Resistance to the Known

Counter-Conduct in Language Education

D. Rivers, D. Rivers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137345196
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Sprachen unterrichten

This volume stands as a demonstration of resistance to 'the known' (i.e. the tyranny of the expected) through individual and collective counter-conduct within the domain of language education. Supported by data drawn from various local and national contexts, the bookchallenges the pedagogies, practices, and policies of 'the institution'.

Part I

Countering Micro-Processes in Local Contexts

1

Language-Learner Tourists in Australia: Problematizing ‘the Known’ and its Impact on Interculturality

Phiona Stanley

Introduction

Think of ‘typical’ Australian scenes, and what springs to mind? Likely images include blond surfers on sun-drenched beaches, Indigenous faces patterned with paint, Sydney Opera House, cricket and rugby, dangerous wildlife and outback terrain, and curious marsupials. All of this is ‘true’ in that it does exist, and all of it is ‘authentic’ in that such images do lie (pun intended) in Australian history, popular culture, fauna and geography. But such images are also manufactured by the tourism industry and by social imaginaries, both inside and outside Australia. And when language education intersects strongly with tourism, as it does in the contexts discussed in this chapter, such images operate as a tyrannical ‘known’ that shapes the experiences that students imagine, and so expect, from their Australian sojourn. Language education providers are then under pressure to provide, indeed to manufacture, Australian ‘authenticity’ as this is imagined by cultural out-groups: the students and their friends and families back home, to whom the experience is displayed on social media. This chapter considers the impact of this on English language education in contexts particularly affected by this (imagined) ‘known’: language schools in Australian cities that are very much on tourism’s beaten path.

The study was inspired by my reflections on and conversations with other trainers about the training of teachers on Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) courses in Sydney. I noticed that the teachers we thought most capable and that we graded highly against CELTA pass criteria were not necessarily those who found and kept jobs in the local language school sector, and that, conversely, plenty of those who struggled with teaching and analysing language turned out to be the most employable. The reasons for this fell into place somewhat when I started thinking about the complexity of the teaching role in local language school contexts: part teacher, part cultural insider, part friend, perhaps. I remember doing a one-to-one tutorial with a weak CELTA candidate at risk of failing the course who told me, in dismay, ‘but the students like me’. And they did: he was bubbly and personable and he cared about them, although he struggled to address their language questions and his classroom management was chaotic. He eventually passed CELTA, and found work, and his students still liked him very much. But although he was a good teacher (in the context), he was not a particularly good teacher (in the sense I understand it). The problem is one of naming: he is good at doing the job expected by Australian language schools and their students, although he is not particularly technically skilled, as measured by CELTA-type criteria. In fact, a de facto teacher role seems to be operating in the context and this stems, in part, from the tyranny of ‘the known’ about what Australia, and Australians, are like.

So I designed a study to understand what students want when they come to Australian language schools to study English, particularly at the ‘language travel’ end of the market. This was a qualitative, interview-based study and my research questions were as follows: what do students expect/want from their Australian language school experience and what are the effects of these demands on the teachers and on teaching? From this, how might a de facto teacher role be described? From this work, I theorize that the students’ demands and expectations coalesce to form ‘the known’ of out-group imagined ‘authenticities’, and that these, in turn, form part of the de facto teacher role. This ‘known’ is constructed mainly by students themselves but perpetuated and in part created by marketing departments and, ultimately, teachers themselves. The notion that ‘authentic’ Australians are blond, bubbly, fun surfer types goes unchallenged in many classrooms, particularly for short-stay language tourists. But there is also resistance, and in some contexts students were exposed to the realities of a complex, multicultural, socially stratified Australia with its convict history and plenty of Indigenous blood on its hands.

Situating this study in the literature

In theoretical and empirical terms, this is a complex study to situate in the literature: there is no single ‘field’ into which it conveniently fits. It is therefore necessary to cast rather a wider net, and this section draws upon literature from tourism studies and gender studies as well as language education and intercultural studies. It discusses out-group social imaginaries and their role in framing expectations and evaluations of cultural others. From there, the discussion turns to discourses of cultural purity and ‘authenticity’, and describes the staged authenticity in which tourism providers engage in order to meet tourists’ demands for essentialist cultural fixities; I contend that something similar is happening in Australian language schools, where there is a circle of marketing-led, tourism-like imagery that is performed back to students and seldom disrupted, with deleterious effects on students’ development of interculturality.

