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MOST of us know that even our seemingly generalizable professional stances and deliberations are affected by the roles we play within the profession. Permit me, then, to begin my comments with a personal observation based on my current position as a “faculty administrator.”
Increasingly, I find that the clean separation of academic and intellectual issues from administrative, legal, and fiscal issues, of the faculty from the administration, is both unrepresentative of what really happens at an institution of higher education and unproductive for the welfare of an institution. Instead, it seems that a college or university must be able to fall back on the firm and expansive reserve of knowledge that becomes available when each member of the institution can draw on academic and administrative experiences and skills. Only then will it be possible to launch and, more important, to sustain responsive and responsible academic policy making and actions in the current social, political, intellectual, administrative, and financial context of institutions of higher education.
Of course, none of these statements are new to any of you. I recall it here because the dynamic applies equally to deliberations in our profession. To me, the papers by Christine Brown, James Jones, and June Phillips, as well as, of course, the paper by Claire Kramsch under discussion now, are a powerful reminder of the need to think for the whole, to overcome the situation in which proponents of intellectual pursuits and those who do our work in the trenches, as it were, all too often speak a different language, or, as Claire puts it, come from different discourse communities. Indeed, we as foreign language educators, as humanists who focus on the power and enchantments of language, may be more afflicted in that regard than are our colleagues in other disciplines. Language can seemingly obviate the need for action when we are already challenged mightily with stating “the facts” correctly. It can objectify as pristinely present something that is disturbingly evolving. It can privilege a conceptual clarity that results from focusing on states and oppositions over the multifacetedness of action and the messiness of reality. And the more that turbulent reality eludes individual control and demands multiple, even highly diverse players, the more language will tend to tune that reality out. I take these points to be critically important as we deliberate how to achieve a maximally effective sequence for foreign language learning.
Earlier on I used the term academic policy making . I did so first of all because I believe that, deep down, this gathering is an attempt to set in motion a policy-making conversation between important constituencies in the foreign language field. Considering both intellectual and systemic issues—and I emphasize the and —we are attempting to lay the groundwork for a consensus on articulation in foreign language education, though we are probably far from achieving it. Second, a policy perspective is an appropriate approach to Kramsch's paper. As she states, we must explore “the opinion that intellectual and systemic differences are undesirable ‘obstacles’ to the articulation we seek between the different sectors of the educational system” if we are to move forward. And, finally, though I will plead for connecting policy to action, this part of the conference and its position papers were to attend to the general context within which we can discuss articulation in foreign language education.
Let me, then, explore the Kramsch paper in three ways.
Unlike Claire, I explicitly affirm the need for planning, for “establishing goals and objectives.” I am not foolish enough to equate establishing goals and objectives with achieving them. Nor do I believe that an initial statement of goals and objectives precludes the ability to understand that those goals and objectives might have to be changed with changing circumstances. Indeed, it seems to me that when we plan properly, we build on that connection and realize that having a plan makes our ability to understand the complexity of issues involved and to act judiciously all the richer.
I favor the demanding tie-in to action, flawed though it may be, for, without it, painfully little gets accomplished. Whether that stance puts me in the group of folks Kramsch referred to who are closer to taxpayers, big corporations, and local politicians I cannot determine. Even so, I can assert that I make every effort to avoid the “quasi-religious missionary tone” that Kramsch seems to associate with the idiom of American business and industry. However, I happily confess to getting quite impassioned about the needs of and the needs in American higher education, about the responsibilities of the inhabitants of the academy to address these problems, and, considerably less grandiosely, about what I believe my institution should contribute to the education of its students.
In other words, I consider establishing goals and objectives to be among the first of many, many demanding steps that I would have to take to evidence real social and political consciousness. I would not only have the luxury of stating a cultural critique or, worded positively, espousing certain ideals. Instead, I would have to subject myself to the unrelenting task of continually respecting multiple perspectives without succumbing to simplistic relativism—all so I could set in motion positive change in a complex and ever-changing environment. In setting goals and objectives I would start out on the intellectually demanding, emotionally fatiguing, arduous road of making something happen for students, an endeavor that will require every skill I have: comprehensive knowledge of things and people, compassion, cooperation, flexibility, stamina, and an awareness of self and of others, to state just the most obvious.
Many foreign language articulation projects, regional, statewide, or otherwise cooperatively conceived and implemented, are painfully eloquent testimony both to the “intellectual and systemic obstacles to achieving consensus on articulation in foreign language education” mentioned in the charge for Kramsch's paper and to ways of making progress through consensus.
I mention above cooperation, flexibility, and awareness of self and of others. To me, these terms characterize consensus, the second point I want to address. Again, I contrast with Claire. I believe in consensus—I suppose because I attach values to it that are decidedly different from those she associates with the term. Far from equating it with the “death of intellectual inquiry,” I consider consensus to be the result of keen, multifaceted exploration of my and others' beliefs, of our presuppositions, our modes and methods of analysis and synthesis; it is a hermeneutics of inquiry that looks at the contexts that have led each one of us to our opinions. In short, to me consensus is far removed from lockstep anything, particularly lockstep pedagogies.
