Color, Race, and English Language Teaching

Shades of Meaning

Andy Curtis, Mary Romney, Andy Curtis, Mary Romney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134815012
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The unique contribution of this book is to bring together Critical Race Theory and narrative inquiry and apply them specifically to a largely overlooked area of experience within the field of TESOL: What does it mean to be a TESOL professional of color?

To address this question, TESOL professionals of color from all over the world, representing a wide range of racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, offer accounts of their own experiences, responding to two related questions:
*Can you identify critical events or conditions in your personal or professional life that are the result of you being a person of color that affect who you are now and what you do as a TESOL professional of color?
*What have you learned from these events or conditions that have had a bearing on your life as a TESOL professional of color?

Color, Race, and English Language Teaching: Shades of Meaning is intended for researchers, professionals, and students in the field of English language teaching. The book is designed as a text for MATESOL programs and courses that deal with issues of language, culture, and teaching. The introduction presents a brief overview of relevant aspects of Critical Race Theory, narrative inquiry, and educational research. Focus questions for each chapter are included to help readers apply aspects of the narratives to their own experience.

Chapter 1
A Brief Introduction to Critical Race Theory, Narrativ Inquiry, and Educational Research

Andy Curtis Queen's University

The notion of being able to give a brief introduction to critical race theory (CRT), not to mention its relationships to narrative inquiry and educational research, reminds me of a seemingly unrelated book I read years ago. It was entitled Kierkegaard in a Nutshell (Van de Weyer, 1997), and was part of the Philosophers of the Spirit series, which included discussions of Hildegard, Pascal, and Socrates. On the first page of the introduction, Van de Weyer noted that Kierkegaard "was not an easy writer; his arguments are complex, his logic often tortuous and prone to unexpected leaps, and his prose frequently repetitive" (p. 9). In the same way that Van de Weyer attempted to present a brief but clear overview and summary of a great deal of difficult and challenging work, I have attempted here to do the same with critical race theory and its relationships to narrative inquiry and educational research. However, Van de Weyer had 90 pages in which to accomplish his task, whereas I very much doubt that any reader of this book has the time to work their way through 90 pages of CRT, narrative inquiry, and educational research. I have, then, attempted to be as focused and as selective as possible, which will, by definition, lead to omissions. But in return, my goal is to present a more accessible and more manageable introduction to these areas than most that I have come across.

Race

According to Larry Rowley (2004), "Writing at the turn of the 20th century, W. Ε. B. Du Bois argued that the defining social problem of the historical epoch know as the 'American Century' would be the issue of race (Du Bois, 1903)" (p. 15). Although this prophetic statement from Du Bois has proved to be true in many ways, as witnessed by the recent reopening of the scientific debate on race reactivated by the Human Genome Project (Abraham, 2005), it has by now become a global discussion and not just an American interest.

A small but effective example of the problems involved in attempting to define or even describe "race" was presented by Carol Lee (2003), in her editor's introduction to the American Educational Research Association's 2003 special issue of Educational Researcher on "Reconceptualizing Race and Ethnicity in Educational Research." Lee described the difficulties of naming the special issue: "I tried to move beyond this country's race-based classification scheme because to use any of the current terms inadvertently communicates the assumptions of privilege against which we argue" (p. 3). Apart from the fact that "race-based classification schemes" are no longer an issue only in America, Lee made some important points about the limits of language in describing people. She went on to write that had they deleted the word race from the title and "had we called this special issue Reconceptualizmg Ethnicity in Educational Research many would have assumed that people of African descent, for example, were not the subject of our inquiry because people of African descent are not generally viewed as an ethnic group; they are identified solely as a racial group on the basis of color" (p. 3).

