Central to democratic education today is its commitment to creating a learning environment where students are introduced to not only content knowledge but also power dynamics that are foundational to our society. Despite this noble appeal, contemporary society is rampant with various isms that could be observed in the production and maintenance of colorblindness in schools, nonnative English speaking teachers’ (NNESTs’) marginalized identity in English language teaching, and international teaching assistants’ (ITAs’) unpopularity among U.S. undergraduate students. This article discusses, from the NNEST perspective, the applicability and relevance of teacher identity as pedagogy in preparing NNESTs for meaningful intercultural communication.

Research in NNEST and ITA pedagogy has pointed out that foreign-born instructors in the United States are considered as illegitimate educators due to their accented English or non-Caucasian facial appearance. In their study of U.S. undergraduates’ reactions to ITAs’ teaching performance in relation to their ethnicity, content knowledge, and accentedness, Rubin and Smith (1990) found that accent plays a decisive role in students’ rating of ITAs; as long as there are traces of foreign accent in the ITAs’ utterances, the students would immediately ascribe incompetence to the instructors. More recently, Kang and Rubin (2009) conducted a similar study to test native speakers’ reactions to nonnative speakers’ speech using reverse linguistic stereotyping and found that it is the speakers’ social attributions, such as accent or ethnicity, rather than intelligibility that produce nonnative speakers’ marginality. Based on this brief review, the issue of NNESTs being marginalized in intercultural contexts is closely connected to students’ consumption of the dominant discourses that adopt a binary worldview of East-West, colonizer-colonized, and native-nonnative (Shuck, 2006) and inferiorize others.

Teacher Identity as Pedagogy

Teacher identity development is heavily influenced by factors such as race, power, culture, and ideologies that are circulating in society (Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, & Johnson, 2005). For example, in the English language teaching profession, instructors whose native language is not English are viewed as less authentic speakers in the language and thus are unqualified in the eyes of students and school administrators. To help these nonnative educators exert their image in intercultural contexts, researchers working in the areas of teacher identity and pedagogy suggest that NNESTs performtheir identity as nonnative speakers or cultural minorities to transgress the established norms (Simon, 1995). Performing one’s identity in Simon’s case is actions of doing, of invocations that challenge marginality and “desire for recognition, affiliation, and commitment” (p. 93).

From teaching as a Jew perspective, Simon (1995) suggested that the assertion of a Jewish teacher identity is intended to deessentialize students’ preexisting knowledge of this group of people and resist the institutional power that attempts to erase or marginalize Jewish teachers. To project a Jewish teacher identity is to challenge both the students and the mainstream culture’s perception of Jewish scholars. Moreover, Simon pointed out that it is crucial for all members in education to understand that to teach as a Jew denotes the particularities of teaching practices of each Jewish teacher. The traditional education has been institutionalized in a way that essentializes and regulates other cultures, which in this case means that the knowledge, culture, and histories of all Jewish teachers are totalized. Thus, an embodiment of teaching as Jew seeks to display the multifarious nature of Jewish teachers and brings students into discussions that interrogate the misconceptions of others.

Applicability and Relevance

The key for NNESTs to develop legitimacy in intercultural communication is to first become aware of power relations embedded in our society including language, culture, and ideology, and have the courage to transgress these properties. Teacher identity as pedagogy will be applicable and fruitful once genuinely implemented because it asks educators to engage in critical dialogues with the students and reconceptualize the banking model of education in which knowledge production is governed by the very few and is passively transmitted to the students. Through the discussion of authority, education, liberation, and emancipation, students may come to understand that teachers are not the only ones in their classrooms who can initiate learning; as individuals who come from diverse disciplines and different states, with distinct life experience, they can also create knowledge that is previously unknown to their teachers.

In addition, NNESTs need to make it explicit in their teaching the multifarious nature of their identities as teachers, students, foreigners, and so forth, so that students do not form a reductionist view of NNESTs and others like them. One of the problematic features of the dichotomy between “us and them” is that it renders the perspectives of people of color into one. Without mentioning this aspect in teaching, NNESTs would only reinforce students’ essentialized understandings of culture; situations can become worse if the students intend to seek employment in education. In a recent study, a few TESOL program instructors were found to have a dichotomized view of students from the far East countries as passive, quiet, and undemonstrative learners and those from Europe as energetic, engaging, and critically thinking (Ellwood, 2009). It is these ingrained images of NNESTs that created those student responses in Rubin’s (1992) report. Thus, NNESTs need to be conscious of their identities and produce these identities as “an engagement with contemporary, historical, and traditional ‘texts’ which inform” (Simon, 1995, p. 100).

Summary

The above discussion on others’ perception of NNESTs’ inadequacy in intercultural communication indicates the power driven label of NNEST in educational linguistics and how that label is used to privilege native-English speakers while oppressing NNESTs. This understanding of power hierarchy in education and society at large may shed light on NNEST education. In the TESOL profession, for example, many NNESTs have developed conflicting identities; on the one hand, they aspire to be teachers who do not conform to the native speaker standard, on the other hand, they are constantly worried about their NNEST status (Reis, 2011). Such tensions and contradictions need to be discussed in teacher education programs so that new NNESTs are aware of possible ways to challenge the native-speaker construct. To increase their agency and empowerment in intercultural contexts, they may utilize teacher identity as pedagogy to transform their intercultural teaching context toward a more participatory, critical, democratic, multicultural, and dialogic place.

References

Ellwood, C. (2009). Uninhabitable identifications: Unpacking the production of racial difference in a TESOL classroom. In R. Kubota & A. Lin (Eds.),Race, culture and identities in second language education (pp.101–117). London, England & New York, NY: Routledge.

Kang, O., & Rubin, D. L. (2009). Reverse linguistic stereotyping: Measuring the effect of listener expectations on speech evaluation. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 28(4), 441–456.

Reis, D. S. (2011). Non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) and professional legitimacy: A sociocultural theoretical perspective on identity transformation, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 208(2011), 139-160.

Rubin, D. L., & Smith, K. A. (1990). Effects of accent, ethnicity, and lecture topic on undergraduates' perceptions of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 14(3), 337–353.

Rubin, D. L. (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of non-native English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education, 33(4), 511-531.

Shuck, G. (2006). Racializing the nonnative English speaker. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 5(4), 259-276.

Simon, R. I. (1995). Face to face with alterity: Postmodern Jewish identity and the Eros of pedagogy. In J. Gallop (Ed.). Pedagogy: The question of impersonation (pp. 90–105). Bloomington, IN & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

Varghese, M., Morgan, B., Johnston, B., & Johnson, K. A. (2005). Theorizing language teacher identity: Three perspectives and beyond. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 4(1), 21–44.

Hao Wang is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum & Instruction Department at The University of Alabama. His research interests include language teacher and learner identity development, international teaching assistants, sociocultural/poststructural theory in second language acquisition, critical applied linguistics, critical pedagogy, and NEST/NNEST issues.