Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies : Agency and Advocacy [1 ed.] 9781617353864, 9781617353840

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DAVIS • CRITICAL QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SECOND LANGUAGE STUDIES

This volume begins by locating critical inquiry within the epistemological and methodological history of second language study. Subsequent chapters portray researcher-participant exploration of identity and agency while challenging inequitable policies and practices. Research on internationalization, Englishization, and/or transborder migration address language policies and knowledge production at universities in Hong Kong, Standard English and Singlish controversies in Singapore, media portrayals of the English as an Official Language movement in South Korea, transnational advocacy in Japan, and Nicaraguan/Costa Rican South to South migration. Transnational locations of identity and agency are fore-fronted in narrative descriptions of Korean heritage language learners, a discursive journey from East Timor to Hawai`i, and a re-claimed life history by a Chinese peasant woman. Labor union and GLBT legal work illustrate discourses that can hinder or facilitate agency and change. Hawaiian educators advocate for indigenous selfdetermination through revealing the political and social meanings of research. California educators describe struggles at the front-lines of resistance to policies and practices harmful to marginalized children. A Participatory Action Research (PAR) project portrays how Latina youth in the U.S. “resist wounding inscriptions” of the intersecting emotional and physical violence of homes, communities, and anti-immigrant policies and attitudes. Promoting agency through drawing on diversity resources is modeled in a bilingual undergraduate PAR project. The volume as a whole provides a model for critical research that explores the multifaceted and evolving nature of language identities while placing those traditionally known as participants at the center of agency and advocacy.

CRITICAL QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SECOND LANGUAGE STUDIES AGENCY and ADVOCACY

Edited by

Kathryn A. Davis

A VOLUME IN CONTEMPORARY LANGUAGE EDUCATION

Safety Area: All Text, Logos & Barcode should remain inside the Pink Dotted

Bleed Area: All Backgrounds should extend to, but not past, the Blue Dotted

Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy

A Volume in Contemporary Language Education Series Editor: Terry Osborn Fordham University

Contemporary Language Education Terry Osborn Series Editor World Language Teacher Education: Transitions and Challenges in the 21st Century (2010) Edited by Jacqueline F. Davis Language Matters: Reflections on Educational Linguistics (2009) By Timothy Reagan Spirituality, Social Justice,and Language Learning (2007) Edited by David I. Smith and Terry Osborn Identity and Second Language Learning: Culture, Inquiry, and Dialogic Activity in Educational Contexts (2006) Edited by Miguel Mantero Teaching Language and Content to Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Students: Principles, Ideas, and Materials (2006) Edited by Yu Ren Dong Teaching Writing Genres Across the Curriculum: Strategies for Middle School Teachers (2006) Edited by Susan Lee Pasquarelli Early Language Learning: A Model for Success (2006) Edited by Carol M. Saunders Semonsky and Marcia A. Spielberger Critical Questions, Critical Perspectives: Language and the Second Language Educator (2005) Edited by Timothy Reagan Critical Reflection and the Foreign Language Classroom (2005) By Terry Osborn

Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy

Kathryn A. Davis University of Hawai’i at Manoa

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC. Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Critical qualitative research in second language studies : agency and advocacy / [edited by] Kathryn A. Davis. p. cm. -- (Contemporary language education) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-61735-384-0 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-61735-385-7 (hardcover) -ISBN 978-1-61735-386-4 (e-book) 1. Second language acquisition--Social aspects--Cross-cultural studies. 2. Second language acquisition--Research. 3. Critical discourse analysis--Cross-cultural studies. I. Davis, Kathryn Anne. P118.2.C75 2011 401’.93--dc22 2011001322

Copyright © 2011 Information Age Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS Preface ................................................................................................... ix 1.

Introduction: Towards Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies ............................................................... 1 Kathryn A. Davis

P A R T

I

SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXTS OF RESEARCH, LAW, AND POLICIES 2.

When the Children of Their Fathers Push Back! SelfDetermination and the Politics of Indigenous Research .............. 23 Margaret J. Maaka, K. Laiana Wong, and Katrina-Ann R. Kapa’anaokalaokeola Oliveira

3.

In the Name of the Child: “Best Interest” Analysis and the Power of Legal Language ............................................................. 39 Susan Hippensteele

4.

Discourses of English as an Official Language in a Monolingual Society: The Case of South Korea ............................61 Ok Kyoon Yoo

5.

The context and Development of Language Policy and Knowledge Production in Universities in Hong Kong1 ................. 99 Angel M. Y. Lin and Evelyn Y. F. Man v

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CONTENTS

6.

Sin(gapore En)glish Oracy Education: An “Online Discussion” ..............................................................115 Warren Mark Liew P A R T

I I

PERFORMING IDENTITIES AND AGENCY 7.

Hawaiian Methodologies of Indirection: Point-less vs. Pointless .................................................................151 K. Laiana Wong

8.

Identity and Agency among Heritage Language Learners .......... 171 Miyung Park

9.

From East Timor to Transnational Dialogic Interaction: Agus’ Language and Literacy Journey .........................................209 Yun Seon Kim with Agustinho Caet

10.

Finding and Reading Road Signs in Ethnographic Research: Studying the Language and Stories of the Unwelcome Stranger....................................................................233 Carlos Ovando and Steven Locke

11.

Agency as Seen through the Life Story of a Chinese Peasant Woman .........................................................................................251 Xiao Rui Zhang

P A R T

I I I

PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES AND PRACTICES 12.

Teachers Organizing to Resist in a Context of Compliance ........277 Lucinda Pease-Alvarez and Alisun Thompson

13.

Transformation and Agency: Participatory Action Research with Bilingual Undergraduates ...................................................297 Hye-sun Cho

Contents

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14.

Using Student-as-Researcher Models as a Mode of Resistance and Agency: Creative Maladjustment in an Urban High School ......................................................................331 Renae Skarin

15.

Promoting Translocal and Transnational Agency: A Multifaceted Learning Community in Japan ...............................367 Hiromasa Tanaka and Ethel Ogane

16.

Participatory Second Language Labor Education: Communities of Practice and the Foreign Worker Union Movement in Japan ......................................................................397 John W. McLaughlin

Contributors .........................................................................................427

DEDICATION TO OK KYOON YOO 1972-2005 This volume is dedicated to the memory of Ok Kyoon Yoo, M.A. graduate of the Department of Second Language Studies (SLS), University of Hawai’i at Manoa (2004). Ok Kyoon Yoo died from a heart attack on March 27, 2005. He was born July 26, 1972 in Seoul. After graduating from Janghoon High School, Ok Kyoon completed an undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature at Jungang University (1998). He began his career as an English teacher at Buchon Girls High School, Gyounggi-do, Korea (1998-2002). While a graduate student at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa (UHM), Ok Kyoon presented a paper on Discourses of English as an Official Language in a Monolingual Society: The Case of South Korea at the Cultural Diversity and Language Education (CDALE) Conference, University of Hawai’i (2004). This paper formed the basis of his M.A. thesis, a SLS Working Papers contribution (2005), and chapter in this volume. He had also been invited to present his study at the 14th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, Madison, Wisconsin. (July, 2005). Aligned with the critical theorists who inspired his scholarly work, Ok Kyoon had envisioned contributing to the development of critical voices in scholarship and teaching, both in Korea and world-wide. At the time of his death, he had been accepted into an internationally recognized doctoral program in the U.S.. This volume concerning critical qualitative research in second language studies, dedicated to Ok Kyoon Yoo, reflects a continuation of his scholarly work and commitment to equitable language policies and education. Not only was he concerned about the range of issues discussed in this volume, but the chapters on sociopolitical contexts of language policies and participatory action research are a tribute to his vision for promoting agency and advocacy. Younghee Her

PREFACE

From 2002 through 2004 I came to know an extraordinary group of Korean graduate students whose academic struggles, inquiring minds, and personal insights inspired this volume. I begin this edited volume with the story of the agentive academic journey of these students. The account is intended to remind us of the fundamental reasons why we engage in critical qualitative studies and affirm that qualitative research, whether or not explicitly revealed as such, always concerns the personal and political. The story as a collaborative narrative is authored by Younghee Her, who initiated a critical theory based study and support group and then documented their personal and ideological journey.1 The group met weekly for two years to explore and transform the meanings of their experiences of marginalizing academic discourses. THE STORY OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSES AS TOLD BY YOUNGHEE This is the story of the ways in which our study group interrogated our experiences with academic literacy in L2 and, thus, uncovered ways in which we could negotiate and construct our identities.2 We found that as we began our graduate studies, we were introduced to a range of academic discourses Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages xi–xvii Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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through readings and discussions in coursework that caused us to question the ideological and political significance of pursuing degrees in a language and culture not our own. Although all of us aspired to become competent members in the graduate community of practice, we experienced challenges in moving into full membership. Ok Kyoon had misgivings early on about the graduate process. He said, “You know, I’m rather skeptical about our professional qualifications. Even though we earn degrees here, we will never be treated as fully qualified professionals in the field simply because we can never become native speakers [of English].” I added “I’m just wondering how we are perceived by professors or native colleagues. Are we thought of as equally capable graduate students, or those with linguistic and cultural deficits? What are we?” We looked closely at how goals of attaining personal and professional growth in studying in the U.S. were disrupted because our professional identities were not recognized within the literacy practices of the academic community. The other member of the group, Jin, describes this conflict one day when she said: “At first I thought it was because of my limited English, I couldn’t get my meaning across to the professor. But as miscommunication occurred over and over again and I felt as if tension had been getting intense, I began to see what I was facing….What was shocking to me was that he didn’t seem to acknowledge that individual students could come from different [professional and academic] traditions. I’m not saying that I was disappointed simply because I failed to sell my ideas to the professor. It’s a matter of respect. Having respect for different stances students might bring to class does not mean that you agree…It seems to me that some professors are ready to listen to whatever rings true to them whereas they crush any other differing opinions. It is not an easy task for me to speak up in class. I take the courage to bring up the kind of issues that I have thought over. Then, I get cut off for being nonsense. That’s really frustrating and hurts.” As we explored what this feeling of marginalization meant to us on a personal level, we came across an article by Ashis Nandy on “emotional colonialism” that resonated with us. Nandy (1983) says: A colonial system perpetuates itself by inducing the colonized, through socioeconomic and psychological rewards and punishments, to accept new social norms and cognitive categories…More dangerous and permanent are the inner rewards and punishments, the secondary psychological gains and losses from suffering and submission under colonialism.

Yet we were also conscious of the benefits inherent in acquiring the cultural and linguistic capital valued by those in our program. I felt that, despite my ambivalent feelings toward academic competence, I made every effort to move into fuller membership through the acquisition of the whats and hows of academic discourse. That is, I strove to “invent similarity”3 with

Preface • xiii

the competent members of the community while downplaying any difference I perceived in myself. Yet I also noticed the extreme conflicts we all experienced by mastering the Discourse of Power. I had written in my field notes at the beginning of our second year in the program: “It’s quite embarrassing to find myself speaking just like them, to which I had such a strong resistance. I changed to the extent that the more I feel at home in this discursive practice, the more I feel competent and confident. This echoes the idea that acquiring a new discourse entails adopting radically different values and worldviews.4 This is also a sure sign of the emotional colonialism that concerns Nandy.” At this point, our group discussions consisted of feeling alternatively subordinated by the dominant discourse and trapped within a system of internalized rewards and punishments. Yet, as we took elective courses focused on theories of power relations, we were exposed to alternative discourses that, as I noted in one of our conversations, “helped us rediscover competence and embrace our lived and living histories.” We felt that courses which offered alternative perspectives to marginalization or assimilation into dominant discourses provided what Bhabha (1994) calls a “third space” in which to assume individual agency and the ability to transform social inequities. Ok Kyoon observed about one course on Language and Power: “I’m so into the readings because the readings and discussion make me think about what it means for me to study [in the program] and what I really want to do with my profession. We read about Gee’s notion of Discourse (1990), and it was mind-blowing to me. It really helped me understand how to make sense of my discomfort about the types of professional knowledge I’ve learned, and all the confusion, and split-self experiences I’d had since I entered the program. These are the very issues that I’ve always wanted to have answered…I feel at home in this class. The course allows me to embrace the way I am, my marginalized [professional] position. I can just be myself as much as I wanted to in it.” Jin also began to assume agency through looking at how academic endeavors either promoted or distracted from her professional goals. She said: “When I was so bogged down with [the professor’s] comments on my papers and was wondering why I failed to sell my ideas to him, a close friend of mine strongly advised me to drop my worries and frustration. She said, ‘What do you think they can do for you? Nobody cares about your topic as much as you do. Just follow your heart. Stick to what you want to explore and how you want to do it…’ She is right. I simply cannot follow their footsteps trying to fit [my academic inquiry] into theirs. If I keep on doing that, I will end up with nothing. If I do, I guess down the road I can earn my degree, but then I won’t be able to explore what I am really interested in. I don’t see the point of doing that. I now came to think I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. It’s my study after all.”

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I noticed a growing confidence among us as we increasingly exercised agency. It was only when we had acquired some competence in academic discourse that we were able to actively take up positions when introduced to alternative discourses. Our exercising agency was fostered as we interacted with others, including sympathetic professors and scholars who supported our subscription to alternative discourses. That is, our personal resources (academic competence and knowledge), social resources (supportive others), and alternative discourses (elective courses) all helped construct us as empowered agents and rendered us controllers of the discourses presented to us. Our study group had appropriated critical theories such as those proposed by Bakhtin (1981) to understand how the prevailing ideology in the graduate program seemed to provide a “contact zone of struggle” against authoritative discourse for us Korean graduate students. The narratives, dialogue, and alternative discourses in elective coursework offered a safe “third” space in which we could negotiate our evolving professional identities. This exploration generally suggests the transformative potential of participatory research. I felt that my frame of interpretation changed as I became more familiar with the stories of the other group members and better informed about relevant theories and research. This in turn affected my understanding of our experiences as we shared in the acquisition of academic literacy in L2. The constant sharing of our experiences over two academic years served to raise our meta-cognition of what we were going through. Communicating the lived moments of struggle and conflict with one another enabled us to critically reflect on our experiences and the meanings of our schooling. Ok Kyoon described his experiences of the research aspects of our study group in terms of both professional and personal growth. “The interviews have provided me with a chance to articulate and reflect on my thoughts and ideas…Through sharing my thoughts and feelings with other people, I could learn the others’ ways of understanding that were different from mine, and also sometimes I heard them speaking my minds. I think sharing each other’s thoughts was such a precious and rare experience. I wouldn’t have come forward this far if it had not been for this research. You know it is rather prohibited for a Korean man to reveal his inner thoughts. It is considered as feminine thing to talk through your conflicts, feelings to detail.” We generally felt that the study group project had therapeutic consequences during an era of conflict while facilitating “ideological becoming” (Bakhtin, 1981) as we experienced spaces for identity negotiation and change. For Ok Kyoon, this ideological “becoming” included transcending gender specific ways of interacting. In the end, we felt that our experiences adjusting to the target academic community were full of tension, worry, confusion, and disconnection from

Preface • xv

the past as we faced a new academic life. Although revealing our inner conflicts and contradictory desires to one another throughout the course of our group project was sometimes burdensome (all of us resisted sharing sensitive issues at several points in the study), our personal narratives helped us maintain coherence and make sense of our lived experiences. We eventually were able to embrace our differences and form our professional positions in our own ways. The participatory research experiences clearly provided us with a collective understanding of our personal struggles and transformations. I feel that our narratives of marginalization and agency also offer theoretical insight into the meanings of co-constructed and interactive realizations of institutional discourses and individual agency. The narratives build on standpoint theory representing “…cognitive—emotional-political achievements, crafted out of located social-historical-bodily experience—itself always constituted through fraught, non-innocent, discursive, material, collective practices” (Haraway, 1997). In addition, we drew on and substantiated a range of postmodern theories, such as Bakhtinian perspectives on authoritative voices, sites of struggle, internally persuasive discourses, and ideological becoming. However, as we graduated from the program and went our separate ways, we felt strongly that the true significance of our narratives centered on our personal transformations toward achieving a sense of agency and forging a commitment to advocacy on behalf of marginalized peoples. LOCATING CRITICAL QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN REFLEXIVITY: KATHRYN’S REFLECTIONS As with any narrative account, the story does not end with the telling. Postmodern stories manifest the premise that temporal and static meanings of modernism must give way to interpretations of timeless, fluid and interactive prisms of experience. This is poignantly reflected in the Koreans’ continuing story. Shortly after the students graduated from the program and returned to Korea, Ok Kyoon died of a heart attack at age 33. He was beloved by students who knew him and we mourned together this tragic loss. Yet the students drew from their agentive experiences in proposing that we engage in an academic endeavor to honor Ok Kyoon, the quintessential postmodern scholar. I arranged for a University of Hawai’i Second Language Studies Department working papers special issue on critical qualitative research dedicated to the memory of Ok Kyoon (2006) and featured his master’s thesis which deconstructs the promotion of English as an official policy in Korea (Chapter 4 of this volume). His friends and sister/fellow students contributed their own critical qualitative studies to the edited working papers. Some time after its publication, I began to feel that such a fine collection of papers should not go unnoticed in the larger academic

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arena. I contacted the then editor of Critical Inquiry in Second Language Studies, Terry Osborn, to ask if they might consider publishing this working papers collection. He suggested that I edit a volume on Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies as part of their Contemporary Language Education series. So this book was born. Other chapters made their way into this body of work. Many are authored by students on the verge of their careers and some are written by established scholars. The Korean students’ story can surely resonate with those of us who are grounded in academia and work with international and minority populations. Our students’ narratives may push us to examine ways in which we facilitate agency and are advocates or how we may marginalize. It also suggests an ethic of care (hooks, 2003) that centrally locates critical inquiry in the lives of our participant collaborators in a mutual search for hope, agency, and equity. Kathryn A. Davis Kaneohe Bay Younghee Her Changwon NOTES 1.

2. 3. 4.

Younghee’s grounding of this project in transformative investigations can be viewed as constituting a participatory action research project. Her project also drew on a number of qualitative methods, including autoethnography, critical ethnography, narratives, and interviews. Younghee and Ok Kyoon are real names while Jin chose to use a pseudonym. See Bucholtz & Hall (2003) See Kutz et al. (1993) REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. New York: Routledge. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2003). Language and identity. In A. Duranti (ed.), Companion to linguistic anthropology (pp. 369–394). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Gee, J. P. (1990). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Critical perspectives on literacy and education. London: Falmer Press. Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseTM: Feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge. Kutz, E., Groden, S., & Zamel, V. (1993). The discovery of competence. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Preface • xvii Her, Y. (2005). Identity construction in literacy practices in L2: A case study of three Korean graduate students in a TESOL program. Second Language Studies, 23(2), 102–137. Retrieved from http://www.hawaii.edu/sls/uhwpesl/online_cat.html. hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. New York: Routledge. Nandy, A. (1983) The intimate enemy: Loss and recovery of self under colonialism. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. Yoo, O. (2005). Discourses of english as an official language in a monolingual society: The case of South Korea. Second Language Studies, 23(2), 1–44. Retrieved from http://www.hawaii.edu/sls/uhwpesl/on-line_cat.html.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION Towards Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies1 Kathryn A. Davis

Critical qualitative research has taken a long and winding path towards gaining acceptance in the applied linguistics field. While research trends have generally reflected social science epistemological shifts, many in the field have resisted socially and politically situated inquiry. Those language scholars with an interest in critical inquiry have tended to gravitate towards the more receptive fields of education and anthropology. Yet, more recently, emerging postmodern language and literacy theories have fostered transnational interest among socially-oriented applied linguists and language educators in researching issues such as power relations, equity, identity, and agency.2 Western-oriented historical philosophical and theoretical research movements in social science (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Grbich, 2004) have informed applied linguistics generally and second language acquisition (SLA) more specifically. While postmodern social scientists hold that qualitative research can no longer be viewed from a neutral or objective positivistic perspective, the present also offers a politically charged space of Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 1–19 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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contested methods (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). Tensions between social-anthropological and cognitive perspectives are represented in a 1997 special issue of The Modern Language Journal in which Firth and Wagner led with a reconceptualization of SLA research that sought to “…enlarge the ontological and empirical parameters of the field” (p. 285). Firth and Wagner suggested that, beginning in the 1960s, tension has existed between “…on the one hand, acknowledgement of the social, contextual dimensions of language, language acquisition and learning, and on the other, the centrality of the individual’s language cognition and mental process” (p. 288). These authors concluded that while language is a cognitive function, it’s also “… fundamentally a social phenomenon, acquired and used interactively, in a variety of contexts for myriad practical purposes” (p. 296). A number of second language researchers from both theoretical perspectives responded to the Firth and Wagner position in this special issue. In 2004 WatsonGegeo further advanced the social-anthropological stance by stating that “…cognition originates in social interaction and is shaped by cultural and sociopolitical processes: These processes are central rather than incidental to cognitive development” (p. 331). While researchers within the applied linguistics and SLA academies contest the cognitive, social, and political parameters of inquiry, indigenous and non-Western scholars have engaged in a full scale attack on Western epistemologies and research methodologies (Denzin & Lincoln, 2008). Indigenous researchers advocate for decolonizing the academy’s scientific practices (L.T. Smith, 1999; Wong & Maaka, 2009) as they move towards local control of socially situated inquiry. Social scientist experts in interpretive qualitative/ethnographic research (Guba & Lincoln, 2005) hold that, while applied qualitative research has been characterized by diversity and conflict, this tension has led to creativity and opened dialogue on research issues of concern. Most importantly, there has been a call for critical and indigenous research methodologies that re-envision colonizing and discriminatory research practices (Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008). Denzin and Lincoln (2008) suggest that the new model of research “…implements collaborative, participatory performative inquiry. It forcefully aligns the ethics of research with a politics of the oppressed, with a politics of resistance, hope, and freedom” (p. 15). In this chapter, I situate present research movements in a historical overview of Western-oriented epistemology and methods commonly associated with applied linguistics and related fields. In focusing on postmodern approaches, this overview also questions the centrality of Western and English-oriented inquiry in much of the scholarship on second language issues. The final section introduces chapters representing alternative and diverse models of critical inquiry. Together, the epistemological frames and the chapters that follow are intended to question time- and place-honored

Introduction • 3

scholarly traditions through inquiry that seeks to advance agency and advocacy. I begin with descriptions of Western epistemology and research methods that have moved from traditional colonizing approaches to innovations in the age of modernity. I then present the innovative theorizing and methodological shifts that occurred during the age of blurred epistemological boundaries. Finally, I focus on the postmodern era which has informed critical second language inquiry. WESTERN EPISTEMOLOGY: FROM TRADITIONAL TO MODERNISM Kenneth Pike (1967) was among the first linguistic researchers to draw on ethnography (e.g. Malinowski, 1922; Whorf, 1941) to argue for understanding language as embedded in structures of human behavior. While linguistic anthropology was stabilizing as a recognized discipline, Chomsky’s psychologically-oriented theories of innate universal grammar began to emerge (1959, 1975). Although linguistic ethnography and language acquisition as framed by Chomsky were both grounded in positivist epistemology, their context, which embedded versus psychological-based language development theories, foretold an increasing territorial split between these two linguistic orientations. The mind-context epistemological divide widened as sociologists and anthropologists began to move away from traditional deterministic views of language learning and use towards constructivist approaches to the study of communication. Goffman (1956) refuted earlier positivistic ethnographies by suggesting that individuals actively construct their social identities rather than passively perform particular cultural prescriptions for social behavior. He further argued for studying how individuals construct identities and mutually negotiate meaning in face-to-face interaction. Based on Goffman’s work, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) and Sinclair and Coultard (1975) studied organization of turn-taking in conversation and classroom discourse, respectively. This work influenced the conceptualization of conversational analysis (CA) that explores interaction as minute-byminute co-construction of discourse and interaction as it unfolds over time. In opposition to Chomsky’s cognitive language theories and decontextualized approaches to communicative studies, anthropologist Dell Hymes (1974) proposed the ethnography of communication. He argued that speech acts and other communicative events can not be fully understood without attending to culture and context. Gumperz’s (1982) ‘crosstalk’ research significantly influenced interactional sociolingustics (IS), a combined sociology and linguistics approach to examining discourse strategies across cultural, ethnic, racial, and gender backgrounds. Both IS and ethnography of communication theories and methods have influenced studies

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of cross-cultural communication in classrooms (Cazden, John, & Hymes, 1972), participation structure differences between community and classroom interactive norms (Philips, 1983), and comprehensive analysis of sociocultural language and literacy expectations in racially, economically, and culturally diverse communities (Heath, 1983). Other qualitative approaches to the study of language and culture emerging from this era included language acquisition and socialization research (Ochs, 1982; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986; Watson-Gegeo & Gegeo, 1986), micro-ethnography (Erickson & Schultz, 1982), and intercultural communication studies (Scollon & Scollon, 2002). At this same time, first language acquisition psycholinguistic case studies (Brown, 1973; Pinker, 1984; Slobin, 1985) and Chomsky’s (1982) cognitivebased language acquisition theories led to the development of the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) branch of applied linguistics. SLA drew heavily on formal linguistics and its associative field of sociolinguistics which was largely viewed as the study of language use. Yet language study in the larger social science arena was experiencing major epistemological shifts. SHIFTING EPISTEMOLOGIES AND BLURRED BOUNDARIES In landmark publications, anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973, 1983) brought into question the nature of reality and the centrality of local studies. More specifically, he argued that all anthropological writings are interpretations of interpretations and, thus, the observer has no special insight into reality. Researchers subsequently have sought new models of truth, method, and (multimodal) representation while increasingly engaging in reflexivity and calling into question issues of gender, class, and race. A blurring of research methods, boundaries, and terminology has similarly occurred across social science fields and increasingly in applied linguistics. In Denzin and Lincoln’s (2005) Handbook on Qualitative Research, interpretive qualitative research and interpretive ethnography are used interchangeably. A notable representation of blurred genres is Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In this bilingual (Spanish/English) collection of essays and poems, Anzaldúa explores the notion of identity through her own multilingual and sociocultural experiences as Chicana, lesbian, and activist. She challenges traditional and modernist binary, apolitical, monolingual, and scientific representations of social inquiry through using literary venues to define “borders” as an inhabited space and legitimate identity. While applied linguists have not challenged written representations to a similar degree, there has been a growing tendency towards contesting dominant Western or modernist paradigms through alternative (non-Western) knowledge and genre constructions (Canagarajah, 2002).

Introduction • 5

An increasing number of ethnographic studies within and across multilingual contexts began to emerge at this time, particularly in the fields of language policy and planning, language learning, and schooling. Ethnographies began to take on a political edge in advocating for equitable language and culture schooling. Hornberger’s (1989, 1996) extensive language policy and planning work with Quechua communities and schools supported indigenous language maintenance. Davis’ (1994) ethnographic study of multilingualism in Luxembourg argued for language policies and plans that countered educational discrimination by acknowledging variation in class and language socialization. Zentella (1997) advocated for multilingual education reform through her ethnographic study of Puerto Rican children in New York that documented the complex linguistic and social nature of growing up bilingual. The socio-political perspectives envisioned during this time were more firmly articulated in applied linguistics through increasing interest in postmodern perspectives beginning in the late 20th century. POSTMODERNISM AND SECOND LANGUAGE STUDIES In the 1980s and 1990s postmodernism began to have an increasing influence on SLA and the larger field of applied linguistics. Besides considering the nature of knowledge as multifaceted, locally situated, and time and context bound, this philosophical position opposes research assumptions of political neutrality and argues instead for examination of power relations in language and literacy studies. Poststructuralism specifically refutes the notion that language can be understood in structuralist terms as a network of systematically linked propositions and coherent organized units (Foucault, 1972; Grbich, 2004). Applied linguists and socially situated SLA researchers have increasingly focused on language and cultural diversity in investigating multiple communication channels, hybrid textual forms, and new local and global social relations (e.g. Rampton, 1995; Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, & Tejeda, 1999; Street, 1995). Postmodern second language interpretive qualitative/ ethnographic studies also focus on power relations from ever-evolving, changing, locally and politically situated perspectives. Norton (2000) drew on poststructuralist theories of social identity in describing how immigrant women in Canada created, responded to, and resisted opportunities to speak English. She further argued for reframing cognitive notions of language learner motivation (Gardner, Lalonde, & Moorcroft, 1985) as investment realized in situated interaction and dependant on social needs and desires. Subsequent studies conducted by applied linguists are beginning to draw on a range of methods, including ethnography (Lam, 2000, 2004; Warschauer, 1999, 2000; Duff , 2004) and participatory action research (Davis, Cho, & Bazzi, 2005; Davis, 2009). In addition, an increasing number

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of qualitative studies are based in geographic regions other than North America and Europe, e.g. Kanno (2003), Lin, Grant, Kubota, Motha, Tinker Sachs, Vandrick, and Wong (2004) and Lin, Wang, Akamatsu, and Riazi, (2002). Theorists and researchers have contributed to earlier textual and social analyses that further understanding of the political and social meanings of actions such as those associated with English imperialism and globalization (e.g. Fairclough, 2003; Pennycook, 2001; Phillipson, 1992; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2004). Postmodern transnational studies are also on the rise. For example, H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook’s (2009) edited volume provides qualitative descriptions of a global hip hop movement in which languages, cultures, and styles are appropriated, integrated, and transformed by youth. A growing number of language, literacy, and education specialists (Fine, 2006; Freedman & Ball 2004; Hull & Zacher 2004; Luke, 2002; Street 2005) are calling for participatory research approaches to addressing inequitable educational outcomes. Participatory Action Research (PAR) has evolved as a collaborative effort among members of social communities and researchers to bring about democratic and emancipatory investigations of processes and outcomes (Fals-Borda, 1979; Fine, Torre, Burns, & Payne, 2005; Fine, 2006; Freire, 2007). PAR works toward placing local participants at the center of investigations while striving to awaken a sense of injustice among those with material and cultural power. Luke (2002) argues that the right to research for gaining strategic knowledge necessarily involves emancipatory discourses defined by Freire and colleagues as “forms of talk, writing, and representation that are counter-ideological and act to articulate and configure collective interests in transformative ways” (Luke, 2002, p.105). Luke specifically calls for critical discourse analysis that provides a positive thesis for productive discourses of power. This position suggests that “…we would need to begin to capture an affirmative character of culture where discourse is used aesthetically, productively, and for emancipatory purposes” (Luke, 2002, p. 106). Davis (2009) described agentive research among youth that involved investigating multifaceted heritage language and cultural identities while interrogating, challenging, and appropriating academic English practices. Canagarajah’s ethnographic studies (1999, 2002) and reflections on future directions for research on multiliteracies (2002) emphasized the need for postmodern transnational studies that “…teach our students strategies for rhetorical negotiation so that they can modify, resist, or reorient to the rules in a manner favorable to them” (p. 162). The postmodern social science era saw exponential growth in the number and range of interpretive qualitative and ethnographic studies in applied linguistics and associate fields. Historical boundaries between qualitative research approaches blurred and notions such as culture, context, and identity were understood as interpretive, ever-evolving, changing, and

Introduction • 7

locally and politically situated. Journals such as TESOL Quarterly; Anthropology and Education Quarterly; Journal of Language, Identity, and Education; and Critical Inquiry in Language Studies promote multicultural, multilingual, non-Western, transnational, and various forms and representations of interpretive ethnographic/qualitative studies. In sum, current and future interpretive ethnographic/qualitative research trends lean towards breaking down positivistic binary positions and moving towards acknowledging multiple epistemologies and methods in exploring the complex and socio-politically situated nature of language acquisition. MULTIPLE METHODS AND SHARED GOALS: PROMOTING AGENCY AND ADVOCACY The models of critical inquiry in this volume present the process and portrayal of human experience through collaborative inquiry. While all authors engage in a multi-leveled research collaboration, they tend to focus on challenging inequitable policies and practices (Maaka, Wong, & Oliveira; Hippensteele; Yoo; Lin & Man; Liew;Hippensteele), exploring the performance of identity and agency (Wong; Park; Kim & Caet; Ovando & Locke; Zhang), and describing participatory approaches to carrying out research and, in some cases, actively involving participants in the inquiry processes (Pease-Alavarez & Thompson; Cho; Skarin; Tanaka & Ogane; McLauglin). Although approaches to research described here equally offer possibilities for change, participant-oriented research directly aimed at bringing about agency and advocacy is positioned last in the volume to signal a call for increased second language/discourse efforts along these lines. As with postmodern perspectives generally, the chapters in this volume represent a range of inquiry experiences and portrayals that do not sit comfortably within the confines of categories or descriptors. All of the observers and writers of accounts for this volume have been intimately involved with their inquiry sites and participants/ collaborators. Thus, the chapters reflect macro sociopolitical policies and practices as experienced and “read” by participants in ongoing inquiry processes. Some have been immersed in political struggles and are active agents of change. John McLaughlin was a rank and file member of a foreign worker labor union in Japan. Susan Hippensteele was a practicing lawyer who defended GLBT parental rights. Both draw on substantial professional and/or apprenticeship as well as years of on-site experience in describing what James Gee (1996) identifies as Discourses (ways of valuing, behaving, believing) and discourses (language in use) operating within a Japanese labor union and U.S./Hawai’i legal system, respectively. They focus on the marginalization of those outside these organizations or communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) who depend on the services and/or help of those within. Margie Maaka, Laiana

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Wong, and Kapa Oliveira are passionately involved in political, academic, and community work that advocates for indigenous Hawaiian rights. Cindy Pease-Alvarez and Alisun Thompson are on the front-lines of resistance to educational policies and practices harmful to English Language Learners and other marginalized children in California. Renae Skarin describes a PAR project in which Latina youth “resist wounding inscriptions” of the intersecting emotional and physical violence of homes, communities, and anti-immigrant policies and attitudes, particularly as experienced by undocumented Mexicans returning to their land of origin. While Laiana Wong uses linguistic analysis and argues for a serendipity approach to interpretations, Cindy Pease-Alvarez and Alisun Thompson documented their participatory research through analysis of multiple modes of communication and data collection (field notes, audio recordings of meetings, conversations and interviews with participating teachers, web postings, emails, and newspaper articles). Renae Skarin utilized a participatory action research in which she and Latina youth explored the lived meanings and agentive processes of their “Theatre of the Oppressed” activities, conversations, and films. The chapters also represent diverse geographic locations which have been affected by what Lin and Man call “internationalization” and “Englishization.” Angel Lin and Evelyn Man describe language policies and knowledge production at universities in Hong Kong; Warren Liew portrays controversy over Standard English and Singlish in Singapore through semifictional email messages; Ok Kyoon Yoo investigates the English as an Official Language movement in South Korea using media analyses; Xiao Rui Zhang tells the poignant life story of a peasant woman in China through narrative inquiry and interviewing; Hiro Tanaka and Ethel Ogane and John McLaughlin utilize a range of interpretive qualitative tools in describing transnational communities in Japan. Through their ethnographic study of Nicaraguans in Costa Rica, Carlos Ovando and Steven Locke explore the situated and personal experiences of South to South migration. Transnational locations of identity are also represented in Miyung Park’s narrative descriptions of Korean heritage language learners and Yun Seon Kim and Agus Caet’s collaborative interpretive narrative and ethnographic account of Agus’ discursive journey from East Timor to Hawai’i. Miyung Park’s narrative study provides a representative example of individual transformative processes within the intersecting and sometimes competing linguistic and cultural discourses of Hawai’i. Hye-sun Cho capitalizes on this diversity through designing and documenting an agentive participatory action research project with bilingual University of Hawai’i undergraduate students. Many of the chapters are not about second languages as traditionally perceived, but represent explorations of identities, agency, and advocacy that focus on discourses of power which are alienating and excluding

Introduction • 9

(Hippensteele; McLaughlin; Lin & Man) and seek social justice outcomes (Pease-Alvarez & Thompson; Skarin; McLaughlin). Given the limitations of categorization and linear presentation of chapters, I provide here authors’ summary descriptions of their chapters in the order they appear in the volume. Margaret J. Maaka, K. Laiana Wong, and Katrina-Ann Kap ’anaokal okeola R. Oliveira. When the Children of Their Fathers Push Back!: Self-Determination and the Politics of Indigenous Research The idea of indigenous agency or self-determination through research is one that has attracted great attention, particularly in the past two decades. Indigenous self-determination entails the ability to make decisions and enact them in ways that affect the world. As indigenous researchers, we have a unique responsibility to utilize our research for the benefit of our peoples. We have been advised by our own peoples that we must exercise agency in advocating for the perpetuation of our languages, cultures, ways of knowing, and ways of disseminating that knowledge if we are to prevent the wholesale loss of all that identifies us as unique peoples. With this in mind, the idea of moral causality is one that deserves attention. This chapter builds on Smith (1999) in arguing that the struggle for indigenous academics is to work in ways to create opportunities that enable the elaboration of more authentic forms of indigenous knowledge and indigenous intellectual traditions that benefit indigenous peoples and the world. Susan Hippensteele. In the Name of the Child: “Best Interest” Analyses and the Power of Legal Language This chapter examines how societal attitudes have influenced the development and interpretation of the legal meaning of “parent” and “family” in cases involving gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) parents. It explores judicial discretion in family law, focusing on application of standards for “best interest” analysis that both sharply focus the relevance of cultural milieu of families and fail to recognize the contemporary cultural reality of families and parent-child relationships involving GLBT parents and their children. It further shows how legal discourse frames and limits definitions of family and the degree to which evocation of traditional standards in family law, whose meanings are often taken for granted but which are “notoriously indeterminate” and vague, serve to deny GLBT parents custody and sometimes even visitation with their children. It concludes that a “best interest” analysis evoking parents’ gender identity and/or sexuality without foregrounding the precise contours of the parent-child relationship fails the basic test of that standard.

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Okyoon Yoo. Discourses of English as an Official Language in a Monolingual Society: The Case of South Korea By critically examining public discourses surrounding the issue of EOL in the South Korean intellectual community, this chapter attempts to reconceptualize “linguistic nationalism,” the ideology of “one nation, one language” in a monolingual country, within the discipline of language planning and policy (LPP). Also, it explores several general theoretical questions in LPP. First, by discussing the tone of mass media coverage of the issue, it attempts to show how dominant ideologies of globalization and English as a global language are reproduced and opposed in media discourse, a potentially powerful manager of public opinion. Second, it attempts to conceptualize a democratic language policy-making process from the bottom up through pedagogical practices in schools, while attending to public opinion formulation processes reflected in public opinion polls on the issue. Angel M. Y. Lin and Evelyn Y.F. Man. The Context and Development of Language Policy and Knowledge Production in Universities in Hong Kong We critically examined the colonial history of university education in Hong Kong, and the recent changes in the governance of universities driven by global management discourses and practices. With the systemic penetration of global economic rationalism, Hong Kong universities have been under forces for structural changes including “internationalization” and “Englishization” of university MOI (medium of instruction) and university research and publication cultures. We discuss the long-term consequences of these global processes in terms of narrowing of the intellectual space and colonization of knowledge production, resulting in the subordination of local societal needs, indigenous knowledges and epistemologies. Warren Mark Liew. Speaking of Standard English and Sin(gapore En) glish: A Discussion Since Singapore’s independence from colonial rule in 1959, English has remained the dominant lingua franca and primary medium of instruction in schools. Taught at the L1 level, Standard English remains a curriculum priority, while the use of Colloquial Singapore English, or Singlish as it is better known, has been systematically suppressed. In April 2000, the annual Speak Good English Movement was launched as part of a nation-wide state campaign to discourage, if not eradicate, the use of Singlish. In this chapter, Warren Liew asks: How does the defense of Singlish figure within larger globalization narratives that celebrate linguistic pluralization in the face of linguistic imperialism? Answers to this question unfold in a series of electronic conference transcripts written by teachers, students, parents,

Introduction • 11

and policymakers as they debate the premises, promises, and pitfalls the nation’s Standard English oracy curriculum. Liew’s critical aim is to give voice to multiple subject-positions without seeking to harmonize their differences and contradictions. The result is an exercise in performative writing (Madison, 2005; Pelias, 1999; Pollock, 1998), one that combines fictional inquiry and academic exposition to unsettle didactic notions of an objective reality to which “scientifically based research” might claim privileged access. This critical qualitative methodology harbors an ethical charge: by troubling the voice of the Other, performative writing troubles its own claims to authority, and so performs the inherent limitations of any research endeavor that would claim to substitute the liveness of the spoken word (and the living bodies of their authors) with the authority of the written text. Kerry Laiana Wong. Methodologies of Indirection in Hawaiian: Pointless vs. Pointless This chapter argues against the tendency to speak Hawaiian in English through grammatical misuse. Examples are provided of how norms of language use in Hawaiian call for more indirect indication of agents than found in English and that, by comparison, there is a tendency to overpoint in English. Violation of language use norms in Hawaiian by making overly direct indication of agents can lead to a disturbance of social harmony. I am claiming, and thereby advocating, that Hawaiian language revitalization attend to Hawaiian ways of speaking and that research on Hawaiian language be conducted in ways that are aligned with Hawaiian worldview. Miyung Park. Identity and Agency among Korean Heritage Language Learners With a longitudinal narrative research approach, I delve into the complex relationships between human agency, identity, and heritage language (HL) learning. My research illuminates the transformation process of three Korean-American HL learners in Hawai’i. Viewing HL learning as a socially situated practice rather than the acquisition of grammatical accuracy, I describe how HL learners continually construct and negotiate their identities in HL communities. Through social interactions, the ideologies of the three HL learners come into conflict with the expectations of the wider society. The major sites of this emerging conflict are the Korean immigrant churches and their corresponding ethnic peer groups. Based on postmodern theories of identity, HL learners are not conceptualized as passive recipients who conform to social norms. Rather, they are viewed as active agents of their own learning who can tactfully choose particular worldviews and cultural values that best suit their desired identities. Through their voice, HL learners challenge the social stigma and stereotypes imposed by the dominant group in HL communities. They fur-

12 • KATHRYN A. DAVIS

ther their understanding by critically deconstructing the power hierarchy and gain a sense of empowerment by doing so. This narrative provides the methodological framework for understanding HL learners’ multifaceted and evolving identity (re)construction in social contexts. Yun Seon Kim with Agus Caet. From East Timor to Transnational Dialogic Interaction: Agus’ Language and Literacy Journey This critical qualitative chapter began as an ethnographic study of literacy which documented how Agus drew on his linguistic/cultural/social resources in navigating politically and economically challenging worlds. In the process of conducting the study, Yun Seon’s interaction with Agus came to constitute a co-constructed narrative and a participatory research study. In other words, Yun Seon and Agus co-constructed an ever-evolving consciousness of the barriers and agency inherent in his dialogic journey. Carlos Ovando and Steven Locke. Finding and Reading Road Signs in Ethnographic Research: Studying the Language and Stories of the Unwelcome Stranger In our study of the mass immigration and the educational experiences of Nicaraguan students in Costa Rica we focus on how language and language differences are used to both marginalize immigrants within Costa Rican society and bind them together into close knit communities. Through an analysis of immigrants’ personal stories we illuminate how perceptions of the immigrant are maintained within Costa Rican society and at the same time how the immigrant community maintains its autonomy and its close connections to the country it left behind. Findings reveal that because of close historical, cultural and linguistic ties, Nicaraguan students sometimes use these differences to their advantage while at the same time face roadblocks and barriers that exclude them from educational and professional opportunities. Xiao Rui Zhang. Agency as Seen through the Life Story of a Chinese Peasant Woman I tell the story here of a Chinese woman who is subjected to the social discourses in which she lives while exhibiting agency in taking up or resisting subject positions that are available to her. With a focus on human agency, I describe the dynamic and unstable effects of political and social discourses in the process of subjectivity formation. Fengying’s resistance and agency demonstrates a shift from believing what she was told to responding to what she experienced.

Introduction • 13

Lucinda Pease-Alvarez and Alisun Thompson. Teachers Organizing to Resist in a Context of Compliance We draw on poststructural and critical perspectives in their description of Educators Advocating for Students (EAS), a teacher collaborative focused on enhancing the learning opportunities available to low-income students living in a predominantly Latino community in Central California. In our role as participant researchers, we have been documenting the activities and perspectives of group members while actively involved in the group. Set within a larger district context that has upheld standardized approaches to instruction and assessment while suppressing the voice and autonomy of teachers and immigrant families, we focus on how EAS emerged as a space where teachers mitigated and resisted testing mandates. In addition, we describe different members’ perspective on EAS, including what teachers think has contributed and impeded group efforts to impact the policy environment in which they work. Hye-sun Cho. Transformation and Agency: Participatory Action Research with Bilingual Undergraduates I describe a longitudinal participatory action research (PAR) project in which bilingual undergraduate students in Hawai’i challenge dominant academic discourses and transform themselves as active agents of their own learning. Repositioning students, particularly linguistic minorities, as researchers rather than “the researched” endorses a position that stands in sharp contrast to the positivist constructions of non-native students as limited, deficient, inappropriate and whose language proficiency does not meet the norm of native speaking counterparts. Based on a postmodern approach to PAR, this study problematizes the identities of bilingual students that are often essentialized or “Othered” in the fields of applied linguistics and education by highlighting the multifaceted, fluid, and socially situated nature of their trajectories in academic communities. By validating knowledge “at the margins,” and signifying linguistic minorities’ fundamental right to investigate power structures inherent in higher education, this PAR study reconsiders linguistic minority students as subjects of critical inquiry in which they actively question the taken-for-granted power relations around them in academia and beyond. Renae Skarin. Using Student-as-Researcher Models as a Mode of Resistance and Agency: Creative Maladjustment in an Urban High School Using a feminist approach to learning and research with adolescent youth, YouthWorks goes beyond the current paradigm of teaching to break binaries that work as wounding inscriptions for minority youth, particularly young women. Based on the case of Xitlalli, a girl recently bereft of her

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mother and failing out of school, this study shows how a caring, loving dialogical approach to learning allows for ideological shifts to happen and for the empowerment of young women in difficult situations. This research has implications for teacher education in that it shows the importance of affect in learning and engagement. It illustrates the importance of finding ways to tap students’ funds of knowledge, embodied experiences, and material lives and showing them how their personal narratives relate to and affect public/political discourses. It also underscores the importance of showing teachers how to use those experiences to inform students’ academic work, and to show students how to use their voices in the world in a way that gets heard. Hiromasa Tanaka and Ethel Ogane. Promoting Translocal and Transnational Agency: A Multifaceted Learning Community in Japan Utilizing concepts associated with communities of practice, investment, and transnationalism, student teachers, international volunteers, and peace activists came together at Meisei University in teams to create syllabi, teaching materials, and teaching strategies for summer school serving working class Japanese children who tend to do poorly in school. The Meisei Summer School Project (MSSP) is a multi-faceted program, which includes previously unconnected participants into a network of communities of practice. Members participate as educators, administrators, activists and researchers seeking different means of mediation and alternate rules of engagement (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). MSSP provided opportunities for teaching and learning transformation and agency. John McLaughlin. Participatory Second Language Labor Education: Communities of Practice and the Foreign Worker Union Movement in Japan This chapter explores second language labor education for immigrant workers in the interstices of critical second language pedagogy and labor education. The data presented are of one seminal event in the migrant worker rights movement in Japan. The discussion includes findings from a longer ethnographic study and refers to approaches to curriculum in labor education in the West, migrant education in Asia, and multilingual organizing and education among unions with a large immigrant membership in the United States. Through this investigation, the author proposes the development of a new and growing area of applied linguistics and labor education, that is, second language or immigrant labor education (Auerbach,1992; Auerbach & Wallerstein, 2004; Wallerstein & Auerbach, 2004). This research also connects to the literature on critical language teaching pedagogies (Norton & Toohey, 2004) through an emphasis on participatory second language labor education.

Introduction • 15

FUTURE DIRECTIONS Questions about future directions of critical second language research arise from the chapters presented here. What counts as critical research? More specifically, what counts as genuine and reasonable critical research in terms of epistemological, methodological, and interpretive approaches? Are indigenous voices heard and honored? How are everyday researchers who are outside the academic confines of applied linguistics and related disciplines—the ethnic, racial, and gendered marginalized, the poor, youth and children, the imprisoned, the physically and mentally ill, along with those who serve them—legitimated or disenfranchised? What do we gain from diverse voices and what might we lose from narrow interpretations of critical qualitative research? Does anything goes or are there parameters for knowledge creation and sharing? The range of epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and political perspectives offered by this volume suggests continued exploration of legitimacy, voice, agency, and social justice through and about critical qualitative inquiry. NOTES 1.

2.

Some parts of this chapter have appeared in another publication by the author: Davis, K. (Forthcoming). Ethnographic Approaches to Second Language Studies. C. Chapelle (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers. Globalization with its associated transnational economic and linguistic movements also have resulted in restricted or altered language-in-education policies and practices. In the U.S., the Department of Education Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs became the Office of English Language Acquisition in 2001, thus, signaling a major shift from support for bilingualism to an English Only policy. The subsequent No Child Left Behind Act established a nation-wide curriculum and assessment policies based on “scientific-based evidence” based on post-positivist, monolingual, and standardized curriculum and assessment in public schools and associated research funding. REFERENCES

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16 • KATHRYN A. DAVIS Canagarajah, A. S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). Multilingual writers and the academic community: Towards a critical relationship. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 1(1), 29–44. Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). Critical academic writing and multilingual students. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Cazden, C., John, V., & Hymes, D. (Eds.). (1972). Functions of language in the classroom. New York: Teachers College. Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of B. F. Skinner’s “verbal behavior.” Language, 35, 26–58. Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on language. New York: Random House. Chomsky, N. (1982). Language and the study of mind. Tokyo: Sansyusya Publishing Co. Ltd. Davis, K. (1994). Language planning in multilingual contexts: Policies, schools, and communities in Luxembourg. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Davis, K., Cho, H., Ishida, M., Soria, J., & Bazzi, S. (2005). “It’s our Kuleana”: A critical participatory approach to language minority education. In L. PeaseAlvarez & S. R. Schecter (Eds.), Learning, teaching, and community (pp. 3–25). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Davis, K., Cho, H., & Bazzi, S. (2005). “Where I’m from”: Transforming education for language minorities. In B. Street (Ed.), Literacies across educational context (pp. 188–212). Philadelphia: Caslon Publishing. Davis, K. A. (2009). Agentive youth research: Towards individual, collective, and policy transformations. In T. G. Wiley, J. Lee, & R. Rumberger (Eds.), The education of language minority immigrants in the United States (pp. 202–239). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.) (2005). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (2008). Introduction: Critical methodologies and indigenous inquiry. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith, (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 1–20). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Duff, P. (2004). Intertextuality and hybrid discourses: The infusion of pop culture in educational discourse. Linguistics and Education, 14(3–4), 231–276. Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 119–161). New York: CollierMacmillan. Erickson, F. & Schultz, J. (1982). The counselor as gatekeeper: Social interaction in interviews. New York: Academic Press. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge. Fals-Borda, O. (1979). Investigating reality in order to transform it: The Colombia experience. Dialectical Anthropology, 4, 33–35. Fine, M. (2006). Bearing witness: Methods for researching oppression and resistance—A textbook for critical research. Social Justice Research, 19(1), 83–108. Fine, M., Torre, M., Burns, A. & Payne, Y. (2005). Youth research/participatory methods for reform. In D. Thiessen & A. Cook-Sather (Eds.), International

Introduction • 17 handbook of student experience in elementary and secondary schools (pp. 805–828). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1997). On discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA research. The Modern Language Journal, 81(3), 285– 300. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). New York: Pantheon. Freedman, S. W. & Ball, A. F. (Eds.). (2004). Bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy, and learning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gardner, R. C., Lalonde, R.N., & Moorcroft, R. (1985). The role of attitudes and motivation in second language learning: Correlational and experimental considerations. Language Learning, 35(2), 207–227. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. New York: Routlidge. Geertz. C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, E. (1956) The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor Books. Grbich, C. (2004). New approaches in social research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). Paradigmatic controversies, contradictions, and emerging influences. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed., pp. 191–215). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gutiérrez, K., Baquedano-López, P., & Tejeda, C. (1999). Rethinking diversity: hybridity and hybrid language practices in the third space. Mind, Culture, & Activity, 6(4), 286–303. Heath, S.B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hornberger, N. H. (Ed.). (1989). Bilingual education and language planning in indigenous Latin America. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 77, 5–10. Hornberger, N. H. (Ed.). (1996). Indigenous literacies in the Americas: Language planning from the bottom up. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hull, G., & Zacher, J. (2004). What is after-school worth? Developing literacies and identities out-of-school. Voices in Urban Education, 3(Winter/Spring), 36–44. Hymes, D. (1974) Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kanno, Y. (2003). Imagined communities, school visions, and the education of bilingual students in Japan. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 2(4), 285–300. Lam, W.S.E. (2004). Border discourses and identities in transnational youth culture. In J. Mahiri (Ed.), What they don’t learn in school: literacy in the lives of urban youth (pp. 79–98). New York: Peter Lang Publishers. Lam, W. S. E. (2000). L2 Literacy and the design of the self: A case study of a teenager writing on the Internet. TESOL Quarterly, 34(3), 457–482.

18 • KATHRYN A. DAVIS Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning. Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press. Lin, A., Wang, W., Akamatsu, N., & Riazi, M. (2002). Expanding identities, and revisioning the field: From TESOL to teaching English for glocalized communication. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 1(4), 295–316. Lin, A., Grant, R., Kubota, R., Motha, S., Tinker Sachs, G., Vandrick, S., & Wong, S. (2004). Women faculty of color in TESOL: Theorizing our lived experiences. TESOL Quarterly, 38(3), 487–504. Luke, A. (2002) Beyond science and ideology critique: Developments in critical discourse analysis. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 22, 96–110. Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the western pacific. London: Routledge. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning. London: Longman. Ochs, E. (1982). Talking to children in Western Samoa. Language in Society, 11, 77– 104. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Philips, S. (1983). The invisible culture: Communication in classroom and community on the Warm Springs Indian reservation. New York: Longman. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pike, K. (1967). Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behaviour. The Hague: Mouton. Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rampton, B. (1995). Crossings: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50, 696–735. Schieffelin B. & Ochs, E. (1986). Language socialization across cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scollon R., & Scollon, S. W. (2002). Intercultural communication: A discourse approach. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Sinclair, J. McH., & Coulthard, M. R. (1975). Towards an analysis of discourse: The English used by teachers and pupils. London: Oxford University Press. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2004). “Do not cut my tongue, let me live and die with my language.” A comment on English and other languages in relation to linguistic human rights. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 3(2), 127–134. Smith, L, T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. New York: St. Martin’s Press, LLC. Street, B. (Ed.). (2005). Literacies across educational contexts: Mediating learning and teaching. Philadelphia: Caslon Publishing. Street. B. (1995). Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy development, ethnography, and education. New York: Longman. Warschauer, M. (1999). Electronic literacies: Language, culture, and power in online education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Warschauer, M. (2000). On-line learning in second language classrooms: An ethnographic study. In M. Warschauer, & R. Kern (Eds.), Network-based language

Introduction • 19 teaching: Concepts and practice (pp. 41–58). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Watson-Gegeo, K. (2001). Mind, language, and epistemology: Toward a language socialization paradigm for SLA. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center. Watson-Gegeo, K. (2004). Mind, language, and epistemology: Toward a language socialization paradigm for SLA. Modern Language Journal, 88(2), 331–350. Watson-Gegeo, K. & Gegeo, D. (1986). Calling-out and repeating routines in Kwara‘ae: Children’s language socialization. In B.B. Schieffelin, & E. Ochs (Eds.), Language Socialization Across Cultures (pp. 17–50). New York: Cambridge University Press. Whorf, B. (1941). The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language. In J. B. Caroll (Ed.), Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (pp. 134–159). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wong, K.L. & Maaka, M. (2009). Foreword to the Special Issue on Ke Ala Hou: Breaking Trail in Hawaiian Research and Development. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 5(2), 6–13. Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York. Oxford: Blackwell.

PART I SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXTS OF RESEARCH, LAW, AND POLICIES

CHAPTER 2

WHEN THE CHILDREN OF THEIR FATHERS PUSH BACK! Self-Determination and the Politics of Indigenous Research Margaret J. Maaka, K. Laiana Wong, and Katrina-Ann R. Kapa’anaokalaokeola Oliveira

MAKA’U WAWAE:1 WARNINGS FROM OUR FATHERS But when, on the contrary, there are no children to intelligently take the place of their fathers, history teaches us that the foreigner—at a time, not far distant—will push aside the feeble remnant of such a nation, and treating them as an inferior race, crush them out from their birth-rights with his unsympathizing policy. (Kekuanaoa, 1862)

Nearly 150 years ago, High Chief Mataio Kekuanaoa, Governor of O‘ahu and President of the Kingdom of Hawai`i Board of Education minced no words in his commentary on what lay in store for Native Hawaiians in their own land. It is unclear whether his words were designed to galvanize his Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 23–38 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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people into acts of resistance to the onslaught of ruthless foreigners, or whether his words were designed to lament the great loss that was already playing out. What is clear is that his words held a stinging prophecy! Similar portentous messages are found in the writings of other indigenous leaders of the time. Aritaku Maaka,2 who was actively involved in the fight for the retention of Maori lands in Aotearoa/New Zealand, documented the grievances of Maori in traditional waiata. In 1889, he wrote about the loss of Maori lands—the sustainer of the Maori people for generations—through confiscation and sale. His waiata not only laments this loss, it also chastises Maori for contributing to their dispossession by turning their backs on traditional ways of living off and caring for the land and embracing Pakeha ways of desiring money and drinking too much beer. The last two lines of his waiata predict the fate of Maori—to be left on the side of the road with nothing. Haere ra Matahine, e huna i a koe Haere ra te whenua, te ora o te tangata Haere ra te whenua, te pono o te tangata ki nga tira haere Kauaka te mahara e rangirangi mai He mea ka ronaki ki te nui raorao Na te kapo o te ringa, nana i whatoro To te tangata hemonga, he moni e E tama ma e, ka mahue i a koutou Nga kai a Toi, i waiho i muri ra Te aruhe, te mamaku, te pono o te tangata e E hine ma, e aku ki waho ra ki nga kai o Kuini e kohete mai nei Ki ona tamariki Tïkina ake ra he tami riwai Pae ana te huka o te pia i te waha e Moumou hanga noa te taru nei te tikanga Te whakatautia ki runga ki te whenua Apopo koutou, e tama ma, pae noa ai i te rori e

In 1917, the Hawaiian language newspaper Ka Puuhonua o na Hawaii published an article in which the writer expresses concern about the demise of the Hawaiian language. The article implores the readership to come to an understanding that with the loss of the language will come the loss of the Hawaiian people. I ikeia no ke kanaka no kekahi lahui ma kana olelo. Ina e nalowale ana ka olelo makuahine o kekahi lahui, e nalo hia aku ana no ia lahui.

When the Children of Their Fathers Push Back! • 25 I keia la, ua nalohia aku ko kakou kuokoa, a i ka pau ana o ka kakou olelo makuahine, o ka pau ana no ia o ka lahui Hawaii.

Like Kekuanaoa and Maaka’s writings, the article cautions Hawaiians that embracing the ways of the foreigner will come at the expense of their language, their identity, and ultimately their existence as a race of people. Aole wale no ka ma na oihanana kakou i hoike ai i ko kakou haawi ana i ke aloha i na ilio, i ko kakou olelo makuahine no kekahi. O ka olelo Hawaii ka mea e ikeia ai kakou he lahui okoa. A ina ua makee kakou i keia mea he lahui, o ka hoomau aku i kona oleloia ka mea e mau ai, aole o ka hoopoina iho.

More explicit in this writing, however, is an appeal to Hawaiians to take a proactive stance in halting this decline. In particular, the writer argues that, because no child under the age of fifteen is able to speak the Hawaiian language in an ungarbled and coherent manner, there is an urgency to address the situation. To ram home the point, a cautionary note is added— people should not cry when the language has gone if they stand by and let it happen. Ma na ano no nae apau a kakou e nana aku ai, eia no ka mana hapanui iloko o ko kakou mau lima. Ua lilo mau ia kakou ka hapanui o na wahaolelo i ka Ahaolelo. A eia i keia poe ka mana e hana i mau kula Hawaii no kakou. No keaha la i hana oleia ai? Ua hapaiia mai i kekahi mau kau a na na kanaka Hawaii no i pepehi. I keia la, ke hepa mai nei ka oleloia ana o ka kakou olelo makuahine. Aole keiki o 15 makahiki e hiki ke kamailio pololei i ka olelo makuahine o keia aina. A no keaha ke kumu i hiki ole ai? No ka mea, aole a’oia i ka olelo pololei. A i ka hala ana o na la pokole wale no o ka pau no ia, a mai uwe aku kakou no ka mea, na kakou no i nanamaka.

What is compelling in this writing is a sense of agency, particularly political agency. The writer notes that more can be done to strengthen the language because the balance of power, as defined by seats in the legislature, is held by Hawaiians. The author argues that Hawaiian legislators are needed who support the establishment of multiple venues (e.g., schools and churches) where the mother tongue, Hawaiian, is the language of instruction. E na kanaka Hawaii, pehea no hoi e koho kakou i poe e hele i ka Ahaolelo e kokua mai ia kakou? Malia paha o olelo mai kekahi, aole e hiki e a’oia ka olelo Hawaii ma na kula aupuni. Ae, aole no he kula aupuni a na Kepani ma Hawaii nei e a’o nei i ka olelo lahui o ko lakou aina, aka, ke ku nei ia mau kula, a ke a’oia nei na keiki Kepani e ike i ka olelo a kona makuahine. Ina ua hiki ole i ka Ahaolelo, e ala no hoi kakou na kanaka Hawaii a e kukulu no hoi i mau kula no na kakou. Eia kekahi mau kanaka a mau wahine Hawaii i lako me na dala, a he manao ko’u ina e komoia aku lakou e koiia e kokua mai, e haawi mai ana no lakou.

26 • M. J. MAAKA, K. L. WONG, & K. R. K. OLIVEIRA A pehea no hoi na Luakini o kakou, aole anei e hiki e a’oia ko kakou poe keiki e heluhelu i na baibala Hawaii, a e himeni Hawaii, a e kula ia na haawina kula Sabati ma ka olelo a ko lakou makuahine? Ka, ea, he nui na manawa e hiki ai e loaa ia kakou he manawa e a’o ai i ka kakou mau keiki i ka olelo a kona makuahine, o ka pilikia, ua lilo no na ka poe makemake e make ka lahui Hawaii ame ka lakou olelo, ke alakai ana.

The author also argues for the need to oppose the use of English: He manaolana ko’u, e hoea mai ana ka la e ku ai he mau kula olelo Hawaii ma ko kakou nei aina. A e hoomaka nae kakou e a’o i kakou mau keiki ma na Kula Sabati i ka olelo Hawaii. E heluhelu nui na keiki Hawaii i ka Baibala Hawaii, a mai ae i ka oukou mau keiki e ao’ia ma ka olelo haole iloko o na Luahkini. Ina kakou e hoomaka ana ma keia keehina, aole no e hala he mau makahiki e ola hou ana ka olelo Hawaii. Ina ua paakiki ka loaa ana he mau kokua mai ka Ahaolelo mai, e hoomaka ma na Luakini. E hoouna i na keiki i ka halepule e a’oia ana na haawina ma ka olelo Makuahine ou e Hawaii.

But, tragically, over the generations, the voices of our fathers have rung unheeded in our ears. As a result, each passing year has seen our native peoples become more and more disconnected from that which sustains us—sovereignty, ancestral lands, language, and cultural knowledge. In recent times, much has been written about our cultural despoliation. Typically, these writings place us as hapless victims of forces beyond our control. Fanon, for example, describes the devastation of one such force; Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic it turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. (Fanon, 1963, p. 20)

While there is no debate that the stripping away of the fundamental markers of Hawaiian and Maori identities through the exploitations of colonization, illegal overthrow, breached treaty, and other acts of barbarism has left our peoples devastated, what has been left largely unexplored are the roles that we have played in our own cultural dislocation and what roles we may play in future efforts to be self-determining. The portentous writings of Kekuanaoa, Maaka, and the author of the article in Ka Puuhonua o na Hawaii suggest that Native Hawaiians and Maori have played significant roles in the losses of our languages and cultures. From their positions in history, our forefathers force us to ask whether we have been, for whatever reasons, complicit in denying our own capacities to be self-defining peoples maintaining the richness of our own cultures in the present and future as they were in the past (see also Freire, 1970; Jackson, 1999). Yet, regardless of this stark imputation, there endures in these writings something precious beyond all else—the belief that, as a collective,

When the Children of Their Fathers Push Back! • 27

our indigenous peoples have the wherewithal to serve as our own agents as we demand our rights to self-determine in all matters from now into the future. HE PIPI TE TUATAHI, HE KAUNUKU TE TUARUA:3 INDIGENOUS SELF-DETERMINATION We, the Indigenous peoples of the world, assert our inherent right to selfdetermination in all matters. Self-determination is about making informed choices and decisions and creating appropriate structures for the transmission of culture, knowledge and wisdom for the benefit of each of our respective cultures. Education for our communities and each individual is central to the preservation of our cultures and for the development of the skills and expertise we need in order to be a vital part of the twenty-first century. (National Organizing Committee of the World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education, 1993, Section III)

I ka ‘ike is an ‘olelo no‘eau that may be translated as “If there is knowledge.” Pukui (2001) further explains that this is “said in scorn or annoyance of one who pretends knowledge” (p. 129, #1182). This ‘olelo no‘eau’s begging question, “What does he know about it?” encapsulates the depth of the discontent of many indigenous peoples at having been forced to carry the considerable burden that comes from hundreds of years of being researched by “others” or “outsiders” whose agendas have not included our wellbeing. In referencing the Maori context, Smith (1999) talks about research as a “powerful intervention” that has certainly benefited “outside” researchers and the knowledge bases of their dominant cultures. She argues, “Research is implicated in the production of Western knowledge, in the nature of academic work, in the production of theories which have dehumanized Maori and in practices which have continued to privilege Western ways of knowing, while denying the validity for Maori of Maori knowledge, language, and culture” (p. 183). The idea of indigenous agency or self-determination4 through research is one that has attracted great attention, particularly in the past two decades (Bishop, 1996; Durie, 1998; Rigney, 1999; G. H. Smith, 2004; L. T. Smith, 1999). Given the fact that indigenous peoples have not fared well under the microscopes of others, Smith (1999) argues that Maori researchers are faced with the daunting task of retrieving the co-opted space: “first, some space to convince Maori people of the value of research for Maori; second, to convince the various fragmented, but powerful research communities of the need for greater Maori involvement in research; and third, to develop approaches and ways of carrying out research which take into account, without being limited by, the legacies of previous research, and the parameters of both previous and current approaches” (p. 183).

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Human agency (or in this case, indigenous self-determination) entails the ability to make decisions and enact them in ways that affect the world. The idea that humans have this capacity is one that lies at the heart of the movement to revitalize the languages and cultures of indigenous peoples worldwide. Of particular interest are the considerations that shape various acts of agency, the consequences of decision-making (whether to act or not), and the assignment of responsibility for the decision made. Of course, human agency also allows the agent and other observers to examine the process of decision-making. Within the context of indigenous research, self-determination stands at the forefront. There exists an imperative for our indigenous researchers to understand the ways in which knowledge functions in harmony and in conflict. By grounding our beliefs about the phenomenon we refer to as knowledge in political activism, we are most likely to develop a pedagogy of hope that emerges from and affirms the cultural experiences of our peoples. This pedagogy of hope exists not only on a macrocosmic plane of profound conscientization, which we might call knowledge production or discovery or recovery, it also exists on a microcosmic plane of transformative action. As indigenous researchers, we have a unique responsibility to utilize our research for the benefit of our peoples. With this in mind, the idea of moral causality is one that deserves attention. Our brief treatise on moral causality is not designed to plunge the reader into the depths of a philosophical conversation on the meaning of life; rather, it is to reiterate the idea that every morally related action bears a consequence, which bears another, which bears another—a chain reaction of cause, effect, and result. For every “problem” there is a multitude of choices, each with its own unique chain reaction. We believe that research is a process of moral (or immoral) causality—and so, for every “problem” there is a solution that will offer up the best outcome. Indigenous researchers, then, must be driven by the needs of our respective peoples; this is why research and self-determination are inextricably linked in indigenous contexts. Reminding our indigenous researchers of this understanding is a central thrust of our treatise. What, then, are the responsibilities of indigenous researchers? Smith (1992) argues that the struggle for indigenous academics is to work to create opportunities that enable the elaboration of more authentic forms of indigenous knowledge and indigenous intellectual traditions: We must be engaged in making space through struggles over power, over what counts as knowledge and intellectual pursuit, over what is taught and how it is taught, over what is researched and how it is researched and how research is disseminated. We must also struggle to make space for students, space for them to be different, space to make choices, and space to develop their own ideas and academic work. All of this is a struggle for our future. (p. 5)

When the Children of Their Fathers Push Back! • 29

But how is this challenge of no small magnitude to be accomplished? Smith (2004, pp. 49-50) also provides an overview of the contexts, the struggles, the achievements, and future directions for Maori. Of particular interest is the set of transformative principles that he refers to as change factors and how powerful these are when embraced by indigenous peoples who understand the potential of research to serve their needs. These principles are those of: • Self-determination or relative autonomy (the prioritization by indigenous peoples to have increased control over their own lives and cultural well-being). • Validation of cultural aspirations and identity (the prioritization of indigenous languages, knowledge, cultures, and values). • Incorporation of culturally preferred pedagogy (the establishment of teaching and learning settings and practices closely and effectively connected with the cultural backgrounds and life circumstances of indigenous peoples). • Mediation of community challenges (the establishment of strong connections among individuals, families, and communities that recognizes the important role that research plays in addressing the challenges, particularly the socio-economic challenges, faced by indigenous peoples). • Incorporation of cultural structures which emphasize the collective rather than the individual (the creation of collective structures such as family and community to take leadership roles in determining the most effective educational experiences for their members). Smith’s principles clearly illustrate that indigenous research must address real life needs. Given the multitude of questions to which indigenous peoples are seeking answers, it is very clear that one single approach will not suffice. We need multiple methodologies that are grounded in our indigenous traditions. As such, indigenous researchers have been engaged in a series of conversations about what constitutes indigenous research and who gets to conduct it. Royal (1999), for example, likens Maori research to an adventure: “there is a great big Maori adventure unfolding: it is being played out in the institutions of the iwi and in the hearts and minds of individual Maori” (p. 78). These words serve to remind indigenous researchers of their responsibilities—that indigenous research should be created by indigenous peoples from an indigenous worldview to explain indigenous experiences. But how is this to be accomplished?

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BREAKING TRAIL OR BREAKING WIND?: SELF-DETERMINATION AND THE POLITICS OF INDIGENOUS RESEARCH5 The old man suddenly appeared at our craps table and stood between the stick man and me. He announced his intent to play by holding up ten crisp 100 dollar bills. As the dealer gestured to the old man to place his money on the table, we watched as he struggled to follow this standard casino rule prohibiting employees from receiving cash directly from players. It wasn’t immediately clear the nature of the old man’s problem. Perhaps he was hard of hearing. Or perhaps he was unfamiliar with the rules of the game. Or perhaps it was something else. While we were prepared to accord him some latitude for being a novice or for being hard of hearing or for being advanced in years or for being whatever, we soon began to agitate over his suspension of our play. Hurry up, Uncle! We like play awready! After some awkward attempts by the old man to negotiate the chip denominations, the transaction was finally completed. Several stacks of chips of various colors were slid over to his position at the table. K-den. Let’s make some money! Without looking up, the old man reached for four twenty-five dollar chips and placed them on the “don’t pass line.” We were shocked by his blatant violation of the unwritten rule that Hawai`i players don’t bet against the roller in downtown Las Vegas. In all my experiences playing craps, I had never seen anyone do this. Since everyone else at the table bet with me on the “pass line,” I knew they understood the expectation that we maintain a sort of camaraderie by betting with the dice. Should the roller win, we would all win! Unsettled by the old man’s affront to the roller, we exchanged knowing looks and muttered under our breaths. He, on the other hand, appeared unaware of his gaffe. Eh Uncle, wass up wit you? Why you make li’ dat? The coming out roll yielded a three and a five thus setting the point at eight. After several unsuccessful attempts by the roller to reproduce the eight, a seven turned up and the collective moan of agony at the table indicated that all bets were lost; all, that is, except the old man’s. The casino paid him even money on his hundred-dollar bet. Tsa! You old fut! Look what you wen do. You wen bachi da rolla! During the course of the evening, this scenario was played out over and over. As the old man’s stack of chips grew (and our stacks diminished!), I began to consider following his lead and placing my bets on the “don’t pass line.” It was obvious that the old man’s strategy was working better than ours.

When the Children of Their Fathers Push Back! • 31 Yet, like everyone else, I was loath to change, favoring, instead, the “unspoken rule” that Hawai`i players always bet with the dice. Later in my hotel room, as I contemplated my empty wallet (and that sickto-the-stomach feeling that attends the frivolous loss of a large sum of money), I wondered why I had not followed the old man’s lead. I thought back to the first roll that set the point at eight. I thought about the fact that there are more ways to make a seven than any other number and, as such, the odds are always in favor of a seven coming up before another eight. And, I thought about the dynamic that lay at the heart of my decision to let my bet stand according to the established “rule.” (Wong & Maaka, 2009)

The field of indigenous research and scholarship can be likened to Wong’s experience at the craps table. In spite of his knowing that the old man clearly had the more successful strategy, one that was aligned favorably with the odds, he continued to stay his course to Kalalau.6 It was simply easier to do so. The well-worn trail brought a sense of perverse comfort even though he knew he was headed for economic misfortune. It could be said that his need for “sameness” caused him to abandon his sense of logic. He was just too timid to join the old man in breaking a new trail. Recent developments in the field of indigenous research carry the promise that we, as indigenous peoples, might abandon that well-worn trail established by others and break a new one more fully capable of accommodating our senses of logic. Smith’s (1999) seminal text, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples, offers an option previously unavailable to indigenous peoples, an opportunity to create a framework that aligns more precisely with our sensibilities and our various worldviews, and, perhaps most critically, an “alternative” to the received notions of what constitutes scholarly investigation and the appropriate presentation of newly produced knowledge. By embarking on a trail of our own making, we transcend a state of mere conscientization and engage, instead, in transformative action (Smith, 2004). This state of conscientization is, by definition, static. Even as we experience the dynamics of motion that propel us along the well-worn trail, we wallow in static awareness, imprisoned by our inclination to conformity, and inability to effect change in the status quo. The mere realization that we are shackled to someone else’s model of scholarship even as we recognize the ample endowment of our own ways of knowledge production is not sufficient. If we fail to engage in transformative action, we effectively concede as legitimate the role of others in determining, in our stead, the parameters of good scholarship. Each step on the well-worn trail serves to further entrench our notions of legitimate scholarship. We are comforted by the perceived acceptance we receive from those others for conforming to their rules, and we are seduced by the idea that we can be like them. Breaking trail, on the other hand, represents a much more rigorous option,

32 • M. J. MAAKA, K. L. WONG, & K. R. K. OLIVEIRA

one fraught with trepidation and the insecurity of unfamiliarity. It offers little comfort other than the knowledge that it is of our own making and the hope that, somewhere in the process, we might reconnect with the trail frequently traveled by our ancestors.7 The issue of rigor often arises in situations involving academic insubordination. In attempting to deviate from the norms established by a dominant group, an (in)subordinate group is often perceived as either deficient in the basic abilities necessary to assimilate, or simply lazy and unwilling to take on the rigors associated with executing “normal” procedures. In reality, objections to such deviation reveal the real agenda of the dominant group, that is, their concern with an impending loss of control over the subaltern and their obsession with maintaining the level of prestige accorded to them via some sense of perceived superiority. In reality, breaking trail is a counter-hegemonic move that disrupts the sense of normalcy in dominate/subordinate relationships. Such a move brings with it the turbulence of contention and the anxiety associated with instability in the status quo. As Fanon (1963) puts it, “National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the heading used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon” (p. 35). We can expand the coverage of Fanon’s point here to include any disruption in the status quo. This is also a violent phenomenon because it precipitates turbulence and anxiety. And, although much more effort must be spent in breaking in a new trail than following one that is well established, the violence associated with the disruption of the status quo is what really makes breaking trail such hard work. From this perspective, questions concerning the rigor involved when indigenous peoples seek to exercise academic self-determination can seem quite ludicrous. The old man who chose to deviate from the “standard” betting patterns at the craps table wasn’t working any less rigorously than anyone else. In fact, he was risking more on each coming out roll than anyone else at the table. He could have easily lost all his money if a “hot” roller had come along. In fact, his trail was much more difficult to traverse because he carried the extra burden of bearing up to social pressures that the rest of us were unwilling to bear. Indigenous researches of real worth are those who boldly break new trails by challenging both the received notions of legitimate research as well as the received knowledge that derives from such research. As indigenous peoples, we have all grappled with the notion of what constitutes research, what constitutes the language of research, and who are deemed authorities. We have been educated (lead) to believe that real research must be conducted in a certain way, in a certain language, and must boast a certain pedigree of authority. Fully aware of this, and fully aware of the risks, many of our foremost indigenous researchers have begun to engage in the more

When the Children of Their Fathers Push Back! • 33

rigorous challenge of deviating from the status quo by breaking new trails. They have chosen to expand the parameters of research by employing techniques that depart from the received norms, and have done so with intent, for the very fact that such techniques work well for their own purposes. They have chosen to present their findings in the languages best suited to accommodate themselves and their audiences, and they have chosen to expand the received notion of “authority” to include unconventional references who, despite their lack of recognition in the academy, are nonetheless authorities from an indigenous perspective. It is they who carry the knowledge that is germane to the particular topics of research in which we tend to engage. The conscious choice to break trail represents an assertion of academic self-determination. For those of us who descend from oral cultures, wherein story telling and other oral genres are critical media for facilitating the widespread dissemination as well as the intergenerational transfer of knowledge, it makes perfect sense to present our observations and findings through these media. Furthermore, there is no underlying expectation that every point made in a story be corroborated by some authority in order to ensure its accuracy. There is, in fact, no expectation that every point be clearly explicated as a point. Thus, in the shift to writing as a medium for the expression of our stories, why should we be burdened by such expectations? In Hawaiian oral tradition, our principle medium for the production, dissemination, and perpetuation of knowledge, the existence of kaona (hidden meaning) is quite ubiquitous. It should not be surprising then, that the use of kaona in the creation of our stories is also ubiquitous. Knowledge is not simply handed over. There must be some effort on the part of the seeker of knowledge to extract meaning from messages intentionally designed to be cryptic. This is Hawaiian rigor. Moreover, not everyone has the right to access knowledge. One must be proven worthy of the kuleana (responsibility) that is affixed to the custodianship of knowledge. This is also Hawaiian rigor! For indigenous peoples, the dissemination and perpetuation of knowledge through stories is a natural process. It does constitute legitimate research. It is, in fact, scholarly. The moment we are told otherwise, that is our cue to break trail. Along with received notions of what constitutes legitimate research is the received notion that indigenous languages are somehow inadequate to the task of presenting scholarly ideas. English, of course, has been anointed as ~ the truth, the light, and the way. Ngugi~ wa Thiong’o, in a speech given at the Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium (2009), emphasized an important point about languages. All languages are capable of conveying knowledge. English does not have a monopoly on this capability. The recent trend that sees Hawaiian researchers (Solis, 2009; Wong, 2006, 2009) writing in `Olelo Hawai`i—without translation provided—makes a powerful

34 • M. J. MAAKA, K. L. WONG, & K. R. K. OLIVEIRA

statement in the indigenous language revitalization movement. It is probably unnecessary to identify the language through which such translation might have been rendered. It is possibly to simply say “without translation” and English would be the automatic assumption. Why is this so? There is an ~~ ideology of English that assumes the opposite of Ngugi’s claim. It assumes a hegemonic relationship amongst English and indigenous languages. This ideology is reinforced by the fact that English represents the well-worn trail. Indigenous languages; particularly Hawaiian, which had reached the moribund stage; have become uncharted territory. As such, the articles written in Hawaiian represent trail-breaking endeavors. There are a number of issues relating to choice of language in the presentation of research. In particular, we must consider the purposes for which such research is conducted (Smith, 1999). Much of the work in Hawaiian is ultimately conducted in order to revitalize Hawaiian as a viable medium of communicative interaction in all domains. The expansion of domains being critical to this effort, breaking trail entails asserting the use of indigenous languages in domains from which they have previously been excluded. The area of research being just one of these, any in-roads made into the academic arena constitute significant advancement of this cause. The benefits are tremendous at all levels from the practical to the symbolic. The opportunity to articulate complex theoretical concepts and the development of the language to accommodate this are just the beginning. The creation of a new body of literature written from an indigenous perspective opens up numerous options for indigenous research conducted both on and in the language. It not only expands the field of inquiry but also expands the possible perspectives from which the issues can be observed and analyzed. At the symbolic level, it elevates the status of our indigenous languages allowing them and their speakers to stand on even ground, shoulder to shoulder with our oppressors. It allows us to say to them, “Ho‘okahi no kulana o kakou. ‘A‘ohe wehena i laila!” The limitation to this position resides in the limited reach our languages enjoy at the moment. Years, decades, and even centuries of indoctrination in the ideology of English have taken their toll. We are currently in a rebuilding phase, looking to expand our audience, our political base, our share of the market. Until this happens, there will continue to be an opportunity cost associated with abandoning English and using, in its place, our own indigenous languages to convey knowledge. By doing so, we forfeit the ability to deliver our message to the broadest possible audience. Furthermore, as we assert our linguistic self-determination, we visit collateral damage upon our own people who, unable to access this knowledge, are excluded from participation. It might be argued that translation would alleviate the pain, but the pain is only a symptom of the underlying problem. We have been prevented from speaking our own heritage languages and we

When the Children of Their Fathers Push Back! • 35

have become accustomed to the well-worn trail of English. Providing access to our indigenous knowledge through English merely serves to solidify the status of English as the trail of choice, the more comfortable option. There is no hacking around in the undergrowth to deal with. At the symbolic level, reliance on English to convey meaning relegates Hawaiian to mere ceremonial status and suggests that it is truly inadequate to the task of conducting and disseminating research. There is no lack of rigor in choosing Hawaiian as the medium within which we conduct and disseminate our research. The disconnect we experience as we struggle to regain competence in Hawaiian and the inability to prevent collateral damage as we engage in that struggle make Hawaiian a very difficult choice. Breaking trail is not for the faint of heart. But please do try it at home! Finally, there are received notions as to who qualifies as the voice of authority in research. Whose voice acts as the final arbiter of quality in the assessment of our research? Whose opinions count in corroborating/challenging our findings? Who counts as an “expert in the field”? And more importantly, who says who says? It is expected that we reference certain “experts” who have done seminal work in their fields, even when those fields are us! It is also expected that we publish our work in certain journals that can boast of low acceptance rates. And whose expectations are these anyway? How did they come to be and what do they have to do with our purposes? Were indigenous peoples consulted on this? The problem is that, in indigenous research on topics of interest to and projects that benefit indigenous peoples, the “experts” are not necessarily recognized by the abbreviations appended to their names. They are not necessarily widely published and they do not necessarily consult published material in search of knowledge. They often come to know what they know simply by doing, as opposed to interviewing others about doing. And finally, our experts are not recognized as experts by those researchers who frequent the well-worn trail. There is a certain irony in the received ways of recognizing authority. If an indigenous scholar should relate a personal anecdote to illustrate a point that supports his or her hypothesis, this is often not considered legitimate research. If, however, a non-indigenous researcher should collect the same story in an interview and publish it in a prestigious journal, suddenly it is considered real data and real research. Fortunately for indigenous peoples, we are beginning to listen to the prophetic words of our forefathers and push back against the forces of assimilation. We do so by first recognizing the value in the knowledge produced by our own people and then by exercising agency over our situation by reversing the inclination to be complicit in our own assimilation. This is not a comfortable choice to make. We are compelled to defend our knowledge—in the academy, in the boardroom, in court, and in many other competitive domains. We are disadvantaged

36 • M. J. MAAKA, K. L. WONG, & K. R. K. OLIVEIRA

when we apply for positions, contract renewals, tenure and promotions, and performance-based research fund rankings. Breaking trail is clearly a more rigorous endeavor than conforming to a received notion of authority. It is nevertheless a worthwhile endeavor because once broken, the trail becomes easier to travel the next time through. The new methods become normalized and, eventually, accepted as legitimate by both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Like the old man who chose to buck the “rules” in Las Vegas, we will have better odds, too, if we elect to break trail. We submit that if we fail to break trail we succeed only in breaking wind. Pipi holo ka ‘amo! (Sorry, no translation available.)

NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

Maka‘u wawae is a Hawaiian ‘olelo no‘eau, or wise saying, that may be translated as “feared by the feet”. Pukui (2001, p. 229. #2102) further explains that this is “said of excreta—unpleasant to step on.” For many indigenous peoples, this wise saying succinctly describes our experiences with foreigners or “others” whose agendas have not included our wellbeing. Aritaku Maaka was co-author Margaret Maaka’s grandfather. The co-authors are grateful to Maaka’s cousin Bradford Haami for the research he conducted in writing his book, Dr Golan Maaka: Maori doctor (1995). Haami cites this waiata on p. 59. The waiata and associated commentary are from Maaka’s (2004) article published in Educational Perspectives, 37(1), 3–13. Permission to reprint these extracts was received from the editor. He pipi te tuatahi, he kaunuku te tuarua may be translated as “First the small entering wedge, second the large splitting wedge.” This saying refers to a method of splitting a tree trunk. As a metaphor it stands for the process by which a small group gains strength and grows to the point at which it can challenge the previously dominant force (Mead & Grove, 2001, p. 109). Self-determination and agency are used interchangeably throughout this article. This section is adapted from Wong and Maaka’s foreword (2009) in AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 5(2), 6–13. The personal story of the old man at the craps table is recounted by Wong. Permission to reprint was received from the editor. Kalalau is a trail along the rugged Na Pali Coast on the island of Kaua‘i in Hawai`i. Many of the Hawaiian expressions mentioning

When the Children of Their Fathers Push Back! • 37

7.

Kalalau engage in word-play with “lalau” or to wander astray. Pukui (1983, p. 52, #419) documents the amusing ‘olelo no‘eau: Hala i Kaua‘i i Kalalau. It is translated as ‘Gone to Kalalau, on Kaua‘i. Said of one who is off-course mentally or is off gadding somewhere; a blunderer.’ This idea is derived from the ‘olelo no‘eau: Na wai ho‘i ka ‘ole o ke akamai, he alanui i ma‘a i ka hele ‘ia e o‘u mau makua (Pukui 1983, p. 251, #2301). It is translated as ‘Why shouldn’t I know, when it is a road often traveled by my parents (ibid.).’ This was the response of Liholiho when he was praised for his wisdom. See also Oliveira (2006). REFERENCES

Bishop, R. (1996). Addressing issues of self-determination and legitimation in Kaupapa Maori research. In B. Webber (Ed.), He Paepae Korero: Research Perspectives in Maori Education. Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Durie, M. H. (1998). Te Mana, Te Kawanatanga: The politics of Maori self-determination. Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University Press. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury. Haami, B. (1995). Dr. Golan Maaka: Maori doctor. Auckland, New Zealand: Tandem Press. Jackson, M. (1999). Research and the colonization of Maori knowledge. In Proceedings of the Te Oru Rangahau: Maori Research and Development Conference (pp. 70– 77). New Zealand: Massey University. Kekuanaoa, M. (1862). Bienniel report of the President of the Board of Education to the Legislature of 1862. Honolulu, Hawaii: Hawaiian Government. Maaka, M. J. (2004). E kua takoto te manuka tutahi: Decolonization, self-determination, and education. Educational Perspectives, 37(1), 3–13. Mead, H. M., & Grove, N. (2001). Nga pepeha a nga tipuna. Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press. National Organizing Committee of the World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education. (1993). The Coolangatta statement on Indigenous peoples rights in education. Coolangatta, Australia. ~ ~ w. T. (2009). From the margins of power: Conversation among the indigNgugi, enous. Paper presented at the 16th Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium, Arizona University, Phoenix, AZ. Olelo Hawaii. (1917, January 26). Ka Puuhonua o na Hawaii. Oliveira, K. R. K. (2006). Ke alanui kike‘eke‘e o Maui: Na wai ka ‘ole o ke akamai, He alanui i ma‘a i ka hele ‘ia e o‘u mau makua (Doctoral Dissertation). University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Hawai`i. Pukui, M. K. (1983). ‘Olelo no‘eau: Hawaiian proverbs and poetical sayings. Honolulu, HI: Bishop Museum Press.

38 • M. J. MAAKA, K. L. WONG, & K. R. K. OLIVEIRA Rigney, L-I. (1999). Internationalization of an indigenous anticolonial cultural critique of research methodologies: A guide to indigenist research methodology and its principles. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Royal, T. C. (1999). Te Ao Marama: A research paradigm. In Proceedings of the Te Oru Rangahau: Maori Research and Development Conference, New Zealand (pp. 78–86). New Zealand: Massey University. Smith, G. H. (2004). Mai i te maramatanga, ki te putanga mai o te tahuritanga: From conscientization to transformation. Educational Perspectives, 37(1), 46–52. Smith, L. T. (1992). The dilemma of a Maori academic. Paper presented at the joint meeting of the New Zealand Association for Research in Education/Australian Association for Research in Education, Geelong, Australia. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books Ltd. Solis, R. D. (2009). A kau aku i na mamo. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 5(2), 174–187. Wong, K. L. (2006). Kuhi aku, kuhi mai, kuhi hewa e: He mau loina kuhikuhi ‘akena no ka ‘olelo Hawai`i (Doctoral Dissertation). University of Hawai`i at Manoa, Hawai`i. Wong, K. L. (2009). Huli ka lima i lalo a kaomi i ke pihi. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 5(2), 14–27. Wong, K. L., & Maaka, M. J. (2009). Foreword: Breaking trail or breaking wind? AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 5(2), 6–13.

CHAPTER 3

IN THE NAME OF THE CHILD “Best Interest” Analysis and the Power of Legal Language Susan Hippensteele

INTRODUCTION I first became interested in the intersection of language, power, and law as a young academic studying appellate and Supreme Court decisions relating to sexual harassment and employment discrimination. My early research examined the distance between legal definitions of harassment and victims’ experience based definitions and through my work as in house advocate for victims of discrimination at the University of Hawai’i at M noa, I learned quickly the power of the former to influence the latter. Over the course of eight years I worked with hundreds of students and employees of the University who sought validation of their experiences of harassment, discrimination, and assault through self and group talk therapy, grievance processes, and in a few cases litigation. I began studying campus ethnoviolence as a means of obtaining an empirical base for understanding how individuals in a multiethnic campus community frame Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 39–59 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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and define these types of experiences. That research examined what is now called intersectional discrimination, i.e., discrimination that is perceived by victims as targeting more than one protected class basis (race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability) and showed that, in contrast to the way discrimination law and social policy had evolved to that point, most students at the University of Hawai’i who experienced discrimination believed they were targeted because of more than one identity factor (e.g., ethnicity/sex or ethnicity/sexual orientation, and so forth). Later, as a practicing attorney, I became concerned not with contributing to the empirical base in the area of civil rights enforcement, but rather with the specific and unique intersections of language, power, and law my clients were navigating in the courts. Most of my legal advocacy work was with overlapping groups of clients commonly referred to as “underrepresented,” due to the difficulty they often face in obtaining legal representation: transgendered Native Hawaiian women, low-income victims of domestic violence, and lesbian parents. My clients were primarily in family court, although issues of parenting and parent-child relationships also emerged in other types of cases, as I will discuss further below. Most of my clients faced numerous obstacles within the legal system, including lack of access, language and cultural barriers, bias from court officials, and lack of familiarity with judicial and quasi-judicial processes. Clients’ own framing of their legal problems placed them outside the narrative framework courts typically recognized, further marginalizing their experiences and limiting their access to justice. Valli Kalei Kanuha (2006) has written extensively about the impact multiple forms of oppression has on women of color seeking to address violence in their lives. Her work has been instrumental in helping academics and legal practitioners unpack the paradigmatic limitations of domestic violence intervention and response protocols; many of the conceptual and structural problems Kanuha identified are analogous to those present in the broader legal arena where intersectional identity factors may significantly impact the experiences of litigants who engage, voluntarily or otherwise, with the U.S. legal system.1 This chapter examines how societal attitudes have influenced the development and interpretation of the legal meaning of “parent” and “family” in cases involving gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) parents. It explores judicial discretion in family law, focusing on application of standards for “best interest” analysis that both sharply focus the relevance of cultural milieu of families and fail to recognize the contemporary cultural reality of families and parent-child relationships involving GLBT parents and their children. It further shows how legal discourse frames and limits definitions of family and the degree to which evocation of traditional stan-

In the Name of the Child • 41

dards in family law, whose meanings are often taken for granted but which are “notoriously indeterminate” and vague (Richman, 2002), serve to deny GLBT parents custody and sometimes even visitation with their children. It concludes that a “best interest” analysis evoking parents’ gender identity and/or sexuality without foregrounding the precise contours of the parentchild relationship fails the basic test of that standard. GLBT FAMILIES IN HAWAII There are no data that show detriment to children raised by GLBT parents, despite an increasing body of literature on the topic. Same sex couples, along with single gays and lesbians, have always raised children but the rise in reproductive technologies during the past three decades means they are doing so in ever increasing numbers (Byrn, 2007). Evidence of the Gayby Boom is readily apparent although precise estimates of the number of children living with GLBT parents remain elusive.2 Only six states expressly forbid same-sex couples or those involved with a person of the same sex to adopt children.3 Yet even where same-sex adoption (referred to as “co-parent” adoption in some jurisdictions including Hawai’i) often occurs without incident, the numbers suggest that samesex parents usually rely on informal relational bonds rather than legal bonds when forming their families. For example, 2005 data suggest that in Hawai’i, of an estimated 3262 same-sex couples, 1200 are raising children under the age of 18. Yet only around 95 children have been legally adopted by GLBT parents (Smith, 2008). There are many possible reasons for this finding, including lack of access to legal representation and preference for culturally relevant parenting relationships such as hanai.4 But my experience representing prospective co-parents suggests that alienation from the legal system, where parties’ legal subjectivity may be questioned and their self-constructed sexual and parental identities are vulnerable to reinterpretation by judges (Richman, 2002), has contributed to a climate in which most GLBT parents perceive the courts as riskier and more unstable than maintaining de facto (as opposed to de jure) parental status. Linda Ikeda-Vogel’s groundbreaking study of the family formation among transgendered individuals in Hawai`i found that many adult transgendered people raise their own and/or their partners’ biological children as well as “drag children,”5 without the benefit of formal legally established parenting relationships (2008). And while transgendered people often share and/or assume responsibility for younger siblings and other biological relatives as well, legal issues relating to their roles as de facto parents tend to emerge in criminal, rather than in family court cases, as will be discussed further below. Because societal definitions of “parent” and “family” do not yet accommodate intersections of sexuality and family that disrupt standard dichotomies and existing mutually exclusive categories, “homosexual par-

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ent” remains a contradiction in terms, and the added dimension of sexgender nonconformity further complicates the judicial task of identifying transgender parents as legitimate legal subjects. As has been the case with GLBT parenting cases, judges hearing cases involving transgendered parents must either redefine the meaning of existing legal categories of “parent” and “family” or create new ones (Richman, 2002). CHILD CUSTODY AND THE RIGHT TO PARENT: THE LEGAL BACKDROP There are two primary approaches courts use when making a custody determination involving GLBT biological parents (Orakwusi, 2007). The nexus approach, implemented by roughly half of U.S. states, including Hawai`i,6 posits that a parents’ sexual orientation or gender status is relevant to a custody determination only if it is shown to harm the child. Only the District of Columbia, which uses the nexus test, statutorily prohibits a court from using a parents’ sexual orientation or gender identity as the sole basis for denying child custody or visitation.7 The per se approach, adopted by far fewer jurisdictions, presumes that a GLBT parents’ sexual orientation or gender identity is adverse to the “best interest” of the child (Orakwusi, 2007). In jurisdictions that have adopted the per se approach, courts rely exclusively on a GLBT parents’ sexual orientation or gender identity in making a best interest determination, regardless of other potentially relevant circumstances (Huff, 2001). Yet while the emerging trend in case law is to consider homosexual conduct irrelevant to custody or visitation unless that conduct is determined to be harmful to the child, rights discourse in custody cases involving GLBT parents remains intimately connected to status, access, and inclusion outside the courtroom and evidence that sexual minority parents must frame their parenting stories to fit within traditional judicial schema about parents and children continues to mount. Parents of a child born within a marriage enjoy the full range of legal rights and responsibilities available under law unless the father is determined through paternity action not to be the natural father. Once paternity is established, whether by a natural father to a child born within the mother’s marriage to someone else, or where the mother was single at the time of the birth, the father obtains the full range of rights and responsibilities as a presumed father. Parent-child relationships are also established through adoption, where a child’s natural parents relinquish their rights or are no longer living. With a final adoption, a child is considered the “natural child” of the adoptive parents who become the legal parents of the child as if s/he had been born to them.

In the Name of the Child • 43

In some jurisdictions, stepparent relationships include obligations to support a child while the marriage lasts and the children reside with the stepparent. And although the stepparent may stand in loco parentis while married to a child’s natural parent, this relationship terminates upon divorce unless the stepparent has previously adopted the child. Sometimes someone other than the natural parent of a child can establish a parent-child relationship through the doctrine of in loco parentis by assuming the obligations of the natural parent after a natural parent has consented to, or is forced to, give another custody rights of a child. In such cases the natural parents’ legal rights are retained unless all parental rights are terminated. And unless parental rights of the natural parent are terminated (or the parent remains unfit to regain custody), the natural parent is entitled to regain full rights to the child at any time. New, and increasingly common, reproductive technologies have brought the rights of parental partners who are not natural parents of their partner’s children into sharp focus. Early cases involved artificial insemination by donor with married women whose husbands were infertile. The husband of a woman who becomes pregnant by artificial insemination is considered the natural and legal father of the child. However, it is increasingly common for unmarried women, both partnered and single, to become pregnant through artificial insemination. Whether an unmarried woman bears a child conceived by artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization (IVF), there is no second parent in the eyes of the law unless such parentage is expressly established. In general, laws establishing parentage with children conceived through reproductive technology give effect to the intentionality of parties to create a parentchild relationship. There are express provisions in the 2002 Uniform Parenting Act that limit a husband’s ability challenge his status as natural father of a child born through IVF; laws that define parent-child relationships for children conceived through reproductive technology also cut off legal rights of the genetic parents. The law favors the rights of natural parents over those of a partner, whether a stepparent or otherwise. A natural parent with custody of a child will only lose custody if proven unfit or if it is proven that continued custody will be detrimental to the child’s interests. The basis for the rights of natural parents reflects principles of constitutional law that give natural parents priority over any third person who might seek custody of the natural parent’s child. The rise in use of reproductive technology, and the laws that pertain to it, have contributed to an expanding definition of a parent that moves past the limitations carried forth from the biological link assumptions of earlier days. But while a GLBT person’s status as a natural parent is no different than that of a heterosexual parent, actual or perceived sexual orientation

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can have an effect on the custody and visitation rights of the natural parent, and the availability of rights to their partner if the person is deemed to be of the same sex. Where a former same-sex partner does not meet the statutory definition of a parent, courts will frequently conclude she or he does not have standing to raise a custody or visitation issue and subsequently has no claim to continued contact with a child—even if the former partner served as a parental figure to the child for an extended period of time. As with unmarried heterosexual partners, the former partner’s relationship with the child is contingent on their relationship with the natural parent. RIGHTS TALK AND GLBT HEADED FAMILIES Voluminous data reflect the growing presence of families that do not conform to the traditional image of married heterosexual father and mother with children born of the marriage,18 yet legal recognition of other parenting relationships has been slow to follow, and GLBT parents in particular face challenges when attempting to gain legal recognition of their parenting relationships with children. Professors John Conley and William O’Barr (2005) suggest that the U.S. legal system is grounded in principles of fairness and equal treatment. Equal protection statutes and caselaw precedents have been used to dismantle segregation and provide both substantive (outcome) and procedural due process rights in multiple arenas, including family law. Federal and state laws ensure that discrimination cannot be a basis for denying public benefits to citizens, prohibit discrimination in education and employment, and provide for fairness in jury selection and sentencing in criminal cases. Yet despite the strict assurances of fairness in application of laws in the U.S., many citizens continue to feel that the law does not treat them fairly (Conley & O’Barr, 2005). Language use by lawyers and judges (and others involved in the legal system) has been critiqued as unnecessary and exclusionary, and legal practitioners are often accused of invoking a club-like atmosphere in which the in-group (legal practitioners) knows the language and rules while the outgroup (clients and other lay people) does not. Law’s authority is further reinforced and legitimized through claims of objectivity (Conley & O’Barr, 2005). Language norms and socio-legal processes aimed at determining legal truths rely on an adversary process premised on the presumption that competition between opposing parties will introduce appropriate type and volume of evidence that will enable legal truths to emerge. Rules of evidence identify strict adherence to evaluating evidence objectively and ensuring that subjective biases from witnesses is excluded. Yet Conley and O’Barr suggest the logic of these rules; which includes strict adherence to legal precedent, relevance of evidence, protocols for the provision of testi-

In the Name of the Child • 45

mony in court, the taking of depositions, and admissibility of documents; often eludes clients and other laypeople. For average citizens, interactions they may have with lawyers and judges will seem more influential than the state, federal or even Supreme Court decisions that may serve as precedent for decisions in their cases, and may appear arbitrary (2005). My first exposure to the impact a lack of “judicial imagination”9 has on GLBT families occurred by chance. Waiting in court for a judge to hear my client’s case, I listened and watched as he questioned a Native Hawaiian mahuwahine (the Hawaiian term for a male to female transgendered person) who had been convicted of a non-drug related offense. The judge appeared confused by the defendant’s request for a suspended or weekendonly sentence. The defendant clearly and succinctly described her parental responsibilities for the pre-adolescent children she had been raising for several years. The judge expressed disbelief that the defendant was responsible for raising children, repeatedly asked where “the mother” was; he became visibly annoyed when the defendant insisted that she was the children’s mother. The defendant was sentenced, taken into custody, and was not provided time or opportunity to make alternative arrangements for her children’s care. Law’s authority is invoked daily through language behavior of police, lawyers, judges and others involved in the legal system (Gibbons, 2003). Professors Conley and O’Barr (2005) have theorized that average citizens feel uneasy about the fairness of law’s application because the details of legal practice—everyday exchanges of information through communication between lay people and legal practitioners—fail to accommodate the communication styles and needs of lay people. Their examinations of linguistic practice in divorce mediation, small claims court, and witness interviews across cultures have scrutinized the question of whether law is fundamentally biased—specifically whether patriarchal practices serve to reinforce power hierarchies and exclude those unfamiliar with the process and practices of legal disputing. The power of law and legal language is readily apparent than when evoked in parental rights cases. A de jure, or legal, parent’s right to care for and determine companionship of his or her children is considered fundamental and is guaranteed under the First, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires courts to apply rigorous protections for individual liberty interests before severing a parent-child relationship (Bell v. City of Milwaukee, 1984), and the liberty interest of de jure parents encompasses an interest in retaining custody of one’s children such that a state may not interfere with custodial rights absent due process protections (U.S. Constitution, Amendment XIV, 1, as cited in Chang, 2003, p. 655). Due process includes the right to “heightened protection against govern-

46 • SUSAN HIPPENSTEELE

mental interference” in exercising certain fundamental rights and liberty interests (Washington v. Glucksberg, 1997, as cited in Chang, 2003, p. 655); the Supreme Court has further recognized the longstanding liberty interest of de jure parents in the care, control and custody of their children (Stanley v. Illinois, 1972, as cited in Chang, 2003, p. 655). The right to raise children reflects 1. 2. 3.

parents’ interest in experiencing the joy and pain of childrearing, the child’s interest in being raised by those most likely to love them unconditionally, and the state’s interest in promoting a diverse and pluralistic society (Chang, 2003).

Even when blood relationships are fraught with difficulty, as when a parent is incarcerated or charged with abuse of a household member, de jure parents retain a fundamental interest in maintaining their formal legal relationship with their children; if anything, where a de jure parent is facing forced dissolution of parental rights, courts typically consider their need for procedural protections to be heightened (Santosky v. Kramer, 1982). In short, a de jure parent cannot be deprived of their parental rights without a showing of lack of fitness to parent, abandonment of a child, or other substantial neglect (In re U.P., 1982). But Tushnet (1984) argued that rights are also context specific and may be unevenly enforced; there can be unintended consequences when individual, unique experiences are converted to legal abstraction (Richman, 2005, p. 143). And because rights are contextual, their application in one context may not translate across the full array of social groups and problems that might appear logical to lay people. In particular, rather than serving as generalizable mechanisms for assuring equal application of law, a discourse of rights may actually limit the effectiveness of challenges to structural inequalities for systematically disadvantaged groups (Johnson & Kuttner, 2001) The language of rights and rights analysis has been important to GLBT, just as it has to other minorities and to women—although significantly less successful in the GLBT arena. According to Richman (2005), rights represent a means of achieving what others are perceived to have, and their deployment has resulted in significant progress toward social attitudes more accepting of civil rights and non-discrimination policies protecting minorities, including GLBT in some instances. Notably, GLBT rights are unique in that certain rights are being attained largely in the absence of statutory “protected class” status of other groups (Goldberg-Hiller, 2001). Rights discourse in the context of family law is very complex, especially for GLBT individuals. Maine’s (1917) early 20th century assertion that the evolution of modern law reflects a progression from familial status to in-

In the Name of the Child • 47

dividual contract reflects a common perception lay people have about the individual rights and what they should be able to achieve by asserting them, and illuminates the unique challenges that emerge for sexual minorities in the family law arena, where arguments that rights should not be conferred on the basis of family status but instead on one’s status as an individual citizen (Goldberg-Hiller, 2005) are often subordinated to the family as the unit of analysis. The landscape and language of rights analysis, therefore, can be treacherous when deployed by GLBT litigants whose family units challenge tradition notions of family and the individual subjective belief systems judges and experts hold about what family structures correlate with a “best interest”11 of the child—the analysis that typically determines the outcome of a child custody case. Perhaps the most compelling examples of the degree to which linguistic norms can service legal hierarchies come in the form of courtroom exchanges where credibility determinations of parties are influenced by broadly accepted societal bias. Consistent with the conclusion of Conley and O’Barr (2005) that linguistic style and practice can be a crucial to the outcome of a case, Richman (2002) suggests the use of expert testimony that supports the common societal presumption that homosexual conduct equates with unfitness to parent can weigh heavily in courtrooms where judges routinely define and evaluate concepts such a “parent” and “family.” Experts’ framing of sexual identities as, for example, a “state of lesbianism,” focuses a judge’s attention on an aspect of a parent’s conduct that, in cases involving heterosexual parents, would be deemed irrelevant, and subordinates the quality of relationship between a parent and a child (Carnahan, 2004). A GLBT parent must then respond to queries that posit their “choice” to engage in homosexual conduct against their child’s perceived “right” not to be exposed to homosexuality. Credibility outcomes in such instances will weigh heavily in favor of witnesses, expert or otherwise, who reinforce and support judicial predilection to conform GLBT parent selfidentity formation to public or social delineations of legal identity (Richman, 2002). A significant challenge to individual rights arguments of GLBT parents is the framing of children as individuals whose rights must be protected in custody matters, rather than members of family units with connections to family members that warrant protection (Fineman, 1989). Framing individual rights in this manner exposes GLBT families to subjective analyses that legitimize consideration of parents’ gender status or sexual orientation as relevant to a court’s determination of the “best interest” of children by validating societal bias. In many instances, the expanding rhetoric of children’s rights has been used to limit or sever rights of GLBT parents to their children (Richman, 2005).

