TESOL and Sustainability

English Language Teaching in the Anthropocene Era

Jason Goulah, John Katunich, Jason Goulah, John Katunich

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350115101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In the burgeoning field of ecolinguistics, little attention has been given to the ways in which English language teaching is and has become implicated in global ecological crises. This book begins a dialogue about the opportunities and responsibilities presented to the TESOL field to re-orient professional practice in ways that drive cultural change and engender alternate language practices and metaphors. Covering a diverse range of topics, including anthropogenic climate change, habitat loss, food insecurity and mass migration, chapters argue that such crises require not only technological innovation, but also cultural changes in how human beings relate to each other and their environment. Arguing that it is incumbent upon the field of English language teaching to reckon with such cultural changes in how and what we teach, TESOL and Sustainability addresses the ways in which discourses such as eco-pedagogy, the critique of neo-liberalism, non-Western philosophy and post-humanist thought can and must inform how and what is taught in ESL and EFL classrooms.

Part One

Foundations for Sustainability in TESOL: Cultural Perspectives, Products, and Practices

1

Earth Democracy as Empowerment for TESOL Students and Educators: Though the Crisis Speaks English, englishes Can Become a Commons Language of Sustainability

M. Garrett Delavan

California State University, San Marcos–

Introduction

Berta Cáceres received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for her decades of work in a grassroots organization in her Lenca indigenous community in Honduras that fought against illegal logging, proposed dams to power expanded mining, and land privatization resulting in displacement of indigenous communities (Goldman Prize, 2018). In her acceptance speech, she declared in Spanish “Our Mother Earth—militarized, fenced-in, poisoned, a place where basic rights are systematically violated—demands that we take action. Let us build societies that are able to coexist in a [just,]¹ dignified way that protects life.”

She concluded by dedicating the prize to, among others, “las y los mártires de la defensa de los bienes de la naturaleza,” the female and male martyrs of the defense of the bounty of the earth (Cáceres, 2015). A year later, she herself was assassinated. Honduras is one of the countries with increasing levels of emigration to the United States—and its TESOL classrooms—which Miller (2017) argues is at least partly a result of climate change and the ever-expanding monoculture of palm oil plantations.

If you talk to TESOL professionals about the ideas in this book, it is likely that many will respond with something to the effect of: “What does ecological sustainability have to do with me professionally? Why can’t I just let the science teachers handle that?” This chapter aims to ready readers to counter such responses and to encourage readers to think of themselves as discursive strategists. I hope to document and stimulate conversation on persuasive reasons—framed in accessible, democratized terms—to disrupt traditional notions of our TESOL professional identity toward one that will do something (different) about sustainability crises while adding English to the linguistic repertoires of multilingual students.

This chapter is a recipe book of possibilities for persuasion; it experiments with several new terms and combinations of concepts, hoping in the process to stimulate conversations that can go into more depth than space allows here. In the spirit of Fairclough’s (2010) fourth stage of critical discourse analysis (“identify possible ways past the obstacles” to “addressing the social wrong” [p. 235]) and what some have called positive discourse analysis (Macgilchrist, 2007; Martin & Rose, 2003), I ask readers to take stock of the discursive strategies that could most effectively impress the English–sustainability link upon the maximum number of professionals who educate English language learners. While I am in favor of the deeper root-metaphor transformations away from anthropocentric and Eurocentric discourse and thought that Bowers (2003) and others have called for, I choose to draw attention to discourse in a way that sees even small movements in thinking as potentially laying the groundwork for fuller transformation in due time. I argue there are multiple discursive possibilities that may prove more accessible and effective in persuading the biggest possible tent of TESOL educators to see language instruction as a logical forum for counteracting anthropocentrism and anti-posteritism, that is, discrimination against future generations.

This chapter sees discourse as a strategic resource for social change (Hardy, Palmer & Phillips, 2000), and it sees democracy as a key strategic discourse that may motivate teachers to address environmental sustainability in their teaching. Heeding Cáceres’s call that we “build societies that are able to coexist,” the chapter’s vision for a focus on environmental sustainability that does not lose sight of other, more strictly human justice concerns is grounded in Vandana Shiva’s (2016) theory of Earth democracy, which arises out of her activism in India opposing corporate globalization and affirming local cultures of sustainability. Recognizing the strategic value of educators’ familiarity with John Dewey’s (1927/2012) early (although flawed) advocacy for democratic public education, this chapter seeks to recover the pragmatist, Deweyan ideal of the great community, a public that is called into being by a need to confront shared problems with the best available evidence. I follow Goulah’s (2018) use of Dewey’s concept of “the religious” as key to articulating this ethical vision. I side with Dewey and others in questioning the secular–sacred binary, in asserting that (human) nature is such that a commitment to protect and sustain nature-bound communities great and small is always inherently religious—indeed, an act of a common faith (Dewey, 1934/2013; Hickman, 2009). Shiva (2016) reminds us that religious institutions and religious discourse do not always uphold this ethic, however. She calls for life-embracing religious diversity rather than destructive or negative fundamentalisms that lead us to ignore evidence of what the most ethical choices actually are.

