TESOL and Sustainability: English Language Teaching in the Anthropocene Era 9781350115088, 9781350115118, 9781350115095

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Foreword by Suresh Canagarajah
Introduction: TESOL and Sustainability John Katunich and Jason Goulah
Part 1 Foundations for Sustainability in TESOL: Cultural Perspectives, Products, and Practices
1 Earth Democracy as Empowerment for TESOL Students and Educators: Though the Crisis Speaks English, englishes Can Become a Commons Language of Sustainability M. Garrett Delavan
2 Reorienting Language as a Commons: Dispositions for English Language Teaching in the “Second Watershed” John Katunich
3 Post-Truth Pedagogy for TESOL: Our Collective Responsibility for the Two-Legged,the Four-Legged, the Flyers, the Swimmers, the Multi-Legged, and the Stationary Sandra Kouritzin
Part 2 Climate Change and Place as TESOL Curriculum and Pedagogy
4 TESOL into the Anthropocene: Climate Migration as Curriculum and Pedagogy in ESL Jason Goulah
5 A Place-Based Ecopedagogy for an English for Academic Purposes Program Kevin Eyraud
6 Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters and Implications for Sustainable TESOL Bal Krishna Sharma
7 Saving the World without (Eco)Justice? English-Language Voluntourism, Rural Education, and Root Metaphors of Success Cori Jakubiak Alan Hastings
Coda: The Incommensurability of English Language Pedagog[uer]y and Sustainability— Spirits and Protein Satoru Nakagawa
Index

Citation preview

TESOL and Sustainability

Bloomsbury Advances in Ecolinguistics Series Editors: Arran Stibbe and Mariana Roccia Advisory Board: Nadine Andrews (Lancaster University, UK) Maria Bortoluzzi (University of Udine, Italy) Martin Döring (University of Hamburg, Germany) Sue Edney (University of Bristol, UK) Alwin Fill (University of Graz, Austria) Diego Forte (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) Amir Ghorbanpour (Tarbiat Modares University, Iran) Nataliia Goshylyk (Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, Ukraine) Huang Guowen (South China Agricultural University, China) George Jacobs (Independent Scholar) Kyoohoon Kim (Daegu University, South Korea) Katerina Kosta (Oxford Brookes University, UK) Mira Lieberman-Boyd (University of Sheffield, UK) Keith Moser (Mississippi State University, USA) Douglas Ponton (University of Catania, Italy) Bloomsbury Advances in Ecolinguistics emerges at a time when businesses, universities, national governments and many other organisations are declaring an ecological emergency. With climate change and biodiversity loss diminishing the ability of the Earth to support life, business leaders, politicians and academics are asking how their work can contribute to efforts to preserve the ecosystems that life depends on. This book series explores the role that linguistics can play in addressing the great challenges faced by humanity and countless other species. Although significant advances have been made in addressing social issues such as racism, sexism and social justice, linguistics has typically focused on oppression in human communities and overlooked other species and the wider ecosystems that support life. This is despite the disproportionate impact of ecological destruction on oppressed groups. In contrast, this book series treats language as an intrinsic part of both human societies and wider ecosystems. It explores the role that different areas of linguistic enquiry, such as discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, language diversity and cognitive linguistics can play at a time of ecological emergency.

TESOL and Sustainability English Language Teaching in the Anthropocene Era Edited by Jason Goulah and John Katunich

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Jason Goulah, John Katunich and Contributors, 2020 Jason Goulah and John Katunich have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Cover design: Ben Anslow All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-1508-8 ePDF: 978-1-3501-1509-5 eBook: 978-1-3501-1510-1 Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Ecolinguistics Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd., To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Table of Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Foreword by Suresh Canagarajah Introduction: TESOL and Sustainability  John Katunich and Jason Goulah

vi vii x 1

Part 1 Foundations for Sustainability in TESOL: Cultural Perspectives, Products, and Practices 1

2 3

Earth Democracy as Empowerment for TESOL Students and Educators: Though the Crisis Speaks English, englishes Can Become a Commons Language of Sustainability  M. Garrett Delavan Reorienting Language as a Commons: Dispositions for English Language Teaching in the “Second Watershed”  John Katunich Post-Truth Pedagogy for TESOL: Our Collective Responsibility for the Two-Legged, the Four-Legged, the Flyers, the Swimmers, the Multi-Legged, and the Stationary  Sandra Kouritzin

19 41

65

Part 2  Climate Change and Place as TESOL Curriculum and Pedagogy 4

TESOL into the Anthropocene: Climate Migration as Curriculum and Pedagogy in ESL  Jason Goulah 5 A Place-Based Ecopedagogy for an English for Academic Purposes Program  Kevin Eyraud 6 Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters and Implications for Sustainable TESOL  Bal Krishna Sharma 7 Saving the World without (Eco)Justice? English-Language Voluntourism, Rural Education, and Root Metaphors of Success  Cori Jakubiak and Alan Hastings Coda: The Incommensurability of English Language Pedagog[uer]y and Sustainability—Spirits and Protein  Satoru Nakagawa Index

85 111 133

151 177 195

Illustrations Figures 4 .1 WIDA Template

94

4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1

97

Model Informative Unit Week 4 MPIs Lichen Up Close: A Marvel of the Natural World Petroglyphs and Pictographs Rock Art Target Practice Buddhist Prayer Flags

120 122 123 141

Table 5.1 Description of Data Sources and Collection

115

Contributors Suresh Canagarajah is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor and Director of the Migration Studies Project at Pennsylvania State University. Suresh comes from the Tamilspeaking northern region of Sri Lanka. He has taught before in the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and the City University of New York. His publication Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations  (Routledge, 2013) won the best book award from American Association of Applied Linguistics, British Association of Applied Linguistics, and the Modern Language Association of America. He was formerly the editor of the TESOL Quarterly and President of the American Association of Applied Linguistics. M. Garrett Delavan is Assistant Professor of Multilingual and Multicultural Education at California State University San Marcos. He received his PhD in Language, Culture and Curriculum from the University of Utah. Prior to entering the field of education, Garrett worked as a manager for an environmental and consumer protection organization, which included lobbying members of congress and holding editorial board meetings and press conferences around environmental policy at the federal level. He then worked for seventeen years as a public school teacher of Spanish, technology, and English as a second language at the adult, high school, and intermediate levels. He also holds an MA in Linguistics with an emphasis in bilingual education. His research interests fall into three areas: (1) new racism and classism embedded within the privatization and charterization of education, (2) equity of access and discursive representation in language education policy, and (3) social and environmental justice content in language teaching. Kevin Eyraud is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language Learning (DELL) at Utah Valley University. In addition to seventeen years in Utah, Kevin has taught ESL four years in university settings in Arizona, Egypt, and New York. He has an MA in TESL Applied Linguistics from Northern Arizona University. He is currently pursuing PhD in Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Utah (anticipated May 2018). His interests include reading instruction, content-based instruction (CBI), and project-based learning (PBL).

viii

Contributors

Jason Goulah  is Associate Professor of Bilingual-Bicultural Education and Director of the Institute for Daisaku Ikeda Studies in Education at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, and Executive Advisor at the Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning and Dialogue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At DePaul, he is also Director of Programs in Bilingual-Bicultural Education, World Language Education, and Value-Creating Education for Global Citizenship. His research interests include transformative language learning; Ikeda/Soka studies in education; socioecological justice; and language, culture, identity, and new literacies. His scholarship has appeared in multiple edited volumes and scholarly journals. His books include  Daisaku Ikeda, Language and Education, which received the 2015 AESA  Critics Choice Book Award;  Makiguchi Tsunesaburo in the Context of Language, Identity and Education; and Makiguchi Tsunesaburo (1871–1944): Educational Philosophy in Context (with Andrew Gebert). Alan Hastings is Assistant Professor of Education at Central College in Pella, Iowa. A graduate of Michigan State University, Alan researches school policy and how it operates in rural educational settings. He has taught courses in educational foundations, the history of education, social studies methods, and place-based education. Cori Jakubiak earned her doctorate in Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Education Department at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, where she teaches courses on place-based education, the cultural politics of language teaching, and TESOL/world language methods. Her primary research agenda examines English language voluntourism, or short-term, volunteer English language teaching in the Global South. Her recently published book chapter, Tracing the Anthrozoological Landscape of Central Iowa: Place and Pedagogical Possibilities, discusses the centrality of human-animal relations in the construction of contemporary rurality. John Katunich is currently Associate Director of the Writing Program and the Multilingual Writing Specialist at Dickinson College. He completed his dissertation in 2019 in the Language, Culture, and Society program in the Curriculum and Instruction Department of Penn State University. His work draws on the social critique of historian and public intellectual Ivan Illich (1926–2002) in order to point toward a new orientation for language teaching that rejects the dominant neo-liberal model of schooling in favor of commonsbased pedagogies and practices. His scholarship calls for the transformation of

Contributors

ix

English language teaching pedagogy to support more convivial practices and equitable outcomes for all, through the recognition of the complicity of English and English language teaching in the present, myriad crises of sustainability. Sandra Kouritzin is a cisgendered, straight, white Professor of Second Language Education in Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Often in collaboration with her Indigenous Amami life-partner, and always interrogating issues of deep personal relevance, Dr. Kouritzin has published on various aspects of identity in Indigenous and minority ESL education, as well as the social norms that influence second language learning. A second line of inquiry has concerned research practices, particularly those that challenge the orthodoxies in standard academic research and writing. Dr. Kouritzin’s most recent work explores embodied workload in the academy, the neoliberal subject in ESL discourses, non-extractive research ethics in multilingual and transnational contexts, white mothering of non-white children, and post-truth teacher education. In all aspects of research, teaching, and personal life, Dr. Kouritzin is committed to uncovering linguistic constructions of reality that permit racialized, class-based, and gendered (LGBTQ+) social or sexual violence. Satoru Nakagawa is an Indigenous Amami person (southern Japan, close to Okinawa, grouped with the Ryukyu peoples), from the island of Tokunoshima. Amami people are visibly, culturally, and linguistically distinct from mainland Yamato clan Japanese peoples. Dr. Nakagawa is particularly interested in how formal education systems, particularly the teaching of colonizing languages, have contributed to cultural decimation, and to the erosion of Indigenous rights to traditional education, language, culture, land, worldview, and freedom from genocide and colonization. Dr. Nakagawa’s works link the loss of Indigenous languages/cultures to the loss of environmental sustainability and to biodiversity, both locally and globally, a framework supported by work in linguistic rights and land rights. He teaches at the University of Manitoba. Bal Krishna Sharma received his PhD in second language studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He currently is Assistant Professor of TESOL at the University of Idaho, where he teaches various applied linguistics and TESOL courses. His primary areas of scholarly interest include intercultural communication, discourse analysis, and teacher development. His articles have previously appeared in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language in Society, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Multilingua, Discourse, Media and Context, and Classroom Discourse, among others.

Foreword This book comes at an important moment when the material environment has demanded greater respect in our social and educational lives. While climate change and the damages to the ecology in the Anthropocene threaten human existence, quantum physics has discovered that material nature is complexly agentive, alive, and self-regulating. These developments have also motivated a new appreciation of indigenous worldviews which are earth-centered and question dualistic philosophies which segregate constructs such as human/ animal; society/nature; mind/matter; individual/cosmos; and so on. The editors and contributors of this collection are leading practitioners of sustainability pedagogies in English language teaching and represent their thinking and teaching to move this earth-centered orientation forward in our profession. Readers will realize that environmental sustainability is not just a topic for classroom discussion, a theme for treatment in the curriculum, or one more social “issue” that demands critical thinking among our students. From such points of view, we don’t have to change our syllabus or curriculum in ELT too much. It’s business as usual. This is how we have accommodated many pressing issues, such as race, gender, homophobia, and poverty, in our teaching in the past. Environmental sustainability is not business as usual in ELT anymore. Our understanding of the natural environment cuts into our very understanding of how knowledge and communication work. The natural world is not another issue or theme, but has fundamental epistemological significance. We have to rethink how language competence, proficiency, and learning work when we adopt an earth-centered orientation to knowledge and communication. Recall that structuralism, which provided the foundations for modern linguistics, separated the language system from the environment in an effort to understand the self-defining rules and norms that characterize grammar. Beyond making a separation of language and material nature, others adopting this paradigm treated language as superior to nature. This theory of representationalism was based on notions such as the following: language encodes the knowledge and values that provide a blueprint for our life; language helps internalize these representations in our consciousness; these representations are

Foreword

xi

essences, preceding and shaping sociomaterial practices; they are housed in our mind, confirming the generative power of the mind in thinking and meaningmaking; and this representational medium of language gives humans the power to understand and transform pliant nature according to their will. When we treat language as the superior medium to encode such representations, we also participate in a form of logocentrism, ignoring the many other material resources that have semiotic potential and generate meaning. Poststructuralist scholars now argue that this view of structuralist representationalism was an effort to tame nature. Since material nature is agentive and alive, it doesn’t wait for human efforts or language representations to shape it. If nature is self-regulating, creative, unpredictable, ecological, and resistant of control, how do we accommodate such processes in our knowledge and meaning-making practices? As we move away from artificially set up structures to consider vibrant earth as the starting point of our thinking and activity, we realize the importance of a different set of values to guide our epistemology. They are a flat ontology that refuses to consider domains as binary or hierarchical; rhizomatic or nonlinear emergence of meanings and practices; distributed practice that views meanings as emerging in the interstices of multiple bodies working together; a refusal of closure in embracing ongoing and constant emergence of meanings; and a nonrepresentational approach that values embodiment and affect in meaning-making as an activity. These constructs challenge the structuralist treatment of language as a bounded, autonomous system of signifiers, internalized in the mind, facilitating representational and cognitively dominant thinking to control the material environment. Such an earth-centered thinking portends significant changes on how we understand the role of language in communication. We move away from logocentrism in acknowledging that diverse polysemiotic resources (bodies, objects, material ecologies) participate equally in making meaning; meaning emerges in activity in situated interactions through an assemblage of social and material networks; it emerges through a responsive and collaborative distributed practice of social agents, environmental resources, and nonhuman participants working together; it is affective, embodied, and ethical, sensitive to all the agents and actants in an ecology and their claims. We can capture these changes in the shift from competence to emplacement as the facility required for us to communicate effectively. Competence indexes the role of the mind, the individual, and mastery of the grammatical system in proficiency. This is what we aspired to develop in our pedagogies in the past. Emplacement indexes how we orientate to communication as an activity

xii

Foreword

in attunement with expansive spatiotemporal ecologies and an assemblage of agents and objects for ethical and responsive meaning-making. In a culture that has treated language as a profitable resource, shaped by agonistic relations with other human and nonhuman beings as the road to success, individual mastery and self-sufficiency as the ultimate goal, and self-interest as our guiding ethic, it will require creative pedagogical practices to develop the dispositions that value responsive, ethical, and collaborative relations for communicative success. We have a long way to go in developing pedagogies based on earth-centered epistemologies and values. The chapters in this book give us a solid start in moving forward in this mission. Suresh Canagarajah Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied Linguistics and English Pennsylvania State University, USA

Introduction: TESOL and Sustainability John Katunich and Jason Goulah

This book examines the role and substance of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) relative to biospheric sustainability, climate change, and the Anthropocene era. Assuredly all languages and cultures— especially globally and industrially dominant ones—warrant consideration in contemplating the ways language and culture further and hinder climate change and sustainable practices, not to mention how they threaten the sustainability— that is, the very survival—of indigenous and nondominant languages and the sustainable practices and cultural beliefs encoded in them (Maffi, 2001; Nettle & Romaine, 2000). However, this book looks specifically at English and the teaching of English as a second and foreign language in this relationship. Chapters herein examine dimensions of this relationship across multiple areas, such as curriculum theorizing and praxis relating to TESOL, place, and climate; language as commons; unpacking root metaphors in the substance, teaching, and learning of English; the manifold issues entailed in the rise of climate refugees among the English learner population; and culture, including what the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL, 2015) calls the interlocking cultural perspectives, practices, and products informing and informed by language, language use, and language instruction. Although the chapters in this volume can be read in any order, we have endeavored to arrange them from the conceptual to the empirical, from foundational considerations of the English language and TESOL education to curricular and instructional contexts in traditional ESL (English as a second language) classrooms and alternative learning spaces across the grade and life spans in local and global locales. The title of this collection recognizes that human beings now live and work in the Anthropocene era, in which the anthropogenic impacts on the biosphere are  so pervasive that they threaten to alter the conditions that sustain human and nonhuman life. The degree to which these anthropocenic

2

TESOL and Sustainability

changes have impacted the work of English language teaching has, however, not been particularly well documented or accounted for—though this is changing. For many teachers, researchers, and teacher educators in the field of TESOL, the relationship between the work of teaching English and broader sustainability crises that characterize the so-called Anthropocene era, such as the interconnected predicaments of climate change, habitat loss, food insecurity, and the threat of nuclear conflict (Bakalar, 2015; Gillis, 2012; IPCC, 2013; Kahn, 2016a, b; Revkin, 2016; Rosenthal, 2017), has been largely elided. Thus, one fundamental objective for this book is to begin to make more explicit the ways in which the field of TESOL is implicated and, to an important degree, if unwittingly, complicit in the present sustainability crises so that a new ethic of language teaching in the Anthropocene era may emerge. This is not to suggest, however, that all previous work in English language teaching and applied linguistics has ignored issues of sustainability, ecology, or the environment. Ecological considerations in applied linguistics have been part of the disciplinary discourse since at least the early 1970s (Haugen, 1972). The project of language ecology, which has been defined most broadly as the study of language in interaction with its environment (do Couto, 2014; Haugen, 1972), has not been a unified project, however, with attention paid variously to the linguistic, social, or even mental environment as the object of ecological observation (do Couto, 2014; Steffenson & Fill, 2014). Only as a subset of inquiry has language ecology taken up the question of how languages are embedded in and interact with natural and biological environments (Steffenson & Fill, 2014). But the Anthropocene requires us to look at language and ecology beyond just the field of language ecology, particularly as we consider the teaching of English. We see this deeper level of examination already happening in critical applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2016, 2017), communications (Fløttum, 2017), translation theory (Cronin, 2016), and, of course, ecolinguistics (Fill & Penz, 2017; Stibbe, 2015). Within the context of language education more specifically, Goulah (2018), for example, argues that the “given” distinctions the Anthropocene has collapsed between Humans and Nature also collapse “given” distinctions between Culture and Nature, and thus between Language and Nature. He asserts that as the Anthropocene redefines human beings as a geological force shaping Earth’s future and the existential crises of sustainability, it compels us to consider and examine the evident, transforming, and emerging literacies and semiotics relating to the changing biosphere (Goulah, 2017b, 2018, 2019; see also Küchler, 2017). He concludes that the amplifying predicaments of the Anthropocene “are intimately entangled with issues central to language education, including geocultural

Introduction

3

dynamics of race, class, gender, ethnicity, spirituality, religion, economy, politics, power, geography, militarization, security, technology, and (un)documented transborder flows” (Goulah, 2018, p. 453). Thus, as TESOL moves into the Anthropocene, these developing predicaments and entanglements “are implicated in language, culture, and identity, [and force] us to reconsider not just what and how we teach in [ESL and EFL] classrooms, but why” (Goulah, 2018, p. 453). Once sustainability (including biological, cultural, and linguistic sustainability) is treated as a core consideration in the professional work of teaching English, then an opportunity for a broader professional field of action and theorizing opens. We see this emerging in important if still limited ways, where the interconnectedness of language, culture, education, and sustainability increasingly frames the topic or theme of symposia, conference sessions, and entire conferences in the field. For example, in addition to our own session with colleagues at the 2017 conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (Katunich, Goulah, Badenhorst, & Smoicic, 2017), the Study Group on Language and the United Nations cooperated with the Center for Applied Linguistics, the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems, and other organizations to host a 2016 symposium on language and the linguistic implications of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, 2015). The symposium explored ways the implementation of the seventeen SDGs requires active, twoway, democratic understanding and communication within and across multiple languages, including English. It focused on the linguistic obstacles that could potentially stand in the way of sustainable development, with keynote speaker Suzanne Romaine arguing that the SDGs still need to address more strongly the place of language in their outcomes. Similarly, also in 2016, TESOL Italy hosted an international conference on sustainable development for scholars, teachers, and practitioners from multiple professional disciplines to engage TESOL and sustainability holistically, where environmental, cultural, economic, and social concerns intersect. With regard to environmental sustainability and TESOL specifically, conference organizers invited papers that engage TESOL in such areas as water and soil conservation, health care, renewable energies, food, and environmental legislation. They also solicited papers on how these areas intersect with TESOL and economic and sociocultural sustainability. Historically, such perspective on collective professional action in the face of existential threat is not unprecedented in the field of TESOL. In 1984, a TESOL member resolution resolved to direct the TESOL executive director to urge

4

TESOL and Sustainability

the declared nuclear states at the time to freeze or reduce nuclear arsenals and resolve to reject the principle of preemptive nuclear strike (TESOL, 1984).1 That our field can and should take up sustainability crises (including, but no longer limited to, crises of nuclear arms and proliferation) is therefore no new issue, but certainly an issue that at least since 1984 has not been visible in the values and discourse of the discipline of language teaching and language teacher education. While the dynamics of the nuclear arms race in the mid-1980s was by no means simple, it is important to acknowledge how much more complex and intractable the present crises of sustainability being faced are. Because of what Orr (1992) terms the “social traps” that define the roots of the sustainability crises, in the absence of cultural changes, any purely technological change to address sustainability may only defer, but not resolve, the underlying crises. Given the cultural bases of these crises, it is imperative that English language teaching, like all fields of education, assume a level of shared responsibility in addressing them. In particular, in addressing the cultural bases of the sustainability crisis, the field of TESOL requires sustained excavation of how the work of English language teaching has been a necessary infrastructure for projects of neoliberalism and the globalization of labor (Flores, 2013). Moreover, further work must be done on the impact of English language teaching on the sustainability and continuity of indigenous cultures, languages, and communities (see MacPherson, 2003, 2010), and the pedagogies of place have yet to find any meaningful purchase in our disciplinary discourses (see Goulah, 2009a, b; Gruenewald, 2003; Gruenewald & Smith, 2014). These and other similar areas are taken up in this volume, with one of the main ones being the presence of root metaphors.

Unpacking Root Metaphors in TESOL In his 2012 essay about the ecological impacts of teaching English as a second language, eco-justice scholar Chet Bowers (2012) suggests that, among other things, language is never a neutral conduit of ideas but carries with it sets of root metaphors that shape how we see our world, and that, importantly, the sets of root metaphors that get carried along implicitly in the teaching and learning of English as a second language are ill-fit to make sense of and take action toward the present ecological crises (see also, for example, Bowers, 2006; Koteyko & Atanasova, 2017; Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2011). Bowers goes so far as to assert that, as Goulah (2017a) summarizes, “TESOL’s failure to problematize and resist ecological metaphors in English actually obfuscates and

Introduction

5

promulgates both biospheric degradation and the enclosure of environmental and cultural commons, and thereby linguistically colonizes ELLs” (p. 91). In a similar vein, MacPherson (2010) illustrates how introducing Western (that is to say, English language) discourse on forestry in a context of rural India prompts a cascade of discursive, cultural, and linguistic changes that shift a forest from a vital, integral, and communal place into a dangerous and otherwise inconvenient space that is only good for the commodities derived from it. It is a linguistic and discursive feat, as much as a physical one, to turn a tree into timber. Whether the spread of Western forestry or the dominance of a neoliberal framework for a globalized market, the work of English language teaching has been complicit, behind the scenes, or sometimes front-and-center in driving processes leading to the crises of sustainability. Such metaphors are present not just in utterances explicitly contextualized in the space and place of environment, or in sustainability and climate change discourse. They exist everywhere in our everyday conversations about all manner of topics. For example, in a recent interview about the Catholic Church’s will and role in addressing priests’ persistent sexual abuse of minors, Msgr. Stephen Rossetti of the Catholic University of America said the issue is “like moving a glacier … you’re talking about moving a glacier” (National Public Radio, 2019). Rosetti’s comparison to a glacier here—assuredly unwittingly—is one such example of ecological implications appearing in discourse about something unrelated to the environment. The dictionary defines “glacial” as “relating to or produced by glaciers or ice” and gives as an example: “If you say that something moves or changes at a glacial pace, you are emphasizing that it moves or changes very slowly”; however, Nixon (2018) contends that such use of root metaphors indicates that our language “is changing at a glacial pace—and shows how blind we are to the horrors of climate change.” In other words, with the rapid melting and erosion of the ice caps today, we must consider whether “glacial” now actually means slow or fast and how this informs the ways English is taught, learned, and understood. Exploration and explication of what Vygotsky called such “meaning” (znachenie) and “sense” (smysl) of language (Goulah, 2006; Vygotsky, 1997) is important, particularly as TESOL moves into the Anthropocene. A number of authors in this book, and others elsewhere (e.g., Bowers, 2006; Koteyko & Atanasova, 2017; Martusewicz et al., 2011), indicate that the root metaphors that have shaped and given meaning to the work of applied linguistics broadly, and English language teaching specifically, have worked to limit the emergence of a new ethic around language and language teaching that fully accounts for the entire biosphere. Most of our root metaphors for understanding

6

TESOL and Sustainability

language and language learning remain deeply embedded in neoliberal, commodified relationships, such as a “language-as-resource” orientation (Flores, 2018), that remain disconnected to any commons-based approaches to valuing and using language. Multiple chapters herein therefore seek to unsettle some of these dominant root metaphors and the underlying cultural perspectives and paradigms that shape our professional work and identities such that we can assume agency to the ecological crises (or “krinein,” see Kahn, 2010) that calls for decision and radical rethinking of the project of English language teaching.

Cultural Perspectives, Products, and Practices While M. Garrett Delavan acknowledges and joins calls for examining root metaphors, his chapter herein instead focuses mainly on TESOL professionals’ identity and aims to ready readers to respond to their role in engaging the climate crises. That is, it aims to encourage them to think of themselves as “discursive strategists” who can challenge traditional notions of our TESOL professional identity toward one that “will do something (different) about sustainability crises while adding English to the linguistic repertoires of multilingual students.” Delavan’s chapter is situated within the historical and cultural perspectives and paradigms that inform education and TESOL, and it endeavors to offer avenues for TESOL practitioners to engage in a democratic and fundamental reimagining of our work as the increasingly complex crises of sustainability require all of us who share this planet to rethink our relationships to the material bases of our lives, our relationships to others, and the ways in which we constitute a good life—no less an effort will ensure that we are capable of assuring a good life (or any life) for subsequent generations of teachers, learners, and all living beings. Delavan’s chapter joins a growing body of literature in language education that coheres and co-specifies the semiotic, linguistic, cultural, and identity dimensions of sustainability, such as treatments by Küchler (2017), Pennycook (2017), and Goulah (e.g., 2006, 2008, 2012, 2017b, 2018), whose work explores how philosophical and theoretical paradigms widely used outside the field of language and culture education, such as transformative learning, relational epistemologies, posthumanism, and Buddhist philosophy, among others, can provide a deeper and more articulate understanding of the nature  and role of TESOL and the TESOL community in biospheric sustainability and interdependence. Here, Delevan draws on notions of democracy

Introduction

7

and “the  religious” by John Dewey as a way to cast englishes (deliberately uncapitalized) as a form of commons for sustainability. Dewey’s ideas have of course been foundational to understanding democratic education, but they are also foundational to experiential and place-based learning, both of which are also taken up in this book. Thus, like many of the authors here, Delevan references historically and culturally dominant voices—often white male voices—that have shaped and impacted the field directly and indirectly while also citing, making connections to, and endeavoring to make way for voices, perspectives, and contexts long ignored and marginalized in the theorizing, research, and practice of language education. For some authors, references to such established intellectual foundations do not always represent uncritical approbation of these ideas so much as they provide a context and explanation for the reasons why issues of sustainability have failed to find purchase in our disciplinary discourse in the last decades. In other instances, authors offer an original reading of ideas foundational to education in general and language education in particular to advance new perspectives on English language teaching in the Anthropocene era. In this, Delavan and others remind us where the field of TESOL and sustainability has emerged from as we seek to identify and understand new paradigms and possibilities from a variety of diverse scholars and practitioners. The chapter by John Katunich directs our attention to the profoundly problematic relationship between English language teaching and the neoliberal economic model that has, in the postwar era, asserted the logic that the market should or must govern all social practices, including the teaching and learning of English (Esteva, 2010). As such, it has become largely unremarkable in work of English language teaching to treat “language-as-resource” (Flores, 2018), which has led directly and indirectly to the commodification of language and language teaching, and the mindset of “growthism” (Halliday, 2003) that has become deeply embedded in English language teaching. Whereas Delevan draws on Deweyan thought in proposing englishes as commons, Katunich draws on the social critique of historian and public intellectual Ivan Illich in proposing a turn in the field of TESOL toward reclaiming “language-as-commons,” in which access to English as a tool for any individual actor does not come at the cost of enclosure of the linguistic commons. Such enclosure includes the radical monopoly that school and state institutions exercise over language learning, the stigmatization of vernacular (which is to say home-based and noncapitalized) language, and the historical suppression of translingual practice in English language teaching and learning. The chapter suggests that to treat language fundamentally as a

8

TESOL and Sustainability

form of commons, like our air and water, demands rethinking of deeply held assumptions of English as a social or economic need to be satisfied. Sandra Kouritzin’s chapter also examines emerging cultural perspectives and paradigms in understanding TESOL in the current moment. Specifically, she considers the role of the “post-truth” turn in TESOL. Post-truth is informed by postmodernism and post-positivism (McIntyre, 2018) and, herein, Kouritzin argues that as it is “fueled by the communications revolution and decay of democracy (Keane, 2018), post-truth is rapidly disseminated through forms of social media in which no vetting or peer review is required to reach a wide audience.” She asserts this has major implications for our understanding and articulation of the climate catastrophe and how we engage it relative to TESOL. For Kouritzin, post-truth around climate change and climate change discourse demands that we consider how to help students “weigh and evaluate competing truth claims” as they “must deconstruct information in the dominant language even while they are learning it.” She concludes that as TESOL educators, “our goal in a post-truth paradigm must be to engage post-truth pedagogy, that is, not merely critical literacy, but historically-informed analyses that combat posttruth posturing while deliberately countering a cynical, postmodern, moral relativism that tolerates all views” around climate change and sustainability. It is such a reimaging of cultural perspectives by Delavan, Katunich, and Kouritzin that can help to reframe the political, onto-epistemological, and axiological foundations of sustainability in the field of TESOL.

Climate Change and Place as TESOL Curriculum and Pedagogy The project of sustainability and TESOL warrants that we grapple with a climatically changing world and the impact this has not only on English learners and the places they learn, but also on curriculum and pedagogy. It also requires that we reassess how the foundations of TESOL are grounded—in terms of conceptual grounding but also the literal grounding on the physical places upon which our practice plays out. Several authors herein critically examine the intersection of climate, English curriculum, and the places (many of which do not look like traditional classrooms with four walls) in who teaches and in what, how, and why to teach in the present Anthropocene era. Climate change in particular bodes to fundamentally reshape the contours of human migration in coming decades, for which the implications are profound,

Introduction

9

both for human society and the work of English language teaching. By some counts, climate-driven displacement has affected over 22 million in the past decade alone, and the United Nations projects 200 million climate refugees by 2050 (Wallace-Wells, 2019). As an example, Wallace-Wells clarifies that beginning in 2011 “about one million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought—and in a very real sense, much of the ‘populist movement’ the entire West is passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of those migrants” (2019, p. 7).2 Likewise, Miller (2017) shows that the growing number of similarly politicized Latin American immigrants entering the United States from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and elsewhere come largely from the climate-driven “Dry Corridor.” Indeed, the rising number of record-breaking—“apocalyptic”— hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, floods, and extreme heatwaves around the world is displacing people domestically and internationally with growing frequency and severity. In many cases, these people are already the world’s most marginalized and under-resourced. Acknowledging that increasingly the impacts of climate change and other kinds of environmental degradation fall hardest on those least capable of changing the material conditions of that threat, it becomes clear that questions of sustainability in the field of TESOL are closely linked to issues of race- and class-based social injustice and the role of advocacy for learners that has been taking a more central role in the disciplinary identity of TESOL. Jason Goulah (2010, 2012) and others have illustrated that the growing reality of climate displacement acts as a driver both of increasing the numbers of English learners and of a new and often traumatic identity dimension the field of TESOL must now consider. In his chapter here, Goulah’s work in climate migration and language education comes into direct contact with his ongoing research on climate change as curriculum and pedagogy and the development of English learners’ climate literacies, language acquisition, and “eco-ethical-consciousness” (Goulah, 2017a, 2019). Specifically, he examines standards-based, high school ESL curricular initiatives related to climate migration and their pedagogical enactment in an introductory ESL class of native Spanish- and Chinese-speaking learners. One of the ESL teachers tasked with coauthoring and field-testing the curriculum was at first uninterested in the topic of climate change and questioned whether her students could handle the intellectual and linguistic rigor it demands. Then she learned that one of her newly arrived students had just been displaced by Hurricanes Irma and María, whose devastation left more than 3,000 Puerto Ricans dead and nearly half the population without drinking water, food, power, or access to medicines and other

10

TESOL and Sustainability

life-saving resources. Goulah’s critical instrumental case study indicates that this once-apprehensive ESL teacher was successful in leading her English learners in standards-based language acquisition, accretion of content knowledge, and literacies consumption and production around issues of climate change and climate science. Moreover, drawing on the extensive but comparatively less-referenced work on socio-ecological selfhood by Japanese educators and Buddhist philosophers, Daisaku Ikeda and Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, Goulah’s chapter provides an interdisciplinary inquiry aimed at fostering both global citizenship (social sciences) and scientific literacy (physical sciences) and demonstrates that global climate change and ecological selfhood require these cross-disciplinary inquiry spaces that conventional curricula do not permit. As a self-identified “global” field to which global flows of information and people have been a central consideration, English language teaching has largely failed to account for place. Any effort to enact a more sustainable TESOL must ground and connect the work of English language to lived, local, and sustainable places. The relevance of place and space in TESOL is also examined herein by Kevin Eyraud, who philosophically, methodologically, and empirically examines what, apart from language, lessons should look like if English for Academic Purposes at the university level is to incorporate a socially, economically, and ecologically critical curriculum. Couched in place-based ecopedagogy and Goulah’s (2017a) position that such lessons should “ask students to awaken to the way they live and communicate in places with others” (emphasis added, p. 95), Eyraud examines how a place-based ecopedagogy helps English learners identify and either take up or engage with Discourse models of sustainability and ecological selfhood, and how the pedagogy supports students’ English language development. Eyraud finds that “ultimately, the study provides a window into the compelling pedagogical benefits of such an approach, not only for language learning and teaching but also for building local knowledge, strengthening connections between both people and place, and complexifying awareness of the more-than-human world.” Eyraud’s chapter also illustrates, if implicitly, that as ESL and EAP students are themselves often dis-placed by their very nature, it is important to reconnect them to place to support their reengagement with a sense of connection to the Earth (see Goulah, 2012). Climate change and place, and the framing of these in English language interactions between Western tourists and tourism workers in the Himalayas, play a central role in Bal Krishna Sharma’s chapter, as he examines root metaphors and the limiting perspectives that inform how climate change is discussed in these place-based informal learning contexts. Through his research, Sharma presents

Introduction

11

a case of an alternative perspective on human beings’ relationship with the environment and all life and living as demonstrated in various communicative activities and intercultural encounters between Western tourists and local Himalayan tourism workers on topics of climate change and human–nature relationships. He outlines the implications of the language of such encounters for the field of TESOL and sustainability, including, on one hand, that it offers increased levels of awareness about human–environment relationships among language teachers and learners and, on the other, that it demonstrates that language teachers need not sacrifice traditional goals of vocabulary, language skills, and communication strategies when focusing on environmental sustainability. Similarly, in their chapter Cori Jakubiak and Alan Hastings explore the root metaphors and the related languaging processes inherent in promotional literature for the work of English language voluntourism in rural Global South communities. Participants in English language voluntourism programs are not required to have language teaching backgrounds or experience in TESOL, which perpetuates the native speaker fallacy. More, they find that neoliberal ideologies of progress, individualism, and success underpin the root metaphors and languaging processes on which these English language instructional voluntourism programs are based, and that they effectuate unsustainable enclosure and “reify individualist, consumerist ideologies and practices that degrade the health and integrity of shared resources” that rural inhabitants rely upon for their social and material welfare. Through their study, Jakubiak and Hastings also engage the role of TESOL in rural communities—like those of Ghana, Thailand, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Tanzania where ELT-voluntourism programs thrive—and examine how TESOL positions itself and is positioned in rural and urban environments in ELT-focused voluntourism and beyond. They disrupt historical framings of “rural spaces and schools as deficient and in need of remediation” and, simultaneously, contribute to the growing scholarship in rural education that “focuses specifically on place-based, or place-conscious, education … [as] a key feature of conversations in eco-justice.” The final chapter in this collection, a cautionary coda by Satoru Nakagawa, poses the serious and existential question to practitioners in TESOL: whether the work of teaching English, a language of colonization and dominance, of industrialization and “progress,” is fundamentally incapable of relating to the indigenous worldviews and languages with which English shares the world. Drawing on his own place-based knowledges and experiences as a member and descendant of the Amami people from the island of Tokunoshima, Nakagawa calls out the TESOL field as having failed to acknowledge indigenous ways

12

TESOL and Sustainability

of knowing and indigenous languages, let alone the profound harm it has consciously or unconsciously perpetrated on those languages and cultures. “Making connections between the human body, the human mind and spirituality, and the ecological impact of language shift or death in global Indigenous communities,” Nakagawa examines how communities like his learn and engage with English. He appeals to readers to reflect on what “my Shimaguchi and shiman-chu worldview represent, and what the world will lose if just my one language, my one ideology, my one truth, is lost …, supplanted by the worldview, ideology, and truth of English.” In this, Nakagawa invites new ways of organizing professional and disciplinary discourse that allows for indigenous words and worlds to be genuinely heard and valued. While the title of this collection is Sustainability and TESOL, taken together the chapters in this book maintain that it is incumbent upon those of us working in the field to create a new discursive space for Sustainability in TESOL, such as to make sustainability a core and integral consideration in our work. Such a radical turn is not entirely novel in the field of TESOL and in some ways replays a similar turn the field effectuated over the last two decades toward embracing race, ethnicity, and identity as integral elements of our professional practice (Canagarajah, 2016). This collection, then, marks a new dialogue on opportunities and responsibilities presented to English language teachers and teacher educators to reorient professional practice in a way that drives cultural change and offers alternate conceptualizations of language, language learning, language teaching, language teacher education, and language education research. In addition, this volume represents a step toward a broader goal of bringing sustainability, place, ecology, and climate into the professional discourse, by challenging and supplanting some of the root metaphors, perspectives, paradigms, pedagogies, and curriculum that have, up to this point, framed the work of English language teaching as disconnected from the physical world of a changing climate, limitless economic growth, and the shadow of armed conflict. To that end, this volume offers a collection of new perspectives on professional practice that are more responsive to the realities of teaching and learning in the Anthropocene.

Notes 1

The full text of the 1984 TESOL Member Resolution on the Reduction of Nuclear Weapons (1984) reads: Whereas an alarming international political climate exists that make accidental or intentional nuclear war an increasing possibility;

Introduction

13

Whereas any way in the world could escalate to a nuclear conflict; Whereas the rights of life and liberty cannot be preserved in a nuclear war; Whereas the arms race is draining the economic and moral strength of the entire world; Whereas there are better possible futures for ourselves and our children than massive arms expenditures or nuclear holocaust; Whereas an international nuclear freeze has gained widespread public support;



Therefore Be it Resolved that the Executive Director of TESOL be directed to write a letter addressed to the Heads of State of all those countries who are known to have a nuclear capability, with a copy to the Secretary General of the United Nations, strongly urging them, if they have not already done so, to take the following, immediate steps to freeze and reduce the arms race, promote international security, and develop ways to resolve conflict without war; 1. form international communications centers to assure communications during international crises; 2. pledge that they will not be the first to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances; 3. halt the funding of all nuclear weapons systems with the first strike capability; and 4. work constructively to achieve a worldwide, verifiable freeze followed by immediate reductions of nuclear weapons. 1984 TESOL Convention Houston, Texas USA 2 We thank and agree with one reviewer who pointed out the troubling nature of “unleashed” in this sentence. Such usage makes refugees to be—by analogy—dogs, and framing it in the passive voice obscures who it was that “unleashed” them. In addition, the reviewer rightly indicated that such usage also assumes that refugees are a problem, which is not necessarily the case.

References American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. (2015). World-readiness standards for learning languages (4th ed.). Alexandria, VA: Author. Bakalar, N. (2015, December 1). 3.2 millimeters: A troubling rise in sea level. New York Times. D6 Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/01/science/3-2millimeters-a-troubling-rise-in-sea-level.html. Bowers, C. A. (2006). Revitalizing the commons: Cultural and educational sites of resistance and affirmation. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Bowers, C. A. (2012). The way forward: Educational reforms that focus on the cultural commons and the linguistic roots of the ecological/cultural crises. Eugene, OR: EcoJustice Press, LLC.

14

TESOL and Sustainability

Canagarajah, S. (2016). TESOL as a professional community: A half-century of pedagogy, research, and theory. TESOL Quarterly, 50(1), 7–41. Cronin, M. (2016). Eco-translation: Translation and ecology in the age of the Anthropocene. London: Routledge. Do Couto, H. H. (2014). Ecological approaches in linguistics: A historical overview. Language Sciences, 41, 122–128. Esteva, G. (2010). Development. In W. Sachs (Ed.), The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power (pp. 1–23). London: Zed Books. Fill, A. F., & Penz, H. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge handbook of ecolinguistics. New York: Routledge. Flores, N. (2013). The unexamined relationship between neoliberalism and plurilingualism: A cautionary tale. TESOL Quarterly, 47(3), 500–520. Flores, N. (2018). From language-as-resource to language-as-struggle: Resisting the Coke-ification of bilingual education. In M. C. Flubacher & A. Del Percio (Eds.), Language, education, and neoliberalism: Critical sociolinguistic studies (pp. 62–81). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Fløttum, K. (Ed.). (2017). The role of language in the climate change debate. New York: Routledge. Gillis, J. (2012, March 2). Pace of ocean acidification has no parallel in 300 million years. New York Times. Retrieved from: https://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/ pace-of-ocean-acidification-has-no-parallel-in-300-million-years-paper-finds/. Goulah, J. (2006). Transformative second and foreign language learning for the 21st century. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal, 3(4), 201–221. Goulah, J. (2008). Transformative world language learning: An approach for environmental and cultural sustainability and economic and political security. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 4(1), 6–23. Goulah, J. (2009a). Considering Tsunesaburo Makiguchi and Lev Vygotsky in the concept of space. Soka kyoiku [Soka Education], 2, 84–92. Goulah, J. (2009b). Tsunesaburo Makiguchi and Mikhail Bakhtin in dialogue: Pedagogy for ecological selfhood and spatial literacy. Asian-Pacific Journal of Education, 29(2), 265–279. Goulah, J. (2010). Conceptualizing environmental refugees in education: A transformative language learning framework. Diaspora, Minority, and Indigenous Education: An International Journal, 4(3), 192–207. Goulah, J. (2012). Environmental displacement, English learners, identity and value creation: Considering Daisaku Ikeda in the east-west ecology of education. In J. Lin & R. Oxford (Eds.), Transformative eco-education for human and planetary survival (pp. 41–58). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Goulah, J. (2017a). Climate change and TESOL: Language, literacies, and the creation of eco-ethical consciousness. TESOL Quarterly, 51(1), 90–114. doi: 10.1002/tesq.277.

Introduction

15

Goulah, J. (2017b). Take two: “transformative world language learning: An approach for environmental and cultural sustainability and economic and political security.” Journal of Language and Literacy Education. http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/take-2/. Goulah, J. (2018). Religion, “the religious,” and language education into the Anthropocene: A response to Huamei Han’s “studying religion and language teaching and learning: Building a sub-field.” The Multilingual Journal, 102(2), 451–455. Goulah, J. (2019). Language education into the Anthropocene: Possibilities and perspectives from Soka humanism at the posthumanist turn. Professing Education, 17(1&2), 6–16. Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3–12. Gruenewald, D. A., & Smith, G. A. (Eds.). (2014). Place-based education in the global age: Local diversity. London: Routledge. Halliday, M. (2003). On language and linguistics: Volume 3. London: Continuum. Haugen, E. (1972). The ecology of language. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. IPCC. (2013). Climate change 2013: The physical science basis. Retrieved from: https:// www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/. Kahn, R. (2010). Critical pedagogy, ecoliteracy, & planetary crisis: The ecopedagogy movement. New York: Peter Lang. Kahn, B. (2016a). Global coral bleaching continues for a record third year. Climate Central. Retrieved from: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/coral-bleachingrecord-third-year-20467. Kahn, B. (2016b). Ice cap images show the arctic’s rapid change. Climate Central. Retrieved from: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/ice-caps-climate-change-20194. Katunich, J., Goulah, J., Badenhorst, P., & Smoicic, E. (2017, March 18–21). Considering the role of applied linguistics in the sustainability crisis, symposium session at the annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics. Portland, OR. Koteyko, N., & Atanasova, D. (2017). Metaphor and the representation of scientific issues: Climate change in print and online media. In E. Semino & Z. Dmjén (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of metaphor and language (pp. 296–308). London: Routledge. Küchler, U. (2017). Signs, images, and narratives: Climate change across languages and cultures. In S. Siperstein, S. Hall, & S. LeMenager (Eds.), Teaching climate change in the humanities (pp. 153–160). London and New York: Routledge. MacPherson, S. (2003). TESOL for biolinguistic sustainability: The ecology of English as a lingua mundi. TESL Canada Journal, 20(2), 1–22. MacPherson, S. (2010). Education and sustainability: Learning across the diaspora, indigenous, and minority divide. London: Routledge. Maffi, L. (Ed.). (2001). On biocultural diversity: Linking language, knowledge, and the environment. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press.

16

TESOL and Sustainability

Martusewicz, R. A., Edmundson, J., & Lupinacci, J. (2011). EcoJustice education: Toward diverse, democratic, and sustainable communities. New York: Routledge. McIntyre, L. (2018). Post-truth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Miller, T. (2017). Storming the wall: Climate change, migration, and homeland security. San Francisco, CA: City Lights. National Public Radio. (2019, February 23). Vatican sex abuse summit continues. Weekend Edition. Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/23/697297551/ vatican-sex-abuse-summit-continues. Nettle, D., & Romaine, S. (2000). Vanishing voices: The extinction of the world’s languages. New York: Oxford University Press. Nixon, R. (2018, April 2). Slang is changing at a glacial pace—and shows how blind we are to the horrors of climate change. Quartz. Retrieved from: https:// qz.com/1242923/. Orr, D. (1992). Ecological literacy: Education and the transition to a postmodern world. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Pennycook, A. (2016). Posthumanist applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 1–18: doi: 10.1093/applin/amw016. Pennycook, A. (2017). Posthumanist applied linguistics. London: Routledge. Revkin, A. (2016). As warnings build, is there a “spiral of silence” on climate change? Retrieved from: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/as-warnings-build -is-there-a-spiral-of-silence-on-climate-change. Rosenthal, E. (2017, November 17). U.N. report describes risks of inaction on climate change. New York Times. A1. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/ science/earth/17climate.html. Steffensen, S. V., & Fill, A. (2014). Ecolinguistics: The state of the art and future horizons. Language Sciences, 41, 6–25. Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. New York: Routledge. Sustainable Development Goals. (2015). Retrieved from: https://sustainabledevelopment. un.org/sdgs. TESOL. (1984). TESOL member resolution on the reduction of nuclear weapons. Retrieved from: https://www.tesol.org/advance-the-field/tesol-member-resolutions/ member-resolutions/tesol-member-resolution-on-the-reduction-of-nuclearweapons-1984. Vygotsky, L. (1997). Thought and language (Rev. ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wallace-Wells, D. (2019). The uninhabitable earth: Live after warming. New York: Tim Duggan Books.

