Power and Meaning Making in an EAP Classroom

Engaging with the Everyday

Christian W. Chun

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783092963
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Englisch

This book examines how critical literacy pedagogy has been implemented in a classroom through a year-long collaboration between the author (a researcher) and an EAP teacher. It details the teacher's introduction to functional grammar and accompanying critical literacy approaches to EAP, and her growing critical language and discourse awareness of power and meaning making in the classroom. The book traces her evolving classroom practices and addresses how powerful discourses in social circulation found their way into the classroom via the curriculum materials the students encountered. The main themes of the book are threefold: narrowing the divide between critically-oriented researchers and practitioners; how critical literacy is actually implemented in a teacher's classroom; and how people (students and the teacher) engage in and with the representations and discourses of the everyday world that include neoliberal globalization, racial and cultural identities, and consumerism. It will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners for the ethnographic and pedagogical issues it raises as well as its accessible theoretical frameworks illustrated by relevant classroom interactional data, mediated, multimodal and critical discourse analysis.

1 Introduction

This book is about a teacher and her English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes, and what happened when she began collaborating with a researcher over the course of several terms. Although she hadn’t known him beforehand, she graciously allowed him to observe her teaching, audio- and video-record her classes, take copious notes while doing so, and interview her numerous times.

I am the researcher she worked with for most of that year. I had taught English language learners (ELLs) for 18 years prior to working with her, and my critical pedagogy practices (Chun, 2009a) informed how I initially conceptualized and planned my EAP classroom research with another teacher. However, I hadn’t fully considered how my own embodied histories of critical EAP teaching practices, approaches and theories would be questioned and problematized when I stepped into this teacher’s classroom. As the dialogic collaborative process gradually developed between us, a praxis arose. The theories and literature addressing EAP pedagogy and curriculum, language learning, critical literacies and meaning making we read together, discussed and sometimes argued over found their way into the teacher’s attempts to implement some of these approaches in her classroom. What emerged from these developing practices further provided a basis for our ongoing shared reflections and discussions. We of course had no way of knowing at first how these dynamics would play out in her classroom in the way it did, but in the end this praxis proved far richer and more meaningful than either of us could ever have predicted. What follows then is the unfolding of this praxis of meaning making between us and the texts and practices we explored, the meanings made by her and the students in the classroom, and the ensuing pathways that continually redirected ways of thinking, seeing and engaging with the language, texts, discourses and representations of the everyday.

The Issue at Hand: What’s at Stake?

In chronicling the teacher’s practices and ensuing approaches with her students over the course of several terms in her advanced level EAP reading and writing classes, I aim to illustrate the challenges of applying critical theories and approaches to daily classroom encounters and engagements with language, texts and discourses. This will be addressed in part through exploring how particular discourses in circulation were taken up, mediated, co-constructed and recontextualized by the teacher’s and students’ making of complex meanings from texts, videos, discussions, actions and the world at large.

The EAP classroom is a site of power, agency and multiple meaning makings. These are practiced, displayed and realized in various ways and to varying degrees, depending on who is doing what, and the multimodal modes of social-semiotic resources including language, discourse and texts that are privileged, utilized and materially available. These include the institutional and academic texts used in the classroom, the power-laden forms of discourses constructing and circulating these texts, and the ways in which teachers and students choose to address and interact with these discourses by adding, layering, interweaving and/or resisting with their own lived and common-sense discourses. Their ensuing discourses in a classroom may reflect alignments to varying degrees with privileged and dominant meanings or equally may contest these, and they can also be complex combinations of both at times, even within the span of an utterance. As a site of power relations involved in the often privileged institutional and societal making of meanings, and the continuing struggle over whose meanings count and are heard beyond the immediate four walls, the EAP classroom is thus inescapably political. By the term ‘political’, I mean it in the dynamic mobile sense of what Janks (2010) defined as politics with an uppercase ‘P’ and a lowercase ‘p’. In her formulation, ‘Politics’ is what most people might immediately think of: governmental policies and debates revolving around socioeconomic systemic relations impacting us in material ways through conflicts over scarce resources, ongoing climate change, accompanying economic crises and collapses, and so on. In the case of ‘politics’, this attends to the ways in which we directly and indirectly imbricate those discourses and practices of Politics within our everyday lives and beliefs. This can be manifested, for example, in the way we might treat others whom we view as Othered, whether based on mediated notions of gender, racial, class and/or sexual differences. As Janks (2010: 188) points out, ‘while the social constructs who we are, so do we construct the social’. Politics and politics are inextricably intertwined, sometimes obviously and at other times less so, but they are both present in various forms via discourses and practices in the EAP classroom.

