So if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language—Gloria Anzaldúa
All too often, educators and researchers embrace a naive form of empiricism, which celebrates science and methodology at the expense of such social factors as equity, class, and cultural identity. But whether teaching linguistic-minority students or a global studies class, educators can do much to link the curriculum to deeper social realities.
Reading Instruction
In the past decade or so, the debate over reading instruction has taken on new importance among both politicians and educators. The 1998 National Research Council report on reading, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), recycles old assumptions regarding the meaning and usefulness of reading, giving primacy to what the authors call "real reading," meaning "cases where children primarily use decoding—and not other sorts of cues (such as syntax, semantics, content, and pragmatics)—to achieve word recognition and literal comprehension of words and text" (Gee, 1999, p. 2). The National Research Council report relies on "empirical," objective data and language. But as critics have recognized, it is "replete with paradoxes when it talks about poor children" (Gee, 1999).
By choosing to classify their approach as "real reading," the researchers excuse themselves from discussing real issues like poverty, race, class, and cultural identity. The scientific objectivity of the report falls under the weight of its own ideology. It not only fails to advocate for the democratic rights of poverty-stricken students, but it also fails to address the inequities that shape the education of poor students. As Cabral has said, "It is not necessary to be courageous; it is enough to be honest" (1973, p. 16). By failing to recognize the interplay of these factors with the overall reading achievement of bilingual students in English, educators become trapped in a reductionistic view of reading that elevates decontextualized decoding skills while sacrificing the appropriate cultural context (including native language) that facilitates meaning.
To be academically honest would require that we challenge those educators who believe that "there is a lack of clear consensus about the advantages and disadvantages of academic instruction in the primary language in contrast to early and intensive exposure to English" (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, p. 29). To be honest would also require that we denounce the research industry that makes a living by pointing out the "lack of clear consensus" in the bilingual debate without providing alternatives. To be honest, finally, would require that educators acknowledge the intimate relationship between society's discriminatory practices and the "savage inequalities" that shape the education of linguistic-minority students. This would, invariably, point to the political nature of education.
Bilingual Education and Politics
"Politicizing" education muffles rigorous academic debate concerning both the grievances and the educational needs of linguistic-minority students. We must begin by questioning some ideas raised in the National Research Council report: Speaking a nonstandard variety of English can impede the easy acquisition of English literacy by introducing greater deviations in the representation of sounds, making it hard to develop sound-symbol links. (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, pp. 27–28) This position assumes that standard dialects are monolithic and show no phonological variations. For example, anyone who has been exposed to the Boston dialect notices that its speakers drop the phoneme r in the final position; they pronounce car as cah. But middle-class speakers of this dialect have little difficulty linking the dropped r with its respective graphemic representation.
The current excess in positivism elevates numbers to an almost mythical status and, in turn, dismisses other fundamental factors. Celia T. Leyva (1998) recounts that growing up, I was often reprimanded for speaking Spanish in class and even in the lunch room, and also discriminated against because I spoke English with a Cuban accent. I was ridiculed not only by classmates, but also by my teachers who insisted that I had to speak English like Americans do. Because of the humiliation I went through growing up, I felt the need to prevent my own children from similar situations, and robbed them the opportunity to learn my native language and, at the same time denied them their own culture. She later added: "I hated English and I hated learning it."
Perhaps more than the ability to link sound and symbol in English, factors such as linguistic and cultural resistance play a greater role in the acquisition of standard English. Author bell hooks (1996) acknowledges that standard English, far from being a neutral tool of communication for most African Americans, is the oppressor's language [which] has the potential to disempower those of us who are just learning to speak, who are just learning to claim language as a place where we make ourselves subject. . . . It is not the English language that hurt me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize. (P. 168) Bilingual students' lack of reading success has more to do with their feelings of shame, humiliation, and colonization than with the mechanical struggles that they face in making sense of sound-symbol links.
Fracturing Cultural Identities
Although the fields of bilingual education and English as a second language have produced a barrage of studies demonstrating the effectiveness of English acquisition, these research studies fail to raise other fundamental questions: Does cultural subordination affect academic achievement? What is the correlation between social segregation and school success? What role does cultural identity among subordinated students play in linguistic resistance? Does the devaluation of students' culture and language affect reading achievement? Is class a factor in bilingual education? Do material conditions that foster human misery adversely affect academic development?
Empirical studies rarely incorporate these questions. As Paulo Freire (1995) has pointed out, when educators claim a scientific posture, [they often] try to "hide" in what [they] regard as the neutrality of scientific pursuits, indifferent to how [their] findings are used, even uninterested in considering for whom or for what interests [they] are working. (P. 103) Because most educators, particularly in schools of education, do not conduct research in "hard sciences," they uncritically attempt to adopt a neutral posture, leaving out the necessary built-in criticism, skepticism, and rigor of hard sciences. In fact, science cannot evolve without a healthy dose of self-criticism. However, social science and education theorists often view critique as contaminating "objectivity." As Freire (1995) would argue, these educators might treat [the] society under study as though [they] are not participants in it. In [their] celebrated impartiality, [they] might approach this real world as if [they] wear "gloves and masks" in order not to contaminate or be contaminated by it. (P. 103)
The metaphorical gloves and masks enable educators to comfortably fragment bodies of knowledge. They can conduct research among children who live in Mott Haven, for example, to determine their phoneme-grapheme awareness, disarticulated from the material conditions of Mott Haven, where children are locked in oppressive and dehumanizing circumstances that invariably guarantee academic underachievement (Kozol, 1991).
