Decolonisation, Globalisation: Language-in-Education Policy and Practice available in Paperback
Decolonisation, Globalisation: Language-in-Education Policy and Practice
- ISBN-10:
- 1853598240
- ISBN-13:
- 9781853598241
- Pub. Date:
- 07/04/2005
- Publisher:
- Multilingual Matters Ltd.
- ISBN-10:
- 1853598240
- ISBN-13:
- 9781853598241
- Pub. Date:
- 07/04/2005
- Publisher:
- Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Decolonisation, Globalisation: Language-in-Education Policy and Practice
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781853598241 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 07/04/2005 |
| Series: | New Perspectives on Language and Education , #3 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.85(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.45(d) |
About the Author
Peter Martin is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for English Language Teacher Education and Applied Linguistics in the School of Education at the University of Leicester. His research interests include bilingualism, bilingual education, language education, classroom discourse and language shift.
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CHAPTER 1
From a Critical Deconstruction Paradigm to a Critical Construction Paradigm: An Introduction to Decolonisation, Globalisation and Language-in-Education Policy and Practice
ANGEL M.Y. LIN and PETER MARTIN
The turn of this century has witnessed a heightened sense among language educators and researchers of the need for critical analytical approaches to language-in-education (LIE) and language planning and policy (LPP) issues in diverse contexts of the world. There are many recent important and useful anthologies embodying such approaches. The question arises why the present volume is needed, or indeed what new kind of insights or contributions will it make theoretically, politically, educationally and practically? Is it just another addition to the already burgeoning critical academic discourses on LIE and LPP issues?
As all good questions do, they push us to go further than just putting together a collection of regional reports on LIE and LPP issues in a range of postcolonial contexts. We endeavour to do more than that. From the outset, we are committed to both theorising and problematising issues in these contexts, to provide the reader with more than just an encyclopaedic walk through the uneven histories and developments of LIE and LPP in different postcolonial contexts. We do not want to provide the reader with an excursion like that of a cultural tourist (and in this case an 'intellectual tourist') – a neocolonialist textual journey into different 'exotic' temporalities and localities – without also raising thorny, uncomfortable questions about the political and educational dilemmas and the new subtle ways of marginalisation and collusion under new forces of globalisation. Fully aware of such a risk and trap (of providing just another comfortable, exotic cultural and academic tour) in embarking on this textual-political project (as all textual projects are simultaneously implicit political projects), we have contracted critical educators and researchers working in different postcolonial contexts who have a track record of not stopping at a comfortable academic excursion only, and who are committed to asking bold questions about existing social, cultural, economic, political and educational formations which in new complex ways effect new forms of educational, social and material inequalities under new forces of globalisation and global capitalism.
What stands out as a key distinguishing feature of this collection of essays is the attempt by the authors to link old colonisation processes with new globalisation processes, seeing the latter as in many ways a continuation of the former and yet not in a simple binary imperialism-resistance logic, but in new, complex ways that also offer new opportunities of collusion and interpenetration, hybridisation and postcolonial reinvention, ways that go beyond the essentialist, nationalist identity and 'two cultures' politics (see Allan Luke's critique in his Foreword to this book) that defined the earlier phases of decolonisation, nationalism and national culturalism in the process of nation-building in many postcolonial societies. In the following sections, we shall propose a framework to see how the different essays in this volume link together and what kinds of new insights they offer to us in current LIE and LPP studies in postcolonial contexts that will allow us to advance from a critical deconstruction paradigm to a critical construction paradigm which will offer not only policy and practice critiques but also practical policy, pedagogy and curriculum alternatives.