After a deeper foray into this theoretical perspective, the chapter will have two main stages. I start by assessing discourses the literature has already offered—based on their democratic potential to unite publics around shared problems (Dewey, 1927/2012)—first discourses applicable to educators in general then discourses for persuading TESOL educators in particular. I finish by suggesting three further possibilities missing from this list of discourses for persuading colleagues who continue to see their work as apolitical or unrelated to any commitments to sustainability they may express elsewhere: (a) a narrative of the emerging environmental justice research demonstrating that minoritized language communities in the United States are exposed to more pollution, (b) a historical narrative that dramatizes the rise of the Anthropocene villainy that is to be met with justice, and (c) a protagonizing (heroizing) narrative that bridges students’ English-speaking identities with their other identities in empowering and culturally sustaining ways.

Theoretical Perspective

Discourse as a Strategic Resource

Benjamin Lee Whorf was the first popularizer of the findings of the new science of linguistics (Carroll, 1956). His research in the 1930s compared European and indigenous American languages grammatically, and he is widely credited with being the first social scientist to begin to assert that possibilities for thought are deeply shaped by the structure of one’s language and the necessarily cultural concepts embedded in its lexicon. Whorf’s claims such as that “economic behavior is conditioned by culture, not by mechanistic reactions” (quoted in Carroll, 1956, p. 21) heralded a linguistic turn—or cultural turn—in the social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century toward considerations of how power is exerted through language and how explanations for human behavior must ultimately come down largely to culture, which is inherently diverse and arbitrary. Historian Michel Foucault (1995) was a key figure in this cultural turn and he focused in on the concept of discourse. He argued that the ways in which professions like medicine and education came to articulate and apply knowledge in the 1700s began to exert a more subtle form of control over populations than ruling classes had formerly been capable of.

The approaches of Norman Fairclough (2010) and James Paul Gee (2014) have built on Foucault and informed much of the critical analysis of discourse in education. Fairclough defines discourses as ways of construing the world through language and other forms of semiosis (systems of meaning) that make the material world socially real, aligning it with the identity positions of speakers and reinforcing particular power arrangements. He demonstrates, for example, how discourse has operated in the increasing marketization of higher education. Gee sees discourses similarly, but emphasizes that they are principally ways of performing particular identity positions and thus belonging to particular discourse communities. Lewis, Enciso, and Moje (2007) build on this conversation by emphasizing the agency that individuals such as students from marginalized communities in the United States employ in navigating among these overlapping discourse communities and identity positions.

Hardy and colleagues (2000) review this same literature on discourse theory to lay out a mechanism of “discourse as a strategic resource” for individuals in exerting some agency—within numerous constraints—to change organizations such as schools. They argue that “by intervening in these processes of discursive production, individual actors hope to achieve ‘real’ political effects” (p. 1235). In essence, they theorize the minute steps by which individuals summon available discursive resources, target them to be recognizable for their audience, and occasionally make tangible social changes insofar as “concepts are successfully attached to relations and/or material referents and create specific objects in the eyes of other actors”; change can occur because “new subject positions [identities from which to know or speak] and practices” become possible and because over time “the accumulation of individual statements and practices influences the context for future discursive activities as prevailing discourses are contested, displaced, transformed, modified or reinforced” (p. 1236). It is in this same spirit of teacher as discursive change agent that Martusewicz, Edmundson, and Lupinacci (2014), in their excellent textbook, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse, Democratic, and Sustainable Communities, demonstrate that ecojustice education is about language and metaphor, about reframing issues by recombining discourses in order to catalyze differences in students’ thinking about the privileging of (certain) humans and the privileging of the current generation (anti-posteritism).

Yet true sociocultural transformation through discursive persuasion would not be possible if discourse were confined to the logic of the head and did not also include the feeling of the gut. Following Goulah (2018), I argue for seeing “humanity’s deep interiority, or the sense of spirituality and interconnectedness” (p. 452) as a way to conceive what really commits us to or lets us feel sustainability’s urgent call rather than just know it is something we ought to eventually get around to. The discursive strategies that we might effectively use to move one another toward sustainability, however, might be various: religious/spiritual discourse (whether it be general or specific to a tradition like Buddhism or progressive Christianity), climate science discourse, economics discourse, curriculum standards discourse, or whatever discourse gets the audience moving away from accepting the unsustainable status quo as a fait accompli. Goulah draws on Daisaku Ikeda’s concept of religious sentiment and Dewey’s concept of the religious as a means of capturing this aspect of human experience and discourse.