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Custody battles involving children of GLBT parents do, however, continue to revolve around issues of rights: rights of parents, rights of children, rights of sexual minorities as citizens, rights to privacy, rights to due process (Richman, 2002). Where children of GLBT people are involved, especially where intersectional identity is also in play, issues atypical and even irrelevant for child custody cases generally—issues of parental identity, parents’ sexual practice, social class, cultural practice, and community morals—buttress and justify decisions that conflict with the well established constitutional right to parent established by the U.S. Supreme Court (see discussion above). The framing of these cases as challenges to traditional rights analyses in family law raises important questions that reveal both the progress and continuing controversy of rights discourse as a strategy in arguing both for, and against, the legal viability of non-traditional family formation.12 Unfortunately, judicial opinions pertaining to GLBT parenting have often reflected judicial preoccupation with what goes on in people’s bedrooms, and what’s in their pants, rather than the contours of GLBT parents’ relationships with their children. That GLBT parents’ sexual identity and practices continue to influence determinations of child custody provides support for the perception, at least among GLBT parents, that application of law is biased and unfair. “BEST INTEREST OF THE CHILD” ANALYSIS: GLBT PARENTS IN HAWAI’I The question of law’s fairness continues to confound legal scholars, practitioners and lay people in family law, as elsewhere (Conley & O’Barr, 2005). There are no published cases in Hawai’i involving GLBT parents asserting custody of natural or other children, however anecdotal data show that Hawai’i courts, like others around the U.S., have been preoccupied with the nature of the relationship between GLBT parents rather than with the parents’ relationship(s) with their children. The first co-parent adoption granted in Hawai’i involved a local attorney and her partner who eventually adopted three children. Their bitter breakup helped convince some judges that it wasn’t wise to grant co-parent adoptions when there was no calendar13 or legal precedent built to handle custody disputes that might arise if the relationship ended (Smith, 2008). A later case began with the adoption of a child conceived through invitro fertilization within a lesbian partnership to the birth mother who gave up her de jure parental rights to her son so that the non-birth mother could obtain de jure parent status. (The barrier the couple was trying to overcome was the court’s position that a child could not have two mothers.) That couple was later granted co-guardianship after being told by the court that it would not grant a petition for co-parent adoption were they to file. In other words, the court was willing to grant two women guardianship status

In the Name of the Child • 49

of a child but remained unwilling to extend the definition of “family” to include a child with two parents of the same sex. The couple’s co-guardianship stood until sentiment among family court judges shifted again and a co-parent adoption for another couple that had been fully briefed by their attorneys was granted. The biological mother with co-guardianship then petitioned for, and was granted, a co-parent adoption of her biological son.14 These cases illuminate the complexities faced by GLBT parents attempting to redefine “family,” as well as their dependency on the predilections of individual judges. EVOLVING FAMILY LAW ANALYSIS: GLBT PARENTING CASES There are many reasons families come within the jurisdiction of courts: paternity, petitions for child support, status or criminal offences by a minor child, abuse of a household member, and divorce are just a few. Yet where the parenting rights of GLBT persons are at issue, legal language often serves as a vehicle for limiting self-identity formation by exercising versions of morality that do violence to social contracts otherwise implicit in family law. For family law attorneys representing GLBT parents, the framing of a custody case (i.e. telling the story of dispute within the family) is critical to the outcome of a case. In most custody cases, application of relevant best interest criteria is fairly predictable. For example, where family violence is an issue, a parent seeking sole custody because the other parent is abusive must provide evidence of abuse and (sometimes) the specific harm witnessing or experiencing violence has on a child.15 Where family violence is not an issue but custody is in dispute, the history of each parent’s relationship and involvement with a child, along with evidence of future ability to meet the obligations of parenting (and in the case of adolescents the child’s own preference) are relevant. In typical cases the practical implications of these standards means that the most compelling evidence for determining an appropriate custody/visitation schedule will be the contours of parent-child relationships. These analyses, in the case of heterosexual parents, assume fitness of both parents. As discussed previously, numerous questions based on societal bias are likely to influence a judge’s determination of the inherent fitness of GLBT parents. When a judge believes there is a basis for questioning a GLBT parent’s fitness because of the sexual or gender identity, courtroom dynamics and determinations of relevancy of evidence are destabilized. Morals-based claims typically involve allegations of substance abuse, illegal activity, or infidelity. A parent against whom a morals charge has been levied may respond with evidence refuting the charge, showing (as in the case of substance abuse) that a previous problem has been resolved, or

50 • SUSAN HIPPENSTEELE

by challenging relevance (as in the case of infidelity). But GLBT parents face unique morals challenges in child custody cases. Moreover, Borash and Lipton (2001) argue convincingly that the outcome of claims and defenses when moral allegations are levied against mothers are likely to be influenced by moral proscription stemming from the western practice of men using heterosexual monogamy as a tool for asserting rights over women.56 And since many GLBT parent-child relationships are formed outside the customary legal structures courts (and attorneys) typically work within, judicial discretion in evaluating the best interest of children need not accommodate the constitutional due process protections legal parents enjoy.57 As a result, the presumption of the right to parent that serves as backdrop for custody battles between two biological parents is not in play. The absence of protections for GLBT parents creates numerous problems in custody disputes of all types that litigants and their attorneys must try to overcome. Most significantly for purposes of this chapter, without the underlying presumption of right to parent or a body of caselaw delineating GLBT parental rights, a de facto parent will literally be at the mercy of a judge’s discretion and must take into account a judge’s individual attitudes regarding GLBT sexuality and parenting. And while a judge in such a case will likely investigate a range of personal and lifestyle issues about which heterosexual parents are not queried, interactions between the judge and GLBT parent(s) may also be influenced by the litigant’s hesitancy to disclose facts s/he believes might reinforce societal and judicial bias. As in any legal proceeding, a party who displays insecurity, evasiveness, or anger while testifying will not be viewed as credible. Here, where a judge is likely to be influenced by societal bias about GLBT parents, the outcome may well be detrimental to the “best interest” of a child. Transgender parenting cases are particularly troubling because plaintiffs must challenge traditional (and generally uninformed) conceptions of sex and gender when seeking custody or visitation with their biological or other children (Chang, 2003). Kantaras v. Kantaras (2004) involved child custody in the context of the dissolution of a transsexual marriage. Following precedent, the Florida court in Kantaras first ruled on the validity of the Kantaras’ marriage then awarded primary custody to Michael (the transsexual partner) on evidence that Linda had anger problems, had violated court orders, and had interfered with Michael’s visitation. But Linda appealed the case and the appellate court later determined the Kantaras marriage was invalid. The case records show ample evidence of the confusion surrounding questions of gender and sex which transsexuals pose for society. The appellate court opined that Michael’s custody was dependant on the trial court’s conclusion that the marriage was valid, and despite the fact that the lower court had granted custody to Michael based on a “best interest of the child” analysis, that determination was jeopardized by the appellate

In the Name of the Child • 51

court’s decision that two people born the same sex, even if one of them later changed sex, could not marry. Cases involving transgender parents may arise after a biological parent has transitioned from one gender to another or where children were born or adopted into a marriage that includes a transgender person. Legal recognition of changed gender and, in some cases the validity of marriages involving a transgender person, remain necessary precursors to legal affirmation of a transgendered parent’s rights. Few such cases have resulted in reported decisions in the U.S., and the lack of precedent and ignorance regarding transgenderism has contributed to an existing opinions denying custody and/or visitation and even terminating parental rights (Chang, 2003). Of critical importance to transgender parent cases is a state’s definition and interpretation of “sex,” which implicates whether a state will recognize a reissued birth certificate that reflects the “new” sex of a post-operative transgender person. In general, states that do not provide for changing sex on a new birth certificate will not recognize a reissued birth certificate from another state and will invalidate marriages performed where postoperative transgendered people can legally marry someone of their same birth sex. New York, Ohio, Texas, and Florida have expressly determined that a sex-change operation is not valid to satisfy the legal intentionality of marriage, while New York and California courts have held that birth certificates acquired post-surgically to reflect changed sex are valid (Kitamura, 2005). New Jersey was the first state to establish that marriage between a post-operative transgendered person and a person of their same birth sex is valid.17 At present, cases upholding transgender marriage have concluded that sex and gender are separate. Kitamura (2005) suggests this linguistic distinction is crucial and clears the way for decisions regarding custody and visitation to be determined as they would absent a sex/gender controversy and (theoretically) providing married transgender parents the same custody rights as other married parents. SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND CIVIL UNIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR CHILD CUSTODY Until courts and legislatures in all jurisdictions conform in their definitions of “marriage,” divorce and parentage laws will not provide structured legal protection for GLBT parents and their children (Graham, 2008). As mentioned previously, if a child is born to a married woman cohabiting with her husband, the husband is presumed to be the natural father of the child unless another man is legally established, through paternity tests, to be the natural father. Unmarried heterosexual couples can readily establish legal parentage for the father through a standard paternity action.

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Establishing parentage for unwed GLBT couples is far more complex. The child’s relationship to their birth mother relies on the fact of that birth, but if she is partnered with a woman and unmarried, there is no vehicle for identifying the partner as the second parent to the child. And even if a GLBT couple marries and has a child, and that child is legally identified as having two parents of the same sex in that jurisdiction, it remains unclear whether the non-biological parent’s legal status in relation to their partner and/or children will be honored in jurisdictions that do not recognize their union. A non-biological parent may have no legal rights if the couple separates unless s/he has been able to adopt the child. Yet while most states do not recognize rights of same sex partners as comparable to those that flow from marriage, an increasing number (currently Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, California, D.C., and New York) do provide same-sex marriage or a legal status for same-sex couples analogous to marriage. Four more states, Colorado, Maryland, Wisconsin, and Hawai’i, provide limited recognition and rights to same-sex couples. Where civil unions are available to same-sex couples, it is likely courts will grant an analogous presumption of parentage to any child born during the union. Still, while only a handful of these cases have reached the appellate level, most have not relied on same-sex marriage or civil union statutes when granting custody rights to a former same-sex partner. One recent Vermont case, Miller-Jenkins v. Miller-Jenkins (2006) did consider the rights of a non-biological parent seeking visitation, which she claimed arose from her status as a civil union partner. While the court ruled that the legislative purpose for enacting civil unions was to give “legal equality” to civil union partners vis-à-vis a marriage partner, it also ruled that parenthood is established without relying on the presumption of natural parentage triggered by either marriage or civil union law, instead relying on equitable theories that the parties had unequivocally intended, by virtue of the facts in the case, to become parents together. While this outcome is important, it reflects only a small step in the evolution of the definitions of “family” and “parent” so critical to GLBT custody cases and “best interest” analyses. NEXT STEPS: GENDER, SEX, AND THE GLBT FAMILY The concepts of parents and family are in transition (Graham, 2008). The growing trend in case law is to consider homosexual conduct irrelevant to custody or visitation unless that conduct is determined to be harmful to the child. In an increasing number of jurisdictions the same “best standard” analysis is applied for homosexual or heterosexual. Yet while significant advances have been made in courts and legislatures, custody decisions in cases involving GLBT parents have been inconsistent and the legal terrain remains highly unstable.

In the Name of the Child • 53

Written opinions in GLBT parent custody cases increasingly acknowledge that a legal parent will often not be a biological parent of a child and courts that recognize GLBT parental rights utilize theories that recognize unique contours of parent-child relationships and the strength of emotional bonds as part of “best interest” analysis. Drawing from diverse cases involving children’s rights, some courts have determined that children may not be penalized by the conduct of their parents (Plyler v. Doe, 1982). It follows then that children born to same-sex and transsexual parents should not be punished by legal restrictions that would deny them the benefit of having two parents. Although the applicability of rights analysis in a child custody context is often connected to status, access, and inclusion outside the courtroom (Richman, 2005), many GLBT advocates continue to frame sexual minority parenting issues as inherently constitutional since restrictions of parental rights of GLBT parents implicates the fundamental right to parent (i.e., equal protection analysis). But while Palmore v. Sidoti (1984), a case in which race based custody determinations were struck down on equal protection grounds by the U.S. Supreme Court, is often considered a model for eliminating other factors based on societal prejudices with no factual basis for showing detrimental impact on a child’s best interest, legal analysts including Richman remain concerned that the lack of federal protection for sexual minorities will limit its applicability. The strategies employed by biological parents to defend against former partners’ claims to parental rights have had limited success. Beginning in the mid 1990’s, courts began granting custody and visitation to de facto parents under a “best interest” framework focusing on the child’s interest in maintaining a relationship with a parent to whom they are emotionally bonded (In re Custody of H.S.H.-K., 1999). In addition, some rights claims (due process, equal protection and privacy) have been employed successfully19 and some courts have granted visitation rights to a non-biological and non-legal parent where the biological mother’s parental rights were determined to be “not absolute” or where they conflict with the rights of children (E.N.O. v. L. M.M., 1999; S.E.G. v. R.A.G., 1987). In general, however, arguments for extension of constitutional protection of gay and lesbian and transsexual parenting relationships have not generally been successful as judges frequently apply a “status” analysis in determining who is deserving (or undeserving) of privacy protection.20 One way of ensuring even application of custody, visitation, and child support rules for same-sex and transsexual families would be for legislatures to adopt or modify statutes to explicitly expand or the definitions of “family” and “parent.” States have a distinct interest in such an approach because it would help ensure social and financial stability to GLBT families by forcing judges to analyze children’s relationships with GLBT par-

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ents rather than on the parent’s sexual identity and conduct. Addressing the problem statutorily would also help eliminate concerns of some GLBT advocates who fear that recognizing parental rights of non-biological and non-adoptive parents could open the floodgates to claims by others against the rights of GLBT parents whose legal rights have not been recognized or granted (Richman, 2005). A second approach would be to adopt a statute that codifies an intentional parenting (de facto parent) analysis as a basis for establishing parentage. Such statutes would provide protection for parentchild relationships for GLBT and heterosexual couples that elect not to marry or enter into civil unions. Neither of these approaches is likely to succeed, however, unless societal bias in favor of married heterosexual parents wanes. Overall, any preclusion of a “best interest” analysis that does not foreground qualitative aspects of the parent-child relationship fails the basic test of that standard. There are no data that show detriment to children raised GLBT parents, despite an increasing body of literature on the topic. Perhaps ironically, the one consistent finding of difference between children raised by heterosexual v. GLBT parents is that the latter group of children are more tolerant than children raised by two heterosexual parents.21 The landscape upon which “best interest” of a child analyses involving GLBT parents rests is evolving as the legal meaning of “parent” and “family” continues to shift. NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4.

Kanuha (2006) suggests these problems include lack of acceptance from litigants’ own ethnic groups, conflicting loyalties, fear of police, hostility from service providers, and lack of culturally relevant interventions. Byrn (2007) cites various studies estimating that as many as 14,000,000 children are currently being raised by one or more same-sex parents, some born during previous heterosexual relationships, others who have been adopted or fostered by gays and lesbians, and an increasing number who were conceived through assisted reproductive technologies. As of September 2009, the six states were Utah, Nebraska, Michigan, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Florida. Marsh (2004) describes the Hawaiian word for adoption, hanai, as meaning to feed or nourish. Hanai, as traditionally practiced in Hawaiian culture, involves a child taken permanently to be reared, educated, and loved by someone other than natural parents, often grandparents or other biological relatives, but also other members of the community. Hanai is permanent and planned deliberately so

In the Name of the Child • 55

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

that the child would experience stability within their ohana (family). A hanai child is reared as one’s own by his/her adoptive family, but also generally has regular contact with her or his birth family. Ikeda-Vogel (2008) suggests that “drag” families may be formed to help cultivate the talents of younger generations of transgendered people (who often work in the local entertainment industry) and/ or because the youth seek refuge after being rejected from their families of origin. HRS § 571-46 (2009) is silent on the relevance of parents’ sexual orientation in determining custody and/or visitation and while there are no published opinions on point, Hawai’i courts have granted numerous co-parent (same-sex) adoptions and gay, lesbian and bisexual parents have successfully argued for custody and/or visitation in recent years. See, D.C. CODE ANN. Sec 16-914(a)(1)(A). Gessing (2004) cites 2000 U.S. Census data showing that 1.2 million U.S. residents reported being in a gay or lesbian relationship and April 2000 National Adoption Information Clearinghouse data suggesting that as many as 25 million individuals in the U.S. are homosexual. Gessing provides additional evidence that the “traditional role of the married couple with children has eroded” and children are now being raised in increasing numbers by unmarried heterosexual parents, one or more biological parents and extended family members, homosexual couples, and single people (pp. 851–852). I have borrowed the phrase “judicial imagination” from Professor Christopher Carnahan (2004), whose discourse analysis of published cases involving GLBT parents offers important insights into the impact judicial bias against GLBT parents has on children. Goldberg-Hiller (2005) argues that individual citizenship reflects ones legal ability to exercise or assert contract rights with the state. Orakwusi (2007) explains that under the “best interest” standard judges have broad discretion although the following factors are most frequently considered relevant to the analysis: a. the child’s physical emotional, mental, religious, and social needs, b. each parent’s ability and desire to meet those needs, c. the child’s preference, provided the child is of an age where articulation and comprehension of such a preference can be made, d. the parents’ preference, e. the child’s interactions with parents and siblings, f. whether one parent is the primary caretaker,

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g. h.

12.

13.

14.

15.

the bond between the child and each parent, the suitability of existing custody and visitation arrangements, including whether the child’s environment is stable and the child is well-adjusted, i. the parent’s relative abilities to encourage the child’s relationship with the other parent and cooperate in decision-making concerning the child, j. any history of domestic violence, child abuse or neglect, k. substance abuse by a parent or member of the household, l. each parent’s criminal record, m. the mental and physical health of all involved, n. a parent’s bad faith, coercion, or duress in negotiating the custody agreement, o. the child’s age and sex, p. each parent’s moral fitness, and q. the child’s cultural background. Orakwusi’s article also provides a complete list of state statutes defining one or more elements of “best interest” analysis, as well as a complete list of states that fully define the test. Richman (2002) discusses the sometimes paradoxical positioning of rights discourse that rests at the intersection of individual rights and collective rights of the family and may deploy similar rights arguments in support of, and in opposition to, positions of gay parents, and the “best interest” of children. “Calendar” refers to the type of case judges are assigned to hear. In Hawai’i, family court calendars include domestic violence, divorce, and child custody. A handful of Hawai’i attorneys have represented couples in coparent adoptions and a number have been granted on O`ahu and on at least one neighbor island. For several years though, only one Family Court judge on O`ahu has been hearing these cases. Recently, couples have been successful in pursuing co-parent adoptions pro se. Co-parent adoptions are handled in a manner analogous to other adoptions, but with the additional requirement that the parties submit a writing that reflects their custody and visitation intent should their relationship dissolve. In my practice the defenses to charges of family violence were also predictable and easily met. Claims of innocence are countered with police reports, pictures of bruises, and witness testimony; claims that the victim of family violence “asked for it” are also increasingly easy to counter although some Hawaii judges are still willing to entertain these arguments.

In the Name of the Child • 57

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

Richman (2002) points out that the issue of “standing” to bring a case involving a GLBT parent can preclude a court hearing the case at all. Kitamura (2005) cites a series of cases from these jurisdictions outlining the range of opinions that can hinge on legal recognition of changed sex and discussing their likely impact on future cases. In Plyler v. Doe (1982) the U.S. Supreme Court examined a Texas statute denying children of illegal immigrants access to public education and determined that while parents who are in the U.S. due to their own illegal conduct may be precluded from accessing certain State benefits available to citizens, the same arguments do not apply to their children, and in Trimble v. Gordon, (1977) the Court struck down an Illinois statute that denied children born outside a marriage rights to inherit from their biological fathers. Matthews v. Weinberg, 645 So.2d 487 (Fla. 1994) holding that Florida law prohibiting gay men and lesbians from serving as foster parents violated their rights to privacy, equal protection, and due process. Richman (2005) discusses Kazmierazak v. Query (1999) along with interviews with judges faced with privacy arguments raised by same-sex couples seeking determinations on custody and visitation. Moreover, the Connecticut case In re Adoption of Baby Z (1999) rejected constitutional claims of a lesbian couple and upheld an order denying adoption because the parties did not assert their claim under state statute, and Matter of Adoption of T.K.J., 931 P.2d 488 (Colo. 1996) denied that a child has a due process or equal protection right to protection of her relationship with a non-biological mother. Strasser (2004) suggests that research purporting to show that children are better off raised with “two parents” typically fail to address the sex of the parenting dyad, yet such data are often used to buttress political claims that, ex hypothesi, children should be raised by two parents to whom the child is genetically related. REFERENCES

Borash. D. P. & Lipton, J. E. (2001). The myth of monogamy: Fidelity and infidelity in animals and people. New York: W.H Freeman and Company. Byrn, M.P. (2007). From right to wrong: A critique of the 2000 Uniform Parentage Act. UCLA Women’s Law Journal, 16, 163–227. Carnahan, C. (Fall 2004). Inscribing lesbian and gay identities: How judicial imaginations intertwine with the best interests of children. Cardozo Women’s Law Journal, 11, 1–35.

58 • SUSAN HIPPENSTEELE Chang, H. Y. (2003). My father is a woman, oh no!: The failure of courts to uphold individual substantive due process rights for transgender parents under the guise of the best interest of the child. Santa Clara Law. Review, 43, 649–698. Conley, J.C. &. O’Barr, W. M. (2005). Just words: Law, language and power (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fineman, M. (1989). The politics of custody and gender: Child advocacy and the transformation of decision making in the USA. In C. Smart, & S. Sevenhuijsen (Eds.), Child custody and the politics of gender (pp. 217–242). London: Routledge. Gessing, E. (2004). The fight to be a parent: How courts have restricted the constitutionally-based challenges available to homosexuals. New England Law Review, 38, 841–896. Gibbons, J. (2003). Forensic linguistics: An introduction to language in the justice system. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Goldberg-Hiller, J. (2001). Making a mockery of marriage: Domestic partnership and equal rights in Hawaii. In C. Stychin, & D. Herman (Eds.), Law and sexuality: The global arena (pp. 113–131). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goldberg-Hiller, J. (2005). The limits to union: Same sex marriage and the politics of civil rights. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Graham, K. T. (2008). Same-sex couples: Their rights as parents, and their children’s rights as children. Santa Clara Law Review, 48, 999–1036. Huff, E. P. (2001). The children of homosexual parents: The voices the courts have yet to hear. American University Journal of Gender & Social Policy, 9, 700. Ikeda-Vogel, L. (2008) Revisioning family: A photovoice project with transgenders and their families in Hawai’i (Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai’i at Manoa). Available from ProQuest Disserations and Theses database. (UMI No. 3328271) Johnson R., & Kuttner, T., (2001). Treading on dicey grounds: Citizenship and the politics of the rule of law. In C. Stychin, & D. Herman (Eds.), Law and sexuality: The global arena (pp. 181–193). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kanuha, V. K. (2006). Compounding the triple jeopardy: Battering in lesbian of color relationships. In N. J. Sokoloff (Ed.), Domestic violence at the margins: Readings on race, class, gender and culture (pp. 71–82). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Kitamura, M. E. (2005). Once a woman, always a man? What happens to the children of transsexual marriages and divorces? The effects of transsexual marriage on child custody and support hearings, Whittier Journal of Child & Family Advocacy, 5, 227–251. Maine, H.S. (1917). Ancient law. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Marsh, R. (2004). Shortcomings in American adoption policies and a Hawaiian alternative. Hohonu, 2(2). Retrieved from http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/academics/hohonu/index.php. Orakwusi, A. (2007). Child custody, visitation and termination of parental rights. Georgetown Journal of Gender & Law, 8, 619–655. Richman, K. (2002). Lovers, legal strangers, and parents: Negotiating parental and sexual identity in family law. Law & Society Review, 36, 287.

In the Name of the Child • 59 Richman, K. D. (2005). (When) are rights wrong? Rights discourse and indeterminacy in gay and lesbian custody cases. Law & Social Inquiry, 30, 137–176. Smith, S.M. (Summer 2008). Recent development: The “Hawaiianness” of same-sex adoption. Hawaii Law Review, 30, 517–534. Strasser, M. (2004). Adoption and the best interests of the child: On the use and abuse of studies. New England Law Review, 38, 629–642. Tushnet, M. (1984). An essay on rights. Texas Law Review, 62, 1363.

Cases Cited Bell v. City of Milwaukee, 746 F 2d 1205; US Ct App 7th Cir WI, (1984). In re Adoption of Baby Z, 45 Conn. Supp. 33, 699 A.2d 1065 (1996), 247 Conn. 474, 724 A.2d 1035 (1999). D.C. CODE ANN. Sec 16-914(a)(1)(A). E.N.O v. L.M.M., 429 Mass 824, 711 N.E. 429 (1999). HRS § 571-46 (2009) In re Custody of H.S.H.-K., 193 Wis. 2d 649, 533 N.W.2d 419 (1995). In re U.P., 648 P 2d 1364; Utah, (1982). Kantaras v. Kantaras, 88 So. 2d 155 (2004) (appeal denied 898 So.2d 80 (2005)). Kazmierazak v. Query, 736 So.2d 106 (Fla. 1999). Matter of Adoption of T.K.J., 931 P.2d 488 (Colo. 1996). Matthews v. Weinberg, 645 So.2d 487 (Fla. 1994). Miller-Jenkins v. Miller-Jenkins, 912 A.2d 951 (Vt. 2006). Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U.S. 429 (1984). Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982), Santosky v. Kramer, 102 S Ct 1388; 455 US 745, (1982). S.E.G. v. R.A.G. 735 S.W.2d 164 (Mo. 1987). Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645, 651 (1972). Trimble v. Gordon, 430 U.S. 762 (1977). Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 720 (1997).

CHAPTER 4

DISCOURSES OF ENGLISH AS AN OFFICIAL LANGUAGE IN A MONOLINGUAL SOCIETY The Case of South Korea Ok Kyoon Yoo

INTRODUCTION With the advent of globalization, the emergence of new national and international orders has posed linguistic challenges at various levels. Three competing trends—homogenization, heterogenization, and hybridization—are reshaping language situations within and between nations. At a national level, in some Western multilingual countries, linguistic justice has been increasingly argued for by minority groups, whether indigenous or immigrant, against the centripetal forces of the ideology of “one nation one language,” as is clear with the English-only movement in the U.S.. In the multilingual third world, many countries have been struggling to create linguistic identities out of their ethnic languages and former colonizers’ languages. On the other hand, at a global level, the phenomenal spread of Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 61–97 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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English is considered by some to be a major threat to other ethnic languages in the world, and by others to facilitate participation in international communications. In this context, South Korea has recently witnessed recurrent proposals for English as an Official Language (EOL) as a language policy for meeting the demands of globalization. In response, another competing force, nationalism, has formed strong reactions to these proposals, thereby opening up heated debates in the media and publications. Considering that South Korea is a “monolingual” society, not a “multilingual one,” that enjoys a very high degree of congruity as a speech community (Coulmas, 1999), and that it is an Expanding Circle country (Kachru, 1989), where English is learned as a “foreign” language, the proposal for EOL in South Korea is an extreme case that focuses only on the need for international communications without critical consideration of its potential effects on domestic language situations. Thus, exploration of this case is valuable to an understanding of how the pressures of global communications within the process of globalization are so powerful as to threaten an already established national language even in a monolingual society. By critically examining public discourses surrounding the issue of EOL in the South Korean intellectual community, this paper attempts to reconceptualize “linguistic nationalism,” the ideology of “one nation, one language,” in a monolingual country, within the discipline of language planning and policy (LPP). Also, it explores several general theoretical questions in LPP. First, by discussing the tone of mass media coverage of the issue, it attempts to show how dominant ideologies of globalization and English as a global language are reproduced and opposed in media discourse, a potentially powerful manager of public opinion. Second, it attempts to conceptualize a democratic language policy-making process from the bottom up, while attending to public opinion formulation processes reflected in public opinion polls on the issue. POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS OF LPP IN RELATION TO LANGUAGE PEDAGOGY According to Ricento (2000), LPP as a subfield of sociolinguistics underwent paradigm shifts from its beginning stage of asserting the Western notion of positivism and neutrality in the structuralist tradition, to its later stages with the critical and poststructuralist perspectives. During shifts, the research focus moved from the description and process of a “universal” version of LPP to the analysis of how and why a certain LPP was enforced in relation to broad social, economic, and political contexts, and the analysis of its “effects.” A similar distinction is made by Tollefson (1991) in what he terms the “neoclassical approach” and the “historical-structural” approach to language planning. In addition, there emerged the ‘ecology of languag-

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es paradigm’ (first coined by Tsuda, 1994, and elaborated by Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996, Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000) that promotes “linguistic human rights” (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1998, 2000; Skutnabb- Kangas, Phillipson & Rannut, 1994) in view of discourses of “linguicism” (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1986) and “linguistic imperialism” (Phillipson, 1992). At the same time, however, poststructualists problematize the essential notion of language in LPP. For example, Pennycook (2002b) argues for the need to “move away from an understanding of language policy as the imposition or denial of particular languages” to viewing “language policy in terms of governentality,” and warns against an assumption that more “enlightened” language policies would necessarily entail less control, even though it does not imply that state intervention needs to be denied. (p. 108) Hence, the issue is “how debates around language, culture, and education practice produce particular discursive regimes” (p. 92) in relation to LPP, while being aware of the political nature of LPP. This change in the LPP research tradition points to possibilities and limitations of LPP reorganizing relationships of power for social justice. Specifically, concerning the role of LPP in dealing with the global spread of English, responses seem to vary. To most liberal linguists, the dominance of English in the era of globalization is a “done deal” outside the control of LPP. For example, in his book, English as a Global Language, Crystal (1997) asserts that “the English language has already grown to be independent of any form of social control” (p. 139). Wright (2004) is also skeptical of the capability of LPP to relocate power and resources by saying that “whether or not the desire to learn English is the product of ‘hegemonic’ processes or the outcome of ’rational’ choice it will be impossible to deflect people’s determination by legislation and policy” (p. 170, emphases original). By contrast, to critically motivated researchers such as Tollefson and Phillipson, LPP could and should transform preexisting power differentials within and between nations. To Tollefson (1991), “while language planning reflects relationships of power, it can also be used to transform them” (p. 202), and to Phillipson (2000), “for English to be a force for democracy and human rights…[l]anguage policy could and should play an important role in such a transition” (p. 102, emphases added). Although it is debatable which “description” or “judgment” does LPP justice, it is axiomatic now that LPP is intrinsically connected to existing power relationships, and has dual potentials to be constrained by external forces to a great degree, and to create new power relationships as well. In this context, Pennycook’s (2001) call for “a critical view of language in relation to a critical view of society and a political and ethical view of change” (p. 56, emphasis added) for critical applied linguistics is well taken. For an ethically driven language policy, it is important to explore how democratic decision-making procedures can be accomplished in LPP. Although language policy has been inherently

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repressive and undemocratic because of its tendency to change behavior top-down, as Brumfit (2002) points out, it does not invalidate the necessity of democratic LPP; rather it seems important to explore to what extent democratic procedure is possible in LPP. Also, as Scholte (2000) points out for policy in general, bottom-up democratic policy making may not be impossible anymore with the help of the technologies of globalization, e.g. electronic communication for public debates. Two kinds of concerns can be discussed for democratic decision-making procedures in LPP: concerns for “the inclusion of a broad participation base” (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997, p. 55), and concerns for “explaining how individuals manage language in communication” (Jernudd, 1993, p. 134) for bottom-up approaches to LPP. However, it is in question whether the inclusion of broad participation and actual language use automatically leads to democratic procedures in decision making in LPP. From the vantage point of critical social theory, people’s needs and behavior need to be critically examined in relation to preexisting power relationships in broad social, economic, and political contexts. The reason is that “false consciousness,” “hegemony” as domination by consent (Gramsci, 1971), or “ideological power” constituted by taken-for-granted practices (Fairclough, 1989) may operate among people in supposedly democratic decision-making processes. In other words, the constraints of social structures and dominant ideologies on individual choices cannot be dismissed as completely irrelevant. Having said that, Tollefson’s (2002) argument can provide insights into how to address the issue. He argues that “scholars and students in language policy studies should develop their ability to critically ‘read’ language policies, that is, to understand the social and political implications of particular policies adopted in specific historical contexts” (p. 4, emphasis original). This “critical eye” can apply to individuals at local levels who can participate in the decision making process of language planning. Possibly, education settings are the best site where the ability to read discourses in policy debate, and assess potential effects of a language policy can be fostered. Critical pedagogies of English (Pennycook, 1994) can be a good candidate for developing a “critical eye” for discursive intervention into LPP on the part of students at local levels. Perhaps it is after this pedagogical intervention from the bottom up is guaranteed that a democratic policy-making process can be achieved. Recent discourses of English as an Official Language in Korea are founded on past and present linguistic and social policies. Thus, an analysis of policies can provide the background for showing how dominant ideologies of globalization and English as a global language are currently reproduced and opposed.

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LANGUAGE POLICIES IN KOREA In many multilingual third world countries, the European model of linguistic nationalism, “one nation, one language,” for creating an “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) was adopted as a homogenizing strategy for nation building to increase domestic communication with one or two western “colonial” languages as official languages (refer to Wright, 2004 for further explanation). In Korea, however, ethnocultural nationalism was kindled and maintained through resistance against Chinese influence and Japanese imperialism during nation building, and “language has played a crucial role in this endeavor” (Coulmas, 1999, p. 408). In addition to Korean in general, Hangul, the Korean writing system, in particular has played an essential role. Although Hangu was invented in the 15th century to break away from dependency on Chinese characters, it was not promoted actively and used extensively until the present century (Coulmas, 1999) because of the strict class stratification in the past with the nobility favoring the use of Chinese characters. It was not until the early twentieth century, the period of Japanese rule in Korea, that the use of Korean, especially the use of Hangul, became a visible symbol of resistance to Japanese linguistic assimilation policy (Coulmas, 1999; Kaplan & Baldauf, 2003). As Kaplan and Baldauf Jr. (2003) mention, “Japanese rule became a catalyst for Korean cultural and linguistic nationalism” (p. 32). In short, the invention of Hangul to break away from dependency on Chinese characters, and the active use of Korean and Hangul against Japanese imperialism contributed to the formulation of linguistic nationalism in Korea to a large degree. Hence, Korean linguistic nationalism can be said to have been reinforced by inner forces rather than adopted from outside as in many multilingual third world countries. The present language situation in South Korea is that it is a monolingual society that enjoys a very high degree of congruity of speech community (Coulmas, 1999). Some of the national language use literature can serve as a starting point for speculating on the current status of English in South Korea. South Korea is an “Expanding Circle” country (Kachru, 1989) along with China and Japan, in which English is learned as a foreign language and has no official role. It does not belong to the group of “countries that give special status to English” (Crystal, 1997), but is a country where English is learned as the global lingua franca (McArther, 1998). The increasing importance of English in South Korea as an Expanding Circle country is implied by McKay (2002), who says that the Expanding Circle is “where there is the greatest potential for the continued spread of English” (p. 11), although the status of English in the Expanding Circle is lower than the Outer Circle. However, South Korea still does not belong to a group of countries that is in transition from an EFL context to an ESL context (Graddol, 1997). In short, the literature shows that English is still a foreign language in South Korea, but

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its importance is presumably rapidly increasing. However, all the categorizations above do not refer to the specific historical context of South Korea. It is said that the influence of English in South Korea has become salient because of strong dependency on the U.S. for international politics and economy since its independence in 1945 and the Korean War in the 1950’s (H. Shin, 2004). English even enjoyed the status of an official language in government business in South Korea during the presence of U.S. troops from 1945 to 1949. The importance of English in South Korea is reflected in language policy for foreign language education. Since the second national education curriculum was proclaimed in 1963, English has been the first foreign language (Shim & Baik, 2000), which is also true for Japan, Indonesia, and Taiwan in the Pacific Basin (Kaplan & Baldauf, 2003). In the early 1990s, proliferating discourses of globalization have increased the importance of English as a “global” language. The Kim Young Sam Administration articulated a national globalization project, Segyehwa, part of which is the promotion of English for national competitiveness through English education (Kaplan & Baldauf, 2003; Shim & Baik, 2000). Consequently, in 1994 extra-curricular English education started for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders in elementary school, and in 1997 English became a mandatory subject for third graders in elementary school in the national educational curriculum (Shim & Baik, 2000). In 2001, with the launching of the seventh national education curriculum, the Ministry of Education recommended an English-only policy in English education for third and fourth graders in elementary schools and seventh graders in junior high school with the policy affecting one higher grade each year (H. Shin, 2004). However, while recent language policies in foreign language education seem to reflect the growing importance of English in the age of globalization, varying degrees of resistance are also reported. Jung & Norton (2002) reported difficulties in the school implementation of the elementary English program policy, and some negative sociocultural, impact of it on other subjects, especially Korean, from teachers’ points of view. H. Shin (2004) also reported teachers’ resistance, this time against the English-only policy in English education, and argues for the need of critical pedagogy, while challenging the “native speaker myth.” With the increased status of English in Korea represented by language-ineducation policies and practices, public debates ensued over official language policy. Since the government-initiated Segyehwa drive in the early 1990s, discussions of the possibility of enacting English as an official language (EOL) in South Korea have become common. Based on a review of mass media coverage and publications surrounding the issue, I present a timeline for the development of EOL discourses as follows.

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• July 1998: The publication of Ethnic Languages in the Age of a Global Language by Bok, and a subsequent review of the book in The Chosun Ilbo newspaper that triggered heated debates in the media and publications. In the year of 1998, a self-described liberal and novelist, Bok wrote a provocative book entitled Ethnic Languages in the Age of a Global Language, which contains a proposal for English as an Official Language (EOL) in South Korea. Bok’s main argument is that ethnic languages will die out soon because people have realized the power and prestige of English as the present global language, and therefore, that the South Korean government should take the initiative to adopt English as a co-official language with Korean for the time being, and in the long run establish English as the one and only official language in South Korea. Thus, his proposal for EOL was based on “subtractive” bilingualism. On July 3, 1998, Bok’s book was reviewed in The Chosun Ilbo, a Korean newspaper company that enjoys the largest sales in South Korea—21% in 1998 (S.W Kim, 2004), which triggered heated debates on the issue of EOL among intellectual communities in the media and publications. • December 1999: Novelist Conference on EOL co-hosted by National Economic Association affiliated Liberal Corporation Center (LCC), and Korean Novelist Association (KNA). It was around the turn of the century that the issue of EOL in South Korea received revived attention from the media. In a ”Novelist Forum” on EOL, co-hosted by LCC and KNA, president of KNA Ul Byung Jung asserted, “Throughout history, Korea has been a country with a lack of information, and without diplomacy, and this has much to do with the pain that foreign-language-insensitive countries are likely to suffer….we need to learn from Singaporean bilingualism” (“Enforcing English,” 1999). • January 2000: Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi’s advisory board “21st Japanese Project” proposed EOL in Japan, which rekindled the debate on EOL in South Korea. At the beginning of a new millennium, Japan’s consideration of EOL in Japan as one of the strategies for globalization fueled the EOL debate in the media again. The apparent similarity of Japan to South Korea, both as relatively monolingual countries and economically competitive countries, provided another rationale for EOL in South Korea. However, the proposal in Japan was different from that in South Korea, in that it was more focused on ‘additive’ bilingualism, rather than the replacement of Japanese by English (Funabashi, 2001).

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• 2001 to the present: Recurrent announcements of government-initiated economic development plans, part of which is the active promotion of English in designated areas. Since 2001, there have been moves to actively promote the use of English by the central and regional governments. In May 2001, the government announced a plan to adopt English as an official language in Cheju Island as an international duty-free city. In April 2002, the government announced the “Korea as the Business Center of Northeast Asia” project with “Special economic zones,” where English will be used as an official language. In March 2004, the Seoul metropolitan government announced the “Daily use of English in Seoul” project. Arguments and counter-arguments have flooded the media on each move, and so far no proposals or announcements have been successfully implemented because of opposition from many fields, especially from the academic and cultural worlds, and nongovernmental Hangul-related associations. It is questionable whether all the four phases of EOL discourse can be grouped under the general term “EOL debates.” For the present, there is much confusion that needs to be cleared up about the debates, e.g. the notion of “official language” especially in a monolingual country, the scope of applicability in implementation, etc. However, one common thread of the proposals is a call for the realization of the rapidly growing importance of English in the era of globalization. On the other hand, counter-arguments to the proposals also seem to converge on one general stance, which is deep rooted in the essential notion of nationalism and the importance of an ethnic language in Korean nationalism. Therefore, it can be said that opinions have been polarized into two extreme positions, a globalization camp versus a nationalism camp, while sometimes the two ideologies intersect with other ideologies, and middle grounds are sporadically found. This phenomenon demonstrates that the issue of ideology may affect the process of the formulation of a language policy in relation to larger environments.1 COMPETING EOL DISCOURSES IN THE SOUTH KOREAN INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITY It is found that there are considerable parallels between the debate in the intellectual community in South Korea, and the one in applied linguistics on the politics of English in general. To understand the complexities of the debates surrounding the issue, and how different ideologies underlie each debate point, I will present and discuss pro-EOL discourses one by one along with anti-EOL discourses. I translated all of the excerpts from Korean publications in the following sections.

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One of the rationales for EOL in South Korea that proponents of EOL provide is the rise of globalization. Bok (1998a, 1998b, 2000, 2001, 2003) consistently argues that globalization as “homogenization” and “standardization” is real, and that even if it is U.S.-initiated, accommodation to this phenomenon is a minimum survival skill. Other proponents of EOL equate globalization with “cosmopolitanism,” and reject nationalism as inherently “closed” (Y. H. Kim, 1999; Ko, 1998). However, nationalist opponents of EOL (Y. Choi, 1999; Y. Han, 1998; Jin, 1999; Y. M. Kim, 2001; Nam, 1998; Sung, 1999; Yun, 2001) criticize the widespread discourses of “neo-liberal globalization,” and highlight the positive effects of nationalism in Korea. What they argue in common is that the ideology of a neo-liberal market economy should not provide a rationale for a language policy such as EOL, and that power disparity among nations in the contemporary globalization as a homogenizing process should be critically understood. Some scholars argue that the spread of English is natural, neutral, and beneficial. To demonstrate that the global spread of English is inevitable, Bok puts forward “Metcalfe’s Law,” which he explains is that “the value of a certain network is proportionate to the square of its users” (2001, p. 129). Bok argues that every language forms such a network, and that once a certain language starts to enjoy the largest network of users, its users will keep multiplying until it becomes a global language by arguing that “the dominance of English is due to globalization…this means that English is relatively independent of the political clout of the U.S. or the U.K. that speaks it as a national language, and that the future of English is bright” (2003, p. 29). However, many opponents of EOL (e.g., Y M. Kim; 2000; Yun, 2001) criticize the position of the EOL proponents as naive and blindly assimilationist, and argue that what seems to be “natural” to them is in fact the result of power differentials among countries. This sharp contrast between the two camps demonstrates a dramatic instance of the discourse and counter-discourses that many critical linguists have provided in relation to the global spread of English. To those critical linguists, Bok may be seen as blind to the deliberate efforts of the U.K. and the U.S. to spread English not only as a commodity, but also as an ideological tool to disseminate their values to newly independent countries (Phillipson, 1992). In addition, he perhaps ignores the historical process by which English has become associated with neutrality and modernity as part of colonial discourses (Pennycook, 1994, 1998). Y M. Kim (2000) aptly points out that English is not only a “global” language, but also the “American” language. Bok’s application of Metcalfe’s Law to a language issue also seems to parallel a liberal position on the spread of English in that “English is achieving a hegemonic critical mass” (Wright, 2004, p. 156), and reinforces his assumption on language in terms of economy and efficiency only. On one occasion he admits that he chooses not to make value judgments while following the frame of economy (Bok,

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1998b). It can be inferred that Bok thinks that any value judgment will make the issue “ideological” rather than “neutral,” not admitting that any assertion of neutrality is already political. In this sense, Bok’s position can be labeled as what Pennycook (2001) calls “liberal ostrichism.” Another argument made in the EOL debate is that individuals will choose English over Korean because they know the power of English. In this regard, Bok asks a mind-blowing question: “If you have a new born baby, and if he or she can choose between English and Korean as a mother tongue, which would you recommend?” (2001, p. 146). Bok assumes that every Korean will answer “English” if they are “true” to their hearts without being misguided by romantic nationalism. What is interesting is that Bok’s conclusion seems to agree with general sentiment on EOL. Since Bok started a debate on EOL in the media in 1998, public opinion polls have been conducted on the issue by the media, the results of which show that agreement with EOL increasingly exceeds disagreement over time (p. 22). Bok interprets this tendency as the result of more and more people realizing the importance of English as a global language. To most of the EOL opponents, however, those individual choices are the result of “voluntary colonialism” (Yun, 2001) through a process of American hegemony. In this interpretation, the “laissez-faire liberalism” (Pennycook, 2001) of the EOL proponents show instances of “colonization of the consciousness” (Fanon, 1967) and “hegemonic” processes (Gramsci, 1971), and reproduce part of colonial discourses without considering any possibilities of ‘articulation of counter discourses’ (Pennycook, 1995) that potentially helps to reorganize the existing power structure. “[W]hether or not the desire to learn English is the product of ‘hegemonic’ processes or the outcome of ‘rational’ choice” (Wright, 2004, p. 170, emphases original), H. Han (2000) and Y M. Kim (2000) find a logical flaw in Bok’s argument, which they think misleads public opinion. Their point is that even though individuals realize the importance and power of English for globalization, they do not realize the fact that EOL does not guarantee the improvement of their English proficiency. Therefore, the most serious problem with Bok’s point is his unfounded belief in the causal link between EOL and English language proficiency. Proponents of EOL additionally suggest that globalization calls for one global language at the expense of ethnic languages. Bok’s understanding of languages as operating on the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest is clear in the following statement: “Ultimately English as a sole international language will be used everywhere in every society in the world. The rise of English will shrink space for ethnic languages, which will make them lose their vitality and be out of daily use. Finally, ethnic languages will disappear . . . and remain as a museum language” (2003, pp. 30–31, emphasis original). In fact, it is this particular view of language that first triggered the whole EOL debate, because it presupposes the disappearance of Korean.

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That is, Bok’s version of English as “an” official language is just an interim policy for English as “the” official language in South Korea in the long run. This position is in contrast with a proposal for EOL in Japan that emphasizes peaceful coexistence of Japanese and English as co-official languages by promoting complementary bilingualism (Funabashi, 2001). These arguments fit well into two contrasting language paradigms, termed by Tsuda (1994), the “Diffusion of English Paradigm” and an “Ecology of Languages Paradigm” (see also Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). This debate is analogous to the classic debate of translatability across languages, or the incommensurability of languages in Whorf’s linguistic relativity principle. According to Kramsch (1993), both of the arguments are extreme, but a weak version of Whorf’s hypothesis, especially concerning cultural differences in semantics, is generally accepted nowadays. Kramsch explains that “the theory of linguistic relativity does not claim that linguistic structure constrains what people can think or perceive, only that it tends to influence what they routinely do think” (ibid, p. 14, emphases original). Therefore, what seems to be one of the most serious problems with Bok’s proposal for EOL is that it is based on “subtractive” dominant language learning, not the “additive” one that is defended by Skutnabb-Kangas (2000). With this said, the productive mode of English as a language of opportunity can be justified as long as it does not subtract from one’s mother tongue. Additionally, the active promotion of foreign languages other than English in education settings that S. Jeong’s (2000) advances deserves attention because of its potential to break taken-for-granted Anglicist cultural values as well as to reflect one’s cultural bias in a more balanced way. The general objective of EOL proponents is to demonstrate that English as a replacement for Korean is possible and desirable. Bok (1998, 2003) takes the linguistic shifts of the Jews and the Irish as examples, and interprets them as implying that people can often decide on their language on the basis of utility. According to S. Jeong (2000), however, they did not change their languages “voluntarily” several times; rather they had no other choice in order to survive. Sung (1999) also says that the instances of language shift cannot “justify” the loss of a mother tongue if we think back to the oppressive situation of the Japanese language assimilation policy in Korea. These counterarguments echo Skutnabb-Kangas’ (2000) comment on the relationship between linguistic and cultural diversity in the cases of the Irish and the Jews: That language loss has happened on a large scale (even if the languages themselves are still alive), and people survived, does not mean that it is something that should be recommended. Many of those people who have themselves experienced this…bear witness to possible negative effects. (p. 253)

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A related discussion centers around the notion of “an official language.” While examining language situations in many other countries, S. J. Kim (2001) explains that an official language is a notion that is required only in multilingual countries, and that since Korea has been a monolingual society throughout history, there has been no need for the discussion of an official language. Rather, the only concern in language policy in Korea has been the standardization of the Korean language. The exceptions were Japanese as the official language that was enforced during the Japanese rule, and English as a co-official language under the U.S. administration from 1945 to 1949. Therefore, one or two conditions should be met to enact EOL in South Korea: changing South Korea into a multilingual country, or admitting that South Korea is a colony of an English speaking country, or both. S. J. Kim goes as far as to say that EOL is practically impossible without the genocide of all Koreans. Hong (1999) also clarifies this point by saying that EOL is a daydream unless English keeps being “imposed” upon Koreans as Japanese did in the colonial period. H. Han (2000) also points out that EOL is impossible without the backup of quality English education. . Bok (2000) asserts that EOL will promise linguistic equalities by providing equal access to English with exposure to it outside of the classroom, which will in turn help to solve the problem of existing societal inequalities in South Korea. In response, some EOL opponents (Chae, 2000; S. Jeong, 2000) hold that EOL will aggravate present inequalities because the English divide will be institutionally legitimized by EOL. In other words, the link between material conditions and English proficiency will be strengthened because of the upgraded status of English, serving the interests of already socially and economically dominant groups. According to H. Han (2000, p. 30), however, whether or not English ability for everybody may entail democratizing a formerly elitist resource, the point is whether or not EOL as a language policy will lead to English proficiency for everybody in South Korea. It can be said that as long as the latter is not clear, EOL cannot democratize the situation. In this sense, the possibility of EOL contributing to social and economic equalities in South Korea is closely related to the question of whether EOL is ever possible in South Korea as an expanding circle country. Another related issue is whether EOL will lead to bilingualism, and if so, what kind of bilingualism it will be. Ko (1999) predicts that if EOL is enacted, the language situation in South Korean will be close to a diglossia where Korean is used for private purposes and English is used in public domains, but he does not bother to consider the ideological implications of “liberal complementarity” (Pennycook, 2001, p.56) or “an ideological naturalization of sociolinguistic arrangements” (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994, p. 69) in an asymmetric diglossia. Although Ko’s version of EOL is more moderate

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than Bok, this sentiment is still in sharp contrast with the proposal for EOL in Japan in 2000. In Japan, Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi’s advisory board “21st Japanese Project” in 2000, was specific about the status of English: “In the long run, English as a second official language needs to be considered, but consensus among people is necessary. At the moment we need to do all we can to make English as a practical language” (Yi, 2001, p.302, emphasis added). In a similar vein, Funabashi (2001), one of the members of the board and active proponent of EOL in Japan, expresses his proposal that “English should be a second official language…upgraded in status from a foreign language…Here, a fundamental task is not to make Japan a victim of an English divide” (p. 217, emphasis added). Yet, once again, as long as it is not decisive whether EOL will guarantee full English competence for every speaker, the designation of an equal or higher status to English is not likely to achieve socioeconomic equality. This echoes Sung’s (1999) argument that government intervention to support a “powerless” language is needed more, the assumption of which parallels the “linguistic human rights” paradigm in LPP. Despite all the competing discourses on EOL in South Korea by the intellectual community in the media and publications, public opinion polls on the issue show a different picture MEDIA DISCOURSE AS A POWERFUL MANAGER OF PUBLIC OPINION2 The proportion of anti-EOL opinions has exceeded that of pro-EOL ones in public debate, especially in publications, but public opinion polls from various sources indicate that public sentiment has been increasingly favorable to EOL, except at the last poll on the “Daily use of English”3 project proposed by the Seoul Metropolitan Government in 2004, as indicated in the following chart. Concerning the general increase of the percentage of agreement with EOL policy, different interpretations followed. Bok (2000) says that this turnover to more than fifty percent agreement is a reflection of Koreans’ realization, as a result of the economic crisis of the IMF intervention into Korea in 1997 and the rapid spread of the Internet, that English has been consolidating its status as a global language. However, H. Han (2002) argues that most of the results of the polls do not reflect the point that EOL will not automatically lead to the improvement of English proficiency. Also, he adds that if people polled had been informed of this point, the results would have been different. That is, the results show the growing needs of individuals to acquire English proficiency, but they do not justify EOL. Thus, the missing link between EOL and English proficiency is not clearly reflected in the opinion polls.

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Figure 1. Results of Public Opinion Polls on EOL from July, 1998 to May, 2004

Many other EOL opponents (e.g., Y M. Kim, 2000; H. Han 2002) also point out the sensational journalism of The Chosun Ilbo, a newspaper company that fueled the EOL debate in July1998 by making a favorable review of Bok’s book, Ethnic Languages in the Age of a Global Language (1998). The newspaper also drove the “English is competitiveness” campaign in 2000, when Japan started to consider EOL. Considering the status of The Chosun llbo as a newspaper company that enjoys the largest sales in South Korea—21% in 1998, and 26.8% in 2003 (S. W. Kim, 2004)—it is very likely that they have exercised a potentially huge influence on the formation of public opinion since they have powerful media discourse control that “may lead to ‘preferred models’ (as persuasion can be understood)” (van Dijk, 2000, p. 78, emphasis original). In this context, the anti-EOL camp suspects that behind their aggressive promotion of English and EOL lurks a profitmaking motive because they have been marketing a Korean-made English test called TEPS (Test of English Proficiency) developed by Seoul National University. In short, the “hidden agenda” of a leading newspaper company made a happy rendezvous with the discourses of English as a global language in the age of the dominant market ideology-driven globalization. DISCOURSES OF EOL IN THE CHOSUN ILBO To demonstrate how the ideology of neo-liberal globalization is manifested in line with the discourses of English as a global language in The Chosun

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Ilbo, I will present an analysis of articles that represent the tone of the The Chosun Ilbo in promoting English, mostly in the “English is competitiveness” campaign in 2000, while taking the assumptions of Critical Discourse Analysis that “discourse is both socially constitutive as well as socially shaped” (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997, p. 258; emphasis original) and that “ideology is the prime means of manufacturing consent” (Fairclough, 1989, p. 4). I translated all of the articles in the following sections, and tried not to change the general tone of each article while editing it for the clarification of its gist whenever necessary. I also italicized words or phrases that are the focus of discussion. In The Chosun Ilbo, as the following headlines of articles show, more than anything else the association of English and individual and national economic growth, and the importance of English for cross-national business transaction in globalization (Pennycook, 1994; Phillipson, 1992) is celebrated as a matter of course, while other competing issues such as potentially negative influences of English on the Korean language, cultural identity, social equality, etc. are never addressed. • “Want growth? Speak English!” said an American leading economist Paul Krugman in Fortune in April, 1999. (The Chosun Ilbo, 1999, December 31) • “English raises your salary” (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, January 2) • “Faltering English often spoils business transactions” (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, January 13) The general economic message penetrates most of the articles while it is intricately related to other specific issues. In the following article, English is considered a major contributor to economy-oriented national interests. • “The low English proficiency of Korean elites leads to huge loss in national interests” (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, January 2) In the evening on December 24, 1997, when the IMF crisis in South Korea just began, there was a conference, “The economy of Korea and her financial standing” at AEI in Washington….A New York Times reporter asked one of the Korean government officials, “The Korean government reportedly asked IMF to provide 20 billion dollars. Do you think this will be enough to alleviate the crisis?” The official answered twice, “I don’t know.” Yim, the then Minister of Finance and Economy, had already announced the request of the aid of 200 billion dollars from IMF four days before. The official ended up lying because of the miscommunication. Another reported asked, “How is it possible that you don’t know? I don’t understand,” and added, “How do you believe the IMF intervention would change the status of the Bank of Korea?” The official

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gave an irrelevant answer by saying, “I have never thought of my power.” This demonstrates one of the examples where lack of English proficiency destroys trust in the Korean government. In the above article, the low proficiency of English is directly connected to the loss of trust. While it is acceptable that better or “perfect” English proficiency would have made the communication better, it is questionable to what extent the miscommunication destroyed trust, because part of the communication breakdown was due to misinformation, i.e. 20 billion dollars. More than that, it also needs to be asked why the officials did not consider relying on interpreters for better communication. However, these questions are never asked in the article. Accordingly, the message that “lack of English proficiency destroys trust in the Korean government” is naturalized as a matter of “common sense.” One specific theme in the campaign is “to learn from other countries,” as in the following examples. • “English is a living language in Taiwan. Taiwanese speak English without difficulty”: Taiwanese elites lead the miracle of English. (The Chosun Ilbo, 1999, December 31) • “Even France explores the possibility of English-French bilingualism.” (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, January 4) • (Editorial) It is time to learn from Japanese move to adopt English as an official language…The reason for the move is that it is absolutely necessary as one of the 21 century national strategies for Japan… Only when English is enacted as an official language or spoken as a practical language will English proficiency follow. (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, January 19) Here, cross-national comparisons are made to provide justifications for the global status of English and EOL in South Korea. However, whether the comparisons are based on ”facts” or not, no reference is made to other countries where EOL is exercising negative effects, especially many multilingual third world countries. Moreover, even in the three countries, Taiwan, France, and Japanese, EOL is yet to be enforced. France just explores the possibility and Japan just made a move. Just the “possibility,” however, gives The Chosun Ilbo opportunities to promote the importance of English and EOL. Another salient pattern is the reproduction of colonial discourses of English, i.e. dependency on native speaker’s norms (Amin, 1997; Auerbach, 1993; Canagarajah, 1999a; Cook, 1999; Phillipson, 1992; Rampton, 1990) and the self-stigmatization of the values of nonnative English speakers.

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• “Early English education needed”: The Chosun Ilbo’s “English is competitiveness” campaign is becoming more convincing with the recent proposal for EOL in Japan….The younger a student is, the more chances they need to have to learn from native speakers….Koreans’ lack of etiquette derives from that of the understanding of foreign languages. (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, January 23) This article shows a dramatic instance of dependency on the native speaker “myth” or “fallacy,” i.e. “the ideal teacher of English is a native speaker” (Phillipson, 1992, p. 193) for early English education slides into the stigmatization of Koreans as non-civilized (“Koreans’ lack of etiquette”). This mechanism is consistent with Skutnabb-Kangas’ (2000) identification of the reproduction of unequal power relationships through the “glorification” of the dominant group, the “stigmatization” of subordinated groups, and the “rationalization” of their relationship (p. 196). Moreover, the native speaker myth and the self-stigmatization is generalized and reinforced by a reference to the case of Japan as follows. • Professor Toshiko Marx is saying, “Japanese people at international meetings are famous for three Ss: Silence, Sleeping, Smile….Japanese prime minister speaks Japanese often without clear subjects. He says a lot, but except some meaningful words, there is nothing to translate….” (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, March 2) • “Japan sets out to construct English infrastructure”: Suzuki Akita, a dean of a Japanese university said, “Japanese people’s low English proficiency is parallel to the wonder of Egyptian Pyramids.”…In Japan, it is almost impossible to find a McDonalds’ in its authentic pronunciation. Many Japanese people do not understand it unless pronounced as ‘Ma-ku-do-na-ru-do’….” (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, January 13) All the stigmatization of nonnative speakers points to “colonization of the consciousness” in Fanon’s (1967) terms. It is also consistent with Yun’s (2001) “internalized colonialism,” and Y M. Kim’s (2000) “Saedae Chui” (Serving the Great) in the previous public debate. Moreover, the connection of the ruling elites in a small country with the “Great countries” discussed by Y M. Kim (2000) is evidenced by the following contributions by Korean elites. • Contribution by Jin Seop Yeom, President of Yahoo Korea: “Without shift in our paradigm toward English, will our future ever exist?” (The Chosun Ilbo, 1999, December 31) • “Early English education urgently needed” by Yun Dae Eo (Dean of Korea University): “Learning English hard and using it as a daily lan-

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guage does not threaten the subjectivity of a nation” (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, January 20) • “It’s time to actively consider English as a second official language” by Su Gil Yang, DECD Emissary: “Generally, Korean public employees are inexperienced in free discussions and lack English ability” (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, February 16) In addition to the ideological control of English as above, the glorification of native speaker norms is also closely tied to market ideology, which shows one aspect of English itself as a world “commodity” (Phillipson, 1992). • “English is a living thing. Listen and repeat all the time!” advises Dr. Cornelius, who has recently visited Korea….During an interview, he said, “There was an interesting study in Congo. A person who had never learned English before mastered English in three months. He sounds like a native speaker,” and concluded “that was possible because of African oral traditions.” That implies the importance of learning a foreign language just like children do…Dr. Cornelius has developed many English learning programs so far.…Now he is President of Faith, which is an international English education corporation. (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, April 20) Here, Dr. Cornelius gives a rather exaggerated and disputable example that may not be applicable to “average” English learners in other contexts. However, his position as a native speaker expert helps to give much more credibility to the case than his nonnative counterpart, since his judgment of nativeness is considered as such. Accordingly, the discourse of “English success” (He sounds like a native speaker) within a “short” period of time (three months) with the help of a magic “method” (just like children do) promoted by “native” experts (Dr. Cornelius) are not problematized, but reproduced and naturalized in the article. Moreover, the words, international English education corporation indicates how market ideology is easily connected to an extreme version of “English success” stories. All of the above examples reveal how ideologies as “particular ways of representing and constructing society which reproduce unequal relations of power” (Faircough & Wodak, 1997, p. 275) are manifested in The Chosun Ilbo. The case of The Chosun Ilbo shows seemingly contradictory aspects of media discourse. On one hand, The Chosun Ilbo is “passive” in that “the media so seldom take the initiative for social change” (van Dijk, 1993, p. 282), by reflecting and confirming the dominant market ideology in globalization. On the other hand, it becomes “aggressive” as long as dominant ideologies fit their private interests, i.e. selling the English test, TEPS. Although we still need to be careful in deciding to what extent the discourses in The Chosun Ilbo might have affected the public opinion polls, and in consid-

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ering the possibility of “different discourse interpretations” (Widdowson, 2000, p. 22) on the part of discourse participants, the newspaper readers, the dominance of market ideology in neo-liberal globalization in the media and the profit-making motive of The Chosun llbo cannot be dismissed as irrelevant in the discussion of the process of the public opinion formulation in EOL in South Korea.

COUNTER-DISCOURSES TO EOL: FOCUS ON THE CASE OF HANKYOREH In contrast to The Chosun Ilbo, some other competing newspaper companies show a varying range of resistance to EOL in South Korea, and provide more diverse perspectives, as the following headlines indicate. • “EOL is a crazy idea” (Kyunghyang Shinmun, 2003, December 26) • “English imperialism in the Internet era” (The Donga Ilbo, 2000, February 24) • “Making Seoul ‘a republic of English’?” (Hankyoreh, 2004, April 25) • “The power of English and English imperialism” (The Hankook Ilbo, 1999, August 24) • “Communication skills determine English proficiency” (The Hankook Ilbo, 2000, November 30) Among the newspaper companies, Hankyoreh has been consistently the most critical about the sensational journalism of The Chosun Ilbo in the promotion of English in relation to EOL. It debunks the hidden agenda of The Chosun Ilbo as follows. “Much Ado about EOL”: The mass media is now making a fuss about EOL in South Korea, arguing that we need to learn from the Japanese 21st century project….Lack of English proficiency is due to its uselessness in Korea…. Behind EOL lurks a profit-making motive in the guise of globalization…. The Chosun Ilbo has already made a big profit out of TEPS, and now is trying to make the whole nation an English school by the promotion of the “English is competitiveness” campaign….(Hankyoreh, 2000, February 8)

Specifically, in reporting the issue of EOL in Japan in 2000, the tone of the following article of Hankyoreh is in sharp contrast with that of The Chosun llbo. “The debate of EOL in Japan getting hotter: Disagreements heard in the academic and cultural worlds”: Despite the wide acceptance of the importance of English as a practical language, disagreements are expressed in various fields in Japan….“The reason why Singapore, Philippines, India, etc. adopted EOL

80 • OK KYOON YOO is that they needed English as a governing language because they were English speaking countries’ colonies and multilingual settings. Japan has no reason to adopt EOL” said Sato Tadashi, who is an educator and used to be a primary school English instructor….”It is hard to understand why discourses of EOL are widespread in a monolingual society like Japan. The government should give its English education a top priority” said Okino Ana, a French literature expert…. “There is no advanced country with unique culture that considers EOL, which is a flippant expression of lack of subjectivities” said Professor Yoshida Yashihoko. (Hankyoreh, 2000, February 21)

The article is focused on voices that were unheard in The Chosun Ilbo, who had reported only the voices in favor of EOL in Japan, taking the power of English for granted and stigmatizing Japanese values. This shows that although there are competing voices on the issue, The Chosun Ilbo and Hankyoreh are very selective in making the voices of Japanese people heard by the public, which suggests the importance of a “critical eye” to reading media discourse on the part of readers. Meanwhile, the voices that were missing in The Chosun Ilbo are foregrounded in the article. The need for contextual considerations of the issue is expressed in “colonies,” and “multilingual settings,” while the importance of English education as a top priority is provided as an alternative other than EOL to improve English competence among Japanese people. Also, strong national sentiment is clear in the phrases “unique culture,” and “lack of subjectivities.” This essential notion of cultural nationalism echoes Kubota’s (2002) discussion of nihonjinron, “a discourse that celebrates the uniqueness of Japanese culture and people” (p. 17). The critical stance that Hankyoreh takes is extended to the “There is something the matter with EOL in ‘Special economic zones’” series, which critically examines the government’s plan of ”Korea as the Business Center of Northeast Asia” with special economic zones, where English would be used as an official language. • “English is just a lingua franca”: According to Jo Dong II’s definition, a lingua franca is “a language that people with different mother tongues speak widely for interaction…It is nonsensical for a (monolingual) country with a national language to adopt English as an official language when English does not enjoy the status as an official language even in the U.S. …Even China, the first in making special economic zones…has not ever considered EOL in the area.” (Hankyoreh, 2002, April 7) • “Place for Korean”: In the recent report of “World map of dying languages”… UNESCO pointed out that…the disappearance of languages means losing human intellect and knowledge embedded in it. (Hankyoreh, 2002, April 8)

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• “Competitiveness comes within”: Korean specific English education should be developed…Competiveness should to be based on one’s unique culture, art, traditions, and creativity, and language is the key foundation. (Hankyoreh, 2002, April 9) From the ways that various issues are addressed above such as a definition of official language (lingua franca), language ecology (disappearance of languages), and a localized pedagogy (Korean specific English education), it is clear that Hankyoreh is more critically oriented to the issue than The Chosun Ilbo. Particularly in addressing English education, they advance its importance as a better “alternative” to EOL, while The Chosun Ilbo thinks of it as “part” of EOL as the following articles (previously introduced) imply. • “Early English education urgently needed” by Yun Dae Eo (Dean of Korea University): “Learning English hard and using it as a daily language does not threaten the subjectivity of a nation” (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, January 20) • “Early English education needed”: The Chosun Ilbo’s ‘English is competitiveness’ campaign is becoming more convincing with the recent proposal for EOL in Japan….The younger a student is, the more chances they need to have to learn from native speakers….Koreans’ lack of etiquette derives from that of the understanding of foreign languages. (The Chosun Ilbo, 2000, January 24) Moreover, in conceptualizing “good” English education, Hankyoreh’s espousal of a localized version of English education is in contrast with The Chosun Ilbo’s over-emphasis on the importance of exposure to English (a daily language), which Phillipson (1992, p.185) terms “the maximum exposure fallacy,” and on native speaker norms (native speakers). This difference is deep rooted in different assumptions about the relationship between language and power, the former envisioning a shift in power relations potentially through “a pedagogy of possibility” (Peirce, 1989) and “pedagogies of appropriation” (Canagarajah, 1999b), and the latter taking preexisting power differentials for granted and thereby perpetuating the status quo through what might be called “a pedagogy of assimilation.” Generally speaking, Hankyoreh is much more critically concerned about the issue of EOL than The Chosun Ilbo. However, the strong nationalist tone of Hankyoreh as opposed to the neo-liberal globalist position of The Chosun Ilbo sometimes falls back into an essentialist notion of Korean culture and the Korean language, something similar to nihonjinron as cultural determinism (Kubota, 1999) as the following articles indicate. • “Competitiveness comes within”: Korean specific English education should be developed….Competitiveness should to be based on one’s

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unique culture, art, traditions, and creativity, and language is the key foundation. (Hankyoreh, 2002, April 9) • “Making Seoul ‘a republic of English’?”: The Seoul metropolitan government is planning to carry out a large scale project of “Daily use of English” for Seoul citizens and government workers, until 2006 when the percentage of proficient English speakers in Seoul reach up to 70 percent as in Singapore…the Seoul metropolitan government says that daily use of English is a prerequisite for Seoul to become a central city of Northeast Asia, and attract much foreign investment... however, it still asserts that it is different from English as an foreign language in Seoul...In response, Hangul Academy recently made a statement “Stop EOL in Seoul” protesting: “...the policy would be to admit to the world that we are an incapable people. What is more important is to make good guidebooks, good things to enjoy, and hospitality.” (Hankyoreh, 2004, April 25) To sum up, the discourses in The Chosun Ilbo and Hankyoreh show contrasting tones in dealing with the issue of EOL in South Korea. Just like the debate by the intellectual community, different ideologies permeate discourses and counter-discourses in each newspaper company’s addressing the issue, and compete for acceptance among readers in the process of the formation of public opinions. While a direct causal link cannot be claimed between the tones of each newspaper and the formation of individual opinions on the issue of EOL, it is very likely that The Chosun Ilbo have exercised much more influence than Hankyoreh and other newspaper companies, recalling that the former enjoys the largest sales, and that their private interests fit perfectly into “already dominant” discourses of English as a “global” language in the neo-liberal globalization era. DISCUSSION The analysis of the debates on the proposal for EOL in South Korea in the present study demonstrates how language itself is implicated in power, and how various ideologies come into play in the discussion of a particular language policy. While dominant discourses of neo-liberal globalization and colonial discourses of English are manifested in the government’s promotion of globalization, and in the tone of a giant newspaper company with a private motive, counter-discourses mostly based on critical perspectives of language are also made by other newspaper companies and the intellectual community in publications. Since EOL in South Korea is just a proposal rather than an actual policy, it is impossible to precisely depict its potential effects through the debate at the moment. However, the case of EOL poses some important questions that need exploration on the basis of contextual understandings of a given situation, and provides implications for ways to

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conceptualize the democratic language policy making processes on the basis of “a critical view of society and a political and ethical vision of change” (Pennycook, 2001, p. 56) as part of the whole project of critical applied linguistics. Strategic Use of Linguistic Nationalism As indicated in the discussion of the EOL debate, the overriding controversy derives from the globalization thesis versus the nationalism one. While globalization and nationalism can be defined in various ways, the EOL proponents and opponents take particular views to their advantage. Paradoxically enough, even the globalists are not free from nationalism when they argue for “open nationalism” or “pragmatic nationalism” and national interests. However, this seeming tension can be explained when we heed Seo’s (1998) remark that nationalism is not necessarily the antithesis of globalization, and Appadurai’s (1990, p. 295) comment that “[t] he central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization.” At the same time, the specific historical context of Korea as a nation-state based on ethnicity that strived to break away from Chinese influence and Japanese imperialism shows a reason why strong nationalism has been developed in South Korea. Here, it seems important to distinguish between the nationalism by big powers that developed into imperialism and the nationalism of those countries which were invaded by imperialist powers (Y. Shin, 2000). A similar argument can be made about linguistic nationalism in Korea. The use of the Korean language, especially Hangul, as a “resisting” symbol against the Japanese colonial assimilation language policy calls for considerations of the contexts embedded in the development of Korean linguistic nationalism. However, one of the biggest challenges to this argument is that the notion of linguistic nationalism, i.e. the ideology of “one nation, one language” in LPP is much criticized for its potential threat to linguistic diversity of languages and/or dialects with its centripetal force (May, 2001; Piller, 2001; Woolard, 1998; Wright, 2004). In terms of its homogenizing tendency at the cost of linguistic diversity, there are considerable similarities between linguistic nationalism at a national level and English linguistic imperialism at an international level. For example, while inferring that Phillipson’s linguistic imperialism seems to propose linguistic nationalism as a combating strategy, Wright (2004) mentions that “[in] the contest between the evils of (linguistic) nationalism and the evils of (linguistic) globalisation, the choice would not seem to be as clear cut as Phillipson’s solutions suggest” (p. 171). It seems problematic though to equate linguistic nationalism to linguistic imperialism across all contexts, because the extent to which the repressive power of linguistic nationalism is exercised varies across contexts. To illustrate, English-only movements in the U.S. are an ex-

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emplary expression of the “one nation, one language” ideology to the detriment of language rights of numerous linguistic minority groups inside the country, which shows that linguistic nationalism in multilingual countries is inherently oppressive. Also, even highly linguistically homogeneous countries such as Germany with romantic linguistic ethnic nationalism “adapted to support the Nazi philosophies” (Wright, 2004, p. 59), and Japan with the Kokugo (national language) ideology of “one nation, one language, and one people” developed during the Meiji period (Yi, 2001; Coulmas, 2002) provide historic examples in which linguistic nationalism exercised oppressive effects on neighboring countries when its “uniqueness” was connected to imperialism. However, the linguistic situation in South Korea is that it is a monolingual society, and its linguistic nationalism developed as resistance to external forces to foster the security of its people rather than having been imposed by the European model of LPP. Therefore, it should be considered how power relations are manifested in the formation of linguistic nationalism. Another possible counter-argument to the “uniqueness” of Korean linguistic nationalism is expected that in either seemingly multilingual or monolingual countries, linguistic nationalism is an ideology (from the false consciousness view of ideology), and not a fact of life. It is true that the essential notion of a monolingual nation is a social and political construct, because LPP as a political enterprise usually intervenes into actual language use to promote “one” language that is “unique” to its people during nation building (Wright, 2004). Also in the case of South Korea, it is true that in addition to resistance to imperialist powers, linguistic homogeneity is achieved partly because of political efforts to create an “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983), which prevented dialects from diverging into different languages. In this sense, the distinction between dialects and languages is fuzzy, which in turn makes the essential distinction between multilingualism and monolingualism at a national level untenable. Yet, once again, the rejection of linguistic nationalism as an ideology does not mean that it is equally oppressive in every context all the time. In some contexts, it can be less oppressive and rather strategically used as a counter-discourse to colonial discourses. During the Japanese rule in Korea, it was used as a counterdiscourse to discourses of the Japanese assimilation language policy that derived from discourses of “the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity” (Kaplan & Baldauf, 2003). What is important here is how power IS organized, resisted, and reorganized in and by discourses. In this sense, linguistic nationalism can be conceptualized as a “discourse” in a Foucaultian sense rather than an “ideology” from the false consciousness point of view of it. Thus, the argument that I advance here points to the reconsideration of the specific historical contexts of South Korea on the basis of power operations instead of the simplified rejection of linguistic nationalism as false consciousness.

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Linguistic nationalism can be strategically used as a counter-discourse to discourses of the spread of English as a global or international language in some contexts.4 However, the strategic use of linguistic nationalism in Korea also means that we need to be aware of the inherent problems that are discussed above. Thus, “there are times to strategically essentialize, and times to strategically problematize” (Pennycook, 2002a, p. 25) linguistic nationalism for “a political and ethical vision of change” (Pennycook, 2001, p. 56). A language situation in any country is not fixed, but is ever changing with its speakers actively engaging in its transformation. For the present, South Korea can be said to be a monolingual society, but the increasing flow of globalization will pose more linguistic challenges at various levels. Domestically, a steady increase of language minority groups, foreign workers and immigrants, will challenge Korean’s firm belief in monolingualism. At the same time, increasing participation in international communications at individual and national levels will accelerate the use of a “global” language, English, and possibly other foreign languages. This kind of change in a language situation is detected in Japan, and its recognition is reflected in the offering of languages other than English in more and more secondary schools (Kubota, 2002). Therefore, Korean linguistic nationalism should be defended as long as English exercises oppressive power, but should be problematized for possibly ever increasing linguistic and ethnic diversity domestically, and for the growing need for global participation. Pedagogical Intervention into Language Policy-Making Process Through the analysis of the debate on the issue of EOL in South Korea by the intellectual community, the extreme aspects of the proposal have been unraveled in several ways. While most of the debaters on the issue seem to agree that English is important in meeting the demands of globalization, some opponents point out the potentially negative effects of EOL, and others question the supposed causal relationship between EOL and English proficiency and emphasize good English education as a possible alternative for the improvement of English ability. Here, a big challenge is presented to English education in relation to a language policy: a pedagogical need to help students take up their subject positions among competing discourses on English-related language policies that will affect them, while improving English proficiency at the same time. Although the need for “good” English education is widely discussed in the EOL debate, it seems that it still remains at the level of the discussion of “language proficiency,” and the necessity of discussing the ideological implications of a language policy in education settings is unheard of even among the critically-oriented debaters of EOL. H. Han (2000), for example, aptly points out that English education is the key to the improvement of English proficiency, and argues that the agreement rates in most of the

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public opinion polls are just a result of the sensational journalism of The Chosun Ilbo, which made individuals believe that EOL would automatically lead to English proficiency. In addition, he proposes a reform of English education through the development of “Korean-specific” English education and through the quality control of English teacher’s language proficiency, e.g. on the basis of TOEFL scores. However, his concern is still confined to the question of how to improve English proficiency only without additional considerations of the politics of English. This is clear in his proposal for the Korean specific English education that focuses on the contrastive analysis between native speakers’ norms and Korean learners’ deviations that derive from the Korean language system, and in his emphasis on TOEFL scores only for “good” English teachers. With that said, H. Shin’s (2004) call for the reconceptualization of English education in South Korea is well taken: “what kind of English Koreans need to learn and what kind of English education Korea should strive for” from the perspective of critical pedagogy to actively engage in the demands of “globcalization” (Robertson, 1995) that globa1ity and locality is in a synergic relationship. Indeed, the present trend, gloca1ization, challenges ELT professionals to actively and critically address issues surrounding ELT in broader social and political contexts. For the present study, language policy is no longer separable from ELT, and critical discussions of a particular language policy in school become important in order to help students develop their ability “to critically ’read’ language policies, that is, to understand the social and political implications of particular policies adopted in specific historical contexts” (Tollefson, 2002, p. 4, emphasis original). This kind of pedagogical intervention into language policy-making process on the basis of critical pedagogy of English may be expected to make the process more democratic. Although we should be careful not to jump to the conclusion that people polled on the issue of EOL in South Korea are “duped” by the dominant ideologies of global capitalism and “manipulated” by the media, the caution does not seem to invalidate the justification for critically oriented pedagogical intervention. A democratic language policy-making process is more likely to be implemented by individuals at the grass roots level who have become critically aware of the implications and potential effects of a language policy than by those exposed to a limited number of dominant discourses only. It is in this respect that critical pedagogies of English can intervene in the process of making English-related language policy democratic. Here, being democratic not only means involving all the parties in the process of decision-making, but also incorporating their voices into it. The notion of “voice” in critical pedagogy summarized by Guilherme (2002) is in sharp contrast with Bok’s “liberal” one.

English as an Official Language in a Monolingual Society • 87 Voice is not in essence a singular or unitary expression of a particular individual entity, be it the individual or the nation. On the contrary, it reflects the interaction between several elements in transitory positions. Informed by this notion of voice, empowerment consists of the critical awareness of the ongoing power relations and the critical capacity to challenge them, and therefore, constitutes an indispensable element for the exercise of a critical citizenship. (pp. 50–51)

Bok’s assertion of EOL on the basis of the liberalist notion of voice as “individual” choice fails to capture its connectedness to existing power relationships within a broad social structure, and thereby makes democratic language policy-making process less likely to happen. In addition to the need to help students find their voices by providing alternatives, “postcolonial performativity” (Pennycook, 2000) framework for understanding the global role of English also provides pedagogical implications. While not taking “the structural power” of English as irrelevant, Pennycook argues: It [postcolonial performativity] also acknowledges that English may have effects in terms of the cultural baggage that comes with English, but it suggests that this can have no absolute or necessary effects, that it will always be changed, resisted, twisted into other possibilities. And it asks not merely whether ideology is imposed or resisted, but what is produced in such relationships. (p. 118, emphases added)

This concern with the “discursive effects” of English presupposes that students actually exercise agency against the potential manipulation of consent by dominant ideologies in public discourse, and suggests that we need to critically examine students’ actual language use at local levels to inform macro-level language policy-making process from bottom up. New Roles and Responsibilities of English Teachers The need of pedagogical interventions into language policy-making process points to new roles and responsibilities of English teachers. Eggington (1997) cogently advances the new roles of ESL teachers in implementing, developing, evaluating, altering a language policy, and informing students of its potential effects on them. As Ricento and Hornberger (1996) point out, “[o]ne way or another, all ELT professionals play a role in reaffirming or opposing language policies that affect not only our students’ future lives but the lives of our communities and nations as well.” Beyond simple involvement, as change agents in language policy-making process, English teachers need to be “transformative intellectuals” (Giroux, 1988) beyond “technicians.” They need to inform students of potential effects of a particular language policy in relation to larger social and political contexts, and

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help them to articulate their voices while being aware of forces that may affect their choices in participating in public debate on a language policy. At the same time, teachers themselves need to actively and critically participate in language policy-making process with knowledge of their students’ language use at local levels as “ethnographers” and “action researchers” in the classroom (Nunan, 1989). With the pedagogical interventions discussed, ways to increase English teachers’ critical involvement in language policy-making process should be explored. More than anything else, English teacher education needs to be reconceptualized in accordance with English teachers’ new roles and responsibilities as critical educators in order to help them to be “culturally and critically empowered teachers” (Kanpol, 1994) who can articulate their multilayered “voices.” At the same time, it is essential for teachers themselves to find ways to make themselves heard to language planners. In the EOL debate in South Korea, English language teachers’ voices are almost absent in the media and publications. This absence of voice is strange, given that English teachers are likely to be most affected by EOL, but it is also natural, considering that “differences of power between different groups are reflected in their differential access to public discourse” (van Dijk, 2000, p. 73). In other words, teachers in South Korea have far more limited access to media and scholarly discourse than government officials, company owners, scholars, etc. because they are yet to be empowered. In this situation, a grassroots teacher development group can be a good candidate for “power together” of English teachers. H. Cho (2001) witnessed the empowerment of English teachers in the Korean English Teachers’ Group at a grassroots level, and this possibility for empowerment is potentially likely to make English teachers’ collective voices heard in public discourse if the empowerment is connected to the role of “critically reflective teachers” (Barlett, 1990) as members in a larger society. CONCLUSIONS The competing discourses of EOL in South Korea that are examined in this paper show how LPP is intricately related to the issue of language and power, and how ideologies underlie the process of language policy-making. Provided that English in the era of globalization exercises the “dual modes of power, oppressive and productive” (Tew, 2002), on non-English speaking countries like South Korea, the point at issue is how to take full advantage of English while being aware of its ideological implications. Most of the proEOL arguments based on technocratic rationality and laissez-faire liberalism close down possibilities for democratic language policy-making process because they lack a critical understanding of the politics of English and contextual considerations of the language situation in South Korea. By contrast, many of the anti-EOL arguments also provide potentially problematic

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interpretations of the situation in that they tend to romanticize the mother tongue while disregarding the productive mode of English in globalization. Still other arguments present a middle ground between the two extremes, but fail to conceptualize the importance of English education as a site to reconstruct an alternative language policy-making process. In this paper I have argued that considerations of specific historical language contexts are indispensable for the language policy-making process, and that for that reason the strategic use of linguistic nationalism in South Korea cannot be rejected as inconsistent with the discussion of EOL. I have also argued that in addressing the ideological implications of English in globalization, LPP at a macro level and critical pedagogy of English at a local level should inform each other to meet the demands of globalization for “a political and ethic vision of change.” Critical pedagogy of English provides insights into democratic language policy making processes. Students that are critically informed of the politics of English are expected to voice informed opinions in English-related language policy making from bottom up rather than being swayed by the influence of dominant ideologies, and being, passively polled on the issue without a critical understanding of its implications. These critical perspectives can be applied to other English related policies in various settings at various levels such as in workplaces, in schools, and in nationwide public domains. It seems impossible to precisely predict how English will challenge the future of ethnic languages in each country in the future. However, rather than assuming that English will be or will not be the global language, or assuming that ethnic languages will persist or disappear, we need to strive to discover implications within broader contexts, and the effects of a related language policy on individuals involved at local levels in order to inform alternative language policy-making. NOTES 1.

Hye-sun Cho (see chapter in this volume) provided updated information on the status of EOL in Korea. She states: Since President Lee Myung-bak took office in 2008, the English as Official Language (EOL) policy and its discourse re-emerged in both public and private sectors in South Korea including education, business, tourism, and technology. For example, Jeju Island fully adopted the EOL policy to enhance the opportunity for international business and tourism (see http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/ special/2009/06/181_47398.html). The Lee administration initially suggested that English become the medium of instruction in all subjects in Korean schools. The overwhelming response by Korean teachers was tantamount to re-

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2.

3.

volt and for justifiable reasons, i.e. because there is no societal need to teach, for example, mathematics, Korean history, music, and art in English. In an act of appeasement, the Lee administration backed down and introduced the Teaching English in English (TEE) initiative as a concessionary policy measure, which still has numerous logistical problems, in the hopes of improving the English proficiency of Korean students. See also: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/ www/news/biz/2008/11/123_34000.html and http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2008/01/116_17811.html One possible explanation for the outlier is that the aggressive development-oriented administration of the Seoul Metropolitan government is extensively criticized in the media (e.g., Y. J. Kim, 2004). Another rationale for the strategic use of linguistic nationalism in South Korea is implied in Sung’s (1999) argument for a need to maintain the same national identity with North Koreans for the preparation of the reunification of the two Koreas. REFERENCES

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English as an Official Language in a Monolingual Society • 93 Kim, Y. H. (1998). Yeong-eogong-yonghwaneun sahoebaljeon-ui pihal su eobsneun yogu-ida [EOL is an inevitable call for social development]. Sidaejeongsin, 11/12, 10–22. Kim, Y. J. (2000, February 16). YangSu Gil GECD daesa: Yeong-eoje-igong-yonghwa jeoggeug geomtohae-ya hat tiae [Su Gil YangOECD emissary: It’s time to actively consider English as a second official language]. The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.chosun.com/svc/news/www/view Article.html ?id=200002160007. Kim, Y. H., & Kim, I. S. (2002, April 9). Yeong-eogong-yonghwamunje-itda 3. Gyeongjaenglyeog-eun an-eseo naonda [There is something the matter with English as an official language 3. Competitiveness comes within]. Hankyoreh. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.hani.co.kr/section-005100025/2002/04/005100025200204091841002.html. Kim, Y. M. (2001). Migug-in-i doegi wihanjeonlyag [Strategies for being American]. Sahoebipyeong, 28, 158–175. Seoul: Nanam publishing. Ko, J. (1999). Gam-yeomdoen eon-eo [Contaminated language]. Seoul: Gaemago-won. Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kubota, R. (1999). Japanese Culture Constructed by Discourses: Implications for Applied Linguistics Research and ELT. TESOL Quarterly, 33, 9–35. Kubota, R. (2002). The impact of globalization on language teaching in Japan. In D. Block & D. Cameron (Eds.), Globalization and language teaching (pp. 13–28). London: Routledge. Kwon, D. Y. (2000, January 2). Yeong-eoga gyeongjaenglyeog-ida: Jidocheungjjalbeun yeong-eo tas-e gug-ig keun pihae [English is competitiveness: The low English proficiency of Korean elites leads to huge loss in national interests]. The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.chosun.com/ svc/news/www/viewArticIe.html?id=200001020204. Lee, J., & Park, J. (2000, January 13). Yeong-eoga gyeongjaenglyeog-ida: Japan ‘Yeongeoinpeula’ guchug noseo [English is competitiveness: Japan sets outs to construct English infrastructure]. The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.chosun.com/svc/news/www/viewArticIe. html?id=200001130421 May, S. (2001). Language and minority rights: Ethnicity, nationalism, and the politics of language. Harlow, UK: Longman. McArther, T. (1998). The English languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKay, S. L. (2002). Teaching English as an international language: rethinking goals and approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nam, Y. (1998, July, 6). Banlon: Nam Yeong-sinssi, Bok Geo-il ssi-ui ‘Gugjehwa’ bipan. Segyehwa wihae minjog bEOLijali. Cheonbaghan gwa-ing segyeju-ui [Counterargument: Mr. NamYeoung-sin, criticism of Mr. Bok Geo-il’s ‘Globalization’. Giving up national identity for globalization? That’s a crude overglobalization]. The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved from http://www.chosun.com/ w21data/html/news/199807/199807060317.html Nunan, D. (1989). Second-language teacher education: present trends and future prospects. In C. N. Candlin, T. F. McNamara & T. Quinn (Eds.), Language learning and community: festschrift in honour of Terry Quinn (pp. 143–154). Syd-

94 • OK KYOON YOO ney: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Macquarier University. Park, J. H. (2000, January 19). Il, yeong-elul ngelul je-i gong-yongeolo. [Japan adopts English as the second official language]. The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://news.chosun.com/svc/content_view/content_view. htmll?contid=2000011870483. Park, J. S. (2002, April 8). Yeong-eogong-yonghwamunje-itda 2. Hangug-eoga seoljali [There is something the matter with English as an official language 2. Place for Korea]. Hankyoreh. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www. hani.co.kr/section-005100025/2002/04/005100025200204081902005.html. Park, S. J. (1999, December 31). Yeong-eoga gyeongjaenglyeog-ida Want Growth? Speak English [English is competitiveness: Want Growth? Speak English]. The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.chosun.com/svc/ news/www/viewArticle.html?id=199912310258. Park, S. Y. (2000, January 2). Yeong-eoga gyeongjaenglyeog-ida: Yeongeo jalhaeya ‘momgap’oreunda [English is competitiveness: English raises your salary]. The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.chosun.com/ svc/news/www/view Artic1e.html ?id=200001020221. Park, S. Y. (2000, March 2). Yeong-eoga gyeongjaenglyeog-ida: Ilchongli bipanhan Marx gyosu: “jidocheung yeong-eosillyeog-i gugga gyeongjaenglyeog” [English is competitiveness: Professor Marx criticizes Japanese Prime Minster: “Elites’ English proficiency is national competitiveness”]. The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.chosun.com/svc/news/www/ viewArticle.html?id=200003020261. Peirce, B. N. (1989). Toward a pedagogy of possibility in the teaching of English internationally: People’s English in South Africa. TESOL Quarterly, 23, 401–420. Pennycook, A. (1994). The cultural politics of English as an international language. Harlow: Longman. Pennycook, A. (1995). English in the world/The world in English. In J. W.Tollefson (Ed.), Power and inequality in language education (pp. 34–58). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pennycook, A. (1998). English and the discourses of colonialism. London: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2000). English, politics, ideology: From colonial celebration to postcolonial performativity. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Ideology, politics, and language policies: focus on English (pp. 107–119). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: a critical introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pennycook, A. (2002a). Mother tongues and protectionism. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2002(154), 11–28. Pennycook, A. (2002b). Language policy and docile bodies: Hong Kong and govenmmentality. In J. W Tollefson (Ed.), Language policies in education: critical issues (pp. 91–110). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, R., & Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1996). English only worldwide or language ecology? TESOL quarterly, 30, 429–452.

English as an Official Language in a Monolingual Society • 95 Piller, I. (2001). Naturalization language testing and its basis in ideologies of national identity and citizenship. The International Journal of Bilingualism, 5(3), 259–277. Rampton, M. B. H. (1990). Displacing the native speaker: expertise, affiliation, and inheritance. ELT Journal, 44, 97–101. Ricento, T. (2000). Historical and theoretical perspectives in language policy and planning. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Ideology, politics, and language policies: focus on English (pp. 9–23). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Ricento, T., & Hornberger, N. H. (1996). Unpeeling the onion: Language planning and policy and the ELT professional. TESOL Quarterly, 30, 401–427. Robertson, R. (1995). Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogenity. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, & R. Robertson (Eds.), Global modernities (pp. 25– 44). London: Sage Publications. Scholte, J. A. (2000). Globalization: A critical introduction. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Seo, G. (1999, December 31). Yeong-eoga gyeongjaenglyeog-ida: Yeong-eoneun saenghwal-eo, daeman-indeul sulsul [English is competitiveness: English is a living language in Taiwan. Taiwanese speak English without difficulty]. The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.chosun.com/svc/ news/www/viewArticle.html?id=199912310183. Seo, K. (1998, July 15). Nonjaeng..Minjogju-uineun segyehwa-ui antiteje anida [Debate: Nationalism is not the antithesis of globalization]. The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved from http://www.chosun.comlw21datalhtml/news/199807/199807150259. html Seogu-e daehan maengjong ha-yan gamyeon-eul beos-eola [Take off a white mask, blind reverence for the West]. (2004, January 2). Hankyoreh. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://news.media.daum.netlentertainmentlart/200401/02/hani/v5920331.html. Siron: Yeong-eogong-yonghwaneun michinjis-ida [Comment: English as an official language is a crazy idea]. (2003, December 26). Kyunhyang Shinmun. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.khan.co.kr/news/artview.html?ar tid=200312261833361&code=990303. Siron: Yeong-eojogigyo-yug milulsu eobsda [Comment: Early English education urgently needed]. (2000, January 20). The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://dbl.chosun.com/cgi-bin/gisa/artFullTextcgi?where=PD:=20000 120&ID=0001200701. Yeong-eoleuljessgong-yong-eolo jijeonghae-ya [Enforcing English as a second official language]. (1999, November 2). Seoul/Yonhap News. Retrieved from httpJ/ news.emrm.comishowtsp”I9991102nOO558!?sc-181&e=359 Shim, R. J., & Baik, M. J. (2000). Korea (South and North). In W K. Ho, H.W. Kam, & R. Wong (Eds.), Language policies and language education: The impact in East Asian countries in the next decade (pp. 173–196). Singapore: Times Academic Press. Shin, H. (2004). ELT in Korea: Toward globalization or glocalization? In J. Cummins & C. Davison (Eds.), International Handbook of English Language Teaching. Dordrrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Shin, Y. (2000). Modern Korean history and nationalism. Seoul, Korea: Jimooondang Publishing Company.

96 • OK KYOON YOO Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1986). Multilingualism and the education minority children. In R. Phillipson & T. Skutnabb-Kangas (Eds.), Linguicism rules in education (pp. 42–72). Roskilde: Roskilde University Center, Institute VI. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1998). Human rights and language wrongs: A future for diversity? Language sciences, 20, 5–28. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2000). Linguistic genocide in education, or worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., Phillipson, R., & Rannut, M. (1994). Linguistic human rights: Overcoming linguistic discrimination. Berlin: M. de Gruyter. Sung, N. (1999). Yeong-eogong-yonghwalon-eunminjog-ui saengjon-eul dambolo han hwansang-ida [EOL is an illusion that risks the existence of our nation]. Sidaejeongsin, 1/2, 10–38. Tew, J. (2002). Social theory, power, and practice. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Tollefson, J. W. (1991). Planning language, planning inequality: Language policy in the community. London: Longman. Tollefson, J. W. (2002). Introduction: Critical issues in educational language policy. In J. W. Tollefson (Ed.), Language policies in education: Critical issues (pp. 3–15). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Tsuda, Y. (1994). The diffusion of English: Its impact on culture and communication. Keio Communication Review, 16, 49–61. van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Elite discourse and racism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. van Dijk, T. A. (2000). Discourse and access. In T. Skutnabb-Kangas & R. Phillipson (Eds.), Rights to language: equity, power, and education:Celebrating the 60th birthday of Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (pp. 73–78). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Widdowson, H. G. (2000). On the limitations of linguistics applied. Applied Linguistics, 21(1), 3–25. Woolard, K. A. (1998). Introduction: Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In B. B. Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard & P.V. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory (pp. 3–47). New York: Oxford University Press. Woolard, K. A. & Schieffelin, B. B. (1994). Language ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 23, 55–82. Wright, S. (2004). Language policy and language planning: from nationalism to globalisation. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Yenge kongyonghwa mwuncey issta: yengenun kyothongeilppwun. (2002, April 7). Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.hani.co.kr/section-005100025/2002/04/p00510002520020407213200l.html. Yeom, J. (1999, December 31). Yeong-eoga gyeongjaenglyeog-ida: Yahukoli-a Yeam Jinseob sajang gigo [English is competitiveness: English is competitiveness: Contribution by Jinseob Yeom, President of Yahoo Korea]. The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.chosun.com/svc/news/www/ viewArticle.html ?id=199912310191. Yeong-eoga gyeongjaenglyeog-ida: Konelli-useubagsa-ui jo-eon: Yeong-eoneun munbeobboda saenghwal, mujogeon deudgo ttalahala [English is competitiveness: Dr. Cornelius’ advice: English is a living thing. Listen and repeat all the time]. (2000, April 20). The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from

English as an Official Language in a Monolingual Society • 97 http://db1.chosun.com/cgibinigisa/artFuliText.cgi?where=PD=20000421& ID=0004210901. Yeong-eoga gyeongjaenglyeog-ida: Kotdae nopeun peurangseudo yeongbureo byeongyong mosaek [English is competitiveness: Even France explores the possibility of English-French bilingualism]. (2000, January 5). The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.chosun.com/svc/news/www/ viewArticle.html ?id:=200001040367. Yeong-eoga gyeongjaenglyeog-ida: Seotun bijeuniseu yeong-eolo sangdam machigi ilssu [English is competitiveness: Faltering English often spoils business transactions]. (2000, January 13). The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.chosun.com/svc/news/www/view Article.html ?id=200001130409. Yeong-eogong-yonghwamunje-itda:. Yeong-eoneungyotong-eo-ilppun [There is something the matter with English as an official language. English is just a lingua franca]. (2000, April 7). Hankyoreh. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http:// www.hani.co.kr/section-00510002512002/04/005100025200204072132001. html. Yeong-eogong-yonghwanonlan-eulo Japan hukkeun [The debate of English as an official language in Japan getting hotter]. (2000, February 21). Hankyoreh. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://www.hani.co.kr/section-007000000/20001007000000200001202141022.html. Yeong-eojogigyo-yugpil-yo [Early English education needed]. (2000, January 24). The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://db1.chosun.com/ cgibin/gisa/artFullTextcgi ?where=PD=20000124&ID=0001240604. Yeong-eopa-wo-wa eon-eojegugju-ui [The power of English and English imperialism]. (1999, August 24). The Hankook Ilbo. Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://prome.snu.ac.kr/~news/home/virtuallcritic/dataleng1.htm. Yeong-eosillyeog, uisasotong gisul-iJwa-uhanda [English proficiency, communicative skills are more important.] The Handbook Ilbo. (1999, November 30). Retrieved February 1, 2011, from http://prome.snu.ac.kr/~news/home/virtual/criticldatalengl.htm. Yeong-eo-ui gong-yong-eolon [Editorial: English as an official language]. (2000, January 20). The Chosun Ilbo. Retrieved February 1,2011, from http://db1.chosun. com/cgi-bin/gisa/artFullTextcgi?where=PD=20000120&ID=0001200201. Yi, Y. (2001). Ibon-ui yeong-eogong-yong-eohwalon [Discourses of EOL in Japan]. Asiamunhwa, 17, 293–309. Yun, J. (2001). Yeong-eo, nae ma-eum-ui sigminju-ui [English, colonialism in my mind]. Sahoebipyeong, 28, 110–126.

CHAPTER 5

THE CONTEXT AND DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE POLICY AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN UNIVERSITIES IN HONG KONG1 Angel M. Y. Lin and Evelyn Y. F. Man

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN HONG KONG: BRITISH CULTURAL COLONIALISM AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE DOMINANCE Since Hong Kong was ceded by Dynastic China (the Ching Dynasty) to Britain as a colony in 1842 as a result of the Ching Dynasty’s defeat in the Opium War (triggered by Britain’s revenge on Ching Official Lin’s destruction of the East Indian Company’s opium merchandise in Guangdong), vernacular or Chinese-medium education (usually practised as Cantonese in speaking and Modern Standard Chinese in writing) has received little Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 99–113 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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government support. By 1911, the British Hong Kong colonial government was providing an English-medium education up to university level for children largely from well-to-do families, and a vernacular primary education for children from less well-to-do families (Irving, 1914). In 1935, a British progressive education inspector, Edmund Burney, visited Hong Kong and completed the famous Burney Report (1935), in which he criticized the Hong Kong government for neglecting vernacular education. It can be seen that not all British officials were culturally and linguistically imperialistic (Sweeting & Vickers, 2007). However, government resources continued to be channeled mainly to English-medium schools, cultivating a Westernized, English-conversant elite among the local Chinese population (see historical documentation by Fu, 1975). THE SPREAD OF BRITISH INFLUENCE BEHIND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FIRST UNIVERSITY IN HONG KONG IN 1911 The elite from the English-medium schools described above went to the English-medium University of Hong Kong, which was the only governmentfunded and recognized university in Hong Kong until 1963, when The Chinese University of Hong Kong was established from assembling a number of previously Chinese-medium private colleges. The establishment of the University of Hong Kong in 1911 symbolized both British cultural rule and the aim of producing an Anglicized ruling Chinese elite in Hong Kong society to support British colonial rule and to extend Britain’s cultural influence to China and Asia. The founding figure of the University of Hong Kong, the then Hong Kong governor, Fredrick Lugard, had the following to say regarding the “Western civilizing” mission of the University of Hong Kong not just to students in Hong Kong but also to students in China, in a letter to the Governor General of Canton in 1909: Soon after I came to Hong Kong the idea occurred to me, that in no way could we show our sympathy with the desire of China to educate her students in Western sciences, than by establishing here a University where students might be able to obtain degrees in no way inferior to those granted in Europe and America, and equally recognized by all nations. This would enable Chinese scholars to acquire degrees without being put to the great expense entailed by going to foreign countries. (Sweeting, 1990, p. 281)

To realize this Western civilizing function of the University of Hong Kong, Lugard placed great emphasis on maintaining English as its medium of instruction and on importing a wholly British staff. In Chirol (1910), Lugard is quoted as asserting that “it is necessary that Western knowledge should be conveyed in a Western tongue,” and to enact “moral education.” “In the Hong Kong University the staff will be wholly British,” except perhaps for

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a few Chinese specialists (as cited in Pennycook, 1998, p. 120). The desire to spread British linguistic, cultural and economic influence can be seen in Lugard’s mission statement for the University of Hong Kong (1910): In conclusion I would emphasize the value of English as the medium of instruction. If we believe that British interests will be thus promoted, we believe equally firmly that graduates, by the mastery of English, will acquire the key to a great literature and the passport to a great trade. On the one hand we desire to secure the English language in the high position it has acquired in the Far East; on the other hand since the populations of the various provinces in China speak no common language, and the Chinese vocabulary has not yet adapted itself to express the terms and conceptions of modern science, we believe that should China find it necessary for a time to adopt an alien tongue as a common medium for new thoughts and expressions—as the nations of the West did when Latin was the language of the savants and of scientific literature—none would be more suitable than English. (as cited in Pennycook, 1998, p. 121)

In the above excerpt, Lugard signaled his vision of the possibility that English might come to replace other languages and his insistence that it would be through English that a secular, Western scientific and moral education could best bring civilization to people in China and the Far East. This cultural “civilizing” function was further realized by the Hong Kong University’s “Hall culture.” Students entered into prestigious dormitories (e.g., Morrison Hall, St. John’s College, Ricci Hall) where they lived with their British residential hall masters and were acculturated into British cultural ways of being and developed strong cultural identities associated with a British university education and British life styles. It is possible to interpret this message merely as further evidence of Lugard’s cultural imperialistic views. It might, however, according to Sweeting and Vickers’ analysis, be alternatively viewed as an instance of Lugard’s political acumen and/or of his skills as a fund-raiser (Sweeting & Vickers, 2007). Lugard’s approach to the issue of medium of instruction, in Sweeting and Vickers’ analysis, appeared to have been pragmatic rather than imperialistic (Sweeting & Vickers, 2007). Addressing the 1912 Congress of Universities of the British Empire, Lugard alluded to criticisms of education in India: The third criticism [of the Indian education system] refers primarily to schools for boys and condemns the sole use of English as the medium of instruction. The criticism does not apply to Universities where (as here) it is necessary that Western knowledge should be conveyed in a Western language, since there is no common dialect which is understood by all Chinese, since the Chinese language is at present incapable of expressing technical and scientific terms, and knowledge of a Western language is necessary to open up the literature of the West to the student. The importance of the study of the

102 • ANGEL M. Y. LIN & EVELYN Y. F. MAN Chinese language and literature is, however, fully recognised. (Mellor, 1992, p. 172)

In Sweeting and Vickers’ analysis, this concern to give modern Chinese university students opportunities to acquire “Western knowledge” was also a central concern of many Chinese reformers in the early twentieth century (Sweeting & Vickers, 2007). It is thus debatable whether university education in Hong Kong had started with a merely cultural colonization desire of Britain, or also with a pragmatic function of bringing Western knowledge to China, as a response to the popular demand among many Chinese reformers for this Western knowledge. A historian of education in China and Hong Kong, Bernard Luk, points out that behind the cultural civilizing rhetoric of Lugard in 1910 were the British empire’s anxieties over rising American and Japanese cultural influences and business interests in China at that time. By the early 20th century, there were many American Christian universities (set up by American missionaries) in China (e.g., in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Canton), and in the other universities in China there were also many Japanese scholars serving as professors. Lugard seemed to be “far-sighted” in establishing Hong Kong University in 1911 to serve as a competitor in higher education in East Asia that would aim at acculturating a group of British-university-educated Asian elite (drawing students from Hong Kong, China, and Malaysia) to foster future collaborators in British colonial rule as well as to extend its political, cultural and economic influence and interest in China and the “Far East” region (Luk 2003; personal communication with B. Luk, July 15, 2005). Co-opting Private Chinese-medium Colleges into The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1963 Despite the lack of the British Hong Kong colonial government’s support, in the period between the consolidation of the Chinese Nationalist Government in China in 1928 and its retreat to Taiwan in 1949, private Chinesemedium secondary schools rapidly outnumbered English-medium schools in Hong Kong due to the influence and support of institutions in China (see historical documentations by Cheng, 1949; Wong, 1982). However, after 1949, with the People’s Republic of China adopting a largely self-isolationist stance towards Hong Kong and the rest of the world, graduates from Chinese-medium schools in Hong Kong could no longer go to China for university education. Many American Christian universities had, however, moved to Hong Kong after the 1949 communist takeover of China (e.g., Baptist College, Chung Chi College) and continued to attract the graduates of Chinese-medium secondary schools in Hong Kong. To exert some control over the rising influence of these American or Taiwan-based Chinese-medium private colleges, the British Hong Kong

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colonial government decided to co-opt these colleges into a governmentfunded (and regulated) university. The Chinese University of Hong Kong was set up in 1963 by amalgamating three existing private Chinese-medium colleges—Chung Chi College, New Asia College and United College. It should be noted that the three colleges all had distinct historical roots, linked heavily to Chinese tradition, language, and culture. a.

b.

c.

