ELT, Gender and International Development
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ELT, Gender and International Development

Myths of Progress in a Neocolonial World

Roslyn Appleby

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ELT, Gender and International Development

Myths of Progress in a Neocolonial World

Roslyn Appleby

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About This Book

For believers in the power of English, language as aid can deliver the promise of a brighter future; but in a neocolonial world of international development, a gulf exists between belief and reality. Rich with echoes of an earlier colonial era, this book draws on the candid narratives of white women teachers, and situates classroom practices within a broad reading of the West and the Rest. What happens when white Western men and women come in to rebuild former colonies in Asia? How do English language lessons translate, or disintegrate, in a radically different world? How is English teaching linked to ideas of progress? This book presents the paradoxes of language aid in the twenty-first century in a way that will challenge your views of English and its power to improve the lives of people in the developing world.

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Year
2010
ISBN
9781847694829

Part 1
Understanding English Language Teaching in Development

Chapter 1
Models of Development and English Language Teaching

The teachers’ narratives at the heart of this book are about their work as English language teachers in international development programs. To see how the teachers’ experiences are shaped within broader political and professional discourses, in this chapter I outline, in broad terms, different paradigms or ways of understanding development, ways of understanding gender in development, and ways of understanding the spread of English language as aspects of development work. In the later part of the chapter, I discuss in more detail the professional practices of English language teaching, explore the distinction between functional and critical approaches, and raise pertinent questions regarding the adoption of appropriate pedagogies for language teaching in development.

Models of International Development

The inception of the development age was concurrent with the post-World War II processes of reconstruction and decolonisation, and set a new international agenda on the basis of a world divided into ‘developed’ (First World) and ‘undeveloped’ (Third World) nations. The new global organisation, attuned to the economic interests of the USA (Rist, 2002), and in part aimed at the containment of communism (in the Second World), opened up markets from the dismantling of colonial empires and, in many ways, perpetuated the interests and hierarchies of colonialism. Colonial expenditure that had been aimed at expanding the trade opportunities of colonial powers gave way to financial investments referred to as aid, and tended to be concentrated in countries where donors had strategic political or past colonial connections. Previously colonised countries tended to be viewed as lacking the means to modernise and develop, thus justifying the need for the First World’s ongoing intervention in ‘less advanced’ nations in the form of economic assistance and the transfer of modern scientific and technical knowledge (Escobar, 2004; Kingdon, 1999).
In broad terms, development means the planned process of change intended to improve the material and social conditions of life for people and states outside the wealthy, industrialised world (Kingsbury, 2004a). However, development remains a highly contentious term, and there is much disagreement at all levels as to its meaning, the nature of the problems to be solved, and the selection of appropriate remedies. The primary focus on economic growth in the early postwar period has shifted over succeeding decades, and development has expanded to encompass a range of meanings and priorities. Goals related to improved governance, health, equity, democratisation, and environmental protection now sit alongside economic measures of development. In the following discussion, different ways of thinking about international development are represented, for the sake of simplicity, in three broad categories, which are then mapped against different ways of viewing gender and English as an international language, with these two elements representing important aspects of many development programmes. The models or paradigms described here are intended as a broad overview, and do not represent complete, or discrete, ways of approaching either development or the spread of English language. My aim here is not to present a conclusive definition of development, nor an exhaustive accounts of shifts in development theory, but rather to consider the broader discourses that influence the ways in which language teachers understand their work in development enterprises.
Three broad categories that have been influential in understanding the processes and ideologies of international development are described here as modernisation, dependency and alternative development. Each of these broad frameworks is associated with particular approaches to education, language and literacy.