Although Dewey’s is often associated with an embrace of evidence-based, democratic, secular public engagement, he combined this with a critique of atheism in favor of “natural piety” (p. 49). In a series of lectures published as A Common Faith, Dewey (1934/2013) acknowledged “the ties binding [hu]man[s] to nature that poets have always celebrated” and argued that such a religious attitude “needs the sense of a connection of [hu]man[s], in the way of both dependence and support, with the enveloping world that the imagination feels is a universe” (p. 49). Dewey theorizes that religiosity (a) protects humans “from a sense of isolation and from consequent despair or defiance” against a universe seen as cruel or other and (b) “support[s] our idea of good as an end to be striven for” (p. 49). In essence, then, making the ethical/communal choice is always religious—felt in the gut rather than merely thought in the head—and especially so when it involves that which is beyond the merely human and other expressions of the parts of nature/humanity most akin to ourselves. Even when an evidentiary process, ethics that are gut-felt and not merely head-thought become religion in a fuller sense than when religious discourses are hijacked or perverted by reactionary leaders to justify particular power structures or obscure evidence that is unflattering to those power structures. The power structures that are synonymous with the unsustainable economic systemization of the last half millennium are an obvious example.

Earth Democracy That Strategically Recovers Dewey’s Great Community

Martusewicz and colleagues (2014) argue that Shiva’s (2016) concept of Earth democracy is the most robust view of democracy with which to move toward social justice in the Anthropocene, which we can take to have begun at least as far back as the coal-driven Industrial Revolution in Northern England and the concomitant enclosures or privatization of common lands.² Shiva’s Earth democracy is a powerful articulation of a unified but pluralist vision for local, sustainable communities that cooperate worldwide to resist the agenda of corporate globalization’s new enclosures and its patriarchal commoditization and destruction of the commons. Earth democracy centers on the production of food by small-scale farmers, who Shiva argues are able to produce more per acre as well as employ and feed more people more equitably in the process. Earth democracy rejects the chemical and factory model of the so-called Green Revolution that accompanied the neocolonial exploitation of the Global South by the Global North as well as rejecting the patriarchal fundamentalisms that have sometimes sprung up in reaction to it.

Yet Martusewicz and colleagues conspicuously choose not to draw on Dewey’s well-known articulation of democracy in and through public education. This is probably because Dewey has been critiqued by ecojustice scholars for working from harmful root metaphors of Eurocentric, anti-indigenous progress and growth (Bowers, 2003) and racist applications of his theories of education for social justice that never questioned the White supremacy and colonialism of the Jim Crow era in which he lived (Margonis, 2011). Despite these apt critiques, the historical earliness of Dewey’s thought continues to help explain these limitations as well as to keep a spot for him in the canon of early heroes of critical approaches to education (Colonna & Nix-Stevenson, 2015) and of poststructural thought ahead of its time (Pierce, 2012). Following Margonis (2011), I argue we can “de-couple Dewey’s [and others’] visionary pedagogies from the [problematic] language that limits their pluralism” (p. 436).

At the turn of the twentieth century, Dewey began to use the concept of democracy as an ideal form of social organization based on public deliberation over the best available evidence rather than dogmatic assertions of truth. At the core of his vision is a call for student-centered, inquiry-based, democratic pedagogy to build a problem-solving public of citizen-scientists who could more intelligently consider their collective habits. He argued that a great community could form among disparate social groups inasmuch as they were able to see that their common problems united them as one public. Dewey is worth reaching back to for informing Earth democracy because he articulated a vision for democratically confronting the problems of the industrial age, a proto-environmentalism where individual humans are seen as part of a broader biological and ethical world. In a key text, The Public and Its Problems, Dewey (1927/2012) critiques humanity’s

enormously enlarged control of physical energies without any corresponding ability to control [themselves and their] own affairs … generating enslavement of men, women and children in factories in which they are animated machines to tend inanimate machines. It has maintained sordid slums, flurried and discontented careers, grinding poverty and luxurious wealth, brutal exploitation of nature and man in times of peace and high explosives and noxious gases in times of war. (p. 175)

After the Second World War, of course, this clear line between peacetime and war became increasingly blurred: so-called peace through prosperity now relies on constant explosions and noxious gases.

We have already seen how Dewey (193...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Foreword by Suresh Canagarajah
• Introduction: TESOL and Sustainability
• Part 1 Foundations for Sustainability in TESOL: Cultural Perspectives, Products, and Practices
• Part 2 Climate Change and Place as TESOL Curriculum and Pedagogy
• Coda: The Incommensurability of English Language Pedagog[uer]y and Sustainability—Spirits and Protein
• Index
• Imprint