Chung Chi College was founded in October 1951 by the representatives of Protestant Churches in Hong Kong to fulfill the need for a local institution of higher learning that would be both Chinese and Christian. The mission of the College was to provide higher education in accordance with Christian traditions, using the Chinese language as the primary medium of instruction. It sought to promote Christian faith, learning and research but also respected Chinese language and culture. New Asia College was founded in 1949 by a famous Chinese scholar, the late Dr. Ch’ien Mu and a small group of scholars from mainland China. It aimed to preserve traditional Chinese culture and to balance it with Western learning so that students might understand their cultural heritage while being able to cope with the challenges of the modern world. It had a humble beginning but soon attracted co-operation and support both locally and from very respectable English-speaking overseas institutions such as the support of the Yale-China Association which was very active in educational development in China since 1954, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Asia Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the British Council, the Mencius Foundation, the Ford Foundation and so on. Links with such overseas institutions ensured that there was not just a focus on Chinese cultural heritage, but at the same time an openness to the language and culture of the West. United College was founded in 1956 through the amalgamation of five colleges: Canton Overseas, Kwang Hsia, Wah Kiu, Wen Hua, and Ping Jing College of Accountancy, which were originally private universities in Canton (now Guangzhou, China) and its vicinity, having close relations with Hong Kong. United College and its forerunners made important contributions to society in providing alternative avenues for the increasing number of Chinese-medium secondary school students to further their studies in Hong Kong. In 1959, United College together with Chung Chi and New Asia, became recognised post-secondary colleges in preparation for the establishment of a new university and in October 1963, The Chinese University of Hong Kong was inaugurated with the amalgamation of the above three foundation colleges.

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The current mission of The Chinese University of Hong Kong is “to combine tradition with modernity, and to bring together China and the West.” In Sweeting and Vickers’ analysis, the decision to set up The Chinese University of Hong Kong was: Certainly in part due to a desire on the part of the colonial government to exert some control over developments in higher education in Chinese—reflecting a particular concern to prevent education becoming another battleground for the Communist–Nationalist in-fighting that caused sporadic unrest within Hong Kong during the 1950s. The policy shift is also open to interpretation along more pragmatic lines. In the circumstances of the 1950s in Hong Kong, it was felt that something needed to be done (and, in the broader Cold War context, something needed to be seen to be done) about the problems of the increasing numbers of non-English speaking residents of Hong Kong, especially with regard to higher education opportunities. The University of Hong Kong solution, favoured by Keswick and his Committee, had not proved feasible. In parallel, eventually, with efforts to produce “bridging programmes” that would enable the academically more successful students from Chinese Middle Schools to reach standards in English sufficient to render them eligible for admission to the University of Hong Kong, the most practical option appeared to be for the Government to approve and subsidise the best of the Chinese post-secondary colleges. This policy orientation led eventually to the establishment of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1963. (Sweeting & Vickers, 2007, p. 26)

The University of Hong Kong and The Chinese University of Hong Kong were thus for three decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s, the two sole prestigious universities in Hong Kong, and they symbolized, respectively, English and Chinese as prestigious languages for pursuit of higher education in Hong Kong. However, since the early 1990s this balance in linguistic symbolism was interrupted with more English-medium universities being established. Setting Up Other English-medium Universities in the 1990s In the late 1980s after the signing of the Sino-British Agreement to return Hong Kong to China in 1997, Hong Kong witnessed a serious “brain drain” problem with many local Hong Kong well-educated people emigrating to Western countries such as Canada and Australia due to political uncertainty. The Tian-an-men Square bloodshed on June 4, 1989 further aggravated the brain drain problem of Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s economic structure had also been experiencing an economic shift from the labour-intensive manufacturing industry of the 1960s and 1970s to the tertiary sector of service industries. The British Hong Kong government seemed to respond to this economic shift and the brain drain problem by setting up new universities and upgrading former polytechnics and vocational institutes to universities

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(Sweeting, 2004). The government felt that higher education needed to be expanded and a decision was made to increase the mean percentage of the relevant age group admitted to degree study from less than 3% in the 1970s and early 80s to 18% in 1994. By the late 1990s, apart from the University of Hong Kong and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, there were also six other newly-established or upgraded degree-granting tertiary institutions: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Lingnan University and the Hong Kong Institute of Education. The medium of instruction at all these new institutions were claimed to be English, and this seems to be maintained at least in the written mode (with most written work and assessment done in English) while individual professors in different disciplines may sometimes use spoken Cantonese or Mandarin as the oral medium of instruction. Increasing Dominance of English in University Education in Hong Kong Since the 1990s The cultural civilizing discourses of the early 19th century (e.g., those of Lugard and other early governors) have gradually, in the 1980s and 90s, given way to the economic and global capitalist discourses of the importance of English as an international language of business and technology, and Western sciences and information technology for maintaining Hong Kong’s economic prosperity and human resource competitiveness in the global market economy. The 1997 political handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China did not witness any decolonization of the medium of instruction of university education in Hong Kong. Ironically the domination of English in the education system in Hong Kong has gained forceful renewed legitimacy when any possible post-colonial critique of English dominance can be powerfully neutralized by the hegemonic discourses of global capitalism (Lin & Luk, 2005). The Case of The Chinese University of Hong Kong The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) has been said to be the only university in Hong Kong that uses Chinese (realized as spoken Cantonese or Mandarin and written Modern Standard Chinese) as its medium of instruction. In fact, it turned out to face the greatest tension and the most difficult situation among the universities when having to come to grips with the medium of instruction issues at tertiary level. While the University of Hong Kong and other universities can boldly claim to use English as their medium of instruction, such moves by CUHK met with considerable resistance from its staff, students and alumni, who point to the cultural roots and the original aim for the establishment of The Chinese University. Over

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the years CUHK has gradually changed its medium of instruction to English in many of its popular disciplines such as the sciences, engineering, medicine and business. Since the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, there has been increasing pressure from both the Hong Kong business sector and the post-1997 government to “internationalize” CUHK by increasing the number of courses taught in English. Resistance was so great from staff and students that the latter surrounded the President’s car and called for his resignation in 2005 for his mishandling of the language issue. A Committee on Bilingualism was set up in 2005 to review The Chinese University’s language policy and make recommendations on how CUHK should uphold its long-cherished policy of bilingualism and form long-term plans to enhance bilingual education to meet the challenges facing the University. A Final Report on Bilingualism was issued in 2007 after extensive consultation with University administrators, faculty, students, alumni and other stakeholders. The Final Report stated that: The bilingual policy of liangwen sanyu (two written systems and three spoken codes), adopted by CUHK for the last four decades, is a distinctive characteristic and strength of the University. The policy on bilingual education at the University and its objectives should remain unchanged.

However, it also emphasized the importance of English: As a university that integrates Chinese and Western cultures, CUHK has a unique cultural mission in the current historical and social milieu. The University must be responsive to the global trend of internationalization, and must strengthen its competitiveness in the international arena. This is of paramount importance to the future of its students and to the University’s development.

It further added that: To be globally competitive, the University must acknowledge the importance of English as an international language. It should foster multicultural exchange and cultivate a cosmopolitan outlook among its students through a bilingual policy.

It was thus decided that those academic subjects of a “highly universal” nature, with little emphasis on cultural specificity, such as the natural sciences, life sciences and engineering, should be taught in English. Such a decision led to a judicial review application in the Court of First Instance filed by a student who claimed that the decision to teach in English demeaned the importance of Chinese and disregarded the original mission of the University since it was founded. The Court finally ruled that the University had no legal obligations to stick to Chinese as the medium of instruction and that the preamble of the University’s founding ordinance did not mandate the

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University to use Chinese as the principal language of instruction, and that English could certainly be used (South China Morning Paper (SCMP), 2009). This is a disappointing ruling but the fact that a single student was brave enough to file a court case against the university’s language policy testifies to the tension infusing MOI (medium of instruction) issues in Hong Kong. MOI POLICIES, RESEARCH ASSESSMENT EXERCISE, AND IMPLICATIONS FOR KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN UNIVERSITIES IN HONG KONG It can be seen from the above historical account that, given Hong Kong’s colonial context, the role of the university seemed to be from the outset intertwined with Western and British colonial political, economic and cultural imperatives. Knowledge and civilization have been seen as originating from the West, especially Britain, and that English is seen as the proper medium for teaching, learning and exploring Western knowledge, culture and civilization. The largely British faculty of HKU in its early years ensured that this “civilizing” mission was carried out in the hands of the British. With the co-opting of local private Chinese-medium colleges into CUHK, the original alternative space for knowledge production and alternative modes of intellectual acculturation have also been to some extent co-opted and regulated by the colonial government. Despite these moves, the late 1970s and 1980s have witnessed more Chinese and bilingual Hong Kong scholars entering into the faculties of the various universities. Almost 90% of those with doctorates earned them outside of Hong Kong, mainly from the West. The neo-Confucian scholars in the New Asia College of CUHK have strived to maintain their own indigenous traditions in their intellectual, teaching and research pursuits. However, with the exception of a few prestigious Hong Kong scholars, the general higher education scene has been dominated by Western faculty and Western-knowledge/epistemology-based scholarship mediated wholly in English. There has also been a conscious attempt to increase non-local student quotas and accept international students (whose mother-tongue is not Cantonese) from 5% to 20% of the approved student number targets for 2008– 09. The universities’ attempt to “market” themselves to attract overseas students further highlights the important role of English in Hong Kong universities. Local institutions have in fact set up attractive scholarships to get quality non-local students and there has certainly been a much greater presence of increasing numbers of non-local, non-Cantonese speaking students. The expansion of university education from two universities to eight in the 1990s has brought about opportunities for a new, young generation of local Hong Kong scholars entering into the faculties of the universi-

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ties. Although most of them have been trained in English and in Western countries (as this is the general recruitment policy of universities in Hong Kong), their presence in higher education stands a chance of bringing about more local scholarship and developing stronger local intellectual communities. However, coinciding with the expansion of university education is also the government’s desire to follow the West in introducing both marketization and atomistic-empiricist (self-) monitoring cultures in the form of “quality assurance” management systems into the governance of university education in Hong Kong. Market ideologies stressing efficiency, accountability and cost-effectiveness emphasize Western management styles and linguistic practices that have a direct impact on the academic culture in universities. For example, research performance (e.g., in the Humanities and Social Sciences) is based on narrowly defined notions of output performance that govern research and publication practices, such as basing performance mainly on recognized Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) criteria in the government’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE, a periodic exercise to evaluate the performance of university professors’ research output, a practice originating from Britain and spreading to Hong Kong in the 1990s). Publication practices use mostly criteria from the West and place a heavy emphasis on publishing in English in international, i.e. English, journals. Publishing in Chinese journals certainly does not carry the same weight. The penetration of university education by global management discourses and practices since the 1990s has again limited the opportunities for fostering indigenous knowledge and scholarship. Ideally, professors and students should have both international horizons and local horizons and the two should fuse and mutually benefit each other. Scholars in Asia should have a balanced approach: to teach, learn, conduct research and write academic papers in both English (for the international readership) and local languages (for the local readership) and to build knowledge with both foreign and local knowledge models. As for the medium of instruction, CUHK’s Final Report on Bilingualism (2007) states that “the choice for language of instruction should allow for flexibility, taking into account the nature of the academic subject, professional requirements, the language habits, competence and cultural backgrounds of the students and teachers concerned, and practical needs,” and that “there can be variation among Departments in the proportion of use of Cantonese, Putonghua and English.” (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007). How to implement such measures and realize the goals for the production of knowledge in university education will be a matter of serious consideration. We do need to engage in critical discussion on the impact of linguistic practices on knowledge production under the Englishizing forces of globalization and internationalization and to reflect on critical issues such as: what is the

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role of the university in knowledge production, and what is the role of the medium of instruction in this knowledge construction process? Habermas (1971) differentiates between different kinds of knowledgeconstitutive interests. Behind the RAE quantifying measures is the modern state’s monitoring and control system derived from the empiricist-analytical interest. Commenting on the Hong Kong government’s introduction of these global (with models directly imported from Britain) management/ monitoring quality assurance systems into the governance of schools in the early 1990s, Hong Kong sociologist of education, Tsang Wing-kwong (2006) has pointed out the colonization (by the government’s techno-scientific management system) of the lifeworld of educational communities. What counts as quality education? Under the government’s empiricist-analytically based accounting/auditing system it is only those observable measures (e.g., operationalized as checklists of quantifiable indicators) that count as evidence of “quality work” and “best practices” of teachers and principals in schools. Extending Tsang’s analysis to the RAE we can say that what counts as the contribution of university scholars to knowledge and society has been reduced to the mere number of publications (and in some universities, narrowly defined as in SSCI journals only). With the empiricist-analytic knowledge-constitutive interest motivating the government’s RAE control/monitoring system of university education and “workers” therein, the worth of these workers is seen only in their display of observable indicators of performance. However, there is contribution/performance that cannot be measured under this accounting system and there is knowledge not derived from the empiricist-analytic but the historical-hermeneutic knowledge-constitutive interest. This kind of “knowledge” cannot be measured in terms of objectified observables and it is a kind of knowledge (and action) derived from the human practical-understanding interest. For instance, scholars in the discipline of social work can contribute to the Hong Kong society much more than just publishing in dominant overseas journals which favor techno-scientific research paradigms that churn out “knowledge” which is of no relevance to the practical needs of front-line social work practitioners in Hong Kong. In his critique on Hong Kong government’s quality-education discourses and policies on monitoring of Hong Kong schools, Tsang also uncovered another insidious effect of the colonization of our lifeworld by the technoscientific management system: destroying the social trust between teachers and parents and disintegrating educational communities into competitive individuals (Tsang, 2006). We can extend Tsang’s analysis in our examination of the impact of RAE discourse and policies in higher education, when RAE criteria tend to be narrowly defined in certain local universities (e.g., especially in some universities where the science and engineering disciplines’ criteria are used as the benchmark for the humanities and social

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sciences). The RAE, at least as interpreted and practiced in some local universities, encourages professors to focus on writing for English-language overseas journals—not the local communities of scholars and fellow citizens. The effect is that intellectuals are encouraged to become individualistic competitive research workers, not bent on interacting with other (local) colleagues and building intellectual communities discussing topics/ issues of concerns in their immediate social world. However, it must also be pointed out that some local universities have much broader criteria than others and might permit a broader range of journals than SSCI journals. So, different universities’ local interpretations and practices are diverse and can offer space for local resistance. Competitive individualism undermines the fostering of intellectual, research communities in the local society as both individual researchers and universities are incited by RAE to compete with one another for government funding. Although the Hong Kong Research Grants Council encourages cross-institution research collaboration, when it comes to calculating the volume of the research grant, only the Principal Investigator (PI)’s university will be credited with the research grant, and the Co-PI’s university will not be credited. Furthermore, the kinds of academic work that one can engage in become increasingly under close (self- and other-) monitoring (e.g., not to depart from RAE-defined research areas), and this can be likened to the effect of the technology of discipline exercised by the panoptic gaze (Foucault, 1977). This gaze is likely to be internalized by individual researchers as these norms (e.g., what counts as valuable research output in one’s annual performance appraisal) are increasingly promoted by department heads and deans in performance appraisals in some local universities. In time the monitoring system will be internalized by individuals and we shall become embedded in networks of “confessional” power relations (Foucault, 1978) if we allow ourselves to be made to feel guilty for deviating from RAE norms as locally defined by senior management in the universities. CODA: SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE WORK The analytical lens provided by Habermas and Foucault may be employed to sharpen our understanding of the systemic effects of global quality assurance discourses and systems on intellectual culture and communities. While it is true that some local universities are intensifying the pressures by imposing an even more narrow interpretation of RAE criteria (e.g., adopting SSCI criteria) than other local universities, there is a trend of intensifying pressures in more and more local universities by adopting mainly English-language, overseas, indexed journals as prestigious journals. Is there anything we can do about it? The views of the scholars reported above seem

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to converge about what can be done under such a situation and it can be summarized as follows: 1.

2.

3.

4.

In terms of the MOI policy issues, local scholars need to engage in a critical discussion with policy makers and the public to advocate for balanced bilingual and multilingual approaches (Lin and Man, 2009) to the MOI of universities. While globalization and internationalization discourses are usually drawn on as rationalizations for using an English-only MOI policy, other bilingual and multilingual approaches to MOI must also be considered, to ensure that the process of knowledge production and the intellectual space are not preempted by Western discourses, knowledges and epistemologies. Scholars need to engage in critical self-reflection about our own situation now, and we need to engage in discussion with other scholars in a similar situation. If we can come to reach some consensus (in a community-building, intellectual public sphere) about what we can do to avoid being dictated by such a system, we can contribute to resisting the imperatives and insidious effects of such systems; e.g., vicious internal competition fueled by the Englishdominant MOI policies, and RAE and SSCI evaluation system. Scholars should seek to protect the existence of the tenure system, which can allow scholars the space and autonomy to do their intellectual work and to pursue other social projects of benefit to society. Scholars in Asian societies can engage in discussion of issues of their common concern and to discuss critical action plans to support one another’s intellectual work; e.g., to develop high-quality regional research journals as arenas for publication of research papers about topics in Asian societies, to develop knowledge models, theories, epistemologies that are relevant to and useful in theorizing experiences and phenomena in societies in this region, and to engage in dialogue with other theories and epistemological frameworks in other parts of the world: to have both international and local horizons.

While there is still much work to do, the present discussion might serve as a starting point to get us thinking about the likely negative effects on academic culture of English-only MOI policies and some local universities’ narrow interpretation of the research performance evaluation system (e.g., imposing mainly SSCI criteria). This paper, thus, does not aim at having a definitive conclusion about what is happening in all universities in Hong Kong. Instead, by documenting the historical background of English-language dominance in higher education in Hong Kong, and bringing it to the reader in conjunction with the discussion of recent developments of

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MOI and RAE interpretation and practice in some local universities, this paper aims at contributing to the critical discussion both locally and regionally about what intellectuals can do to resist the potential danger of the narrowing of intellectual space and academic freedom as a result of the penetration of English-only policies which are rationalized by the globalization and internationalization discourses. NOTE 1.

Some parts of this chapter have appeared in an earlier paper by the first author: Lin, A. M. Y. (2009). Local interpretation of global management discourses in higher education in Hong Kong: potential impact on academic culture. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 10 (2), 260–274. REFERENCES

Burney, E. (1935). Report on education in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Government Printer. Cheng, T. C. (1949). The education of overseas Chinese: A comparative study of Hong Kong, Singapore and the East Indies. Unpublished master’s thesis, London University. Chinese University of Hong Kong. (2007). Final Report on Bilingualism. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chirol, V. (1910). Indian Unrest. London: Macmillan. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books. Fu, G. S. (1975). A Hong Kong Perspective: English Language Learning and the Chinese Student. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan. Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and Human Interests, Boston: Beacon Press. Irving, E. A. (1914). The educational system of Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Government Printer. Lin, A., & Luk, J. (2005). Local creativity in the face of global domination: insights of Bakhtin for teaching English for dialogic communication. In J. K. Hall, G. Vitanova, & L. Marchenkova (Eds.). Dialogue with Bakhtin on second and foreign language learning: New perspectives (pp. 77–98). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Lin, A., & Man, E. (2009). Bilingual education: Southeast Asian perspectives. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Lugard, F. D. (1910). Hong Kong University: Objects, history, present position and prospects. Hong Kong: Noronha. Luk, B. (2003). From under the banyan tree to in front of the computer: The story of Hong Kong education. Hong Kong: Step Forward Multimedia. Mellor, B. (1992). Lugard in Hong Kong: empires, education and a governor at work. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Pennycook, A. (1998). English and the discourses of colonialism. London: Routledge.

Language Policy and Knowledge Production in Hong kong • 113 Sweeting, A. (1990). Education in Hong Kong, pre 1841–1941: Fact and opinion. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Sweeting, A. (2004). Education in Hong Kong, 1941 to 2001: Visions and revisions. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Sweeting, A., & Vickers, E. (2007). Language and the history of colonial education: the case of Hong Kong. Modern Asian Studies, 41(1), 1–40. Tsang, W-K. (2006, January). From discourses of education quality to quality education: the experiences and lessons from Hong Kong SAR. The Peking University Education Critiques. University not legally bound over language use. (2009, February 10). South China Morning Post (SCMP). Wong, C. L. (1982). A history of the development of Chinese education in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: PoWen Book Co.

CHAPTER 6

SIN(GAPORE EN)GLISH ORACY EDUCATION An “Online Discussion” Warren Mark Liew

INTRODUCTION Nationally recognized as the language of global commerce and education, English occupies the cornerstone of language planning and policy in Singapore. Since 2000, state-sponsored efforts to promote spoken Standard English (SE) have taken the form of a nationwide campaign known as the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM). Launched in April 2000, the SGEM comprises an annual media blitz of ministerial speeches, television features, radio programs, newspaper editorials, book releases, website launches, street banners and billboards, and Speak Good English contests, widely orchestrated to “encourage Singaporeans to speak grammatically correct English that is universally understood” (SGEM, 2009). A concomitant aim of the SGEM is to counter the pervasiveness of the local English vernacular popularly known as “Singlish” or, more technically, Colloquial Singapore English (CSE)—an English-based creole with lexical, syntactic, Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 115–148 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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phonological, and prosodic features derived from the indigenous languages of Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil, and Malay.1 Although three decades of linguistic research have sought to legitimate Singlish as a distinct, rule-governed variety among “new Englishes” (e.g. Brown, 1999; Deterding, Brown, & Low, 2005; Gupta, 1992; Pakir, 1991; Platt & Weber, 1980; Wee, 2004), little of this scholarship has been absorbed by the language planning and policing discourses of the state. Through the national curriculum (where English is taught at the L1 level) and the SGEM, the Singapore government has labored to curb the use of Singlish among Singaporeans, rationalizing its suppression on the principle of economic necessity. In his 1999 National Day Rally Speech that prefigured the launch of the SGEM, the former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong declared that “We learn English in order to communicate with the world. The fact that we use English gives us a big advantage over our competitors” (Goh, 1999, ¶ 97). He warned: If we carry on using Singlish, the logical final outcome is that we too will develop our own type of pidgin English, spoken only by 3 million Singaporeans, which the rest of the world will find quaint but incomprehensible. We are already half-way there. Do we want to go all the way? We would be better off sticking to Chinese, Malay or Tamil; then at least some other people in the world can understand us. (¶ 104)

The Singapore government is not alone in opposing what it considers to be the unprofitable preservation of a non-standard vernacular lacking in “international intelligibility.” Countries like India, Hong Kong, South Africa, Brazil, and the United States have pursued language education policies that place SE at the forefront of curriculum and pedagogical initiatives, while denying the legitimacy of non-standard Englishes.2 In some parts of the world, a postcolonial resistance movement has succeeded to some extent in contesting the hegemony of the Standard in recognition of the cultural rights of indigenous languages. In Hawai`i, for example, educationists have campaigned for more than two decades against official moves to eradicate Pidgin and other native languages. Today, various K–12 immersion programs based on innovative language-arts curricula continue to advocate for the importance of indigenous languages in the educational experiences of language minority students. Led by researchers and teachers, a vibrant literary movement has paved the way for increased cultural acceptance of Pidgin and other heritage languages as pedagogical resources in the schooling of immigrant populations (Davis, Bazzi, Cho, Ishida, & Soria, 2005). In Singapore, opposition to the SGEM has spawned an ongoing public debate over the uses, misuses, and abuses of Singlish in various communicative settings (e.g. Chng, 2003; Kramer-Dahl, 2003; Rubdy, 2001; Wee,

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FIGURE 1. Warning sign showing Singapore’s four official languages: English, Chinese, Tamil, and Malay (Wikipedia, 2010).

2005). Spurring the debate are the tensions between the perceived “symbolic value” and “use value” of Singlish. While many Singaporeans regard Singlish as a cherished symbol of their culture and nationality, some reject it as an “illiterate” dialect ill-suited to the communicative demands of a modern global economy. The attachment of status and stigma to Singlish bears significant similarities with the 1996 Ebonics controversy in Oakland, California (see Baugh, 2000). As Chng (2003) notes: Like the Ebonics debates, commentators have cast the issue of Singlish-Good English as “a natural dichotomy of power”: Standard English is seen as naturally empowering, and Singlish, like Ebonics, is but a “language of social marginals,” a “handicap,” and therefore a language that will mark the Singlish speaker in positions of inferiority.” (p. 54)

Further invoked in the Singlish debate is the vexed distinction between competence and performance. According to Noam Chomsky (1965), linguistic competence refers to a speaker’s idealized capacity to comprehend and generate well-formed utterances that adhere to a formal lexicogrammatical script. Performance, on the other hand, refers to the actual “live” production of speech or writing in social interactions. While advocates of the SGEM have prescribed competence as integral to performance (“I do and will speak good English because I can.”), a large body of research has described how competence is subordinate to actual linguistic performances amid the social psychological dynamics of specific speech situations (“I may not speak good English even if I can”). On this latter view, the notion

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of “communicative competence” (Hymes, 1974) suggests that competent speakers flexibly conform to, and depart from, formal linguistic conventions according to the exigencies of audience, purpose, and context. Just as the competent performer is able to communicate effectively with his/her audiences within the conventions of the theatrical event, so Richard Bauman (1977) has similarly defined performance competence as the “knowledge and ability to speak in socially appropriate ways” (p. 11). However, the idea of performing both “good” and “bad” English as part of one’s code-switching repertoire appears to have escaped the understanding of English curriculum planners in Singapore. In primary and secondary schools, Standard English is uniformly taught at the L1 level under the rule of a centralized EL curriculum that promotes SE while paying scarce attention to the naturally occurring variations in English “standards” between different social contexts.3 Reflecting the prescriptions and proscriptions of the SGEM, the official EL curriculum at once censors and censures the use of Singlish, despite the fact that Singlish remains widely used as a lingua franca among Singaporeans outside the formal classroom. This chapter seeks to examine the place of Singlish amid the sociocultural realities of English oracy acquisition in schools and classrooms. A neologism for “oral literacy” first adopted by Andrew Wilkinson (1968), oracy refers to the ability to speak effectively for a range of communicative purposes across diverse social settings. We might then ask: How does the oracy curriculum in Singapore define “effective communication” in its theoretical and practical senses? “Effective” for whom, when, where, and for what purposes? These questions extend toward larger concerns: What challenges do English Language teachers face as they mediate between the needs of students and the demands of the formal curriculum? What contradictions surround the valorization of SE in Singapore’s multicultural, multilingual society? How does the defense of Singlish figure in the struggles of linguistic democratization against the presumed hegemony of Anglocentric standards? PERFORMING CONVERSATIONS: A PROLOGUE ON “METHODS” The questions raised here are central to the educational stakes of the Singlish debate, a dramatization of which is attempted in the “online discussion” that follows. Gathered in this make-believe conversation is an assemblage of views, opinions, and insights gleaned from news reports, letters to the press, anonymous responses to web articles, official policy statements, published research, and informal interviews with students and teachers in two secondary schools. In reconstructing the debate on Singlish and oracy in the form of an asynchronous electronic conference, I draw on fiction as a method of inquiry and a mode of representation. Proponents of

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arts-based qualitative research have long argued for the legitimacy of such performance methodologies, in which “data” culled from experiences, observations, and artifacts are translated into fictional narratives, dramatic vignettes, and other imaginative renderings (Barone, 2001; Eisner, 1997; Knowles & Cole, 2008). Part of my intention is to unsettle didactic notions of an objective reality to which “scientifically based research” might claim privileged access. In dramatizing the postmodern crisis of representation, fictional inquiry rehearses the essentially contested nature of “truth,” shifting the spotlight on the canons of validity, reliability, and generalizability to illuminate the “truth-effects” of persuasiveness and verisimilitude. Instead of asking, “Is this study true?” performance texts demand that we interrogate the nature and appearance of truth. Calling for a “transgressive validity” consonant with the postmodern turn in social science research, Laurel Richardson (2000) asks that we ask: “Does it seem ‘true’—a credible account of a cultural, social, individual, or communal sense of the ‘real’?” (p. 937). I have, in the following attempt to (con)fuse fiction and fact, sought to portray a dialogic encounter in cyberspace, where computer-mediated communications have become a commonplace feature of contemporary social life. Afforded by the Internet are expanded opportunities for individuals and communities to connect across geographical barriers, cultural divides, and social distances, through communication technologies that have opened up new social venues for individual and participatory agency (McCaughey & Ayers, 2003; Poster, 1997). Suggestive of the communicative modes of digital networking, the following performance text seeks to capture the voices of teachers, students, government officials, policymakers, teacher educators, and researchers in a conversation over the uses, abuses, and promises of Singlish in the context of oracy education in Singapore. A collection of loose ends and intersecting threads, the form of this debate is anything but linear, as befits the text’s imagined context. Heteroglossic in matter and manner, the discourse structures computer conferences typically partake of the casual and conversational, thus occasioning my present attempt to violate the conventions of formal academic writing.4 At stake in such texts, moreover, is a reading experience emblematic of dissonance and diversity rather than coherence and harmony. As Knobel and Lankshear (2008) suggest, the literacy practices engendered by digital social media are decidedly “more ‘participatory,’ ‘collaborative,’ and ‘distributed’ in nature…[and] less ‘published,’ ‘individuated,’ and ‘authorcentric’…than conventional literacies” (p. 9). My aim in this chapter is to perform such new literacies through a playful refusal of academic conventions. To invoke Roland Barthes’ (1974) formulation, whereas “readerly” texts command clear meanings that encourage passive reception, “writerly” texts demand active negotiation with plural interpretations. Consequently,

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the following writerly exercise pleads no excuses for offending readers accustomed to the readerly genres of academic discourse. As the literary critic Wolfgang Iser (1978) asserts, the effect of a text’s gaps and silences is to provoke the activity of engaged reading that moves back and forth between lines and pages in a recursive process of anticipation, retrospection, and interrogation. This is strenuous work, which I invite readers to participate in. DISCUSSION Welcome to E-duTalk, an online forum where participants discuss and debate topical issues concerning the future of education in Singapore! This forum seeks to foster dialogue and debate among practitioners, researchers, and policymakers. Feel free to share your ideas, reflections, and resources in a spirit of inquiry and community! (Note: The forum moderator reserves the right to delete posts that might be considered offensive or inappropriate.) Subject: Singlish—First, Second, or Last? Dear All: Singapore is home to about 3.2 million Singaporeans (Department of Statistics, 2008). National language policy names English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tamil as the country’s official languages, given that our four major ethnic groups are Chinese (75.2%), Malays (13.6%), Indians (8.8%), and Others (2.4%). (By the way, is “Others” an ethnic group? What language do they speak?) English is taught at the L1 level in primary and secondary schools, while the other ethnic mother tongues are mostly taught at the L2 level. But for many Singaporeans whose home language is Malay, a Chinese dialect, or an Indian language, English is in fact a second language (Foley, 2001).5 Meanwhile, the authorities regard Singlish as neither “mother tongue” nor “second language.” Wikipedia calls Singlish “the first language of many Singaporeans, and the second language of nearly all the rest of the country’s citizens.” You could also say that Singlish is our “step-tongue” (Gupta, 1994), born of the “interracial marriage” between English and the other ethnic mother tongues (with Hokkien as first wife). Some people call Singlish a dialect, a pidgin, a creole, a deviant variant of the norm, while the true-blue-blooded Standard is, of course, the “Queen’s English.” Modern Singapore, after all, was founded in 1819 by Sir Stamford Raffles, and British English has been the official language of government since Singapore’s independence in 1965. We cannot deny that SE is the language of literacy and educational advancement. The last population census in 2000 showed a positive correlation between proficiency in the English language and socio-economic status (Leow, 2001). As the government often reminds us, Standard English,

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both spoken and written, is the language of educational opportunity and social mobility. Our command of it will insure Singapore’s prosperity in the globalized world. Mr. E. Alist Subject: Re: Singlish—First, Second, or Last? Da April 15, 2001, edition of the Honolulu Advertiser wen report dat in Singapore, da government is orchestrating one Speak Good English Movement by telling da people dat their Singlish is not patriotic. Singlish is one blend of English mixed togeddah wit da languages in Singapore, like Malay, Tamil, and all kine Chinese kine dialecks. Most people in Singapore can talk British English, but dey raddah talk to each oddahs in Singlish. Da government getting hod time cuz use of Singlish is supa-popular and planny people see ‘em as part of their Singaporean identity. But still yet da government is spending ukumillion bucks in one full-on TV, radio, mass media campaign fo’ get peple fo’ talk “proper english.” Lee Tonouchi (2004, p. 80) Subject: English for foreign workers Greetings! Nowsaday, Singapore is having more and more “foreign talents” from China, India, Indonesia, and Philippines. From 1998 to 2008, the percentages of non-Singaporeans who lives in Singapore increase from 19% to 25% of the total population (Leow, 2001). But many foreigners don’t know how to speak good English. This is not good when so many of them works at sales counters, cafes, restaurants, and travel agencies. The government should make foreigners pass English proficiency test if they want to migrate here. I agree with our Minister that Singaporeans must speak good English so that we can also teach our foreign guests good examples of English. If English is broken,6 our future nation will also be broken. Mr. Lee Ah Meng Subject: Advantages of Singlish Dear All: Is Standard English really the best way for Singaporeans to express themselves? Some things are better said in Singlish. Emotional nuances are lost when Singlish is translated to English. Language is for communication with our friends and loved ones. Although our economy needs Standard English, with our lahs and mehs,7 we can express the gamut of our thoughts and emotions more economically. Yes, we should strive to improve our standards, but we should not demonize Singlish as a perverse deviant variant of the norm. Though I don’t fully understand all his words (is it some kind of

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written Hawaiian pidgin?), I think Mr. Tonouchi is saying the same thing: the government is wasting our taxpayer’s money with all this Speak Good English Movement hype! T. W. Ang (2006) Subject: Re: Advantages of Singlish Allow me to restate the main objectives of the Speak Good English Movement. The Movement aims to encourage Singaporeans to speak good English (i.e. SE that is understood around the world), and to recognize the importance of speaking it. When the SGEM was launched in 2000, the focus was to raise awareness of the importance of speaking good English. What we want now is to encourage people to change their attitudes and be pro-active about improving their English. In 2008, the Movement’s focus is on service and retail staff—our frontline “ambassadors” at important international events such as the Formula One Grand Prix last year. As our Education Minister Dr Ng Eng Hen (2004) declared, “Speaking good English … gives added confidence to our workers, especially those working in the tourism, hospitality and retail sectors who will be able to make a good impression on and better service tourists and visitors to Singapore” (¶ 4). In view of this, the SGEM is currently working with the Singapore Workforce Development Agency and the Singapore Retailers Association to provide training programs to improve the English proficiency of Singapore’s workforce. Meanwhile, the SGEM has launched a website (www.sixlives.sg) that showcases an animated drama series about a couple planning for their wedding, in order to stress the importance of using good English to communicate well (Hong, 2009). Please tune in every Friday evening for each new episode, proudly brought to you by those who Speak Good English! Mr. Goh E.T Chairman, Speak Good English Movement Subject: Intelligibility Misunderstood “Speak Well. Be Understood” was the slogan for the Speak Good English Movement from 2000 to 2004. But does “being understood” necessarily mean “speaking well”? What does it mean to “speak well”? Correct grammar? Powderful8 vocabulary? Proper pronunciation? Pleasing accent? What does it mean to be “intelligible to the rest of the world”? Does “the rest of the world” speak only Received Pronunciation or General American English? How “well” must one speak in order to be “understood”? Understood by whom, where, and for what purposes? The linguist David Graddol (1999) projects that by the year 2050, there will be 433 million native speakers of English compared to 668 million non-native English speakers, and that English will become “a language used mainly in multilingual contexts

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as a second language and for communication between non-native speakers” (p. 57). Perhaps we need to understand how a global society of diverse English speakers might learn to understand one another without having to Speak Good English. Socratease Subject: Re: Intelligibility Misunderstood Such teasing questions, Socratease! Interestingly, the MOE’s English Language Syllabus states that learners should “[s]peak, write and represent in internationally acceptable English (Standard English) that is grammatical, fluent, mutually intelligible and appropriate for different purposes, audiences, contexts and cultures” (Ministry of Education, 2010, p. 10; my emphasis). This framework seems grounded in a model of Systemic Functional Linguistics. As far as oral communication is concerned, teachers in Singapore don’t really teach the finer points regarding the relations between form and function, text and context. Ultimately, what’s tested in the GCE O-Level English Language and A-Level General Paper oral and written examinations9 is mastery of “internationally acceptable English,” which, according to the language experts in the MOE, is none other than Standard English. I’m still waiting to see an exam paper that asks students to analyze the ways in which non-standard varieties are justifiable with respect to “purpose, audience, context and culture.” Something similar happens in teacher education. As a teacher-trainee at NIE, I remember taking a mandatory course, “Communication Skills for Teachers.” According to the website, the course is designed “to provide student-teachers with the oral and written skills necessary for effective communication as teachers in the classroom and in their professional interaction with colleagues, parents and the general public” (National Institute of Education, 2009, p. 62). The course objectives state that teachers should “become aware of the importance of considering the purpose, audience and context when communicating” (p. 62; my emphasis). But what the course emphasized was the importance of speaking grammatically and fluently so as to be “effective.” There was nothing about expanding our speech repertoires or code-switching for a range of purposes, audiences, and contexts. The irony is that teachers, especially in neighborhood schools like mine, often have to speak Chinese or Malay when communicating with students, parents, and even colleagues in school who are not English-proficient! Mrs. Laura Ang Subject: Some Theories of Language Learning Dear Educators,

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The popular approach to language teaching in Singapore schools is still very traditional. Students learn grammar rules, memorize vocabulary, and practice them with guidance, correction, and remediation. Proficiency then becomes “automatic” when skilling-by-drilling results in internalized competence. Yet research has long established that language acquisition is a social practice that exceeds decontextualized rote learning and drilling. Social constructivist theories suggest that learners construct and negotiate new knowledge through social interactions both in and outside the formal classroom (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978). As language practices shape and are shaped by socio-cultural contexts, “[a]ny assessment of spoken English, therefore, which gives undue weight to Standard English, is measuring not the school’s effectiveness, not the pupil’s ability, but their social background” (Perera, 1993; as cited in Carter, 1999, p. 164). Proponents of the New Literacy Studies (NLS) (Gee, 2000; Street, 1984, 1999) have argued that the idea of literacy (including oracy) as a set of competencies should be replaced by an understanding of “multiliteracies” (New London Group, 2000) as dynamic social, cultural, and political practices. An NLS approach would thus emphasize the social, cultural, and political roles that Singlish plays in the learning ecologies of formal schooling in Singapore. While definitions of “good English” touted by the SGEM and the MOE defer uncritically to “native speaker” varieties, an NLS-based analysis of what counts as literacy, whether spoken or written, for whom, where, when, and why, can point the way to a more inclusive and sophisticated oracy curriculum. Dr. Mark Lew Subject: Re: Some Theories of Language Learning Wah lau eh! 10 Dr Lew, why you write like that? Your Engrish damn cheem11 leh! Teacher usually don’t write like that one. So many theory for what? English teacher should teach the MOE syllabus. How can say our gahmen?12 Some teacher (like my son’s one) cannot even speak proper Engrish, just like me lor. Maybe they can write good Engrish to pass out from university and NIE. But writing ≠ speaking, correck or not?! Teachers first must learn to talk before can teach what you call “inclusive and sophisticated oracy curriculum.” So don’t talk cock with your powderful Engrish lah!13 Boh Tuck Chek14 Subject: Intelligibility and Misunderstanding Dear Singaporeans, Having worked in Beijing as a high school English teacher for five years, I find this Singlish debate not unlike the tedious controversies over “Chinglish.” A certain Professor Oliver Radtke, who specializes in this quaint

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tongue, argues on his website (www.chinglish.de) that “Chinglish should be regarded with pride…It’s enriching an existing language, offering a new point of view, a new set of vocabulary and new usages.” Some of you might concur, although I personally consider this view objectionable. Chinglish was and still is incomprehensible to me and my fellow native English speakers. Academic apologetics aside, “Chinglish” has done little to increase my admiration for the speakers of the Chinese language. Singlish, I dare say, is infected by the same parochialism. Insisting that the native-English-speaking majority accommodate to a minority of Singlish-speaking natives is not only naïve but outrageous. Surely there must be some respect for the rich history of the English language! cheers, H. Higgins P.S. That the Singlish word “kiasu” has recently entered the Oxford English Dictionary strikes me as deliciously ironic. What better illustration of Singaporeans’ “kiasu” character than the desire to be recognized and respected, even for its “fear of losing face”? Subject: Language for Literature I concur ardently with Mr. Higgins’ plea on behalf of the “rich history of the English Language”! Having studied A-level English Literature teachers from native English speakers, I have truly been enlightened. Indeed, the English Language transcends utilitarian values. It is no mere vehicle of economic exchange, but a musical instrument of human expression, a mirror to the mellifluous depths of our mortal natures. No language is worthy that cannot express immortal truths with beauty and accuracy. As the poet John Keats once wrote: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Unlike Singlish, Standard English is essential to appreciating the great works of Shakespeare, Austen, Wordsworth, and Shelley. Cultural literacy and literary sensibilities cannot be acquired apart from a fervent appreciation of the expressive wealth of the English language. Eliza D. Rita Stamford Junior College Subject: Re: Intelligibility and Misunderstanding Mr. Higgins has obviously done a good job in educating Miss Rita. But his bigoted self-importance leaves me speechless (i.e. orally challenged). Concerned Singapore Citizen Subject: Teacher Professionalism Dear Fellow Educators:

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As an English Head of Department, I’m so often annoyed that teachers of other subjects are not expected to model the Standard the way English teachers are expected to. As far as I know, Math, Science, and Humanities teachers are not obliged to teach and promote written and spoken Standard English in their classes. When students fare badly in their English exams, English teachers get blamed. I think the MOE underestimates the role that other teachers and school administrators play in supporting the EL curriculum. Someone once said, “every teacher is a teacher of English.” Clearly, language learning does not take place merely within the confines of the English Language classroom. Unfortunately, when it comes to modeling Standard English, all English teachers are equal, but some are more equal than others! As an English Head of Department, I know of teachers who are not only guilty of countless grammatical errors in their speech, but are also incapable of picking out the errors in their students’ essays! Dudley Au Subject: Re: Teacher Professionalism and Professionalization Dear Dudley, As a maths teacher, I resent the charge of professional incompetence! Many teachers use non-standard English to enhance rapport with students, and I often find myself code-switching to Singlish or even Malay when teaching students in my neighborhood secondary school. In fact, teachers of students who do not come from English-speaking homes should learn to switch between Standard English, Singlish, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil. They should learn to cater to the needs of their multilingual, multi-ethnic classrooms. A teacher who can use so many languages and registers should get more respect than monolingual speakers of Standard English! Siew Y.P. Subject: Re: Teacher Professionalism and Professionalization Dear Mr. Dudley, I know my language in class is stammered with inaccuracies, but frankly I don’t bother. My Chemistry lessons are not about English grammar. So long as my pupils are happy with my teaching, so long as I do my job, why should the school complain about my English? Chemistry is more of a content-based rather than a skills-based subject. For Maths and History teachers also, teaching facts and knowledge is the top priority, not writing or speaking skills! I think students prefer that we speak a bit of Singlish, especially when using anecdotes and jokes to illustrate scientific concepts. It brings out a certain joy in being communicated in Singlish instead of perfect English. I may not speak perfect English, but the school respects me as a good science teacher who always produced good results for the

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Chemistry O-Level exams. Plus I still get my Performance Bonus every year! Thank you very much. Lee Bo Chap15 Subject: Accommodating Whole-Language Approaches Applying the theories of Ferguson (1959) and Fishman (1972), sociolinguists have characterized linguistic variability among Singaporeans in terms of lectal shifts within a situation of diglossia (Gupta, 1991; Platt & Weber, 1980). On this account, a speaker’s communicative competence depends on her/his ability to code-switch between the High (H) and Low (L) varieties relative to audience and context. In Singapore, the H-variety of Educated Singapore English, historically allied to Standard British English, belongs to the formal EL classroom. However, to insist on a “monologic” standard is to ignore the dialogic demands of student-teacher interactions. As Communication Accommodation Theory suggests, people’s speech patterns tend to converge in face-to-face interactions. The socio-psychological dynamics of speech accommodation “function to index and achieve solidarity with or dissociation from a conversational partner, reciprocally and dynamically” (Giles & Coupland, 1991, pp. 60–61). Accordingly, teachers may often use CSE to facilitate communication and rapport with students, whether or not consciously. Accommodation practices find additional warrant in Communicative Language Teaching strategies, which aim in part to encourage “fluency” over “accuracy,” thereby creating opportunities for learners to interact verbally in a non-threatening learning environment. To this end, the teacher’s ability to communicate in CSE may facilitate pedagogical connections between students’ cultural-linguistic backgrounds and the demands of the formal curriculum. Professor Singh Lee Subject: Accommodating Excuses? Professor Lee’s academic justifications strike me as dubious. Good intentions often beget unintended results. As the Senior Minister once said: “Secondary students use Singlish with their peers but switch to English when speaking with their teachers. Many find grammar a problem” (Goh, 2000, ¶ 5). So even the use of Singlish in speech accommodation may inadvertently be perpetuating bad English. My concern is that some teachers don’t even try to speak good English with their students. As a parent, I am shocked that some English teachers are unconsciously modeling non-standard English! It seems that some Singaporeans “code-switch” to Singlish only to disguise their limited command of English. In other words, they resort to Singlish expressions simply because they are unable to express their thoughts in SE. Mrs. Koo K.S.

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Subject: Re: Teacher Professionalism and Professionalization Dear teachers, In the secondary school curriculum, different subjects are governed by different sets of syllabi, assessment practices, instructional practices, and teachers. This “strong classification” (Bernstein, 1996) accounts for the division of labor among different subject teachers, with EL teachers shouldering the main burden of English literacy (and oracy) instruction. An effective EL curriculum, therefore, should break down traditional disciplinary divides and make other subjects collaborate with English teachers to support the teaching of SE across the curriculum. Are there any schools that have tried to design and implement an integrated oracy curriculum across all subjects? As I understand, if a school wants to restructure its curriculum, it needs to reculture its teacher communities (Fullan, 2001). This is hard work that requires good leadership and teacher collaboration. What would it cost to restructure and reculture the entire system, from teacher-recruitment processes and teacher education curricula, to teachers’ performance evaluation and the preparation of teacher educators? Mike Foo Lun Subject: Assessment Pressures It’s no surprise that teachers privilege writing over speaking. According to researchers at the National Institute of Education, “While the privileging of reading and writing did not always resonate with teachers’ own beliefs about the purpose of language learning and use, many felt that they had to be realistic and prepare pupils for examinations” (Goh, Zhang, Ng, & Goh, 2005, p. 91). Learning outcomes tend to be based on short-term performance in high-stakes exams like the O- and A-levels. Learning to speak well is a long-term commitment that is hard to measure with standardized tests. Many teachers recognize that the O-Level and A-Level exams ultimately determine the school’s fate in the annual ranking or “banding” exercise This competition for visible indicators of excellence is further motivated by the reward structures of the School Excellence Model (SEM), MOE’s auditing system based on official school inspections and performance evaluations. The desire to optimize school performance even confuses achievement motivation with selfish motives. This is not unlike the ethos of kiasu-ism16 that afflicts so many Singaporean students and parents. Students are smart enough to know that our system is really a “testocracy,” so the smart kids learn quickly to be exam-smart (Barr & Skrbiš, 2008; Cheah, 1998; Tan, 2005). If getting into the top universities and schools included required the ability to speak SE, then surely more students would take Oral English learning more seriously. Educators need to convince their students that learning to speak SE will not only prepare them for the challenges of

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the new economy, but also help them get the grades that look good on their education resumes! Meanwhile, we shouldn’t blame students for neglecting their oral skills. They are, after all, exam-oriented products of an examdriven education economy. Mr. E. Alist Subject: Influences of School Culture My son was educated in a foreign school and he spoke proper English with the right grammar. He joined a local school in August last year. He spoke good English initially, but was teased by his classmates for speaking “ang moh17 English.” Since then, due to peer pressure, his good English became bad English, with wrong grammar. As a parent of a schooling teenager, I am disappointed that teachers don’t do enough to counter such bullying by punishing, for example, those who insist on using Singlish outside the classroom. Mrs. Koo K.S. Subject: Re: School Culture Affects School Children Mrs. Koo: Let’s face it: Singlish is used everywhere in Singapore, even among students in the top-ranking schools, and is considered by many young people as a mark of their Singaporean identity. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of Chinese Singaporeans speaking Mandarin at home has increased more than the number adopting English as their home language (Department of Statistics, 2005, p. 17). Meanwhile, families with high EL proficiency still belong to an elite minority in Singapore. Perhaps you should have you’re your homework before choosing the “right” school for your son. There are, after all, private schools for the children of native-English speakers (such as the Singapore American School). On another note: without research-based evidence, pundits of the SGEM unquestioningly assume a positive correlation between verbal competence in SE and workplace effectiveness. As a teacher in a neighborhood secondary school, I can testify that not every student aspires to a university education, and not every job that awaits my kids will require them to speak and write in perfect SE. As Mr. Lee Ah Meng pointed out earlier, many of the service-industry jobs have been given to foreigners from China, India, Philippines, etc., many of whom have limited command of English. One of my students even argues that mastering SE isn’t necessary since he has no ambitions of becoming an English teacher! Dudley Au

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Subject: Re: School Culture Affects School Children Actually, Dudley, I don’t blame parents like Mrs. Koo for wanting the most literate school environment for her child. As a parent and teacher myself (who has not been promoted for many years because I am only an O-Level holder), I have no illusions about how the Singapore system works. Ours is a “technocratic government” and an “administrative state,” ruled by education-based “meritocracy” and the values of economic efficiency and competition (Ong, 2006; Sharpe & Gopinathan, 2002; Tan, 2008). As for your regrets about students not wanting to be English teachers, please don’t take them (or me) personally. I myself would rather my students become lawyers, engineers, and doctors. My doctor friend tells me that speaking Singlish and other dialects is crucial for her job where she has to talk to patients who don’t care whether or not you speak perfect English. And I’m quite sure he makes more money than either you or me. Mdm V Tan Subject: Singlish for National Service I remember having to speak in Singlish, Mandarin, and Hokkien with my army mates. No one ever speaks only Standard English during National Service. One of my platoon mates was this kentang18 Singaporean who was schooled in Australia. He had a hard time getting along with the hokkien peng,19 not so much because of his accent, but his lack of Singlish vocabulary (he couldn’t speak Chinese either). As part of the army’s basic language training, either you adapt your language habits or else kena lum pah pah lan!20 I believe Singlish is more widely spoken by males, not because women have better language skills (as my English teacher once claimed), but because it’s a survival tool in the army, part of the male-bonding culture. Frankly, many chor lor21 words in Singlish have an aggressive tone that would sound pretty unsexy coming from the lips of ladies… Lieutenant Kilat Subject: Rojak Hi Everyone! I’m a secondary two student and I agree with Mr. Au that Singlish is “considered by many young people as a mark of their Singaporean identity.” In today’s National Education lesson, my teacher agreed with me that Singlish contributes to our nation’s “Social Defense” and “Psychological Defense” (Ministry of Defence, 2009) as it can give Singaporeans a sense of belonging. In fact, Singlish is like rojak. Rojak is originally from the Malay culture, and it is like the root of where rojak comes from, since Singapore was first discovered and occupied by the Malays. Then Indian and Chinese immi-

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grant started to add their own ingredients into the rojak, making it quite a new dish: Singlish! Just as rojak is welcomed by many races because of its unique taste, Singlish should be preserved because it is unique and can be understood by different people from different cultures. Although nonSingaporeans might not understand what it is totally about, they can understand the part of rojak that comes from their own culture and which gives them a sense of warmth. When we think of Singapore or Singaporeans, we think of Singlish. Nobody, besides us, is able to speak it, so we should be proud of this language we have created! Sincerely Andre Lum Subject: Attitudes Towards Mother Tongues Dear All, Students in primary and secondary school must learn two languages, English at the L1 level and a mother tongue (Mandarin, Malay, or Tamil) at the L1 or L2 level, thanks to Singapore’s bilingual education policy that was introduced in 1972. The link between mastering the mother tongue (as second language) and the maintenance of cherished heritage cultures has been a running theme in official discourses about Singaporeans’ Asian identity. Mother-tongue languages can inoculate us from the negative effects of long-term exposure to the cultural influences of the West. As our first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew explained: It is foolish to believe that we can ever completely divorce language, culture, and education from the passions with which people jealously guard their personal identities. It has taken 20 years to convince all that no one is being asked to surrender his personal identity.… The principal value of teaching the second language is the imparting of moral values and understanding of cultural traditions. (Lee, 1979, pp. iv-v; my emphasis)

This point was recently echoed by our Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong (2004): English is not our native language nor are English culture and customs, our culture and customs. But for practical reasons, and because we are a multi-racial society, Singaporeans accept English as our working language. To ensure that Singaporeans remain grounded in our ancestral Asian culture and values, we require our young to study their mother tongues in schools, be they Mandarin, Malay, or Tamil. (¶ 18; my emphasis)

Thus, compared to the ethnically coded mother tongues, English—specifically SE—is seen as a “neutral” language that transcends linguistic-cultural differences among Singaporeans. This point is again rehearsed in the latest English Language Syllabus for secondary and primary schools, which states:

132 • WARREN MARK LIEW At the local level, [English] is the common language that facilitates bonding among the different ethnic and cultural groups. At the global level, English allows Singaporeans to participate in a knowledge-based economy where English is the lingua franca of the Internet, of science and technology and of world trade. (MOE, 2010, p. 6)

Here, the perennial tensions between the “local” and “global” functions of English are conveniently lost on our language-planners. Is it not true in many local communities that to speak only SE carries the potential stigma of sounding too ang moh, on account of its Anglo-European (or “western”) origins? Or are we to assume, ignoring history, that Standard English is an internationally and ideologically neutral language? Perhaps we can describe these language ideologies with the following schema: “Asian” & “Local”

“Western” & “Global”

“Ethnically Neutral”

Taught in Schools

Mother Tongue

Yes

No

No

Yes

Singlish

Yes

No

Yes

No

Standard English

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Our ministers who insist that Asian languages transmit “Asian values” seem to downplay the fact that English, too, can transmit “Western values.” If Singlish can be seen as a rapprochement between the localizing effects of the mother tongue and the globalizing force of SE, then it ought to be more positively recognized by a nation that likes to call itself “global” and “cosmopolitan.” Prof. Singh Lee Subject: Re: Attitudes Towards Mother Tongues The SGEM can be compare to the Speak Mandarin Campaign that started in 1979. Then, the gahmen try to wipe out Chinese dialect like Hokkien and Cantonese by teaching only Mandarin Chinese in school. When the gahmen talk about keeping Chinese traditional values, they didn’t mention that Chinese tradition actually come from Chinese dialects or mother tongue and not from standardized Mandarin Chinese. Of course, now that China is become more powerful, Mandarin is become more and more important. Our gahmen say that the Speak Mandarin Campaign and bilingual education policy helped our businessmen to make profits with China and Taiwan. So I say to Professor Lee, talking about “Asian values” is like talking cock. In the end, no money no talk! Wee Kok Tok

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Subject: TalkingCock.com (2006) The Speak Good English Movement launched an attack today on the Speak Mandarin Campaign for their ungrammatical slogan, “Hua Yu Cool.”22 Said SGEM spokesman Colonial, sorry, Colonel (NS) Chia Kan Tang, “We are rather disappointed that our compatriots in the struggle for language purity have opted for such mongrel conjugation. Here we are, striving so hard to eradicate non-English elements, and our Chinese counterparts go ahead and use linguistic miscegenation to create positive associations.” “At the very least it should be ‘hua yu IS cool’,” continued Colonial Chia. “But really, isn’t it bizarre that to seem cool, Mandarin has to employ an English word, and an Americanism at that? If Mandarin really IS cool, it should be ‘hua yu leng’23 or something, am I not right? What would it say about our campaign if our slogan was English bang?” To which Speak Mandarin spokesman Miss Chee Na Piang responded by saying, “Ha? Your Engrish so cheem, wo men catch no ball.”24 She then said something in Mandarin, which our English-ed Mission School reporter believes can be loosely translated as “Take that fucking potato out of your mouth, you fucking colonized retard, so you can kiss my motherfucking ass.” Kway Png Subject: Re: TakingCock.com By the way, the authors of TalkingCock.com have denied all charges of political intent: “WE ARE NOT A POLITICAL SITE.… We make fun of people in every sector, strata and profession in a completely democratic way” (TalkingCock.com, n.d.). Which is not to say that it’s not a “subversive” website that mocks both SE and Singlish by employing both SE and Singlish to witty satirical effect. Another good website is The Coxford Singlish Dictionary, which provides a good translation guide for those interested in the inventiveness and outrageousness of Singlish. The people in power know that the media is a powerful influence. When the titular hero of the sitcom Phua Chu Kang spoke Singlish on prime-time TV, the government responded by advising the show’s producers to rescript the character’s lines. Later, the TV station’s assistant vice-president conceded that it was a good idea to have “PCK [Phua Chu Kang] sound like PCK without resorting to Singlish” (Srilal, 1999). When Talking Cock: The Movie was released in cinemas, the censors banned a 15-second TV spot promoting the movie (Tan, 2002). Through websites, blogs, and videos on YouTube, the Internet is playing a subversive role in challenging the official stand on Singlish. But of coz no

134 • WARREN MARK LIEW

serious cock-talker will say until like that la! Cannot be so obvious. Otherwise lum pah pah lan, understand? Collin Goh Subject: Cultural mismatch Dear Boh Tuck Chek, Returning to your earlier challenge (and I will put this more simply, if I can): As educators, we cannot ignore the impact of learners’ cultural background and social environment on their “ways with words” (Heath, 1983). By relegating CSE to the status of a “substandard” variety, English language teachers deny, if not disparage, the linguistic realities of learners’ social worlds. Critical scholarship has long demonstrated the ways in which the “achievement gap” between different classes and ethnic groups can be traced to students’ experiences of marginalization arising from the cultural-linguistic disjunction between the discourses of the home and the school (see review by Hull & Schultz, 2001). Yet, too many Singaporean educators I know read this gap in terms of a cultural deficit thesis. We need instead to recognize the role of the school as an instrument of cultural reproduction – an ideological system that distributes desired “symbolic capital” (in the form of job-earning educational qualifications) to those who possess the right “cultural capital” (Bourdieu, 1986). Some research on Singapore has shown how cultural capital functions as the structural basis of “meritocracy” on which educational pathways to success are paved (e.g., Barr & Skrbiš, 2008; Tan, 2008). An important implication of this is that school failure and educational underachievement are often correlated with differences in cultural-linguistic background (Lippi-Green, 1997). Some evidence of this can be seen in the persistent achievement gap between the Malays and Chinese in Singapore (Rahim, 1998; Tan, 2007). It is also worth mentioning that the definitions of “critical thinking” and “creativity” propounded by the MOE and NIE tend to be depoliticized, decontextualized, and de-textualized—that is, dissociated from the language/ knowledge/power nexus (Adler & Sim, 2008; Koh, 2002; Yen, 2008). With few exceptions, research conducted by Singaporean sociolinguists on language diversity issues “has been largely driven by positivist and structural agendas, working diligently at capturing the complexities of functional differentiation of the various languages and dialects, but stopping short of considering their connection to metalinguistic issues of power and ideology” (Kramer-Dahl, 2003, p. 165). What we need now is curriculum reform towards critical literacy, which encompasses [a]nalytic habits of thinking, reading, writing, speaking, or discussing which go beneath surface impressions, traditional myths, mere opinions, and routine clichés (Shor, 1999, p. 20). A critical literacy curriculum would affirm the social, cultural, and political functions of CSE

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among Singaporeans. Students, for example, can be taught to critique the fallacy of a one-size-fits-all Standard pegged to native speaker norms, while undertaking a contrastive analysis of SE and CSE that focuses on their respective social and ideological functions. This would amount to a politicized account of language learning, a “critical pedagogy” (cf. Freire, 1970) committed to examining the role of curricula and pedagogy in perpetuating unequal power relations between the purveyors of the Standard and possessors of the non-standard. In sum, a critical oracy curriculum would be responsive to the sociolinguistic practices of students, as well as reflexive about its ideological goals and assumptions. Mark Lew Subject: The Realities of Teaching Dr. Lew: I don’t deny that it’s important for teachers to honor the home literacy practices of students, but this caring ethic is simply out of touch with the practical realities of classroom teaching! Have you yourself ever taught in a secondary or primary school? As an English teacher assigned three classes of 38 students, I have neither time nor energy to do anything but follow the syllabus to the best of my abilities, with the primary aim of preparing my kids for the all-important exams. Let’s be realistic: there is always a gap between the intended curriculum and the implemented curriculum. Curriculum prescriptions do not ensure successful follow-up by every teacher in every school. In fact, actual classroom practices have more to do with teachers’ beliefs and attitudes than with institutional standards of professional conscience and competence. The teachers who have shared their experiences in this forum, I’m sure, can attest to this. Mr. E. Alist Subject: Re: The Realities of Teaching Dear Mr. Realist, I agree that not all teachers have the same time, energy, or dedication for their work, but there will always be a few hardworking teachers who do make a difference. My secondary two English teacher did a whole unit on Singlish with our class. In the first part, we formed small groups and wrote short plays in Singlish. We had a good time because some of our plays were really hilarious! In the second part, we exchanged plays and translated each other’s scripts into proper English. This was quite funny too because the original humor was lost or sounded very lame. For the third part of our lesson unit, our teacher made us read and discuss the works of a Singaporean playwright. The plays and poem had parts written in Singlish. Finally, we had to write an essay analyzing why Singlish was used in these literary

136 • WARREN MARK LIEW

texts and how it related to themes like tradition versus modernization, East versus West, etc. One of my classmates is doing a group project with a teacher-supervisor who is guiding them to come up with a Social Studies teaching package entitled, “Singlish: Our Cultural Origins.” The group members are two Chinese, one Malay, and one Indian, and each one has to identify Singlish words and sentence structures that resemble his or her own ethnic language. Their goal is to show how Singlish can help Singaporeans understand and appreciate their cultural roots through language. I guess what I’m saying is that there are many ways that teachers can work with students to make learning fun and meaningful. Maybe the reason why teachers get discouraged is because they’ve stopped finding fun and meaning in what they do. cheers, Kah Wee Subject: Language Management as Language Genocide Dear All: I appreciate everyone’s critical perspectives so far. In my view, the SGEM is essentially a social engineering program designed to eradicate Singlish before it gains cultural legitimacy. Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) argues that the EL teaching community has been complicit in globalization’s efforts to eradicate minority languages in the interests of linguistic homogenization. It’s no secret that Singapore’s nation-building policies are consistently driven by an ideology of pragmatism (Chua, 1995). Is it any surprise that linguistic instrumentalism has joined hands with linguistic imperialism to incite linguistic genocide in the name of economic survival? Should the SGEM succeed with its objectives, Singlish may one day become another quaint archeological artifact buried in our cultural memories. There is the possibility that Singlish will be effectively banished from the educated classes, and left as a stigmatized lingua franca among the lower classes. Whereas English speakers of the Anglophone west have historically laid claim to being the “owners of the language, guardians of its standards, and arbiters of acceptable pedagogic norms” (Jenkins, 2000, p. 5), today linguistic diversification on a global scale is destabilizing the notion of a global one-size-fits-all Standard. But the fact that English is becoming increasingly pluralized under the forces of globalization seems under-appreciated by the Ministry of Education, despite its avowed aim of preparing our students to be “global citizens.” Particularly in a multiethnic, cosmopolitan, postcolonial society like Singapore’s, traditional EL curricula, pedagogy, and policy need to evolve within a globalizing world of intercultural contact and assimilation, moving beyond “native-speaker-centered” English Language Teaching. The Ministry should now consider the possibility of teaching

Sin(gapore En)glish Oracy Education • 137

English as a “glocal” language, with global SE reserved for international interactions, and hybrid varieties such as Chinglish, Japlish, Spanglish, and Frenglish) adapted to the needs of local communities. With the growing influx of immigrant workers from mainland China, India, and Europe, this local-global hybridization seems one way of countering the condescending Anglicism espoused by some of our Singaporeans (like Elize Ah) and foreigners (like Mr. Higgins). The Other(ed) Eurasian Subject: Re: Singlish for National Service Dear “Other(ed) Eurasian” and others, Don’t talk cock la! Singlish is NOT a democratic tongue. The majority of Singlish words come from Chinese (Hokkien, to be exact)! If Singlish were truly our “lingua franca,” the Singlish dictionary would have an equal distribution of Chinese, Malay, and Tamil words! As a woman, I find Singlish extremely sexist. How many popular Singlish expletives treat women’s bodies violently and disrespectfully! Lieutenant Kilat says it’s all part of the “male-bonding culture” But (and pardon my Singlish) lim peh ka li kong:25 “kan ni na bu chao chee bye!”26 Yours faithfully, Miss Feminist Subject: Re: Language Management as Language Genocide? Dear “Eurasian,” How do we come to a consensus about the norms that constitute a “glocal” variety such as Singlish? Who are the authorities and experts in the codification process? If glocal languages are the products of dynamic intercultural contact, aren’t they also vulnerable to change over time? Will they, hydra-like, proliferate endlessly? Is all this talk on behalf of language democracy a kind of “Babel babble”? Aren’t governments, bound by the exigencies of global capitalism, well-intentioned in their efforts to intervene against the threat of linguistic relativism? Is “Glocal English,” like the proverbial “melting pot,” a false liberal ideal? Linguists including David Crystal (1997) have contended that SE and local varieties can peacefully coexist, fulfilling important formal and informal functions respectively. But as critics have pointed out, this apparently liberal attitude masks a division of labor that accords greater economic prestige to formal varieties without actually removing the stigma attached to indigenous languages. All languages are equal, but some are more equal than others. Socratease

138 • WARREN MARK LIEW

EPILOGUE Since the advent of modern print technologies, the dominance of writing in the domains of formal education, public administration, and professional exchange has led to an overwhelming emphasis on written literacies at the expense of oral/aural modes of literacy. In the history of western literacy, the loss of primary oral cultures to print literacies was abetted by modern schooling systems in which writing and reading skills were increasingly separated from, and emphasized above, oral competencies (Ong, 1982). Writing technologies similarly mark the modus operandi of academic research, for which books, journals, and conference papers constitute the primary means of communication and dissemination. To conclude on a self-reflexive note, it is important to acknowledge that scholarly critiques of oracy movements are themselves parasitic on the primacy of written literacies. In this instance, I would be remiss to ignore the paradox of a written text aspiring to “give voice” to the realities of oral/ aural practices. Standing in the gap between the silent page and the audible voice, “written speech” performs an inevitable distortion: “Texts thus express an altered voice in the writing [that] the voice makes necessary by its insurmountable difference” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 161). While the foregoing performance text has sought to articulate the rights and realities of minority language practices, it remains constitutionally incapable of reproducing live performances of Singlish on the everyday stage through the disembodied page. It would appear, then, that critical research advocating for the rights of vernacular speech to be heard and spoken must concede finally to the written word’s privileged currency within the scriptocentric economy of academic scholarship. What call to action might a silent text utter, if writing is at best a poor proxy for living speech? In speech-act theory, performative utterances do not so much represent actions and events as enact them. But to what extent can critical qualitative research hope to actuate its concerns in writing? Here I want to suggest that the aim of inciting critical reaction and social action lies at the heart of “performative writing” (Denzin, 2003; Pelias, 1999; Pollock, 1998), a modest version of which was attempted in the foregoing “online discussion.” To the extent that “performative writing is an inquiry into the limits and possibilities of the intersections between speech and writing” (Phelan, 1998, p. 13), it is also committed to the performative possibilities of writing speech and writing about speech. What features of performative writing might qualify such ambitions? Soyini Madison (2005), drawing on Della Pollock’s (1998) essay “Performing Writing,” contends that performative writing is evocative, relational, embodied, and consequential. In brief strokes, I conclude by showing how these qualities adumbrate the critical intents and portents of qualitative research through performative writing.

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Performative writing is evocative. In contrast to the orderly, objective stance of “readerly” academic exposition, performative writing proposes a “writerly” exercise in engaging and disrupting readers’ attempts to identify with a multiplicity of perspectives. To this end, the use of emotive language and informal discourse that echoes everyday speech affords a rhetorical strategy for eliciting the interests of a wider audience, thereby extending the pedagogical potential of academic scholarship. Arguably, readers are more likely to participate in a dialogue whose voices ventriloquize their own ideas through the familiar patterns of everyday speech. Moreover, the calculated use of genial and satirical humor might act to disarm audiences, possibly making them laugh at the depiction of their own failures and follies. Performative writing is relational. Portrayed in the online forum are forms of speech and writing that articulate the collective and contested interests of multiple stakeholders. Such social venues open up a kind of “third space” (cf. Bhabha, 1994) where policymakers, researchers, and practitioners might gather for the purposes of debate and dialogue. Implied here is the ethic of inclusiveness enjoined by Dwight Conquergood’s (1985) notion of dialogical performance: The aim of dialogical performance is to bring self and other together so that they can question, debate, and challenge one another. It is a kind of performance that resists conclusions, it is intensely committed to keeping the dialogue between performer and text open and ongoing. Dialogical understanding does not end with empathy. There is always enough appreciation for difference so that the text can interrogate, rather than dissolve into, the performer. (p. 9)

Dialogical performances engage readers as active participants for whom ambiguity, uncertainty, and subjectivity are spurs to continued inquiry. Also implicit in dialogue is the socially distributed nature of critical agency, one that strives beyond individual action to remake institutional relations, social projects, and policy positions through a relational ethics of contestation and negotiation. Performative writing is embodied. It does not merely communicate thoughts and ideas, but also enacts the embodied voices of speakers in all their emotional registers. Singlish’s seeming tendency toward crude informalities and bawdy obscenities might be seen to exemplify the visceral nature of vernacular speech, with its disdain for the proprieties of rational, polite discourse. Meanwhile, the representation of speech itself gestures towards the liveness of speaking bodies, by ironizing its own ontological status as so many disembodied marks on a silent page. Here, the gap between speaking and writing is further thematized by the tensions between competence and performance—between unmarked Standard English on the one hand, and marked non-standard English on the other.

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Finally, by embracing the evocative, the relational, and the embodied, performative writing becomes consequential. As representation that gestures towards action, performance is, in Victor Turner’s (1982) words, about “making, not faking” (p. 93). And what it makes possible in this instance is a dramatic conflict between multiple voices that discloses the contradictory challenges that teachers, students, and scholars face in affirming the social, cultural, and political significance of non-standard languages. Meanwhile, state-sponsored language policies that speak on behalf of the nexus of education and economic development are not simply disparaged in favor of a naïve vision of liberal humanism. In the face of complex problems, the refusal of pat solutions and one-sided opinions argues instead for the ceaseless work of dialogue, negotiation, and joint action. To this end, performative writing insists that the literal and metaphorical voice be written, read, and—most of all—heard. The rest is never silent. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Kathryn Davis, Andrea Lunsford, Renae Skarin, Shobha Vadrevu, Elise Paradis, and Stefan Loe for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. NOTES 1.

2.

According to standard history textbooks, modern Singapore was founded on January 29, 1819, when Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, on behalf of the British East India Company, signed a treaty with the Malay Sultan Hussein Shah to develop the island into a British trading post for Southeast Asia. Free immigration policies under the leadership of Raffles’ deputy, Sir William Farquhar, led to an influx of Chinese, Indians, and Britons to the island, which eventually became a British colony in 1824. Apart from Malay spoken by the native Malays, the main languages spoken by first-generation immigrants included Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Mandarin, Hindi, and Tamil. Today, Singapore is a cosmopolitan city-state with a local population consisting of thousands of expatriates from Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States. Today, the Singapore government recognizes only four official languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. See, for example, the essays in the volume by Canagarajah (2005). Since gaining independence from British rule in 1946, Singapore has maintained the use of English as the primary language of administration. Singapore Standard English is historically modeled on Standard British English, although it has since absorbed many features of General American English. Singapore Standard Eng-

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

lish bears a synonymous relation to what now passes as Standard English (SE) around the world, and will simply be referred to as SE throughout this chapter. Encouragingly, the latest English Language Syllabus issued by the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) states: “Speaking occurs in real time, and its social context determines the purpose of the spoken language and shapes its structure and features. Pupils need to develop the ability to use spoken English effectively in a variety of contexts and to represent their understanding, ideas and learning in a variety of spoken texts” (MOE, 2010, p. 38). Ironically, “effectively” and “variety” as they are programmatically interpreted by the Ministry does not include the effective use of non-standard varieties. The American Education Research Association’s latest guidelines for the submission of conference papers spell out the canonical format for this dominant written genre: “The paper should deal explicitly with the following elements, preferably in this order: (1) Objectives or purposes, (2) Perspective(s) or theoretical framework, (3) Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry, (4) Data sources, evidence, objects or materials, (5) Results or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view, and (6) Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work” (Lee & Rochon, 2009, p. 304). One might, of course, object that participants of a discussion forum rarely, if ever, include scholarly citations as part of their written texts. Nonetheless, the blurring of academic and non-academic genres – along with the conjunction of verisimilitude and artifice, convention and experimentation – might be seen as emblematic of the “liminal” nature of performance writing. An endemic feature of all performances, the liminal designates “a mode of spatial, temporal, and symbolic ‘betweenness’ [that] allows for dominant social norms to be suspended, questioned, played with, transformed” (McKenzie, 1998, p. 218). A weekly newspaper column, “English As It Is Broken,” ran from July 2006 to March 2008, with the aim of exposing common errors in Singaporean English. These weekly lessons have since been compiled into a best-selling book series bearing the same title. In Singlish, the discourse particles lah and meh are often used for emphasis at the ends of sentences, phrases, or words. See relevant entries in A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English (n.d.). “Powderful” is a Singlish mispronunciation of “powerful,” often used to mock the bombastic registers occasionally associated with formal SE. These and subsequent glosses of Singlish words and

142 • WARREN MARK LIEW

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

phrases are drawn from two authoritative online references: A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English (n.d.) and The Coxford English Dictionary (2000–2003). The Cambridge-Singapore General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level and Advanced Level (GCE O- and A-Level) Examinations are nation-wide examinations designed and administered by the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate (UCLES) in England, in consultation with the Singapore Ministry of Education. The O-Levels are administered at the end of students’ fourth year in secondary school, and the A-levels at the end of their second year in the junior college, at the ages of 16 and 18 respectively. A Hokkien phrase whose direction translation reads, “My father!” Approximations in English include “Oh my goodness!” and “What the fuck!” Hokkien for “deep,” usually implying a mocking attitude towards pompous pedantry. Gahmen is the Singlish mispronunciation of “government,” often used as a satirical reference to unpopular government policies and officials. The verb “say” is used in this context to mean “criticize” or “talk about in an accusatory way.” Mr Boh’s impertinence may be paraphrased as: “Stop spouting nonsense (i.e. “talking cock”) with your grandiloquent English!” An English transliteration (from Hokkien) would read: “No read books.” This phrase in Singlish is usually used to refer to the “uneducated.” “Bo chap,” meaning “don’t care” in Hokkien, is often used to declare one’s proud indifference to authority. Kiasu is Hokkien for “afraid to lose.” The nominalization of this adjective with the suffix “-ism” is a good example of how Singlish words have creatively appropriated the features of SE. As Mr Higgins notes, the word kiasu can now be found in the Oxford English Dictionary (2010). Hokkien for “red hair” – a pejorative reference to Caucasians. The Hokkien descriptors for brown or blonde are decidedly less economical than that for red (“ang”). Kentang or kantang is Malay for “potato.” In Singlish parlance, it usually refers to a Caucasian Anglo-American/European or, by extension, an English-speaking “westernized” Asian. In the local imagination, potatoes are to Caucasians as rice is to Asians. “A soldier with little or no formal education who speaks mainly in a Chinese dialect (not necessarily Hokkien)” (A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English, n.d.).

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20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

The Coxford Singlish Dictionary provides an unabashedly accurate gloss of this expletive: “A Hokkien term describing a person on whom a plan or action has backfired. Literally: ‘the testicles hitting the penis.’ The rhythm of the phrase suggests a ricocheting action, a surprisingly elegant touch, in such a rude phrase. The anglicized phrase ‘bang balls’ probably came from this.” Hokkien for “rough” or “crude.” Hua yu is the Romanized spelling (hanyu pinyin) of the Mandarin characters for “Chinese.” Both the post-modifying adjective “cool” and the elision of the “be” verb allude consciously to the lexicogrammatical features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a sociolect in the United States that, however stigmatized in some quarters, has nonetheless gained international visibility and even a “coolness” factor among Singaporean youth, as a result of the media’s promotion of “hip hop” popular culture. Leng is Hokkien for “cool” or “cold.” Roughly translated as: “Your English is too difficult for me to understand.” Hokkien phrase literally meaning, “Let your father tell you” – a commanding utterance often used to warn one’s listener to heed one’s advice. This expletive is perhaps the most brutal and vulgar of popular Singlish expressions. Readers may refer to various Singlish dictionaries for a suitable translation. REFERENCES

A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English. (n.d.). Retrieved January 12, 2010, from http://www.singlishdictionary.com/ Adler, S., & Sim, J. (2007). Secondary social studies in Singapore: Intentions and contradictions. In D. L. Grossman & J. T-Y Lo (Eds.) Social education in Asia: Critical issues and multiple perspectives (pp. 163–182). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Ang, T. W. (2006, July 8). Language is for communication. The Straits Times [Letter to the forum]. Retrieved 2006, July 10, from http://www.straitstimes.com/ STForum Barone, T. (2001). Touching eternity: The enduring outcomes of teaching. New York: Teachers College Press. Barr, M. D., & Skrbiš, Z. (2008). Constructing Singapore: Elitism, ethnicity and the nationbuilding project. Malaysia: Nordic Institute of Asia Studies. Barthes, R. (1974). S/Z (R. Howard, Trans.). New York: Hill & Wang. Baugh, J. (2000). Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic pride and racial prejudice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bauman, R. (1977). Verbal art as performance. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

144 • WARREN MARK LIEW Bernstein, B. (1996). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. London: Taylor & Francis. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–58), Westport, CT: Greenwood. Brown, A. (1999). Singapore English in a nutshell: An alphabetical description of its features. Singapore: Federal. Canagarajah, A. S. (Ed.). (2005). Reclaiming the local in language policy and practice. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Carter, R. (1999). Standard grammars, spoken grammars: Some educational implications. In T. Bex, & R. J. Watts (Eds.), Standard English: The widening debate (pp. 149–166). London: Routledge. Cheah, Y. M. (1998). The examination culture and its impact on literacy innovations: The case of Singapore. Language and Education, 12(3), 192–209. Chng, H. H. (2003). “You see me no up”: Is Singlish a problem? Language Problems & Language Planning, 27(1), 45–62. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chua, B. H. (1995). Communitarian ideology and democracy in Singapore. London: Routledge. Conquergood, D. (1985). Performing as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance. Literature in Performance, 5, 1–13. Crystal, D. (1997). English as a global language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, K., Bazzi, S., Cho, H-S, Ishida, M., & Soria, J. (2005). “It’s our kuleana”: A critical participatory approach to language minority education. In L. PeaseAlvarez & S. R. Schecter (Eds.), Learning, teaching, and community (pp. 3–25). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Denzin, N. K. (2003). Performance ethnography: Critical pedagogy and the politics of culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Department of Statistics. (2005). General Household Survey: Socio-demographic and economic characteristics. Singapore: Ministry of Trade and Industry. Department of Statistics. (2008, Sep 26). Population (Mid-year estimates). Singapore: Ministry of Trade and Industry. Retrieved July 24, 2009, from http://www.singstat.gov. sg/stats/themes/people/hist/popn.html Deterding, D., Brown, A., & Low, E. L. (Eds.). (2005). English in Singapore: Phonetic research on a corpus. Singapore: McGraw Hill. Eisner, E. W. (1997). The new frontier in qualitative research methodology. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(3), 259–273. Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15, 325–340. Fishman, J. A. (1972). The sociology of language. Rowley: Newbury House. Foley, J. (2001). Is English a first or second language in Singapore? In V. B. Y. Ooi (Ed.), Evolving identities: The English language in Singapore and Malaysia (pp. 12–32). Singapore: Times Academic Press. Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Sin(gapore En)glish Oracy Education • 145 Fullan, M. (2001). The new meaning of educational change (3rd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Gee, J. P. (2000). The New Literacy Studies: From “socially situated” to the work of the social. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 180–195). London: Routledge. Giles, H., & Coupland, N. (1991). Language: Contexts and consequences. Keynes: Open University Press. Goh, C. C. M., Zhang, L. J., Ng, C. H., & Goh, G. H. (2005). Knowledge, beliefs and syllabus implementation: A study of English language teachers in Singapore. Singapore: National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. Retrieved August 1, 2005, from http://www.nie.edu.sg/download/ nie_publications/ edrf_goh05.pdf Goh, C. T. (1999, August 22). Prime Minister’s National Day Rally Speech. Retrieved September 24, 2005, from http://app.sprinter.gov.sg/data/pr/1999082202. htm Goh, C. T. (2000, April 29). Speech by Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong at the launch of the Speak Good English Movement. Retrieved March 27, 2005, from http://stars. nhb.gov.sg/public/index.html Graddol, D. (1999). The decline of the native speaker, AILA Review, 13, 57–68. Gupta, A. F. (1991). Acquisition of diglossia in Singapore English. In A. Kwan-Terry (Ed.), Child language development in Singapore and Malaysia (pp. 119–160). Singapore: Singapore University Press. Gupta, A. F. (1992). The pragmatic particles of Singapore Colloquial English. Journal of Pragmatics, 17(3), 39–65. Gupta, A. F. (1994). The step-tongue: Children’s English in Singapore. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hong, L. (2009). Speak Standard English to maintain competitive edge, says Deputy Prime Minister Teo. Channel NewsAsia.com. Retrieved August 29, 2009, from http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/ view/1001477/1/.html Hull, G., & Schultz, K. (2001). Literacy and learning out of school: A review of theory and research. Review of Educational Research, 71(4), 575–611. Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading: A theory of aesthetic response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as an international language: New models, new norms, new goals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koh, A. (2002). Towards a critical pedagogy: Creating “thinking schools” in Singapore. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 34(3), 255–264. Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (Eds.). (2008). A new literacies sampler. New York: Peter Lang. Knowles, J. G., & Cole, A. L. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of the arts in qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

146 • WARREN MARK LIEW Kramer-Dahl, A. (2003). Reading the “Singlish debate”: Construction of a crisis of language and language teaching in Singapore. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2(3), 159–190. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lee, K. Y. (1979). Reply to the Education Study Team Report. In Education Study Team Report on the Ministry of Education, 1978. Singapore: Ministry of Education. Lee, C. D., & Rochon, R. S. (2009). American Educational Research Association 2010 annual meeting call for submissions. Educational Researcher, 38(4), 301– 322. Leow, B. G. (2001). Census of population 2000 statistical release 2: Education, language and religion. Singapore: Ministry of Trade & Industry. Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. New York: Routledge. Madison, S. (2005). Critical ethnography: Method, ethics, and performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. McCaughey, M., & Ayers, M. D. (Eds.). (2003). Cyberactivism: Online activism in theory and practice. New York: Routledge. McKenzie, J. (1998). Genre trouble: (The) butler did it. In P. Phelan & J. Lane (Eds.), The ends of performance (pp. 217–235). New York: New York University Press. Ministry of Defence, Singapore. (2009). Total Defence. Retrieved July 27, 2009, from http://www.totaldefence.sg/imindef/mindef_websites/topics/totaldefence/home.html Ministry of Education, Singapore. (2010). English language syllabus 2010: Primary & secondary (Express/ Normal [Academic]). Singapore: Ministry of Education. National Institute of Education, Singapore. (2009 June). Postgraduate Diploma in Education 2009–2010. Retrieved July 2, 2009, from http://www.nie.edu.sg/ itt_hb/web/2010/PGDE10.pdf New London Group. (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 9–37). London: Routledge. Ng, E. H. (2004, April 21). Speech by Acting Minister for Manpower and Minister of State for Education at the launch of the Speak Good English Movement 2004. Retrieved May 11, 2005, from http://www.goodenglish.org.sg/2009/about/ over-the-years/2004/official-speeches-2004/dr-ng-eng-hen-2004/ Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen. Pakir, A. (1991). The range and depth of English-knowing bilinguals in Singapore. World Englishes, 10(2), 167–79. Pelias, R. J. (1999). Writing performance: Poeticizing the researcher’s body. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Phelan, P. (1998). Introduction: The ends of performance. In P. Phelan & J. Lane (Eds.), The ends of performance (pp. 1–19). New York: New York University Press.

Sin(gapore En)glish Oracy Education • 147 Platt, J. T., & Weber, H. (1980). English in Singapore and Malaysia: Status, features, functions. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Pollock, D. (1998). Performing writing. In P. Phelan & J. Lane (Eds.), The ends of performance (pp. 73–103). New York: New York University Press. Poster, M. (1997). Cyberdemocracy: The internet and the public sphere. In D. Porter (Ed.), Internet culture (pp. 201–218). New York: Routledge. Rahim, L. Z. (1998). The Singapore dilemma: The political and educational marginality of the Malay community. New York: Oxford University Press. Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.) (pp. 923–948). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Rubdy, R. (2001). Creative destruction: Singapore’s Speak Good English Movement. World Englishes, 20, 341–355. Sharpe, L., & Gopinathan, S. (2002). After effectiveness: New directions in the Singapore school system? Journal of Education Policy, 17(2), 151–166. Shor, I. (1999). What is critical literacy? In I. Shor & C. Pari (Eds.), Critical literacy in action: Writing words, changing worlds (pp. 1–30). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/ Cook. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2000). Linguistic genocide in education—or worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Speak Good English Movement. (2009). What is the history, objective and target audience of the Speak Good English Movement? Retrieved July 2, 2009, from http://www.goodenglish.org.sg/2009 Srilal, M. (1999, August 28). Quick Quick: ‘Singlish’ is out in re-education campaign. Asia Times. Retrieved July 22, 2009, from http://atimes.com Street, B. (1999). The meanings of literacy. In D. A. Wagner, R. L. Venezky, & B. V. Street (Eds.), Literacy: An international handbook (pp. 34–40). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. TalkingCock.com. (n.d.). Wah piang eh! You’ve logged onto TalkingCock.com, Singapore’s most powderful satirical humour website. Retrieved July 27, 2009, from www.talkingcock.com Tan, C. (2005). Driven by pragmatism: Issues and challenges in an ability-driven education. In J. Tan & P. K. Ng (Eds.), Thinking schools, learning nation: Contemporary issues and challenges (pp. 5–21). Singapore: Prentice Hall. Tan, C. (2007). Narrowing the gap: the educational achievements of the Malay community in Singapore. Intercultural Education, 18(1), 53–64. Tan, H. H. (2002, July 22). A war of words over “Singlish.” Time Magazine. Retrieved July 22, 2009, from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,501020729–322685,00.html Tan, K. P. (2008). Meritocracy and elitism in a global city: Ideological shifts in Singapore. International Political Science Review, 29(1), 7–27. The Coxford Singlish Dictionary. (2000–2003). Retrieved August 9, 2009, from http:// www.talkingcock.com/html/lexec.php?op=LexView&lexicon=lexicon Tonouchi, L. A. (2004). Da state of pidgin address. College English, 67(1), 75–82. Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

148 • WARREN MARK LIEW Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wee, L. (2004). Singapore English: Morphology and syntax. In B. Kortmann, K. Burridge, R. Mesthrie, E. W. Schneider, & C. Upton (Eds.), A handbook of varieties of English. Volume 2: Morphology and syntax (pp. 1058–72). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wee, L. (2005). Intra-language discrimination and linguistic human rights: The case of Singlish. Applied Linguistics, 26(1), 48–69. Singlish. (2010). In Wikipedia. Retrieved February 2, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Singlish Wilkinson, A. M. (1968). The implications of oracy. Educational Review, 20(2), 123– 135. Yen, Y. J. W. (2008). Youth temporalities and the cost of Singapore’s educational success. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 29(2), 159–178.

PART II PERFORMING IDENTITIES AND AGENCY

CHAPTER 7

HAWAIIAN METHODOLOGIES OF INDIRECTION Point-less vs. Pointless K. Laiana Wong

INTRODUCTION: AGENTS, AGENCY, AND ADVOCACY The indication of grammatical agents in Hawaiian is just one of many aspects of the language that serve to separate it from other languages, particularly with regard to worldview and the unique identity deriving from it. The current state of the Hawaiian language is in flux as it undergoes a rebuilding process whereby a new generation of speakers is being raised to preserve, perpetuate, and revitalize what would otherwise have been considered a moribund language (Warner, 2001). In facilitating this effort, Hawaiian language medium pre-schools called Punana Leo were established with the intent to “recreate an environment where Hawaiian language and culture were conveyed and developed in much the same way that they were in the home in earlier generations” (Wilson & Kamana, 2001, p. 151). Subsequently, Hawaiian language medium schools were established within the Hawai‘i State Department of Education to accommodate the matriculation Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 151–170 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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of the Punana Leo students beyond the pre-school level. At present, a child of this “new generation” can receive instruction in Hawaiian at all levels up to graduation. The vast majority of participants, however, are either second language learners or being raised or taught by second language learners (Wong, 1999). Although it is widely accepted among language professionals that language is not a static entity but one that is dynamic and subject to constant change,1 the Hawaiian context must be differentiated from situations involving more natural language change for the very fact that non-native speakers of Hawaiian disproportionately influence the direction of that change (NeSmith, 2003). Since the default worldview of these new speakers is fundamentally English, the consequences of such influence include the emergence of a one to one correspondence between Hawaiian and English ways of speaking and the apparent convergence of worldviews (Wong, 1999). Frequent unwitting assumptions are made that for each language use pattern found in English there is a corresponding reflection in Hawaiian that operates in much the same way and is generated for the same reasons as its counterpart. This paper will focus on Hawaiian ways of pointing at agents (human agents, in particular), which differ from those that guide speakers of English. I advocate here for the merits of maintaining a distinction between Hawaiian and English ways of speaking, particularly in terms of the ways in which agents are normally indicated, in order to preserve those characteristics that identify Hawaiian as unique. Such advocacy, although prescriptive in nature, is necessary in order to curb the wholesale shift in the character of Hawaiian away from its traditions and the resulting disconnect between the Hawaiian spoken today and its predecessor. The range of such characteristics must not be limited to those aspects of language such as grammar and lexicon, which are generally treated as autonomous in the field of linguistics and tend to be the primary criteria for the assignment of language labels such as English and Hawaiian. They must also include those ways of speaking that reflect the epistemology or “worldview” of the speech community. These ways of speaking are embodied in the structure of the language and are necessary components of a holistic communicative competence that marks an individual speaker as a member of the speech community (Hymes, 1972). Without mastering those ways of speaking, English speakers learning Hawaiian as a second language will be relegated to speaking (and socially performing) English in Hawaiian.2 That is to say, mastery of grammar and lexicon alone without the concomitant mastery of more subtle ways of speaking, such as Hawaiian norms for pointing at agents, significantly limits the ability of the speaker to function appropriately in the target language3 and ultimately contributes to an overall shift in the defining linguistic and related social characteristic of the language. In

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this case, the shift moves away from Hawaiian and toward English and tests the link between language and identity. Language is commonly recognized as a marker of identity, but what is the point of putting in the effort to learn Hawaiian if it merely results in the ability to speak English in Hawaiian? Simply attending to the acquisition of grammatical patterns and lexical items does little to alter the learner’s ways of thinking and speaking. Such a person will continue to be identified as an outsider to the native speaking Hawaiian community. Moreover, the legitimacy of the Hawaiian that that person speaks is likely to be called into question. Grammar and lexicon can merely provide a thin veil to cover the deep-seated worldview that identifies a speaker’s first language. They can be likened to cheap paint that fails to cover the old paint as it continues to bleed through. A certain amount of prescription must be accepted as inherent to the process of acquiring a target language. It is pointless to throw a spear without aiming and subsequently declare the point it comes to rest as the intended target. A target is, by definition, predetermined and therefore prescribed. Identity and authenticity, however, are not the only issues of concern. There are other, more socially related consequences of failing to attend to aspects of communicative competence. These will be discussed later in the chapter as part of this advocacy. Finally, language research should never be conducted in a vacuum. It must always be connected to the reasons for using the language in the first place. Those reasons reside with the people who use the language to serve their communicative purposes. Research on indigenous languages must invariably attend to the fact that there will be ramifications for or a general social impact on the indigenous community. Thus, the researcher must be able to assess that impact to ensure that the research ultimately benefits the community and does not merely seek to extract knowledge from it (Smith, 1999). It is also critical that the researcher, as the agent of that research, be an advocate for the well being of the community. This paper deals with both content and process. As such, a significant part of the discussion will be devoted to examining those aspects of my methodology relating to my role as researcher, the kuleana (i.e., “right,” “responsibility,” “authority”)4 associated with that role, and the requisite decisions dictated by that kuleana. POINTING WITH WORDS It has been my contention (Wong, 2006) that, in Hawaiian, indirection is the norm when it comes to pointing at grammatical agents, especially those that denote humans. Although linguists view grammatical subjects as being able to perform several distinct roles such as agent, actor, experiencer, instrument, and patient/undergoer (Duranti, 1994; Keenan, 1984),5 for the purposes of this study, I will consider a very broad definition of “agent” that includes all of these and more. That is, an agent can be the subject of either

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transitive or intransitive verbs, an entity overtly marked as an agent in passive constructions, or an entity that can be deemed responsible for causing the occurrence of some state of affairs that results from implied action. Neither intentionality, free will, or resistance is a necessary component of agency as suggested by some linguists,6 but they can be attributed to entities overtly indicated as responsible for actions or outcomes. I will also consider as an agent any such entity even if it is not overtly marked as such, but otherwise recoverable from context. It is important to recognize that different languages have different norms with regard to the ways in which agents are indicated and that these often operate below the level of awareness. That is, norms of language use are generally part of the background of a language and are not realized at the conscious level unless they are violated and brought to the foreground. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) noted that: If a rule has absolutely no exceptions, it is not recognized as a rule or as anything else; it is then part of the background of experience of which we tend to remain unconscious. Never having experienced anything in contrast to it, we cannot isolate it and formulate it as a rule until we so enlarge our experience and expand our base of reference that we encounter an interruption of its regularity. (p. 209)7

Thus, the indirectness of pointing at agents in Hawaiian is not noticeable to the native speaker of Hawaiian. It is only when such indication is made too directly that it becomes noticeable. This phenomenon can also be realized at the conscious level when contrasted with English ways of pointing that are relatively more direct. Thus, a native speaker of English who is learning Hawaiian as a second language is likely to indicate an agent based on the norms of English, which operate as the default mode of that speaker, resulting in what I will call “overpointing.” In much the same way that pointing a finger at someone can cause discomfort, the same result can be accomplished by pointing with words. Not having been raised in Hawaiian nor having acquired a sufficient level of communicative competence in the language, most second language learners are likely to overpoint with words while remaining oblivious to the power of such words and the effect they have on the indicated individual. This phenomenon can be exemplified by the common underestimation by L2 learners of the power of profanity in the target language. Being unaware of the power of words in another language, the second language learner is liable to produce such words unchecked. The social forces or consequences that would ordinarily curb the production of words of equivalent power in one’s native language would simply not apply.

Hawaiian Methodologies of Indirection • 155

OVERPOINTING: FALSE ACCUSATION There are numerous ways in which overpointing can occur, only a few of which will be discussed here. The first of these, which I will label “false accusation,” deals with the grammatical indication of an agent who is not really responsible for any alleged or inferred action or outcome. For example, the question “How did you break your leg?” is quite acceptable in English. The use of the pronoun “you” in the subject position to indicate the agent responsible for committing the act of breaking the leg does not draw any attention to the idiomatic nature of this statement precisely because it has been regularized as normal language use in English. Intentionality is a nonissue in the indication of the agent and the resulting attribution of responsibility. It would therefore appear that, in the English way of viewing this situation, a person is responsible for his or her own leg and, by extension, whatever should happen to it.8 If, in fact, intentionality is not applicable here, then the grammatical culpability suggested by the English construction is incorrectly assigned to an innocent party. On the other hand, in a Hawaiian way of viewing the same situation, the broken leg would be considered a simple matter of happenstance and require no attribution of agency, unless there were some compelling reason to do so.9 A normal Hawaiian construction would employ the stative verb “haki” (broken) that signifies a state of being and not an action.10 Ua haki kou wawae? Is your leg broken?

The norm in Hawaiian calls for a focus on the result or outcome, implicit in the stative verb (haki), of some unidentified action, whereas English tends to highlight the subject/agent of an overt action (to break). In other words, Hawaiian views the scene as a condition that results from action while English views it more as an event that is constitutive of action. Because there is no ostensible importance, in the Hawaiian view, attached to the action leading up to the eventual state of being, there is also no reason to point at an agent responsible for such an action. The Hawaiian worldview recognizes that there is no agent responsible for breaking the leg and, therefore, provides constructions, such as the use of stative verbs, that allow a speaker to abstain from overpointing and falsely accusing an innocent party. The idiomaticity of a question such as “How did you break your leg?” is not recognizable to the English speaker. It is only when compared to normal Hawaiian ways of speaking that it comes into question. Of course, the recognition of what is normal in Hawaiian requires the development of a certain degree of communicative competence in Hawaiian. As Whorf (1956) contends, it is necessary to expand our experience in order to recognize the subtle regularities that occur in a second language. Ways of

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pointing in Hawaiian contrast with those of English in subtle ways and are not generally part of the second language pedagogy. This is indeed a shortcoming, because failure to recognize these distinctions can result in the use of calques11 or the incorrect use of Hawaiian lexicon and grammatical patterns to accommodate the expression of English idioms in Hawaiian. Moreover, failure to apply Hawaiian ways of pointing can result in an affront to the indicated party and precipitate interpersonal disharmony. In a speech community comprised primarily of second language learners, lack of competence in this area is not likely to be noticed as unusual unless the interactants include native speakers. It is only then that the contrast in ways of speaking becomes salient. When interacting in the absence of native speakers, the fact that second language learners share a common default system (English) that guides their way of indicating agents obscures the idiomaticity of overpointing. This is an extremely subtle type of idiom to begin with. It is infinitely easier to recognize the awkwardness of literal translations of expressions more obviously idiomatic such as “The shit hit the fan” or “It’s raining cats and dogs.” Nevertheless, even the translation of expressions less than obviously idiomatic in English should, as part of the effort to revitalize Hawaiian, be avoided to prevent them from unduly influencing the character of the language. A pedagogy of conscientization should be developed in order to reveal the foreign origins of such direct ways of pointing. At the very least, it will assist the language learner to home in more accurately on the target language. Maintaining indirect ways of pointing that represent the norm in Hawaiian, as difficult as it might be for the English speaking second language learner, is well worth it because, in doing so, the unique characteristics that identify the Hawaiian speaking community are ultimately retained and the tendency to “speak English in Hawaiian” is significantly reduced. OVERPOINTING: FABRICATION Another type of overpointing, which I am calling “fabrication,” deals with the fabrication of some nebulous entity that serves as agent and shoulders the responsibility for an action or outcome. In the English example “It’s raining,” there is no fixed referent for the ambient “it” that occupies the subject position and acts as the grammatical agent of the intransitive verb “raining.”12 It would seem that, in the absence of an actual agent, English manages to fabricate one to occupy an important position and play an important role. Much like the example of the broken leg, this example is subtly idiomatic and not recognizable as such unless contrasted with the Hawaiian way of expressing the same idea. See the example below:

Hawaiian Methodologies of Indirection • 157 Predicate Ke ua nei (It) is raining

Subject Ø

The first thing to notice here is that there is no subject in this particular Hawaiian sentence. This would seem odd to a speaker of English who is most likely to have been taught, as all of us have been, that a complete sentence in English must include a subject and a predicate. This grammatical tenet is injected into the shared repertoire of English speakers both by way of direct instruction and by the fact that it is pervasive of the ambient speech found in English speaking communities. It has been regularized as the norm vis-à-vis English ways of speaking and, as such, represents the default mode of the native speaker of English. That being said, it is easy to see why an English-speaking learner of Hawaiian might be prone to producing the following sentence: Predicate Ke ua nei It is raining

Subject ‘o ia

Such a construction, although grammatically possible in Hawaiian, does not represent the normal way of expressing this idea. A second language learner who, either guided or compelled by an English default system, produces this type of construction would be exposed as lacking in communicative competence. Given that the subject position is obligatory in the canonical constituent order of English, it is not surprising for a subject/ agent to be fabricated in order to occupy that position, even though there is no referent in the real world that can be assigned literal responsibility for executing the act of raining. In terms of social impact, the indication of this particular type of fabricated agent, although it violates Hawaiian ways of pointing at agents and could influence a shift in the way this is handled in the community, does not necessarily contribute to social disharmony. That is, there is no affront created here because there is no human agent to take offense. In other types of overpointing, however, the possibility of causing an affront definitely exists. COGNITIVELY SALIENT ENTITIES Another example of overpointing involves the indication of what Cook (1993) calls the “cognitively salient entit[y]” instead of the “active zone” (pp. 1–2). In his example “David blinked,” “David” is considered to be the cognitively salient entity while his eye would be the active zone. Cook reports that Samoan is an active zone language and that David’s eye, as the active zone, would be the more appropriate agent. This is also true of Hawaiian. In my dissertation (Wong, 2006) I provide numerous examples,

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gleaned from old Hawaiian language newspapers, that illustrate this way of pointing in Hawaiian. In Hawaiian, the indication of the active zone is a common occurrence, and it represents the norm with regard to ways of speaking. Although it is possible to say, “David blinked,” in Hawaiian, it is more likely to be stated as follows: Ua ‘imo ka maka o Kawika David’s eye blinked

The broad variety of examples I collected in which the active zone was indicated as the grammatical agent instead of the cognitively salient entity supported my claim that the indication of agents in Hawaiian is must less direct than in English. As stated earlier, it would seem that the cognitively salient entity (David) is the more likely agent in the English worldview because David is ultimately responsible for the actions of his eye. That is, the actions of his eye are presumed to come under his control, even if it were to do something ostensibly involuntary such as to flinch. It would not be odd for an English speaker to say that it was David who flinched. It is, of course, possible to say, “David’s eye blinked/flinched,” in English, but that is not representative of the norm. One would expect to find this type of construction in more literary or poetic genres rather than everyday speech. For Hawaiian, on the other hand, it is not uncommon for the eye to see, the ear to listen, the hand to work, etc. This is reflected in the frequently quoted “(`Olelo) no‘eau” (proverbial expressions) below: Nana ka maka; ho‘olohe ka pepeiao; pa‘a ka waha. Observe with the eyes; listen with the ears; shut the mouth. Thus one learns. (Pukui, 1983, p. 248) Pa‘a ka waha, hana ka lima. Shut the mouth; keep the hands busy. Never mind the talking; start working. (ibid, p. 281)

Indication of the active zone instead of the cognitively salient entity allows the speaker of Hawaiian to avoid pointing too directly at human agents and the possible affront that such overpointing might cause. In his discussion on the environments in which fully marked agents might be found in Samoan, Duranti (1994) puts forth the idea of a grammar of praising and blame in which he recognizes these as “important social acts through which speakers can in fact affect the way the world is” (p. 145). Such effect is particularly salient with regard to social relationships. Speech events involving the indication of a particular individual as the focus of blame or praise obviously affect the dynamics of social relationships and the overall harmony of the speech community. It is clear to see how blaming can negatively impact the relationship between accuser and accused while also impacting their relationships with other participants in

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the speech event. It is less clear, however, to see how praising might be construed as negative in any way. I have suggested (Wong, 2006) that the overt indication of an individual, even for the purposes of praise, can often engender feelings of discomfort because it elevates that individual above his or her peers and, in doing so, isolates that individual from the rest of the group. The maintenance of group harmony, then, is facilitated by the avoidance of direct indication of human agents. By indicating the body part (active zone) instead of the individual to whom it belongs (cognitively salient entity) as the agent responsible for a particular act, a speaker can mitigate the negative effects of either blame or praise and preserve social harmony. The Hawaiian language is equipped with a number of features that allow for the indirect indication of agents and the avoidance of overpointing. The appropriate use of such features reflects the ways of speaking that constitute the shared communicative competence of the speech community, marking it as distinct from other communities. I advocate for the use of such features as a way to avoid the wanton use of calques, capricious overpointing, and the general tendency to speak English in Hawaiian that pervades the language use patterns of second language learners of Hawaiian. I also advocate for their use as an effective strategy for facilitating the maintenance of social harmony. SPEAKING HAWAIIAN IN HAWAIIAN The goal that I advocate calls for speaking Hawaiian in Hawaiian. Some of the features Hawaiian offers for facilitating indirect indication of agents are found in the canonical constituent order Verb – Subject – Object, the pervasive use of the passive voice, the choice of stative or intransitive verbs in place of transitive verbs, the choice of non-verbal constructions instead of those that utilize verbs, the use of dual and plural pronouns to spread responsibility to other agents, and the indication of the “active zone” as the true agent responsible for an action, to mention a few. Each of these features allows for the mitigation of agency and was employed copiously in Hawaiian at a time when the language was still viable and, in fact, the lingua franca of the Hawaiian Islands. In order to maintain the Hawaiian-ness of the Hawaiian language within the current revitalization context, it is necessary to prevent the convergence of Hawaiian and English worldviews. Avoiding the use of L1 strategies to point at agents in L2 contexts represents only half the battle. Hawaiian is not a language that is point-less (i.e., devoid of strategies for pointing at agents). As such, it is also important for the second language learner to recognize Hawaiian ways of pointing that are not part of his or her English default system and incorporate them into a new repertoire. As difficult as it is to break away from L1 habits, many of which operate below the level of awareness, it is just as difficult to acquire new norms in terms of ways of

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speaking. The most difficult aspect here is imagining new ways of speaking that do not exist in the default repertoire. The default repertoire, although it does not limit the ideas we are able to conceive, does have a profound influence on them. An English speaker might never imagine the existence of certain Hawaiian ways of pointing unless prompted by exposure to them. Even upon recognizing such ways of speaking as important aspects of Hawaiian worldview, it is not easy to incorporate them into one’s repertoire without a full understanding of the appropriate environment for their use. With regard to understanding unfamiliar ways of speaking, or any other aspect of linguistic performance, Duranti (1994) recognized the importance of asking the question “Why this form now?” (pp. 171–2). The examples presented below represent ways of pointing that are not part of my English repertoire. Duranti’s question has been instrumental in leading me to my conclusions about Hawaiian ways of pointing and the nature of their use. HAWAIIAN WAYS OF POINTING In the story of Kawelo, a chief from the island of Kaua‘i, Kawelo’s wife (Kanewahineikiaoha), travels across the island of O‘ahu to the home of her parents in order to ask her father if he would be willing to train Kawelo in the art of ka‘a la‘au (a style of fighting that utilizes a war club). She has not been home for some time and her father, somewhat surprised to see her there and curious to know why she has arrived, addresses her as follows: Aia a pau kau paina ana, alaila, ninau aku au i ka makemake o nei huakai au, e ka maua lei aloha, i hoea mai nei ia nei, o ka au ana mai nei a kou mau wawae i keia loa (Hooulumahiehie, 2009, May 14). As soon as your eating is finished, then I will ask about the purpose of this journey, oh beloved child of ours, whereby you have arrived here, your feet having walked for such a great distance.