Part One

Foundations for Sustainability in TESOL: Cultural Perspectives, Products, and Practices

18

1

Earth Democracy as Empowerment for TESOL Students and Educators: Though the Crisis Speaks English, englishes Can Become a Commons Language of Sustainability M. Garrett Delavan

California State University, San Marcos

Introduction Berta Cáceres received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for her decades of work in a grassroots organization in her Lenca indigenous community in Honduras that fought against illegal logging, proposed dams to power expanded mining, and land privatization resulting in displacement of indigenous communities (Goldman Prize, 2018). In her acceptance speech, she declared in Spanish “Our Mother Earth—militarized, fenced-in, poisoned, a place where basic rights are systematically violated—demands that we take action. Let us build societies that are able to coexist in a [just,]1 dignified way that protects life.” She concluded by dedicating the prize to, among others, “las y los mártires de la defensa de los bienes de la naturaleza,” the female and male martyrs of the defense of the bounty of the earth (Cáceres, 2015). A year later, she herself was assassinated. Honduras is one of the countries with increasing levels of emigration to the United States—and its TESOL classrooms—which Miller (2017) argues is at least partly a result of climate change and the ever-expanding monoculture of palm oil plantations. If you talk to TESOL professionals about the ideas in this book, it is likely that many will respond with something to the effect of: “What does ecological sustainability have to do with me professionally? Why can’t I just let the science teachers handle that?” This chapter aims to ready readers to counter such responses and to encourage readers to think of themselves as discursive

20

TESOL and Sustainability

strategists. I hope to document and stimulate conversation on persuasive reasons—framed in accessible, democratized terms—to disrupt traditional notions of our TESOL professional identity toward one that will do something (different) about sustainability crises while adding English to the linguistic repertoires of multilingual students. This chapter is a recipe book of possibilities for persuasion; it experiments with several new terms and combinations of concepts, hoping in the process to stimulate conversations that can go into more depth than space allows here. In the spirit of Fairclough’s (2010) fourth stage of critical discourse analysis (“identify possible ways past the obstacles” to “addressing the social wrong” [p. 235]) and what some have called positive discourse analysis (Macgilchrist, 2007; Martin & Rose, 2003), I ask readers to take stock of the discursive strategies that could most effectively impress the English–sustainability link upon the maximum number of professionals who educate English language learners. While I am in favor of the deeper root-metaphor transformations away from anthropocentric and Eurocentric discourse and thought that Bowers (2003) and others have called for, I choose to draw attention to discourse in a way that sees even small movements in thinking as potentially laying the groundwork for fuller transformation in due time. I argue there are multiple discursive possibilities that may prove more accessible and effective in persuading the biggest possible tent of TESOL educators to see language instruction as a logical forum for counteracting anthropocentrism and anti-posteritism, that is, discrimination against future generations. This chapter sees discourse as a strategic resource for social change (Hardy, Palmer & Phillips, 2000), and it sees democracy as a key strategic discourse that may motivate teachers to address environmental sustainability in their teaching. Heeding Cáceres’s call that we “build societies that are able to coexist,” the chapter’s vision for a focus on environmental sustainability that does not lose sight of other, more strictly human justice concerns is grounded in Vandana Shiva’s (2016) theory of Earth democracy, which arises out of her activism in India opposing corporate globalization and affirming local cultures of sustainability. Recognizing the strategic value of educators’ familiarity with John Dewey’s (1927/2012) early (although flawed) advocacy for democratic public education, this chapter seeks to recover the pragmatist, Deweyan ideal of the great community, a public that is called into being by a need to confront shared problems with the best available evidence. I follow Goulah’s (2018) use of Dewey’s concept of “the religious” as key to articulating this ethical vision. I side with Dewey and others in questioning the secular–sacred binary, in asserting that

Earth Democracy as Empowerment

21

(human) nature is such that a commitment to protect and sustain nature-bound communities great and small is always inherently religious—indeed, an act of a common faith (Dewey, 1934/2013; Hickman, 2009). Shiva (2016) reminds us that religious institutions and religious discourse do not always uphold this ethic, however. She calls for life-embracing religious diversity rather than destructive or negative fundamentalisms that lead us to ignore evidence of what the most ethical choices actually are. After a deeper foray into this theoretical perspective, the chapter will have two main stages. I start by assessing discourses the literature has already offered—based on their democratic potential to unite publics around shared problems (Dewey, 1927/2012)—first discourses applicable to educators in general then discourses for persuading TESOL educators in particular. I finish by suggesting three further possibilities missing from this list of discourses for  persuading colleagues who continue to see their work as apolitical or unrelated to any commitments to sustainability they may express elsewhere: (a)  a narrative of the emerging environmental justice research demonstrating that minoritized language communities in the United States are exposed to more pollution, (b) a historical narrative that dramatizes the rise of the Anthropocene villainy that is to be met with justice, and (c) a protagonizing (heroizing) narrative that bridges students’ English-speaking identities with their other identities in empowering and culturally sustaining ways.

Theoretical Perspective Discourse as a Strategic Resource Benjamin Lee Whorf was the first popularizer of the findings of the new science of linguistics (Carroll, 1956). His research in the 1930s compared European and indigenous American languages grammatically, and he is widely credited with being the first social scientist to begin to assert that possibilities for thought are deeply shaped by the structure of one’s language and the necessarily cultural concepts embedded in its lexicon. Whorf ’s claims such as that “economic behavior is conditioned by culture, not by mechanistic reactions” (quoted in Carroll, 1956, p. 21) heralded a linguistic turn— or cultural turn—in the social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century toward considerations of how power is exerted through language and how explanations for human behavior must ultimately come down largely to

22

TESOL and Sustainability

culture, which is inherently diverse and arbitrary. Historian Michel Foucault (1995) was a key figure in this cultural turn and he focused in on the concept of discourse. He argued that the ways in which professions like medicine and education came to articulate and apply knowledge in the 1700s began to exert a more subtle form of control over populations than ruling classes had formerly been capable of. The approaches of Norman Fairclough (2010) and James Paul Gee (2014) have built on Foucault and informed much of the critical analysis of discourse in education. Fairclough defines discourses as ways of construing the world through language and other forms of semiosis (systems of meaning) that make the material world socially real, aligning it with the identity positions of speakers and reinforcing particular power arrangements. He demonstrates, for example, how discourse has operated in the increasing marketization of higher education. Gee sees discourses similarly, but emphasizes that they are principally ways of performing particular identity positions and thus belonging to particular discourse communities. Lewis, Enciso, and Moje (2007) build on this conversation by emphasizing the agency that individuals such as students from marginalized communities in the United States employ in navigating among these overlapping discourse communities and identity positions. Hardy and colleagues (2000) review this same literature on discourse theory to lay out a mechanism of “discourse as a strategic resource” for individuals in exerting some agency—within numerous constraints—to change organizations such as schools. They argue that “by intervening in these processes of discursive production, individual actors hope to achieve ‘real’ political effects” (p. 1235). In essence, they theorize the minute steps by which individuals summon available discursive resources, target them to be recognizable for their audience, and occasionally make tangible social changes insofar as “concepts are successfully attached to relations and/or material referents and create specific objects in the eyes of other actors”; change can occur because “new subject positions [identities from which to know or speak] and practices” become possible and because over time “the accumulation of individual statements and practices influences the context for future discursive activities as prevailing discourses are contested, displaced, transformed, modified or reinforced” (p. 1236). It is in this same spirit of teacher as discursive change agent that Martusewicz, Edmundson, and Lupinacci (2014), in their excellent textbook, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse, Democratic, and Sustainable Communities, demonstrate that ecojustice education is about language and metaphor, about reframing issues

Earth Democracy as Empowerment

23

by recombining discourses in order to catalyze differences in students’ thinking about the privileging of (certain) humans and the privileging of the current generation (anti-posteritism). Yet true sociocultural transformation through discursive persuasion would not be possible if discourse were confined to the logic of the head and did not also include the feeling of the gut. Following Goulah (2018), I argue for seeing “humanity’s deep interiority, or the sense of spirituality and interconnectedness” (p. 452) as a way to conceive what really commits us to or lets us feel sustainability’s urgent call rather than just know it is something we ought to eventually get around to. The discursive strategies that we might effectively use to move one another toward sustainability, however, might be various: religious/spiritual discourse (whether it be general or specific to a tradition like Buddhism or progressive Christianity), climate science discourse, economics discourse, curriculum standards discourse, or whatever discourse gets the audience moving away from accepting the unsustainable status quo as a fait accompli. Goulah draws on Daisaku Ikeda’s concept of religious sentiment and Dewey’s concept of the religious as a means of capturing this aspect of human experience and discourse. Although Dewey’s is often associated with an embrace of evidence-based, democratic, secular public engagement, he combined this with a critique of atheism in favor of “natural piety” (p. 49). In a series of lectures published as A Common Faith, Dewey (1934/2013) acknowledged “the ties binding [hu]man[s] to nature that poets have always celebrated” and argued that such a religious attitude “needs the sense of a connection of [hu]man[s], in the way of both dependence and support, with the enveloping world that the imagination feels is a universe” (p. 49). Dewey theorizes that religiosity (a) protects humans “from a sense of isolation and from consequent despair or defiance” against a universe seen as cruel or other and (b) “support[s] our idea of good as an end to be striven for” (p. 49). In essence, then, making the ethical/communal choice is always religious—felt in the gut rather than merely thought in the head—and especially so when it involves that which is beyond the merely human and other expressions of the parts of nature/humanity most akin to ourselves. Even when an evidentiary process, ethics that are gut-felt and not merely head-thought become religion in a fuller sense than when religious discourses are hijacked or perverted by reactionary leaders to justify particular power structures or obscure evidence that is unflattering to those power structures. The power structures that are synonymous with the unsustainable economic systemization of the last half millennium are an obvious example.

24

TESOL and Sustainability

Earth Democracy That Strategically Recovers Dewey’s Great Community Martusewicz and colleagues (2014) argue that Shiva’s (2016) concept of Earth democracy is the most robust view of democracy with which to move toward social justice in the Anthropocene, which we can take to have begun at least as far back as the coal-driven Industrial Revolution in Northern England and the concomitant enclosures or privatization of common lands.2 Shiva’s Earth democracy is a powerful articulation of a unified but pluralist vision for local, sustainable communities that cooperate worldwide to resist the agenda of corporate globalization’s new enclosures and its patriarchal commoditization and destruction of the commons. Earth democracy centers on the production of food by small-scale farmers, who Shiva argues are able to produce more per acre as well as employ and feed more people more equitably in the process. Earth democracy rejects the chemical and factory model of the so-called Green Revolution that accompanied the neocolonial exploitation of the Global South by the Global North as well as rejecting the patriarchal fundamentalisms that have sometimes sprung up in reaction to it. Yet Martusewicz and colleagues conspicuously choose not to draw on Dewey’s well-known articulation of democracy in and through public education. This is probably because Dewey has been critiqued by ecojustice scholars for working from harmful root metaphors of Eurocentric, anti-indigenous progress and growth (Bowers, 2003) and racist applications of his theories of education for social justice that never questioned the White supremacy and colonialism of the Jim Crow era in which he lived (Margonis, 2011). Despite these apt critiques, the historical earliness of Dewey’s thought continues to help explain these limitations as well as to keep a spot for him in the canon of early heroes of critical approaches to education (Colonna & Nix-Stevenson, 2015) and of poststructural thought ahead of its time (Pierce, 2012). Following Margonis (2011), I argue we can “de-couple Dewey’s [and others’] visionary pedagogies from the [problematic] language that limits their pluralism” (p. 436). At the turn of the twentieth century, Dewey began to use the concept of democracy as an ideal form of social organization based on public deliberation over the best available evidence rather than dogmatic assertions of truth. At the core of his vision is a call for student-centered, inquiry-based, democratic pedagogy to build a problem-solving public of citizen-scientists who could more intelligently consider their collective habits. He argued that a great community could form among disparate social groups inasmuch as they were able to see that their common problems united them as one public. Dewey is

Earth Democracy as Empowerment

25

worth reaching back to for informing Earth democracy because he articulated a vision for democratically confronting the problems of the industrial age, a proto-environmentalism where individual humans are seen as part of a broader biological and ethical world. In a key text, The Public and Its Problems, Dewey (1927/2012) critiques humanity’s enormously enlarged control of physical energies without any corresponding ability to control [themselves and their] own affairs … generating enslavement of men, women and children in factories in which they are animated machines to tend inanimate machines. It has maintained sordid slums, flurried and discontented careers, grinding poverty and luxurious wealth, brutal exploitation of nature and man in times of peace and high explosives and noxious gases in times of war. (p. 175)

After the Second World War, of course, this clear line between peacetime and war became increasingly blurred: so-called peace through prosperity now relies on constant explosions and noxious gases. We have already seen how Dewey (1934/2013) asserted that poets have always celebrated an obvious continuity between humans and nature. In describing Dewey’s proto-environmentalism, Reid and Taylor (2003) write of “Dewey’s radically ecological understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of experience” (p. 79) that is visible in statements of Dewey’s like this one: “‘Whenever the bond that binds the living creature to his environment is broken, there is nothing that holds together the various factors and phases of the self ’” (p. 83). Dewey saw his concepts of social cohesion as analogous to the interdependence of organism and environment in a way that went beyond mere metaphor. Tarrant and Thiele (2016) quote this excerpt of Dewey’s ecological or systems thinking: “‘In actual experience, there is never any such isolated singular object or event; an object or event is always a special part, phase, or aspect, of an environing experienced world—a situation’” (p. 57). They emphasize that Dewey’s protoenvironmentalism is visible in his theories of adapting to the new conditions of the industrial economy as an organism does in changing environmental conditions, which they argue anticipates the current school of thought advocating “adaptive co-management” of imperiled natural resources (p. 60). Scholars and laypeople alike often use the strategy of grounding and legitimizing their position in the longest and most established tradition available. In this vein, I argue we can strategically carry forward a Deweyan conception of grassroots democracy, great community, or global public that is deeply biological and nature-defending yet also refreshingly evidence-based to inform our era of disinformation campaigns on climate change. Written at the inception of the public

26

TESOL and Sustainability

relations and advertising industries, the Public and Its Problems was a treatise written to defend the idea of a democracy by all rather than by a technocracy of experts. Dewey (1927/2012) calls in essence for a view of discourse as a strategic resource for democracy: “The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public … the freeing and perfecting of the processes of inquiry and dissemination of their conclusions” (p. 208). This critique of the tyranny of experts in some ways presages Foucault’s critique of the tyranny of the professions. I argue that Dewey and Shiva pair well. Dewey was a voice for undoing factory schooling since 1897 (during the Industrial Revolution). Shiva was a voice for undoing neocolonial factory farming in 1982 (during the Chemical Revolution). The molar–molecular distinction is instructive in understanding these two phases of what might be called the Unsustainability Revolution. Molar refers to that which is seen in macroscopic chunks while molecular refers to that which is seen as composed of its many constituent particles. Dewey critiques the molar phase of the Unsustainability Revolution, the coal-fired factory model, and the burning of fossil fuels by the colonial powers. Shiva critiques the neocolonial, molecular phase which added on the conversion of petroleum into a vast array of chemicals and plastics over and above the continued burning of petroleum for mere propulsion. It added the tearing up of the molar tracks to make way for the molecular highways; it brought the carrying of the middle class and the sprawling of the suburb, and, of course, nuclear bombs, energy, and waste. Indeed, Shiva’s (2016) Earth democracy includes the concept of biopiracy—the patenting and thus privatization of DNA that nature has in fact invented—in its critique of this molecular capitalist revolution. We will return shortly to these molar and molecular phases of unsustainability. In sum, democracy is a discourse that may motivate teachers to address sustainability crises in their teaching despite it not being their purported specialty. In the following section, we will turn to other such persuasive discourses in circulation, first those that apply to all teachers and next those that apply to TESOL professionals in particular.

Persuasive Discourses in Circulation Persuading Educators in General Any educator who has ever or will ever teach in English to students who are significantly less proficient in that language than in their other languages could

Earth Democracy as Empowerment

27

and should consider themselves a TESOL professional. Yet knowing that many will not self-identify as such, the three discourses in this section are framed broadly enough that they could be used with such TESOL professionals in denial of their TESOL-ness. Sustainability questions can highlight other social justice issues teachers may already address. Sustainability can be part of a social justice or human rights narrative already welcome in many curricula, especially if the inequitable effects on different social groups are emphasized. Martusewicz and colleagues (2014) and Shiva (2016) are excellent examples of this discursive pairing. Unconvinced teachers could be informed that in 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had already connected his theretofore focus on White supremacy to other aspects of social justice—economic, military, and even hints of environmental—to begin to stir interest in a broad agenda for social transformation that would unite multiple constituencies. His assassination just one year later cut this work short. In his Massey Lecture in Canada that year, King (2008) spoke of African Americans being confined to cities “gasping in polluted air and enduring contaminated water” (p. 172). In his Christmas Sermon on Peace that year, he reworked his theme of “inescapable network of mutuality,” which dated back at least to his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, into an explicitly ecological perspective of global sustainability: “All life is interrelated” (p. 211). Hearing such examples of the long tradition of collaboration between environmental activism and social justice activism in the United States— from Robert Bullard, founding scholar of environmental racism, to Aurora Castillo, “La Doña” of East Los Angeles, to the 2016 Standing Rock protests against unsustainable pipelines—might help tear down the metaphorical border wall where sustainability gets set to one side as if a purely scientific concern or a luxury for white middle-class contemplation. Nixon (2011) documents examples of a growing “environmentalism of the poor” in the Global South that, while still wary of “full-stomach” versions of environmentalism that are neocolonial or “antihuman” (p. 5), are firmly rooted in a desire for sustainable livelihoods rather than simply access to the Global North’s unsustainable level of consumption. Moore (2015) argues that an honest critique of capitalism or economic inequality should acknowledge how considerations of sustainability were always already part of capitalism and modernity. To take an economically progressive position without taking environmental sustainability into account is to misread history. Urgency and its denial. The urgency of the climate crisis in particular demands a politics of transformation rather than mere access. Unless TESOL

28

TESOL and Sustainability

educators work to address sustainability, the goals of raising educational or social access via TESOL or exposing TESOL students to social justice content without an ecological component will ultimately amount to “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” (Dobson & Tomkinson, 2012, p. 271). The urgency is heightened by the high-profile and well-funded discourses that cast doubt on the consensus among climate scientists. Goulah (2017) draws on evidence that this discourse of climate change denial among the US population is often religious or spiritual in its appeal. This epitomizes the value of Dewey’s combination of (a) inclusion of spirituality in a conception of the great community’s dialogue and (b) faith in public intelligence, which he argued must include both the dissemination of experts’ findings and the rhetorically adaptive persuasion of one’s fellows to take such narratives seriously. This spiritual denial discourse is part of what Goulah draws on to argue for using “TESOL as a means of exploring the cultivation of an eco-ethical consciousness” (p. 92). Strategic uses of discourse built on a perspective like Dewey’s that is both spiritual and evidentiary promise to be more inclusive, allowing many who identify deeply with their religiosity not to thereby disidentify with the reality of climate urgency. Unsustainability framed as violence. In the spirit of Fairclough’s (2010) concept of critical language awareness, this chapter begins from the assumption that language teachers should not be naïve about the politics that language always already forces users to take a position within (Alim, 2010; Pennycook, 2001). By extension, all inhabitants of Earth have a responsibility not to be naïve about sustainability and the literal violence that unsustainable practices can inflict on contemporary communities and future generations—human or otherwise. The question is how and when do we inform and persuade others about evidence and responsibilities pertinent to environmental violence? In the spirit of Dewey’s critique of technocracy, we do not rely on experts who have extensively studied violence to be the ones to recommend that it stop. We all are obligated to recommend that it stop. For example, if teachers see violence occurring anywhere in the school, they are obliged to try to stop it themselves or solicit help in stopping it, regardless of their degree of expertise over that space or violence per se. Foltz (2010) writes through an Islamic lens: The most pervasive and dangerous form of global violence today is violence against the Earth’s life-support systems … Environmental degradation is directly linked to other forms of violence such as war, poverty, and oppression, though these linkages are often obscured by political and other factors, and sometimes deliberately so. … the various human struggles we see around the

Earth Democracy as Empowerment

29

world today are like fighting over possession of deck chairs on the Titanic. Yet we persist in treating the environmental crisis as merely one issue among many, rather than as the central issue that it is. How can we deceive ourselves so? (p. 132)

An elitist environmentalism of “wilderness” and national parks can seem to those in bleak poverty like the rearrangement of first-class deck chairs on the Titanic, but an environmentalism of toxic (by-)products, sea-level rise, and desertification is about rerouting the Titanic, chairs and all. US educational standards now explicitly legitimize environmental advocacy. The Next Generation Science Standards now explicitly call for using sustainability questions to discursively frame and motivate students’ learning of science, and “climate change is prominently included” (Goulah, 2017, p.   91). Sustainability is a more easily defensible topic for TESOL and many other disciplines thanks to this legitimation. For the same reason sustainability is a compelling means of engaging students in science, it is also a compelling means of engaging students in learning a new language. Feinstein and Kirchgasler (2015) argue that to give sustainability the proper depth and context, it should be treated in an interdisciplinary way and not just by science teachers but also by  social studies teachers. It is a rare TESOL lesson indeed that cannot defensibly be connected to either science or social studies. In my own context of California, as of 2016 there are now formal standards for integrating “environmental literacy” with science and social studies, and a strategic “blueprint” (Environmental Literacy Taskforce, 2015) lays out goals for expanding the standards to even more curricula, including English language development: Develop and increase educator access to, and use of, culturally relevant instructional materials that both address environmental topics and meet academic standards. … Consistent with the letter and spirit of existing law, incorporate the Environmental Principles & Concepts (EP&Cs) into future curriculum frameworks and related implementation plans for science (CA  NGSS), History-Social Science, English Language Development, math (CA CCSS), and English Language Arts (CA CCSS). These efforts must include plans to increase awareness and understanding of the EP&Cs among educators through communication and professional learning. (p. 25, emphasis mine)

Mandates like this are an extremely hopeful sign, but educators will still need to persuade one another to follow through meaningfully on what such policies call for.

30

TESOL and Sustainability

Persuading TESOL Professionals in Particular Sustainability issues with consequences for the global public are clearly global learning. Discourses have been circulating in language education for some time asserting the need for global learning (Christiansen & Kasarcı, 2016), a global workforce (Delavan, Valdez, & Freire, 2017), or world readiness for global communities (ACTFL, 2018). Sustainability issues affecting the global public are clearly topics that belong in any multilingual education program that promotes itself with such globalization discourses. Dewey would argue that the global public called into being by these discourses takes on its fullest meaning for members when it focuses on solving that globe’s problems. Climate refugees and migrants. As the example of Honduras suggested at the outset of this chapter, many TESOL students’ reason for being in a new Englishdominated space is displacement related to climatic unsustainability (Goulah, 2010, 2012). Such “ecological refugees” (Reid & Taylor, 2003, p. 85) may not often identify with this label if they themselves have not had the democratic opportunity to see evidence of a deeper anti-Earth un-democracy driving the poverty or social instability that forced them to migrate. Loss of languages and cultures of sustainability. Many scholars have pointed  out the links between language shift toward English and language extinction to the loss of cultures of sustainability (MacPherson, 2003; Maffi, 2001; Nettle & Romaine, 2000). This brings attention to the maintenance of language diversity as one aspect of the positive cultural diversity embedded in the goals of Earth democracy, which rejects the negative diversity of fundamentalist responses to imperialism that mimic its violence and patriarchy. By emphasizing to TESOL teachers that part of their professional mission is to “act as advocates to support students’ home culture and heritage language” (TESOL International Association, 2010, p. 38), they may grow more concerned about global language loss and its environmental correlates and bring these connections more clearly to the attention of their students.

Proposed Discursive Strategies Using Data to Link TESOL Students to Environmental Risk: Minoritized Language Groups Face More Pollution It is well established that many environmental consequences unequally burden communities with less economic and racial privilege or mobility (Bullard,

Earth Democracy as Empowerment

31

1999). Yet empirical research on whether this holds true for minoritized language groups in the United States has only recently begun to emerge. As one might have predicted, TESOL students and their families—whether recent immigrants or from established multilingual communities—live and work in spaces at greater risk to the environmental hazards of unsustainability in the United States. Liévanos (2015) reviews one study that found “the spatial concentration of immigrants and non-English speaking households” to be “positively associated with the concentration of two of three environmental pollution indicators” and another that found “the spatial concentration of recently arrived foreign-born individuals” to be “positively associated with the spatial concentration of air-toxic health risk” (p. 52). Liévanos’s own study found similarly “disproportionate environmental health risks faced by economically deprived, linguistically isolated, API [Asian/Pacific Islander] and Latino immigrants” (p. 63). The TESOL International Association’s (2010) standards call for training TESOL teachers to see themselves as “resources to support ELLs [English language learners] and their families as families make decisions in the schools and community” (p. 68).

Using History to Reveal Complicit Identity: The Crisis Speaks English It should hardly be a revelation to lay out the argument that English is the world’s most powerful language because of the colonialism of the British Empire and the neocolonialism of the US Empire. See, for example, Kumaravadivelu’s (2006) chapter titled “Dangerous Liaison: Globalization, Empire and TESOL” in a book titled (Re-)locating TESOL in an Age of Empire. Furthermore, I am likely not the first to try to urge TESOL professionals to consider deeply their complicity with the consequences of those two empires at least as often as they cash their paychecks. Kumaravadivelu lays out globalization in three periods: the preindustrial Spanish/Portuguese-led phase, the industrializationdriven, British-led phase in the 1800s, and the United States-led phase after the Second World War. We have already established above that molar fossil fuel exploitation is what accompanied industrialization and that molecular innovations of the Chemical Revolution are what drove the postwar economy. English owes its hegemony—and TESOL professionals owe their livelihoods—to the overproduction of urban sprawl, carbon dioxide, air and water pollution, herbicides, pesticides, nuclear waste, and the like. Two ironies emerge from histories of industrialization, however, that offer hope for cultural change. Both

32

TESOL and Sustainability

ironies demonstrate that it was cultural choice and not some inevitable (human) nature or destiny that led us down the unsustainable path. The first irony is that there is in fact no evidence to support the assumed narrative that coal won out over waterwheels to power the Industrial Revolution because coal was more efficient or less scarce. Malm (2016) meticulously refutes this assumption, showing that the steam engine first designed for factories could not initially find many buyers because those who did convert made less profit in comparison to factories still using waterpower. Malm finds instead that the historical evidence suggests fossil fuels were thought superior because they allowed factory owners to make up for that efficiency loss by having more precise control over the timing of labor and production. “More export-oriented than any other, the cotton industry fostered a novel sensitivity to the ups and downs of water” (p. 166). The on–off switch on coal-fired engines allowed owners to more precisely and efficiently extract labor from each laborer by disconnecting from the commons. Coal power allowed owners to avoid the natural fluctuations of the free, renewable energy sources technologically accessible at that time, chiefly the amount of water currently flowing in the stream. What made this disconnection possible was borrowing the plant matter from another time period. We now know with certainty it was literally borrowed time. Particularly once labor organized for more sustainable schedules and government stepped in to regulate exploitation, an intensification of the efficiency of each hour became an owner’s source of increased profit, and fossilfueled engines could precisely tune that intensification. Malm (2016) writes, “The increased expenditure of labor had to be placed on the solid footing of the steam engine, utterly malleable to the temporal needs of capital—turned on, turned off, speeded up at will. Such virtues were mere corollaries of the essence of fossil fuels: their ejection from perceptible natural rhythms through burial underground” (p. 56). Now that more natural rhythms are “perceptible”—now that the global public has new evidence to revise its best possible explanations and plans with—together these two ironies put the lie to the narrative that the Unsustainability Revolution was inevitable because it was most efficient (in the most reductionist sense) and therefore ultimately most beneficial to the largest number in the grand scheme of things. These are, of course, the presuppositions of the “science” of mainstream economics and its logic of the “necessity” of perpetual growth. Recall Whorf ’s early warning that we admit that economic behavior is predominantly cultural. It might prove strategic, moreover, to trouble an audience’s acceptance of the narrative that coal’s climate dangers were in fact as imperceptible as even Malm

Earth Democracy as Empowerment

33

implies above. A recent collaborative online inquiry (Revkin, 2016) revealed that the discourse of the detrimental, human-caused, CO2 greenhouse effect goes back at least to Furey (1890). A highly visible article in Popular Mechanics by Francis Molena (1912) subtitled “The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate—What Scientists Predict for the Future” created widespread discussion in the newspapers around the world. Similarly, it was recently revealed that at least one major oil company suppressed its own conclusive findings on humancaused climate change in the 1970s (Hall, 2015). This surprising lack of scientific ignorance on coal’s dangers even during its heyday echoes the second historical irony: Adam Smith, the first major theorist of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, included the crucial role of nature—that is, photosynthesis and the domesticated animals fed off of it— when theorizing the mechanisms of economic production and growth. Duncan (2004) reveals that economic theory and thus both capitalist and socialist discourses were built on the British case, and specifically on David Ricardo’s and, thence, Karl Marx’s missed opportunity to embrace Adam Smith’s “green vision,” as Duncan calls it. Marx, Engels, and the economic and progressive thinking that adopted their discourses—chiefly, asserting labor’s right to take over and run the dirty, destructive factories themselves—severed social justice from environmental justice. Instead of Smith’s green vision, they accepted Ricardo’s anthropocentric frame, which claimed it was entirely “human” labor that produced value. In other words, anthropocentrism was not predestined by so-called (human) nature but chosen—strategically for some in the short term— from multiple available discourses. That anti-posteritist choice among available discourses set in motion severe consequences for us today. It is in this spirit that Moore (2015) advocates for a theory of capitalism that fundamentally abandons the society–nature dualism. He argues for seeing capitalism as a particular regime of environment making that exploits humansin-nature to extort value or profit. The age of capital can be defined as having arisen after 1450 as a new political economy and knowledge paradigm emerging along the Atlantic coast of Europe began to alter landscapes and consume resources at an accelerating rate. Led by Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, and France, wealthy nations then colonized other geographies as frontiers to fuel that new technique. The invention of the slave–plantation–commodity system on the Portuguese island of Madeira was a key inaugural event. Moore prefers the concept of the Capitalocene to the Anthropocene to describe the geologic impact of this era because a discourse of “human” impact obscures the fact that it is the age of intense economic reorganization or “growth” and not the age of

34

TESOL and Sustainability

Homo sapiens per se that is at issue. Thus the term “Anthropocene” could also imply that capitalism was somehow humanity’s natural or destined course. This view challenges us not to oversimplify the correlation between the sustainability crisis and the hegemony of English. Nevertheless, a narrative of how the crisis speaks English can effectively tell the most visible and incontrovertible part of the story, positioning TESOL educators to then explore and de-inevitablize (hopefully along with their students) the deeper roots of the crisis within preindustrial capitalism.

Creating Additive Anglophone Identities: englishes Can Become a Commons Language of Sustainability If we tell the story of unsustainability as a villainy that all started with the enclosure of the English commons, which then spawned the global hegemony of English, it might prove particularly effective to disclose this history with English, to disclose with English the possibility of a return to the commons. English was not only and always a language of domination, a global language subtractively replacing others. English was also a language of multiple regions and classes, of struggle and organizing, a negotiable commons with no centralized institution to set supposed rules. It has always been a mishmash of Germanic, French, Latin, and loanwords from many cultural contact zones (Durkin, 2014). Centuries before there were World englishes (Kachru, 1992) there were its appropriations in the British Isles where communities gave it their own Celtic cadences. Englishes were always hybrid and contested and they continue to become so no matter how dominant and monoculture-inducing “Standard English” may at first appear (Mahboob, 2014; Pennycook, 2006). TESOL educators could be invited to take this discursive step toward thinking of themselves as teaching englishes instead of English. To teach englishes, uncapitalized and non-singular, is to teach them additively, helping students to add an Anglophone identity while still sustaining their other identities. From an Earth democracy perspective, multiple forms of languaging can find sustenance on the same section of earth. Uncapitalized englishes teaching could become a social movement for taking action in the midst of economic capitalization and its mounting consequences. It can offer fertile ground for cultivating the more democratic global language of sustainability discourse itself. Educators might be enticed by the opportunity to use sustainability content in particular to empower TESOL students in particular to be protagonists of their futures. Such teaching of englishes can

Earth Democracy as Empowerment

35

make it function as a commons language that (a) discloses injustices and solutions even if English has been and may continue to be used to enclose and poison the commons for the benefit of only a few and (b) fosters a protagonizing (heroizing) narrative that bridges students’ English-speaking identities with their other identities in empowering and culturally sustaining ways. Teaching englishes could include, for example, a process of empowering TESOL students to find and study sustainability activists they can racially, culturally, and geographically identify with.

Conclusion: Earth Democracy as Empowerment for TESOL Students and a Call to Responsibility for TESOL Educators I have attempted to detail how the history of ecological villainy can be told as a unique fit for TESOL. After showing how quantitative research has begun to show that TESOL students and families are more likely to live near pollutants in the United States, I make the argument that climate change speaks English, as do industrial pollution and mass production of consumerist waste more generally. By that I mean that the historical processes that brought the British and American Empires and their shared language and similar cultures to a globally hegemonic position were precisely the same processes that initiated and solidified an unsustainable process of industrialization and consumerization. The mining and burning of coal was what propelled Britain past other colonial powers, and the post–Second World War petrochemical revolution propelled the United States to neocolonial and resource-consumptive supremacy. I argue that TESOL educators’ job security is thus one and the same with their complicity with the unsustainable ascendance of the language of access they peddle. I have then argued that to teach TESOL with a naiveté about this complicity is to teach a subtractive English rather than additive englishes for Earth democracy. If TESOL educators can embrace this responsibility inherent in their complicity with the Unsustainability Revolution, then they can act as some of the experts who help the global public inform itself about its problems and deliberate democratically on their solutions. They can help empower TESOL students to lead local communities—their leadership consisting of a constant engagement in strategic use of discursive resources—to resist the destructive and homogenizing aspects of corporate globalization as well as the reactionary fundamentalisms that try to claim purity in the face of global flows of people and culture (Pennycook, 2006). Neither englishes, nor other

36

TESOL and Sustainability

languages, nor any of their speakers or geographies will ever be pure or permanent, and language teachers will always be needed to help us prepare for and adapt to the flows. These communities always in flux can then reclaim the space around them as a commons called Earth, or at least a piece of it, like the rivers and valleys and towns that Berta Cáceres fought to keep safe from mines and dams. A return to organic agriculture and other versions of sustenance economies like the one Cáceres died in defense of can be the metaphor that guides the negotiation of the shared consequences of how natural “resources” are treated and how equitably they can be accessed. Adaptive co-management of resources through inquiry (often in englishes) will keep dialogue alive both among diverse communities and also back and forth over “the bond that binds the living creature to his environment.”

Notes 1 This word was missing from the Goldman Prize translation. 2 Further along I will address how Moore (2015) argues for different name for the geologic era, Capitalocene, and an earlier starting point c. 1450.

References Alim, H. S. (2010). Critical language awareness. In N. H. Hornberger & S. L. Mckay (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and language education (pp. 205–231). Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). (2018). Worldreadiness standards for learning languages. Retrieved from: www.actfl.org. Bowers, C. A. (2003). The case against John Dewey as an environmental and eco-justice philosopher. Environmental Ethics, 25(1), 25–42. Bullard, R. D. (1999). Dismantling environmental racism in the USA. Local Environment, 4(1), 5–19. Cáceres, B. (2015). Berta Caceres acceptance speech, 2015 Goldman Prize ceremony. Retrieved from Goldman Environmental prize YouTube channel: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=AR1kwx8b0ms. Carroll, J. B. (1956). Introduction to Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–34. Christiansen, B., & Kasarcı, F. (2016). English as a foreign language teaching and productivity in global hypercompetition. International Journal of Innovation in the Digital Economy (IJIDE), 7(4), 46–55.

Earth Democracy as Empowerment

37

Colonna, S. E., & Nix-Stevenson, D. (2015). Radical love: Love all, serve all. The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 6(1), 5–25. Delavan, M. G., Valdez, V. E., Freire, J. A. (2017). Language as whose resource?: When global economics usurp the local equity potentials of dual language education. International Multilingual Research Journal, 11(2), 86–100. Dewey, J. (1927/2012). The public and its problems: An essay in political inquiry. University Park: Penn State Press. Dewey, J. (1934/2013). A common faith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dobson, H. E., & Tomkinson, C. B. (2012). Creating sustainable development change agents through problem-based learning: Designing appropriate student PBL projects. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 13(3), 263–278. Duncan, C. A. (2004). Adam Smith’s green vision and the future of global socialism. In R. Albritton, S. Bell, & R. Westra (Eds.), New socialisms: Futures beyond globalization (pp. 90–104). London: Routledge. Durkin, P. (2014). Borrowed words: A history of loanwords in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Environmental Literacy Task Force. (2015). A blueprint for environmental literacy: A report by state superintendent of public instruction Tom Torlakson’s Environmental Literacy Task Force—2015. Retrieved from: https://www.cde.ca.gov. Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. London: Routledge. Feinstein, N. W., & Kirchgasler, K. L. (2015). Sustainability in science education? How the Next Generation Science Standards approach sustainability, and why it matters. Science Education, 99(1), 121–144. Foltz, R. C. (2010). The Environmental crisis and global violence: A matter of misplaced values. Journal of Islamic Perspective, 3, 131–141. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage. Furey, G. W. (1890). The origin of epidemics. Medical and Surgical Reporter, 63(1). Retrieved from: http://www.books.google.com. Gee, J. P. (2014). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. New York: Routledge. Goldman Prize. (2018). Berta Cáceres: 2015 Goldman Prize recipient, South and Central America. Retrieved from: https://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/berta-caceres/. Goulah, J. (2010). Conceptualizing environmental refugees in education: A transformative language learning framework. Diaspora, Minority, and Indigenous Education, 4(3), 192–207. Goulah, J. (2012). Environmental displacement, English learners, identity and value creation: Considering Daisaku Ikeda in the east-west ecology of education. In J. Lin & R. Oxford (Eds.), Transformative eco-education for human and planetary survival (pp. 41–58). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Goulah, J. (2017). Climate change and TESOL: Language, literacies, and the creation of eco-ethical consciousness. TESOL Quarterly, 51(1), 90–114. doi: 10.1002/tesq.277.

38

TESOL and Sustainability

Goulah, J. (2018). Religion, “the religious,” and language education into the Anthropocene. The Modern Language Journal, 102(2), 451–455. Hall, S. (2015, October 26). Exxon knew about climate change almost 40 years ago. Scientific American. Retrieved from: https://www.scientificamerican.com. Hardy, C., Palmer, I., & Phillips, N. (2000). Discourse as a strategic resource. Human Relations, 53(9), 1227–1248. Hickman, L. A. (2009). Secularism, secularization, and John Dewey. Education and Culture, 25(2), 21–33. Kachru, B. B. (1992). World Englishes: Approaches, issues and resources. Language Teaching, 25(1), 1–14. King Jr., M. L. (2008). Conscience for change. In The lost Massey Lectures: Recovered classics from five great thinkers (pp. 165–220). Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2006). Dangerous liaison: Globalization, empire and TESOL. In J. Edge (Ed.), (Re-)locating TESOL in an age of empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lewis, C., Enciso, P., & Moje, E. B. (2007). Introduction: Reframing sociocultural research on literacy. In C. Lewis, P. Enciso, & E. B. Moje (Eds.), Reframing sociocultural research on literacy: Identity, agency, and power. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Liévanos, R. S. (2015). Race, deprivation, and immigrant isolation: The spatial demography of air-toxic clusters in the continental United States. Social Science Research, 54, 50–67. Macgilchrist, F. (2007). Positive discourse analysis: Contesting dominant discourses by reframing the issues. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines, 1(1), 74–94. MacPherson, S. (2003). TESOL for biolinguistic sustainability: The ecology of English as a lingua mundi. TESL Canada Journal, 20(2), 1–22. Maffi, L. (Ed.). (2001). On biocultural diversity: Linking language, knowledge, and the environment. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press. Mahboob, A. (2014). Englishes in multilingual contexts. In A. Mahboob & L. Barratt (Eds.), Englishes in Multilingual Contexts (pp. 1–12). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer Dordrecht. Malm, A. (2016). Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. London: Verso Books. Margonis, F. (2011). In pursuit of respectful teaching and intellectually dynamic social fields. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 30(5), 433–439. Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2003). Working with discourse: Meaning beyond the clause. London and New York: Continuum. Martusewicz, R. A., Edmundson, J., & Lupinacci, J. (2014). Ecojustice education: Toward diverse, democratic, and sustainable communities. New York: Routledge. Miller, T. (2017). Storming the wall: Climate change, migration, and homeland security. San Francisco, CA: City Lights.

Earth Democracy as Empowerment

39

Molena, F. (1912, March). Remarkable weather of 1911: The effect of the combustion of coal on the climate—What scientists predict for the future. Popular Mechanics. Retrieved from: http://www.books.google.com. Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital. New York: Verso. Nettle, D., & Romaine, S. (2000). Vanishing voices: The extinction of the world’s languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pennycook, A. (2006). Global Englishes and transcultural flows. London: Routledge. Pierce, C. (2012). Education in the age of biocapitalism: Optimizing educational life for a flat world. New York: Springer. Reid, H. G., & Taylor, B. (2003). John Dewey’s aesthetic ecology of public intelligence and the grounding of civic environmentalism. Ethics & the Environment, 8(1), 74–92. Revkin, A. C. (2016, October 21). News coverage of coal’s link to Global Warming, in 1912. Weblog post. Retrieved from: https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/ coals-link-to-global-warming-explained-in–1912/. Shiva, V. (2016). Earth democracy: Justice, sustainability and peace. London: Zed Books. Tarrant, S. P., & Thiele, L. P. (2016). Practice makes pedagogy—John Dewey and skillsbased sustainability education. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 17(1), 54–67. TESOL International Association. (2010). Standards for the recognition of initial TESOL programs in P-12 ESL teacher education. Retrieved from: http://www.tesol.org/.

40

2

Reorienting Language as a Commons: Dispositions for English Language Teaching in the “Second Watershed” John Katunich

Dickinson College

Three Moments One evening in 2012 after a day-long professional development session for public school teachers in southern Colombia, I was speaking informally with one of the Colombian high school English teachers: she asked me for advice on how   to respond to one of her students, David,1 who had asked her “why do we have to learn this [English]?” She explained to me that David was angry that English was an obligatory subject in Colombian high schools. In part, the resistance to English she described was not unlike the resistance of any teen to a compulsory study that they do not see the immediate reward for. In response, I suggested that she continue to emphasize the value of English to pursue higher education, obtain a better job, or travel abroad. Over the subsequent days, I kept thinking about David and why his relationship to English was one of anger, and not simply apathy. To David’s teacher, I justified the study of English as a (or the?) pathway to an elite higher education, a high-paying job, or cosmopolitan travel around the world; therefore, for David, English in his life served mostly as a way to signify what was always going to be beyond his ability to obtain as a working-class youth in provincial Colombia. David’s anger at English came to seem reasonable and I felt at a loss for a better and more meaningful answer to what his teacher might say to him to engage him with English. Several years later I was talking with Josie, a preservice early childhood education teacher in the United States, who was doing her student teaching in an urban elementary school in a fourth-grade classroom with a high proportion

42

TESOL and Sustainability

of English language learners (ELLs). Josie shared that recently one of the students in her classroom, who is a designated ELL student, came to her saying she thought she was ready to move from the ESL class into the mainstream reading class. Josie reported that the ESL teacher refused to consider the change saying that “she [the student] needs more support.” Josie continued, speculating that it was she [the ESL teacher who] needs that kid, the star kid who wants to come out, because she’s the star kid in the classroom. She’s the one who will shine, she’s the one who will answer during [the teacher’s] observation. I personally think it’s because of that. That’s why she doesn’t wanna let her go … [but] these kids they’re just like, “I wanna get out. Help me get out.”

Finally, I recall an interaction I had with Mark, a preservice teacher getting his ESL program specialist endorsement through an intensive, cultural immersion teaching practicum in Ecuador in which I was teaching. We had just finished a series of classes addressing issues of dominant language ideology, language commodification, and issues of nonnative speaker (NNS) discrimination in the field of teaching English. Our class conversations had bluntly grappled with the problems that arise around the present hegemonic position of English. Mark always came across as an idealist and optimist who wanted to make the world a better place, having told me before that one of the biggest reasons for his becoming an English teacher was his religious commitment to making the world more peaceful and harmonious. He struggled to reconcile his idea of English as a cross-cultural, unifying force in the world with the “dark side” of hegemonic English. Mark asked me to meet him for coffee one afternoon, and he started by stating, “Sometimes I wonder if you are saying that teaching English is a bad thing.” These three moments frame the subsequent discussion in this chapter that, like conversations with Mark’s class, asks professional teachers of English to grapple with our complicity in a number of interrelated crises in our world today. Many of us as teachers want or need to see the good in what we do—that we help students like David broaden their life prospects or that we support the academic success of Josie’s fourth-grade ELL. However, once we begin to contextualize our work amid an era of ecological and economic crises, we may see how our dominant metaphors of teaching English have been grounded in treating language as a resource subject to the economic logic of the market. This is the neoliberal economic metaphor that had informed my initial response to David’s teacher, and I suggest that such a guiding metaphor is no longer appropriate if

Reorienting Language as a Commons

43

we, as English language teachers, wish to honestly and ethically respond to our complicity in present social, economic, and ecological injustices. Instead, this chapter is a call for those working as ESL teachers and teacher educators begin to imagine and enact new guiding metaphors, ones that work to reassert language as a form of commons. While the concept of what constitutes the commons remains contested across disciplines of economics, education, and applied linguistics, with Egan (2014), noting “the conflicting baggage that travels with the commons” (p. xiii), for the purposes of English language teaching and exploring what a language commons might look like, the commons should be viewed as a critical alternative to the dominant discourse of neoliberalism, which drives an economic system and politics that prioritize privatization and enclosure of previously commonly held goods (Pennycook, 2018). A commons-based discourse, politics, and social structure, on the other hand, are based instead on a respect for limits (Shiva, 2010); local traditions and shared practices (Esteva & Prakash, 2014), and conviviality (Illich, 1973). This idea of conviviality is central to the broad project of reimagining the work of TESOL amid the current crises of sustainability that is a core theme throughout this volume, including for example, the chapter by Jakubiak and Hastings (this volume). Like the concept of commons, the idea of conviviality is contested; however, this chapter draws on Ivan Illich’s work to define conviviality in terms of human dignity and autonomy, as a social condition in which “technologies serve … individuals rather than managers” (Illich, 1973, p. xxiv) and the practice of “turn[ing] people into the accessories of bureaucracies and machines” is rejected (p. xxiv). For Illich, a return to a convivial relationship between humans and our technology is crucial in order to understand “the parameters of human endeavors within which human life remains viable” (p. xxiii). Throughout this chapter I examine the work of social critic and historian Ivan Illich (1926–2002), both to contextualize the role of English language teaching in the present crises, and to inform new principles of English language teaching that serve convivial purposes. Even as Illich was a widely recognized and influential public intellectual throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Cayley, 1992; Finger & Asun, 2001), and a contemporary, collaborator, and critic of Paulo Freire (Elias, 1976), his thought has not had the lasting impact on educational theory, curriculum, and pedagogy as Freire’s, in part because as Finger and Asun (2001) note, “his critique of dominant education and alternatives he proposed … were too radical even for the radicals” (p. 7). I suggest that his central critique of the crises that were emerging in the 1970s

44

TESOL and Sustainability

is as relevant today as it was when he was an active public intellectual, or more so. In reclaiming the critique of Illich and what it says for the work of English language teachers in our present era of crisis, there is a possibility to reclaim a vision for a commons-based, convivial (and sustainable) approach to our teaching practices and pedagogies. In the following pages, I explore how Illich’s broad social critique can be applied to the field of English language teaching. Specifically, I put Illich’s critique of our late modern moment in dialogue with one predominant metaphor in our field, in which language is treat as a type of resource (Ruiz, 1984), in order to suggest ways that as a field we can move beyond this “resource-ification” of our work. To this end, I propose a set of principles that reflect an alternate “languageas-commons” orientation toward the work of English language teaching, which promises to inform pedagogies and practices that are more equitable, convivial, and ultimately more sustainable.

Teaching Language in the Second Watershed To acknowledge the reality, as Orr (1992) among others has suggested, that we are in the midst of multiple crises of sustainability, means addressing crises which require for their solution not only technological innovation but fundamental cultural change and education, due to the “social traps” (Orr, 1992, p. 5) that are built into late capitalism, evolutionary biology, and the human condition. The social traps that have prevented humanity from thinking on a planetary scale to mount a robust response to these crises include the relentless and unquestionable focus on growth (what Halliday, 2003 has called “growthism”), the tacit acceptance of applying market logic to all human activity, and deeply ingrained feelings of in-group/out-group tribalism (Orr, 1992). The field of teaching ESL/EFL has been no less ensnared by these traps than any other form of work. Any effort to build more socially and environmentally just practices in the field of TESOL has to accept the role (and complicity) of the field of teaching ESL/EFL in what has been called the “Anthropocene Era” (Steffen, Crutzen, & McNeill, 2007), a geological period characterized by the comprehensive and global impact of humanity on ecosystems, including the   increase of atmospheric carbon, spread of invasive species, radioactive emissions, and the ubiquity of plastic polymers. It is incumbent for those working in the field of TESOL to ask themselves what it means now to teach and learn in the Anthropocene.