I agree completely with Claire Kramsch that in our profession and in this society there are many and fundamentally different ways of talking about foreign language education—we discuss it in terms of educational tradition, geographical setting, social class, views on literacy, intellectual style, research tradition, and political leanings. These differences will not go away. But we should be unwilling to leave it at that. Instead, we should cautiously venture into action on the ground—and this is where consensus comes in.
I believe consensus is essentially different from unanimity or sameness. Far from an abdication of intellectual rigor, it is in my opinion the result of the most demanding and deeply honest and respectful exploration of our positions, one that should lead to a candid determination of our differences but also to a growing awareness of those points on which we seem to be relatively close in our assessment. What cannot be missing, however, is the will to act responsibly. Keeping the responsibility for joint action uppermost is an act of trust between us in which we choose to focus on these proximities of judgment and valuation so that we may accomplish a certain communal good of which we all hold a reasonable compatible vision. I find this approach quite different from embracing conflict, just as I find it quite different from succumbing to a mindless uniformity reminiscent of corporate behavior.
This discussion brings me to the heart of the matter, articulation in foreign language education. I take it that, in this context, the term articulation means specifically a coherent sequence of events that is presumed to lead to the most beneficial learning environment for the student over a number of years.
I suspect that Claire Kramsch is right when she says that our different ways with words create different ways of viewing the world, different views that are worth having and keeping; that these perspectives cannot be simplistically resolved through talk; and that, most likely, they should not be so resolved. Particularly in education, where the coin of the realm so often is talk, it is wise to remember these words. But might it also be that our world made up of a network of words can all too easily become our iron cage of inaction? Could we, through working things out on the ground, with all the pitfalls and difficulties that entails, rather than loftily talking about them, find a consensual common ground that will allow us to move forward intellectually and practically, even in untidy ways?
For reasons of time I mention just one major point of agreement. We may differ on many issues, but I believe we agree that the United States educational system cannot produce the kind of linguistically, critically, and culturally sophisticated learners and uses of language we all envision without instituting long-term language study. Thanks to a tremendous amount of work by language professionals and thanks also to changing societal pressures, we no longer find serious language learning confined only to the college level or to a highly select group of the population. If anything happened in the profession during the eighties, it is that our desire, though not necessarily our ability, to deliver languages to a much broader clientele in grades K-12 has grown. High school foreign language education has been mandated at a more creditable level in an increasing number of places. If, furthermore, long-term study is critical for sophisticated engagement in another language—a goal we all espouse—then I see as an inevitable consequence that colleges must learn to take what language learning high schools can reasonably support and produce and to build on it unequivocally and enthusiastically rather than primarily to lament its inadequacies. This statement sounds so commonplace as to hardly merit mention in this forum. But its implications for the conduct of higher education foreign language programs—from curricula to instructional approaches to staffing to materials and support systems—are enormous. We have yet to face them honestly, even though by refusing to do so we have precluded the possibility of pervasively raising the level of sophistication in the population regarding the issues of language and culture that we espouse as our goals!
Let me iterate that I take a discussion of articulation to be a discussion of policy. As a consequence we are not talking primarily or exclusively about matters that are decided at the individual classroom level. I suggest that we reconsider Claire Kramsch's recommendation that we should ask, “What do I believe is in the best interest of my students in my school, community, or state, knowing what I know about how the students got to be the way they are?” Though this question captures many important perspectives, it could be expanded by a view of education that is well contextualized, horizontally and vertically, in regard to the systems and structures, intellectual or otherwise, that characterize teaching and learning.
We might better emphasize this larger educational context by asking, “How can my knowledge of my students in my school help shape the goals, mandates, environments, and opportunities that my community and state establish throughout the sequence of foreign language education, and how will I, in turn, place my instruction within that agreed-on continuity to maximize learning that will have both individual and social consequences?” In other words, whatever our intellectual insights are, they cannot remain intellectual exercises, and if they are implemented, their implementation must not be tilted toward the local, individual, and private: it must highlight the joint and cooperative task of educating students, over many years, to become participants in society.
By posing the question in this fashion I return to the beginning: professional, academic knowledge should be tried to goal setting and administration and, in turn, administration and goal setting should inform instruction. Of course this line of questioning will yield different answers. But in contrast with past approaches, it will not treat education so much as an enclave for a privileged few, both among those engaged in teaching and among those who will be allowed to learn. That is, instead of continuing teaching and learning as a separatist enterprise for those who, because of their positions within the system, answer primarily to themselves, we would feature it as a cooperative endeavor in which we all depend on and bear responsibility for one another.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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