In addition, these metaphorical gloves and masks enable educators to willfully not understand that behind the empirical data are human faces with fractured identities, dreams, and aspirations. The fracturing of cultural identity usually leaves an indelible psychological scar on even those who seemingly have "made it." Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, p. 203) recounts that El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancó la lengua (The Anglo with the innocent face has yanked our tongue), thus sentencing colonized cultural beings to a silenced culture: Ahogados, escupimos el oscuro. Peleando con nuestra propia sombra el silencio nos sepulta. (Drowned, we spit darkness. Fighting with our very shadow we are buried by silence.) The "yanking" of students' tongues is not only undemocratic, but also reminiscent of colonial policies, as recounted by the African author Ladislaus Semali: Then, I went to school, a colonial school, and this harmony was broken. The language of my education was no longer the language of my culture. (Semali & Kincheloe, in press).
The expression "And then I went to school" is common throughout the world, including in democracies such as the United States, where bilingualism and multiculturalism are under constant assault. We fall into historical amnesia, for example, by forgetting the English reeducation camps for Native American children. These children were taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools for the primary purpose of cutting them off from their "primitive" languages and "savage" cultures. "And then I went to school" is, however, not forgotten by the American Indian writer Joseph H. Suina: School was a painful experience during those early years. The English language and the new set of values caused me much anxiety and embarrassment. (1991, p. 10)
Whether we feel the pain of Anzaldúa's tongue being yanked in our own democracy, whether we listen to the African author Semali's lament for his native Gikuyu language, or whether we connect with Suina's embarrassment, these experiences undeniably share one common feature: colonization.
A Colonial Legacy
The theme "And then I went to school" is again present in Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's analysis (1986) of what it means to lose one's language: We learned to value words for their meaning and nuances. Language was not a mere string of words. It had a suggestive power well beyond the immediate and lexical meaning. Our appreciation of the suggestive magical power of language was reinforced by the games we played with words through riddles, proverbs, transpositions of syllables, or through nonsensical but musically arranged words. So we learnt the music of our language on top of the content. The language, through images and symbols, gave us a view of the world, but it had a beauty on its own. The home and the field were then our preprimary school but what is important for this discussion is that the language of the evening teach-ins, the language of our work in the field were one.And then I went to school, a colonial school, and this harmony was broken. The language of my education was no longer the language of my culture. (P. 11)
If we analyze the present debate over bilingual education and the primacy of Western heritage versus multiculturalism, we see that the principles that sustain those debates are consonant with the mechanisms of a colonial system. That system devalues the cultural capital of the colonized. Only through a full understanding of our colonial legacy can we comprehend the complexity of bilingualism in the United States.
For most linguistic-minority speakers, their bilingualism is not about the ability to speak two languages. There is a radical difference between a dominant speaker learning a second language and a minority speaker acquiring the dominant language. Whereas the former involves the addition of a second language to one's linguistic repertoire, the latter usually provides the minority speaker with the experience of subordination in speaking the devalued language by the dominant values and language that he or she has learned, often under coercive conditions. Both the colonized context and the asymmetrical power relations create, on the one hand, a form of forced bilingualism, and on the other, what Albert Memmi calls a linguistic drama (Memmi, 1967, p. 107).
An example of how our society treats different forms of bilingualism is reflected in our tolerance toward certain types of bilingualism and lack of tolerance toward others. Most of us have tolerated various degrees of bilingualism for foreign language teachers and professors, which range from a heavy English accent to a serious deficiency in the mastery of the foreign language that they teach. Nevertheless, these teachers, with rare exceptions, have been granted tenure, have been promoted, and, in some cases, have become "experts" and "spokespersons" for various cultural and linguistic groups in our communities.
However, if bilingual teachers are speakers of a subordinated language who speak English with an accent, they are not accorded the same level of tolerance. Take the case of Westfield, Massachusetts. In response to the hiring of a Puerto Rican teacher, 400 people signed a petition asking state and local officials to ban hiring elementary teachers who speak English with an accent (Giroux & McLaren, 1986). They did this because "accents are catching" ("Humanities 101," 1992, p. 16).
Empirical studies that neglect to investigate this linguistic drama and treat bilingualism as mere communication in two languages end up reproducing those elements characteristic of the communication between colonizer and colonized. The ultimate meaning and value of the minority language are not in how systematic and rule-governed it is. Its real meaning lies in the assumptions that govern it. The issues of effectiveness and validity obfuscate questions about the social, political, and ideological order within which the minority language exists.