Before broaching his question, it is clearly important for the father to make sure that his daughter has been properly fed. The translation provided has been intentionally left in an unpolished state in order to illustrate that, instead of assigning agency to his daughter for terminating the eating process (e.g., As soon as you have finished eating…), he uses the stative verb “pau” (to be finished) which allows his statement to focus on the eating as the subject and to avoid setting up Kanewahineikiaoha as the agent. It is quite possible in Hawaiian to choose a transitive verb such as ho‘opau (to finish something) in order to place Kanewahineikiaoha in the subject position, marking her as the agent responsible for finishing the eating: Aia a ho‘opau ‘oe i ka pa‘ina ‘ana, e ninau au ia ‘oe i kou kumu i hele mai ai i keia loa a ho‘ea mai ma ‘ane‘i.

Hawaiian Methodologies of Indirection • 161 As soon as you finish eating, I will ask you why you have traveled so far to get here.

So why, then, would the author chose to have Kanewahineikiaoha’s father use the stative verb in this context? There are perhaps numerous reasons for doing so but I have focused on the fact that this is a common construction that represents the norm in Hawaiian. This type of encounter (i.e., that involves an inquiry into the purpose of someone’s arrival) is commonly found in the old stories and is especially conducive to indirect pointing. Before even getting to the question, however, a minimum of hospitality would require that a visitor be fed. It would seem that the tendency toward indirectness in this type of event is reinforced by the fact that Kanewahineikiaoha must be properly received. The use of the stative verb shields her from the responsibility of expediting the eating process in order to move on to more pressing business. Instead, the eating, as an integral aspect of the welcoming process, becomes the subject of “pau” and the time frame within which it should be conducted is removed from her control. After recognizing his responsibility to his guest, Kanewahineikiaoha’s father foreshadows his question by announcing its contents. He again chooses an indirect path in his inquiry by further shielding his daughter from responsibility for her actions and for any intention related to their execution. He does this by pointing at the journey (huakai) as the subject of “makemake” (generally translated as “desire” or “want”) thus passing the buck, so to speak, by attributing whatever intention there might be for making this journey to the journey itself. Even the execution of the journey, which required her to walk for some distance, is not placed directly under her control. That is, instead of pointing directly at her as the agent of “au” (to walk), her feet, as the active zone, are assigned that responsibility. In applying Duranti’s question to this situation, it would not seem that the indirectness is motivated by some effort to avoid causing discomfort for Kanewahineikiaoha. It would seem, instead, that in the Hawaiian worldview, indirectness is the norm. With regard to her feet doing the walking, indication of the active zone reflects a worldview in which such entities as feet can shoulder the responsibility of agency and, in some cases, may even be considered to have their own mana‘o (intention). The relative frequency, however, with which the overall indirect indication of agents occurs when compared to English, leads me to conclude that indirectness is the norm in Hawaiian. I will offer one more example that illustrates this overall tendency to mitigate agency in Hawaiian. Many years ago, in a conversation with Josephine Kaleilehua Lindsay, one of a dwindling number of native speaking kupuna “elders,” she began to recount a story she had heard during her youth about a kupua (shape shifter) who lived amongst the people of Waipi‘o

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Valley, Hawai‘i, and who could take the form of a shark. According to the story, the people were vanishing one by one as they failed to return from their activities in the ocean. The existence of this shark-man was suspected to be the source of the problem and it had to be someone who lived in the valley. As she related the story to me, I found myself increasingly curious as to the nature of this kupua, and was unable to suppress my desire to ask a question of her. Knowing full well that asking a question would be inappropriate and would certainly interrupt the telling of her story, my curiosity got the better of me and I asked her anyway. I wanted to know whether this kupua was inclined to strike on land as well as in the water. Her response was interesting in a number of ways, the most salient of which is the fact that, left to my own devices, I would never have come up with a similar response. What she said was: ‘A‘ole, no ka mea, he ahuwale ko ka ‘aina. No, because the land has clear visibility.

Although I was immediately able to understand what she meant, I would never have thought to put it that way myself. So why then did she choose to express her idea in that way? I realized then that her worldview differed significantly from my own in that her focus was not placed on the agency of the kupua but was placed instead on this particular quality that is possessed by land. I would have been inclined to say that the kupua would be seen and would not have been able to get away with it. This type of response, however, implies agency at a number of levels. The act of attacking innocent beach goers, the act of witnessing the deed, and the act of getting away all suggest agency in this situation. Thus my habitual compulsion to assign agency to action reflects a different worldview from that of Mrs. Lindsay who, at least ostensibly, has no such compulsion. Any agency denoted by her response lay imbedded in the context of the story and would have to be recovered from the available contextual information because there is no overt indication of agency. I realized that the acquisition of communicative competence in Hawaiian, as exhibited by Mrs. Lindsay, would require an adjustment in worldview. Attending to the norms of pointing at agents in Hawaiian would serve to facilitate the acquisition of communicative competence and to adjust my own worldview so that I might have a similar focus on the attributes of the land and not on the agency implied in the context. There would then be a much greater possibility that I might produce a similar response to that of Mrs. Lindsay when asked a similar question. METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS A critical aspect of indigenous research methodology is that it must align with the values and purposes of the indigenous community in which the

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research is conducted. The researcher, whether intentionally or not, acts as an agent of change. As such, he or she is ultimately accountable to the community and responsible for conducting research that ultimately enhances the community’s well being (Smith, 1999). It is necessary for the researcher to position him- or herself in the research in order to ensure that accountability. In Hawaiian research, this is an issue of kuleana (right, responsibility, authority). Who has the kuleana to do research in Hawaiian communities? How is one’s position as insider or outsider (in relation to the community) relevant to the issue of kuleana? Who should advocate to/ for whom? What kind of impact will the research have on the community? Is there an indigenous way to engage in the production of knowledge? In presenting my research on the indication of agents in Hawaiian, I decided to write my dissertation in Hawaiian. This was not a difficult decision to make given the fact that I was advocating for a concerted effort among second language learners of Hawaiian to aspire to speak Hawaiian in Hawaiian as we endeavor to revitalize the language and expand its domains of use. It would have been ironically hypocritical at worst or inherently counterintuitive at the least if I had chosen to advocate for the expansion of domains of Hawaiian through the medium of English. However, no other dissertation had yet been written in Hawaiian, even though it is clearly permitted under the policies and procedures of the institution, as listed in the University of Hawai‘i style guide (Wong, 2004).13 Transcending issues of hypocrisy, it would have been regrettable if I had chosen to bypass the opportunity to introduce Hawaiian to this new domain. The decision to write in Hawaiian, however, raises the question of kuleana in a number of different ways. As a Hawaiian who is a non-native speaker of Hawaiian, my status as insider or outsider for the Hawaiian speech community is somewhat unclear. One could easily make the case that my path in seeking competence in Hawaiian was markedly different from that of the native speaker and, as such, I should be considered an outsider. This would immediately bring into question my kuleana to engage in this research. Was it appropriate for an outsider to produce the first dissertation in Hawaiian? Was my Hawaiian up to the task? In advocating for Hawaiian language use that privileges Hawaiian worldview particularly in terms of ways of assigning agency, would I be prone to essentializing the Hawaiian-ness of Hawaiian language? What would be the social impact of this research? These and other questions constantly attended my work. Perhaps one of the most haunting questions, though, and one that was inextricably linked to the others, was whether this would be a Hawaiian dissertation or an English dissertation written in Hawaiian. Again, while advocating for a revitalization effort that recognizes the merits of speaking Hawaiian in Hawaiian, it would be incumbent on me to write a Hawaiian dissertation in Hawaiian. But what does this mean?

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There is no precedent, no model to pattern after. Furthermore, it would be pi‘ikoi14 to deviate too drastically from the norms and expectations that mark the genre. In other words, it was necessary to present my research in a format that would be recognizable as a dissertation while, at the same time, attempting to do so in a Hawaiian way. Making room for Hawaiian language and Hawaiian ways of speaking in a well established (and somewhat conservative) Western writing form would certainly require striking a delicate balance between advocacy for change and respect for existing conventions. In recognizing my role as agent of change, it was critical that I make decisions that would be acceptable to both the Native Hawaiian and Western scholarly communities. After all, I still wanted it to be considered a legitimate dissertation and did not want to be accused of hiding behind the Hawaiian (i.e., using the differences between Hawaiian and English to escape the rigor normally associated with an English dissertation). In order to accomplish this, I decided to maintain the canonical structure of an English dissertation while incorporating aspects of Hawaiian language and worldview that could be easily recognizable as such. A HAWAIIAN DISSERTATION? My strategy involved incorporating in my writing some ways of speaking normally associated with Hawaiian but not necessarily common to academic writing in English. The most prominent of these, of course, was the use of Hawaiian norms of pointing that would reflect the claims I was making in the main thesis of the dissertation. This strategy yielded a highly mitigated use of agency when compared with English. Pervasive use of the passive voice, which would normally be flagged as insufficiently definitive in English, aligned well with the Hawaiian texts from which my data were drawn. This was also the case for the use of stative and intransitive verbs that allow for a shift in focus away from human agents. Indication of the active zone instead of the cognitively salient entity, indication of dual and plural pronouns, indication of other non-human entities, and the overall avoidance of overpointing all facilitated the mitigation of human agency thereby adding a Hawaiian flavor to the text. This strategy, combined with a copious use of hedging words such as “paha” (perhaps or maybe) and phrases such as “me he mea la” (it would seem that), allowed for softer claims to be made leaving room for the possibility that mine might not be the last word on the topic. From an English perspective hedging aligns with postmodern epistemology that recognizes the situated, ever evolving, and shifting nature of reality. But, from the Hawaiian perspective, claims are made with an appropriate degree of indirectness that avoids confrontation with opposing views. Another feature along the same lines was the incorporation of “‘olelo no‘eau” (proverbial expressions) that lend a cryptic sense to some of the arguments and explanations. ‘Olelo no‘eau are ubiquitous in Hawaiian texts.

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They serve to make points in an indirect fashion because they are much more figurative than literal. They are, however, widely accepted in that they reflect the intertextuality and intersubjectivity inherent in the schema shared by the members of a speech community. That is to say, they are part of the discourse of a community that can be accepted as given. “Taken together, the sayings offer a basis for an understanding of the essence and origins of traditional Hawaiian values” (Pukui, 1983, p. VII). These ‘olelo no‘eau are formulaic expression that might be considered cliché in English and inappropriate for scholarly writing. In Hawaiian, however, they play an important role in maintaining Hawaiian values that guide the ways in which we interact with our environment and our fellow/sister human beings. The use of ‘olelo no‘eau facilitates an overall sense of indirectness that represents the norm in Hawaiian. The cryptic nature of that indirectness, however, challenges the sensibilities of many English academics who tend to place a high value on clarity. According to Grice (1975), the maximization of clarity in communicative interaction is a universal human tendency. From a Western positivistic perspective that aspires to achieve objectivity, lack of clarity is viewed as problematic. From a Hawaiian perspective, though, lack of clarity is a resource that, when skillfully employed by competent Hawaiian speakers, allows for mitigation of behavior that would otherwise be considered maha‘oi or “presumptuous.”15 A couple other stylistic points are worth mentioning here although they are not intimately related to the issue of pointing at agents. One is the use of the second person perspective that is common in old Hawaiian writings, particularly in the genre of epic stories that served as the primary source of my data. Addressing the reader directly might be viewed as a rapport-building device that invites the reader to become more intimately involved with the story. In taking on the kuleana of creating a precedent for dissertation writing in Hawaiian, I chose to exploit this as well as some of the other features mentioned above in order to privilege Hawaiian ways of writing while maintaining the more canonical aspects associated with writing an English dissertation. In keeping with the narrative style of my Hawaiian sources, I employed a number of anecdotes to explicate my ideas and retold parts of the original epic stories in order to provide a contextual foundation for analyzing the data. This allowed me to employ a number of literary devices and language use patterns common to Hawaiian narratives, further contributing to the Hawaiian flavor of the dissertation. One final decision worthy of mention that concerns the write up of my research has to do with the use of newly coined terms. In order to optimize my abilities in Hawaiian and avoid the natural tendency to think in English, I endeavored to write my thoughts directly in Hawaiian without translating from English. The obvious problem here is that, as a native speaker of English, I am more inclined to think first in English. Moreover, my studies

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in the area of anthropological linguistics and Hymes’ (1974) ethnography of speaking instilled certain habitual ways of understanding and expressing the main concepts of these fields. As a result, I often found myself in need of terminology commonly used to articulate those concepts. Such terminology did not exist in a more traditional version of Hawaiian. Therefore, in order to avoid creating a one to one correspondence between English jargon and the Hawaiian I was using, I made a conscious effort to circumlocute rather than transliterate or fabricate corresponding terms in Hawaiian. METHODOLOGIES OF INQUIRY What defines a Hawaiian way of doing research? There is no widely accepted template available to Hawaiian researchers, and it would be unreasonable to assume the existence of such a template as it would only serve to confine the limits of inquiry. It would be even more unreasonable to expect that traditional ways of knowledge production in Hawaiian would mirror those of English. It was for this reason that I found myself drifting away from those methods of inquiry that marked my experience with Western positivistic research traditions. Instead of formulating a research question based on some preexisting hypothesis and examining all the available relevant information that might either support or reject that hypothesis, I was inclined to engage in what I half jokingly refer to as the serendipity approach to the conduct of research; because the discovery of new knowledge via this approach would at first glance appear to involve a bit of luck. Of course, the serendipity approach is not merely dependent on luck. It requires, instead, that the researcher engage with the phenomenological world and recognize, in that experience, answers to questions previously unformulated in any formal way. Implicit in the empirical approach is the existence of a correct answer, either yes or no, to some preformed question. In comparing the two methodologies, it is clear to see the dramatic difference in the level of agency of the researcher. The search for a particular answer places the responsibility on the researcher to engage in actions that will lead to that answer whereas the recognition of answers among the body of one’s experience, with or without being guided there by previously formulated questions, represents a more passive endeavor thereby removing the responsibility from the researcher for engaging in active efforts to make a “discovery.” Furthermore, the absence of such responsibility removes the possibility of failure in this endeavor. In the serendipity approach, the agency must be assigned to the knowledge itself. It is the knowledge that is responsible for revealing itself to the researcher. This is not luck nor is it a less rigorous approach. The researcher must work to be in a position to receive the knowledge at the point of revelation.

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The serendipity approach is, by comparison, less direct than the positivistic empirical approach in that it reflects a more passive stance. It applies to the ambient phenomena experienced by the researcher and not those phenomena he or she actively seeks. This approach seemed to align much more closely with the worldview I was describing as indirect, particularly in terms of the indication of agency. Moreover, the available information on Hawaiian ways of learning suggests that Hawaiians relied on observation and imitation. One learned what one was exposed to of the existing body of knowledge while new knowledge was also receives as opposed to actively sought with specific expectations. The ‘olelo no‘eau “Nana ka maka; ho‘olohe ka pepeiao; pa‘a ka waha” (Pukui, 1983, p. 248) mentioned earlier in this paper suggests that questions were considered to constitute inappropriate behavior in the Hawaiian learning context. It was not, as in English learning contexts, considered a learning tool intrinsically available to the student. The Hawaiian worldview suggests that the learner is not the master of his or her own fate. By extension, this suggests that Hawaiian research, as we find in the language, also reflects a paucity of agency. I advocate for a new direction in Hawaiian language revitalization that reflects this worldview. CONCLUSION Any agent responsible for producing/receiving new knowledge through research must necessarily consider the social implications of that research. There is a responsibility that attends such work and it applies at multiple levels. That is, it transcends the level of content and applies at the methodological level as well. In this case, I am that agent and, as such, I am responsible for both the content and methodology of my research. Serendipitously, the content of my research itself deals with the responsibilities that accrue unto grammatical agents who are indicated as such in Hawaiian. Furthermore, within the content of this research, I have claimed that there is also responsibility attached to the assignation of agency and it is not the same for Hawaiian as it is for English. Pointing at grammatical agents generally involves placing an individual in the proverbial spotlight. This is quite capable of causing an affront to that individual and a level of discomfort similar to that caused by an accusatory finger. I have claimed that norms of language use in Hawaiian call for more indirect indication of agents than found in English and that, by comparison, there is a tendency to overpoint in English. Violation of language use norms in Hawaiian by making overly direct indication of agents can lead to a disturbance of social harmony. It does not make sense to work so hard to revitalize Hawaiian if we confine our attention to grammar and lexicon. I am claiming, and thereby advocating, that proponents of Hawaiian language revitalization also attend to Hawaiian ways of speaking. Furthermore, research on Hawaiian language

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should be conducted in ways that are aligned with Hawaiian worldview. I was once asked whether there is room in academia for a dissertation that is for all intents and purposes a position paper. If there was no room then, there is now—and so it should be. NOTES 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

Bynon (1977) claimed that language change has been systematically studied for a period of one hundred years. The idea of speaking one language in another comes from a rumor about the famous Russian linguist Roman Jakobson who is alleged to have said, “I speak Russian, in seven languages.” (Oller, 2000, p. 36) Apparently Jakobson had a heavy Russian accent. I have taken this idea and expanded it beyond the realm of phonology in order to include ways of speaking as, at least in part, implicitly constitutive of one’s ability to speak a language. Agar (1994) claims: “You can’t use a new language unless you change the consciousness that is tied to the old one, unless you stretch beyond the circle of grammar and dictionary, out of the old world and into the new one.” See Pukui and Elbert (1986). See also Warner (1999) for a more complete discussion of kuleana. See also Radford (1988) for an extended explanation of noun phrase roles. See Ahearn (2001). See Lucy (1992). It should also be noted that this also applies to any act the leg might happen to commit. For example, an improperly set broken bone in the leg might require resetting and an intentional re-breaking of the bone. See Elbert and Pukui (1979) for extended discussion on stative verbs in Hawaiian. See Odlin (1990) for a discussion of calquing. The verb “to rain” can be either transitive or intransitive. In this example it is intransitive. See University of Hawai‘i (2002). It should also be noted here that under the Hawai‘i State Constitution, both Hawaiian and English are considered official languages of the State. See State of Hawai‘i (1978). This word is defined by Pukui and Elbert (1986) as follows: “To claim honors not rightfully due, to seek preferment, to aspire to the best or to more than is one’s due; to claim to be of higher rank than one is” (p. 327).

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15.

The word “maha‘oi” can be translated literally as “protruding forehead” and gives the sense of butting into someone else’s business. REFERENCES

Agar, M. 1994. Language shock: Understanding the culture of conversation. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. Ahearn, L. M. (2001). Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 109– 137. Bynon, T. (1977). Historical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, K. W. (1993). Samoan as an active zone language. Paper presented at the Seminar on Indigenous Languages at the Autonomous National University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico. Duranti, A. (1994). From grammar to politics: Linguistic anthropology in a Western Samoan village. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Elbert, S. H., & Pukui M. K. (1979). Hawaiian grammar. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press. Hawai‘i State Constitution, Official Languages, Article XV, Section 4. Hooulumahiehie-i-ka-oni-malie-a-pua-lilia-lana-i-ka-wai. (1909–1910). Ka moolelo hiwahiwa o Kawelo. Kuokoa Home Rula. [Cited in text as Hooulumahiehie]. Hymes, D. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride, & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics (pp. 269–285). Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Keenan, E. L. (1984). Semantic correlates of the ergative/absoutive distinction. Linguistics, 22, 197–223. Lucy, J. A. (1992). Language diversity and thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. NeSmith, R. K. (2003). Tutu’s Hawaiian and the emergence of a neo-Hawaiian language. ‘Oiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal, 3, 68–76. Odlin, T. (1990). Language transfer: Cross-linguistic influence in language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oller, D. K. (2000). The emergence of the speech capacity. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pukui, M. K. & Elbert, S. (1986). Hawaiian dictionary. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Pukui, M. K. (1983). ‘Olelo No‘eau: Hawaiian proverbs and poetical sayings. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. Radford, A. (1988). Transformational grammar: A first course. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books Ltd. University of Hawai`i. (2002). University of Hawai‘i style gude. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i.

170 • K. LAIANA WONG Warner, S. L. N. (1999). Kuleana: The right, responsibility, and authority of indigenous people to speak and make decisions for themselves in language and cultural revitalization. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 30(1), 68–93. Warner, S. L. N. (2001). The movement to revitalize Hawaiian language and culture. In L. Hinton, & K. Hale (Eds.), The green book of language revitalization in practice (pp. 133–144). San Diego: Academic Press. Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (J. B. Carroll, Ed.). Cambridge: The MIT Press. Wilson, W. H., & Kamana, K. (2001). Mai loko mai o ka ‘i‘ini: Procceding from a dream. In L. Hinton & K. Hale (Eds.), The green book of language revitalization in practice (pp. 147–176). San Diego: Academic Press. Wong, K. L. (1999). Authenticity and the revitalization of Hawaiian. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 30(1), 94–115. Wong, K. L. (2004). He hawa‘e kai nui a kau ma kula. Educational perspectives, 37(1), 31–39. Wong, K. L. (2006). Kuhi aku, kuhi mai, kuhi hewa e: He mau loina kuhikuhi akena no ka olelo Hawai‘i. Unpublished doctoral dissertation in Linguistics. University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

CHAPTER 8

IDENTITY AND AGENCY AMONG HERITAGE LANGUAGE LEARNERS Miyung Park

INTRODUCTION According to the 2003 U.S. Census, approximately 3.5 million residents are foreign-born, and nearly 18% of the U.S. population aged five or older speaks a language other than English at home. Fueled by the interest of heritage language (HL) learners1 in studying the languages of their ancestors, U.S. institutions of higher education have offered an increasing number of “less commonly taught language” courses including Korean, Chinese, Tagalog, and Vietnamese (Deusen-Scholl, 2003, p. 211). For example, a recent survey by the Modern Language Association (MLA) reported that Korean language programs experienced the third largest increase in enrollment from 2002 to 2006 at 37%, after Arabic at 126% and Chinese at 51% (Furman, Goldberg, & Lusin, 2007). The majority of students learning Korean at the college level come from Korean heritage backgrounds, especially at intermediate and advanced levCritical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 171–207 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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els (Kim, 2006). According to a 1998 study, approximately 80–90% of Korean language classrooms were composed of HL learners, many of whom enrolled in Korean language courses primarily to return to their roots and discover their ethnic identity (King, 1998). Chaudron et al.’s (2005) needs analysis study conducted for students enrolled in first year through fourth year Korean classes at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa between Fall 1999 and Spring 2000, implies that more than half of the sample population (n=83) participating in their research had Korean-speaking parents or grandparents. The study also found that many of the students chose to study Korean because they wished to better communicate with family members and learn more about their heritage culture. Learning a HL in a particular social context has consequences for the identities2 of the learners, and this identity construction influences language learning trajectories in powerful ways. Language learning involves not only acquiring a set of linguistic skills, but also taking on new ways of being and producing knowledge (Kanno & Norton, 2003). As HL learners engage in social practices of an institutional or community setting, they are further challenged by unequal relations of power and emerging conflicts between their desire to become legitimate HL speakers and their positions within the cultural contexts. A number of Korean HL studies suggest that identity and HL proficiency are strongly interrelated, meaning that those who were more proficient in the HL tended to incorporate more of their cultural and ethnic background as essential parts of their identity (Cho, 2000; Kim, 2006; Lee, 2002; Lee & Kim, 2007). Although identity issues have been gaining ground in the field of Korean HL education, most studies have relied on quantitative research methods to look at the correlation between the degree of ethnic belonging and its effects on HL learning as well as motivational orientation for learning the HL. Little attention has been paid to the complicated nature of identity construction and the influence of learning and using the HL over time. The study described here contributes to the emerging discussion of identity and SLA by reporting on the experiences of three Korean-American3 HL learners. These learners are viewed as social beings who “exist in extremely complex social environments that consist of overwhelmingly asymmetrical power relations and subject the learners to multiple discourses” (McKay &Wong, 1996, p. 603). This study provides accounts of how KoreanAmerican HL learners build on their HL skills and bicultural competence in searching for a comfortable sense of self and learning to become active agents in designing their world. I first provide a conceptual framework that draws on postmodern theories and describe my research methodology for this study. Then, I present my findings, focusing on the ways in which Korean-American HL learners make sense of their engagement in linguistic

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and social activities of their HL communities and how they construct and reconstruct their identities, agency, and investment over time. POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY This study draws upon a number of epistemological and theoretical perspectives. I apply postmodern views of discursive constructions of identity (Davies, 1990; Pavlenko, 2003; Weedon, 1997) to examine how human agency and identity come into existence in relation to the particular discourses that surround each individual. Bakhtin’s notions of voice, narrative, and authoring the self (1981, 1984, 1986; Vitanova, 2005) are used to investigate the dynamics of the individual’s ongoing establishment of evaluative stances toward the social world in narratives, drawing on a variety of available academic, cultural, and religious discourses. Furthermore, I utilize the concept of imagination (Anderson, 1991; Wenger, 1998) in analyzing how Korean-American HL learners position and reposition themselves as members of their HL communities as well as how they envision alternative futures. Discursively Constructed Identity and Learner Agency Poststructuralist feminist scholar Chris Weedon’s (1997) discussion of identity has influenced the field of SLA and literacy theory (Anderson, 2002; Ibrahim, 1999; McKay & Wong, 1996; Norton Peirce, 1995; Norton, 2000). Weedon (1997) rarely uses the term “identity,” focusing instead on conceptualizing “subjectivity” as a discursively produced construct. According to Weedon, subjectivity is “the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself, and her ways of understanding her relation to the world” (p. 32). In contrast to the structuralist view of identity as an individual’s fixed and coherent core, Weedon proposes a subjectivity which is “precarious, contradictory and in process, constantly being reconstituted in discourse each time we think or speak” (p. 32). Drawing on the work of Foucault (1981, 1986, 1988), Weedon (1997) further claims that this wide range of discursive fields4 which contain “competing ways of giving meaning to the world and of organizing social institutions and processes” provides the individual with various possibilities of subjectivity (p. 34). Poststructuralist notions of identity do not mean that the individual cannot make their own judgments and decisions in life. Individual learners actively engage in constructing the conditions under which they craft their own learning experience (Sfard & Prusak, 2005). Lantolf and Pavlenko (2001) emphasize the socio-historic nature of agency, viewing it as “a relationship that is constantly co-constructed and renegotiated with

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those around the individual and with the society at large” (p. 148). This perspective presumes that those involved in learning a second language come to terms with power relations inherent in the environment. Agency exists in identities that provide an individual with a sense of power over their environment and thereby their learning (Boxer & Cohen, 2004). Human agents have the potential to alter ways of behaving across discourses by critically reflecting on how they position themselves while negotiating, modifying, or even resisting the discursive constitutions, according to the possible effects on their lives. The questions that arise from the complexity of learner agency encompass how an individual takes up subject positions within a particular discourse and why the individual invests in the discursive position. Agency is developed by what is significant to the individual (Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2001) and influenced by the power relations entangled in the discourse (Davies, 1990). An individual’s ability to obtain particular identities depends on available resources or strategies (see Ball, 1994). Voice, Narrative, and Authoring the Self Postmodern theories of identity and agency emphasize subjectivity constituted in competing and even contradictory discourses. Bakhtin (1984) conceptualizes subjectivity in relation to one’s ability to author his or her words. Bakhtin’s theories (1981, 1984, 1986) are relevant to examining HL learners’ language practice since they underline real world contexts of language use. To Bakhtin (1981), potential for agency is realized by the continuous dialogic practice of responding to and addressing others. His understanding of subjectivity and agency comes from the individual’s ability to “create new opportunities in establishing one’s voice” (Vitanova, 2005, p. 152). An individual’s self in a Bakhtinian sense is characterized by “an emotional-volitional tone” which is a vital component of voice. An emotional-volitional tone is defined as “a complex of one’s feelings, desires, and moral evaluations” which is evoked as a challenge to the social order (p. 158). The voice is inseparable from a person’s dialogic relationships with others. Viewing a dialogue as a social action rather than a mere verbal exchange, Bakhtin asserts that engaging in a dialogue offers opportunities to respond to others’ voices, and that the distinctive and creative features of each response characterize the act as answerable (Vitanova, 2005). Vitanova’s definition of narratives echoes the view of Wortham (2001) who emphasizes the transformative power of personal narratives: Autobiographical narratives might construct or transform the self in part because, in telling the story, the narrator adopts a certain interactional position…in other words, autobiographical narrative may give meaning and direction to narrators’ lives and place them in characteristic relations with other

Identity and Agency among Heritage Language Learners • 175 people, not only as narrators represent themselves in characteristic ways but also as they enact characteristic positions while they tell their stories. (p. 9)

Narratives facilitate the voice of marginalized individuals, allowing a form of agency and resistance to the authoritative discourse. In opposition to the subordination experienced through physical interactions with others, in the narrativized world, such individuals can gain power to become the characters they desire to be, represented by the narrator “I,” and exercise control over the texts they enter. Narratives are more than recounting and describing events that occurred at specific moments in our lives. Instead, “narrative spaces become the intertextual ground for contesting others’ voices, re-accentuating their utterances with new meaning, and reinterpreting the self through another” (Vitanova, 2005, p. 156). Through challenging and entering a dynamic conversation with others’ discursive practices, narratives may become avenues for agentive possibility. Imagination Vitanova’s (2005) analysis of second language users shows how individuals negotiate a sense of identity in interaction with others in a particular social context. The notion of imagination allows us to look at how engaging in imagined communities affects HL learners’ learning path. Initially coined by Benedict Anderson (1991), the notion of “imagined communities” has been linked to identity and learning (Kanno & Norton, 2003; Kinginger, 2004; Norton, 2000, 2001; Pavlenko & Norton, 2005; Wenger, 1998). Wenger’s 1998 work extends learning to learners’ affiliation with the imagined world. He defines imagination as “a process of expanding our self by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves” (p. 177). He states: Through imagination, we can locate ourselves in the world and in history, and include in our identities other meanings, other possibilities, other perspectives. It is through imagination that we recognize our own experience as reflecting broader patterns, connections, and configurations. It is through imagination that we see our own practices as continuing histories that reach far into the past, and it is through imagination that we conceive of new developments, explore alternatives, and envision possible futures…imagination can make us consider our own position with new eyes. By taking us into the past and carrying us into the future, it can recast the present and show it as holding unsuspected possibilities. (p. 178)

Wenger (1998) considers imagination an essential component of identity. Positioning ourselves within the broader social world, we become selfreflective and aware of our own actions and create new images of the future. Norton’s (2006) notion of imagined communities introduces a new

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way to understand the relationship between second language learning and identity. Imagined communities are defined as “groups of people, not immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of imagination” (Kanno & Norton, 2003, p. 241). According to Norton (2006), visualizing the self as a member of an imagined community affects learning trajectories in such a way that L2 learners invest time and agency to strive for the realization of desired visions of the future. The postmodern view of identity as a discursively produced construct is useful for understanding the complex and evolving nature of identity that is often imposed by the larger socio-political discourses and shaped by the individual’s agency. Vitanova’s work on Bakhtinian theory of voice, narrative, and authoring the self suggests ways in which individuals challenge and respond to an authoritative discourse through language. The concept of imagination further illuminates how individual’s engagement in imaginative communities influences identity construction. These postmodern theories informed both my choice of inquiry method and interpretations in this study of three Korean-American university students’ HL practices and identity construction.

NARRATIVE AND ETHNOGRAPHIC INQUIRY I employ narrative inquiry (Alvermann, 2002; Bell, 2002; Pavlenko, 2002, 2007) embedded in ethnography in this case study to examine the individual participants’ identity construction as HL users and member of their HL communities. The sources of narrative data included field notes of observations and informal personal conversations, audio-recorded interviews, and e-mail correspondence. Data collection took place over sixteen months from January 2007 to April 2008. In addition to the narrative investigation, which generated most of the data, I also engaged in classroom observations and gathered personal essays from the Korean language courses in which the three participants enrolled. Interview data was collected in English and Korean. I translated and analyzed the Korean data myself. If certain points in the narrative data were not clear, I followed up with participants to clarify meanings and, thus, militate against misunderstandings and bias. Alvermann (2002) uses the term “narrative inquiry” to refer to various research practices that show how oral and written stories of historical episodes help the individuals understand themselves as well as the studies that deconstruct narrative stories. As noted by Bell (2002), “Narrative inquiry rests on the epistemological assumption that we as human beings make sense of random experience by the imposition of story structures” (p. 207).

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Wortham (2001) claims that narratives are powerful not because they lay out one coherent set of an individual’s characteristics, but because they enable narrators to express and make sense of their multiple and contradictory selves and experiences. Feminist and postmodern theorists (e.g., Davies, 1993; Gergen, 1994; Stewart, 1996, as cited in Wortham, 2001) have also argued that the genre of autobiographical narrative is suitable to represent the fragmented and complex nature of one’s identity since narratives can present a variety of past selves and diverse evaluations of these selves within the same story (Wortham, 2001). Bell (2002) acknowledges that the interpretation of current experience is influenced not only by one’s past experience but also by the potential future self that one envisions. Narrative is a transformative act in that it has the power to construct or partly transform the self (Wortham, 2001). According to Wortham, narrators often construct and reinforce the kind of person they are, positioning themselves through interaction and dialogue with other speakers. However, narrative does more than describe a pre-existing self; individuals can change who they are in part and realize who they want to become through telling stories about their life experiences. Wortham also views narratives as an interactional event which is “open to revision and multiplicity” because they are part of an ongoing negotiation between the narrator and the audience (p. 8). Participants The participants for this study are three Korean-American HL learners who were enrolled in a fourth year Korean language class at a Hawai‘i university. Korean language courses offered at the university range from first year Korean (beginning-level) through fourth year Korean (advanced-level). All three participants are female. They are referred to as Sora, Taehi, and Semi (all pseudonyms). I was acquainted with the participants in the fourth year Korean class that I visited once a week between January 2007 and April 2007. Among the five students whom I initially interviewed, Sora, Taehi, and Semi best represented the wide range of linguistic and cultural experiences of the entire class and offered insightful comments and opinions. These participants interacted regularly with me in the Korean class; they viewed me as a Korean language expert and tried to utilize my presence as a Korean resource in class. As time passed, I built friendships with the participants; each participant openly shared her experiences and emotions with me. I became especially close to Taehi, who is a major contributor to my study, through extensive conversations beyond the initial more formal interviews. We enjoyed having meals and going out to shopping malls together, which enabled me to learn more about Taehi’s perspectives toward life.

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Data Analysis I attend to the unique ways in which each of the participants organizes her experiences and deals with multiple, shifting, and conflicting identities through the journey of HL practices. I focus on looking at the sites of struggle where the individual participant confronted widespread, powerful ideologies and explore how they make sense of their struggles and tensions as an essential part of their learning. Pavlenko (2007) illustrates one way of analyzing the narrative data from the perspectives of content, context, and form. Content is the story being told; context is the larger sociopolitical conditions that influence this narrative construction; and form is the structures of narratives and linguistic devices used for the narrative construction. In my research analysis, I focus on the stories of each individual participant and the sociopolitical context that shapes their stories. I also pay attention to form in relevant parts of my data analysis. In terms of analyzing content, Pavlenko’s (2007) approach encourages researchers to consider not only what is told in the story but also what is left out. As for contextual analysis, Pavlenko classifies context into two levels, global, or macro level, and local, or micro level. The former refers to historic, political, economic, and cultural circumstances of narrative production, and the latter to the context of the interview or manuscript writing, and thus to the influence of language choice, audience, setting, modality, narrative functions, interactional concerns, and power relations (Pavlenko, 2007). Analysis of form allows us to look at what linguistic resources are used to create a coherent and compelling story. Paying attention to the speakers’ particular language choice illuminates individual creativity and agency in shaping the structure of their life stories and thus constructing meaning. Interweaving critical social theories and epistemology, I apply a critical lens to look at how power is exercised within everyday language practices and social relationships, especially in relation to Korean HL use in community settings. This critical approach is a tool to analyze the role of individual agency in bringing about personal and social transformation and expanding opportunities for growth and development as a HL use. In the following sections, I explore the ways in which each participant makes sense of their HL practices and identities in sites of struggle, while drawing on a variety of available academic, cultural, and religious discourses. The HL communities that have been sites of struggle can be largely organized into two domains: the Korean immigrant churches in Hawai‘i and the ethnic peer groups. I lay out each participant’s experience in both domains. In this study, struggles are not necessarily viewed as negative influences on the individual’s identity construction. Rather, they are conceptualized as an effective path to new ways of learning, understanding, and living. These rich and complex sites of struggle yielded plentiful opportunities to

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the participants to navigate different value systems and develop their own ideologies and identities (Freedman & Ball, 2004).

IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND HERITAGE LANGUAGE PRACTICE WITHIN A KOREAN IMMIGRANT CHURCH Korean churches in the U.S. play an important role in strengthening the sense of community among Koreans by providing social services and organizations, maintaining homeland traditions, and sustaining social positions (Alumkal, 2003; Kim, 1981; Kim, 2004). According to the Korean Church Directory in America (2001), there are approximately 77 Korean Christian churches in Hawai‘i. Korean churches have non-religious functions for Korean immigrants in the U.S., acting as cultural brokers between Korean immigrants and the larger society (Alumkal, 2003; Kwon, 2003). These churches have served as places where Korean immigrants can meet other Korean community members and share information about opportunities in employment, housing, schooling, and vocational training (Shin, 2005). Fueled by the community’s desire to preserve cultural traditions, they also operate weekend Korean language schools5 for the children of their immigrant members (Wiley, 2001). Due to high religious participation among contemporary Korean immigrants in Korean churches in the U.S., the second-generation Koreans tend to have strong religious ties (Kim, 2004). In the following descriptions, I portray the varied experiences of Taehi, Sora, and Semi as these second-generation Korean-Americans navigate the social and linguistic expectations in a traditional Korean church community. Taehi: Imposed Identity as Korean-American Taehi explained that her strong sense of connection to the Korean community stems from her long-term engagement in Korean churches. Her involvement in the Korean church started when she attended a Korean language school at her church as a child, and she attributes her high proficiency in Korean to her attendance at the language school and engagement in social interactions at the church. Taehi grew up studying the Bible while sharing a room with her grandmother who is a devout Christian. Taehi speaks Korean all the time with her grandmother who does not speak English. Interacting with her in Korean helped Taehi develop strong Korean language abilities and Christian faith and beliefs at a young age. The Korean church has also been a place where Taehi is able to experience the complexity and uniqueness of the Korean language and culture as daily experiences. The majority of the adult church members are first-generation Koreans who are more comfortable speaking Korean. Therefore, the

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church conducts most of its services in Korean although it also offers Sunday services in English for the English-speaking Korean-Americans. As seen in many studies of Korean-Americans in the U.S. (e.g., Kang, 2004; Kim, 2004), the Korean church serves as a powerful community for Taehi where she gains a strong feeling of belonging to her ethnic group. She has also played an important leadership role in the church by interpreting the sermons and worship services from Korean to English for nonKorean speaking church members and leading Bible study and Korean language classes for Korean-American youth. In addition, the Korean church serves as a physical site to comfortably claim and construct her religious identity. Envisioning herself as a dedicated member of a Christian community shaped Taehi’s HL learning trajectories in an influential way. Korean language practices were never separate from her quest for religious being. The opportunities for using the HL were constantly built around her religious endeavors which required the intensive use of the Korean language. Despite her strong passion for teaching Korean to Korean-American children, Taehi feels that she does not receive full respect and credence from the first-generation Korean principal of her school due to pre-existing, negative stereotypes about Korean-Americans. External factors, such as the church and its elders, seemed to prevent Taehi from being entirely free or autonomous in defining her identities. In the following excerpt, Taehi expresses a feeling of discomfort and marginalization when the principal monitors how she is doing in class: I hate that label [second-generation Korean-Americans], but a lot of people use that to label us and categorize different people. I’m a second-generation Korean-American. There are so many stereotypes that are imposed on me as Korean by Americans. They would say “Koreans are hot tempered, impatient, and good at math,” which is totally not me. At the same time, people from Korea have a lot of stereotypes about the second-generations. I hear a lot of things like “Oh second-generations don’t have responsibility,” or “They have no clear ethnic identity.” I heard that from the principal of the Korean school. She would say that in front of all the Korean school teachers from Korea. I was the only second-generation teacher. The principal doesn’t observe other native Korean teachers. But, she always comes to my class and checks. It makes me uncomfortable; she treats me very differently. (Personal communication, April 10, 2007)

Taehi related feelings of being treated differently and unfairly by her first-generation Korean principal because she was not born and raised in Korea. By constantly being observed by the principal, Taehi sensed that her potential as an effective Korean teacher was not validated. In addition, the dominant discourse that was being circulated among first-generation Koreans who were born and raised in Korea involved stereotypical notions of second-generation Koreans as irresponsible. Taehi also felt she held a

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subordinate or “marked” position in social situations with native Korean speakers who seemingly had low expectations of Korean-Americans’ HL proficiency and the commonly held belief that most Korean-Americans do not maintain their HL and ethnic identity. Taehi indicated that this “othering”6 by members of her own ethnic group caused her great emotional distress and inner conflict. Bakhtin (1981) suggests that struggles occur because “The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it” (p. 342). Yet, in struggling with native Korean discourse, Taehi managed to resist this authoritative positioning of her as inferior. Just as Vitanova’s (2005) participant, Vera, refuses to remain silent about being marginalized in a work-related social gathering, Taehi challenges the first-generation Koreans’ views of her as different and culturally and professionally inadequate. In the following excerpt, Taehi reflects on ways she resisted perceptions of her as a deficient Korean language speaker at the Christian retreat she had attended the past summer: For that whole week, I worked with him [the pastor] and translated his work together. I spoke all Korean with him. All the testimonies and sermons—everything was in Korean. The first-generation Koreans who were organizing the retreat didn’t trust me because they didn’t know how high my Korean proficiency was. But, I proved it wrong when I was there. I gave my testimonies all in Korean. This was the 9th annual retreat, and I was the only and first second-generation Korean. I was the youngest. It instilled that hope in me thinking I can do this. It strengthened and confirmed in my mind that this is what I want to do and I can be useful in some way. (Personal communication, November 1, 2007)

Taehi explained that the Christian retreat organized by her church was a significant event because she, who was the youngest and the only KoreanAmerican participant, strove to prove the prevailing stereotypes false by repositioning herself as a competent HL speaker of Korean. Taking on a leadership position through the fluent use of her HL and ability to effectively translate allowed Taehi to construct alternative, competent identities while gaining recognition by first-generation Koreans who initially did not validate her Korean language skills. More specifically, Taehi’s agency comes from her ability to establish a voice, “a distinct emotional-volitional tone,” while confronting the tensions between herself and native Koreans. According to Vitanova (2005), “a distinct emotional-volitional tone” is evoked as a challenge to the social world. She constructs her identity as a competent Korean speaker through engaging in a discursive practice in which various linguistic resources are

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drawn upon (Wetherell, 2001). Taehi succeeds in strengthening this claim by offering the details of the genres of speech she delivered in public and emphasizing the complete use of Korean during the retreat. She repeatedly used the indefinite pronouns “all” (e.g., I spoke all Korean with him) and “everything” (e.g., all the testimonies and sermons, everything was in Korean) which function to legitimize her “Koreanness” and HL skills (Pomerantz, 1986; Yamaguchi, 2005). This linguistic strategy is used to reinforce her qualifications to be a true Korean who can deliver a speech in Korean without any interruptions or dependence on English. In addition, she appropriated the subject position imposed on her as a Korean-American in a positive way, by making a powerful statement that she accomplished such a demanding task despite the fact that she was born in an English-dominant country. In the last three sentences of the narrative above, Taehi was able to judge herself both publicly and individually by switching her stance from storyteller to evaluator of her own actions. Using evaluative markers such as “instilled,” “strengthened,” and “confirmed,” Taehi makes sense of how participating in the event and initiating a chance to deliver her testimonies in Korean influenced her identity construction. Challenging meaning and power within the Korean Church enabled Taehi to create new, resistant discourses and gradually increase her social power (Weedon, 1997). Sora: Resistance to Korean Social Hierarchy Although the Korean church played a powerful role in the construction and reinforcement of Korean identity for Taehi, Sora displayed a strong resistance toward acculturating into the Korean church community. During her high school years, Sora started to become more interested in the Korean language and culture. She felt the desire to be part of the Korean community in Hawai‘i, which she had not been exposed to during her childhood years. This self-realization encouraged Sora to follow her Korean friend to a Korean Christian church. Yet, becoming a legitimate member of the Korean church community was not easy for Sora. When she joined the church community, she encountered various perceived oppressive verbal and ideological points of view which were not congruent with her own (Freedman & Ball, 2004). Sora, who had attended both Korean and Caucasian American churches, compared her experiences: I used to go to a Korean church, but I stopped going. They kept telling me to do stuff. They would expect you to come at certain time and do certain things. And it’s like church is church. You go to church because you want to go and you don’t go because you are obligated to go. I think that’s how Korean churches are different from American churches. I used to go to an American church, and they never used to call me to say “You have to come in the morning.” They would give you options. If you came, then you came. If you didn’t, you didn’t. (Personal communication, March 14, 2007)

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Sora struggled with making sense of the authoritarian nature of the leadership style that was prevalent among the first-generation Korean leaders of her church. She felt obligated to the church community because the firstgeneration church leaders expected her to attend church services without absence, come at certain times, and behave in particular ways. For example, the preacher kept track of Sunday service attendance and called absentee church members to ask why they could not come. Sora’s experience at the Korean church and American church reflects a contrast between hierarchical versus more egalitarian approaches to socializing the church members into the church community. In criticizing the hierarchical leadership of the Korean church leaders, Sora resisted the larger authoritarian discourse because she felt it constrained and weakened her ability to act in her best interests. In this sense, Sora relates more to what she understands as American ideology of an autonomous identity free from the influences of oppressive social rules. Sora also had a hard time understanding a variety of unwritten norms, rules, and codes of conduct which are transmitted and perpetuated at the level of social interactions in the Korean church. For example, she began to realize that position within the youth hierarchy was based on social position in the church and age. In the following excerpt, Sora answers back to the existence of strict Church membership status and the rigid hierarchical church structure: The hierarchy in Korean churches differs from American churches. They have an expanded bureaucracy of pastors, deacons, evangelists, and so on. They have the system in Korean churches that doesn’t exist in American churches in the U.S…I stopped going [to the church]. I belonged to that [Korean church] group, but I didn’t like their hierarchy. They had it even among a small teenage group. They were enni [older sister] and oppa [older brother]. I didn’t like the fact they are only four years older than me and I constantly have to live up to everything they tell you. [They said], “Can you get me water?” and [I said] “Ok.” After a while, [I said] “No, you get it.” I’m close friends with them, but, I just didn’t like the fact that you are younger than me, so you have to do something. I hated that. I don’t like the Korean church. I’m not going. (Personal communication, March 14, 2007)

Sora was surprised that a hierarchy in terms of age was recognized, even among the teenager members. They pressured her to conform to the hierarchical rules and agree to do everything they told her. This contributed to Sora’s feelings of disdain toward the Korean church. The strong unspoken expectations within the church were gate keeping factors which inevitably prevented Sora from becoming a legitimate member of the church. Given the cross-cultural experiences that Sora underwent in both Korean and American churches, she exercised agency in deciding not to hold on

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to the fixed rules of conduct imposed by others in the Korean church and to conclude, “I’m not going.” As Vitanova (2005) argues, a dialogue is a more social action than a mere verbal exchange. Through producing the personal narrative above, Sora contests others’ dominant voices, draws attention to their utterances by giving them new meaning, and re-interprets her self through others (Vitanova, 2005). Sora clearly shows her feelings about not wanting to behave in a submissive manner toward the hierarchical culture. Deciding not to attend the Korean church does not necessarily mean that Sora did not want to have a Korean identity, but rather, given the options of Korean and American cultural norms, Sora chose an American value system that in her view promotes autonomy. This new experience of deconstructing the hierarchical Korean culture mediated the process of Sora’s ideological becoming by influencing the ways that she thinks and contributing to her formation of what is truly internally persuasive for her (Freedman & Ball, 2004). Semi: Marginalization of a Second-Generation Korean Language Teacher Like Taehi, Semi engaged in ideological becoming while teaching Korean to Korean-American children in the Korean language school at her church. Working with children who come from similar backgrounds as Semi provides her with a sense of belonging and a social niche where she can exercise her bilingual and bicultural knowledge. Semi, who teaches the beginning-level Korean classes to kindergarteners and first and second graders, stated that her initial motivation for teaching Korean at her church was derived from her own positive childhood experiences attending Korean HL school. Semi feels that teaching in the Korean community school is rewarding and worthwhile because she helps other Korean-American children gain an understanding of their Korean identity. Although Semi enjoys teaching Korean and interacting with students, she also relates a feeling of marginalization and subordination at her workplace. She said that through interacting with authoritarian figures, primarily with the principal of the Korean language school, she feels inferior and voiceless. A major struggle that Semi feels resulted from the incongruence between her ideologies and those of the first-generation Korean principal occurred regarding how to most effectively teach the Korean language. In the following excerpt, Semi expresses her frustration when the principal pushes her to speak only Korean in class, thus invalidating her preferred teaching methods: Maybe we [second-generation Korean-American teachers] are not as good as the native Korean teachers. Maybe we shouldn’t teach. We can’t speak Korean during the whole class time. We need to explain things in English. We get in

Identity and Agency among Heritage Language Learners • 185 trouble for that from our principal. We speak in English a lot. If we speak a lot of Korean, the kids can’t understand. We need to clarify things for them. But, they say that it’s a Korean school and we have to speak full Korean—no room for English. It’s hard for little kids in our class. Some of them don’t even know how to speak English well. They are only 6 years old. (Personal communication, November 19, 2007)

According to Semi, the native Korean principal neither accepts Semi’s teaching behavior as appropriate nor views her as a legitimate bilingual Korean-American language teacher. The first-generation Korean principal’s authoritarian discourse about language teaching conflicts with Semi’s internally persuasive discourse which is largely influenced by her upbringing (Freedman & Ball, 2004). Semi’s sarcastic comment that “maybe we shouldn’t teach” is a challenge to the Korean perspective that non-native Korean teachers are not legitimate because they use English when teaching Korean. She follows up with her logic behind using English. Semi stated that she is well aware of how difficult it can be for children to learn their HL when they are still acquiring English in their early years. Having gone through similar experiences firsthand, Semi strongly believes that HL children can benefit from lessons combining Korean with their first language, English, during the early years of a child’s life. However, her internally persuasive discourse seems to have no impact because she does not have authority, acknowledgment, or privilege. The principal appears to rigidly adhere to her own ideology that Korean language teachers should only use Korean in the classroom and does not validate Semi’s teaching beliefs. Semi’s marginalization is evident even during teacher meetings. Semi observed that, in certain situations, native Korean teachers, who acquired Korean as their first language, have more control over school policies. Semi revealed that she does not feel confident enough to express her own opinions because first-generation Korean teachers are viewed as being more knowledgeable and having more legitimate ideas regarding the teaching practices at the school and making suggestions for improvement. Semi stated, “At the meeting, our principal asks us what we can do to make things better. They [native Korean teachers] can tell her everything. For us [second-generation Korean teachers], we want to say something, but we don’t know how to say it. They would have more control over what goes on in the school. I feel inferior.”This excerpt clearly shows that language is part of a complex web of identity and power. Identity involves what Butler (2004) calls “norms of recognition,” “norms that make it possible for us to be intelligible to others so that they ascribe to us a particular identity or subject position” (Block, 2007, p. 27). Creating such intelligibility is essential to obtaining “authentication” which refers to “the assertion of one’s own or another’s identity as genuine or credible” (Bucholtz, 2003, p. 408). Although Semi feels inferior to the native Korean teachers, she reveals that

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interacting with a variety of authoritative discourses resulted in a meaningful transformation by increasing her awareness of her own Korean speaking skills. Going through these challenging experiences also gave her reason to make greater efforts in practicing and developing fluency in the Korean language. In this section, I have discussed ways in which three young Korean-American adults were positioned and marginalized by native Korean members of the Korean immigrant church. According to Weedon (1997), “Power is exercised within discourses in the ways in which they constitute and govern individual subjects” (p. 110). The three participants were not offered recognition as competent HL speakers and legitimate members of the church community because they were viewed as different and deficient in terms of their HL abilities and ethnic identity. Each individual was constrained by the preexisting negative stereotypes of Korean-Americans and was forced to live up to the dominant hierarchical rules that regulated practices of the Korean church. This colonizing force had the power to make individuals feel and experience themselves as “other” as well as shape and direct their identity. Where there was a gap between the identity offered by the discourse and individual interests, resistance occurred (Weedon, 1997). The three participants illustrated their capacity to critically reflect on their pregiven marked identity and challenge the dominant discourse. Their strategies included taking verbal actions to break the prevailing stereotypes about second-generation Korean-Americans, choosing and creating a new community that they were more comfortable with, and voicing their opinions and feelings through engaging in narratives.

IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND HERITAGE LANGUAGE PRACTICE THROUGH ETHNIC PEER GROUPS All three participants shared two important influences on their identity development: active membership in the Korean church and social interaction with Korean peers from a Korean heritage background. Their social interaction involved a diverse group of Korean friends including international students from Korea, Korean immigrants, and second-generation KoreanAmericans. These interactions provided the participants with exposure to different patterns of linguistic and cultural behaviors. The exposure helped them to develop their HL and construct their own ideologies and beliefs. However, conflicts and tensions naturally arose when they encountered linguistically and culturally different Korean peers. They felt obligated to meet the expectations of their peer groups. To them, this helped to validate their acceptance as recognized members of their groups. Each participant

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strove to locate a match within her comfort zone—a group of peers aligned with her own identities. This provided a feeling of security while enabling them to comfortably share their life’s challenging and conflicting experiences. In the following sections, I highlight the ways in which each participant’s identities and investments in HL learning are continuously shaped by her interactions with her peer groups. Taehi: Negotiating Shifting and Contradictory Identities According to Taehi, she and some of her Korean-American peers clashed a great deal due to the different degrees of Korean culture and language they practiced. Taehi indicates ways in which her identities were positioned and constructed through her interaction with Korean-American peers whose ideologies and beliefs about the HL and culture were different from her own: In my high school, there were some [Koreans], but they were very much locals. They had no Korean background. They do speak a little bit of Korean at home with their parents, but they don’t see themselves as Koreans. They are not really connected to their ethnic background. I felt lost when I was with them. I was actually teased by them; they thought that I was from Korea because, to them and in their mind set, I spoke better Korean than they did. I could write and read all of that. I always felt different. So, I always felt I had to hide parts of myself from them. (Personal communication, April 10, 2007)

Taehi’s Korean friends in high school were second-generation KoreanAmericans who were not connected to their ethnic background. Taehi’s interactions with her second-generation Korean-American friends provided her with perspective on how their identities contrasted with her Korean identity. Taehi presents her Korean-American peers as behaving less like a Korean and more like a local7 whereas she views herself as behaving too much like a Korean. Taehi believes her friends would agree with her self assessment. Much of this contrast is explained by Taehi’s belief that her Korean-American friends do not seem to appreciate the value of their HL and culture. They have blended very much in with the mainstream local culture whereas Taehi has maintained and practiced her cultural values, many of which she learned through her family and Korean members in her church. Although Taehi is a fluent speaker and writer in Korean, her Korean-American friends’ HL skills were limited. This deviation from the norm in a Korean-American peer group resulted in Taehi being excluded from the group. She was even teased and laughed at by her peers. Taehi’s knowledge of the Korean language and Korean culture was not considered cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991).The Korean-American friends assumed that Taehi had

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just arrived from Korea because her HL ability and cultural understanding resembled stereotypical behavior of new Korean immigrants. For this reason, when Taehi was surrounded by these Korean-American friends, she felt emotionally detached from this group and felt not secure in the relationship. This had an impact on her self-esteem because she tried not to show her Korean identity as much as she did with other Korean friends from her church. Taehi hid her Korean identity not because she was ashamed of her ethnic background, but because she wanted to gain acceptance for herself and maintain a positive social identity with her local Korean friends. This conflicting experience resulted in Taehi feeling insecure about her identity and only selectively exhibiting her Korean background. According to Bakhtin, the individual’s reflective self is continuously formed in relation to certain interlocutors and the self exists only within dialogic interaction (Bakhtin, 1981). Hall (2004) also claims, “An individual’s selfconsciousness never exists in isolation…it always exists in relationship to an ‘other’ or ‘others’ who serve to validate its existence” (p. 51). Taehi indicated that after entering college, she wanted to refine her Korean language. She felt more comfortable with native Koreans, so she started seeking opportunities to meet international students from Korea whom she thought she would be more compatible with. However, in the following excerpt, Taehi delivers a contradictory message about wanting to fit into the native Korean peer group while resisting their hierarchical social rules: I try to be friends with them [international students from Korea] a lot. They can learn English and I can learn Korean. I would say I have more [native] Korean friends than before and more than second-generation Korean-American friends. That’s where my conservative, traditional values come from too. I meet them at school or church…I feel that we have more similarities in the values and ways of thinking. For example, if I get married, I want to live with my in-laws. That’s how conservative I am. But, I hate when they say “Call me enni [older sister], oppa [older brother], or senbay [senior student or colleague].” I’m pretty good at using honorifics. But, I don’t like when they [native Korean friends] talk about age. Culturally, we [Korean-Americans] are not used to it. There are times when I got into fight in school. They would be one year older than me and ask me to call them enni and bow. I really hate that. They need to change that in their culture. I’m glad that I’m not living in Korea. (Personal communication, November 1, 2007)

Taehi’s narrative challenges the concept of identity as essential and coherent. According to Wortham (2001) and De Fina (2003), one discursively shifts and changes his or her identities, depending on the situation or context, even within the same narrative. In the first half of the narrative, Taehi aligns with the native Korean peers by claiming that she possesses conservative, traditional Korean values as her native Korean peers do. However, in the latter half of the narrative, Taehi takes a negative stance against native

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Koreans by criticizing the hierarchical social structure which is constituted based on age.8 Taehi could not completely assimilate with the group of native Korean peers who expected or even required the use of honorifics by people who are younger. She believes that some of her native Korean peers abuse their hierarchical culture for the sake of exercising power and control by requesting that she uses honorifics when addressing them. Taehi shows her intolerance toward the demand for using honorifics in stating “They [Koreans] need to change that [honorifics] in their culture. I’m glad that I’m not living in Korea.” Taehi also displays her complex hybrid identity in drawing on different pronominal choices or identification devices to make distinctions between ingroups and outgroups. For example, with regard to claiming her traditional Korean identity, Taehi considers herself part of a group of native Koreans by using the inclusive identification device “us” to refer to her and her native Korean peers. However, later, discussing her resistance toward using honorifics with Korean peers who are just a year older than her, she voluntarily presents herself as out of the native Korean peer group. In other words, Taehi engages in a discursive practice of dichotomizing “they” versus “we.” She aligns herself with Korean-American friends, by using “they” to refer to native Koreans and “us” to refer to her and Korean-Americans. She shifts her identity from being a member of a native Korean group to being a member of a Korean-American group. At the end of this narration she expresses her resentment toward hierarchical Korean social norms, which is misaligned with her initial remark emphasizing her keen desire to preserve traditional Korean culture. Another example of this discursive practice of both “othering” and identification is found in Yamaguchi’s (2005) study. His 1.5 generation Japanese participant, Marco, uses the first-person plural pronoun “we” to place himself and the Japanese researcher into the Japanese category, while using the third-person plural pronoun “they” to place Americans into the category of “others.” People position and represent themselves and others in particular ways while narrating their identities. Both this study and Yamaguchi’s study show that identity construction is a dynamic process which involves “becoming,” rather than being permanently fixed (Hall, 1990). The latest narrative account from Taehi indicated that she had begun to socialize primarily with second-generation Korean-Americans and Koreans who were born in Korea and immigrated to the U.S. with their parents at an early age, the so-called 1.5 generation. This group seems to fit with her own hybrid identity as both Korean and American. Developing a primary friendship network offered Taehi a sense of security and opportunities to better understand her Korean background. Taehi explains via email how her second-generation Korean friends helped her construct and negotiate her identities:

190 • MIYUNG PARK We are a mixed group of people where half of us were born and raised in the United States whereas the other half was born in Korea and immigrated to the States with their families. This melting pot of friends has become my sense of security. I feel that now my second-generation Korean friends are going through a lot of positive change. Not simply discovering ourselves as “Koreans,” but as people in general. We talk a lot about our parents, how we were raised and about how we hated their nagging and overbearing tough love. Many of us seem to think it has rather done us a lot of good. We basically talk about family, religion, relationships, goals and aspirations in life in addition to talks about traveling the world. One of my good friends from school is a second-generation Korean and I feel happiest when I am with her, because we talk about things that international students don’t talk about. (Personal communication, March 10, 2008)

Taehi indicates that she is comfortable socializing with second-generation Korean-Americans with whom she shares similar experiences of growing up in Korean immigrant families in America. Unlike the second-generation Korean-American peers in high school or international students from Korea, Korean-American friends who she met through church and college shared many commonalities with her. Taehi and her current Korean-American friends share not only the same ethnic background, but also similar upbringing experiences, interests, and perspectives toward religion. At the same time, discussing similar experiences that have been part of their upbringing strengthens a common understanding within the group, builds emotional support, and reinforces feelings of belonging. This particular friendship network provides Taehi with a third space (Bhabha, 1994; Davis, Cho, Ishida, Soria, & Bazzi, 2005; Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, & Tejeda, 1999; Moje et al., 2004; Soja, 1996) where new discourses, knowledge, and cultures can be drawn upon and negotiated. According to Moje et al. (2004), a third space opens up new alternatives and offers possibilities for resisting and challenging dominant discourses. A space is produced in and through language as Taehi and her Korean-American peers come together and use their different backgrounds to understand better the meanings and symbols of Korean culture. Taehi stated that first-generation Korean parents’ conservative childrearing methods and her desire for autonomy were one of the central themes that she and her Korean-American friends discussed. In the email excerpt above, Taehi indicates that she and her Korean-American friends transformed from disdaining their parents’ “tough love” to understanding the value and positive consequences of it. I was curious to know how they arrived at this new understanding, so I followed up with Taehi in person to get more detailed information. She commented on the intergenerational cultural conflict caused by a mismatch between her ideals and the attitudes of her parents. When Taehi was a child, she had viewed her parents as too

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traditional and conservative. Tensions emerged especially when her mother and grandmother directed her decision making by discouraging her from majoring in art design and instead encouraging her to become a teacher because they considered an art profession a poor career choice. However, through sharing these ethnic experiences with her Korean-American peers who had similar experiences, Taehi realized that her mother and grandmother’s parenting styles were normal in the context in which they grew up. She ultimately made sense of the dynamics of Korean parent-child relationships and childrearing practices. Transcending cultural boundaries helped Taehi reflect on her individual and collective self and gain a better understanding of the Korean culture. Thus, being in a mixed group of Korean-American and Korean immigrant peers provides Taehi with a sense of “security” by enabling her to share conflicted life experiences that her native Korean friends may not understand. Sora: Linguistic and Cultural Significance of the Ethnic Community An ethnic peer group exerted a powerful influence in Sora’s life in various ways. When I first met Sora, she had developed strong bonds with a group of native Korean peers whom she met in high school and college. She claimed that her native Korean peers provided significant opportunities for her HL learning and understanding of the Korean youth culture. The types of cultural knowledge and the speech style of the Korean language she wanted to learn was that of international students in her high school and college who became close friends. Sora claims that she was able to learn her HL most effectively when conversing with these native Korean peers on a daily basis. The following excerpt from Sora’s reflection demonstrates how important it is for her to be connected to this group of young native Korean friends and how her relationship with them has affected her HL learning: It [talking with my teenage Korean friends] was so easy going and simple, yet I was able to learn so much from just speaking to my friends, especially when I spoke to my international student friends from Korea. I was able to learn how to speak like a young native Korean. How a young native Korean talks and how an older native Korean talks is different. I learned this when I made friends for the first time with international students at my old high school. By having conversations with my Korean friends, I was able to speak better Korean and also understand the Korean culture better than before… I feel more culturally enveloped when I am with my friends [Korean international students]. When talking with older Koreans, the topics we talk about are different, and there is a definite amount of generation gaps that can be felt with having a conversation [with older Koreans]. And they do not offer the same opportunities to practice. I will be more pushed to talk more when I’m with

192 • MIYUNG PARK people who are my age rather than people who are much older than me. (Personal communication, November 20, 2007)

Sora learned about the differences between youth and elder Korean speech when she befriended international students for the first time at her high school. Sora believes that mastering the speech variety widely used by the group of young native Koreans offers better access to her imagined community of bilingual Korean youth (Norton, 2006). When I asked Sora to describe the way she and her Korean friends communicated with one another, she replied that it was simple and easygoing. Based on my observation of her speaking with her friends, it seems that the development of a Korean youth language variety has been influenced by the media and technology, including television soap operas, advertisements, and Internet. Youth language is distinctively informal and characterized by the uniqueness of its grammar and vocabulary which has been created, appropriated, amalgamated, and abbreviated through media influences. Sora also states that she is very reluctant to practice Korean with older native Koreans, not because she discriminates against them but because they simply do not offer the same opportunities for HL learning as her peers do. It is clear that Sora’s actual and desired memberships in imagined communities influence her HL development through shaping her agency, motivation, investment, and resistance in language learning (Norton, 2006). Gaining legitimacy in the native Korean peer community has clearly positively affected her HL development. Sora actively practices the variety of language that her young native Korean friends speak, because of the values that her particular peer community and Sora herself place on this language. As with many young people, the speech style of younger Koreans is an expression of identity and means to build solidarity with peers. As a second language learner, when Sora speaks, she organizes a sense of who she is and how she relates to her social world. The linguistic variety of Sora’s HL serves as a self-conscious symbol for identifying and being identified as “authentic young Koreans.” Yet this solidarity with Korean youth and opportunity for language development was disrupted when Sora decided to transfer to another university in Boston to advance in her undergraduate studies. In the following narrative, Sora explains the driving force behind her decision to transfer: I wanted a better environment to study and Boston is a perfect place for academics. My main motivation for transferring was to get away from the same repetitive life I had in Hawai‘i. I love Hawai‘i and everything about it, but it was too small; I felt suffocated. Here, I feel more freedom. There are better opportunities for me here. I don’t know exactly what I’d like to do with my life, but I feel that I need a larger plane to explore so that I may finally discover my passion in life. (Personal communication, November 10, 2007)

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Sora thought that transferring to a school which offered a more academically challenging atmosphere and greater resources would be a better investment for her future. She believed that building a thorough foundation elsewhere in her field of study would enable her to achieve greater control over her life and find superior job opportunities. Sora actively sought to alter her living and learning environment, both physical and symbolic, in order to discover who she is and what career best suits her abilities. After Sora left Hawai‘i, she regularly shared her experiences of coping with life transitions with me through emails, telephone conversations, and Facebook. At first, she related that although the courses at her new university demanded a greater workload, she enjoyed adjusting to the new environment because of the freedom gained with such a drastic change. Sora viewed interacting with new people, new environments, and new discourses as an opportunity to grow rather than as a challenging obstacle because she considered herself to be an academically competent individual. However, Sora very soon encountered difficulties in transitioning to the unfamiliar community dynamics in Boston. Sora noticed upon her arrival in Boston that most residents are Caucasian Americans; this contrasts with Hawai‘i where a large portion of the population is of Asian descent. She reflects on the negative consequences of no longer being immersed in a Korean community on her identity and HL development: Not having a lot of Korean friends is of course the downfall of being in Boston. In Hawai‘i I had an extensive array of Korean friends, but in Boston I don’t have as many. I can’t have conversations in Korean as much and I can’t feel the Korean culture as much, but I know that I always have the Korean community in Hawai‘i to fall back on. I know I need to feel Korean. And sometimes when I’m in Boston, I don’t feel Korean, I just feel, American. That is one feeling I want to get rid of. I want to be Korean, I am proud of my heritage. Unfortunately in Boston, I don’t have a lot of opportunity to express my heritage…This is probably why I began to feel that I was falling behind, or rather, not keeping up my Korean learning. As the days and weeks passed, I began to notice that every time I spoke Korean, it wasn’t natural to me anymore. This came as a surprise because this had never happened to me in a long while. I had to think about the words I wanted to say, it was as if I was trying to learn Korean all over again. If I didn’t think it through, my words would sometimes come out jumbled or, even worse, the words wouldn’t come out at all. When I spoke Korean with the Korean kids who lived with me, I used the words “uh” and “um” a lot to fill in pauses in our conversations. (Personal communication, March 11, 2008)

Relocating to Boston, which has few Korean-speaking residents, influenced Sora’s HL learning and identity construction dramatically. She had attempted to create a Korean-speaking environment by finding an off-campus accommodation which she calls haswukcip (boarding house). A married older

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Korean couple turned a single-family home into a boarding house, rented several rooms to Korean university students, and offered Korean-style meals daily. Nine people lived in the house, including the landlord’s family and three international students from Korea. Sora envisioned that living in a Korean boarding house would provide her the valuable Korean immersion opportunity that she wanted. However, the reality was far removed from her vision. Her opportunities to speak Korean were mostly limited to the three Korean students she was able to minimally connect with. Sora’s efforts to form a connection with the Koreans in the boarding house were unsuccessful. Initially, she used her Korean language to the fullest, speaking in different situations with them. She would greet them as she entered the house, ask them about their day, tell them about her day, and talk with them while eating in the lounge. Sora would try to hold conversations with the three young Korean adults but it seemed that these Koreans were not being as responsive as she hoped. Sora felt that maybe they had more urgent matters to attend to than to be concerned with Korean language chit chat. Sora mentioned that although they used the same youth language she had used with friends in Hawai‘i, she was not able to carry out wide-ranging dialogues with these three international students because she and her housemates did not share a common understanding grounded in personal interests and experiences. The domains of the conversation topics were restricted to a set of questions and answers about their daily routines and school life. Although she tried, Sora felt that she could not replicate the extensive network of Korean friends that she had in Hawai‘i. Sora stated that she missed the openly shared ideas and emotional support within the context of the social network she was once a part of. Over time Sora’s sense of community was greatly diminished and she experienced an enormous decrease in her Korean language use as a result. Sora continuously sought opportunities to develop her Korean. Although Sora wanted to continue with her Korean language studies in college through other means, she could not receive any support from the university. She was not able to find suitably advanced levels of Korean courses. The highest level of Korean offered to undergraduates was a step lower than the fourth-year level class she took in Hawai‘i. As time passed by, Sora began to notice that speaking Korean no longer came to her naturally. In the same email which included the excerpt above, she spoke about the moment in which she realized that her Korean was deteriorating. She remembered clearly going to sing karaoke with her Korean housemates. As they walked to the Karaoke club, a conversation began in Korean about Korean high school students. According to Sora, she could have used one of two forms to refer to Korean female high school students, yeca kotunghaksayngtul (female high school students) or yekosayng which is

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a contracted form of yeca kotunghaksayngtul. However, instead she chose to say kotunghakkyo yehaksayngtul (high school female students), i.e., she transposed the word order. Her housemates found the incident hilarious and teased Sora for using this incorrect form. Sora admits that she often cannot remember the appropriate expression in Korean for certain situations. Her Korean housemates have said that Sora does not seem like a native Korean. Sora stated, “This statement was like a stab to my heart.” Being able to speak Korean fluently is a vital part of her being and emotions. This threatened Sora’s identity as Korean and made her “feel more American.” When I further asked what she meant by “feel more American,” she stated: I want to embrace my heritage and try to understand myself through my heritage of being Korean. But, when I am not around other Koreans and am not speaking Korean and eating Korean food, I feel that my heritage is going to waste. What good am I as a Korean if I am not celebrating being a Korean? I will always be Korean even though I do not eat Korean food or speak Korean, but what I am trying to say is, speaking Korean and eating Korean food reinforces my Koreanness and helps me “feel” Korean. (Personal communication, March 16, 2008)

Sora is clearly uncomfortable with feeling detached from her heritage and wanted to get back to the social niche in which she freely maintained her Korean identity and practiced Korean culture. The transitional experience of Boston was eye-opening for Sora since she had spent most of her life in Hawai‘i where a large Korean population resides. Experiencing the gradual loss of her Korean, Sora realized how privileged she was growing up with a variety of HL resources and opportunities. After this unique realization, she came to appreciate more the HL-rich environment she was raised in. This appreciation helped her see the strength of her ethnic belonging to the Korean community back home. After two semesters in Boston, Sora decided to return to Hawai‘i and go back to her previous university with hopes that she can return to her former social network and Korean language proficiency. Semi: Identity as Conception of Self in Relation to Others Semi’s identity is constructed and reconstructed as she moves across the wide range of discursive fields that are culturally distinctive. Since childhood she has been a member of the Korean church and member of the youth ministry. In this environment, she has been immersed in Korean cultural expectations of church elders and associated with international undergraduate and graduate students from Korea and second-generation Korean-Americans. Yet, having grown up in Hawai‘i, Semi has also acquired a particular system of meanings and values that are attached to the cultural

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environment and collective identity known as “local.” Semi reported that she views herself as a local and has strong local qualities, such as a lifestyle, local culture, Hawai‘i Creole English use, and social networks with other local peers. In the following excerpt, Semi reflects on the noticeable cultural differences between herself and Korean native peers at church: I do see the differences. The way they [native Korean friends] dress and the way they talk to everybody. They are very polite. They call everybody enni [older sister] and oppa [older brother]. Even if they are one year older. Because I’m so used to American culture, I don’t see someone one year older than me as an enni. I feel like we are more the same. Yeah, I say enni and oppa to the ones from Korea just to show respect. Because I think they would think that I’m bad if I don’t say and don’t show respect. I know their culture. Their culture is very respectful. I think Korean-Americans are different. They are more Americanized unless they are Korean-Americans who hang out with people straight from Korea. That’s different. I’m more respectful [than before]. I always do insa [say hello with a bow of the head] to oppa who is a year older than me. If I’m just with regular friends I don’t feel the need to [do insa]. But then when I do see people that I know from my church or if they would be with their friends who just came from Korea, I behave differently. (Personal communication, November 19, 2008)

The process of Semi’s development of Korean identity involves recognition of how her native Korean friends address each other in their social interactions. As Semi started socializing with international students from Korea, she moved out of familiar local circles and was exposed to alternative discourses which encompass different ways of being, speaking, and living (Gee, 1996). This experience later enabled Semi to adapt to a Korean-language specific discourse. When I asked her whether she experienced any tensions or conflicts while interacting with her native Korean peers, Semi answered that she did not find obvious tensions between her and her Korean peers but became more aware of the cultural differences. Semi initially found the way her native Korean peers speak to one another in Korean intimidating and uncomfortable. By mentioning specifically the practice of using kinship terms oppa (older brother) and enni (older sister), she associates a linguistic practice to the ideologies of social interaction that she herself was not accustomed to. Through her cultural lens, she cannot consider someone who is a year older than her as an enni. The expectations of her Korean peers come into conflict with her existing identity as a local or American who embraces peer relationships in which both parties involved in the relationship are of equal status. Weedon (1997) asserts that social relations are always relations of power and powerlessness between different positions, and identity is governed by social factors including power. In contrast to Taehi and Sora who had a strong resistance toward using kinship terms toward Korean peers who are

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only a few years older than them, Semi passively accepts the discourse and adapts her linguistic behavior by using honorifics whenever necessary. This adaptation was her effort to be accepted as a member of the peer group. Gee (1996) asserts that one is required to take up new identities as s/he takes up new discourse and engages in social practices embedded in the discourse. Semi feels obligated to live by the rules of social interaction and to use honorifics with proper behavior in order to conform to the Korean peers whom she wished to associate with. She positively confronted the obstacles of familiarizing herself with a new discourse environment. Her resulting knowledge of Korean cultural expectations made it easier for Semi to understand linguistic behaviors of her Korean peers. She stated “I know their culture. Their culture is very respectful.” Yet Semi seems to use the honorific kinship terms enni or oppa only with the church members and not with peers outside this community. Semi’s identity is constantly undergoing changes which are dependent on her relations with others. Semi plays an active role in self-categorizing herself not only in terms of ethnic identity in relation to her Korean peers (e.g., He, 2004; Kang, 2004), but also within the broader Hawai’i community. In the following excerpt, Semi classifies herself as local and explains the meanings she associates with this term. She demonstrates how Korean students’ linguistic behaviors are different from her own in the context of the Korean language classroom at the church: Miyung: You mentioned that in your Korean class some are from here [America] and some are from Korea… Semi: Or, there are some people who are from America and hangs around with people from Korea. There is this girl, called Jaesun. She only hangs around with a couple of the girls from Korea that are in our class. The way she acts compared to Jimin, for example, is really different. You can tell by the way Jaesun ask questions to the teacher. Miyung: Really? Semi: They really use honorifics when talking to the teacher. We say politely. But, I feel the way she talks to him. She places him in a high pedestal. We know he is a teacher but we don’t talk to him like he is the king. You know what I mean? If you listen to people asking questions, it’s the biggest thing you can hear. Miyung: On that continuum, where are you? Semi: Not over there [Jaesun’s side]. I’m in the middle. If not, more toward Jimin side. Miyung: Is Jimin more local?

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Semi: Yeah. Even like Jaewoo. He is one like me. Even though he knows more Korean than a lot of others, he is not like the ones from Korea. Miyung: Do you think you have local qualities? Semi: Yeah, I think I have these. When we are local or Americanized, we are all friends and don’t talk to each other in this overbearingly respectful way. Miyung: Why are you not using Korean in your Korean class? Semi: I don’t really use in Korean class. I don’t speak Korean in class. The teacher told me “You are really good when it comes to test taking time but you just don’t speak.” I’m not used to it. That’s why. I’m just not used to speaking in Korean. I’m just more comfortable with my mom. I’m not comfortable speaking with other people. I don’t know if I’m talking correctly—like grammar and stuff. With parents, they understand what you are saying even if you speak weird. They live with you. They understand. I don’t want to say something Korean and everyone goes what? I know Jinwoo from church. He doesn’t speak Korean either. I guess we are local. I guess we just don’t speak Korean. (Personal Communication November 19, 2007) Semi distances herself from another Korean-American classmate, Jaesun, who only hangs around with Koreans. She sees Jaesun more as Korean than Korean-American because Jaesun’s ways of acting and speaking resemble those of native Koreans. For example, Semi stated that Jaesun’s way of talking to the Korean instructor is different from her own in that Jaesun places the teacher in a high position as reflected in her heavy use of honorifics. Semi states that although she speaks politely to the teacher, she does not use the same level of honorifics as Jaesun does. Semi feels Jaesun overuses honorifics to express her politeness to the native Korean teacher. Semi then compares and contrasts the difference between Jaesun and Jaewoo who she feels more connected to in terms of mutually shared values. She seems to respect Jaewoo who has a great command of Korean and has a control over levels of polite speech and appropriate social behaviors. In short, Semi uses honorifics because she does not want to be considered as an outsider. However, she is conflicted about the overuse of honorifics. For Semi, being Korean is connected to whether one adheres to Korean patterns of social interactions and linguistic behavior, rather than how fluently she or he speaks Korean. In other words, Semi does not use explicit ethnic labels for herself. She positions herself in relation to her Korean classmates on an ethnic continuum she herself constructs and defines (e.g., more Korean, more Korean-American, more local or Americanized). In response to my initial binary statement about Koreans and Korean-Americans in her

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class, Semi challenges the idea of Korean-Americans as a unitary group. Semi points out to me that Korean-Americans can vary culturally depending on whom they socialize with. When I explicitly asked Semi where she belongs on the ethnic continuum, she confidently states “not over there [Jaesun’s side],” suggesting that she does not consider herself as part of the Korean group or KoreanAmericans whose linguistic behavior is similar to Koreans’. She then selfcategorizes herself “in the middle,” but right after this remark, she repairs her response by saying “if not, more toward Jimin.” As Semi points out and Kang’s (2004) study confirms, assigning oneself a category of ethnic identity is not clear-cut and requires clarification. Semi exemplifies how ethnicity is an ongoing negotiation in relation to the social structures within which individuals exist. These social structures, such as peer groups and educational systems, constrain the amount and range of choice available to individuals (Block, 2007). This lack of choice can inhibit bilingual speakers who may not have the ability or inclination to conform to monolingual settings. Semi describes her uncomfortable feelings in her Korean language classroom due to the presence of advanced speakers of Korean. According to Semi, insecurity about her Korean and what she is saying seem to make her feel that she is not capable of creating appropriate social impressions (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1991). She also stated that she sometimes cannot engage in conversations entirely in Korean and needs to code-switch from Korean to English to fully express her ideas. She feels ashamed of using English and, although she feels the need to improve and practice more Korean in class, she evades social interactions in Korean when she thinks others might judge her disapprovingly. Semi ends this particular narrative by justifying her reasons for not using Korean by returning to her self-categorization as local. She claims herself as local and includes Jinwoo in the category since he also does not speak Korean in class. Although her code-switching and situated adherence to Korean and local social expectations could indicate hybrid cultural identity, Semi sees her perceived lack of Korean fluency as a significant force behind her self-selected local identification. In this section, I have discussed how ethnic peer groups both constrained and contributed to Korean-American young adults’ identity construction and HL development. Each participant joined particular peer groups for various reasons. Their narratives indicated contradictory and conflicting stances toward their Korean peers, especially when there was a space between the identity ascribed by others and their views of self. Nevertheless, interacting with Korean peers and learning to adapt to different discourses seemed to result in positive transformations. Socializing with ethnic peer groups provided each individual with a sense of belonging and offered multiple opportunities to develop heritage language and cultural abilities. For

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example, through sharing difficult childhood experiences with her KoreanAmerican peers who underwent similar experiences, Taehi ultimately made sense of the dynamics of Korean parent-child relationships and developed a more positive Korean identity. For Sora, a group of her native Korean peers served as a comfortable site where she acquires the authentic speech style of young native Koreans and freely expresses her heritage CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS This study shows how three Korean-American young adults made sense of their HL learning and identity construction through engaging in the linguistic and cultural activities of their ethnic community. The study challenges essentialistic and static views of learner characteristics in the SLA literature and demonstrates complex and often conflicting relations among language, identity, and the larger society (e.g., Kanno, 2003; Kramsch, 2000; McKay & Wong, 1996; Morita, 2004; Norton Peirce, 1995; Norton, 2000, 2001; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004; Toohey, 2000; Vitanova, 2005; Yamaguchi, 2005). The participants’ language learning was a socially situated practice that took place through interpersonal interactions in multiple social contexts. The participants were motivated to improve their HL for different social purposes. Yet, by and large, the link to their heritage was an important factor in both heritage language learning and the construction of HL learner identity. In effect, HL learning provided each participant with an effective tool for expressing her individual, unique identities and group solidarity, while enabling her to engage in the social world. The fundamental component in the process of identity construction and HL learning has been sites of struggle which varied from one participant to another (Freedman & Ball, 2004). This struggle thrived and declined depending on the degree of coherence between what the ideological environment encouraged or permitted and what the individual participant wished to become. The ideological environments which were crucial in the lives of the three participants included the Korean immigrant churches and the ethnic peer groups. The conditions under which HL learners speak and learn the target language were often highly challenging, engaging their identities in complex and often contradictory ways. There were unequal relations of power between Korean-American HL learners and native Korean speakers who were the majority population of the HL communities in which they participated. When an individual’s identities and the ideologies of the larger HL community came into conflict with those of the authoritarian discourses, resistance occurred. This resistance is best understood as one’s desire to escape marginalization and construct preferred identities. As Bakhtin (1981) notes, it is through struggle that each person acquires new understanding, learning, and different ways of being in the world. He states, “the importance of struggling with another’s discourse, its influence

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in the history of an individual’s coming to ideological consciousness, is enormous” (p. 348). Taehi and Sora positioned themselves as strong, assertive individuals by challenging and rejecting the hierarchical Korean culture that was prevalent in social relations. Through deconstructing the larger authoritarian discourses and selectively assimilating the words of others, they gained meta-awareness of the dynamics of power and control which influenced their behaviors and ways of thinking (Hall, 2004). For each participant, identity construction was a process of acquiring a particular ideological version of the world and self. The narrative spaces that were constructed through the course of this study provided participants with comfortable spaces to confront widespread, powerful ideologies and make sense of their struggles and evolving selves. Narrative became the social space that triggered transformation (Wortham, 2001). This transformation occurred as the result of the tendency for participants’ stances to be reshaped over time, as their stories were constantly being restructured and reinvented in the light of new events and desires. Over the course of this research, each participant’s understanding of her social relationships with people around her changed. In the following excerpt, Taehi reflects on the whole process of being involved in this research and how narrative inquiry helped her discover who she is as well as realize how she changed over time. Taehi noted: Honestly, I didn’t expect this to become such a big project. There are some aspects of me that I don’t really want to come terms with. But, [if you hadn’t asked questions about me], I wouldn’t have really thought about it and I wouldn’t have been able to record all the changes in me that happened around me. I started to learn who I am as a person. Sometimes, more than you or same as you, I get excited and look forward to meeting. There are some things that happened. And, I want to share this with you. It’s interesting. I think it’s a good thing. I think this whole thing about evolving [as a person], it’s a self discovery for me. Not a lot of people have this opportunity to voice their opinions and voice their thoughts. When you are thinking, something up here [in your brain], you can’t really say it. It’s kind of muddled. You can’t put a finger on it. You don’t know it. So, I think this [project] is a good way. I looked back too. I am a totally different person. I’m a lot more enthusiastic now. (Personal communication, March 14, 2008)

As new challenges and struggles arise over the course of each participant’s life, the process of her identity construction continues to evolve. Individuals constantly formulate and reformulate their sense of self while envisioning a self-ideal they can look to as their goal (Anderson, 1991; Kanno & Norton, 2003; Kinginger, 2004; Norton, 2000, 2001; Wenger, 1998). Through this narrative inquiry, Korean-American young adults learned to embrace their bilingual and bicultural resources and become active agents,

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reinventing their sense of self. Their identities are not complete and will be always evolving throughout their lives. In summary, it is important to note that the three participants described in this study are exceptional learners who achieved a high degree of proficiency in the HL through utilizing various resources available in the community and the university. Hawai‘i served as a uniquely effective learning environment. These Korean-American young adults had easy access to the Korean community, peer social networks, information about Korea through media, and formal Korean language instruction in communitybased schools and the university. All of these resources helped each participant form and reform her identities in relation to her respective HL communities. This study also suggests implications for implementation of potential language policy and language programs where students can build on their multiple languages and cultural recourses, as bilingualism becomes more relevant in today’s globalized context. Heritage language and dual language programs can allow heritage language learners to claim their multiple identities and provide for national language needs. NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

According to the definition proposed by Valdés (2001), heritage language learners are individuals “who are raised in homes where a non-English language is spoken; speak or merely understand the heritage language; and are to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language” (p. 38). Wang and Garcoea (2002) stress that HL learners are not a monolithic group originated from specific linguistic or racial backgrounds; there is a wide range of HL proficiency, cultural knowledge, and identities among the students. The plural form of the term “identities” is used in this study to reflect the multiple dimensions of identity (Kanno, 2003; McKay & Wong, 1996; Norton, 2000; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004), unless the study I cite prefers to use a singular term “identity.” In this study, I use the term first-generation to refer to immigrants who were born in Korea and migrated to the U.S. at a later age (adolescents and beyond). I use the term second-generation to refer to those who were born in the U.S. or emigrated before the age of two and were raised in the U.S. I use the term native Koreans to refer to those who were born and raised in Korea and who reside in Korea and maintain a Korean citizenship. International students who are temporarily staying in the U.S. for high school or college education are considered native Koreans. James Paul Gee (1996) calls this discursive field Discourse—a socially accepted association among ways of using language, being, acting, talking, valuing, believing, or complete identity kits. In this

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5.

6.

7.

8.

view, SLA and literacy learning are determined by the particular Discourse which requires the successful integration of these various attributes. Because there is no government financial support for heritage language learning, churches have been the optimal places to teach Korean due to availability of classrooms, volunteer teachers, students, and funding (Shin, 2005). “Othering” refers to a differentiation of the self against a threatening, inferior, or simply different other (Diez, 2005, p. 628; Rumelili, 2004). “Othering” is an act of disempowering the other and empowering the self. According to Eades et al. (2006), in a narrower sense, being local refers to a person who is either Hawaiian or a descendant of the plantation workers. Now the term is used in a broader sense to include more recent immigrants, primarily from Asian countries, and their descendants, who have become residents and a part of the local culture. The local culture is characterized by an appreciation of diversity, and considered a mix of different cultures and ethnic groups. For some people, speaking Pidgin is a central component of local identity. Pidgin is the term used to refer to the language variety which is technically called Hawai‘i Creole English. It is used to ensure group solidarity with friends and family and reinforce a sense of belonging while Standard English is used in formal, out-group interactions. In the Korean language and culture, the hierarchical relations of age difference are heavily reflected in various honorific forms (Sohn, 1999). For instance, the rules for using people’s names are complex and restricted. Pronouns in Korean have their own set of honorific terms according to the relationship between the speaker and the person spoken to. People use the person’s name only when talking to someone younger than themselves. When talking to someone older, people address him or her by honorific titles or kinship terms depending on their hierarchical relationship. In Korean, people commonly use kinship terms when addressing people outside the family. REFERENCES

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204 • MIYUNG PARK Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). London: Verso. Anderson, D. D. (2002). Casting and recasting gender: Children constituting social identities through literacy practices. Research in the Teaching of English, 36(3), 391–427. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. Bakhtin (M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics (C. Emerson, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (V. W. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Ball, S. (1994). Education reform: A critical and poststructural approach. London: Routledge. Bell, J. S. (2002). Narrative inquiry: More than just telling stories. TESOL Quarterly, 36(2), 207–211. Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. New York: Routledge. Block, D. (2007). Second language identities. New York: Continuum. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Boxer, D., & Cohen, A. D. (Eds.). (2004). Studying speaking to inform second language learning. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Bucholtz, M. (2003). Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(3), 398–416. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. New York: Verso. Chaudron, C., Doughty, C., Kim, Y., Kong, D.-K., Lee, J.-H., Lee, Y.-G., Long, M. H., Rivers, R., & Urano, K. (2005). A task-based needs analysis of a tertiary Korean as a foreign language program. In M. Long (Ed.), Second language needs analysis (pp. 225–261). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cho, G. (2000). The role of heritage language in social interactions and relationships: Reflections from a language minority group. Bilingual Research Journal, 24(4), 369–384. Davies, B. (1990). Agency as a form of discursive practice: A classroom scene observed. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 11(3), 341–361. Davies, B. (1993). Shards of glass. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Davis, K. A., Cho, H., Ishida, M., Soria, J., & Bazzi, S. (2005). “It’s Our Kuleana”: A critical participatory approach to language minority education. In L. PeaseAlvarez & S. R. Schecter (Eds.), Learning, teaching, and community (pp. 3–25). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. De Fina, A. (2003). Identity in narrative: An analysis of immigrant discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Deusen-Scholl, V. D. (2003). Toward a definition of heritage language: Sociopolitical and pedagogical considerations. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2(3), 211–230. Diez, T. (2005). Constructing the self and changing others: Reconsidering “normative power Europe.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 33(3), 613–636. Eades, D., Jacobs, S., Hargrove, E., & Menacker, T. (2006). Pidgin, local identity, and schooling in Hawai‘i. In S. Nero (Ed.), Dialects, Englishes, Creoles, and Education (pp. 139–166). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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206 • MIYUNG PARK Kramsch, C. (2000). Social discursive constructions of self in L2 learning. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 133–154). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kwon, O. (2003). Buddhist and protestant Korean immigrants: Religious beliefs and socioeconomic aspects of life. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing. Lantolf, J. P., & Pavlenko, A. (2001). (S)econd (L)anguage (A)ctivity: Understanding second language learners as people. In M. Breen (Ed.), Learner contributions to language learning: New directions in research (pp. 141–158). London: Longman. Lee, I., & Ramsey, S. (2000). The Korean language. New York: State University of New York Press. Lee, J. S. (2002). The Korean language in America: The role of cultural identity and heritage language. Language, Culture, and Curriculum, 15(2), 117–133. Lee, J. S., & Kim, H. (2007). Attitudes, motivation and instructional needs of heritage language learners. In K. Kondo-Brown & J. D. Brown (Eds.), Teaching Chinese, Japanese, and Korean heritage students: Curriculum, needs, materials, and assessment (pp. 159–185). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. MacIntyre, P. D., & Gardner, R. C. (1991). Methods and results in the study of anxiety and language learning: A review of the literature. Language Learning, 41, 85–117. McKay, S. L., & Wong, S. L. C. (1996). Multiple discourses, multiple identities: Investment and agency in second-language learning among Chinese adolescent immigrant students. Harvard Educational Review, 66(3), 577–608. Moje, E. B., Ciechanowski, K. M., Kramer, K., Ellis, L., Carrillo, R., & Collazo, T. (2004). Working toward third space in content area literacy: An examination of everyday funds of knowledge and Discourse. Reading Research Quarterly, 39(1), 38–70. Morita, N. (2004). Negotiating participation and identity in second language academic communities. TESOL Quarterly, 38(4), 573–603. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational change. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education. Norton, B. (2001). Non-participation, imagined communities, and the language classroom. In M. Breen (Ed.), Learner contributions to language learning: New directions in research (pp. 159–171). Harlow, UK: Pearson Education. Norton, B. (2006). Identity: Second language. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and Linguistics (2nd ed., Vol. 5, pp. 502–507). Oxford, UK: Elsevier. Norton Peirce, B. (1995). Social identity, investment and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 29(1), 9–31. Pavlenko, A. (2002). Narrative study: Whose story is it anyway? TESOL Quarterly, 36(2), 213–218. Pavlenko, A. (2003). “I never knew I was a bilingual”: Reimagining teacher identities in TESOL. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2(4), 251–268. Pavlenko, A. (2007). Autobiographic narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 28(2), 163–188. Pavlenko, A., & Blackledge, A. (Eds.) (2004). Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Identity and Agency among Heritage Language Learners • 207 Pavlenko, A. & Norton, B. (2005). Imagined communities, identity and English language learning. In J. Cummins & C. Davison (Eds.), Kluwer handbook of English language teaching (pp. 590–600). Dordrecht: Kluwer Pomerantz, A. (1986). Extreme case formulations: A way of legitimizing claims. Human Studies, 9, 219–229. Rumelili, B. (2004). Constructing identity and relating to difference: Understanding the EU’s mode of differentiation. Review of International Studies, 30(1), 27–47. Sfard, A., & Prusak, A. (2005). Telling identities: In search of an analytic tool for investigating learning as a culturally shaped activity. Educational Researcher, 34(5), 14–22. Shin, S. J. (2005). Developing in two languages: Korean children in America. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Stewart, K. (1996). A space on the side of the road. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Toohey, K. (2000). Learning English at school. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. U.S. Census Bureau. (2003). United States foreign-born population. Retrieved February 20, 2008, from http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/ foreign.html Valdés, G. (2001). Heritage language students: Profiles and possibilities. In J. K. Peyton, D. A. Ranard, & S. McGinnis (Eds.), Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national resource (pp. 37–77). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Vitanova, G. (2005). Authoring the self in a non-native language: A dialogic approach to agency and subjectivity. In J. K. Hall, G. Vitanova, & L. A. Marchenkova (Eds.), Dialogue with Bakhtin on second and foreign language learning (pp. 149–169). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Wang, S. C., & Garcoea, M. I. (2002). Heritage language learners. National Council of State Supervisors of Foreign Languages. Retrieved September 12, 2005, from http://www.ncssfl.org/papers/NCSSFLHLLs0902.pdf Weedon, C. (1997). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory (2nd ed.). London: Blackwell. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wetherell, M. (2001). Themes in discourse research: The case of Diana. In M. Wetherell, S. Taylor, & S. Yates (Eds.), Discourse theory and practice (pp. 14–28). London: Sage Publications. Wiley, T. (2001). Policy formation and implementation. In J. K. Peyton, D. Ranard, & S. McGinnis (Eds.), Heritage languages in America. Preserving a national resource (pp. 99–108). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems. Wortham, S. (2001). Narratives in action: A strategy for research and analysis. New York: Teachers College Press. Yamaguchi, M. (2005). Discursive representation and enactment of national identities: The case of generation 1.5 Japanese. Discourse and Society, 16(2), 269–299.

