Abir Ward, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania, USA

Self as a Pedagogy: A Short History of My Life

We learn about the world through language. This is why those who speak more than one language have a different view of the world than monolinguists. It is like looking at a tree from one angle and then looking at it from another angle. You form a different understanding of the same tree. Nothing but another language can change our view of everything around us. I see a more vibrant world when I think of it in all the languages I speak. (Reflections, Summer 2019)

I begin with this epigraph—from one of my reflective writings in a doctorate seminar on language teacher identity designed and taught by Dr. Gloria Park—as a way to showcase the shifts I have gone through in my own learning and teaching. I was born and raised in Monrovia, Liberia, to Lebanese parents who forced me to speak Lebanese Arabic at home. My mother taught me standard Arabic (reading, writing, high grammar, and composition), and I studied standard English at school. Outside the house, I spoke vernacular Liberian English, but at home I spent my afternoons writing in a language I had never heard anyone besides my mother speak until I moved back to Lebanon as a teenager. There, I studied Arabic as a first language, English as a second language, French as a third language, and I later enrolled in Italian and German classes. The college I attended in the United States did not exempt me from studying a foreign language because I could not test in Arabic and was not fluent enough to test in one of the other languages I had learned, so I ended up studying Spanish for a year. However, when I graduated with an MA in English and went on to teach composition and literature classes to second language (L2) students, I did not anticipate that other languages would pervade my classroom space.

Zooming Into My Classroom: Snapshot of My Coming to Know

As a teacher of English at the American University of Beirut (AUB), in Lebanon, I have struggled with the English-only ideology, in that we should not allow our students to use a language in class other than English. My struggle stems from the colonial practices in some Lebanese schools where students were penalized if they spoke Lebanese during recess, and they were forced to speak either English or French, depending on the school curriculum. Many educators believed that this is the best practice to help students learn how to speak French (the second official language of the country) or English more fluently. I had internalized the English-only ideology as a discourse practice, thinking it is a universal truth set in stone until, one day, I saw a group of students struggling with discussing an article during an in-class group activity. I heard the students floundering, not knowing how to express their ideas in English because English was their third or fourth language (some of them were Lebanese Armenian who had studied Armenian, Arabic, and French at school but were studying English as a third or fourth language at the university). As I approached the group, the students stopped talking and looked at me with frustration, so I decided to encourage them to discuss the article in whatever language they preferred as long as they could report back to the class in English.

The students sighed with relief, and some began their discussion in Armenian. Though I could not understand what they were talking about, I could hear them borrow words from the text and try to negotiate the meaning of these words. They also discussed how to phrase the sentences in English to report back to class. When their turn came up, the group passionately talked about the article and delivered an in-depth interpretation of it. Since then, I have encouraged my students to speak in their language of choice while discussing articles. I have also motivated them to ask questions in their preferred language, and I would assist them in translating these questions to English to help others in class understand what the questions are. After working with the L2 students on translating the question, I would ask them if they thought that the translation was accurate. In doing so, I was inviting them to negotiate the meaning and claim agency over their words by making sure they approved of how the question was interpreted. We would then write the two questions on the board in the two languages and attempt to answer them together in English. I found that this dialogic negotiation of language, text, and meaning adds a critical layer to my thinking and that of my students.

Here, I am no longer the sole language authority in the class. In fact, I am only providing a platform for the students to negotiate meaning using multiple languages. This pedagogical action speaks volumes in promoting learner agency. Also, by making an effort to learn the students’ linguistic choices in discussing texts (be it Arabic, Armenian, French, or Spanish), I am affirming that their languages matter, and making these linguistic choices is one way to share the power inherent in our voices and experiences. In essence, English is no longer the central academic language but a tool to help learners negotiate their places in their respective spaces (or fields). Learners, therefore, are using the language that everyone understands and not only the ones perceived to be owned by the Inner Circle (Kachru, 1997). In this way, the linguistic positioning is being shifted to (shared with) the periphery because it is viewed as another tool that helps with our understanding of concepts. The focus is no longer on the language but what using the language can offer. In addition to shifting the language to the periphery, I advocate for the emplacement (Porter & Tanghe, 2016) of the teacher as the main agent in the classroom, for I am a facilitator and not the central source of knowledge in the class.

