Christian and Critical English Language Educators in Dialogue

Pedagogical and Ethical Dilemmas

Mary Shepard Wong, Suresh Canagarajah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135837846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The legacy of English teaching and Christian missionaries is a flashpoint within the field of English language teaching. This critical examination of the place of Christianity in the field is unique in presenting the voices of TESOL professionals from a wide range of religious and spiritual perspectives. About half identify themselves as "Christian" while the others identify themselves as Buddhist, atheist, spiritualist, and variations of these and other faiths.

What is common for all the authors is their belief that values have an important place in the classroom. What they disagree on is whether and how spiritual values should find expression in learning and teaching. This volume dramatizes how scholars in the profession wrestle with ideological, pedagogical, and spiritual dilemmas as they seek to understand the place of faith in education. To sustain this conversation, the book is structured dialogically.

Each section includes a set of position chapters in which authors explain their views of faith/pedagogy integration, a set of chapters by authors responding to these positions while articulating their own views on the subject, and discussion questions to engage readers in comparing the positions of all the authors, reflecting on their own experiences and values, and advancing the dialogue in fresh and personal directions.

1
Introduction

New Possibilities for the Spiritual and the Critical in Pedagogy

Suresh Canagarajah

No set of issues is as explosive, controversial, emotional, and threatening as moral and religious disputes. None is more vital.

(Purpel, 1989, p. 68)

While acknowledging the important contributions of postmodern social theory, it is also crucial to recognize its serious limitations. For instance, it has not sufficiently addressed the central issue of how identities and subjectivities are constructed within different moral experiences and relations … it has failed to develop a substantive ethical discourse and public morality that is necessary for overcoming existing forms of exploitation and subjugation.

(Giroux & Freire, 1989, p. xiv)

It is indeed curious that the popularity of postmodern discourses in academic disciplines hasn’t facilitated a fruitful dialogue among professionals whose teaching and scholarship are motivated by deeply held values. Though the departure from positivistic assumptions has created a space for the expression of one’s values and identities, we are still unsure how to personally relate to the diverse values and identities others bring to the classroom. Even more curiously, though values are acknowledged now in education, we are still unsure how to deal with moral and spiritual values. The academy seems to be uncomfortable with spirituality.

It is good to remind ourselves of the road we have traveled so far to understand the new bases for teaching and scholarship, and to map the territory we still have to cover in order to grapple with the new challenges raised for all of us. The positivistic tradition, which accompanied modernity, imposed a values-neutral and somewhat controlled orientation to learning and knowledge. This tradition was founded on the idea that we live in a closed universe whose mysteries are open to the mind and senses of those who could separate themselves from their predisposition, feelings, and values. The questioning of that tradition has ushered a new outlook into the educational domain. In a post-positivist education (see Scheurich, 1995), there are spaces for a broadened scholarly discourse, inclusive professional orientation, and expansive pedagogical resources. Scholars from different cultural traditions and geographical regions find more spaces for practicing their knowledge. Diverse identities find expression in scholarly discourses. Scholars from different philosophical traditions are compelled to negotiate their differences. The aim of this book is to facilitate a more fruitful dialogue among two specific groups of TESOL professionals who occupy some of the most divergent discourses and intransigent positions on the place of moral/ spiritual values in the profession—i.e., critical practitioners (CP), who bring a keen sensitivity to the pedagogical negotiation of power, and Christian English Teachers (CET) who bring a keen sensitivity to spirituality in learning and scholarship. If we meet with the appropriate attitude, religion doesn’t have to be a “conversation stopper” (Rorty, 1994, p. 1) anymore, whether in TESOL or in the academy generally!

There is already a dialogue—of sorts—in TESOL circles relating to the expression of spirituality in English language teaching. The problem is that it has produced more heat than light. Scholars of both spiritually based and politically based perspectives feel that their discourses are too disparate for a dialogue to be possible. The point is expressed loud and clear even by some contributors to this book. If modernist assumptions still influence one’s thinking, the discourses of CP and CET will certainly seem incommensurate. On the other hand, if the developments of post-positivistic inquiry are taken to their logical conclusion, the differences in discourses of any school shouldn’t keep one away from dialogue. Incommensurate discourses are the norm in the post-positivist academy. Perhaps, as Morgan points out in his contribution to this book, there is a “blind spot” relating to spirituality in TESOL (p. 193).

The confusion in TESOL circles regarding moral/spiritual values reflects the uncertainty more broadly in popular discourse and academic discussions as to the framework guiding such a dialogue. As the platform for discussion is shifting, making space for a constructive dialogue, there is a search for footing by all parties in this discussion. Signs of the renewed epistemological search are evident in the popular debates on spirituality unleashed by a wave of new books.¹ In the confusion, the volume against spirituality has been turned up in some quarters. Paradoxically, this vitriol is itself spawned by the renewed interest in spirituality in many circles. The recent books by Richard Dawkins (2006) and Christopher Hitchens (2007) show a continuation of stereotypes relating to the connections between spirituality, politics, and rationality. Though this attitude is not surprising, what is remarkable is that these books have been roundly criticized by even non-religious reviewers for being so clichéd. The Chronicle of Higher Education has culled some of the reviews on Dawkins in the scholarly community. No other than the Marxist theorist, Terry Eagleton, argues:

Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be.

