TESOL and the Cult of Speed in the Age of Neoliberal Mobility

Osman Barnawi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000039849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

TESOL and the Cult of Speed in the Age of Neoliberal Mobility argues that because the nexus between TESOL and the cult of speed in an age of increased neoliberal mobility has not yet been explicitly unpacked, discussed, identified and theorized, the implications of this socio-economic phenomenon for TESOL policies, curricula, pedagogies and practices have been overlooked.

Through the presentation of several qualitative case studies, the book illustrates the social dynamics of speed and its key aspects (i.e., the materiality and the politics of time) in different TESOL contexts, including Saudi Arabia, the USA and Canada. The aim in presenting these diverse case studies was to craft a collection of responses, which, when put together, could offer new insights into the TESOL academic community. The book examines the ways in which the cult of speed has been envisioned, celebrated, negotiated with, enacted and justified by the various actors within the contemporary field of TESOL. It also investigates the new language teaching practices and forms the cult of speed in TESOL has generated and is generating.

TESOL and the Cult of Speed in the Age of Neoliberal Mobility will be of interest to TESOL/applied linguistics educators, students, policy makers, administrators, employers and the wider community, and it is hoped will give them ideas about how to deal with today's culture of fast movement in the globalized higher education landscape.

1
My lived experience with “time-sickness”

In the form of a personal history, this chapter presents my lived experience with the social dynamics of speed at personal, educational, professional, and institutional levels. It first shows the interconnectedness between time, industry, business, markets, and life in modern cities, including industrial cities. I then argue that recent allegations put forward by business-friendly governments and corporate bodies that university faculty members are slow and that they are major obstacles to solving economic problems have kept several critical questions at the back of my mind alive and kicking. It was these questions that ultimately led to my exploration of the nexus between TESOL and the cult of speed in this age of increased neoliberal mobility.

The social dynamics of speed at personal, educational, professional, and institutional levels

I started teaching the English language nearly two decades ago at various schools in Saudi Arabia. At the beginning of my career, working conditions were quite different and I enjoyed a slower pace of work than I do now. After I moved to one of the industrial cities located in the western region of Saudi Arabia nearly 15 years ago and began to teach in a technically oriented higher education institution, however, my lived experience with the ethos of speed went through a series of different battles. The institution (the university hereafter) where I am employed consists of different colleges and institutions, including the English Language Institute where I work. The university offers a wide range of associate degrees as well as bachelor degree programs in the fields of engineering technology, management, computer sciences, computer engineering, human resources, marketing, accounting, applied linguistics, and interior design. English is the medium of instruction in all the aforementioned programs.

One thing I observed vividly after moving to this industrial city was the interconnectedness between time, industry, business, markets, and the local community. I found that local industries have different work shifts, including morning, afternoon, mid-day, and night shifts. They also have their own recreation centers, clubs, and communities. Inhabitants of this industrial city often carry on interacting with their own professional communities even after finishing their day’s work. It came to my attention that it had become common to hear members of the local community as well as some of my relatives (who work in various companies in the city) saying that, for instance, X company has had a one-month shutdown (i.e., an occasion when certain pieces of equipment or machines in the factory had temporally stopped operating) and that everybody was now working 12-hour days to fix these technical problems as quickly as possible in order to keep the business afloat. This is because time is money for these factories, and thus acting quickly could help to maintain the factory’s production quota. When I visit my relatives I also quite often hear them saying “thank God our company’s shutdown is over. We need to take a break to travel to Makkah to see our families.”

When shopping in the city’s shopping malls, it is common to see different groups of people in the work clothes or uniforms of different chemical or petrochemical companies (safety shoes, overalls, etc.) pushing shopping carts and talking about shutdowns or night shifts. This led me ask myself, do these people not have time to go home and change their clothes and come to enjoy their shopping? Here, most people go to the mosque five times a day to pray, and it is very common to see people praying in their work clothes or uniforms of different industrial companies. When waiting in the queue at restaurants, it is very common, for instance, to hear two people whispering about tiredness, vocation, shutdown, and other topics related to the tempo of their working conditions. These and other similar observations kept a question alive in my mind: How has a state of affairs come about where time regulates, categorizes, and organizes the inhabitants and their day-to-day interactions to such a great extent in this city?

