|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
MY DISCUSSION of patterns of change in departments of foreign languages draws on two central concepts in linguistics, form and function, and the possible relations between them. I designate the educational goals and purposes of a foreign language department, or, to use the current term, its mission, as the functional side of the dyad; and I refer to a department's structural or governance environment as form. In making that distinction, I assume that educational mission takes priority over administrative decision making.
In educational and administrative practice, however, an academic unit's mission tends to become obscured even when that mission is explicitly stated. Indeed, over time certain function-form relations become established and gain independent status and independent momentum, making it difficult to determine whether a given practice is motivated more by functional or by formal considerations. Consequently, the typical structural and procedural arrangements of foreign language departments are eventually taken as the natural way of doing things. Only when new pressures subject governance and administration to careful analysis do we become aware of the historicity and, to some extent, accidental and arbitrary nature of such arrangements. The potential and even the need for change is particularly great when familiar practices cover up serious disjuncture between educational function and administrative form, mismatches that not only dramatically affect the educational outcomes of programs but are borne disproportionately by the different players in the work of departments—the students, the faculty, and the entire institution. Thus the current period of transition can be characterized as a time when long-standing function-form relations are being scrutinized from the standpoint of contemporary sensibilities, conditions, expectations, and even requirements, with an eye toward overcoming some of the most glaring discontinuities and inequities.
However, those who do the scrutinizing are usually not faculty members but administrators and, indirectly, the public. Faculty members, by contrast, have largely ignored the issues or rationalized them away as the unavoidable downside of bureaucratic activism that likes change for the sake of change, as part of the cycle of “this too shall pass” events in the academy, perhaps even as reasons to withdraw from the scene in utter frustration. Only more recent events have alerted us in language departments to the dangers of such an attitude of benign neglect and have demanded our attention. First we felt the strangeness of the concepts imported from the corporate world, such as mission and outcomes statements, accountability, fiscal strictures, resource reallocations, cost-benefit analyses, and opportunity costs. Gradually we experienced the effects of these administrative concepts on academic programs, on intellectual emphases, on pedagogical approaches, and on faculty life. Then we noted the kinds of “layoffs” that are peculiar to the academy—the increasing use of part-timers and adjuncts, rising class sizes, the failure to replace tenure-track lines. Finally we witnessed dramatic restructurings, even program closings. When that scenario repeats itself, even faculty members who, for much of their careers, considered themselves mere observers of administrative conduct and secure in their positions begin to realize that formal changes are by no means innocent with regard to the classroom and scholarly content they privilege. On the contrary, they deeply affect educational choices.
So why are governance structures changing? More precisely, why are such changes happening with greater frequency now? And why and how does it matter? I think we need not search for sinister motives or ill-advised intentions on anyone's part, nor must we took far to determine the real actors and the real beneficiaries of these occurrences. To use the hackneyed phrase, we have met the enemy and it is us. Exploration of two related subjects goes a long way toward providing some explanations.
The first subject is how faculties carry out the work of departments of foreign languages. I treat that topic more extensively in a forthcoming curriculum paper (“Constructing”). Therefore I address it here only insofar as it provides a frame for my examination of the second, more important subject, namely, the conflicting views, oftentimes implicit and unarticulated, of foreign language faculty members on the following key issues: the nature of language; the intellectual justification and, consequently, the position and role of foreign language studies in American colleges and universities; the goals, purposes, and approaches for second and foreign language acquisition by adults in an instructed setting; and, finally, the governance structures that would best fit with—or at least provide a necessary context for—achieving the goals and purposes of foreign language studies as we have identified them.
Each component can be examined in two ways: as a critique of the current situation and as an envisioning of what might yet come. Taken together these considerations will do much to answer the question posed in the title of the MLA convention session at which I presented a version of this essay: “Do We Know Where We Are Going?” Perhaps more important, that examination might reveal the extent to which we can be expected to apply ourselves once we know what the issues are. Past experience in that regard justifies no more than cautious optimism.
We must acknowledge considerable reluctance on the part of the departmental faculty as an academic unit to plan, implement, and uphold the quality of students'education through constructing comprehensive curricula and making appropriate pedagogical commitments. Rarely do faculty members interpret their status and roles primarily in the light of those educational goals. As faculty identity was shaped during the last fifty years, in no small part by cold war funding, our reward system came to privilege research and scholarship, that is, the parts of our lives that relate us to our disciplines and that therefore are transinstitutional or independent of institutions. Correlatively, we accord proportionately much lower value to teaching and to what we designate as service, both of which are institution-specific and dependent on institutions (but see the reconsideration of this issue in the report of the MLA Commission on Professional Service).