CHAPTER 9

FROM EAST TIMOR TO TRANSNATIONAL DIALOGIC INTERACTION Agus’ Language and Literacy Journey Yun Seon Kim with Agustinho Caet

INTRODUCTION The field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) provides varied perspectives on language and literacy concerning what factors impact academic success for second language learners and how the learning process works. Given the various views on academic literacy acquisition, the field has tended to move towards a focus on language and literacy development as situated social processes (Barton, Hamilton & Ivanic, 2003; Gee, 1996; Street, 2003b). Within an understanding of language and literacy as forms of social practice, the narrative study reported here investigates the way in which a multilingual learner’s educational trajectories are shaped by social meanings. Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 209–231 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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The co-author and subject of this case study, Agus, came from East Timor to the United States in order to develop his English language skills and earn a college degree. He had learned to speak two dialects of East Timor and learned two different languages, Portuguese and Indonesian, while living under a historical Portuguese colonial legacy and the military take-over and rule by Indonesia (1975). While he learned his additional fifth language, English, he faced ongoing challenges as he moved from one learning context to another. Even within an academic situation, disciplines use different approaches, which are identified as valued literacy practices (Lea & Street, 1998; Street, 1995). An exploration of Agus’ academic journey began when Agus attended Yun Seon’s Speaking course in an English Language Program. Subsequent to the course, Yun Seon suggested to Agus that she conduct a qualitative study of his language and literacy development. Through interactions from Fall semester 2006 to Spring semester 2008 Yun Seon’s relationship with Agus grew into a friendship and they eventually decided to approach the study as a co-constructed narrative. This chapter is first and foremost Agus’ story. Yun Seon contributes to the co-constructed meaning-making of their interaction through structural and theoretical framing of struggles with and advocacy for equitable education. We focus here on seeking an understanding of Agus’ academic journey through viewing language and literacy practices as “ideological,” that is, varying according to particular socio-cultural and socio-political contexts. In addition, we draw on the notion of intertextuality to help understand how Agus constructs his learning through the selective appropriation of literacy resources within and/or around him. Finally, we take Bakhtinian notions of a dialogic approach to agency and subjectivity to examine how Agus engages the complexity of cross-cultural perspectives, evaluations, and attitudes he is exposed to and that inevitably make up his identity. We first frame the study in terms of the meaning of multiple literacies, intertextuality, and Bakhtin’s dialogic approach to agency and subjectivity. We then describe narrative as research methodology. Agus’ background as well as the study findings follow. Finally, we address the theoretical and pedagogical implications of this situated narrative. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Academic Literacies A number of educators and researchers in higher education have made great efforts to answer the question of what it means to be academically literate. For example, Lea and Street (2000) note that “(l)earning in higher education involves adapting to new ways of knowing: new ways of understanding, interpreting and organizing knowledge” (p.32). They further suggest that academic literacy practices—reading and writing in disciplines—

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constitute pivotal processes through which students gain new knowledge in new areas. Yet scholars concerned with literacy differ in their approaches to research on and teaching of reading and writing. The majority of research in L2 literacy has focused on linguistic and cognitive demands by examining L2 reading and writing in order to uncover mental operations and identify learners’ processes and strategies for approaching L2 texts (Auerbach & Paxton, 1997; Lee & Schallert, 1997; O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Raimes, 1991; Spack, 1997). Meanwhile, other research (Christie, 1999; Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Hyland, 2003) has focused on genre approaches to literacy development which vary from linguistically based to socially based views. However, despite the fact that contextual factors in student’s L2 reading and writing are recognized as important, both approaches to L2 learning have tended to concentrate on ways in which students can be helped to adapt their practices to those of the university. An increasing number of scholars suggest that language learning is both personal and social, individual and political, and language learners must be recognized as complex social beings (McKay & Wong, 1996). This study is founded on the premise that in order to understand the nature of L2 academic learning, it is important to realize that language, literacy, and learning are socially constructed: A social constructionist in any discipline assumes that entities we normally call reality, knowledge, thought, facts, text, selves, and so on are constructs generated by communities of like-minded peers. Social construction understands reality, knowledge, thought, facts, texts, selves, and so on as community-generated and community-maintained linguistic entities…that define or “constitute” the communities that generate them. (Bruffee, 1986, p. 774)

From this social constructionist view, literacy is “a social and cultural phenomenon, something that exists between people and something that connects individuals to a range of experiences and to different points in time” (Schieffelin & Cochran-Smith, 1984, p. 4). An emphasis on social and cultural interaction has been central to the New Literacy Studies (NLS) (Barton, Hamilton & Ivanic, 2000; Gee, 1996; Street, 2003), a school of thought that is characterized by an understanding of multiple literacies and situated within social and cultural practices and discourses. Both Gee’s notion of Discourses and the NLS concept of multiple literacies contribute to understanding social and cultural interaction in relation to developing academic literacies. According to Gee (1991), what constitutes a successful social practice within the Discourse1 “is not language, and surely not grammar, but saying(writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations in the ‘right’ places at the ‘right’ times with the ‘right’ people and the ‘right’ props” (p. 7). Gee also alludes to Foucault and Bourdieu

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when he describes the ways in which Discourses create social positions from which people are invited to “speak, listen, act, read and write, think, feel, believe and value in certain characteristic, historically recognizable ways, combined with their own individual styles and creativity” (p. 128). Thus, Gee (1996) claims that Discourse is an “identity kit.” He further notes that Discourses are “inherently ideological” in that they are related to social power and hierarchical economic distribution. Street (2003b) makes a distinction between “autonomous” and “ideological” models of literacy. The “autonomous” model of literacy assumes that “literacy in itself—autonomously—will have effects on other social and cognitive practices” (p. 1). It premises itself on literacy as a technical, universal, and neutral skill. On the other hand, the “ideological” model of literacy posits literacy as a social practice, which recognizes that “it is always embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles” (p. 1). Literacy practices then are rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity, and being (Street, 2003b) that vary from one context to another. In other words, from this perspective, the linguistic and cognitive skills, processes and strategies involved in the activities of reading and writing are influenced by predominating beliefs, practices, and social relationships in particular educational contexts. NLS scholars such as Gee (1991) further contend that literacy is inherently plural (literacies) in that they are embedded in and inextricable from particular Discourses or social practices. From a research perspective, since reading and writing practices involve values, attitudes, feelings and social relationships, they are not observable as decontextualized units of behavior (Street, 1995). Therefore, literacy practices are more usefully researched and understood “as existing in the relations between people, within groups and communities, rather than as a set of properties residing in individuals” (Barton & Hamilton, 2000, p. 8). Intertextuality and Agency Among various definitions of intertextuality, the notion that supported this research is found in feminist poststructuralists’ notion of dialogic language use (Bloome & Bailey, 1992) which “involves intertextual linkages that are socially constructed and negotiated by the individuals in the event” (Willett, Solsken, & Wilson-Keenan, 1999, p. 176). Bazerman (2004) utilizes Bakhtin’s concept of intertextuality in suggesting its use as a conceptual tool to analyze “how the interplay of voices and perspectives is managed in different texts with particular ideological implication” (p. 58). Drawing on Bakhtin, Bazerman (2004) also emphasizes the relation between intertextuality and agency: “intertextuality for composition and rhetoric is about creating authority, agency, and powerful text, and not about their dissolution within everything that has been written before” (p. 64). While recognizing the inability of intertexuality to be used as a precise analytic tool for

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rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies (Bazerman, 2004), we draw on intertextuality theories to examine the ways in which the writer, Agus, engages with multiple texts and voices in developing academic literacies. This exploration further involves a dialogic approach to agency and subjectivity. Only recently has the term agency emerged in SLA by researchers employing a feminist poststructuralist framework introducing “how second language learners take up different subject positions in different discourses” (Vitanova, 2005, p. 151). In Vitanova’s discussion of agency, she draws on Bakhtin’s view of the self as “a unique human being and, at the same time, a dialogic phenomenon” in that agency is both individual and co-constructed though discourses (Vitanova, 2005, p. 151). She emphasizes that “a voice carrying a distinct emotional-volitional tone” makes the Bakhtinian self different from poststructuralist’s conceptualization of the deconstructed self. From the poststructuralists’ point of view, discourses position individuals; in the Bakhtinian framework, “individuals actively use speech genres to orient themselves in their relationships and interactions” (Burkitt, 1998, p. 165). Thus, the emotional-volitional tone is particularly important in considering how Agus constructs his identities and explores his relationships with others while engaging in literacy practices. The concepts of dialogue and answerability are also central to Agus’ subject formation process. In a Bakhtinian sense, Agus can voice himself through dialogue as a socially embedded, meaning-making process by appropriating discourses and valued literacy practices and making them his own. Vitanova (2005) also stresses Baktinian notion of dialogue as “a form of answering to others’ concrete or generalized voices” (p. 154). In this sense, one can author the self through active engagement with one’s situation. Informed by Bakhtin’s understanding of the subject as an author of his/ her discursive existence, this study illuminates through narratives how Agus realizes agency in literacy practices across disciplines. According to Vitanova (2005), narrative spaces become “the intertextual ground for contesting others’ voices, re-accentuating their utterances with new meaning, and reinterpreting the self through another” (p. 156). In this sense, Agus’ narratives express voice as he evaluates social issues which may include competing discourses and positionings. Narrative Inquiry The case study reported here employs narrative inquiry as a method. In seeking an emancipatory investigation, a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach is utilized to encourage Agus’ own agency by positioning him as a subject rather than an object of research (Fine, 2006; Freire, 1982). In order to help him negotiate his identities and literacy learning, Yun Seon created narrative spaces where Agus learned to critique and negotiate privileged academic discourses. According to Bell (2002), “narrative

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inquiry rests on the epistemological assumption that we as human beings make sense of random experience by the imposition of story structures” (p. 207). In this sense, narrative is a valuable approach for understanding the assumptions held by learners from other cultures. By examining learners’ stories and the contexts in which they unfold, the researcher can gain awareness of the underlying assumptions that the stories embody. Sole (2007) defines narrative as a discourse practice that also modifies and constructs events and opinions. Thus, by identifying themselves to others and to themselves through telling a story, individuals also shape the social beliefs and practices they describe. Accordingly, narrative as a tool is utilized to hear Agus’ voices and help gain insights into Agus’ construction of his social and academic identities. Agus’ narrative content, context, and form is also analyzed in terms of power relations in local language learning and use processes (Norton, 2000; Pavlenko, 2001) as these are shaped through global contextual influences (Pavlenko, 2007). To enhance understanding of how Agus claimed his voice and the act of authoring by evaluating those around him (Menard-Warwick, 2005), Yun Seon also engaged Agus in extensive discussions of his life experiences, observed classrooms, and collected textual documents such as course assignments. The goal of Yun Seon’s initial interviews with Agus was to capture his previous cultural, linguistic, and educational background in East Timor. Through the later discussions, Yun Seon explored with Agus what he had been experiencing and thinking while going through his academic courses and English Language Programs in the United States. Journey through East Timor and to the United States The following narratives describe Agus’ past and current language and literacy experiences. We first detail the socio-cultural context in which Agus’ language and literacy experiences took place in East Timor. Subsequently, we focus on the way in which Agus provides his stance towards his language and literacy experiences through his narratives. Finally, we discuss how these experiences have affected his academic literacy development and social identity construction in the United States. East Timor Agus was born and raised in a small town in East Timor. East Timor, officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, is a country in Southeast Asia comprising the eastern half of the island of Timor. East Timor had been colonized for over 450 years by Portugal, since the year of 1512 when Portuguese traders began the sandalwood trade. East Timor was known as Portuguese Timor for centuries (hereafter referred to as the “Portuguese Period”). It was in 1975 that East Timor was invaded and occupied by In-

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donesia, and Indonesia declared Timor the 27th province the following year (hereafter referred to as the “Indonesian Period”). Following the 1999 United Nations (UN) sponsored act of self-determination, Indonesia relinquished control of the territory, and on May 20, 2002, East Timor became the first new sovereign state of the twenty-first century. As a result of their complicated history under colonization and invasion, East Timorese use diverse languages for different purposes and in different regions. When Agus was growing up in the small town of Oe-cusse in East Timor, people used only Baiquino, which is one of the several dialects in East Timor. People communicated in Baiquino while Indonesian was only used at school. Agus was educated in Oe-cusse until he finished his studies at junior-high school. Since it was during the Indonesian Period, Agus had to speak, read, and write in Indonesian with teachers at school, while he used Baiquino at home and with friends outside school. When Agus was still in elementary school, he experienced a life-shattering educational crisis. I was 10 years old when my father told me I wouldn’t continue my studies at high school. I couldn’t even imagine how and why my father would decide to stop me from studying. When my father came home one night, I had prepared a question for him. With great emotion, I asked my father to explain the reasons for his decision. At first, he could say nothing at all, but I saw tears flowing down from his wrinkled face. He said “I wish I could have enough money to support you.” He then hugged me and said “son…I am sorry I could not make you happy, I have tried my best but couldn’t make it happen for you.” I was desperately saddened by hearing a very honest and sincere response from my father as it was his deepest heart talking to me. It made me cry much that day as I had nowhere else to go. I felt like if watching myself in the middle of the sea, swimming to nowhere. I was about to give up at that time and thought my father’s decision might have just determined the ruin of my studies, and for that matter the ruin of my life. I hated much this life and claimed this life is unfair; how can life be fair if some people have no trouble in finding money for their tuition fees? For myself, I had never had one dime in my pocket, and neither did my father have any money to sustain my studies. However, I had a wish, and that was the only wish I ever had in my entire life: I wanted to continue my studies at the university, no matter what. My wish seemed extremely ridiculous and stupid, for I could not even continue to high school. How could I be at the university without going first to high school? What had I to do if my studies would be suspended? What had I done wrong, for the universe to punish me that way? I found no answer to my questions. I could not stop thinking every single night what would I be if I had to stop school. I could have found endless words to describe my situation at the time, but the one word that stood out above all is “suffering.”

Yet Agus did not relinquish his educational goals. After several more years in his village he decided to pursue his dream.

216 • YUN SEON KIM with AGUSTINHO CAET I had decided to go to the capital to search for a job, and to start collecting money for my studies the following year. I sought new direction in my life. One’s life is a vector, and one can make a wrong turn. Besides, I have been told many times by elders that “life is a series of choices and therefore we must live with consequences of every choice we have made.” I was unsure whether my decision of going to the city would fulfill my hopes or just destroy my dream. But I was comfortable with my decision and was totally ready for every single consequence I might face in any circumstances. I liked to see myself as a graceful slender reed that does not fight the storm that rages around me, but dances with it. I like to think that I bend with the wind. I knew whatever decision I made would affect the rest of my life. The day I had waited for had come quickly and I had no choice but to leave my parents. I told both my father and mother my aims of going to the city: I wanted to work and collect some money myself and would be back next year for my studies. My parents seemed unhappy with my decision and my mother started crying at the time of my departure. But they did nothing to stop me from leaving them because that was what I wanted to do with my life. I tried to face this life myself and wanted to transform the situation my family faced. As I recall, I left my hometown on August the 23rd 1997 and arrived on the same day in the city. The city I was going for was Kupang, the capital city of western part of Timor Island. In Kupang, I was exposed to a totally new environment with people speaking two unlike dialects, which are completely different from mine. Feeling excluded began to emerge in my life. When sought jobs I would be discriminated against because of my linguistic background (although I could speak Indonesian at that time, most employers preferred local people who speak the two city dialects). I was also classified as a non-native citizen of the city and this had made it almost impossible for me to be employed, since almost all employers refused to hire non-local people due to pressure imposed on them by locals. If employers were found hiring a non-local employee, those employers were seemingly threatened by locals. As days passed by, my tiredness and hunger led to a desire to go back home. I experienced life in the city as more expensive than in my hometown. Almost everything cost an arm and a leg. I always tried to tighten my belt so that I could still survive. The second week had ended and I was still jobless. I had almost nothing to eat. Luckily, a friend of mine, who had worked for years in the city, came to my rented house the day I was out for searching jobs and slipped a small letter under the door saying “My boss wants you to be his driver’s attendant and you must show up tomorrow.” Finally, I got employed but I had to work illegally without the knowledge of locals. In July 1998, it had been completely one year that I was in the city and I decided to go back home and enroll at high school. I used the money I had saved to purchase a uniform, books, school bag and other school equipment needed during my studies. I wrote a letter to my boss, asking to quit my job. My boss was very happy and supportive with my decision and I can always remember him saying “School is more important than job and your future depends on your studies.” The wisest advice I have ever had. I enrolled in one

From East Timor to Transnational Dialogic Interaction • 217 of public high schools in my home town and was able to make it through the second year when the war erupted in 1999 and that war impeded my studies for at least one year.

Agus was forced to stop studying and take refuge in West Timor for three months to hide from Indonesian troops and then stayed in his home town of Oe-cusse until the end of the war. After one year of interruption and as the country resettled with the arrival of international forces in the country to keep it peaceful and safe, I resumed my studies the following year, 2000. I didn’t go to the same high school I had been before, instead, I decided to move to the capital city of East Timor, Dili, and enrolled in a privately owned high school run by the Catholic mission. In the city, people speak Tetum [the national language] and I couldn’t speak it at that time because it hadn’t been taught in school, nor did people speak it very often in my home town. Inside the classroom almost all teachers use Indonesia as language of instruction but outside most students were more comfortable using Tetum in conversations. Again, I was thrown into another exclusive society where I could hardly get along with my friends whose first language was Tetum. It took me a year to learn the language until finally I could confidently speak it with friends.

When Agus moved to Dili, he could speak two languages: Baiquino, a dialect of Oe-cusse, and Indonesian, a school language. Dili, the capital of East Timor, was the environment in which Agus learned three more languages which turned out to be life-changing. He learned Portuguese not only because it was one of the subjects at his school, but also because some teachers utilized Portuguese in order to minimize the risk of students’ misunderstanding their lectures since there were at least three language speakers mixed in one class in Dili at that time: Tetum, Indonesian, and Portuguese. While lecturing, Agus states that some teachers, who had been educated during the Portuguese Period, utilized both Tetum and Portuguese. He says these teachers were of an older generation and taught Portuguese as well as history. Meanwhile, younger teachers, who had been educated during the Indonesian Period, utilized Tetum and Indonesian interchangeably to teach math, geography, sociology, and other subjects. The other major language Agus learned in Dili was English, which he had learned as a subject since junior high. Moreover, while Agus was working in a car repair shop, which many foreign customers visited daily, he had more opportunities to be exposed to authentic English than most other students. His level of English proficiency, according to him, however, still remained low because, even though he could understand well, he could not speak English. In the following year after graduating from his senior high school, Agus became a university student in Dili, majoring in English education. At that

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time, he had a chance to work with the UN, which consequently provided the opportunity for him to improve his English proficiency to a great degree. The UN in Dili needed an interpreter between Tetum (the “city language”) and Baiquino (Agus’ mother tongue) and a translator between Indonesian, Tetum, and English for official documents of serious crimes. While he worked for the court under the UN with English speakers from various nations for one and a half years, Agus could improve his listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. In the fourth year of his university studies in East Timor, Agus came across an advertisement on the wall of a university building that offered scholarships to study in the U.S. Agus thought at first this is “only for those who have money and have good connections.” However, after one of his professors called him personally and encouraged him by explaining the scholarship process, Agus decided to apply. Among the many students who turned in their application forms, only 46 students were allowed to take a test similar to TOEFL. Of 46 students, 17students were chosen to have an interview with a representative of the East West Center at the University of Hawai’i. After attending the interview, Agus and four other students were accepted for a full scholarship to pursue a four-year education degree in the United States. The journey for Agus from the impossibility of going to high school to a scholarship for study at the University of Hawai’i has been long and arduous. Along the way he learned to speak five languages: Baiquino (a dialect of the small town where he grew up), Indonesian (a school language), Tetum (a “city language”), Portuguese (an official language), and English (a working language). Agus’ commitment to getting an education and his multilingual experiences clearly had led to possibilities far beyond his original goals. Imagined Communities Agus suggests the roles language has been played throughout his life and how important and meaningful English is to him as follows. I could say language is like an angel. Angel. Yes. It’s like, you know, it’s like it was very helpful and useful for me. I mean I don’t know my life would be if I could never speak English. But, because at that time I was able to speak English. Then, my difficulties at that time my limited economy I was able to survive with language cuz I know the language at that time I was employed by the United Nations and at that time I earned some money. And I can use it to go to university and improve English. And then when this scholarship was announced, I was able to apply even though it was very competitive. So, language is for me so very important. Language makes life better.

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Agus evaluated language in general as “very helpful and useful” by using a metaphor of an angel and specifically attributed a “better life” to knowledge of English. Agus indeed took advantage of knowing English to get a job, in both the UN and the car repair shop. However, in the UN the majority of employees who Agus worked with used English in the manner of the highly educated, in contrast to the customers who he had worked for in a car repair shop who spoke informal English. Moreover, Agus was paid enough in the UN to continue his study at college as opposed to working as a mechanic in a car repair shop, which was located in what Agus described as a ghetto and offered little money. Referring to Bourdieu’s (1991) theories of social interaction,2 Agus experienced the particular linguistic and socio-cultural fields of the UN and car repair shop where prevailing social conditions, including language and literacy practices, were quite different. Although Agus’ own habitus might have restricted social and economic movement, his educational experiences and evolving English language and literacy abilities changed his social positioning in the larger socio-cultural context of East Timor by providing him with increased linguistic and cultural capital. English language capital continued to open other chances for gaining both social and economic capital. Earning a full scholarship with the University of Hawai’i East West Center suggests that English plays a central role in “making life better” for Agus. Agus emphasizes that taking the chance to acquire higher education was a pivotal experience in his life. I have been through different way of life. I like um. I start with something like…um…I don’t know… um…it’s kind of suffering much and torturing. Actually, um, I grew up in a very very simple family. I, I, I think I have told you that earlier. Actually, I stop one year and continue to go to senior high school after finishing junior high school. I don’t know if I told you already. I think I did. So, it then, but at that time I didn’t decide to stop, I mean, the only way, wish, I had at that time I have to go to the university no matter what. I mean. I have nothing to support my study at the university but I had to go, had to go to study, so um, it is like, um, something like my optimism? Yes, optimism. It’s like, I try to go, go beyond my situation at that time. You know some people say that you wanna touch the moon. You have been viewed to desire. It is like, you know, I wanted to touch the moon no matter what.

Agus now believes that pursuing higher education in the United States will allow him to continue advancing his socio-economic situation once he goes back to East Timor. I don’t know in the future, I can still survive with English. For me, I just want to improve my English. I want to know deeply the English itself, the language. So, you know, to master English! So, when I go back to East Timor I can use English so I can survive to teach English or to work with different kind of

220 • YUN SEON KIM with AGUSTINHO CAET company or something like that. Because in East Timor in the future English is very useful, very important. So, that’s why I was thinking I have to, uhm, this is, I think, I have to study and master English. I have to be fluent in English… That’s why I want to spend more about English cuz I am not like a native speaker, like writing and reading skills, those kind of English skills that I can survive with in the future. Then, if somebody ask me to teach, then I can teach, or I can work. It’s not that I have to teach, no. I can work, you know, because English you can work for politician, governments, or in NGOs, or other they might need English and then you can work. So, that is what I really want to do in the future, in my life.

Agus relates his conviction that if he can “master” English he will have more chances to choose whatever job he wants in the future. As a young man who does not know what he will become or can become in East Timor after completing his study in the U.S., Agus is carefully searching for a possible job which will bring him a better life. In this context, it is important to look at what “master English” means for Agus. Even in East Timor, he experienced particular literacy practices that were valued differently across the contexts in which he worked. For example, in a car repair shop, he only needed to understand spoken English related to his work as a mechanic, but didn’t need to be fluent. In the UN, he needed to not only read and write, in English, official documents regarding serious crimes, but also listen carefully and speak effectively to communicate as a translator in court. To Agus, to master English is to master enough skills to work wherever he wants. He also presents himself as one who is “not like a native speaker,” which he defines as a monolingual speaker. Rather, he portrays himself as someone who can handle diverse languages and language uses across varied contexts, especially, across disciplines. It is apparent that Agus imagines future communities in East Timor that transcend his early life. This is the beginning of a story in which Agus’ language and literacy experiences led up to and supported his educational endeavors and success in East Timor. In the following section, we portray how Agus’ imagined communities affected the way in which he engaged school work in the United States to achieve his career goals. In this description we highlight his academic literacy development and social identity construction while studying in the United States. LANGUAGED SELF IN THE U.S. When Yun Seon first interviewed Agus, as a first year second semester college student, he expressed his frustration over the fact that his English skills were not sufficient even after going through the Pre-Academic English Language Program (PAELP).3 After three sessions had been successfully completed in the PAELP, Agus applied for admission to the university. Even though he passed the requirement of a TOEFL score of 500 for admission,

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as a result of a required Academic English placement test, Agus needed to take four courses in the university English Language Program (ELP). Thus, Agus was placed into the Advanced Listening/Speaking, Intermediate Reading, and Intermediate Writing courses in the first semester and the Advanced Writing course in the second semester of his undergraduate studies. He was to take these courses concurrently with various regular content courses. With the language learning advantages from his personal background, Agus seems to have no problem understanding and following the course in the ELP. However, Agus did face difficulties in following lectures of content courses. These classes are different because students are all of them, mostly, I think all of them, how can I say, English native speakers, so more challenging because sometimes you got lost in the middle of lecturing or discussions because they talk too fast and talk something that, you know, related to their culture, you know, we got lost, so “where am I?” So, this is more challenging.

Agus said that contrary to the instructors in the ELP, the instructor of Anthropology class described here4 spoke “too fast” when she gave lectures. He suggested that it got harder to follow the course when the classmates spoke fast as well. Yet Agus also recognized that he felt challenged by the Anthropology class since he did not share the same Discourse as others (Gee, 1996), e.g. they discussed course content by drawing on knowledge with which Agus is not culturally affiliated. Thus, according to Agus, he was not “invited to speak” in Anthropology class since he used different “ways of talking” and “being” in terms of cultural knowledge (Gee, 1996, p. 128). In addition, Agus said he hesitated to speak out in the content courses because he was afraid his classmates might lose patience with him when he spoke slowly. As far as I observed, if they speak fast, I don’t know this is maybe false assumption. If I talk slow, they might get bored. So, this is my thinking, but I never try to talk.5

Agus seems to have a marginalized social position in this class. He also seems to be looking at himself through the eyes of his English speaking classmates and his emotional-volitional tone (Bakhtin, 1993) reveals an image of himself as language deficient. Moreover, when he attained a B grade in Public Speech, Agus found problems with his “language use, like grammar and vocabulary.” Agus said, “If I were a native speaker, I would get an A.” As shown in the excerpts above, he considered his language the force that molded his social standing (Vitanova, 2005) and affected academic success. What is interesting here is that Agus’ participation in the classroom activities of the ELP is apparently different from that of content courses.

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Yun Seon’s classroom observations revealed Agus as a confident enough student to ask questions in the ELP courses; however, he did not ask any questions in any content courses even though he said he had many questions in mind. Agus actively speaks out in the ELP where the class is more supportive of non-native speakers who share a common ground as language learners, whereas Agus often loses his voice in the content courses where less understanding or awareness of non-native speakers might exist. Thus, language use becomes a central positioning factor for Agus in learning contexts where different kinds of discourses dominate. However, this does not simply mean he passively accepts however he is positioned by others. Instead, his critical awareness and consciousness of the reality he encounters in each learning context create an interplay of diverse voices and perspectives towards him. Cultural Knowledge behind Genres and Literacy Practices One example of positioning as a non-native speaker is illustrated in Agus’ Creative Writing class. Agus experienced differences not only in terms of a new genre of writing, but also the kind of activities required in the class. I was, I was, like I was down. I, like, didn’t expect because, you know, every poem we write, we have to read it out. You have to read it aloud in class. And then our friends give like comments. “Oh, I didn’t like this part.” “Oh, I like this part.”

The activities required in Creative Writing class were quite different from other courses he took in previous semesters. Agus could choose6 to be silent during the classroom discussions for Anthropology and Political Science classes whereas he was not allowed to be silent for the classroom activities in Creative Writing class. This writing course that demanded active communicative academic literacy practices caused Agus to be depressed at the beginning since he could not remain silent in the class. He realized that it would be inappropriate to keep silent when everyone takes turns and reads his/her own works in the class. The oral activities required in Creative Writing show some basic cultural assumptions and values (Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995). Observations revealed that the instructor of the Creative Writing course seemed to presuppose the students in the class would be accustomed to an “American” set of social practices, for example, to share poetic works in class. She also appeared to consider this activity as a “commonsense” practice that is naturally expected in a higher level course in the English Department which more experienced writers of English often attend. Agus emphasized that he was the only non-native speaker of English in Creative Writing class while Anthropology and Political Science instructors seemed to have more un-

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derstanding of their numerous multi-cultural and multi-lingual students.7 The instructor’s cultural presumptions towards the students in Creative Writing class did not serve to Agus’ advantage since he never experienced the kinds of cultural norms, inherent in this particular course, in previous disciplines either in the U.S. or in East Timor. The Creative Writing class is indeed a Discourse community in which cultural knowledge specific to the “American” (or a “Western”) way of life dominated. Agus recognized that different disciplines in the U.S. require different genres and Discourses and said, “When you move to another step from one hundred class to two hundred, three hundred, it’s different. Different use of language.” In other words, different genres of reading and writing were required at different levels of content courses that Agus enrolled in. The rhetorical form he was encouraged to learn in Creative Writing class did not match his previous Academic English experiences of a five paragraph essay valued in the PAELP, an analytical argumentative essay valued in the ELP, or a research paper valued in Political science class. Instead, the creative writing class valued the genre of poetry that demanded connotative stylistic elements such as imagery, metaphor, and personification. According to Cope and Kalantzis (2003), “constituent genres can be partly characterized in terms of the particular social relations and subject positions they articulate” (p. 22). This observation applies to Agus in that he was positioned to share his poems even though he wanted to refrain from doing this since he was not confident about his poetry writing abilities. In addition, the interactions with peers in terms of social expectations were also different from other genres and Discourses. Agus’ classmates were not only active listeners like in other content courses, but also evaluators in the Creative Writing class. Agus’ position of evaluatee was emphasized in the Creative Writing class, in addition to Agus’ self-positioning as language deficient. In other words, he could avoid feedback from peers in other course discussions by not participating and, thus, not risk humiliation, yet he was more vulnerable in Creative Writing class. From the first poem he wrote, Agus received negative feedback from his classmates, saying that linguistic skills like metaphor and personification were missing. As a result of student evaluations, Agus was designated as language deficient in the class due to his lack of knowledge of a new genre of writing and ways of “talking, listening, (often, too, reading and writing), acting, interacting, believing, valuing, and using tools and objects” in Creative Writing class ( Gee, 1996, p. 128). In other words, it was the whole “Discourse” that he lacks (Gee, 1996) and this lack decided his social position as language deficient, thus creating an experience of unequal power relations. Agus and his sense of agency intertextually interacts here with a genre and Discourse where diverse voices and cultural logic contend in a par-

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ticular course within the American educational system. Yet he attempted to diminish power relations in order to stand himself in an equal power position, as demonstrated by his story of being able to overcome the problem. Even though the professor said that you have to write about something that really really happened to you and then you have to imply the meaning. You have to, not state directly what that poem means. I was, I was, I was, I was, I wasn’t quite sleep until two. I said that “No, I have to write something.” I was sitting and keep thinking “how can I write about we need a scholarship to coming to here?” and I write. I write something, then I correct, then I write. If I don’t know how to use personification and metaphor in English, I write in Indonesian language. I look at the dictionary, Indonesian to English.

To write about “something that really really happened to you” has been for Agus to write something related to his life in East Timor. He had previously utilized East Timor’s political situation and/or East Timor’s educational situation as topics for his discipline-specific writings especially for Anthropology and Political Science classes. Yet, this time he had to “imply the meaning” to transform the similar story into poem by using linguistic forms such as metaphor and personification. When struggling with how to write his second poem, Agus said to himself, “No, I have to write something.” This suggests Agus’ struggle for voice and his consciousness of language practice (writing a poem, literacy practice) which can be a critical tool for responding to others’ voices (voices of others toward him of language deficient within the Discourse community of Creative Writing class) (Bakhin, 1984). He had to use his voice through the required literacy practice to answer in ways that challenged the unequal power that he experienced (Vitanova, 2005). Thus, Agus’ dialogic action is very important in that he proclaims his existence in the social environment by answering others’ voices. Clark and Holquist (1984) also emphasize that “What the self is answerable to is the social environment; what the self is answerable for is the authorship of its responses” (p. 9). Indeed, Agus’ literacy practice of writing the second poem brought him a chance to use his own voice and re-form his identity. In this process, he utilized one of his languages, Indonesian as a resource, which was his school language in East Timor. Since he had read and written poetry in Indonesian, Agus utilized his knowledge of metaphor and personification in this language to write a poem in English. Agus appropriated the Other’s linguistic skills such as metaphor and personification, but this was not mere reproduction of the same linguistic forms. Instead, Agus applied one of his own knowledge with his own creativity. His literacy practice of writing shows a more profound interlanguage within the notion of intertextuality that he used as a tool to empower himself. We also found that Agus considered his linguistic background as a gift not as his handicap. By utilizing his repertoire of languages and his genre experience in another language, Agus attempted

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to re-author his subject. Through this process, Agus was able to learn how to transform the message into a new genre valued in the target class. Then, he decided to read his poem aloud with confidence in the class. I was really mad to myself. Why why I cannot do this. I tell myself, “sit down.” hahahaha “oh, I have to write about this”…Then, last night I promised myself that this poem I will read it loudly in class no matter what. I don’t care and I did. Read it, like, read it aloud. And then the class was so quiet because they needed to take time to evaluate. And then at the end, “oh, I like this poem,” “I like this.” So, I said, “oh, okay, hahaha.” Hhhhhh.8

When Agus engaged in an inner dialogue with a strong emotional-volitional tone (Bakhtin, 1993) by saying “I was really mad to myself. Why why I cannot do this,” he emphasized his act of authoring by continuing to take control over the moment of reading his poem. In contesting others’ voices, they turned to be “so quiet.” Agus not only reported classmates’ words (“oh, I like this poem” and “I like this”), but also retold his response (“oh, okay, hahaha”) and, thus, showed his own evaluation and response to others’ utterances. Agus’ narrative then finished with his laughing (Hhhhhh). To Bakhtin (1984), laughter is “directed toward something higher—toward a shift of authorities and truths, a shift of world orders” (p. 126). Agus attempted to tell his story of transforming his power through his literacy practice within the class. Through this carnivalesque acts of laughter (Vitanova, 2005), we found that Agus realized how his voice challenged and contested the voices of others and the ways that he was being positioned by them. This example also reveals that Agus’ identities as language deficient and lacking of specific linguistic skills in Creative Writing class were not rigidly set, but “flexibly negotiated in actual contexts of practice” (Gee, 1996, p. 129). Agus was the author of his subject transformation. Agus first critically analyzed his context (where it requires him to read aloud his poem, and consequently, determines him as language deficient) and produced metaphor and personification in writing by creatively using his literacy experience in East Timor. In this process, Agus re-authored himself through active engagement with his situation through literacy practices. Here, Agus, as a social being, is akin to Bakhtin’s understanding of the subject as an author of his discursive existence. By answering to others’ concrete or generalized voices toward him in class (Vitanova, 2005), he constructed himself as an authoritative agent of his existence in Creative Writing class. CONCLUSION Agus gained understanding of shifting power relations by critically analyzing each of the contexts and Discourses he experienced. Vitanova (2005) pointed out in her analysis of Lantolf and Pavlenko’s (2001) work: “agency is a relationship, mediated between learners and their communities of prac-

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tice” (p. 151). In Ahearn (2001)’s definition, agency refers to “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (p. 112). While wrestling with how Agus perceived his own actions and others’ voices throughout his East Timor and the United States experiences, we found that the meaning of agency itself was in a constant state of change through acts of appropriating, transforming, or resisting life circumstances and situated Discourses. Essentially, Agus’ exercise of power in the sense of the ability to constitute and reconstitute his own world is his fundamental agency. This study further explored the ways in which Agus developed his English academic literacies at the University of Hawai’i across disciplines through dialogic interaction with diverse contexts, which constituted different sociocultural factors and power relations. In these situated social processes, Agus’ agency and metalinguistic awareness lie at the heart of his subjectivity and academic formation. While he moved from one learning context to another, he recognized that he was unable to enter the mainstream of a Discourse community without gaining knowledge of valued literacy practices. In seeking to acquire equal power in the U.S. university setting, he utilized his previous linguistic knowledge to appropriate English genres and, thus, achieves equal educational standing. In the process, he raised his awareness of language and literacy as situated practices imbued with power relations. Following other NLS scholars’ efforts, the ethnography of literacy undertaken here provides insights into how situated local practices are connected to larger sociohistorical influences, political processes, and power relations through exploring all the experiences that Agus had—military invasion, poverty, schooling, language and literacy learning, and agency. We observe what obstacles students may need to overcome, what resources they bring to the educational setting (Agus’ multilingualism), and how they might draw on these linguistic/cultural/social resources in developing curriculum that supports rather than “oppresses” them. Informed by feminist approaches and engaged ethnography, our study emphasizes the teacher-student interactive approach to education. Participatory Action Research (PAR) has evolved as an extensive collaborative process among participants to construct knowledge (Fine, 2006; Freire, 1982). In our study, Agus was not a mere research subject but an active participant in the process. Through the framework of narrative inquiry, Yun Seon created a “space” in which Agus could voice his growing sense of agency by evaluating social issues, hierarchical economic distribution, literacy practices, and power relations constituted in school. The narratives further created a “space” for Agus to construct meaning of past and current experiences which he can then use to envision and articulate his future. At the beginning of this study, Agus recognized academic success as meaning mastering English, which could bring him a secure job when he goes back to East Timor after acquiring a college degree: “In the future, I can still sur-

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vive with English. For me, I want to know deeply the English itself, the language.” In the process of this PAR narrative project Agus began to articulate his future more specifically. In 2008 summer, Agus conducted research on multilingual issues of critical concern to the children of his country. Agus imagines his future working for his people by building school institutional language and literacy practices. As the initiator and facilitator of this kind of project, he can become an integral part of an integrated educational program of support and change. This study also demonstrates the possibility of PAR to assist in the development and implementation of critical literacy curriculum for U.S. language minority undergraduate students and through which educational institutions can strive towards social equity. Instructors commonly have little idea of who their students are—what life challenges and language/cultural resources they bring to the educational experience. From a cognitive second language perspective, educators commonly consider learning process and strategies as individual mental processes devoid of social context, such as language and literacy learning as “motivation, responsibility, and expectations of recognition or reward” (Mann, 1994, p. 14). This cognitive and individual approach neither explains the sociocultural nature of literacy practices, nor attends to important educational implications. For example, a cognitive perspective argues that educators should explicitly teach textual features and genre to students. However, our study suggests the benefit of educators encouraging students’ own agency as an important tool in developing meta-analysis abilities to self-recognize the textual, rhetorical, and discursive nature of particular genres (McComiskey, 2000). This PAR study compels us as educators not only to reconsider the significance of agency in the process of learning to read and write, but also to explore what academic success means for students. Educational institutes as a site of academic practices and a site of diverse Discourses and power relations have been crucial places for developing students’ agency and/or promoting marginalization. We suggest that teacher educators, teachers, and curriculum developers should carefully look at the cultural and linguistic diversity that each student brings to the classroom and the school at large. Through a close examination of students’ learning process, educators should seek to make school practices and policies more sensitive to students’ experiences. In this way, educators can bridge school practices and, if necessary, transform them in order to support students’ use of their own agencies in positively impacting their life paths. NOTES 1.

Discourse with a capital “D” differentiate from discourses, defined by Gee (1996) as “connected stretches of language that make sense” and thus “discourse is part of Discourse” (p. 127).

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Bourdieu utilizes the notion of fields to describe semi-autonomous, structured social spaces characterized by discourse and social activity (Bourdieu, 1991; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Schools are just one of many intersecting and/or competing social spaces which an individual may encounter (Carrington & Luke, 1997). Habitus defines the process of socialization, through which one develops particular class, culture-based and engendered ways of seeing, being, occupying space, and participating in history. The various language and literacies practices of individuals and groups are articulations of the linguistic habitus (Carrington & Luke, 1997). Capital is defined by Bourdieu as the cultural, economic, social, and linguistic indexes of relative social power. Capital is only such if it is authoritatively recognized in a particular social field. A number of sociolinguists and ethnographers have used the notion of habitus to explore language and literacy as situated practices imbued with power relations both in and out of school. Even though Agus improved the four English skills dramatically while working with the UN, his English basic academic literacy developed while taking courses in the Department of English Education in East Timor. His academic classes had productive purposes for him. Agus learned how to teach the four skills, vocabulary, and grammar, offered as subjects by the Department of English Education. Meanwhile, Agus also had the opportunity to improve his own skills through course reading, and writing assignments in English. However, academic English in East Timor and in the United States differs greatly. As a college student, Agus took Anthropology and Geography in the first semester; Political Science, Math, Public Speech, and Hawaiian Studies in the second semester; and Argumentative Writing, Rhetoric and Computer Writing, Creative Writing, and Modern Grammar in the third semester. It doesn’t mean he never participates in any discussion occurring in content courses. In Anthropology class, he greatly utilized group discussion to follow up course readings and lectures. It is important to note that the group members are what he calls “locals” who grew up in Hawai’i and likely spoke Hawai’i Creole English, but whom he recognized linguistically as native speakers of English. Agus consciously used this word, “choose,” in his explanation of why he barely speaks in content courses: “I just choose to be silent. Listen. I feel I can do something else because this class was not about speaking, it was about writing.”

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7.

8.

The courses are general requirements for graduation from the university and thus students from diverse backgrounds are expected to enroll in these courses within their first and second semesters. Agus’ poem: A Moment of My Life Far in the distance, a wave of wind brings my happiest moment Ring ~ ring~ “hello, and Congratulation!” “You are chosen” The words of an oyster my ears delighted in Among four recipients, out of five, exceeding thousand, My heart was pale as the moon. In East Timor, I was chosen out of thousand. The news that ignited my face as sparks from firework, burned away my misery I once faced. A dream comes true, once in a lifetime. Get an education and the best, not a dime I pay. Education is the key to life, helps me excel, not lead me to a county jail. Today I step into a new world, a memory to my parents a bid farewell.

REFERENCES Ahearn, L. M. (2001). Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 109– 137. Auerbach, E. R., & Paxton, D. (1997). “It’s not the English thing”: Bringing reading research into the ESL classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 237–261. Atkinson, D., & Ramanathan, V. (1995). Cultures of writing: An ethnographic comparison of L1 and L2 university writing/language programs. TESOL Quarterly, 29(3), 539–568. Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (2000). Literacy practices. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 7–15). New York: Routledge. Barton, D., Hamilton, M., & Ivanic, R. (Eds.). (2003). Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. (C. Emerson, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act. (V. Liapunov, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bazerman, C. (2004). Intertextualities: Volosinov, Bakhtin, literary theory, and literacy studies. In A. F. Ball, & S. W. Freedman (Eds.), Bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy, and learning (pp. 53–65). New York: Cambridge University Press. Bell, J. S. (2002). Narrative inquiry: More than just telling stories. TESOL Quarterly, 36(2), 207–212.

230 • YUN SEON KIM with AGUSTINHO CAET Bloome, D., & Bailey, F. (1992). Studying language and literacy through events, particularity, and intertextuality. In R. Beach, J. L. Green, M. L. Kamil, & T. Shanahan (Eds.), Multidisciplinary perspectives on literacy research (pp. 181–210). Urbana, IL: NCTE &NCRE. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bruffee, K. (1986). Social construction, language, and the authority of knowledge: A bibliographical essay. College English, 48, 773–790. Burkitt, I. (1998). The death and rebirth of the author: The Bakhtinian circle and Bourdieu on individuality, language, and revolution. In M. M. Bell & M. Gardiner (Eds.), Bakhtin and the human sciences: No last words (pp. 163–180). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Carrington, V., & Luke, A. (1997). Literacy and Bourdieu’s sociological theory: A reframing. Language and Education, 11(2), 96–112. Christie, F. (1999). Genre theory and ESL teaching: A systemic functional perspective. TESOL Quarterly, 33, 759–763. Clark, C., & Holquist, M. (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin: Life and works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.). (1993). The powers of literacy: A genre approach to teaching writing. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.). (2003). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. London: Routledge. Fine, M. (2006) Bearing witness: Methods for researching oppression and Resistance—A textbook for critical research. Social Justice Research, 19(1), 83–108 Freire, P. (1982). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York. Gee, J. P. (1991). Socio-cultural approaches to literacy (literacies). In W. Grabe (Ed.), Annual review of applied linguistics (pp. 31–48). New York: Cambridge University Press. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social Linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (2nd ed.). London: Falmer Press. Hyland, K. (2003). Genre-based pedagogies: A social response to process. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12, 17–29. Lantolf, J. P., & Pavlenko, A. (2001). Second language activity theory: Understanding second language learners as people. In M. P. Breen (Ed.), Learner contributions to language learning: New directions in research. Essex, England: Pearson Education. Lea, M. R., & Street, B. V. (1998). Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 157–172. Lea, M. R., & Street, B. V. (2000). Student writing and staff feedback in higher education: An academic literacies approach. In M. Lea, & B. Stierer (Eds.), Student writing in higher education: New contexts (pp. 32–46). Buckingham, UK: Open University Press/SRHE. Lee, J. W., & Schallert, D. L. (1997). The relative contribution of L2 proficiency and L1 reading ability to L2 reading performance: A test of the threshold hypothesis in an EFL context. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 713–740.

From East Timor to Transnational Dialogic Interaction • 231 Mann, P. S. (1994). Micro-politics: Agency in a postfeminist era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Menard-Warwick, J. (2005). Transgression narratives, dialogic voicing, and cultural change. Journal of Sociolinguisitcs, 9(4), 553–556. McComiskey, B. (2000). Teaching composition as a social process. Utah: Utah University Press. McKay, S., & Wong, S. L. (1996). Multiple discourses, multiple identities: Investment and agency in second-language learning among Chinese adolescent immigrant students. Harvard Educational Review, 66, 577–608. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity, and educational change. London: Pearson Education. O’Malley, J. M., & Chamot, A. U. (1990). Learning strategies in second language acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pavlenko, A. (2001). “How am I to become a woman in an American vein?”: Transformations of gender performance in second language learning. In A. Pavlenko, A. Blackledge, I. Piller, & M. Teutsch-Dwyer (Eds.), Multilingualism, second language learning, and gender (pp. 133–174). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pavlenko, A. (2007). Autobiographic narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 28(2), 163–188. Raimes, A. (1991). Out of the woods: Emerging traditions in the teaching of writing. TESOL Quarterly, 25, 407–431. Schieffelin, B., & Cochran-Smith, M. (1984). Learning to read culturally: Literacy before schooling. In H. Coelman, A. Oberg, & F. Smith (Eds.), Awakening to literacy (pp. 3–23). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books. Sole, C. R. (2007). Language learners’ sociocultural positions in the L2: A narrative approach. Language and Intercultural Communication, 7(3), 203–214. Street, B. V. (1995). Social literacies. Longman: London. Street, B. V. (2003a). Literacies across educational contexts: Mediating learning and teaching. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon Street, B. V. (2003b). What’s “new” in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2), 1–14. Spack, R. (1997). The acquisition of academic literacy in a second language: A longitudinal case study. Written Communication, 14(1), 3–62. Vitanova, G. (2005). Authoring the self in a non-native language: A dialogic approach to agency and subjectivity. In J. K. Hall, G. Vitanova, & L. Marchenkova (Eds.), Dialogue with Bakhtin on second and foreign language learning (pp. 149–169). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Willett, J., Solsken, J., & Wilson-Keenan, J. (1999). The (im)posibilties of constructing multicultural language practices in research and pedagogy. Linguistics and Education, 10(2), 165–218.

CHAPTER 10

FINDING AND READING ROAD SIGNS IN ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH Studying the Language and Stories of the Unwelcome Stranger Carlos Ovando and Steven Locke

In our study of the mass immigration of Nicaraguans to Costa Rica over the past two decades, language and cultural barriers were less of an issue than the challenge to develop a perspective framework that revealed and explained the experiences of Nicaraguan youth in Costa Rica. Most research in this area has focused on immigration from developing or poor countries to industrialized countries and consequently has occurred in a Western framework that pays little attention to the epistemological structures of the immigrant’s cultural experiences. While we were fluent in Spanish and well grounded in Latin American culture, our Westernized academic research agendas and cultural perspectives precluded us from investigating the authentic voices and experiences of the Nicaraguan immigrants who Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 233–249 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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have settled in Costa Rica yet have maintained a physical and psychological connection to their communities across the border to the north. The stories of immigrants leaving their homes amid economic and political turmoil, the difficulties of traveling, crossing the border and finding work without legal documents, and fitting into their adopted homes are familiar themes that have been documented and analyzed in countless places. However as noted by numerous scholars (Freire, 1993, McLaren, 2007; Smith, 1999) the poor and marginalized are often silenced and co-opted by those who have the privilege to define and write about their experiences. Thus, in our research we reexamine and reconsider approaches and a methodology that explicates the experiences of Latin immigrants situated in a similar but different culture. In particular, we examine how language and language differences are used to both marginalize immigrants within Costa Rican society and bind them together into close knit communities. Based on our experiences we thus consider a set of methods and methodology for doing field research with what has become known as South-South immigration (Ratha & Shaw, 2007). IN SEARCH AND RESEARCH OF THE AUTHENTIC VOICE Researcher bias has long been debated in western research. Even qualitative research with its emphasis on interpretive design and attempts to examine the experiences, interactions and substantive understanding of the lived reality of informants (Erickson, 1986; Shaffir & Stebbins, 1991) has been questioned. There has consistently been misrepresentation of marginalized and oppressed voices (Smith, 1999; Stoll, 1999) especially when viewed from a historical context where the social context has changed or is not understood (Tierney, 2000). The question thus becomes how can Western academics study the phenomena of non-western cultures? Qualitative research and critical theory has contested the positivist paradigm’s reductionist empirical methods that concerns itself with validly, reliability and claims to be value-free. It has offered more inclusive and participatory approaches to research and data analysis that promised emancipation and praxis. Unfortunately, similar to the quantitative research paradigm, qualitative research, including ethnography, has also been faulted as colonizing and privileging western research in its attempts to represent the “other” through scientific reporting (Denzin & Lincoln, 2008, Smith, 1999). According to Smith, the authentic voices of the “other” is often co-opted by western research or forced to conform to accepted norms. In his examination of narrative inequality in ethnography and linguistics, Hymes (1996) takes particular exception to traditional educational ethnographic research as being limited to that which is observed and noted in the classroom. He suggests that ethnographic researchers often miss behavioral patterns and meanings in the classroom because integral phases

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of behavior occur outside the view of the researcher. Comprehensive understanding of interactions thus becomes a matter of understanding the meanings assigned to physical environment, historical context and the stories or narratives that individuals utilize to describe traditions, values, and worldviews as well as how language use forms the identities, both externally and internally, of individuals within their communities. As noted by Bowers (2001, 2005), traditional knowledge and skills are connected to relationships within the community and the community with its environment. The land and immediate environment also shape the way people think and prioritize their values (Meyer, 2008). The environment (or land) is thus more than just a physical place or locale but rather a consciousness consisting of values that are set in a context. Modern communications, Bowers argued, has decontextualized knowledge and has undermined intergenerational knowledge that connects humans to one another and to their environment. Thus it is not that nonurban, traditional populations are illiterate, uneducated and unable to deconstruct their social and physical environment but a matter of utilizing a different perspective for locating themselves, both physically and psychologically, within their communities and environment. Indigenous researchers and a number of critical place-based environmental scholars, through their questioning and analysis of critical theory and qualitative research methods, have offered a starting place for rethinking methods and methodology that explicates cultures under examination. Both Bowers (2001) and Smith (1999), coming from radically different research agendas, have argued that the development of culture and identity is tied closely to ones physical and social environments. In her studies of indigenous people, Smith noted that the identity of indigenous people is developed and tied to their local geography as well as to the social interactions of their community. To understand a culture one must first understand the physical context of that culture. Smith (1999) argued that reality is constructed through the naming of the world and without a shared context the language is meaningless. Concepts regarding ones social and physical environment, she noted, are developed in one’s own language and are difficult to capture in another language. Bowers and Smith both concluded that many cultures have relationships that are tied to the environment and universe. Likewise all communities exist within a historical context. While Western notions of history have been accused of being paternalistic and used by colonizers to oppress (Smith, 1999), cultural and place specific history can help to explicate the economic, political, social, and ecological structures of a community that form the basis of knowledge about that particular community. History, according to Smith, can help to reclaim a people’s past by showing injustices and how colonizers negated the perspectives of

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those they colonized as being meaningless and incorrect. Scollon and Scollon (1979) in their analysis of the Chipewyan first contact with Europeans found that interpretations of this meeting differed dramatically between the French fur traders and the indigenous culture. While the European version focused on the economic and historical significance of the contact and the courage that was needed to face the snowy wastes in Alberta, Canada, the Chipewyan were focused on the impact of this contact and the courage it took to meet the Europeans. A reexamination of an immigrant’s history from their perspective promises to add depth and breadth while giving agency to immigrants’ experiences. Similar to place, specific history, narrative, and storytelling are viewed as oral accounts and means of passing along important traditions, values, and perspectives of communities and cultures. Storytelling, Dunbar (2008) states, is important because it contributes to a collective story that locates individuals within their culture and is a source of cultural history that connects individuals to traditions, and worldviews. Goodman and Melcher (1984) successfully argued that outsider bias and perspectives of western anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have eroded previous claims of scientific objectivity. The study of cultural stories, they concluded, provides a window into which one can study the values, perspectives, and structures of other cultures. Lastly, language is an important element to consider within a non-western research agenda. This consideration, of course, goes beyond the superficiality of communication and speaks to the intersections among language, interactions between cultures, perceptions and presentation of self in the community, and identity and positionality in society. To understand a culture one must first understand the social context of that culture. Tied to this is the idea of understanding relationships and lines of authority within a community. Siddhartha (2005) who in his work with marginalized tribes in India on issues of land tenure and environmental protection found that confrontational methods of problem solving were at odds with community leaders’ consensual ways of conflict resolution. The selection and interpretation of road signs poses a challenge in the development of any type of qualitative research agenda. It is doubly difficult when entering a foreign culture. Borrowing methods and methodologies from indigenous and critical neo-Marxist research offered us a starting place to examine the educational experiences of Nicaraguan students in Costa Rica. By no means do the Nicaraguan immigrants in Costa Rica resemble an indigenous culture. Yet, these methods and methodologies do offer direction in looking at the silencing and lived experiences of this group.

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RECONSIDERING MODES OF INQUIRY AND DATA SOURCES A number of indigenous scholars have described and addressed the problems of conducting research that is ethical and respects the knowledge of those who have been typically marginalized or silenced (Denzin, Lincoln & Smith, 2008; Smith, 1999). The primary concern of this interest is for research that decolonizes as well as reveals the authentic voices of informants. In addressing the ethics of protecting indigenous knowledge, Marie Battiste (2008) notes, among other things, that those being researched must be acknowledged as the interpreters of their culture and that they must be treated as equals. More importantly the researchers, Battiste argues, should consider numerous approaches that are participatory and empower the voices of those under study. While the focus of Battiste’s work focuses on indigenous populations, the application to our study of Nicaraguan immigrants in Costa Rica is relevant. Most of our interviews took place in Nicaraguan communities that had essentially been transplanted to Costa Rica from the south. These communities in Costa Rica, thus, share a common history, language, and culture. Keeping this in mind, we examined and analyzed the socio-cultural and educational experiences of undocumented Nicaraguan students in rural schools in Costa Rica using an interpretative qualitative case study research approach (Merriam, 1998; Yin, 2003). Since most of the research and theory that guides the study of immigrant education is based on South to North immigration (Ratha & Shaw, 2007) and on how students adapt to western-styled education systems we were challenged to focus our research agenda and structure our interviews to reveal the authentic experiences of the informants. Thus our interviews consisted of the collection of stories informants told, their relationships within their communities, place specific histories, and a meta-analysis of their language. Data were collected over the course of nine years, primarily through open-ended and structured personal interviews with six students and their mothers in zones that had a high concentration of Nicaraguan migrants. Interviews were tape recorded in Spanish, transcribed, and later translated into English. While the language did not pose a barrier, understanding references and the contexts of the interviews required knowledge of the history and local culture, an understanding of their relations in immigrants’ home country, and the meanings they assigned to various actions and references to their environments. In an analysis of critical race theory, Dunbar (2008) argued that it is not always possible for an outsider to understand the experiences, relationships and language of informants. While not impossible, he noted that shared stories, experiences and epistemologies are best understood when the observer and observed share similar backgrounds. Thus, our challenges were to develop a sense of the conditions in which immigrants lived and worked, and give legitimacy and authority to

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their voices without filtering it through western interpretation and perspective. In meeting this challenge we considered the testimonio which offered an opportunity and alternative in revealing the life history of the speaker and with a minimal interference and inference from the author (Tierney, 2000). Developed in Latin America, the testimonio gives voice to those who have been traditionally marginalized and excluded from society to express their experiences without censure. Beverly (2000) argued that the testimonio gives the reader a sense of the author, is equalitarian and democratic, and is a direct narration of what the author experienced. More important, Beverly noted, it is an affirmation of the authority of the speaker where the truth becomes personal and contextual. It speaks to how different authors, when commenting on the same set of facts or events, will construct different understandings of the world. The testimonio as described by a number of different scholars (Beverly, 2000; Smith, 1999; Tierney, 2000) is essentially a life history told through story. Listening to and noting the stories of immigrants is a viable alternative and plays an important role in the collection and analysis of data especially within groups where literacy is problematic and oral traditions are strong and used as a means to pass along information. A story may carry a moral, a lesson, a warning, or information about a deed or the structure of a community. The story embodies memories, is a form of passing along the beliefs and values of a culture as well as connects the past to the future (Goodman & Melcher, 1984; Smith, 1999). While stories and storytelling are usually considered as tales that are passed from the old to the young and can become regulators of society, stories can also help frame the many experiences of joy, hardship, sorrow, happiness, love, and revenge, among other emotions. The story becomes a means of shared understanding among the teller and listener, a way of relating, confirming, and reaffirming an incident or experience. Equally important and inherent in all stories is the construction of a richly detailed context that gives the listener an image of the social and physical environment. The testimonios we collected are presented alongside an analysis of the cultural, economic, political, and linguistic factors and contexts that have influenced the educational experiences of immigrants (Nieto, 2000). As a whole, they illustrate and illuminate the diversity of voices and experiences as immigrants adapted and worked within the Costa Rican culture. Likewise, cultural brokers were engaged to help gain access to the communities of Nicaraguan immigrants, develop interview focuses, and provide an analysis and interpretation of the data. In many instances, the Nicaraguan students we interviewed were later able to provide insights into the data analysis process. They had the advantage of understanding both the lives of their parents and relatives back in Nicaragua and the sophistication to understand the modern globalized culture in which they now lived. As a means to illustrate our theoretical, epistemological, and methodological

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approach to research among Nicaraguan youth in Costa Rica, we offer here a sample of the stories we collected over the course of our nine year study. We then draw on both personal and public stories to explore historical perspectives on a language of difference and exclusion, environmental influences on Nicaraguan immigrants, and the ways language formed identity and marginalized communities. STORYTELLING AND THE SHAPING OF COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCES Within the many hours of interviews with informants, the story became an important tool for illuminating the journey of the Nicaraguan immigrant to Costa Rica. The most popular story was “How I came to Costa Rica.” Within this story were many smaller and connecting stories that included details of communities left behind, of friends and family, the war, the economic hardships and, of course, the hardships of traveling from Nicaragua to Costa Rica. Take, for example, the story of Evert who talked about leaving Nicaragua when he was 14 at the height of the civil war between the United Statesbacked contras and the democratically elected Sandinista government. As the war escalated so did pressures on the government to draft young men into military service (Walker, 2003). At the time the Sandinista Army would come into town and would ask who was old enough to join the army. I was small so they passed over me for a while but as I got older it was only a matter of time before people in the community would say hey he’s 14, and would point me out. My dad decided that it was time for us to leave. We were both miserable and half dead when we reached San Carlos. We had gotten some rides but we did not have any shoes or shirts and at night we would just get eaten by the mosquitoes. (Evert, Personal communication, November 22, 2007)

Evert arrived in San Jose and got a job as a laborer on a construction crew. After several months, he approached the Ministry of Education and asked if he could continue with high school in the evenings. At that time, the Ministry did not care who you were as long as you could pass the entrance exams. I passed them easily, worked during the day as a labor, and went to school at night. I liked school and was good in math. At the end of the year, I was tutoring practically the whole class in math and helping the teacher. It is how I met my wife, we were classmates. (Evert, Personal communication, November 22, 2007).

The story of Evert is a rags-to-riches story as he tells of working first as a laborer then as a labor contractor before starting his own construction company and becoming a successful contractor. The themes of this story connect to and run through other stories told by others who made the journey south.

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There are many variations on the story of “How I Came to Costa Rica” and few of the stories we listened to had a similar ending or even similar details. Yet this is not the purpose of noting down the different stories. In their examination of the testimonio Tierney (2000) and Beverly (2000) write that the point is not to look for the contradictions or truth in these stories but rather to examine how the numerous different accounts represent the numerous challenged descriptions of reality. Tierney argues that the point is not to determine if something exists or doesn’t but rather to come to grips with truths that are different than our own. The story serves several functions at different levels for the researcher. At one level the story becomes a window to the reality of the storytellers and the various nuances and complexity of their community. The researcher can vicariously be connected to the teller though the images and various details of the account that immerge and combine to develop an understanding of the experiences and the context of those experiences. At another level, Tierney (2000) and Beverly note that the story (or testimonio) is a call to action and a call for social change when it is connected to a group or class that is oppressed or marginalized. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES AND A LANGUAGE OF DIFFERENCE AND EXCLUSION Critical scholars (Freire, 1993, Giroux, 1997) and linguists (Scollon & Scollon, 1979) have long viewed and documented how history and language have guided national sentiment and perspective that have favored and promoted the importance and contributions of one culture over another while. Smith (1999) has shown how indigenous cultures have been denigrated and oppressed through the rewriting and interpretation of their history both in accounts of contact and subsequent subjugation and the detailing of cultural and social history. Through this history, national values, traditions, and social institutions and structures are acknowledged and reified. Often history is one-sided and the language glorifies, negates, or completely ignores different perspectives. The reason for such lopsided representation, historian James Loewen (1995) writes, is that history is politicized and that the need to promote nationalism among citizens has been the culprit. The interpretation of history in Costa Rica in the past two decades has served to differentiate and to justify its images of itself and of the immigrants that have arrived from across its northern border (García, 2006). Historically, up to 1948 when Costa Rica wrote a new constitution and abolished its military, there were few differences between the two countries. Likewise, at first blush, Nicaragua appears to differ little from its neighbors to the north and south in terms of social patterns and structures (Walker, 2003). In his study of rural egalitarianism in Costa Rica, Wilson (1998) noted that Costa Rica and Nicaragua shared a similar legacy of land tenure that

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follows the hacienda system found in other Central American countries. He also noted that despite a lack of wealth there were significant income and social class disparities and that the early colonialists in Costa Rica maintained their social and political positions. Politically, neither Costa Rica nor Nicaragua were democratically driven countries but controlled by a political and economic elite where electoral fraud was rampant and power was often gained through military strength rather than the ballot box. Yet, through its textbooks, literature, and written history, Costa Rica has popularized and perpetrated a rural democracy myth in which egalitarianism, similar to the United States, sprung from the land and humble beginnings in the early 19th century (de Tocqueville, 2002). Because of isolation and poverty there was a natural equality among citizens, an absence of classes, and the tendency for all ideas to be considered with equal merit. García (2006) noted that Costa Ricans developed a perception that they are exceptional, unlike other Central Americans, and that their bucolic past led to a large middle class that in turn was peaceful, humble, and prosperous. In contract, Costa Rican historians and writers have portrayed Nicaragua as a country marred by destructive civil wars and instability starting with its independence in 1824, continuing through the 1854 when the forces of filibuster William Walker invaded Costa Rica, and culminated in the decade long civil war between the Sandinista government and U.S. backed contras during the 1980’s. This contrasting history has led many intellects and writers in Costa Rica to conclude that these conflicts are due to the violent character of the Nicaraguan immigrant. While Costa Rica has been portrayed as civilized and the Central American Switzerland, Nicaragua has been depicted as a country that has evolved from numerous cultures, most notably African and indigenous. When asked about the differences between the two cultures, a typical response from most Costa Ricans is exemplified by the following response from a PANI (patronato naciónal infantil) social worker: Nicaraguans are more violent…they are also darker in color than Costa Ricans and they often beat their children. Most domestic violence in this country involves the Nicaranguan (Elena, Personal communication, December 8, 2003).

Most telling in this description is the reference to skin color. Skin color in Costa Rica is often related to character and cultural traits (Biesanz, Biesanz & Biesanz, 1999; García, 2006). Inferred in this notion, Sandoval G. noted, is that Costa Ricans view skin color in connection to a lower and rural class of people who have tendencies to be more violent. The term polo (hick), sometimes used to describe Nicaraguans, refers to the idea that a person is unrefined, uneducated, lacking social skills, from a rural area, and more violent. While Costa Ricans take pride in their agrarian roots, often refer to

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their rural traditions, or still own family land which they return to several times a year, both Biesanz et al. and García note that the Costa Ricans now view themselves as cosmopolitan and urban. This is in contrast to the view that the Nicaraguan has not evolved and left the countryside. The Nicaraguan Civil War probably did as much to reaffirm the image of the violent tendencies of the Nicaraguan immigrant in Costa Rican society than any previous conflicts. Several widely published crimes in the media confirmed Nicaraguans as violent in relation to their past. In the late 1990’s, the kidnapping of German tourists led the media to label the crime as being committed by ex-guerillas and ex-contras and later as nicas (semiderogatory term for Nicaraguan) (García, 2006). Likewise La Nación on March 10, 2005 played up the fact that the single bank robber who survived the failed bank robbery in which nine people were killed in St. Elena was a Nicaraguan who used an AK-47 assault rifle. The implication being that the AK-47 was the weapon of revolutionaries and guerillas. Sandoval concluded that because Costa Rica views itself as isolated from its neighbors due to its past, it has created a national attitude of being threatened by its “aggressive” and “communist” neighbors, especially in the case of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES ON THE NICARAGUAN IMMIGRANT Critical place based curriculum theorist Bowers (2001) and indigenous scholar Smith (1999), both have made connections between the development of social/cultural and personal identity and local geography and environment. To understand the immigrants who have arrived from the Northern states of Estelí and Leon one must first understand the geographic topography of the region. The northern departments of Nicaragua were settled early in the colonization of the Americas and became important economic and agricultural centers. The area produces a great deal of sugar cane and other plantation crops which has put the region at the mercy of fluctuating world markets and, thus, the inherent poverty and social and economic inequalities found in the production of plantation crops. The northern states have also been the center for revolution and in 1956 Anastasio Somoza Garcia was assassinated in Leon. During the 1980’s the area around Estelí was the focus of some of the heaviest fighting during the American/Sandinista War (Walker, 2003) which has been responsible in part for the flood of migrants to Costa Rica. The area is also higher in elevation, cooler and more prone to drought which has made it more difficult for small farmers to produce crops and transport what they do produce to markets in the south. All this has had the obvious effect of increasing the poverty, a sense of oppression, but also the development of a community that distrusted government institutions:

Finding and Reading Road Signs in Ethnographic Research • 243 I quit high school and was drafted into the military. It was terrible….we were always wet and hungry and always looking for the contras in the mountains. One day I just left and went home…Walked for days and when I got back to Pueblo Nuevo I just kept going south. (Arlan, Personal communication, December 6, 2005)

This distrust carried over into Arlan’s new home and conversations were always about avoiding conflicts with government officials. There was also the idea that the hard life in Nicaragua had contributed to an attitude of self-reliance and a cultural image of Nicaraguans as hard workers with the ability to overcome adversity more so than their Costa Rican hosts. The self-image of the Nicaraguan in Costa Rica was one as hard worker with the ability to overcome adversity. This self-image of shared adversity and hard work was perpetuated through the maintenance of communities to Costa Rica. Nicaraguan immigrants formed social networks in Costa Rica that extended all the way back to their communities in Nicaragua. Marin (2004) found that Nicaraguan communities in Costa Rica had developed through social networking where immigrants from single communities in Nicaragua would join their friends and family in Costa Rica and, thus, maintaining the same community and familiar connections they had in Nicaragua. The migration was fluid and often family members or friends would accompany others back to Costa Rica during their annual or biannual visits home. Easter is an important holiday in Latin America where many Nicaraguans travel home and it was on one of these visits that Selda noted it was connections with her family that caused her to immigrate to Costa Rica in 1990. A sister of mine studies business administration and the other was in her third year of law school. We came [to Costa Rica] on vacation and I decided to stay. I came for only three months but stayed. I had several brothers and sisters living in Puerto Viejo [Costa Rica]. The reasons I stayed were more personal than economic (Selda, Personal communication, April 19, 1998).

While economics played a role, being with family and friends from their Nicaraguan communities was the principal reason for visiting and deciding to stay in Costa Rica. Nicaraguan immigrant communities maintained and recreated their cultural identities, traditions, and celebrations which continue to be tied to their community environment back home in the northern part of Nicaragua. LANGUAGE: FORMING IDENTITY AND MARGINALIZING COMMUNITIES In typical South to North immigration, language issues are hotly contested given the debate over bilingual education (Ovando, 1990) and the much

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publicized and politicalized debate over the English Only movement (Mora, 2009). Though, linguistically, Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans share the same language of Spanish, differences in vocabulary, pronunciation and accent have served as a distinguishing factor that marginalize the Nicaraguan immigrant in Costa Rican society. At the same time it is the study of this difference that also serves to illustrate the uniqueness and shed light on the culture and values of the Nicaraguan. Accent and vocabulary are probably the most distinguishing characteristics that differentiate the Nicaraguan from the Costa Rican. Most notable is the difficulty Nicaraguans have in pronouncing the “s” which is dropped in many words and has become a form of racists’ jokes and stories. Moreover, Walker (2003) noted, Nicaraguan vocabulary is very colorful and words such as jodido (screwed up) and verga (slang for male genital) are commonly used by the Nicaraguan immigrant. Cruel jokes and stories that reference the accent and vocabulary thus become a way of denigrating Nicaraguans, resulting in diminishing the social standing of these immigrants (Fernandez & Arguedas, 2007; García, 2006). Even though the dropping of the “s” is found in many parts of Latin America, most notably among the Caribbean and African descendants, it is considered non-standard Spanish in Costa Rica as non-standard Spanish, spoken by the uneducated or rural population. Likewise, Fernandez and Arguedas noted, the vocabulary contributes to the image of the Nicaraguan as being vulgar and subhuman. Interestingly, Nicaraguans in Costa Rica, we found, adopted several strategies when confronted with speaking a language that is often the butt of racists’ jokes and used to exclude. Children who attended school in Costa Rica appeared to be the most invisible. Sandra in talking about her heritage stated that: My friends really do not know me outside of school. I guess I talk like a Tico [diminutive form of Costa Rican]. The problem is that I can’t even talk like a Nicaraguan. When I talk to other Nicaraguans I use the words, it is just that I no longer have the accent. The Nicaraguans I know tell me that I talk like a Tico. (Sandra, Personal communication, June, 22, 2006)

Sandra spoke of being hurt when jokes were told at the expense of Nicaraguans, but in later interviews she noted that she had no plans of ever going back to Pueblo Nuevo where she left at the age of nine to be with her parents. Evert, who is 20 years older than Sandra, left Nicaragua when he was 14, and successfully completed high school in San José, also changed his accent but as a successful contractor uses Costa Rican vernacular when around Ticos he does business with and switches his vocabulary and accent when speaking to his Nicaraguan workers. Patricia Alvarenga (2004) in her interviews in Nicaraguan communities around Costa Rica found that immigrants were aware of how their accents

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and vocabulary differentiated them from the Tico. While some immigrants attempted to hide their accents, others would claim to be from Guanacaste, a province that borders Nicaragua and whose inhabitants speak differently than those in the Central Valley where the capital of San José is located. While at times some immigrants attempted to change their dialect to avoid the embarrassment of being singled out and discriminated against, she noted that Nicaraguans for the most part were proud of their heritage and country. When asked about whether she tried to adapt language and her actions to fit in and be more Costa Rican, Mara responded that she had nothing to hide and that she was proud to be a Nicaraguan and feared that her daughter was becoming too Tico. Rather than attempting to fit in or hide themselves in Costa Rican culture, many Nicaraguan immigrants pride themselves in being hard workers and contributing to Costa Rican society through filling a labor need. The language of being a hard worker in the eyes of the Nicaraguan sets them apart and elevates them both in their community and in Costa Rican society. In reference to some Costa Rican subcontractors who failed to show up when the rest of the crew arrive at 6 am to lay the ceramic tile, Evert noted with disgust: It is typical of them to not show up until 8 am. They show up, they do an hour worth of work and then eat breakfast. They eat lunch and then go home early…they just can’t work nor do they have the strength or stamina that we do. (Evert, Personal communication, December 12, 2007)

The inability of Costa Rican workers to work like Nicaraguans was a common conversation on construction sites during breaks or after the delivery of building materials by Costa Rican drivers who do not help unload trucks. In the eyes of the Nicaraguan community, these conversations add value, worth, and a sense of contribution to their identity and in some respects makes them separate and superior. Mara noted with pride one Saturday after all her co-workers were laid off due to the lack of work that she was the only one who was retained because no one else could clean a house as well as she could or work as hard. Yet this idea of the Nicaraguan as hard worker, García (2006) notes, also works against the Nicaraguan immigrant. García found that there were several different images in Costa Rican society in regards to this attribute. Those who viewed immigrants as looking for opportunity and attempting to improve their economic situation valued the contribution that they made to society. On the other hand, a portion of the Costa Rican population viewed the Nicaraguan as workers who could do heavy work that Costa Ricans could not do, looked upon them as pests, subhuman or animals that also were capable of committing crimes and taking drugs. Lastly, language differences between the two cultures illustrate cultural and class differences and social stratification. Nicaragua is one of the few

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countries that do not use the informal tu (you) in conversation preferring to use the antiquated nonstandard informal pronoun vos. While the use of vos is considered another example of non-standard Spanish that is used by the immigrant, the Costa Rican use of the informal tu is a contrast to historical social stratification of Nicaragua where 80% of the population worked with their hands while the other 20% did not (Walker, 2003). While the use of dona and don (titles of respect for the wealthy) have fallen into disuse after the Sandinista Revolution, in Nicaraguan society and communities there still exists a sense of social stratification that is ignored in Costa Rica. CONCLUSIONS AND RESULTS Rethinking methodologies by focusing on how language and language differences are used to both marginalize Nicaraguan immigrants served several useful purposes. To start, our approach served to reveal the authentic voices of immigrants, their experiences, and to place their perspectives in the context of their relationships, personal histories, stories, and language. This is in contrast to some of the more popular theories and ideas of the immigrant experience put forth by anthropologist John Ogbu (1992), Nieto (2000), and Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (2001). While the work of these scholars has done much to shed light on the adaptation of immigrants into western culture, these theories have been constructed from a Western perspective and diminish the authentic voices of the immigrant experience. Initially in our field work we found that the traditional theories of economic and political upheaval could explain the immigration of Nicaraguans to Costa Rica. We also found that Western theories of adaption could describe and interpret the adaptation of immigrants in the host country. What we quickly discovered missing was the accurate authentic depiction of the stories of our informants that would lead us to more fully understand and appreciate their lives. The learning and retelling of our informants’ stories led us to more fully understand the plight, oppression, and successes of Nicaraguan immigrants. Our approach taught us the moral obligations we had as researchers to the communities where we worked and revealed notions of trust and relationships that operate outside the parameters and/or are discounted by the institutional review board (IRB). From its legalistic Western institutional bubble, the IRB attempts to protect the rights of the individual which in our fieldwork was irrelevant. We found that “undocumented” did not carry the same social or political weight as it does in the North American university. There were many nuances within the communities where we worked that were defined by history, relationships, and bonds that blurred the lines of authority and concepts of justice that are accepted by North Americans. Because of our approach we were also obligated to maintain contacts and

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use our participatory methods to enrich and fold back into the community our dialogues that would enrich and empower those who lived in the communities where we worked. Indigenous scholars (Smith, 1999) and scholars of critical race theory (Dunbar, 2007) point to the need to reexamine methodologies and methods that decolonize the oppressed and minorities. Globalization as well as economic and political upheaval has amplified South-South migration and subsequently the marginalization and oppression of immigrants. New approaches to participatory research promise to shed new light on the lived experiences of immigrants and act as a liberating force for this group. While developed countries have committed money and resources to the study of those who cross their borders, the focus has been on how to best manage this group and provide services. New methodologies that explicate the relationships, histories, stories, and language of this group will empower it to create its own voices, leadership and advocate for its rights and autonomy. REFERENCES Alvarenga, P. (2004). Passing: Nicaraguans in Costa Rica. In S. Palmer & I. Molina, (Eds.), The Costa Rican Reader: History, culture, politics (pp. 257–263). London: Duke University Press. Battiste, M. (2008). Research ethics for protecting indigenous knowledge and heritage: Institutional and researcher responsibilities. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 497–511). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Beverly, J. (2000). Testimonio, subalternity, and narrative authority. In. N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln, (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed., pp. 555–565). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Biesanz, M.H., Biesanz, R., & Biesanz, H.Z. (1999). The Ticos: Culture and social change in Costa Rica. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Bowers, C. A. (2001). Educating for eco-justice and community. Athens, GA: University of Georgia. Bowers, C. A. (2005). How the ideas of Paulo Freire contribute to the cultural roots of the ecological crisis. In C.A. Bowers & F. Apffel-Marglin (Eds.), Rethinking Freire (pp. 133–150) Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2008). Introduction: Critical methodologies and indigenous inquiry. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 1–20). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. de Tocqueville, A. (2002). Democracy in America. London: Longmans, Green. Dunbar, C. (2008). Critical race theory and indigenous methodologies. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 85–98). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 119–161). New York: Macmillan

248 • CARLOS OVANDO & STEVEN LOCKE Fernandez, K. M., & Arguedas, L. P. (2007). Chistes sobre Nicaragüenses en Costa Rica: Barreras simbólicas, mecanismos de control social, constructores de identidades. In C.S. García (Ed.), El mito roto; Inmigración emigración en Costa Rica. (pp. 339–356). San Jose, Costa Rica: UCR. Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. García, C. S. (2006) Otros amenazantes: Los nicaragüenses y la formación de identidades nacionales en Costa Rica. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial UCR. Giroux, H.A. (1997). Pedagogy and the politics of hope: Theory, culture and schooling. Boulder, CO: Westview. Goodman, J. & Melcher, K. (1984). Culture at a distance: An anthroliterary approach to cross-cultural education. Journal of Reading, 28(3), 200–207. Hymes, D. (1996). Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: Toward an understanding of voice. London: Taylor & Francis. Loewen, J. W. (1995). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York: Touchstone. Marin, D. B. (2004). Migraciones de Nicaragüeneses hacia Costa Rica: Analisis de dos redes sociales. Unpublished dissertation. University of Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica. McLaren, P. (2007). A pedagogy of possibility. In A.C. Ornstien, E.F. Pajak, & S.B. Ornstien (Eds.), Contempory issues in curriculum (4th Ed.) (pp. 22–31). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Merriam, S, B. (1998). Qualitative research and case study applications in education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Meyer, M.A. (2008). Indigenous epistemology and the triangulation of meaning. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 217–232). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Mora, J.K. (2009). From the ballot box to the classroom. Educational Leadership, 66(7), 14–19. Nieto, S. (2000). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education (3rd ed.). New York: Longman. Ogbu, J. (1992). Understanding cultural diversity and learning. Educational Researcher, 21, 5–14. Ovando, C. J. (1990). Politics and pedagogy: The case of bilingual education. Harvard Education Review, 60(3), 341–356. Ratha, D., & Shaw, W. (2007). South-South migration and remittances. World Bank Working Paper No 102. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S.B.K. (1979). Linguistic convergence: An ethnography of speaking at Fort Chipewyan, Alberta. New York: Academic Press. Shaffir, W., & Stebbins, R. (1991). Experiencing qualitative fieldwork: An inside view of qualitative research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Siddhartha (2005). From conscientization to interbeing: A personal journey. In C .A. Bowers & F. Apffel-Marglin (Eds.), Rethinking Freire (pp. 83–100). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books. Stoll, D. (1999). Rigoberta Menchú and the story of all poor Guatemalans. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Finding and Reading Road Signs in Ethnographic Research • 249 Suárez-Orozco, C., & Suárez-Orozco, M. (2001). Children of immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tierney, W.G. (2000). Undaunted courage: Life history and the postmodern challenge. In N. K. Denzin & Y.S . Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd Edition. (pp. 537–552). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Walker, T. W. (2003). Nicaragua: Living in the shadow of the eagle (4th ed). .Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wilson, B. M. (1998). Costa Rica: Politics, economics, and democracy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Yin, R. K. (2003) Case study research: Design and Methods (3rd ed.). London: Sage.

CHAPTER 11

AGENCY AS SEEN THROUGH THE LIFE STORY OF A CHINESE PEASANT WOMAN Xiao Rui Zhang

INTRODUCTION In the summer of 2007 I was at the stage of finalizing my study of Chinese women in Japan (Zhang, 2008). I was very much inspired by the poststructuralist and feminist poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, discourse, and power relations in my interpretations of young Chinese women’s study abroad experiences in Japan. Most of the women I encountered in Japan had prestigious family backgrounds and came to pursue a “better life” through further academic study. Poststructuralist theories helped me to see how these young intellectuals experienced various struggles in the process of social translocation (Anthias, 2002). Moved by these women’s stories, I was eager to learn stories of other Chinese women who lived in a different social environment in China—those who lived in the economically depressed countryside area and were still struggling with sustenance living, Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 251–274 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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those who had limited education and social capital (Bourdieu, 1991). I was wondering what I could learn from their stories. In August 2007 I did a short stay at a prestigious university in southern China. There I met Ziqing, who was then a graduate student at the university. When I discovered that Ziqing was from a peasant’s family background, I talked to him about my interest in doing fieldwork in the Chinese countryside and asked him if he could make some connections for me. Ziqing was enthusiastic about my project and suggested that I start my study with his family. In the winter of 2007 I began interviews with Ziquing’s mother, Fengying, on the Internet (Skype) and over the phone. Moving between the lines of my transcripts, I saw a woman who was suffering from oppression and was a victim of the historical times she lived through. I had intended to write the “unfair” stories of Fengying and, in the name of social justice, was ready to disclose her “poor” life conditions. Yet, Ziqing did not agree with my take on his mother’s life. He suggested to me ways of viewing Fengying as an active social agent who made great efforts to overcome all the difficulties and conflicts in her social environment. After listening and re-listening to my interviews with this alternative perspective in mind, and especially after I met and stayed with Fengying in her home, I felt that there was indeed a different story than what I had originally being told here. I heard an individual’s story of struggling for change (Weedon, 1997); I saw a real-life process of ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981). Fengying’s stories poignantly revealed to me how and when a discursively constructed social individual can make her own choices and is able to think differently than those holding authoritative voice. These stories demonstrate how and when human agency can be activated through an individual’s way of knowing and interpreting the world in which she lives. In the summer of 2008 I visited Fengying’s family and stayed with them for 10 days, which enabled me to obtain a concrete “feeling” for their life. This fieldwork experience confirmed a theoretical stance which views the social individual as situated in a complex intersection of being discursively confined on the one hand and equipped with the agency to think differently and make choices on the other. In this chapter I attempt to explore the processes of when, how, and under what conditions agency is activated or not activated as a reaction to dominant or authoritative discourses. AGENCY FROM A POSTSTRUCTURALIST PERSPECTIVE I tell the story here of a Chinese woman living a world imbued with the philosophies of poststructuralism (Best & Kellner, 1991; Sarup, 1993). I present a poststructuralist individual who is subjected to the social discourses in which she lives while exhibiting agency in taking up or resisting subject positions that are available to her (Weedon, 1997). With a focus on human

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agency, I describe the dynamic and unstable effects of discourse and social cultural practices (St. Pierre, 2000) in the process of subjectivity formation. Poststructuralism perceives human individuals as subjects that are constructed by social historical discourses. In other words, they are the products of the society in which they live. Althusser (1971) conceptualizes human individuals as products of mainstream ideologies, thus constrained by culture. Emphasizing the role of power relations in human subject construction, Foucault (1983) identifies two meanings for the term “subject”: “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his [sic] own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge” (p. 212). Both Althusser and Foucault originally argue for a conception of human individuals as agents who are not free, but confined by the dominant discourses or power relations in the culture in which they live. To rephrase the above, Althusser and Foucault define human subjects as carriers of dominant ideology and products of social discourses. However, later, Foucault (1988b) conceptualized human subjects in a more active way. He says: Now I am interested…in the way in which the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested, and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group. (p. 11)

Though still taking on a perspective of the constrained self, at this time Foucault turns his eyes to the “active” side of the individual subject, who has the ability to “find” alternative ways of being. Foucault then perceives individual subjects as having technologies of the self. Technologies of self are practices: which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conducts, and ways of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault, 1988c, p. 18)

In interpreting Foucault and Althusser and other poststructuralists and applying these theories to feminist practices, Weedon advocates an alternative version of poststructuralism, namely, feminist poststructuralism. Weedon (1997) defines it as: A mode of knowledge production which uses poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, social processes and institutions to understand existing power relations and to identify areas and strategies for change. (p. 40)

This version of poststructuralism emphasizes subjectivity as being involved in a dynamism of freedom and struggle. Weedon (1997) defines subjectiv-

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ity as “the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of her self and her ways of understanding her relation to the world” (p. 32). She argues that human subjects are produced historically and socially. They acquire their sense of themselves and their ways of thinking and behaving in the particular discourses in which they live. However, the forms of an individual’s subjectivity are not fixed; instead, they are multiple and always changing across the wide range of discursive fields which constitute them. This conception of subjectivity captures the culturally confined human subject on the one hand and emphasizes an active social individual equipped with human agency on the other. As theorized by St. Pierre (2000), feminist interpretations of poststructuralism reveal: A double move in the construction of subjectivity: a subject that exhibits agency as it constructs itself by taking up available discourses and cultural practices and a subject that, at the same time, is subjected, forced into subjectivity by those same discourses and practices. (p. 502)

Human agency, as explained by St. Pierre (2000), is “a subject’s ability to decode and recode its identity within discursive formation and practice” (p.504). In discursive formations and social practices, diverse forms of subjectivity emerge due to a multiplicity of forces as individuals struggle with various desires in their social practices. Through human agency, individuals can take up or resist certain subject positions that are available to them in any particular situation. Therefore, a human subject is not a completely fixed product of its cultural environment, rather her identity is fluid and in a process of continual reconstruction and reconfiguration. She is always on her way to “becoming.” However, questions remain. As Butler (1995) asks, “How is it that we become available to a transformation of who we are, a contestation which compels us to rethink ourselves?”(p. 131). And as St. Pierre (2000) queries, “What makes us open to refiguration? What enables those tiny explosions of the self that refuse to repeat the same ‘I’?” (p. 504). In this chapter I attempt to investigate the working process of human agency. I explore under what conditions human agency is activated and to what extend can agency be activated to enable the individual to think differently and make her own choices. I explore the social, cultural, political, and personal forces in discursive practices which make subjectivity transformation, reconstruction, and refiguration possible. LIFE HISTORY AS A METHOD OF INQUIRY In the current study I employ life history method to explore the social discourses as well as the on-going process through which Fengying’s subjectivities were constructed and agency activated.

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Schwandt (1997) calls life history “the biographical method” (p. 82). It is a way to social inquiry through individual life experience. Life history, as a method of inquiry, does not simply contain an account of an individual’s life stories. Hatch and Wisniewski (1995) noted that “an analysis of the social, historical, political and economic context of a life story by the researcher is what turns a life story into a life history” (p. 125). And, as Goodson and Sikes (2001) stated, life history provides “a modality that embraces ‘stories of action within theories of context’” (p. 86). As they further suggested and cited Middleton as follows: Stories might be seen as the social constructions they are, providing glimpses in their location within power structures and social milieux. Stories, then, provide a starting point for active collaboration, “a process of deconstructing the discursive practices through which one's subjectivity has been constituted” (Middleton, 1992, p. 20). Only if we deal with stories as the starting point for collaboration, as the beginning of a process of coming to know, will we come to understand their meaning, to see them as social constructions which allow us to locate and interrogate the social world in which they are embedded. (Goodson & Sikes, 2001, p. 86)

Thus, life history provides me with a means of exploring in concrete detail the social discourses through which Fengying’s subjectivities were constituted and examining when and how her agency was activated in her on-going process of becoming. Having a strong personal interest in another woman’s life, one who is my country fellow, however, lives in a very different social environment, and bearing a poststructuralist world view, I started my journey to the understanding of Fengying’s life. In the winter of 2007 I began with some casual conversations with Fengying on the Internet (Skype). After several pleasant contacts, I told Fengying that I wanted to interview her and write about her life. Fengying, who demonstrated an active personality, was happy about the fact that someone was interested in hearing her stories and even intended to write about her. My interview with her went smoothly with Fengying’s supportive collaboration. Half a year later, in the summer of 2008, I visited Fengying at her home in the rural area of Shangdong province and continued my interview with her during her work breaks, at the dinner table, and in the evenings. For the most part, during our interviews I tried not to interrupt, except for a few clarifications and confirmations, and let Fengying tell the stories the way she chose to tell them. Some 20 hours of audio-recorded interviews were transcribed and translated into English by me. I would like to note here that in my interviews with Fengying, she spoke a variety of Shandong dialects, in which there are expressions that were different from standard Chinese. However, I basically had no problem in understanding her except for a few occasions

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where I had to confirm with her the meaning of several local expressions. Since in the current study, my analysis and interpretation are focused on the content of her story, discussion of the linguistic issue is beyond the scope of the paper. Atkinson (1998) stated: “what is of greatest interest in the life story is how people see themselves and how they want others to see them” (p. 20). Meeting Fengying and living with her, as well as liking her for some time, helped me to develop a better sense of how Fengying saw herself and how she wanted to be seen. I learned that Fengying perceived herself as someone who had overcome all the difficulties in her life. She saw herself as someone who won the battles in her life rather then as a victim of the historical time she lived, which echoed what Ziqing, Fengying’s son, had emphasized in our discussion about his mother’s life stories at the beginning of my study. This basic tone of an agentic individual confirmed my theoretical stance of subjectivity and agency in my analysis and interpretation of Fengying’s life stories. The stories that I heard from Fengying reflect the subjective essence (Atkinson, 1998) of her life. What were emphasized in her life story highlighted what were personally important to Fengying and revealed her way of understanding her life. The stories told show both who Fengying really was as well as who she wanted to become. They serve as answers to the question of “who she was?” Thus, Fengying’s narrative about her life serves as important means for discovering how she “constructs” her life, which, then, reveals the social historical discourses, her social discursive practices along with her agentic negotiation with her social environment. Analysis of Fengying’s life stories is a process of making sense of, or interpreting, the information and evidence that are contained in her narrative about herself. Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber (1998) identified four models for the analysis of narrative data, that of holistic-content, categorical-content, holistic-form, and categorical-form approaches. Given that the nature of the current study is to grasp the essences that reflect the process of Fengying’s subjectivity construction and agency activation in her social discursive practice, I take the “holistic-content” approach in my understanding and interpreting of Fengying’s stories. In such an approach, as Lieblich et al. (1998) stated that “the life story of a person is taken as a whole, and sections of the text are interpreted in the context of other parts of the narrative” (p. 12). In addition, concerning the detailed analysis of segments of data, Goodson and Sikes (2001) suggested that there were two layers in the life stories: “The rendering of lived experience into a 'life story' is one interpretive layer, but the move to 'life history' adds a second layer and a further interpretation” (p.17). Stimulated by Goodson and Sikes’ suggestions, viewing Fengying’s lived experience per se also as an on-going narrative of her subjectivity and sense of becoming, I employ a three-layer analysis in examining Fengying’s narrative of her life story. First, Fengying’s

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life experience per se as an on-going narrative. I paid attention to what she did and/or did not do, how she did and/or did not do things, and why she did and/or did not do things. Second, Fenyging’s narrative about her life story. I examined what she said and/or did not say, how she said and/ or did not say things, and why she said and/or did not say things. Third, Fengying’s narrative interpreted through a poststructuralist perspective. In my interpretation of Fengying’s life story narrative, I take a poststructuralist lens and give special focuses on her subjectivity construction, the social discourses in her social discursive practice, and the moments when her agency was activated in her reaction to her social life environment. In the following section, I present in detail Fengying’s life history and let her stories tell us how multiple subjectivities, multiple discourses, power relations, and agency are inter-related in her discursive social practice. GETTING TO KNOW FENGYING AND HER FAMILY Following my Internet (Skype) interviews with Fengying in the winter of 2007, I visited Fengying and her family in Shandong province for ten days in the summer of 2008. This home stay provided me with opportunities to get some sense of how they experience their lives both physically and spiritually. As I entered the two square boxes built simply with thin pieces of board that they called “home” in the midst of the fruit market and joined them for the one-dish dinner around the small table in the darkness in the evening, I compared this home with the comfortable and well constructed and decorated houses that I visited in the cities and became quite clear about what I wanted to know about this family. I wondered what life meant to them and how they interpreted the meanings of life and happiness. I also became interested in knowing how they compared their ways of life to those living differently from them in the cities. I noticed that Fengying was playing a central role in the family. She was in her early 50s and looked healthy, energetic, and always seemed to be ready to take on new challenges. Fengying and her husband have four children: Ziqing, Ziwei, Zifang, and Zilei. The eldest son, Ziqing (26 years old), was a graduate student studying classic Chinese at a prestigious university in southern China. The second son, Ziwei (25 years old), graduated from a sports college three years before and had returned back home to help his parents with their family business. He had just gotten married in May 2008 and his wife, Xiaoli, was working for a local pharmacy company. After marriage the young couple lived together with Ziwei’s parents and sister. The daughter, Zifang (23 years old), graduated from a community college two years before and was at home helping her parents and brother in their family business. The youngest son, Zilei (21 years old), was at the time a college student majoring in construction technology. Fengying was very proud of the fact that all her children had gotten a college education; they

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were the only family in the village that had children who had reached such a high educational level. In the family Fengying played a dominant role and made final decisions about major issues. With the support of her husband, her second son, and her daughter, she was managing the small family fruit business. The business income was supporting the whole family’s daily life expenses and at the same time sponsoring Ziqing to go to graduate school and Zilei’s college tuition and other expenses. Fengying spent most of her time on trips importing fruit to be sold at their local market. She told me that she was so used to this way of life and could not stand with staying at home and doing nothing. Fengying believed that she was born to work and make change. Fengying talked to me about her youth, marriage, family life, and her relations with her mother-in-law and other people in her village, which were stories of conflict, struggle, and change. THE CAPABLE GIRL: FENGYING’S CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE Fengying was born in 1956 to a peasant family in Shaomen village in the southwest of Shandong province. Her village is about 800 kilometers from Beijing and 250 kilometers from its provincial capital, Jinan. Shaomen village was an isolated agricultural community. Fengying was born and raised in the period of time when the new People’s Republic of China was emerging and was struggling to complete its social transformations. At the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the government inherited a poor economy from the long war periods, these being the anti-Japanese war from 1937 to 1945 and the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists from 1945 to 1949. Inflation, floods, low industrial and agricultural production badly injured the nation’s economy and its people’s life. Since 1949 various strategies were implemented to balance and take control of society. By 1956 the government proclaimed its completion of “socialist transformation.” Private property had been abolished and collectivization system implemented in the rural areas. In 1958, as a policy to further deepen its socialist transformation in the countryside, People’s Communes were implemented in rural China. Chinese peasantry were organized into working brigades and further into communes to work on collective projects and on collective land. Despite these economic and social reforms and its declaration of an advanced political social structure, in the 1950s China remained a poor country. Fengying was the eldest child in her family and had four brothers and a sister. At the time Fengying’s father was working with the commune’s transportation team. His job was to travel with the team loading and unloading goods. Fengying’s mother, as a member of the production brigade, took part in agricultural work in the collective land. Since both her parents were

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tied to outside work, as the eldest child, Fengying started helping with the household chores at a very young age. She recalled: I was about five years old. One time I was cleaning dishes. I couldn’t reach the wash basin on the table, so I stood on top of a little bench. There were so many dishes and I piled them all up. When I was about to finish and get down the bench, I knocked the plates and bowls down and then everything collapsed. My mother heard the sound and rushed into the room. And when she saw the broken pieces of plates and bowls on the ground, she burst into anger and came towards me. I was so scared and run out of the room. I climbed across the fence and run into my grandma’s house for protection.

Fengying said that it was a common belief in her village at the time that a girl’s role in the family was to help her mother do daily life household work such as cooking meals, feeding house animals, and an elder girl was also expected to assist her mother in taking care of her siblings. Fengying was unexceptionally fulfilling the responsibilities that were expected on her. Though Fengying commented in my interview with her that she could not imagine asking a five-year-old today to do all the work expected of her, she did not complain or feel sorry about not being able to enjoy a carefree childhood. Instead, when recalling these episodes from her childhood, Fengying seemed to be happy and satisfied with the image of herself as a capable child. She said that she tried to do everything that her mother asked her to do and also tried to be a good big sister to her brothers and sister. At the age of eight Fengying told her mother that she wanted to go to school. Fengying’s mother did not like the idea so much since she definitely needed Fengying’s help at home. Most girls in Fengying’s village were left at home to help with housework. Only two out of 10 girls in her village went to school. In addition to the need for help with housework, peasants in Fengying’s community did not see the logic of sending a girl to school since she would grow up, get married, and become a “person of other’s family.” They did not see any return on educating a girl. But, Fengying said “I didn’t know why, I just wanted to go to school, I wanted to be like the boys, I wanted to go to school.” Fengying insisted on going to school but at the same time promised her mother that she would continue to fulfill her housework responsibilities. She told her mother: “I would not fail to watch on the kids, I would not fail to cook meals, but, I want to go to school.” Fengying’s mother accepted her daughter’s request with this promised condition of fulfilling all her duties. This negotiation victory gained Fengying the opportunity to go to school. Fengying described her early schooling as follows: When I went to school I brought my two brothers with me. I held the younger one in one arm and took the hand of the elder one. When the elder one cried

260 • XIAO RUI ZHANG and also asked me to hold him, I would put down the younger one for a while and run to hold and comfort the elder one. [On my way to school and back home] I run back and forth to hold and put down the two of them in turn. When I was in class, I put them on each side of me. They were quiet since if they made noise I would hit them later. They knew that. After school I would run in a hurry to home and cook for my mother. By the time my mother got home from her work in the field, I got the food ready for her. I directed my elder brother to bring water for my mother to wash her face and get ready to eat. Mother was happy about that.

Fengying laughed and said that she now believed that the food should not be good. However, it made life run smoothly for her family. Through Fengying’s tone of narrating her childhood experience, I discovered an individual with complex and contradictory subjectivities. On the one hand, Fengying’s construction of her self-image as a good daughter and good big sister represents a way of believing that reflects or fits into the traditional Chinese cultural discourse that was dominant in the rural community in which she was living. Obeying the Confucian doctrine of women’s subordinate social and family roles, Fengying perceived helping with household work and taking care of her siblings as the unavoidable responsibilities of women. She did not think of rejecting such expectations, and viewed her accomplishment of such responsibilities as a proof of herself as a good girl. In other words, her narrative of her childhood experience reveals a discursively constrained individual in ways of thinking and interpreting her social experience. Interestingly enough, at the same time, the young Fengying seemed to be aware of men’s power over women dictated by Confucianism. She was determined to obtain, through extra effort, the opportunity of getting the same education provided for boys. Her intension of “wanting to be like the boys” demonstrates an agentive resistance to the traditional cultural discourse, on the other hand. I would argue here that the discursive formation process of “ideological becoming” (Bakhtin, 1981) functioned as the motivating force that activated Fengying’s agency and enabled her to take up an alternative subject position. AN OUTSTANDING STUDENT: FENGYING’S EDUCATION EXPERIENCE The good and capable daughter Fengying also played an outstanding role at school. In elementary school she was elected the “road leader” who was given the responsibility of organizing the students on their way home after school. She said: After school students living in neighborhood would line up and walk home together. I would stand by the side of the queue and gave instructions to them. I led them to sing songs along our way home. I started the song with

Agency as Seen through the Life Story of a Chinese Peasant Woman • 261 “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng,”1 “we are determined…” then everyone would follow me and continue singing the rest of the song. My brother was in the line, too. He was very proud of me and saying to other students: “see the road leader is my sister.”

Fengying’s memory of her elementary school time reflects her image of herself as an outstanding student. This self-image continued on to her middle and high school period. She always took on various kinds of leadership roles in school activities—organizing agricultural field work events, leading the political study groups, etc. However, I discovered that Fengying’s memory of her middle and high school time was limited, segmental and had very little to do with academic study. She said: During that time, nobody cared about academic study. We did labor work, and participated in the movement of Criticizing Lin [Biao] and Criticizing Kong [Confucius].2 If you worked well, and actively involved yourself in the political activities, you were evaluated as a good student.

Fengying’s recall of her middle and high school life seemed to reflect a memory of herself as a regular member of the production brigade. A common image of “student life” as a time of academic learning seemed to be missing from Fengying’s experience. Fengying’s secondary school period parallels that of the Cultural Revolution. It was the time when regular academic studies were basically abandoned in school classrooms since academic work was viewed as symbols of the feudal past and the bourgeois present. Texts of traditional Chinese thought as well as foreign books were destroyed. Chairman Mao’s “Red Treasured Book” (Hongbaoshu)3 became the only text for study. Students were organized into groups to participate in endless “thoughts of Mao Zedong” study meetings and "class struggle" sessions. The focus of school education was to train the students to be individuals with work skills and Chinese communist ideology. Fengying’s teenage social experience was constructed by the revolutionary discourses at the time through which she was created and portrayed as a particular kind of “model student” and outstanding individual. Though the Cultural Revolution is given a negative evaluation today, yet, this period seems to remain a somewhat good memory in Fengying’s mind. She did not complain about being deprived of the opportunity for further academic training. However, it is also not without regret that Fengying unquestioningly accepts her teenage experience. As she said, “it was my fate.” By the time Fengying graduated from high school in the mid 1970s, a new type of secondary school system had emerged in China’s rural areas. This system called for local community—peasant production brigade and commune—controlled schools. The goal and curricula of such schools,

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different from the state administered school, were to reflect the peasants’ voices and to train students to meet particular local needs. Due to Fengying’s outstanding performance in high school, she was offered the opportunity to be a teacher at the elementary school in her village. This was viewed as an award for her performance. Fengying remembered the occasion when people in her production brigade hit gongs and drums to send her off to the school for her first class. Fengying enjoyed her work at the school and she taught there for two years. One of the regrets that Fengying had was that she missed the opportunity of going to university. In the middle of 1970s, after about ten years of interruption during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), universities in China started to resume. In the first few years university admission was based on recommendations of various communities. Fengying said that two people in her village were sent, in a row, to university through the recommendation system in the two years before she graduated from high school. She said that she knew that it was her turn to be given such an opportunity. However, in the year of her graduation the system was suddenly abandoned. The new policy required all university admissions to be based on entrance exams. She took the test but failed. Fengying explained that since she hardly did any academic study in high school, a lot of the questions were beyond her limited knowledge. However, there were also questions that were extremely easy, along the lines of “what is one plus one?” Since the answers were so obvious, Fengying was thinking that there must be some political motive behind the questions. She was so afraid of writing down the politically wrong answer that she finally decided to give up on those questions. Thus, Fengying lost the chance of going to university. After high school Fengying taught at elementary school for two years, she was then promoted to three important positions in her village. It was the year when she had just turned 20 years old. She was given three heavy responsibilities: she was appointed the Chair of the Youth League, the Chair of the Women’s Organization soon after, and was also put in the production brigade’s accounting office to be in charge of loans in her village. As the Chair of the Youth League, she organized about 100 young people for all kinds of agricultural and political activities. These young people under Fengying’s leadership include not only those who were originally from her village but also those who were “sent down” to the countryside from the cities.4 As the Chair of the Women’s Organization, her major responsibility was to implement the policy of child birth control. As an accountant, Fengying had a lot to learn about the loan business. She said that now she could not imagine how a 20-year-old young girl could do all these jobs. But, she did manage the work quite successfully at the time. Although she said that she was extremely busy everyday and hardly had time to eat meals, she did not remember that she felt tired. She was singing, running, and

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laughing all the time. Because Fengying was earning work credits equal to that of two men at the time, she could build a three room house for her mother. When summarizing her pre-marriage life, Fengying said that she was like a “bright star” in her village. Compared to the commonly negative evaluation of the Cultural Revolution in Chinese society today, Fengying’s memory of her youth experience during this time seems to be a happy one. In spite of the fact that she was deprived of the opportunity of receiving regular secondary academic education, and though she lost her chance of going to university due to the sudden change of policy, Fengying did not complain much about her losses. She perceived it as her own “fate” and received it without questioning its unfairness. Instead, in Fengying’s narrative of her youth experience, I hear a tone of satisfaction. As one who was from a poor peasant family background, Fengying was positioned as a member of the leading revolutionary social class and was given a central role in the revolutionary movement. And, as a woman, she was chosen as a model of the communist “women’s liberation” propaganda. Fengying’s apparent successful discursive practice during the time seems to engage her in a positive view of her experience. Fengying’s narrative about her youth experience reveals an individual who was recruited by the social discourses at that time. Her view of her past demonstrates her subjectivity constructed by the revolutionary discourses of the time. Fengying shows a passive mode of a socio-historically produced subject, who was not provided alternative ways to evaluate her experience during the Cultural Revolution. However, it is worth noting that, at the same time, looking from a different perspective, Fengying’s optimistic construction of her past experience, a life period that cannot be retrieved, reveals an active mode of a social agent who chose to interpret her social experience in a positive way. Today, living in a difference socio-cultural context, Fengying was not being unaware of the many things that she missed during her youth, for example, opportunity for further education. That is why she was determined to work hard to send her children to universities. However, she knew that lamenting the past could not do much help. Fengying, thus, chose to have a positive interpretation of her past experience. She seems to demonstrate an agency of interpretation in constructing her life experience. MARRIAGE LIFE IN A NEW ENVIRONMENT: BELIEF IN EFFORT AND CHANGE Contrary to her memory of her youth, Fengying’s narrative about her life after marriage was dark and heavy. She said that her life seemed to turn in an opposite direction after she moved into her husband’s village. Fengying got to know her husband, Xiuxi, through youth activities when she was the Chair of the Youth League. Fengying said that at the time she

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was not thinking about dating and getting married. She hoped that after she got more settled she would look for a man with a stable and somewhat established career. However, she met Xiuxi unexpectedly and after a period of getting to know him, Fengying’s heart was taken by this young man’s deep passion for her. She also appreciated his honest personality. After Xiuxi proposed to Fengying, she agreed to visit his home to discuss marriage. Fengying then went to Xiuxi’s home in a village which was about 10 kilometers away from her home. Fengying described the visit as follows: When I entered his home, I was so shocked at the family’s poverty! The house was in a very poor condition and there was nothing in the house. His mother had to run to their neighbor’s house to borrow a pot to pour me hot water and a bowl of rice to cook for me. I was so shocked that I got on my bicycle and left his home right away. Then, Xiuxi ran after me and tried very hard to stop me. I stopped many times and told him that I regretted and I couldn’t marry him. But, he did not give up. He cried and begged me to stay. Finally, we got to the bridge at the entrance of his village. I felt sad and pain for him and could not continue to move on and leave him behind like that. I agreed.

The next problem Fengying had to face was to persuade her mother to agree to her marriage. Fengying’s mother had a tough attitude towards her daughter’s decision. She said that every woman wanted to get married into a comfortable and wealthy family. She emphasized that picking a poor family meant to choose a hard life. Fengying argued that if people only consider getting rich, then the poor would get poorer. She believed that the poor people needed help so that they did not stay poor forever. Fengying believed in change and, furthermore, she believed in making change. She asserted that “people have two hands. They can make change through hard work.” Fengying’s mother was not convinced by what she considered naïve thinking and pushed hard against this decision by saying that if Fengying insisted on marrying Xiuxi, she would break the motherdaughter relationship and would not allow Fengying to come back to her home. However, by this time Fengying was very much determined to marry Xiuxi. She then kept up her promise to Xiuxi and married him. Fengying got married in 1981. It was the time when various social and economic reforms were undertaken in China. The dominant ideology turned from “the poorer the better” (queqiong yuehao) in Mao’s revolution time to the opposite direction of “looking towards money” (xiang qian kan). There was then a generally accepted discourse in Chinese society that getting rich was important and essential to a happy life. Many Chinese women considered marriage as a path to improve their material life conditions. Fengying’s decision seemed to go against such popular social discourse. While not being able to go to university was “fate,” the issue of getting married presented other options. She could choose not to marry the

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poor Xiuxi. However, driven by her deep passion for Xiuxi, Fengying made a decision against the common social discourse and her mother’s will. Her decision may also reflect her compassion for the poor as well as her belief in her ability to make change. I would like to argue that Fengying’s agency in making her decision was embedded in her passion and compassion for another individual. It also came from her self-confidence in her ability to change her husband’s family financial condition with her own two hands. GETTING MARRIED AND RELOCATING IN A DIFFERENT SOCIAL DISCURSIVE PRACTICE Things did not go as smoothly as Fengying had wished. In my interviews with her, when telling me stories of her post-marriage life, Fengying always had a sad look on her face. She burst into tears from time to time when describing her “sad stories.” She said that her life changed drastically after she got married and moved into her husband’s village. She realized her “naivety” that her mother had warned her against. In her new home Fengying had to struggle for adequate food, for a shelter for herself and her children. She was no longer the respected young leader as she was before in her own village. She was now a “little wife,” an outsider and a newcomer moving into a conservative community. In addition to poverty, Fengying also discovered the marginalized position of her husband’s family in the village. Xiuxi’s father died when Xiuxi was twelve years old. He had three sisters and a brother. The five children were all raised by their mother and the family’s finances relied solely on the mother’s work income. In the countryside at the time, due to inadequacy of the legal system as well as the educational level of the peasants, decision making and benefit distribution were largely affected by power plays in the local community as well as physical strength and social power of men in their roles within communities. Xiuxi’s family was in a disadvantaged position in terms of masculine power, and they were treated roughly in many ways. When Fengying and her husband applied for a place to build their own house, they were given an unwanted piece of land where dead people had been buried. There were also times when trees grown on their land were taken away without notice and no monetary compensation. Fengying said that when she first moved into the village, she had a bad feeling about the strange attitudes of the people around her. Facing this tough environment, Fengying believed that a better life could be created through hard work. She put what she believed into action. In the first two years after they got married, Fengying’s husband worked for the village’s carpet manufacture factory while Fengying worked in her home village. In order to increase their amount of agricultural production, Fengying worked early in the morning or late at night to try to cultivate every piece of waste land that she could find in her husband’s village. She planted and grew wheat and vegetables on the land. Fengying worked hard

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and her efforts were rewarded. Fengying and her family made their living on products from their extra land for four or five years. However, the land was then taken away by the village with no compensation to Fengying. Fengying did not complain much about it. She said that at least she used it for some time and that helped her family. Struggling and creating living spaces for her family seemed to be a major issue in Fengying’s life after marriage. In addition to cultivating land for agricultural products, Fengying also had to struggle to find a stable dwelling space. In the first few years after Fengying got married, she stayed at her mother-in-law’s house. But, due to a family argument, Fengying was one day suddenly forced by her mother-in-law to move out of the house. The sad scene left a deep scar in Fengying’s mind: I remember clearly that it was a cold night in the fall. My mother-in-law got so angry at me since I urged her to tear down her old house so that we could build a new one instead. She didn’t like the idea since she thought I was intending to take her property. She then forced me to leave her house right away. It was at midnight. I woke up my three little kids, put on clothes for them, and told them that we had to leave their grandma’s house right away. My kids cried, I cried, and we walked out of the house and went into darkness. Then, I realized that it was raining outside. I worried about my kids. So, I went back, kneeled down and begged my mother-in-law to let us stay until dawn. I promised that I would leave her house the next day. I said that even if you hated me you should at least think about your grandchildren. But, my mother-in-law still insisted that we leave right at the moment. So, I took my kids and we walked in the mud for a long time. We finally found a house which was in the middle of construction. We stayed there for the night. Later, I got the sympathy of the owner and he permitted us to have a short stay there.