Reorienting Language as a Commons

45

Illich offers a related terminology for this era, one that conveys its human, rather than geologic, scale: he refers to our present historical moment as the “second watershed”2 (1973, p. 2), which not only characterizes a shift in the relationship of humans to the physical environment, but also reflects fundamental postwar social changes in the ways that institutions, most particularly the institutions of schooling and medicine, have come to dominate and dictate the human condition. Illich’s critique reveals the extent of the crises of the “second watershed” as another kind of “social trap” that has been preventing humankind from adequately responding to the present crises that pose an existential threat to the continuation of our species as well as other complex life on our planet. Similarly, Illich (1990/2010) has marked “the epoch … after Guernica 1936” (p. 96), as a qualitatively new era in how humans relate to their tools and technology. Guernica, a Spanish village bombed by German aircraft during the Spanish Civil War, symbolized for Illich, as it did for Picasso in his epic Guernica, “a new terrifying industrial and anonymous warfare” (Walsh, 2017) in which the anonymity of the human now defined her or him; for the German bombers, it no longer mattered who they were bombing, for the human targets were only secondary to the tools of war that the bombing was meant to demonstrate. Post-Guernica, as humans crossed the “second watershed,” human beings mattered less and less as autonomous individuals, and found themselves subject to either programming (at best) or destruction (at worst), in service of their own technology. In a post-Guernica world, do we as teachers accept this new dispensation in which the tool (in this case English) is no longer in service to the learner, but instead, the learner becomes programmed for the tool? If we consider, David, the Colombian high school student in our first conversation, it is hard to argue that he is in any way empowered by English, but rather learning English for him and his classmates serves as a form of programming in service of school and economic institutions. English language teachers have an ethical responsibility to ask whether “teaching English is a bad thing,” in the words of Mark, the preservice ESL teacher. Of course, the ethical accounting when looking strictly at the outcomes of our students—our students for whom learning English means better access to education, autonomy, jobs, and money—suggests that teaching English provides an unquestioned benefit. Many of us, after all, enter this field because we believe in the work that we do and the value we provide to our students; if we think charitably about the ESL teacher in Josie’s school, she seeks to keep the ELLs in her classroom against their wishes because, she may genuinely believe, they have needs that only she can meet.

46

TESOL and Sustainability

I want to propose that this kind of ethical accounting that looks only at one’s own students, community, or country, and excludes those who are not in our classes or our countries, represents what Orr (1992) calls a “social trap” in which an observable and rather more immediate outcome (be it a test result or a demonstrated job skill) hides the longer-term and less observable consequences that have to be paid for (such as social stratification based on schooling and long-term and pervasive economic inequality). At the heart of any conversation about sustainability in the work of TESOL is this question of the long-term, unaccounted for, consequences of our work, and how “honest bookkeeping would deter entry into social traps” (Orr, 1992, p. 5) that the work of English language teaching has long played into. This “honest bookkeeping” in our work starts with questioning (and replacing) some of the dominant metaphors and paradigms that have been largely taken for granted in the work of English language teaching. Consider, for example, a sign in the hallway of a language department of a prestigious Ecuadorian university that reads (in English): “The more you LEARN, the more you EARN.” This sign appears to most English language teachers as an anodyne slogan to motivate university students, for whom English may or may not be their highest priority. What it does, however, is treat language as a kind of resource, which is one of the most deeply held root metaphors (Bowers, 2006) that shape the teaching of English as a second and foreign language. It works as a social trap that hides the broader damage that the spread of English does, occluding the economic assumptions underlying the promise of material benefits accruing from English study, without accounting for whom this maxim applies, and for whom it does not. At least since Ruiz (1984) the metaphor of language as a resource has shaped the work of English language teaching. However, what alternatives are available to replace or complicate the dominant metaphor of “language as resource” to make sense of our teaching of English? One such alternative is to reclaim language as the “commons” that language has long been, as we recognize that throughout human experience, language has primarily been a vernacular tool which is put to service by the individuals who use it, rather than the inverse. Such an alternate orientation toward language and language teaching can help language teachers and teacher educators articulate new goals for teaching and learning that are no longer dictated by the implicit growthism and imputation of needs that justifies expanding consumption, which have been social traps largely unquestioned by English language teaching field.

Reorienting Language as a Commons

47

Turning Language into a “Resource” In his influential 1984 article “Orientations in Language Planning,” Richard Ruiz presented a compelling new paradigm for language planning and policy in which three “orientations” to language were presented to clarify conceptual, societal, and policy approaches to language, in order to make sense of increasingly diverse language landscapes and the pressing educational policy decisions that needed to be made around language. While writing specifically about bilingual education policy, the article has influenced the ways in which the field of TESOL has conceived of its work, especially amid the translingual and multilingual turn of the last decade (see, for example, Taylor & Snodden, 2013). Ruiz (1984) suggested that two orientations—“language-as-problem” and “language-as-right”—have long been part of the history of debating bilingualism in the United States, yet Ruiz suggests neither fully articulates the more robust rationale for bilingualism that was necessary in the emerging post-Lau bilingual education environment, in which school districts and states across the United States became legally obligated to meet the needs3 of language minority students. For Ruiz (1984), a “language-as-problem” orientation that reflected many local approaches to language minorities ended up driving educational policy and curriculum toward compensatory programs that treated language difference as deficiency, and were ultimately subtractive in nature; at the same time, a “language-as-right” orientation embraced by many bilingual education advocates at the time subjected schools’ and society’s language policy decisions to legal adjudication that presumed an unhelpfully conflictual basis for achieving societal language diversity and bilingualism. Thus Ruiz (1984) proposed a third orientation—“language-as-resource”—that articulated a more compelling and positive rationale for bilingual education and bilingualism, in which language diversity would be seen as a strength to be cultivated, in terms of its value either to the nation (as benefits to national security, diplomacy, economic competitiveness, or civic engagement) or to the individual (as better prospects for employment and the maintenance of cultural identities and intergenerational connections). Although not the intent of Ruiz (1984), his article marks a key watershed in the discourse of teaching and learning English; in the turn toward “language-as-resource,” one’s language repertoire comes to be seen as socially, economically, and politically valuable—in the sense that it is able to be assigned a value. Even though Ruiz (1984) was by no means arguing for the commodification of language as a good or service, from this watershed moment,

48

TESOL and Sustainability

language has become increasingly subject to the logic of economics, reflecting a neoliberal economic framework that “subsumes under its logic every other form of social interaction in every society it invades” (Esteva, 2010, p. 14), including of course, the social interaction of teaching and learning English. To better understand the significance of this turn toward language-asresource, Shiva (2010) offers a critique of the neoliberal appropriation of the term “resource” itself. Shiva (2010) prompts us to recall the premodern usage of the term “resource” as the quality of life-giving sources to “rise again and again” (p. 228), like a spring or a forest, literally a re-source. For Shiva (2010) as well as MacPherson (2010), it is through the neoliberal appropriation of language that a natural resource becomes no longer a source of life, but a collection of material that is economically valuable. The neoliberal logic dictates the differentiation between exploitable, commodifiable goods, like lumber, from a communally held commons, like a forest. It is the logic that justifies the linguistic violence that precedes the ecological violence in the shift from “forest” to “timber.” Of course, when discussing the concept of language as resource, it has been suggested that “linguistic resources are fundamentally different from natural resources” (Hult & Hornberger, 2016, p. 38), and thus it would be wrong to assume that language must be subject to an economic logic in the same way as natural resources are, simply because of the use of the term “resource” which, when referring to language, may denote something distinctly different than when referring to a natural resource. Interestingly, Ruiz (1983, as cited in Hult & Hornberger, 2016) explores this incongruity between linguistic and natural resources, noting that natural resources left in the ground remain there for future generations, while for linguistic resources “the longer we neglect their use, the closer we are to extinguishing them” (Ruiz, 1984 as cited in Hult & Hornberger, 2016, p. 39). It is worth challenging this distinction on several counts. First of all, treating language resources as enriched by their use rather than neglect assumes a synchronic, static view of language; it fails to acknowledge that the vernacular languages that are used (if they are brought into use in an industrialized, neoliberal social context) will be transformed such that the language we have in the end is no longer the same resource. To point out a single example, that of Kichwa, an indigenous language spoken throughout Ecuador, upon its standardization and transformation into a written language, it may no longer (for better or worse) be seen as the same language prior to its standardization (Wroblewski, 2012), but it becomes rather a more logocentric and Westernized variety of the language. Furthermore, such thinking that “the longer we neglect their use, the closer we are to extinguishing [languages]” (Ruiz, 1984 as cited in

Reorienting Language as a Commons

49

Hult & Hornberger, 2016, p. 39) assumes a lack of agency among speakers of minority languages, such that neglect, presumably by the industrial and state apparatuses like schooling and mainstream media, dooms them. It is worth noting here one of the fundamental themes of Illich’s broader critique of schools and other industrialized institutions: that local “commoners” must be much warier of the attention of institutions like school and the state than neglect by those institutions (Illich, 1971). In terms of linguistic resources, Illich’s critique of the institution suggests that we treat the exploitation of socalled linguistic resources by the state, the economic system, or schools (for purposes such as national security or economic competitiveness) as a process that degrades languages’ viability as convivial, vernacular tools, in very much the same way that exploitation of a forest leads to a similar, degraded outcome. Illich’s critique of institutionalization suggests that the neglect of language— in the sense of its exclusion from the industrialized, neoliberal state and its institutions—may offer the only genuine prospect of ensuring the survival of many vernacular languages, including vernacular indigenous languages (Illich, 1978/1992). The turn toward a “language-as-a-resource” (LaR) orientation throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s did build support for more robust bilingual policy approaches to schooling for immigrants and other language minorities, even as it also grounded the work of language teaching more firmly in the neoliberal regime. This turn toward LaR paralleled another conversation in the broader field of applied linguistics—the emergence of the field of study termed “language commodification” (see, for example, Kelly-Holmes & Mautner, 2010; Rubdy & Tan, 2008) which began exploring questions such as how to understand English language teaching as an industry, how English language skills become valued as a human resource, and how specific varieties and accents of English are commodified in the globalized labor markets of call centers, among other settings (e.g., Holborow, 2015; Kelly-Holmes, 2010; Tupas, 2008). That language is a form of social interaction which can be subsumed under the logic of the master narrative of economics has become in the last decades very much a common-sense, naturalized dimension of a neoliberal language ideology. Illich (1978/1992) suggests a “language-economics” that accounts for the costs of teaching language (which for Illich is what most schooling is about). Illich (1978/1992) points out that tremendous amounts of money are spent to “make the poor speak more like the wealthy” (p. 119), and how wealthy countries both absorb and demand huge investments in language teaching (and by language teaching, he does not mean foreign-language teaching, but rather the school

50

TESOL and Sustainability

industry of the “taught mother tongue”). In contrast, in so-called developed countries, “people still speak to each other, though their language has never been capitalized, except perhaps, among an … elite” (Illich, 1978/1992, p. 121). Even as language becomes capitalized in a language economy, language does not normally appear to be subject to the classical economic laws that are meant to describe the relationship between scarcity and perceived unlimited demand, such as the so-called “law” of supply and demand, which Illich (1990/2010), among others, has pointed out to be applicable to the industrial economy, but far less so to vernacular communities that are not defined by their production and consumption of commodities. Even looking at commodified language in terms of language products, which Illich (1978/1992) describes as “each paid word to the rich cost[ing] per capita more than each word addressed to the poor” (p. 120), it is clear that while there is an assumed principle of scarcity at work that dictates the price of capitalized, commodified language, such a principle does not apply to vernacular language. Uncommodified language that remains as a living vernacular is generally not governed by market economics, even as it remains barred from use in schooling and commerce due to strong social stigmas, a reflection of the radical monopoly (Illich, 1973) that characterizes institutionalization amid the second watershed. Illich (1973) distinguishes between the conventional notion of market monopoly and the radical monopolies that characterize the late modern industrial period. Coca-cola and Pepsi, for example, may hold a monopoly on the selling of carbonated sugar water, but this would not be characterized as radical monopoly, insofar as consumers remain able to choose other ways to satisfy their thirst and no one is compelled to purchase one of their products. Radical monopolies however are structured such that alternatives are rendered unviable by the spread of the radical monopoly. For Illich, the rise of the automobile has constituted one of the most pernicious forms of radical monopoly on transportation. As communities organize an infrastructure to accommodate high-speed automobile travel, foot traffic on those highways becomes explicitly illegal or so dangerous as to preclude its use. Similarly, modern medicine and modern schools have come to assert their own radical monopolies on health and learning. To be healthy is defined solely through the process of being treated by medical professionals, just as to be educated is solely defined by having subjected oneself to treatment in schools. In the presence of hospitals and schools, radical monopoly precludes all other vernacular alternatives, be they traditional healers or informal, intergenerational transmission of indigenous knowledge. For Illich (1973), it is this rise of the

Reorienting Language as a Commons

51

radical monopoly and the accompanying increase of counterproductivity4 that characterize the human condition in the second watershed. The stigmatization of vernacular language, for example, can be interpreted as a way of delegitimizing the forms of language which are learned and shared without interference from or control by the state, school, or other industrial institutions, undermining the radical monopoly of standardized language. What previous debates over “language commodification” (Block, 2017) have failed to recognize are the implications of language becoming subject to a commodified, industrialized radical monopoly of taught, standardized language: home languages, dialects, and vernacular speech become marginalized (and unviable) under an institutionalized standard language regime in the same ways that walking and biking become marginalized (and unviable) modes of transportation in an automotive regime. Even as language remains open to vernacular production (insofar as we all learn to speak our vernaculars without direct intervention from state institutions like schools), language learning and teaching has been industrialized, especially in the form of a massive, “taught mother tongue” industry that comprises most of schooling (Illich, 1978/1992). The problem with the turn toward LaR (Ruiz, 1984), even if oriented toward the expansion of equity and support for language diversity, is that it occurs in the context of a neoliberal economic regime that continues to assert a radical monopoly over schools, standardized language, and English. For this reason, it is critical to articulate an alternate orientation toward language that is no longer embedded in a neoliberal logic, but rather one that is grounded in a revitalized, reclaimed language commons, which stands in contrast to the neoliberal policies of privatization of learning and enclosure of the commons. Such an alternate orientation entails raising fundamental questions about the utility of English as an international language, and the genuine questions about the possibility of disentangling English language teaching from the radical monopoly that has driven the rapid, global, and largely unquestioned spread of English.

The Disutility of English Let’s revisit for a moment the case of David, the Colombian high school student: for him English is imposed in his school curriculum under the logic that it delivers individual benefits for oneself (that is to say, because English is treated as a valuable human resource). Learning English means getting a better job which means a better income which means a better quality of life. And yet,

52

TESOL and Sustainability

when we shift to ask why English for this particular Colombian high school student, for whom there may be little promise of employment by a transnational corporation or international travel (except for, perhaps, the lure of migration to English-speaking North America) these justifications may carry little or no meaning; it becomes clear that for every individual benefit that any particular individual accrues through learning English, there will always be at least one other individual for whom that individual benefit must be denied. In this sense, education for the purpose of conferring individual benefits, in this case the benefits of learning English as a national or international language, becomes fundamentally a practice of enclosure—the conversion of a commonly held good (here, vernacularly produced language) into an individually earned and owned benefit (here, institutionally regulated, standardized language). In the context of the global spread of English for the Colombian student and other youth in the Global South including immigrant youth from the Global South to the United States, teaching English therefore becomes, in effect, a pernicious means of social sorting and institutional justification for the ongoing inequalities of our present era based largely on race and nationality (Illich, 1971 offers an in-depth discussion of compulsory schooling as institutional justification for inequality). Ever since the Colombian teacher of English had posed her question to me, it has been one of the fundamental professional questions with which I have grappled, and one, I believe, with which any emerging or practicing teacher of English and ESL teacher educator must grapple. How do English language teachers who are concerned with the inequalities inherent in our present educational system, overcome the gatekeeping functions of English, when the issue is no longer that of broadening access to English, but rather rethinking the entire project of English and how it has become deeply embedded in the neoliberal regime of privatization and enclosure? For such rethinking, Illich’s conceptualizations of language, need, and scarcity become critical. Illich’s theory of language, taken seriously, raises a number of fundamental and troubling questions for professional language teachers. Illich (1981/2013, 1978/1992, 1990/2010) has traced genealogically origins of the language teaching profession to the work of Antonio de Nebrija (1441–1522), and his offer to Queen Isabella of his Spanish grammar as an instrument of empire; for Illich, this turn toward language as a tool for “control in the name of the Queen over the everyday speech of all her people” (p. 31) in the form of a mother tongue defined and policed by grammarians (themselves authorized by ruling elites), was the first successful move to subject vernaculars, which had been held in common by local communities for centuries, to the logic of enclosure.

Reorienting Language as a Commons

53

For Illich (1978/1992) any taught language, especially a “taught mother tongue” was a means of alienating people from a convivial tool—their home vernacular language—that they naturally acquire without any institutional mediation at all. Illich’s notion of vernacular language (1981/2013) had anticipated later translingual scholarship which has questioned whether languages as distinct, bounded entities exist at all (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Pennycook, 2010); in a 1981 essay, Illich describes what would later be called the translingual nature of medieval European vernaculars existing on continua, with intelligibility largely an issue of geographical proximity between villages, and vernacular language identities as “peoplish” (Illich, 1981/2013), which is to say that people identified their language as the language the people they knew spoke. It was in this translingual environment of medieval Europe that Nebrija’s Spanish grammar worked as a potent tool of empire and a profound expression of linguistic violence against people’s vernaculars. The term “vernacular” and what Illich means when he refers to it is critical here. Illich (1973) suggests that the term “vernacular” is far richer (and refers to a distinctly different phenomenon) than simply mother tongue. Tracing the concept of the vernacular to the Roman scholar Varro, Illich stipulates that vernacular goes beyond language: vernacular, whether referencing vernacular tools, vernacular cooking, or vernacular language, refers to any locally developed and locally relevant means of satisfying local necessities for living. Vernacular language therefore is not only the mode of communicating with family members and one’s community, but also a means of binding together families and communities in a shared bond of linguistic identity. Vernacular practices are quintessentially convivial. Just as globalized, industrialized English can be characterized by its centrifugal force to spread and colonize new communities (see below), vernacular language has a built-in centripetal force that both binds a local community together and sustains their language practices. The centuries following Nebrija and Columbus (whose contemporariness is not insignificant) have been an era of increasing enclosure of all manner of commons through what Illich terms the “war on subsistence” (Illich, 1981/2013), including the targeting of vernacular language by Nebrija and the teaching profession that his ideas had spawned. Vernacular and home languages become dangerous in this era because they undermine the rights of institutions to lay claim to what is otherwise (and rather obviously) the innately productive faculty of human beings to create language. Nebrija and the heirs to his grammarian legacy lay claim to the right to teach each person their own “mother tongue,” and to do so, have been obliged for the last five centuries to stigmatize vernacular speech

54

TESOL and Sustainability

and expression in the service of an imperial (and since the second watershed, an industrial) language, be it English, Spanish, or other taught language. The work of language teachers is enacted in the aftermath of this rift between vernacular and taught language. We see it in the perennial debate over “students’ right to their own language” (CCCC, 1974; Smitherman, 1999), in which English compositionists (which is to say, instructors of writing in one’s taught mother tongue) “affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style” (CCCC, 1974). Even as the substance of the resolution affirms students’ home and vernacular speech, it can also be read as the acknowledgment by teaching professionals of not only the reality of positional institutional power to marginalize and diminish the worth of a students’ use of home or vernacular language, but also the power to return that “right” back to speakers. The debate itself over the issue of the role of home and vernacular language is evidence of the alienation from one’s own language that has been imposed by centuries of language teachers teaching a taught mother tongue. It is out of this profound alienation from one’s own language that language becomes reconstructed as a need (Illich, 1990/2010) which requires satisfaction in a form that can only be delivered by a trained, professionalized, and credentialed  teacher. To understand how language can become a need, subject to the regime of scarcity, it is important to understand the specific conceptualization of “needs” and “needy man” (sic) that has been fundamental in the social critique of Illich and others in the post-development school (Esteva, 2010; Esteva, Stuchul, & Prakash, 2005; Illich, 1981/2013, 1990/2010; Sachs, 2010). While subsistence societies have always been obliged to live amid the reality of necessities for their survival and continuation, it has been the postwar phenomenon of development and underdevelopment, in which subsistence-based communities are ascribed exogenic “needs,” the need for a flush toilet for example, that differed from the cultural necessities that had from time immemorial been part of their vernacular way of being (Illich, 1990/2010). Needs, unlike necessities, are ways of consumption that defined a “universal human” (which is to say Illich’s homo economicus, Illich, 1990/2010) whereas necessities were always invariably local and particular matters of particular people in particular places. For Illich the scope of what constitutes needs continually grows, unlike necessities which are defined by the limits inherent in an ecosystem or community. Human communication through language is and has always been a human necessity, but it is only when local vernaculars are colonized by the grammarians and textbook writers to become

Reorienting Language as a Commons

55

a taught mother tongue, that the necessity for communication becomes a need for instruction on how to speak. For Illich, the rise of these particular kinds of needs was intimately related to what Illich calls the “regime of scarcity,” which describes the conditions in modern capitalism: the logic of economics can only become the master narrative of the social world when mediation of social interaction is conducted under the presumption of scarcity. The regime of scarcity becomes therefore the basis for language policing of standard varieties (i.e., the taught mother tongues that Illich, 1981/2013 notes), in which the economic value of a privileged language variety can be related to its relative scarcity; those who possess a privileged language variety have an incentive to police its boundaries and engage in gatekeeping to subsidizes the value of their own language. This drives the need for linguistic outsiders to undertake ever-increasing burdens of linguistic shadow work, a key Illichian concept that describes the nature of late industrial labor (Illich, 1981/2013). Illich’s shadow work refers to the external labor or payment that becomes a necessary condition to participate in the industrial system of exchange (Illich, 1981/2013, 1982). Shadow work is an unmeasured tax on time and money that is never accounted for in any measures of increasing GDP or other economic measures of development. Housework, noted by Illich, is the prototypical form of shadow work (Illich, 1982) as are the costs of buying, driving, and maintaining an automobile (not to mention the time cost of commuting) as a form “shadow work” that has become nearly obligatory to fully participate in the late industrial system (Illich, 1981/2013). Indeed, the very efficiency and efficacy of the late capitalist system depends on a large body of work that must be conducted in the unreported but unmeasured shadow of the economy. That such shadow work falls inequitably on marginalized members of society, particularly women and the poor, is a defining feature (Illich, 1982). Shadow work is not simply any form of unmeasured labor, but particularly “an activity in which people must engage to whatever degree they attempt to satisfy their needs by means of commodities” (Illich, 1982, p. 49), an activity which Illich directly contrasts to vernacular modes of subsistence. As English becomes obligatory in the institutions of the neoliberal, late modern industrial state, the acquisition of the standard language variety (which is the taught mother tongue variety) becomes a significant form of shadow work, requiring time, effort, and often money to enable one to participate in the late industrial system. Once established as obligatory, standard language plays an irreplaceable role in the neoliberal economy as a radical monopoly that constrains or even disallows a role for local, meaningfully produced and maintained vernacular language, much in the same way that the medical

56

TESOL and Sustainability

institutions have disallowed the practices of traditional healers, and transportation institutions constrain walking. Folk healing practices, walking under one’s own power, and vernacular speech are all generally unimpacted by the regime of scarcity and need not create customers or consumers for the neoliberal economy as do doctor’s offices, automotive highways, and schools; thus they present themselves as dangerous alternatives to an increasingly precarious neoliberal economy. For those working in the field of English language teaching, it is incumbent to consider how schools, along with those who administer and teach in those schools, propagate the system of shadow work, which necessarily falls hardest on the marginalized groups like immigrants and the poor. As long as a standardized English is explicitly obligatory in schooling or society (as in English-only instructional models and policies) or simply effectively obligatory (when participation in an industrial economy is dependent on its acquisition and use), it is impossible to characterize English language teaching as convivial. Trying to make sense of the unprecedented massive, global spread of English in the postwar error and the impact it has had on human autonomy, it can be suggested that “when [English language teaching] grows beyond a certain point, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself ” (Illich, 1973, pp. xxii–xxiii). In other words, English language teaching conducted under dominant industrial and neoliberal principles and assessed with “honest bookkeeping” may no longer serve a net social benefit, but rather serves its own institutional interests, and, as such, is both unconvivial and unsustainable.

Toward Language-as-Commons In light of the disutility of English, English language teachers must question the very need for English that has come to be taken for granted across the world and what the implications are for teaching and learning language under the (fallacious) assumption of scarcity. By asserting that English (and by extension the English language teaching profession) does not hold a privileged position of satisfying a universal need, we, as English language teachers and teacher educators, do not undermine our work as much as we discover a new basis for our work—one in which an orientation toward language does not assume language to be a resource to be exploited, as much as it is a commons that can support convivial life amid the new “multiple balance” (Illich, 1973, p. 46), in which human individuals use, but are not used by, their tools and technology.

Reorienting Language as a Commons

57

An orientation toward language, as framed by Ruiz (1984), among others, is a “complex of dispositions … toward languages and their role in society [which] delimit[s] the ways we talk about language and language issues [and] determine[s] the basic questions we ask” (p. 16). Proposing alternative orientations toward language is not merely an academic exercise, but serves a pragmatic and instrumental purpose in shifting the paradigmatic assumptions that guide, for Ruiz (1984), decisions of policy, but also can be used to inform pedagogical practices, in the sense of local school and classroom policies for using and understanding language (Hult & Hornberger, 2016). Ruiz (1984) advocates for a “repertoire of orientations” (p. 18) to be more responsive to a range of contexts and changing social environment. In the same vein therefore, I propose an outline of the dispositions toward language that constitute an alternative “language-as-commons” (LaC) orientation. Considering, as Ruiz (1984) suggests, that an orientation repertoire is needed to address specific contexts for language use, learning, and teaching, in our particular moment (one that is characterized by crises of sustainability in the second watershed), articulating an LaC orientation is particularly pressing in order to reemphasize a respect for limits in the spread of English, allow for language to be taught and learned as a convivial tool, and more directly integrate translingual practice (Canagarajah, 2013b) into how language is taught and learned. I propose that an alternate LaC orientation to language, which would inform dispositions among teachers and leaders toward English language teaching, can be characterized by the following dispositions and implications: • Language is an indispensable and unalienable part of human life; all human beings have the innate ability to learn and use language that is relevant to the conditions of their life. • Languages (as discrete, named, and stable entities) reflect historical and political developments, more than fundamental linguistic differences. • Language varieties cannot be owned by any particular communities or groups; language norms are informed by local, community-based vernacular practices. • Standard language varieties reflect a radical monopoly over communication that marginalizes vernacular modes of language use; convivial, vernacular modes of communication should be respected and encouraged. • The persistence of standardized, capitalized, and institutionally policed language varieties serves the goals of state, institutional, and industrial actors, rather than the interests of learners. The interests of members of

58

TESOL and Sustainability

local communities should take precedence over the needs of the state or the industrial system. • Language learning is not a need to be satisfied; the acquisition of standardized language codes beyond one’s home/vernacular language should not be treated as obligatory for a meaningful life of dignity. • Professional language teachers are not indispensable to language learning, when language learning is defined as the acquisition of local, vernacular, community-based practices. Language teachers may play a role in coordinating and facilitating meaningful, convivial language practices for language learners. • Translingualism naturally arises from convivial, vernacular use of language. Language learning environments should assume translanguaging as the norm, including the incorporation of vernacular language into translingual practices and pedagogies. This framework for a new orientation toward language is not unprecedented and reflects the emerging translingual turn toward language and language teaching over the last decade. For example, both documentation of historical and contemporary translingual practices in India (Canagarajah, 2013b) and the historical record of translingualism among the non-elite in medieval Europe (Illich, 1981/2013) offer important insight into how language has and can continue to operate governed by principles of the commons. For example, Canagarajah’s (2013b) description of the translingual practice in South India called manipravala provides a clear example of convivial language diversity in the linguistically rich and diverse setting of South Asia before colonialization, including the widespread use of elite, high-status language such as Sanskrit in ways that did not restrict or marginalize the use of vernacular codes. Under the language ideology of South Asian manipravala there was no the sense of language ownership, neither restricting the legitimate use of a language code to a particular group, nor restricting an individual to one legitimate language code. Contrast this to the idea of ownership of a language in the contemporary English language teaching paradigm, which has been debated at least since Widdowson (1994). To the degree to which Widdowson’s (1994) thesis that English should no longer to be considered as legitimately owned by native speakers has been broadly taken up in the work of teaching ESL/EFL (see, for example, Canagarajah, 1999, 2006; Norton, 1997), it is possible to observe already emerging dispositions in a LaC orientation, in which English is rightfully owned by all (or rather owned by none). Likewise, the turn toward translanguaging and translingual pedagogies in

Reorienting Language as a Commons

59

the teaching of language minority students (Canagarajah, 2013a, b, Garcia, 2011) may be reflective of an emerging commons in language teaching and learning (although it remains important to be vigilant toward the means by which the translingual turn itself may become co-opted by the neoliberal regime, see here Flores, 2013). Nationalist language ideologies that have emerged in Western society have raised alarm at the abdication of ownership of language, fearing that loss of linguistic purity and clearly maintained language boundaries leads inevitably to social breakdown and loss of cultural and national cohesion (Weber, 2015). Even though this does not reflect a consensus view in the scholarship of applied linguistics or teaching ESL, it may be worth asking whether the widely cited “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin, 1968) may in fact apply to the teaching and learning of English. In other words, is there a danger in moving toward a vision of language in which English is no longer viewed as stable, discrete, privatized, and policed? In my own experience working with preservice and in-service ESL teachers who are being exposed for the first time to translingual and translanguaging pedagogies, one of the more frequently expressed concerns is that not regulating language on the basis of a standard, monolingual English norm opens the door to translingual practices that will lead to a downward spiral of lowered standards, and ultimately a loss of intelligibility between speakers who may no longer share a single, standard language code. While such concerns are unfounded, they are not unreasonable; fundamentally, these teachers are asking the question of what happens to language when it is no longer subject to the privatized and policed enclosure of standardized language standards. Such concerns mirror Hardin’s (1968) classic case of the “tragedy of the commons,” which presents the choice between the private enclosure through policed ownership and public degradation that leads from the unregulated commons. In regulating either the number of livestock to graze on a village green (in Hardin’s example) or to regulate the standardized use of a language, we face the double-bind of either overwhelming the carrying capacity of a system (either linguistic or environmental) or acceding to centralization of control (Orr, 1992). The impact of this doublebind falls inequitably on those who have lived as commoners: peasants and campesinos, those who live by their own subsistence and work with vernacular tools, including language. For them, privatization implies its original Latin roots, privatus “to deprive or rob” (Shiva, 2010). Rather than appeal to the practice of enclosure and privatization in response to concerns about unregulated linguistic or environmental commons, we must recognize that commons are regulated

60

TESOL and Sustainability

(Ostrom, 2015). Likewise, a translingual language commons is not unregulated, albeit it is regulated in service of its local community, but not regulated in service of maximizing the efficiency of instruction, schooling, and industrial economy. On what basis can members of local communities (whether a vernacular language community or a classroom) regulate a language commons? Language policy decisions must be made in light of what Illich (1973) calls the “multiple balance” (p. 47) that can reorient human lives toward conviviality, amid the crises that arise in an increasingly unstable social structure. In particular, “the rising cost of fitting man [sic] to the service of his tools” (including and especially English) cannot be perpetually maintained; instead human beings must begin to work to restore a balance of conviviality amid a highly programmed, institutionalized, and standardized world. One self-regulating principle of a language commons, therefore, must be to accept that “tools [such as English] foster conviviality to the extent that they can be used by anybody as often or as seldom as desired for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user” (Illich, 1973, p. 22). As language teachers, it is incumbent to embrace “as seldom” as much as “as often” to strive to undo the pernicious effects of English’s (and other standard languages’) radical monopoly. As Illich (1973) indicates, “A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of another member’s freedom [to not use tools]” (p. 12). As a profession we need to revision a rationale for bringing English to the world that reasserts a balance between open access to English and obligatory English. Learners must be inducted into a critical stance toward their own learning, recognizing that insofar as when English is being taught and learned as a non-convivial tool whose use and spread obliges more use and wider spread, this process works to exclude and impute a need to others, like David and Josie’s ELL student. The work of English language teaching is inherently unsustainable when the spread of English creates a need that only further spread of English can satisfy. In working to make sense of how English language teachers can take up this LaC orientation toward our work, which requires us to embrace limits to the growth of English and a limit on the role of the professional, credentialed language teacher, it is incumbent to recognize, as Illich (1973) does, that the most important changes must come from individual and personal commitments to a more just, convivial, sustainable future: People must learn to live within bounds. This cannot be taught. Survival depends on people learning fast what they cannot do. They must learn to abstain

Reorienting Language as a Commons

61

from unlimited … consumption and use. It is impossible to educate people for voluntary poverty or to manipulate them into self-control. It is impossible to teach joyful renunciation in a world totally structured for higher output and the illusion of declining costs. (p. 65, emphasis in original)

What I suggest Illich is saying here, which is particularly relevant for the broader acceptance of a commons-based pedagogy for English language teaching and learning, is that any kind of substantive professional development and growth must be focused on the individuals and teachers themselves, and how we grapple with our complicity in an economic system built to generate unlimited growth and consumption, including growth and consumption of capitalized, standardized language. Mark’s question remains apt: “Are you saying that teaching English is a bad thing?” Failing to acknowledge, let alone to renounce, our profession’s complicity in maintaining the social traps presented by the institutionalization and commodification of language, we are obliged to answer Mark in the affirmative. How, then, as educators and teacher educators, can we move our field toward the reimagination of cultural values necessary for equity, conviviality, and long-term sustainability of humankind on the planet, when the very nature of that cultural and educational change cannot be “educated” into people? Insofar as an alternate orientation toward language and language teaching can permit us to talk in new ways about language, ask new questions, and come to new conclusions about our work and professional obligations (Ruiz, 1984), then this present work aims to initiate those conversations and questions, which, given the ongoing crises in our “second watershed” will only become more pressing.

Notes 1 All names are pseudonyms. 2 The “first watershed” for Illich, happened in the early twentieth century when modern institutionalized treatments finally began to approximate the quality of outcomes of traditional approaches. In medicine, for example, the first watershed can be identified when the institutionalized medical profession could deliver outcomes at least as effective as vernacular (or folk-based) approaches to health and healing. Passing the first watershed, humankind sped toward the second in which these institutionalized services were able to not only treat problems but become so ubiquitous that they define the problems they are organized around solving, such

62

TESOL and Sustainability

as determining what it means to be unhealthy or to be uneducated. The second watershed is characterized by manufacture of these problems or “needs” faster than the services can be delivered, which, for Illich, is a fundamental explanation for the irrepressible, but unsustainable, desire for economic growth without limits in the present “second watershed” (Illich, 1973, pp. 1–9). 3 This construction of an educational “need” in the wake of Lau v Nichols may be considered as an excellent example of how “needs” are defined by their satisfaction at the hands of an outsider or dominant group member. Ascribing needs for language minority children in the post-Lau era is analogous to the ascribing the needs of so-called “underdeveloped” societies, such as Western education, flush toilets, and of course, English. Illich (2010) offers a compelling analysis of how “needs” are constructed in development discourse. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that in Josie’s description earlier of her ELL student and the ESL teacher she works with is framed in terms of “needs.” 4 “Counter-productivity” has been described by Finger and Asun (2001) as one of the most original and influential of Illich’s theoretical contributions. As institutions in the twentieth century became more capable of delivering benefits to individuals (such as access to knowledge or healing), there is a point at which the beneficial relationship into a pernicious, controlling one. Finger and Asun (2001) point out that “Illich is not against schools or hospitals as such, but once a certain threshold of institutionalization is reached, schools make people more stupid, while hospitals make them sick. And more generally, beyond a certain threshold of institutionalized expertise, more experts are counterproductive—they produce the counter effect of what they set out to achieve” (p. 11).

References Block, D. (2017). What on earth is “language commodification.” In B. Schmenk, S. Breidbach, & L. Küster (Eds.), Sloganizations in language education discourse. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Bowers, C. A. (2006).  Revitalizing the commons: Cultural and educational sites of resistance and affirmation. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Canagarajah, A. S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Canagarajah, A. S. (2006). Toward a writing pedagogy of shuttling between languages: Learning from multilingual writers. College English, 68(6), 589–604. Canagarajah, A. S. (2013a). Negotiating translingual literacy: An enactment. Research in the Teaching of English, 48, 40–67. Canagarajah, A. S. (2013b).  Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. New York: Routledge.

Reorienting Language as a Commons

63

Cayley, D. (1992).  Ivan Illich in conversation: The testament of Ivan Illich. Toronto: House of Anansi. Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) (1974). Students’ right to their own language. Retrieved from February 18, 2019: http://www.ncte.org/ library/NCTEFiles/Groups/CCCC/NewSRTOL.pdf. Elias, J. L. (1976). Conscientization and deschooling: Freire’s and Illich’s Proposals for reshaping society. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press. Egan, M. (2014). Forward. In T. Wall (Ed.), The commons in history (pp. xi–xv). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Esteva, G. (2010) Development. In W. Sachs (Ed.), The development dictionary (pp. 1–23). London: Zed. Esteva, G. & Prakash, M. (2014) Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the soil of cultures. London: Zed. Esteva, G., Prakash, M. S., & Stuchul, D. L. (2005). From a pedagogy for liberation to liberation from pedagogy. In C. Bowers & F. Apffel-Marglin (Eds.), Re-thinking Freire: Globalization and the environmental crisis (pp. 13–30). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Finger, M., & Asún, J. M. (2001). Adult education at the crossroads: Learning our way out. London: Zed. Flores, N. (2013). The unexamined relationship between neoliberalism and plurilingualism: A cautionary tale. TESOL Quarterly,  47(3), 500–520. Garcia, O. (2011). Bilingualism and translanguaging in Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Halliday, M. (2003). On language and linguistics: Volume 3. London: Continuum. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162, 1243–1248. Holborow, M. (2015).  Language and neoliberalism. New York: Routledge. Hult, F. M., & Hornberger, N. H. (2016). Revisiting orientations in language planning: Problem, right, and resource as an analytical heuristic. The Bilingual review/La revista bilingüe, 33, 30–49. Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. New York: Harper and Row. Illich, I. (1973), Tools for conviviality. New York: Harper and Row. Illich, I. (1978/1992). In the mirror of the past. New York: Marion Boyers. Illich, I. (1981/2013). Beyond economics and ecology: The radical thought of Ivan Illich. S. Samuel (Ed.). London: Marion Boyers. Illich, I. (1982). Gender. New York: Pantheon. Illich, I. (1990/2010). Needs.  In W. Sachs (Ed.), The development dictionary (pp. 88–101). London: Zed Books. Kelly-Holmes, H. (2010). Markets and languages: Sociolinguistic perspectives. In H. KellyHolmes & G. Moutner (Eds.),  Language and the market (pp. 20–29). London: Palgrave. Kelly-Holmes, H., & Moutner, G. (2010)  Language and the market. London: Palgrave. MacPherson, S. (2010). Education and sustainability: Learning across the diaspora, indigenous, and minority divide. New York: Routledge.

64

TESOL and Sustainability

Norton, B. (1997). Language, identity, and the ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 31(3), 409–429. Orr, D. (1992). Ecological literacy: Education and the transition to a postmodern world. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ostrom, E. (2015). Governing the commons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. New York: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2018). Posthumanist applied linguistics. New York: Routledge. Pennycook, A., & Makoni, S. (Eds.). (2007).  Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Bristol, UK: Multilingual matters. Rubdy, R., & Tan, P. (Eds.). (2008). Language as commodity: Global structures, local marketplaces. London: Bloomsbury. Ruiz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE journal, 8, 15–34. Sachs, W. (2010) Environment. In W. Sachs (Ed.), The development dictionary (pp. 24–37). London: Zed. Shiva, V. (2010) Resources. In W. Sachs (Ed.), The development dictionary (pp. 228–242). London: Zed. Smitherman, G. (1999). CCCC’s role in the struggle for language rights. College composition and communication, 50, 349–376. Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. J., & McNeill, J. R. (2007). The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature. AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 36, 614–662. Taylor, S. K., & Snoddon, K. (2013). Plurilingualism in TESOL: Promising controversies. TESOL Quarterly, 47, 439–445. Tupas, T. (2008). Anatomies of linguistic commodification: The case of English in the Philippines vis-à-vis other languages in the multilingual marketplace. In R. Rubdy & P. Tan (Eds.), Language as commodity: Global structures, local marketplaces (pp. 89–105). London: Bloomsbury. Walsh, M. (2017). Picasso’s Guernica, Walter Benjamin, war and peace. Border crossings: A magazine for the arts, 36, 12–13. Weber, J. (2015). Language Racism. London: Palgrave. Widdowson, H. G. (1994). The ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 28(2), 377–389. Wroblewski, M. (2012). Amazonian Kichwa Proper: Ethnolinguistic domain in panIndian Ecuador. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 22(1), 64–86.

3

Post-Truth Pedagogy for TESOL: Our Collective Responsibility for the Two-Legged, the Four-Legged, the Flyers, the Swimmers, the Multi-Legged, and the Stationary Sandra Kouritzin

University of Manitoba

If you are reading this volume, then it is likely you have already been thinking about our role as TESOL professionals facing human-provoked climate change, and about whether “sustainability” is even attainable in the Anthropocene Era. It is likely that you have experienced sleepless eco-anxious nights worrying about rising sea levels, economic collapse, poisoned oceans, heat-ravaged lands, global famine, suffocating air, and the soon-to-explode violence of desperate, dying peoples (Wallace-Wells, 2017). It is probable that you have had your heart broken by the videos circulating on social media of a starving Polar Bear staggering on the tundra, and you have cried for an orangutan trying to protect the last tree in her home from a bulldozer; therefore, you have probably begun to connect survival of humans to survival together. Survival together depends on caring for all of us on the planet—not just the two-leggeds, but also the flyers and the fourleggeds (Lewis, 2018) and, I might add, the swimmers, the multi-leggeds, and the stationary. You will have, at a minimum, felt the echo of the now-spasmodic heartbeat of Mother Earth in atrial fibrillation. You would have realized, at least subconsciously, that much of what climate change deniers assert (as above) is not merely euphemistic “alternative fact” but rather, post-truth fiction.

Defining Post-Truth Post-truth, Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2016, is defined as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are

66

TESOL and Sustainability

less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” An exemplar sentence reads: “In this era of post-truth politics, it’s easy to cherry-pick data and come to whatever conclusion you desire” (https:// en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/post-truth). The exemplar also references one consequence of post-truth: public loss of faith in expertise and research, about which Fish (2016) notes: Attitudes—towards expert opinion, towards truth, towards evidence— characterize what is beginning to be called “post-truth” politics: a form of politics where there is a willingness to issue warnings regardless of whether there is any real sense of the events being likely to come about, or make promises that there is no real commitment to keeping, or make claims that there is no real reason to believe are true, all for the purpose of gaining an electoral advantage. (p. 211)

These attitudes referenced by Fish make it possible for charlatan savants to mobilize the existential “they” (or other dummy pronouns) for post-truth purposes, as in the quotes cited above. Academic discussions of post-truth render its meaning more nuanced than this dictionary definition, naming not only agents of the appeals to emotion and personal belief, but also the intentions behind the appeals and the manner in which they are disseminated. Opinion masquerading as information is consumed quickly by individuals, frequently in isolation, and not subjected to discussion, debate, or critical thinking, in which the: previous journalism-centered regime of truth … is increasingly being subverted (if not replaced) by a broadly discursive, media-centered epistemology where various actors (politicians, institutions, movements, bloggers, talk show hosts, and so on) are involved in a dispersed and widespread creative construction of truth. (Jones, 2009, p. 129)

Moreover, academic and popular discussions of post-truth make clear that the circumstances giving rise to post-truth are not local (Gross, 2017), nor are they new. Fueled by the communications revolution and decay of democracy (Keane, 2018), post-truth is rapidly disseminated through forms of social media in which no vetting or peer review is required to reach a wide audience. That is, while post-truth is popularly associated with President Trump and the Brexit campaign, post-truth is not limited to individuals or movements. Several scholars warn that the skepticism engendered by post-truth posturing (referencing theatrics beyond the politico-economic sphere, this is a better term than post-truth politics) is spilling over toward expert opinion, truth, evidence, and information, with the result that there is a growing distrust of scholars and

Post-Truth Pedagogy for TESOL

67

their expertise (Levitan, 2016; Nichols, 2017). Keyes (2004) squarely laid a good portion of the blame for this “death of expertise” (Nichols, 2017) characterizing post-truth times on the shoulders of postmodern academics; likewise, Tallis (2016) suggests: We post-positivists rightly congratulate ourselves on having developed a sophisticated and reflexive relation to “facts,” “information” and, indeed, “(post-) truth.” However … we post-positivist scholars too often disavow our authority by failing to sufficiently engage in public debate and political action on explicitly post-truth terms. (p. 11)

Given that postmodernism has only recently been noticed outside of the academy (Smith, 2017), however, a more convincing argument is put forward by Bacon (2017): Post-truth represents a backlash by historically privileged groups threatened by inevitable demographic shifts and demands for long overdue social change. More and more, those long silenced are writing counter-narratives that disrupt the past textual monopolies of white, male, Eurocentric “truth.” With control over truth being wrestled away, those who gripped it for so long are attempting to burn the fields upon their retreat. If they can’t control truth, they’ll do away with it altogether—delegitimizing public media, empirical science, and even their own political institutions in a last ditch effort to slow the tides of change. (Bacon, 2017, np; also Ball, 2017; Bowers, 2002)

Therefore, recognizing that climate change denial comes from historically privileged groups, we must question everything in our closed environmental system, no matter how exhausting it becomes. While such scholarship suggests that post-truth is something new, arising from postmodern and post-positivist views, something that academics have brought upon themselves, alternative facts existed in the mainstream long before 2016. Evidence of post-truth is found in retouched photographs of celebrities, constantly reinforced social constructions of race and of binary gender, revisionist histories leaving out inconvenient or disadvantageous truths, quotations reworked and attributed to famous people, white lies, virtual reality, predatory journals, film and audio-splicing, propaganda masquerading as curriculum. In fact, Keyes (2004) traces human deception to the beginnings of known history, and into the animal kingdom. But recently, there seem to have been three fundamental shifts in the nature of post-truth: 1) from a good con enacted on others outside our own communities (Keyes, 2004), to what opponents “couldn’t prove to be wrong” (Gross, 2017: 2),

68

TESOL and Sustainability

to “gaslighting,” or the production, through language, of “outright lies, empirical falsehoods, and misleading associations … in the service of [the elite’s] own interests” (Tallis, 2016, p. 9); such lies are repeatedly asserted as true even when there is overwhelming empirical, easily accessible data to the contrary; 2) from local deceits to global ones such as those Blacker (2013, pp. 37–39) describes, including free trade, speculative finance, and “public” resources; and, 3) from socially condemned behavior that would force the liar to resign if found out (Gross, 2017) to socially sanctioned behavior: The emotional valence of words associated with deception has declined. We no longer tell lies. Instead we “misspeak.” We “exaggerate.” We “exercise poor judgment.” “Mistakes were made,” we say. The term “deceive” gives way to the more playful “spin.” At worst, saying “I wasn’t truthful” sounds better than “I lied.” Nor would we want to accuse others of lying; we say they’re “in denial.” (Keyes, 2004, p. 13)

But, what does this have to do with sustainability, and the coming climate apocalypse—about which the late Stephen Hawking warned that humans may need to colonize other planets in order to survive the environmental destruction we have wrought (Barclay, 2018)? Simply stated, educational institutions (meaning all of us) have failed in their/our espoused public purposes, only to be supplanted by populist knowledge which undermines scientific research on renewable processes, and alters the political discourse on the human causes of climate change and other threats to human survival (Oreskes & Conway, 2010).1 Such political discourses paint those who object to the status quo as “killers—of people, progress, and jobs” (Schlosberg, 2017, np). At a conference I attended recently several educators told me that they could not discuss fossil fuels because their students’ parents were in the oil industry. As in this local example, every day, we educators support post-truth practices by engaging in such small sacrifices of our integrity by undermining scientific research.

