Language, Culture, and Community in Teacher Education

Maria Estela Brisk, Maria Estela Brisk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135155230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Published by Routledgefor the American Associationof Collegesfor Teacher Education

This volume addresses the pressing reality in teacher education that all teachers need to be prepared to work effectively with linguistically and culturally diverse student populations. Every classroom in the country is already, or will soon be, deeply affected by the changing demographics of America's students. Marilyn Cochran-Smith's Foreword and Donaldo Macedo's Introductory Essay set the context with respect to teacher education and student demographics, followed by a series of chapters presented in three sections: knowledge, practice, and policy.The literature on language education has typically been discussed in relation to preparing ESL or bilingual teachers. Typically, needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students, including immigrants, refugees, language minority populations, African Americans, and deaf students, have been addressed separately. This volume emphasizes that these children have both common educational needs and needs that are culturally and linguistically specific. It is directed to the preparation of ALL teachers who work with culturally and linguistically diverse students. It not only focuses on how teachers need to change but how faculty and curriculum need to be transformed, and how to better train teacher education candidates to understand and work efficaciously with the communities in which culturally and linguistically diverse students tend to be predominant.

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) is a national, voluntary association of higher education institutions and related organizations. Our mission is to promote the learning of all PK-12 students through high-quality, evidence-based preparation and continuing education for all school personnel. For more information on our publications, visit our website at: www.aacte.org.

1

Poisoning Racial and Cultural Identities

An Educational Challenge

Donaldo Macedo

University of Massachusetts, Boston

Rare is the university or college that has escaped the debate over multiculturalism and diversity. In some schools, the issue has given rise to extraordinarily volatile contexts where racism, anti-Semitism, antifeminism, and ethnic xenophobia characterized campus life. In some instances, the high level of xenophobia has so much poisoned the campus environment leading to drastic measures such as the evacuation of “scores of minority students from [the Trinity College] campus [in Chicago] after menacing letters, including one in which a threat to shoot a Black student was made, were received by at least three minority students” (Ferkenhoff, 2005, p. A3). This current incident is the continuation of the racial violence that characterized, for example, “At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst – scene of some of the worst outbreaks of racial violence on campus in recent years – an African-American residential adviser was beaten up by a White visitor and feces were smeared on the door of his room. Enraged, scores of black students rampaged through a 22-story dormitory. Police had to warn residents not to leave their rooms” (Elfin & Burke, 1993, p. 52).

In this chapter, I want to argue that, as we enter the 21st century, one of the most pressing challenges facing educators in the United States is the specter of an “ethnic and cultural war,” which constitutes, in my view, a code phrase that engenders our society’s licentiousness toward racism. Central to the current cultural war is the facile call for a common culture and the overcelebration of myths that attempt to inculcate us with beliefs about the supremacy of Western heritage at the same time as the dominant ideology creates other instruments that degrade and devalue other cultural narratives along the lines of race, ethnicity, language, and gender.