The increase of multimodalities in the officially sanctioned curriculum texts (e.g. Kress, 2010; Stein, 2008) as well as the outside texts often found in the same classroom – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and so on that are accessed by students on their laptops, smartphones and other digital devices – have helped to disseminate discourses already circulating in and through the classroom via the traditional textbooks, teacher talk and institutional texts. These need to be addressed as well inasmuch as ELLs face a daunting array of power-laden discourses they need to learn and engage with in their various academic, institutional and societal forms. Those who have had immediate and available access to the various resources of cultural, social and material capital have been able to decode, understand, embody, rework and rewrite these discourses to their advantage. But for those who don’t have access to these resources, then what? Will these students be able to speak back to the spheres of power and attendant meaning makings that help shape and attempt to fix the representations (Hall, 1997; Hall et al., 2013) of the world featured both in their classroom and outside texts? How can teachers address these representations with their students so that they can make sense of these discourses while learning how to make sense of the language and other equally important meaning-making modes that constitute and are constitutive of these discourses and representations? And what are the ways in which EAP classroom practices can facilitate deeper and more productive engagements with these texts so that both teachers and students become more active readers of the everyday featured in these materials? This book addresses these questions by looking at the teacher’s EAP classes over three terms.

Critically Engaging with the Everyday

Because the EAP classroom is a site of power, then critical approaches and practices can be seen as being appropriate to language learning to engage with the dimensions of power ELLs face in their classroom, school and society. But what do I mean by the term ‘the critical’, and how will it be used in this book? The Italian political theorist and philosopher Antonio Gramsci argued that everyone is a philosopher in the sense that they articulate what he called a ‘spontaneous philosophy’ (Gramsci, 1971: 323). As he viewed it, this spontaneous philosophy is embodied in three domains: (1) language, ‘which is a totality of determined notions and concepts’ (Gramsci, 1971: 323); (2) popular religion including folklore beliefs, superstitions and opinions; and (3) common sense and good sense. For Gramsci, the distinction between common and good sense is important because the latter term refers to the practical common sense meaning in English language usage. In contrast, ‘common sense’ refers to how people often hold sometimes incoherent and contradictory views and conceptions of how things ‘really’ are in the world or, as Hall and O’Shea (2013: 8) define it, ‘a form of “everyday thinking” which offers us frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the world’. It is important that this common sense is not regarded as or confused with ideological ‘false consciousness’ in the traditional Marxist sense (as Engels would have it) in that there is a sort of distorting lens that people must take off to actually see the world as it is, using true cognition (science). Common sense is instead ‘contradictory – it contains elements of truth as well as elements of misrepresentation’ (Forgacs, 2000: 421).

As such, Gramsci pointed out that common sense is not rigid or immobile but in constant dynamic transformation, as this composite logic of truth and misrepresentations contains a ‘healthy nucleus… the part of it which can be called “good sense” and which deserves to be made more unitary and coherent’ (Gramsci, 1971: 328). And it is these elements of good sense as part of the nucleus within common sense that give this construct a much more nuanced dimension than the use of ‘ideology’. This healthy nucleus of good sense contains the ‘apparently obvious taken-for-granted understandings that express a sense of unfairness and injustice about “how the world works”’ (Hall & O’Shea, 2013: 10). This is apparent in both the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party Movement in the United States, for both have expressed outrage about the growing inequalities in society but each attribute these injustices to different agents at times (corporations and ‘the 1%’ versus the government) due to their differing everyday thinking.