Why Should TESOL Educators Care? That educational institutions are failing should not be surprising; we are working with a model of education that was developed for different times and different students (Kouritzin, 2018). iGeneration youth, those who have never lived

Post-Truth Pedagogy for TESOL

69

without technology and who do not distinguish cyberspace from “real” space, are exposed to constantly aggregating forms of post-truth posturing. D’Ancona (2017) argues that, for them, the “inclination of some teachers to treat the Internet as a second-rate resource misses the point …; it is the only reference” (p. 114) that educators therefore must engage. Because social media platforms have algorithms feeding users only what they are predisposed to view favorably, users are seldom called upon to challenge their own opinions. Research from Stanford University reported that the majority of students in K-university were unable to accurately assess the credibility of news reports online (Donald, 2016), while Schneider (2018) reports that “a recent study by Media Insight Project … found that, on social media, who shares a news story matters more than who reports or writes it” (p. 11). However, 56 percent of GenZed in Canada (born between 1995 and 2005) describe themselves as “very active and aware” of matters related to politics and social movements, and 81 percent of them regularly report reading the news (Abedi, 2018). Abedi (2018) cites concerns from GenZed activists (a) that they are not taken seriously and (b) that they are being manipulated by third parties. In other words, not engaging with students on post-truth posturing is socially unjust. An added concern in TESOL is that, in order to weigh and evaluate competing truth claims, our students must deconstruct information in the dominant language even while they are learning it. Our goal in a post-truth paradigm must be to engage post-truth pedagogy, that is, not merely critical literacy, but historically informed analyses that combat post-truth posturing while deliberately countering a cynical, postmodern, moral relativism that tolerates all views. In order to deal with the paradox that while there may be no absolute truths, there are most definitely untruths, students must become intelligent consumers of texts by consulting multiple sources, weighing opinions against facts, and determining credibility through historiography, archaeology, and genealogy. We must show students how all learning, just like language learning, is participatory and dialogic. Bacon (2017) suggests that post-truth posturing mimics critical literacy in that it aims “to instill mistrust of mainstream media, academic institutions, and broad scientific consensus” (np). He suggests that post-truthing is deliberate, and politically motivated; therefore, we must be political. Language teachers, because of our unique positioning amid languages and cultures, ideologies and ontological diasporas, are aware that language shapes thought. Referring to English specifically, through language, the concept of race was socially constructed to serve political purposes, as was the binary

70

TESOL and Sustainability

of gender (Spoon & Coyote, 2014), as were myths of food scarcity that led to environmentally destructive farming practices (Mann, 2017) and consumer price-gouging (Hamilton, 2003), as was the calorie as the measure of national and international starvation (Cullather, 2007). Likewise, Wals (2015) flags linguistic social constructions such as “the use of deceptive language to normalize or legitimize ecological malpractice such as the use ‘emissions’ instead of air pollution” (p. 12) and “‘up to 30% plant-based material’ to promote the use of plastic bottles” (p. 12), demonstrating how climate change deniers and political leaders have de/constructed realities via a linguistic turn legitimized as “spin.” Therefore, language teachers must be able to themselves critically analyze evidence and effectively communicate how to evaluate truth claims. Language teachers must embrace plurality of perspectives without embracing the deliberate creation and dissemination of alternative facts and fake news, or the attempted elimination of real-world issues by removing the language of human-caused climate change or LGBTQ+ from political webspaces. Marmot (2017) suggests that “professions which the public regard as purveyors of truth need to have our voices heard” (p. 498), noting that teachers, nurses, doctors, and judges are considered most truthful. I suggest a number of reasons why TESOL-ers in particular are important in this regard. First, in common parlance, we refer to the 1 percent, the wealthy elite, bemoaning our lack of financial and political power as members of the 99 percent.2 Needed is coordination, agreement, and unison of voice—and therefore language—among the 99 percent. I am not so elitist to suggest that everyone in the world needs to speak English; however, currently a number of languages together can represent the voices of most of the 99 percent. Most communities not speaking a dominant language have access to someone who does. Among the dominant languages, English is the one that most resembles a global lingua franca (Crystal, 2012). Second, language teachers are in a unique position. Speaking from the perspective of Canada where I live, there are few provinces or districts that have a standardized curriculum for English as a second/additional language (ESL/ EAL). Those that exist focus on language structures, vocabulary, contexts of usage, and rhetoric for academic language in the case of K-12 education, on workplace, settlement, or academic language in the case of adult education. Unlike subject area teachers in the K-12 school system who must follow gradelevel subject curricula, we frequently have more option to choose our content or topics, giving us increased opportunity to disrupt normative thinking. At the same time, however, Goulah (2017) points out that very little attention is paid to climate change in TESOL methods or planning texts.

Post-Truth Pedagogy for TESOL

71

Third, we in TESOL and in other languages teach in every context. We teach EAL, ESL, English as a foreign language (EFL), English as an international language (EIL), or Standard English as a second dialect (SESD) in preschool, K-12, universities, colleges, vocational institutes, internationally, adult institutes, in homes, workplaces, refugee and immigrant communities, Indigenous communities, in public and private institutions or businesses, in government agencies, in digital networks, nongovernmental organizations, virtual environments, translingual spaces, and communities in diaspora. That is, in TESOL, we have colleagues and friends across the educational spectrum, and we connect with every age group. Fourth, we in language education are internationally connected with one another; we speak to one another in many professional contexts such as workshops, congresses and conferences, and online; we therefore already have the infrastructure to work as a collective. We have cross-context, transnational conversations, digitally and face-to-face, and we share our practices and resources generously, often without concern for recognition of our intellectual property. Fifth, we engage as co-learners with our students, guiding our students to clear hurdles erected by others. We are not the exam makers or the gatekeepers; we are the people who help to open the gate. Our classroom stances are frequently those of servants rather than teachers; our students often know more than we do. We are thus uniquely positioned to engage with learners in pursuit of one absolute truth—survival, living together, and having non-extractive relationships (Kouritzin & Nakagawa, 2018) with one another. Therefore, finally, if not us, then who? Do we wait for someone else? Or do we begin, and hope that other groups of educators follow suit? That is, more than any other educators, we have a shared responsibility—but also a privilege—to engage with the dilemmas and questions posed by Wals (2015): The push by the younger generation for serious engagement of education of sustainability is urgently needed, as earlier attempts to realize such engagement have, on the whole, not been very successful. Over 40 years of promoting and developing environmental education (EE) and over 20 years of education for sustainable development (ESD) have not influenced education enough to reorient it to serving the well-being of people and planet …. Hundreds, if not thousands of articles have been published about climate change and sustainable development but rarely do they make a reference to the role of education, teaching and learning. As the world is confronted with major ecological crises leading to or amplifying major social crises (and vice versa) it is about time that

72

TESOL and Sustainability the media begin to engage the question of “How should education respond?” and “What should people be learning and how?” (Wals, 2015, pp. 5–6)

Wals here very clearly identifies the push as coming from younger generations. We cannot promote pedagogies of compassion, mindfulness, or inclusion, an ethics of care or respect, without acknowledging an ecological endgame.

Initiating Post-Truth Pedagogies I speak frequently to my (admittedly no-longer-minor) children about what the next decade(s) will bring, what we can do, and how we might enact a physical and ideological “exit strategy,” if one remains to us. My gentle older daughter hopes for an apocalypse. She wants those she loves to live and die together, and so she wants to make her home on Tokunoshima, surrounded by the Indigenous Amami she identifies with, her father’s people. My younger daughter, a proud, defiant transwoman of great strength and character, is determined to fight back through her devotion to agroecology and veterinary entomology. Neither of my children has given up, but neither believes that they will have many choices in life, or that grandchildren are in their futures. I am not offering these stories to celebrate my parenting practices. Rather, such stories, because they belong to me, become an entry point I offer my students in my university classes. My students’ responses are many and varied: denial, grief, frustration with me, irritation at the waste of time—but in many cases relief, confessions of eco-anxiety, and a sense that “finally, we are putting into words what I fear most.” Such practices, I suggest, reflect post-truth pedagogy. Post-truth pedagogy is a pedagogy of responsibility; it does not require that we know what to do and have an action plan; rather, post-truth pedagogy opens the doors for us to listen to each other, to plan for survival, together. Post-truth pedagogy begins with questioning how we, as language teacher educators and language teachers, engage with students in ways that evaluate and refute post-truth claims. More importantly, it also asks more important questions: How do we engage with one another and teach our students to engage with one another in non-extractive ways? How do we prepare students to live in post-truth, post-national, and postdemocratic worlds that we have not experienced and cannot predict? How do we not live “sustainably” which “usually means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people feel is their right,” which in turn promotes the idea “that WE are not the problem, it is only our current way of

Post-Truth Pedagogy for TESOL

73

doing things that is to blame” (Baker, 2013, p. 29)? If we are unable to change the path we are on, how do we live eschatologically? That is, post-truth pedagogy rejects focus on personal goals and sustainable development as if these are infinite; rather, it promotes living responsibly within self-imposed constraints on accumulation and boundaries on engaging with other Beings in extractive ways. If we do not, we will then be able to do nothing more than engage in language education at/for world’s end. The kinds of educational and pedagogical questions initiating post-truth pedagogy, grouped by known conceptual frameworks in TESOL, include: (1) Communities of practice: How do we engage with one another and teach our students to engage with one another in non-extractive ways? How do we stop viewing other people in terms of their utility to us? Why do we believe that we are more important than other Beings on our planet? What does it mean to take seriously the lives of the flyers, the four-legged, the swimmers, the multi-legged, and the stationary? How do we work together to achieve food sovereignty and food security for all Beings? (2) Imagined communities: How do we prepare teachers and students, ESL or otherwise, to live in a future we cannot imagine? What lessons can we learn from Cape Town, and what does it mean to live in a city/town/country without water? What will happen when sea levels rise 20-50-100-200 centimeters, especially since most industry is located close to water? How do we prepare students to survive war, famine, genocide, and the destruction of the nation-state (brought about by capitalism), especially when many of our students have lived through these and know better than we do? (3) Eco-justice education: How has education come to serve the economy rather than people and other Beings? Why do we use the language of war to describe what we do as teachers: “on the front lines,” “in the trenches,” and what does this imply about schooling? What is education for? What would an international curriculum for eco-language contain? How is landbased learning appropriate to language education, and how do we elites foster love of land instead of disrespect or abuse? How does the electrical grid system currently force us to maintain our reliance on vehicle fossil fuels (Dubinsky, 2016)? What is “the ratio between the time of use of a disposable wood stick and the time it took to travel from its original tree to the coffee shop?” (Burnside, Jiang, & Zabala, 2017, np). “Does the earth have a metabolism, can rocks listen, what are the rights of a creek?” (Lather, 2013, p. 641).

74

TESOL and Sustainability

(4) Power and political structures: How do we free ourselves from end-stage capitalism? What comes after capitalism? How were Hollywood political dramas complicit in creating the pre-conditions for a Trump presidency? What is reflected about national and international politics in how characters speak to and about one another in political dramas? How does it change the public consciousness when a recent episode of Madam Secretary talks about trying to buy people on the planet a bit more time, thereby acknowledging that we have passed the tipping point on climate change?3 Why do we not limit extreme power or wealth in the same way that we try to limit extreme poverty or captivity/slavery (also Wals, 2015)? What are the linguistic “playbooks” of political power, and how can we recognize them? “Instead of an economy that works for the prosperity of all, for future generations, and for the planet, we have instead created an economy for the 1%. How has this happened and why?” (Oxfam, 2016, p. 5). (5) Social constructions: How does the language we use turn people into neoliberal subjects, or consumers, or authorities, or criminals? How do we use language to engage in cultural appropriation and theft? What are the narratives—like the “self made man”—that make us admire rather than disparage those who horde more resources than they can ever use while allowing, even forcing, others to have nothing? Why do Western ideologies distinguish between animate and inanimate objects? Should they?

Post-Truth Classroom Practices I would be remiss if I did not share how I have tried to do this in my own classrooms in preservice teacher education, in-service post-baccalaureate education diploma, and graduate programs.4 In the first place, I have pledged to interrupt my dominant-culture students’ ideologies—even though they don’t like it very much. For example, I live in Winnipeg, surrounded by farm country. Many of my students are descended from farm families, and have vested interests in “big agriculture” practices like mono-cropping. It is contentious for me, in my role as “second language teacher educator” to discuss the following: Food varieties come from diverse ecological systems, and these ecological systems are the environments within which knowledge is molded and encoded through language and culture as an adaptive response; therefore, homogenizing ecosystems through industrial agriculture selects adaptive features of language

Post-Truth Pedagogy for TESOL

75

and culture, while this same process inhibits and obstructs the cultivation and freedom for the majority of biological organisms and cultures. (Jacques & Jacques, 2012, p. 2972)

According to some students, I “should be” focused solely on language teaching methods. On the other hand, I argue, this sentence is beautifully constructed. It is a goal for English language learners to be able to write like this, indeed for my preservice teachers to be able to write like this. This sentence contains sixty-one words. There is a correctly used semicolon, along with independent and dependent clauses, use of gerunds, parallel verbs and nouns, creative adjectives; it is a language lesson unto itself. I could introduce a less controversial topic, but I prefer to use those that challenge assumptions. But, challenging assumptions is not enough; we in TESOL need to move beyond questions in our classrooms, toward acknowledging our lost wisdoms that are not based merely in individualist, progress-oriented, anthropocentric criticality (Bowers, 2002), but are outside the box of rationalist Western-style thinking. I also continue to find new ways to include what my partner and I call “philostories,” ways in which we can tap the primacy and essential honesty, of oral truthing (Nakagawa, 2007, 2011) and storytelling. We do this because while formal classroom practices favor reporting on information and facts, we choose instead to use our time together to speak to what should be. We do this by assigning photo “essays” without words, oral exams with topic prompts that students must discuss with us, digital videos, personal artifact creation and introduction—and of course we explain that the best way to do any of this is to tell stories. We make assignments out of writing commentary to print journalism editors, with bonus points for getting them published. None of our practices is unique to us, but the difference is that these practices are not followed up by the “real” assignment of a written test or paper; these practices are our assessment practices. We teach a graduate course together called Global Indigenous Knowledges in which we assign no readings; students must view videos, movies, documentaries, artworks, and walk barefoot on the land. They must create seven- to tenminute oral stories that are one of narrative, descriptive, process, compare/ contrast, cause and effect, argument, critical. Each narrative must take one of several forms: a folk tale, a story with a moral, retelling history, heart-touching story, science story, math story, historical/cultural story, a story that makes an argument, a personal story. These are shared orally, first in small groups, then to the whole class. Each story must be memorized and practiced before it is shared. We all listen carefully, and magic happens.

76

TESOL and Sustainability

I have recently been lucky enough to pilot a graduate course called Decolonizing Methodologies in which I explained “Decolonization here roughly refers to processes by which individuals, groups of people, or nation states free themselves from the ideological, political, economic, social, spiritual, agricultural, technological and epistemological rule of a dominant empire” in which empire was defined broadly to mean “a powerful and important enterprise or holding of large scope that is controlled by a single person, family, or group of associates” (dictionary.com/browse/empire). Each week we read only one article, following which each of us, including me, wrote a story in response with the only instruction being: It may be a true or fictional story. It may include argument, but should primarily be a story. Using one of the methodologies explicated by Smith (2012), or another of your own choosing, you will write something that is to be read aloud.

Each of us was able to find a way to speak our own truth to power, and, to speak power to truth, in that What historically have been accepted as “truths,” in the sense of distinguishing knowledge from opinion or fact from fiction, are themselves products of complex negotiations, often over long period of time, between progressive and repressive forces that coexist within the inherently disputatious governance structures of knowledge production. (Keren & Hawkins, 2015, p. 3)

An added bonus for me is that I did some of the best writing of my life for that class, words I am excited to share when I can find an outlet for them. And, finally, I allow myself to be vulnerable. I speak openly to students about my struggle to change my gender expressions, now that my transgender daughter has awakened me to its importance. I ask my students to challenge me if I inadvertently use a gendered pronoun or example, or slip into gender-binary language (recognizing only male and female). I talk about the other linguistic changes I have had to make throughout my life, such as changing from saying “Native Indian” to “Aboriginal” and now to “Indigenous,” shifting my language from that of governance structures to language that demonstrates respect. In respect for mental health concerns, I have changed from “committing suicide” to “completing suicide,” a linguistic turn that shifts perspective from an individual crime, to a social phenomenon that we are all responsible for. It is important for students to understand that once we change our language, our emotional response changes as well. These are practices that I have introduced over the past three years, addressing post-truth head on, becoming more deliberately political.

Post-Truth Pedagogy for TESOL

77

Conclusion On Wednesday, June 27, 2018, a group of graduate students from my Decolonizing Methodologies course were at my home for dinner and discussion. One of them noted that while we had engaged with theory and data collection in decolonizing ways, we then analyzed data in a distinctly traditional manner—is this not a contradiction? I struggled to answer her question, reflecting that indeed, data collection and representation have been the focus of much liberatory work, while analyses seem to remain a matter of storying the theory (critical work, standpoint theory) or theorizing the story (emergent analysis, grounded theory). I had no answers; I realized that inventing different imaginaries for analyses must now be a challenge for me to live. Likewise, living the realties of climate change, we are faced with the need to invent a pedagogy that will help us counter post-truth posturing. In short, TESOL educators can make a commitment to doing something—as Goulah (2017) has committed to in promoting ecoethical consciousness—or we can do nothing. Whether it is good enough or not, I choose to do what I can. After all, I have to find a better purpose for my education than “getting ahead.”

Notes 1 I am cognizant of the substantial body of scholarship pointing out that education is indeed fulfilling the vision of its inception. On the other hand, most of us in education do not identify with those tropes, but rather with humanitarian and social justice goals. 2 The idea of the 1 percent is deceptive. Oxfam (2016) reports that “in 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people—the bottom half of humanity. This figure is down from 388 individuals as recently as 2010.” This would imply that the 1 percent is more appropriately the .01 percent or even .001 percent. However, I use 1 percent because it implicates us in TESOL. According to Anand and Segal (2017), up to 2012, landing in the global 1 percent required a Personal Purchasing Parity (PPP) of $50,600 USD, or PPP $202,000 for a family of four. That is, as individuals and often as families, we earn salaries normally among the 1 percent, identifying us rightly as part of the problem. Using the Global Rich List (http://www. globalrichlist.com), calculating my own position in the world was sobering. 3 I wrote in my journal with the title “The day the narrative shifted.” November 19, 2017. That’s the day the narrative shifted. That’s the day that Episode 7, Season 4 of Madame Secretary called “North to the Future” aired. The gist of the episode

78

TESOL and Sustainability

is that permafrost in Russia is warming up, and smallpox has been released as a consequence. The United States and Russia agree to try a pilot project involving northern countries to reintroduce snow-tramplers into the environment, rationalizing that their hooves would beat down the snow that is acting as insulation, allowing cold air to come into contact with the permafrost and refreeze it. For days, even weeks, after the episode aired, I watched through reviews of the episode; the only debates I could find were about whether or not the science in this episode had any merit. Whether it did or not was not my biggest concern. What concerned me was a conversation in which the fictional SoS remarked that, if it worked, “we could buy ourselves another hundred years.” Chilling. Hollywood, it seems, has thrown in the towel. That sentence is an acknowledgment that the tipping point has passed, that there is no point in looking for solutions, that the monster cannot be tamed. We are now in the business of buying humankind a little bit of time; the fact that the narrative has shifted in Hollywood means that this is the new normal. 4 I am engaging in post-truth pedagogies in CLIL classes in Japan in fall 2018.

References Abedi, M. (2018, June 22). Generation Z—Online, connected and set on fixing the world. Global News Canada. Retrieved from: https://globalnews.ca/news/4251656/ generation-z-social-political-activism/. Anand, S., & Segal, P. (2017). Who are the global top 1%? World Development, 95, 111–126. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.02.001. Bacon, C. (2017, January 2). Political clarity: Combatting “post-truth” narratives through critical literacy. Berkeley Review of Education. Retrieved from: http://www .berkeleyreviewofeducation.com/cfc2016-blog/political-clarity-combatting-posttruth-narratives-through-critical-literacy. Ball, J. (2017). Post-truth: How bullshit conquered the world. London: Biteback Publishing. Barclay, E. (2018, March 14). Stephen Hawking’s warning: It’s time to get the hell off planet Earth. VOX. Retrieved from: https://www.vox.com/science-andhealth/2017/6/20/15836426/stephen-hawking-colonize-other-planets. Blacker, D. (2013). The falling rate of learning and the neoliberal endgame. Winchester, UK: Zero Books. Bowers, C. A. (2002). Toward an eco-justice pedagogy. Environmental Education Research, 8(1), 21–34. doi:10.1080/13504620109628. Burnside, B., Jiang, X., & Zabala, A. (2017). Shades of green: Understanding sustainability in a post-truth age. Ecology and Evolution. Retrieved from: https:// natureecoevocommunity.nature.com/users/35154-aiora-zabala/posts/16312-shadesof-green-understanding-sustainability-in-a-post-truth-age.

Post-Truth Pedagogy for TESOL

79

Crystal, D. (2012). A global language. In P. Seargeant & J. Swann (Eds.), English in the world: History, diversity, change (pp. 151–177). London: Routledge. Cullather, N. (2007). The foreign policy of the calorie. American Historical Review, 112(2), 337–364. D’Ancola, M. (2017). Post-truth: The new war on truth and how to fight back. London: Ebury Press. Donald, B. (2016). Stanford researchers find students have trouble judging the credibility of information online. Stanford Graduate School of Education. Retrieved from: https://ed.stanford.edu/news/stanford-researchers-find-students-have-troublejudging-credibility-information-online?newsletter=true. Dubinsky, Z. (2016, April 10). Electric car sales seem poised for big jump: Can our grid take the load? CBC News, Technology and Science. Retrieved from: https://www.cbc. ca/news/technology/canada-electric-cars-electricity-system-1.3526558. Fish, W. (2016). Post truth politics and illusory democracy. Psychotherapy and Politics International, 14(3), 211–213. Goulah, J. (2017). Climate change and TESOL: Language, literacies, and the creation of eco-ethical consciousness. TESOL Quarterly, 51(1), 90–114. Gross, M. (2017). The dangers of a post-truth world. Current Biology, 27(1), R1–R4. Hamilton, S. (2003). Cold capitalism: The political economy of frozen concentrated orange juice. Agricultural History, 77(4), 557–581. Jacques, P. J., & Jacques, J. R. (2012). Monocropping cultures into ruin: The loss of food varieties and cultural diversity. Sustainability, 4, 2970–2997. doi:10.3390/ su4112970. Jones, J. P. (2009). Believable fictions: Redactional culture and the will to truthiness. In B. Zelizer (Ed.), The changing faces of journalism: Tabloidization, technology and truthiness (pp. 127–143). New York: Routledge. Keane, J. (2018, March 22). Post-truth politics and why the antidote isn’t simply “factchecking” and truth. The Conversation. Post-truth Initiative: University of Sydney. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/post-truth-politics-and-why-theantidote-isnt-simply-fact-checking-and-truth–87364. Keren, M., & Hawkins, R. (2015). Introduction. In M. Keren & R. Hawkins (Eds.), Speaking power to truth: Digital discourse and the public intellectual (pp. 1–14). Edmonton, Canada: Athabasca University Press. Keyes, R. (2004). The post-truth era: Dishonesty and deception in contemporary life. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kouritzin, S. (2018). iGeneration language teacher education: Post-truth pedagogies for decolonizing our professional selves. In J. Liontas (Ed.), TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0923. Kouritzin, S., & Nakagawa, S. (2018). Toward a sustainable, non-extractive research ethics for cross cultural, cross-linguistic research. Journal of Multicultural and Multilingual Development, 39, 675–687. doi:10.1080/01434632.2018.1427755

80

TESOL and Sustainability

Lather, P. (2013). Methodology-21: What do we do in the afterward? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 634–645. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2013.788753. Levitan, D. J. (2016). A field guide to lies: Critical thinking in the information age. Toronto: Allen Lane (Penguin, Canada). Lewis, K. (2018, May 27). Town hall meeting on climate change: Signature event on climate change part 2. Canadian Society for the Study of Education, Annual Meeting, Regina, Saskatchewan. Mann, A. (2017, July 3). Growing food in the post-truth era. The Conversation. Posttruth Initiative: University of Sydney. Retrieved from: https://posttruthinitiative.org/ the-conversation/. Marmot, M. (2017). The art of medicine: Post-truth and science. The Lancet, 389, 497–498. Nakagawa, S. (2007). Accord or discord: Returning to oral traditions? Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 27(2), 447–473. Nakagawa, S. (2011). What kind of pen should I use to write my language and my culture? Canadian Language and Literacy E-journal, 13(1), 60–71. Nichols, T. (2017). The death of expertise: The campaign against established knowledge and why it matters. London: Oxford University Press. Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2010). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. London: Bloomsbury. Oxfam. (2016). 210 Oxfam briefing paper: Summary. An economy for the 1%: How privilege and power in the economy drive extreme inequality and how this can be stopped. www.oxfam.org. Briefing paper retrieved from: https://d1tn3vj7xz9fdh. cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/file_attachments/bp210-economy-one-percent-taxhavens-180116-summ-en_0.pdf. Schlosberg, D. (2017, July 25). On the origins of environmental bullshit. The Conversation. Post-truth Initiative: University of Sydney. Retrieved from: https:// posttruthinitiative.org/the-conversation/. Schneider, H. (2018). Reading between the lines. The Quill, 106(1), 8–15. Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd ed.). London: Zed Books. Smith, R. (2017, April 18). How postmodernism is infiltrating public life and policy. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/howpostmodernism-is-infiltrating-public-life-and-policy/article34734386/. Spoon, R., & Coyote, I. E. (2014). Gender failure. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press. Tallis, B. (2016). Living in post-truth: Power/knowledge/responsibility. New Perspectives, 24(1), 7–18. Wallace-Wells, D. (2017, July 10). Uninhabitable earth. New York Magazine. Retrieved from: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change

Post-Truth Pedagogy for TESOL

81

-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s3&utm_ campaign=sharebutton-t. Wals, A. E. J. (2015). Beyond unreasonable doubt: Education and learning for socioecological sustainability in the Anthropocene. Inaugural address held upon accepting the personal Chair of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability, Wageningen University. Wageningen, The Netherlands: Wageningen University Press. Monograph retrieved from: https://arjenwals.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/ final8412100972_rvb_inauguratie-wals_oratieboekje_v02.pdf.

82

Part Two

Climate Change and Place as TESOL Curriculum and Pedagogy

84

4

TESOL into the Anthropocene: Climate Migration as Curriculum and Pedagogy in ESL Jason Goulah

DePaul University

This chapter reports findings from a critical instrumental case study on (1) district-wide curricular initiatives to include climate migration in unit planning for high school English learners in one of the largest public school districts in the United States and (2) the pedagogical enactment of these initiatives in an introductory English as a second language (ESL) class of native Spanish- and Chinese-speaking students. The chapter contributes to the emerging scholarship on “language education into the Anthropocene” (Goulah, 2017a, b, 2018, 2019) and TESOL and sustainability by examining curricular, pedagogical, and perspectival dimensions of climate change, migration, and English language learning in actual classrooms with teachers and students.

Climate Migration and TESOL The phenomenon of climate displacement and climate migrants—also called climate refugees, environmental refugees, ecological refugees, and environmental diaspora—started appearing in the scholarly and policy literature with increasing frequency in the late 1980s (Castles, 2001, 2002; Collectif Argos, 2010; Cornisbee & Simms, 2003; Deen, 2007; Jacobson, 1988; Kelin, 1998; Kibreab, 1997; Myers, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005; Myers & Kent, 1995; Westra, 2009). With WallaceWells’s (2019) New York Times best-selling book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, discussion of climate migration has now entered the popular discourse. Although international law does not yet recognize climate refugees (Bell, 2004; King, 2006), their current and projected numbers are greater than for those displaced because of war or political, ethnic, or religious oppression

86

TESOL and Sustainability

(Myers, 2001). Indeed, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) 2016 statement on the status of global climate, “in 2015 there were 19.2 million new displacements associated with weather, water, climate and geophysical hazards in 113 countries, more than twice as many as for conflict and violence” (World Meteorological Organization, 2016). “Of these,” the statement continues, “weather-related hazards triggered 14.7 million displacements. South and East Asia dominated in terms of the highest absolute figures, but no region of the world was unaffected” (World Meteorological Organization, 2016). The WMO’s 2017 statement indicates that in 2016, “weather-related disasters displaced 23.5 million people” (World Meteorological Organization, 2018), and its 2018 provisional statement, issued in early 2019, indicates that “over 2 million people were displaced due to disasters linked to weather and climate events [just] as of September 2018” (World Meteorological Organization, 2019). Drought, floods, and storms (including hurricanes and cyclones) cause the most disaster-induced displacement, but other climatic and environmental drivers include desertification and land degradation, rising sea levels, deforestation, soil erosion, crop depletion, wildfires, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. Displaced internally and internationally, climate migrants are often displaced multiple times: often initially internally for climatic reasons, then again—often internationally—after facing further environmental degradation or ethnic, political, or religious persecution in their initially relocated areas (Cornisbee & Simms, 2003; Deen, 2007; Myers, 2005; World Meteorological Organization, 2018). Most internal displacement is caused by sudden onset extreme weather events while slow onset climate-related phenomena such as droughts, desertification, coastal erosion, and sea-level rise frequently result in cross-border displacement (World Meteorological Organization, 2018). The UN projects 200 million climate refugees by 2050, but other figures place the number as high as 1 billion, and the UN Environment Program in Nairobi predicts 50 million environmental refugees by 2060 in Africa alone (Deen, 2007; Wallace-Wells, 2019). A decade ago, I advocated for the need to conceptualize climate migrants in education and illustrated that a growing percentage of them is entering the category of English learners around the world (Goulah, 2010). I have also argued that climate migrants’ traumatic relationship with the land and the attendant sense of loss born from displacement have created a new dimension of identity that fields in language education must consider and address (Goulah, 2012, 2019). Climate migrants comprise both documented and undocumented, national and international, multilingual and monolingual students from every part of the world and language community. They fill seats

TESOL into the Anthropocene

87

in world language, ESL, bilingual, and heritage language classrooms and bring experiences, identities, perspectives, and linguistic practices that warrant attention in the language classroom and in language education theorizing. However, even as immigrants continue to be researched in the education literature (Ngo, 2017), nearly none of this literature considers climate migrants. In his provocative book, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, Todd Miller (2017) chronicles Central American campesinos, subsistence farmers in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, whose corn, beans, and rice seeds completely dried up from a 2015 drought that affected over a million farmers across this four-country “Dry Corridor.” Miller focuses on a seventeen-year-old Honduran boy, a farmer named Ismael who is fleeing the extreme drought for the United States a thousand miles away. When asked why, Ismael answers simply, “‘No hubo lluvia.’ There was no rain.” Miller explains the danger of such migration, increasingly commonplace across the world, in light of the US government’s growing, militarized, and politicized border security. Through Ismael’s example, poignantly captured in graffiti on a passing train car as he talks with the boy—Por la dignidad de un viaje sin fronteras (“for the dignity of a journey without borders”)—Miller brings the intersection of extreme climate instability and displacement together with the intersection of undocumented border crossing and the “lethality” of homeland security: “Perhaps, there is no better way to explore the emergence of a 21st-century border system vis-à-vis climate upheavals, than with a Central American’s journey north” (Miller, 2017, p. 73; see also Homeland Security, 2014). This intersection has direct implications for the field of TESOL—particularly TESOL in the US context where the study reported herein occurred—when we consider that the increasing number of climatically displaced youth like Ismael enter ESL programs.

TESOL into the Anthropocene: The Study In 2016, the office overseeing language and culture education in one of the largest public school districts in the United States commissioned a small group of ESL and bilingual teachers to create model unit plans and facilitate professional development sessions to assist secondary-level teachers of all subjects to theorize, plan, and meet the social, linguistic, academic, and cultural needs of the district’s growing population of English learners. Targeting the narrative, informative, argumentative, and research genres, and couched in state-mandated standards

88

TESOL and Sustainability

each for content and language learning, these model units address the theme of “journey,” with each genre dedicated to a different aspect of this theme. The five-week unit targeting the informative genre features “migration” and includes one week explicitly engaging students in language and content about weather, climate, environment, and the push- and pull-factors of climate migration. Using a critical instrumental case study design, discourse analytic and observational methods (Creswell, 1997), and “being-in-place methodology”— the “poetics of place with conscience” (Brady, 2008, p. 504)—I examined the creation and substance of the aforementioned curricular integration and one of the authoring teacher’s pedagogical enactment of it as she field-tested the unit in an introductory ESL class. The unit writing initiative and the teacher’s pedagogical enactment constitute the case. The study happened from 2016 to 2018.

Conceptual and Theoretical Framework The study was conceptually framed by Schubert’s (2009) essential question for curriculum and pedagogy. It was theoretically framed by Ikeda’s (2010a, 2014) nine essential elements for enacting the kind of global citizenship necessary to live sustainably and ameliorate the world’s interlocking social and environmental crises. Schubert’s (2009) essential question for curriculum and pedagogy is “What is worthwhile.” More specifically, he asks “What is worth knowing, needing, experiencing, doing, being, becoming, overcoming, sharing, contributing, and wondering” (Schubert, 2009, p. 23). By “curriculum” here, Schubert means more than just narrow considerations of what content to teach and how to teach it in schools. Rather, when viewed through the lens of such questioning, curriculum and pedagogy constitute a comprehensive philosophical and practical approach to understanding and positively effectuating the human condition in and outside the context of schooling (He, Schultz, & Schubert, 2015). With regard to the second frame, Ikeda has engaged the nature and substance of global citizenship for six decades, locating it in a world that is culturally and socioecologically fundamentally interconnected. The scope and substance of this cosmopolitan ethic has expanded to its most articulate form as the conscious cultivation of one’s inherent wisdom, courage, and compassion (Ikeda, 2010a) combined with the development of understanding, identification, and an empathetic imagination (Ikeda, 2014). With regard to the former three, Ikeda advocates for education to develop:

TESOL into the Anthropocene

89

• The wisdom to perceive the interconnectedness of all life and living. • The courage not to fear or deny difference; but to respect and strive to understand people of different cultures, and to grow from encounters with them. • The compassion to maintain an imaginative empathy that reaches beyond one’s immediate surroundings and extends to those suffering in distant places (Ikeda, 2010a, p. 55; Ikeda, 2010b, pp. 112–113). For Ikeda, such wisdom, courage, and compassion indicate one’s fullest capacity to be and become human in the richest sense through a continual process of inner transformation that he calls “human revolution” (Ikeda, 1991–2011). This necessarily and unending psycho-spiritual human revolution in the deep interiority of each individual moves us from the private and isolated “lesser self ” (shoga)—“held prisoner to its own desires, passions and hatreds”—to the “greater self ” (taiga) of an expanded, deeply rooted, and collective identity “coexistent with the living essence of the universe,” spatiotemporally infinite, and possessing an “overflowing exuberance” manifest in socioecologically self-actualized and contributive living (Ikeda, 2010a, pp. 233–234). Significantly, at the dawn of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; 2015), Ikeda (2013) recast the abovementioned three elements explicitly within the context of transitioning from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the SDGs, calling for a “compassion that never abandons others to suffer alone; the wisdom to perceive the equality and possibilities of life; and the courage to make our differences the impetus for the elevation of our humanity” (p. 9). These are important qualities and dispositions when considering climate devastation and empathizing with the plight of those who are climatically displaced. With regard to the latter three, Ikeda asserts that education for global citizenship should: • Deepen understanding of the challenges facing humankind, enable people to explore their causes, and instill the shared hope and confidence that such problems, being of human origin, are amenable to human solutions; • Identify the early signs of impending global problems in local phenomena, develop sensitivity to such signs, and empower people to take concerted action; and • Foster empathetic imagination and a keen awareness that actions that profit one’s own country might have a negative impact on or be perceived as a

90

TESOL and Sustainability

threat by other countries, elevating this to a shared pledge not to seek one’s happiness and prosperity at the expense of others (Ikeda, 2014, p. 12). Like the former three, Ikeda frames these latter three elements specifically in the context of the SDGs, noting that “this kind of comprehensive education for global citizenship should be integrated into secondary and tertiary curricula in each national setting. Also, civil society should take the initiative to promote it as an integral aspect of lifelong learning” (Ikeda, 2014, p. 12). In terms of Ikeda’s perspective of global citizenship for sustainable development, here it warrants noting that in his 2014 peace proposal, Value Creation for Global Change: Building Resilient and Sustainable Societies, he couches the latter three elements in a fundamental ethic of soka, or “value creation,” inspired by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s (1981–1988, Vols. 5 & 6) theory of value creation and value-creating pedagogy. Specifically, he envisages three aspects of meaning, or “value” that students, educators, and civil society should endeavor to create in their efforts for sustainable development: • Value creation that always takes hope as its starting point; • Value creation of people working together to resolve issues; and • Value creation that calls forth the best in each of us (Ikeda, 2014, p. 2). Makiguchi’s philosophy of value creation is articulated fully in his fourvolume work, Soka kyoikugaku taikei (The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy; Makiguchi, 1981–1988, Vols. 5 & 6), but its roots, particularly within a cosmopolitan ethic, lie in his 1903 book, Jinsei chirigaku (The Geography of Human Life; Makiguchi, 1981–1988, Vols. 1 & 2; hereafter, The Geography). Although Bethel (2000) portrays The Geography as an explicit response to “ecological devastation” and a “celebration of the natural world,” a close reading suggests this is not the case. Rather, it outlines eight modes of interaction—cognitive, utilitarian, scientific, aesthetic, moral, sympathetic, public, and religious—between humans and their natural surroundings. Significantly, Ikeda has applied The Geography’s principle of examining one’s local communities and the meaning humanity and civilizations give to various natural phenomena as a way to learn, reflect on, and become empowered relative to the natural environment, climate change, and sustainability (Ikeda, 2010a, b). This is an approach that Ikeda (2014, 2010b) envisions to foster what Makiguchi (1981–1988, Vols. 5 & 6) twenty-five years after The Geography would come to call jinkaku kachi, or a “character value,”

TESOL into the Anthropocene

91

through value creation that enhances social resilience locally while enabling sustainable security globally. Taken together, the abovementioned six elements and three values that Ikeda advances provide the being, becoming, knowing, and doing of a global citizen striving for ecological sustainability. That is, wisdom, courage, and compassion as Ikeda articulates them provide the ontological dimensions of global citizenship based on the dignity of life; understanding, identification, and empathetic imagination comprise its epistemological dimensions; and the three values to be created constitute the axiological vector of global citizenship. Put differently, when viewed through Schubert’s (2009) essential question of what is worthwhile in curriculum and pedagogy, Ikeda’s approach provides a comprehensive curriculum of global citizenship for sustainability, a curriculum for students, educators, and all members of civil society to live life most fully by engaging and working toward sustainability centered on environment, development, peace, and human rights (Ikeda, 2010b). Finally, when considering the abovementioned curriculum within the context of Ikeda’s 2002 proposal for education for sustainable development, we see the methodological means he envisions for operationalizing and concretizing the ontological, epistemological, and axiological dimensions of a “life-sized paradigm” of global citizenship for sustainability. Specifically, he outlines the following practical or instructional items for sustainable development and human security: “1.) To learn and deepen awareness of environmental issues and realities; 2.) To reflect on our modes of living, renewing these toward sustainability; 3.) To empower people to take concrete actions to resolve the challenges we face” (Ikeda, 2010b, p. 39). These frames by Schubert (2009) and Ikeda (2010a, 2014) are helpful for understanding and engaging the growing crises of climate migration as a dimension of one’s own ecological selfhood actualized in the lived realities of local and global communities. They are also particularly useful, as Razfar (2012) and Goulah (2012, 2013) illustrate, for excavating dimensions of language ideology, critical linguistic anthropology, and critical curriculum inquiry, especially as these relate to language education and English learners as persistently nondominant and marginalized.

Methods and Site Ethnographic and observational data were collected at all unit writing meetings for all four genres and in the ESL classroom of one of the coauthoring teachers

92

TESOL and Sustainability

while she field-tested the informative unit. The unit writing meetings occurred three to four hours on Saturday mornings at the district’s central office over the span of a year and a half. The classroom-based data collection happened in early 2018. Findings from these two aspects are addressed in separate sections below. Data analyses followed a two-stage process. First, ethnographic data were analyzed relative to content and a priori and emerging themes based on the conceptual and theoretical frames (Boyatzis, 1998). Second, data were analyzed inductively relating to repeated patterns and emergent themes, then deductively to consider emergent themes relative to pertinent literature (Boyatzis, 1998). Codes were developed by systematizing different colored ink and highlighting for each theme. This created a visual model of convergent themes, which were then developed into a narrative of findings (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011). This narrative is presented below with “interpretive commentary” (Davis, 1995), which Mackey and Gass (2015) indicate provides triangulation and strengthens credibility, transferability, and dependability. The district is one of the largest in the United States. The high school where the observed teacher works is historically white, working-class, and English-dominant. The neighborhood where it is located, however, is now predominantly Latino and Spanish-speaking, and it is experiencing a marked increase in Chinese-speaking students. The school serves roughly 1,600 nativeSpanish-speaking Latinos, 360 native-English-speaking whites, and 340 nativeChinese-speaking students, the majority of whom speak Cantonese natively. In recent years, the school was designated “low-performing” in part because it struggles to meet English learners’ academic needs. Officials from the US Department of Education, the state board of education, and the district office that commissioned the model unit initiative have all visited the school and intervened in its administration.

Climate Migration as TESOL Curriculum While a full description of the entire informative unit plan created by the ESL and bilingual teachers is beyond the scope of this chapter, here I present its key elements (Enduring Understandings, Key Uses of Academic Language, Essential Questions) and detail important aspects relating to climate migration as ESL curriculum. The informative unit features “migration” as a dimension of “journey,” and it includes focused engagement in “environmental/climatic implications”

TESOL into the Anthropocene

93

relative to migration. It seeks to leverage students’ “developing language and literacies” to enhance their capacity to “read and comprehend informative texts to explain current migration patterns and their implications in local and global communities.” The unit is framed around the following three Enduring Understandings: “Migrants’ cultural identity is inseparable from language and is a reflection of cultural heritage,” “Migration is informed by specific push-pull factors (e.g. political, economic, military, sociocultural, environmental),” and “Each journey follows a different path.” The Key Uses of Academic Language include the overarching academic purpose tied to one or more language functions (discuss, explain, argue, or recount), with a special focus on “Explaining the factors that cause migration and local and global implications.” Finally, the factual, conceptual, and debatable Essential Questions for the entire unit are Factual: What is migration? What are push-pull factors? What are migration trends in local and global communities?; Conceptual: What are the implications of migration? How are language and culture impacted by migration? How are local and global communities impacted by migration?; and Debatable: Is migration a choice? Is migration a positive or negative experience? The model units cohere and co-specify objectives for content and language learning according to an Understanding by Design (UbD; McTighe & Wiggins, 2012) unit planning format. Content objectives are driven by the Common Core State Standards (2014), which the state mandates all students—English learner or otherwise—must meet. The language objectives for English learners are driven by the state-mandated WIDA (2018) English Language Development Standards for language acquisition. Common Core and WIDA are independent of each other and typify the growing imposition of multiple, externally imposed standards on curricular initiatives and learning outcomes in most K-12 ESL programs in the United States (Kibler, Valdés, & Walqui, 2014; TESOL International Association, 2013). In other words, it is not enough just to want to address climate change or to take time in class to engage the topic with English learners. Any attempt to do so must be contextualized in the Common Core State Standards for content and the WIDA standards for language learning—and the WIDA framework of Model Performance Indicators (MPIs; see template) is mandated for operationalizing such contextualization. The MPIs are teacher-created means for indicating instructional differentiation for language learning and language assessment based on learners’ yearly ACCESS proficiency test scores (WIDA, 2018). Creating these MPIs is complex and time-consuming. In the state where this study occurred, teachers

94

TESOL and Sustainability

Figure 4.1  WIDA Template.

are expected to create multiple MPIs for each aspect of a multi-week unit for each domain of speaking, reading, writing, and listening to differentiate language supports and scaffolds according to learners’ tested proficiency levels. However, my extensive experience conducting professional development in this district and others suggests that many teachers—especially general content teachers— are unfamiliar with the MPIs, and most do not write them as part of their regular lesson or unit planning. The model unit initiative was commissioned in part to address this gap. Accounting for “connection to content” and the “context for language use,” these teacher-created MPIs must address specific targeted “cognitive functions”—such as analyzing, understanding, applying, and evaluating—related to particular content material. In so doing, they must identify the language function—e.g., “follow oral directions”—related to a content stem or example topic—e.g., “to design area maps”—assisted by specific language proficiencybased instructional supports or scaffolds—e.g., “using manipulatives, sentence starters and illustrated examples in small groups.” In total, then, the teachercreated indicator for these components in the domain of listening just for the WIDA “Entering” or “Emerging” proficiency quadrant in the template would be: “Follow oral directions to design area maps using manipulatives, sentence starters and illustrated examples in small groups.” The teacher would then create incrementally different indicators in each proficiency quadrant for each proficiency represented in the class so that every English learner can

TESOL into the Anthropocene

95

acquire the same content as English-proficient students based on his or her individual linguistic needs. These MPIs thus serve as the teacher’s roadmap for differentiating instruction for his or her own unique classes. With regard to the model unit initiative, the authoring teachers created additional sections within the UbD format to indicate specific supports for accommodating English learners relative to unit directions intended for Englishproficient students. For example, in week 4 the unit indicates the following directions: Students will watch a video that illustrates various types of environmental or  climate related migration. Teacher will front load vocabulary phrases related to informative writing/speech (e.g., in addition to, in conclusion, upward trend). Students will analyze videos, photos, and images that depict migration trends caused by environmental or climatic issues. Students will read and extract factual information from differentiated informational texts tied to the video. Students will place information on a cause and effect pictorial flowchart and use it to write a summary of the text. Based on proficiency level, teacher may provide differentiated strategies to aid in the summarizing process.

The bold words in these general directions correspond to specific aspects of instructional supports and differentiation for English learners, which the authoring teachers explicate with brief examples in a corresponding section in the unit. These include the following:

Videos, Photos, and Images Activate schema for English learners using sensory supports, such as videos, photos, and images.

Differentiated Texts Teacher-provided texts will be differentiated for the various levels of English language proficiency. Websites such as https://newsela.com/and http://www. breakingnewsenglish.com/can be used to provide differentiated versions of the same news articles. For example, breakingnewsenglish provides a single news story aligned to different proficiency levels, such as School Strike for Climate (https://breakingnewsenglish.com/1902/190226-school-strike-forclimate.html). In addition, teachers may select various texts at differentiated levels (e.g., political cartoons, news articles, reports, editorials).

TESOL and Sustainability

96

Flowchart Teacher will provide students with a flowchart to indicate causes and effects regarding environmental implications on migration (e.g., Drought → Displacement → War → Refugees). This flowchart can include visuals like screenshots from the video. A writing assignment can be differentiated according to student proficiency levels. See Week 4 MPI for details.

Differentiated Strategies for Summarizing Based on proficiency level and student need, the teacher will provide strategies such as sentence starters, sentence frames, cloze activity with or without word banks, and outlines. The teacher will model how to objectively summarize and cite a text (e.g., MLA style in present tense with in-text citation). Some example sentence starters provided in the unit include: The migration trend is … They migrated because … The push factor is _____________, and the pull factor is ______________. One migrant’s journey was … A positive experience reported was …, A negative experience reported was … According to the data … The chart shows …

The general directions also indicate that content knowledge will be assessed by having students “objectively summarize an informational text related to environmental/climatic implications of migration” and that language learning will be assessed by having students “outline the environmental/climatic implications of migration in writing.” The MPIs referenced in the abovementioned Flowchart section are excerpted below. Specifically, they include two examples the authoring teachers created together for engaging English learners across

TESOL into the Anthropocene

97

Figure 4.2  Model Informative Unit Week 4 MPIs.

the proficiency spectrum in listening and writing about content dimensions of climate migration. They also indicate the differentiated language objectives for each proficiency band.

Climate Migration as TESOL Pedagogy During multiple meetings writing the above unit, one of the coauthoring teachers indicated that although she endorsed the inclusion of climate migration in the unit plan, she herself was apprehensive about teaching the climate dimensions because of the perceived difficulties getting learners in her introductory ESL classes—those at the “Entering—Emerging” levels on the WIDA (2018) ACCESS scale—to acquire the difficult language necessary to understand the complex content material. However, her perspectives changed when she learned that one of her new students was a climate migrant from Puerto Rico who had been displaced by Hurricanes Irma and María. This change in perspectives, contexts, and content relative to students and their learning perfectly illustrates Schwab’s (1973) four commonplaces of curriculum—subject matter, teacher, student, and the milieu—that warrant consideration in educational theorizing, praxis, and research. Thus, it was meaningful that this teacher invited me to observe her field-test the unit in her introductory ESL class.