Recalling this past experience, Fengying cried with deep sadness. She said that she had not expected that life would be so hard for her in this new environment. She attempted suicide several times, but failed. She then thought about her children. Her awareness of her responsibility for raising her children provided her with the strength to continue her life and to keep making efforts to improve life conditions for her family. Fengying and her husband borrowed money to have their own simple house built. They then tried to run several different small businesses to pay back the loan and raise their children. In the early 1980s, with the gradual implementation of economic and social reform policies, the collectivization system was abandoned in rural China. Land was divided for individual family use. Peasants obtained freedom to use their land and run their own businesses. Fengying and her husband started with a small business in which they brought wheat from the villagers to a nearby factory for threshing. They earned fees for this service. With the little money they saved from the business, Fengying bought and planted apple trees on

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her family’s “responsibility land” (zeren tian), the piece of land that was authorized for her family use. She worked hard to have a good harvest. Fengying remembered that one time a heavy rain attacked her fruit garden and knocked the apples off the trees. She realized that she could not afford to lose the apples. She then rushed into the pouring rain and picked up the apples one by one. She worked until she used up all her energy and collapsed on the ground. Fengying sold her own produce on a pull cart in the street. Often she had her apples and her children on the same cart. In order to save money, she brought cold food with her from home when she left for work in the morning. Fengying and her children hid themselves under the cart to eat their lunch. They headed for home from the center of the town at night in darkness. Fengying would then cook dinner for her children for the day and prepare food to be brought with them the next day. In Fengying’s memory her life was filled with hard work. But, she believed that she had been making change little by little. Fengying’s life after marriage was full of struggles against poverty, which demonstrates an individuals’ agency in process. To solve the essential survival problem, Fengying worked hard to cultivate waste land to increase the amount of agricultural production for her family. When deprived of a dwelling space, Fengying managed to build a simple house for her children. Facing tough financial conditions, Fengying attempted various small businesses to improve her family’s income. She was determined to resist the subject positions that were offered to her—inadequate food supply, no dwelling space, and harsh financial conditions. I would like to argue that Fengying’s agency came from her basic needs for surviving and from her passion for her family. And, it was a result of her resistance to the dominating discourses in her social life. THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING A MOTHER MAKES FENGYING THINK DIFFERENTLY Getting married and becoming a mother embeds Fengying in another set of discourses. At the age of 18, right after she graduated from high school, Fengying was appointed the Chair of the Women’s Organization in her village. One of her major responsibilities was to implement the then national policy of birth control, which allowed only one child for each married couple. Accordingly, all women were required to have a sterilization operation after giving birth to one child. Fengying’s job was to urge women to have the operation and make sure that they followed through. She did a successful job. All the geographic areas that she was in charge were evaluated as models of success. Fengying firmly believed in the rationality of such a policy and was determined to carry it out. She was awarded the “model” leader and was very proud of this fact for a period of time.

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However, after getting married, Fengying gave birth to and raised four children herself. I asked Fengying why she herself did the contrary to her advice to other women. Fengying told me the following: After I got married and had my first child, my way of thinking changed. I thought that it was a wrong thing to do not to let a woman to have children as she wanted. I remembered the old Chinese saying that the worst thing to do was to prevent people from having sons to continue their family. Some families had only girls, of course, they would want boys. Also, my own experience of living in my husband’s village told me that a family in the countryside needed man’s power. Not enough man’s power would result in being bullied. So, I decided that even if I would have to lose a lot of opportunities, I had to have more children. I had already done the job as the Chair of the Women’s Organization enough. I wouldn’t care if they fired me.

Fengying gave birth to her first son at her mother’s home while she was still continuing her work at her home village. Thus, people in her husband’s village did not know that Fengying had had a child. A year and a half later Fengying’s second son was born in her husband’s village and people thought that it was her first child. Later, when people discovered that she had two children, Fengying was removed from her position as the Chair of the Women’s Organization. Since she had married and moved out of her home village, she was also removed from the other positions she held there. Fengying did not regret losing her positions at all. She said that she had always been thinking that she made the right decision to have all her children instead of keeping her jobs. Fengying was also proud at the fact that she used to help some women in her village to escape the sterilization operation. She said: After I became a mother, I could feel how a woman felt about having children. When Liying [one woman in her village] was forced to have the operation, I saw the sadness in her eyes. I suddenly felt great sympathy to her. I took her away from the hospital and gave her the certificate showing that she had already done the operation. I did it several times for other women, too

and I felt I was like a Bodhisattva. I saved many kids’ lives. Fengying’s own experience of being a mother provided her with an alternative way of thinking and behaving. She was now having a very different interpretation of the national policy of birth control. She no longer thought that sterilization was the right thing to do as she used to perceive it. She thought that the policy served to deprive women of their right to have children, and that sterilization was a behavior equal to killing. She perceived her own action of giving false operation certificates as a way to save children’s life. Fengying’s experience reveals that thinking differently

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becomes possible when our discursive practice shows conflicts with the authoritative discourse--what we were told or expected to believe. It is worth noting that besides her own personal experience of being a mother, Fengying’s resistance to the authoritative discourse of one-child policy also came from traditional Chinese cultural discourses. In the long course of Chinese feudal society, influenced by Confucianism, giving birth to and raising children was viewed as the major responsibility of a woman. In the patriarchical social system, only men could carry on and continue their family history. Thus, giving birth to boys was viewed as an important task for a woman. In the Chinese countryside, due to the required hard labor, having boys was considered more important than in urban areas. It was this socio-cultural discourse that enabled Fengying to change her attitude and behavior towards the then national policy of birth control. It could be said that in the conflict between the traditional Chinese cultural discourse and the contemporary national authoritative discourse, Fengying’s personal discursive practice influenced her choice of the former. Her agency reveals an active mode of resistance on the one hand, while at the same time a passive one in subjecting herself to the traditional cultural discourse on the other hand. Through these conflicting experiences and feelings, Fengying demonstrates the complexity and multi-layeredness of human agency. CONTINUOUS EFFORT IN MAKING CHANGE Getting rid of poverty and gaining self-esteem appear to be the major forces that push Fengying to move forward. Through years of hard work, Fengying and her husband saved some money and decided to expand their fruit-selling business. She then began to import fruit from outside of her province and started a wholesale business in her local market. In order to save time and run her business smoothly, Fengying and her husband built a very simple “home” right in the marketplace. This home was a two-box shelter constructed from pieces of wood board. Each of the boxes was only big enough for a bed and a desk. It served as a space for the whole family to release their tiredness of the day and regain energy for their next day’s work. An old gas stove outside of the boxes was used to make simple food for the whole family. Fengying and her husband continued this life-style for about fifteen years and during this period they sent their four children from this small home out to college and one on to graduate school. When their second and third children graduated from college, they helped Fengying and her husband with their family business. Their first son is completing his master’s degree and moving on to pursue his doctorate. The youngest son will complete his college education and begin a master’s program next year. When I visited Fengying’s family in their simple house in the summer of 2008, I felt the simplicity of their life and at the same time the tremendous energy of this family. Fengying spent all her money sending her four

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children to college, and she said that she was happier with her children having good education than having her own house built. Fengying’s experience taught her that hard work could lead to positive change. Effort resulted in a better life. Over the years Fengying was positioned in a life condition of poverty and marginalization. She did not own a living space for herself and her children; she was not provided with adequate resources for living a comfortable life. However, she struggled to change all of these disadvantages. She managed to cultivate land for extra agricultural production for survive, she raised a family and continuously improved their life through her hard work. She transformed her wish for a higher level of education for her children to reality. Fengying’s personal life experience reveals how one individual reacted positively to various challenging social historical discourses. It shows how the basic human desire for a better life, passion and compassion acted as a driving force for action, for making choice and decisions. Fengying tells us that human agency is the very energy that comes out of our desire to make change. WHAT FENGYING TELLS US ABOUT HUMAN AGENCY: HUMAN AGENCY REVISITED Fengying’s narrative of her life story helped me to answer some of my original questions concerning human agency, these being: What are the factors and conditions that enable us to thinking differently and resist the subject positions that we are offered? What are the processes of subjectivity transformation? And, what are some of the characteristics of human agency? In what follows, I will summarize what Fengying has taught us. Fengying tells us that as social subjects we are confined by the social discourses in which we live (Althusser, 1971; Foucault, 1972, Weedon, 1997). However, there are complex and contradictory multi-layered as well as multi-directional discourses in our discursive practices (Caldwell, 2007). It is the complexity and conflicts among the various discourses that provide us with possibilities of thinking differently and resisting certain subject positions. When the conflicts and contradictions in discourses appear in discursive practices, something significant to the individual (Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2001) is needed to trigger agency to be activated. In addition, some discursive, personal, and social resources (Davis, 1990) should be available to the individual. In what follows I will demonstrate the above proposed framework by reviewing Fengying’s life experiences. As a girl, confined by the rural local community discourse, Fengying perceived doing household chores and taking care of her siblings as her unquestioned responsibility. She viewed carrying on such responsibilities successfully as proof of herself as a good and a capable girl. But, at the same time, she saw for herself another way of being—to be like the boys and go to school, instead of staying at home as expected of girls. Fengying’s

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self-reflexivity, her perception of herself as a member of her “imagined community” (Anderson, 1991)—to be like the boys—seem to serve as a significant issue in her subjectivity transformation. Discursive resources (Davis, 1990), Fengying’s ability to recognize the alternative ways for her “to be,” provided necessary conditions for her agency to be activated. As a young student, recruited by the revolutionary discourse of the time, Fengying actively involved herself in the social political movements and constructed herself as a “model” youth. She perceived her leadership roles in the Youth League, the Women’s Organization, and in her village as symbols of individual success and career accomplishment. Even decades after the Cultural Revolution, Fengying was still in a mode of acceptance of the political movement that deprived her of a regular school life and academic study. She perceived her loss as her “fate.” At this point Fengying seems to demonstrate a passive mode towards her discursive practice (Foucault, 1972). However, it can be interpreted that Fengying chose not to give this period of her life a negative evaluation since it represents a peak in her personal life and her social practice, which was significant to the construction of her self-esteem. Fengying’s decision in choosing her life partner reveals how passion and compassion can serve as an engine to activate human agency. It shows how the “significant other” can motivate an individual’s discursive behavior and transform her discursive practice. After her marriage, Fengying’s marginalized social experience in her husband’s village, her suffering from her poor family financial condition, all serve as oppressing power relations that pushed Fengying to resist such imposed subject positions. As Foucault states, “as soon as there is power relation, there is a possibility of resistance” (Foucault, 1988a, p. 123). Raising her children, providing food and shelter to her family became the significant issue to Fengying. At this point social resources (Davis, 1990), the emotional connection to her family members, her deep love of her children, provided significant and tremendous agency in Fengying to fight against poverty and for a social and physical space for her family. Fengying’s successful personal social experience before marriage told Fengying that she was a strong, powerful, and capable individual. Thus, it enabled her to believe in her capability to fight and make change. In addition, Fengying was also supported by the discourse that human beings can make changes in their environment and that hard work will lead to the improvement of life conditions, a popular social cultural discourse advocated during Mao’s revolution period (Tang & Holzner, 2007). It can be said that the significant issues or people, the discursive practice, and the power relations or oppressing discourses in Fengying’s discursive practice work together as the driving power for Fengying’s agency and subjectivity transformation.

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Personal discursive practices provide sources for thinking differently. Fengying’s experience of being a mother made her resist the national authoritative discourse of birth control, which she had previously accepted, and turn to the traditional Chinese cultural discourses about women having children. Her empirical experience recruited her to a different set of discourses. Fengying’s resistance and agency demonstrates a shift from believing what she was told to that of responding to what she experienced. Fengying’s stories echo the characteristics of agency depicted in Davis’ (2009) exploration of Hawai’i youth experience. As Davis puts it, the postmodern notion of agency is “illusionary and transitory” and that shifts “across the spectrum of empowerment and oppression occur moment by moment and is highly dependent on contextual circumstances” (p. 225). Fengying’s stories also reveal an individual who is in a continuous on-going process of subjectivity construction and reconstruction, whose agency enables the possibility of her “ideological becoming” (Bakhtin, 1981). TIMELINE. 1956: Fengying born to a peasant’s family in Shandong province. 1964: 8-year-old goes to elementary school. 1966: The Cultural Revolution started, soon schools were closed. 1968: Urban youth sent to the countryside to receive education from peasants. 1969: 13-year-old goes to middle school. 1971: 15-year-old goes to high school. 1973: 17-year-old graduates from high school, becomes an elementary school teacher. 1975: 19-year-old takes responsibilities as President of the Youth League, Chair of the Women’s Organization, and village accountant. 1977: Universities reopened and the university entrance exam resumed. 1980: The one-couple one-child policy implemented. 1981: Gets married to Xiuxi. 1984: Deng Xiao Ping goes to Shenzhen and the economic reform is started. 1982: Gives birth to her first son. Still working at her original village. 1983: Gives birth to her second son. Moves to her husband’s village. 1985: Gives birth to her daughter. Fired from her work responsibilities. 1987: Gives birth to her third son. NOTES 1.

Lei Feng (Dec. 18, 1940–Aug. 15, 1962) was a soldier of the People’s Liberation Army. A campaign initiated by Mao Zedong in 1963 af-

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2.

3. 4.

ter Lei Feng’s death advocated the spirit of selflessness, modesty, and dedication. A political campaign (1973–1974) started by Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing, which was used to indirectly attack the then-Premier Zhou Enlai. Quotations from Chairman Mao, known in the West as The Little Red Book. “Up to the mountains and down to the villages” (Shangshan xiaxiang) was a policy instituted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mao Zedong declared that urban youth should be sent to the countryside in order for them to learn from the peasants. The claimed goal was to release urban youth from bourgeois thinking. REFERENCES

Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation). In Lenin and philosophy and other essays (pp. 127–186). New York: Rutledge. Anderson, B. (1991). The imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). London: Verso. Anthias, F. (2002). Where do I belong?: Narrative collective identity and translocational positionality. Ethnicities, 2(4), 491–514. Atkinson, R. (1998). The life story interview. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogical imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Best, S., & Kellner, D. (1991). Postmodern theory: Critical interrogations. New York: The Guilford Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (1995). For a careful reading. In S. Benhabib, J. Bulter, D. Cornell, & N. Fraser (Eds.), Feminist contentions: A philosophical exchange (pp. 127–143). New York: Rutledge. Caldwell, R. (2007). Agency and change: Re-evaluating Foucault’s legacy. Organization, 14(6), 769–791. Davis, B. (1990). Agency as a form of discursive practice: A classroom scene observed. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 11(3), 341–361. Davis, K. (2009). Agentive youth research: Towards individual, collective, and policy transformations. In T. G. Wiley, J. S. Lee, & R. Rumberger (Eds.), The education of language minority immigrants in the USA (pp. 202–239). London: Multilingual Matters. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language (A. M. S. Smith, Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1983). The subject and power. In H. L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (2nd ed.) (pp. 208–226). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

274 • XIAO RUI ZHANG Foucault, M. (1988a). Power and sex. In L. D. Kritzman (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings 1977–1984 (pp. 110–124). New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1988b). The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom. In J. Bernauer & D. Rasmussen (Eds.), The final Foucault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foucault, M. (1988c). Technologies of the self. In L. M. Martin, H. Gutman & P. H. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self (pp. 16–49). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Goodson, I. F., & Sikes, P. (2001). Life history research in educational settings: Learning from lives. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Hatch, J. A., & Wisniewski, R. (1995). Life history and narrative: Questions, issues, and exemplary works. In J. A. Hatch, & R. Wisniewski (Eds.), Life history and the narrative (pp. 113–136). Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis. Lantolf, J. P., & Pavlenko, A. (2001). (S)econd (L)anguage (A)ctivity theory: Understanding second language learners as people. In M. P. Breen (Ed.), Learner contributions to language learning: New directions in research (pp. 141–158). Essex, England: Pearson Education. Lieblich, A., Tuval-Mashiach, R., & Zilber, T. (1998). Narrative research: Reading, analysis, and interpretation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Middleton, S. (1992). Developing a radical pedagogy: Autobiography of New Zealand sociologist of women’s education. In I. F. Goodson (Ed.), Studying teachers’ lives (pp. 18–50). London: Routledge. Sarup, M. (1993). Poststructuralism and postmodernism (2nd ed.). Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press. Schwandt, T. A. (1997). Qualitative inquiry: A dictionary of terms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. St. Pierre, E. A. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education: An overview. Qualitative Studies in Education, 13, 477–515. Tang, W., & Holzner, B. (Eds.). (2007). Social change in contemporary China. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh. Weedon, C. (1997). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Zhang, X. R. (2008). Subjectivity, discourse, and change over time: A longitudinal qualitative study of Chinese students in Japan. UMI No. 3326400.

PART III PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES AND PRACTICES

CHAPTER 12

TEACHERS ORGANIZING TO RESIST IN A CONTEXT OF COMPLIANCE Lucinda Pease-Alvarez and Alisun Thompson

U.S. teachers confront an enduring tension between professional autonomy and institutional control. While several scholars have described this tension as endemic to the way U.S. teachers have experienced their work (e.g., Grant & Murray, 1999; Ingersoll, 2003; Labaree, 1992), there is evidence that the current policy environment has exacerbated this tension (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2006; Alvarez & Corn, 2008; Pease-Alvarez & Samway, 2008). In recent years teachers have had little if any say when it comes to the development of policies which specify what and how they should teach and assess their students. Schools, districts, and governmental entities expect teachers to comply with these policy initiatives via strictly enforced accountability measures and external monitoring. Despite claims that these policies will help close the achievement gap that has come to characterize how students of different ethnic, linguistic, economic, and racial backgrounds experience schooling in the U.S., there is evidence that these policies are further constraining learning opportunities for English language learners and students of color in U.S. schools. Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 277–295 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Recently researchers have described occasions when teachers of English learners have attempted to resist these policies. By and large, these accounts focus on the acts of individual teachers who are sometimes supported, though usually not publicly, by their colleagues and principals. In contrast to these accounts of individual resistance, this chapter focuses on the efforts of a teacher collective known as Educators Advocating for Students (EAS), which is comprised of teachers committed to working together to resist policy initiatives that they think undermine learning opportunities available to English learners. In addition to reporting on the genesis of the group, we will focus on how the group resisted testing mandates as well as group members’ perspectives on the group’s accomplishments and activities. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Resistance has been defined in various ways from a variety of vantage points. From a structural perspective, resistance has been downplayed and deemed to “be reproductive of capitalist relations” (Hodson, 1995, p. 82). Some theorists have been dissatisfied with theories of agency which are either too anchored to rational choice theory (e.g. free will) or so bound to structure that agency is not cast as implicated in the shaping of social action (e.g. determinism). These theorists are unwilling to conceptualize agency and structure as oppositional forces in on-going binary tension (Shilling, 1992; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). For example, Emirbayer and Mische theorize agency as a dynamic process of social engagement that is influenced by the past (schemas of social experience and internalized limits), oriented towards the future (imagined options) and constituted in the present (normative judgment). To theorize agency as a mechanism of resistance, we draw from a range of theoretical perspectives, including institutional theory, feminist frameworks, and post colonial theory. For example, drawing from Gidden’s theory of structuration, Shilling (1992) theorizes agency as a dynamic process; “structures are not social facts which exist apart from individuals, but sets of ‘rules’ and ‘resources’ which actors draw on, and hence reproduce in social interaction…[but] they do not determine behavior” (Shilling, 1992, p. 78). Agents enact structures—it is through instantiation that they endure. In conceptualizing the role of agency in resistance, structures are not static and given but are actively reproduced, challenged, and transformed by social actors. Structures exist to the extent that actors reproduce them. In feminist examinations of power and agency, women’s resistance has been conceptualized as understood from their position as objects. Yet, as Betina Aptheker and others state, women’s resistance does not always directly contest power, especially when power is dispersed through the web of contextual domains in which we live and work (Munro, 1998). This leaves

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open forms of resistance that take up or in some way appropriate dominant ideologies. According to Aptheker (1989), this form of resistance can “have a profound impact on the fabric of social life because of its steady cumulative effects” (p. 183). Similarly, scholars drawing on critical and post colonial frameworks have underscored the transformative power of individual and collective agency via accounts of subtle, even surreptitious, acts of resistance among those holding subordinate positions within authoritarian ecologies. Most notable is Scott’s conception of everyday acts of resistance among peasants and slave populations as having the potential to incur social change. Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own. (Scott, 2002. p. 95)

Over the course of the last 25 years, theories of resistance have emerged in an effort to explain the role power and agency play in the schooling process. These theories provide what many perceive to be a much needed contrast to social and cultural reproduction theories that explain power strictly in terms of macro forces and structural relations. Criticisms of resistance theories abound. Some hold that intentions and purposes underlying resistance must be grounded in a critique of social conditions and/or aim for social transformation and social justice (e.g., Giroux, 1983). Others claim that such value-laden views of resistance lack empirical rigor and theoretical openness (Hargreaves, 1982). When applied to the work of teachers, there has been a tendency to treat teacher resistance as emanating from a general opposition to change (Bailey, 2000; Goodson, Moore, & Hargreaves, 2006; Hargreaves, 2005). Most prominently found in the school change literature is a depiction of teacher resistance as an expected feature of reform, manifesting as something to be planned for and managed. In addition, resistance within the context of school-change is generally undertheorized. For example, in her examination of mandated change, Bailey (2000) draws from school change literature to characterize prime conditions for enlisting teachers’ support of reform initiatives, but doesn’t deal at all with the political context of mandated change as the external control of teachers’ work. Given the context of high-stakes reform that framed Bailey’s work, it is unusual that she did not deal with the pressing and timely issue of receding teacher discretion and autonomy. Similarly, Hargreaves (2005) and Goodson et al. (2006) paint a picture of the routinized teacher, ultimately preferring the known to the unknown, whatever the context. In all of these cases, reform is similarly depoliticized; the nature of the reform or power relations in the implemen-

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tation of reform are excluded from the analysis, projecting the notion that all reforms are equal and an expected condition of schooling. In contrast to this prevalent view, a growing number of scholars, including those examining teacher’s responses to top-down policy initiatives, take the view that resistance must be considered within the multifaceted ecology of teachers’ working lives (Ball, 2003; Gitlin & Margonis, 1995; Honan, 2004) and that examinations of resistance must include considerations of power (Bushnell, 2003; Kerr, 2006). Within this body of literature, situated outside the area of school change, researchers examine resistance from a more politicized perspective. Woods (1994), Ball (2003), Bushnell (2003), MacGillivray et al. (2004), Achinstein & Ogawa (2006) and Pease-Alvarez & Davies-Samway (2008) investigate resistance within the context of the current reform period and examine the nature of resistance to particular instructional mandates and the rapid increase of external control over teachers’ work. MacGillivray et al. (2004) and Ball (2003) theorize about the particular qualities of control in what Ball refers to as “performativity” and MacGillivray characterizes as the “neocolonization” of teachers’ work. Both theoretical constructs are complimentary in that they situate resistance in the specific reform context of high-stakes accountability. Another strand of literature exploring a more politicized view of resistance involves resistance as emanating from discontinuity between reform initiatives and teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning. In this vein, Achinstein and Ogawa (2006) and Pease-Alvarez and Davies-Samway (2008) share findings that cast resistance as pedagogically inspired. Although the samples were distinctly different in the two studies, with Achinstein & Ogawa looking at new teachers at various schools and Pease-Alvarez & Davies-Samway studying teachers across career stages at one school, findings similarly reported teachers resisting mandates based on beliefs about quality teaching and the learning needs of their students. Woods (1994) found similar trends of pedagogical resistance across two school populations in England. Similarly, Gitlin and Margonis (1995) offer the perspective of resistance as “good sense.” Essentially, they advance the position that teachers’ responses to reform should be taken seriously as they are likely to have insights into why reforms don’t result in change; in short, teachers see things outsiders might miss. These strands, in sharp contrast to the school change literature, offer a common conceptualization of resistance as agential and pedagogical. Given these comparisons, we do not conceive of teachers as mere conduits of policy initiatives or ideological perspectives of the institutions that regulate their working lives. Rather, we conceive of teachers as critical agents in the policy-making process. In fact, researchers agree that even when policies are enforced in a top-down manner and highly monitored, teachers remain a critical agent in the policy’s translation into practice (Co-

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hen, 1995; Cuban, 1990; Ruth, 2000). It appears that in order for reform to stick, regardless of teachers’ levels of involvement in the development of the policy, a critical degree of teacher buy-in is essential. In fact, researchers have found that when it comes to classroom implementation, teachers are frequently the gate-keepers of educational policy initiatives (Bailey, 2000; Coburn, 2001; Datnow, Hubbard, & Mehan, 2002). Teachers’ implementation of top-down policy initiatives are mediated within the network of contexts, experiences, and relationships that constitute their professional and personal lives (e.g., Coburn, 2001, 2004; Datnow & Castellano, 2001; Datnow, et al., 2002; Hargreaves, 2003; Hill, 2001). Teachers who resist or enact curricular reform initiatives are engaged in purposeful and generative activity that reflects their professional identities, relationships, understandings, and positions, and how they make sense of these initiatives (Gitlin & Margonis, 1995; Hargreaves, 2003). Instead of conceiving of teachers’ opposition to or compliance with top-down mandates as reactionary unwillingness to change or blind submission to authority, researchers have found that teachers’ responses to these initiatives emanate from deeply held principles about learning and teaching as well as teachers’ own professional convictions about what it means to be a teacher (e.g., Achinstein & Ogawa, 2006; Datnow & Castellano, 2001: Joseph, 2006; MacGillivray, Ardell, Curwen, & Palma, 2004; Pease-Alvarez & Samway, 2008). In addition to locating the influences on teachers’ resistance within the multifaceted contexts in which they live and work, recent research elucidates the various manifestations of resistance within an authoritarian ecology that conceives of teachers as agents or authors of resistance. In so doing, this work has alerted us to creative and strategic manifestations of resistance as on-going negotiations between agents and structure (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). For example, Woods (1994) describes a form of resistance as appropriating reforms in ways that enable teachers to continue their pedagogical practice. He defines appropriation as taking something over and using it for one’s own ends and characterizes it as an oppositional strategy with, “power generated from below” (p. 251). Similarly, Pease-Alvarez and Samway (2008) describe two strategic forms of resistance as the surreptitious use of banned instructional practices and the tweaking of required curriculum with the approval/encouragement of administrators. Although much of the research portrays teacher resistance as individually authored and/or limited in scale, scholar activists have also described the resistive and public acts of teacher collectives. In contrast to perceptions about teacher unions as narrowly focused on “bread and butter” issues that have led to the erosion of public education (Moe, 2005), these scholars contribute to a view (and vision) of unions as vehicles of educational and pedagogical reform. In the edited volume, The Global Assault On Teaching,

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Teachers, and their Unions: Stories for Resistance, authors both document and comment on ways that teachers unions throughout the world are resisting initiatives that are part of a neoliberal assault on public education (Compton & Weiner, 2008). HOW WE APPROACHED OUR STUDY OF EDUCATORS ADVOCATING FOR CHANGE In the following account we examine a group of teachers’ collective efforts to negotiate district, state, and school-wide policy mandates. Set within a larger district context that upheld standardized approaches to instruction and assessment while suppressing the voice and autonomy of teachers and immigrant families, Educators Advocating for Students (EAS) first emerged as a space where teachers got together on a regular basis to share professional concerns and experiences. Over time, the group coalesced around a range of activities, including initiatives aimed at 1.

2. 3.

making sure that teachers and parents have a voice in deciding on the kinds of tests and assessments that teachers are required to use in their classrooms; formalizing ways to establish open and respectful communication between teachers and district administration; and educating the wider community about the inequities that low-income Latino students are facing due to district policies requiring one-size fits all approaches to instruction and accountability.

Research questions that guide our study include the following: • How is the group negotiating the current top-down policy environment in which they are working? • What resistive actions to policy initiatives and/or institutional authority does the group engage in? • What facilitates the group in its efforts to resist policy initiative and/ or institutional authority? • What impedes the group in its efforts to resist policy initiatives and or institutional authority? • How does involvement in the group affect participants’ professional lives and growth? As members of EAS we have taken on the role of participant researchers. In this role, we have assumed the primary responsibility of documenting as well as interrogating the activities and intentions of the group and the individuals comprising the group by collecting, transcribing and analyzing relevant data (e.g., field notes, audio recordings of meetings, conversations and interviews with participating teachers, web postings, emails, and news-

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paper articles). But more importantly, we are actively involved in the activities of the group. That is to say, as group members we are, like all group members, committed to changing status quos relations that have compromised the autonomy and integrity of teachers committed to enhancing the educational opportunities of their students. Nevertheless, given real and perceived differences in our roles and that of other group members (i.e., we are not currently practicing teachers employed by schools and districts facing policy and economic pressures), we struggle with the level of authority we should assume in the group. There have been times when we have pondered our actions within the group, worrying that we have been either too directive or, alternatively, too passive in our efforts to influence group actions. To facilitate our goal of understanding resistance in a way that draws on the lived experiences and interpretations of teachers, we draw on an expanded view of resistance as the actions teachers take or the views they assume that in some way contest or counter the actions, views, and ideologies of the institutions and individuals who have authority over their work. From our vantage point, this expansive view will enable the kind of theoretical openness absent in studies that begin by explicitly and narrowly defining the phenomena they set out to understand. POLICY AND THE SCHOOLING OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS To understand EAS and how it came to be, we must understand the educational policy environment that language minority students and their teachers are negotiating. In many nations throughout the world there has been an increased pressure toward the implementation of standardized curricula and assessment resulting in a de facto language policy environment upholding the status and role of national languages at the expense of other languages and multilingual modes of expression (e.g., Menken & García, 2010). As Evans and Hornberger (2005) describe when commenting on the implications of this policy environment in the U.S., the 2002 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education act, more widely known as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, represents a “policy shift away from a view of multilinglualism as resource and toward the imposition of monolingual English-only instruction in U.S. schools in a global context in which both multilingualism and multilingual language policies are as much in evidence as they ever were” (p. 29). Although this commitment to English monlingualism is evident in various features of the act, including the decision to eliminate any mention of bilingualism and bilingual education, nowhere is the enactment of an English-only orientation more apparent than in the accountability measures and accompanying provisions for standardized instruction that represent the key reform features of the act. With

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regards to testing, the act requires that 95% of each student subgroup, including students identified as English learners, be tested on a yearly basis in order to demonstrate adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward benchmarks on standardized tests in grades 3–8. Further, the English proficiency of English learners must be tested each year. Schools with student subgroups that fail to meet yearly targets in mathematics, English language arts, and science are subject to sanctions, which include providing parents with the option of transferring their children to another school, restructuring the curriculum and its “delivery,” offering supplemental tutoring, and, in the case of schools that repeatedly fail to meet AYP benchmarks, reassigning staff and school closure. Given the push for English learners to achieve in the area of English language arts as well as other subject areas that are tested in English, these sanctions have made English-only instruction appear as the only viable option for schools serving English learners. As Gándara and Baca (2008) emphasize, NCLB contains certain provisions that mitigate the use of English-only tests with all English learners. Title 1 of the act specifies that states must assess English learners in a valid and reliable manner and use “to the extent practicable, assessments in the language and form most likely to yield accurate data on what students know and can do in academic content areas” (p. 208). Further, Title 1 does not require English learners who have attended school in the U.S. for less than three consecutive school years to be tested in English for reading and language arts. Nevertheless, California has chosen to test all students in English in all subject areas, regardless of English proficiency or academic history in the U.S. Furthermore, in contrast to what is specified in the federal statute, standardized testing in California begins in the second grade. As Gandára and Baca argue, the English-only testing policy threatens the few remaining bilingual classrooms and programs that have managed to endure despite the passage of Proposition 227 in 1998, which stated that “all children in California public schools shall be taught English as rapidly and effectively as possible.” While Proposition 227 has been credited with narrowing the educational goals of English learners to the development of oral English (Gutiérrez et al., 2000), Reading First, a federal grants program under NCLB, has further constrained English language learners’ opportunities to learn language and literacy. Because schools receiving funding under Reading First must utilize specific reading programs that are aligned with findings from so-called scientifically-based research on reading instruction (as specified in a report issued by the National Reading Panel) opportunities to use language and literacy are limited to the domains and skills that those overseeing Reading First funds perceive to be highlighted in that report. Unfortunately, there are a number of issues with this requirement. First and foremost, The National Reading Panel did not include studies focused on the reading

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instruction or development of ELs, a feature of their report that the panel repeatedly alludes to in their report. In addition, Reading First requires schools to highlight those aspects of reading instruction around which the report was organized, which include the five areas of reading instruction the panel deemed to be important for native English speakers: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. In so doing, Reading First is not referencing specific findings in each of these areas but relying on the organizing principles of the panel to specify focus areas for instruction. Finally, Reading First specifies instructional programming that emphasizes decoding skills and what many describe as a prescriptive approach to instruction that has been widely criticized by educators who advocate sociocultural and constructivist pedagogical perspectives (Harper, de Jont, & Platt, 2008). Furthermore, in making these recommendations, Reading First further strays from the panel’s report, which cited limited evidence regarding the efficacy of these approaches when used with native English speaking students. In California, schools receiving Reading First funding must use one of two state approved reading programs in grades K-3: Open Court Reading, published by S.R.A. McGraw Hill, or Houghton Mifflin Reading published by Houghton & Mifflin. In addition to requiring teachers to utilize these commercial reading curricula, schools and districts throughout California insist that teachers adhere to pacing and testing schedules designed to enforce teachers’ implementation of these curricula. Recent research investigating the impact of these reform efforts has yielded some troubling findings. For example, the use of prepackaged curricula has been reported as not contributing to the reading achievement of struggling readers, including English language learners (Alvarez & Corn, 2008; Gutiérrez, BaquedanoLopez, & Asato, 2000; Moustafa, & Land, 2002; McGill-Franzen, Amach, Solic, & Zeig, 2006; Wilson, Martens, Arya, & Altwerger, 2004). Also, schoolwide efforts to enforce such programming may result in pedagogical environments that jeopardize the literacy learning opportunities available to students, including those serving English language learners in high poverty schools (Gerstl-Pepin & Woodside-Jiron, 2005; Sunderman, Kim, & Orfield, 2005). EAS began as an informal gathering of teachers working in schools in a medium- sized school district serving a student population from two very different communities; Arden Valley and Sunnyside. The majority of residents living in Sunnyside are white and middle class. In contrast, the majority population of Arden Valley is working class and of Mexican origin. In general, the schools in the district are segregated: most white students attend schools in the northern region of the district and the majority of Latino students, many of whom are officially designated as English learners, attend schools in the southern region.

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At the time EAS emerged, many teachers were struggling to negotiate a school district environment that was shaped by the aforementioned policy initiatives. In complying with state and federal policies, the district office engaged in a variety of efforts to make sure that teachers implemented these policies. The schools in the district were experiencing differential effects of NCLB, with schools serving largely middle income populations making AYP testing targets and experiencing far less scrutiny and loss of curricular autonomy than those schools that were not making their AYP testing targets. Indeed, EAS members serving large numbers of English learners, regardless of AYP designation, faced periodic monitoring of their classroom practices by a committee of district administrators. THE BEGINNING OF EAS A series of events led to the establishment of EAS. In October of 2007, a student teacher working with Elsa Richardson, a fifth-grade teacher who works in a school serving a majority EL student population, told Cindy and Melissa Stevens, an instructor in the UCSC teacher education program, that Elsa was frustrated with various school district policies, including the district mandate requiring elementary school teachers to use the Houghton Mifflin literacy program. After corresponding with Elsa via email, Cindy, Melissa, and Elsa met to discuss Elsa’s concerns and her plan to replace the Houghton Mifflin program with what she deemed to be a more studentcentered approach to literacy instruction. This was a plan that she had presented to both her principal and the assistant superintendent who oversaw curriculum and instruction at her school site. During their meeting, Elsa told Melissa and Cindy that both her principal and the associate superintendent rejected her plan. Determined to engage her students in a more meaningful approach to literacy instruction, she also told Cindy and Melissa that she had made the same request to the associate superintendent. In addition, she shared a number of other concerns regarding district policies, including the use of what she and other teachers call the “SCOE” to test students in English reading and writing, which she thought provided very limited information about children’s abilities and needs; her general concern regarding the lack of voice teachers had when it came to instructional decision making; and a growing lack of communication and trust between teachers and school and district administrators. After Cindy and Melissa mentioned that they had been in contact with teachers in Elsa’s district who were also concerned about similar issues, Melissa suggested that they get together with other teachers to share their experiences. Elsa resonated with this idea, saying that she thought such a meeting would break isolation among teachers and contribute to a sense that “teachers aren’t in this alone.”

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After contacting teachers via phone and personal emails, the group had its first meeting at Cindy’s house in early December. A total of six teachers from three different school sites attended, in addition to Cindy and Melissa. Immediately their discussion turned to assessment policies. In particular, teachers raised concerns about utilizing valuable instructional time to administer and prepare children for the SCOE and CST and having to spend additional time correcting and entering test scores into their schools’ database. When the conversation turned to what would happen if teachers did not administer the SCOE, Elsa shared that her principal had told her that she would be “written up” if she did not administer the test. Because she was curious to know what it meant to be “written up,” Elsa had contacted the district’s personnel director for an explanation. She told the group that the personnel director did not make “write ups” available to prospective employers. During the meeting, Margaret Wilson, a second grade teacher, shared a letter she had written to the district that summarized similar concerns about testing issues. When considering future actions, the group was eager to meet again and to see if they could encourage greater attendance at their next meeting. The group suggested a number of positive actions that they could take as a collective, including appearing on a community TV program dedicated to educational issues and using Margaret’s letter as the basis for an article or statement that could be sent to local newspapers. Over 25 teachers attended the next meeting held in late January of 2008. During that meeting, participants shared issues and set priorities for action. While a number of issues emerged, the group decided on a set of actions related to the district’s assessment policies, which included elaborating on and re-crafting Margaret’s letter into a position statement; obtaining teacher signatures endorsing the statement; sending the statement to local newspapers; and having teachers appear on a local TV program to discuss their concerns regarding district policies. The president of the district affiliate of the teachers’ union, who was present at the meeting, invited the group to become officially allied with the union by becoming the new Working Conditions Subcommittee of their local chapter. With the exception of the summer, the group has met at least once a month since its initial meeting in December of 2007. While the greatest number of teachers turned out for our January meeting, a core group of between eight to ten teachers has attended most meetings. Other teachers have, to various degrees, maintained contact with the group via a passwordprotected website that was established in Spring of 2008. The group also decided to give itself a name and adopt the following mission statement, which was composed by Alisun, after eliciting ideas from group members, and approved by the group during its May meeting.

288 • LUCINDA PEASE-ALVAREZ & ALISUN THOMPSON The EAS Coalition is a group of teachers committed to equity, diversity, student achievement, and community involvement. Central to the vision and mission of the group are concerns about the effects of the accountability movement including the misuse of time and resources for standardized testing, diminishment of formative assessments to guide and direct assessment, reduction of time for a balanced education (including the teaching of science, social studies, art, and music) as well as the positioning of textbooks as curriculum rather than teachers’ resources. The group is fundamentally opposed to the recently narrowed conception of schooling and the lack of time, attention, and resources allocated to children’s social-emotional development, and the fostering of their cultural and linguistic identity. We support the reinstatement of the teacher as an active and vital member of instructional decision-making and believe that teachers should be valued as professional stewards of the educational process. Our mission includes providing a forum for support, educating the community, and organizing advocacy efforts on behalf of our students and their families.

EAS’S STANCE ON TESTING POLICIES Although a number of actions have been discussed (e.g., proposing a slate for school board elections, making recommendations for textbook adoptions) the group has coalesced around actions related to the district’s assessment policies. Drawing on Margaret’s letter about district testing policies, EAS members crafted the following statement in late March of 2008. Program Improvement? Students across our district are currently losing over 100 hours of instructional time, 50 days of prime reading and writing instruction, due to mandated tests. Tack onto that another 30 plus hours lost for test preparation and practice. Very little of this actually helps students improve their skills, nor does it give their teachers much useful information. Furthermore, teachers are required to administer these tests to all their students, even those who are learning English as a second language and some special needs children. All across the district, schools are being labeled “Program Improvement Schools.” This means they have joined the growing ranks of California schools which have not yet met state or federal standardized test benchmark scores. In our district, improving a school program has come to mean testing students until their eyes glaze over. Students are losing out on social studies, science and art so that they can be “prepared” for all of the language arts and math testing. They are being subjected to a repeating tsunami of over 100 hours of testing that hits them in waves every 3 to 6 weeks throughout the year. This results in teachers spending hours of valuable planning time correcting, analyzing, and entering data based on these tests. District assessment decisions are final and mandated by personnel who are far removed from the classroom. Teachers who interact with students on a daily basis no longer have a voice in how to teach or assess the students they

Teachers Organizing to Resist in a Context of Compliance • 289 work with and know well. Moreover, many questions and concerns teachers direct to district administration and consultants, about testing policies and mandates, go unanswered. As teachers, we believe that instructional time is extremely precious and needs to be carefully guarded, especially when students are working so hard to reach grade level standards. We fully understand the value of assessment that informs teaching and enhances learning. Teachers are asking to get back to the kind of useful, diagnostic assessments that actually help them to know what students have learned, what they need to review, and what to teach next. The reality in the district is that teachers have few opportunities to contribute to decisions related to the use and implementation of these mandated tests. District Administration has taken the job of educating our kids out of the hands of knowledgeable teachers and hired it out to “consultants” who don’t work with kids, and whose “program improvements” are themselves untested and whose results are unproven. Please help stop this madness. Express your concern over instructional time that has been lost to demoralizing, repetitive testing, and ask that teachers once again be included in decisions about how to assess the kids they know best. Contact your teachers, principals, school site council, school board representatives, or send letters to the editor with your input. Support the children of our district and their teachers.

In addition to spending hours composing and revising this statement, EAS members made sure that faculty at various school sites had access to the statement and the opportunity to sign it. Once 200 teachers signed the statement, EAS members contacted reporters with three different newspapers. Over the course of a three to four week period, the statement was published in each newspaper, including a Spanish version of the statement in a Spanish-medium newspaper widely available in Arden Valley. The group also engaged in other resistive actions focused on district and state testing policies. Several teachers were interviewed about their views on testing and other issues in a follow up article that was published shortly after the letter. As planned, and with the help of the union president, a panel of EAS members appeared on a local community TV program focused on testing. In late September of 2008, the EAS members read the statement in English and Spanish to a group of parents participating in a monthly community gathering in the Arden Valley town plaza. Afterward they answered questions from parents. In December, an EAS member drew on the letter to draft a resolution calling for a testing moratorium that would be part of a nation-wide campaign supported by American Federation of Teachers. After two other group members helped her revise the letter, she shared the resolution at a district-wide meeting of the union. The local union membership authorized the resolution via a ballot that was attached to the resolution and disseminated to every teacher in the district.

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The group’s desire for teacher input into district policies related to testing was also reflected in the 2008–2009 contract negotiations as evident in the following clause that appeared in the final version of the contract. The District acknowledges the need to review the total number of assessments being administered throughout the District and to support only those assessments determined to be effective and necessary as a Program Improvement District. The District shall seek the input of the union’s assessment committee on this topic.

Shortly after the contract was negotiated, the union president asked that three or four members of EAS join the district’s assessment committee, which is charged with providing an evaluation of the tests and other assessments that the district requires. Currently, we are interviewing group members to gain their perspectives on the group, including the impact it has had on their work and professional growth. We have also asked group members to identify what has both helped and hindered the group in its efforts to change oppressive policies and working conditions. Although these findings are preliminary, our interviews and field notes reveal the following. EAS is a safe space to talk. Several teachers describe EAS meetings as a time when they connect with teachers from other sites to discuss issues. Having access to the views of others has provided teachers with important insights that are not necessarily available at their school sites. Small victories provide momentum. Several members attribute the momentum of the group to a set of small but visible initiatives. As one member stated, “Small victories keep a group going.” EAS’s Union Connections. EAS’s position as a sub committee of the union has provided the group an important venue for asserting its influence. Because the union president is an active member and sees the group’s agenda as overlapping with that of the union, he regularly calls on the group to participate in union initiatives (e.g., as members of subcommittees). Further, EAS initiatives have received union endorsement before going public, which has expanded the scale and scope of the group’s actions, if not added to its legitimacy. “We don’t do enough!” On several occasions group members have voiced concerns that the group doesn’t do enough. Actions are discussed, recommended and ultimately appear to get lost. One group member described her erratic attendance to her frustration over the group dropping the ball when it came to pursuing issues that she considered to be important. The challenge of coordinating our work. Members discussed challenges the group faced in asserting its collective will. Some are worried that EAS has taken action that does not reflect the intentions of all group members. For example, several group members were surprised to learn that the group

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had publicly endorsed the resolution calling for a testing moratorium. While the group had been queried regarding this action on the passwordprotected site, the resolution had not come up for an official endorsement during one of the regularly scheduled EAS meetings. This has led to some discussion of a need for procedures that specify how the group makes endorsements. In addition, members have worried that the group has not been more deliberate and efficient when setting an action agenda. A concern for maintaining anonymity. Since the inception of the group, tensions have emerged regarding the degree to which group actions and affiliation are public. Several group members have declined to let others outside of the group know that they are members of EAS due to a fear over job security. When signing the testing statement that appeared in the local newspaper, teachers were given the option to sign their names or use the term Arden Valley District Teacher. Concerns about anonymity also resulted in the development of the password-protected website. Previous to the development of the website, the group communicated via an email list that included well over 40 names. DISCUSSION Explorations of resistance provide a window into understanding the overlapping and contested terrains of power and agency within a particular cultural field. In examining teacher resistance, our goal is to better understand the nature of teacher agency within authoritative contexts. This in turn affords important insights into the role power and authority play in the working lives of teachers. Recently, researchers have described how individual teachers of English learners resist policy initiatives. Overall, their studies portray teachers’ efforts to resist these initiatives as principled, often understated or subtle, and largely encapsulated within the confines of their own classrooms or immediate work environments. As a grass roots group engaged in collective as well as principled acts of resistance, EAS represents an interesting departure from these understated and contained efforts. Nevertheless, we can’t help but wonder about the impact EAS is having in our region. Is the group influencing policy and structural transformations? We’re not sure. Together participating teachers engaged in highly visible public protests via collective action. Because the pedagogical commitments underlying these protests were propagated by their local teachers’ union, EAS was able to involve hundreds of teachers in actions protesting testing policies. Yet, the teachers participating in EAS continue to be uneasy about assuming a public identity that places them in direct opposition to institutional authority. Indeed, their most recent discussions have focused on retaining their anonymity given the current climate of budget cuts and pink slips. This work has left us contemplating a number of questions:

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What is the relationship between individual resistance and collective resistance? Do teachers’ involvements in collective resistance prepare or compel them to participate in individual acts of resistance (or vice versa)? Recently, an EAS member reported to the group’s website that due to her involvement in EAS, she, as an individual, has been willing to be public about her opposition to district policies and actions. In fact, this second-year, nontenured teacher provided a critique about her district’s mishandling of the current budget crisis that recently appeared in a local newspaper article. How do teachers’ involvements in EAS influence other aspects of their personal and working lives, including their practice, actions and relationships with colleagues? Several members have reported on these influences. One member attributes her involvement in EAS as contributing to her decision to assume a leadership role in her school. Another told us that her involvement in EAS helped her realize that she thrives best in an environment of collegiality, something that was missing at her school. This realization ultimately led her to resign her position and obtain a job teaching in a school known for its collegial faculty. How does resistance play out in the classroom and what does this mean for students? We need to gain a better first-hand understanding about what goes on in resisting teachers’ classrooms. Some teachers participating in EAS have told us that they think the classroom practices that they are required to implement are inappropriate for English learners. Other teachers tell us of ways to meet those practices in ways that accommodate the needs of their English learners. What are the implications of our work for teacher education? NCLB has certainly had an affect on teacher education as well as on the working lives of teachers. And we see how teacher education may be implicated in reproducing the institutional environments that the teachers in our study are struggling with and/or against. How could frameworks that consider the working lives of teachers, including the ones referenced here, shape teacher education curricula? EAS is a dynamic space where educators are working together to transform state and local policies in ways that reflect their commitments to enhancing their EL students’ opportunities to learn in school. In so doing, they are resisting what many perceive to be an international movement toward standardized approaches to instruction and assessment that threaten bilingual and multilingual students’ right to learn in schools that acknowledge and celebrate their resources, interests, and voices (Davis, Forthcoming). Critical examinations of this and other teacher collectives focused on

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social justice goals should enhance our understandings of teachers’ transformative potential. REFERENCES Achinstein, B., & Ogawa, R. T. (2006). (In)Fidelity: What the resistance of new teachers reveals about professional principles and prescriptive educational policies. Harvard Educational Review, 76(1), 30–63. Alvarez, L., & Corn, J. (2008). Exchanging assessment for accountability: The implications of high-stakes reading assessments for English Learners. Language Arts, 85(5), 354–365. Aptheker, B. (1989). Tapestries of life. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Bailey, B. (2000). The impact of mandated change on teachers. In N. Bascia & A. Hargreaves (Eds.), The sharp edge of educational change: Teaching, leading, and the realities of reform (pp. 112–128). New York: Routledge. Ball, S. J. (2003). The teachers soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. Bushnell, M. (2003). Teachers in the schoolhouse panopticon: Complicity and resistance. Education and Urban Society, 35(3), 251–271. Cohen, D. K. (1995). What is the System in Systemic Reform? Educational Researcher, 24(9), 11–17. Coburn, C. E. (2004). Beyond decoupling: Rethinking the relationship between the institutional environment and the classroom. Sociology of Education, 77, 211–244. Coburn, C. E. (2001). Collective sensemaking about reading: How teachers mediate reading policy in their professional communities. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 23(2), 145–170. Compton, M., & Weiner, L. (2008). The global assault on teaching, teachers, and their unions: Stories for resistance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cuban, L. (1990). Reforming again, again, and again. Educational Researcher, 19(1), 3–13. Davis, K. (Forthcoming). Ethnographic approaches to second language acquisition. In A. S. Ohta (Ed.), Social interaction and complexity theory approaches to SLA. In C. Chapelle (General Ed.), Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. New York: WileyBlackwell Publishers. Datnow, A., & Castellano, M. (2001). Teachers’ responses to Success for All: How beliefs, experiences, and adaptations shape implementation. American Educational Research Journal, 37(3), 775–799. Datnow, A., Hubbard, L., & Mehan, H. (2002). Extending educational reform: From one school to many. New York: Routledge/Falmer. Gándara, P., & Baca, G. (2008). NCLB and California’s English language learners: The perfect storm. Language Policy, 7, 201–216. Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023. Evans, B., & Hornberger, N. H. (2005). No child left behind: Repealing and unpeeling federal language education policy in the United States. Language Policy, 4, 87–106.

294 • LUCINDA PEASE-ALVAREZ & ALISUN THOMPSON Gerstl-Pepin, C. I., & Woodsie-Jiron, H. (2005). Tensions between the “science” of reading and a “love of learning”: One high-poverty school’s struggle with NCLB. Equity & Excellence in Education, 38, 232–241. Giroux, H. A. (1983). Theories of reproduction and resistance in the new sociology of education: A critical analysis. Harvard Educational Review, 55(5), 257–293. Gitlin, A., & Margonis, F. (1995). The political aspect of reform: Teacher resistance as good sense. American Journal of Education, 103, 377–405. Goodson, I., Moore, S., & Hargreaves, A. (2006). Teacher nostalgia and the sustainability of reform: The generation and degeneration of teachers’ missions, memory, and meaning. Educational Administration Quarterly, 42(1), 42. Grant, G., & Murray, C. E. (1999). Teaching in America: The slow revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gutiérrez, K. D., Baquedano-López, & J., Asato. (2000). “English for the children”: The new literacy of the old world order, language policy and educational reform. Bilingual Research Journal, 24, 1–15. Hargreaves, A. (2005). Educational change takes ages: Life, career and generational factors in teachers’ emotional responses to educational change. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21(8), 967–983 Hargreaves, A. (2003). Teaching in the knowledge society: Education in the age of insecurity. New York: Teachers College Press. Hargreaves, A. (1982). Resistance and relative autonomy theories: problems of distortion and incoherence in recent Marxist analyses of education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 3(2), 107–126. Harper, C. A., de Jont, E., & Platt, E. J. (2008). Marginalizing English as a second language teacher expertise: The exclusionary consequence of No Child Left Behind. Language Policy, 7, 267–284. Hill, H. (2001). Policy is not enough: Language and the interpretation of state standards. American Educational Research Journal, 38(2), 289–318. Hodson, R. (1995). Worker resistance: An underdeveloped concept in the sociology of work. Economic and industrial democracy, 16, 79–110. Honan, E. (2004). (Im)plausiblities: A rhizo-textual analysis of policy texts and teachers’ work. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(3), 267–281. Ingersoll, R. (2003). Who controls teachers’ work? Power and accountability in America’s schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Joseph, R. (2006). “I won’t stop what I’m doing”: The factors that contribute to teachers’ proactive resistance to scripted literacy programs. Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Kerr, L. (2006). Between caring and counting: Teachers’ take on educational reform. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Labaree, D. (1992). Power, knowledge, and the rationalization of teaching: A genealogy of the movement to professionalize teaching. Harvard Educational Review, 62(2). MacGillivray, L., Ardell, A. L., Curwen, M. S., & Palma, J. (2004). Colonized teachers: Examining the implementation of a scripted reading program. Teaching Education, 15(2), 131–144. McGill-Franzen, A., Zmach, C., Solic, K., & Zeig, J. L. (2006). The elementary school journal, 107(1), 67–91.

Teachers Organizing to Resist in a Context of Compliance • 295 Menken, K., & García, O. (2010). Negotiating language policies in schools: Educators as policymakers. New York: Routledge. Moe, T. (2001). A union by any other name. Education Next, 1(3), 40–45. Moustafa, M., & Land, R. E. (2002). The reading achievement of economically-disadvantaged children in urban schools using Open Court vs. comparably disadvantaged children in urban schools using non-scripted reading programs. American Educational Research Association (AERA), Urban Learning, Teaching, and Research 2002 Yearbook (pp. 44–53). Munro, P. (1998). Subject to fiction: women teachers’ life history narrative and the cultural politics of resistance. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Pease-Alvarez, L., & Samway, K. D. (2008). Negotiating a top-down reading program mandate: The experiences of one school. Language Arts, 86(1), 32–41. Ruth, L. P. (2000). Who has the power? Policymaking and politics in the English language arts. In J. Flood, D. Lapp, J. Squire, & J. Jensen (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching english language arts. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Scott, J. C. (2002). From weapons of the weak. In S. Duncombe (Ed.), Cultural resistance reader (pp. 89–96). London: Verso. Shilling, C. (1992). Reconceptualizing structure and agency in the sociology of education: Structuration theory and schooling. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 13(1), 69–87. Sunderman, G. L., Kim, J. S., & Orfield, G. (2005). NCLB meets school realities: Lessons from the field. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Wilson, P., Martens, P. Arya, P., & Altwerger, B. (2004, November). Readers, instruction, and the NRP. Phi Delta Kappan, 86(3), 242–246. Woods, P. (1994). Teachers under siege: Resistance and Appropriation in English primary schools. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 25(3), 250–265.

CHAPTER 13

TRANSFORMATION AND AGENCY Participatory Action Research with Bilingual Undergraduates Hye-sun Cho

As a rapidly increasing number of linguistic minority students1 enter colleges and universities in the United States, educators are faced with a demographic imperative to serve diverse student populations (Banks & Banks, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1999). Thirty-one percent of college students were considered to be part of a racial or ethnic minority group in 2002 (U.S. Department of Education, 2005).2 Diverse student populations bring a wide range of sociocultural and linguistic knowledge (Gee, 1992). However, in college education these students also seem to be submerged in “the academic literacy mode where ‘everyone’ is learning a ‘new language’ and ‘new culture’ at university” (Leung & Safford, 2005, p. 307). As is evident to those who work with language minority students, these individuals have fewer possibilities for full participation in academic spheres than their ‘mainstream’ counterparts who, as Gee (1992, p. 33) has suggested, have already acquired academic discourse by “enculturation (apCritical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 297–329 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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prenticeship) into social practices through scaffolded and supported interactions with people who have already mastered the Discourse” (Valdés, 2004).3 As a result, linguistic minority students are often treated as “deficient,” “limited,” or “inadequate” by faculty, administration, and mainstream peers and, thus, feel marginalized, alienated, and devalued within institutions of higher education. Although there have been an increasing number of studies on academic lives of such minority students in higher education (e.g., Belcher & Braine, 1995), very few have focused on students’ transformation processes in which they question and challenge the dominant ideology behind academic discourse communities and actively advocate change. The study presented in this chapter is based on participatory action research (PAR) approaches4 with bilingual undergraduates in Hawai`i. PAR was appropriate and essential to actualizing our joint effort to bring about a change at the research site. It also allowed bilingual undergraduate students as co-researchers to engage in critical examination of academic communities in which they participated. Ultimately, this study responds to Lather’s (2008) call for “socially useful research” that “use(s) its subject position to refuse re-positivization” (p. 363) in educational policies and plans. PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH Participatory action research is a subset of action research (AR) that entails a collaborative process among its participants to construct knowledge. Like AR, PAR is underpinned by an iterative process of inquiry through which participants move through the cyclical phases of plan, action, and reflection, with each phase informing the next. Unlike AR, however, PAR involves extensive collaboration among all participants, including those who may be traditionally defined as “the researched” (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000). The key characteristic of PAR is that researchers adopt an activist view of their role. Although some critical researchers are relatively passive in the practices where they conduct research, PAR researchers seek to bring about change at their site. Diverse definitions of PAR have been proposed (e.g., Hall 2001; Reason & Bradbury, 2006), but the definition offered by King & Lonnquist (1992) most closely resonates with my understanding of PAR as “a continuing cycle of research activities involving active participation of practitioners in the process that results in direct action-oriented experience in the local environment” (p. 2). PAR is historically located in the tradition of participatory research that arose within the so-called Third World, including Latin America, Asia and Africa from the 1970s onwards (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000). The strong participatory aspect of PAR draws on critical theory which views knowledge as historically, socially, and culturally constructed and mediated through the perspectives of dominant groups in society. This approach also embrac-

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es a collaborative process among participants to develop knowledge. 5 Thus, the use of PAR challenges some fundamental presuppositions about the nature of research as a social practice—ontological, epistemological, and methodological—including criteria for judging worth of research, forms of reporting research findings, and the intended audience of research results (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000).6 For example, centering inquiry in collective epistemology, or ways of knowing, is the key difference between PAR and other qualitative methodologies. More specifically, PAR puts emphasis on challenging positivist views concerning the production of knowledge. This epistemological approach closely aligns with social constructionist approaches to knowledge creation, which view knowledge as being socially constructed among all the participants. Truths are multiple, local and specific in nature (Lincoln & Guba, 2000). While social constructionism acknowledges the multiple, evolving subject positions of participants, critical theory makes visible the power relations that also structure these processes, in turn giving the research transformative potential. 7 The assumptions that underlie the importance of social and collective process in exploring “what is the case” can be found in the process of PAR—mostly concerned with maximizing participation by “the researched.” Another major element of PAR particularly in academic discourse communities lies in the concept of voice,8 which is an avenue for the dominated to articulate personal perspective. As Hall (2001) writes: Participatory research fundamentally is about the right to speak…Participatory research argues for the articulation of points of view by the dominated or subordinate. (p. 62)

To claim the right to speak, PAR embraces storytelling as “a strategy of empowerment by listening to, affirming, and reflecting on personal experiences” (Williams & Cervin, 2004). That is because PAR embraces experience as a source of legitimate knowledge and seeks to challenge traditional knowledge-creation monopolies. I emphasize the potential of PAR for allowing voice to more traditionally marginalized groups. As Davis (2009) poignantly argues, promoting PAR with minority groups allows for individual and collective negotiation of shifting power relations in varying situations. Repositioning students, particularly linguistic minorities, as researchers rather than the researched endorses a position that stands in sharp contrast to the current positivist constructions of non-native students (NNS) as limited, deficient, inappropriate and whose language proficiency does not meet the norm of native speaking (NS) counterparts. Legitimating democratic inquiry within classrooms as well as outside, PAR utilizes and validates knowledge “at the margins,” and signifies linguistic minorities’ fundamental right to investigate and contest power structures inherent in their educational experience. In other words, PAR repositions linguistic minor-

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ity students as subjects of critical inquiry by actively questioning the takenfor-granted power relations around them in academia and beyond. While some critical studies have claimed being more democratic than positivist research—which oftentimes disregard individuals’ lived experiences and identities with statistical formulas and essentialist categorizations—there is also danger with critical research that it, too, can be unreflective and silencing (Goodburn, 1998). I agree with Pennycook (1999, 2001) who posits that critical theory alone tends to only offer a rationalist account of social conditions that is supposed to supplant a possibly irrationalist account: A critical approach that claims only to emancipate people through a greater awareness of their conditions is both arrogant and doomed to failure. As the discussion of engagement suggest, a more plausible way forward is through a critical engagement with people’s wishes, desires, and histories, that is a way of thinking that pushes one constantly to question rather than pontificate. (Pennycook, 1999, p. 343)

For example, some critical researchers narrowly define emancipation or empowerment9 in terms deriving from an Anglo-centric, Enlightenment perspective on individualism (LeCompte, 1994). Furthermore, as Luke and Gore (1992) articulate, an assumption of critical research often lies in the fact that there is a simplistic dichotomy between, for instance, “the oppressor” and “the oppressed” and the tendency to promulgate a “single-strategy pedagogy of empowerment, emancipation, and liberation” (Pennycook, 2001, p.7). This tendency often leads to the assumption in the PAR literature that collaboration is a solution for the problem of participant agendas and that the participants will speak with the voice of the researcher. By contrast, it is important to recognize that the researcher’s action of doing research, by itself, is not empowering her participants. The notion that critical dialogue with “the people” would eventually lead to the dismantlement of false consciousness and discovery of “the truth” should be problematized. Rather, I embraced PAR with postmodern perspectives that would respond to the shortcomings of previous PAR work, with recognition that I would be constantly challenged by ideas, arguments, questions posed by the student participants as a co-learner engaged in the inquiry of academic discourse communities. In effect, a postmodern stance acknowledges that when conducting research, “many ways of knowing and inquiring are legitimate and that no one way should be privileged” over another (Wall, 2006, p. 2). Yet, the goal of postmodernism is not to rule out the traditional scientific method, but to question its dominance and to demonstrate that it is possible to gain and share knowledge in many other ways. From a postmodern viewpoint, having a partial, local, and/or historical knowledge is still knowing.

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Despite the advantages of PAR that I discussed above, PAR is not without its potential problems. In any research when the researcher is in a position of power, the danger exists that participants may become a captive population (Abasi, Akbari, & Graves, 2006). This PAR study is situated within a college classroom context where the authority of the teacher is inherently bounded up with the nature of participation. Naturally, students expected me to assume a leadership role in class. The differential power accorded to me was at first problematic to student participants challenging my construction of issues derived from my beliefs and learning experience in western academia. Additionally, no matter how hard I tried to engage students in co-interpreting their own discourses and actions that took place during the study, it was impossible to make this research entirely a cooperative model of PAR. Nonetheless, students were constantly reflecting on and analyzing their experience in academia with attitudes, passions, and efforts of researchers. They further carried forward what they found in the process during their own teaching of heritage language and ESL/EFL learners during and after their participation in my seminars. Drawing upon Pennycook (2001), I offer the following characteristics of PAR that frame this study: 1.

2. 3. 4.

having an interest in particular domains such as class, gender, ethnicity, race, culture, identity, and ideology that are interwoven with power relations; embracing the notion that my research considers paradigms beyond the dominant, postpositivist-influenced one; seeking a transformative pedagogy (and by implication, transformative research practices); and taking a self-reflective stance on critical theory rather than uncritically accepting and using such terms as “oppression,” “ideology,” and “empowerment.” PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH WITH BILINGUAL UNDERGRADUATES IN HAWAI’I

Careers in Language Education & Academic Renewal (CLEAR) is an undergraduate program that was designed to prepare heritage language (HL) speakers to become bilingual educators in Hawai`i public schools.10 To achieve the three goals of the program—(1) academic development in English, (2) academic development in the HL, and (3) professional development, CLEAR students were required to take 18 credits from the Department of Second Language Studies (SLS) and 9 credits from their HL program at UH. In addition, they would participate in the core component of CLEAR, the Bilingual Studies Seminar, every week. A series of the seminar courses were developed to assist students in developing metalinguistic awareness

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necessary for their academic success in college while facilitating professional development. That is, the three-fold purpose of the program is not only to offer support to the undergraduate students as they go through the program, but also to provide (experientially) alternative curriculum models for their future language minority students. Co-researchers in this PAR project were a cohort of five students who I worked with in CLEAR for the course of three semesters. The Cohort consisted of one Samoan male (Mano), three Korean females (Jisun, Young, and Kyungmi) and one Chinese female (Rose) who had emigrated from Hong Kong. We worked together in the series of seminars entitled: L2 Academic Literacies (Spring 2005), Language Materials Development (Fall 2005), and Heritage/English Language Practicum (Spring 2006). MY ROLE AS FACILITATOR AND CO-RESEARCHER It is vital in any critical work to disclose oneself as a teacher, researcher and author, locating oneself in enough detail that the reader can understand the researcher’s metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological assumptions. To make power-related issues explicit and visible, I disclosed my teacher-researcher and critical pedagogue positions at the outset of the study (and whenever I had a chance to bring up the issue afterwards). Selfdisclosure in my classroom, I believe, did encourage a sense of camaraderie and collaboration between my students and me. While a co-participant, I was also the instructor who facilitated the co-construction of meaning by drawing on critical theories that framed the seminars. I also served as a spokesperson concerning the tensions and transformations that occurred in the seminars. I viewed my classroom as a hybrid, transactional, and fluid space where the lines between teaching and research blurred (see Fecho & Meacham, 2007) and where I came to “work the hyphen” (Fine, 1998) as a teacher-researcher-student-subject-advocate. Keeping in mind my “consciousness of the Borderlands” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 77), I attempted to figure out ways in which I could present myself as an Asian (more specifically Korean), female, graduate student and instructor as both the “Other” and the privileged speaking subject (Ellsworth, 1992). This helped me develop “a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 79) and document the struggles throughout the duration of the study. I also admit the limitation of my attempt to define my student participants as collaborators, naively believing in the equal participation by the students who are framed in accordance with my agenda. From the beginning of the study, I was well aware of the power differentials implicitly and explicitly embedded in the relationship between my students and me. As such, I expected them to assume power through personal narratives in eliciting their own history, perceptions, values, and beliefs on the topics at hand. With “research as praxis” (Lather, 1991) as a process of co-inquiry

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imbued with negotiation and reciprocity in mind, I invited the students to “the dialogic process of mutual challenge and mutual transformation” (Lin, et al., 2004, p. 499). PAR APPROACHES ENACTED IN CLEAR SEMINARS In the seminar classroom, we constantly dealt with the visible of invisible struggle of minority students in U.S. college settings. Among several issues that arose in the seminars, the concept of plagiarism was a representative example of CLEAR participants’ challenging discrimination based on linguistic background. The issue led us to discussing power imbalances inherent in the discourse of academic writing. One instance of such discussion took place when we were discussing Pennycook’s (1996) article on plagiarism.11 Excerpt 1 illuminates one tense moment during Kyungmi’s presentation on the article: Excerpt 112 1

2 3 4

5 6

7 8

Rose: [abruptly interrupting Kyungmi’s presentation] I had this professor who accused me of plagiarism when I was doing my best to produce a good writing. I worked so hard on the paper. But the professor said, that was not my work. If my writing is not good, they’d tell me to try harder, but if my writing is good, they’d get suspicious, asking “Did you do this?” Hye-sun: Umm mm. Ss: Yeah! Yeah! (nodding) Jisun: I had also/ (inaudible) Rose: I…I was so upset…I…I…did my best, but they were like, “You didn’t do this.” (in teary eyes)…I was so upset…um…ah…(inaudible) (Ss looking at Rose, silence with sympathetic looks) Kyungmi: I also experienced similar discrimination against nonnative students. One of my native instructors at the ESL program had low expectations of non-native students. One day she asked me if somebody read my three-paragraph essay before turning it in. “I know you’ve got help from a native speaker.” I think plagiarism is a western concept, not considering different learning styles and strategies of students from different backgrounds. I think/ Rose: [interrupting Kyungmi’s remarks] I don’t steal others’ text, I don’t do that kind of stuff! (in tears) Jisun: If you use high level vocabulary in your paper, they get suspicious, you know. (Class transcript, April 25, 2005)

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Although Rose may seem to break the flow of the class discourse unexpectedly by interrupting Kyungmi twice (turns 1 and 7) and Jisun once (turn 5) in Excerpt 1, her emotional narrative eventually involved others in sharing their narrative regarding plagiarism. Rose’s vulnerable, emotional, and painful narrative was built upon by others and in turn served as a platform for co-constructing meaning of plagiarism and cultural differences in expectations by teachers in the subsequent class discussions. For instance, Jisun affirms Rose’s reaction to the contested notion of plagiarism by contributing her observation of NS teachers who “get suspicious” of NNS students who use “high level vocabulary.” Jisun critiques the prejudice of some teachers that do not recognize the capability of NNS writers to use advanced levels of academic lexicon. The teachers may not consider the appropriation of the lexis of the new authoritative discourse as one way of students’ entry into academic literacies (Angelil-Carter, 2000). The warrants invoked by the students stem from shared experience regarding discrimination against their language background in academic discourse communities. Students explicitly refuted being positioned by others as inferior, deficient, or incompetent learner. After discussing low expectations of her ESL native teacher, Kyungmi shares her epistemological understanding of plagiarism, stating that “I think plagiarism is a western concept” without considering students’ varying cultural backgrounds and learning strategies. This corresponds to Angelil-Carter (2000)’s argument that plagiarism is a modern Western construct which arose with the introduction of copyright laws in the eighteenth century (p. 2). There was little sense of artistic “ownership” until this time. Rose’s rather unexpected emotional outburst led us to exploring the issues of plagiarism from personal experiences associated with them rather than simply discussing the reading itself. Bakhtin (1986) argues that the emotional-volitional tone is “not a passive psychic reaction…This is an answerably conscious movement of consciousness, which transform possibility into the actuality of a deed (a deed of thinking, of feeling, of desiring, etc.)” (p. 36). In this case, Rose is emotionally engaged in forming her identity thereby claiming a space of resistance with the emotional-volitional tone when she announces, “I don’t steal others’ text, I don’t do that kind of stuff!” The supportive and facilitative spaces built in the classroom thus far seem to allow her to express her emotions about the issues that are personally meaningful and evocative. Emotions are not sanctioned and accepted as powerful instrument for expressing resistance (Fricker, 1999). Here emotions connect people’s thoughts and played a role as the “glue of identity” (Haviland & Kahlbaugh, 1993, p. 222, cited in Zembylas, 2003). Her reaction also implies that this is a moral issue involving the shamefulness of the deed of plagiarism and lack of honesty of the offender (AngelilCarter, 2000).

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After sharing her narrative, Rose asked me about my experience with plagiarism as a student. Her question was intriguing for two reasons; first, Rose rarely initiated a question in the first semester unless she was a discussion leader. I suspected that she was so invested in the issues involving plagiarism that she volunteered to ask me the question; second, it was interesting that she asked about my experience with plagiarism as student rather than teacher. I think that she might not have asked me the same question if I were a NS teacher or even NS graduate student. Rather than positioning the instructor as “expert” with authoritative discourse, Rose considered me as a peer or partner whose internally persuasive discourses may resonate with hers. That is, my status as NNS graduate student who was simultaneously undergoing similar experiences with academic literacies at an American academic institution benefited all of us in creating a space for collaboratively interrogating the dominant academic discourse in part due to shared experience and solidarity. This may indicate that in the seminar classroom, the authoritarian nature of a strict teacher-student or expertnovice hierarchy was not left intact. Everybody was vulnerable yet equal to co-construct meaning through personal narratives in this PAR project. Often students expressed their confusion, frustration and distress caused by the demand of L2 academic literacies, particularly in writing because they were uncertain about to what extent they should embrace their voice in their research paper while providing comprehensive understanding of the theoretical backgrounds covered in their courses. What is worse, lack of clear definitions or policy seemed to make students’ academic writing more complicated and challenging since plagiarism is often naturalized by those who enforce its discipline (see also Devlin & Gray, 2007). Kyungmi’s ESL teacher in Excerpt 1, for example, seems to enforce an ideological belief in academic writing that it should be solely a product of the author, discounting the dialogic and collaborative nature of writing. It is understandable that students strongly resisted the limited perceptions of their NS instructors about bilingual students’ academic English writing given their academic institution in which plagiarism is always considered negative and immoral by teachers and students alike (e.g., Devlin & Gray, 2007). Our examination of course syllabi revealed that none of them contained either definitions or guidelines for plagiarism—merely dire consequences of which students are supposed to understand. Treated as cheating and a dishonest act, plagiarism subsequently results in serious failures on the student’s part. We collaboratively explored important differences in definitions in terms of “intention to deceive” and “intention to imitate.” The latter may be a learning strategy for undergraduate L2 learners who may have little alternative in the early stages of academic writing in higher education. We also critiqued current academic practices in higher education which views plagiarism simply as an undisputed, immoral and deceitful act.

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Alternatively, we interrogated the commonly agreed notion of plagiarism in a collaborative manner: Why is it the sole responsibility of students to avoid plagiarism? Why don’t faculty recognize that there are varying levels of plagiarism, most of which are not intentionally fraudulent or dishonest? To what extent can one decide on the originality of one’s words? For example, Mano mentioned in his Samoan community, there are few citations in writing because there is an assumption that all of the ideas came from somewhere else: Excerpt 2 Rose: In Chinese, reciting 3,000 poems is a way of literacy learning. You imitate the traditional literature and create new one afterwards. Hye-sun: There seems to be no clear cut between imitation and creation. Mano: [Referring to Rose’s remarks] I found it similar to our culture. Each chief has a guest house which is a classroom. Talking chief and high chief teach children traditional speeches, proverbs, etc. You recite or you’ll be punished. That’s the way we’re disciplined. That process of reciting helps develop words for you and develop ideas into words. That’s also learning! (Class transcript, April 25, 2005) Here Rose points out memory plays a vital role in Chinese literacy learning—a process in using the authoritative discourse of the old classics to create new voice. Mano adeptly recognizes the role of memory not only for developing words but developing ideas. In a subsequent class discussion, Kyungmi agreed with Rose that memorizing and copying classical texts is the way Chinese children learn to write. She mentioned to respect the texts and the scholars who wrote them, you have to faithfully imitate the text rather than changing it from the original. The point here is not to bind NNS students into cultural categories in which they are held captive or “excuse” them from plagiarizing (Angelil-Carter, 2000). Rather, it is to highlight the awareness of conflicting social discourses that students from diverse backgrounds bring into the classroom. In other words, it is important to understand plagiarism “as located not within some objectively describable system of textual relations” (Pennycook, 1996, p. 227), but rather in the relations of social power and privilege. We negotiated the notion of plagiarism as strategic borrowing for learning disciplinary knowledge and creativity while contesting the western concept as mere academic crime. What deserves attention is that after our discussions on plagiarism, students took actions in other classrooms—such as asking their instructors to clarify writing assignments, consulting with teachers and experienced peers about their research ideas and textual organization, seeking guidelines and model papers, and asking teachers to

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clarify the criteria for research papers. Like the example about issues of plagiarism discussed above, there is ample evidence to suggest that bilingual undergraduates were enriched and transformed by their seminar experiences through their participation in PAR. In what follows, I first define the notion of transformation used in this study. I then illustrate transformative processes which an individual CLEAR participant underwent during and after her/his participation in the program. In addition, I describe my reflexive and critical teaching practice as a result of interaction with the students. Finally, I conclude with the possibilities of transformation for bilingual individuals as a life-long journey. TRANSFORMATION AND AGENCY DEFINED Transformation in this study is defined broadly as a life-long process of cultural, social and personal development rather than an immediate and tangible outcome caused by action. It is the process in which divergent and contradictory voices within the individual often collide and, thus, brings about a shift in positioning regarding some pre-existing social discourse or cultural context. In other words, within the conceptualized framework of third space as a hybridized, conflicting, ambiguous, fluid space, processes and outcomes are not in a linear, causal-effect relationship; instead, they should be questioned critically (Moll & Rubinstein-Avila, 2007). Further in this study, transformation is not only taking visible and tangible action in response to social injustice; it is also the internalization of a critical consciousness which allows questioning taken-for-granted assumptions, ideas, behaviors and beliefs that have been naturalized by both internal and external forces.13 The CLEAR seminar series were designed to provide a venue for opening interaction and critical reflection in which teaching was adaptive and learning was recontextualized. To consciously create a space for fostering agency, students were encouraged to challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs, and practices in the academic discourse communities to which they belonged. The notion of agency in this study is understood as “the socially constructed capacity to act” (Barker & Galasinski, 2001, p. 17), not a self-constituting, free action independent upon the context where the agent is situated. The exercise of agency further involves the capability to bring about effects and to (re)constitute the world around individuals. For example, students and I, albeit to varying degrees, critiqued the deficit views of the so-called NNS students in English-dominant classrooms while alternatively acknowledging and negotiating our identities as bilingual/ multilingual language professionals. Students’ rich cultural knowledge and diverse life experiences as multilingual/multicultural individuals were constantly recognized and validated in the seminar classroom. At the same time, they were provided tools for developing academic English literacies

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such as interviewing research participants, writing a research paper, and developing digital literacies. Within the critical literacies framework used in this study, it is important to teach students tools for academic success in the “mainstream” western academy while equipping them with the capacity to critique, challenge and appropriate the dominant discourse (see also Davis, Bazzi, & Cho, 2005; Delpit, 1995; Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008). It seems that, once a sense of agentive potential is realized, bilingual individuals can utilize experiences of transformation in negotiating shifting power relations in varying contexts (Davis, 2009). In addition to this potential of individual agency, collective agency among participants was manifested during their participation in the CLEAR program. Since our experiences are unique and distinctive, I tell each of our stories in a compartmentalized manner below, but note that our learning and teaching trajectories are inextricably intertwined and interdependent on one another. INDIVIDUAL AGENCY BUILDING Jisun: “I no longer feel just powerless!” Jisun was the one who always seemed to have questions about the readings and was unafraid of speaking what was on her mind. She often embodied the objectives that I wanted to accomplish within the course—raising critical awareness of power issues inherent in academic discourses, considering the sociocultural context of literacy, using personal narratives to make sense of academic texts, theory, and knowledge. Her talk pushed the group to explore topics at hand from critical perspectives, connecting personal experience and the authoritative texts they were reading. She often mentioned in and out of class that important changes in her perspectives and attitudes through her experience in CLEAR greatly influenced her evolving interest in Korean language and education. Her transformation was manifested in her remarks such as the following: Excerpt 3 Before this seminar, I always felt powerless as NNS student. It’s the reality that the teacher gives a grade—he’s the one who has power. So even though I was not satisfied with a grade on my paper, I didn’t say anything. I just thought anything he said was right anyway. But now after taking the seminars, I feel confident in negotiating with the instructor. For example, when I had complaints about the instructor’s lack of feedback in SLS 3XX, I approached him and told him that I needed more specific suggestions for the paper, not just a grade on it. I was kind of surprised that I was able to do that! (Jisun, personal communication, May 30, 2006)

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By juxtaposing her experience as NNS student before and after the CLEAR program, she now positions herself as an empowered student who challenges an instructor for constructive suggestions for her paper rather than indisputably receiving a grade on it. The final sentence (“I was kind of surprised that I was able to do that!”) is significant in this regard since it shows her (unexpected) realization of her own transformation. The next two excerpts further show her transformed self that Jisun presented in our conversations after she finished the program. She began her narrative by addressing what she thought was the most valuable lesson that she learned through the program: Excerpt 4 I realized that reflection is the key to both learning and teaching. Before I entered the program, I didn’t know the concepts of “critical teacher” or “reflection.” I entered the program because I thought it was designed for ESL teacher training and especially Bilingual Education. But I learned that reflection is the most critical component for language learning/teaching. I gained confidence in my own practice by reflecting through dialogue among other students over the three semesters. (Jisun, personal communication, May 25, 2006) Her newly developed conviction in the importance of reflection in both learning and teaching is displayed throughout the process of PAR. Reflection became internalized in her practice as a learner and teacher as she became cognizant of the concept and had reflective dialogue with other cohort members in the program. When I asked her the same question about a year later, she presented her narrative in a more coherent and critical manner: Excerpt 5 The first and foremost thing I learned through the CLEAR seminars is critical language awareness. I used to just accept whatever the instructor said or whatever I read in a course without any question, but now I find myself naturally questioning them all the time. I challenge the perspectives of professors in the classroom and scholars in the readings…. Second, I developed leadership throughout the seminars. We chose the reading and led the class discussions in CLEAR. Now I do that very confidently in graduate courses. ….To be honest, I don’t think the knowledge we learned in the seminars is the most important and useful thing to me. It’s the sense of agency—I feel empowered. I now resist and challenge the white instructors and classmates who ignore the power of minority students like me. I

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do negotiate now, which I didn’t know how to do before the CLEAR program or I didn’t even know I can negotiate. I don’t just accept the views of others—I argue! This is important in not only academia but life in general…. I used to ask my native speaking white friends all the time whether something is right or wrong—whatever they said was the norm. But now, I believe what I know and what I believe are important. (Jisun, personal communication, April 15, 2007) Jisun’s narratives in both Excerpts 4 and 5 represent transformative nature of her participation in the CLEAR program by juxtaposing her perceptions, values, and knowledge before and after the program. She positions herself as moving from an uninformed, non-reflective learner and teacher to reflexive, critical, and assertive in her own learning and teaching practices. She has come to validate her own knowledge and belief, instead of unquestionably accepting the NS norms regulated by her white peers. This sense of agency allows her to use her understanding of critical theory and pedagogy not only in the context of academic projects but in her personal life as well. Her grappling with the importance of reflection and critical language awareness in learning and teaching can be traced throughout her narratives. Note that her narratives in both excerpts are dense with lexis connected to theories of critical literacy and pedagogy in English (e.g., reflection, critical teacher, dialogue, critical language awareness, challenge, empowered, agency, minority, negotiate, and argue). Jisun produces utterances involving the process of appropriation (Bakhtin, 1981) by incorporating the terminologies that she has learned in various courses in her undergraduate and graduate courses. She does not simply emulate the authoritative discourse imposed by the experts in the field; instead, she appropriates and expands her linguistic repertoire to author her own critical voice to demonstrate her understanding of critical (academic) literacies. She no longer allows authoritative voice to dominate in an uncontested way; rather, she is going through ideological becoming in which she reflects upon and “selectively assimilates the words of others” (p. 341) while tightly interweaves them with her own words (p. 346). Her last remark in Excerpt 5 (“But now, I believe what I know and what I believe are important.”) demonstrates evidence that she gained confidence in her own knowledge, experience, belief, and values, rather than unquestionably adopting those of native speakers. In follow-up informal conversations with Jisun and her graduate program professors (April 2007 and 2008, one year apart), Jisun positioned herself and was positioned by her professors as one of the most vocal, articulate, and critical students in the MA program. This contrasts with Jisun’s initial sense of displacement and reveals some evidence of Jisun’s transformation as a student who no longer remains silent, simply accepting the marginalized status of a language minority student. This is a remarkable change in

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her academic identity because she often admitted that she suffered from anxiety, stress, and distress when she first started her undergraduate studies in 2003. Continuing on her academic journey, she completed her Master’s degree in applied linguistics and was accepted to a Ph.D. program specialized in Korean at the same university where she was the only candidate offered a scholarship from the department. It can be argued that her academic achievement strongly influences the ways in which she enacts her increased sense of agency as well as her transformed self. Young: “Just because I am quiet in class doesn’t mean I don’t participate in learning.” Young transferred from Business Administration to SLS when she entered the CLEAR program. Thus unlike other CLEAR students, she had not taken any SLS-related courses until she was enrolled in the first semester in the program. Understandably, she often expressed her difficulty in comprehending some of the readings from the seminars as well as other SLS classes. To gain background knowledge necessary for class discussion, she listened rather than spoke, unless called upon, in the seminar classroom at the beginning of her studies in SLS. Young seemed to feel overwhelmed with the bombardment of authoritative discourses in the field of new discipline. Throughout her middle-class upbringing and social interactions in Korea, she never perceived any of her social identities, including gender, would hinder her from becoming a full participant in any community of practice she wanted to enter. On the contrary, in college classrooms in Hawai`i where the majority of students were non-white, she still found herself feeling invisible and inaudible because of her perceived lack of English proficiency and content knowledge. Her feeling of alienation and marginalization prohibited her from actively making her voice heard in the classroom. However, her initial difficulty with readings related to L2 learning and teaching was overcome due to her increased familiarity with the required readings for courses through the seminars. She mentioned many readings in some SLS course overlapped with the seminar readings. She was able to utilize her newly gained knowledge from the seminars to familiarize herself with a new course, as she said, “I was kind of recycling the readings!” Her exertion of agency was more evident as her participation in the seminars progressed. As she continued to overcome challenges, she seemed to have experienced significant personal transformations. She revealed to me that she spoke up more often than before in a course wherein she had much investment—bilingual education.

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Young also challenged the status quo in the academic discourses she had encountered by contesting the notion of participation in American classrooms: Excerpt 6 Young: I am critical of the concept of participation. In every single syllabus I was given, they had “participation” as part of grading. I still don’t know what that exactly means. It seems that here in America, participation means you have to speak up and say something about what you think—no matter what. Hye-sun: Yeah, you’re right. I myself put “participation” in the grading criteria in the syllabus all the time without carefully considering what it really means. Young: Just because I am quiet in class doesn’t mean that I do not participate in learning. I actively listen to the instructor and other students. I try to understand what they say and incorporate or critique them in my head. But it does not show. In one of my classes, the instructor wanted us to do self-assessment regarding participation. She told us to submit what we think about our participation in class. But I thought she already evaluated our participation based on her observation. We had the same person in the small group who was reporting back to the whole class all the time. Even I noticed the same people who talked. I suspect the teacher already gave us a grade for participation. What’s the point if I submit my self-assessment, then? Hye-sun: Right. That’s a good point. (Young, personal communication, June 1, 2006) Considered being “on the quieter side,” and “easily lost in the crowd” by her instructors, Young may not be viewed actively engaged in academic discourses by her instructors and peers. However, her narrative here reveals otherwise. In the above excerpt, Young problematizes the contested notion of participation in western academic communities by offering her evaluative stance on limited construct of participation as “to speak up and say something about what you think—no matter what.” By actively listening to her instructors and peers and critiquing their remarks in her head, she does seem to engage in active and conscious learning. Her rhetorical question at the end of the excerpt (“What’s the point if I submit my self-assessment, then?”) implies the limit to student agency that is presumably offered by the institutional authority (even with instructor’s good intentions to include students’ own evaluation on their performance to grading). How do students assert their agency when teachers impose identities on them?

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From discursive perspectives, her question seeks for my agreement to her critique of self-assessment practice. Not only did her remarks on participation and self-assessment demonstrate her critical consciousness in ideologies behind academic discourse communities, but they also served several purposes; first, they placed our narratives within cultural and social contexts; second, they highlighted the constructed nature of academic practices, foregrounding their ideological functions; and third, they made me realize how these academic practices were naturalized by instructors in the field, including myself. Upon graduation from UH, she worked as a teacher assistant working with pupils from diverse backgrounds at an elementary school in Honolulu while continuing on working as Korean HL teacher in a community school. Returning to Korea after her Optional Practical Training (OPT) period finished, she is currently working as EFL materials developer at a large company while applying for a graduate school of education to accomplish her goal as EFL teacher in Korea. Rose: “I learned how to negotiate with instructors.” Rose made every effort to gain knowledge and skills in academic and professional domains, not afraid of challenges ahead of her. Despite her extremely busy schedule, she never missed an opportunity to attend workshops available on campus on a range of topics, such as educational technology, L2 teaching, and Chinese language learning, so she could expand her theoretical and practical repertoires in the varying disciplines. She always asked for help from her instructors and peers whenever she felt she was lost, instead of letting herself remain uninformed. This sense of agency is also enacted in her student teaching—she was up for challenges in completing her student teaching in a local middle school classroom, dealing with classroom management issues with some disruptive students. Moreover, she was the only cohort member who took the initiative to work with a range of student populations—from K–12 to the undergraduate levels— and figured out all the institutional logistics to have insight into teaching in the varying educational contexts. This practicum experience includes her co-teaching of a music class in an elementary school, doing student teaching in a middle school classroom; and observing a Mandarin class in a private high school and ESL writing class for international students at UH. Her agency in learning further led her to register for a technology class as an elective course to overcome her difficulty with technology. However, her struggle in this course was exacerbated by the instructor’s refusal of assistance. Although she mentioned that she did not want to be confrontational several times, she was very proactive when she faced discrimination based on her English proficiency. Having difficulty catching up with instruction in the class, she attempted to seek support from the instructor

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by requesting help in email and in person. However, she failed to receive attention from the teacher who “was always in hurry and had something else to do” when she visited her in the office. When she felt she was treated unfairly, Rose did not remain silent. She wrote a lengthy letter to the instructor to point out her unfair treatment. By writing a letter to her instructor, she exercised her agency to remedy the situation she viewed problematic. When Rose showed me the letter, I could see how forthcoming she was in resisting the imposed identity as “a slow learner” by the instructor. In her letter, not only did she provide the reasons for her sense of marginalization in this particular classroom, but she also enacted her agency by suggesting “alternative pedagogy” to the teaching practice she found problematic, unequal and unjust. Her acts of resistance and transformation (e.g., writing to the instructor to ask for correcting the situation; seeking help from other instructors to resolve the conflict) were clearly evident in her performance as well as her narratives in both oral and written forms. When asked about her experience in the program, she summarized her learning, “What I learned most from CLEAR is how to communicate with other worlds. That’s literacy.” Her comment demonstrates her new understanding of literacies beyond the ability to read and write; rather, as the capability to communicate with the outside worlds. Rose mentioned her increased critical awareness in academic reading after she finished the program: Excerpt 7 Students should not be discriminated against language background. I’m now more critical of the readings I do than before. I put myself into the reading, thinking “How can I change practice using this theory?” I was more passive before, accepting whatever the article was saying. But after the program, I ask myself, “How I need to respond to power difference? If it is an unfair situation, how can I respond to it?” I learned how to negotiate with instructors with respect. (Rose, personal communication, May 29, 2006) In the above excerpt, Rose offers an assertive statement about working with students from diverse language backgrounds, which seems to stem from her own personal experience in school. Here Rose’s remarks indicate that she now performs resistant reading (Lewis, 2001); that is, she reads against the grain of the texts, instead of merely adopting the ideas drawn from the texts. Clearly, her reading is a dialogic process as she interrogates the authors she reads and interrogates herself about her response to the readings. Her enhanced agency as reader comes with noting how texts are imbued with power relations. She began to consider textual resources as “contestable authored knowledge claims” (Abasi, et al., 2006, p. 112) rather

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than the “absolute truth” that she had no choice but to adopt. It can be said that her take on resistant reading promises a site of agency. To her, this new sense of agency further encompasses ‘response’ or action to unjust practice. This is also a crucial aspect of Bakhtin’s internally persuasive discourses—questioning the author, evaluating and challenging the text (Matusov, 2007). In fact, I found it quite radical for her to counter what the author said in the readings to which she was assigned because she always seemed willing to accept what(ever) authoritative discourse conveys in the readings at the outset of the program. Her last remark (“I learned how to negotiate with instructors with respect.”) in Excerpt 7 deserves attention; she transforms her value of Chinese educational upbringing, yet not letting it go completely. Rose begins to embrace both sides of her social positioning—Chinese and English— continuously intermingling and flowing. Despite her verbalized resistance to “the critical” throughout the program (e.g., “I don’t want to create conflict,” “I don’t want to be too political or too critical,” and “I don’t like argument”), Rose was indeed in the process of enacting the critical by negotiating her subjectivities while walking the borderland. This implies the complexicity and the contradiction of the notions of agency, resistance, voice, and transformation that are often conceptualized as static, fixed and monologic entities in the critical pedagogy literature. Although she insisted on being apolitical at all times, she did make every effort to “be heard” and recognized as a legitimate member of varying academic communities. To this end, she does portray a transformed “voice” that demands equitable treatment. Together, her multifaceted identities were recognized and validated in the CLEAR seminars. Aspiring to become a certified teacher in Hawai`i, she plans to further her studies in the College of Education while working as a tutor for ESL pupils in Honolulu with Chinese background. Kyungmi: “I feel that there is a big gap between theory and practice.” Kyungmi often commented on some of the academic discourses she found problematic in detail and raised issues with them in class discussions. For example, she problematized the assessment of SLS-related contents which was primarily based on rote memory of educational terminologies, “The instructor gave us a list of questions that were supposed to be on the exam and you should just memorize the definitions of the terms. Questions were like ‘What is syllabus?’ All we did was learn the definitions of those terms by heart” (Kyungmi, personal communication, June 5, 2006). She also poignantly pointed out a lack of preparation by the instructor, “You can tell he wasn’t prepared for a lesson. He didn’t even answer the questions students asked in class.”

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As we talked our way through the advantages of being NNS teachers in class, Kyungmi began to position herself as a qualified language teacher, who was proficient in three languages; who had traveled extensively, engaged with other cultures; who had a formal knowledge of English as well as Korean and knew how it worked. Situating her identity as Korean EFL teacher, she further assumes agency in resisting her ascribed identity as NNS teacher as less competent and qualified than NS teacher by presenting advantages of being NNS teacher who shares her mother tongue with students in the Korean EFL context. She articulates the pedagogical and linguistic strengths NNS teachers bring to the EFL classroom (Braine, 1999) thereby positioning herself as a competent teacher and language role model for her future students. Upon graduation from UH with honors, Kyungmi returned to Korea and was hired as EFL teacher at a private English language institute (hakwon) in a small city located in the southern part of Korea near her hometown. Not only did she make money to support her future graduate studies, but she wanted to have teaching experience before applying for a graduate degree. During my visit to Korea over the fall of 2006, I met with her at a restaurant for lunch in Seoul and asked her about her experience as a newly hired EFL teacher. Her critical points of view on the Korean EFL context and education in general were explicitly expressed throughout our conversation: Excerpt 8 Kyungmi: There are a number of unfair issues in our school. For example, my contract requires me to work 30 hours per week, but actually I taught 38 hours in summer. Because I was a new hire, I could not complain or even raise the issue with the administration. However, this time around (for winter break), I asked the vice principal to correct the situation. She did not even say sorry and just said she would let me know. I felt angry and protested. American teachers work 40 hours but they are provided with housing. In the U.S., when I worked at the UH library, I wrote a time sheet by 15 minutes. Here I overwork by 8 hours per week, but do not get paid for that. (Kyungmi, personal communication, September 14, 2006) Although Kyungmi was critically aware of the unequal financial treatment between NS and NNS teachers at work, she could not raise the issues to the administration in her first semester. However, she informed me later that she did take action by negotiating with her superior to compensate for her unpaid overwork in the following semester. Despite her attempt to improve the teaching conditions, it was inevitable to face a limit to how much she could exercise her agency as a temporary hire. Once her one-year contract

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expired, she moved to another English language institute located in the outskirts of Seoul. Yet, her teaching still remains a site of struggle in the sense that her desire for transforming her students in the ways she experienced in CLEAR and the social, cultural, educational, and political forces influencing the Korean EFL teaching constantly collide with one another. Her challenges as EFL teacher in Korea were not only from the administration, but also from the children, parents, other language institutions and the Korean society in general where English language learning has been mostly commercialized, carrying social, economic, and symbolic capital with Koreans. In a recent conversation, she reaffirmed her realization of critical pedagogy as “a kind of luxury” (personal communication, August 8, 2008) for a teacher situated in a commercialized, competitive Korean EFL classroom in which parents and students consider themselves “consumers” and demand immediate and tangible outcomes (e.g., achieving high TOEFL scores and passing the college entrance examination) by virtue of their financial investments. While continuing on teaching English in a private language institute, Kyungmi is currently preparing for applying to a TESOL graduate program in the U.S. Mano: “I came in one perspective as Samoan, but explored other windows.” Mano was recognized by his teachers and peers as a confident, active, and competent class participant in oral discussions. He perceived himself as “a very active person in any society” that he joined in the past years of his life (Mano, personal communication, January 22, 2006). Certainly, he was the most vocal student throughout the seminar series; always answering the questions posed by instructors; making reference to the prior readings we did in class; and connecting his personal experience to theory to make sense of the academic texts. He was in this way able to consciously adjust conditions of the academic discourses in which he participated. Mano always brought up linguistic and cultural issues surrounding Samoan communities in Hawai`i and in American Samoa as an attempt to understand authoritative discourse via his own personal storytelling. He actively took on the cultural expert role, not always at instructors’ request, to claim his membership in the classroom community as an active and responsible student. Highly proficient in Chiefly Samoan as well as the vernacular form,14 he actively capitalized on his linguistic resources to produce academic papers and projects across courses. The majority of his research papers during his undergraduate studies centered on issues in relation to Samoan language, identity, and culture. Driven by his love of Samoa and his family, he actively (re)constructed his academic identities and literacies that

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were relevant and meaningful to him, with the active use of his cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge. In a sense, Mano strategically manipulated available cultural resources to position him as a competent member of academic communities. Towards the end of his participation in CLEAR, he displayed his broaden perspectives about language, identity, and education beyond his “Samoanness.” When asked to describe his experience in the program, he commented: Excerpt 9 Mano: It [CLEAR program] was an excellent experience. I was blessed to work with most motivated people. We built this community of learning—more like family, you know. We established good communication in it…I came in with one perspective being “Samoan,” but explored other windows. I noticed multiple perspectives on language and culture and learned to incorporate other perspectives into my belief system. We cannot limit ourselves to just one perspective…. The CLEAR program values individual perspective and experience. Our voice is accepted here in the seminar…It’s a support system; we encourage each other to speak up...When I go back to Samoa, I’d like to build a program like this. (Mano, literacy autobiography, May 22, 2006) Acknowledging his initial monolithic, unified discourse as “being Samoan,” Mano admits the importance of open-mindness to multiple perspectives, saying that “we cannot limit ourselves to just one perspective.” He appreciates the space given for developing meta-knowledge by making connections between what they learned in other classes and what they would do in the future as educators. His agency is further shown in his determination to building a program like CLEAR in American Samoa. He showed willingness to accommodate multiple perspectives expressed by classmates that differed from his own. His transformative narrative presented here is an instantiation of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus; he produces “a layering and thickering of learner identities” (Baynham, 2007, p. 336), which is illustrated in his next move. Upon his graduation in Spring 2007, he went back to American Samoa and was appointed as adjunct faculty in the Samoan Studies Institute. He taught two Samoan introductory level courses in the spring semester of 2007. He proudly reported back to me that he was utilizing what we did in CLEAR in his teaching. His teaching practice seems to resonate with what I believe critical reflective teaching, including making learning relevant to students’ lives, offering help to students in and out of class, listening to and considering students as experts, not mere recipients of knowledge in banking model of education and taking time to reflect on teaching (Freire,

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1970). It seems that Mano’s new status as faculty and graduate student and the intersecting trajectories between his teaching and graduate studies has strengthened his voice and agency with which he experiences a great sense of fulfillment and self-esteem as a legitimate member of the Samoan teaching community. Further, he now discusses issues of critical multiculturalism (Kubota, 2004) with his Samoan students, while introducing critical issues around race, language, and culture. In this regard, he is indeed translating critical theory into practice which is relevant and meaningful to him and his students. He has developed a critical, agentive self, using the unique repertoire of cultural and social resources, relationships, networks, knowledge, and skills available to him. As presented above, the students enacted their agency in a variety of ways in reaction to the academic communities’ social, cultural, institutional, and pedagogical contexts, thereby experiencing personal transformations related to their competence, academic and social identity, and beliefs about language teaching. However, it is not my intention to argue that students’ critical awareness of academic practice resulted solely from their learning and interaction in CLEAR; students were already equipped with critical perspectives of western academic discourse when entering the program. What follows, however, demonstrates the transformative, collaborative, and dialogic processes explicitly observed during their participation in the final semester. STUDENTS’ COLLECTIVE AGENCY BUILDING While I have thus far provided a sketch of the ways in which students’ individual agency was enacted in varying forms and degrees during and after their participation in CLEAR, their collective agency exercised in the seminar classroom was more evident as the time went by. After the first semester, students selected readings for each class meeting in addition to required readings. Students began to actively negotiate curriculum plans with the instructors and requested more time for reflections on their learning and teaching experiences. This was possible because the instruction was organized around daily experiences and the needs of the students rather than the pre-fixed curriculum. Furthermore, we had far more collaborations and negotiations in the final semester in terms of selecting readings for discussion, deciding on the logistics of class observation and student teaching, and negotiating the assessment criteria for electronic portfolios. Conference Presentation as a Milestone for Students’ Transformation This section illustrates the ways in which CLEAR scholars prepared for and made a group presentation at a local conference for language profes-

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sionals. It is important to be discussed here since their conference presentation epitomizes a milestone in their personal, academic, and professional development in many respects. CLEAR students successfully made a group presentation at a State TESOL conference in their final semester of the program. They took the initiative to work extra time outside the seminar class so that they could contribute to the knowledge making and dissemination process as active producers of text. It was a significant departure from their status as critical consumers of text. As Freire would argue, they became subjects, instead of objects of knowledge production. The students demonstrated their knowledge, skills, expertise, and experiences through their conference presentation that was very much like the way researchers produced for their own academic conferences. By making a presentation at a professional conference for language teachers, they took ownership of the knowledge production process. The students conducted research, worked together for writing an abstract and a handout, assigning roles and responsibilities, including creating PowerPoint slide show, rehearsing the presentation several times out of the class, anticipating possible questions from the audience followed by the talk and answering them. Through the process of preparing for the presentation, they collaboratively interrogated each other’s section of the talk as well. At first, students struggled to situate their own personal narratives about electronic portfolios within a professional context of a conference. However, the outcome of their work demonstrates the fact that they did not entirely let go of their voice, but at the same time, they were able to connect it to theoretical framework in the literature. The mutual benefit of presenting something “meaningful” between the audience and presenters was expressed by Jisun in her online post, “Because the content of the presentation was directly derived from our own experiences, thoughts, and opinions, rather than from the theories and literatures written by the experts in the field of Second Language Studies, I felt the presentation was more meaningful and special to me” (Jisun, personal communication, March 20, 2006). It was obvious that their high level of motivation to make the local TESOL conference presentation successful resulted from their desire to contribute to language teaching communities as active producers of professional knowledge. As Bauman and Briggs (1990) argue, “All of these factors—agency, legitimacy, competence, and values—bear centrally on the construction and assumption of authority” (p. 77). Students took the opportunity to create and deliver authoritative multimodal texts which embodied agentive selves. As PAR is defined largely by its transformative action, students’ presentation is a representation of their agency to act upon and contribute the knowledge they produced collaboratively. It would be overstatement that just presenting at a local conference once represents their ultimate accomplishment; individuals’ identities are transformed more consistently “across a series of

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events, not usually in one pivotal event” (Wortham, 2006, p. 48). Yet, this experience did give all of them a vision and hope that they could “start from here” (Mano, reflection journal, March 25, 2006) to grow more academically and professionally as active producers in the knowledge constructing process. Taken together, bilingual undergraduates assumed a role of active agents, while taking ownership over the research enterprise and claiming the right and the responsibility to synthesize, analyze, and articulate their experience with electronic portfolio development. This “capstone” experience was a clear representative of the transition that bilingual students were making from so-called NNS and otherwise marginalized undergraduates to articulate professional educators who possessed the agency, knowledge, and skills to inform practicing teachers at the conference. My Transformation as Instructor Participatory action research engenders a reflexive and creative practice to transform teaching experience into a learning experience. It is what Schön (1983) famously calls “reflective practice” which helps a teacher to make new sense of situations of uncertainty or uniqueness that she may experience. Critical researchers argue for a self-reflexive approach and acknowledge their own situatedness within an institution. For example, we need to interrogate the rationale of apparently progressive pedagogical practices such as reflective journal writing or a small-group discussion in relation to our specific pedagogical contexts and students (Gore, 1992). Are they actually liberating or empowering? Or are we unconsciously adopting the common academic practices in our classes? This kind of reflexivity on my part results in reframing and considering alternatives to the problems of teaching in response to what I learned from my students. As Brookfield (1987) states, critically reflective teaching happens only when we scrutinize the assumptions that undergrid how we work. I have undergone transformative learning in my self-reflection and through the interactions with students. I sometimes assumed that undergraduates should acquire certain concepts of critical approaches to language (e.g., Critical Language Awareness) through the seminars. I was (subconsciously) privileging theories and practices developed primarily by white teachers and scholars of language learning, academic literacies and identities (e.g., stressing oral participation in the name of “getting students’ voices heard”). As noted with Young’s case (Excerpt 6), I felt I was learning more from my students than my students learned from me. In other words, the PAR approach adopted in this study made salient the importance of reflective teaching by scrutinizing the underlying assumptions on the way I taught in the seminar series. Beyond the walls of the seminar classroom, students influenced the ways in which their teachers thought, behaved, and interacted with students. Students reported that they asked their instructors to clarify writing as-

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signments, asking for guidelines and the criteria for research papers. They asked for more time to revise their work and receive feedback, rather than submitting a final paper at the end of the semester. They no longer felt intimidated to make an appointment with professors to discuss their progress on research papers and projects. This may seem trivial to some, but this was a significant change in their academic identities because they often admitted that they did not have such experience before even with their L1 in their home country. This was the result of their PAR endeavor—a social change that was immediately concerned with their personal and academic lives.