When I related the above question to the tempo of my own academic work-life, I observed that my university had also been affected by the wider socioeconomic fabric of the industrial city in many ways. Like other university professors in different parts of the world, my job consists of teaching long hours a week, sitting on various committees (e.g., the curriculum design and development committee, the professional development committee, and accreditation committee), invigilating exams, marking papers, working as a course coordinator, and attending as well as conducting a series of workshops on accreditation, program evaluation, and quality assurance. A few years ago, the university where I work appointed me as the dean (i.e., managing director according to the organizational structure of the institution) of the English Language Institute. During my tenure as dean, I was asked to attend a series of local and international training sessions in such areas as Business Acumen, the Director as a Strategic Leader, Balance Score Card Training, Finance for Non-finance, Business Execution, Service Excellence, Corporate Sustainability, Team Leadership, and Establishing Trust, to name a few.

In addition to the above, the university also supported me financially and logistically to attend a series of local and international conferences on Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) in North America, New Zealand, and Europe. I was also asked to benchmark the standards of the English Language Institute with those of institutes in the UK and North America, and at the same time establish partnerships with various other institutions in different parts of the world. Although the university was fully funded by the government, I was also asked to generate extra income by offering training courses to the local community. I was also given an annual business plan and key performance indicators for operating the English Language Institute. In our official bi-weekly meetings with the president of the university, among other duties, we (the deans of the various colleges and institutes within the university) were required to put forward new initiatives for our colleges/institutes as well as to report on the achievements and progress being made according to our annual business plans. During those meetings, the Saudi government’s new initiative, “Education and Work,” was consistently used by the deans of the engineering and business colleges to demand that the English language program and outcomes should be aligned with the immediate needs of the job market. The pressure being put on us (as deans) to align our programs with the needs of the industry was the thing I noticed the most. Another thing I observed from those meetings was that I, a language educator, was being treated as a managed professional/entrepreneur. As I demonstrate in later chapters in this book, English language education has for some time now been framed as a “commodified” and “technicized” skill that can be exchanged in the market economy (Kubota, 2011). The above practices clearly show a sense of urgency, active control, and an overwhelming tendency for the university to direct all its educational efforts toward the needs of industry.

Gradually, the ways in which English language education was being construed, coupled with the pressure for accountability, profit generation, efficiency, and effectiveness imposed by the university, increased the tempo of my work to the extent where the fragmentation of my time and energy became a serious concern to me. Over time, I found that, in addition to my teaching duties, I had become engaged in a wide range of tasks including chairing meetings, responding to countless email messages, preparing various report forms (e.g., the annual business plan report, the quarterly report, and the budgetary report), attending conferences and training sessions, and establishing “partnerships with international institutions.” In these working conditions, I also found that there was insufficient time for me to keep abreast of the current trends, research, methods, and pedagogies in my field. I felt guilty because I had fallen behind with my personal goals, such as publications, family commitments, and reading, because of my lack of time. I had begun to experience constant feelings of distraction, frustration, academic burnout, and other effects of the “short-term” culture. I felt that the boundaries between my teaching time, administrative tasks, and personal activities had disappeared. Indeed, as Vostal (2016) and many other scholars have argued,

the dramatic shifts of funding regimes prompted by neoliberal ideology, the efficiency imperative, output-oriented and performance-based research culture, increasing teaching commitments resulting from massification, pervasive managerial practices and the changing purpose of the university are commonly recognized as the main forces behind such realities.

(p. 295)

Many scholars also contend that the adoption of market-driven agendas in contemporary global HE institutions has left teachers with no quality time in which they can think, read, write, and research. Worse, it has now become difficult to differentiate between the rhythms of academia and those of commercial organizations, especially in the tireless efforts of both to generate profit (see, for example, Barry et al., 2001; De Angelis & Harvie, 2009; Menzies & Newson, 2007). Strikingly, my experience of the symptom of time-sickness (or lack of quality time) was further heightened by an email message I received from the president of the university early in the morning (7:47 a.m. to be precise) of July 22, 2015:

Dear Barnawi,

The following link contains a short but important article that I hope will be of help to you and your colleagues.