98

TESOL and Sustainability

Entering the ESL Class Twenty desks were squeezed into the small ESL classroom, with some pushed into groups of four and others situated around these groups in rows two or three deep and angled to face the center. The class included nineteen students, of whom thirteen were native Spanish-speaking and six were native Chinese-speaking. Each day, the teacher wrote directions and topics for students on the white board, including domain abbreviations the students clearly already knew—e.g., Do Now (journals, homework); Push/Pull Factors (R[eading]/W[riting]); Quiz— Extreme Weather Video (R/W/L[istening]), Vocab Frontload Practice (R/W), Graphs/Charts (S[peaking]/L/R/W). She also posted the WIDA (2018) Can-Do Descriptors that she intended students to target for the day’s lesson on the other side of the white board—e.g., WIDA Listening I I can identify resources, places, products, figures from oral statements and visuals; WIDA Reading I I can match visual representations to words/phrases; WIDA Speaking I I can repeat words, short phrases, & memorized chunks of language; WIDA Writing I I can supply missing words in short sentences. Throughout the unit, the teacher employed a spiraling combination of pedagogical and multimodal approaches—incorporating videos, worksheets, multiple scaffolds, group work, individual problem-solving, and whole class, teacher-scaffolded reflective meaning-making. She began with Hurricane María, which, in addition to displacing one of her new students (or maybe because of it) provided the basis for the lesson in terms of work sheets, language related to statistics, and the photographs and video used to concretize the unit theme.

Introducing the Topic The teacher began by projecting images of children and families amidst decimated houses and communities clearly destroyed by weather-related phenomena. They were photographs from the Time piece “A Land They No Longer Recognize: Desperation and Resilience in Hurricane-Battered Puerto Rico” (Vick, 2017). She instructed students to “look at the pictures and write what you see.” She then  wrote and read aloud sentence starters on the white board: I see _____, There is _____, There are _____, and she confirmed, “You can write sentences or words. Whatever you might see.” Walking around the room and assisting students with questions, she then asked the whole class as she pointed to the photograph, “Where do you think this might be?” One student offered an idea: “Nigeria?” The teacher then recast without directly evaluating:

TESOL into the Anthropocene

99

“I’m going to show you some more. In your World Studies class you’ve been talking about Puerto Rico … You see this person bathing in the river because there is no power. Here’s one of someone in a bedroom. This is a family.” She then asked the students to share as she scrolled through photographs. “How about this one? Is he outside or inside?” One boy answers timidly, “Outside.” “Ok, write that down,” she encourages him, pointing to his journal. She asks the whole class, “Ok, what else do you see?” A girl offers, “He is sad.” “Good, Grace1! Say it again,” the teacher responds. “He is sad,” Grace repeats confidently. “Ok, what do you see around him,” the teacher probes. “Trash,” another student responds, followed by a cascade of answers from others who now seem emboldened by classmates answering before them: “I see a man,” “I see a lot of trash,” “I see two houses,” “ I see that the man is outside,” “It’s an ugly place,” “I see little kid,” “I see destruction,” “I see part of a house,” “I see poverty,” “I see environment,” “I see very dirty.” The teacher responds to the last answer and summarizes the others, “Ok, it’s dirty, needs to be cleaned up, fixed up. He’s outside and has no home. You could say something like, There was a hurricane in Puerto Rico and the boy’s house was destroyed. He is outside.”

Frontloading Weather and Climate Vocabulary The model unit plan calls for frontloading climate- and weather-related vocabulary, which the teacher facilitated with student- and teacher-made word walls and anchor charts that they then hung around the classroom (Nation, 2009). By the end, the classroom was full of student- and teacher-made word walls, anchor charts, and bulletin boards containing student work. The unit theme of “migration” was clearly present with many of these items highlighting “migration vocabulary,” including the English (written in black), Spanish (written in blue), and Chinese (written in red) words for borders, evidence, migration, immigration, policy, push and pull factors, economic, climate, and military. They hung these beside already existing vocabulary lists for “Physical Characteristics” and “Personality,” which were similarly written on large post-it sheets. The teacher hung a different handwritten chart beside these, which she would come to use and reference in multiple ways repeatedly throughout the unit. It contained “Journey, Migration” in a circle with fourteen spokes radiating out to the terms weather, climate (hurricanes, floods); health, hospitals, medicine, procedures, doctors; school, education (teachers, learn English); country vs. city life (urban, rural); learn about other cultures; refugee (refugee camps); religion;

100

TESOL and Sustainability

problems (economic, political, climate, military, danger, different ideas, war, violence, gangs); work; open a business (stores, etc.); better opportunities; freedom of expression; family (join family). On another wall hung all-purpose sentence starters such as “Please repeat,” “I am confused, please explain …,” “May I use my phone to translate …,” etc. On a different day, the teacher drew students’ attention to the above charts and  again engaged them in reviewing and developing vocabulary with a worksheet on the Geography of Severe Weather. The sheet provided photographs and illustrations above corresponding terms for thunderstorms, flash flood, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, and drought. Students were then prompted to answer the question, Where do these events happen? Students were also prompted to write places the weather phenomena might occur, including by country or region, the type of climate in such locations, and whether the phenomena occurred in their local community and home country. At another point in the unit, the teacher reviewed vocabulary with a different worksheet that contained each abovementioned vocabulary word, corresponding illustrations, and a place for students to write the definition in English (Nation, 2009). She pointed to the day’s objectives already written on the white board for students: Content Objectives—Students will learn vocabulary related to climate and weather. Language Objectives—Students will copy definitions to match written meaning and pictures. The teacher first instructed students to repeat each word after her and place a “+” beside the words they knew or a “–” beside words they did not know. She repeated each word multiple times, ensuring that students repeated it each time as she checked for pluses and minuses. This is an introductory ESL class, so consonant with WIDA (2018) standards and Can-Do Descriptors for introductory levels and approaches outlined by Nation (2009), the teacher then encouraged students to copy definitions beside the corresponding vocabulary terms. Holding up the sheet and pointing to the empty box, she instructed students, “Copy this in the box right here. Here. Copy this in the box. These are going to be your definitions and you just copy it.” She also had students confirm these words in their native languages. “And here you can write in the Spanish or the Chinese. Wei, please write the Chinese on the board. Go through, look at the pictures.” Wei writes 悪劣天气 and the teacher writes tiempo severo beside it on the board as the students begin writing. She then separated students into small groups—small groups being one of many MPI scaffolds already visible in her multiple pedagogical turns—to

TESOL into the Anthropocene

101

continue developing students’ emerging vocabulary. She moved from group to group, assisting at the point of need. Stopping at one group, she reads from a student’s paper: “‘No rain.’ Ok, so which word do you think means ‘No rain?’” she asks waiting for his response. The boy points. “Ok, good, then copy this here and write the word in Spanish.” The worksheet concluded with three short-answer prompts: Name three characteristics that make up a thunderstorm; Name two forms of extreme weather that are started by thunderstorms; How are an earthquake and tsunami the same? How are they different?—Use Venn Diagram on the next page. Students worked on these sheets in pairs and small groups with the teacher again facilitating at the point of need. During this section, the teacher reminded students also to reflect on parts of speech. “Remember your part of speech. It’s a thing, so it’s a noun. You have noun, verb, adjective, adverb, person, place, thing or idea.” In this way, the teacher constantly moved from student to student, group to group, offering different but always related assistance for both content and language related to climate and weather, always within the context of the model unit and MPIs. This established a base for students to communicate push and pull factors of migration.

Communicating Push/Pull Factors of Climate Migration The teacher instructs students to look at an assigned text and statistical charts on Hurricane María and Puerto Rico. She guides the whole class in reading the texts and locating basic text-based information using an initiate–response–evaluate (IRF) model. Pointing to an anchor chart of question words in English, Spanish, and Chinese that she affixed to the white board moments earlier, she asks students for the When, Where, and What of Hurricane María, scaffolding their learning as multiple students offer differing answers and, for some, uncertain answers: “Ok, so let’s all find it the text or in your chart. Point to it. Find it in your text. When is it? When?” She then switches from this IRF approach to an open, sociodialogic approach (Bakhtin, 1986; Vygotsky, 1997), asking students: “So when you came to class today, you saw a picture of people in Puerto Rico, Ok. Do you think the people will stay in Puerto Rico or do you think they may migrate?” In unison the students respond “Migrate.” “Ok, Why?” the teacher asks. There’s a slight pause, then one student quietly offers, “Because maybe they are afraid of another  disaster, hurricane.” The teacher repeats the answer loudly for the

102

TESOL and Sustainability

class and looks at the students for another answer. Another student responds, “Because they don’t have a house and no foods …” The teacher responds with a question: “Ok, so they will move?” The student nods. The teacher continues engaging students in this way, asking questions, repeating students’ answers, and asking more questions. This sociodialogic pedagogical approach has been shown to be an effective means for fostering language learners’ scientific knowledge, critical literacies, sophisticated thinking, and individual expression (Chin, 2007; Goulah, 2017a; Pessoa, Hendry, Donado, Tucker, & Lee, 2007). As the unit progressed, the teacher continued to engage students in content-based dialogue around migration, incrementally scaffolding and then drawing on their language acquisition by variously employing techniques Chin calls “pumping,” “reflective toss,” “constructive challenge,” “verbal jigsaw,” “word/phrase association,” “verbal cloze,” “framing,” “multi-pronged questioning,” and, in using the abovementioned Time piece, statistical charts and graphs, and photographs and illustrations of weather and climate phenomena, “multimodal thinking” (p. 823). Moreover, the teacher’s pivot from IRF vocabulary development to sociodialogic meaning-making is reminiscent of successful pedagogical moves by another ESL teacher in a different state that I chronicled elsewhere (Goulah, 2017a). He also taught climate change to high school English learners. For that teacher, as for the one chronicled here, the move from IRF to open-ended questioning facilitated beginning-level learners’ capacities to acquire and use vocabulary necessary to participate in substantive discussion and meaningmaking around complex issues, statistics, and factors contributing to climate change, climate displacement, and the intersections of social and physical sciences. The teacher here then transitioned from whole class dialogue to a paired speaking activity to spiral and strengthen language and content learning. “Let’s discuss what happened in Puerto Rico after the hurricane, ok, and how the government was trying to make things better, ok.” She projects a simple chart titled Statistics: Progress in Puerto Rico. The chart was prepared by FEMA and shows numbers and percentages for cell service, potable water, patients cared for, open ATMs, generators, gas stations, power, and installation of blue roofs across 1, 30, 45, 60, and 90 days since Hurricane María made landfall. “So people did not have cell phones, ok. There were no ATMs to get money,” she points to each as she goes. “There were no gas stations, so the problem from one day to then 90 days later, after the hurricane, ok.” Students nod and she continues: “So we’re going to ask questions. One person is going to ask questions. We’re

TESOL into the Anthropocene

103

going to look at the chart with our partner, ok. So I’m going to put you with a partner. I want you to take a minute and just look at the chart, and then we’re going to do a speaking activity.” She confirms if they have understood and agree: “Ok? Thumbs up or thumbs down?” All thumbs go up. She then asks the students to stand and she places them in pairs across language communities as much as possible. Students each have the FEMA statistics chart and a green sheet of open- and closed-ended questions and example answers with sentence starters and sentence frames: What do the charts show? The chart shows____; What was the percentage of recovery of power after 30 days? How did cell service change from 1 day to 90 days? It increased/decreased from ___to ___. The teacher moves from pair to pair, providing individual assistance for content, vocabulary, discursive forms, and ways of constructing questions and answers related to the assigned texts and charts about weather and climate, Puerto Rico, and climate migration. The teacher then encourages them. “You can also ask your own questions. What questions do you have?” She then offers what Chin (2007) calls a “constructive challenge” to prod their thinking. “Think back to our work on the Great Migration. Who moved north? Why? So it’s just like that. Don’t guess here. Go to the text. Think. What questions help us understand why people would stay or migrate from Puerto Rico?” The students are looking at her, taking it in. “Look at the statistics, the photographs, the text, and think about it. Was anything different about the weather or climate?”

Conclusion After the speaking activity, the teacher progressed to the next portion of the model unit, similarly engaging the English learners in the Flowchart portion, drawing on video screenshots and photographs to help them comprehend, characterize, and communicate push–pull factors of Puerto Rican climateinduced migration. The learners continued to develop and use language throughout the unit as the teacher modeled responses and repeatedly referenced the various charts, word walls, sentence starters, sentence frames, and texts. In one week, these high school English learners were introduced to the disaster that Hurricane María leveled on Puerto Rico; acquired and applied vocabulary relating to climate, weather, and migration; read and discussed statistics about resources in post-hurricane Puerto Rico; wrote words, phrases, and simple sentences about climate migration; and contextualized this language and content learning in prior knowledge about migration as a form of journeys.

104

TESOL and Sustainability

These findings are important in three respects. First, they suggest that adolescent English learners are capable of standards-based language acquisition, accretion of content knowledge, and literacies consumption and production around issues of climate change and climate science, supporting findings by Chin (2007), Goulah (2017b), and Lee, Quinn, & Valdés (2013). For K–12 TESOL contexts driven by the increasingly constrictive standards movement (Kibler et al., 2014; TESOL International Association, 2013), these findings suggest such learning is possible relative to Common Core State Standards and WIDA. Second, these findings also suggest that even small curricular initiatives can make a difference in exposing English learners to factual issues of climate science and climate change. This is particularly important given that climate change “is perhaps the most egregious case of modern science denial” (McIntyre, 2018, p. 27). According to McIntyre (2018), although two combined studies of nearly 18,000 scientific papers on climate change reveal that only 0.17 percent and 3 percent respectively dispute the idea of anthropogenic climate change, just a quarter of adults in the United States believe that “almost all climate scientists agree that human behavior is mostly responsible for climate change” (p. 30). In addition, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) latest consensus report, English Learners in STEM Subjects: Transforming Classrooms, Schools and Lives (Francis & Stephens, 2018), indicates that English learners at the K-12 levels lack clear access to STEM subjects, mainly because of educator biases about English learners’ capabilities relative to the STEM fields they teach; because of a paucity of rigorous, grade-appropriate courses; because STEM and language learning happens in silos; and because curriculum materials are not developed with English learners in mind (see also Lee et al., 2013). Climate science and climate change are increasingly important aspects of STEM and are included not only in the Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014), but also in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). It is important to open English learners to opportunities to understand climate science and its sociological, geographical, and political implications, not only to help shape their learning, development, and career advancement, but also to ensure that the field of TESOL is not complicit in the “post-truth” movement around global warming (McIntyre, 2018). Third, findings suggest that although initially apprehensive the ESL teacher chronicled here was capable of successfully leading her English learners in language- and content-based inquiry into severe weather, climate change, and

TESOL into the Anthropocene

105

its sociological implications at local and global levels. Still, particularly given findings from McIntyre (2018) and NASEM (Francis & Stephens, 2018), the field of TESOL must work to improve English learners’ access to critical climaterelated learning and help to prepare ESL teachers to engage the interdisciplinary area of climate science and climate change. The curricular initiatives described here and the pedagogical attempts by one ESL teacher to engage English learners in discussions around weather and climate as push and pull factors of increased climate migration illustrate a concerted effort in one of the largest public school districts in the United States to address such gaps. The section on climate migration as one part of a larger discussion on migration typifies what is possible even with introductory-level English learners. Other districts are encouraged to take similar steps. One area warranting additional examination is the impact of such learning on the development of what Ikeda (2010b, 2014) calls the ethos of sustainable global citizenship, the character value of contributive living. This is akin to the “eco-ethical consciousness” cultivated in other ESL-based climate engagements by high school English learners (Goulah, 2017b). In particular, it is important to examine how such an ethos manifests relative to climate migrants and to transforming learners’ own behaviors and perspectives that lead to climate instability. While the examined unit on climate migration and climate change involved learning, a deepening understanding of the challenges facing humankind, engagement in identifying signs of global problems, some reflection, and, implicitly, imaginative empathy with the suffering of others, the remaining elements of Ikeda’s (2010b, 2014) comprehensive curriculum were not explicitly addressed, particularly as these relate to value creation. Studies exploring these dimensions are necessary. Finally, another area requiring empirical analysis is how the curriculum initiatives, pedagogies, and student learning chronicled here affect the student—and others like her—who was a climate migrant from Puerto Rico. This study did not include interviews with students, but as a climate migrant this particular student’s experiences, identity development, and transformed perspectives relative to climate engagement in ESL are an important area for future inquiry.

Note 1 Pseudonyms are used throughout and the names of the city and district where the study occurred have been left out to protect anonymity.

106

TESOL and Sustainability

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bell, D. R. (2004). Environmental refugees: What rights? Which duties? Res Publica, 10, 135–152. Bethel, D. M. (2000). The legacy of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi: Value-creating education and global citizenship. In D. Machacek & B. Wilson (Eds.), Global citizens: The Soka Gakkai Buddhist movement in the world (pp. 42–66). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyatzis, R. E. (1998). Transforming qualitative information: Thematic analysis and code development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Brady, I. (2008). Poetics for a planet: Discourse on some problems of being-in-place. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials (3rd ed.) (pp. 501–564). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Castles, S. (2001, December). Environmental change and forced migration. Lecture given at the Westmorland general meeting on the Preparing for Peace initiative, Green College, University of Oxford, England. Retrieved from: http://www. preparingforpeace.org/castles__environmental_change_and_forced_migration.htm. Castles, S. (2002). Environmental change and forced migration: Making sense of the debate (New Issues in Refugee Research Working Paper No. 70). Switzerland: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit. Retrieved from: http://www.reliefweb.int/library/RSC_Oxford/ data/UNHCR%20Working%20Papers%5C70%20environmental%20change%20 and%20forced%20migration.pdf. Chin, C. (2007). Teacher questioning in science classrooms: Approaches that stimulate productive thinking. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 44, 815–843. doi: 10.1002/tea.20171. Collectif Argos. (2010). Climate refugees. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2014). Common Core State Standards for English language arts and literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Retrieved from: http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RST/11-12. Cornisbee, M., & Simms, A. (2003). Environmental refugees: The case for recognition. London: NEF Pocketbooks. Creswell, J. W. (1997). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five traditions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Davis, K. A. (1995). Qualitative theory and methods in applied linguistics research. TESOL Quarterly, 29, 427–453. doi: 10.2307/3588070. Deen, T. (2007, June). U.N. braces for new breed of environmental refugees. Asian Tribune, 7. Retrieved from: http://www.asiantribune.com/index.php?q=node/5971. Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (2011). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

TESOL into the Anthropocene

107

Francis, D., & Stephens, A. (Eds.). (2018). English learners in STEM subjects: Transforming classrooms, schools and lives, Consensus report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Goulah, J. (2010). Conceptualizing environmental refugees in education: A transformative language learning framework. Diaspora, Minority, and Indigenous Education: An International Journal, 4(3), 192–207. Goulah, J. (2012). Environmental displacement, English learners, identity and value creation: Considering Daisaku Ikeda in the east-west ecology of education. In J. Lin & R. Oxford (Eds.), Transformative eco-education for human and planetary survival (pp. 41–58). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Goulah, J. (Ed.). (2013). Daisaku Ikeda, language and education. New York: Routledge. Goulah, J. (2017a). Climate change and TESOL: Language, literacies, and the creation of eco-ethical consciousness. TESOL Quarterly, 51(1), 90–114. doi: 10.1002/ tesq.277. Goulah, J. (2017b). Take two: “Transformative world language learning: An approach for environmental and cultural sustainability and economic and political security.” Journal of Language and Literacy Education. Retrieved from: http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/ take–2/. Goulah, J. (2018). Religion, “the religious,” and language education into the Anthropocene: A response to Huamei Han’s “Studying Religion and Language Teaching and Learning: Building a Sub-Field.” The Multilingual Journal, 102(2), 451–455. Goulah, J. (2019). Language education into the Anthropocene: Possibilities and perspectives from Soka humanism at the posthumanist turn. Professing Education, 17(1&2), 6–16. He, M. F., Schultz, B., & Schubert, W. H. (Eds.). (2015). The SAGE guide to curriculum in education. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Homeland Security. (2014). 2014 Homeland Security Quadrennial Review. Retrieved from: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/2014-qhsr-final-508.pdf. Ikeda, D. (1991–2011). Ikeda Daisaku zenshu [The complete works of Ikeda Daisaku], 150 Vols. Tokyo, Japan: Seikyo Shimbunsha. Ikeda, D. (2010a). A new humanism: The university addresses of Daisaku Ikeda (2nd ed.). London: I.B. Tauris. Ikeda, D. (2010b). Soka education: For the happiness of the individual (Rev. ed.). Santa Monica, CA: Middleway Press. Ikeda, D. (2013). Compassion, wisdom and courage: Building a global society of peace and creative coexistence, 2013 peace proposal. Tokyo, Japan: Soka Gakkai. Retrieved from: https://www.daisakuikeda.org/assets/files/peaceproposal2013.pdf. Ikeda, D. (2014). Value creation for global change: Building resilient and sustainable societies, 2014 peace proposal. Tokyo, Japan: Soka Gakkai. Retrieved from: https:// www.daisakuikeda.org/assets/files/peaceproposal2014.pdf.

108

TESOL and Sustainability

Jacobson, J. (1988). Environmental refugees: A yardstick of habitability (Worldwatch Paper No. 86). Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute. Kelin, W. (1998). Environmental migration and sustainable development: A case study of Southwest China. Chinese Geographical Science, 8, 271–280. Kibler, A., Valdés, G., & Walqui, A. (Eds.). (2014). Special Issue: K–12 standards-based educational reform: Implications for English language learner populations. TESOL Quarterly, 48(3), 433–650. Kibreab, G. (1997). Environmental causes and impact of refugee movements: A critique of the current debate. Disasters, 21, 20–38. King, T. (2006). Environmental displacement: Coordinating efforts to find solutions. Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, 18, 543–565. Lee, O., Quinn, H., & Valdés, G. (2013). Science and language for English language learners in relation to Next Generation Science Standards and with implications for Common Core State Standards for English language arts and mathematics. Educational Researcher, 42(4), 223–233. doi: 10.3102/0013189X13480524. Mackey, A., & Gass, S. M. (2015). Second language research: Methodology and design (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Makiguchi, T. (1981–1988). Makiguchi Tsunesaburo zenshu [The complete works of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi] 10 Vols. Tokyo, Japan: Daisan Bunmeisha. McIntyre, L. (2018). Post-truth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McTighe, J., & Wiggins, G. (2012). Understanding by design framework. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Retrieved from: https://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/siteASCD/publications/ UbD_WhitePaper0312.pdf. Miller, T. (2017). Storming the wall: Climate change, migration, and homeland security. San Francisco, CA: City Lights. Myers, N. (1997). Environmental refugees. Population & Environment, 19, 167–182. Myers, N. (2001). Environmental refugees: A growing phenomenon of the 21st century. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 356, 16.1–16.5. Myers, N. (2002, May). Environmental security: What’s new and different. Paper presented at The Hague Conference on Environment, Security, and Sustainable Development, The Peace Palace, The Hague, The Netherlands. Retrieved from: http://www.envirosecurity.org/conference/working/newanddifferent.pdf. Myers, N. (2005, May). Environmental refugees: An emergent security issue. Paper presented at the 13th Economic Forum, Prague, Czech Republic. Myers, N., & Kent, J. (1995). Environmental exodus: An emergent crisis in the global arena. Washington, DC: The Climate Institute. Nation, I. S. P. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL reading and writing. New York: Routledge. Ngo, B. (Ed.). (2017). The paradox of pursuing the “American Dream” for immigrant youth and families (Special Issue). Educational Studies, 53(3), 429–549. NGSS Lead States. (2013). Next generation science standards: For states, by states. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

TESOL into the Anthropocene

109

Pessoa, S., Hendry, H., Donato, R., Tucker, G. R., & Lee, H. (2007). Content-based instruction in the foreign language classroom: A discourse perspective. Foreign Language Annals, 40(1), 102–121. doi: 10.1111/j.1944-9720.2007.tb02856.x. Razfar, A. (2012). Language ideologies and curriculum studies: An empirical approach to “worthwhile” questions. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 28(1), 127–140. Schubert, W. H. (2009). What’s worthwhile: From knowing and needing to being and sharing. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 6(1), 22–40. Schwab, J. J. (1973). The practical 3: Translation into curriculum. The School Review, 81(4), 501–522. TESOL International Association. (2013). Overview of the Common Core State Standards initiatives for ELLs. Alexandria, VA: Author. United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2015). Retrieved from: https://www. un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/. Vick, K. (2017, October 17). A land they no longer recognize: Desperation and resilience in hurricane-battered Puerto Rico. Time. Retrieved from: http://time. com/a-land-they-no-longer-recognize/. Vygotsky, L. (1997). Thought and language (rev ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wallace-Wells, D. (2019). The uninhabitable earth: Life after warming. New York: Tim Duggan. Westra, L. (2009). Environmental justice and the rights of ecological refugees. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd. WIDA. (2018). Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Retrieved from: https://wida.wisc.edu. World Meteorological Organization. (2016, November 4). Provisional WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 2016. Retrieved from: https://public.wmo.int/en/ media/press-release/provisional-wmo-statement-status-of-global-climate–2016. World Meteorological Organization. (2018). WMO statement on the state of global climate in 2017. Retrieved from: https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_ id=4453. World Meteorological Organization. (2019). Provisional statement on the state of the global climate in 2018. Retrieved from: http://ane4bf-datap1.s3-eu-west-1. amazonaws.com/wmocms/s3fs-public/ckeditor/files/Draft_Statement_26_11_2018_ v12_approved_jk_0.pdf?VXUDp1UTysIkHog4_TTuiHsIzZ6A9D93.

110

5

A Place-Based Ecopedagogy for an English for Academic Purposes Program Kevin Eyraud

Utah Valley University

Introduction In McCrum’s (2010) work, Glōbish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language, the emergence of English as a global phenomenon is the cultural revolution of our time. He cites Ostler (2005) in casting English as one of the “Empires of the Word” (p. 13). Many scholars have documented this phenomenon, exploring the colonial history and hegemonic power of English (Errington, 2001, 2008; Pennycook, 1994, 1998; Phillipson, 1992, 2008). Even more pointedly, others (Edge, 2003, 2009; Kumaravadivelu, 2009) have called on the field of language teaching and learning to “relocate” TESOL in a new age of “overt empire,” asking if practitioners are to be “imperial foot soldiers,” thereby demanding that professionals consider their roles in the reflexive processes of hegemony (Canagarajah, 2010; Kumaravadivelu, 2003, 2016). Kumaravadivelu (2009), in fact, argues for nothing less than a total restructuring of major aspects of the field to mitigate the ways in which “TESOL professionals, knowingly or unknowingly, play a role in the service of global corporations as well as imperial powers” because “English, in its role as the global language, creates, reflects and spreads the import and the imagery of the global flows” (p. 1). In other words, English is a language deeply inflected by root metaphors1 of consumerism, progress, and scientism (Blenkinsop, 2012; Bowers, 1997, 2000, 2012; Goulah, 2011, 2017) at odds with the conservation and revitalization of the cultural and environmental commons (Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2015). Perhaps a means for restructuring TESOL with the necessary “philosophical, pedagogical and attitudinal investments” (Kumaravadivelu, 2009) can be found

112

TESOL and Sustainability

in the field’s burgeoning “ecological turn.” In his TESOL Quarterly article, Goulah (2017) provides an archaeology of some of the merits as well as critiques of the movement. The author traces ecology and environment relative to language and language learning leading up to his argument for the creation of an “eco-ethical consciousness” through “value-creative” approaches which transcend standardsbased language and content curriculum. A conceivable handhold for fostering such consciousness comes from Bowers (2012) in his book, The Way Forward, writing that “understanding how words (metaphors) reproduce earlier ways of thinking, including the silences and prejudices, is … essential to the educator’s craft” (p. 2). This characterization is particularly apropos to the teaching context which informs this paper, English for academic purposes (EAP), and the manner in which the linguistic colonization of English language learners (ELLs) can be reproduced. In that light, a question to the academy from Benesch (1993) is still resonant in today’s state of the art: Why has EAP adopted an accommodationist ideology instead of an ideology of opposition and change? … Freed from the responsibility of making our colleagues’ textbooks and lectures comprehensible, EAP could develop a critical ESL curriculum whose impact would be felt across the campus. We could, as Boyer (1990) suggests, negotiate academic curricula responsive to urgent social, economic, and political issues, rather than serving one that is so narrowly focused on career preparation. (p. 714)

If EAP is to incorporate Benesch’s (1993) and Bowers’s (2012) propositions, a fraught curricular question also comes to mind, i.e., “apart from language itself, what is a language lesson to be about?” (Pennycook, 1990, p. 13). Goulah (2017), in part, provides a response in lessons meant to “ask students to awaken to the way they live and communicate in places with others” and which couch language beyond “just a curricular subject or tool for talking with others” (emphasis added, p. 95).

A Place-Based Ecopedagogy The intentional use of place as content for critical language pedagogy is rather unique in the field of TESOL. Well-established traditions of critical pedagogy (Freire 2000; Giroux, 1988; McLaren, 2003) have clearly influenced applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2001) and EAP in particular (Benesch, 2001, 2012; Helmer 2013). However, these commitments to “identifying and redressing the injustices, inequalities, and myths of … an oppressive world” (Gruenewald,

Place-Based Ecopedagogy for EAP Program

113

2003, p. 4) have also largely ignored the fact that ecological systems are home to human culture (Bowers, 1997, 2001, 2012). Even so, critical pedagogy and place-based education are mutually supportive educational traditions because place-based education “emphasizes the spatial aspects of social experience” and “a critical pedagogy of place … seeks the twin objectives of decolonization and reinhabitation” (Gruenewald, 2003, p. 3). Buxton (2010) clarifies by explaining the “two-step social and political process” where decolonization—a central idea to critical pedagogy as per hooks (1992)—is the recognition and then reversal of “ways of thinking that are instilled by the dominant culture that do social, political, and ecological violence” (Buxton, 2010, p. 124). According to Buxton then, reinhabitation, “an idea from the ecological arm of place-based pedagogy,” encourages teachers and students to critically question social and environmental inequities in order to begin to live more harmoniously within previously damaged environments and ecosystems. As such, a critical pedagogy of place ably informs an ecopedagogy, an educational move whose goal is to connect students “with the natural world through ecological ways of experiencing, thinking and knowing” (Birrell, Gray, & Preece, 2013, abstract). These pieces in turn constitute “transformative environmental education which critically and dialectically deconstructs how social conflicts and environmental (socio-environmental) devastation are connected” (Misiaszek, 2011 as cited by Manookin, 2018, p. 18). In other words, when students and teachers begin to interrogate the imbalances, their roles in reproducing the imbalances, and actions to take to curtail those inequities, they are “engaged in the decolonization and reinhabitation central to a successful critical pedagogy of place” (Buxton, 2010, p. 124). For language learning and teaching nested in place, and to foster Bowers’s (2012) call for revealing how metaphors—Discourse models—work, Pennycook (2010) further theorizes space. In his Language as a Local Practice, he argues that language functions in space and time, i.e., language practices have a history in a place. This notion requires a diligent search beyond the sociolinguistic axiom that people simply use language in any given context. Perceptions of language as just a system, as well as conceptions of locality and practice, are thereby reframed so that language is recast as performative, or as a “doing.” Pennycook (2010) continues, “From this perspective, language is … an effect of language practices, which are socially, discursively, historically, and politically constituted acts of language” (p. 135). Thus, language is reconstructed “as action and as part of how places are interpreted, [as well as] how the meaning of places

114

TESOL and Sustainability

is reinforced or changed” (p. 2). Ways in which “language produces the world around it” (p. 136) and how that “space is an interactive and mediating element that is part of the social” (p. 140) become more discernable. In sum, teachers and students can begin to interrogate local language practices and Discourse models in wider circulation to problematize their ideological impacts.

The Study Thus far, I have briefly described English as a tool of Empire (Fabrício & Santos, 2009) and the resultant root metaphors (Bowers, 2001, 2012; Gruenewald, 2003) or Discourse models (Gee, 1998, 2005) which permeate the language. These Discourse models are local (and global) practices and narratives “that underpin our current unsustainable civilisation2 … leading to ecological destruction and social injustice” (Stibbe, 2014, p. 117). I also propose one pedagogical remedy to the colonizing nature of English, a place-based ecopedagogy meant to explore the intricate linguistic, social, and spatial elements of place as language learning content. The ideas informing this remedy emerged from a dissertation study designed to understand (1) how a place-based ecopedagogy gets implemented in an EAP, (2) how such a pedagogy helps ELLs identify and either take up or engage with Discourse models, and (3) how the pedagogy supports students’ English language development. Ultimately, the study provides a window into the compelling pedagogical benefits of such an approach, not only for language learning and teaching but also for building local knowledge, strengthening connections between both people and place, and complexifying awareness of the more-than-human world.3

Methodology and Data Collection This study engaged an ecolinguistic approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA). CDA highlights “how language conventions and language practices are invested with power relations and ideological processes which people are often unaware of ” (Fairclough, 1992, p. 7). An ecolinguistic approach to CDA differs only in the ecological dimension, where “the objects of analysis, then, are discourses which have an impact on how humans treat each other, other organisms and the physical environment” (Stibbe, 2014, p. 118).

Place-Based Ecopedagogy for EAP Program

115

This study interrogated both how ELLs learn English in a place-based ecopedagogy and how they might engage with the Discourse models or “scripts” that individuals and groups bring to a “reading” of social situations (Rogers, 2011). Such a reading necessarily includes the available social, cultural, and ecological resources that ELLs might also engage with as they learn English. Student voices, observations, and interactions from four semesters—the academic years of 2015 and 2016—comprise the multimodal data for this qualitative research project. The data come from diverse student-generated sources as well as various interviews and focus groups conducted by/with teachers which are represented in the following table.

Table 5.1  Description of Data Sources and Collection Data Sources

Description of Data Collection

1. Educational and social history questionnaire

Collected at the beginning of the semester.

2. Nature Journals (8–10 entries)

Several entries designed to immerse students in nature.

3. Wilderness Writing Workshop Essay

Conducted and revised at the Capitol Reef Field Station (CRFS) for publication in a student book.

4. Capitol Reef Field Station (CRFS) handouts

Assignments meant to access student observations and learning from their assigned topics.

5. Field notes of students in action These notes are based on students’ at CRFS conversations and interactions with each other and trip leaders. 6. Post-CRFS survey, student interviews, and focus groups

Collected as a means to “debrief ” and provide a pedagogical break for students to “return” to the classroom; faculty see what students take away from the experience and collect feedback to make the experience better for everyone involved.

7. Field notes of students in action Observations of student interactions with during Conference on Writing audience members during the presentation of for Social Change (CWSC) research topics in formal poster sessions Poster Session 8. Survey, student interviews, and focus groups with student participants one semester later

Meant to find out what changes students have made in their lives since the CRFS semester and trip and what language learning lessons they took away from the semester with time to reflect.

116

TESOL and Sustainability

Data Analysis One concern with scholarly texts is they can be “student vacant” (Adler-Kassner & Harrington, 2002; Bishop, 1993; Marrott, 2008) insofar as students’ experiences, feelings, subjectivities, and motivations do not always inform discussions of curriculum and pedagogy. Additionally, few educational CDA studies have been applied to students’ texts, and in particular, nondominant students’ texts (Marrott, 2008). This is particularly true in the case of ELLs because of the difficulty of analyzing these participants’ texts in detail, i.e., the microlinguistic, is self-evident. Consequently, I follow Gee (2011) in writing that because “these details would end up being trees that obscure the forest” (p. xi), in this study, the texts, and therefore analyses, are broader. All relevant textual data, including my field notes and transcripts of student interviews and consultations, were investigated using the analytical tools provided by a CDA approach with an ecolinguistic lens. Substantial portions of the data are recorded and transcribed. In particular, data from individual student interviews and focus groups are presented in this manner. All the student names in this paper are pseudonyms. Taking into consideration the inherent challenges of teacher as researcher, including those of reifying an expert, univocal interpretation (Rogers, 2011) in CDA approaches, I ground this study in two unifying characteristics of critical feminist research—reflexivity and polyvocality—to help address these limitations and to guide my researcher praxis (Sanger 2005). In other words, I relied heavily on field notes and other data sets for important interactions, observations, and conversations. Where these notes are added to or reconstructed for presentation, the student or students with whom the interactions and conversations take place were brought in as “member checks” (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). I relied on Huckin’s (1995, 2002) suggestion to approach the texts in the role of an “intended” reader and then moved on to the “texts as a whole” and then “sentence-by-sentence.” I allowed themes to emerge (Seidman, 2006) demonstrating students’ macrolevel understandings of the issues of interest to this study, paying particular attention to metaphors, clichés, and statements presented as fact or otherwise. I then color-coded themes, characteristics, or components which came together to form evidence of Discourse models and noteworthy features, creating a visual record seeking to put local contexts and texts into conversation with macrolevel Discourses to understand threats to and opportunities for the cultural and ecological commons.

Place-Based Ecopedagogy for EAP Program

117

The Instructional Site(s) In October 2008, Utah Valley University (UVU) debuted an altogether unique facility, a field station in the heart of one of Utah’s five national parks. In fact, UVU’s Capitol Reef Field Station (CRFS), operated under the auspices of the university in partnership with the National Park Service (NPS), is only one of eight such entities within the borders of a national park (Stevens & Gilson, 2016). The CRFS provides access to the park’s distinct cultural landscape, diverse ecological habitats, and matchless geology, home to the almost 100-mile-long Waterpocket Fold and strikingly colorful sedimentary rock strata that lay bare more than 250 million years of Earth’s past. Capitol Reef also boasts a pristine night sky refuge that has gained recognition as a Gold Tier International Dark Sky Park (NPS, 2015). Clearly, Capitol Reef National Park (CRNP) is a virtually limitless pedagogical space with the field station serving as a home base. Be that as it may, the majority of the language learning activity takes place within the traditional classroom, incorporating tenets of Project-based Learning (PBL) and Content-based Learning (CBL) under what Stuchly (2015) aptly calls “an umbrella term” of Content-based Learning Projects (CBLP).4 Faculty teach four classes (five credit hours each) for twenty hours of instruction per week focusing on major projects which are all related to a student-chosen research topic. The major projects include a formal oral presentation, reading portfolio, and research paper. These projects lead up to a culminating display of the students’ research in a poster session format, frequently in conjunction with UVU’s annual Conference on Writing for Social Change (CWSC), the goal of which is to challenge students and community members to effect positive change in the world. The instructors themselves engage students with content that reflects the overarching theme of the projects, an exploration of the economic and environmental impacts of issues of import locally and in the region, and by extension, globally. In other words, content is selected by the instructors and explored together for different aspects of language learning and analysis of rhetorical structures and cultural elements. The faculty work together with students to discuss, write about, examine, synthesize, and make connections between content concepts and vocabulary in order to recycle vocabulary and to create curricular cohesion. In sum, the teachers model and guide the behavior that students need to use to break down, comprehend, and interact with the frequently challenging content, as well as to prepare their own research.

118

TESOL and Sustainability

The curriculum while at the CRFS also includes CBLP. The students are placed into predetermined small groups. Immediately before and during the stay at the field station (5 days/4 nights), the teachers and students are responsible for learning and then “peer teaching” content that is germane to Capitol Reef and the Colorado Plateau. While the content areas explored have varied greatly over twenty-one semesters, the teachers have settled on elements that both help students engage in the “leave no trace” ethos of the national park and increase their appreciation of the unique web of life in such a surprisingly fragile desert environment. In addition to these content areas, students work on a Nature Journal and the group conducts the Wilderness Writing Workshop (Eyraud & McMurtrey, 2011; Manookin, 2018), which takes place in a natural sandstone “amphitheater” during a hike in the park. The field station itself as well as the day-to-day activities are also incorporated as content. The off-the-grid buildings are constructed with passive heating and cooling features. Power is provided by solar panels, and a water treatment facility is located nearby. Because Utah is the second driest state (after Nevada), and yet uses more water per capita than its surrounding neighbors, water use is measured for the duration of the trip and information about water use is strategically placed (gallons per toilet flush, gallons per minute the faucets and shower heads). Strict recycling guidelines are followed as well as weighing each group’s trash to compare with American averages and other CRFS visitors.

Findings The national park and CRFS, in fact, are exemplars of the sometimes competing economic and environmental challenges related to course content selected by instructors, and the student-chosen research topics impactful in the real world. As a result, the Capitol Reef excursion and culminating projects become capstones that students recognize as they are engaging with evocative language learning tasks for a transformative end.

“Incidental” Language Learning and Expertise Studies (Kasper, 1997; Lo, 2014; Stuchly, 2015) do show that CBI approaches can improve student motivation, academic language and content acquisition, and

Place-Based Ecopedagogy for EAP Program

119

also facilitate student performance in their subsequent studies. As such, the main goal of the place-based ecopedagogy is first and always language acquisition. As Stoller and Grabe (1997) note, the approach “uniformly view[s] language as a medium for learning content, and content as a resource for learning language” (p. 1). Ideally, students are held accountable for the content learning as well as the language learning, but assessment of each can vary. In fact, the term “incidental” content/language learning is used (Grabe & Stoller, 1997) to describe learning that is not formally measured per se. Yet I would recast “incidental learning” as what happens when the students move through their place(s) as potent social actors in their own right appropriating English for their own purposes (Belcher, 2006). These next three student statements illuminate why CBLP approaches are motivational and transformational for students (and, by the way, for faculty), particularly when inflected by the place-based ecopedagogy as described in this chapter. Izarra: I feel important for the projects and also for Capitol Reef and what I learned. It makes me important to my family and friends because I contribute more [knowledge and language]. I even change people’s action because of my project [food waste in local restaurants]. Tadashi: I’m an “expert” now on Capitol Reef so I can tell my American friends about what I know. I know more even [geology and biology/botany] than even Utah friends about Capitol Reef. Trang: I think [the Capitol Reef excursion] teachers need to abdicate more to student[s] and the most important is the students working in groups to have responsibility to become “experts” in Capitol Reef.

With these statements in mind, the vignettes in the next section at Capitol Reef present selected broad texts to provide context for a final discussion. These vignettes rather nicely illustrate James Kirchner’s aphorism, “Field stations are places where we can read the book of life in the language in which it was written” (Organization of Biological Field Stations, n.d.).

Multilayered and Situated Language Learning Ottavio: Look at that [lichen]! You can see little leaves just like a plant. Xiaoli: Wow! Like lettuce … and it’s living on rocks? Hiroko: This one has leaves shiny like oil on water. So cool! Ottavio to Kevin: The book [A Naturalist’s Guide to Canyon Country] said lichen is “a pioneering species.” What does that mean? Like the Mormon pioneers?

120

TESOL and Sustainability

Figure 5.1  Lichen Up Close: A Marvel of the Natural World.

Seventeen advanced college-level ELLs and four instructors are in a shadowy cool sandstone slot canyon on the Cohab Canyon5 hike in CRNP investigating aspects of their different teams’ content assignments. They are also having fun learning how to “chimney climb” the high and narrow canyon walls to access and explore the closed end of the slot. Team Moenkopi—named thus after one of the visible and colorful 250-million-year-old geological layers in the park— is preparing for their peer teaching assignment about “one of the marvels of the natural world—neither plant nor animal” in the form of lichen (Williams, 2013, p. 84). The teacher and team members are looking at excellent examples of Varying Rim-Lichen under geologists’ loupes that magnify typically unseen details. The teacher returns to the student’s question about the comparison of a pioneering species and early Mormon settlers in the region, saying:

Place-Based Ecopedagogy for EAP Program

121

Kevin: Well, that’s not a bad parallel … How would you describe a “pioneer”? Ottavio: The first people to a place … sometimes the first for doing something? Xiaoli: The book [reading from A Naturalist’s Guide to Canyon Country] says lichens “set the stage” by “colonizing bare rock.” Izarra: Set the stage for what? Colonizing? What does all that mean? Kevin: That’s a great question. And that’s exactly some of the information you need to break down for your graphic organizers in order to teach your classmates the “salient” features of lichen—remember that word, salient? Hiroko: The most important features? Xiaoli: The definition features. Kevin: Yes! How do lichens set the stage? What does it mean that it’s a pioneering species? Izarra: It means they are the first on the rock? Kevin: I think that’s exactly what it means. Why would a pioneering species or a colonizing species such as this be important to the desert ecosystem? That’s what’s on page 84 of the book and that’s what you have to break down for your classmates. Let’s look at paragraph 4 on page 84 … Ottavio: Wow. I just thought this was stuff on rocks almost like paint or something. I had no idea it was alive. I’ll never see rocks the same …

The parallel between lichen as a “pioneering species” and the Mormon pioneers is an instance of accessing our unique situatedness (Gee, 2011) in the “linguistic landscape” (Pennycook, 2010) that is also central to this experience. Before, during, and after the trip to the CRFS, the students, with the teachers acting as guides and co-investigators, engage in multifaceted language learning activities directed toward asking and answering questions that challenge dominant cultural paradigms and that consider how to recognize living more harmoniously with their surroundings and the more-than-human world in multidimensional ways. The student drew the parallel between Mormon pioneers and the “pioneering” species of lichen. While anchoring the meaning of “pioneer” in an experience or locality with which he was familiar and identified with as a missionary and member of that faith, the student was unaware of the use of that word in the world of lichen, creating an understanding of their primary biological functions essential to desert ecology. This is also why they are characterized as a “colonizing” species as they prepare the way for other life, providing camouflage for some immature insects for instance, as well as the role lichen serves in breaking down the very rock that nourishes it, helping build footholds and soil for nurturing still further life (Williams, 2013). Layers of situated and complex meaning are thus open to the students. New avenues and definitions of life are offered up and lived by the students. When

122

TESOL and Sustainability

made aware that lichen provides haven for insects that may provide pollination services, which in turn are eaten by lizards or birds, which then deliver goods and benefits in their own rights to other species as each in its place, the immensity of a previously invisible web of biomass and interrelatedness begins to take shape. Many of the students’ preconceived notions of a desert are challenged, resulting in a lamination of insights that can only add intricacy to their understanding of the more-than-human world and our deeply embedded place within. Students are then exposed to another framework for “pioneers” and “colonizing” at an imposing petroglyph and pictograph panel at the base of looming Wingate sandstone walls. The following depiction poorly replicates the experience of standing in front of the symbols and ancient signposts etched, scratched, and painted onto the cliff face which spread in all directions. Students frequently spend time looking up and pondering the mysterious shapes as well as taking obligatory “selfies” in front of the panel. Nevertheless, there are profound moments of solemnity brought on by evidence of past peoples and the location itself. In fact, the site allows a chance to discuss the possibly positive conceptions of colonial projects that we see evidenced in the initial canyon interaction. Here we have a chance to challenge taken-for-granted facets of our reality, asking students to question aspects of their lives they have heretofore possibly viewed as unproblematic.

Figure 5.2  Petroglyphs and Pictographs.

Place-Based Ecopedagogy for EAP Program

123

Figure 5.3  Rock Art Target Practice.

As a powerful instance of such moments, the next image shows striking concentric circles probably representing our sun, a supposition which is bolstered by another nearby glyph evocative of the moon. Clearly the person(s) who painstakingly created the circles was quite an artist and pretty ingenuous to boot. There are also a couple of faint anthropomorphs about 15–18 inches tall that provide a sense of scale for the sun. Distressingly, it is more than apparent that the sun glyph was used at some point(s) for target practice with more modern tools and less foresight than those that created it with such care. Be that as it may, this vandalism offers multiple and deeply layered opportunities for students to pursue lines of inquiry into colonial projects, the peoples that passed before us, and the damage we continue to inflict on cultural and natural commons.

124

TESOL and Sustainability

In that light, please consider anew the opening vignette from this chapter in connection to an experience another student, Quetzaly, had with lichen. After she and her team gave their presentation on lichen, we walked to the next peer teaching site and she told me: Quetzaly: You know, at first I didn’t want to learn about lichen. I thought it was boring. But when we came here and see it, I realized something very important, I think. You remember when you told us that sometimes vocabulary are “invisible” until we learn them and use them? Sometimes I know what words mean but now I know I really don’t … until I can use them and “see” them in the world … then I see them everywhere and see connections. I think the same with lichen. Kevin: Wow! The way you explain that is very interesting. I know when we were hiking to Hickman Bridge that you and your lichen group were walking with Brooke and you were looking at the bright yellow and orange firedot lichen and talking about it with her. Quetzaly: Yes! So bright! So I was thinking after learn about lichen and then see it on the rocks and see the desert and the sand and how we see little islands of plants and soil on the rocks and the lizards, the birds, the insects. I connect this all to my topic [monarch butterflies]. Kevin: Really? That’s great! How? Quetzaly: First the vocabulary and things we learn can be used for both. Lichen is microscopic life what we learned and we can see [using geologists’ magnifying loups] like with biological soil and how it all works together and I think about the butterflies and how small a life it is but I realize how big it all is together … because of lichen and what I am learning of monarchs too. I see life! Everywhere! [Laughs] Even in this dry place!