TRANSFORMATION AS A LIFE-LONG JOURNEY Without homogenizing the relationship of identity and learning in my quest for evidence of transformation, I have endeavored to make some claims about personal, academic, and professional growths of participants in the CLEAR program. Students’ transformation during their participation in the program did not take a linear developmental path marked by distinct stages of academic and personal growth. Rather it involves a fluid, unstable, and dynamic process by which an individual confirms or problematizes who she/he is and becomes (Zembylas, 2003). Nonetheless, there seem to be some common themes recurrent in the PAR process: having critical reflection on the readings and the relationship between their learning and teaching; cooperating with instructors and peers through constructive dialogues; and taking actions to the issues that marginalize them. Bilingual students in this study employed a variety of strategies to claim their agency in academic discourse communities, including speaking in less face-threatening situations such as small group discussions; volunteering for a reading that they were familiar with; asking questions to instructors in person to clarify the contents of the reading before their presentation; and seeking help from their peers. In other words, each of the students worked, to varying degrees, to re-structure the contexts in which they were situated and to develop subject positions for themselves that they felt comfortable occupying given the constraints of their various communities of practice. Note that students did not simply resist or adopt critical issues, as depicted particularly in Rose’s case. The practical application and “outcomes” of critical pedagogy were much more complex, contradictory, and ambivalent than critical theorists would predict. This study suggests greater attention to the multiplicity and the complexity of students’ social identity in academic contexts through an understanding of the situatedness of agency and transformation. It challenges the monolithic discourse of linguistic minority students in American edu-

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cational contexts. Agency, both individual and collective, is a much more complex construct than some critical researchers would conceptualize. There are no pure categories, no static hierarchy, and no personal accounts from the allegedly oppressed, individuals that are congruent, consistent, and coherent with their analytic categories (Rhee, 2006). There is an ongoing negotiation between the individual and the social contexts imbued with values, beliefs, ideologies and power relations. Unlike some PAR studies that truly originated from the intent of all participants such as Fine and Torre (2004)’s prison study with women prisoners, this PAR project did not aim at “social change” which usually denotes community-based action particularly at the macro public policy levels. Our experience of PAR in this study involved a personal change including shifting self-concepts, perspectives, and social actions around our academic lives. I would argue that PAR studies should not limit the scope of the investigation to community-oriented issues such as poverty, crime, and health concerns. Bilingual undergraduate students in this study were engaged in a deliberate process of praxis through which they came to transform social practice around them through a cycle of awareness, action, and reflection within the power relations operated within an academic institution. As Kemmis and McTaggart (2000) succinctly argue, the personal is the political. By helping students and teachers to question and investigate the dominant positivist paradigm, to afford the possibility of connecting their lived experience and the academy, and in turn to make a difference in their social worlds, participatory action research allows us to reflect on what could change because of what we have learned and done.

APPENDIX TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS • [text] indicates descriptive text added to clarify the context of the transcript. • Kinesic signals are italicized inside round brackets. • Prosodic and paralinguistic features are italicized inside the square brackets. • Stressed words are underlined. • Kinesic, prosodic and paralinguistic features are selectively rather than exhaustively identified. • Interrupted or dropped utterance is indicated with a slash (/). • Voiced hesitations (e.g., ah, um) are marked where selected. • Pauses are marked with dots (…) with the number of dots indicating an estimated length of pause (Adapted from Locke, 2004, pp. 81–82).

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NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

I recognize that the term linguistic minority students fails to reflect that students who speak a language other than English are often in the majority group given the make-up of the communities in which they are situated. Alternatively, I use bilingual (or multilingual) students to validate their biliterate and bicultural competence. However, I use ‘linguistic minority students’ as well to indicate the power differential and inequity that inevitably exist between mainstream students and language minority counterparts in terms of access to resources for success in academia. Drawing upon Spivak’s (1993) notion of “strategic use of essentialism,” Pennycook argues that “it allows us to consider when we want to question identities, realities, rights, or language and when we need to operationalize more fixed and concrete notions for strategic purposes” (p. 172). Yet, it should be noted that the analysis of the focal students’ academic experiences shows that they are multidimensional, dynamic, and complex social beings. Minority students include American Indian (including Alaska Native), Asian/Pacific Islander (including Native Hawaiian), Black (including African American), and Hispanic (including Latino) among U.S. citizens. International students whose mother tongue is not English were not considered minority students in the statistics. According to ‘Demographic Profile of 1999–2000 Undergraduates’ by the U.S. Department of Education (2005), approximately 13 % of undergraduate students spoke a language other than English at home while growing up. While mother-tongue English speaking undergraduates often experience an incongruity between the identities and discourses they must adopt to participate in academic discourse communities and those of their home cultures, this can pose a much greater challenge for language minority students due to language barriers. This chapter is drawn from my doctoral dissertation (Cho, 2008). I am grateful to Kathryn Davis, my dissertation chair, for her continued support and guidance. My deepest appreciation goes to my students in the study whose collective voice is reflected throughout the pages of this chapter. However, I do not aim to provide a step-by-step guide to PAR because it would be the antithesis of PAR as a process that demands from its participants “ongoing critical analysis, a fine-tuned responsiveness, and ensuing fluidity” in program directions (Williams & Cervin, 2004).

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6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

McTaggart (1999) explains for the relative scarcity of PAR reports in the educational literature resulting from the nature and purpose of PAR. In PAR, the key point of reference for writing is the perceived needs of the action, not merely the publication of accounts of the “other” (p. 498). It should be noted that constructivist researchers have often considered their primary role as utilization-focused rather than political (Guba, 1990). According to Giroux (1988), voice constitutes the focal point for a critical approach to education. The term empowerment has entered the mainstream of educational discourse since the introduction of Freire (1971)’s notion of “conscientization” which makes human subjects rather than objects of history (Anderson, 1989). However, the notion of empowerment has become problematic as it is often protected by its alluring promises of liberation and remedies for power inequalities in education. I agree with Tew (2002) that empowerment should be disentangled from modernist notions of power and agency. I borrow the term from Simon (1987) for the purpose of this study: “Its referent is the identification of oppressive and unjust relations …. To empower in this perspective is to counter the power of some people or groups to make others “mute.” To empower is to enable those who have been silenced to speak. It is to enable the self-affirming expression of experiences mediated by one’s history, language, and tradition” (Simon, 1987, p. 374). This federally-funded program was developed and implemented by University of Hawai`i (UH) Center for Second Language Research (CSLR) staff from 2001 to 2007. In this article, Pennycook raises issues with western notions of plagiarism by sharing reflections on his Chinese student who wrote an essay on Abraham Lincoln, which was memorized verbatim from a high school English textbook. When asked about the essay, the student had seen no problem writing a biography of a famous person because he learned it by heart. Students who are accustomed to this learning strategy may encounter accusations of plagiarism when they enter a western academic institution. See Appendix for transcript conventions. Freire (1970) also uses the term, transformation, to describe personal changes that occur in a problem-posing approach to education. It has a chiefly or polite variant used in elite communication and a colloquial or vernacular form used in daily communication.

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REFERENCES Abasi, A. R, Akbari, N., & Graves, B. (2006). Discourse appropriation, construction of identities, and the complex issue of plagiarism: ESL students writing in graduate school. Journal of Second Language Writing 15, 102–117. Anderson, G. L. (1989). Critical ethnography in education: Origins, current status, and new directions. Review of Educational Research, 59(3), 249–270. Angelil-Carter, S. (2000). Stolen language? Plagiarism in writing. Harlow: Pearson Education. Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas. Bakhtin, M. (1986). The problem of speech genres (V. W. McGee, Trans.). In C. Emerson, & M. Holquist (Eds.), Speech genres and other late essays (pp. 60–102). Austin: University of Texas Press. Banks, J. A., & Banks, C. A. M. (Eds.). (2005). Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Barker, C., & Galasinski, D. (2001). Cultural studies and discourse analysis: A dialogue on language and identity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. L. (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, 59–88. Baynham, M. (2007). Transnational literacies: Immigration, language learning, and identity. Linguistics and Education, 18, 335–338. Belcher, D., & Braine, G. (Eds.). (1995). Academic writing in a second language: Essays on research and pedagogy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Braine, G. (Ed.) (1999). Non-native educators in English language teaching. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Brookfield, S. D. (1987). Developing critical thinkers: Challenging adults to explore alternative ways of thinking and acting. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Cho, H. S. (2008). Exploring critical literacies and social identities with linguistic minority undergraduates. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Hawai`i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI. Davis, K. A. (2009). Agentive youth research: Towards individual, collective, and policy transformations. In T. G. Wiley, J. S. Lee, & R. Rumberger, (Eds). The Education of language minority immigrants in the United States. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Davis, K. A., Bazzi, S., & Cho, H.S. (2005). “Where I’m from”: Transforming education for language minorities in a public high school in Hawai`i. In B. Street (Ed.), Literacies across educational contexts: Mediating learning and teaching (pp. 188–212). Philadelphia: Caslon Publishing. Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: The New Press. Devlin, M., & Gray, K. (2007). In their own words: A qualitative study of the reasons Australian university students plagiarize. Higher Education Research and Development, 26(2), 181–198. Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R., & Morrell, E. (2008). The art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for moving from theory to practice in urban schools. New York: Peter Lang.

Transformation and Agency • 327 Ellsworth, E. (1992). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminisms and critical pedagogy (pp. 90–119). New York: Routledge. Fecho, B., & Meacham, S. (2007). Learning to play and playing to learn: Research sites as transactional spaces. In C. Lewis, P. Enciso, & E. B. Moje (Eds.), Reframing sociocultural research on literacy: Identity, agency and power (pp. 163–188). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fine, M. (1998). Working the hyphens: reinventing self and other in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The landscape of qualitative research (pp. 130–155). London: Sage Publications. Fine, M., & Torre, M. E. (2004). Re-membering exclusions: Participatory action research in public institutions. Qualitative Research in Psychology. 1(1), 15–37. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Fricker, M. (1999). Epistemic oppression and epistemic privilege. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 25, 191–210. Gee, J. P. (1992). The social mind: Language, ideology, and social practice. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Granby, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Goodburn, A. M. (1998). Literacy research: Issues of authority, ownership, and representation. English Education, 30(2), 121–145. Gore, J. (1992). What we can do for you! What can “we” do for “you”? Struggling over empowerment in critical and feminist pedagogy. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminisms and critical pedagogy (pp. 54–73). New York: Routledge. Guba, E. (1990). The paradigm dialogue. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Kemmis, S., & McTaggart, R. (2000). Participatory action research. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.), (pp. 567–605). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. King, J. A., & Lonnquist, M. P. (1992). A review of writing on action research. Minneapolis, MN: Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, University of Minnesota. Kubota, R. (2004). The politics of cultural difference in second language education. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 1(1), 21–39. Hall, B. (2001). I wish this were a poem of practices of participatory research. In P. Reason, & H. Bradbury (Eds.), Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice (pp. 171–178). London: Sage Publications. Haviland, J. M., & Kahlbaugh, P. (1993). Emotion and identity. In M. Lewis, & J.M. Haviland, (Eds.), Handbook of emotions. (pp. 327–339). New York: Guilford. Ladson-Billings, G. (1999). Preparing teachers for diversity: Historical perspectives, current trends, and future directions. In L. Darling-Hammond, & G. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Lather, P. (2008). New wave utilization research: (Re)imagining the research/policy nexus. Educational Researcher, 37, 361–364. Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy within the postmodern. New York: Routledge.

328 • HYE-SUN CHO LeCompte, M. D. (1994). Some notes on power, agenda, and voice: A researcher’s personal evolution toward critical collaborative research. In P. McLaren & J. M. Giarelli (Eds.), Critical theory and educational research (pp. 92–112). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Leung, C., & Safford, K. (2005). Nontraditional students in higher education: English as an additional language and literacies. In B. Street (Ed.), Literacies across educational contexts: Mediating learning and teaching (pp. 303–324). Philadelphia: Caslon Publishing. Lewis, C. (2001). Literary practices as social acts: Power, status, and cultural norms in the classroom. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Lin, A., Grant, R., Kubota, R., Motha, S., Sachs, G., Vandrick, S., & Wong, S. (2004). Women faculty of color in TESOL: Theorizing our lived experiences. TESOL Quarterly, 38(3), 487–504. Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (2003). Ethics: the failure of positivist science. In Y. S. Lincoln & N. K. Denzin (Eds.), Turning points in qualitative research: tying knots in a handkerchief (pp. 219–238). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (2000). Paradigmatic controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.) (pp. 163–188). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Locke, T. (2004). Critical discourse analysis. London: Continuum. Luke, C., & Gore, J. (1992). Feminisms and critical pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Matusov, E. (2007). Applying Bakhtin scholarship on discourse in education: A critical review essay. Educational Theory, 57(2), 215–237. McTaggart, R. (1999). Reflection on the purposes of research, action, and scholarship: A case of cross-cultural participatory action research. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 12(5), 493–511. Moll, L., & Rubinstein-Avila, E. (2007). Commentary. In C. Lewis, P. Enciso, & E. Moje, (Eds.) Reframing sociocultural research on literacy: Identity, agency, and power. (pp. 189–195). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pennycook, A. (1999). Introduction: Critical approaches to TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 33, 329–348. Pennycook, A. (1996). Borrowing others’ words: Text, ownership, memory and plagiarism. TESOL Quarterly, 30(2), 201–230. Reason, P., & Bradbury, H. (Eds.) (2006). Handbook of action research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Rhee, J. (2006). Re/membering (to) shifting alignments: Korean women's transnational narratives in US higher education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(5), 595–615. Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. Simon, R. I. (1987). Empowerment as a pedagogy of possibility. Language Arts, 64(4), 370–382.

Transformation and Agency • 329 Spivak, G. (1994). Bonding in difference. In A. Arteaga (Ed.), An other tongue: Nation and ethnicity in the linguistic borderlands (pp. 273–285). Durham, NC: Duke University Publishing. Tew, J. (2002). Social theory, power, and practice. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2005). The Condition of Education 2005, NCES 2005-094, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Valdés, G. (2004). Between support and marginalisation: The development of academic language in linguistic minority children. Bilingual education and bilingualism, 7(2), 102–132. Wall, S. (2006). An autoethnography on learning about autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5(2), 1–12. Retrieved from http://www. ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/5_2/PDF/wall.pdf. Williams, L., & Cervin, C. (2004). Contemporary approaches to participatory action research in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Social and Cultural Studies, 4, July 2004. Wortham, S. (2006). Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Zembylas, M. (2003). Emotions and teacher identity: a poststructural perspective. Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 9(3), 213–238.

CHAPTER 14

USING STUDENT-ASRESEARCHER MODELS AS A MODE OF RESISTANCE AND AGENCY Creative Maladjustment in an Urban High School Renae Skarin

There are some things in our society and some things in our world for which I’m proud to be maladjusted. (Martin Luther King, 1958) I had to maladjust myself to the notion that the demands and structure of schooling were normal and the students were problems if they did not adjust. (Herbert Kohl, 1994) INTRODUCTION The first film that Xitlalli produced for our media production class is about the moment she found out that her mother had died. It is only a few minutes long, but at the end of it we are all shocked into silent crying. She Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 331–000 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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speaks of the moments before when her family gathered together to tell her that her mother is gone. She speaks of the sudden sense of panic when she realizes that something is very wrong. Then she speaks about the disbelief, the chaos, the sense of being underwater she feels when the words finally come forth. I am heartbroken and at a loss when she continues to speak about the disintegration of her family who, two years after her mother’s death, do not know how to cope with their grief and anger. In the couple of years since her mother’s death, Xitlalli has stopped performing well in school, has taken up drinking and light drugs to, as she says, “escape the pain,” and she feels lost and forlorn. A couple of teachers have approached her to tell her how sorry they are for her loss, but no counseling has been offered. She says that she really has only told one or two trusted friends what happened. She is in my summer program because she failed some of her classes and needs the credits. Xitlalli is one of the statistics. My researcher/writer modus operandi is shifting as of late. Siding with Martin Luther King (1958), I no longer feel compelled to draw attention to the educational achievement gap that has existed as long as the history of public schooling. By achievement gap, I am referring to the idea that poor people, Blacks, Latinos, English learners (ELs), some segments of the Asian population, and Native Americans (including Pacific Islanders), perform less well academically than their more affluent White and Asian counterparts. Not that I am denying the “existence” of this discursive gap in the sense that it has real effects on material, affective, social, cognitive, and other realms of student lives. Certainly those who are on the “wrong side” of the gap embody it in ways that those on the “right side” don’t. My intention is to quit attending the church of Reagan with its theology of standardization that each one of us educators/bishops is supposed to see as “saving” our children from the sin of inadequacy or poverty or deviance, and to join the insurgency of those apostates who recognize the institutional myopia that dogmatic adherence to the grand narrative of standardization (and its daughter NCLB) creates. This institutional myopia attributes student failure to individual psychology or intellectual ability and fails to see the structural inequality that underlies the process of schooling. Antonia Darder (2002), writing on Paolo Freire’s understanding of the effects of the marketization of education says, “schools play an important role in the process of capital accumulation as they organize student populations in an economic hierarchy and officially carry out an unfair system of meritocracy that ultimately functions to legitimate the ideological formations necessary for the reproduction of inequality” (p. 2). I too refuse to pander to a conservative ideology that seeks to hold children up to a pre-existing ideal of what they should be and do without having given them the resources and tools in which to meet those challenges.

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Rather, I start this paper by interrogating the notion of “achievement” and “accountability” and calling to the witness stand those discourses that segment our school population into binary categories, namely those of winners and losers. I then illustrate how a feminist educational approach can make spaces to challenge those dichotomizing discourses and cultivate student voice as the ground on which to develop critical reflection and political action, as well as literacy skills. I argue that agentive transformations can only take place in a context of love where the emotions and lived experiences of students are central to classroom learning. THE PRICE OF MARKET-DRIVEN EDUCATION: INTERROGATING ACHIEVEMENT AND SEEKING ALTERNATIVES As subjects constituted by discourses, we are all caught up in the social currents and in the national circulation of educational meanings being studied. Not only are these discourses entrenched in our social system, but also entrenched in our very psyches and bodies, and they infect and shape our ways of knowing the world. Weedon’s (1987) interpretation of Foucault’s discourse illustrates this idea. To her, discourses are, Ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern. (p. 108)

The discourses that govern most of our present day thinking around education, although seemingly commonsense and natural, have only recently begun circulating in the ideological marketplace. Since the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform” (NAR; National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) which called for the U.S. to raise its standards for educational achievement, the U.S. has been on the fast track to forcefully enhancing federal control over the American education system (Guthrie & Springer, 2004) and creating a national standard of achievement. This trajectory can be traced through calls for standards in the 80s and 90s, to Goals 2000, to the reauthorization of ESEA and finally the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2001. Some of the binaries that undergird current educational discourses that I have uncovered in my work (drawn from school accountability reports, educational literature, educational small-talk with other insiders, and from interviews and conversations with students,) are included in Table 1. Those highly ideological categories, most of which have only recently begun to circulate in public discourse, make up only a small percentage of the many potentially wounding dichotomies that abound in the market

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List of Binary Terms Found in Educational Settings

Successful Competent Smart kids Good kids White Achievers Winners Proficient Fully English proficient (RFEP) High socio-economic status Normal Normal Motivated Participating Male Highly qualified Graduates AP/College bound courses Meeting AYP Not in PI

At-risk Incompetent Stupid kids Bad kids Of color Non-achievers Losers Non-proficient Non-English proficient Low socio-economic status ADHD Learning disabled (LD) Unmotivated Non-participating Female Unqualified Drop-outs GE courses Not meeting AYP In PI

Contributing members of society School-based knowledge

Delinquents Personal knowledge

driven discourse of accountability and achievement in schools. Indeed, the current education system, which thrives on measurement, differentiation, benchmarks, and diplomas, cannot survive without them. I refer to them as wounding because they perform a re/productive and symbolic violence on the subjects who are interpellated by them. They attempt to turn those they describe into their objects and slaves. They attempt to define “the other” by creating a prejudicial understanding of what constitutes high achievement. Since our subjectivities are always formed in relation to others within a particular political economy, these signifiers that mark a person as this or that kind of person enslave us in their interpellating power. This violence is more insidious because we do not realize that we are complicit in inflicting it. Speaking to one of these dichotomies, Herbert Kohl (1994) asked the following questions. What makes a child at risk? What is the hidden agenda of the people who have manufactured the “at-risk” category? What are at-risk children at risk of doing? In plain language, at-risk children are at risk of turning the poverty and prejudice they experience against society rather than learning how to conform and take their “proper” place.

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And so, with Herbert Kohl (1994) “As a teacher I found it essential to maladjust to dichotomies like these and refuse to allow them to enter into my thoughts or vocabulary” (pp. 134–135). I, too, refuse to take my proper place and so seek alternative ways of framing pedagogical practice. A feminist research and pedagogy perspective offers an alternative to dehumanizing educational practices through a paradigm of love and with an ethic of care (hooks, 2003). By love, I am talking about an inclusive love for the “Other” for the different, for those that do not conform to standardization or normalization. This love sees the potential of every underprepared student, not her lack and failures to meet some arbitrary benchmark. It does not sacrifice intellectual growth to enhance teacher-student relationships, but rather sees the two as complementary pursuits. Research and pedagogy based on love and an ethic of care purposefully works toward blurring the reason-emotion split that stifles so many students and teachers in U.S. schools and supports our yearnings for recognition and nourishment. It means that emotional connections between students and teachers/researchers are nurtured alongside professional practices that promote learning. This pedagogy can only be enacted in a noncompetitive, nonhierarchical relationship with each other and the larger world. It stresses the values of empowerment, shared power, solidarity, community, and civic transformation. The emphasis in a feminist research and pedagogy is on the co-construction of knowledge, rather than individually produced knowledge, and affect is seen to play an essential role in the intellectual experience of the co-construction of knowledge. Further, it operates under the assumption that “all humans are worthy of dignity and sacred status without exception for class or ethnicity [or test scores]” (Christians, 1995, p. 129). Not only this, but it assumes that all humans are capable of producing important knowledge about their social worlds. Thus, while an emphasis on rationality objectifies second language learners and speakers (ELLs and FEPs) and “underperforming” learners and turns them into products of a market economy, an ethic of care can work to disrupt the disembodied and emotionally sanitized rationality that characterizes both the educational system in general and empiricist educational science. In the project described here, I sought to highlight those discourses of failure that swirl around and are discarded, taken up, and reconstituted in the multimodal/multisemiotic space among girls in the belly of the behemoth, on the campus of a high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. This space would be one in which emotional expression is encouraged, personal experience is validated, and critical thinking is but one practice in a repertoire of loving practices. I took the position that most underserved students do not experience school as a place as an expansive and enabling institution, but this is only because normative discourses work so hard to close down channels of possibility for them. It is my contention that the

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development of an ethic of care in pedagogical practices can change our institutions to ones of inclusiveness and possibility. Mike Rose (1989) explains how caring educators are able to help underserved students experience the “majesty” of rebirth as they transform their “misery” into “possibility” (p. 159). Through critical analysis of the social worlds and discourses, students and I resist and critique entrenched and embodied notions of success and failure, and mire our way through to pedagogical potentials of attending to difference and to love within the pedagogical context. Though teachers and students can never disembed ourselves from social structure or discourses, perhaps we can affiliate ourselves with discourses that assign us more agential status. Or maybe we can find in the myriad in-between “third” spaces, in the cracks, in the transgressive sites, the opportunity for learning and for alternative visions. Loving visions such as these would treat “difference, and not similarity, as the driving force in processes of becoming” (Roy, 2003, p. 5). Bhabha (1994) defines “third spaces” as the constructing and reconstructing of identity that is fluid, not static. He also views third spaces as “discursive sites or conditions that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, and rehistoricized anew” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 37). According to Lam (2004), we can “create third spaces or zones where immigrants [and other “others”] may engage in discourses that serve to construct an in-between space or trajectory for speaking and that they use to subvert the dominant discourses of both their native and adopted countries” (p. 85). Bakhtin (1981) suggests that individuals often “struggle against various kinds and degrees of authority” (p. 345) in the process of developing their own ideologies and personal identities. Thus, through the analysis of the ways that discourses structure our subjective selves, we can negotiate or take up alternative/hybrid selves within discourses. In what follows I outline my critical/feminist research and pedagogical methodology as well as introduce the work of and the participants in the YouthWorks summer/after school program that I created specifically for girls. I then explore how, during the course of our summer program, one participant, Xitlalli, wrestles with various wounding discourses and through dialogic interaction struggles to resist and take up less wounding discourses. I extend this analysis to think about the possibilities of freeing up the fixed relations within classrooms and between students and teachers, and to expose them to new organizations that do not make us complicit in social injustice. YouthWorks THEORY, PEDOGOGY AND RESEARCH Girls growing up in the Bay Area, as anywhere else, embody the gender/ class/race/sexual possibilities made available to them in the cultural-historical economy. A central tension in girls’ lives growing up comes from the

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simultaneous struggles to be intricately meshed in the social fabric, while also signaling individuality. This requires taking up a coherent narrative of oneself, as well as becoming a part of the coherent narratives of others. In order to do this, one must see the ways of being made possible by the discursive practices of our social groups, and to be able to position ones self and be positioned as a member. Althusser (1984) called the taken-for-granted quality of the discursive categories “obviousness,” and said that this obviousness is an ideological effect. In addition, one shares obviousnesses with other people in social groups, and is positioned in relationship to them, creating category memberships that are most often one of the elements of a binary pair. If you are not a man, you’re a woman, if you are not a good girl, you’re a ho, if you’re not legal, you’re illegal, etc. Indeed, then, young immigrant women in the Bay Area are part of a cultural economy that positions and categorizes them, and they make sense of these categorizations from the inside of the category, as well as in relation to its binary opposite. YouthWorks addresses the intersection of the personal and political through incorporating technology, media literacy, critical literacy, and research skills (including autoethnography and action research). A few researcher/pedagogues have enacted student-as-researcher pedagogies (Davis, 2005, 2009; Morrell, 2008; Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008), but these projects are few and far between, and often relegated to the margins of education (e.g. summer programs, after-school programs, etc). While the YouthWorks project focused on media production, it also shared the major elements of what Morrell (2008) described as “critical composition pedagogy.” The core tenets of this course include the following: 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

Historicity. Critical composition pedagogy must begin with students’ experiences as citizens of the word. Problem-posing. A critical composition pedagogy must embrace, as its curriculum, the real world problems and struggles of marginalized people in the world. Dialogic. A critical composition pedagogy must entail authentic humanizing interactions with people in the world. Emancipatory. A critical composition pedagogy must confront individual alienation and social injustice and have as its project liberation from oppressive realities. Praxis. A critical composition pedagogy must be about action and reflection upon that action. (Morrell, 2008, p. 116)

My ethnographic documentation of YouthWorks was not separate from my pedagogical project as they were conceived in synergy. In terms of “methodology” and “interpretive frameworks” this study can be classified under the wide banner of critical ethnography. D. Soyini Madison (2005) lays out

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some of the central agreed-upon tenets of this framework (CE) in her book Critical Ethnography. These include the following: 1. 2.

3.

4.

CE “begins with an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain.” CE “takes us beneath surface experiences, disrupts the status quo, and unsettles both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and obscure operations of power and control.” “Empirical methodologies become the foundation for inquiry, and it is here ‘on the ground’ of Others that the researcher encounters social conditions that become the point of departure for research.” CE “probe[s] other possibilities that will challenge institutions, regimes of knowledge, and social practices that limit choices, constrain meaning, and denigrate identities and communities.” (p. 5)

The critical pedagogical and ethnographic tenets clearly complement each other in support of social justice objectives. In addition, I take what Michelle Fine calls an “activism stance” in my research. This requires the researcher to take up political stances with participants with regard to hegemonic practices that may oppress them, and to offer alternatives to the ways they have been positioned. I do this by becoming a passionately involved participant-observer/teacher, and engaging with students in participatory action research projects. These projects become both part of the research and the object of research. My researcher positionality pushes against the notion of an objective neutral observer and forces me to lay bare my own power, privilege, and biases while at the same time working with my participants to lay bare oppressive social relations. In sum, the aim of this inquiry is the co-reconstruction of experience through dialogical encounters in the classroom space, the co-critique of the discourses that do the work of subject-making within those experiences, and transformation/emancipation of oppressive conditions or relations through the co-writing of alternative stories/epistemologies. During YouthWorks, Summer 2008 four Latina and one Filipina high school girls, all redesignated Fully English Proficient (RFEP), participated in the project. Xitlalli became the case study focus of this chapter. We came together four hours a day, Monday through Friday, for six weeks, to talk about their own important social realities, engage in theatre play, write autobiographic vignettes, and use student-as-ethnographer skills to create a media-based participatory action research project. By first engaging in group discussions, theatre role-play, and autobiographical writing and speaking in a space co-constructed to encourage risk-taking, these young women collaborated on identifying a problem or concern specific to them and their communities. Growing out of these activities, each student gen-

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erated a film research project that excited her and responded to her issues and needs. These films were developed after many hours of community-building exercises, that specifically worked to identify personal issues through autobiographical writing and “Theatre of the Oppressed” (Boal, 1979, 1995) exercises, creating short digital narratives around salient and sometimes troubling real-life personal experiences, engaging in daily dialogue about these personal experiences and continually revisiting our re/actions to these experiences, and then connecting these experiences to larger cultural and social issues and envisioning possibilities for creative resistance in a final film project. Theatre of the Oppressed, a form of interactive theatre closely related to critical pedagogy, which stresses dialogue between oppressors and oppressed, was an essential component in the program, because it allowed us to dehabituate to discourses and relations with an end to contesting sedimented and oppressive meanings. For example, after acting out a painful event that occurred in their lives, students might be asked to replay the scene, but do or say something differently. Spectators could come in and take the place of other roles and do or say something differently. Scenes could be acted ten times in a row, all with different nuanced behavior or outcomes. Then a debriefing might reveal even more possibilities for re-acting the situation. Davies (2008) claims that, “Finding ways of speaking that take us beyond what is already sedimented in every day speech and action requires us to begin with a detailed reflexive examination of our habituated immurement in the ordinariness of life-as-usual” (p. 173). Students’ final films ranged in topics, but included girl fighting, grieving the loss of a loved one killed by means of a violent act, “illegal” immigration, the positives and negatives of gang culture and finding true friendships in an environment hostile to girls. These films can be characterized as autoethnographic texts in that they use research, writing, and other representational methods to “connect the autobiographical and the personal to the cultural and social” (Ellis, 2004, p. xix). Each girl used her own video camera to capture footage of conversations and interviews with informants, found footage, photographs, etc, and then edited that footage into their short films. To document the ideological shifts of the girls, I drew on a number of data resources. The first is our TO exercises and ensuing discussions, which I regularly audio-recorded over the six week period. These exercises and discussions generally lasted for an hour or two each day and were the basis for the writing and filmmaking that the students produced. I draw from field notes and curriculum notes about the entire course process, as well as the final movie that Xitlalli produced. To gain further insight into ideological shifts of Xitlalli, I conducted a two-hour follow-up interview in November 2008 about the program, her film, and the changes that had happened

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in her life since the summer. Data were analyzed through an inductive and recursive process with themes and patterns arising and evolving as the data collection proceeded. In this study, I particularly focused on the major discourses salient within the data materials I gathered and how these discourses interacted with each other and changed over time (Clarke, 2005). As explained above, I am referring to Foucault’s conception of discourses as any semiotic information or social practice that transmits meaning. Alsop, Fitzsimmons, and Lennon state that, For Foucault discourses are anything which can carry meaning. Language, images, stories, scientific narratives and cultural products are all discourses. But discourses are also things we do. Social practices like segregating work, giving away the bride in marriage, and so on, all carry meaning. (Alsop, et al., 2002, p. 81)

With Foucault, I contend that, as social subjects, my participants and I are produced by these discourses. But power confronting other power produces, “redistributions, realignments, homogenizations, serial arrangements, and convergences of the force relations” (Foucault, 1978, p.94). Thus, I attempted to map these discourses inherent in my data to examine them for how my participants and I occupied varying positions of power in the network of power relations. I first analyzed each piece of data to locate the major discourses operating within it. Then I looked across relevant data materials collected over time and compared the discourses operating within these. I paid particular attention to which discourses appeared more or less salient as time went on. These discursive materials gave me insight into resistance to particular discursively produced positions and thus into ideological change over time. At the same time, I also explore the overall intersection of the personal (domestic violence) with the political (oppression of women) and the political (oppression of illegal immigrants) with the personal (death at border crossings). RESEARCHER REFLEXIVITY In critical ethnography issues of difference, power and privilege between researcher and researched are paramount, especially when differences of race and class are also involved. Other dilemmas of research objectives and feminist ethics also surface. For example, with regards to representation, Denzin (1997) warns us not to fall prey to seeing the constructed ethnographic text as a perfect image of the lived realities of participants. The naturalness, he says, of these images of reality are a masquerade. Denzin writes, “The original voices of individuals in a field setting, and the intentions behind those voices can never be recovered” (p. 43). I also need to theorize my researcher and participant positionality within this narrative. It is important to acknowledge the history of colonialist power

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between the United States and Mexico, and to tread lightly when it comes to what might be construed as colonialist representations of Mexican masculinity, which work to recreate racist stereotypes of the Mexican “other.” Representation is a key issue in qualitative research, and I realize that when I speak of gender I am drawing from my own gendered subjectivity, my own gender beliefs, and other conceptual categories. I must be careful not to engage in essentializing women in my feminist practice. However, as in the U.S., male violence is a central focus in Chicana Feminista literature, and this tradition contests the notion that women should remain silent in the face of domestic violence because of the political costs of airing domestic problems in public spaces. The policing of women’s voices in communities of color is, according to Fregoso (2003), “rooted in the hierarchical ranking of oppression—the notion that struggles against oppression based on class or race are more important than those against sexism and homophobia,” and that it perpetuates “dominant culture’s views about blacks and other minorities as pathologically violent” (2003, p. 33). I raise this issue because I understand that I am treading on dangerous ground when I attempt to represent Xitlalli’s voice speak about sexist practices within an ethnic community that I do not call my own. My positionality as a White woman is especially problematic for many reasons, but namely because of the history of oppression between the U.S. and Mexico and between Whites and Mexicans. In fact, because I am aware of my positionality, I was often dumbfounded as to what to offer as guidance to some of my Latina youth who expressed their rage and frustration at the forms of male dominance that they experience. However, rather than remain silent about it, instead I historicize male violence, and point out that, Most of the empirical evidence on sexual assault and domestic violence shows that Mexican and Chicano men are no more prone to commit violence against women than are those from any other national or racial group. Domestic violence is a leading cause of female injuries in nearly every country, cutting across the axes of race, class, religion, nationality, and ethnicity. (Fregoso, 2003, p. 34)

Rather than downplay familial forms of violence within Mexican communities, an act that would further denigrate my female participants’ experiences, I engage in what Spivak (1987) called “strategic essentialism.” Spivak argues that acknowledging women’s multiple identities means acknowledging the role women’s bodily experience of subjugation to men has in shaping women’s identities. There is no essential identity because we all live with a number of hybrid identities on the borderlands between our homes and elsewhere (Anzaldúa, 1987). Spivak contends that in order to increase the opportunities for substantive resistance, marginalized peoples must “take the risk of essence” (1987, p. 150). At the same time I attempt

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to highlight Xitlalli’s response to this violence rather than my own, and use problem-posing to encourage critical responses that work for her. Her responses were reportedly triggered by the strength she drew through our group discussions, during which we, as sisters with shared experiences and as women who have experienced oppression and violence, together negotiated our own stories, and envisioned resistance against masculine forms of dominance. In short, it was through her dialogic relationship with the Other that Xitlalli is able to bring herself more fully into existence. Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) states, I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a thou). Separation, disassociation, enclosure within the self is the main reason for the loss of one’s self. The very being of man is the deepest communion….To be means to be for another, through the other, for oneself. (p. 287)

Thus, my pedagogical and research strategies include the acknowledgment of the intersectionality of multiple subjectivities in the construction and negotiation of performance. I explicitly highlight the ways that we are different and might have different perspectives on issues (in fact ethnic cultural differences were a regular topic of discussion in our classroom), while at the same time acknowledging that there are nodal points of shared experience on which we can connect, support each other, and learn from each other. XITLALLI AND AVAILABLE GENDERED SUBJECTIVITIES: THE PERSONAL AS POLITICAL Xitlalli and her family are economically, politically, and socially positioned as “undocumented immigrants” or more insidiously, as “illegal aliens.” When Xitlalli was young her family crossed into the United States to find work and a sustainable life for the family. When they entered gringolandia from Mexico they left everyone they loved behind and only had each other on which to rely. According to Xitlalli, gender roles in her family tended toward the traditional, with her mother bearing much of the childcare and home maintenance responsibilities. In addition to this, both her mother and father worked blue-collar jobs outside the home, needing the dual income to make ends meet. Thus, Xitlalli’s mother bore the stress from her dual roles as homemaker and employee. Xitlalli characterizes herself as forming a strategic alliance with her mother, who she says took her side in fights and protected her from her older brother and father who were aligned. Xitlalli’s mother also refrained from teaching her daughter how to cook and clean, because as Xitlalli explains, “She wanted me to do good

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in school, not be like all them other girls that, like, have to do everything for their men. We don’t live in Mexico anymore.” Her mother’s act of refusal can be seen as an interruption of the conventional normative order of the traditional Mexican family, although she also reiterated the normative structure through her own gender performances. This stabilizing force provided Xitlalli with the support and role modeling needed for crossing feminist and cultural borders (Anzaldúa, 1987). Then the unthinkable occurred. When Xitlalli was 12 years old her mother made the dangerous trip back home to Mexico to visit family. On her return, she attempted to illegally cross the U.S. border. Although Xitlalli’s mother paid a coyote to take her across into Arizona, she never made it. Though the details have not been discussed with the children, Xitlalli knows that her mother died trying to cross the border. She left behind her husband and four children, her baby sister not yet one year old. The children, wracked with pain from the loss of their mother, continued living with their father, who Xitlalli reports, began drinking heavily. He also took on another job to produce the income that he and his wife had produced together. Her father, she reports, is now largely emotionally and physically absent from the family. Xitlalli seems to characterize this time as a period of chaos and forlornness: “Man, everything is fuckin’ crazy. With my moms gone nothing makes sense no more. We don’t feel like a family anymore. I feel like, without my moms, my family is like, falling apart. Damn, it’s sad.” (Field notes, June 23, 2008) The gender dynamics of the household changed with the death of her mother, and Xitlalli was suddenly obligated to take on household responsibilities. Fights between her and her brother ensued over her inability, and sometimes refusal, to cook or clean. She, for her part, didn’t understand why her older brother couldn’t take on some of the household responsibilities. She implicitly understood the traditional discourses of gender roles, but she was also exposed to a new gender order with her mother’s (partial) rebellion against it and to other discourses about gender that she was exposed to in school and in the media. Xitlalli began resisting the social order of the male members of her family. At the same time, she felt extremely resentful and guilty. She explained to me that it’s not that she didn’t want to contribute to filling the hole that her mother had left in the family, but that she didn’t want to give in to her brother’s insistence on the unequal division of labor within the home. I would argue that she wanted to undo gender performativity by refusing to compromise her own internally persuasive discourse; that of equality between the sexes. In her book Undoing Gender, Butler (2004) illuminates her understanding of how “restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life” might be undone. While, not necessarily negative or positive, these attempts are often caught

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up in the paradoxical tension between societal-mediated survival and individual agency. Family life became almost unbearable for Xitlalli as tensions erupted into conflict and violent physical fights. Her older brother, then 15 years old, made it clear that as the oldest male sibling he was the man of the house while his father was working. He also made it clear that noncompliance to his rule would result in emotional humiliation or physical violence. He began to guard the male authority of the house, and physically punished Xitlalli if she talked back to her father. This violent behavior makes evident the larger reality of power relations on gendered bodies, and the fact that her father supported and her brother felt justified in his actions is evidence of the degree to which biological essentialism is still at work and violence against women is naturalized as a form of control. Yet the brother’s authority did not go uncontested. At one crucial point in their cycle of conflict Xitlalli related the following narrative. R: X: R: X: R: X: R: X:

And then, on the weekend, how’d it go? Not good. Why not? Because of Friday. Because I ran away. Why’d you run away? Because of what happened on Friday. What happened on Friday? My dad picked me up from my girlfriend’s. Me and my dad were going to the car, right (inaudible speech). I told him, I just have to tell you, I lost my phone. After that, he just got disappointed with me. I was like, “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t yelling at him or nothing, he wasn’t yelling at me. I was like, “I don’t know, I’m sorry.” He was like, “Wow. Did you try calling it?” I’m like “Yeah.” He was telling me normal things like, trying to remember where I left it. Then we got home, and like always [said in tired singsongy dragged out voice], my dad has to tell my brother everything. So when I came in my brother was already sitting on the couch. He was like “Oh, did you know your sister lost her phone?” He was like, “Yeah.” He starts with his little shit, like, my dad has to tell my brother everything. And um, like ummmm… He was trying to play like he’s the shit, right, and he was like, “What the fuck did you do with your phone?” And I was like, “Like I did it on purpose! I didn’t know I was going to lose my phone.” And he was like, “You made dad waste $100 for a phone.” And I’m like, “I bought the cheapest one.” And he was like, “So it was still $100 more that we were supposed to have lose.” I was like, “I didn’t know that I was going to lose it.” I’m like “I got the cheapest phone, it was either that or losing more money.” And

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R: X:

then he like started with his little shit. “Like I got my own phone, and I’m paying for my own bills.” I’m like, in my head, I’m like, “come on, I don’t even have a job, how could I pay for my phone without no money?” If I had my own money I would have paid for it. I’m like, dang, why is he bragging about it? Besides, he’s already graduated from high school, and you’re still in high school. Yeah, and he’s like, “See if you just keep track of your phone and everything.” And I’m like, “Shut the fuck up.” Because he was irritating me. Come on, he got in my business and now he’s like telling me what to do and all this shit. Before he came in the picture me and my dad were okay. Like everything was okay, no one was yelling at no one, no one was getting mad. It was just a matter of disappointment. I was like, look, I’m sorry. He was like, you should buy your own stuff. And I’m like “with what money?” just being stupid, and I’m like “Shut the fuck up!” because he wouldn’t shut up. And so I’m like “shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up.” He wouldn’t be quiet. So he pissed me off, and so I cursed him out, I’m like you stupid pincha. He already had a ball, and he aimed at my face and threw it hella hard. He missed and hit the wall. You know how when you throw it hella hard it hits the wall and bounces real bad? So it hit the wall and it sounded hella loud. And I’m like, “you fuckin missed.” And he was like, “you want me to fuckin try it?” I’m like, “fuckin do it!” He was standing up and my dad was trying to block him. He was acting all tough and shit. I stand up and I was gonna to go up the staircase to leave everything alone. I was already hella pissed, and I told my dad why is he always telling my brother everything. That’s what I was telling my dad before I went up the stairs, I’m like “Why you gotta tell him, look at what’s happening.” I was already feeling pissed off going up the stairs. And like my dad already knows he likes to fight. He was gonna take me to the store, and he was like “You still want to go to the store?” And I’m like, “no it’s cool” And he was like, “you want to go to the park?” and I’m like “Dad, you already know I hate the park, I don’t want to go to the park.” And I kind of screamed that out to him, that’s because I was so pissed off. And my brother was like “Why the fuck are you yelling at dad?” and I was already halfway up the stairs and he started coming up the stairs and like he started punching me while I’m on the stairs. And like, I fell down, and I was just kicking him so he could get off of me and I was down the stairs by the side. He was kicking me and he was punching me and everything. Like I was just blocking myself

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like that [holds up hands in front of face]. I couldn’t punch him because I was on the ground already because I trip over the stair and I fell down. I was like basically in the corner like that, because my fists go like that and come up like that. And he was like punching me and kicking me when I was right there. But I didn’t even cry because, usually in the past I would start crying, you know. But I don’t cry anymore. And when he was punching me and got me in a choke, and I was like, “stop it you fuckin asshole.” That’s all I was saying was “stop it you fucking asshole.” And he almost punched me in my face. And then my dad grabbed him and he pushed him away. And I’m like, “You stopped him when he almost punched me in my face?” and I started cussing everyone out, I’m like “you think you’re fucking tough? I ain’t fuckin crying, all right?” I’m like, “you fuckin punch me again, I’ll fuckin like it. Go ahead, I ain’t a fuckin puss no more. I’m fuckin stronger than you think. This ain’t the fucking past, right? Hit me again.” [Said in a threatening voice]. [X is crying at this point, talking with a quavering voice]. And he was just looking hella pissed. Then I went to my room. (Field Notes, July 23, 2008) After spending time mapping the narrative discourses in this situation at this temporal juncture, I came up with several invisible and visible discourses salient to an analysis of ideological change. Ultimately, all of our actions and discourses must be analyzed in relation to a situated context of production (Hodder, 2000, p. 706). Here I provide a portrait of some of these salient meso-level actors and elements that can contribute to the production and maintenance of these discourses (Clarke, 2005, p. 192). First of all, in our previous discussions Xitlalli had spent a lot of time talking about the effects of her mother’s death on the border. She indicated that her family had “fallen apart” and that none of them could communicate effectively with each other now that her mother, the gender arbiter of the family, was dead. Certainly, the U.S. Border Patrol, the various U.S. political and media-related discourses around immigration, as well as the Minutemen and other like-minded groups are all collective actors which discursively deploy immigration control discourses, and in doing so, create a general sense of fear and loathing with regard to the undocumented Other. One does not have to look very far, and indeed Xitlalli did not in her research about undocumented immigrants, to find vivid discourses that contribute to a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment. I can also conjecture that the political/legal discourses (e.g. immigration laws) left little or no legal recourse to the family to pursue justice or compensation for her death. While this is just a conjecture based on what Xitlalli has told me,

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the fear of legal or social punitive measures could have contributed to the silence of her family on the details of her mother’s death, as well as the failure of the school or any other organization to provide counseling services to Xitlalli or her family in the days and months after her mother’s death. Her inability to do something or even to talk about the situation most likely contributed to a sense of helplessness with regard to healing the relationships in her family and dealing with the alienation that she expressed to me in our first encounters. Violence does not exist in a vacuum. Sociocultural elements play an important role in the production of discourses in this situation. Xitlalli also talked about the gender roles in the family. As I indicated above, the roles in Xitlalli’s family were highly gender divided. Her mother had “protected” Xitlalli from her brother and her father supported the son in his role as oldest male sibling in the household. I assume that, to some extent, her father accepts a patriarchal social world construction of male domination. Her mother, on the other hand, although playing a genderspecific role as householder and primary caregiver, was reportedly reluctant to reproduce that discursively produced situation in her daughter’s life. Xitlalli shared that her mother made an explicit point to refrain from forcing her daughter to do household chores, and instead told her to focus on her academic life. Her mother served as a resource to a more feminist discourse, which refuses to relegate girls and women to the primary role of housewife. Xitlalli also had access to other versions of feminist discourses at school and in the media. As a result, Xitlalli resisted the role of primary caregiver that her family tried to reinscribe on her when her mother died. The following statement she made while in a discussion of gender roles that arose from the situation illustrates her resistance and counter-narrative to this attempt to reinscribe her female body. “Why can’t he [her brother] fuckin’ do nothing in the house? Why do I got to do it all? Just because I’m female? That’s not fair. Just because he’s got a job now? I got school” (Field notes, June 23, 2008). While Xitlalli knows that her father needs help in maintaining the household, Xitlalli refuses the gender inscription by invoking a sense of unfairness and injustice. This refusal leads to a great deal of tension between her and her brother, who reportedly sees her behavior as disrespect for her father and as “bitch” behavior. At the same time, her statement, “without my mom, my family is falling apart,” illustrates that the loss of her relationship with the matriarch of the family, the strong mother figure that protects her, leaves her feeling particularly vulnerable and unable to effectively act on her situation. Until the particular fight narrativized above, and without a means to link her experiences with those of other girls and women who have experienced this kind of loss and family disintegration, Xitlalli has engaged in ineffective behaviors (screaming and crying) to express her frustration, failing to change her situation.

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IDEOLOGICAL SHIFT After previous discussions in which Xitlalli had relayed her description of and dismay at the violent fights between her and her brother, the class had engaged in TO exercises to dramatize other possible responses and outcomes to the fights in which she and her brother were engaging. Xitlalli chose fellow students to play the roles of members in her family and then took them aside to direct them in playing these roles. After ten minutes or so, they came back into the group and acted out the scripted scenario of a fight with her brother. After they acted the scene for everyone, the audience was asked to respond to what they saw. Girls talked about the various characters and the possible motivations behind each their actions, related similar experiences of their own, and commented on different actions that the characters could take to change the outcome of the situation. The actors then replayed the scene, but this time, audience members were invited to stop the role-play at any point, and step into any role she chose. She could then change the actions of that character, responding differently than that character had responded the first time. As the actions of the characters changed, the role of Xitlalli responded in turn. Xitlalli and the other participants were then encouraged to notice how shifting the dynamics of the role-play by acting it out differently, changed the outcome of the event. They were encouraged to try reflecting on their actions in any given situation or dynamic, to draw from internal resources in the situation at hand, and to practice shifting the dynamic in situations of conflict in their daily lives. In a subsequent interview months after the program had ended, Xitlalli acknowledged the fight described above as a shift in her self and in her relationship with her brother and father. Yet, it is only through her challenge of the familiar everyday performances of her familial order that she was able to make that shift. In the speech event she describes her brother using a number of performatives to position himself in alignment with his father as part of the known patriarchal social order, and thus as someone who holds more power in the relationship. For example, in Xitlalli’s report, he interrogates her by saying, “What the fuck did you do with your phone?...You made dad waste $100 for a phone.” The first statement, a direct question with an expletive and without any attempts at the rituals of politeness in his language, interpellates Xitlalli as subordinate to him. Given their economic situation, his second and subsequent statements work to characterize Xitlalli as an offender, as one who “made Dad waste.” In positioning himself as the righteous brother who is defending the hardships of her father, and positioning her as an offender who doesn’t care about her father’s economic hardships, Xitlalli’s brother enacts a linguistic violence on Xitlalli. In other words, she is wrongly accused. These performatives position him as someone who needs to take punitive measures against Xitlalli’s actions, which for him, take the form of physical violence.

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But, citing Austin’s concept of the performative utterance, Butler notes that words’ ability to “do things” are dependent on their specific embodied context. Austin’s claim that what a word “does,” its illocutionary force, varies with the context in which it is uttered implies that it is impossible to adequately define the performative meanings of words. Xitlalli provided a counter-narrative to this familial order, and resisted her brothers wounding reinscriptions of her as weaker and subordinate. Indeed, in her retelling of the event, she also physically stood up to her brother’s violence. She relays that she “got in his face” and told him, “You think you’re fucking tough? I ain’t fuckin’ crying, all right?” I’m like, “you fuckin’ punch me again, I’ll fuckin’ like it! Go ahead, I ain’t a fuckin’ puss no more. I’m fuckin’ stronger than you think.” These utterances turned her brother’s tough performative acts on their head. His power to reinscribe relations of domination was suddenly called into question. After this event, her brother ceased physically assaulting her. Would Xitlalli have eventually found a way to stand up to her brother without the support of her female classmates and the insights gained through our work together? Perhaps; but the fact that she did so in the course of our program speaks to the efficacy of participatory performance in helping to empower individuals to generate change in their own personal and political lives. I argue that this disruption illustrates the beginning of an ideological shift in her family. She is letting go of her old ways of relating (“This ain’t the fuckin’ past, right?”), and entering new ways of performing as a familial subject. Her violent and defiant reaction shows her willingness to risk the loss of the terms that made her relationship with her brother possible and to forge new paths. As we shall see, these paths afford her more agency in other social worlds of which she is a part. But these acts of defiance (of employing counter-discourses) do not exist in a vacuum. They are dialogically constructed and mediated partly in the ideological space of our classroom (Bakhtin, 1981). Bakhtin’s notion of ideological becoming is a helpful lens through which to make sense of the changes that occur for participants (including myself). Ideological becoming refers to the perpetual dialogic process of change in our beliefs and values. We live in a social world in which many discourses are at play. In our own ideological becoming, we use the discourses of others to refract our own so that our voices become heteroglossic. That is, we “assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate” prior discourse (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 89) making it our own. As Bakhtin says, Our ideological development is just such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values. The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dia-

350 • RENAE SKARIN logize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean…(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 364)

The following excerpt from my field notes taken reveals a dialogic encounter that occurred a few weeks later in the program between girls in this interstitial space. The girls are in circle talking about experiences of having been beaten by boys or men in their lives. Xitlali talks about the fight with her brother. Alba then tells a story about her ex-boyfriend beating her up. She says she had bruises all over her arms and that his dad didn’t believe that he had done it. He called her a lying ass bitch. Dee: Awww…Hell no! Damn girl. Alba: You know, don’t let other people treat you that way. You’re a girl right. Even though you don’t have your mom she made you strong. Like who you are right now. X: I’m not gonna lie, if my mom was here, I would have been like a puss. Like, I was crying for everything. Like “Oh my god, he broke my nail.” Like, if my mom was here, I wouldn’t have as many friends. Like, when my mom was here I wouldn’t have done the things I’m doing now. I would have been like the shy one. I wouldn’t even dress like this. I would be like curl myself up and shit. Everything has a good and bad, like. I’m not saying my mom dying was a good thing, but a lot of good things came out of it. My mom dying made me stronger cause no one’s gonna stand up for me, so obviously I have to be the one. Xitlalli is able to narrativize her mother’s death as the source of her becoming stronger and more mature. She believes that her mother leaving forced her to grow up and stand up for herself, whereas when her mother was alive, her mother was the sole source of strength. Renae: I’m really glad you can see that there is a good and bad to everything. It’s tragic, really sad that your mom died, but… Alba: Your mom dying…(inaudible), just made you stronger. X: If my brother wouldn’t beat me up, then my life would have been boring. I wouldn’t have been telling you this story. That basically made me realize that I’m stronger too. Before my brother beat me up last time, I didn’t know that I was that strong. I didn’t know I was not gonna cry. I was just kickin’, I was just going like that (kicks in air), like stop you fuckin’ asshole. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t saying “Stop” (said in a whiny voice). I wasn’t telling my dad to stop him. I was like standing up and telling him to do it again, to see if he likes it.

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All he was doing was getting himself hurt, not me. He’s gonna get it back. The brother’s violence also becomes a source of strength and part of what makes her life interesting and special. Is this a kind of counter-narrative to the victim discourse? Is this a way of coping with tragic circumstances? Where does this discourse come from? Is it related to a therapy culture of which she is only a peripheral part? Alba: He’s gonna get it back. Right back. X: Karma’s a bitch. And if karma doesn’t get him, I’ll get him in the future. (laughter) Alba: No, it does get you though, it does get you. (Field Notes, June 30, 2008) My voice is noticeably minimal here. While what I say (“I’m really glad you can see that there is a good and bad to everything. It’s tragic, really sad that your mom died, but….”) is informed by the ideological discourse of the “survivor,” one discourse of many that are available to us, I am careful to speak in support of Xitlalli’s internally persuasive discourse that is continually developing in the temporal moments inside and outside of this classroom. Not that I believe my voice to be devoid of influence in this space. Rather, I am careful to try and mitigate what Lather (1991) refers to as “the dangers of researchers with liberatory intentions imposing meanings on situations, rather than constructing meaning through negotiations with research participants.” (p. 110). Xitlalli and the rest of these girls are not merely caught in a reflexive “loop” suggested by Bourdieuian theoretical understandings of structure and agency. In other words, they are not merely only subjects produced by structure and then reproducing those same structures. Ortner (1996) suggests a possibility of going beyond discursive constraints by “choos[ing] to avoid the loop, to look for the slippages in reproduction, the erosions of long-standing patterns, the moments of disorder and outright ‘resistance’… with everything slightly—but not completely—tilted toward incompleteness, instability, and change” (pp. 17–18). These moments of disorder occur more frequently when the usual classroom power paradigms are disrupted. When Xitlalli entered our classroom, her ways of talking about her mother dying, her gender position, and her familial relations suggested victimization and helplessness. Her screaming and crying suggested a sense of frustration and lack of control over her own emotions and her ability to do anything to produce change in herself and her family. The discourses (both explicit and implicit) of her family, her culture, and of larger society

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worked persistently to make Xitlalli feel marginal, to reproduce her sense of helplessness, and to reinforce an ideology of gender subordination. Collectively, these girls are able to call upon other available “Borderland” discourses to destabilize those that marginalize them. By “Borderland,” I am referring to the metaphorical space inhabited by Chicana/os who struggle against colonialism and interrogate dominant cultural politics, including those dominant voices of their own culture (Cordova, 1999; Mignolo, 2000; Villenas & Foley, 2002). “Borderlands” discourses come from the “everyday lives and bodies of people and not from abstract and detached perspectives” (Saavedra & Nymark, 2008, p. 257). The Borderlands discourses are hybrid in that those who perform them are “articulating new positions in these ‘in-between,’ Borderland worlds of ethnic communities and academies, feminist and job worlds” (Anzaldúa, 1990, p. xxvi). In these Borderland worlds, my participants are able to “assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate” prior discourse (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 89) making discourse of their own. For instance, Alba calls upon both feminist and strong maternal discourses when she says, “You know, don’t let other people treat you that way. You’re a girl right. Even though you don’t have your mom she made you strong. Like who you are right now.” Here she performs a counter-discourse that challenges the notion of female weakness and subordination, and reinscribes their female identities with strength and the power to change situations. Xitlalli performs a survivor (among other) discourses when she talks of her mother’s death and her brother’s violence as events that eventually led her to become stronger. However, a dialogic space must be created for these discourses to emerge. Trust, openness to engage with the lived experiences of students, and a context of acceptance and love must be the container for this dialogical process of ideological shift. Taking the time to listen and affirm each other’s stories is an important element, and at least an hour or two of our four-hour day was spent taking the time for these stories to emerge. When this space is created and transformations begin to occur, students may then begin to extend their energies beyond the self and the classroom, and to envision ways that they can begin to transform the world. Darder (1997) describes such a pedagogy as “mov[ing] beyond the boundaries of prescribed educational practice” to a more democratic pedagogy that performs a “critical commitment to act on behalf of freedom and social justice that serve as a model for our students to discover their own personal power, social transformative potential, and spirit of hope” (p. 350). In the next section I illustrate how our deeply personal conversations are used as a springboard to profoundly questioning the politics of domination, constructing social and political knowledge of the world, and to do work which promotes ones’ own and others’ liberation from hegemonic discourses.

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AZTLAN PERFORMING MATERIALIZES PERFORMATIVITY: THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL Xitlalli recognizes that the discourses operating at a political and societal level have affected her family in profound ways. Through the dialogic space that opened up with the aid of TO exercises, circle discussions, and her first film, Xitlalli was able to start articulating her pain and to begin to take steps at the micro-level to enact change in her life. However, from the very beginning of the program, I stressed the always-already political aspects of many of their personal experiences, and encouraged the process of using their experiential knowledge to construct social and political knowledge of the world in an attempt to effect ideological change in both self and others. In other words, my pedagogical agenda was to encourage Xitlalli to use her experience as a way to make sense of her complex social world and to work toward effecting change in that world. Spry (2001) describes this as the ability to “interrogate the political and ideological contexts and power relations between self and other, and self as other.” (p. 716). Xitlalli’s first film was a deeply personal recounting of her experience of her mother’s death. Though we spent much time discussing the implications of this tragedy for her life and family, just as much time was spent discussing the political context under which hundreds of individuals die crossing the border each year. Xitlalli, making the connection between her personal life and the massive structural inequalities, began to see the ways that her story was not just a personal tragedy, but a failure of racialized capitalist social modes of production which create the context and discursive regime that makes killing Mexican border-crossers acceptable practice. After pointing Xitlalli to organizations and media sites including youth-based social justice, immigrant rights, anti-immigrant, hate-based, talk shows, news stories, etc.,1 which provided data on the issue of the status of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., Xitlalli began the process of researching this issue for her next film. It is important to note that, for a number of political and personal reasons, but mostly to protect the privacy of her family, Xitlalli decided that she would not include her personal story in this film. However, the true stories of other undocumented border crossers are fictionalized from stories she read and recreated in her film. In this next section I describe the social justice film that Xitlalli ended up making and provide analysis of the ways that this film reflects the critical composition pedagogy with which we engaged. Film “Aztlan” Opening scene: X’s voice says over a black screen: “Why are Mexicans dying to come to their own land when you are the illegal immigrants here?”

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Then a picture appears of an Aztec symbol with the words “Aztlan” in black letters superimposed. The lettering looks like old script sometimes used by Lowrider culture. The first part of the soundtrack starts; it is Mexican guitar music, which then leads into a Mexican rapper singing in English about the plight of the border crossers. This particular rapper’s moniker is “Aztlan.” He is a friend of Xitlalli’s. The next image is of Mexican folks (mostly men) standing next to a metal fence. The next is a picture of a sign with the words “Ciudado!” The next is another metal fence running across a desert followed by a photo of a sign illegal immigrants being loaded onto a bus by armed ICE agents. The next has an official border sign which says “Permisos Migratorios” and an arrow. Following that is a picture of Mexican workers standing on a corner with a homemade sign which says “worker pick-up.” The next picture depicts a nighttime shot of illegals hiding out in some desert brush, presumably crossing into the U.S. One man in the photo wears a full black ski mask. The next photo features a flag emblazoned with a fist. The fist is grabbing hold of barbed wire. The flag is stuck to a border fence. The fence has a ladder, which a man is climbing while looking over the other side of the fence. The next shot shows a number of men dressed in jeans and t-shirts, sitting in a sparse concrete room together. Xitlalli narrates: “Many people try crossing the border, and these are some of their stories.” The upper torso of a girl, with her eyes and the top of her head blacked out appears in the next shot. She says, “My name is Maria.” Another girl appears in the same manner and says, “My name is Claudia.” Another says, “My name is Jennifer.” A video shot of helicopters shining spotlights down on Mexican men shouting and running in the desert appears next. This is followed by the first girl, Maria, who says “I lost my cousin trying to cross the border.” Claudia then says, “I lost my father trying to cross the border.” Jennifer says, “I lost my sister trying to cross the border.” A video shot of a man’s boots walking on desert soil is followed by a shot of Maria, who says, “My cousin had walked for four days without anything to eat or drink. It was 103 degrees, and he was basically walking while his organs were cooking inside of him. My family had told me that he had died because he didn’t have enough water to help his body survive through the desert. He was my best friend, and person I could always trust. I wish he could have never had died.”

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Claudia appears in the next shot and starts her monologue. “My father got to where the coyote was going to take them across the American canal. The guy who picked him up on the other side crashed the car while he was being chased by border control. All of the people in the car had to be taken to the hospital. They were all injured. The car overturned and pinned my father under the car. He died from his injuries.” Jennifer appears and intones, “My sister was walking with her two year old baby across the desert. She was with a group of illegal immigrants who were all walking to Arizona. After three days she grew too tired to walk any longer. They left her behind. We later found out that they were found dead in the desert.” Maria next says, “I think it’s wrong to keep people who mostly belong in the United States away from their country.” Claudia says, “If they never took our land away from our people, my father would never have tried to go back to his land. He would still be alive.” Jennifer then says, “I lost a sister and a niece just because they were trying to come here to California for a better life.” Xitlalli narrates over a black screen shot. “These stories are just examples of many people who died crossing the border trying to find a better life. But for people who do make it across the border, they are exploited for work and the bosses send them back when they no longer need them.” A shot of a border agent arresting an illegal crosser. “They produce propaganda and lies about us. They say we are lazy and dirty. Yet, we take the jobs that Americans don’t want, like farm laborer, groundskeepers, service jobs, and custodian staff.” Photos of Mexicans doing these jobs appear as she says them. Then a black screen appears and the words “Third World Invaders” in red letters appears on the screen. “They call us third world invaders who colonize the country and attack their way of life. They criticize immigrants as criminals, murderers, rapists, terrorists, and danger to children and families.” These latter words appear on the screen as she says them and pauses slightly between each word. “In recent years, 500 people have died on the U.S. side of the border and 500 people on the Mexican side of the border. That comes up to 1000 people dying each year.” These statistics appear in red lettering on the black screen as she says them. She then says, “Why are my people dying to come back to their homelands? The land that was owned by the Aztecans? The Europeans illegally came to our land and took what was rightfully ours. I just want my people to stop dying for something stupid. Why do they have to separate us by race, behind a fence like an animal” This

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shot shows a man locked in an outdoor cage. “Do they think they are lower than we are? Do they think they can function without us? Things have to change, and things will change. This is for my people who are suffering to live a better life. Keep your heads up. Someday we will get our land back.” As she says these last words the opening music begins again. As the music plays and the rapper raps, a number of images flash across the screen. These include a graffitied fence that says “Power to the people. Mexico” A picture of men with their hands behind their heads, being arrested by guards. The next is a Mexican woman with her head in her hands, crying, while a girls stands solemnly next to her. The statue of liberty with blood streaming from her eyes. A marcher at a rally holding a sign, which reads, “If you think I’m “illegal” because I’m a Mexican, learn the true history because I’m in my HOMELAND.” The next depicts the cover of a book called “Border of Death, Valley of Life.” A minuteman with binoculars stands next to a van. Then the words in red, “You built a 20 foot fence. We built a 21 foot ladder.” And then these words appear typed on the screen, “This is in memory of all the loved ones who lost their lives trying to cross the border for a better life.” This is followed by the credits. FILM ENDS. In this film project, Xitlalli’s perspective on anti-immigrant activists is similar to that of Freire’s predatory colonizer. He speaks of the “colonizer’s predatory presence, his unrestrained desire to overpower not only the physical space but also the historic and cultural spaces of the invaded” (Freire, 2004, p. 54). Yet Xitlalli knows that her perspective is not the dominant perspective that is taught in schools or given play in the media. Her multimodal text is an aptly constructed counter-hegemonic text that responds to the politically generated discourse she has encountered in the educational and social realm and the popular media. It draws from what Michel Foucault would call a “counter-discourse” which challenges the claims of the popular discourse about undocumented Mexican (but not Canadian or Swedish) immigrants. It is effective because it employs multiple semiotic features and the interaction and negotiation between these semiotic features create a cohesive and emotional message of resistance to the ways that she and other undocumented Latino immigrants have been demonized in U.S. culture. It reflects Xitlalli’s expanding rhetorical awareness in that she demonstrates an awareness of organization and the use of visual/aural/written elements to create ethos and pathos and to strengthen her message. In addition, the film medium invests her voice with an authority that other media available to her would not necessarily allow.

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Xitlalli begins the film with one single spoken phrase, which flips the script of the dominant discourse. She asks to a black screen, “Why are Mexicans dying to come to their own land when you are the illegal immigrants here?” This statement constructs the colonizers as the culprits and lawbreakers, instead of the undocumented Mexicans. This question works in cohort with the title of the film, Aztlan written in Lowrider script, the Aztec symbol that serves as a backdrop to the title, and the music in that they frame meaning making with the use of Mexican, Chicano, and Aztec codes and conventions of visuality and music. Each of these semiotic elements implicitly or explicitly refers to ideological belief systems or cultural knowledge. Understanding these codes is predicated on understanding the cultural worlds that produced them. Xitlalli carefully chose all of these codes because they are invested with political significance. Using Xitlalli’s frames of meaning, I will briefly touch on what these symbols mean in the context of this film. The term “Aztlan” originally referred to the ancient ancestral home of the Nahua people of Mesoamerica, thought by some historical linguists and anthropologists to have been located in the Southwest United States. Radical Chicano activists, reacting against a U.S. society rife with institutional racism and discrimination, took up the term in the 60s and 70s and their political agenda was to take back the lands annexed by the U.S. before and after the Mexican-American War. These activists believe that the land is their birthright and according to the national website for the Chicano Movement: Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), “1) We are Chicanas and Chicanos of Aztlán reclaiming the land of our birth (Chicana/Chicano Nation); 2) Aztlán belongs to indigenous people, who are sovereign and not subject to a foreign culture” (http://www.nationalmecha.org/philosophy.html#philosophy). Thus Xitlalli’s invocation of the term “Aztlan” along with the accusation “…you are the illegal immigrants here” positions those who colonized the West as foreign invaders and lawbreakers and positions herself and her people as the rightful owners of the land. In addition, Xitlalli’s use of art in the title represents a politicized and idealized image of the Aztec as an oppressed and revolutionary figure. The overtly political music and the Lowrider script reinforce the nationalistic and Chicano pride implied in the title and other semiotic elements. The photographs and music that then open Xitlalli’s film speak to the context of danger within which border-crossers operate. For example, the photograph of the sign that reads “Ciudado” or “Careful,” the image of the metal fence and the ICE agents loading people onto a bus, are all semiotic resources that convey to the reader that border crossing is a dangerous endeavor. While these photographs could very well be used for very different propagandistic purposes, setting them in juxtaposition to the resistance music indicates the pro-immigrant ideological stance that she is taking.

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This mélange of photographs sets the ideological tone for the personal stories that come next. In the next scenes actors are seen and heard relaying border crossing stories. These actors are shown only from the torso to the nose, effectively erasing their identities. This camera effect serves very specific ideological purposes. Xitlalli wanted to make a critical statement about the fact that though hundreds of undocumented workers die each year, their personal tragedies go untold in the popular media. As Xitlalli put it, “It’s like they don’t even care about us. We don’t mean nothing to them.” She also wanted to emphasize that loved ones are not able to bring attention to this issue because they too must remain hidden from authorities for fear of being deported. This section of the film makes use of pathos in quite an effective way. Xitlalli weaves the women’s stories together in a common documentary style as a way to highlight their shared tragedy. She employs emotional appeals in an attempt to draw us into these tragedies and to highlight our shared humanity. Xitlalli said that she wanted the audience to understand that “We’re just like them. We’re not animals. We feel sad too.” Xitlalli seems to implicitly understand that sharing her political message will not win over her audience. Rather, her political message must be contextualized in light of the injustices inflicted on “her people.” By using these emotional appeals couched between her highly political statements, Xitlalli is making a direct link between the injustice of annexation and the injustices inflicted on present day undocumented workers, effectively disinterring stories of injustice from the rubble of the master narratives of “Manifest Destiny,” the “American Dream,” and cultural superiority. Xitlalli is quite aware of the fact that U.S. discourses frame Mexicans as indolent, devious, and dirty. The next section of the movie counters the tactics of racial/ethnic/class stratification that characterize the discourses of Western imperialism. She does this by commenting on the ways that U.S. society exploits (“They are exploited for work and the bosses send them back when they no longer need them.”), scapegoats (“They produce propaganda and lies about us.”), and demonizes (“They call us third world invaders who colonize the country and attack their way of life. They criticize immigrants as criminals, murderers, rapists, terrorists, and danger to children and families undocumented workers from South of the border.”) She then counters these images with the much familiar argument that, contrary to the indolent, and lazy image that has been portrayed, Mexican workers “take the jobs that Americans don’t want, like farm laborer, groundskeepers, service jobs, and custodian staff.” She reinforces this message with images of people that appear to be Latino hard at work in these various jobs. Finally, she reiterates the injustices that result from these discourses by quoting statistics on the number of people dying on our borders and asking why her people have to die for “something stupid.”

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In the last part of the film, Xitlalli reiterates her anti-colonialist (“The Europeans illegally came to our land”), nationalistic (“The land that was owned by the Aztecans”) messages, and her emotional appeal (“I just want my people to stop dying for something stupid. Why do they have to separate us by race, behind a fence like an animal”). In conclusion, Xitlalli adds a message of hope for the future (“Things have to change, and things will change. This is for my people who are suffering to live a better life. Keep your heads up. Someday we will get our land back”). The same politically charged music begins again, and more photographic images are displayed. This time the images are slightly different. These images don’t show only the degradation or danger of border-crossing, but also convey resistance to the discursive regimes of immigration. Some of these photographs implicitly deconstruct popular icons or ideologically charged physical sites. For example, the image of the Statue of Liberty, the ultimate symbol of freedom from oppression and America’s open-door policy, is shown with blood streaming from her eyes. This serves as a visual trope, signifying the blindness to the hypocrisy of U.S. values regarding immigration. In the U.S. the border fence has become a symbol of protection from “foreign invaders.” Xitlalli speaks back to this with a photograph that shows a sign on the border fence that says, “You built a 20 foot fence. We built a 21 foot ladder.” Many of the messages are such that they speak to the notion that undocumented immigrants will prevail over oppressive and tyrannical practices. The final text we see in the film is the epitaph, “This is in memory of all the loved ones who lost their lives trying to cross the border for a better life.” This message is both a deeply personal reference to her mother’s own death, and also a profoundly political message connecting her own experience to the thousands of untold tragic border stories. In the interest of space I have only described and partially analyzed Xitlalli’s multimodal composition. Much more space could be devoted to the myriad of choices (based on ideology, rhetoric, pathos, composition) she made in the process of composing this multimedia composition. I will, however, briefly describe why this composing process represents all the aspects of a critical composition pedagogy as described by Morrell (2008, p. 116). Firstly, we began with Xitlalli’s experiences as a person subject to embodied experiences that are the effects of discursive regimes of truth. To start anywhere else would most likely be ineffective in engaging Xitlalli whose experience with trauma have rendered it difficult for her to meet the cognitive demands of school work abstracted from her lived experiences. Second, rather than marginalizing the perspective of undocumented workers and those who struggle for immigrant rights to a textbook paragraph or worse yet, remaining silent on the issue, we used Xitlalli’s embodied experiences as a springboard to fore fronting social justice for immigrants. Here we begin to see Xitlalli connecting her personal experiences to wider

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sociopolitical issues (the personal is political). All sides of this issue were explored in her preliminary research (including statistics, media representations of border crossers, and real-life stories of people who have crossed the border). Xitlalli chose an ideological stance on this issue based on her beliefs and positionality and chose to compose a multimedia text from this standpoint. Xitlalli was trying to communicate a very specific message and one very different from the usual cultural story we are used to seeing about the issue of immigration: People are dying every day crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. and the blame lies not with those attempting to cross, but within a larger sociohistorical and political context of North to South relations of oppression. Xitlalli’s film was a form of action and counter-discourse to confront these oppressive relations and to promote liberation from these discursively constructed conditions. As I write this chapter, legislation has just been passed in Arizona making it legal for law enforcement officers to stop anyone that they suspect of being “illegal” and to ask for proof of legal status. Many groups have decried this law as an outrageous violation of human rights, as it results in the justification for racial profiling and in an implicit approval of xenophobic acts. What Xitlalli shows through her film is that this kind of legislation ignores the human side of this ethnically/racially-politicized violence. It ignores our humanity, it ignores social justice, it ignores the history of oppression that undergirds our attitudes toward immigrants from the South. This multimedia project also connects with Xitlalli’s embodied experiences in that domestic violence is symbolic of economic, social, and political violence that women (and other marginalized subjects) confront outside the domestic sphere. One cannot extricate the personal circumstances of Xitlalli’s life from the sociopolitical context that frames her experience; they are inextricably connected and inform each other. Xitlalli’s mother played a pivotal role as the negotiator of cultural border crossing for her daughter. While holding down the traditional female role as caregiver in the family, she also paved the way for Xitlalli to have a different experience of gender than traditional Mexican culture would allow. With her death at the physical border, the cultural broker was gone and the figurative border was shut down. Xitlalli came up against opposition to that cultural bordercrossing from her brother and father and her resistance to those cultural expectations was met with violence. Allowing space to contend with and challenge the ways that race, gender, and class systems of stratification are reproduced in our society provides a means for students like Xitlalli to become empowered to join the struggle against them in their everyday lives, and in the larger political sphere. McLaren (1997) notes that “emancipatory praxis has been largely orphaned in our institutions of education as educators are either unable or refuse to name the political location of their own pedagogical praxis” (p. 52). In my view, many of us are unaware or unwilling to reflect deeply into

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our pedagogical practices to look for the ways that we are complicit in reproducing dominant discourses that do not serve our struggling/marginalized students. We as educators must be willing to take up questions of gender, race, class, sexuality and power relations, in students’ everyday lives so that they can be the central focus in creating social transformation. In addition, as I have shown above, students’ personal experiences are not separate from academic concerns, but can serve as a springboard to the development of critical literacy skills. DISCUSSION Although the move toward school accountability and the stated goal of increased achievement has unexpectedly resulted in the highlighting of the inequities between groups in schools, I believe that ultimately the policies and practices that work to define normal achievement, and indeed the ideologies that underlie notions of educational achievement and that define the academic success or failure of students do more harm than good. Put another way, inequity provides the rationale for the formulation of particular educational policies (NCLB) to combat it. Then, in treating issues of inequitable access, educational policy makers rationalize the problems posed by the educational differences between populations, looking for causal links and attempting to define efficient solutions that are one-size-fits-all. Subsequently, remediation for young people like Xitlalli becomes the primary goal as schools are transformed into educational machines, and educational success comes to be defined exclusively in the statistical terms by the multiple standardized tests given in each grade. Rates, styles, and motivation for learning are increasingly viewed as areas for educational intervention, and educational practice is integrated into the economic and social management of society. This stress on equity, particularly on defining and measuring it, turns the educational system into an agency of greater and greater social control. The less “equitable” the school or district, the more federal control it is subjected to. The architecture of schools is affected by this mode of control (see Foucault’s (1977) idea of the panopticon), as are hierarchical political structures in schools. It also has obvious effects on society at large, the family, and individual subjectivities. Ultimately, these discourses work to close down educational and economic opportunities for thousands of young people like Xitlalli. Darder puts it this way: “Hence, early in their lives, these children are officially classified and tracked, which renders them members of the disposable and expendable class” (2002, p. 14). I am not denying a problem with the fact that varying groups have had relatively more or fewer opportunities to achieve enough cultural capital to move into the more intellectually and interpersonally demanding and higher-paying jobs that the knowledge economy has to offer (Darling-Hammond, 2005). But the work of testing children several times a year, carving up the school population demographically and then assigning each group

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success or failure rates does more to reproduce educational and social inequity then it does to challenge it (Meier & Wood, 2004; Nieto, 2008). I also want to suggest that this testing gives further opportunities for inscription and reinscription of wounding subjectivities. It is perhaps the proliferation of these binaries and the discourses they accompany that are painfully reinscribing wounding subjectivities on those falling primarily on the “losing” side of the binary boundaries. I claim here that it is these discourses that do the very work of student/educator/policy-maker subject-making and indeed they constitute an educational apparatus that allow for new productions of hierarchies within the new world education system. Rather than rectifying the inequitable system, we are only limiting other possibilities. Invoking a Deleuzian view of categorization, Roy (2003) explains; Very broadly speaking, excessively categorical thinking can be maintained only at the expense of further becoming; strata upon strata generate forces that gravitate toward specific channels only. Over time, stringent orthodoxies appear that govern modes of being and thinking, along with rigid investments in maintaining the status quo. These tell us what should be, and what is acceptable or not acceptable, molding and shaping experiences in highly selective ways. In other words, these adherences and allegiance to categories reify, strangling life and repeating old forms…. These ideas or discourses do not belong to any particular agency but are the combined effects of myriad social forces that intersect to form despotic systems. (p. 11)

As Roy suggests here, these reified categories are discursively constructed. St. Pierre (2000) conveys the opinion that as poststructuralist thinkers, “we are ethically bound to pay attention to how we word the world” (p. 484). Further, she claims that poststructuralism “does not allow us to lay the blame elsewhere, outside our own daily activities, but demands that we examine our own complicity in the maintenance of social injustice (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 484). As I alluded above, my own work in the past as a social justice educator, rather than disrupting the market discourses around education, has worked to reproduce the binaries that make them possible. I have not worked outside the market-driven discourse, but rather have been complicit in it through highlighting how the populations I work with don’t, by and large, achieve educational success; in other words by highlighting dominant notions of success and failure in the name of greater equity I am “reify[ing], strangling life, and repeating old forms” (Roy, 2003 p. 11). While our subjectivities are rooted within specific discursive practices/ structures and the subject positions that those practices make possible for us, a more useful agency (or a creative maladjustment) might be possible. Because discursive structures as well as subjectivities are unstable and tenuous at best, there is always the potential to subvert these discursively constructed selves and inscribe new kinds of subjectivities that don’t perform to ascribed roles. As Davies puts it, “who one is is always an open question

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with a shifting answer” (2000, p. 89). How does one challenge and subvert existing power structures? My work looks at the pedagogical possibility of students and teachers working together to analyze the power relations that function in the construction and performance of specific subject formations. We do this through a critical feminist pedagogy that attends to the specific discursive codes and conventions through which our identities/ subjectivities are signified. We study the ways that discourses normalize and train us, and then alienate us from ourselves. We question dominant paradigms, categories, and ways of thinking about the world, becoming insurgents looking to overthrow regimes of signifiers that box up difference into packages of deviance (Roy, 2003). We denaturalize and unfix subjectivities that do not serve us. We “deterritorialise” sedimented meanings, trying to free up the firmly structured relations that fix us in positions (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). We disrupt the ongoing repetitive citations to “contest what has become sedimented in and as ordinary” (Butler, 1997, p. 145). We root out and examine the process of abjection. We must then, through loving practices, locate ourselves in the position from which discourses wounds us less, and thus become its “subjects” by “subjecting” ourselves to new meanings, power and regulation (Foucault, 1982). In this account, subversion must take place within existing discourses because there is no human meaning that can take place outside of discourse. These struggles, according to Foucaultian thought are necessarily local and specific, but can have effects and implications beyond the local site of struggle. Perhaps I’m being Butler’s “good enlightenment thinker” who says that one objects to normalisation only “in the name of a different norm.” Or opposes one signifier with another. But, we necessarily exist in relation to the “Other,” which leaves us no alternative. However, this critical pedagogy cannot operate without a firm basis in love. Feminist writer bell hooks states, “The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate others and ourselves. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.” As a critical pedagogue working against oppression, I cannot merely focus on the “intellectual” aspects of my students’ development. Instead, I strive to understand the emotional capacity of my work, which holds that the ideal of teaching with love is an act of service. This kind of love is what Freire (1998) termed an “armed love” in which the “teacher/learner strives “to be both joyful and rigorous…to be serious, scientific, physical, and emotional.” It is, he contends, “impossible to teach without the courage to love, without the courage to try a thousand times before giving up. It is impossible to teach without a forged, invented, and well-thought-out capacity to love” (p. 3). For me this agenda requires me to listen deeply and question deeply. It requires me to take seriously the material of students’ lives, emotions, and embodied knowledge and to use that as a springboard

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to further intellectual development. It requires me to reject a prescribed and standardized curriculum in favor of a curriculum that emerges from us and speaks to us. YouthWorks is an attempt to take ourselves, to some extent, outside of the social currents of educational meanings, and to define for ourselves what is important to know and learn about. It is an attempt to use the material of our own lives as a starting point for the construction of knowledge about the world, rather than some preconceived and socially constructed ideal of what is important. It is an attempt to bear witness to each other’s lives, and in doing so, honor the experiences and knowledge that each person brings to the table. It is an attempt to subvert destructive dualisms that turn students into deviants. It is an attempt to widen the band of acceptable questions and points of view that we bring to the table. It is fraught with contradictions and uncertainties. It is always necessarily an incomplete process. It is always a struggle. NOTE 1.

See the following websites for examples of those that Xitlalli researched: http://www.westernyouth.org/, http://www.nclr.org/, http:// www.y4cri.org/ , http://www.youthinactionri.org/content/links, http:// www.chicano.ucla.edu/press/journals/default.asp, http://aztlanunderground.net/blog/ REFERENCES

Alsop, R., Fitzsimons, A., & Lennon, K. (2002). Theorizing gender. Cambridge: Polity. Alcazar, L. (1984). Essays on ideology. London: Verso. Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Rabelais and his world (H. Iswolsky, Trans.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1965.) Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds.; V. W. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. (Original work published 1979.) Bakhtin, M. M., & Holquist, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M., Holquist, M. & Emerson, C. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. London; New York: Routledge. Boal, A. (1979). Theater of the oppressed. New York: Urizen Books. Boal, A. (1992). Games for actors and non-actors. London; New York: Routledge. Boal, A. (1995). The rainbow of desire: The Boal method of theatre and therapy. London: Routledge.

Using Student-as-Researcher Models as a Mode of Resistance and Agency • 365 Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. London: Routledge. Christians, G. C. (1995). The naturalistic fallacy in contemporary interactionist-interpretive research. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 19, 125–130. Clarke, A. (2005). Situational analysis: Grounded theory after the postmodern turn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Córdova, T. (1994). The emergent writings of twenty years of Chicana feminist struggles: Roots and resistance. In Felix Padilla, (Ed.), The handbook of Hispanic cultures in the United States. Houston: Arte Publico Press. Darder, A. (2002). Reinventing Paulo Freire: A pedagogy of love. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Darder, A., Torres, R. D., & Gutiérrez, H. (1997). Latinos and education: A critical reader. New York: Routledge. Darling-Hammond, L. (2005). Instructional leadership for systemic change: The story of San Diego’s reform. Lanham, MD.: Scarecrow Education. Davies, B. (2000). A body of writing: 1990–1999. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Davies, B. (2008). Re-thinking “behavior” in terms of positioning and the ethics of responsibility. In A. M. P. J. Sumsion (Ed.), Critical readings in teacher education: Provoking absences (pp. 173–186). Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Davis, K. (2009). Agentive youth research: Towards individual, collective, and policy transformations. In T. G. Wiley, J. S. Lee, & R. Rumberger (Eds.) The education of language minority immigrants in the USA. London: Multilingual Matters. Davis, K., Cho, H., Ishida, M., Soria, J., & Bazzi, S. (2005). “It’s our kuleana”: A critical participatory approach to language minority education. In L. PeaseAlvarez & S. R. Schecter (Eds.), Learning, teaching, and community (pp. 3–25). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Denzin, N. K. (1997). Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic practices for the 21st century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R., & Morrell, E. (2008). The art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for moving from theory to practice in urban schools. New York: Peter Lang. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Fine, M., et al. (2000) For whom? Qualitative research, representations, and social responsibilities. In N. Denzin & Y.Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1978). The will to knowledge: The history of sexuality, Vol. 1. London: Penguin Books. Fregoso, R. L. (2003). Mexicana encounters: The making of social identities on the borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press. Freire, P. (1998). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach. (D. Macedo, D. Koike, & A. Oliveira, Trans.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Guthrie J. W., & Springer, M. G. (2004). A nation at risk revisited: “wrong” reasoning sometimes result in “right” rules? Peabody Journal of Education, 79(1), 7–35.

366 • RENAE SKARIN Hodder, I. (1994). The interpretation of documents and material culture. In: N. K.Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 393-402). London: Sage. hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. New York: Routledge. Kohl, H. R. (1994). I won’t learn from you: And other thoughts on creative maladjustment. New York: New Press. Lam, E. W. S. (2004). Border discourses and identities in transnational youth culture. In J Mahiri (Ed.), What they don’t learn in school: Literacy in the lives of urban youth (pp. 79–97). New York: Peter Lang. Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York: Routledge. Madison, D. S. (2005). Critical ethnography: Method, ethics, and performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. McLaren, P. (1997). Revolutionary multiculturalism: Pedagogies of dissent for the new millennium. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Meier, D. & Wood, G. H. (2004). Many children left behind: How the no child left behind act is damaging our children and our schools. Boston: Beacon Press. Mignolo, W. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Morrell, E. (2008). Critical literacy and urban youth: Pedagogies of access, dissent, and liberation. New York: Routledge. Nieto, S. (2008). Dear Paulo: Letters from those who dare teach. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Ortner, S. B. (1996). Making gender: The politics and erotics of culture. Boston: Beacon Press. Rose, M. (1989). Lives on the boundary: The struggles and achievements of America’s underprepared. New York: Free Press; Collier Macmillan. Saavedra, C. M., & Nymark, E.D. (2008). Borderland-Mestizaje feminism: The new tribalism. In N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 255–76). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Spivak, G. C. (1987). In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics. New York: Methuen. Spry, T. (2001). Performing autoethnography: an embodied methodological praxis. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(6), 706–732. St. Pierre, E. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education: An overview. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(5), 477–515. National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform: a report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education. Washington D.C., The Commission: Supt of Docs, U.S. G.P.O. Distributor. Villenas, S. & Foley, D (2002). Chicano/Latino critical ethnography of education: Cultural productions from la frontera. In R. Valencia (Ed.), Chicano school failure and success: Past, present and future. New York: Routledge and Famer. Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

CHAPTER 15

PROMOTING TRANSLOCAL AND TRANSNATIONAL AGENCY A Multifaceted Learning Community in Japan Hiromasa Tanaka and Ethel Ogane

INTRODUCTION While recognizing psycholinguist contributions to understanding second language acquisition, second language educators (e.g. Benesch, 2001; Canagarajah, 1999; Cazden, 1988; Duff & Uchida, 1997; Edelsky & Hudelson, 1980; Lantolf, 2000; Norton, 2000; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; Wong Fillmore, 1976) have moved toward social constructivist and critical approaches to language learning. Although language-in-education policies in Japan increasingly recognize communicative approaches, gate-keeping assessments result in washback teaching effects (Brown, 1995; Brown & Yamashita, 1995) in which language is viewed as a set of arbitrary rules, a decontextualized and static body of knowledge which is used for mental Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 367–396 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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training and discipline (Law, 1995; LoCastro, 1996; McVeigh, 2002; Yamada, 2005). In addition, second language policies and practices in Japan continue to privilege native speakers (Ortega, 2009) and, thus, ignore national and transnational resources. In efforts to foster language learning that is functional and co-constructed while attending to issues of situated and global power relations, Meisei University has developed an innovative language education program. This chapter focuses on a primary component of the program, the Meisei Summer School Project (MSSP) which is administered by university students in cooperation with local non-governmental organizations (NGO) and an international non-governmental peace organization. Adopting the concept of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) as a framework for project development and analysis of student learning, we show how students coconstruct their subjectivities. We begin our ethnographic descriptions with a brief overview of education in Japan and then explain the main components of MSSP. We then provide an overview of MSSP which includes the sociocultural theoretical perspectives that helped the developers to conceive and frame this project and discuss the research methods used to document participant experience. The main section of the paper describes the tensions, constraints, and resources that participants experience during the planning and realization of the summer project. We conclude with discussion of the possibilities of multilayered collaborative programs for personal, professional, and linguistic agency and explore potential contributions of the study for second language learning and critical awareness theories. SOCIAL EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT To better understand the theoretical framework which was used in developing and implementing MSSP as well as our critical ethnographic descriptions of the project, we first provide an overview of how students experience education in Japan. In all schooling systems, students are not only provided with certain kinds of knowledge and trained for specific skills, they are also discursively socialized into normative behavior, that is, in certain ways of talking, believing, valuing, doing, and being (Gee, 1996). Nakane’s ethnographic analysis (2007) of Japanese high school classroom interaction illustrates common norms of Japanese high schools. Her data show a strong tendency toward using written communication, a teacher-centered participant structure, and an Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) model in turn-taking. Classroom interaction involved a total absence of voluntary participation, competition for the floor and interaction among students, as well as a high frequency of silent pauses. She argues that Japanese classroom discourse reflects positivistic educational principles which emphasize objective knowledge. Under such a classroom norm, students’ opinions, experience, critical views and

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disagreement are considered to have less relevance. Thus, students are not generally trained to engage in verbal critical interaction. In other words, Nakane’s analysis seems to indicate that Japanese education may possibly confine students to being silent and passive learners. In a similar vein, Yoneyama’s large scale study (1999) of Japanese education systems argues that attributes such as authoritarian teacher-student relationships, teacher-centered pedagogy, a positivistic and instrumental view of knowledge, and pervasive rules may be related to ijime (group bullying) and toko-kyohi (school phobia). Such discourse in education potentially prevents Japanese students from adequately functioning in multicultural educational settings (Nakane, 2007) or intercultural settings (Tanaka, 2006). This picture of the silent, passive Japanese student carries over to the Japanese English language learner. Many are reluctant to express the simplest English phrases being too concerned with a possible loss of face should they stumble in pronunciation or grammar (Law, 1995; LoCastro, 1996). Baskin and Shitai (1996) note that “there are millions of Japanese who have studied English for six, seven, and eight years without acquiring the ability to communicate” (p. 82). They argue that Japanese students study English grammar and vocabulary in order to pass entrance examinations with little or no communicative use of English during the process. The most prevalent teaching method, yakudoku, emphasizes meta-linguistic grammatical knowledge and translation. According to Gorsuch (1998), approximately 80% of Japanese high school teachers of English use the yakudoku method of language instruction. The justification most commonly offered for employing this methodology is that it helps students prepare for university entrance examinations. Research in second language acquisition has used theoretical and methodological frameworks based on “individualistic and mechanistic,” essentially monolingual and monocultural, conceptions of language, discourse and communication which elevates the status of native speakers and relegates learners to the level of “defective communicators” (Firth & Wagner, 1997). Foreign language teachers in the U.S. often fail to recognize nonstandard varieties of the target language and insist upon the native-speaker of the dominant or privileged variety as the standard (Ortega, 1999). These elitist beliefs are prevalent in the Japanese English teaching field as well. Honna and Takeshita (2005) problematize the tendency of Japanese English teachers to require students to imitate native speaker models of pronunciation. Such teaching may result in the loss of self-confidence in learners. Bhatt (2001) points out the need to replace discriminatory conceptions with ones that are faithful to multilingualism and language variation. How prospective teachers are taught and socialized in educational institutions have profound consequences for classroom instruction.

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The question of whether appropriate and adequate preparation in teacher education programs is provided by universities is a persistent question in Japan (Asaoka, 2003). Most newly-hired high school teachers have graduated with discipline-oriented degrees rather than from teacher education programs (Tanaka, Uesugi, & Shiraishi, 1993). Not only is pre-service teacher education not as strongly emphasized as student training in Japan (Yonesaka, 1999), but the teacher training students do receive often neglects central insights from the literature on sociocultural approaches to teacher development, including the importance of agency in learning. Some aspects of current teacher education in Japan foreground the mechanism of discipline and control, providing pre-service teachers with few opportunities to develop agency in learning, and often preserving the notion of English teaching as consisting only of the transmission of decontextualized static knowledge. Due to the large numbers of students in teacher certification programs, many courses are teacher-fronted lectures in large halls. Because of class size and other institutional constraints, teaching methodology and pre-practicum courses do not provide adequate time for language practice. The time for learning opportunities to develop a sense of commitment and professionalism during the teaching practicum is also limited. Preservice teachers presently undergo only a four-credit (3-4 weeks) teaching practicum. In addition, the supervision and evaluation of students by mentor teachers during the practicum is hardly a clear one (Igeta, Sakamoto, Suzuki, Yoshida & Wada, 2008). University teacher educators are troubled when student teachers return from their practicum saying their high school supervisors would not allow them to try out the teaching methods learned in their university classes (Igeta, et al., 2008). High school supervisors who are in charge of student teachers worry for their class pupils when demoshika sensei show up for the practicum. This is a term veterans in the educational scene use to refer to student teachers who do not possess a particularly strong desire to become teachers, but who think teaching may be the last resort open to them as a job (Igeta, et al., 2008). In addition, Japanese teacher to student relationships can be very hierarchical and autocratic (Nakane, 2007). The influence of high school supervisors is felt when the enthusiasm brought to the practicum by the student teacher is quelled by the supervisor’s demands and restrictions (Asaoka, 2003), or more drastically and sadly, when a single supervisor’s negative evaluation of a student teacher’s practicum lessons closes the gates to a teaching career (Igeta, et al., 2008). There is a strong need here to question “how educational procedures and processes acknowledge struggles, transformations, and empowerment as individuals pursue life paths” (Davis, 2009, p. 4). In sum, as Lantolf and Thorne (2006) note, “learners would be influenced by their personal histories of language education as well as by lan-

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guage ideologies in the form of implicit and explicit discourse produced at institutional and nation-state levels” (p. 239). Targeting agency as a focus of program development allows for opportunities to develop critical awareness of prevailing discourses and counter these discourses through alternative approaches to language learning and teacher education that promote personal and professional investment (Norton, 2000) in the learning processes. In the next section, we describe theories that inform Meisei Summer School Project development and specific practices. THE MEISEI UNIVERSITY SUMMER SCHOOL PROJECT The Meisei University Summer School Project is grounded in three main theories which build on each other: 1. 2. 3.

communities of practice (CoP); investment theory; and transnationalism.

We elaborate on the theories in the following sections each with a description of the theory and how it was used in project development, implementation, and ethnographic documentation. Communities of Practice Learning is the increased participation in communities of practice which involves the learner as a whole person acting in the world (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Communities of practice are composed of people who participate in different ways in their various communities through developing, negotiating, and sharing their understandings of the world (Wenger, 1998). A newly emerging concept of the CoP as a network of local, national and international interests in which knowledge and resources are shared and problems are solved collaboratively (Caldwell, 2008) informs the development of MSSP. Some of the key findings in respect to the innovative processes of the networked CoPs are: 1. 2. 3. 4.

the student, not the classroom, school or educational system, is the most important unit of organization; the school acting in isolation cannot achieve transformation; networks span a range of individuals and public and private organizations in educational and non-educational settings; and intellectual and social capital are as important as financial and facilities capital (Caldwell, 2008, p. 3).

Envisioned as a community of practice, MSSP was first planned and carried out in 2002. Taking inspiration from the Foreign Language Partner-

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ship Project (FLPP) in Hawaii (Davis, 1999), MSSP was designed to teach English to local junior high school students who were seen to be “at risk” in local school discourses. MSSP would be a community of practice in which student teachers and students come together in a joint enterprise and in the process develop a common, socially constructed repertoire of activities in which learning would occur as the participants engaged in the ongoing teaching project. Starting with 38 children from the local community, and two faculty members and 25 student teachers from Meisei, MSSP grew in size to 96 learners from 19 nearby cities and wards, five faculty members, 56 student teachers from two universities, and 12 international volunteers in 2009. The summer school classes run for a week from the end of July to the first week of August, but overall project activities begin several months earlier in April. Faculty members start recruiting international volunteers through an international non-governmental organization, Youth Action for Peace (YAP), and its affiliate, the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE). At the same time, a call for student participants is announced at Meisei University and Tamagawa University. Based on the number of accepted international volunteers and student teachers, the number of school children MSSP will accept for the year is determined in early May. The methods used to recruit school children have progressed from hand-made posters and flyers to advertisements on the Meisei website and in local newspapers. International volunteers arrive at the program site one week prior to the start of classes to work together and put final touches on lesson plans with their Japanese counterparts. The MSSP learning community has evolved into a complex of interconnected schools and organizations encompassing three primary populations, elementary and junior high school students, university students, and international volunteers. MSSP participants are situated in a network of communities of practice, and are inevitably involved in activities in which they seek to achieve their shared goals interacting with diverse stakeholders and with their own multiple identities (see Lave & Wenger, 1991). As participants engage in activities of significance and meaning to them, agency, “the mediated capacity to act,” is shaped and constructed (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, p. 234). In the following section we describe the different population groups within MSSP. Local Students Labeled “At risk” The intention of the student teachers in the early stages of MSSP was to support students who were labeled “at risk” in the discourse of Japanese junior high schooling. In spite of Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) guidelines on the use of communicative English language teaching methods, implementing adequate

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assessment tests of student communicative competence proved to be a difficult task for junior high school teachers (Sasaki, 2008). In general, grammatical knowledge remained as a central construct of their assessment tests. Such measurements tend to benefit those who can afford to go to juku (cram schools). Wakabayashi and Negishi (1993) argued that inadequate testing could produce eigo girai (English haters) and these eigo girai tend to be labeled “at risk,” since English is one of the subjects they need to pass in order to continue on to higher education. In its first three years, MSSP actively recruited many of these so called English haters. However, starting in 2004, when MSSP expanded its target to elementary school students, the type of student participant changed. Since English is not taught in elementary school as an academic subject, elementary school students who have applied to MSSP have either been those who are interested in English or whose parents are interested in having their children learn English.1 Although, MSSP has drawn English haters, recent participants include those who first joined MSSP when they were elementary school students and continue in the program when they become junior high school students. An interesting case is that of a 2002 MSSP participant who entered Meisei University and participated in MSSP in 2008 as a student teacher. The primary and middle school students experience language learning in which they make some investment because they become interested in communicating with international volunteers who cannot speak Japanese, become close to student teachers, or find the MSSP learning activities interesting. Because of their involvement in the MSSP community of practice, the general responses from the school children and their parents have been quite positive. MSSP began to attract a large number of students, and in 2007 there were 127 participants. As the number had started to become too large to handle for the limited number of student teachers, MSSP accepted only 96 students chosen randomly from 234 applicants in 2009. MSSP has grown rapidly, and the picture of participants labeled “at risk” is not clear anymore. University Students as Teachers and Administrators Students who participate from Meisei are first-, second-, and third-year International Studies majors and about one-fifth of the students usually participate in the program for academic credit and the rest for non-credit. The Tamagawa students are third-year Business Administration majors who are registered in an English language teaching methodology course, but do not receive academic credit for their participation in MSSP. Both groups of students are enrolled in teacher certification programs administered by their universities. MSSP represents an opportunity to teach “real” students before they start their teaching practicum in their fourth year. Another attraction that the Meisei summer school project holds for university

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students is that, unlike other summer programs that are commercial juku (cram schools) which take a “knowledge through transmission” approach to preparing students for exams (Freire, 1990; Rogoff, 1994), MSSP prioritizes communicative language teaching and content-based methods. All students who apply are accepted; however several students drop out from the program each year for various reasons including health and family related issues. Although most of the Japanese university students participate as student teachers, the project also attracts students who seek holistic personal development and include undergraduate and graduate students in diverse academic fields who involve themselves in MSSP administration and management. About a dozen students each year work in “international volunteer support teams” which communicate with international volunteers before and during the international volunteers’ stay on the Meisei campus. The teams help the volunteers by providing them with information packets which include directions to Meisei from the airport, local transportation networks, and tips on living in Japan. The teams take turns staying at the Meisei guest house helping the volunteers with cooking and cleaning. MSSP is also a site where graduate students of education act as leaders and undertake participatory action research projects. Their action research focuses on documenting and analyzing syllabus design, teaching methodologies, and testing. Graduate students suggest changes in the project after researching MSSP teaching and learning activities. Strong leadership abilities and a sense of agency have emerged out of this ‘ethnographic experience’ (Roberts, Byram, Barro, Jordan, & Street, 2001). Through their research and leadership experience, graduate students begin to see themselves as professionals in the field of education. MSSP opened the program to university students world-wide in 2005. After three years as a “local” project, faculty members and student leaders, drawing in part from Kachru’s (1992) notion of World Englishes, determined that teaching the array of Englishes used around the world was a way to enrich English education in Japan. Japanese student teachers and international volunteer teachers from countries such as Ukraine, Russia, Greece, Spain, Austria, Taiwan, Korea, and Mexico, where English is not the native language, now work together using English as the lingua franca. The discourse of World Englishes and language-as-resource (Ortega, 1999) is the medium through which the two student groups negotiate meaning as they do their jobs as teachers. In the next sections, we discuss how second language investment theory and transnationalism inform our description of personal and professional development in the MSSP community.

