Imagined Communities and Educational Possibilities

A Special Issue of the journal of Language, Identity, and Education

Yasuko Kanno, Bonny Norton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781138146518
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136507502
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Imagined Communities and Educational Possibilities focuses on three main themes: imaged communities expand the range of possible selves, technological advances in the last two decades have had a significant impact on what is possible to imagine, and imagination at even the most personal level is related to social ideologies and hegemonies. The diverse studies in this issue demonstrate convincingly that learners and teachers are capable of imagining the world as different from prevailing realities. Moreover, time and energy can be invested to strive for the realization of alternative visions of the future. Research in this special issue suggests that investment in such imagined communities offers intriguing possibilities for social and educational change.

“I Never Knew I Was a Bilingual”: Reimagining Teacher Identities in TESOL

Aneta Pavlenko

Temple University

This study examines imagined professional and linguistic communities available to preservice and in-service English as a second language and English as a foreign language teachers enrolled in one TESOL program. A discursive analysis of the students’ positioning in their linguistic autobiographies suggests that the traditional discourse of linguistic competence positions students as members of one of two communities, native speakers or non-native speakers/L2 learners. The analysis also suggests that contemporary theories of bilingualism and second language acquisition, in particular Cook’s (1992, 1999) notion of multicompetence, open up an alternative imagined community, that of multicompetent, bilingual, and multilingual speakers. This option allows some teachers to construe themselves and their future students as legitimate L2 users rather than as failed native speakers of the target language.

Key words: autobiographies, imagined communities, multicompetence, teacher education, TESOL

In the past decade, the English teaching profession engaged in a lively debate on the status of non-native speakers (NNSs) in the field, pointing to numerous ways in which NNSs are treated as second-class citizens (cf. Braine, 1999). To address this problem from the perspective of critical pedagogy, Brutt-Griffler and Samimy (1999) conducted a pioneering study of a graduate seminar in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) where students, all second language (L2) users of English, were invited to examine the native/non-native speaker (NS/NNS) dichotomy, drawing on their own teaching experiences and learning trajectories. The authors’ findings indicate that although the process of empowerment is neither simple nor linear, teacher educators can help NNS students to generate a new sense of professional agency and legitimacy.

This article aims to contribute to the discussion of critical praxis in teacher education in TESOL by building on some aspects of the earlier work and by challenging others. I argue that current pedagogical attempts “to empower the NNSs” exhibit a number of problems. To begin, approaches that criticize the NS/NNS dichotomy while using the same categories may end up reproducing the oppressive social order, albeit in more politically correct terms, such as international English professionals (Brutt-Griffler & Samimy, 1999). Furthermore, akin to poststructuralist feminists pointing out that gender is a system of social relations rather than a “women’s issue,” I suggest that inequitable hierarchies are an issue that should be addressed not only within the marginalized group but also within the profession as a whole. As Pennycook (2001) points out, “empowering individuals within inequitable social structures not only fails to deal with … inequalities but also reproduces them” (p. 39). Consequently, I argue that authors who view the NS/NNS dichotomy not as a linguistic construct but as a socially constructed identity (Brutt-Griffler & Samimy, 1999) underestimate the power of linguistic theories to legitimize social identities. In this article I aim to show that Cook’s (1992, 1999) theory of multicompetence offers a compelling alternative to the dual competence model. Reframing the notion of linguistic competence, this view offers new possibilities for critical praxis in TESOL.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

My view of critical pedagogy draws on feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial advances in the field (Luke & Gore, 1992; Pavlenko, in press; Pennycook, 1999, 2001; Stanton & Stewart, 1995), which distance themselves from the modernist liberalism and emancipatory assuredness of the earlier leftist pedagogies, question the notion of empowerment, fundamental to the work of Paolo Freire and Ira Shor, and urge teachers to examine their own assumptions and to problematize their own everyday practices. One important aspect of poststructuralist critical pedagogy is engagement with imagination (Pennycook, 2001). To theorize this engagement, I draw on the work of three scholars not commonly associated with critical pedagogy—Vygotsky (1978), Anderson (1991), and Wenger (1998)—as well as on the work of Norton (2000, 2001), who brought the notion of imagination into the field of TESOL.

These four scholars focus on different but highly complementary functions of imagination. For Vygotsky (1978), imagination is extremely important as a new psychological function, which children master in the process of play. He argues that developing imagination allows children to acquire rule-based behaviors and to achieve better self-regulation and greater control over the world around them. Thus, he sees play, based on imagination, as creating a zone of proximal development for the child (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 102) and providing a wider background for changes in his or her needs and consciousness. In his view, imagination, linked to development of learner’s consciousness, acquires an important educational function.