After our visit to CRFS, Quetzaly presented her work on monarch butterflies with a professional poster featuring a large map of North America with the monarch migration routes from Mexico to the United States and to Canada, tracing the limits of its primary food source—a plant also crucial to its reproductive cycle—the milkweed. Quetzaly effectively explained the mystery of the monarch. It takes two to three generations for the butterfly to reach its ranges in the United States and Canada, but the fourth generation of monarch, without ever having been in Mexico, and in fact being a generation or two removed, flies back to its sanctuaries in Mexico. Because of the connection to Mexico, Quetzaly was highly invested in her work. She eloquently explained the significance of the orange color, indicating its bad taste to predators from its milkweed diet, but also the cultural connection

Place-Based Ecopedagogy for EAP Program

125

to the Day of the Dead celebration. The monarch and the Day of the Dead are associated because of two reasons: (1) the orange is evocative of the orange Mexican or Aztec marigold, also known as the cempasàºchil, or “flower of the dead,” and is used to decorate graves and shrines for the ceremonies and (2) the monarch returns to Mexico at around the same time as the celebration, November 1. In the minds of many over the centuries, the returning butterflies perhaps represent the return of ancestors’ spirits, in part brought about by the ceremonies surrounding the Day of the Dead; a beautiful metaphor even though we understand a small portion of the science behind the mystery because of Quetzaly’s research. What was striking about Quetzaly’s poster session was that she ended her presentation by pointing out organizations supporting monarchs and highlighting groups who give out free milkweed plant seeds, even giving out small packets herself. Feasibly more powerfully, Quetzaly pointed out to her audience members: Quetzaly: These insects do not see borders and walls. Insects do not recognize them. Monarchs bring these three countries together. They bring us together. [pointing to the flags of the three nations prominently displayed above the map of the monarch’s range]

Discussion Implementing a place-based ecopedagogy gives participants the freedom to devise “learning opportunities” rather than simply indulging the “teaching point” (Allwright, 2005), and to engage their pedagogic intuition (Kumaravadivelu, 2006) with a focus on the L2 learner instead of the native English speaker (Morgan & Ramanathan, 2005). Belcher (2006), more eloquently rephrases by writing: The critically aware practitioner neither simply abandons language teaching nor continues trusting that ELT [English Language Teaching] will open doors without closing any, but instead gives priority to helping learners appropriate English for their own purposes—to accept, resist, and even push back, to glocalize6 the global, asserting ownership of English in forms useful in users’ own communities. (p. 143)

A CBLP approach within a place-based ecopedagogy goes far in terms of providing the freedom for students to assert that ownership. They do so by

126

TESOL and Sustainability

taking charge of their own learning when more of the curriculum is placed in their hands. Students negotiate and share meaning and content with professors and classmates, they have situated and hands-on contexts in which to recycle language and content for diverse formats and purposes, and most importantly, they engage in transformative experiences “that change people’s views of the world and empower them to take action to improve their surrounds and their place therein” (Buxton, 2010, p. 123). I recognize that not many have access to such exceptional pedagogical spaces. However, I present this chapter on a place-based ecopedagogy to foster new ways of thinking about language teaching and learning, acknowledging that “a contextsensitive … pedagogy that encompasses location-specific teaching strategies and instructional materials cannot evolve in a pedagogic vacuum” (Kumaravadivelu, 2009, p. 21). In other words, such pedagogies emerge from one’s own pedagogic experiences to create a theory of practice in and for one’s own place.

Acknowledgments In addition to the students and teachers represented in the data presented in  this  paper, I would like to thank Heidi Condie for her close readings and helpful comments while implementing equally helpful editorial comments.

Notes 1 From this point forward, the term metaphor or “root metaphor” (Bowers, 2000; Gruenewald, 2003) is interchangeable with “Discourse models,” or macrolevel theories or stories which perform a mediating and/or linking function between language use and society (Gee, 1998, 2005). This interpretation is based on Gee’s “little d” and “big-D” definitions of d/Discourse where “little d” discourse is “language bits” or any “stretch of language (spoken, written, signed) which ‘hangs together’ to make sense in some community of people who use that language” (2005, p. 103). Alternatively, “big-D” Discourse (1998) is the “socially accepted association among ways of using language, other symbolic expressions, and artifacts, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing and acting” (p. 131). 2 I have cited scholars from all over the world and have thus retained the original spellings of certain words from their pieces as affirmation of not only the global nature of English, but also of the local practices of language that drive those linguistic manifestations.

Place-Based Ecopedagogy for EAP Program

127

3 This term is used by many scholars (Blenkinsop, 2012; Gruenewald, 2004; Preston & Griffiths, 2004) who reference Bell (1997), who promotes a “fully-embodied participation in the more-than-human world” grounded in the sensual and social rather than an “unduly cerebral” engagement with facts and systems in environmental learning (p. 137). I echo this use throughout the chapter as it represents a challenge to the notion of humanity’s domination of the natural world, i.e., anthropocentrism, which negates the innate value of nonhuman species. 4 See Cenoz (2015) for an overview of the shared pedagogical realities of CBI and CLIL. Stoller (2002, 2006) explains how PBL is a “natural extension of what is already taking place in [CBI] class[es]” (p. 109). 5 Early Mormon settlers—members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—in the area were pejoratively referred to as Cohabs, i.e., a person who cohabits, or polygamists. The name of the canyon came about due to polygamists hiding from federal authorities in these warren-like areas, facts that are highlighted and explained and explored before, during, and after the hike. This vignette was purposefully selected for this chapter, both to demonstrate the profound multilayered nature of the linguistic landscape and to highlight the student’s reference to pioneers as an example of how the space itself can be pedagogical. 6 According to Belcher (2006), the term is Robertson’s (1995), but she uses it to connect the highly diverse English for specific purposes (ESP) arena with the reality of identify formation in these milieus. She explains, “Contributing to the complexified picture of ESP are more methodologically, technologically, and theoretically enriched assessments of language use and learner needs, and a growing array of means to meet them, in a glocalized world (Robertson, 1995), where local and global needs meet and merge, collide and conflict, and new culturally and linguistically hybrid ‘thirdness[es]’ (Mauranen, 2001, p. 51) emerge” (p. 134).

References Adler-Kassner, L., & Harrington, S. (2002). Basic writing as a political act: Public conversations about writing and literacies. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Allwright, D. (2005). From teaching points to learning opportunities and beyond. TESOL Quarterly, 39(1), 9–31. Belcher, D. D. (2006). English for specific purposes: Teaching to perceived needs and imagined futures in worlds of work, study, and everyday life. TESOL Quarterly, 40(1), 133–156. Bell, A. (1997). Natural history from a learner’s perspective. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 2, 132–144. Benesch, S. (1993). ESL, ideology, and the politics of pragmatism. TESOL Quarterly, 27(4), 705–717.

128

TESOL and Sustainability

Benesch, S. (2001). Critical English for academic purposes: Theory, politics, and practice. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Benesch, S. (2012). Considering emotions in critical English language teaching: Theories and praxis. New York: Routledge. Birrell, C., Gray, T., & Preece, M. (2013). Ecopedagogies: Ways of connecting with the natural world through the arts. Presented at the Linking Art and the Environment: Proceedings of the first EcoArts Australis Conference, 2013, EcoArts Australis Inc. Retrieved from: https://www.academia.edu/8370724/ Birrell_C._Gray_T._et_al._2013_._Ecopedagogies_Ways_of_Connecting_with_ the_Natural_World_through_the_Arts._Linking_Art_and_the_Environment_ Proceedings_of_the_first_EcoArts_Australis_Conference_2013_EcoArts_Australis_ Inc._ISBN_978-0-9924107-0-4_pp_99-105. Bishop, W. (1993). Students’ stories and the variable gaze of composition research. In S. I. Fountaine & S. Hunter (Eds.), Writing ourselves into the story: Unheard voices from composition studies (pp. 197–214). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Blenkinsop, S. (2012). Four slogans for cultural change: An evolving place-based, imaginative and ecological learning experience. Journal of Moral Education, 41(3), 353–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2012.691634. Bowers, C. A. (1997). The culture of denial: Why the environmental movement needs a strategy for reforming universities and public schools. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bowers, C. A. (2000). Four double binds that limit the development of an eco-justice pedagogy. Retrieved from: https://cabowers.net/pdf/Four%20Double%20Binds.pdf. Bowers, C. A. (2001). Educating for eco-justice and community. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Bowers, C. A. (2012). The way forward: Educational reforms that focus on the cultural commons and the linguistic roots of the ecological/cultural crises. Eugene, OR: EcoJustice Press, LLC. Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professorate. Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Buxton, C. A. (2010). Social problem solving through science: An approach to critical, place-based, science teaching and learning. Equity & Excellence in Education, 43(1), 120–135. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1080/10665680903408932. Canagarajah, A. S. (2010). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching (Nachdr.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cenoz, J. (2015). Content-based instruction and content and language integrated learning: The same or different? Language, Culture and Curriculum, 28(1), 8–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2014.1000922. Edge, J. (2003). Imperial troopers and servants of the lord: A vision of TESOL for the 21st century. TESOL Quarterly, 37(4), 701–709. Edge, J. (Ed.). (2009). (Re-)locating TESOL in an age of empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Place-Based Ecopedagogy for EAP Program

129

Errington, J. J. (2001). Colonial linguistics. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 19–39. Errington, J. J. (2008). Linguistics in a colonial world: A story of language, meaning, and power. Malden, MA: Blackwell, Pub. Eyraud, K. E., & McMurtrey, A. (2011, March). The world as classroom: Using excursions in intensive CBI courses. Paper presented at the 45th Annual TESOL Convention, New Orleans, Louisiana. Fabrício, B. F., & Santos, D. (2009). The (re)framing process as a collaborative locus for change. In J. Edge (Ed.), (Re-)locating TESOL in an age of empire (pp. 65–83). Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). New York: Continuum. (Original work published 1970). Gee, J. P. (1998). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (2nd ed., reprinted). London: Palmer Press. Gee, J. P. (2005). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Gee, J. P. (2011). How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit. New York: Routledge. Giroux, H. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. South Hadley, MA: Bergin Garvey. Goulah, J. (2011). Ecospirituality in public foreign language education: A critical discourse analysis of a transformative world language learning approach. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 8(1), 27–52. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1080/15 427587.2011.545766. Goulah, J. (2017). Climate change and TESOL: Language, literacies, and the creation of eco-ethical consciousness. TESOL Quarterly, 51(1), 90–114. Grabe, W., & Stoller, F. L. (1997). Content-based instruction: Research foundations. In M. A. Snow & D. Brinton (Eds.), The content-based classroom: Perspectives on integrating language and content (pp. 5–21). White Plains, NY: Addison Wesley Longman. Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3–12. Gruenewald, D. A. (2004). A Foucauldian analysis of environmental education: Toward the socioecological challenge of the earth charter. Curriculum Inquiry, 34(1), 71–107. Helmer, K. A. (2013). Critical English for academic purposes: Building on learner, teacher, and program strengths. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 12(4), 273–287. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2013.08.003. hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Boston, MA: South End Press. Huckin, T. N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. The Journal of TESOL France, 2(2), 95–112. Huckin, T. N. (2002). Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness. Discourse & Society, 12(3), 347–372. Kasper, L. F. (1997). The impact of content-based instructional programs on the academic progress of ESL students. English for Specific Purposes, 16(4), 309–320.

130

TESOL and Sustainability

Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003). A postmethod perspective on English language teaching. World Englishes, 22(4), 539–550. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2006). TESOL methods: Changing tracks, challenging trends. TESOL Quarterly, 40(1), 59–81. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2009). Dangerous liaison: Globalization, empire and TESOL (pp. 1–26). Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2016). The decolonial option in English teaching: Can the subaltern act? TESOL Quarterly, 50(1), 66–85. Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Lo, Y. Y. (2014). L2 learning opportunities in different academic subjects in contentbased instruction—evidence in favour of “conventional wisdom.” Language and Education, 28(2), 141–160. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2013. 786086. Manookin, K. L. (2018). The benefits of nature-based writing for English language learners. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 8(1), 17. Retrieved from: https:// doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0801.03. Marrott, D. (2008). Defining literacy: How basic writers define and are defined by literacy, Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest LLC. Martusewicz, R. A., Edmundson, J., & Lupinacci, J. (2015). EcoJustice education: Toward diverse, democratic, and sustainable communities (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Mauranen, A. (2001). Descriptions or explanations? Some methodological issues in contrastive rhetoric. In M. Hewings (Ed.), Academic writing in context. Birmingham, England: University of Birmingham Press. McCrum, R. (2010). Glōbish: How the English language became the world’s language. New York: Viking. McLaren, P. (2003). Life in schools (4th ed.). New York: Allyn and Bacon. Morgan, B., & Ramanathan, V. (2005). Critical literacies and language education: Global and local perspectives. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 25, 151–169. National Park Service. (2015, April 15). Capitol reef national park receives international dark sky designation [.gov]. Retrieved from: https://www.nps.gov/care/learn/news/ capitol-reef-national-park-receives-international-dark-sky-designation.htm. Organization of Biological Field Stations. (n.d.). What are field stations? Retrieved from: https://www.obfs.org/what-s-a-field-station-. Ostler, N. (2005). Empires of the world: A language history of the world. London: HarperCollins. Pennycook, A. (1990). Towards a Critical Applied Linguistics for the 1990s. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 8–28. Pennycook, A. (1994). The cultural politics of English as an international language. New York: Longman. Pennycook, A. (1998). English and the discourses of colonialism. New York: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Place-Based Ecopedagogy for EAP Program

131

Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. New York: Routledge. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, R. (2008). The linguistic imperialism of neoliberal empire. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 5(1), 1–43. Preston, L., & Griffiths, A. (2004). Pedagogy of connections: Findings of a collaborative action research project in outdoor and environmental education. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, 8(2), 36–45. Robertson, R. (1995). Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, & R. Robertson (Eds.), Global modernities (pp. 25–44). London: Sage. Rogers, R. (Ed.). (2011). An introduction to critical discourse analysis in education (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Sanger, P. C. (2005). Living and writing feminist ethnographies: Threads in a quilt stitched by heart. In R. P. Clair (Ed.), Expressions of ethnography: Novel approaches to qualitative methods (pp. 29–44). New York: State University of New York Press. Seidman, I. (2006). Interviewing as qualitative research: A guide for researchers in education and the social sciences (3rd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Stevens, M. T., & Gilson, G. G. (2016). An exploration of field-station partnerships: University-operated field stations located in US national parks. BioScience, 66(8), 693–701. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biw053. Stibbe, A. (2014). An ecolinguistic approach to critical discourse studies. Critical Discourse Studies, 11(1), 117–128. Stoller, F. L. (2002). Project work: A means to promote language and content. In J. C. Richards & W. A. Renandya (Eds.), Methodology in language teaching: An anthology of current practice (pp. 107–120). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stoller, F. L. (2006). Establishing a theoretical foundation for project-based learning in second and foreign language contexts. In G. H. Beckett & P. C. Miller (Eds.), Projectbased second and foreign language education: Past, present, and future (pp. 19–40). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Stoller, F. L., & Grabe, W. (1997). A six-T’s approach to content-based instruction. The content-based classroom: Perspectives on integrating language and content. White Plains, NY: Longman. Stuchly, A. (2015). Content-based learning projects: A way to enhance motivation in the foreign language classroom? (Student Essay, Teacher Education). University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle. net/2077/39746. Williams, D. B. (2013). A naturalist’s guide to canyon country. Helena, MT: Falcon.

132

6

Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters and Implications for Sustainable TESOL Bal Krishna Sharma University of Idaho

Concerns of Sustainability in TESOL The world today is facing severe ecological crises, such as ozone layer depletion, global warming, increased amounts of toxins in the environment both on land and in the oceans, soil erosion and desertification, deforestation, shortage of potable water, and environmental pollution (Harré, Brockmeier & Mühlhäusler, 1999; Kahn, 2003). These elements represent the characteristics of a risk society (Beck, 1995). This identifies the risks in modern society as created by human actions mainly as a result of science and technology, threatening the existence of humans and other species on this planet both now and in the future. In addition, globalization from the West, anchored in capitalism, technology, and consumerism, has threatened, replaced, or changed the diverse ecosystems around the world (Bowers, 2007). International institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monitory Fund, and the World Trade Organization have reinforced neoliberal values and ideas, such as free market economy and debtbased finance, by using developing regions of the world as exploitable markets. As a result, “third world” countries bear the great burden of “sustainable development” articulated by global forces as a “panacea” for all who are already suffering from the previous legacy of development and imposed transformation of their life worlds (Kahn, 2010). Dominant Western philosophical thought, for example humanism, placed human values as central within education, suggesting that humans are rational and capable of self-determinism promoting the ideal that they have the potential to make the world a better place (Crookes, 2009). This philosophical thought

134

TESOL and Sustainability

has had a significant impact on communicative and functional approaches in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). This position, however, has raised a basic question: To what extent has humanism been successful in understanding and addressing the ecological crisis that we are facing today? Principal assumptions of humanism which give sole agency to humans to bring transformation through the promotion of democratic values and social justice in schools and societies are promoted in the progressive and transformative models of pedagogy proposed by John Dewey and Paulo Freire. However, critical scrutiny of human activities today challenges this widely accepted assumption of the rationality of humans. By implication, the progressive and transformative models of pedagogy have not paid adequate attention to the agenda of ecological crisis created by humans. Critics (e.g., Bowers, 2007; Kahn, 2003) have argued that these models share a number of assumptions with today’s proponents of a globalization culture that results in increasing the rate of environmental degradation without thought toward understanding and resolving the planetary crisis. Both the followers and critics of Freirean critical pedagogy, for example, realize that Freire hardly led to any rethinking of how his main concern of conscientization enables people to realize their fullest potential as human beings in relation to the environment (Bowers, 2007; Kahn, 2010; McLaren & Houston, 2004). These philosophical ideas, pedagogical models, and their related critical concerns have made gradual inroads into the fields of applied linguistics and TESOL (e.g., Crookes, 2010; Pennycook, 2001, 2018). The critical examination of philosophical thoughts and pedagogical models urges language professionals to reconsider dominant approaches to second language education. Given the pervasiveness of environmental crisis and the associated risks in our everyday lives, language educators may feel an urgent need to address these questions in their curriculum and pedagogy. Crookes (2010) notes this gap in research, identifying that while “green” topics are an important strand in critical pedagogy and have a long history in curriculum theory, there is less literature than one might expect in applied linguistics and TESOL. Halliday (2001) likewise suggests that issues of environmental degradation, climate change, and destruction of species are not just the problems for biologists, physicists, and environmentalists; instead, they are the problems that humans as species have brought about and result in problems for scholarly engagement for the applied linguistics community at large. We should remember that the global environmental crisis can be addressed not only from technological advancement. One possible way to do so is to pay attention to the forms of cultural and communicative practices that explain how human beings relate to

Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters

135

each other, with other animals on the planet and with the physical environment, “with a normative orientation towards protecting the systems that humans and other forms of life depend on for their wellbeing and survival” (Stibbe, 2015, p. 9). English language teachers and scholars for that purpose must reconsider dominant approaches to language teaching, keeping in mind some important questions of how, what, and why we teach (Goulah & Katunich, 2018; see also Goulah, 2018). Keeping these concerns at the center, this chapter aims to present a case of an alternative perspective on the human’s relationship with the environment and other nonhuman species as demonstrated in various communicative activities, and it discusses the implications of this perspective for addressing sustainability in applied linguistics and TESOL. In order to do so, this chapter examines intercultural encounters between Western tourists and local tourism workers on topics of climate change and the human–nature relationship in the context of Himalayan tourism from an applied linguistics perspective. The first part of the chapter takes an ecolinguistic approach to critical discourse studies (Stibbe, 2015) to examine how the topics of the environment and relationships among species are discussed and socially constructed by the participants who come from different linguacultural backgrounds, and how their conversations are shaped by their respective sociopolitical histories and identities. The second section of the chapter discusses the implications of such intercultural discourses for applied linguistics and the TESOL field. The analysis of human interactions with and about the environment encourages us to reconsider what it means to teach language, urging us to reconceptualize the fact that language and communication are not limited to linguistic resources only, but to the assemblages of linguistic and nonlinguistic, human and nonhuman, and material and affective repertoires (Pennycook, 2018).

Research Context and Data This chapter comes out of my larger research project that aims to study the role of language and communication in tourist–host interactions in Nepal. I conducted a linguistic ethnography in an intensive English course at the Traveler’s World (pseudonym) for tourism workers. Its website mentioned that Traveler’s World was a private nongovernment organization that aimed to “provide education on safe and ecologically sustainable trekking methods, and to preserve Nepal’s unique and fragile ecosystem.” The institute considered English language

136

TESOL and Sustainability

skills to be an important aspect of sustainable tourism development in Nepal. It ran five-week English language courses twice a year, one starting in July and another in February. These courses targeted for tourism workers, such as porters, trekking guides, and travel agents. I attended the class regularly, paying attention to what trekking guides and porters were learning (see Sharma [2018a] for details). The lesson topics included sustainable tourism; trekking schedules; weather and climate; cross-cultural differences; safety and first aid; and local festivals, food, and cultures. The teachers also taught related vocabulary and necessary grammar items that corresponded with these topics. Making students able to communicate about the environment in the Himalayas was one of the major goals of the English class. After the five-week sessions, I followed graduates from the Traveler’s World on multiday treks and tours, sharing food and accommodations with them, in order to see the connection between their training and their workplace communication. For this chapter specifically, I focus on one focal participant who was a student in the language program in 2013. The following year, I accompanied the guide (Durga, pseudonym) with his American client for a seven-day trek in the northern Himalayas. He was a native ethnic Tamang from the Himalayas. He first started working as a porter in 1990, and later received training and his trekking guide’s license in 2005. As a trekking guide, Durga read maps and knew information about the altitude, the vegetation, the weather, and the landscape of the trekking trail areas. In addition, he was also a tour guide who provided commentaries to his clients about the culture, heritage, and religion of the people living along the trekking trails. The trek offered many opportunities for me and tourists to see and experience the lived culture of Tibet-bordering ethnic Tamangs in their close-knit clusters of settlements. The accompanying American tourist was a low-budget backpacker who loved trekking. Although the tourist knew some Nepali and Hindi words through guidebooks and touristic encounters, the language in which our tour took place was English. Durga agreed to carry a digital audio recorder in his pocket during the trek. I had access not only to the communication of guided treks, but also mealtime and  other informal conversations among the tourist, the worker, and local people.  I audio-recorded all the conversations among the participants, which totaled about twenty-five hours of data. Since most conversations took place while on the move, while ascending and descending some difficult trekking routes, it was not possible to video-record most of the conversations. I was still able to collect about two hours of video data. The total data from this trek produced 106 pages of transcripts. While transcribing and reading the transcript, I noticed

Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters

137

that conversations about the environment were one recurring topic in tourist– guide interactions. I made a corpus of about seventeen episodes that could be categorized as “Greenspeak” (greenspeak in lower case henceforth). Harré, Brockmeier and Mühlhäusler (1999) give the collective name of greenspeak to refer to a form of discourse used for discussing and representing environmental and ecological issues. Greenspeak can be realized in its various forms and genres such as policy documents, scientific texts, media broadcasts, and narratives and conversations. In the context of tourism, discourses about the environment or greenspeak are one key form of communication (Dann, 1996). Here, I take a discursive approach, increasingly known as ecolinguistics, to analyze the greenspeak episodes. Following Stibbe (2015), ecolinguistics is a form of critical discourse studies that considers relationships not only between humans, but also with the larger ecological systems on which all life depends. In many cases, greenspeak can be a site of struggle since different individuals and institutions have various sociocultural values, ideologies, and practices relating to the global environment (Coupland & Coupland, 1997). A textually grounded, discourse analytic approach to understanding the environment can show how and where issues of the environment are constructed and discussed in organic interactions. In what follows, I present three representative greenspeak examples and discuss how the discourse-oriented approach can address sustainability concerns in TESOL.

Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters I first start the analysis with an example of a conversation that took place on the fourth day of the trek on our way to the top of a hill that was 10,826 ft. high. The topic of this conversation was climate change. In the conversation, the participants frame climate change as a problem for humans. A frame, following Stibbe (2015), is a story about an area of life that is brought to attention by particular trigger words; the process of framing entails the way the stories from one area of life are used to understand and conceptualize another area of life (p. 47). In the example, two seemingly different frames of “nature” and “human” life are brought together by showing their interconnectedness. The narrative that unfolds illustrates how people think, talk, and act about the environment. The tourist and the guide generate distinctive subjectivities of orientations and interests in interpreting the changes that have taken place in the Himalayas (transcription notation: [0.1] means pause in tenth of a second; means sound elongation [shows an overlap]).

138

TESOL and Sustainability

Example 1 01.   Tourist: Is there usually more snow up on the top in this time of the year or less? 02.    (0.3) Like is it different than ten (0.4) twenty years ago? 03.   Guide: Yes, that time is lots of snow you know. Now less. There is (0.2) global warming 04.   (.) Its impact you know negative impact (0.2) in Nepal. Mountains are going 05.   black (.) you know. When I was started trekking that time four thousand meters, 06.   you know (.) on March April month there wa:s snow and a lot of snow. 07.   Now we don’t uhm: (0.2) see snow in five thousand meter in January February. 08.   Tourist: So one impact for snow (2.0) melting more is cars and trucks and (0.3) they blow 09.   up um exhaust (0.3) the black exhaust from the cars and trucks. That goes into the 10.   into the air and it lands on the snow. And the snow is darker (0.4) um than white 11.   so you know when things are darker they get warmer (0.8) so it melts 12.   more snow because of the exhaust fumes (.) from the cars. 13.    Guide: Yes yes. 14.    Tourist: And did you say less snow? 15.   Guide: Yes. Also less snow and if there is snow you know um there is um going down. 16.    You know going water. [Not freezing you know. 17.   Tourist:    [Yeah melting 18.   Guide: Uhm yes I think. (0.2). And, I saw in the newspaper television you know. 19.   In Europe and U.S. (0.2) there is too cold there long time snow. 20.   But they have lots of cars, and factories, (.) electricity there but in Nepal 21.   we don’t have. Here lots of trees and jungle but negative impact here. 22.   (0.3) I don’t understand you know.

Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters

139

This conversational episode starts with the tourist asking about the changes in the amount of snow that the mountain has experienced in the last two decades. The guide frames his response mostly drawing from his experience (lines 03–07). Overall, the guide mentions that while in the past he could see snow as late as in March or April on hills that were four thousand meters high, but in recent years, he continues, one cannot see snow in five thousand-meter high mountains in the peak winter months of January and February. The story that the guide and the tourist co-construct creates a poignant and nostalgic tone with the help of contrastive keywords that depict the mountains as white vs. black (identifying the presence vs. absence of snow), thinning of the mountains, snow melting, and so on. The use of nominalization such as “snow melting” and “global warming” converts the process normally associated with a human agent into a syntactic construction with no agency. Goatly (1996) reminds us that the nominalized technical terms, such as these, allow the agent to be suppressed; problems are represented as if they occur on their own. As the guide narrates, he embeds his lived experience from the Himalayas with a globally circulating scientific discourse “global warming” (line 03). The guide also offers an evaluation within his narrative. Following Stibbe (2015), evaluations are narratives that deploy certain “linguistic features which come together to represent an area of life good or bad” (p. 84). The guide then reiterates the negative impact that the change has made (lines 04, 21). The tourist takes on an expert and authoritative identity, explaining the causes behind such environmental changes. She frames the problem. She frames the problem by drawing on the discourses of urbanization and global changes, for example, the increasing number of trucks and cars, exhaust of fumes, and so on (lines 08–12). From lines 18–22, the guide again speaks from his experience interspersed with knowledge gained from media sources. He generally questions an apparently paradoxical argument and evidence he encountered: the United States and Europe have more cars and factories, but they seem to suffer less from global climate changes; in contrast, Nepal does not have many cars and factories, but large areas of forest, and yet it suffers more severely from snow melting and erosion of the mountains. The guide’s concern “I don’t understand” in line 22 is largely representative of how people in the most-affected “third world” contexts make sense of globally circulating scientific discourses on climate change. The seeming naivety simultaneously produces a discourse of resistance, confirming the reality that the third world bears the consequences of environmental degradation that the industrialized world has caused.

140

TESOL and Sustainability

Next, I provide another example that illustrates how human–nature relationship is discussed in tourist–guide interactions. This piece of conversation took place on the third day of the trek. As we were talking, the guide stopped by a lake and started explaining its significance for people living in this region.

Example 2 01.   Guide: This is sacred lake. We call it Ama Chhodingmu. Ah: ah: so sometime 02.   there’s a (.) In March April May month doesn’t rain you know. 03.   Doesn’t rain about ah: six months. And then we ask the rain God 04.   (.) oh we need rain. You know. Please give rain. Ah: then with the 05.   shaman (.) with the ah: monks came here and make small worship you know 06.   worship. Then after some days, you know rain comes down. 07.    Tourist: And what is this flag? 08.   Guide: This is Buddhist flag. Flying flag (.) And yellow is hill 09.   and forest and ground you know (0.2) Green is water. 10.   Tourist: Yes. 11.   Guide: Okay. Blue is sky you know. Red one is (.) fire yeah. White (.) air. 12.   Tourist: I see. 13.   Guide: And it is especially (.) for praying and good future (.) you know. Ama Chhodingmu Lake has a special significance for local Tamangs. During months without rains, locals from the neighboring villages would visit the lake and do a special prayer led by a Buddhist priest. From lines 01–06, the guide remarks that the rain God resides in the lake, and after people make special rituals, it rains. The keywords such as “sacred lake,” “God,” “shaman,” “monks,” “worship,” “prayer flag,” and so on cluster together to form a bond among several actors and assemblages. Stibbe (2015) reminds us that such trigger words collectively bring a particular frame to mind which is shared by individuals in community. The representation of the lake is framed in such a way that it interconnects the nature, the human, and the supernatural (the God). In response to the tourist’s question in line 07 about the Buddhist flag (Figure 6.1), the guide explains the meanings of five different colors: yellow for earth, red for fire, green for water, white for air, and blue for sky. The flag contains Buddhist mantras that wish for a good future and the health of all people. Thus, the colors and the mantras have a collective agency.

Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters

141

Figure 6.1  Buddhist Prayer Flags.

The differences in frames supposedly held by the Western tourist and the local guide illustrate how people as social members interact with their ecological surroundings. The co-constructed greenspeak questions the overt agency of humans to act upon the environment. When the humans, and nonhumans, such as the flags, and the environment, such as the lake, work in a network of relations and assemblages, the interaction makes us reconsider the assumed duality of human vs. nonhuman. This conversation alludes to Buddhist philosophical orientations that question the dominant perspectives on several subject–object dualities: thought and thing, self and world, spirit and matter, and human and nature. Thus, the idea of nature as a nonhuman domain contradicts with Tamang people’s conventional mode of relationship with their environment (cf. Campbell, 2017). The guide’s narrative questions the role of human agency in controlling the environment merely for the narrow utilitarian goal of supporting human lives. Rather, the conversation decenters humans and positions the whole universe as an organism of interlinked phenomenon. This way of conceptualization invokes a form of sentient moral ecology of ecocultural intimacies instead of the objectivist biophysical ontology about the environment (Campbell, 2017). In addition, the networked agency is placed on a nonhuman object; for example, the prayer flags and their mantras wish a good future to species on the planet. This spiritual orientation provides an alternative way of thinking that positions humans as only one part of a wider ecological system, but who equally have

142

TESOL and Sustainability

the responsibility to understand the impacts of their actions on the broader system (Raymond et al., 2013). Similarly, the following greenspeak episode took place on the second day of the trek. The guide and local Tamangs performed a dance and a song for tourists in their native language. After the song was over, the tourist asked a question.

Example 3 01.    Tourist: What was the song about? 02.    Guide: Animals sheep and wool (.) you know um: and yak and nak 03.    Tourist: What is nak? 04.   Guide: Ah: (0.5) girl you know female yak. 05.    Tourist: I see. Can you sell them for meat? 06.    Guide: Uhm yeah uhmm (0.2) mostly natural death you know. 07.    In Gatlang we believe in Buddhism. And animal and people uhm human 08.    same you know. Human born animal (.) in another life (.) in future 09.    you know. And after that another animal born (.) and another born. 10.    And again human born from um animal. 11.    Tourist: Really? Is it like reincarnation? 12.    Guide: Uhm: re- what you said? 13.    Tourist: Reincarnation. It’s like rebirth. 14.    Guide: Yes. It’s called karma (.) born animal again. 15.    Animal and um people family you know (.) relatives hahahaha From lines 01–04, the guide notes that the song provides a narrative of species’ life in general, telling stories about people, sheep, yak, and nak (female yak). The narrative represents the interrelatedness of human and animal life in the Himalayas. Then the tourist raises her question from a different perspective: “Can you sell them for meat” (line 5)? This suggests a tension resulting from the two frames that the guide and the tourist use respectively: while the guide’s framing is used to show the intertwined nature of human–animal relationship, the tourist uses a frame motivated by a consumerist perspective. For example, when we hear the word “sell,” this evokes a transactional frame that consists typically of an exchange of goods and money, involving a buyer and a seller. Such frames are not limited to the tourist’s conceptualization of the Himalayan animal, but can be shared by a large number of people as part of social cognition. Discourses of consumerism such as this can be labeled as “destructive”

Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters

143

discourses (Stibbe, 2015) as the ideologies they convey stand in opposition to the principles of ecological harmony. The tourist’s question provides an opportunity for the guide to elaborate his response during the rest of the conversation. By explicitly drawing on the Himalayan Buddhist principles, the guide treats the human–animal relationship as non-separable entities: animals are another form of humans born in another life, and vice versa. The guide’s use of metaphors such as “family” and “relatives” shows a strong bond across species (line 15). Following Stibbe (2015), metaphors are “words which bring specific and distinct frames to mind” (p. 17). The choice of such metaphors that treat humans and animals as “family” and “relatives” urges us to reconsider how we imagine our identity, leading us to an alternative path of sustainability. This example, however, by no means claims that all Tamang people or the Buddhist people in the region hold the same view about the human–animal relationship; however, the guide’s views are largely representative of the community that reside there. This discursive treatment of human–nature relation presents contradictions between the Tamang and Euro-American construction of the environment as an external object for the purposes of human protection. Tracing associations and discourses in relationships between people, plants, and animals helps us understand the inter-relatedness of humans and nonhumans described within this frame. Goatly (2001) reminds us the interrelatedness of the human life, the environment, and spirituality, arguing that the world is not the center of the universe, nor are humans the center of the species. The greenspeak examples analyzed above are illustrative of this concern.

Implications for TESOL In this section, I discuss two major ways this form of ecolinguistic analysis can offer  practical insights to TESOLers and applied linguists. First, it offers an increased level of awareness about the human–environment relationship within language teachers and learners. In content-based and thematic instruction, issues and discourses about the environment are authentic topics and conversations to be included in both textbooks and teacher-prepared instructional materials. Topics and conversations that take place in cross-cultural encounters can be utilized by language teachers to promote critical awareness about the environment within themselves and learners. As our planet faces serious challenges today, consciousness raising about environmental problems may be combined to teach

144

TESOL and Sustainability

people new ways to engage in advocacy as pertinent steps to address the issues (e.g., Goulah, 2017; Hauschild, Poltavtchenko, & Stoller, 2012). Going further into linguistic details, a close reading and analysis of greenspeak provides multiple ways of understanding how discourses are framed and presented. Several examples which could not be included in the analysis due to space constraints show a clear conflict between the schema and frames that Western tourists and local tour guides draw on to talk about human interactions with the environment. Such conflicting perspectives became apparent during specific occasions, for example, when tourists consider the snow-peaked Himalayas as spaces of sport and adventure while locals consider them as homes of the Gods. There were ample occasions when scientific discourses such as the Kyoto Protocol, Clear Air Act, greenhouse effects, recycling, and so on were introduced by tourists, but understood little by local guides. Local guides, while not denying the possibility of the use of some scientific discourse that they had heard from media, mostly drew on their lived experiences gained from Buddhist spirituality principles practiced in their locality. In the context of the language class referenced earlier, teachers can teach not only the words and sentence structures needed to communicate about the environment, but also ways to talk about the human–nature relationship, which may draw on local spiritual and cultural traditions. While second language teachers such as those working for Traveler’s World can incorporate harmony discourse with positive and peace vocabulary in their pedagogy, it is possible to simultaneously teach their students strategies that question anthropocentric ideologies and practices. Authentic conversations such as the ones analyzed earlier can be used as effective professional development resources for raising cross-cultural awareness in communication for volunteer tourists teaching at Traveler’s World. The unpacking of destructive discourses such as the one discussed in Example 3 above can be useful as a tool of resistance. Resistance consists of raising student awareness that the ideology conveyed by the destructive discourse has harmful effects on the environment. This idea aligns with Fairclough’s (2014) notion of critical language awareness. This strategy is most effective when “those most responsible for using destructive discourses become aware of the damaging effects of the ideology they are unwittingly promoting” (Stibbe, 2015, p. 28). Rather than treating nature as a material entity and animals as objects of human consumption, by promoting a discourse of harmony and sustainability through reimagining the human–nature relationship as intertwined, the language of

Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters

145

environmental protection and conservation gets a new, alternative framing. This reconceptualization helps us redefine the regimes of environmental protection and conservation that have conferred all power to human agency to save the environment, which is conceptualized as something that is “out there” and under threat, and therefore in need of human protection. Himalayan anthropologist Campbell’s (2010) work is a point of relevance here: Rather than seeing culture and the environment as two domains of reality that anthropologists and conservation policy thinkers are attempting to bring into relation, it is more appropriate in conditions such as pertain in the Himalayas to ask what different kinds of versions of human relationship with the nonhuman inform people’s everyday livelihoods, their local practices of sociality, their material and discursive relations with outsiders, and their ability to negotiate with languages of power in changing significations of territoriality and citizenship. (p. 201)

Second, I emphasize that language teachers need not sacrifice the traditional goal of teaching—that is, to teach vocabulary, language skills, and communication strategies—while still focusing on environmental sustainability. As I mentioned in the previous section, my primary goal for accompanying tourists and guides to multiday treks was to document and analyze if and how tourism workers employed language skills learned in the classroom at Traveler’s World. For years, teachers of English for specific purposes, especially for tourism purposes in Nepal, have wondered how they can best prepare guides for effective communication. Researchers and practitioners both have desired more knowledge of the actual interactional discourses that take place in the workplace. The analysis of workplace discourse (Holmes, 2005) provides a more accurate description of specific tasks and communication strategies that both teachers and tourism workers need to know. Let’s have a look into some sequences from the examples analyzed above.

Extract from Example 1 13.    Tourist: And did you say less snow? 14.   Guide: Yes. Also less snow and if there is snow you know um there is um going down. 15.    You know going water. [Not freezing you know 16.   Tourist:    [Yeah melting

146

TESOL and Sustainability

Extract from Example 2 10.    Guide: … And again human born from um animal. 11.    Tourist: Really? Is it like reincarnation? 12.    Guide: Uhm: re- what you said? 13.    Tourist: Reincarnation. It’s like rebirth. 14.    Guide: Yes. It’s called karma (.) born animal again. In the first extract, when the tourist asked the guide about the amount of snow on the mountains, he is apparently trying to explain why the snow is “melting” more in the Himalayas during recent years. The guide does not use that particular word, but still successfully accomplishes his conversational turn, circumlocuting by employing such words as “going down,” “going water,” and “not freezing.” With an overlap, the tourist supplies the word “melting” in line 16. This extract not only provides an opportunity to draw students’ attention to the environment-related vocabulary such as “snow,” “freezing,” and “melting,” but also helps students notice how the negotiation of meaning can be accomplished in native speaker–nonnative speaker interactions. Similarly, in the extract in the second example, as the guide was narrating the human–animal relationship in a Buddhist conceptualization, the tourist introduces “reincarnation,” perhaps a new word for the guide (line 11). The guide displays hesitation, followed by an uninverted clarification question “what you said?” (line 12). The tourist repeats the word and supplies its meaning with a help of a synonym (rebirth), which the guide seems to understand. This extract again not only introduces some key culturally religion-specific vocabulary such as “reincarnation,” “rebirth,” and “karma,” but also some important conversational mechanisms of turn taking, question–responses, and meaning negotiation. This piece of authentic data can be used in second language classrooms both to develop awareness of the human’s relationship with other species and as an example of a successful accomplishment of a lingua franca talk. Analysis of target discourse such as this can be the most useful way to understand naturally occurring tasks and discourse features. Bartlett (2005) notes that discourse analysis allows us to see data from a micro-analytic perspective in order to investigate various types of speech acts, features of conversation such as repetition, repair, strategies of negotiation, and conversational turn-taking. Such a zoomed-in focus can provide important insights on several other aspects of conversation such as intertextuality, phatic communion, social rapport, accommodation endeavors, and identity negotiations—which are features that are not limited to tourism

Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters

147

encounters, but occur in everyday conversations and can be generalizable to a wide range of language-use domains. Playing the audio and providing students with accompanying transcripts help them develop their competences and resources needed for communication in the global world on topics of environmental sustainability.The micro-analysis of interactions points out some inadequacies of model dialogs presented in second language textbooks. Scripted textbook dialogs that are devoid of authentic contexts of communication largely fail to prepare second language learners for the realities of everyday interactions. The content and conversations analyzed above reflect many tourist–guide encounters today in other tourism contexts, where talk about environmental sustainability is becoming more common. While the sociopolitical situation of any tourism activity may vary, the kinds of difficulties and tasks tourism workers face in managing intercultural encounters at work are similar in many ways. Overall, carrying out a target discourse analysis informs the teaching of language courses since a detailed description of authentic communication about the environment is extremely useful for both language teachers and learners to create a sustainable world.

Conclusion This chapter has illustrated ecolinguistics in action to address topics of communication about the environment and sustainability in TESOL. The examples provide several frames, metaphors, evaluation devices, and identities as constructed and represented in greenspeak episodes. The analysis presents tensions and contradictions between Western scientific discursive frames and indigenous discourse perspectives in talking about the environment and its relationship with humans. Incorporating lived experiences and principles of spirituality can invoke morality that partly addresses our search for alternative framings that can encourage people, including language teachers, to protect the ecology that all life depends on. Alternative approaches to understanding ontology and epistemology such as posthumanism have made inroads into applied linguistics (e.g., Pennycook, 2018). This is a welcome addition to the field, but we should not come to the hasty conclusion that posthumanism is in fact a “new” perspective. Spiritual and indigenous traditions that question the duality of culture vs. nature, human vs. nonhuman, subjects vs. objects, and so on have existed for centuries. Himalayan way of life grounded on Buddhist philosophies is a case in point (see also Goulah, 2012, 2018). This

148

TESOL and Sustainability

tradition provides us with certain ethical and moral values that enable us to construct theories and knowledge aimed at furthering quality of life, social justice, environmental sustainability, and cultural diversity. It is, however, not my intention to essentialize the worldviews and beliefs of Western tourists and locals in the Himalayas since spirituality and environmental awareness can be a major part of many tourists’ life, and likewise local residents’ and tourism workers’ worldviews on ecology may significantly be influenced by the scientific, West-originated environmental discourses. Likewise, as I argued, my goal in this chapter is not to focus on whether the individuals in interactions truly believe in what they said, but to examine how cross-cultural interactions may be deployed for pedagogical purposes in TESOL. On a practical and pedagogical level in TESOL, teachers should reflect on and encourage their students to rethink their relationship with the world and connect their lived experiences to the global environmental and social concerns. Alternative perspectives on the environment invite them to question the largely accepted human activities and perspectives toward nature and other species and to work for the common good rather than only for individual interests. When teachers and students view their language classrooms and communities through a spiritual or a posthumanist lens (Sharma, 2018b), they are encouraged to ask such questions as: What do my beliefs and philosophies say about: • • • • •

The human relationship with ecology and other animals? The quality of our local environment, and what can be done to improve it? The extent to which our school and society promote eco-justice? The consequence of today’s human activities on future generations? How activities in the classroom can promote the learning of human– environment harmony vocabularies and communication strategies?

Moreover, new ways of deploying the language of sustainability offer tools to integrate considerations of linguistic and cultural diversity and well-being. MacPherson (2003) in this regard reiterates that research and conversations about the environment need to be complemented by a critical awareness of broader ethical implications if and when possible. Lived experiences and orientations to spirituality can provide an alternative perspective in understanding our risk society, questioning the scientific and objective understanding of the environmental crisis. Spiritually grounded perspectives can offer a transformative lens and values that raise eco-ethical consciousness in tandem with people’s religious identity expression (Goulah, 2008, 2011, 2017). Agency on the part

Greenspeak in Tourism Encounters

149

of language teachers is instrumental in incorporating grave concerns about the environment into their instruction; for example, by incorporating “green” resources (Hauschild et al., 2012) and sustainability-motivated activities into the existing curriculum.

References Bartlett, T. (2005). A double shot 2% mocha latte, please, with whip: Service encounters in two coffee shops and at a coffee cart. In M. H. Long (Ed.), Second language needs analysis (pp. 305–343). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beck, U. (1995). Ecological politics in the age of risk. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bowers, C. A. (2007). Silences and double binds: Why the theories of John Dewey and Paulo Freire cannot contribute to revitalizing the commons. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 17(3), 71–87. Campbell, B. (2010). Beyond cultural models of the environment: Linking subjectivities of dwelling and power. In A. Guneratne (Ed.), Culture and the environment in the Himalaya (pp. 186–203). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Campbell, B. (2017). Encountering climate change: Dialogues of human and nonhuman relationships within Tamang moral ecology and climate policy discourses. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 49, 59–87. Coupland, N., & Coupland, J. (1997). Bodies, beaches and bum-times: “Environmentalism” and its discursive competitors. Discourse and Society, 8(1), 7–25. Crookes, G. (2009). Values, philosophies, and beliefs in TESOL: Making a statement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crookes, G. (2010). The practicality and relevance of second language critical pedagogy. Language Teaching, 43(3), 333–348. Dann, G. (1996). Greenspeak: An analysis of the language of eco-tourism. Progress in Tourism and Hospitality Research, 2(3–4), 247–259. Fairclough, N. (2014). Critical language awareness. New York: Routledge. Goatly, A. P. (1996). Green grammar and grammatical metaphor. Journal of Pragmatics, 25, 537–560. Goulah, J. (2008). Transformative world language learning: An approach for environmental and cultural sustainability and economic and political security. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 4(1), 6–23. Goulah, J. (2011). Ecospirituality in public foreign language education: A critical discourse analysis of a transformative world language learning approach. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal, 8(1), 27–52. Goulah, J. (2012). Environmental displacement, English learners, identity and value creation: Considering Daisaku Ikeda in the east-west ecology of education. In J. Lin & R. Oxford (Eds.), Transformative eco-education for human and planetary survival (pp. 41–58). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

150

TESOL and Sustainability

Goulah, J. (2017). Climate change and TESOL: Language, literacies, and the creation of eco-ethical consciousness. TESOL Quarterly, 51(1), 90–114. Goulah, J. (2018). Religion, “the religious,” and language education into the Anthropocene: A response to Huamei Han’s “Studying Religion and Language Teaching and Learning: Building a Sub-Field.” The Multilingual Journal, 102(2), 451–455. Goulah, J., & Katunich, J. (2018). Call for chapter proposals, TESOL and sustainability: New perspectives in English language teaching in the Anthropocene era. Halliday, M. (2001). New ways of meaning: The challenge to applied linguistics. In A. Fill (Ed.), The ecolinguistics reader: Language, ecology, and environment (pp. 175–202). London: Continuum. Harré, R., Brockmeier, J., & Mühlhäusler, P. (1999). Greenspeak: A study of environmental discourse. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hauschild, S., Poltavtchenko, E., & Stoller, F. L. (2012). Going green: Merging environmental education and language instruction. English Teaching Forum, 50, 2–13. Holmes, J. (2005). When small talk is a big deal: Sociolinguistic challenges in the workplace. In M. Long (Ed.), Second language needs analysis (pp. 344–372). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kahn, R. (2003). Paulo Freire and eco-justice: Updating pedagogy of the oppressed for the age of ecological calamity. Freire Online Journal, 1(1). Retrieved from: http:// www.paulofreireinstitute.org/freireonline/volume1/1kahn1.html. Kahn, R. (2010). Critical pedagogy, ecoliteracy and planetary crisis: The ecopedagogy movement. New York: Peter Lang. MacPherson, S. (2003). TESOL for biolinguistic sustainability: The ecology of English as a lingua mundi. TESL Canada Journal, 20, 1–22. McLaren, P., & Houston, D. (2004). Revolutionary ecologies: Ecosocialism and critical pedagogy. Educational Studies, 36(1), 27–44. Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2018). Posthumanist applied linguistics. New York: Routledge. Raymond, C. M., et al. (2013). Ecosystem services and beyond: Using multiple metaphors to understand human–environment relationships. BioScience, 63(7), 536–546. Sharma, B. K. (2018a). English and discourses of commodification among tourism workers in the Himalayas. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22(1), 77–99. Sharma, B. K. (2018b). The relevance of Hinduism to English language teaching and learning. In M. S. Wong & A. Mahboob (Eds.), Spirituality & language teaching: Religious explorations of teacher identity, pedagogy, context, and content (pp. 85–102). New York: Multilingual Matters. Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. New York: Routledge.