Modernisation discourses of development

The dominant paradigm of development established in the early postwar years depicts the developing countries of the Third World as following a pre-established pattern of economic, political and social change in order to ameliorate poverty and achieve progress towards the material standards of living attained in developed, First World nations. In the era of decolonisation, modernisation offered an apolitical justification for why some nations were rich and others poor, identified the transition from traditional to modern societies as the key to progress, and proposed a set of planned interventions to achieve that transition (Fiedrich & Jellema, 2003: 40).
Economic growth, stimulated by capital investments, has for the most part been central to the modernisation theory that continues to pervade mainstream development thinking, and is designed to move societies ‘on a linear path from [traditional] subsistence agricultural systems to industrialized economies and market production’ (Visvanathan, 1997: 6). In the early postwar decades, the work of Rostow (1960) in describing the stages of growth that would lead traditional societies towards economic maturity and mass consumption led to a belief that every country would follow the path to prosperity mapped by developed nations. Development in this sense is seen as synonymous with modernisation, a process that includes not only progress towards industrialisation, the inculcation of economic and organisational efficiency, and the establishment of formal political institutions, but also the adoption of ‘modern’ attitudes and behaviours in relation to education, health and employment.
Integral to this model of development is the view, held by most donor countries and international agencies, that the only workable paradigm for development is the normative, externally established, Western model of advanced, globally integrated market economies. This view has been strengthened since the collapse of the ‘Second World’ and the end of the Cold War, which has left only one broad mainstream blueprint for development being promoted worldwide (Kingsbury, 2004a). Recent decades have seen purely economic measures of development expanded to include concern with the elimination or reduction of inequality and unemployment, and improvements in health, education and environmental sustain-ability (Todaro & Smith, 2009). Nevertheless, in mainstream institutional discourses, these factors have remained firmly within, and contributing to, the framework of economic growth (Rist, 2008). Sidestepping potentially unpalatable political and ideological issues that might arise from an externally imposed model of economic development, poverty is usually approached as a series of technical problems for which technical solutions may be offered by more developed economies.
In the mainstream paradigm, the value of education as a means of human resource development lies in its contribution to ‘economic growth, sound governance, and effective institutions’ (AusAID, 2007: 5). This instrumental relation between education and economic growth was highlighted in the Education for All speech delivered by the then Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs at the end of the international decade of ‘Education for All’1:
In both developed and developing nations education is the key to growth. It is an absolute necessity if we are to reduce poverty and achieve development. It is, in fact, development’s most basic building block. Education develops knowledge and skills and contributes to the strengthening of civil society, to national capacity and to good governance. These elements are critical in the effective implementation of sound economic and social policies necessary for the alleviation of poverty. Education makes further contributions to the alleviation of poverty through its impact on economic growth. Better educated workers are more productive and the accumulation of knowledge increases the rate of technological change – thus accelerating economic growth. Education and training are instrumental in ensuring the supply of a skilled labour force in ever changing markets. (Downer, 2000)
Prominent in Australia’s aid policy during that time was also the notion of knowledge transfer from the West to institutions of higher education in developing countries. These were seen as ‘conduits for the transfer, adaptation and dissemination of knowledge generated elsewhere in the world’, and thereby ‘contribute to increases in labour productivity and higher long-term growth’ (Downer, 1996: 11). From this perspective, education interventions thus aim to transfer skills, knowledge and attitudes for a more productive workforce, raising the level of income per head and thereby stimulating economic activity.
Contributing to human resource development, a threshold level of basic, functional literacy was claimed to be necessary for workers to maximise their productivity levels and facilitate economic growth towards Rostow’s ‘take-off’ stage of development and modernisation (1960). External funding for functional literacy, seen as a neutral set of decoding skills existing autonomously outside culture and society, became part of the modernisation project in the 1970s. More recently, developing countries that are seen to have performed best, such as the newly industrialised countries of East Asia, are those where economic growth has been propelled by heavy investments in education and training (Kingsbury, 2004b). In particular, OECD data has suggested that language and literacy education is ‘critically involved in making some economies more competitively successful than others’ (Lo Bianco, 2002: 4), but in the age of globalisation, support for a more complex level of literacy combined with technical assistance to improve employment opportunities has been identified as an essential requirement of educational development.
Over the 60 years of the development age, aspects of modernisation theory have been subject to ongoing revision. However, since the mid-1980s the influence in mainstream development thinking of neoliberal, market-based solutions has supported the rise of neomodernisation models that maintain a focus on Western style economic growth. In this sense, neoliberalism represents a return to the ‘the often unstated belief that there is one path to development that all nations can follow in a series of stages ... a simple movement toward modernity that is portrayed as so successful in the West’ (McKay, 2004: 61). Under this regime, targeted development programmes have been linked to market restructuring conditions demanded by funding bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that aim to remove ‘traditional barriers to growth’ such as government intervention (McKay, 2004: 61). By improving global capital flows and trade opportunities, these reforms purport to ‘extend the benefits of economic globalization’ and alleviate poverty by integrating developing countries into a worldwide, market-driven, economic system (Griffin, 2003: 790). In the mood of the times, although mainstream development programmes have incorporated notions of equity and sustainability borrowed from alternative development paradigms, the principles of the economic growth model have remained intact, alongside ‘value neutral’ functional literacy programmes focused on vocational or work skill competencies (Rassool, 1999).