Anderson (1991), who coined the term imagined communities, provides the social context for the work of imagination and argues that imagination takes place on a societal and not just on an individual level, in the form of ideologies of nationhood. In his analysis, the invention of printing technology acquired an especially important role as a way to influence public imagination and to aid in the creation of nation-states, which he sees as imagined communities “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (p. 6). For Anderson (1991), then, imagination is a way to appropriate meanings and create new national identities; as such it has important ideological and identitary functions.

Wenger’s (1998) situated learning theory expands Anderson’s view of imagined communities to any community of practice an individual may want to seek entrance to. In his view, imagination is a distinct form of belonging to a particular community of practice and a way in which individuals locate themselves and others in the world and include in their identities “other meanings, other possibilities, other perspectives” (p. 178). In this perspective, imagination plays both an educational and an identitary function.

Norton’s (2000, 2001) work firmly connected the notions of imagination and imagined communities with the processes of L2 learning and use and with classroom practice. Norton (2001) shows that at times L2 learners are most uncomfortable speaking to people they see as members of—or gatekeepers to—imagined communities they are trying to enter. Thus, their behaviors and choices are linked to their investment in particular imagined communities. For Norton (2000, 2001) imagination plays both an educational and an identitary function: She argues that if we do not acknowledge the imagined communities of the learners, we may exacerbate their nonparticipation and impact their learning trajectories in negative ways.

Consequently, my discussion will not deal with the concept of imagination as a whole but focus on the nexus of the three functions identified above: ideological, identitary, and educational. The ideological function allows us to consider imagination not as a personal attribute but as a terrain of struggle between different and often incompatible ideologies of language and identity in particular sociohistoric contexts. The identitary function allows us to view appropriation of newly imagined identities as an important aspect of a learning trajectory, which transforms apprentices or peripheral community members into legitimate participants. And the educational function underscores the need for teacher education to offer identity options that would allow teachers to imagine themselves and others as legitimate members of professional communities. It is within this framework that I posit questions that have not yet been sufficiently addressed in the scholarship on critical praxis in TESOL: How are the students’ imagined communities linked to their perceived status in the profession? How can critical praxis engage the students imagination and broaden their options?

RESEARCH DESIGN

Data Collection Method

To gain insights into ways in which preservice teachers imagine their linguistic and professional memberships, I appeal to linguistic autobiographies, a data collection method shown as fruitful in previous research in teacher education (Brutt-Griffler & Samimy, 1999; Okawa, 2000). The autobiographies were collected from two different cohorts of MATESOL students in a large urban university. Both groups were enrolled in a Second Language Acquisition (SLA) class in the spring of 2000 and in the spring of 2001. As part of their course requirements all students had to submit a linguistic autobiography reflecting their current understanding of second language teaching and learning. This assignment was worded in the syllabus in the following way: “Write an autobiographic essay which reflects upon your own language learning and teaching history linking it to concepts and issues discussed in this class (approximately 5 pages).” At no point were the students explicitly told to write about the NS/NNS dichotomy, the theory of multicompetence, or their own and others linguistic and social identities. At the end of the semester, long after the essays had been graded and given back to students, volunteers were asked to return the essays to create the data corpus for the study. All of the students chose to participate in the study and signed appropriate consent forms. The data collected this way has a number of advantages and disadvantages. Although it lacks the richness of the data collected through triangulation of observations, interviews, and discussions, it allows the researcher to examine discourses of language and identity, or imagined communities, the students draw on when not explicitly asked to reflect on nativeness or linguistic membership.

Participants

Forty-four students participated in the study, 34 women and 10 men, between the ages of 22 and 78. The group was extremely diverse ethnically, racially, and linguistically. Twenty-four among the 44 participants were Americans, 2 of them Puerto Ricans. The other 20 included 14 Koreans, 2 Japanese, 2 Chinese students, as well as 1 student from India and 1 from Albania. Some of the L2 users, in particular students from China and India, were multilingual. Among the 24 Americans, most were also multilingual and multicultural, with competencies in a variety of languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian, Thai, and Somali. All of the students had previous teaching experience, mostly teaching English as a foreign or second language; a few also taught French and Spanish. All of the Americans have traveled abroad and many lived and worked in non-English speaking countries, including Switzerland, Kenya, Thailand, and Palestine.

