26, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 17-17
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Reply to Heidi Byrnes and Elizabeth B. Bernhardt
Claire Kramsch
HEIDI Byrnes and Elizabeth Bernhardt have chosen to respond to my paper by using the very dichotomies I always attempt to break away from: intellectual exercise versus untidy reality, the privileged few versus the student masses, lofty talk versus action on the ground, iron cage of inaction versus responsible action, local private interests versus the communal good. In so doing, they remind us that the perspective of administrators and school educators may be very different from that of university professors, even though all of them may have taught the same “der, die, das” in their German classes five days a week for many years. But by the same token, both authors' responses push a series of ideological buttons that obscure rather than illuminate the debate.
I fully understand and empathize with the administrator's need for action and the educator's concern for equity in schools, but I am a language teacher, and as such I am sensitive to the fact that action in education is always a matter of language and nothing else. We teach through language; we advise through language; we comfort, guide, praise, and blame through language; we hope to improve the articulation between schools and colleges through national standards and guidelines that too are mediated through language. To claim that talk is vacuous and lofty and that only by acting responsibly can we establish trust among us is to pretend that language is transparent and innocent, which, as our three papers show, it is not. The very notion of what constitutes responsible action may be different for each of us. I for one consider the very debate in this issue of the ADFL Bulletin to be an eminently responsible course of action, one that may indeed lead to greater trust, as we do not shy away from confrontation but air our differences by daring to reveal our fears.
I totally agree that we need more dialogue between the schools and the colleges regarding foreign language education. Better articulation will come out of this dialogue, but only if the parties have found a way of truly listening to one another rather than pigeonholing one another into traditional camps. College teachers know shamefully little about the educational work of schoolteachers, but schoolteachers know too little about the dilemmas and constraints of college foreign language teachers as well. We all have the best interest of the learners in mind, but the best we can do as educators is to model for them a use of language that will, perhaps, increase their trust in the relevance of foreign languages to their overall education.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 26, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 17-17 |
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