‘The known’ in this context is an out-group constructed social imaginary about what Australia, and Australians themselves, are like. By ‘social imaginary’, I mean:

That set of symbols and conceptual frameworks particular to a social collectivity or network, which have been built up, modified, mediated and transformed over time, and which are drawn on in the sense-making process … The imaginary refers to the ways in which a nation or other grouping sees both itself, and others, that is, those considered not part of itself … The media here is understood as a mediator and shaper of that set of projected and shared envisionings. (Lewis, 2009: 227)

This is not to say that a single, homogeneous social imaginary exists among potential English language students outside of Australia, and it is important to note that out-group constructions may differ. For example, students interviewed for this study construct Australia and their Australian study sojourn variously as follows:

[Before I arrived] I think teachers here, they are all very motivated ... And they are funny. I think it’s very important, because you are not in the real school ... This is like, it’s school, okay, but it’s like holidays, it’s mixed ... It doesn’t have to be like high school. We want to take it easy. (Sylvia, Italian student, chain language centre, Regional City, 2012)

First of all I thought, I just wish[ed] that all the teachers have special way to teach English correctly. So once I had a question to my teacher but she can’t answer to me. So I’m really disappointed because I didn’t expect that situation. So, yes, that was a bit different ... In Korea, it’s a little bit passive way but they’re strict so they always made us to study. But here I think it’s cultural things, it’s a little bit different ... I don’t think it’s strict enough...For example they don’t check my homework. Yes, it’s my responsibility but if they check my homework every day I would do that. (Hye Jun, Korean student, chain language centre, Regional City, 2012)

When you are in Colombia and somebody speaks with you about Australia, you’re only thinking kangaroos, koalas. [They think] there is koalas in Sydney ... Before I arrived here I thought that this country was like United States, like a big city, busy city. All the people maybe stressful, maybe angry. But when I arrived here I saw that all the people was very organised, all the things was just very organised ... Here people may be thinking of you if you have a problem, [people ask] ‘are you okay?’ Friendly. (Andrés, Colombian student, independent language centre, State Capital, 2012)

These excerpts evidence the variety of social imaginaries of Australia that exist among incoming students. Whereas Sylvia constructs her Australian experience as part holiday and hopes that her teachers will be fun, funny, relaxed and energetic/passionate (‘motivated’), Hye Jun constructed strict, expert teachers who would ensure quick progress; these images are at odds. Andrés had a different construction altogether, and one that differs from the majority construction: the blond, relaxed surfer stereotype. Perhaps Tourism Australia is less active in Latin America than, for instance, in Europe or East Asia, and the blond surfer stereotype has not informed social imaginaries there to the same extent. Indeed, social imaginaries of Anglophone ‘gringos’ in Latin America may be dominated by love–hate notions about the USA (Pratt, 2004; see Rajagopalan, this volume), which Andrés acknowledges as the source of his pre-arrival constructions. It is important to say, therefore, when discussing social imaginaries that those at work in this study are out-group constructions, plural. So although a dominant social imaginary of Australia does seem to exist among the students, there are also outliers such as those cited above. Importantly, these remind us that social imaginaries are heterogeneous.

It is hard to overstate the importance of social imaginaries in framing lived experiences. This was exemplified in my previous research among university students in Shanghai (Stanley, 2013), for whom ‘Western’ teachers of English are evaluated according to how well, or otherwise, they correspond to Chinese social imaginaries of what ‘authentic’ Westerners are like. These out-group constructed stereotypes form powerful criteria against which Westerners are evaluated, with the result that the teachers are pressured into performing back to the students a caricature of the fun, outgoing, loud, confident, non-serious, non-expert Westerners that the Chinese social imaginary had constructed.

