Language,Power and Pedagogy
Chapter 1:Issues and Contexts
Jim Cummins
Komotini, Greece, October 2, 1999: Power Relations Past and Present
My feelings yesterday were almost surreal as I listened to Howard Smith of the University of Texas at San Antonio describe the history of educational oppression experienced by African American children in the United States. What was I doing sitting in an auditorium in the province of Thrace, near Turkey, at a conference focused on the education of the Muslim minorities in Greece, listening to the ugly history of racism on the other side of the globe, and how its residues still persist?
Today, I listened to Daphna Bassewitch Ginzburg and Anwar Dawod from Israel present Jewish and Palestinian perspectives on two different attempts to heal the wounds of the past (and present) through education. Both described settings at the preschool (Daphna) and elementary school (Anwar) where Jewish and Palestinian children are being educated together in the same classrooms, with the same curriculum, and using both Arabic and Hebrew as languages of instruction. I was struck by the courage of educators in these schools who saw education as a means of transforming the future rather than reproducing the past.
Maria del Socorro Leandro, Director of Bilingual Programs in the Edgewood School District in San Antonio, Texas, also spoke of the two-way bilingual immersion program in Edgewood that brings together English-dominant and Spanish-dominant students in the same classrooms with the goal of promoting fluent bilingualism and biliteracy for both groups of students. Here again was testimony about reclaiming dignity and voice from a people who had experienced subordination for more than 150 years. Educators who remembered the very recent past, up to the late 1960s, when Mexican-Americans were treated as an inferior species by all institutions of society, were using the power of language and education to repudiate that past and evoke a very different future.
Too often, the conflicts of the past pervade the classrooms of the present. This was illustrated vividly when Anna Frangoudaki and Thalia Dragonas of the University of Athens, organizers of the conference and directors of the project on the education of the Muslim minorities, spoke yesterday about the history of education in Thrace and the goals of their project. The Turkish-speaking population of Thrace became Greek citizens in May 1920 when western Thrace became part of Greece. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which was referred to many times during the conference, still governs the education of the Muslim minorities in Greece. It provides for a separate education for the Muslim minorities with Turkish textbooks to be developed by the Turkish government. However, use of these textbooks is subject to approval by the Greek government. The curriculum in the Muslim minority schools is divided in two: half of the subjects are taught by Greek teachers and half by Turkish teachers. The school principal comes from the minority group and the vice-principal from the majority. The vast majority (99%) of the Muslim minority attend these segregated schools and have no contact with non-Muslim students until at least the age of 12 when they finish elementary school. More than 7,000 students attend 300 minority schools, many of them in isolated mountainous areas.
The situation is complicated by the fact that among the Muslim minorities are small groups of Roma communities speaking the Roma language as well as Pomak communities who speak a Slavic dialect related to Bulgarian. Although their language is not Turkish, their education is viewed by the Turkish minority and by the Turkish government as being regulated by the Treaty of Lausanne as a result of their Muslim religion. Originally, this interpretation of the Treaty was also encouraged by the Greek government. Consequently, these groups attend the Turkish/Greek medium minority schools and learn through two languages which are not their mother tongues. The mutual suspicion that has characterized relations with the Greek government and Greek communities of Thrace, together with pressure from the more powerful Turkish minority, has resulted in a bizarre situation where many Pomaks deny that they speak a different language and claim Turkish as their home language.
For the past 70 years, it seems that the Muslim minority children in Thrace have been pawns to be sacrificed in a struggle for historical righteousness. Turkish textbooks prepared by the Turkish government have been rejected by the Greek government on the grounds that they were full of anti-Greek propaganda. Turkish textbooks prepared in the early 1990s by the Greek government were burned by the Turkish community because they violated the Treaty of Lausanne. Many Greek teachers have approached their duty of “teaching the enemy” with a feeling of hostility to the language, culture, and traditions that children bring to school. Their expectations for student success have been extremely low and thus it was not difficult to rationalize the minimal literacy skills attained by the Muslim children in Greek (and even Turkish) as being due to their inherent inferiority. Contact between Greek and Muslim teachers in the school has tended to be minimal and characterized by the same hostility and suspicion.
The project that Anna Frangoudaki and Thalia Dragonas spoke about was funded by the European Union and has initiated extensive professional development for teachers in the minority schools over the previous two years. It has also developed attractive and culturally-sensitive teaching materials for use in teaching during the Greek part of the day. Not the least of its achievements has been to bring Greek and Muslim teachers into constructive dialogue, perhaps for the first time ever, regarding ways of improving the education of minority children. This conference itself seemed to represent a huge step forward. It was endorsed by both the “majority” and “minority” Primary Schools Teachers Associations in Thrace and the auditorium was filled with teachers from both communities,. The droning repetitious discourses of past hatreds were at least temporarily set aside, although their echoes could occasionally be heard in the reflections and recommendations of participants.
