What do we mean by Choice in Language Education? Ecologically Appropriate Pedagogies for Language Learning under Duress

What does it mean to be languaged in todays world?

A Human Ecological Perspective

Alison PhippsUniversity of Glasgow

GlennIntros, title, then Up front say why were working together: To connect and compare radically different language education contexts, and the observation through our previous work that there are many areas of overlap that make the work of Alisons projects not only relevant to so-called conventional language teaching, but even essential to truly bringing it into the 21st century.

Todays WorldAnthropoceneRoyal Geological Society 2011

Language in the Anthropcene

Extractivist attitude to language the fossil fuel of rhetoric which we burn in our universities (Michael Cronin yesterday)

Questions pointing to absenceWhat does it mean to live in communities?(New Scots project: 2013)What does it mean to be languaged?

LanguagedWhatdoes itmean?To be []LanguagedIn todays World.

To be languagedPassive formEnlanguagedPorosity(Irigarary) Human beings are porous: open to air and light.

What does it mean?Open to diverse ecological contexts of learning.Open to pollution.Open to colonisation.Open to monopoly.Open to militarisation.(Brueggemann)

Todays WorldGlobalisation takes place only in capital and data. All else is damage control.

(Spivak 2013, p. 3)

ALISON: Gayatri Spivak wrote recently that Globalisation takes place only in capital and data. All else is damage control. Damage calls for a response from the human subject. As does globalization.

GLENN:The languages we teach now, we teach at the end of the most violent century in world history and one which had seen unprecedented technological change and innovation, the accumulation of wealth in certain parts of the world and a military-knowledge economy growing to protect that wealth and ostensibly to keep the peace and ensure global security. Alongside this has come an extraordinary democratization of both travel and of the experience of cultural, linguistic and ethnic otherness with new generations growing up in multicultural and intercultural contexts worldwide. This is not to say that diversity had not been part of life previously, but it is to say that the experience of diversity had become far more widespread. Part of that challenge is to create a theoretical, methodological and conceptually coherent teaching practice that is creative, reflexive and ethical in orientation.

ALISONThe university language classroom is not usually considered the site of ethical or, sadly, even genuine intercultural negotiation or struggle. To be sure, the cultural content of the classroom may indeed provide learners with affordances for learning and expanding their horizons toward (for them) as-yet unknown perspectives through strange and (for them) inherently interesting study of the new culture. But in our observations of language classrooms in a range of educational settings, the mainstream pedagogical focus appears primarily to be rooted in instrumental and grammar-driven syllabi. Our complaint, if it may be called that, and the primary argument of this presentation, is that pedagogical practice has neither integrated the insights of a large and growing body of second-language acquisition (SLA) research of nearly a generation nor formally responded to the challenges of globalisation. In the 2014 Special Issue of The Modern Language Journal, Lo Bianco states that:A new and dynamic approach to foreign language education, in the context of the communication effects of globalization, requires ongoing interrogation as it surrounds us with unprecedented challenges of conceptualization and still unimagined challenges of pedagogy. (Lo Bianco, 2014, p. 523)

Critical Effects: (Post)colonial

NGougi wa TiongoAccept theft or die

On the Postcolony: MbembeWe should first remind ourselves that, as a general rule, the experience of the Other, or the problem of the I of others and of human beings we perceive as foreign to us, has almost always posed virtually insurmountable difficulties to the Western philosophical and political tradition.

Butler: Can we find ethical and political ways of objecting to forcible and coercive dispossession that do not depend upon a valorization of possessive individualism?

What are your languages?My language is []I speak []I have []My English []Why are you learning [.]

Language Lobo? Language Wrangles

GlossophobiaCritiqueExcavate the ideological roots of monolingualism (Gramling).and multilingualismHistoricizeMythologizePoeticize/ aestheticizeCollectivizeSalvage ethnographyDecolonize (the University)

Theoretical & Critical Perspectives?Does glossophobia produce positive (individual) psychological effects?If so, happiness for whom? To do what? At whose expense?

1)Feminist, queer2)Postcolonial

Lauren Berlant: Cruel Optimism An incitement to inhabit and track the affective attachment to what we call the good life which for many is a bad life which wears out the subjects, who nonetheless find their conditions of possibility within it.

Sara Ahmed: The Promise of HappinessCan we rewrite the history of happiness from the point of view of the wretch? If we listen to those who are cast as wretched, perhaps their wretched-ness would no longer belong to them. The sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like must be like to be a stranger, but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar

Happiness work has a Political Economy

Political economy: Happiness gets distributed in all sorts of complicated ways.

To be a good subject (good language learner) is to be perceived as a happiness-cause, as making others happy. To be bad is thus to be a killjoy.