'The Empire Strikes Back'? The Global Spread and Hegemony of English Riding on New Wings of Globalisation
The papers in this volume cover an array of societies which are at different historical and economic conjunctures of their respective developmental trajectories, with both similar and distinct pathways. It is important that they are not seen as merely lying on different points of a singular, linear developmental pathway, as Western modernism might have us believe. Having said that, one has to note that they do, however, seem to share a similar moment in their respective histories: that in all their encounters with the West, now dispersed into the globe in various forms of global capitalism, global mass-media flows and global technological and communications penetration, English has often been perceived as an indispensable resource which many postcolonial peoples and governments seek for themselves and their younger generations in their respective socioeconomic contexts. This is often infused with a strong desire for economic development, technological and material modernisation, and human-resource capital investment for current and future successful participation in the new global economic order (that is, the desire to have one's cake and eat it). Such capital includes English communication skills, information technology, business management and commercial know-how and so on, and very often English comes in a package with all these desirable 'goodies', or it is the indispensable medium for bringing in and acquiring these goodies. How to make English linguistic capital accessible to more of the school population and how to spread English capital more efficiently and evenly across different social sectors in the society become important issues in critical (if not always government) research in policy, curriculum and pedagogy, and very often occupy priority places in national development agendas. The main initiatives (sometimes coming from government, sometimes coming from local communities or both) found in different societies to reform their former largely structure- and drill-based English curricula, to introduce communicative, task- and function-based pedagogies, to develop the kinds of English interactive/ productive competencies required of new generations of the workforce in economically modernising contexts are similar in their spirit if different in their particularities of implementation.
Thus, we see in India (see Annamalai's chapter) and Malaysia (see Martin's chapter) that English has returned with renewed force as a strongly desired (by parents) and officially desirable medium of instruction in both higher and basic education (for perceived needs of economic, technological modernisation and globalisation). In Singapore (see Rubdy's chapter) and Hong Kong (see Lin's chapter), exonormic English (that is, English varieties oriented to external Anglo norms, not counting Singlish or Hong Kong English) continues to be the single most important language for socioeconomic advancement for accessing higher professional education and the globalised, knowledge-intensive job market, and thus a tool of social stratification. In Turkey (see Reagan and Schreffler's chapter) and Iran (see Riazi's chapter), both local communities and the governments (albeit in different manners) recognise the need for learning English to a greater extent and the prestige and value of mastering English under new forces of globalisation (for example, a major state university in Turkey installing English as a medium of instruction in more courses to compete with private English-medium institutions; middle-class Iranian parents sending children to private English tutorial schools to acquire more globally marketable communicative competences in English which the public schools' old English curricula cannot provide). In South Africa (see Probyn's chapter and Brock-Utne's chapter), despite the post-apartheid constitutional commitment to linguistic diversity and multilingualism, research evidence indicates that this policy has not been implemented and, where schools' language practices have changed, the shift has been towards an even earlier introduction of English as a medium of instruction. In Tanzania and South Africa (see Brock-Utne's chapter), we see the painful cost paid by schoolchildren sitting year after year in English-medium lessons, often repeating a class, without learning anything. In Kenya (see Bunyi's chapter), we see how the policy of installing English as the medium of instruction from Primary Four onwards presents enormous challenges to the majority of Kenyan children and teachers, particularly those living in rural and poor urban communities, where there is little access to English outside school. The forceful, legitimate (and legitimised) 'return' (if it has ever departed, perhaps only temporarily, as in the history of postcolonial Malaysia) of English as a dominant language and/or medium of instruction in the education system to postcolonial contexts riding on new wings of global capitalism cannot be described simply as 'the Empire strikes back' – for this time the 'Empire' is both invisible and non-monolithic, as it is dissolved into the 'Globe' taking the form of various (sometimes conflictual) forces of globalisation, and is not necessarily one-sidedly against national and local community interests (as seen in the postcolonial governments' and local communities' growing desire for English for both national and personal interest, as described in the chapters of this book).
'The Postcolonial Puzzle'? Renewed Desires for English in Education in Postcolonial Contexts
In the Afterword to this volume, Suresh Canagarajah succinctly and vividly notes how the carpet has been pulled from under the feet of those non-Western countries that were undergoing the 'project' of decolonisation, by another 'project', that of globalisation. Whereas decolonisation entailed resisting English, globalisation 'has made the borders of the nation state porous and reinserted the importance of English language' (Canagarajah, this volume).