Why Higher Ed and Business Need to Work Together

https://hbr.org/2015/07/why-higher-ed-and-business-need-to-work-together

After reading the above email message and then the full article, which was loaded with allegations, including that university faculty members are slow and that they are a major obstacle to solving economic problems, in the first hour of my day’s work gave rise to a variety of feelings, including curiosity, anxiety, and fear. The article, published by the Journal of Harvard Business Review, put forward the allegation that although businesses and workforce skills and job requirements have changed and are changing dramatically, university teachers are still slow and unable to understand and respond to the fast-movement rhetoric of technological innovation, workforce requirements, and the evolving demands of industries in their curricula and pedagogical practices. The above allegations were supported by a study conducted in the IBM Institute for Business Value with a group of academic and industry leaders. The findings revealed that just over 50% of the respondents believed that higher education (HE) systems had failed to adapt to the fast-changing needs of students, and about 60% thought HE bodies were unsuccessful in meeting the requirements of today’s rapidly changing industries (King, 2015). Being slow in today’s HE context is perceived as impractical and as leading to the loss of money or sometimes even jobs. It is this type of education that sociologists like Ritzer (1996) describe as “McDonaldization”: i.e., “the process by which the principles of the fast food industry are coming to dominate more and more sectors of the world [including HE today]” (p. 98).

The message itself also made me feel anxious because against the background of my constant feelings of distraction, frustration, academic burnout, and other effects of the “short-term” culture that I had been experiencing as a result of the current tempo of my academic work-life, the president of the university had seen fit to send me such an article so early in the morning. I was even more disappointed when, at a subsequent meeting, he confirmed his position, commenting that we needed to “arm” our students with the necessary language skills in line with the rapidly growing pace of work in the fields of engineering, business, science, and technology. The president’s comment clearly implied the view of English language education as a product that should be consumed efficiently. During the meeting, however, I became afraid that if I immediately confronted the idea of acceleration, this would be interpreted as a form of rebellion or as my going against the interests of the university. The anxiety caused by the aforementioned allegations generated several additional questions at the back of my mind, including: (a) What are the possible risks of not going along with the current tempo of your university? (b) What forms of power and liberty do university professors possess to intellectually negotiate the accelerating pace of work currently operating in their teaching contexts? (c) As far as time is concerned, how do you strike a balance between your own interests and the interests of your school, or what Parkins and Craig (2006) in their work on “Slow Living” call the “time for the self and time for the other” (p. 47)? (d) How do we maintain our professional identities and our ethical, social, and moral responsibilities? (e) Do we (as language educators) experience time differently? (f) In the context of the accelerating pace of academic work-life, how can we enjoy what we are doing? (g) Is it not true that, as Mahatma Gandhi states, “There is more to life than increasing its speed”? (h) Should we not also revisit the value of “slowing down” in life in order to enjoy each day, listen deeply to ourselves and our needs, appreciate what we have, and reflect on our practices? It is the aforementioned personal, educational, professional, and institutional experiences that led me to explore the nexus between TESOL and the cult of speed in this age of increased neoliberal mobility.

2
Introducing TESOL and the Cult of Speed in the Age of Neoliberal Mobility

What does neoliberalism mean?

In recent years, scholars in different disciplines, including TESOL – Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages – have provided substantial analyses (critiques) of neoliberalism as a philosophy of economic and social transformation favoring free market ideologies, privatization, individualization, flexibility, accountability, efficiency, self-interest, secularism, consumerism, competition, and accumulation (see, for instance, Barnawi, 2018; Chun, 2017; Kubota, 2014; Giroux, 2009; Hill & Kumar, 2009; Block et al., 2012; Oksalah, 2013). These scholars have also presented detailed and nuanced discussions of how neoliberalism is “inseparable from globalization and imperialism, as a project for the restoration of class power, as a specific form of governmentality and as a new form of the state” (Dean, 2009, p. 51). The following excerpts succinctly capture the logic of neoliberalism:

Most generally, neoliberalism is a philosophy viewing market exchange as a guide for all human action. Redefining social and ethical life in accordance with economic criteria and expectations, neoliberalism holds that human freedom is best achieved through the operation of markets. Freedom (rather than justice or equality) is the fundamental political value. The primary role of the state is to provide an institutional framework for markets, establishing rights of property and contract, for example, and creating markets in domains where they may not have existed previously. Consequently, neoliberalism accords to the state an active role in securing markets, in producing the subjects of and conditions for markets, although it does not think the state should – at least ideally – intervene in the activities of markets.

(Dean, 2009, p. 51)

[Based on various types of free market logic, neoliberalism has] dismantled or relaxed many national regulations in favor of global rules encouraging or enforcing free trade and the global flow of capital in pursuit of the highest return; it has promoted the financialization of social relations, extending the logic of capital to new areas of life.… The effect has been to promote capital accumulation as a principle of societalization at the expenses of other principles and, although the public rationales for this (such are the virtues of free markets and competition) are false, they are nonetheless integrated into societal self-description and have real consequences.

(Jessop, 2012, p. 205)

[Today, n]ot only have nations with differing political histories embraced neoliberalism from China to New Zealand, South Africa to Sweden, and Chile to the United States, its apologists also occupy positions of strategic policy influence in the university corridors, media studios, banking halls, and corporate boardrooms of every metropolis.

(Grant, 2009, p. x)

On the basis of the philosophy of socioeconomic transformation described above, the very concept of “public goods” has been challenged in the name of strong private property rights, free markets, competition and accumulation, personal agendas, prosperity, and free trade relations within and between nations in the global market economy. Although the practices of neoliberal free market ideologies are to a great extent shaped by historical, socioeconomic, political, and cultural conditions, today there is barely a corner of the world that has been left unaffected by neoliberal capitalist globalization. In fact, as Barnes and Hall (2012) note,

The past thirty years have been a neo-liberal era marked by the opening of international markets, the intensification of market competition, and the growing influence of markets over the allocation of resources. In labor markets, liberalization has featured initiatives to reduce employment protection, to make part-time and temporary employment more feasible, to tighten eligibility and replacement rates for unemployment or sickness benefits, and to weaken trade unions. In markets for corporate governance, neo-liberal initiatives have reduced impediments to foreign direct investment, made corporate takeovers more feasible, and have increased the power of shareholders relative to stakeholders. In markets for goods and services, analogous initiatives have reduced barriers to trade, privatized public enterprises, encouraged the contracting out of public services, and opened markets to new competitors.

(p. 2)

At the same time, however, the ensuing crisis of global capitalism has increased both “government and consumer debt for many countries including China, Spain, Greece, Mexico, and the United States” (Chun, 2017, p. 1) as well as countries in the Arabian Gulf (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Oman), Africa (e.g., Sudan, Algeria, and Libya), and Latin America (e.g., Venezuela). Crucially, the ongoing crisis of global capitalism has intensified the incessant competition within and between governments and consumers worldwide. In addition, ethical, political, and economic commitments within and between governments and consumers in various parts of the world have become unstable (mobile) owing to the rapidly changing nature of their economic interests, needs, and aspirations in a hypercompetitive global...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 My lived experience with “time-sickness”
• 2 Introducing TESOL and the Cult of Speed in the Age of Neoliberal Mobility
• 3 Speed and neoliberalism in the age of mobility
• 4 Theorizing TESOL and the Cult of Speed in the Age of Neoliberal Mobility
• 5 Methodological orientations: TESOL and the cult of speed
• 6 The city of New York, TESOL teachers, and the mania for speed
• 7 A Saudi industrial city, TESOL, and the acceleration of time
• 8 TESOL teachers and the cult of speed in Canada
• 9 Dialogic investigations of TESOL teachers in the land of speed
• 10 Concluding remarks: re-conceptualizing slow versus fast
• References
• Index