Critical discourses of development

In a second paradigm, originally influenced by Marxist scholars such as Frank (1969), economic development and modernisation are thought to represent ongoing forms of Western political domination and exploitation, with development aid objectives designed to support the political, strategic, military and commercial objectives of donor countries. Development itself is seen as an essentially political process that involves local, national and international communities’ choices about the production, allocation and use of resources. This political interpretation of development suggests that the process of decolonisation continued the economic ‘war’ between the colonial North (the wealthy, powerful core regions) and colonised South (the impoverished periphery) over resources and markets (McKay, 2004).
The assumptions of the capitalist economic development model are said to contain an inherent tension between donor altruism and economic self-interest that renders impossible the goal of achieving a more just and equitable global society through the extension of economic growth (Rist, 2002: 214). Instead, continued development through a capitalist system of economic growth is said to reproduce spatial patterns of uneven development in favour of donor countries’ interests, a process that fails to achieve the broader goal of a more just and equitable global society (Harrison, 2004). From this perspective, underdevelopment thus remains rooted in historically generated structures of the capitalist world system and colonial dependency, with systemic inequality maintained by national and international elites who benefit from previous and present concentrations of power.
Critiques of development informed by Foucauldian discourse analysis suggest that a conflation of discourses on progress, modernisation and Westernisation has produced a ‘Third World’ where people are defined and measured by deficiencies and lack, thus perpetuating colonial images of the pagan ‘Other’ as backward and ignorant (Escobar, 1995; Spurr, 1993). In this sense, development is seen as an heir of colonialism and its dichotomous construction of Self and Other: of European superiority, and ‘Otherness’ as a lack of qualities associated with ‘Europeanness’ (Gillen & Ghosh, 2007). Economic growth models of development which aim to correct such deficiencies in recipient communities tend to present poor people as ‘objects of someone else’s policy and not as active participants in the improvement of their individual and community lives’ (Zachariah, 1997: 483), thus ‘reinforcing rather than addressing sources of discrimination and social exclusion’ (Mayo, 1997: 22). Such policies support notions of First World superiority and assume that foreign ‘experts’, who have identified the gap in skills or knowledge, can then prescribe and implement an appropriate solution based on Western cultural models. Moreover, the association of expert knowledge with Western science in the professionalisation of development enables the removal of problems from the political and cultural realms, recasting them in terms of the apparently more neutral realm of science. The discourses of development are thus seen to establish particular hierarchical social, cultural and knowledge relations that ‘set the rules’ of development practice, determining ‘who can speak, from what points of view, with what authority, and according to what criteria of expertise’ (Escobar, 1995: 45). ‘The rules’ also determine the way in which problems are identified and categorised, and what solutions are to be enacted.
In terms of educational aid, dependency is linked to the adoption of Western educational forms and models, the preferential use of Western languages, especially in higher education, and reliance on Western academic books and journals, practices that combine to make periphery universities consumers of knowledge from the centre rather than producers of locally mediated knowledge (Altbach, 1998; Coleman & Sigutova, 2005). Development assistance for education through these means has been critiqued as a form of cultural imperialism that has secured allegiance between national and transnational bourgeois elites (Arnove, 1980; Carnoy, 1980). Possibilities for resisting metropolitan forms of knowledge and influence are limited, because the types of educational development offered by foreign consultants and aid agencies are said to be compromised by their incorporation into the economic and political objectives set by donors. Within an ideological framework determined by an external funding body such as the United Nations, the World Bank, a foreign government or a large corporation, many agencies responsible for the delivery of aid adopt educational programmes and ‘specific pedagogical models’ that ‘implicitly articulate and underwrite particular views of social development’ (Rassool, 1999: 92). Reliance on international agencies and consultants in educational development can thus lead to an external form of governance and quasi-privatisation of the education system, with implications for the control of literacy provision, and for the status of languages through decisions about the language of instruction.
In recent years, a neodependency school has denounced the claims that development will be enhanced by economic globalisation, which is identified as a means of further expanding the economic and political interests of international capitalism at the expense of underdeveloped countries (Escobar, 2004; Petras & Veltmeyer, 2002). Moreover, critical theorists have argued that donor countries have profited since the end of the Cold War by an increasing association between aid and military intervention in conflict zones such as Rwanda, Sudan, Sri Lanka and East Timor (Addi-son, 2000; Clarke, 2006; German & Randel, 2002; Jeffreys, 2002). In these situations, aid is seen as a ‘will to govern’, to support donor countries’ geopolitical interests, and to instil order in areas of the globe construed as unstable, barbaric borderlands where underdevelopment is associated with threats to global and regional security (Duffield, 2002). In particular, since September 11, 2001, critics have argued that increased development assistance has been used as one ingredient in the war on terror, and an element in establishing a ‘new imperial’ order of ‘asymmetrical and spatialized violence’ and ‘territorial control’ (Escobar, 2004: 18) ultimately designed to meet US security and economic objectives.
A growing body of work is now emerging in regard to the role of educational aid in conflict or postconflict environments. After food and water, shelter and health care, education has become a crucial element of humanitarian response in emergency situations (Kagawa, 2005); nevertheless, in any reconstruction effort, tension exists between the drive for a return to ‘business as usual’ via speedy restoration of the education system, and the urge for significant long-term curricular reform as a means of ameliorating underlying economic, political and social causes of discord (Paulson & Rappleye, 2007; World Bank, 2005). The World Bank recognises that the process of reconstructing and reforming education systems is a means of ‘reshaping the future’, but questions remain about whose plan of reform and whose vision of the future should be implemented.

