26, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 15-17
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Response to Claire Kramsch
Elizabeth B. Bernhardt, Ohio State University, Columbus
LIKE Heidi Byrnes, I too dispute the basic thrust of Claire Kramsch's paper. I believe that Kramsch is essentially arguing for détente. She suggests that we should agree to disagree, that we must “accept and understand” the historical positions behind the conflicts we face, that our differences “can only be acknowledged and respected for what they are.” This is the essence of détente. I believe détente is exactly what we do not need.
What détente allows us to do is to let everybody off the hook and live in a rarified intellectual world in which we refuse to face the realities of our space and time. In other words, I can think as I want to with like-minded persons, and you can do the same. And we can all wallow in our self-assuredness. And yet, we can continue our debates in the atmosphere of meetings like the MLA convention and feel good about our erudition and have our respective cheerleaders come up to us after our talks to let us know how wonderful we are and how uninformed those other speakers were. I feel free to say this because I have danced on the heads of many pins at many conferences and enjoy doing so as much as the rest of you do. We have intellectual exchanges about which theory of second language acquisition will win in the end, whether a discourse-based approach is more insightful than a psycholinguistic one, or whether a feminist approach to the study of eighteenth-century Hindu literature is appropriate. But in the end I do not believe that these discussions touch the lives of the students in front of us in any significant way—certainly not in this space and time.
I do not sit in a German department any more; I sit in a college of education—I'm apparently one of these people who is close to “taxpayers [who, I will remind you, sign my paycheck and many of yours], parents, communities, local employers, big corporations, and local politicians.” So according to Kramsch, mine is the idiom of business and industry. Frankly, I wear that label as a badge of honor. Why? I am charged with having to do something and to produce something. That is, I am charged with preparing educators who will touch the lives of students—some of whom are the children of those taxpayers, some of whom are taxpayers themselves—in a significant way, that is, by teaching them to speak a foreign language.
I am told in the Kramsch paper that my discourse is not that of critical pedagogy, cultural criticism, and postmodern thought—those discourses show “evidence of social and political consciousness.” In my college there is a whole group that beats this drum continually—they sit at the coffee shops and discuss how political everything is and how conscious they are. But I continually ask myself: Who has social and political consciousness? Those who talk about it or those like my colleagues who teach Reading Recovery—well-published professors who spend five days a week working with kids at risk of failure in the first grade—or another colleague who works in the dropout program at Columbus East High School? To me these are the professionals who have a political consciousness because they do make significant contributions to lots of lives.
At the risk of sounding politically trite, I believe we can do better. We do not have the effect on the lives of our students that we should. Granted, there are lots of forces working against that. But nevertheless in the last ten years we have made major strides toward increased language instruction and equity. So what's the problem? Those major strides get stopped dead in their tracks at the college level. I believe that they get stopped dead by those professors who are more concerned for the texts in front of them than for students and their learning. These colleagues contribute to Goethe scholarship or to applying postmodern concepts to the works of Cervantes—not to students, not to learning. My point is this: We cannot put up with this attitude anymore; we must change it. This mind-set is not OK; it is not just; and I certainly do not respect it as I am asked to in the Kramsch paper.
We know that in the history of American education the college curriculum and objectives set the pace—this was true in 1898 (as I discovered in the research for my forthcoming MLA paper), and it is true today. Those attitudes must change. Before arriving at this meeting, I was warned not to be too hard on the college language departments—but I think that is a risk I'll take, because the issue is too important.
I have sincerely tried during my career to provide alternatives when I have complained about something, so I will not end my response without putting forth my suggestion. Some of you know, most of you don't, that I now spend half my life in science education, specifically as a researcher at the National Center for Science Teaching and Learning heading up an area called “social and cultural factors in science learning.” I have spent the last two years learning about a new field, observing it, and trying to “acquire voice” (if I may use a postmodern term). Early on, I said to myself that I was really uncomfortable with the science-education group and concluded that the foreign language group really had itself together compared with the science people. In essence, I described the science crowd as “mean.” We in the foreign language profession are never mean; we are always “nice,” and it gets us nowhere. What I was slow to understand about science education in this country was how that field decided to take its fate into its own hands. Frankly, I have come to believe science educators are more like us than English professors, for example.
Science is a field that constantly gets negative press. No matter what science professors do, scores seem to decline, and the rest of the world decries the profession for how badly educated the students are: they are not “scientifically literate.” How did science education confront that bad press? Some educators from the science community got together and admitted that they deserved some of it. But instead of designing yet more research focused on how students should adopt a constructivist perspective or on how to use technology to more facilely balance chemical equations (please insert corollary questions from second language education here), which they had been doing already and which was not succeeding, they sat down to discuss systemic change. They argued that systemic change could only happen if they examined external forces at play in the science-learning endeavor. In other words, systemic change meant giving people like myself (assigned to represent African Americans, the bilingual population, and women) a place at the table. It also meant bringing very powerful and serious career scientists into the fold and forcing them to talk about children, face the crisis of women and minorities, and take the education issue as their issue.
The directors of our center have taken enormous risks with this approach and have come under a firestorm of criticism from their colleagues who would have preferred doing additional studies on learning strategies and so forth. But let me assure you that when a Nobel Prize winner in physics talks about educating children and values it, people listen. We must find those powerful literature professors who will speak for us. We can continue to speak for ourselves right into a retirement home, and, I believe, nothing will happen. We need to make a concerted effort not to “listen to one another” but to persuade the true power brokers that our cause is theirs. I do not believe we have ever done that. I look at this audience and see that only “safe” people are here; as someone told me before I arrived, “Well, they rounded up the usual suspects.” But we have heard from the usual suspects too often. We need to hear from those who have the real decision-making power in college and university language departments.
By the way, how did our Nobel Prize winner come into the fold at the science center? He was motivated by fear of extinction. Science education is in a major crisis in the United States; you need only to look in a classroom to check out who is not there. Some career scientists, instead of closing their eyes and saying, “Too bad, this isn't our problem,” have acknowledged that they do indeed need to be committed to increasing the talent pool in front of them and not to rely exclusively on foreign nationals. Let me hasten to add that what I suggest is not pleasant. I know from my experience that these career scientists can be arrogant and aloof and it takes a time commitment as well as a strong ego to face much of their condescension. But I believe including career scientists in our discussions is critical for our success. We must make these colleagues listen. We have always taken the position that it was important to understand and accept everyone's point of view. This might be true enough, but it does not lead to coalition building. We have never really tried to persuade these colleagues, because we have always centered our discourse on their terms, not ours.
We are considered to be a profession of the elite, a profession that does not care about students outside the traditional college-bound group. We have historically accepted only those most like ourselves. We must finally acknowledge the lack of morality behind this elitism. We must acknowledge that all students deserve a sequence of language study that makes sense, not just one that happens to be convenient. Articulation in such a sequence is important, students are important, coalitions are important. We must insist that all in the language-teaching endeavor take the cause of students as their own, otherwise, we cannot dare to claim the moral imperative.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 26, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 15-17 |
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