Color, Race, and ELT: Shades of Meaning 20 Years Ago
by Andy Curtis
It was a chilly morning on Friday, 2 March 2001, in St.
Louis, Missouri, USA when we made a small but enduring piece of association history
by presenting a panel at the 35th Annual TESOL Convention titled "Linguistic
Perceptions of TESOL Professionals of Color." The "we" that day was Mary
Romney, Shelley Wong, Gertrude Tinker-Sachs, Donna Fujimoto, and me. In the
Convention Program Book, Gateway to the Future, it says:
"Panelists discuss linguistic perceptions of TESOL professionals of color who
are NS [native speakers of English], but who are sometimes assumed not to be.
Through individual experience and research, some teaching-learning implications
of these perceptions are examined" (Curtis et al., 2001, p. 144).
Room 162 of
the America’s Center, where we presented, holds a maximum of 50 people, and
while our panel presentation was well attended, we did not realize that the
long-term effects of that morning would resonate over 20 years! And in terms of
diversity, it is important to note that, of the 15 TESOL officers and Board of
Directors for 1999–2000, Mary and Donna were the only TESOL professionals of
color (TESOL International Association, 2001, p. 275). According to the
340-page program book, of the 1,000 or so presentations at the 2001 Convention,
ours appears to have been the only one focused on the relationships between
color, race, and English language teaching. Whatever the reason for our panel
being described by some of our workshop attendees as "ground-breaking," a
follow-up book was set in motion that day, which would take 5 long, hard years
of labor to complete. As many of us have experienced, oftentimes, the most
important moments can come before or after—rather than during—the presentation we just gave.
And so it was with our book: During the Q&A at the end of our session,
1998–1999 TESOL Past President Kathi Bailey asked Mary and I what we were
planning "to do next with this information, this momentum" (Curtis &
Romney, 2006, p. x).
Apparently,
my nonverbal communication gave away the fact that we had not planned to do
anything in particular with that information, and we may not have even realized
that there was such a momentum. As Kathi put it: "They looked at me somewhat
startled…[Andy and Mary] thought they were done. (Andy didn’t exactly say,
'What do you mean, next, Bailey?' but that was what the look
on his face conveyed)" (Curtis & Romney, 2006, p. x). To employ the
well-worn but still meaningful cliché, I remember that moment like it was
yesterday, and I remember the emotions, too. Kathi wrote that, while she
"expected that the content of the program would be quite good," she did not
expect "to be moved to tears by most of the speakers…to learn about serious
(often negative) youthful experiences that my friends and colleagues had had,
apparently as a result of their race" (Curtis & Romney, 2006, p. ix).
Kathi went
on to write that she "did not expect to be ashamed of what teachers had said
and done to [the panelists], perhaps sometimes unknowingly, perhaps sometimes
intentionally" (Curtis & Romney, 2006, p. ix). When my friends and
family who are not in education ask me: Why spend all that time and hard-earned
money to go to these events? I answer that it is for those moments of
connection and realization, whether while presenting or being presented to. At
the risk of stating the obvious, the content is what it is, whether online or
in person, but it is the emotional connections that can last a lifetime that we
miss when everything has to be all online.
Color, Race, and ELT: Shades of Meaning 20 Years Later
The book in
which Kathi wrote the aforementioned words, in the foreword, is Color, Race, and English Language Teaching: Shades of
Meaning, coedited by me and Mary Romney, published in 2006 by the
now-defunct Lawrence Erlbaum. I wrote the opening two chapters, the first of
which is titled, "A Brief Introduction to Critical Race Theory, Narrative
Inquiry, and Educational Research." Critical race theory was such an obscure
topic 20 years ago, that never would I have imagined it becoming one of the most
hotly debated race-related political topics in the United States today! In
addition to her own main chapter, "Not a Real American: Experiences of a
Reluctant Ambassador," Mary also wrote the conclusion chapter, in which she
summarized "recurring themes emerging from the narratives," which included "the
influence of popular culture on perceptions of people of color," "the
compounding of English non-nativeness with race," and "the dearth of TESOL
professionals of color in certain contexts and in positions of influence and
authority" (Curtis & Romney, 2006, p. 189).