This shift in status and identity (Appleby, 2016) has occurred within the context (that of AUB) as a result of a reflexive interpretation of my work. When I first exercised the preceding, I was not aware of the effects of this action. Only when I started reading, writing, and reflexively thinking in the doctorate seminar on language teacher identity that I took in 2019 with Dr. Gloria Park did I understand the importance of my actions. I negotiated my role as a teacher and purposely stepped aside to make it easier for the students in my class to claim agency in determining what language they preferred to use to make meaning of their readings in English. I have also invested in learning words in their languages to help me help them reproduce them in English. This new role that I have adopted as learner/facilitator helped shift my position of the “know-it-all” teacher who deposits knowledge (the “banking” concept) into these empty vessels (Freire, 1970), into a partner in meaning making. Porter and Tanghe (2016) state: “A critical practice in this setting would require a careful negotiation of simultaneous identities as insiders and outsiders, experts and learners, and even as critical practitioners and beneficiaries of the problematic history (and present) of the TESOL identity” (p. 771). This constant negotiation of my identity as a teacher and learner, especially when my students become the teachers, has helped me deconstruct some of my and their understanding of the role of the teacher and to view her as an accessible, approachable, and teachable entity.

Further Pedagogical Insights

The preceding narrative rendition has allowed me space to revisit how I construct and negotiate my language teacher identity. Rightly so, I have consistently pushed back Western-based ideological discourses in order to create a niche for more contextualized understanding of language learning and teaching. I am grateful for the opportunity to reflect on my language teacher identity via the LTI seminar in Summer 2019, but more importantly, I am privileged to be in spaces where I can think about how my practices affect my students’ and my own development as multi-/translingual. I want to leave readers with an invitation to collectively move toward creating a more sustainable, coherent, and meaningful learning landscape. The following questions are the beginning of a global effort to promote social justice in what we do as language users and teachers in this ever-changing world.

1. How can we be both a teacher and a learner in our classrooms? This question becomes critical as a way for us to acknowledge that being a language teacher means that we need to be willing to learn from and with our students in order to find a middle ground in negotiating knowledge and experiences.
2. How can we engage our students in the curricular conversation? This question raises ideas around dual roles of being students—sharing pedagogical ideas as a way to resist banking-education models.
3. How can we push back against marginalization that lumps second-/third-language students into one homogeneous group that needs to be taught ESL using similar methods? This query raises the importance of individual literacy practices, family literacy, and cultural practices that create and resist both master narratives of education and schooling processes.
4. How can international TESOL organizations be more inclusive of teachers from peripheral contexts? This question raises both intentional and unintentional ways in which organizations like TESOL continue to privilege one group over the others. One way is to continue to guide and promote teacher scholars from the peripheral countries to publish and collaborate more with Western-based teacher scholars to share knowledge and experiences via publications.

These are a few of the pedagogical insights shared by my professor, Dr. Gloria Park, and me as we continue to navigate the fluid nature of our language-teacher identities. I welcome other insights into pedagogical practices, and I look forward to being part of a community of teacher-scholars.

References

Appleby, R. (2016). Researching privilege in language teacher identity. TESOL Quarterly, 50(3), 755–768. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.321

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. Bergman Ramos, Trans.). Continuum.

Kachru, B. B. (1997). English as an Asian language. Blackwell.

Porter, C., & Tanghe, S. (2016). Emplaced identities and the material classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 50(3), 769–778. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.317

Abir Ward is a PhD candidate in composition and applied linguistics. She teaches academic writing and communication skills at the American University of Beirut, and her research interests include areas of spatial marginalization, linguistic injustice, power, privilege, and teacher identity.