This can be theorized with reference to the work, on gender roles, of Judith Butler (1990). Performance expectations borne of out-group constructed social imaginaries operate like roles to provide frameworks within which individuals or experiences may or may not ‘fit’. So an individual’s appearance or behaviour may be critically evaluated as ‘typical’ or ‘atypical’, or as (insufficiently) ‘authentic’, according to out-group constructions about the cultural identification ascribed to the individual. So if students imagine Australians to be blond, blue-eyed surfers, they may subsequently evaluate dark-haired, non-surfer Australians as deficient rather than problematizing the stereotypes. Additionally, students may evaluate Australia itself as disappointing if preconceived expectations are not met. In both cases, expectations frame how lived experiences are experienced and evaluated.

Tourism studies have explored this area, considering tourists’ search for what they perceive as ‘authentic’. MacCannell (2008: 334) sets out two distinct discourses that may variously frame tourists’ expectations of foreign cultural ‘authenticities’:

The first would be an essentialist, realist ethnographic perspective that believes in authentic primitives and natives frozen in their traditions. And the second is a post-modern, post-structural, non-essentializing, hip version of culture as emergent, as constantly responding to challenge, changing and adapting.

Where tourists imagine, for example, ‘authentic primitives and natives frozen in their traditions’, we can expect them to be disappointed if, for example, they visit the Amazon and, in place of ‘authentic’ natives, they find people wearing jeans, using iPads and drinking lattes. Instead of problematizing their own ‘authenticity’ constructions it may be easier to critique the natives as lacking. So tourists’ experiences may be marred by seemingly inauthentic performances of local people that are evaluated against tourists’ own constructions of local cultures (Ateljevic and Doorne, 2005; Badone and Roseman, 2004; Kontogeorgopoulos, 2003; Little, 2004; Oakes, 2006; Robinson and Phipps, 2005; Rojek and Urry, 1997; White, 2007).

But cultural authenticity is a chimera. No culture is untouched; no culture exists in a vacuum of fixed authenticity – and if it did, it would anyway likely differ from out-group constructions of what that authenticity was actually like. However, MacCannell’s (2008) existentialist first discourse of culture still frames many tourists’ expectations, and as a result tourism providers may ‘stage authenticity’. For instance, Bruner (2005) describes Masai dance performances for tourists in Kenya. Crang (1997: 148) describes such work, of playing expected roles, as ‘the deep acting of emotional labour’. He analyses different types of tourism performances, including ever-smiling airline staff and compulsorily bubbly, chatty and flirty bar staff in Mediterranean resorts, and concludes that ‘these employees’ selves become part of the product … their personhood is commodified’ (Crang, 1997: 153). However, it is more than just employees’ performances that are commodified by these jobs. Their ascribed characteristics – ethnicity, gender, age, and looks, for example – are ‘part of what is required from an employee’ (Crang, 1997: 152). So in the same way as ‘Western’ teachers in China experience pressure to perform back to students the students’ own imagined constructions of ‘authentic’ Western behaviours and characteristics, Australian teachers and home-stay families may be under pressure to live up to incoming language school students’ expectations, and some providers may choose to ‘stage’ this ‘authenticity’ back to students by employing teachers or home-stay families that do not disrupt students’ out-group social imaginaries of ‘authentic’ Australianness.

What is the effect of this, though, on students’ interculturality? This is defined as:

The capacity to experience cultural otherness and to use this experience to reflect on matters which are normally taken for granted within one’s own culture and environment ... in addition, interculturality involves using this heightened awareness of otherness to evaluate one’s own everyday patterns of perception, thought, feeling and behaviour in order to develop greater self-knowledge and self-understanding. (Barrett, 2008: 1–2)

While most students in this study stated their primary purpose in Australia as learning or improving their English, most also contextualized this against extrinsic motivations rooted in imagined globalized p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction: Conceptualizing ‘the Known’ and the Relational Dynamics of Power and Resistance
• Part I Countering Micro-Processes in Local Contexts
• Part II Countering Macro-Processes in National Contexts
• Epilogue
• Index