It should not be surprising, then, that faculty members often possess only rudimentary knowledge about how the department functions within the institution, that they cannot “read” institutional events, and that they explain many occurrences with victim narratives that prominently feature uncontrollable external agents ranging from the administration to society. To make matters worse, this limited understanding is readily matched by myopia and misunderstanding on the other side: public and legislative ignorance and short-sightedness vis-à-vis the culture of the academy; inappropriate demands for accountability in education that can easily eliminate more lasting, less quantifiable aspects of the college experience; and excessive calls for institutions to prove the usefulness and usability of course work, a test that language study often cannot meet. Thus faculty denial and helplessness can persist even when the very survival of entire foreign language departments is at stake.
In reality, however, dramatic changes in the governance of foreign language departments most often result less from outside actions and pressures than from inside inaction. While there are certainly close calls, administrations by and large will not shift a department's governance structures, even its mission, if the department has devised a well-considered plan about its contributions to students' education, has articulated that plan carefully to administrators at the appropriate levels, and has meticulously followed it over a number of years. Instead, the need to consider new administrative configurations arises when there is no such plan, because its absence indicates that departmental faculty members cannot or will not take seriously their and the department's comprehensive educational mission rather than its particularistic interests and, furthermore, that they are unable to locate that mission creatively within the larger administrative context.
In other words, it seems that two contradictory trends are alive and well in foreign language departments, both of which support the status quo and fateful inaction. On the one hand, departmental plans do not incorporate comprehensive reflections about educational aims and the proper approaches for reaching them. As Janet Swaffar puts it, foreign language departments have yet to work out “a consistent philosophy about the relationship between acquiring language and acquiring knowledge” (78). At the same time, statements about educational aims, which are always value statements, are highly contested. In other words, foreign language departments have developed a particularly hardy strain of the phenomenon William E. Massy, Andrea K. Wilger, and Carol Colbeck refer to as “hollowed” collegiality, the tendency for faculty members in all disciplines to avoid, at almost any cost, the discussion of serious and therefore potentially divisive issues, justifying that evasion in the name of collegiality. As a result they generally lack a shared understanding of their educational mission, and therefore their departmental course offerings merely loosely assemble the educational priorities of individual faculty members. That approach only incidentally and accidentally results in a coherent curriculum, one that students would experience as particularly formative because it is greater than the sum of its parts. It is true that history or political science departments probably suffer few serious consequences from such behaviors; but language departments most definitely do.
And that brings me to my second subject.
I propose that nothing is more important for determining where we are going than specifying the role that foreignness—or, if you prefer the postmodern term, alterity—and the foreign language boundedness of our intellectual work play in scholarship, teaching, and service. I comprehensively refer to that work as the language studies enterprise (see also Berman).
Let me sketch out our unfinished business in defining our role in terms of the major missions that departments of foreign languages have traditionally claimed—language teaching, literary studies, cultural studies, and, at times, linguistics or what used to be designated philology.
I begin by stating the obvious: language learning is not part of the educational core at any level of the American educational system, and we should not be under any illusions that utilitarian pressures, globalization, or worldwide economic opportunities can and will soon change that. With perhaps the notable exception of Spanish, then, formal language instruction and learning will continue to take place predominantly on the college level, where they must meet certain intellectual expectations and contribute to certain academic goals even while also conforming to restrictions on the kinds of pedagogies and learning outcomes that can and should be profitably pursued.
Where languages are taught at the precollegiate level, the recent shift to communicative or proficiency-oriented language teaching has laid bare long-standing incongruities in the college curriculum, the result of faculty members' widely divergent interpretations of the nature of language, the goals of language learning, and the most appropriate pedagogical approaches for literate adult learners. Communicative language teaching has become strongly associated with highly personalized, frequently even quotidian, context-dependent interactional orality, though it need not inherently have that thrust. College faculty members who primarily work with written texts, literary or otherwise, did not appreciate how that development affected two areas of language teaching.
First, in the so-called content courses these faculty members implicitly continued to conceptualize language largely as a normative system that students would master through the study of invariant syntactic rules; they assumed too that this mastery undergirded the interpretive competences required for insightful engagement with literary texts. This is not the place to assess how well either assumption held in the precommunicative era with a rather different student population, nor is it particularly useful to discuss the appropriateness or validity of the communicative turn, given that conditions in education and language instruction have indeed changed dramatically. What does require critical attention, however, is that students need to be led in a well-motivated fashion, beginning with their first college language courses, away from the highly contingent language use in largely interactional oral communication of meanings that has in recent years become the momentum driving their language acquisition; faculty members must introduce students to the linguistically considerably more elaborated environments of written language and particularly to literary texts. In other words, language instruction must attend to the formal appropriateness, accuracy, and complexity of students' interlanguage and must assume that students' language use reflects the ways in which highly differentiated meanings are constructed in extended discourse and texts. This surely has not taken place in any discernible fashion.
