TESOL Scotland 22nd Annual Conference Proceedings
13 November 2004
Glasgow Caledonian University
"Multiple Identities in Scotland" Proceedings
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Opening talk: From Collision to Collusion: Monolingual teachers and culturally diverse classrooms
Dr Chris Kearney, Goldsmiths College, London
The main point of my talk was to examine how teachers (particularly monolingual teachers) can be most adequately prepared for their work in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Teaching in culturally and linguistic classrooms is an extremely complex business. Research has demonstrated that it is most effective if teachers build upon the cultural and linguistic experiences which children bring to school; what Luis Moll refers to as 'funds of knowledge'. However, it is also clear that the vast majority of teachers in the UK are monolingual. So how do teachers gain a clear picture of what these funds of knowledge are in their specific contexts? What does it mean in practice?
Drawing on my own research on the complex identities of six academically successful bilingual adults I examined ways in which teachers can support bilingual children. For this I traced my own complicated journey, as a monolingual teacher, from collision to collusion. The questions tackled were ones I had been grappling with in my own 18-year 'Odyssey' as a teacher; thirteen as a class teacher and five as an advisory teacher. These were the mysteries I was trying to penetrate and am still working on. They were indeed the background to my talk. I wished to emphasise that we are often harshly critical of teachers who fail to grasp the complexity of the situation. So my talk concentrated upon ten lessons I had learned over the past 30 years I had spent as a teacher and a lecturer grappling with these issues. I know I still have much to learn.
In educational ethnography we often undervalue our (often extensive) personal experience in multilingual and culturally diverse classrooms. Yet reflecting on it for this talk, I realise, was similar to traditional anthropological fieldwork or 'deep hanging out' as Clifford Geertz puts it in his own autobiographical reflections (Geertz: 2000). When I think back on my first teaching job in Hackney I can readily empathise with Geertz's declaration that:
One of the psychological fringe benefits of anthropological research – at least I think it's a benefit – is that it teaches you how it feels to be thought of as a fool and used as an object, and how to endure it.
Much more difficult to come to terms with, however, is another very closely related sort of collision between the way I typically see things and the way most of my informants do; more difficult, because it concerns not just the immediate content of the relationship between us but the broader meaning of that content, its symbolic overtones
(Geertz:2000:30-31)
These were the mysteries I was trying to penetrate and am still working on. For the talk I expressed my own journey as the debunking of myths to which I had subscribed as a teacher. Apart from the last one against which I have been struggling since the early 1980s. Below I present an annotated version.
1. Teachers should come out of college fully prepared to teach in multilingual and culturally diverse classrooms. I don't know how the idea that student teachers can be fully prepared at the end of their initial teacher education but it is a persistent and dangerous myth. We are always learning through our own reflections.
2. Teachers will automatically know which 'bilingual' children in their class are having difficulties with their learning. The distinction between the needs of bilingual children and those with learning difficulties is a subtle one for teachers to grasp, particularly when children are in the early stages of learning English.
3. That 'bilingual' children will know a great deal about each others' home background and cultures through socialising both in and out of school. My own research demonstrates that the dominance of English and American mass media means that many children from diverse heritages are embarrassed and ashamed of their home backgrounds and do not often discuss home life with each other.
4. Bilingualism is a monolithic phenomenon. As Cummings has demonstrated there is a wide spectrum of attitudes and competence in terms of multilingualism. As I have already noted it is a complex and often contradictory phenomenon.
5. There is a single method or approach that works best in all cases. This aspect demands a subtle and sensitive approach of us as teachers. Children need differing kinds of support depending upon their own favoured approaches to learning and the expectations they have derived from their own cultural experiences.
6. Monolingual teachers cannot help bilingual students. It is the job best done by specialist teachers. Monolingual teachers can do a great deal through sensitive approaches, which are based on a genuine love of diversity and an open and enquiring mind and the confidence not to be always the font of all knowledge in their classrooms.
7. 'Bicultural' children are automatically 'bilingual'. The link between language and culture is not straightforward, especially among children whose parents or grandparents were born in Britain.
8. All children have the same understandings about the processes of learning to speak, read and write. Again the spectrum is wide and complex. Some languages the children speak do not possess a written form.
9. That children's home language, culture and identity are static and unchanging and linked unproblematically to their parents' or grandparents' homeland. The question of identity is one of the most important in our rapidly changing world. It is fraught with complexity and contradiction.
10. That teachers' professional development follows predictable patterns and can be catered for by government sponsored training courses with prescribed learning outcomes. Very much a myth perpetuated by Thatcher's ministers and taken on with particular relish in the "New" Labour government by David Blunkett during his time as Education Secretary.
The final myth is a most persistent and dangerous one as it is an obstacle to teachers who wish to develop and promote their own approaches. All these myths need to be addressed if we are to develop an effective education for all children.
Author's summary. Contact Chris at: aea01ck@gold.ac.uk
Dr Chris Kearney is a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths College. He taught for 18 years in culturally and linguistically divers classrooms in the London Boroughs of Hackney and Tottenham. His recent book, The Monkey's Mask, ( Trentham Books 2003) examines the life histories of six academically successful adults and explores the complex ways in which they construct their identities.
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