(Critical Mass, 2006, p. B4)

Similarly, in a review of Hitchens, Berlinerblau (2007) argues:

Crude polemic, I would be the first to admit, has its charms. But if Hitchens truly believes his warning that “as I write these words … people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction,” then sobriety and informed discussion would seem more suitable. God Is Not Great fails in precisely the same way that a spate of recent, ear-piercing works written by militant nonbelievers fails. The author so simplifies and underestimates his “adversary” as to obviate useful analysis. His misconceptions about religion, however, do reveal some of the questionable assumptions that secular elites make about their fellow citizens. With American secularism about to enter one of the most challenging periods in its short history, those assumptions will need to be re-examined.

(p. B6)

Thoughtful post-positivist scholars are becoming tired of the stereotypes relating to religion. They see a need for a fresh discussion in the context of the epistemological shifts taking place both inside and outside the academy.²

In this introduction, I will consider how the terms of the dialogue in TESOL can be broadened or redefined for practitioners to engage with each other’s position more constructively. We need a new platform built on the recent epistemological realizations to facilitate a richer discussion. Before I articulate the attitudes and values that can facilitate a productive dialogue, let me first take stock of the changes in the philosophical mood that enable the construction of a more solid and constructive platform.

Revisiting the Old Platform

With the split of the spiritual and the scientific during modernity, human inquiry has been shaped by the following values:

• the belief in the possibility of final answers in a closed world where all enigmas could be accounted for in terms of the here and now (positivism);

• the faith in reason to unravel mysteries and provide solutions (rationalism);

• the assumption that a dispassionate orientation, devoid of values, is the appropriate stance for scholarly inquiry (objectivity);

• the primacy of physically available evidence to establish truth (empiricism);

• the professionalization and self-definition of academic disciplines, leading also to the removal of scholarly inquiry from ecological, moral, and social considerations (autonomy);

• a disinterested and pragmatic approach to knowledge and pedagogy, removing larger questions of ends, means, and values from consideration, and engaging in knowledge for its own sake (pragmatism).

Such tendencies created a suspicion of religion and spirituality among teachers and scholars. Spirituality was treated as irrelevant at best, distorting and distracting at worst, for human inquiry. If they countenanced spirituality at all, scholars and teachers adopted an attitude of compartmentalization, keeping it separate from their professional life.

The reaction against the narrowness of modernist assumptions has created openness for moral and spiritual considerations. The philosophical changes that augur well for dialogue between scholars and teachers of diverse values can be termed broadly post-positivist (Scheurich, 1995).³ The changes in thinking in the post-positivist age make a space not only for spirituality but also politics, morality, and identity in education. Here are the counter-values that inform post-positivist educators (hereafter PPE):

• The realization that everything is value laden. PPE in fact go further to acknowledge the shaping role of values in learning and inquiry.

• A place for the personal in learning and knowing. PPE realize that our own experience, background, and identity, in addition to values, have implications for how we conduct inquiry. We are not shy of acknowledging our interests, investments, and predisposition in inquiry. PPE in fact appreciate how the personal opens up unique insights that a dispassionate stance cannot.

• More importance to consciousness and agency in explanations. We are treating the learning subject as a complex, situated, multifaceted being, not amenable to reduction, control, or stereotyping. Scholars are reacting against the overdetermined nature of the human subject in models in which people are perceived as inflexibly conditioned by environmental, social, linguistic, and even psychological structures to behave in predictable ways. More scholars are now giving agency to the subject who can shape these structures to suit his/her interests. We are beginning to give more importance to such intangible and “virtual” factors as imagined communities (Anderson, 1984), structures of feeling (Appadurai, 1996), and performed identities (Rampton, 1995; Pennycook, 2003) in explaining communicative and learning outcomes.

• Acknowledgment of indeterminacy in knowledge. Even at the material level, PPE are now open to the possibility that multiple factors, some personal and situational, go into explaining social and natural phenomena. PPE are also open to the possibility that our models of explanation can’t be closed and final, as changing knowledge and contexts generate additional problems for explanation. For example, dynamic systems perspective, aka chaos theory, explains how the smallest components of a system can affect other parts and continually reshape the whole (see Larsen-Freeman, 2002). It adopts just the opposite approach to structuralism, which explained the parts as composing the whole in a tightly knit and stable system. It was difficult to consider features like beliefs, morals, and attitudes in a system that was defined in highly abstract terms. Chaos theory allows for constant reshaping of the system, with patterns emerging out of idiosyncratic factors.

• A desire to accommodate difference in learning, diversity in social life, and pluralism in inquiry. The values of modernity were after all cultural, belong-ing to the dominant communities of Western European civilization, even though they presented themselves as universal. With the decline of modernity, education is now more open to intellectual traditions and educational orientations from elsewhere. Furthermore, whereas there was a quest to pin down the most rational, logical, or correct orientation in modernity, PPE are now open to the possibility that multiple orienta...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors’ Spiritual Identification Statements
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Setting the Tone
• Part II Ideological and Political Dilemmas
• Part III Pedagogical and Professional Dilemmas
• Part IV Spiritual and Ethical Dilemmas
• Subject index
• Author Index