In between
Mary’s opening chapters and my closing ones are powerful, moving, and
insightful narratives from TESOL professional of color from England, Guyana,
Japan, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Suriname, the Bahamas, India, Sri Lanka, and
Pakistan. Again, at that time, we may not have fully realized the significance
of bringing together—for the first time—such a diverse group of TESOL
professionals in a single volume focused on the relationships between color,
race, and English language teaching. Each of the authors responded to questions
that are still very valid today, for example:
As a person
of color, can you identify one or more critical incidents in your personal or
professional life that were or are the result of being a person of color, which
affect who you are now, what you do, and how you do it as a TESOL professional
of color? (Curtis & Romney, 2006, p. xii)
I must
confess that I have used that question, and the others we asked in our book, in
my recent research methods courses as examples of questions that just ask way too much in one go! And while we would ask the
questions differently today, these questions still need to be asked, as the
recent and ongoing work of the association’s Diverse Voices Task Force shows
(Healey & Powers, 2019).
More than 20
years later, on 22 June 2021, history came full circle when Mary and I brought
together, for the first time since 2001, the five-member panel from that day,
with Shelley Wong, Gertrude Tinker-Sachs, Donna Fujimoto, Mary, and me to
present online at the 2021
Virtual TESOL Advocacy & Policy Summit. The webpage lists the
benefits of attending, which include: "Share powerful messages with your
members of Congress.” Our panel members decided to focus on that sharing, and
the focus question to address during our panel presentation was: When you
re-read your chapter in our Shades of Meaning book, 15
years later, what do you think has and has not changed for you, as a TESOL
professional of color, and what do you think has and has not changed for TESOL
professionals of color in general?
Long Time, Little Change, Still Much Work To Do
While it
would be uplifting to conclude by saying that the recurring theme of our five
presentations was how much has changed and improved for TESOL professional of
color, sadly, the opposite turned out to be true: Though some positive changes
have taken place, in large part thanks to efforts by the association, given how
much time has passed between our two panel presentations, and the publication
of our book, relatively little has changed, and there is still so much work to
be done. And although our Shades of Meaning book appears
to never have sold more than a few hundred copies, I am still writing about
race (Curtis, 2020), and many of the authors in our book, including Shondel
Nero, Suhanthie Motha, and Ahmar Mahboob, went on to publish major works in the
field of color, race, and English language teaching. Who knows? Maybe one day
there will be a second edition of our book that grew out of a chilly Missouri
morning all those years ago…
References
Curtis, A.
(2020, 15 June). Being 'of colour' in Kingston: It’s not about race. The Kingston Whig Standard. https://www.thewhig.com/opinion/columnists/being-of-colour-in-kingston-its-not-about-race
Curtis, A., Fujimoto, D., Romney, M., Tinker-Sachs, G., & Wong, S. (2001, 27 February–3 March). Linguistic perceptions of TESOL professionals of color [Conference presentation abstract]. Thirty-fifth annual convention of TESOL International Association, St. Louis, Missouri, United States.
Curtis, A.
& Romney, R. (Eds.). (2006). Color, Race, and English
Language Teaching: Shades of Meaning. Lawrence Erlbaum.
Healey, D.,& Powers, C. (2019, October). Increasing inclusivity: Diverse voices in TESOL. TESOL Connections. http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolc/issues/2019-10-01/1.html
TESOL
International Association. (2001). Gateway to the future. 35th Annual
TESOL Convention and Exposition Program Book. Author.
Dr. Andy Curtis served as the 50th president of TESOL International Association from 2015 to 2016. He has (co)authored/(co)edited 200 articles, book chapters, and books and presented to 50,000 language educators in 100 countries; his work has been read by 100,000 language educators in 150 countries. He is an online professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Anaheim. He is based in Ontario, Canada, from where he works with language education organizations worldwide.
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I am very excited about the topics for the next two months because I will be focusing on strategies that all teachers can use to help English learners (ELs) be successful contributors in the science classroom no matter their level of language proficiency. This blog will cover four of the nine strategies, and the remaining five strategies will be covered in my November blog post.
