Abstract
The negotiation of privilege and marginalization in the field of English language teaching (ELT), traces back to the field’s sociohistorical construction in and through the British and American colonial agenda of linguistic, cultural, economic, political, religious, educational and ethnic imperialism (Pennycook A The myth of English as an international language. In: Makoni S, Pennycook A (ed) Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, pp 90–115 (2007)). ELT was a vehicle by which to privilege British and American colonizers, and create colonial subjects modeled after their own image (Kumaravadivelu 2003; Pennycook 2010). Thus, ELT was predicated upon fluidly intertwined binaries of being, including colonizer/colonized, and Native Speaker (NS)/Non-Native Speaker (NNS). These categories were value-laden, affording linguistic, cultural and academic authority and “superiority” to individuals associated with the category of “NS,” while Othering the identities of individuals grappling with the epistemic and actualized violence of colonialism (NNSs) (see Kumaravadivelu 2016). As “local” teachers began to enter the classroom, an additional binary emerged -Native English Speaker Teacher (NEST)/Non-Native English Speaker Teacher (NNEST)- privileging “NESTs” over “NNESTs,” as teachers were collectively responsible for targeting an “idealized nativeness” conflated with the identity of an idealized colonizer. “NNESTs’” use of “local” language in the classroom to facilitate learning, was countered by the discourses of the monolingual principle (Howatt 1984), or notion that learning, and learning through, “English,” exclusively, was ideal for maximizing student growth (Hall and Cook 2012). The worldview underpinning this principle marginalized the identities of all individuals whose negotiation of being and becoming did not correspond with that of the idealized “superior.”
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Notes
- 1.
When employing the term discourses in this introduction, we are referring to the notion of “complex interconnected webs of modes of being, thinking, and acting. They are in constant flux and often contradictory. They are always located on temporal and spatial axes, thus they are historically and culturally specific” (Gannon and Davies 2007, p. 82).
- 2.
Here, we define essentialization as the discursive construction (and/or acceptance and promotion) of borders demarcating “Self-Other,” “Us-Them” “purity-impurity”, “correctness-incorrectness,” and “valuable-not valuable,” relating to “language,” “culture,” “place,” and “identity” (Rudolph 2016a, b; Rutherford 1990) These borders frame, whether intentionally or unintentionally, who individuals “are,” and “can” and/or “should” become (Rudolph 2016b). We explore essentialization further, in latter portions of this introduction.
- 3.
Here, we draw upon Pennycook’s (2001) conceptualization of “criticality” within the field of applied linguistics, which “involves a constant skepticism, a constant questioning of the normative assumptions of applied linguistics. It demands a restive problematization of the givens of applied linguistics and presents a way of doing applied linguistics that seeks to connect it to questions of gender, class, sexuality, race, ethnicity, culture, identity, politics, ideology, and discourse. And crucially, it becomes a dynamic opening up of new questions that emerge from this conjunction” (p. 10).
- 4.
We must also note, here, that scholars both positioned and positioning themselves as “critically-oriented,” are negotiating participation in criticality in dynamic ways. Thus during the span of their professional lives, authors’ work may be situated within divergent approaches to identity and interaction, in line with their negotiation of personal-professional identity.
- 5.
Ontological and epistemological diversity can be found within “poststructural” scholarship. Some scholars contend for the complete deconstruction of “self” (Procter 2004). We, the Editors, draw on poststructural theory that apprehends “self” as discursively negotiated, and subjectivity and positionality as apprehensible and worthwhile pursuits. Additionally, as noted by Agger (1991) there is conceptual overlap between postmodern and poststructural theory.
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Yazan, B., Rudolph, N. (2018). Introduction: Apprehending Identity, Experience, and (In)equity Through and Beyond Binaries. In: Yazan, B., Rudolph, N. (eds) Criticality, Teacher Identity, and (In)equity in English Language Teaching . Educational Linguistics, vol 35. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72920-6_1
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