7

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice? English-Language Voluntourism, Rural Education, and Root Metaphors of Success Cori Jakubiak, Grinnell College and

Alan Hastings, Central College

Introduction English-language voluntourism is a practice in which people from the Global North teach English in the Global South on a short-term basis (e.g., one week to three months) as a form of alternative travel (Callanan & Thomas, 2005) and humanitarian assistance (McMillon, Cutchins, & Geissinger, 2003). Like volunteer tourism projects more generally—which include childcare, animal welfare efforts, and light construction—English-language voluntourism is characterized as unskilled service work (Jakubiak, 2016). Participants in Englishlanguage voluntourism programs are not required to have language teaching backgrounds or experience in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). Instead, akin to other English language teaching (ELT) programs that recruit instructors from the Global North (e.g., the Japan Exchange and Teaching [JET] Program; see Kubota, 2002), nongovernmental organization (NGO) and commercially sponsored English-language voluntourism relies on and extends the native speaker fallacy (Phillipson, 1992). This is the idea that any Inner Circle (Kachru, 1997), prestige-variety English speaker is also a natural and effective language teacher. A rich body of scholarship in critical applied linguistics has interrogated various intersections of the native speaker fallacy and ELT (e.g., Brown, 2016; Doerr, 2009; Kubota, 2002, 2011). However, little attention has yet been paid to English-language voluntourism (see Jakubiak [2016] and Keyl [2016] for recent exceptions). And while studies of volunteer tourism are robust in tourism,

152

TESOL and Sustainability

human geography, and mobility studies (e.g., Butcher & Smith, 2015; Germann Molz, 2016; Vrasti, 2013), this work focuses mainly on the phenomenon writ large and not the specific projects in which volunteers engage (see Gray et al. [2017] for a recent exception). In this chapter, we offer a contribution to this understudied field by taking a fine-grained look at English-language voluntourism. Specifically, we analyze English-language voluntourism promotional literature and explore the root metaphors (Bowers, 2006) upon which these programs’ claims are based. Root metaphors are the ways of knowing and “commonsense” logics encoded in a culture’s multiple languaging processes, which ecojustice educator Chet Bowers (2006) defines as “the spoken and written word, its architecture and other expressions of material culture, and its forms of play and aesthetic expression … [that involve] learning to think in ways that are influenced by the taken-forgranted assumptions of [a] culture” (p. 33). Multiple languaging processes adhere to English-language voluntourism. For example, participation in these programs is often characterized as global civic engagement (Butcher & Smith, 2015), and policy documents describe volunteer tourism as a form of international development (Tiessen & Heron, 2012). Here, we focus our attention on the ways in which particular root metaphors of progress, individualism, and success undergird English-language voluntourism. Promotional literature offers that short-term, volunteer-led ELT is urgently needed in rural, Global South communities for two reasons: first, to alter rural schooling practices, which are framed as in need of remediation; and second, to render individuals more competitive for employment by equipping them with marketable skills. Organizational sponsors consistently cast English as a tool or skill rather than index of identity or community belonging (cf. Heller, 2010; Wee, 2008), and they use deficit terms to describe the rural schooling contexts in which English-language voluntourism programs operate. Development discourse within English-language voluntourism thus centers on teleological notions of progress (i.e., from rural to urban, from backwards to modern) and education for individual human capital. It ignores the relations between place and community vitality and the overall health of the commons. By the commons, we refer to the resources, cultural products, intergenerational knowledge, and mentoring relationships that people share communally and are free (Bowers, 2006). In concert with this volume’s attention to the links between TESOL and sustainability, we argue that English-language voluntourism’s aims contribute to processes of enclosure. These programs’ root metaphors reify individualist, consumerist ideologies, and practices that degrade the health and

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

153

integrity of shared resources—resources that many rural dwellers still rely on to meet their social and material needs (Theobald, 1997). As ecojustice educator Chet Bowers (2001) writes, “the modern idea of development equates progress with bringing what remains of the cultural and environmental commons under the control of the market forces that have been made even more destructive by the expansion of global competition” (p. 7), and our analysis of English-language voluntourism promotional material strongly suggests this view. This chapter proceeds as follows. First, we situate English-language voluntourism within scholarship on volunteer tourism and rural education. Because English-language voluntourism programs take place in predominantly rural communities (Keese, 2011), a discussion of rural education is salient to our analysis of these programs’ root metaphors. Then, following a brief explication of our study’s research methods, we analyze English-language voluntourism promotional literature and highlight the root metaphors we find therein. Finally, we consider the potential implications of our findings and suggest some new directions for research.

Volunteer Tourism as a Spatial Practice Scholars have noted that volunteer tourism has particular spatial dimensions. Kate Simpson (2004) argues that volunteer tourism creates a “geography of need”: organizational sponsors cast local host communities as eagerly awaiting and amenable to volunteers’ interventions. James Keese (2011) reports that most volunteer tourism programs are clustered in rural, yet easily accessible, communities in geopolitically stable countries like Ghana, Thailand, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Tanzania. This clustering reflects not community-based needs per se but organizational sponsors’ concerns with volunteer safety, which is advertised as included in program fees.1 Promotional literature also suggests that living (temporarily) in the rural Global South provides volunteers with innumerable educational and personal benefits. Using vivid “place imaging” (Keese, 2011) on their websites and in brochures, organizational sponsors describe rural host communities as more culturally authentic and decommodified than other places (see Mowforth and Munt [2006] on the links between rurality and authenticity in tourism). Love Volunteers’ (n.d.) description of its Bali program site is typical: This wonderful teaching program is set in the picturesque coastal fishing village  of Tianyar in north eastern Bali. This is the true Bali—set away from

154

TESOL and Sustainability

the over-crowded and fast paced tourist meccas found elsewhere. Here (sic) volunteers will find peaceful villages and families far away from the tourist dollar …. This project is a great way for international volunteers to learn more about the Balinese people and culture, teach those in need and spend time exploring this magical location.

The NGO WorldTeach (n.d.) employs comparable language on its website. The organization offers that its Brazil summer program gives volunteers a unique opportunity: From paddling on a caiçara canoe carved out of a single tree trunk and hiking through a preserved island forest to learning how to process the cassava flour and about the fishing art and its production chain that sustains the community, you will gain intimate access to the daily lives of these coastal villages and how they welcome the growing effects of the globalizing world while still preserving the storied traditions of their culture.

These depictions frame labor-intensive, shared community traditions such as hand-batch flour processing and small-scale fishing as culturally rich and socially valuable—at least, for visiting volunteers. When rural communities more routinely rely on the commons to meet their needs—e.g., by sharing resources, fostering strong intergenerational relationships, and retaining an awareness of cyclical time (Howley & Howley, 2014; Theobald, 1997)—these practices are cast as liabilities in volunteer tourism discourse. Even WorldTeach, above, presents rural Brazilians as uniformly welcoming the changes wrought by economic globalization. And while ascertaining the veracity of this statement is beyond the scope of this chapter, what is less disputable are the deficit ways in which many groups cast rural schooling.

Rural Education, Place, and Ecojustice Volunteer tourism sponsors’ romantic portrayals of host communities notwithstanding, rural spaces are often framed in society as deficient (Ching & Creed, 1997; Thomas, Lowe, Fulkerson, & Smith, 2011). This framing has had particular consequences for schools and schooling in rural areas, both in the United States and around the world (Spring, 2004). Discussions of what rural schools lack, for example, drive conversations about consolidation (DeYoung & Howley, 1990) and outmigration, which negatively affect peoples’ perceptions of rural schooling’s quality (Theobald & Wood, 2010). Schools worldwide are

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

155

inherently situated in local contexts (Merz & Fuhrman, 1997; Peshkin, 1995), but rural schools in the United States, at least, have always been distinctly local institutions (Theobald & Nachtigal, 1995). Place-based education was the main form of schooling in the United States prior to the common school (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008), and rural schools in many indigenous communities retain a bioregional focus (Pinto & Blue, 2016; Spring, 2004). However, as schooling practices across the globe have shifted to more standardized curricula that are amenable to international comparisons, many schools have moved away from place-based aims. Schools are increasingly made to be responsive to state and private funders’ sanctions (Berliner & Glass, 2014; Brock-Utne, 2002); they face pressures to implement practices that are, at best, unrelated to local contexts and epistemologies (Pinto & Blue, 2016). These pressures are acutely felt in rural schools, which, given the close-knit nature of many rural schools and their communities, are uniquely positioned to offer place-based, ecojustice-oriented educational experiences (Bauch, 2001; Theobald & Nachtigal, 1995). To be sure, the rise in accountability practices and standardized curricula that have accompanied centralized education reforms such as the No Child Left Behind legislation in the United States and the World Bank’s “Education Sector Strategy” in the Global South (cf. Spring, 2004) have affected rural schooling in many ways. For one, rural educators face new tensions in their attempts to balance local knowledge and context with state or national curricula. This can lead to the exclusion of previous lessons and local context if these conflict with more centralized demands (Thomas, 2005). Additionally, as evidence from the United States tells us, teachers face problems connecting a standardized curriculum to the students to whom it is being taught (Edmondson & Butler, 2010; Waller & Barrentine, 2015). Given the historical framing of rural spaces and schools as deficient and in need of remediation, it is difficult to understate the impact of curricular changes that directly crowd out students’ lived experiences (see  Bhattacharya [2016] on how standardized, English-medium schooling in India results in dis-citizenship for village students). Concerns over increased standardization displacing local knowledge were foreshadowed by works connecting education and schools to knowledge of the local (cf. Bauch, 2001; Gruenewald, 2003a, b; Smith, 2002; Theobald, 1997). There has since been an expansion of this work, which draws attention to the importance of education grounded in places. At the same time, scholarship in rural education that focuses specifically on place-based, or place-conscious, education has become a key feature of conversations in ecojustice (cf. Bowers, 2006; Green & Reid, 2014; Gruenewald, 2003a, b). Several works

156

TESOL and Sustainability

have sought to provide exemplars and theories of how to apply this thinking about place-conscious education to rural contexts and schools (cf. Azano, 2011; Brooke, 2003; Theobald, 1997). The attentiveness of rural scholars and educators to place in curriculum logically follows the close association that rural schools have historically had to their communities. Concepts within a critical pedagogy of place—such as what Gruenewald (2003b) refers to as decolonization and reinhabitation—are particularly salient for rural educators and scholars; they seek to connect schools to their local communities through what Theobald (1997) calls intradependence, or, “to exist by virtue of necessary relations within a place” (p. 7, emphasis in original). The goal of sustainability at the heart of education around place has particular resonance in rural schools and communities (Howley & Eckman, 1997; Theobald, 1997), where cultural practices often reflect bioregional knowledge (Bowers, 2001). Place itself is a vital construct for understanding schools and schooling in rural communities. It manifests itself in literacy practices (Corbett & Donehower, 2017), school leaders’ identities (Budge, 2006), and students’ aspirations (Howley, Harmon, & Leopold, 1997). Two edited volumes in the rural education field (Howely, Howley & Johnson, 2014; Schafft & Jackson, 2010) have sections directly devoted to place as a construct. And while the definition of place is both complex and multifaceted (Cresswell, 2015; Gruenwald, 2003a), there are many components of place that focus on its connection to the land and how land is inhabited (cf. Howley et al., 2014). This connection to the physical location of place is important when considering the context of education in rural spaces. A sense of place becomes vital for people working with rural schools and communities because the tendency to refer to rural schools as inferior is difficult to overcome without it (Howley & Howley, 2014). Indeed, our data suggest that English-language voluntourism promotional literature consistently frames the rural, Global South schooling contexts in which volunteer tourism programs operate as problems to be overcome. We discuss this point further following an explication of our research methods.

Research Methods This study was conducted as a discourse analysis of English-language voluntourism promotional materials. Grounded in a poststructuralist view of discourses as words, metaphors, images, representations, and stories that both produce and constrain different ways of being and acting in the world (Burr,

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

157

1995), we see discourse as reflecting ideology as well as constructing it. In that sense, a discourse analysis of English-language voluntourism promotional materials uncovers the taken-for-granted root metaphors that undergird contemporary development projects. It also reveals the systems of thought that such projects make possible and seem natural (see Fairclough, 1992). To construct a data corpus, the first author identified twenty nonsectarian, nonprofit, and commercial English-language voluntourism sponsors that run short-term ELT programs in the Global South. The first author was familiar with many of these organizations through prior investigation into their programs (see Jakubiak, 2016). Other organizations were selected through a process of snowball sampling (Patton, 2002), as international travel and volunteering website clearinghouses such as Transitions Abroad and the International Volunteer Programs Association provide links to NGO and corporate volunteer tourism sponsors’ webpages. Other organizational sponsors were identified in printed guides such as Volunteer Vacations: ShortTerm Adventures That Will Benefit You and Others and World Volunteering, trade books that publicize international volunteer opportunities. Of the twenty volunteer tourism sponsors whose materials were ultimately chosen for analysis, fifteen are based in the United States and five are based in the United Kingdom. Out of these twenty organizations, only three focus exclusively on ELT; the other seventeen sponsor an array of projects under names such as “child development” and “women’s empowerment,” under which short-term ELT is subsumed. Data were also collected from volunteer tourism sponsors’ online newsletters and advertisements over time, as the first author signed up to “receive more information” when perusing organizational sponsors’ websites. These online newsletters were, and continue to be, sent to the first author’s personal email account with varying frequencies; reading them confirmed the trustworthiness (Glesne, 1999) of the analysis presented here. Specific text segments related to ELT were identified on each organization’s website through keyword searches for “English language teaching,” “teaching projects,” “ESL,” and “education”; brochures were scanned for similar words and concepts. From these searches, text segments that ranged in length from a few sentences to an entire paragraph were extracted and pasted into a separate Word document for coding. The first author then began an iterative process of theme-building from these data (following Charmaz, 2006) that involved (1) repeated reading of the text segment corpus to identify patterns and themes; (2) writing analytic memos in response to emergent themes; and (3) returning

158

TESOL and Sustainability

to the data to revise and confirm emergent themes (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995). The second author was consulted to resolve issues of thematic coding and interpretation. Among the themes that emerged were: (1) deficit descriptions of rural, Global South schooling; and (2) a version of success that valorizes autonomous individualism. Consonant with Laurel Richardson’s (2000) assertion that “writing is not just a mopping-up activity at the end of a research project. Writing is also a way of ‘knowing’—a method of discovery and analysis” (p. 923), we continually debated which segments of text best illustrated our emergent themes as we wrote this chapter. The segments we ultimately selected were chosen based on how well or how vividly they captured particular themes. Thus, the data to which we now turn are more representative than exhaustive.

Rural Schooling as Deficient A primary discourse in English-language voluntourism promotional literature is that volunteer-led ELT is needed worldwide to rectify existing, intra-national inequalities between rural and urban schools. Brochure discourse characterizes English as a central but unevenly distributed element of vulnerable peoples’ life prospects; it suggests that all students’ social futures are contingent upon receiving comparable English instruction. The NGO Global Crossroad (n.d.) takes this view in its Cambodia program description: The demand for English language skills is very high in Cambodia and English fluency is often related to employment success. As a result, many rural Cambodians are left jobless. Poorer Cambodians cannot send their children to expensive boarding schools; thus, the children are deprived of vital English skills and dreams for a secure future are shattered.

The NGO Experiential Learning Abroad (n.d.) uses similar language on its website. The organization asserts that poor English education exacerbates rural students’ challenges: Children begin taking English courses at a very young age. Unfortunately, this also represents an even sharper divide between urban communities and the relatively poorer rural ones. Without the English education standard in more urban schools, children from rural neighborhoods have a great disadvantage. Volunteer teachers travel out to the more rural schools and help provide the English education to give these children more equal footing.

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

159

These data suggest that a lack of English language skills creates formidable barriers to opportunity. It is not policy-driven rural resource divestment (cf. Howley & Howley, 2015) that generates differential social outcomes for the rural students of a nation-state and its wealthy boarding school attendees; rather, it is asymmetrical access to English language education that renders poor children likely to remain poor. In this perspective, short-term, inexperienced, volunteer teachers ostensibly address inequality, as any kind of English language instruction is preferable to none at all. Moreover, the idea that rural students are prima facie disadvantaged vis-à-vis urban ones positions rural schools as having no inherent value from which all students, urban and rural alike, might benefit. Scholars note that such deficit framings of rurality and rural schooling miss key affordances of the nested nature of schools and education in rural locations. These affordances include strong links between schooling and ecological justice (Orr, 1994); students’ abilities to develop a “land ethic” (Leopold, 1949) and homeplace (Jackson, 1996) through their schooling experiences; and greater community livelihood as an outcome of place-based schooling (Bowers, 2006; Gruenewald & Smith, 2008). In addition to positioning rural schooling as inadequate because of its ELT (or  lack thereof), volunteer tourism discourse portrays rural teachers’ instructional practices negatively. Brochures and websites consistently describe  rural teachers as ignorant of modern language pedagogies; they attribute student struggle to boring classrooms routines and teachers’ lack of formal preparation.  And although volunteers themselves are rarely teachers by profession, they are invited to model superior instructional techniques. New  Hope Volunteers (n.d.) uses language that reflects this point. The organization states: Would you like to spread the joy of teaching in a developing country? Look no further than in Ghana. English may be the official language of Ghana, but the opportunities for quality English education is (sic) not provided to students in rural schools …. Rural schools which are attended by poor families are often resource-poor and are unable to afford well-trained and experienced teachers …. Your innovative and new ideas will be able to vastly improve the teaching methods at the school, creating a long-lasting, positive impact that can eventually benefit the entire community.

The NGO Cross-Cultural Solutions (n.d.) uses similar rhetoric on its website. Here, the organization calls on prospective volunteers to overhaul rural Tanzanian schooling:

160

TESOL and Sustainability

Help inspire [Tanzanian] children to foster a lifetime love of learning by introducing engaging new techniques, games, and enthusiasm. Be a part of the transformation; turning an educational system based on rote memorization into a vibrant setting where children can learn and develop on their road to maximizing their human potential.

In a similar vein, Volunteers Initiative Nepal (n.d.) laments rural teachers’ classroom practices. It writes: In underprivileged rural communities situations of discrimination and poverty continue unchecked …. Many of the teachers working in rural community schools are untrained and unqualified. Teaching methods often take the form of a lecture and children often learn things by repetition, without developing the ability to reason and apply critical thinking.

It is difficult to understate the frequency with which English-language voluntourism promotional literature equates rural, Global South schooling with abjection. Websites and brochures are rife with the suggestion that rural schools do not foster students’ critical thinking, and rural teachers are consistently condemned for their poor instructional approaches. Volunteer tourism promotional materials also position rural schools as helpless. Rural teachers, administrators, and community members are cast as unable to notice any instructional or organizational problems, let alone address them. Globe Aware (n.d.) takes this view in its Vietnam program description, wherein it explains that short-term, visiting volunteers will “visit with several schools. After visiting the schools … help write ‘evaluations’ to indicate how [and] what [they] may to improve the education system in the Vietnamese countryside.” Similarly, Cross-Cultural Solutions (n.d.) characterizes rural Moroccan schooling as dependent upon volunteers’ inventions: Education is one of the most pressing social issues in Morocco …. Particularly in rural, mountainous areas like Azrou, children are often taken out of school at a young age to help support their families in farming and herding activities. At the preschool level there is little to no government support and teachers receive no formal training. In these rural schools, with poor infrastructure and a low number of teachers, volunteers are essential in providing engaging and varied early childhood activities to support the individual academic potential of each student while increasing critical capacity building skills to ensure students don’t fall behind.

Taken together, the images conjured by these promotional materials equate rurality and rural schooling with backwardness. Even activities such as farming

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

161

and herding are given no intellectual value. And while we do not dismiss critiques of reductive and dehumanizing pedagogies (cf. Bhattacharya, 2016), we are concerned about the ways in which volunteer tourism discourse casts certain instructional strategies as incontrovertibly superior and appropriate across all settings. Such thinking reflects what Bartolomé (1994) calls the “methods fetish.” This fetish reduces teaching to technique and ignores other, more culturally sustaining, aspects of teaching and learning such as the quality of caring relationships between students and teachers; ideological questions about the broader purposes of education; and the role of schools in wider community life (cf. Gruenewald & Smith, 2008). To be sure, whether schools help to strengthen (or detract from) students’ cultural ways of knowing is a critical question in ecojustice education. Many rural schools’ pedagogical and organizational principles prioritize the commons and community welfare rather than individual achievement (Bowers, 2006; Pinto & Blue, 2016; Theobald, 1997). To suggest that certain pedagogies (e.g., lectures) are inherently wrong denies the ways in which instructional methods are always embedded in particular cultural epistemes (Mueller, 2011), many of which are grounded in unsustainable practices. As Canagarajah (2002) notes, center-based teaching methods make an assault on alternative styles of learning and teaching. He writes: Methods are not value-free instruments validated by empirical research for purely practical teaching functions. Methods are cultural and ideological constructs with politico-economic consequences. Methods embody the social relations, forms of thinking and strategies of learning that are preferred by the circles that construct them. (p. 136)

In other words, volunteer tourists’ good intentions may weaken the existent priorities and cultural norms of rural host community schools. Research suggests that when outside “experts” construct particular ELT methods as state-of-theart, teachers and schools face intense pressures to adopt them (Phillipson, 1992). Bowers’s (2001) writings on educational reform are instructive at this juncture. Observing how Western educational reforms are generally based on root metaphors of autonomous individualism, linear progress, and views of nature as an extractable resource, Bowers views Western interventions in global schooling as misplaced. He writes: Technocratic, neo-Romantic, and emancipatory genres of educational liberalism base their reform proposal on the same core set of root metaphors that legitimized the Industrial Revolution and now the digital phase of the world-transforming

162

TESOL and Sustainability

process we are now entering …. Basing thinking on these root metaphors leads to universalizing the liberal prescriptions for educational reform, thus ignoring that many of the world’s cultures view the western educator’s effort to foster an autonomous form of individualism and to base social change on the more widespread use of western technologies and expert systems as the most recent expressions of colonialization. (p. 149)

We also see volunteer tourism’s interventions as based on root metaphors of rational progress, individual autonomy, and market fetishism. Why, otherwise, would conserving rural community knowledge (e.g., through lectures, memorization, or shared cultural traditions) be considered so wrong? The idea that rural students universally need “engaging new techniques, games, and enthusiasm” in their instruction denies the ways in which existent rural, placebased pedagogies may be attending to other, more sustainable and convivial, goals. Indeed, research suggests that rural schooling in many areas still “introduces children and youth to the skills and dispositions needed to regenerate and sustain communities …. [and] help[s] them to understand the processes that underlie the health of natural and social systems essential to human welfare” (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008, p. xvi). Learning to farm and herd from one’s elders, for example, need not be at odds with formal schooling. Nonhuman animal stewardship requires deep knowledge of herd grazing habits, local weather patterns, bioregional food sources, and historic land-use practices, among other, culturally and ecologically situated, information. Such information is essential to conserving and enriching the commons (cf. Mueller, 2011). Yet, volunteer tourism discourse dismisses such knowledge as irrelevant to students’ critical thinking.

English for Individual Success In addition to framing rural schooling in deficit terms, English-language voluntourism promotional literature carries forward particular root metaphors about who, exactly, a successful person is and how one is to become this person. Brochure discourse characterizes English in exclusively instrumental ways (Wee, 2008); it suggests that knowing English is the key to paid work and individual economic prosperity. In that sense, self-secured employment through skills acquisition defines success in English-language voluntourism discourse. In illustration, the NGO Global Crossroad (n.d.) writes:

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

163

Between globalization, tourism, and international relations, English skills have become increasingly more important for those seeking employment in Argentina. Argentineans who are proficient in the English language are more likely to receive higher salary jobs and better employment opportunities …. You have the power to help improve their futures and increase their opportunities for success.

The NGO Volunteering Journeys (n.d.) makes similar statements on its website. Successful people, as the organization tells it, acquire new skills to escape constraints and create life anew as they see fit: Most people live in the rural areas of [Cambodia], with many doing farm work  …. The population is generally eager to improve their skills and learn everything they can, from adults to younger children. These interests include learning English reading and writing skills, to progress out of poverty and open up more career opportunities in the community. By learning valuable skills that can be transferred to multiple jobs available, people are given the freedom to make their own choices and build the life they truly want.

New Hope Volunteers (n.d.) also defines success in strictly individual terms. According to the organization’s website, the only drawback to endless economic growth in China is that individual people are now responsible for acquiring English language skills. The NGO states: China is growing incessantly. With this growth, [sic] comes constant beneficial development for the country. China’s industrial and financial involvement in the international arena means that the English language is becoming a must-have skill for the people to have in order to enter institutions of higher learning …. By volunteering to teach English in China, you will help to give young Chinese students the skills they need for a better future.

The rhetoric across these promotional materials makes English language learning—among all people everywhere, from Argentina to China—seem urgent. Characterizations of English as “a must-have,” “valuable,” and “increasingly more important skill” leave little room for interrogating how, exactly, English might operate in different social domains and with whom one might use it. Research demonstrates that regional languages, not English, play a key role in establishing trade blocs (Kubota, 2011), and many people who know English remain severely underemployed in contexts with minimal state infrastructure (Vavrus, 2002; Williams, 2013). Nevertheless, English-language voluntourism discourse suggests that irrespective of a person’s identity position, current place of residence, or social structural location, any English speaker can secure highwaged employment and enjoy economic globalization’s benefits.

164

TESOL and Sustainability

Success in volunteer tourism discourse is also speculative. While promotional literature describes ELT as a critical outlay in vulnerable peoples’ social futures, returns on learners’ investments are not guaranteed. Thus, English-language voluntourism as a development strategy entails a high level of risk; this contrasts with traditional, agrarian communal values, which tend to be risk-aversive (Theobald, 1997). Global Volunteers (n.d.) takes this stance in its warrant for English-language voluntourism. The organization states that “knowing English enables children to reach their highest potential …. It offers the chance to go on to higher education, get a more fulfilling and better paying job, and achieve ever greater success” (emphasis added). Likewise, Global Service Corps (2008) acknowledges ongoing uncertainty. It states: Obtaining English language skills opens a world of opportunity for people across Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia …. [A]s Cambodia’s economic growth and increasing international presence provide potential opportunity for its people (sic) Cambodia is simultaneously faced with the challenge of bolstering English language skills, which is (sic) required to succeed in these dynamic times. (emphasis added)

The NGO Global Crossroad (n.d.) also notes that individual success is speculative. Here, the organization implies that success for some is contingent upon others’ failure: Many local schools and agencies have requested Global Crossroad’s assistance in recruiting fluent English teachers for their volunteer teaching English program in Ecuador. The ability to speak English accurately often ensures Ecuadorian students’ success by equipping them with the skills required to compete in the growing global economy. (emphasis added)

Across these data excerpts, the promises of English language competency are never realized in the present. Instead, English is framed as a necessary component of one’s personal and professional portfolio, a notional project to which lifelong learners are expected to add new credentials (Nairn & Higgins, 2007). Akin to how people in Japan often study English for its symbolic rather than use value (Kubota, 2011), English language study in volunteer tourism discourse equips people for a largely suppositional future. Rhetoric in English-language voluntourism promotional materials also links success to particular personal qualities. All people, brochure discourse tells us, should be creative, opportunistic, and entrepreneurial—just like visiting volunteers. Indeed, websites and brochures describe volunteers as already

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

165

possessing these qualities. By virtue of their putative educational and class backgrounds, volunteers are innovative and business-minded and able to foster these traits in others. Projects Abroad (n.d.) takes this view in its Romania management plan: Problem-solving and creative thinking have become essential skills for entrepreneurs to master to be able to run successful, innovative businesses. Building up these skills during a child’s education will increase their likelihood of becoming academically successful and economically productive. Students [in rural Romania] are not given the chance to develop their creativity, imagination or ability to think critically. Our volunteers can enable children to develop these skills by running creative activities that will motivate students in their learning as well as encourage them to think for themselves and become more innovative.

The NGO Global Volunteers (n.d.) displays a similar line of thought. Describing what volunteers will do in its Mexico program, the organization writes: “You’ll tutor small groups of students and explain English lessons. These might be English idioms for advanced students—or common phrases that come up in typical business conversations” (emphasis added). This discourse frames English-language voluntourism as working in the service of private industry. It also suggests that any visiting volunteer is well-versed in the language of business. While the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has long had ties to commercial interests (cf. Phillipson, 1992), we are concerned about the consistency with which volunteer tourism discourse draws upon root metaphors of individualism, economism, and the self as a “skills bundle” (Urcioli, 2008) to warrant global ELT. Research suggests that many people worldwide learn English for non-commercial purposes. Keyl (2016) reveals that migrant students in Beirut used English to share community information such as where to receive prenatal care. Similarly, Canagarajah’s (2000) work points out that people living in repressive political environments have long used English to access revolutionary texts. Yet, to read English-language voluntourism promotional literature, one would think that the exclusive purpose of ELT is to help individuals make money. Ecojustice, place-based education advocates know better. Observing how economic globalization exploits shared resources for the benefit of a few, Gruenewald and Smith (2008) call for the abandonment of individualistic, economic-oriented development schemes. The remedy to human vulnerability, they assert, resides in an enriched and thriving commons. They state:

166

TESOL and Sustainability

For most people living today, the promise of individual economic mobility is a cruel illusion; their wealth and security must instead be found in the care and imagination of others closer to home. Only as members of mutually supportive groups have human beings, for all but the past half millennium, been able to assure their own survival. (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008, p. xx)

These authors’ comments are relevant to our discussion of Englishlanguage voluntourism. Research demonstrates that possessing English language skills cannot help people overcome the oppression they face as members of marginalized groups (Flores & Rosa, 2015), and English alone is no guarantee of employment (Garrido & Codò, 2017). Finally, and perhaps more troublingly, English-language voluntourism’s continual tying of English to employment and monetary gain limits the transformative possibilities of all language education (see Goulah, 2017 on eco-ethical consciousness development through ESL).

Discussion Volunteer tourism has been widely critiqued for failing to address the structural causes of poverty (Butcher & Smith, 2015; Germann Molz, 2016). It has also been assailed for doing little to help volunteers understand how structural inequality is created and maintained (Crossley, 2012; Simpson, 2004). Englishlanguage voluntourism, however, concerns us for additional reasons. First, its deficit portrayals of rurality and rural schooling efface the unique, often place-based and ecojustice-oriented, priorities of many rural schools and their communities. Second, the individualistic, notional version of success put forth by English-language voluntourism discourse is at odds with rural, often communal, ways of life that enrich rather than enclose the commons. Our analysis of English-language voluntourism promotional literature suggests that these programs extend root metaphors that center and reify homo economicus: the human subject as an autonomous, rational actor whose choices are guided primarily by monetary self-interest. For this human subject, schooling is a process of acquiring individual capital so as to outcompete others for scarce resources. A successful person and a materially rich person thus become one and the same. This definition of success discounts other educational values such as personal virtue, community livelihood, and whether one meets commitments to the Earth and living communities.

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

167

Rural education scholar Paul Theobald (1997) laments the rise of a similar “successful” person, whom he argues emerges from modern political liberalism. Modern political liberalism, we offer, also undergirds modernist development discourse, which informs English-language voluntourism’s root metaphors of success. Theobald (1997) writes: As we have embraced liberal tents more tightly than ever in this society, that is, as we have more steadfastly clung to an individual orientation to life, as we have defined life plans as synonymous with competition in the race for material accumulation, and as we have elevated the status of the risk takers among us, the accolade “successful” has come to be a much better cultural “fit” than the accolade “virtuous.” Virtue speaks of attention to shouldering one’s obligations to others and is therefore more at home in a community- oriented worldview. Success, by contrast, confines itself to the level of the individual. (p. 47)

Theobald’s remarks are apposite in regard to English-language voluntourism. Success in English-language voluntourism promotional literature is also tied to individual achievement and monetary gain. Whatever its contours, the ostensible benefits of learning English never include increased community livelihood, a thriving commons, or other, non-commodified, outcomes. English and schooling more generally are presented as ways for people to leave—to leave their communities if those communities are poor. Indeed, volunteer tourism promotional material is often explicit on this point. Given the ostensibly poor schooling on offer and lack of local opportunities to get rich, rural children, volunteer tourism discourse tells us, should abandon their rural lifeways and move to cities. Voluntary Projects Overseas (n.d.) takes this view in its call to prospective applicants: We really do need you—about 80% of school leavers will leave their rural communities behind and head off in search of better paid jobs to support their families back home. English education has been identified as a great catalyst for the improvement of rural Thai children’s future prospects.

This language frames rural to urban migration as a natural and benevolent process; the idea of children moving away from rural communities is celebrated. As Theobald (1997) notes, success in the modern era is often equated with moving away. He writes: We can identify a few other traits of those among us who are most frequently labeled successful. In many cases, successful people follow a mobile career path. That is, they go where they see opportunity for ever-greater material gain ….

168

TESOL and Sustainability

Care and concern for the well-being of a place, particularly a shared place (the intradependence that is a community, in other words) is conspicuously absent in our mobile society—and our society is governed by successful people. (Theobald, 1997, p. 47)

The very qualities that compel volunteer tourism sponsoring organizations to place programs in particular locations—e.g., natural beauty, traditional lifeways, strong intergenerational ties, and low crime rates (Keese, 2011)—are never cast as resources to which successful people might have ongoing obligations. Instead, English-language voluntourism discourse suggests that pursuing individual, monetary goals is always desirable and appropriate. Volunteer tourism promotional literature says nothing about what might become of rural, volunteer-receiving host communities—those “magical locations” with “storied cultural traditions”—if and when its residents become successful and leave. Environmental studies scholar David Orr’s (1994) description of how 1980s neoliberal economic restructuring affected the US Midwest is insightful on this point. Stressing that “we cannot know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities” (p. 13), Orr offers a cautionary tale about the loss of community vibrancy. He writes: I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to “disinvest” in the economy of the region. In this case MBA graduates, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility, have done what no invading army could do: They destroyed an American city with total impunity and did so on behalf of an ideology called “the bottom line.” But the bottom line for society includes other costs: those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community. (Orr, 1994, p. 13)

Lively, connected, and intradependent communities also constitute a form of wealth. The pervasive economism that Orr describes here—which, we argue, also operates as a root metaphor within English-language voluntourism—prioritizes only that which can be privatized and sold, including one’s labor power. As we highlighted in our discussion of rural education, however, rural schools and the communities in which they are embedded often retain a strong focus on place. They frequently attend to civic livelihood, shared resources, and bioregional sustainability—features of the commons—in ways that many larger communities do not (Bowers, 2006). And although some critique volunteer

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

169

tourists’ desires to temporarily reside in small, rural Global South host sites as Orientalist (Vrasti, 2013), others see volunteer tourists’ yearnings as reflecting broad social ennui (Smith, 2014). To the extent that many small, rural, Global South communities still retain a strong focus on bioregional sustainability, intergenerational relationships, and nonmarket-based activities, these places appeal to Global Northerners with similar priorities (see Wearing, 2001).

Conclusion This chapter has presented a discourse analysis of English-language voluntourism promotional materials. We have argued that these programs rely on and extend root metaphors of teleological notions of progress (from rural to urban, from backwards to modern), autonomous individualism, and economism. Whatever its contours, the supposed benefits of English language learning are always directed toward individual, economic activity. Furthermore, English-language voluntourism discourse presents rural schools as instructionally backward and in need of Westerners’ interventions. Akin to what Gérald Berthoud (2010) argues in his entry to The Development Dictionary, English-language voluntourism’s root metaphors suggest that “development is held to be possible only for those who are ready to rid themselves entirely of their traditions, and to devote themselves to making economic profit, at the expense of a whole gamut of social and moral obligation” (p. 70). Further research on English-language voluntourism is needed to determine whether, and how, volunteer participants in these programs resist, take up, or reappropriate its various root metaphors. As rural teacher educators with strong interests in ecojustice, we are troubled by English-language voluntourism’s obfuscation of other, community-enriching, versions of language education in rural schooling. And although some have suggested that volunteer tourism should be eliminated from the “humanitarian repertoire” (Henry, 2018), we remain tentative about such claims. Many people around the world continue to desire English (Motha & Lin, 2014); it is unlikely that English-language voluntourism will disappear anytime soon. Given this reality, how might English-language voluntourism better respond to a world in dire need of the commons? What might it mean for rural schooling and its traditions to be valued rather than critiqued? Bowers (2001, 2006) has urged us to consider what traditions and lifeways need to be preserved and conserved—particularly through schooling—in order to restore the commons. English-language voluntourism may have a role to play in this project.

170

TESOL and Sustainability

Note 1 NGO and commercial volunteer tourism sponsors claim to mitigate the risks of international travel for visiting volunteers as part of their program fees. This contrasts sharply with previous tourism formations (e.g., long-term backpacking), in which facing personal risk was part of the travel experience (see Mowforth & Munt, 2006).

References Azano, A. (2011). The possibility of place: One teacher’s use of place-based instruction for English students in a rural high school. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 26(10). Retrieved from: http://jrre.psu.edu/articles/26-10.pdf. Bartolomé, L. I. (1994). Beyond the methods fetish: Towards a humanizing pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 64(2), 173–194. Bauch, P. A. (2001). School-community partnerships in rural schools: Leadership, renewal, and a sense of place. Peabody Journal of Education, 76(2), 204–221. Berliner, D. C., & Glass, G. V. (Eds.). (2014). 50 myths and lies that threaten America's public schools: The real crisis in education. New York: Teachers College Press. Berthoud, G. (2010). Market. In W. Sachs (Ed.), The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power (2nd ed.) (pp. 74–94). New York: Zed Books Ltd. Bhattacharya, U. (2016). The politics of participation: Dis-citizenship through English teaching in a suburban Indian village school. The Journal of English as an International Language, 11(1), 71–85. Bowers, C. (2001). How language limits our understanding of environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 7(2), 141–151. Bowers, C. (2006). Revitalizing the commons: Cultural and educational sites of resistance and affirmation. New York: Peter Lang. Brock-Utne, B. (2002). Language, democracy, and education in Africa. Uppsala, Sweden: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Brooke, R. (Ed.). (2003). Rural voices: Place-conscious education and the teaching of writing (Vol. 25). New York: Teachers College Press. Brown, C. (2016). “They just have the foreigner face”: Ideologies of ethnicity, nationality, native-speakerism, and English in Taiwan. In J. A. Álvarez Valencia, C. Amanti, S. Keyl, & E. Mackinney (Eds.), Critical views on teaching and learning English around the globe: Qualitative research approaches (pp. 105–122). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Budge, K. (2006, December 18). Rural leaders, rural places: Problem, privilege, and possibility. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 21(13). Retrieved from: http:// jrre.psu.edu/articles/21-13.pdf.

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

171

Burr, V. (1995). An introduction to social constructionism. London: Routledge. Butcher, J., & Smith, P. (2015). Volunteer tourism: The lifestyle politics of international development. New York: Routledge. Callanan, M., & Thomas, S. (2005). Volunteer tourism: Deconstructing volunteer activities within a dynamic environment. In M. Novelli (Ed.), Niche tourism: Contemporary issues, trends and cases (pp. 183–200). Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. Canagarajah, A. S. (2000). Negotiating ideologies through English: Strategies from the periphery. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Ideology, politics, and language policies: Focus on English (pp. 121–131). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). Globalization, methods, and practice in periphery classrooms. In D. Block & D. Cameron (Eds.), Globalization and language teaching (pp. 134–150). London: Routledge. Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Ching, B., & Creed, G. W. (1997). Knowing your place: Rural identity and cultural hierarchy. New York: Routledge. Corbett, M., & Donehower, K. (2017). Rural literacies: Toward social cartography. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 32(5), 1–13. Cresswell, T. (2015). Place: An introduction (2nd ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Cross-Cultural Solutions. (n.d.). Cross-Cultural Solutions. Retrieved from: https://www. cross-culturalsolutions.org. Crossley, É. (2012). Poor but happy: Volunteer tourists’ encounters with poverty. Tourism geographies: An international journal of space, place and environment, 14(2), 235–253. DeYoung, A. J., & Howley, C. B. (1990). The political economy of rural school consolidation. Peabody Journal of Education, 67(4), 63–89. Doerr, N. M. (Ed.). (2009). The native speaker concept: Ethnographic investigations of native speaker effects. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Edmondson, J., & Butler, T. (2010). Teaching school in rural America: Toward an educated hope. In K. A. Schaft & A. Y. Jackson (Eds.), Rural education for the twentyfirst century: Identity, place, and community in a globalizing world (pp. 150–172). State College: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (1995). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Experiential Learning International (n.d.). Experiential Learning International. Retrieved from: http://www.eliabroad.org/content/category/11/28/104. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing linguistic appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and linguistic diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. Garrido, M. R., & Codò, E. (2017). Deskilling and delanguaging African migrants in Barcelona: Pathways of labour incorporation and the value of “global” English. Globalisation, Societies, and Education, 15(1), 29–49.

172

TESOL and Sustainability

Germann Molz, J. (2016). Making a difference together: Discourses of transformation in volunteer tourism. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 24(6), 805–823. Glesne, C. (1999). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction (2nd ed.). New York: Longman. Global Crossroad. (n.d.). Global Crossroad. Retrieved from: https://www. globalcrossroad.com. Global Service Corps. (2008). Teach English abroad in Cambodia in Asia. Retrieved from: http://www.globalservicecorps.org/site/cambodia-teach-english-abroad/. Global Volunteers. (n.d.). Global Volunteers. Retrieved from: http://www. globalvolunteers.org. Globe Aware. Adventures in Service: Vietnam. Retrieved from: http://globeaware.org/ destinations/asia/vietnam. Goulah, J. (2017). Climate change and TESOL: Language, literacies, and the creation of eco-ethical consciousness. TESOL Quarterly, 51(1), 90–114. Gray, N., Meeker, A., Ravensbergen, S., Kipp, A., & Faulkner, J. (2017). Producing science and global citizenship? Volunteer tourism and conservation in Belize. Tourism Recreation Research, 42(2), 199–211. Green, B., & Reid, J. (2014). Social cartography and rural education: Researching space(s) and place(s). In S. White & M. Corbett (Eds.), Doing educational research in rural settings: Methodological issues, international perspectives and practical solutions (pp. 26–40). New York: Routledge. Gruenewald, D. A. (2003a). Foundations of place: A multidisciplinary framework for place-conscious education. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3), 619–654. Gruenewald, D. A. (2003b). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3–12. Gruenewald, D. A., & Smith, G. (Eds.). (2008). Place-based education in the global age: Local diversity. New York: Routledge. Heller, M. (2010). The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 101–114. Henry, J. (2018, August 30). Pedagogy, possibility, and pipe dreams: Opportunities and challenges for radicalizing international volunteering. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2018.1515215. Howley, A., & Howley, C. (2014). Making sense of rural education research: Art, transgression, and other acts of terroir. In S. White & M. Corbett (Eds.), Doing educational research in rural settings: Methodological issues, international perspectives and practical solutions (pp. 25–43). New York: Routledge. Howley, C. B., & Eckman, J. M. (1997). Sustainable small schools: A handbook for rural communities. Charleston, WV: ERIC/CRESS. Howley, C. W., & Howley, C. B. (2015). Farming the poor: Cultivating profit at the schoolhouse door. In K. M. Sturges (Ed.), Neoliberalizing educational reform: America’s quest for profitable market colonies and the undoing of public good (pp. 23–52). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishing.

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

173

Howley, C., Harmon, H., & Leopold, G. (1997). Rural scholars or bright rednecks? Aspirations for a sense of place among rural youth in Appalachia. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 12(3). Retrieved from: http://jrre.vmhost.psu.edu/wpcontent/ uploads/2014/02/12-3_5.pdf. Howley, C. B., Howley, A., & Johnson, J. D. (Eds.). (2014). Dynamics of social class: Race, and place in rural education. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Press. Jackson, W. (1996). Becoming native to this place. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Jakubiak, C. (2016). Ambiguous aims: English-language voluntourism as development. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 15(4), 245–258. Kachru, B. (1997). World Englishes 2000: Resources for research and teaching. In L. E. Smith & M. L. Forman (Eds.), World Englishes 2000 (pp. 209–251). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Keese, J. R. (2011). The geography of volunteer tourism: Place matters. Tourism Geographies, 13(2), 257–279. Keyl, S. (2016). Learning English in the margins: Migrant worker knowledge production in Beirut’s NGO spaces. In J. A. Álvarez Valencia, C. Amanti, S. Keyl, & E. Mackinney (Eds.), Critical views on teaching and learning English around the globe: Qualitative research approaches (pp. 157–176). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Kubota, R. (2002). Impact of globalization on language teaching in Japan. In D. Block & D. Cameron (Eds.), Globalization and language teaching (pp. 13–28). London: Routledge. Kubota, R. (2011). Questioning linguistic instrumentalism: English, neoliberalism, and language tests in Japan. Linguistics and Education, 22, 248–260. Leopold, A. (1949). A sand county almanac. New York: Oxford University Press. Love Volunteers. (n.d.). Love Volunteers. Retrieved from: http://www.lovevolunteers.org. McMillon, B., Cutchins, D., & Geissinger, A. (Eds.). (2003). Volunteer vacations: Shortterm adventures that will benefit you and others (8th ed.). Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press. Merz, C., & Furman, G. (1997). Community and schools: Promise and paradox. New York: Teachers College Press. Motha, S., & Lin, A. (2014). “Non-coercive rearrangements”: Theorizing desire in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 48(2), 331–359. Mowforth, M., & Munt, I. (2006). Tourism and sustainability: New tourism in the third world (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Mueller, M. (2011). Ecojustice in science education: Leaving the classroom. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 6, 351–360. Nairn, K., & Higgins J. (2007). New Zealand’s neoliberal generation: Tracing discourses of economic ir(rationality). International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(3), 261–281. New Hope Volunteers. (n.d.). New Hope Volunteers. Retrieved from: https://www. newhopevolunteers.org.

174

TESOL and Sustainability

Orr, D. (1994). Earth in mind: On education, environment, and the human prospect. Washington, DC: Island Press. Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Peshkin, A. (1995). The complex world of an embedded institution: Schools and their constituent publics. In L. C. Rogsby, M. C. Reynolds, & M. C. Wang (Eds.), Schoolcommunity connections: Exploring issues for research and practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinto, L. E., & Blue, L. E. (2016). Pushing the entrepreneurial prodigy: Canadian Aboriginal entrepreneurship education initiatives. Critical Studies in Education, 57(3), 358–375. Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 923–948). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Schafft, K. A., & Jackson, A. Y. (2010). Rural education for the twenty-first century: Identity, place, and community in a globalizing world. State College: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Simpson, K. (2004). “Doing development”: The gap-year, volunteer-tourists and a popular practice of development. Journal of International Development, 16, 681–692. Smith, G. A. (2002). Place-based education: Learning to be where we are. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(8), 584–594. Smith, P. (2014). International volunteer tourism as (de)commodified moral consumption. In M. Mostafanezhad & K. Hannam (Eds.), Moral encounters in tourism (pp. 31–46). Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Spring, J. (2004). How educational ideologies are shaping global society: Intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, and the decline of the nation-state. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Theobald, P. (1997). Teaching the commons: Place, pride, and the renewal of community. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Theobald, P., & Nachtigal, P. (1995). Culture, community, and the promise of rural education. Phi Delta Kappan, 77(2), 132. Theobald, P., & Wood, K. (2010). Learning to be rural: Identity lessons from history, schooling, and the U.S. corporate media. In K. A. Schaft & A. Y. Jackson (Eds.), Rural education for the twenty-first century: Identity, place, and community in a globalizing world (pp. 17–33). University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Thomas, A. R., Lowe, B. M., Fulkerson, G. M., & Smith, P. J. (2011). Critical rural theory: Structure, space, culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Thomas, T. G. (2005). Teachers’ decision-making about place-based education and state testing. Rural Educator, 26(3), 19–24. Tiessen, R., & Heron, B. (2012). Volunteering in the developing world: The perceived impacts of Canadian youth. Development in Practice, 22(1), 44–56.

Saving the World without (Eco)Justice?