In relation to studies on the relationship between race and school achievement, Mica Pollock (2001) described race as "the hidden subject" (p. 9), in part because of the difficulties of language and nomenclature she encountered in the school where she worked as a teacher and researcher, a place where teachers talked about "helping black students without calling them 'black'" (p. 5). Displaying admirable honesty, Pollock concluded with some soul-searching autobiographical self-study:

Those players who feel closest to racial patterns, it seems, often become most afraid of mentioning their existence. After two years around Columbus [school] as teacher and then researcher, I myself would hear a student coming late to class and anticipate she would be "black"; I regularly assumed that honor roll lists would largely display names that were either "Filipino" or "Chinese." (p. 9)

However, even when a concept is very difficult discuss or describe, it may still be a central aspect of the debate. Indeed, it may occupy that position in part because it is so difficult to define or discuss, as Henig, Hula, Orr, and Pedescleaux (2001) pointed out in their work, The Color of School Reform: "[R]ace plays an important confounding factor in the development of civic capacity. It would be foolish and counterproductive to overlook it" (p. 7).

In relation to race and educational research, Michelle Young and Jerry Rosiek (2000)—referring to the early work of Gillborn (1990), Sleeter (1992), Tatum ( 1992), and others—noted that "scholars in the field of education have focused on issues of race as critical to socially just and equitable education, educational practice, and educational policy for a number of years" (p. 39). Young and Rosiek went on to state that "more recently, a number of scholars have succeeded in moving the study of racial identity, including white racial identify, into educational discourse" (p. 39).

In terms of defining what race is and is not, an important publication was Lawrence Parker, Donna Deyhle, and Sofia Villena's Race Is ... Race Isn't: Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Studies in Education (1999). In this collection, the different contributors "capitalize[d] on the theme of counter-storytelling as a narrative structure that can be used in qualitative research methods to document subjugated accounts of reality" (Lopez. 2001, p. 31). The book drew on the experiences of Latino/Latina and Navajo communities in America, as well as those of First Nations and Korean American contributors. In the concluding chapter of Race Is ... Race Isn't, William Tate ( 1994) suggested that work in the area of race and critical race theory should "explore the lives, successes, marginalization, and oppression of people of color" (p. 268).

Critical Race Theory

The complex, tripartite nature of critical race theory was captured in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic's (2001) commonly cited definition, which highlighted the relationships among the development of an academic-professional theory, attempts to bring about specific changes, and the people making those attempts: "The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationships among race, racism, and power" (p. 2). In terms of the origins of CRT, according to Delgado and Stefanie (2001):

Critical race theory sprang up in the mid-1970s, as a number of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the country realized ... that the heady advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled and, in many respects, were being rolled back. Realizing that new theories and strategies were needed to combat the subtler forms of racism that were gaining ground, early writers such as Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado ... put their minds to the task. They were soon joined by others, and the group held its first conference at a convent outside Madison, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1989. (p. 2)

The rise of CRT was accompanied by the emergence of critical legal studies (CLS), in which legal scholars of color developed theories of race and racism that enabled them to "better understand how racial power can be produced even from within a liberal discourse that is relatively autonomous from organized vectors of racial power" (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 1995, p. xxv). As Sleeter and Delgado Bernal (2004) maintained, "although CRT began in legal studies, it has spread to other disciplines, including education" (p. 245), and since 1994 "scholars of color in the field of education have increasingly employed it [CRT] in their research and practice" (p. 245). This can be seen in the work of educational researchers such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, who in the title of her 1998 paper provocatively asked the question: "Just What Is Critical Race Theory and What's It Doing in a Nice Field Like Education?" The question may be especially relevant to the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages, or TESOL, because it could just as easily have been: Just what is critical race theory and what's it doing in a very- nice field like teaching English as a second/foreign language (EFL/ESL)?

In recent years, CRT has grown into independent subfields. One such subfield is LatCrits, which combines Latino/Latina studies with CRT (e.g., Gutierrez, 2000). Another subfield is FemCrits, which is based on critical race feminist theory (e.g., Ng, Staton, & Scane, 1995). One of most recent developments is Τribal Grits, which combines Native American Studies and CRT (e.g., Brayboy, 2001).