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INVESTMENT IN SECOND LANGUAGE USE AND LEARNING THEORIES The fact that participation in MSSP is voluntary does not mean that the participants have a good command of English or are very adept or active in working with others. Past projects evidenced a wide variation in participants’ linguistic competencies, degree of enthusiasm in teaching children, and commitment to teaching global issues. In traditional SLA terms, some of the participants might be described as insufficiently motivated, introverted, and having little aptitude for language learning. We turn, however, to Norton’s (Norton Peirce, 1995) view of language learning processes. Advocating an approach based on situated cognition, Norton argues that learners need to be seen as diverse, contradictory, and dynamic individuals situated in a particular social site. Norton’s notion of investment replaces the traditional excessively homogeneous view of language learners. She argues that learners invest in their second languages in order to acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources in certain social settings which increase their cultural capital (see Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979). MSSP utilizes Norton’s theory in developing a CoP which creates situations in which language learners are invested in language instruction and interaction which, thus, promotes effective language learning. Further, we hope to extend MSSP and our research beyond the discussion of project development that focuses on creating opportunities for investment in language learning. In the following section, related theories are brought in which provide the means for investment, not only in language learning, but also for student teacher training, leadership development, and critical awareness-raising concerning multiculturalism and activism. Transnationalism Although power relationships generated by the potential imperialistic aspects of “global English” (Pennycook, 2001) might play out in situated interaction among individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, there are potential benefits in utilizing English as a global language which are linked to the participants’ transformative processes. While the participants use English as a common working language, we recognize a range of benefits associated with identity and agency. Cultural identity is inherently political, and participant lives are shaped by local and national politics; however, MSSP could potentially become a transnational community of practice that deconstructs the participants’ traditional ideas regarding boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender and nation states (McGinnis, Goodstein-Stolzenberg, & Saliani, 2007). The use of English as a shared communicative resource in transnational practices and spaces may help participants build new transnational relationships and

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identities. Such relationships may work to emancipate them from existing social categories (see Lam, 2004). Schools need to create opportunities where transnational participants can bring together their linguistic, cultural, and social resources which constitute “ideological and implementational spaces” for the development of learner voices (Hornberger, 2007, p. 3). Because of the social and cultural diversity inherent in the structure of the project, MSSP faculty and student leaders are aware of the possibility of tension and misunderstandings. MSSP organizers give support to young people as they work together on shared project goals identifying and reaching self and collective understandings. MSSP is therefore seen as providing an opportunity for students and volunteers to learn that the avoidance of conflict is in itself a political act and, thus, are encouraged to learn how to work out solutions to disagreements. Further, it is hoped that MSSP participants bring their learned understandings of conflict resolution to play in peace advocacy work in larger spheres of action. Informed by Freedman and Ball’s (2004) research in language literacy and learning which is framed by Bakhtin and his notion of ideological becoming, we view the student teachers and school students as placed in a community of practice that provides an ideological environment. We take the position that the CoP mediates the participants’ ideological becoming. In other words, when diverse populations interact and multiple discourses meet, ideologies inherent in this situation inevitably create individual struggles and tensions that are sites of mediation for learners to come to new understandings (Bakhtin, 1981, cited in Freedman & Ball, 2004, p. 348). During MSSP the student teachers voluntarily choose the roles they wish to take in their teams: teaching team leader, international volunteer support team member, NGO liaison, and action researcher. The role the participant chooses often influences the development of his or her social identity which may conflict with those of other participants. Language becomes a medium that potentially creates power relations among participants; English as a lingua franca is not a neutral medium. The acculturated contextual knowledge of more experienced participants may contribute to unequal power relationships. The social identities of participants which develop in complex power relations are seen as multiple and contradictory. MSSP becomes a site of struggle which could re-position the participants’ subjectivity and affect the development of agency. Fostering transnationalism can promote the exchange of views, creating better understanding, tolerance, resolving conflict, and addressing global social justice issues such as poverty, war, genocide, human trafficking, and gender and ethnic equity. Meisei student leaders determined that the promotion of peace as an international youth project would be an important MSSP objective. Since 2007, international students who are dedicated to peace activism and studying conflict resolution collaborate with an NGO,

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Minsai Center Japan,2 and student teachers in shared goals of service-oriented teaching and learning. MSSP student teachers explore social justice issues through development of content-based lessons on Laos and NGO activities. Each teaching team plans at least one lesson on issues associated with war victims and landmines, and poverty and education among children in Laos. Although MSSP is free of charge to students, they are offered the opportunity to make contributions to Minsai Center Japan. The money collected has enabled more than 12 Laotian children to complete their formal education. All participants thus become activists for children’s rights in education. Utilizing concepts associated with CoP, investment, and transnationalism, student teachers, international volunteers, and peace activists work together in teams to create syllabi, teaching materials, and develop teaching methodologies. MSSP is a multi-faceted project which brings together previously unconnected participants into a network of communities of practice. Members participate as educators, administrators, activists and researchers seeking different means of mediation and alternate rules of engagement (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). MSSP is ripe in opportunities for transformation and for participants to develop agency. In the following section, we describe the challenges and agentive achievements of the MSSP learning community. TENSIONS, TRANSFORMATION, AND INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES Our research focused on processes of gaining agency among participants and the transformation of their subjectivities, which moves them beyond previous experiences of dominant ideologies and discourses. We also explored how prevailing institutional ideologies and policies constrained individual choice. To gain understanding of both the possibilities of and constraints on participant transformation, the authors were in a constant state of data collection employing multiple ethnographic data collection methods throughout the course of three years preparing for and implementing MSSP. We kept field notes at meetings and in classrooms, recorded student narratives, and took video and audio recordings of classroom and out of classroom interaction. We conducted 22 interviews of student teachers, four of graduate students and five of international volunteers which were either taped and transcribed or chronicled using field notes. The participants’ reflective journals were also used as data. The fact that we participate in MSSP as trainers, teachers, and administrators enables us to have an insider’s perspective. It should be noted, however, that although the solidarity established between participants and the researchers might provide access to the candid feelings of the student participants, the teacher-student

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power relationship was still in place and may have inhibited students from providing negative evaluations of MSSP. The following description of participants’ experiences, while they negotiated the MSSP community of practice and larger institutional policies and practices, center on investment in language and social learning, transnational interpersonal relations, and institutional challenges. Language and Social Investment The diversity of the participants in terms of languages, English competencies, and cultures, highlighted the meaning of the use of English as a medium for constructing a MSSP community of practice. While international students’ English language abilities tended to be intermediate to high, the Japanese participants who were socialized in the existing discourse of learning English as a subject rather than use initially struggled with the MSSP discourse of participants as users of English for authentic purposes. Interaction with international volunteers in order “to get the job done” made them aware that English is not just an academic subject which is only studied for passing examinations, but a pragmatic tool necessary for the co-construction of social meaning and enterprise. The learning trajectory of one participant, Mafuyu, suggests ways in which investment in communication during MSSP over three years changed his subjectivity to the English language. Before participating in MSSP, Mafuyu states, “Jibun no reberu dato, gakumon ikooru bunpoo, tango nan desu yo.” (From my perspective, learning [English] was learning grammar and vocabulary.) In reflecting upon his career as “a conventional English teacher,” he viewed English as a body of academic knowledge that he wanted to teach to students. Mafuyu observes: De, tonikaku eigo no bunpoo dattari o benkyoo shite, tonikaku motometeiru tokoro wa eigo no kyooshi, de tabun sono toki no jibun no eigo no kyooshitte iuno mo, komyunikeeshon to ka demo naku, eigo o tantan to oshieru, demonai keredomo nanka, iwayuru ima iru kookoo no eigo no sensei. (Anyway, I thought I would study like grammar, and I wanted to become an English teacher, and the image of an English teacher at that time was, nothing like communication, just a person who just teaches, teaches, teaches the subject, maybe, what you might call the high school academic English teacher.)

In describing his view of English as “nothing like communication,” Mafuyu was initially confined by the existing English education discourse in Japan (McVeigh, 2002). Yet his image of a conventional English teacher was totally challenged in his second year of MSSP when he encountered Akina, a leader of his teaching team. Akina demonstrated how English, as a medium of discourse, could be used to construct meaning with other participants. Akina impressed Mafuyu on the first day when they had a meeting with in-

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ternational volunteers using English, and Akina immediately became a role model for Mafuyu: “Nanka mechakucha kakko yoku mietan desu yo ne. Eigo o tsukatte komyunikeeshon o torutte koto ni taishite no sugata ga, sungoi jibun ni wa... shogeki o ukerutteka,…uwa, sugee kakkoii to omotte.” (She looked so cool when she communicated in English. She impressed me, like wow. She is cool.) In this meeting, Mafuyu, for the first time, encountered a situation where English was used in a meaningful and authentic way in real life. Although Mafuyu had taken six periods of English lessons a week in his university program during the previous two years, he never consciously learned skills and knowledge for real conversation. Since Mafuyu had never used English for authentic purposes, he was not able to speak up in the meeting. He later observed, “Chiimu miitingu o zenbu eigo de yaru, de, sorega, sugoi taihende, nande konna ni tsutawarannai no ka naatte omotte.” (The whole meeting was done in English, and it was very difficult for me. I thought, “Why am I such a bad communicator?”) Mafuyu realized at this critical point that grammar and vocabulary alone do not help and decided to observe how Akina used English. Akina san no shaberikata o zutto mite tan desuyo. De, a, kooiufuu ni shabereba ii no katte omotte, jaa Akina san no shaberikata o maneyootte omotte hajimeta no ga ima no shaberikata. (I continuously observed how Akina used English, and I found like, “Okay, I can use English this way. Now I will do the same thing.” Then I started to speak English like this.)

Mafuyu paid attention to communication strategies. Thus, he unconsciously drew from prevailing sociocultural theory on the development and use of language learning strategies (e.g. Donato & MacCormick, 1994). Mafuyu, was a leader of a team of student teachers by the third year of his participation. Most participants agreed that his communicative competence in English was much improved. He led meetings in English and established rapport with international volunteers. Mafuyu enjoyed using English to establish and deepen relationships with international volunteers and his Japanese team members in order to get their teaching work done: “Eigo de karera to komyunikeeshon o torutte koto no hoo ga jibun wa tanoshikutte, de, nanka, sore ga tabun sono, akachan ga shabereruyoo ni naru to shaberitagaru janai desu ka, jibun mo sore ni nite te.” (Communicating in English was fun for me. Well, maybe, when a baby starts to talk, the baby wants to talk a lot. I am like that.) He also knows that as Akina was a model to him, he is becoming a role model to younger participants. He realizes that he is showing them how he communicates in English: “Sukoshi shabereruyoo ni nattara, nanka, koo, misebatekina…” (I became a little better speaker, and somehow I am showing myself, too…) Being in a linguistically less diversified society, Japanese student teachers do not have many chances to use English for authentic purposes. For

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most of the Japanese participants, English only existed in classrooms or in their English textbooks. Using English for their jobs as student teachers in MSSP, they gained a sense of agency through changed identities as increasingly competent second language speakers. Now many student teachers, like Mafuyu and Akina, view themselves as people who can communicate and influence others by using English. From the perspective of his transnational experience, Timothy, additionally shows how he and the members of his team developed a relationship in which mutual learning could take place. In the initial days of working with the Japanese student teachers, while Timothy felt hampered by his team members’ insufficient oral ability in English, he also suffered from his own lack of social and educational contextual knowledge: “In the beginning, the first two days, maybe, it was a bit difficult to get to get the same harmony … to…to understand each other to get to know each other…” However, the development of a relationship with his Japanese teammates gradually contributed to a deepening of his understanding of social aspects of the MSSP CoP Discourse (Gee, 1996). His Japanese team members also became used to speaking with their international teammate about their shared objectives, their shared interest in teaching. They co-constructed the meaning of what they were doing and why they were together. Their shared communal repertoire in terms of language and teaching provided them with a meaningful context for interaction, interpretation, and integration (Wenger, 1998). “They [Japanese teammates] helped me a lot…I could discover a lot about the project and the Japanese students’ learning through them.” Sociocultural theory helps to explain the experiences of these participants: learning is a process of identity formation within and through the development of relationships with other members of the community (Wenger, 1998, Lave & Wenger, 1991). By working with experienced student teachers and international volunteers in the community, the newcomer becomes a certain “kind of person” who gains the knowledge and skills to use English to get the job done. The involvement of non-native English teachers from foreign countries helped the MSSP participants re-conceptualize their notion of the English language and develop agency in a transnational space. Purposeful real life interaction using English with speakers of other languages moved the participants away from the idea of learning English as a static body of knowledge. Becoming knowledgeably skilled, participants change their roles in relation to the community, which leads participants to reconstruct their subjectivities. They take into account the consequences of their actions, and are able to alter their actions in light of the information gained from discursive consciousness. The data indicate development of agency among the participating student teachers by this shift in their subjectivities.

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Site of Struggle: The Power of Language and Social Discourse Because of the cultural and linguistic diversity in MSSP where English is used as a working language, tensions and conflicts associated with the use of lingua franca, English, as well as the use of the local language, Japanese, arose. From the researchers’ experience, generally, the fluency of the Japanese participants has been lower than the fluency of the international volunteers perhaps partly because the international volunteers invest more time and money in order to participate in MSSP. This tendency is repeatedly observed because the level of determination international volunteers must have in order to participate in MSSP is much higher than the level required of Japanese participants. In spite of the Japanese student teachers’ initiation in incorporating World Englishes into MSSP, the data indicate that some participants still feel their English variety is inferior, and feel they have a limited command of the language as well. Even one of the most fluent speakers among the Japanese MSSP participants, Yuichi, felt that a strong command of English could wield power. Eigo o tsukau toki ni, jibun ga kanarazu sabuoodineito na kanji, mukoo ga shuperia na kanjitteiu sooiu kankakutte …nanka arun desu ne. Jibun jishin mo eigo tsukatte iru toki wa neitibu supiikaa ga ue, jibun ga shita mitai na, to onaji yoo ni kokusai borantia ga ue, jibuntachi ga shita mitai na, mukoo no hoo ga eigo ryoku takai mitai na…kekkou mierun desu yo ne, kokusai borantia ga ue, jibuntachi ga shita, dakara karera no iu koto wa tadashiin dakara, jibuntachi no shuchoo ga dekinai toka, dakara karera ni awaseru mitaina. Soo iu konpuromaizu mitai na no ga mieru. (I have a feeling like, when we use English, I always feel that we are subordinate and they are superior. I, myself, feel I am in a lower position and native speakers are in a higher position. In the same way, I can see [other Japanese participants] think they are in a lower position and international volunteers higher, thus, what they [international volunteers] say is always right and Japanese participants cannot make an argument. Therefore we follow what they say, something like that. I see the Japanese participants making compromises.)

Participating native or near native speakers of English in MSSP are not, however, usually aware of the power associated with their strong command of English. An incident which took place in the team led by a very capable speaker, Sayaka, illustrates how power, which is based on linguistic competence, works in an intercultural setting using English as the lingua franca. A week before MSSP was scheduled to begin, the Japanese members of Sayaka’s team first met with their counterpart international volunteer, Mary, an Irish participant, who arrived on the project site the previous day. Sayaka’s team had prepared a timetable to work with Mary. Sayaka’s team had set up a meeting with Mary in the afternoon. Since some of the other members still had other commitments on campus, Shun, a male member

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of Sayaka’s team was elected to meet with Mary at the appointed time to explain the progress of their preparations. According to Shun, Mary came to him and told him that she was going to go shopping in Tachikawa, a nearby downtown area, and would not meet with Shun. Shun tried to tell her that he was supposed to brief her about their progress in the scheduled meeting. Mary replied that the meeting could be held the following day. Shun was going to persuade her to stay for the meeting but Mary left before he was able to verbalize his argument (Field notes, July 24, 2008). Shun felt bad because he thought that he had been ignored. However, Mary took the situation differently, “At the lunch time, they (Sayaka and her team members) said they would have exams. Nobody will stay with me.” She seemed to understand the meeting with Shun as not especially important and potentially simply a polite way for the Japanese team members to cope with their inability to meet. However, it is also possible to interpret her phrase, “Nobody will stay with me,” as a misunderstanding on her part. Mary might have felt unappreciated. Thus, this incident might have been caused by misunderstanding on both sides. Sayaka, as the leader of the team, needed to deal with this tension caused by a small communication breakdown. However, being overwhelmed by Mary’s fast pace of talk, Sayaka did not feel confident in discussing this issue with Mary, who is a native speaker of English and also older than Sayaka. In the Japanese cultural context, age is an important hierarchical factor. Sayaka felt disempowered by this new member of her team. She laments, “Sooiu koto wa, ii nikui desu.” (It is almost impossible for me to tell her such things to straighten up the misunderstanding.) This fear of coping with tensions is understandable in view of the complex power relations concerning language and social expectations operating in this situation. Arriving at a realization of the power of language and the potential for social tension can very well be overwhelming for young adults in unfamiliar transnational contexts. Yet Savaka was determined to try and bring about understanding. On the following day, she reluctantly went to Mary to sit down and talk, but she was only told “never mind” by Mary. Sayaka wanted to discuss the issue further but was not able to continue. The incident shows how the power associated with having cultural capital and a command of linguistic and social resources can influence the relationships among participants. It should be noted that, although we do not have further information from Mary about her reaction, there are several possible explanations for her “never mind” reaction, including embarrassment, frustration with interaction in English, or simply that—from her cultural understanding—she didn’t consider this an important issue to discuss. Nonetheless, the team forged ahead on their shared goals of effectively teaching English to Japanese children. Because of problems in the classroom, the Japanese student teachers started to exchange ideas with Mary. Their first problem was the passive

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attitude of the children. It was apparent that the children would only talk with their close friends. After the class, the teaching team, including Mary, started to discuss how they could encourage all of the children to talk to each other in the classroom. In Excerpt 1, Shun suggests that the student teachers could change the seating arrangement everyday so that the children who do not know each other could start to talk to one another. Excerpt 1. Shun: I think, er, some students. [They move. Mary: [They move. We need to watch them. Shun: And the teachers, [have them] go back…to their seats. Mary: Yeah. Shun: We have to do [this]. Mary: I think it is a good idea to move them everyday because they talk to other children. Mary: Are you okay for your class tomorrow? Sayaka: Hahahaha Mary: You’re ready? Shun: And that’s tomorrow? Mary: No, no. It’s… Fuji: Monday. Shun: Do your best. Ue: Do your best. The meeting ended on a positive note and the team looked forward to their work on the following Monday. Social interaction emerged from the necessity to find solutions to shared problems. Shun’s suggestions to Mary and the other Japanese participants strengthened ties in this community of practice. Power resides not only in the use of English, but also the local language, Japanese. Sayaka noticed that during lunch time, Japanese members tended to use Japanese while eating lunch together in the team. Thus, Mary, although enrolled in a beginning Japanese language course in her university, found it difficult to participate in lunch-time talk. Sayaka also noticed that when Japanese teachers gave instructions in the classroom, they tended to use Japanese, which was violating the English-as-lingua-franca policy of MSSP. Since Japanese was, of course, relatively incomprehensible to Mary, Sayaka, in a meeting, tried to raise awareness of this potential exclusion of Mary. Excerpt 2. Sayaka: Ah, we have to speak English more. Mary can’t hear Japanese.

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Mary: Yeah. Sayaka: When we eat lunch, we speak Japanese…in Japanese. Mary: During the class, when you explain everything in Japanese…I know some explanation needs to be Japanese, when you do activities. (silence. 6.0) Sayaka: “Mearii nihongo kikitorenai jan. ... Shabererutte ittemo, honto ni aisatsu dake, aisatsu toka, itadakimasu toka, dake nandakedo, uchira wa tsuneni nihongo bakkari hanashiteru kara, jyugyoo igai anmari eigo tsukawanai to omoono. De, watashi ga mite iru to, shokuji no toki mo nanka koo, Mearii suwattete, demo nanka nihongo de hanashiterunda yo ne. Yoko de, Mearii koko ni iru noni, kocchi de nihongo de, koo nanka. …Dakara, sore ga waruitte iu wake janain dake do, wa ni hairenai to sugoi tsurai jan, minnano. Minna mo soo dashi.” (You know, Mary is not good at understanding Japanese. …She speaks Japanese but really only greetings, greetings such as itadaki masu, but we always speak Japanese outside of the classroom, and I see during lunch, Mary’s sitting and we speak Japanese. There we have Mary, and here we speak Japanese. …I’m not blaming you but it’s depressing when you cannot join in a conversation. I think everyone feels that way.) Sayaka suggested that the Japanese team members try to speak English in order to include Mary in their conversations. The team first experienced the power behind Mary’s command of English and this experience led them to realize the power of their own local language. In this instance of ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) they became aware of the power of language. The site of struggle over the relative power of Japanese and English created learning experiences which speaks strongly for the integration of the multicultural in MSSP, and the project’s ethos of peace keeping advocacy. Peace keeping necessarily encompasses the notions of co-construction of meaning as well as individual and collective agency. TOWARDS CO-CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING AND AGENCY Within communities of practice, learning is conceptualized primarily as a situated, relational, and discursive practice of meaning generation. Meaning is constituted through the continual, recursive process of participation and reification (Wenger, 1998). However, this CoP perspective is difficult for many of the Japanese student teachers, as illustrated in Yukina’s MSSP experience. Yukina is a graduate student majoring in English education who acted as a leader of one of the teaching teams. Naturally she mentored some of the younger student teachers. As pointed out by Yamada (2005), one of the fun-

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damental problems of the Japanese pre-service teacher certification program is that it requires only a certain number of academic credits. Earning credits in courses is considered independent work and may not mean that the students had sufficient teaching practice. Many of the students were at first confined by this notion of teaching as a purely individual performance. However in MSSP, teaching is shaped through interaction with members of a supportive peer team. Group members give feedback to each other during mock lessons. The young first-time participants found it difficult to understand the notion of teaching as a socially constructed practice and hesitated to practice teach in front of others. Yukina, states, “Saisho wa mogijyugyootte no o tabun iyagatteta n desu yo, ichinensei toka wa. Atashi mo saisho wa mogijyugyoo toka sugoi iya datta shi.” (They hated to rehearse in front of us, especially those first-year students. I did not feel like showing my teaching to others, either.) However, Yukina insisted that they observe each other’s practice lessons. As they repeated such practice classes the student teachers realized that receiving and giving feedback to each other was a meaningful process and valuable in the construction of their teaching abilities. They now know that teaching is not the work of an individual but that teaching involves the co-construction of meaning. Yukina reveals that: Demo yappari mogijyugyoo o surutte no ga daiji nano wa wakatte iru kara, ima, ichinensei wa kyoo mo watashi ni, kyoo hookago yarun de, kyoo gogen aitetara mite kudasai toka, jibun kara yaritai n desu kedotte iu hatsugen ga dete kuru yoo ni natte, yappari mogijyugyoo ga taisetsu date iu no ga hon nin tachi mo wakatte iru yoo ni natte, yappari mogijyugyootte no ga doiu yakuwari o hatasu no katte no ga. Jibun ga jibun ga motte iru fuan o zenbu butsukete, sore o hitotsu hitotsu hirotte moratte, kooshitara iin janai, aa shitara iin janai tte, iwarete iku koto ni yotte, jibun no kangaete iru koto to, sensei no itte iru koto o, mata koko de, choseishite. Te, ii mono o tsukuri agete ikutte iu sooiu yakuwari. (They understand now that sharing their teaching plans is important. Today, the first-year students asked me to look at the practice lessons which they will do in the fifth period. They understand how important it is to share their practice lessons, and what rehearsals are for. They share the parts of their teaching that they are not satisfied with. By listening to their team members’ suggestions, like “how about teaching like this or that,” they integrate what they think and what teachers usually tell them, and create a good lesson plan.)

During their practice teaching sessions, student teachers receive suggestions from experienced team members, exchange ideas on new teaching techniques, and strengthen their relationships. They construct their teaching through these social interactions. Through co-construction of the meaning of teaching, the participants gained the power to intervene with the existing social systems. As noted by Giddens (1994), “to be an agent is to be able to deploy…a range of casual powers including that of those influencing those deployed by others. Ac-

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tion depends on the capability of the individual to ‘make a difference’ to pre-existing state of affairs or course of events.” (p. 14–15). Thus, empowerment of the participants is the basic premise of agency. The sociocultural approach to teacher development enables participants to make decisions and influence their own instructional enterprise by themselves. We can see from Maya’s story that she experienced a trajectory of increasing agency as she moved through multiple MSSP programs. Maya has participated in MSSP for the last five years. She was first a student teacher in MSSP when she was a second-year student. She continuously participated in MSSP until the second year of her graduate studies in English education. During her first year as a participant, she was a typical demoshika teacher. Ninen no toki waa…sonna ni…omotte…omotte ta kedoo dochira ka to iu too, kyooin ni naroo to shite kyooshoku totte iru to iu yori mo, kyooiku jisshu ni ikitakutee. kyooiku jisshu ni ikitakattan desu. Kookoo toka. Demo, kookoo ni ikitakattan desu yo. Kookoo no kyooiku jisshu wa, nanka ibento teki na kanji ga moto moto kookoo ni ita toki kara atte… doosookai jainai desu ka dooki dakara…puchi doosookai dashii, nanka gasshoosai mo deru shi. (When I was a sophomore, I didn’t …I wanted but not so…rather I wanted to go to my high school for the teaching practicum. I wanted to do the teaching practicum in high school. But I wanted to go to high school. I have had this perception of the teaching practicum as a fun event since I was a high school student. It’s like an alumni event, …a small home coming day. I can participate in the chorus festival.)

In the beginning, Maya only saw the teaching practicum as an opportunity to meet her friends in high school.3 After participating in MSSP for five years, Maya became a determined pre-service teacher. During the last three years of her work with MSSP, she participated as an action researcher. She paid special attention to documenting and evaluating lessons for primary school children. She further used these qualitative and quantitative evaluations to develop curricula for young learners’ courses in MSSP. With Maya’s initiative, the quality of curricula for primary school students has improved. She also published articles on her action research projects in MSSP (e.g. Sugiyama, 2009). Maya has clearly developed the subjectivity to transform existing teaching practice and achieve an increasing sense of agency. She became a member of the management team responsible for the financial part of MSSP as well as curriculum design for young learners’ courses. She gives advice to undergraduate student teachers. Maya clearly reveals how learning is achieved not only in relational contexts, but as individual agency. Tatoeba (sono) kookoo mitai nii, oshieraretee, yaru koto datoo, moo honto nii, kooyattara koo narutte no ga wakattetee, sore o yaranakya ikenaitte iu…gakushuu dakedoo, samaasukuuru waa, nanka mokuhyoo ga ikko arun dake do, sore made ni nanko ka

Promoting Translocal and Transnational Agency • 387 suteppu o fumanakya dekinakattari shitee, sono aida oo, oshietekureru hito ga inai karaa, doo yaru katte iu, jibun de yatte mite. (Like in high school learning, I need to do what I was taught to. It’s really that I need to do something, the consequence of which is already clear. But in MSSP, in order to achieve an objective, I need to take some steps. Nobody tells me what to do. So I need to think what to do, and try it out myself.)

Maya recognizes that she became more versatile. Less experienced student teachers often propose and suggest alternative ways of teaching to Maya. Maya accepts such new ways of teaching and encourages undergraduate participants to try them out. Because of her research experience, she is interested in seeing the outcomes of various attempts at developing innovative curricula. Nanka, ii no o hitotsu ni kime naku natta kana tte iu. Ironna hoohoo de yatte mita kekka ga shiritai to omoo janai desu ka. Kenkyuu ni tabun shinakattara are nan desu yo. Nanka moo umaku ittereba, ichinen me seekoo shitara sore de ii ya mitai na. Nanka sore igai wa, nanka omoi tsuku no mo, jibun de kangaete ite soko ni iki tsuite iru kara, kekkyoku kangaete mo onaji yarikata ni nacchau shi, de, nanka ga nai, kikkake ga nai to kawaru koto mo nai to omoon desu kedo, kenkyuu o suru to, nanka, ironna hito no yarikata o mirushi, ato jibun no kenkyuu taishoo no naka de chigatta yarikata o shita itte iu hito mo iru kara, soo iu no mo, nanka sore de yattara doo naru ka natte ki ni naru kara, yatte mina yo, tte kekkoo daiji mitai na kanji de, ato oshi mo dekiru shi, nanka jibun ga ima mo oshieru dake de, kotoshi mo mein de riidaa yatterutte nattara tabun atashi no kurasu wa atashi no yarikata tte nacchau shi, shita no kotachi ni mo sore de oshiette te nacchaun dakedo, nanka sore mo riidaa no kangae mo, maa sore wa jiyuu ni yatte morai tsutsu, sono naka de jibun no iken mo irete moraitsutsu, jiyuu ni ironna hoohoo o tameshite moraeru, moraootte omoo, jookyoo ga kenkyuu shite kara aru no kana. (I do not have the idea of “the only one best approach.” I would like to know the results of various attempts. If I had not been involved in research activities, I would have been like, if things go well, if one approach is successful in the first year, then this is it. I would not think of alternative ways. If it was me who developed the successful teaching approach, I would be only able to think of something similar. I would continue using the same approach. But when I undertake research, I will investigate various people’s approaches, and maybe someone in my data might try a different approach, and I am interested in the potential effects of such a new approach. So I encourage [undergraduate students] to try it out. If I only taught in MSSP as a main teacher on the team [and did not undertake research], I would use my approach, and ask undergraduate student teachers to use my approach. But I want them to feel free to try anything although I continually give them my opinions. My research experience made me take this attitude toward different approaches.)

Maya is able to now accept various ideas and approaches rather than clinging to the same ideas. Thus, she has freed herself from her own narrow perspectives.

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Noritaka, an administrative leader, and action researcher in MSSP, also argues that his research helped him gain a more critical perspective of his own teaching freeing himself from complacency. Kenkyuu o suru to genjyoo ni manzoku shinakunaru mitai na.…dakara, koo, kenkyuu suru koto de, kore, motto koo dekiru daroo, mitai na koto toka, kooiu fuu ni shitara doo nan daroo ka, mitai na no ga dete kuru toka. (Because of my research experience, I am never satisfied with what I do.… So I undertake research and I come to think of what else I can do, how about doing this and that, something like that.)

Through their MSSP teaching experiences, student participants begin to see how English is used as a pragmatic tool necessary for the co-construction of social meaning and enterprise. We see a shift in subjectivities and the development of agency among these student teachers and graduate student researchers. The graduate students, in particular, developed into independent thinkers capable of critically evaluating their own research and initiating innovative attempts in MSSP. The project’s ethos of peacekeeping and conflict resolution created spaces for co-construction of meaning as well as individual and collective agency. Student teachers gradually became aware of how the teaching and learning process involves the coconstruction of meaning. However, although most student teachers gained the ability to critique traditional approaches to teaching and learning while gaining the agency to become innovative and confident instructors, others experienced overwhelming institutional challenges. INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES Whether effective or ineffective, learning and motivation are always socially embedded (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). Situational, personal, and contextual factors in student lives can make differences resulting in agency that is constrained. Takumi, one of the four Tamagawa University student teachers who participated in the 2008 MSSP, is a case in point. The four Tamagawa students; Takumi, Tomoko, Chihiro and Jina; who participated in MSSP were placed together into a teaching team with seven Meisei students. Of these four students, Takumi struggled the most to become a functioning member of this team community of practice. Takumi’s periphery membership (Wenger, 1998) began with Jina and Chihiro taking on the job of going to weekly meetings at the Meisei. By not attending meetings with the complete team, Takumi had fewer chances to establish relationships with his Meisei peers. Takumi was selected to teach the first lesson on the first day of the project for his team. From peer reports, the lesson went smoothly despite the nervousness and apprehension Takumi showed in mock sessions leading up to it. “Takumi’s lesson is good. Students were laughing at time” (Email,

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July 31, 2008). However, Takumi left abruptly after the end of the morning lessons, failing to take part in an afternoon feedback session and practice session with his team members. He did not report back to MSSP on the second day and failed to notify anyone prior to his absence. After repeated calls and email to Takumi to check on his safety and whereabouts, this early morning email message was finally received by the second author on the fifth day of MSSP: I'm sorry to be late. I can't go to school with frend. I think My heart is weeker and weeker. I can't sleep well. My body is broke. I understand all of thing. But I will not do. I'm happy I give the mail and call. I'm sorry I fix me. (Email, August 4, 2008)

A few days later, Takumi tried to explain at a meeting with his seminar teacher, the second author, the reasons for his failure to continue in the project. Yet he seemed unable to describe exactly why he did not go to MSSP the following days. When asked what he meant in his email about his heart getting weaker and weaker, Takumi said “heart” meant the Japanese word, kokoro, which means heart in the sense of mind or emotions. In other words, Takumi was feeling emotionally weak. To understand Takumi’s avoidance of attending team meetings and subsequent abrupt departure from the program, an understanding is needed of the larger context of his institutional challenges. The four Tamagawa University students were third-year business majors in the school’s international management department and enrolled in their English teacher certification program. Participation in MSSP was a voluntary activity they undertook as students in the program’s required Teaching Methodology (TM) course. The students shuffled their already heavy business and teacher certification coursework and extracurricular schedules in order to attend MSSP planning sessions and take part in MSSP mock lessons. They do not receive academic credit for their participation in MSSP. These students were the remnants of a larger group who had started the certification program as first-year students. At Tamagawa, teacher certification students must adhere to strict rules or face dismissal from the program: they must attend and be on time for every certification program meeting, have a 2.4 grade point average and achieve a level of English proficiency comparable to a score of 39 or more on the iBT (Internet Based TOEFL) by the end of their second year. In addition, anyone who receives a keikoku (academic warming) is instantly cut from the program. Given these strict rules and the burden of having to take numerous teacher education courses in addition to their business courses, many of these students are, surprisingly, demoshika sensei; as business majors some do not pursue careers in the teaching profession.

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Takumi was one of five students, two men and three women, who had survived the strict certification trial. When the other male student decided to quit the teacher certification program earlier in the spring semester, Takumi felt alone. Since their first year together, he felt isolated (najime nai kanji) (Field notes, November 26, 2009). Taking a defensive stance, Takumi declared, Kono guruupu ni kirawarete mo ii. (This group can hate me if they want to.), Tanoshiku furumatte tsukarette (I’m tired of trying to act as if being with them is fun) (Field notes, November 26, 2009). Takumi indicated that he wanted to stay in the teacher certification program, but it was hard to get along with the women. Takumi felt he was the worst, least deserving of the group: Chanto yara nai de. Betsu no koto o yuusen shi chatta. (I knew I had to shape up. I gave more priority to my other interests) (Field notes, October 15, 2009). He said he acted like a complete goof off, not keeping up with his coursework and skipping classes, but at the same time, he related this unwillingness or resistance to working hard to an experience he had in junior high school. At that time, he tried to do his very best in everything, but was always very tired, often vomited from stress, and had sometimes even collapsed. It was according to Takumi, seishin teki na mondai (an emotional problem) (Field notes, October 15, 2009). In his third year of junior high school while studying for high school entrance examinations, he was hospitalized for a week. He decided from that time on to hold back because he learned he might possibly die if he overexerted himself (zenryoku dasu to shinu) (Field notes, October 15, 2009). In high school and university, he has gotten through by doing the very minimum required. Low grades in high school did not bother him (kookoo no toki, hikui tensuu demo heiki) (Field notes, October 15, 2009). Takumi seems to carry with him feelings of guilt and inferiority as well as a lack of confidence in himself. He confides, “Jibun ni wa nai to iu ki ga suru. Kyooyoo wa nai. Kyooin no shishitsu wa kaketeru.” (I think I do not have what it takes to be a teacher. I do not have a good academic foundation. I am lacking in the qualities needed to be a teacher) (Field notes, October 15, 2009). Despite these feelings of inferiority, Takumi took a step toward a teaching career by joining an English Education third-year seminar and MSSP, thus expressing a commitment to becoming a teacher. This is my dream. Sore wa machigai nai. [That’s true]. When I was in elementary school my teacher was a very good man. I admire him. I liked studying all of thing. Teacher is very good, so my dream is teacher. I met good teachers in junior high school, high school, university. Teacher is very humanity, good human. Kizuita no wa, [What I realized was], I like to learn the things teacher teach, mukashi kara kawatte nai [this hasn’t changed from before], very fantastic. (Field notes, October 15, 2009)

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Takumi’s commitment to teaching is in contrast to Tomoko and Chihiro, who revealed their tendencies toward being demoshika sensei (uncommitted teaching); they joined business seminars, and began job hunting. Yet, despite Takumi’s commitment to teaching, the dynamics and the tensions that existed in the Tamagawa circle of teacher certification students held sway. As Lantolf & Thorne (2006) point out, “Communities of practice are rarely stable and smoothly functioning entities. They are characterized by shifting motives, goals, and rules of behavior and they normally entail struggle and conflict” (p. 243). Takumi was not able to become, or clearly identify himself as, a member of the Meisei team of student teachers. His subsequent frequent absences from lessons jeopardized his chances for passing required courses, and thus meeting teacher certification program requirements. He faced the real possibility of a fifth year of college. As indicated by Lantolf & Thorne (2006), “Certain social-material conditions may impoverish, rather than afford, opportunities for developmental transformation” (p. 243). In sum, by socially constructing their own educational enterprises, most student teachers were found to have gained not only confidence and self-esteem in their teaching capability, but also to have developed more linguistic competence through interaction with other more fluent participants. Student teachers also became aware of their communicative responsibility and need for self-regulation as a member of the community of practice in order to jointly organize and run the project. Yet personal experiences of institutional challenges could also result in an inability to move beyond the social and academic discourses of university communities. Thus, this study argues the need for academic institutions to examine how students are challenged by educational discourses and how they can overcome these challenges through innovative agentive and translocal/transnational programs. CONCLUSION In a sociocultural approach to education, individual learning is seen as a transformation of the learner’s identity (Diamondstone, 2002). Through participation in communities of practice, participants often shift to a position of control over their own activity and extend their influence over the broader enterprise they are engaged in, thereby liberating themselves from dependent roles designated to them by existing discourses (Rogers, Morrell, & Enyedy, 2007), that is, learners gain agency. The findings of this study show the importance of focusing on agency in educational endeavors. There is a need to take seriously the intentions, actions, and strategies of learners and to monitor the events they carry out. Projects involving collaborative participation suggest communities of practice as foci and discourse as the medium of learning in which participants develop a shared language in order to create shared understanding

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in a community. The experience helps participant integration of cognitive elements into instructional practice. For example, Mafuyu learned how to use communication strategies from Akina, the leader of his teaching team, and implemented these strategies in his work with his teammates. Mafuyu’s raised awareness of language as a communicative medium helped him to invest further in language learning. Discourse as medium is particularly meaningful when the project aims to develop language teachers in a multicultural community, a transnational space. Iran-Nejad and Gregg (2001) argue that in experience-based learning, drawing on sociocultural theory, participant learning is not limited to one educational objective but generates holistic learning. Iran-Najid and Gregg thus advocate whole themes as educational goals for learners. The Foreign Language Partnership Project (Davis, 1999) documents multiple beneficial effects of the collaborative participation of students involved in meaningful discourse in relevant, purposeful, and authentic contexts (Syed, 1999). Similarly, the findings of this study demonstrate the wide range of learning that MSSP student teachers achieved. One of the teaching teams first experienced the power behind their international volunteer’s (Mary) command of English and this experience led them to realize the power of their own local language. In this ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) they became aware of the power of language. Through conflict, through their agency, they learned to resolve their differences. The impact of participating in MSSP has the potential to change one’s life course. Maya, started her teacher certification program with a demoshika sensei mindset, but finally at the end of her fifth year of MSSP participation, she was determined to become a professional teacher. Maya was offered a teaching position at a public elementary school in Tokyo and started to work as a teacher. As a result of the development of her agency, she was able to transform herself from a subject of English education to a subject acting upon English education. The communities of practice framework holds that movement toward full membership is closely related to the transition from peripheral to central participation (Rogers, Morrell, & Enyedy, 2007). Not all members of the MSSP community move to full participation. A certain number of student teachers drop out of the project each year. Takumi’s story shows how individual variables and institutional constraints can potentially inhibit agency and marginalize students. Our analysis of the MSSP community has provided us with critical insights into teacher development in Japan which may have pedagogical and theoretical significance for the field. Pre-service teacher training involves an inherent paradox; i.e., student teachers must learn to teach. At some point in time, pre-service teachers need to transform their subjectivity from that of a trainee to a professional, from that of a language student to a lan-

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guage teacher, and from an outsider to an insider in English-as-the-linguafranca communities. MSSP tells us that the social constructivist approach to teacher development leads to the participants’ holistic development of agency. They autonomously co-construct their subjectivity towards becoming a teacher. The social interaction with international volunteers that is required in MSSP to reach project goals helps student teachers, as well as the other participants, international volunteers and school children, to realize that their investment in language learning could provide them with social capital that can potentially further shape their transnational identity and capacity. However, the sociocultural approach to teacher development is not a panacea. Although our large-scale educational intervention, MSSP, presumes the identities of learners in diverse ways, the social, historical, and psychological contexts of individual participants may lead them to paths of non-participation as well as participation. The findings of our ethnographic study suggest that teacher educators must consider the benefits and challenges of living in multiple communities. NOTES 1.

2. 3.

Recently revised MEXT curriculum guidelines call for mandatory classes in English language activities for all fifth- and sixth-graders in public elementary schools starting in the spring of 2011. A Tokyo-based international NGO which provides scholarships to children in Thailand and Laos. In most cases, student teachers go to the high schools they graduated from where they may meet former classmates enrolled in other universities who are also doing their teaching practicum. REFERENCES

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394 • HIROMASA TANAKA & ETHEL OGANE Caldwell, B. J. (2008). Networking knowledge to achieve transformation in schools. In C. Kimble, P. Hildreth, & I. Bourdon (Eds.), Communities of practice: Creating learning environments for educators, Volume 1 (pp. 1–19). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc. Canagarajah, A. S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cazden, C. B. (1988). Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Davis, K. A. (1999). Foreign language teaching and language minority education. Honolulu: Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center University of Hawai’i Press. Davis, K. A. (2009). Agentive youth research: Towards individual, collective, and policy transformations. In T. Wiley, J. S. Lee, & R. Rumberger (Eds.), The education of language minority immigrants in the United States. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Diamondstone, J. (2002). Keeping resistance in view in an activity theory analysis. Mind, Culture, and Activity. 9, 2–21. Donato, R., & MacCormick, D. (1994). A sociocultural perspective on language learning strategies: The role of mediation. The Modern Language Journal, 78(4), 453–464. Duff, P., & Uchida, Y. (1997). The negotiation of sociocultural identity in post-secondary EFL classrooms. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 451–486. Edelsky, C. & Hudelson, S. (1980). Acquiring an L2 when you’re not the underdog. In S. Krashen & R. Scarcella (Eds.), Research in second language acquisition (pp. 36–43). Rowley, MA: Newberry House. Freedman, S. W., & Ball, A. F. (2004). Ideological becoming: Bakhtinian concepts to guide the study of language, literacy, and learning. In A. F. Ball & S. W. Freedman (Eds.), Bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy, and learning (pp. 3–33). New York: Cambridge University Press. Freire, P. (1990). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum. Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1997). On discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA research. The Modern Language Journal, 81(3), 285– 300. Gee, J. P. (1996). Discourses and literacies. In J. P. Gee (Ed.), Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (pp. 122–160). London: Falmer Press. Giddens, A. (1994). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuralism. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Gorsuch, G. (1998). Yakudoku EFL instruction in two Japanese high school classrooms: An exploratory study. JALT Journal, 20(1), 6–32. Honna, N., & Takeshita, Y. (2005). English language teaching in Japan: Policy plans and the implementation. RELC Journal, 36, 363. Hornberger, N. H. (2007). Commentary. biliteracy, transnationalism, multimodality, and identity: Trajectories across time and space. Linguistics and Education, 18, 325–334. Igeta, O., Sakamoto, M., Suzuki, S., Yoshida, K., & Wada, T. (2008). Kyouiku jisshu o meguru, koukou daigaku no renkei e no kokoromi: rire- taiwa ni yoru kangae

Promoting Translocal and Transnational Agency • 395 no kouchiku e mukete. [Relay narrative: How can high schools and universities work together to train pre-service teachers?]. Eigo Kyouiku Kenkyuu, 43, 2–10. Iran-Nejad, A., & Gregg, M. (2001). The brain-mind cycle of reflection. Teacher College Record, 103, 868–895. Kachru, B. (1992). Teaching world Englishes. In B. Kachru (Ed.), The other tongue, English across cultures (2nd ed., pp. 355–366). Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Lam, W. S. E., (2004). Border discourses and identities in transnational youth culture. In J. Mahiri (Ed.), What they don’t learn in school: Literacy in the lives of urban youth (pp. 79–98). New York: Peter Lang Publishers. Lantolf, J. P. (2000). Sociocultural theory and second language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lantolf, J. P., & Thorne, S. L. (2006). Sociocultural theory and the genesis of second language development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Law, G. (1995). Ideologies of English language education in Japan. JALT Journal, 17(2), 213–224. LoCastro, V. (1996). English language education in Japan. In H. Coleman (Ed.), Society and the language classroom (pp. 40–59). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGinnis, T., Goodstein-Stolzenberg, A., & Saliani, E. C. (2007). “indnpride”: Online spaces of transnational youth as sites of creative and sophisticated literacy and identity work. Linguistics and Education, 18, 283–304. McVeigh, B. J. (2002). Foreign language instruction in Japanese higher education: the humanistic vision or nationalist utilitarianism? Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 3(2), 211–227. Nakane, I. (2007). Silence in intercultural communication: Perceptions and performance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational change. Harlow, UK: Longman/Pearson Education. Norton Peirce, B. (1995). Social identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 29(1), 9–31. Ortega, L. (1999). Rethinking foreign language education: Political dimensions of the profession. In K. A. Davis, (Ed.), Foreign language teaching and language minority education (pp. 21–39). Honolulu: Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center University of Hawai’i Press. Ortega, L. (2009). Understanding second language acquisition. London: Hodder Arnold. Pavlenko, A., & Lantolf, J. P. (2000). Second language learning as participation and the (re)construction of selves. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 155–178). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Roberts, C., Byram, M., Barro, A., Jordan, S., & Street, B. (2001). Language learners as ethnographers. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

396 • HIROMASA TANAKA & ETHEL OGANE Rogers, J., Morrell, E., & Enyedy, N. (2007). Studying the struggle: Context for learning and identity development for urban youth. American Behavioral Scientist, 51(3), 419–443. Rogoff, B. (1994). Developing understanding of the idea of communities of learners. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 1(4), 209–229. Sasaki, M. (2008). The 150-year history of English language assessment in Japanese education. Language Testing, 25, 63–83. Sugiyama, A. (2009). Issues in EFL teaching in Japanese elementary schools. In Center for English Teaching (Ed.), Views: Vienna English working papers. Special issue. Conference proceedings. Bridging the gap between theory and practice in English language teaching, 18(3), 222–224. Vienna: Institut für Anglistik & Amerikanistik der Universität Wien. Syed, Z. (1999). Learning with others: Collaboration and partnership in education. In K. A. Davis (Ed.), Foreign language teaching and language minority education (pp. 65–82). Honolulu: Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center University of Hawai’i Press. Tanaka, H. (2006). Emerging English speaking business discourse in Japan. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 16(1), 25–50. Tanaka, M., Uesugi, T., & Shiraishi, Y. (1993). Teacher training in the research university: A survey of teachers’ opinions. Peabody Journal of Education, 8(3), 58–66. Wakabayashi, S. & Negishi, M. (1993). Musekinin na tesuto ga ‘Ochikobore’ wo tsukuru – tadashii mondai sakusei e no eigo jugyou gaku teki apuroochi. [Problematic tests produce students at risk of failing-English pedagogical approach to create adequate constructs]. Tokyo: Daishukan Shoten. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wong Fillmore, L. (1976). The second time around: Cognitive and social strategies in second language acquisition (Doctoral dissertation). Stanford University: Palo Alto, CA. Yamada, Y. (2005) Nippon no eigo kyooiku. [English Education in Japan]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Yonesaka, S. (1999). The pre-service training of Japanese teachers of English. The Language Teacher, 23(11), 9–15. Yoneyama, S. (1999). The Japanese high school: Silence and resistance. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 16

PARTICIPATORY SECOND LANGUAGE LABOR EDUCATION Communities of Practice and the Foreign Worker Union Movement in Japan John W. McLaughlin

INTRODUCTION The emerging field of labor education for immigrant workers is one that could benefit from the expertise of applied linguists and second language educators. At the same time, a more critical or participatory second language pedagogy can provide curriculum and instruction more appropriate to the needs of immigrant workers, in Japan and elsewhere. The languagerelated socio-cultural findings reported here are based on my experience as a bilingual researcher and activist in the foreign worker union movement in Japan for almost seven years from 1995–2002. I draw on participant observation at communicative events in the foreign worker union movement, as well as interviews with key activists and use of archival data in order to Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 397–425 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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make sense of the wider migrant workers rights movement in Japan, which includes many non-governmental organizations and volunteer community groups. I employ social theories of language learning and use to conceptualize my research and interpret findings. I specifically draw on communities of practice theory (Wenger, 1998) and critical applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2001) to understand the learning implications for my data on participation and communication in the foreign workers unions that I studied. The theoretical underpinnings to this study were an interdisciplinary approach to applied linguistic and second language education research that considered broadly the macro-level contexts and language issues affecting immigrant or migrant workers. My review of the published research on foreign workers in Japan encompassed Japanese labor and immigration law, public administration, economy, and society with regard to contemporary global migration and labor patterns; developments in the postwar Japanese labor movement; the cultures of the kinds of unions organizing foreign workers; the cultural backgrounds of the foreign workers themselves, and the hybrid socio-cultural practices arising from a multicultural, multilingual foreign worker union movement. This kind of interdisciplinarity is one hallmark of critical approaches to applied linguistics. The aim of this chapter is to explore the possibility of second language labor education for immigrant workers in the interstices of critical second language pedagogy and labor education. The data presented are of one seminal event in the migrant worker rights movement in Japan. The discussion will include findings from the longer fieldwork and refer to approaches to curriculum in labor education in the West, migrant education in Asia, and multilingual organizing and education among unions with a large immigrant membership in the United States. A critical approach to any discipline is centrally concerned with interrogating structural inequalities of power based on social categories such as race, nationality, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality (Pennycook, 2001). Accordingly, one larger agenda of this study will be to connect my findings with this emerging field of critical applied linguistics in a way that questions the normative assumptions of applied linguistics and opens up new questions for the field to address. Indeed, I would like this study to contribute to the development of a new and growing area of applied linguistics and labor education, that is, second language or immigrant labor education, to which Auerbach and Wallerstein (Auerbach, 1992; Auerbach & Wallerstein, 2004; Wallerstein & Auerbach, 2004) have been major theorists and contributors so far. This area obviously connects to critical language teaching pedagogies (Norton & Toohey, 2004), another area of critical applied linguistics, through an emphasis on participatory second language labor education.1

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CRITICAL APPLIED LINGUISTIC APPROACHES TO SECOND LANGUAGE LABOR EDUCATION I drew on ethnographic principles in focusing on the behavioral patterns of groups (Watson-Gegeo, 1988); constructing an emic perspective on how “insiders” of a culture or organization themselves understand their actions (Davis, 1995); identifying the tacit knowledge needed to effectively participate in the union culture; and, more broadly, linking group behaviors with the macro-level socio-cultural patterns and factors which influence the phenomenon of unions organizing foreign workers in Japan (Carspecken, 1996). More specifically, the study uses methods from ethnography of communication and critical ethnography for data collection and analysis. Ethnography of communication (Saville-Troike, 2003) draws on concepts from linguistic anthropology (Duranti, 1997) to provide a rich understanding of possible participant roles in communicative events. Those roles are more complex and diverse than simply speaker and hearer roles, especially at public events, and we are cued into aspects such as the order of speaking, legitimate overhearers, and how speakers are nominated. Early ethnography of communication has been accused of being too structural and static (Watson-Gegeo, 2004). Duff (2002) makes the case for the relevance of ethnography of communication today, arguing for a post-structural version which emphasizes the co-construction of meaning, subject positions and identities, including those of resistance and non-participation. In line with Duff, this study is informed by many concepts from the ethnography of communication and linguistic anthropology without strictly applying them. The main innovation in this study was framing various union events as communicative events and later analyzing the social and cultural dimensions of language use for their pedagogical value and potential. By the 1990s, critical ethnographic approaches in education studies (see Carspecken, 1996; MacLaren, 1998, for more recent overviews) had become established in second language education studies, especially in the teaching of English as a second language (Holliday, 1996; Roberts, Byram, Barro, Jordan, & Street, 2001; Watson-Gegeo, 1988). Since there are many strands of ethnographic research, it is difficult to say which ones are critical or not. To determine a set of criteria, Norton (1995) surveyed critical qualitative research in education and came up with six tenets of conducting critical research: • a rejection of claims to objectivity by reporting multiple perspectives; • a focus on the relationship between structure and agency, without resorting to deterministic or reductionist analyses; • attention to the social causes of inequities of gender, race, class, ethnicity and sexuality;

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• an interest “in the way individuals make sense of their own experience”; • an interest “in locating their [researchers’] research within a historical context;” • a belief “that the goal of educational research is social and educational change” (pp. 570–572). These principles will be adhered to in the presentation and discussion of the data. Furthermore, when one is also a central participant and subject of research, as I was, Ellis and Bochner (2000) propose auto-ethnography as a way to incorporate dialogue and personal stories in the reporting and analysis of one’s research. Without shrinking from presenting my own central role, I was careful to report dialogic feedback, solicited and unsolicited, that I received from key participants. In the end, I define critical ethnography as ethnographic research which considers macro-level power relations at every step of the research process: design, fieldwork, analysis and reporting. The following section provides a discussion of the macro historical contexts for foreign worker labor unions. THE FOREIGN WORKER POPULATION IN JAPAN An unprecedented wave of labor migration to Japan began in the late 1980s and somewhat came as a surprise to the Japanese society and government, due to the volume, speed and diversity of the influx (Komai, 1995; Shimada, 1994). The timing of this influx was partly a result of global economic, social, and political factors2 beyond the government’s control, but surely it was neither entirely unprecedented nor unexpected. In fact, several advanced industrial countries have witnessed a similar influx, especially into major global cities such as New York and London (Sassen, 1991, 1994) as part of the globalization of financial and labor markets which accelerated in the late 1980s. Compared to other advanced industrial countries, the percentage of foreign nationals residing in Japan has been rather small, surpassing 1% of the population only in the late 1990s.3 Despite the low percentage, there was a surge of foreigners coming to Japan primarily to work in the late 1980s and early 1990s.4 This sudden 40% increase was even more notable when one considers that most of it comes primarily from developing countries in Asia and Latin America, and many communication problems have resulted from these recent immigrants’ limited understanding of Japanese language and socio-cultural practices (Tokyo Toritsu Roudou Kenkyuujo, 1996). After a stricter Immigration Control Act went into effect in June 1990, the number of undocumented foreign workers nevertheless nearly tripled to 278,892 by May 1992, and it remained close to 250,000 in 2000 (Asian Migrant Centre & Migrant Forum in Asia, 2002).5 Recent trends indicate that the number of undocumented foreign workers in Ja-

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pan has been declining but both documented and undocumented workers are staying longer in Japan, intending to settle there for longer periods or permanently (Komai, 2001). Despite the restrictiveness of Japanese immigration policies, the labor laws in Japan, when applied fully, are relatively protective, and thus provide an important resource for foreign workers to exercise their rights to gain access to various public or social services (Sugeno, 1992). Consequently, community and general unions which organize workers at small and medium-sized enterprises in Japan have capitalized on this advantage and have helped foreign workers settle employment disputes and gain access to the various benefits to which the labor administration system entitles them (McLaughlin, 1996, 2000; Ogawa, 2001). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, several community unions and branches of general unions organized a few thousand foreign workers living in the large metropolitan areas between Tokyo and Fukuoka. The existence of such unions is particularly important for the relatively large proportion of undocumented workers among the “newcomer” population in Japan. These workers, under the constant risk of deportation, find that their rights as employees or residents to various public services and legal protections have been seriously curtailed, but that if they are members of a union they may be given special consideration to stay while undocumented (McLaughlin, 1996). To some extent, organizing foreign workers is also important to the Japanese labor movement, because the high visibility of organizing foreigners brings attention to the necessity of organizing “peripheral employees,” such as those at small and mediumsized enterprises, including part-timers, temporary workers, women and foreigners (Douglass & Roberts, 2000). This campaign to organize foreign and other contingent workers came at a time when the progressive wing of the Japanese labor movement has been struggling for new directions since the reorganization and merging of several large, opposing factions in the late 1980s into a more centrist national labor federation called Rengo (Gordon, 1998; Kumazawa, 1996; Williamson, 1994). The challenge of organizing such a culturally diverse, multilingual, economically, and socially precarious population of foreign workers in Japan into unions has been daunting. There has been much international scholarship published in English documenting the legal and social obstacles faced by this population (Lie, 2001; Linger, 2001; Roberts, 2000; Sellek, 2001), including their language needs (Noguchi & Fotos, 2001). Several studies have focused on unions organizing foreign workers in Japan, either as case studies of one union (Ogawa, 2001; Roberts, 2000) or broader surveys across unions (Inaba, Ogaya, Ogasawara, Tanno & Higuchi, 2001; Shipper, 2001). However, none of the studies has looked closely at efforts to facilitate communication and participation by foreign workers in Japanese

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unions. I offer potential avenues for foreign member participation by describing and interpreting an innovative labor union event. IMAGINING COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE IN THE FOREIGN WORKER UNION MOVEMENT The foreign worker union movement has three main levels of organization: semi-autonomous branch unions that often had a majority of foreign members in a Japanese member-majority general union; foreign worker caucuses or leadership councils in the general unions; and committees of union staff organizers and bilingual foreign union members from several unions who met monthly to plan joint events. Communities of practice existed among active foreign and Japanese union members at all of these levels of organization and the whole foreign worker union movement can be seen as a constellation of communities of practice with boundaries and brokers between them. In this section, we will review the salient concepts and terms from Wenger’s (1998) community of practice framework. The notion of communities of practice, as originated by Lave and Wenger (1991), and developed primarily by Wenger (1998) and other associates (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002) is a very powerful one for understanding the kind of informal learning that goes on among and across members of organizations. It provides a rich vocabulary for talking about participation, including concepts such as practice, reification, negotiation of meaning, participant identities, membership trajectories, and modes of belonging such as engagement, alignment and imagination. At the same time, the participation of language minority members is an area that needs further exposition (Kanno, 1999). The central term for learning in community of practice theory is legitimate peripheral participation. Lave and Wenger (1991) explain that In order to be on an inbound trajectory, newcomers must be granted enough legitimacy to be treated as potential members.…Again legitimacy can take many forms: being useful, being sponsored, being feared, being the right kind of person, having the right birth. Granting the newcomers legitimacy is important because they are likely to come short of what the community regards as competent engagement. Only with enough legitimacy can all their inevitable stumblings and violations become opportunities for learning rather than cause for dismissal, neglect, or exclusion. (p. 101)

Legitimacy is an important precondition for learning to become a member of a community of practice and it is unclear whether foreign union members are legitimately peripheral or marginal. In the larger study that this chapter is based on (McLaughlin, 2007), I question the extent to which foreign members of unions had access to participating and observing the practices of the union from the periphery, and to what extent they were

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legitimate members who were welcomed or expected to do this. Many authors (e.g., Barton & Tusting, 2005; Gee, 2000) have criticized Wenger for neglecting and under theorizing issues of power relations and conflict in communities of practice. In their earlier work on legitimate peripheral participation, this deficiency was acknowledged. Lave and Wenger (1991) explained that “in particular, unequal relations of power must be included more systematically in our analysis. Hegemony over resources for learning and alienation from full participation are inherent in shaping the legitimacy and peripherality of participation in its historical realizations” (p. 42). One question in my study was how to distinguish peripherality from marginality as a membership status for foreign workers in the various communities of practice that I studied and consequently how to understand community of practice participation that is not yet legitimated. In addition to LPP, Wenger (1998) posits three major modes of belonging to a community of practice that have been useful for understanding the challenges of participation and learning in unions for foreign workers: engagement, alignment and imagination. In this study, mutual engagement was the main mode of belonging for foreign union members because it involved physical participation in union events and activities whether one understood Japanese or not. Of the three modes, alignment, or the coordination of activities to fit in a broader structure, is most connected with power relations and an area of tension between foreign activists and Japanese organizers, as it can become unilateral. The latter had a clearer sense of the overall field of the Japanese labor movement and politics that the foreign worker union movement operated within. The trade-off for alignment is often less freedom to negotiate or determine meaning, and this can expand membership and participation when it is effective in channelling members’ energy or dampen it. While the pressure on foreign union members to participate in events planned on their own behalf by Japanese organizers led to increased mutual engagement, that tactic did not necessarily lead to increasing alignment. Finally, Wenger (1998) defines belonging through imagination as “a process of expanding our self by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves” (p. 176). This was a crucial distinction for organizing foreign workers and creating the second language labor education that I propose. Nevertheless, facilities of imagination all depend heavily on spoken and written language and probably require a greater level of bilingualism in individual members and the community of practice. Membership in a community of practice always has an element of imagination, of the collective future being created. The pedagogical aspects of this mode of belonging for second language education have been explored by Norton (2002). Later I will propose approaches to second language labor education which address language issues concerning participation, engagement and imagination in particular.

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Drawing from data on foreign workers’ participation at a key regional/ national event, I describe below how participatory second language labor education can be effectively used to strengthen communities of practice among immigrant workers in Japan and elsewhere. The description and interpretation is based on my field notes, published reports of the events and comments from interviews with participants. While my study looked at a wide range of events at various levels of participation, this event was selected for this chapter because it illustrates the most participatory multilingual event in all of my fieldwork. INTERNATIONAL MIGRANTS DAY CELEBRATION, TOKYO, DECEMBER 2001 The International Migrants’ Day Celebration in Tokyo was held on Sunday afternoon in mid-December 2001 just before the actual day the United Nations was designated as International Migrant Rights Day, December 18. It commemorates the approval of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families by the United Nations General Assembly on December 18, 1990. Ijuuren, the National Network in Solidarity with Migrant Workers or SOL (Solidarity with Migrants), had been pressuring the Japanese government to sign this convention to no avail. The next day, they would hold negotiations with various national government ministries on laws and policies affecting the welfare of documented and undocumented foreign workers residing in Japan. Therefore, this event was both a pep rally for the ministry negotiations and the international convention and an occasion to bring together foreign workers and their Japanese advocates at the end of the year. The attendance at the event peaked at about 130 people, and included many kinds of foreign workers. As illustrated in Figure 1, they were packed into one large room on the second floor of a Tokyo metropolitan labor consultation office. The audience was about half foreign and half-Japanese; among the foreign workers, there were many South Asians, Filipinos, Koreans and Latin Americans. There were posters and banners on the wall in many of the languages of the participants. The main languages for interpreting were Urdu, Spanish, Korean, Tagalog and English. I was the English interpreter and there were only a handful of other English native-speakers, but I noticed that the interpreters for Urdu and Tagalog would often wait for my English interpreting to end before doing theirs. After some introductory and welcome remarks, the symposium began at around 3:30 p.m., about thirty minutes late. It was entitled “How foreigners, other than Caucasians, are judged by judicial bodies[sic/official translation].” The speakers were mainly lawyers and support group members for two famous court cases involving migrant workers. One was for Govinda Mainali, a Nepalese man accused of murdering a Japanese woman in 1997,

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Figure 1. Guest Speakers at Symposium on “How foreigners, other than Caucasians, are judged by judicial bodies,” Tokyo, December 2001

whom the District Court exonerated but the police had appealed the case to the High Court. Mr. Mainali had asserted his innocence throughout and his wife came from Nepal to attend this event and speak on his behalf. A woman from the United States who was part of a prisoners’ rights group that was following his case also gave a speech. Having these two particular international guests made the symposium quite riveting. There were also appeals made by lawyers and supporters of a Filipina, Manalili Rosal, who was accused of murdering her boyfriend in her apartment in 1997 even though she claims she was innocent and has an alibi. The general thrust of the symposium, as its title indicated, was that the Japanese legal system discriminates against non-white foreigners.

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Figure 2. Forum Theater

The next part of the event was an interactive forum theater activity that was never done before at one of these events. Put on by Latin American and Filipina workers organized by SOL, it followed the theater of the oppressed method of August Boal.6 They prepared workplace scenarios that presented common problems they faced and performed them. During the performance, the audience was invited to intervene as soon as someone identified a behavior they saw as problematic. The audience and actors then created new solutions. The Latin American group presented a scenario in which something heavy fell on a worker and he needed medical attention but the Japanese boss tried to cover it up. The Filipinas enacted an assembly line making boxed lunches in which a woman got to work late because her younger daughter was sick; she asked her older daughter to stay home from school to take care of her. The skits were done in Japanese and members of the Philippine and Latin American desks of SOL helped in preparing them. The audience could participate in whatever language they wished since interpreters were available, but everyone who participated chose to speak in Japanese. Audience participation was not so immediate, as people were not

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familiar with this kind of activity. Sometimes translators such as myself and other union leaders jumped in to make sure a problematic situation in the skit did not continue for too long. Eventually some audience members who were not translators or leaders did participate. The two forum theater episodes took over an hour and any negotiation of how to solve even a part of a situation took many minutes for the whole group to work out. Finally, there was a party with food prepared mainly by the South Asians in the United Workers Union (UWU)7 but also by Latin Americans and other Asians. While people were eating, a poem was performed in Spanish and the audience was invited to participate in a circumambulation while it was being recited. There were also some Indian dances performed. Although there was not enough food for the large turnout, the party continued a full hour, past the 6:00 p.m. finish time and the room was not cleaned up until 7:00 p.m. This upset a Japanese citizen’s group member who yelled at some of the Japanese organizers for being so slack and rude as to let the event run an hour overtime. Discussion of the Event from a Critical Applied Linguistics Perspective It is clear that the planning and participation by foreign workers from developing countries stood out in stark contrast to the majority of events that were Japanese-centered. One might frame this whole event as an example of postcolonial performativity, of former imperial subjects “re-presenting” themselves and “talking back” to centers of imperialism (Pennycook, 1994). The Forum Theater was a turning point in foreign workers planning activities themselves and controlling the use of time, space and language at a large public event such as this. It was not the only aspect of the event that was different: there were banners in various languages and displays of information and photos for each group, the food and dance and the focus on two court cases involving Asian workers, took the focus of the event off of Japanese national concerns as well as international governmental concerns which are often the domain of educated Japanese or English speakers (of any nationality). Both symbolic and provocative, entitling the symposium “How Foreigners, Other than Caucasians…” marked a turning point in racializing discourses that had rendered non-white foreigners and their experience in Japan less visible.8 Perhaps there was some exasperation at the attention Western foreigners in unions were getting for their cases by Japanese organizers and media. They also knew that many (white) Westerners got special attention in Japan simply because they are English-speakers and some Japanese enjoyed helping them in English, but certainly not all do. This lack of solidarity among foreign workers was perhaps mutual as few Westerners showed up for the event.9 Even if there was latent or overt antagonism, the most empowering interpretation for what occurred was that

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migrant workers from the Third World were reclaiming their subjectivity in migrant rights Japanese discourses. They provided leadership in new ways of knowing, hearing and interacting with each other, something Westerners and Japanese had not accomplished until then. Unfortunately, the SOL NGO that provided the leadership behind planning this extraordinary event closed down four months later. After ten years of involvement, the Yokohama Catholic Diocese had decided to close SOL and direct its funds elsewhere. It was a big blow to the migrant worker movement and the Keihin Workers Union (KWU), which relied heavily on its interpreting and consultation services through its Filipino, Korean and Latin American desks and staff. However, it was not a fatal blow since the Ijuuren had been established well into its fifth year already and the KWU had been organizing foreign workers for more than ten years, so both could carry on. What was lost was the creativity and dynamism of vision of SOL, which had been instrumental in training migrant advocates, migrant leaders and promoting the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. More than the Japanese labor unions and Japanese-led Ijuuren, SOL brought in popular and participatory education and research practices under the catchphrase of migrants’ empowerment, which will be explained in the next section. SOL’s staff consisted of several bilingual foreign activists with backgrounds in participatory education and labor or community organizing who joined forces with some bilingual Japanese activists. In reflecting on the overall event, Ken Suzuki of SOL commented that: More than ten years have passed since we began supporting migrant workers, but we have never been able to realize a collaborative task with them until now. This time we were successful in achieving our initial goal to organize this celebration with them’the course of this celebration, I could sense that we can now go forward to a new era of truly being in solidarity with migrant workers instead of acting from a one-sided stance of simply supporting them (Suzuki, Migrant Network News, 2002, p. 2; translated from Suzuki, M-Netto, No. 46, 2002)

This was a unique moment of foreign worker agency and participation in their own movement. Hopefully, it is one that will live on in some way. Moreover, community of practice theory could use a better means for explaining innovations that come from the periphery or margins. Discussion of the Event and the Foreign Worker Union Movement in Relation to Communities of Practice Building on Norton (2002) and Kanno and Norton (2003), I suggest the possibility of an imagined community among foreign and Japanese labor organizers in which foreign activists are put on an inbound trajectory

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of leadership in their unions and this movement. To the extent that they are fluent and literate in Japanese, many of them could start out as legitimate peripheral participants in the core community of practice of Japanese union organizers. At the same time, contact with foreign workers and leaders provided both Japanese and foreign activists access to imagined global communities of grassroots labor organizers.10 Yet the crucial question is how an interpretation and assessment of the data presented here from a community of practice framework can illuminate the limitations and potential for both building a sustainable foreign worker union movement and creating a labor education program as part of that? Further, how can a focus on language use in communication and participation from a critical applied linguistics perspective promote an understanding of multilingual communities of practice? One of the successes of the community of practice of mainly Japanese union organizers in the foreign worker union movement had been promoting, funding and leading Ijuuren. So the community of practice was not only of the leadership, Japanese and foreign, in these foreign workers unions, but also with the leadership of supportive non-governmental organizations and networks. This overlap enabled the busy, overworked general and community union organizers to draw on the language interpreting resources, fresh ideas and volunteer staff who want to support foreign workers in Japan. Each union on its own had a close relationship with at least one nongovernmental organization that provided interpreting, health care or other intellectual resources to the Japanese organizers and foreign membership. In turn, the Japanese union organizers of foreign workers were a major pillar of leadership at the core of the founding and development of Ijuuren. In fact, one Ijuuren staff was funded by the foreign worker union movement steering committee and union organizers and foreign workers regularly attended annual local and biennial national Ijuuren events. The main obstacle was how foreign activists could or did participate in this community of practice. Language was a barrier between groups of foreign workers and, moreover, the actual and symbolic power of native speakers of dominant languages was a barrier to transnational solidarity. There was always some tension between the foreign worker union movement and the wider international migrant worker movement that had support from Japanese NGO activists. The role of language use as communicative practice has been undertheorized in communities of practice. What community of practice cannot account for in terms of language use is the power and symbolic meaning that being a native speaker of a certain language or having a certain nationality carries as well as the real linguistic, cultural and social capital it possesses. This differential capital affected claims to membership in the migrant worker movement where the hierarchy was somewhat reversed: the migrant

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workers with the least linguistic and other capital had the most authentic claim to membership, voice and representation of other foreign workers. This consciousness began to be more explicit in the last few years of my study. Such consciousness-raising was facilitated by the non-governmental organizations active in the migrant workers rights movement in Japan and the labor movement was certainly sympathetic. Otherwise, English-speaking foreign union members from the West still got greater attention and help due to their superior status, capital and resources. One might ask whether “foreign workers” from the capitalist core countries could be in the same community of practice as other migrant workers. The possibility is there but Westerners would need to use their resources to serve and develop the leadership of the Third World migrant leaders in the way Japanese supporters sometimes did. They would also have to make sure they understood and were sensitive to the wariness of these migrant workers towards them, which was based on their home countries’ experiences of Anglo or Western imperialism. To conclude, communities of practice was powerful at helping us to explain and understand what we are analyzing at the level of participation, but it missed some of the broader contextual issues of linguistic capital and imperialism within a multilingual movement that includes First and Third world members. In the next section, I explore issues of linguistic capital in the context of developing effective labor education. LABOR EDUCATION IN UNIONS ORGANIZING FOREIGN OR IMMIGRANT WORKERS Beyond the analysis of the watershed participatory event, most of my study looked at the communicative practices of participation at all three levels of movement organization in order to propose a second language labor education curriculum for the foreign worker union movement. This section will discuss the underpinnings of labor and migrant education. One of the central principles of labor education is that it is a social as opposed to personal education, meaning that it is designed “to promote and develop the union presence and purposes so as to advance the union collectively” (Suzuki, 2002, p. 17). Accordingly, labor education is intended to benefit a larger number of people “because the participants are expected to share the learning they have gained with other union members” (p. 17). Furthermore, for this study, the informal or non-formal aspects of labor education as a trade union member resonate with community of practice themes. Spencer (2002) explains that: Most labour union members learn about the union while on the job (what is often referred to as informal or incidental learning). They probably will learn more and become most active during negotiations, grievances and disputes, but they also learn from union publications and communications, from at-

Participatory Second Language Labor Education • 411 tending meetings, conferences and conventions, and from the union’s educational programs....Labour education can be described as essentially non-vocational, non-formal adult education with its origins rooted in the traditions of workers’ education, the seeds of which are more than a century old and pre-date modern unions. (p. 17)

This definition of labor education also fits well with the kind of data I collected and analyzed with a focus on communication and participation. Analysis of foreign worker union participation in Japan informed by a communities-of-practice perspective can contribute to developing the theoretical underpinnings of this informal aspect of learning labor education. Yet more formal education does occur. Labor educators frequently divide the core of labor education into three levels of courses. Spencer (2002) refers to the primary level as “tools courses” which include shop steward training, grievance handling, health and safety and representative courses. The second level is “issues courses,” for example, handling sexual harassment, racism or new human resource management strategies, which often link workplace and societal issues. A final set of courses is labelled “labour studies,” including courses on history, economics and politics which examine the broader context of the labor union movement. A recent assessment of the “state of labor education in the United States” followed a fairly similar division of courses (Byrd & Nissen, 2003). In that study, language courses were considered primarily to be a tool for non-native speakers of the dominant language, but I think that issues of language use in the workplace and in the union could be developed into labor studies or issue-oriented courses even for native speakers in a union. Since tools courses directly prepare members for active roles in the union and are aimed at existing or potential union activists, the second language needs of foreign members are likely to be targeted for those on a trajectory towards a leadership role in the union. It is important for labor education to look more closely at language use in relationship to inclusion or participation of language minority members as well as leadership development of bilingual union activists. Some of that education has to be provided in members’ first languages as well as bilingually so they can communicate with dominant language speakers whether they be co-workers, supervisors, or union leaders. While the notion of tool from labor education has some overlap with practice, it is missing Wenger’s (1998) more social and historical understanding of practice, which would probably incorporate critical themes from labor studies. I argue that language use is more productively considered as a social practice rather than a tool, which is also why this study is situated in critical second language pedagogy rather than some form of language for special purposes, such as labor union Japanese. Transnational, critical approaches to education for foreign, migrant or immigrant workers in Asia began in the late 1990s as representatives from

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East Asian NGOs met to define a growing field of “migrant education” based on Freirian notions of conscientization and empowerment in popular and adult education. In addition to Japan, some labor organizing and labor education for foreign workers in their native or second languages occurred in other East Asian countries. For example, in Hong Kong, there are unions of foreign workers based on language and ethnic group. In South Korea and Taiwan, there are unions and church groups organizing undocumented workers from South and Southeast Asia. In Japan, unions and NGOs serve a wider range of documented and undocumented foreign workers, from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the industrialized West. The central concept in this emerging form of migrant education is empowerment. Empowerment is defined as a process that enables migrant workers to: Appreciate the causes and effects of migration on macro and micro-levels; to enable them to understand the problems that migrants face in the workplace and at home; and to enable them to respond to those problems by mobilizing personal and collective resources that are available to them. (Asian Migrant Centre, Asia South Pacific Bureau for Adult Education, & Migrant Forum in Asia, 2001, p. 34)

Some indicators of empowerment include migrant workers’: a. b. c. d. e.

critical awareness to understand situations and problems; awareness of their rights as migrant workers; awareness of remedies to problems available through law or through services available in society; ability to exercise their rights and to articulate violations of those rights; capability to exercise control over one’s situation, to change one’s situation, to restore dignity, to decide independently, to work collectively with others, to conceptualize, plan and undertake alternative actions, to understand one’s identity and to be able to access resources. (Asian Migrant Centre et al., 2001, p. 34)

In Freirian pedagogy, migrant education encourages students to discover their own potential for liberating themselves and others (Asian Migrant Centre et al., 2001, p. 35), so one aspect of migrant education is aimed at members of the host society. In fact, this education is a political practice which: calls for a reorganization of prevailing views and patterns of domination through class, gender, ethnicity and other identities. The purpose of education therefore is to address not only the immediate needs of victims (through counselling and shelter) but also to revise the system of domination that push

Participatory Second Language Labor Education • 413 or pull [sic] people to work overseas. (Asian Migrant Centre et al., 2001, p. 35)

These underpinnings of migrant education in Asia make it compatible with a critical approach to language use and education in applied linguistics. In relation to the event described earlier, migrant education also makes use of the educational value of various kinds of mass campaigns. These campaigns are often for or against the enactment of certain national laws or international treaties, for example, the Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their Families (Asian Migrant Centre et al., 2001), or they protest scandals such as large-scale forced labor (unpaid wages) or a series of industrial accidents. Some campaigns commemorate national or international days of relevance to migrant worker issues, such as Labor Day or Human Rights Day. In these celebrations or events, drama and other artistic performances are often planned (music, dance, painting, etc.). However, most migrant education in East Asia has not made it to the collective level. At best, it stops with language education and a few proactive programs for job skill training, savings, or reintegration back into migrants’ home countries. In a case study on Japan (Asian Migrant Centre et al., 2001), the country is noted for the large number of migrant workers and support groups linked together in networks, specializing in various functions or competencies (legal, medical, welfare, etc.). Yet, the authors claim that the public is not very aware of migrant workers or these groups, labor unions were “not very functional,” few migrant publications were sustainable, and there was a need to develop co-ethnic leadership in migrant workers support organizations. Many groups have come and gone, and memberships have dramatically risen and fallen. As a practical form of second language migrant education, the report (Asian Migrant Centre et al., 2001) recommended that groups jointly develop short-term modules for migrant education and train co-ethnic leaders who can more closely connect the Japanese NGOs with migrant communities. This section began with a discussion of the principles of labor education in the West and the framing of second language use as a tool or a labor issue, and concluded with a discussion of migrant education in Asia and the various levels at which it is conducted. It is interesting to note that both approaches had three levels of education that went from the more instrumental “tools” of empowerment to broader, social movement approaches to empowerment education. Language use is central to all three levels of either kind of education, Curricular decisions to focus on language as a tool of engagement or alignment rather than language use as a labor issue or to target it only to the non-native speakers rather than the dominant language in a union are decisions which need to interrogated for their pedagogical

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and organizational consequences in maintaining the marginal or peripheral statuses of foreign union members. CONCLUSIONS: TOWARDS A SECOND LANGUAGE LABOR EDUCATION FOR IMMIGRANT WORKERS Despite a growing literature, there is still no established sub-field or discipline of second language labor education for immigrant workers, although in practice that kind of labor education is developing rapidly for immigrant workers in North America and migrant workers in East Asia. The emergence of this education is due to two main factors. First, there have been structural and demographic changes among the populations and labor forces of migrant and immigrant-receiving host countries. Second, there has been a greater emphasis by organized labor on organizing immigrant workers in the past decade as well as the industries where they are concentrated, such as hotel and restaurant work, the needle trades, construction and agriculture. Often labor supporters who advocate labor education for this kind of organizing focus on union building, internal democracy and mobilization and the cultivation of leadership among minority workers such as women and people of color, if not recent immigrants (e.g., Milkman, 2000; Milkman & Wong, 2000; Wong, 2001). Implicitly they are criticizing the labor movement and status quo labor education for serving the interests of the dominant groups in the labor movement, and not doing enough to help groups of workers who are increasing in number or power. Frequently that kind of labor education focuses on the tools and skills that designated leaders need to be a shop steward, handle grievances or negotiate a contract, something few rank and file or new members are likely to do. Yet if the union does not continuously bring in new members and new activists, it will stagnate and decline, as many unions have been doing. Beyond this emerging trend in labor education toward communication and leadership skills, there has been very little theorizing about the value of conducting labor education in a second language or bilingually. Many labor educators and organizers have seen the value of teaching English as a form of outreach to immigrant workers in the United States or the value of providing interpreting or conducting meetings in the native language of the majority of a local, for example, in Spanish. There is an assumption that if an active non-native speaking union member wishes to become a leader, he or she will develop the proficiency in the target language to be able to do this, rather than providing bilingual labor education that would facilitate member mobilization in the process of acquiring the target language if members wish to. For the most part, I think that the reason this has not happened yet is because it is an emerging area. Organizers and advocates may be more sensitive to language rights and the need for sensitivity, respect for and inclusion of cultural diversity as part of overall communication is-

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sues than they are to understanding participation in their unions through the lens of language use in communicative events and the attendant sociocultural knowledge for effective and sustainable participation. In Japan, one of the appeals of a communities of practice approach, with its various membership trajectories and modes of belonging, is that it would not be so dependent on the prevailing apprenticeship system in Japanese unions (see Rohlen & LeTendre, 1996). It was questionable whether this apprenticeship-style system of training of members and activists is sustainable in small organizations with few staff and large-scale organizing aspirations. Many foreign workers leave Japan or the Tokyo area, change jobs and thus leave their branch union, or get burned out and become less active after their dispute or a period of activism. Furthermore, most foreign union members in TWU preferred to have basic knowledge about their union or the labor law in English or other foreign languages. One challenge was that this information had to be updated at least once per year and there have not been sufficient personnel and resources to do this in most unions or even government agencies. This was a good example of how reification needs participation in a community of practice in order to be effective. Foreign union activists did want guided or facilitated classes, workshops or simulations in Japanese that enable them to carry out certain communicative functions of being a union member, from participating in collective bargaining sessions and other union meetings, to giving a variety of speeches at union events. Most Japanese organizers did not see it as their job to teach foreigners how to do this in Japanese; in fact, they would prefer to work with bilingual foreign activists who are literate and fluent in Japanese at least at the high intermediate level, if not advanced. However, often foreign union members with this level of proficiency were not active in the union and organizers needed to figure out how to work with those foreign members who were interested in being active in the union. The ultimate solution to this problem was to hire a bilingual foreign organizer to conduct this wide range of labor education for foreign members. TWU did this a year after my fieldwork completed but during the long period of analysis and writing afterwards. However, for such organizers to endure and thrive on the job, they probably need the support of some other paid or committed bilingual foreign organizers, preferably in their union or possibly among other unions organizing foreign workers. Given the need for bilingual labor education, one of the most exciting instances of labor education happened at the inter-union event previously described when the Latin American and Filipino members of KWU prepared scenarios using the forum theatre technique. Although it was never to be repeated again in my study, it was a moment when a new potential for foreign worker learning in a community of practice to take the center stage. It also presented scenarios from workplaces that were a way to share

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experiences of working in Japan. This activity was guided by Tanaka-san, the bilingual Japanese Peruvian activist who was a staff member of SOL who worked closely with the KWU. She had instigated the Grupo Seis (Group Six) to study their situation as immigrant workers and drew on the Latin American tradition of Christian base communities from liberation theology. The notion of immigrant workers creating their own materials such as video narratives based on their every day experiences was also quite intriguing. These could serve as Freirean codes for starting an interesting group inquiry into participants’ own lives as language minority immigrant workers (Wallerstein & Auerbach, 2004). In contrast to the recent trend of migrant education that started in East Asia only in the 1990s, U.S. unions have been organizing thousands of Latino and Asian workers who have immigrated since the mid to late 1960s. They have confronted numerous language and cultural barriers; the successful ones have dealt with these issues in a variety of resourceful ways. Most of them hire bilingual organizers when possible if the workforce they are trying to organize is primarily from one particular language background. However, when workers are from various language backgrounds, unions often offer English as a Second Language classes which focus on labor issues. Finally, in collaboration with universities and non-profit organizations, unions have offered leadership training to bilingual immigrant labor activists. The roles that these ESL classes and bilingual organizers play in their unions have effects on union organizing and immigrant empowerment which extend beyond language education. ESL and labor education have a long history together in the United States, going back at least to the Worker’s Schools of the early 1900s, which offered English literacy classes along with other classes related to union organizing, leadership, and political philosophy (Banks, 2000; Byrd & Nissen, 2003). At that time, labor education was part of humanistic liberal arts education that included, for example, the study of a variety of political philosophies. Many bilingual immigrant activists were ESL learners at one point in their lives and saw the value of second language labor education for union activists. For example, Francisco Chang, a Korean-Argentinian-American organizer in the garment industry, recounts the following story about the Workers Justice Center, which was formed in New York City in 1992: By April 1994, the Workers’ Justice Center had 2,300 dues-paying members and we were teaching English classes, but it wasn’t just conversational English. Our main area of activity was recovering back wages for wage and hour violations. So the ESL classes were teaching workers how to ask, “What’s my pay, why am I not getting paid,” language related to the worksite and their working conditions. So it was a movement of politicization where workers learned their rights, overcame fear, built confidence, had faith, and when those things came together, they acted. (Wong, 2001, p. 27)

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In one sense, ESL labor education can be a kind of language for specific purposes (LSP) program whereby immigrant workers learn and practice, for example, phrases necessary to negotiate for pay raises and payment of unpaid wages. However, another purpose these classes achieve, intentionally or not, is bringing immigrant workers together to realize that they have the right to discuss among themselves, learn, and ask about working conditions affecting them. That is part of the Freirian process of conscientization in which workers come together to name their world and pose their own problems (Freire, 1985). Many organizers see education as an important part of their work. Usually this involves political education, but language is also an essential part. Furthermore, the communicative language activities that ESL teachers design are not unlike the popular education methods used by labor educators and organizers for native or non-native speakers (e.g., Mar & Webber, 2003; Utech, 2002). They rely on discussion, personalization and self-expression, multi-sensory perception, and creative expression, such as visual or performing arts. This approach can be easily adapted to typical union or workplace situations. The University of California at Berkeley Center for Labor Research has published an ESL textbook on labor education (Mar & Webber, 2003) which gives workers training and practice, for example, in negotiating for unpaid and overtime wages. The book focuses on contextualized grammar and conversation practice and uses narratives of immigrant workers’ lives as texts for reading and discussion. This example illustrates how narrative (testimony) and ethnographic data can be used for critical teaching purposes through examples of real interaction and narratives of actual workers, organizers and events. Recently, some immigrant workers themselves have been publishing ESL, labor education and popular education materials bilingually and in Spanish.11 Language use is an important symbol of cultural and political respect, and language proficiency is not simply a skill or competency. An atmosphere of respect and trust generated by providing culturally sensitive interpreters can foster an environment that enhances union members’ second language proficiency and organizing goals. Related to this theme of the symbolism of language use, unions that are interested in organizing immigrant workers who speak primarily one language, should invest in bilingual business agents and staff in order to serve their membership adequately. For instance, an organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union reported how one union shop “eventually voted to get rid of the union because there were like 200 workers there, all Spanish-speaking, and the business agent didn’t speak Spanish” (Milkman & Wong, 2001, p. 8). In the Japan study, the choice of language used or set up of interpreters were symbols of respect; moreover, second language proficiency or performance

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depended on the comfort foreign workers felt with others in a social setting. If we looked at union activities as communicative events and analyzed the kinds of language use necessary as well as what kinds of target language vocabulary and grammatical patterns for social interaction at them, we would have a basis for a fully developed second-language or bilingual approach to labor education. If we look at them as social practices and learning opportunities, we can also see what background historical, legal and socio-cultural knowledge might be needed to fully enjoy and understand one’s participation at a demonstration or inter-union event. Moreover, we could grade which practices and events require a minimum of understanding of the target language to participate in and which activities require a more advanced level of language proficiency. Then, we could decide certain forms of labor education such as simulated second-language activities or an apprentice-like mentoring relationship. When one brings to the forefront the language and cultural aspects of participating in an event, both native and non-native speakers enjoy interacting with each other at a level where language and culture can be salient topics of conversation. I observed that in the response of Japanese participants to my union Japanese lessons and the enjoyment everyone had participating in the December 2001 inter-union event where foreign workers were the featured “actors” and their foods and customs were shared by all the participants. However, a simple focus on cultural customs and differences can easily devolve into a hardening of boundaries or differences. There will be times when people do not wish to eat each other’s traditional foods if that is the only element of interculturality. Perhaps the greatest contribution that community of practice theory can make for all labor education, but especially immigrant labor education, is an appreciation of how complex it is to become a full-fledged participating member of a community of practice. Most unions as organizations only see such communities emerge at the level of leadership rather than rank-and-file. Building on this appreciation of the complexity of becoming a full member of a community of practice, unions can also look at their membership in terms of the various trajectories and modes of belonging existing members have, including multi-memberships and brokers at the boundaries of organizations, and they can look at non-participation from a new angle. There is nothing rigid or formulaic about doing this and it would be important to convey that to any labor educator or union leader who might take on this approach to understanding participation. Such a perspective would open up numerous subtle ways in which participation is blocked and/or can be enhanced. For example, the recognition that real communication and solidarity building occur at informal parties after meetings would help union leaders understand why women, younger mem-

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bers or foreign members are less inclined to attend union events and get more involved in the union since mostly older men attended these events. Seeing that a delegate or representative-based system of structuring a leadership or liaison council provided no opportunities for incoming foreign members to become more active in the general union may lead them to reorganize such groups into more open caucuses as TWU did. Knowing what really needs to be translated word for word or written in the languages of participants can help the union decide where to put limited resources of time, money and human energy. Even useful documents will go unread or become quickly out of date if there is not a process of using them in participation by speakers of those languages in union activities and leadership. If I were to do this study again, I would take a participatory action research (PAR) approach in which a group of foreign union activists explore the Japanese language and socio-cultural knowledge needs of union members together and develop various forms and practices for breaking through current barriers or boundaries circumscribed by language issues. I can see how there might be aversion both to doing any kind of research and bringing in notions from language education and applied linguistic research among labor activists, but I suspect that as a small core started experimenting with these ideas and approaches and others saw how grassroots or bottom-up this initiative is, they might come on board. Although collecting and analyzing data is a lot of work and few people would want to do it in their spare time, I would surely work with a group of bilingual activists in carrying out participatory action research in the future. The results of such research would be potentially agentive for foreigners or migrants struggling for equitable treatment in any second language situation (see Auerbach, 1996; Rivera, 1999). Whether or not I engage in PAR studies in the future, hopefully this account will inspire others to situate language education in the lives of real working people even before they begin a more formal course of second language education through use of critical research approaches and pedagogical practices. It is also my hope that applied linguists begin to take seriously the need for participatory second language labor education to meet the needs of growing migrant and immigrant worker populations in an era of rapid globalization. NOTES 1.

It is important to clarify why I frame the study as “critical” rather than, for example, Marxist. The labor unions and movements I consider in my study are also part of the Japanese working class but my analysis includes the concerns of critical theorists on issues such as race, ethnicity, gender, language, culture, and imperialism. Not only are there contradictions in Japanese class relations but there

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2.

3.

4.

are contradictions in lumping Western foreign language teachers and Third World undocumented workers into the category “foreign worker” in Japan. Thus, in conceptualizing the study of labor unions as communities of practice, I further draw on critical theories of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992) and postcolonial subjectivity and performativity (Pennycook, 1994, 2001) in my data analysis. Furthermore, some of the work on the materiality and performativity of social identity upon which I draw comes from post-structuralist feminist theory (Cameron, 1998; Norton, 2000; Sunderland, 2004). Therefore, my use of the term critical theory refers to a range of critical theoretical perspectives which address a variety of social inequalities. Such factors include: the rapid evaluation of the yen against the dollar and other major foreign currencies after the signing of the Plaza Accord in 1985, Japan’s rise to global economic and political prominence in the 80s, the collapse of world oil prices in the mid1980s and the subsequent decline in construction work in the midEast, the bubble economy in Japan of the late 1980s and a chronic labor shortage are all factors which coincided with and to some extent induced international labor migration to Japan in the late 1980s. Precedents for the large-scale importation of foreign labor were set by several European countries from the late 1950s until the mid-1970s and in Japan’s own history of imperialism in East Asia prior to World War II. With about 1.4 million foreign residents out of a population of 127 million people in 2002, foreigner nationals constituted slightly more than 1% of the population. This number includes roughly 650,000 Korean and Chinese permanent residents, hereafter referred to as zainichi, most of whom are permanent residents of Japan, and whose ancestors came over as “subjects of the emperor” before or during World War II and lost their Japanese citizenship after the war but chose to remain in Japan. Thus if we excluded them, the “foreign” population would be only about 0.5% of the whole population. The 600,000 or so newcomers constitute only about 1% of the labor force of 65 million. These numbers were fairly stable from 1992 and I have rounded them off for manageability. (For more precise figures, see Shimada, 1994: pp. 15-32). In comparison, the percentage of foreigners in the population and labor force of most Northern European countries is 3%-10% (see Soysal, 1994, p. 23). Data taken from Mori (1994) Appendix No. 1, Table 2. His source is the Japan Immigration Association journal, Kokusai Jinryu (International Flow of People), October 1994, p. 37.

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5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

The statistics on visa overstayers comes from Komai (1995, pp. 3-4), and The Daily Yomiuri (Sept. 11, 1995, p. 2). It should be noted, however, that it is difficult to accurately estimate the number of undocumented foreign workers, and estimates vary by hundreds of thousands of people. One reason why is that it is rather common for workers on tourist visas to leave the country every three months to renew them, perhaps even staying out of the country for several months to diminish suspicion. Also, it is likely that many if not most of the approximately 100,000 foreign students staying in Japan on various student visas, which restrict the number of hours per day which they can work, are in fact working far in excess of the limit without the necessary work permits. Forum Theater and its origins with Boal are explained by Delp (2002). All the union names mentioned in this chapter are pseudonymous. As a privileged, white researcher I have not made race or whiteness a central focus of my study, but I also did not want to ignore it when it surfaces. Critical race theorists, however, endeavor to uncover race-based assumptions and epistemologies in their interpretations (see Ladson-Billings, 2000). I counted only a handful of Caucasians at the event: Don from the Tokyo Workers Union (TWU) came late; the others seemed to be affiliated with Churches or non-governmental human rights organizations and were not directly connected with the foreign worker union movement. While many TWU members probably did not know about the event, most of them probably do not identify as “international migrants” or feel they have much in common with those who do, even as “foreign workers.” Many of them referred to themselves as “expatriates” which tends to be used for multinational company employees, skilled professionals and intellectuals. Nevertheless, this identity as a foreign worker is available to Anglo Caucasians who choose to adopt or appropriate it whereas a Third World expatriate was less likely to slip into the professional category even if they were skilled professionals. We see that happen with visits to Korea by Maruoka-san of KWU and Ogawa-san of UWU (Migrant Network News, July 2002) as well as visits to America by Sugita-san of the Tokyo Workers Union. Casa de Maryland publishes titles such as New Citizenship Activists, English for Organizing, Liderazgo para Accion Social (Leadership for Social Action) (all 2004), which can be previewed and ordered at www. casademaryland.org.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Hye-sun Cho recently received her Ph.D. from the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She has taught EFL/ESL, academic literacies, Korean and bilingual education in Seoul, Michigan and Hawai’i. As a former secondary school teacher, she enjoys working with in-service teachers of Hawai`i public schools. She is currently developing and instructing online courses on content area literacy for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Her research focuses on critical literacy, agency and power in schooling, bilingual/heritage identity and language teacher education. Contact address: 7740 Autumn Ridge Circle, Reno, NV 89523. Email: [email protected] Kathryn A. Davis is professor of Second Language Studies in the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa (UHM). She received her Ph.D. from the Stanford University School of Education. Her teaching and research focuses on the sociopolitical nature of language policies and situated language practices, including hybrid identities, multilingualism, literacies, and transformative schooling. She has published books, edited volumes, and journal special issues on authenticity and identity in indigenous language education, language and Critical Qualitative Research in Second Language Studies: Agency and Advocacy, pages 427–433 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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g1ender, critical qualitative research, language policy and planning in the U.S.A, and language policies and use in Luxembourg. Her funded projects focus on equity research and program development that include an undergraduate bilingual education program at UHM, secondary school heritage language and academic English programs in public schools, and world languages and social justice partnership projects. Contact address: Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 1890 East West Road, Honolulu, Hawai’i 96822. Email: [email protected] Younghee Her received her MA from the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She has been involved in teaching English and English teacher training programs in Korea. Currently she is leading a hectic life raising her son while working full time. She thinks of her overall graduate study experience in Hawai’i as a precious cultural and intellectual asset. Contact address: Lotte Apt. 5-902, NamyangDong, Changwon-Shi, Kyeongnam Province, South Korea 641-933. Email: [email protected] Yun Seon Kim received her MA from the Second Language Studies Department in the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 2008. She is happily raising two amazing boys and everyday creates space for them to play and speak in ways that allow them to dialogically interact with the world. Contact address: Hyundai 3rd Apt. 303-105, Daerim-3dong, Youngdungpo-gu, Seoul, South Korea. Email: [email protected] Warren Liew earned his PhD from the Stanford University School of Education. He is an Assistant Professor with the English Language and Literature Academic Group of the Singapore National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University. His research interests include Performance Studies, critical discourse analysis, seventeenth century English religious poetry, and the philosophy of the body. Contact address: National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore 637616. Email: [email protected] Angel M. Y. Lin received her PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada in 1996. She has since led a productive teaching and research career in areas of sociocultural theories of language education, new media communication studies, youth cultural and feminist media studies, critical discourse analysis, and language-ineducation policy and practice in postcolonial contexts. Her recent publications include Bilingual education: Southeast Asian perspectives (co-authored with Evelyn Y. F. Man; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009); Race, culture, and identities in second language education: Exploring critically

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engaged practice (co-edited with Ryuko Kubota; New York: Routledge, 2009); and Classroom interactions as cross-cultural encounters: Native speakers in EFL lessons (co-authored with Jasmine C. M. Luk; Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006). Contact address: Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. Email: [email protected] Steven Locke is an associate professor of elementary education at the University of Wyoming where he works as a teacher educator. He has spent over 15 years working and teaching in rural elementary schools in Costa Rica and rural development projects in Ecuador. He received his PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington in curriculum and instruction. Contact address: Department of Elementary/Early Childhood Education, College of Education, Laramie, Wyoming 82071. Email: [email protected] Margie Maaka is a professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa College of Education, where she received her PhD in Educational Psychology in 1992. She is Director of Ho‘okulaiwi: Center for Native Hawaiian and Indigenous Education and Co-Chair of the Sovereign Councils of the Hawaiian Homelands Assembly Committee on Education. She is co-founder of the American Educational Research Association Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Special Interest Group. She is interested in the preparation of indigenous leaders in education. Her research interests include indigenous selfdetermination through education, language and cognition, and teacher education. Contact address: Ho‘okulaiwi: ‘Aha Ho‘ona‘auao ‘Oiwi, College of Education, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 1776 University Avenue, Honolulu, HI 96822. Email: [email protected] Evelyn Y. F. Man received her PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada in 1997. She has since led an active teaching and research career in areas of teacher education, bilingual education and the teaching of English as a second language. She sits on a number of government committees and was until recently a member of the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research (SCOLAR) of the Hong Kong SAR Government. She is actively involved in a number of education and policy-related projects. Her most recent publication is Bilingual education: Southeast Asian perspectives (co-authored with Angel M. Y. Lin; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009). Contact address: Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong. Email: [email protected] John W. McLaughlin is the Federal Coordinator of the McKinney-Vento Education for Homeless Children and Youth program and the Title I, Part D Neglected, Delinquent, or At Risk Program at the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. Prior to that, he was

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the State Coordinator for homeless, neglected and delinquent education programs with the Minnesota Department of Education and a lecturer at the University of Michigan, English Language Institute, in teaching English as a Second Language, migrant education, teacher education and service learning. John started his career as a counselor at a group home for youth in New Haven, Connecticut in 1988 and has been an advocate and volunteer community and labor organizer for immigrants, migrant farm workers, refugees and the homeless in California, Japan, Michigan and Minnesota while teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language. His current focus is linking school districts with housing and welfare agencies in order to prevent and end family, child and youth homelessness in the USA and promote school stability and success for students living in homeless situations. He received his doctorate from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction (TESL) in the Graduate College of Education at Temple University, PA. His BA is in Sociology from Yale University and he has a Master’s of Public Administration from International Christian University, Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan and a Master’s of Arts in Advanced Japanese Studies from the University of Sheffield (England). Contact address: U.S. Department of Education Student Achievement and School Accountability Programs, 400 Maryland Ave., S.W., Washington, DC 20202-6132. Email: [email protected] or [email protected] Ethel Ogane is an associate professor in the Department of International Management in the College of Business Administration at Tamagawa University in Tokyo where she teaches English as a foreign language and teaching methodology classes. She is interested in teaching methodology and teacher education issues, and curriculum evaluation and development. She received her doctorate in Curriculum, Instruction and Technology in Education from the Graduate College of Education at Temple University. Contact address: Tamagawa University, 6-1-1 Tamagawa Gakuen, Machida, Tokyo, Japan 194-8610. Email: [email protected] Katrina-Ann Kapa’anaokalaokeola R. Oliveira is an Assistant Professor at Kawaihuelani: Center for Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. In 2006, she received her PhD in Geography, specializing in Cultural Geography. Oliveira is currently the Interim Director of Kawaihuelani. Kapa’s research focuses on Hawaiian language, culture and history including: genealogy, land tenure, history of Maui, Hawaiian space and time, Hawaiian worldview as it pertains to the land, place names, power and domination, and Hawaiian language. Contact address: Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian Language, 2540 Maile Way, Spalding Hall 253, Honolulu, HI 96822. Email: [email protected]

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Carlos J. Ovando is Professor in the Department of Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, at Arizona State University. He received his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction and International Comparative Education from Indiana University. His research, teaching, and service focus on factors that contribute to the academic achievement of language minority students and ethnically diverse groups. Born in Nicaragua, Carlos Ovando immigrated to the United States in his pre teen years and has therefore experienced first-hand many of the academic, sociocultural, and emotional issues that confront language minority students. His most recent research focuses on south-to-south international migration in Central America, school reform in Mexico, English as world language in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Peru, the impact of globalization on PK–12 school reform, and the challenges and opportunities that western-educated researchers face when conducting research in non-western sociocultural and linguistic contexts. He has served as guest editor of two special issues of Educational Research Quarterly, and contributed to the first and second editions of the Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education. He has also published in the Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Educational Researcher, Peabody Journal of Education, Bilingual Research Journal, Phi Delta Kappan, Educational Leadership, Kappan Delta Pi Record, World Yearbook 2003: Language Education, Race, Ethnicity, and Education, the Harvard Educational Review, and the Encyclopedia of Bilingual Education. His books include: (with Mary Carol Combs and Virginia P. Collier) Bilingual and ESL Classrooms: Teaching in Multicultural Contexts, 4th ed. (McGraw-Hill, 2006); (with Peter McLaren) The Politics of Multiculturalism and Bilingual Education: Teachers and Students Caught in the Cross Fire (McGraw-Hill, 2000) and (with Colleen Larson) The Color of Bureaucracy: The Politics of Equity in Multicultural School Communities (Thompson/Wadsworth, 2001). Professor Ovando’s international experience includes a visiting scholarship at the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica (Instituto de Estudios Latinoamericanos) and presentations in Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Egypt, England, Guam, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Netherlands, Perú, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States. Contact address: Department of Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, Coor Building, Mail code: 3502. Email: carlos. [email protected] Miyung Park is a PhD candidate in Korean Linguistics in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, classroom discourse, and Korean pedagogy. She is working on her dissertation on Korean language teachers’ speech style shifts in classroom settings by taking a microanalyatic qualitative approach. Contact address: Department of East Asian Languages

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and Literatures, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. 1890 East West Road, Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822. Email: [email protected] Lucinda Pease-Alvarez is a faculty member in the Education Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has also directed the department’s teacher education program. Her research focuses on topics related to the use and development of language and literacy among bilingual children of Mexican descent. This has included classroom-based studies focused on instructional practices that enhance children’s language and literacy learning as well as studies of bilingualism conducted in community, home, and school settings. She is also engaged in action-oriented and collaborative research examining how teachers of English learners are responding to and negotiating recent policy mandates, including instructional initiatives related to the teaching of literacy. Her scholarship in teacher education has focused on investigating how prospective teachers’ experiences with language minority children and their families outside of school inform their perspectives on learning and teaching as well as their instructional practices, particularly in the area of language and literacy learning. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, she is a coauthor of Pushing Boundaries: Language and Culture in a Mexicano Community (Cambridge University Press) and co-editor of Learning, Teaching, and Community: Contributions of Situated and Participatory Approaches to Educational Innovation (Lawrence Erlbaum). Contact address: Education Department, Social Sciences I, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High St., Santa Cruz CA 95064, Education Department, 217 Social Sciences, University of Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. Email: [email protected] Renae Skarin is a PhD candidate in Educational Linguistics in the School of Education at Stanford University. Her research interests include critical applied linguistics, language and power, linguicism, and language and literacy development for economically and linguistically marginalized U.S. populations. Renae has been working with high school and community college students for over a decade teaching ESL and remedial English using her own evolving critical feminist pedagogy. Contact address: 1404 Lyon Street, San Francisco, California 94115. Email: [email protected] Hiromasa Tanaka is a professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Meisei University in Tokyo where he has initiated a socio-cultural theory-based teacher development program. His research interests are in the area of business discourse analysis and critical pedagogy with a special focus on English as a lingua franca. He received his EdD in Curriculum, Instruction and Technology in Education from Temple University. He is also an independent consultant/trainer for various business corporations. As a consultant, he helps multi-national corporations develop curricula for lit-

Contributors • 433

eracy training in transnational business settings. He has contributed chapters to The Handbook of Business Discourse (Edinburg University Press, 2009), Language and Life in Japan (Routledge, 2010) and The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Routledge, 2011). Contact address: Department of International Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Meisei University, 2-1-1, Hodokubo, Hino-city, Tokyo, Japan, 191-8506. Email: tanakahi@eleal. meisei-u.ac.jp Alisun Thompson is a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work focuses on teachers of ethnically and linguistically diverse students with an emphasis on educational policy. She currently teaches in the teacher education program and is involved in a project investigating recruitment of math and science teachers for hard-to-staff schools. Her current research examines what influences teachers to teach in schools serving predominantly low-income students of color and conditions that sustain teacher commitment and support teacher retention. Contact address: Education Department, Social Sciences I, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High St., Santa Cruz CA 95064, Education Department, 217 Social Sciences, University of Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. Email: alisun@ ucsc.edu Laiana Wong is an assistant professor in Kawaihuelani: Center for Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. In 2006, he received his PhD in Linguistics, specializing in Hawaiian worldview. His is the first dissertation written in the Hawaiian language. He has three children, all of whom have been raised speaking Hawaiian, and two grandchildren who are also being raised speaking Hawaiian. For more than twenty years, Laiana has devoted his personal and professional life to the advancement of Hawaiian people through Hawaiian language education and research. Contact Address: Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian Language, 2540 Maile Way, Spalding Hall 253, Honolulu, HI 96822. Email: [email protected] Xiao Rui Zhang is an associate professor in the Department of International Studies at Meisei University in Japan. She received her EdD from the Graduate College of Education at Temple University, PA. She has taught courses in intercultural communication and qualitative research methods. In the past few years she mainly focused her research in the areas of subjectivity, discourse, and agency through narrative and discourse analysis. Her recent research interests include the interpretation of subjective wellbeing and new media discourse analysis. Contact address: Department of International Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Meisei University, 2-1-1, Hodokubo, Hino-city, Tokyo, Japan, 191-8506. Email: [email protected]