Thus, being critical means taking on this important idea that ‘common sense is a site of political struggle’ (Hall & O’Shea, 2013: 10) and, as explained above, political in both senses of the larger macro ‘Politics’ and the micro but equally important ‘politics’, both of which comprise our everyday lives. And inasmuch as the sedimentations of common sense allow ‘us to hold contradictory opinions simultaneously, and to take up contradictory subject-positions’ (Hall & O’Shea, 2013: 11), the classroom is an arena in which this is played out as both teachers and students take on different subject-positions as they engage with the discourses circulating in and through the classroom site. It is how ‘the field of discourse is constituted at any particular moment in time’ (Hall & O’Shea, 2013: 17) and how this relates to the participants’ meaning making that will be central focus of this book. And it is precisely the struggles over common-sense meaning makings by motivated power attempting to fix these meanings so that specific representations and discourses are naturalized (Hall, 1997; Hall et al., 2013) that calls into being resistance and, hence, critical practices and approaches. It is our desires for the ability, agency and, importantly, the spaces (Lefebvre, 1991b) in which to exercise and create our representations, identities, performativities, narratives and sense of not only this world, but of the possibilities that can change the everyday. The critical involves more than speaking back to power or speaking truth to power; it holds out and nurtures these budding good sense practices, beliefs and views that can sustain and, indeed, mobilize us in working to redistribute power relations, be they the social relations of production, gender inequalities, racial discrimination and oppression, or the policing of sexual preferences and identifications.

Accordingly, then, it is also productive to employ Raymond Williams’ concept of hegemony, drawn upon Gramsci’s work, that reverberates throughout this book. For Williams (1977: 108), hegemony relates ‘the whole social process to specific distributions of power and influence’. Hegemony is ‘not only the conscious system of ideas and beliefs, but the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings and values’ (Williams, 1977: 109), in effect saturating our ‘whole process of living… of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships’ (Williams, 1977: 110). In his view, hegemony should not be seen as ‘ideology’ in the false consciousness sense, and is ‘not to be understood at the level of mere opinion or mere manipulation’ (Williams, 1980: 38). Instead, he conceptualized it as ‘a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living; our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world’ (Williams, 1977: 110). Constituting ‘a sense of reality for most people in society’, hegemony is ‘a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming’ (Williams, 1977: 110). Inasmuch as hegemony ‘does not just passively exist as a form of dominance’ but instead must be continually ‘renewed, recreated, defended, and modified’ (Williams, 1977: 112), the task of being critical is to create counter-hegemonic discourses and representations in resisting, opposing and displacing hegemonic, dominant ones. Therefore, the purpose of any critical analysis is to question how to ‘grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative but also its transformational processes’ (Williams, 1977: 113).

These processes occur in what I will be referring to as ‘the everyday’ in this book. This notion is taken from the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s (1984, 1987, 1988, 1991a) conceptual framework of the everyday:

The everyday is ambiguous and contradictory.… It is lived experience (le vécu) elevated to the status of a concept and to language. And this is done not to accept it but, on the contrary, to change it, for this everyday is modifiable and transformable, and its transformation must be an important part of a ‘project for society’. A revolution cannot just change the political personnel or institutions; it must change la vie quotidienne, which has already been literally colonized by capitalism. (Lefebvre, 1988: 80)

Lefebvre’s concept of everyday life incorporates contradictory formations of daily life (la vie quotidienne), the everyday (le quotidien) and everydayness (la quotidienneté):

Let us simply say about daily life that it has always existed, but permeated with values, with myths. The word everyday designates the entry of this daily life into modernity: the everyday as an object of a programming (d’une programmation), whose unfolding is imposed by the market, by the system of equivalences, by marketing and advertisements. As to the concept of ‘everydayness’, it stresses the homogenous, the repetitive, the fragmentary in everyday life. I have also stated that the everyday, in the modern world, has ceased to be a ‘subject’ (abundant in possible subjectivity) to become an ‘object’ (object of social organization). (Lefebvre, 1988: 87)

Thus, ‘if everydayness designates the homogeneity and repetitiveness of daily life, the “everyday” represents the space and agency of its transformation and critique’ (Roberts, 2006: 67). The everyday is ‘not just a space of critical decoding… but also a place of active dissent from everydayness’ (Roberts, 2006: 67). My adopting of Lefebvre’s view of the everyday situates the EAP classroom as a nodal point of a network that stretches from the specific locale of the university program to the urban nexus of a North American city, through which globalized flows of immigrants, expatriates, refugees and international elite students are channeled, all embodying disparate and common cultural and historical lived experiences. These experiences are present in any classroom at particular junctures in history. How are the teacher’s and students’ daily lives that are permeated with their own lived values and myths re-situated and recontextualized through mediated social actions and interactions in an EAP classroom? Inasmuch as many ‘doing school’ practices can be seen as ‘everydayness’ in their repetitive and mundane drills and lessons, one function of the critical is the ongoing attempts to reclaim the everyday to be a subject rather than an object of social organization. How and why are the experiences of the everyday represented, reproduced, contested and reified in EAP classrooms?