We started this morning at 9.30 and continued through the day until almost 9.00 in the evening. At the end of the conference, the auditorium was almost as packed as it was earlier in the day. My own intellectual and physical stamina exhausted, I remember thinking that I could imagine few settings in North America where educators or any other profession would give up their weekend for almost 12 straight hours of lectures and often passionate discussion. The devastating earthquakes that had struck both Turkey and Greece in the weeks prior to the conference, and the mutual assistance given by each country to the other, perhaps had contributed to shaking up old ways of thinking. Expansion of imaginative horizons could perhaps also be read into the rapt attention paid to accounts from both the United States and Israel of similarly conflictual and oppressive social relations, and the possibility that educators could transform these coercive social relations into collaborative ones. Even if this collaborative transformation were to occur only within the microcosm of the school, or in the interactions of individual educators with their students, it would nevertheless constitute what Noam Chomsky (1987) called “the threat of a good example.” When schools and individual educators refuse to play their preordained part in the social order, education becomes dangerous. The discourses of national and religious identity, and the historical myths that sustain them, risk implosion when contact and dialogue replace isolation and monologue. When two languages are used in the school to affirm the experiences and cultures of the students and communities who speak those languages, this in itself challenges the discourse of superiority and devaluation that characterizes social relations between these communities in the wider society.
To create a future we need to rupture the past.
Northern Ireland comes to mind and the half-truths of history into which I was socialized as a child.
It is not surprising to hear Thalia Dragonas speak of the change in attitudes towards the project among some officials in the Greek Ministry of Education—initial support and enthusiasm have been replaced by ambivalence and concern. Enemies have their place—they are essential to national identity. If education transforms enemies into colleagues, is it serving the interests of our society or undermining its strength?
Ironically, the Muslim children in Thrace have received a bilingual education for the past 70 years, illustrating the fact that language of instruction itself is only surface structure. Coercive power relations can be expressed as effectively through two languages as through one. Change in the deep structure will come only when educators walk into their classrooms burdened not by the anger of the past and the disdain of the present, but with their own identities focused on transforming the social futures towards which their students are traveling.
Victims and victimizers: Turkish minority children in Thrace caught in the crossfire of historical antagonisms, but at least with access to mother tongue instruction (however inadequate) and no prohibition on private use of Turkish; Kurdish children in Turkey still denied access to mother tongue instruction in any form and restrictions even on private use of Kurdish:
The only ban on the Kurdish language that has been lifted [by new legislation passed in 1991] is that on private use, provided it does not fall under the other paragraphs. Thus, Kurds are now allowed to speak Kurdish in their homes and sing Kurdish love songs in their gardens, but if a Kurdish child complains to a parent in a private garden, while picking beans, about not being allowed to speak Kurdish during the breaks in school, this act is still a terrorist crime. (Hassanpour, Skutnabb-Kangas, & Chyet, 1996: 371)
Earlier today, during one of the breaks, I spoke with a young man who was teaching in a Pomak village. He had come from another part of Greece and had not been socialized into the immediacy of hostile relations between Christians and Muslims that many Greeks in Thrace had experienced. He described his frustration at his inability to connect with his students early in the year. Teaching the prescribed curriculum was going nowhere. Things began to change when he discarded the curriculum and asked his students to teach him some of their language. In my terms, he moved from transmission of a prescribed curriculum rooted in a coercive power structure to an attempt to establish genuine human relationships with his students and their parents. His efforts were so successful that the community assumed that he must be a Muslim. When he demonstrated to them that he was in fact Christian (by showing them the cross he carried on a chain around his neck), the community was angry and rejected him. The teacher contemplated resigning and leaving the community but after further discussion the community asked him to stay.
