constructs are conceptualized by the West, I think I should be careful with using them in my theoretical framework. Because constructs in the conceptual framework are bodies of assumptions about a (linguistic or cultural) phenomenon, I should critically reflect whether the constructs that I am using are the “appropriate” ones, that is, whether the constructs could capture the phenomenon that I am observing and investigating. “Inappropriate constructs” might not allow me to see what I should see in my research context.

Honestly, I do not know what to do when I teach again. Teaching English has become complex after my academic course work in my Master’s. I just trust that if will be critical and reflective of my classroom and instructional decisions, I think I will be on the right track.