In the past two decades or so a large body of literature has amply demonstrated the advantages of multiculturalism, which range from greater cultural democracy to more harmonious intercultural relations. Ironically, although these studies unequivocally point to the underlining value of multiculturalism, Western hegemonic forces are imposing themselves with arrogance and disrespect toward the dignity and integrity of subordinated cultures that are still struggling to sever the yoke of cultural imperialism. Against a backdrop of Western cultural hegemony, conservative educators continue to demonize any and all forms of multiculturalism while many liberal educators have selectively embraced a sloganized form of multicultural and diversity education as a means to address the current dance of bigotry that characterizes education in most countries, particularly in developed nations. In this chapter, I want to also argue that before we can announce the existence of multicultural programs based on a truly cultural democracy, we need to denounce the false assumptions and naïveté that inform the present development of multicultural education and often lead to a form of “charitable paternalism.” For example, instead of developing a cogent multicultural education that could teach us about the arduous and complex process of coming to cultural voice, a process that invariably involves tensions, contradictions, fears, doubts, hopes, and dreams, many educators (including many liberals) usually reduce the process of coming to cultural voice to a facile proposition such as “we need to empower minorities” (a euphemism for the oppressed) or “we need to give them voice.” What these seemingly progressive educators fail to realize is that emergence of submerged voices almost always involves political clarity, pain, and hope. In other words, voice is not something to be given through an added-on multicultural curriculum by those in power; for if one has the power to give voice, one must also retain the same power to take it away. What is important to understand is that cultural voice requires struggle and the understanding of both possibilities and limitations. For most subordinate cultural groups, coming to voice represents a process through which they come to know what it means to be at the periphery of the intimate and yet fragile relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. It also means that the colonized becomes fully aware that cultural voice is not something to be given by the colonizer. The very discourse of giving voice points to the inherent power and cultural arrogance that are usually inculcated in the psyche of the colonizers as well as the colonized, particularly in those individuals who remain unable to decolonize the mind. Thus, during the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa, one may have heard, for instance, “the White South African minority government has decided to give the Black majority the right to vote” where “to give the right to vote” is linguistically and psychologically structured as a gift package. The true reality is that racial democracy in South Africa and elsewhere came about due to the persistent struggles of citizens who courageously resisted the oppressive yoke of White supremacy rule. We need to understand and courageously announce that cultural voice cannot be prepackaged as a gift. Cultural voice is a human right. Cultural voice is a democratic right. Against a landscape of charitable multicultural education, I want to propose that the failure of most multicultural education programs and curricula to achieve cultural democracy is primarily due to two fundamental factors: (1) the teaching of cultural tolerance as an end in itself and (2) the lack of political clarity in the multicultural education movement which, in turn, prevents even the most committed educators from understanding how the school of positivism that many of them embrace informs and shapes multicultural program and curriculum developments, often neutralizing the possibility for the creation of pedagogical structures that could lead to an authentic cultural democracy.

The Paternalism of Cultural Tolerance

A simple analysis would readily show preponderance in the field of multicultural education to teach tolerance. This posture is not only paternalistic but it also fails to critique its underlying assumptions so as to understand the power asymmetry that characterizes the constellation of cultures within which we live, particularly in the age of globalization. The emphasis on the teaching of cultural tolerance often fails to denude the privilege inherent in such posture. In other words, promising the “other” a dose of tolerance so we can get along not only eclipses real opportunities for the development of mutual respect and cultural solidarity but also hides the privilege and paternalism inscribed in the proposition: “I will tolerate you even though your culture is repugnant.” The teaching of tolerance that is ushering multicultural education into the 21st century has brought with it highly complex and challenging realities that are still ill understood but have enormous ramifications for a more humanized world. Not only has the teaching of cultural tolerance not dealt with the great economic disparity created by the widening gap between the so-called “first” and “third worlds,” the resulting gulf between the rich and poor countries has manifested itself in unpredictable immigration patterns that have exacerbated our already racist societies. For example, in the last few years, for the first time in human history, over 100 million people immigrated from one part of the globe to another. This exponential increase in immigration has given rise to a dramatic increase of racism and xenophobia. In France, the ultra-right National Front Party, headed by Jean-Marie LePen, has mounted an incessant attack on immigrants, particularly the Muslims from former French colonies. In Germany, there has been a significant increase in the number of neo-Nazi groups who have been responsible for a number of house bombings against Greeks and Turks. The Turks, in turn, have remained no less violent against the Kurds as they arbitrarily wiped out hundreds of Kurd villages, killing more than 30 thousand people and sentencing the remaining Kurds to a life of half-citizenry in the margins of ghetto existence. In Austria, Russia, and some Scandinavian countries, the level of anti-Semitism is also on the rise. Israel, in turn, fueled by uncontained racism, has elevated racist violence against the Palestinians to unacceptable levels. In Portugal, the discrimination and segregation of Africans from the former colonies are attested by the inhumane ghetto reality that characterizes shantytowns that dot some peripheries around Lisbon. Similar levels of xenophobia are also found in Spain, where Gypsies and North African immigrants are a constant target. The violent eruption against North Africans in the town of El Ejido, where 22 people were injured, point to the outbreak of racism in a country that always claimed to be nonracist. Even in Greece, where many people would deny that racism exists, we would have to acknowledge the discriminatory practices leveled against Albanians and other recent immigrants. Against a backdrop of increased globalized racism and xenophobia, I doubt very much that the teaching of tolerance alone will enable us to critically understand how capitalist forces construct, shape, and maintain the cruel reality of racism. I also doubt that the teaching of tolerance could equip educators with the necessary critical tools to understand how language is often used to ideologically construct realities that veil the raw racism that devalues, disconfirms, and poisons other cultural identities. Even within the multicultural education movement, most educators fail to understand the neocolonialist ideology that informs the multicultural debate to the extent that they almost always structure their arguments within a reductionistic view of culture that has its roots in a colonialist legacy.