Alternative discourses

A diffuse range of alternative development theories has grown out of dissatisfaction and disillusionment with both modernisation and dependency paradigms. Alternative approaches have broadened the concerns of development to include ‘bottom-up’, grass-roots interests, and an emphasis on democratic structures of community participation, self-reliance and empowerment, social justice and equality (particularly in regard to gender), and environmental sustainability and alternative cultural values. Favouring local, indigenous knowledges, and influenced by feminism, these approaches have helped to challenge Western economic and scientific bias in development thinking and to encourage alternatives that ‘imagine other forms of existence’ (Rist, 2002: 244).
Proponents of alternatives known as reflexive development and critical globalism (Neverdeen Pieterse, 1995, 2001) reject the either-or dichotomisation of both ‘top-down’ mainstream and ‘bottom-up’ critical approaches, and present a complex view of development as a process of global–local interaction, rather than as a coherent, linear project (Harrison, 2004). From this point of view, some aspects of globalisation are seen as oppressive, but others have the potential to be enabling and transformative. Rather than focusing on oppression, exploitation, deficiencies and needs, such approaches aim to harness people’s potential to shape their own identity and destiny. As Amartya Sen (1999: 14) has argued, economic growth is not an end in itself, and ‘development has to be more concerned enhancing the lives we lead and the freedoms we enjoy’. In a complex reciprocal relationship, economic freedom can help to promote political, social and cultural opportunities, such that ‘freedoms of different kinds can strengthen one another’ (Sen, 1999: 11). Within this more complex picture, development is understood as an on going, contingent, trial-and-error process of integrating multiple knowledges in a larger framework against which a critical stance should be maintained (Craven, 2002).
Alternative approaches to development vary in their degree of accommodation or opposition to mainstream development, and their underlying approach to social, political and economic reform. A key point of difference arises, for example, in regard to the aims and means of increasing participation and empowerment: an emphasis on increased participation may, in some development domains, aim to incorporate marginalised individuals into mainstream social, political and economic structures; in other enterprises, increased participation may be envisaged as a means of overturning entrenched social structures by building alliances that transform the mainstream. In recent years, concerns have been expressed that participatory approaches have been co-opted into the mainstream and have promoted a model of incorporation into ‘disempowering agendas’, and, as a result, have failed to achieve meaningful change to inequitable social, economic and political structures at both local and global levels (Hickey & Mohan, 2005: 238).
Alternative educational responses to Westernisation in development are often aimed at the promotion of critical understanding and empowerment, the construction of new identities and, ideally, the creation of cultures of resistance and social transformation (Kingsbury, 2004b). Associated approaches to adult literacy aim to support participation in the democrat...

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