Data Analysis

The narratives in the corpus were analyzed within the framework of discursive positioning developed by Davies and Harré (1990) and Harré and Langenhove (1999). The term discourse refers here to a way of organizing knowledge through linguistic resources and practices, or, in other words, to a concatenation of terms and metaphors drawn on systematically to characterize and evaluate actions and events from a particular perspective (Potter & Wetherell, 1987, p. 138). Positioning, following Davies and Harré (1990), refers to the process by which individuals are situated as recognizable and observably coherent participants in story lines.

Of particular importance for this analysis are two sets of linguistic means. The first, typically seen as reflexive or self-positioning, encompasses lexical choices made by individuals when describing themselves as former, present, or future members of particular groups. An analysis of reflexive positioning patterns illuminates people’s cultural beliefs and allows us to see which identities are available for appropriation to individuals in a particular time and place. In this study it shows which imagined communities TESOL students draw on in their linguistic autobiographies. The second set of linguistic means involves changes in tense and aspect and change-of-state verbs, the use of which signals perceived changes in linguistic and social memberships. Paying attention to identity terms linked to change-of-state verbs allows me to pinpoint instances of repositioning with regard to particular communities.

RESULTS

To contextualize the results of the study, I start out by outlining the structure and the goals of the TESOL program in question. The program consists of six core and two elective courses taught by two full-time, tenure-track faculty members who share a commitment to linguistic diversity and social justice and aim to challenge the monolingual bias of the profession and to offer the students a complex and nuanced understanding of multilingualism, second language learning, and linguistic diversity through readings (e.g., Baker, 1996; Braine, 1999; Heller, 1999; Lippi-Green, 1997; McKay & Hornberger, 1996), discussions, group and individual projects, service-learning opportunities, and numerous professional events and conferences. In the SLA class in question the students read and discussed recent articles, which: (a) challenge the monolingual bias in SLA and offer the notion of multicompetence as an alternative to the dual competence model of linguistic proficiency (Cook, 1992, 1999; Kachru, 1994; Sridhar, 1994); (b) point to the unstable nature of first language (L1), or the so-called native-speaker’s competence and examine L1 loss and L2 influence on L1 (Pavlenko, 2000; Tao & Thompson, 1991; Waas, 1997); (c) challenge the standard English ideology and highlight linguistic and cultural diversity (Bailey, 1997; Cortazzi & Jin, 1996); and (d) argue for the critical role of identity in the process of second language learning (Norton Peirce, 1995; Pavlenko, 1998; Siegal, 1996). In the spring of 2000, the students attended Bonny Norton’s invited lecture on imagined communities, and in the spring of 2001 a lecture by Monica Heller on commodification of bilingualism in Canada.

Preliminary content analysis of students’ autobiographies demonstrated that not all of the students engaged with the NS/NNS dichotomy. Thirty students discussed the dichotomy or at least made references to “native-speakerness”; the other 14 linked their linguistic trajectories to the critical period hypothesis, first language transfer, or communicative competence. Among the 30 students, 12 (out of 24) were Americans and 18 (out of 20) international students. It is not surprising that the dichotomy engaged many more international students than American students. For them it had tremendous personal relevance: It was their competence and professional legitimacy as Englis has a foreign language (EFL) and English as a secong language (ESL) teachers that were oftentimes challenged by colleagues and students alike (cf. Braine, 1999). In contrast, most Americans were or were planning to be teaching their native language. As will be shown below, it was mainly Americans whose professional careers and personal trajectories were linked to foreign languages, who paid more attention to the dichotomy and surrounding debates. Furthermore, only 6 of the 30 respondents were men. Whereas this predominance of female voices mirrors the demographics of the classroom, it may also be indicative of women’s heightened sensitivity to the issues of public voice and authority (Pavlenko, 2001).

The 30 narratives were analyzed from the perspective of discursive positioning. This analysis demonstrated that the students drew on two alternative discourses of language and identity that offered them three imagined communities in which they sought and claimed membership: (a) native speaker community, (b) non-native speaker/L2 learner community, and (c) multilingual/L2 user community. Below I show that the students’ views of themselves, their relationship with the L2 and their own professional legitimacy differed depending on what community they decided to invest in. I also argue ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Contents
• Copyright Page
• Imagined Communities and Educational Possibilities Introduction
• “I Never Knew I Was a Bilingual” Reimagining Teacher Identities in TESOL
• Accessing Imagined Communities Through Multilingualism and Immersion Education
• Imagined Communities, School Visions, and the Education of Bilingual Students in Japan
• The Imagined Communities of English Language Learners in a Pakistani School
• Teaching Culture Imagined Communities and National Fantasies in the O. J. Simpson Case
• Imagining a Monocultural Community Racialization of Cultural Practice in Educational Discourse