This teacher’s experience brought to mind a quotation from Oscar Wilde which suggests that educators have both the responsibility, and the opportunity, to refuse complicity in the punishments inflicted by society on children, as demonstrated by this Greek teacher in a remote area of Thrace:
A child can understand a punishment inflicted by an individual, such as a parent or guardian, and bear it with a certain amount of acquiescence. What it cannot understand is a punishment inflicted by society. <1>
Tokyo, August 1-5, 1999: Measured Words and Dissenting Voices
Several items in the media caught my eye on this the first day of the International Applied Linguistics (AILA) Congress. An article in the Airport Limousine magazine which I had picked up the previous day en route from Narita airport was entitled “Japan’s Baby Bust: Young and Old Alike Feeling the Pinch” (Odani, 1999). It outlined the mostly bleak economic consequences of the drop in Japan’s birthrate to 1.4 births per woman, far below the 2.1 births required to sustain the population at its current level. Rapid constriction in all levels of education is predicted as fewer young people come to school and go to university. Without a dramatic increase in fertility (which is highly unlikely) or massive increases in immigration (which is currently negligible—foreigners account for only 1% of the Japanese population), the economy will shrink and make it difficult to maintain social services to the rapidly increasing elderly population (aged 65+) which will make up 20% of Japan’s population by 2005. Two days later, the Asahi Evening News elaborated on these trends (Kristof, 1999), pointing out that the working-age population of Japan will drop by about 650,000 a year over the next 50 years.
Dramatically increase immigration or face economic decline? Stark choices for a nation accustomed to viewing itself as homogenous and proud of it (leaving aside some blips on the homogeneity screen resulting from groups such as the Ainu, Koreans, and Burakumin [Maher & Yashiro, 1995]). To increase immigration in such a way that immigrants would want to settle and boost the population would entail significant social changes: reduce widespread discrimination against foreigners, implement effective Japanese L2 language learning programs, and possibly bilingual education in immigrant languages, and generally adjust a social and educational system to promote equity and academic advancement for second language learners. Not simple to do, or even to contemplate, because we are talking about fundamental changes to the culture and power structure of the society.
These issues are just beginning to appear on the horizon of public consciousness and, to its credit, the Japanese government has initiated research to address the educational issues faced by the inevitability of increasing diversity. Preliminary results from a large-scale study involving approximately 9,000 teachers, 800 parents, and 1,000 children from Portuguese-, Chinese-, Spanish-, and Vietnamese-speaking backgrounds led by Professor Suzuki Nishihara of Tokyo Women’s Christian University were reported at the AILA Congress. Among the findings reported by Professor Toshio Okazaki (1999) is a significant positive relationship between parental attitudes favoring active maintenance of their children’s home language and both L1 maintenance and L2 acquisition. A positive relationship or interdependence between L1 and L2 emerges after the L1 has reached a certain level of development. In other words, contrary to the views of many Japanese (and North American) educators, active promotion of the first language in the home appears to benefit not only development of L1 but also the L2.
The importance for families of L1 maintenance and the challenges involved in achieving this goal were apparent in a news clip in the August 1 Asahi Evening News. This article reported the retirement of the Buffalo Sabres’ Dominik Hasek, five-time choice as the National Hockey League’s best goalie, and quoted him as follows:
We want our kids to go back to the Czech Republic and share a Czech background. Every year he (9-year-old son) has more problems to speak Czech. ...The longer we stay in the United States, the harder it will be for our kids. (Asahi Evening News, August 1, 1999: 5)
Obviously, affluence and privilege alone can’t buy L1 maintenance in the face of the massive power of the dominant language in the environment.
I frequently hear sad anecdotes from international students enrolled in the University of Toronto about how their elementary school children are rejecting the home language and culture. After just two years in Canada, many children refuse to use the first language in the home and want to anglicize their names in order to belong to the culture of the school and peer group. I very rarely hear stories of how teachers communicate strong affirmative messages to students about the value of knowing additional languages. In the vacuum created by the absence of any proactive validation of their linguistic talents and accomplishments, bilingual students’ identities become infested with shame. A psychological phenomenon, to be sure; but also sociological. Pre-service teacher education programs across North America typically regard knowledge about linguistic and cultural diversity as appropriate for “additional qualification” courses rather than as part of the core knowledge base that all teachers should possess. As the discussions about assessment and pedagogy in Chapters 6 and 10 make clear, the contradictions that derive from viewing the generic student as monolingual, monocultural, white, middle-class, and heterosexual are becoming embarrassingly evident.
Dominik Hasek’s predicament, and that of millions of other minority language parents around the globe, reminds me of the incident that happened a few years ago in Amarillo, Texas, where State District Judge, Samuel Kiser, ordered a bilingual Mexican-American mother (Marta Laureano) involved in a child custody dispute to refrain from speaking Spanish to her daughter. If you are from a group that has historically been subordinated rather than a Hockey superstar, even the home is not a safe haven for the mother tongue. The judge told Laureano that she was “abusing” her five-year old daughter by speaking Spanish to her and ordered Laureano to speak only English at home. The father of the child, Timothy Garcia, who was seeking unsupervised visitation rights with his daughter, had complained that she was not proficient in English. As reported in Maclean's magazine (September 11, 1995: 13):