If we closely analyze the ideology that informs and shapes the present debate over multicultural education and the present polemic over the primacy of Western heritage, we can begin to see and understand that the ideological principles that sustain those debates are consonant with the structures and mechanisms of a colonial ideology designed to devalue the cultural capital and values of the colonized.

Only through a full understanding of our colonial legacy can we begin to comprehend the complexity of our multiculturalism in the Western countries. For example, for most cultural subordinate individuals in the United States, their multiculturalism is not characterized by the ability to have two cultures. There is a radical difference between a dominant person adopting a second culture and a cultural subordinate individual struggling to acquire and be accepted by the dominant culture. Whereas the former involves the addition of a second culture to one’s cultural repertoire (for example, a middle-class White American student who goes to Paris to learn French and enjoy the French culture), the latter usually provides the subordinate person with the experience of subordination in his or her native culture, which is devalued by the dominant values and the dominant culture that he or she is attempting to acquire, often under coercive conditions. This is the case for most lower-class immigrants in the United States, particularly those from Third World countries. Both the colonized context and the asymmetrical power relations with respect to cultural identity in the United States (and other Western countries as well) create, on the one hand, a form of forced multiculturalism and, on the other, what could be called a “cultural drama.” That is, the reality of being forced to live in a borrowed cultural existence. This is an existence that is almost culturally schizophrenic—that is, being present and yet not visible, being visible and yet not present. It is a condition that invariably presents itself to the reality of cultures that have been subordinated—the constant juggling of two worlds, two asymmetrical cultures, and two languages of which the subordinate language is usually devalued and demonized. An example par excellence concerning how our society treats different forms of multiculturalism is reflected in our tolerance toward certain types of biculturalism and lack of tolerance toward other bicultural realities. Most of us have tolerated various degrees of biculturalism on the part of cultural anthropologists and language teachers that range from a simplistic form of anthropolizing the so-called primitive cultures to serious deficiency in the mastery of the foreign language on the part of many foreign language teachers. Nevertheless, these cultural anthropologists and foreign language teachers, with rare exceptions, have been granted tenure, have been promoted within the institutions they teach and, in some cases, and have become “experts” and “spokespersons” for various cultural and linguistic groups in our communities. On the other hand, for example, if a teacher is a speaker of a subordinated language who speaks English as a second language with an accent, the same level of tolerance is not accorded to him or her. Take the case of Westfield, Massachusetts, when “about 400 people there signed a petition asking state and local officials to ban the hiring of any elementary teacher who speaks English with an accent” (Lupo, 1992, p. 19), because according to them, “accents are catching” (The Boston Globe, 1992, p. 16). The petition was in response to the hiring of a Puerto Rican teacher assigned to teach in the system. As one can readily see, any form of multicultural education that neglects to fully investigate this cultural drama and treat multiculturalism as having mere competencies in two cultures invariably ends up reproducing those ideological elements characteristic of the relationship between colonizer and colonized through which the colonized is always and falsely discriminated, devalued, and demonized.

Fracturing Cultural Identities through Scientism

Throughout history, oppressive dominant ideologies have resorted to science as a mechanism to rationalize crimes against humanity that range from slavery to genocide by targeting race and other ethnic and cultural traits as markers that license all forms of dehumanization. If we did not suffer from historical amnesia, we would easily understand the ideology that informed Hans Eysenck’s psychological proposal that suggested “there might be a partly genetic reason for the differences in IQ between black and white people” (Eysenck, 1971). The same historical amnesia veils dangerous memories that keep us disconnected from Arthur Jensen’s racist proposals published decades ago by the Harvard Educational Review.

