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.
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