Men and Masculinities in Global English Language Teaching

R. Appleby

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137331809
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistique

This book draws on a range of sources, including tales of castaways, fictional narratives, and interviews with teachers in conversation schools and universities in Japan, to explore many current concerns around teacher identity, gender, and intercultural sexuality in global English language teaching.

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Masculinity and Heterosexuality in English Language Teaching

This book is about the experience, construction, performance, and effects of masculinity and heterosexuality in global English language teaching. It analyses masculinity as a social construction that is historically and geographically contingent. To illustrate this approach, and in keeping with the situational specificity of masculinity, it provides a particular focus on Western men teaching English in Japan.

The book argues that masculinity and heterosexuality have been invisible – as the unmarked dominant – in official histories and theoretical analyses of global English language teaching. Moreover, although gender and sexuality have been explored in an increasing number of books on language teacher identity and practice, these have focused almost exclusively on the experiences of female teachers and learners, while experiential accounts of men, masculinity, and heterosexuality have largely been ignored. The purpose of this book, then, is twofold. First, it aims to open a scholarly conversation about the cultural history, discourses, and experiences of masculinity and heterosexuality in English language teaching as a global industry. Second, it presents a series of studies that indicate a range of ways in which research on masculinity and heterosexuality in English language teaching might be approached in other contexts. In doing so, it opens the way for further consideration of gender as a significant dynamic in the personal and professional politics of English as a global language.

The first part of the book begins with an overview of theoretical concepts and discourses that have emerged in masculinity studies over recent decades. I then explore selected historical accounts and cultural representations of white, Western masculinity and heterosexuality that, together, illuminate particular aspects of contemporary English language teaching (ELT) as a gendered practice. The second part of the book draws on data generated in interviews with white, Western men living and working in Japan as English language teachers over several decades, dating from the late 1980s to the present time. The context of Japan is of particular interest as the location of a sizeable ELT industry, as a site where the majority of ‘native speaker’ English language teachers are men, and as a site where Western men have been idealised in discourses of racialised erotic desire. Although Japan offers many distinguishing features as a location for foreign teachers of English, I expect that certain dimensions of these studies will resonate in other contexts and will provide a touchstone for wider claims about masculinities in a globalised profession.

Invisible men

More than a decade ago, Bethan Benwell argued that the burgeoning field of language and gender studies had been slow to include a focus on masculinity and that the near-exclusive focus on women and ‘women’s talk’ had contributed to the phenomenon of invisible masculinity, whereby men are constituted as the unmarked, universal norm (Benwell 2003a: 155). Since then, much has changed in the field of language and gender studies, where masculinity has become a significant topic of scholarly interest (see, for example, Edley 2001; Kiesling 2005, 2007, 2011; Milani 2011; Wetherell & Edley 1999, 2009; and separate chapters in Cameron 2006; Coates 2003; Speer 2005; Talbot 2010). However, studies of gender and English language teaching remain primarily concerned with the experiences of women teachers and have tended to overlook the experiences of men and the effects of masculinity in professional practice (Davis & Skilton-Sylvester 2004). Moreover, although men have published research on almost every aspect of language teaching and learning, men’s personal reflections as gendered participants in professional practice have been sadly missing. All this is perhaps understandable since, in many locations, women outnumber men in the language teaching profession. But it could equally be argued that the invisibility of men has served to perpetuate an unbalanced gender regime that continues to shape the professional experiences of both women and men. If we take seriously the notion that classrooms always operate in the context of broader social, economic, and political domains, then the connections between pedagogical masculinities – that is, the experiences of men as classroom teachers – and gender regimes in society at large, are worthy of investigation.