175

Urcioli, B. (2008). Skills and selves in the new workplace. American Ethnologist, 35(2), 211–228. Vavrus, F. (2002). Postcoloniality and English: Exploring language policy and the politics of development in Tanzania. TESOL Quarterly, 36(3), 373–397. Volunteering Journeys. (n.d.). Volunteering Journeys. Retrieved from: https:// volunteeringjourneys.com/teaching-english/. Volunteers Initiative Nepal. (n.d.). Volunteers Initiative Nepal. Retrieved from: https:// www.volunteersinitiativenepal.org/teaching-program/. Vrasti, W. (2013). Volunteer tourism: Giving back in neoliberal times. New York: Routledge. Waller, R., & Barrentine, S. J. (2015). Rural elementary teachers and place-based connections to text during reading instruction. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 30(7), 1–13. Wearing, S. (2001). Volunteer tourism: Experiences that make a difference. Oxon, UK: CABI Publishing. Wee, L. (2008). Linguistic instrumentalism in Singapore. In P. Tan & R. Rubdy (Eds.), Language as commodity: Global structures, local marketplaces (pp. 31–43). New York: Continuum. Williams, E. (2013). Political perspectives on language policies and development. In E. J. Erling & P. Seargeant (Eds.), English and development: Policy, pedagogy and globalization (pp. 68–87). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. WorldTeach (n.d.). Brazil summer program. Retrieved from: http://worldteach.org/ programs/brazil-summer/.

176

Coda: The Incommensurability of English Language Pedagog[uer]y and Sustainability— Spirits and Protein Satoru Nakagawa

University of Manitoba

Without food, my weakened comrade Was ordered buried while still alive. It’s hard to hear that story. —Yoshi Nakagawa (my grandmother; translated by Satoru Nakagawa, 2012) After a number of crises including a difficult death befell our extended Canadian family, my Canadian nephew asked me a question that I have been struggling to answer for a long time now: “Do you believe in life after death?” Putting this into context, my nephew and I share respect for one another; I admire his fortitude, dedication, pursuit of a perfect body, and decision to abandon his safe, good, professional choice in higher education for a noble one. I believe he respects me for what I know, who I am, what I have experienced, and how I have managed to make my way in his country and his world. But despite our mutual respect, the question remains, how do you answer a question like this when you do not share a worldview with the person who is asking? My tall, blond body-builder and model English-monolingual nephew has never known marginalization; for him, Western wealth, the culture of dominance, and the extraordinary privilege that comes from being well off, well educated, and well received were his birthright. Visiting me in Japan in 2007, my nephew found the Kansai district in mainland Japan to be noisy, congested, and backward in terms of human rights, even though it was exciting in many other ways. He was frustrated that he was unable to access

178

TESOL and Sustainability

the exact protein or calorie counts on food packaging, surprised by the lack of wheelchair  accessibility, and somewhat disgusted by many cultural habits in Japan. If he experienced Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Tokyo—the most cosmopolitan cities in Japan that way—then, I wondered, how could I explain in a meaningful way from my Japanese small-island, brown, rural, IndigenousAmami perspective all the way to his worldview what I believe to be true about life after death? How could I explain the essence of self-replication, of spirituality and mind, or about how language, culture, and ontology are not merely inscribed on our bodies, but rather actually constitute our bodies? But my nephew honored me by asking me this question, with the result that I have pondered it for a long time. This chapter is an attempt to answer my nephew’s question, the only question ever posed to me about what life is like on my island that is really worth asking. To answer my nephew’s question in a meaningful way, I need to ask you, the reader, to engage with me. I will be making connections between the human body, the human mind and spirituality, and the ecological impact of language shift or death in global Indigenous communities (Crystal, 2000). Language shift is accelerated through the globalizing forces of English (e.g., Liyonage, 2010; May 2012), propelled by TESOL professionals, oftentimes without their knowledge (e.g., Phillipson, 2001). I am asking you to reflect on what my Shima-guchi and shiman-chu worldview represent, and what the world will lose if just my one language, my one ideology, my one truth is lost (see also Dalby, 2003). What happens when global Indigenous languages and ideologies are supplanted by the worldview, ideology, and truth of English or other killer languages (SkutnabbKangas, 2003)? In this chapter, therefore, I am asking TESOL professionals to think whether or not they belong there when they enter communities in countries they do not know. Specifically, I am asking TESOL professionals to think about what they do when they ignore the languages of those they teach in Englishdominant classrooms. And I may not always do so in ways that are familiar to you, because standard academic discourse (SAD), even that of a critical tradition, “de-authorizes all speech grounded in traditional societal authority” (Gouldner, 1979, p. 29) for me. Such linguistic traditions create a binary between Indigenous and scientific knowledges that, as Nakata (2007) suggests, can result in (a) Indigenous knowledge being overtaken by Western scientific knowledge and (b) the holders of Indigenous knowledge being positioned beneath holders of the Western scientific knowledge. Bowers (2002) explains this concept well for Western people:

Coda: Spirits and Protein

179

These traditional sources of authority include mythopoetic narratives that may be the foundation of a cultural group’s moral codes, intergenerational knowledge that carries forward an understanding of the limits and possibilities of the bioregion, wisdom of elders and mentors, and forms of knowledge that come from direct experience of negotiating relationships in everyday life. (p. 28)

Sadly, despite the understandings put forward by these researchers above and others four decades ago, not much headway has been made in judging what is acceptable and unacceptable academic language (meaning that I must refer to authorities such as them in writing such as this), forcing those of us with differing discourse codes to translate our knowledge into English or other dominant languages—and to use those languages in ways that please “native speakers” of them. Gaudry (2011), a Metis researcher, puts the case more strongly, arguing that doing so steals knowledge from Indigenous communities, re-names knowledge according to dominant worldviews, and validates knowledge within Western academic traditions. [The process] serves as a method of translation: seeking to legitimize Indigenous worldviews through demonstrating parallels with scientific, liberal, or capitalist practice. Although often used to defend Indigenous interests, this translation also reinforces the colonialist assertion that Indigenous knowledges are not valuable in their own right or defensible on their own terms. (Gaudry, 2011, p. 115)

In other words, rather than operationalizing and validating Indigenous worldviews, translating our knowledge into dominant languages allows Indigenous communities to be judged by the standards of the dominant culture. Like many Indigenous peoples, I am trying to uncover and learn much about my peoples’ histories for the first time, relying on knitting together the tatters remaining of oral knowledge and using it to challenge the official knowledge in the written records of the colonizers. As there is no written form of my island language, Shima-guchi, all records are in Japanese. Many communities, like mine, learn and engage with English only because English trumps the immediate colonizer, in my case, Japanese (Nakagawa & Kouritzin, 2011); our language needs are not the cultural proficiency desired for global integration like the English being modeled by JET program teachers in schools and cram schools (juku) throughout Japan—including my island (e.g., McConnell, 1996), nor the CLIL-oriented critical cognitive language ability (Cummins, 1999) mandated to professors and instructors in Japanese universities (Ishikura, 2015); our needs are not conversational abilities like the English being taught by “native-speaker teachers” in for-profit contexts in Japan (Owens, 2017); our needs are not

180

TESOL and Sustainability

business English like the English being taught in workplace settings to further the business interests of the corporations that have enslaved us. Rather, our needs are for an English that will connect us with other Indigenous communities and allow us a voice in dominant world structures (Nakagawa & Kouritzin, 2011), as we work toward ecological harmony and emancipation from the yoke of capitalism. This is not the same as practicing Freirian-inspired pedagogies. Like Bowers (2002) above, I am critical of Freire’s ideals, but not merely because his root metaphors are those “shared by the corporations and politicians promoting globalization” (p. 24), but also because of Freire’s disdain for banking education, noted here: The teacher’s task is to organize a process which already occurs spontaneously to “fill” the students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge. And since people “receive” the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. (Freire, 1970, p. 57)

In fact, the education systems of dominant cultures around the world, including Japan, are modeled on the banking concept. Freire (1970) argues that banking forms of education force students to adopt the worldviews of their teachers and the ideologies of Western countries; they thereby create profitable situations for the existing world order (e.g., Klees, 2002). Likewise, Gramsci (1971) pointed out how conscious and intentional shifts in educational approach threatened future generations of Italian identity, a process he referred to as “hegemony” (Gramsci, 1971). In short, formal education when engaged in as banking education is a powerful tool of the colonizers, conducted in the colonizer’s language and imprinting the dominant culture on schoolchildren. However, our own Indigenous form of banking education is the only thing that we have to pass on our ontologies to our children through the development and practice of accord (Nakagawa, 2007). Accord refers to the primary oral consciousness that we all have, the ways in which we are shaped and taught by the cadence and content of language from birth. Accord incorporates ideas of harmony, social contract, concurrence, unity, agreement, voluntary-ness, and is derived from the Latin word for heart; it refers to oral tradition, dance, symbol, ritual, art, sign language, and other performance arts that require human beings to be present with and to one another. In our world, there are not multiple ways of doing things, nor are there multiple truths. That is, in keeping with poststructuralist views I do not believe in one truth but rather only

Coda: Spirits and Protein

181

“regimes of truth” (Foucault, 1980, p. 131) in the dominant [capitalist] ideology; however, I firmly believe in one truth in my Indigenous worldview. I do not believe in master narratives in the dominant worldview, though I firmly believe in Indigenous oral traditions that are master narratives. Indigenous peoples have one way for living truth based on what the land guides them to do, one way derived from thousands of years of myriad intersecting cultural practices, and that allows our lives to be sustained now and into the future.

Positioning Shiman-chu To engage with you, first, I must position myself and introduce my island. The island of Tokunoshima, my birthplace, is now perceived to be located in the southern part of Japan. In scientific or geographical terms, Tokunoshima is located north at 28° (27° and 51´) and east at 129° (128° and 51´) between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of China. We have learned to locate ourselves in such terms of our colonizers, but islanders have no need of such location systems; we are exactly where we need to be. From Tokunoshima, we can see the next island, and from there we can see the next. Beyond that, we need not travel, since everything we need is on the island—ocean, rivers, mountains, beaches, farmland, animals, and birds. Tokunoshima is located far enough south that it is in a semi-tropical climate zone. The seashore is surrounded by coral reefs. The island is covered with a laurel forest and is always green. My wife likes to tell the story of how she threw an avocado pit into the compost when we were first married, and didn’t think about it; now we have a gigantic avocado tree. In the past, islanders produced rice, sweet potatoes, and silk, working small vegetable plots, until we were forced to specialize in sugar by our colonizers. In 1609, Satsuma-han of preindustrialized Japan ordered an army from mainland Japan to conquer all islands and peoples throughout Amami to the Ryukyu-kingdom, and they officially announced that they were the new rulers of the Amami islands and the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1610 (Haring, 1961; Matsushita, 2006; Uehara, 1992). Consequently, beginning in 1609, for 300 years, Satsuma-han abused us. Satsuma-han was able to gain enormous wealth from the sugar “needed” by English people to have sweet tea, by enslaving the Amami people (us) for a long period of time known as sato jigoku (sugar hell). Slavery, I am sure you will object, is a strong word. But, we were not waged labor; we were physically controlled by force; we had no right to our land or lives; and we were not free even to eat what we produced (see Cooper, 2000). Resistance was punishable by death.

182

TESOL and Sustainability

Today, most of the people living on the island rely on sugar production for export as their main income source, forced by the happenstances of history to live in the “globalizing metabolic rift of the capitalist epoch” (Moore, 2001, p. 137). We are visibly, culturally, linguistically, historically, and spiritually different from “mainland” Japanese. When we leave the island, we are often mistaken for Hawaiian, Filipino, or Samoan. In the land I live in now, Canada, I am frequently mistaken for Latino, or for Canadian Aboriginal.

The Nonbinary Nature of Life and Death To answer my nephew’s question, next I have to challenge the idea of life versus death, the Western idea that life and death are opposites, a binary, that when one is dead one is no longer alive and vice versa. This is not an ideological position I can endorse and I have to tell a not-uncommon island story to explain. My grandmother from my mother’s side always promised me that she would share her afterlife with me. She has kept this promise. In fact, she was not what Western people would call my grandmother, but rather my grandmother’s younger sister who raised my mother. Because of the war, I had no grandfathers, so this story begins without men. My biological grandmother gave my mother to her sisters (one older and one younger) because her younger sister had lost both of her children in a measles epidemic, and somehow also lost her marriage in the aftermath. My biological grandmother was about to have a new baby and could not care for her two-year-old daughter (my mother) as well; she was the second wife, did not live with her husband and his children, and she was forty seven years old. As a result of this series of incidents, I had four grandmothers—one on my father’s side, and three on my mother’s side. The older sister passed away when I was still in the early stages of elementary school; I clearly remember the day of the funeral when I was eight years old. The younger sister is the one I considered to be my grandma, and the one I remember with great love still. She was my roommate in my junior high school years. One day, while I was at school, she passed away at home. That was a big day for me since I was able to do well in volleyball that day and I was looking forward to telling my grandmother and my family—but instead came home to sadness. I cannot remember the details clearly but I know I connected the two events together; she was visiting me and provided me with the ability to perform well as a gift during her departure. She always said to me she would be with me when I most needed her and that day I had been powerful. She said

Coda: Spirits and Protein

183

to me “you cannot see me but I will be on your shoulder looking over your life.” I believed her then, and still do. If I were to apply an official story to my belief system that includes the spirituality I shared with my grandmother, it would go like this: according to books, Amami people are polytheistic and have been throughout known history (Kreiner, 1986). Publications also acknowledge that Amami people historically do not differentiate the current world we live in from other worlds—like the gods’ worlds and death’s world (Kreiner, 1986; Tonaki, 1992; Uehara, 1992; Yamashita, 1986). Likewise, I grew up in a family who held beliefs in the existence of multiple gods dwelling in our surroundings. Recently I have talked to my mother about my grandmother, and my mother confirmed that my grandmother always talked about spirituality. My mother believes that grandmother is with us and all of our ancestors are with us. Our spirituality is not a purely human phenomenon. My mother, father, grandparents, uncles, aunts, other relatives, and friends all cautioned me repeatedly to be careful how I lived with rivers, trees, mountains, water, ocean, rocks, bugs; even removing a special sacred rock from its resting position may harm an individual and family members for generations, until the rock is replaced in its original position and a memorial service for the gods is held. I have to work on to continue this ideology/worldview/truth/belief system for my next generations. As is clear from these examples, to me life and death are not a binary. In fact, “are life and death a binary?” is not even a question that I can appreciate. The way I was taught from my grandmother was that she is with me all the time; her spirit will be there to support me and all those I love as long as, and whenever, I need her. This teaching from my grandmother translates into the idea that one’s physical life on earth is just one form of spiritual expression; the spirit does not depend on the body, during life or after life. A spirit can transcend time and distance. Although some Western religions profess to believe the same way, their belief is not backed up by action. For example, hearing voices and seeing images that others cannot hear or see is considered to be a hallucination or a mental illness in Western ideologies, not a spiritual state. Therefore, my beliefs may sound fanciful to dominant culture people, just like other oral stories and tales sound counterfeit/untrue/weird unless the listening person has life experiences that resonate with them. Even if I were to read my grandmother’s story as a text (as you are doing now) it may sound ordinary, not moving at all. Some things in our imaginations cannot be written by text and/or even by languages. However, I have tried to answer with my imagination to my nephew’s question “Do you believe in life after death?”

184

TESOL and Sustainability

Spirits and Protein In answer to my nephew, with all of this as context, I started to explain what I believe by addressing it in two manners: the existence of my physical being (which can be mapped onto Western science) and that of my spiritual/ mental being. I told him that the existence of a physical being after death can be scientifically approached if we start with what we know to be the facts of human body composition. Our bodies consist mainly of water, followed by carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, iron, calcium, magnesium, and many other varieties of atoms which create unlimited numbers of molecules. The scientific principle, now common-sense knowledge, that we all share is that nothing simply disappears from existence. Since our bodies are made from atoms and molecules, the formation of our individual beings may become corrupted (sick) and deteriorate (death), but the substance that forms us will never disappear from this land/location/earth/universe. My carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and metals will remain and reassemble in different formations through the work of bacteria, reforming me into soil and/or other beings such as bugs, birds, fishes, and many other kinds of plant or meatdigesting beings. In other words, my body will no longer exist in a formation of me, but it will exist as a component of other beings dwelling in the environment. As my body decays, it will nourish soil and thereby provide the food sources for other Beings. I will become, in that way, simply part of others. In other words, I am built from the ancestors who lived in my environment, my land, Tokunoshima’s Nature. In a way, eating food of any sort can be viewed as a distant form of cannibalism in its best sense. We nourish our bodies and our souls by taking in the food grown on our own land. In my case, I grew up on Tokunoshima, so most of my body was built by my ancestors who died and were buried on Tokunoshima. But, now I live in Canada; therefore, my life is supported by those who were buried here on Turtle Island. I am grateful to them. Owing to the world trade part of globalization, I am also consuming other people’s ancestors from far-distant continents such as Central America, South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe, and many other land masses that are not named or considered not worth naming by Europeans. Moreover, if I am buried here, my body will be shared by others when I am gone, so my body and the bodies of others in me will never disappear in a molecular sense. “I” will disappear as one formation of Being, but not-I will remain as another form of Being. Therefore, when I changed my location to Canada, and I began to feel more disconnected from my people, it was because I was no longer

Coda: Spirits and Protein

185

consuming food grown on Tokunoshima land containing my grandmother’s spirit-protein, and the spirit-protein of my people, but rather I began consuming the spirit-protein of Others. Sometimes I wonder what the result will be when food is no longer grown on land, but in warehouses with roots searching air or water restlessly for spirit-protein. Will we become ethereal? Will our souls evaporate? The prospect for my children and grandchildren frightens me.

Spirituality and Mind Spirituality and mind is much less scientific than the explanation above. Some things are almost impossible to explain within a scientific text since there are too many influencing variables and those variables cannot be quantified; Western scientific approaches do not accept nonquantifiable variables, so they discard them as “not worthy” of study. For example, those involved in car racing will only look at laps and finish times, not how drivers were feeling or their mental states at a particular moment in a curve (unless, of course, something goes wrong). Even if nonquantifiable variables could be turned into numbers, the problem becomes one of methodology, the reasoning behind how feelings are quantified. Such explanations cannot be agreed on when even relatively straightforward concepts cannot be agreed upon. Let me explain by use of the idea of “one.” What constitutes “one”? We think we know, but do we really have a universal understanding of what “one” represents? One is an imagined concept that we would like to believe in. Moreover, in a very rudimentary sense, science is using the imagined concept of “one” as an absolute gold standard, as in 1+1=2. Yet, do we have global accord around this scientific truth? What if one person eats one apple—there is still one person, meaning 1+1=1. This answer is “wrong” but how can this scenario be represented in an equation? If we cannot eat an apple without violating mathematical laws, do we conclude that people cannot eat apples? What is one in this case? So, another rule must apply; 1+1=2 if they are the same units. What if we are to count things of the same unit? Are we really in consensus with the notion of unit? For example, do we believe that 40 kilograms of person is equal to 40 kilograms of apples? Or do we even believe that one apple is equal to another apple because they are the same unit, or because they weigh the same amount, or when one is decayed and one is not? And, what happens to one apple over a specific period of time inside a person’s digestive tract, and does the apple become one again when it reemerges? Different views—like mine suggesting that “one” is not a

186

TESOL and Sustainability

true measurement just because a body of work is founded on it—have been annihilated (Diamond, 1997). Clearly, 1+1=2 is a game, a social construction. But since such formulas make science, and science makes money, it is a good scheme for us to play economic games with, until an apocalyptic event or climate change brings Western science to an end. In short, it is difficult to talk about spiritual beliefs through a scientific ideology because it involves a willingness to give up understandings that have now become “common” sense. Therefore, this section requires general and common understandings of human tales and feelings, such as memories. Since I cannot use/read/write anyone else’s memory, I will refer to another earlier memory of mine. My grandmother, this time my father’s mother, is with me all the time, whether I think about her or not. She is there even when I do not want her to see me because I spent critical time with her. I may not have talked to her to absorb her wisdom as much as I now wish that I had, but I spent quantities of time with her. I breathed the same air with her and coexisted with her within a confined space. I didn’t go to Disneyland with her and spend all day being distracted by attractions; I lived with her. Her memory is engraved in me, so she is in me, and I have come to be one physical representation of her, as are all the others she lived with. She lives in me as long as I live and she will continue to live in my children and their children in different forms. My grandmother contained her ancestors as well; therefore, I am all of them and we all together will become all of my offspring, whether they like it or not. Using this logic, I told my nephew that I am he; the more time he spends with me, the more I become him and he cannot prevent it. I have no blood connection to him so I cannot speak my own heart’s language to him, but he is me and I am him just because he spent critical time with me, absorbing my understandings and my belief system. Our critical time was not “quality time” (a concept I dislike); we did not spend time talking about things the world might think are important. Rather, we spent critical time growing together when he was young. Of course, I was not his only “influence”: he has absorbed more from those he spent more time with. Nothing but quantity of time counts.

Getting Outside the Box Both physical and spiritual/mental Beings exist eternally in different forms. Since I am selfish, I would like to be shaped as a human formation of atoms and molecules, but if the human species can no longer exist as humans, then

Coda: Spirits and Protein

187

I will exist as another Being. We all will. It is comforting to know this, though ideally, I want the human animal to exist as a species for eternity. For this to happen, we all must obey what the local lands supporting individuals and communities tell us. Because both languages and ideologies are based on local environments, any change, or shift, or decay, or alteration of local languages is accompanied by a change of ideology, worldview, or truth. Likewise, a change to local ideologies (e.g., through education) or change to the environment (e.g., through destructive technologies) will precipitate a change in language, ideology, and environment. As we know from history, once a language, or an ideology, or an environment is changed and forgotten, it cannot be recovered in its previous form (e.g., Harrison, 2007, 2010; Kouritzin, 1999; Nakagawa, 2013; Nettle & Romaine, 2000). It becomes almost impossible to even remember the ancestors within us, or to feel their essences as their molecules and atoms support us in our lives. We need to let go of our own egos to become part of them, to become “Mu,” the nothingness and emptiness of self, to become everything by destroying the self/ego. This is no easy task. It can be taught to the brain, but cannot be taught or told to the heart. As a result, everything and everyone in our Indigenous world suggests that we must reject the dominator’s language, and thus reject the ideology and environmental practices that come with it. The trouble is that those held captive in schools by dominators have no choice regarding what they are taught (e.g., Nakagawa, 2013; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). What I am saying here is nothing new; we all heard this from our grandparent(s) and parent(s) when they gave us advice such as “give, share, love,” or in the behavior they demanded from us like smiles and touches, and in the words they modeled and made us repeat: “thank you,” “hello,” “sorry,” “it’ll be alright.” Even though we know that money is not important and that money is little comfort on our deathbeds, we drink the Kool-Aid of [getting our] money’s worth in formal education. We seem to believe while we are young that there is endless time; until a person is no longer able to produce items for an economybased world order that person will not have time to remember the important teachings from their ancestors. But, when we finally reach that epiphany, it is too late to teach our children. Perhaps we should hope that we do not remember, lest all that remains for us is to regret, and grieve, and cry. My father, who has a terminal illness, says “as time goes by I realize that the only things I can ask for are gods and ancestors; medicine (i.e., science) will not save me, nor do I want it to indefinitely.” Science will not save a life (though

188

TESOL and Sustainability

medicine may temporarily stave off the inevitable), nor will it ever create life. My father, in his advanced age, is prepared to live out his life in his current state and to accept whatever comes. He does not wish to try to live on and on into a future that was never meant for him, knowing that further living of his life can only be at the expense of someone else’s suffering (most likely people he can’t see who are far away). Even my mother-in-law, who did not live close to nature, knew in her dying days that she was dying; she comforted those of us who were not dying, and bravely accepted her excruciating last months, weeks, days as what was “due” her. Why due? My wife’s mother suffered heart damage from rheumatic fever at the age of four (and again in her twenties and her forties); she had cheated a natural death by invoking science in the form of medicine many times during the last three decades of her life. Living her last hours with my wife beside her while she could not die because the medical interventions she had endured would not allow her heart to stop beating, I came to agree with my father that ultimately science can only destroy lives and will never create any forms of life. In accordance with its historical background, science managed to defeat all (or almost all) Western spiritual beliefs, making itself into a religion without calling itself religion. It is now trying to defeat ancient Indigenous wisdoms, making inroads even on my little geographically isolated island, where the hospital has become the center. People move to be closer to the hospitals (where they go to die without their loved ones), away from the land that gives them life. Ironically, they move onto land that was “reclaimed” from the sea (or rather, created where the sea used to be) because that is where the hospital is; that land, only a meter above sea level, is soon to be “reclaimed” by the sea. Things that we were taught in formal education systems as being authentic, real, legitimate, or fact function as to reinforce one ideology or scientific worldview; that information-based knowledge counters what we experienced through growing up as children and adolescents (see Nakagawa, 2008). This is not a new idea; even Western poets like Wordsworth wrote about it in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Any information taught within the formal education system, within this ideology, is in the box; the box (or rather the circle) represents justice, standards, rights, morals, ethics, love, forgiveness, compassion, knowledge, and all other known attributes. If an individual approaches a point near the periphery of what is considered to be the “norm” or “standard” (in statistical terms, this is likely to be measured as two standard deviations of concentric spheres away from the center point), then that individual has reached the area of the “critical.” In other words, criticality is

Coda: Spirits and Protein

189

still inside the circle, meaning “in the box,” but is getting very close to what is no longer considered to be the norm or standard. Outside the circle is the “strange.” Where we are located in our Indigeneity is, to the dominant ideology, in the realm of the strange. It is possible for dominant cultures to annex Indigenous perspectives and subsume them under the dominant ideology in the name of critical. But, as Nakata (2002) reminds us: “For without a doubt, the collection and documentation of Indigenous knowledge by the development and scientific communities is a very partial enterprise, selecting and privileging some Indigenous knowledge whilst discarding and excluding others” (p. 283). This means that only that Indigenous knowledge considered important to dominant ideologies is annexed by them. Indigeneity, from a dominant culture and knowledge perspective, serves critical positions, whereas Indigeneity, from our perspective, is an entirely different knowledge system. Indigeneity, as conceptualized by the dominant worldview, is on the periphery or edge of the dominant, not on the border or the edge or the periphery of Indigenous. If one is at the “critical” point of Indigenousness, one is still outside the box, not inside. To be specific, if one is working for the dominant society, then Indigeneity is a critical approach; but, if one is working for Indigenous peoples’ interests, then Indigeneity is just the way things are. As long as Indigenous scholars (see Nakagawa, 2017) are located within the box of dominant thinking and dominant norms then they are critical, but when Indigenous scholars go beyond this socially constructed norm/standard and mobilize Indigenous ideologies, then their ideas are dismissed as myth, dream, superstition, or other categories which characterize them as strange, weird, bad, evil, or otherwise not worthy. To do critical work is therefore to continue to work within the dominant society. Engaging criticality means that you are working for the dominant society. Within this belief system, “engaging Indigeneity” means trying to translate Indigenous ways of thinking for dominant ideology people so that they can understand and steal what they consider to be the good stuff. Once dominant ideology people understand in the way they want to understand, then they are able to annex the forms of knowledge that are useful to their own critical projects. They can “mobilize” Indigenous thinking as “theory” and find it useful. The danger is that Indigenous scholars might unintentionally do so too. Commenting on this, Gaudry (2011), a Metis researcher, refers to most academic research as “excavation research” which steals from Indigenous communities, renames all knowledge according to dominant culture worldviews, and is validated within Western academic traditions. Conducted on these principles, Gaudry argues that excavation research is academic “parasitism” which

190

TESOL and Sustainability

serves as a method of translation: seeking to legitimize Indigenous worldviews through demonstrating parallels with scientific, liberal, or capitalist practice. Although often used to defend Indigenous interests, this translation also reinforces the colonialist assertion that Indigenous knowledges are not valuable in their own right or defensible on their own terms. (p. 115)

In other words, rather than operationalizing and validating Indigenous worldviews, such research judges research on Indigenous communities by the standards of the dominant culture. And that leads me to ask the question, when Indigenous scholars (including me) have commodified and “sold” the good stuff, then what is left for those who don’t speak any dominant languages?

Implications To answer my nephew’s question, I have tried to connect my epistemology with yours, based on the idea of the food chain. I revealed my perspectives and experiences with my grandmothers and their teachings, unpacking binary views of the world such as the distinctions between spirit and body or between death and life. I have deconstructed scientific understandings like the concept of one. I then concluded that there is no life after death because life and death are concepts I do not share. Now, with this knowledge, I ask you in TESOL to think about what you are doing. I suggest that my traditional and ancestral view of the world applies not only to “recognized” (a loaded concept; what gives dominant ideologies the right to “recognize” others?) Indigenous peoples, but to all other peoples as well, because we are all of us Indigenous to somewhere, sometime. We have just lost our way. It is undeniable that we were born from our predecessors and that without their multiple existences we could not exist as who we are at this moment in time. In this way, sustainability (much less ecopedagogy or ecojustice) is incommensurable with TESOL for global Indigenous peoples. Our knowledges and ideologies are based on sustainability in a noncapitalist sense, a sustainability that does not include accumulation or profit-seeking. Such knowledge is embedded in our languages and our lands, and it lives in our bodies. That is, teaching English to speakers of other languages is one aspect of globalization (Kumaravadivelu, 2006), and was frequently part of the process

Coda: Spirits and Protein

191

of colonization (Pennycook, 2017; Phillipson, 1992). While this has been documented by scholars in TESOL, nonetheless, it has been my experience as an Indigenous person that frequently practitioners of TESOL are more concerned about the practice of their profession than they are about those they practice their profession on (see also Brumfit, 2006). For example, English teachers and JET program ALTs who are sent to my island region do not know the complicated history of the Amami Islands and the Ryukyus. To their way of thinking, they have been sent to live in rural Japan, where the people speak a different dialect and practice different ways. They cannot be faulted for this; they are hired by Japan, and Japan does not recognize our language, our distinct identity, or our sovereignty. But, in their practice of the TESOL profession, this knowledge can explain much. When islanders are struggling to maintain their languages, cultures, and identities in the face of encroaching capitalism, it helps TESOL professionals to understand that the confusion and ambivalence students display may actually result from struggling to maintain shima-guchi before it is lost, to learn through the medium of Japanese as a second language, while learning the language of internationalization (English) that is mandated by the Japanese national curriculum. That is, I suggest, it is incumbent upon all teachers of English to understand local contexts and histories in order to appropriately understand and respect those whose land they are on. At the same time, it may be time for TESOL in its international manifestations to foster such professional development by inviting minority Indigenous voices to conferences to teach about their lands, their languages, and their cultures. By this, I do not mean that we should be invited to plead for understanding, but rather invited as equals to be part of a conversation in which we are high-stakes stakeholders. Along the same lines, perhaps it is time for TESOL publications to allow space for Indigenous peoples to speak back to the profession, not in anger, but in ways that allow us to influence the forms and functions of the pedagogy we experience. Perhaps it is also time for professional standards and agendas to recognize the global Indigenous people affected by TESOL, and to acknowledge/honor their wisdom and their practices of sustainability in all teacher education programs. Finally, I believe it is essential also to recognize the practices, the land and the people who are your hosts in all places where you gather, including classrooms. In other words, out of respect for all of our ancestors who are buried beneath your feet and who nourish the land you walk on, please tread lightly.

192

TESOL and Sustainability

References Bowers, C. A. (2002). Toward an eco-justice pedagogy. Environmental Education Research, 8(1), 21–34. doi: 10.1080/13504620109628. Brumfit, C. (2006). What, then, must we do? Or who gets hurt when we speak, write and teach? In J. Edge (Ed.), (Re-)locating TESOL in an age of empire (pp. 27–48). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cooper, F. (2000). Farewell to the category-producing class? International Labor and Working-Class History, 53, 60–68. Crystal, D. (2000). Language death. New York: Cambridge University. Cummins, J. (1999). BICS and CALP: Clarifying the distinction. (Rep. No. Eric # 438551). ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center), Bloomington, IN. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED438551.pdf. Dalby, A. (2003). Language in danger: The loss of linguistic diversity and the threat to our future. New York: Columbia University Press. Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. New York: W. W. Norton. Foucault, P. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977. C. Gordon (Ed.). New York: Pantheon. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Gaudry, A. J. P. (2011). Insurgent research. Wicazo Sa Review, 26(1), 113–136. Gouldner, A. W. (1979). The future of intellectuals and the rise of the new class. New York: Seabury Press. Gramsci, A. (1971 [1927]). On education. Selections from prison notebooks. New York: International. Haring, D. G. (1961). Chinese and Japanese influences. In A. H. Smith (Ed.), Ryukyuan culture and society: A survey (pp. 39–56). 10th Pacific Science Congress, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Harrison, K. D. (2007). When languages die: The extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of human knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. Harrison, K. D. (2010). The last speakers: The quest to save the world’s most endangered languages. Washington, DC: National Geographic. Ishikura, Y. (2015). Realizing internationalization at home through English-medium courses at a Japanese university: Strategies to maximize student learning. Higher Learning Research Communications, 5(1), 11–28. doi: 10.18870/hlrc.v5i1.237. Klees, S. J. (2002). World Bank education policy: New rhetoric, old ideology. International Journal of Educational Development, 22, 451–474. Kouritzin, S. (1999). Face[t]s of first language loss. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kreiner, J. (1986). Some notes on beliefs of god and the other world: With special emphasis on the noro-cult of Amami-Oshima. In Okina wa bunka no kosou wo

Coda: Spirits and Protein

193

kangaeru: Hosei university 7th international symposium (pp. 38–51). Tokyo, Japan: Hosei university. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2006). Dangerous liaison: Globalization, empire and TESOL. In J. Edge (Ed.), (Re-)locating TESOL in an age of empire (pp. 1–26). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Liyonage, I. (2010). Globalization: Medium-of-instruction policy, indigenous educational systems, and ELT in Sri Lanka. In V. Vaish (Ed.), Globalization of language and culture in Asia: The impact of globalization processes on language (pp. 205–229). New York: Continuum. Matsushita, S. (2006). Amami shiryou shusei [Collection of historical material of Amami]. Kagoshima, Japan: Nanpo Shinsha. May, S. (2012). Language and minority rights: Ethnicity, nationalism and the politics of language. New York: Routledge. McConnell, D. L. (1996). Education for global integration in Japan: A case study of the JET program. Human Organization, 55, 446–457. Moore, J. W. (2001). Marx’s ecology and the environmental history of world capitalism. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 12, 134–139. Nakata, M. (2002). Indigenous knowledge and the cultural interface: Underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge and information systems. IFLA Journal, 28, 281–291. Nakata, M. (2007). Disciplining the savages: Savaging the disciplines. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Nakagawa, S. (2007). Accord or discord: Returning to oral traditions? Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 27(2), 447–473. Nakagawa, S. (2008). Information and wisdom in the practice of knowledge. Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 3(2), 24–45. Nakagawa, S. (2013). The quest of shiman-chu: Questioning the absolutes of language, culture and being. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Alberta. doi: https://doi.org/10.7939/R3DD3V. Nakagawa, S. (2017). Indigenous research methodology and the indigenous academic. Canadian Journal of Native Studies 37(1), 95–115. Nakagawa, S., & Kouritzin, S. (2011). The present tense[ions] of English in one local context in Japan. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 8(1), 53–71. Nettle, D., & Romaine, S. (2000). Vanishing voices: The extinction of the world’s languages. New York: Oxford University Press. Owens, C. D. (2017). Traveling yellow peril: Race, gender and empire in Japan’s English teaching industry. American Studies, 56(1), 29–49. Pennycook, A. (2017). The cultural politics of English as an international language. New York: Routledge. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, R. (2001). English for globalization or for the world’s people? International Review of Education, 47(3–4), 185–200.

194

TESOL and Sustainability

Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2003). Linguistic diversity and biodiversity: The threat from killer languages. In C. Mair (Ed.), The politics of English as a world language: New horizons in postcolonial cultural studies (pp. 31–52). Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V. Tonaki, A. (1992). Aji, noro, oh-monogatari no kouzou to ronri-. In Tanigawa (Ed.), Ryukyuko no sekai. Tokyo, Japan: Shogaku-kan. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Residential schools: The legacy. The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 5. Montreal: McGill University Press. Uehara, K. (1992). Ryukyuohchyou no rekishi -Daiichi, daini Shoshi no seiritu to tenkai-. [History of the Ryukyu kingdom -Development and operation of first and second Shoshi]. In Tanigawa (Ed.), Ryukyuko no sekai [World of the Ryukyu crescent] (pp. 195–226). Tokyo, Japan: Shogaku-kan. Yamashita, H. (1986). Amami no shima to shinnyo—Noro to Yuta wo chushinni [Islands of Amami and Goddess—Noro and Yuta as the centre]. In Tanigawa (Ed.), Ryukyuko no sekai [World of Ryukyu crescent] (pp. 327–362). Tokyo, Japan: Shogaku-kan.

Index American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) 1 Anglophone identities 34–5 Anthropocene era. See also climate migration Capitalocene concept 33–4 English language teaching 1–3, 5, 7–8 social justice 24 applied linguistics 2–3, 5, 43, 49, 59, 112, 134–5, 147, 151

critical pedagogy 112–13, 134, 156 Cross-Cultural Solutions (NGO) 159–60 curriculum, TESOL foundations 8–12

banking education 180. See also Freire, Paulo bilingualism 47, 49, 87, 92 Bowers, Chet 20, 24, 67, 75, 133–4, 159, 161, 168–9, 178, 180 on ecojustice 155–6 Language as a Local Practice 113 on place-based education 111–14 on root metaphors 4–5, 46, 152 The Way Forward 112 Buddhism 23, 140–1, 142, 146, 147 spirituality principle 144

Decolonizing Methodologies 76–7 developed countries language-as-a-resource (LaR) orientation 49–51 learning English, individual benefits 51–6 teaching and learning language 56–61 Dewey, John on democratic education 6–7, 20–1, 23–4 on global public 30 inclusion of spirituality 28 protoenvironmentalism 25 religious concepts 23 discourse analysis environmental risk 30–1 positive 20 religious/spiritual 23 sustainable communities 22–3

Cáceres, Berta 19 capitalism 27, 33–4, 44, 55, 73–4, 133, 180, 191 classrooms 1, 3, 8, 19, 74–5, 85, 87, 146, 148, 159, 178, 191 climate change 8–11, 19, 25, 28–9, 33, 35 climate migration 9, 85, 88, 91–2, 97, 101, 103, 105 key aspects 92–5 push/pull factors of 101–3 weather and climate vocabulary, need for 99–101 Common Core State Standards Initiative 104 communication 2–3, 8, 11, 29, 54–5, 57, 66, 135–7, 144–5, 147–8 convivial/conviviality 43–4, 49, 53, 56–8, 60–1, 162

Earth democracy theory. See also Dewey, John Anglophone identities 34–5 strategic resource 21–3 EcoJustice Education:Toward Diverse, Democratic, and Sustainable Communities (Martusewicz, Edmundson, and Lupinacci) 22 ecological systems 74, 113, 137, 141 education. See also global citizenship; place-based ecopedagogy; posttruth pedagogy adult 70 bilingual 47 eco-justice 73 forms of semiosis 22 Freire’s theory 43 for iGeneration youth 68–9

196

Index

language and culture 6–7, 87, 180 policy decisions 47 rural 11, 153–69 social justice 24, 28 sustainable development 71, 73, 89–91, 133 US standards 29, 41 education for sustainable development (ESD) 71 educators 2, 8, 10, 12, 19–21, 26–9, 34–5 “Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate-What Scientists Predict for the Future” (Molena) 33 English colonialism of the British Empire 31 as common language 34–5 disutility 51–6 global hegemony 31, 34–5, 42 ideology issues 41–2 monolingual norms 59, 86, 177 -only instructional models 56 race, concept 69–70 English as a foreign language (EFL) 3, 44, 58, 71 English as an international language (EIL) 71 English for academic purposes (EAP) 10, 112–14 English language learners (ELLs) 5, 31, 42, 45, 112, 114–16, 120 English language teaching (ELT) in the Anthropocene era 2, 4, 7–10, 12 convivial purposes 43–4, 46, 49, 51, 56–8, 61 in Global North and Global South 151–2 native speaker fallacy 151 neo-liberal principle 48, 56 voluntourism 151–70 English as Second Language (ESL). See also climate migration Anthropocene era 44–5, 87–8 cross-disciplinary inquiry 10 high school curricular initiatives 9 LaC orientation 58 standardized language standards 59, 70 traditional classroom 1, 3 environment degradation 5, 9, 28, 59, 86, 134, 139

human relationships 2–3, 5, 9, 11 social justice 19–21, 25, 27–31, 33 environmental education (EE) 71 Environmental Principles & Concepts (EP&Cs) 29 Experiential Learning Abroad (NGO) 158 food insecurity 2–3, 9, 24 fossil fuels 26, 31–2, 68, 73 Foucault, Michel 22, 26, 181 Freire, Paulo 30, 43, 112, 134, 180 banking forms of education 180 gender 3, 67, 70, 76 generations 6, 20, 28–9, 48, 72, 74, 124, 148, 180, 183 GenZed activism 69 global citizenship 10, 88–91, 105 Global Indigenous Knowledges 75 globalization 4, 20, 24, 30–1, 35, 133–4, 154, 163, 165, 180, 184, 190 Global North 24, 27, 151 Global South 11, 24, 27, 52, 151–3, 155–8, 160, 169 global warming 104, 133, 139 Glōbish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language (McCrum) 111 Goulah, Jason 1–6, 9–10, 20, 23, 28–30, 70, 77, 85–6, 91, 102, 104–5, 111–12, 135, 144, 148, 166. See also climate migration grammarians 52–4 Green Revolution 24 greenspeak episode Buddhist prayer flags 141–2 examples 138–47 research context and data 135–7 sustainability concerns 133–5 TESOL concerns 133–5, 143–5 Halliday, M. 7, 44, 134 Hawking, Stephen 68 Honduras 9, 19, 30, 87 host communities 153–4, 161, 168 human beings 1–2, 11, 45, 53, 57, 60, 134, 166, 180 human life 43, 57, 90, 137, 143

Index human rights 27, 91, 177. See also social justice hurricanes 9, 86, 99–100 iGeneration youth 68–9 Ikeda, Daisaku 88–91, 105 Illich, Ivan 43–5, 49–56, 58, 60–3 compulsory schooling 52 criticism, English language teaching 44, 61 idea of conviviality 43, 60 on “language-as-commons” 7, 49, 56 on language economics 49–50, 55 notion of vernacular language 53 on postwar social changes 45 shadow work 55 theory of language 52–3 immigrants 9, 31, 49, 56, 87 India, English medium schooling 155 indigenous knowledge 50, 178–9, 189–90 languages 1, 4, 11–12, 21 indigenous communities 19, 71, 155, 179–80, 189–90 loss of languages and cultures of sustainability 177–91 Industrial Revolution 24, 26, 32–3, 161 initiate–response–evaluate (IRF) model 101. See also climate migration instructors 54, 117–18, 120, 151, 179 International Volunteer Programs Association 157 Japan banking concept 180 colonization 190–1 cultural habits 177–8 Tokunoshima island 181–2 Katunich, John 3, 7–8, 41, 135 language as-commons 56–61 concept 12 ecological impact 8–12 as a form of commons 43 human behaviour and 21–2 ownership 58–9 as problem and as-right 47

197

as a resource 42–3, 46–8 standardized use 59–60 teaching 2, 4–7, 9–12 Language as a Local Practice (Pennycook) 113 LaR (“language-as-a-resource”) 42–3, 46–51 learners 8–11, 20, 31 lexicon, cultural concepts 21–2. See also language LGBTQ+ 70 livelihoods 27, 31, 145 Makiguchi, Tsunesaburo 90 MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) 89 minoritized language 21, 30–1 model unit initiative 92, 94–5 MPIs 93–7, 101 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) 104–5 neoliberal/neoliberalism 4, 6–7, 14, 42–3, 48, 51, 55–6, 168, 173 New Hope Volunteers 163 Next Generation Science Standards 104 nongovernmental organization (NGO) 151, 154, 157–9, 162–5. See also specific organizations nonnative speaker (NNS) 42 PBL (Project-based Learning) 117 place-based ecopedagogy 10, 111–12, 114–15, 119, 125–6 commitments 112–14 data analysis and methods 114–16 discourse models 114 global phenomena 111–12 implementation 125–6 incidental language learning and expertise 118–19 instructional site(s) 117–18 multilayered and situated language learning 119–25 post-truth pedagogy classroom practice 74–6 definition 65–8 initiatives 72–4 TESOL educators 68–72

198 poverty 28, 30, 160, 163, 166 privatization 24, 26, 51–2, 59 professionals. See also TESOL educators critical tradition 178 identity 6, 20, 27 institutional power 54 sustainability issues 3, 12, 19, 30–1 TESOL restructuring 111–12 Projects Abroad 165 quality of life 48, 51, 148 race 3, 9, 52, 67, 69, 167, 173 radical monopoly 7, 50–1, 55, 57, 60 refugees 71, 96, 99 religion 3, 23, 99, 136, 188 (Re-)locating TESOL in an Age of Empire (Kumaravadivelu) 31 root metaphors 4–6, 10–12, 24, 46, 111, 114, 126, 152–3, 161–2, 165–6, 168–9, 180 rural communities 11, 153–4, 156, 167, 172 rural teachers 159–60 scholarship 59, 67, 151, 153, 155 schooling 45–6, 49–51, 56, 60, 73, 88, 154–6, 159, 166–7, 169, 174 rural 152, 154–60, 169 Schubert, W.H. 88, 91 science 29, 32, 125, 133, 185–8 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) 3, 89–90 Second World War 25, 31, 35 semiosis 2, 6, 22 Smith, Adam 33 social change 20, 22, 45, 67, 117, 162 social justice 27–8, 33, 134, 148 social traps 44, 46, 61 spirituality 3, 12, 23, 28, 143, 147–8, 178, 183, 185 standard academic discourse (SAD) 178 Standard English as a second dialect (SESD) 71 STEM subjects 104 Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (Miller) 87

Index students. See also place-based ecopedagogy; post-truth pedagogy climate-related vocabulary 99–101 Earth democracy 35–6 environmental risk 30–1 summarizing strategies, MLA style 96–7 sustainability. See also climate change; climate migration Anglophone identities 34–5 bioregional 168–9 crises 2, 4–6, 20, 34, 43, 57 discursive strategies 20–3, 30–1 technology 3, 43, 45, 56, 69, 133, 162, 187 TESOL educators 8, 20–1, 34–6, 68–72, 77 curricular initiatives, case study 85–105 idea of conviviality 43–4, 49, 53, 56–8, 60–1, 162 instructional materials 29 International Association 31 post-truth pedagogy 68–72 social media platforms 69 TESOL pedagogy 8–12 climate migration 85–7, 92–3, 97–103 conceptual frameworks 73–4 crises of sustainability 43, 46 critical discourse analysis (CDA) 114–16 global citizenship 88–91 “green” topics 137–49 place-based education 112–14 post-truth politics 65–8, 72–6 postwar social changes 45 transformative models of pedagogy 134 tourism workers 10–11, 135–6, 145, 147–8 tragedy of the commons (Hardin) 59 translanguaging pedagogy 58–9 translingual pedagogy 47, 53, 57–60 Trump, Donald 66, 74 Understanding by Design (UbD) 93, 95 United Nation (UN) Environment Program in Nairobi 86 MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) 89 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) 89–90

Index United States educational standards 29 environmental and social justice activism 27 marginalized communities 22 minoritized language groups 8, 19, 21–2, 31 neocolonialism 35 No Child Left Behind legislation 155 rural schools 155 TESOL classrooms 19, 21 unsustainability 28, 30–2, 34–5 molar phase 26, 31 Unsustainability Revolution 26, 32, 35 Utah Valley University (UVU) Capitol Reef Field Station (CRFS) 117–18, 121, 124 CBI approaches 118–19 Conference on Writing for Social Change (CWSC) 117 content-based learning (CBL) 117 content-based learning projects (CBLP) 117–18, 125–6 National Park Service (NPS) 117–18 project-based learning (PBL) 117 value creation 90–1, 105. See also Ikeda, Daisaku; Makiguchi, Tsunesaburo Value Creation for Global Change: Building Resilient and Sustainable Societies (Ikeda) 90 vernacular language concept 53 shadow work 55–6

199

stigmatization 51 taught language vs 54 vocabulary 11, 70, 100, 103, 117, 124, 136, 146 Volunteering Journeys 163 volunteers 152–4, 159–60, 164–5 Volunteers Initiative Nepal 160 volunteer tourism 151–4, 161, 165–7, 169 ecojustice 154–6 English for individual success 162–6 research methods 156–8 root metaphors 166–9 rural schooling, deficiencies 158–62 spatial practice 153–4 Vygotsky, Lev 5, 101 water 3, 8–9, 27, 32, 50, 73, 86, 119, 138, 140, 145, 183–5 Way Forward, The (Bowers) 112 weather 86, 88, 98, 100–5, 136 Western society culture of dominance 177–80 educational reforms 161–2, 169 nationalist language ideologies 59 philosophical thoughts 133–4, 182–6, 188 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 21 WIDA framework 93–4, 97–8, 100, 104 wisdom 88–9, 91, 179, 186 World Bank, “Education Sector Strategy” in the Global South 155 World Meteorological Organization 86 WorldTeach (NGO) 154

200

201

202

203

204