In responding to the first part of her own question on what CRT is, Ladson-Billings gave an answer that may surprise some with its openness: "Critical race theory begins with the notion that racism is normal in American society. It departs from mainstream legal scholarship by sometimes employing storytelling" (p. 7). The last part of the response highlighted the importance of narrative inquiry", whereas the next part of her response identified one of the potential limitations of CRT, because it is in its relatively early stages: "Critical race theory's usefulness in understanding education inequity is in its infancy. It requires a critique of some of the civil rights era's most cherished legal victories and educational reform movements, such as multiculturalism" (p. 7; see also Ladson-Billings, 1999; Ladson-Billings & fate, 1995; Rasool & Curtis, 2000).

Sleeter and Delgado Bernal cited William Tate's 1994 article, "From Inner city to Ivory Tower: Does my voice matter in the academy?" as "the first explicit use of CRT in education" (p. 245). However, Tate had published a paper a year earlier based on a "critical race analysis of the proposed national assessment in mathematics" (1993), contrasting advocacy and economics. What may have made Tate's 1994 paper a first was that it was an autobiographical paper, with the voice in the academy being his own.

In relation to the three main contributions that CRT can make to the development of multicultural education, Sleeter and Delgado Bernal (2004) identified "the third, and potentially greatest, contribution of CRT is its justification and use of storytelling in legal analysis and scholarship" (p. 247). In terms of how this contribution is made, Sleeter and Delgado Bernal went on to explain that "because CRT scholars view experiential knowledge as strength, they draw explicitly on the lived experiences of people of color by including such methods as storytelling, family history, biographies" (p. 247; see also Van Manen, 1990, for more on researching lived experiences). Examples of this can be seen in the work of researchers such as Adalberto Aguirre (2000), who has combined "academic storytelling" with CRT to present aspects of affirmative action from a sociological perspective (see also Aguirre 1987, 1995).

Within CRT, rather than standard narrative inquiry, there is "counterstorytelling," popularized by Richard Delgado, which originated within critical legal studies at the end of the 1980s (see Delgado, 1989, 1993, 1999). According to Sleeter and Delgado Bernal (2004), "Counterstorytelling [all one word] is a methodological tool that allows one to tell the story of those experiences that are not often told (i.e., by those on the margins of society) and to analyze and challenge the stories of those in power" (p. 247). In relation to education and counterstorytelling, Sleeter and Delgado Bernal specified three main applications and potential benefits: "building community among those at the margins of society, putting a human and familiar face on educational theory and practice, and challenging the perceived wisdom about the schooling of students of color" (p. 247).

As is the case with all theories, especially those "in their infancy" (see Ladson-Billings, 1998), CRT does not provide all the answers and it is not complete, as "some critics of CRT argue that it is an essentialist paradigm based on race" (Sleeter & Delgado Bernal, 2004, p. 248). However, much of the criticism of CRT seems to come from its use of narrative inquiry, which is discussed next.

CRT and Narrative Inquiry

In terms of brief incidents that might stay with you for some time after the event, Delgado and Stefanie (2001) offered four examples from inside and outside of class:

Think of events that can occur in an ordinary day. Achild raises her hand repeatedly in a fourth grade class; the teacher either recognizes her or does not, A shopper hands a cashier a five do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 A Brief Introduction to Critical Race Theory, Narrative Inquiry, and Educational Research
• 2 Dark Matter: Teaching and Learning Between Black and White
• 3 An Exceptional Voice: Working as a TESOL Professional of Color
• 4 Stories Through Perceptual Frames
• 5 My Journey Into Racial Awareness
• 6 From Learning English in a Colony to Working as a Female TESOL Professional of Color: A Personal Odyssey
• 7 Perpetual Foreigners: Can an American Be an American?
• 8 Becoming an English Native: An English TESOL Professional of Color's Experience
• 9 Musings of a Black ESL Instructor
• 10 The World Away From Home
• 11 English Teaching and Ethnic Origin
• 12 Not a Real American: Experiences of a Reluctant Ambassador
• 13 Out of the Safety Zone
• 14 Confessions of an Enraced TESOL Professional
• 15 Conclusion
• Author Index
• Subject Index