Language is the only means by which students can develop their own voice, a prerequisite to the development of positive self-worth. As Giroux and McLaren state, the students' voices are "the discursive means to make themselves 'heard' and to define themselves as active authors of their worlds" (1986, p. 235). The authorship of one's own world also implies the use of one's own language and relates to what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as "retelling the story in one's own words" (1981, p. 294). Simply put, proponents of the English-only movement work primarily to preserve the structures of a colonial system. In essence, educators who refuse to transform or even address the ugliness of human misery, social injustices, and inequalities invariably become educators who, as Jean-Paul Sartre (1967) poignantly suggested, "will change nothing and will serve no one, but will succeed only in finding moral comfort in malaise" (p. xxvi).
Literacy for Social Justice
Instead of accommodating to a form of "moral comfort in malaise," literacy teachers, particularly those who consider themselves agents of change, can weave key concepts, such as political and ideological clarity, courage, solidarity, and ethics, across the existing curriculum. Unfortunately, we often structure the debate in a false binarism, where the emphasis on political clarity deemphasizes the mastery of content. In other words, we assume that if a teacher develops political clarity, then the content automatically suffers. The converse argument, that effective teaching of content must preclude any political linkage, is also common. But all teachers—not just those who work with linguistic-minority students—can effectively incorporate political contexts into their curriculum.
Bill Bigelow, a high school teacher, used a soccer ball in his Global Studies classroom to encourage students to read the multiple realities linked with a soccer ball. Bigelow (1997) began the lesson with a beat-up soccer ball and asked students to write a description. As expected, he was greeted with "puzzlement and annoyance" because, according to one student, "it's just a soccer ball." The students' "accounts were straightforward and accurate if uninspired": The ball is a sphere which has white hexagons and black pentagons. The black pentagons contained red stars, sloppily outlined in silver. One of the hexagons contains a green rabbit wearing a soccer uniform with "Euro 88" written parallel to the rabbit's body. Another hexagon has the number of patches that the ball contains. (P. 1)
Although the students provided an accurate description of the ball, their depictions remained purely physical, with little connection to a deeper social reality associated with this ball—a reality that advertising and consumption-oriented rhythms of U.S. daily life discouraged students from considering, "Made in Pakistan."
Schools produce a disarticulation of an object by dislodging it from a critical and coherent comprehension of the world that informs and sustains it. With this disarticulation of knowledge, students can never see reality clearly, rendering students, at best, capable of a mere descriptive level of reading and, at worst, unable to link reading the word and reading the world.
Many educators view such linkages as politicizing education. What these educators fail to acknowledge is that only a politicized person is able to sort out the different and often fragmented bodies of knowledge contained in reading the word to be able to read the world. These educators ignore that clarity requires a high level of political awareness.
Bigelow then invited his students to inquire about "the human lives hidden in 'just a soccer a ball'—a clue to the invisible Pakistanis whose hands crafted the ball." Aware of the importance of making linkages, Bigelow used Bertolt Brecht's poem "A Worker Reads History" to engage his students in a deeper meaning contained in the hidden stories of the soccer ball:
<POEM><POEMLINE>Each page a victory.</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>At whose expense, the victory ball?</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>Every ten years a great man,</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>Who paid the piper? (P. 12)</POEMLINE></POEM>
By using the poem, Bigelow eclipsed the criticism alleging that the development of political clarity invariably waters down the curriculum. Who would argue that reading Brecht waters down education? After reading the poem, the teacher asked his students to "re-see" the soccer ball. Students raised questions: Who built this soccer ball? Where did the real people go after it was made? One student, Sarah, wrote: I sew together these shapes of leather. I stab my finger with my needle. I feel a small pain, but nothing much, because my fingers are so callused. Everyday I sew these soccer balls together for 5 cents, but I've never once had a chance to play soccer with my friends. I sew and sew all day long to have these balls shipped to another place where they represent fun. Here, they represent the hard work of everyday life. (1997, P. 12) When we compare the first description of the soccer ball with Sarah's in-depth reading of the world contained within the ball, we see how political clarity not only expands the range of possibilities for making meaning, but it also improves the quality of writing. As Bigelow puts it, Students had begun to image the humanity inside the ball: their pieces were vivid and curious. The importance of making visible the invisible, of looking behind masks presented by everyday consumer goods, became a central theme in my first-time effort to teach about the "global sweatshops" and child labor in poor countries. (P. 12)
The important lesson is that a global studies course should not only romanticize the great deeds in museums, victory arcs, and great books. A more honest account would require students to take a closer look at those great deeds, as Brecht's poem suggests. We also need to see the barbaric images hidden in victory celebrations, Michael Jordan's seductive Nike commercials, or even a soccer ball, to denude human exploitation.
Bigelow's pedagogy shows that the development of political awareness should not be restricted to a specific course, but should be woven throughout the curriculum. Thus, political clarity, as Paulo Freire suggested, is the only means through which "the less coherent sensibility of the world begins to be surpassed and more rigorous intellectual pursuits give rise to a more coherent comprehension of the world" (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 132).
In short, literacy for social justice means moving beyond the mere acquisition of technical reading skills. Adopting a critical posture helps teachers advocate for their students. Teachers and students can move beyond the present to imagine a future where social justice and humanity are always present in the classroom.