To understand the new desires, new phenomena, new interests and new hybrid identities in diverse postcolonial contexts, we can no longer use the old binary logic that characterises the old imperialism-resistance analytical model. Pennycook (2000) captures this point well when, with reference to Michel Foucault (1980) and Judith Butler (1999), he argues for a notion of postcolonial performativity, which means:
... first, viewing the global dominance of English not ultimately as an a priori imperialism but rather as a product of the local hegemonies of English. As Foucault (1980: 94) puts it, in the context of arguing for a notion of power not as something owned by some and not by others but as something that operates on and through all points of society, 'major dominations are the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations'. Any concept of the global hegemony of English must therefore be understood in terms of the complex sum of contextualised understandings of social hegemonies. ... but such hegemonies are also filled with complex local contradictions, with the resistance and appropriations that are a crucial part of the postcolonial context. (Pennycook, 2000: 117)
Under Pennycook's notion of postcolonial performativity, English is neither a Western monolithic entity nor necessarily an imposed reality, and local peoples are capable of penetrating English with their own intentions and social styles. English as appropriated by local agents serves diverse sets of intentions and purposes in their respective local contexts, whether it be the acquiring of a socially-upward identity, or the creation of a bilingual space for critical explorations of self and society (see Lin et al., 2002).
The debates revolving around the apparent puzzle of why postcolonial governments and local communities in many postcolonial contexts today seem to desire English with such renewed and unashamed enthusiasm, the phenomenon that we may describe as 'the postcolonial puzzle', can be tackled by recourse to the postcolonial theorists' discourses on postcolonial hybridity, performative agency, multiple subjectivities and new global identities, upon which Pennycook and Canagarajah's sophisticated analyses have drawn.
In the Foreword to this volume, Allan Luke points out insightfully that all research and scholarship, theory and practice is at once biographical and autobiographical. We cite Luke here as we wish to engage dialogically with him:
Reading through the essays here, brought together by Angel Lin and Peter Martin, I was both reassured and disturbed by the axiom that all research and scholarship, theory and practice is at once biographical and autobiographical. The choices these authors have made in theory and practice are indeed tied to their historical standpoints as researchers and writers. The decisions we make about how to play the pedagogies of everyday life likewise depend upon our historical positions and dispositions as teachers and learners. But as soon as we venture into the complexities of state, identity, politics and power that are and must be the contexts for discussions of language and education in the Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa, this is a bit trickier than 'finding a voice', supporting retention and opposing loss, or uncovering and serving the needs of 'the community'. Changing the web of everyday practices about us, intervening in applied domains of social science such as language and literacy education requires something more than identity politics, however necessary and powerful a starting point they might be. (Luke, this volume)
We would like to add a theoretical twist by responding to Luke's words. We agree with him that it is important to go beyond merely doing identity politics – that enterprise of finding and giving voice to hitherto marginalised groups. However, we also appreciate the fact that the writers and researchers in the different postcolonial contexts contributing to this book seem to be echoing similar voices – voices of the subalterns, for example, the marginalised children (and sometimes also teachers) who struggle in the English-medium classrooms in an English-dominant education system, those social actors confronted with the social stratification and selection mechanisms based on a mastery of English, university people faced with the dilemmas created by the perceived need for local cultural and linguistic preservation and the parents' overwhelming desire for global English. It would seem to be too much of a theoretical reduction to see the writers and researchers as merely trapped by old nationalistic or culturalistic discourses of identity politics or polemics born of personal, biographical histories, as yet uninformed by theories of postcolonial hybridity, peformativity and multisubjectivity.
So here lies both our theoretical and our practical question: Are there any alternative theoretical and political discourses and praxis which will allow us not to fall into the trap of old European, masculine binarism (the 'Empire-Resistance' binary analytical framework, the simplistic theoretical analysis as caricatured by 'the Empire strikes back' or 'renewed imperialism' discourses) while at the same time allowing us to analyse the new forms of marginalisation and new productions of subaltern subjectivities amid the new possibilities and opportunities of postcolonial hybridity, performativity and cosmopolitanism under new forces of globalisation?
We see the above question as a driving force for this book and for bringing out the unique contribution of this book to existing discourses on issues in LIE policy and practice in postcolonial contexts. Going beyond the debate between 'imperialism-resistance' discourses and 'postcolonial performativity' discourses, we have to find a way of understanding and exposing new forms of inequalities in education and society and new productions of subaltern subjectivities under globalisation. While doing critical education analysis we must also be wary of falling into the trap of doing merely essentialist identity politics; rather, we must struggle to study the new material conditions and to explore practical alternatives in LIE policy and practice.
(Continues…)
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