Index certain forms as normative which serve the unimpeded flow of (linguistic) capital

Ahmed: The KilljoyTo killjoy, is to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance.

If ethics is to preserve the freedom to disagree, then ethics cannot simply be about affirmation, or for affirmation, understood as good encounters.

Estrangement - VerfremdungTo the forces of monolingualism and English-only happiness; to the glossophobia of linguistic imperialism the multilingual subject stands as a quixotic figure.

The multilingual collective, is terrifying.

A killjoy. Saumoud

A condition requiring artistry. And defiance.

Killing the Joy of Good English

Researching Multilingually:Killjoy methods; Taking the standpoint of the wretchedLanguaged/ing under Pain and Pressure.Troubling the cult of English/monolingually masked research.

What does it mean to be langauged in todays World?Working within demands for Justice Decolonizing the UniversityAddressing epistemic violence (Pillay 2015)Attempting to think and act from positions which do not valorize individual possessionLiberation theology; Anthropology; Philosophy; Artistic

Epistemic Violence they came with the bible and we had the land, they told us to close our eyes. We opened our eyes, and we had the bible, but they had the land.

Africa is a CountryBecause the university is a place of authoritative knowledge, certified knowledge, it is at the heart of epistemic violence. It is where authorized and legitimate knowledge is cultivated, preserved and protected but also changed. (Pillay)

Deep language learning and unconditional ethics are [] out of joint with this immensely powerful brave new world-machine (Spivak 2013) (26).

A human ecological language Perspective with Glenn LevineContextComplexityCapabilitiesConflictCompassion

Responding to these creatively, reflexively and ethically defines for us the characteristics required for a human ecological language pedagogy.

Glenn:In a model of language pedagogy that builds upon the ACTFL five Cs and the MLA reports call for deep translingual and transcultural competence, we have sketched a proposal for linking five additional Cs, which we here develop further as a response to the challenge to re-imagine language pedagogy for the global challenges elucidated in the MLJ special issue and by critical scholars and theorists of this age. The five Cs (on the slide - no time here) we propose to assist in this task emanate from the challenges identified theoretically and seek to begin the practical task of describing and framing just such a language pedagogy. We are calling this a human ecological language pedagogy. The 20 minutes we have mean were not going to detail each of these, rather stay focused on the larger framework were trying to build here.

Asserting Multilingualism in face of death /theft

Nazmi Al Masri TEFL model/ AFL qualityEmployability/peace projectConflict and Compassion are central concerns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnxZ_tWPOT0

Notes for ALison

Describe in brief the context of the project i.e. attempt to create an SME out of an EU funded programme of reflection and benchmarking from which Arabic training for language teachers for work in online environments, but which was highly contextualised and meeting those moved to compassion and humanitarian work.

Noticable points- Highest regard for EFL/ESOL programmes and in a context of academic scarcity of articles and electricity/material resources a desire to use Western CCC methods uncritically to quickly establish a marketable product. Internationalisation linked with Saudi and EU partners etc.Partnership working and the insertion of critically framings both regarding digital resources but also regarding the postcolonial context have allowed the aspects of conflict and compassion and context to be brought front and centreCreativity in response - sign language; alos Chomsky classes.

Presenting IUG as a multilingual campus: an allied position in conflict English BrailleArabic sign languageArt, Languages & technology designing gifts & furniture by engineers & physically impaired people (Mosaic Works, Arabesque work)

Nau mai Haere MaiKarakiaWhakawhanaungatangaWhakapapa o te ao Mori-Whakarongo (Visual-kite--karu)-Titiro (Audio-Rongo--taringa)-Krero (Kinaesthetic-Mahi--tinana)

-

AlisonThis is where the ecological aspects come through of context and capacity - developing an understanding in face of its loss and pressure to retain it; doing so as a resistance to dominant models of language learning by incorporating contextual elements which match with Maaori values - allowing for an essentialism and a critical stance towards it. Creativity also key here. (Alison to talk through each specific element briefly)

Mori - Mihi (Decolonising Methodologies)Te Whakapapa o AlisonTna koutou katoa e te whnau whnuiNg mihi nui ki a koutou katoa I tnei w o te tau.Ko Calmac tku wakaKo Clyde tku awaKo Maunga Lomond tku maunga tapuKo Yorkshire-Scottish-Blen tku iwiKo Phipps-Swinfen-Andmariam tku hapKo West End tku maraeI te taha o tku papa ko Fred rua Gertrude ku tpunaI te taha o tku mm ko Leonard rua Annie ku tpuna.Ko Roy rua ko Anne ku mtua. N reira tn koutou katoa

Mihi as way of doing identify work in language - similarities and differences to classic first beginners class and the giving on name is in a sacred context and the genelology is also placed in a context of loss - nothing is taken for granted in the list.