9/8 Reading

Reference: Critical Approaches to TESOL, Pennycook

While Pennycook's article was quite dense, it was nonetheless very informative and actually a great detailed summary of what is going on in language teaching today. Pennycook discusses yet again the concept of Paulo Freire and the idea of the teacher as a transformative pedagogist. He punctuates this with the question: "How does this particular approach to education hope to change things?" (pg. 330) I think that, while the idea of the teacher being a transformative intellectual is really a revolutionary concept because it is not exactly what is expected from a teacher, it is rather limited in its applications in the real world. It sounds like this amazing idea that all teachers can do, but like we discussed in class, it is an intimidating role. A teacher cannot necessarily just change the minds of all students in their classroom. It just is not going to happen. Students, especially those in the middle school/high school age, are already beginning to get set in their ways about their belief systems. We as teachers do not want to interfere with their individualism, especially as teenagers. Plus, parents are not going to appreciate someone who does not live in their home teaching them their values. Again, this depends entirely on the political/social/religious factors in the town where one is teaching. It may be a very liberal community in San Francisco or a very conservative town in Mississippi; teaching for sure is context-dependent. I want to be a role model to my students, but I do not think it is a smart idea to impose my ideas on them at such an impressionable age.

Another thing I found interesting was the focus on the inequalities in the teaching environment in this article. A quote I found eye-opening from Pennycook was this: "This process of becoming Black is intimately tied with the forms of English and popular culture with which these students start to identify" (pg. 332). I found it amazing that Ibrahim's article that was found in this issue where the article was published was about how African students began to "act black" so to speak and fit in with the "racialized world of North America" (pg. 332). It is a rather strong statement to make. Sometimes our ESL students will be from countries that have no access to American history, and even if they do, they will never completely understand the racial tensions that exist here. Our generation only knows because of textbooks and possibly parental examples; my parents grew up during the Civil Rights Movement, so they know what it was like here, and that's at least what I have to go off of when I am talking about it. It was not surprising to me that these African students would want to find a cultural identity similar to their own, and they have to adapt to survive here, but it was still strange to just see it in print. It is another thing I do not think I could ever discuss with my students; it is something they should know if they plan to stay here, but at the same time, it is not politically correct to do so. It is such a Catch-22, it's hard to really decide what is correct to do and what is not.