One could argue that the above-cited incidents belong to the dusty archives of earlier generations, but I do not believe we have learned a great deal from historically dangerous memories, considering our society’s almost total embrace of scientism as characterized by the success of The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and former Harvard professor Richard J. Hernstein. It is the same blind acceptance of “naïve” empiricism that continues to fuel and shape both educational research and curriculum development, including multicultural programs with a misguided focus on testing and objectivity.

By and large, the present debate over bilingual and bicultural education in the United States is informed by the positivistic and management models that hide their ideologies in the false call for objectivity, hard data, and scientific rigor. This can be seen, for example, in the comments of Pepi Leistyna’s term paper on the political nature of bilingual and bicultural education: “These are unsupported politically motivated claims! [the Harvard professor called for] a more linguistic analysis” (Leistyna, 1998). As Leistyna recounts, this same professor told him: “I hope you have been reading some hard science.” The false call for hard science in the social sciences represents a process through which “naïve” empiricists hide their anti-intellectual posture, a posture that is manifested either through censorship of certain bodies of knowledge or through the disarticulation between theories of the discipline and the empirically driven and self-contained studies that enable the pseudoscientists to:

not challenge the territorialization of university intellectual activity or in any way risk undermining the status and core beliefs of their fields. The difference, [for scientists] is that this blindness or reluctance often contradicts the intellectual imperatives of the very theories they espouse. Indeed, only a theorized discipline can be an effective site for general social critique—that is, a discipline actively engaged in self-criticism, a discipline that is a locus for struggle, a discipline that renews and revises its awareness of its history, a discipline that inquires into its differential relations with other academic fields, and a discipline that examines its place in the social formation and is willing to adapt its writing practices to suit different social functions. (Nelson, 1997, p. 19)

As these theoretical requirements make abundantly clear, Pepi Leistyna’s professor’s arrogant dismissal of Freire’s social critical theories unveils the ideology behind the prescription that Leistyna should have been “reading some hard science.” The censorship of political analysis in the current debate over bilingual and bicultural education exposes the almost illusory and schizophrenic educational practice in which “the object of interpretation and the content of the interpretive discourse are considered appropriate subjects for discussion and scrutiny, but the interests of the interpreter and the discipline and society he or she serves are not” (Nelson, 1997, p. 19).

The disarticulation between the interpretive discourse and the interests of the interpreter is often hidden in the false call for an objectivity that denies the dialectal relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. The false call for objectivity is deeply ingrained in a positivistic method of inquiry. In effect, this has resulted in an epistemological stance in which scientism and methodological refinement are celebrated while “theory and knowledge are subordinated to the imperatives of efficiency and technical mastery, and history is reduced to a minor footnote in the priorities of empirical’ scientific inquiry” (Giroux, 1983, p. 87).

The blind celebration of empiricism has created a culture in which pseudoscientists, particularly in schools of education, who engage in a form of “naïve empiricism,” believe “that facts are not human statements about the world but aspects of the world itself” (Schudson, 1978, p. 6). According to Michael Schudson (1978):

This view was insensitive to the ways in which the “world” is something people construct by the active play of their minds and by their acceptance of conventional—not necessarily ‘true’—ways of seeing and talking. Philosophy, the history of science, psycho-analysis, and the social science have taken great pains to demonstrate that human beings are cultural animals who know and see and hear the world through socially constructed filters. (p. 6)

The socially constructed filters were evident when Massachusetts, Arizona, and California voters passed referenda banning bilingual education. Although the school administrators and politicians were gearing up to disband bilingual programs, data from both San Francisco and San Jose school systems showed that bilingual graduates were outperforming their English-speaking counterparts (“Bilingual grads,” 1998, p. 143). This revelation was met by total silence from the media, the proponents of English-only and political pundits. This is where the call for objectivi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• AACTE Statement
• Note from Dr. Sharon P. Robinson
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Poisoning Racial and Cultural Identities: An Educational Challenge
• Part I: Knowledge
• Part II: Practice
• Part III: Policy
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Proceedings and Recommendations from the Wingspread Conference
• About the Authors
• Index