The critical intervention in the everyday is to acknowledge these daily lives and re-examine the everydayness that constitute any classroom. Much of class time may consist of ‘drill and kill’ lessons, and ‘chalk and talk’ pedagogy; yet there is much that is going on in the classroom that may not be acknowledged or may be simply ignored: thoughts, daydreams, fantasies, imagination, feelings, desires and ideas. Lefebvre viewed everyday life in its alternative radical potentialities as ‘a place where creative energy is stored in readiness for new creations… a moment made of moments… the dialectical interaction that is the inevitable starting point for the realization of the possible’ (Lefebvre, 1984: 14). The aim of a critical EAP pedagogy is to transform the everydayness of the classroom into a space of creative, dialogic and dialectical interactions in order to acknowledge and articulate the imaginings of the possible.

My Own Trajectories Toward EAP Teaching and Research

What led me to become a researcher committed to addressing the cultural, social and political processes of English language education in society from critical perspectives? I arrived at this juncture via various roads. I grew up hearing stories of my great-grandfather’s and grandparents’ efforts and difficulties in learning English and adjusting to the US after leaving China in the 1920s. I witnessed the struggles of my parents, who were raised in Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side in Manhattan, to raise my sisters and me in Queens, New York City, and then later in the suburbs of Long Island. Growing up as a hyphenated American with the attendant, almost inevitable question, ‘Where are you from?’, shaped and directed my sense of cultural identity. At times, I was reminded by none-too-subtle remarks that we weren’t full members of the community with the rights and access that some, with their valued forms of symbolic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984), have seen as their sole province. It has been in this context of being born an American but not always recognized as such that I sometimes felt at times an outsider. This feeling informed and shaped my interactions with ELLs and international graduate students, who voice their own sentiments of cultural strangeness and dislocations.

One incident illustrates this dislocation. When I began my undergraduate studies, I met with a counselor to plan my course of study. I confided that I had trouble adjusting to college life and its culture, living away from my family for the first time, and the school’s somewhat remote cultural location in rural eastern Pennsylvania. The counselor nodded, and proceeded to tell me I should overcome these ‘inconveniences’ and ‘adjust better’ because, in his exact words, ‘you don’t want to end up being a coolie someday, do you?’ Too shocked and dumbfounded to protest this racialized labeling, I mumbled my acknowledgement and quickly left his office, never to return.

I first became aware of social class during this time. The majority of students at my undergraduate school were from upper middle-class and upper-class backgrounds, while I was from a working-class background, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Seemingly ‘middle class’, I grew up in a comfortable suburban home on a cul-de-sac with neighbors who were doctors, lawyers and teachers. There were the proverbial two cars in the driveway. However, my parents had not gone to college and in fact my father quit high school to join the US Army and never completed his degree. After finishing his military service, he worked at a variety of jobs including bartending before eventually becoming a manager and co-owner of a Chinese restaurant. So although he and my mother were able eventually to achieve a decent living that technically put us in the middle class based on their income level, their lived cultural, historical and occupational identities complicated this picture. Part of my parents’ lived identities involved transmitting to us their economic anxieties stemming from the precariousness of running a small business upon which our middle-class life was tenuously based. This anxiety was expressed in their admonishing me to join the ranks of the professionals, where presumably one could not lose one’s livelihood.

My parents’ identities and their interactions with my own sense of self illuminate how social class is not easily reducible to static categories such as income brackets, but rather is partly constructed from these very cultural dynamics of lived identities and experiences. This became increasingly apparent to me in college, and was highlighted in one of my economics seminars when a professor asked the class how many of the students’ fathers had a university degree. Every hand in the room went up immediately, with mine slowly going up to cover my embarrassment at the time, already acutely conscious about being the only ‘visible’ minority in this classroom. It was obvious to me that many of my classmates felt assured they would easily follow the path of their professional parent(s), whereas at the time I was far from feeling certain that I would manage to become someone my parents had never been.

Although I was an outsider in college based on both my race and class background, I was fortunate to have several professors who helped me make sense of these experiences through their introductions to critiques of political economy and cultural studies. It was my first exposure to critical theories an...