Heterosexuality has also been an unmarked category in ELT research and, as such, has received little explicit attention. Yet, as Cameron and Kulick (2003) observe, sexual identities and practices are significant in shaping performances of gender, and many performances of gender will involve the affirmation of heterosexual identity ‘because of the heteronormative assumption that heterosexuality is an indispensible element of “proper” femininity or masculinity’ (p. 73). The absence of studies that explore heterosexuality in ELT might be explained by the difficult, and often taboo, nature of sexuality in the classroom, where relationships between male teachers and female students, for example, are ‘sexualized as harassment’ (Gallop 1995: 81). The result has been that both women and men, as language teachers, have been represented as ‘sexless’. And yet research on education outside of the ELT field ­suggests that the frisson of eroticised attraction that can emerge within the pedagogical relationship is a significant experience for some teachers and students (see, for example, Gallop 1995; T.S. Johnson 2006; Sikes 2006, 2010). The construction and performance of heterosexual masculinity is not only about relations between men and women as teachers and students, but also about relations of status and prestige among men. Thus, in ELT, masculinity and heterosexuality are constituted not only in the relationship between male teachers and their female students or colleagues but also in the various relationships amongst men in professional and personal domains.

A further complexity for any consideration of masculinity in ELT concerns the ways in which gender intersects with other categories of difference, and especially with race and/or ethnicity, in the construction of teacher identity. As Kubota and Lin (2006) point out, professional practice in ELT inevitably involves groups of people who are ‘perceived as racially and culturally distinct’ (p. 472) and, given the historical links between ELT and Western imperialism, it is not surprising that the significance and experience of whiteness, and the positionality of white teachers and researchers, have been subjected to critical inquiry in a number of studies. However, like studies of gender more broadly, studies that focus on the intersection of gender and race have also predominantly been authored by women and have focused on the experiential and narrative accounts of women teachers and researchers. While this is not necessarily a shortcoming, it does raise questions about the absence of male teachers writing about their own experiences and positionality as men who are working in the racialised contact zone of an ELT classroom. It is only very recently that a few isolated studies of language teacher identity have taken seriously the production and experience of Western masculinity in a transnational contact zone: notable in this group are Lan’s (2011) study of Western English language teachers in Taiwan, Cho’s (2012) study of Korean-American male English teachers in South Korea, and Stanley’s (2012, 2013) study of Westerners’ gendered identities in China. With these few exceptions, an understanding of the ways in which Western male identities are experienced within global English language education remains largely unexamined.

By turning the spotlight on white Western men’s accounts of heterosexuality and gendered subjectivity, this book begins to address these gaps in research on professional identity in ELT and aims to contribute more broadly to an understanding of masculinity within ELT as a professional practice shaped by the diverse dynamics of gender and ethnicity. In doing so, it speaks to a broader set of challenges to do with the ways in which English language teachers negotiate the complex geopolitical context of their work. While the particular studies that form the basis of the book are located in a specific set of contextual circumstances, I believe they also speak more broadly to the transnational nature of ELT, and have significance for the sorts of conversations we have around teacher education and practice. Clearly, further research is needed on masculinity and heterosexuality in English language teaching, and I hope this book will encourage others in the field to explore these dynamics and their effects on professional practice.

The historiography of English language teaching

In the course of developing a broad background understanding of men and masculinities in English language teaching, I became aware of a striking, yet obvious, curiosity. It became apparent that extensive, historically contextualised accounts of men in English language teaching had already been written: conventional histories of the origins and influential ideas that have shaped the discipline, such as Howatt’s (1984, 2004) History of English Language Teaching, are often written by men, and about men, in English language teaching. In such historical accounts, it would seem that men have singularly populated the practice, intellectual development, and professionalisation of English language teaching over several centuries. Indeed, Howatt (2004: 295) notes, as an aside, that ‘there were very few women in ELT until it developed strongly in the United Kingdom in the 1960s’. This sole focus on men as traditionally the only participants in this field is all the more odd because in the present day, at least in the Anglo-American ‘Centre’ countries, ELT is a feminised profession. As Connell (2005a) points out, however, academic historical writing has, of course, always been about men – and mostly famous men. And yet conventional historical accounts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Masculinity and Heterosexuality in English Language Teaching
• 2 Key Concepts and Approaches in Studies of Masculinity
• 3 Masculine Histories
• 4 Fictional Masculinities
• 5 Introduction to Empirical Studies of Western Men in Japan
• 6 Embodied Masculinities
• 7 Married and Single Masculinities
• 8 Professional Masculinities
• 9 Conclusion
• References
• Index