Second, faculty members have not explicitly developed a pedagogy of foreign language literature and culture for an American student audience. Only sporadically at best do faculty members reflect on the unique demands made of American foreign language learners and on their unique potential for insights into foreign language literatures. A special issue of PMLA, The Teaching of Literature , is only one recent indication that professionals are giving these complex matters little theoretically informed—on both the literature side and the language acquisition side—and pedagogically practicable thought. Indeed, one is tempted to conclude that “the lady doth protest too much” when the profession repeatedly affirms that the study of foreign languages and literatures helps learners discover the self by stepping outside the self, a deeply humane act that is uniquely facilitated through the foreign language medium and high levels of competence in it, and yet the profession devotes little substantive discussion to that intricate connection. As a consequence such claims easily become unbelievable-and become easily ignored.
You might find my assigning responsibility in this fashion rather curious, inappropriate, even poorly informed. After all, who shapes a language program if not those who direct and conduct it? As we all know, literature faculty members do not generally carry out either activity. However, my counterargument is that, from the standpoint of persons who have responsibility and the power to make policy—and we must argue from that perspective—literature faculties are heavily implicated in misreading or essentially disregarding the changes in second language acquisition and research over roughly the past twenty years. That assessment does not deny that those who advocated a more communicative or proficiency approach, primarily second language acquisition researchers and language teachers, also bear responsibility, inasmuch as they too did not truly understand how a constricted view of communication might seriously detract from the intellectual self-representations higher education must make. If they had, they might have more assiduously attended to those moorings and might have expressed the aspirations of the communicative approach more comprehensively in a way that would resonate better with larger academic demands and the demands of the literature faculty members, who dominate departments.
I have thus far dealt primarily with the relation of the language and literature faculties to language and language learning. One could make similar observations regarding the other two faculty groups that tend to reside in foreign language departments, cultural studies faculty members and linguists. Suffice it to say here that they too are ambivalent about the significance of the foreign language in the formulation of their educational goals, in their selection of academic content, and in the shaping of their pedagogies. For example, the cultural studies field has repeatedly vacillated about the role of the foreign language and has often abandoned it entirely in favor of English. (See Seeba for a recent discussion of the repercussions of this shortsightedness.) As for linguists, they frequently reside only in the graduate program and, with the exception of the (usually lone) applied linguist whose responsibilities are often primarily administrative (e.g., TA coordination and supervision), show little engagement in the undergraduate life of a department.
Foreign language departments attempt to accomplish a number of disparate missions concerning language teaching, literature, area studies, and linguistics. But while the unitary governance arrangement they have enjoyed might have helped them develop an encompassing intellectual framework, they have been unable to do so.
As it turns out, the seemingly advantageous governance arrangement of the traditional foreign language department carries significant institutional costs:
the need for relatively small classes that often require unusually high contact hours;
difficulties in predicting enrollment levels and staffing needs;
difficulties defending the intellectual probity of a field whose content, on the surface, seems to be readily acquired outside the academy;
a corresponding difficulty defending the work of the faculty, particularly those members who teach the most students (e.g., part-time and full-time adjuncts who hold no ordinary faculty status and graduate TAs);
difficulties with tenure and promotion decisions involving very different faculty members in the same department; and
difficulties with getting the required curricular and staffing flexibility as diverse units across the campus make demands on the department's resources, demands that the department often denies because it sees them as demeaning service chores or that it should deny because the foreign language faculty lacks the necessary content expertise.
Small wonder that administrations everywhere contemplate and put into place major realignments, ranging from changes in faculty status (concerning, e.g., tenure, multiple,year contracts, adjunct and part-time hiring, and position cuts or redesignations) to new governance arrangements. Indeed, in the absence of an encompassing intellectual justification for keeping the disparate goals of foreign language departments under one roof, a certain intellectual signature for the entire field of language studies, it is surprisingly easy or at least tempting for administrations to apply to language instruction what in the business world is called outsourcing. Some of its manifestations are quite subtle, such as staffing cuts or redesignations of faculty lines; others cannot be overlooked, such as the creation of separate units of language instruction that have few tenure lines, budgetary arrangements that imply a service status or skills orientation for the administrative unit, and even the use of nonacademic providers of language instruction or various distance-learning and technology-driven approaches.
Seen in this light, the recently created language centers are not themselves the problem. On the contrary, they represent an attempt to overcome a nonfunctional arrangement or, at a minimum, an expensive function-form split, to yield better “mission-responsiveness” (another corporate term), and perhaps also to ensure better governance arrangements. Indeed and quite ironically this kind of restructuring might in the long run promote better health for the very component of departments of foreign languages most neglected in the past, namely, foreign language teaching and learning: the ugly duckling might yet turn into a swan.
But there is no reason to rejoice greatly in that development, since the hoped-for gain carries the potential for serious, even debilitating losses. I say “potential” for two reasons. First, since we departmental faculty members did not in the past develop a common intellectual signature and thus did not realize any gains as a result, we are not really losing much. Second, significant gains may well accrue if we split language teaching from literature, area studies, and linguistics:
common standards and goals;
appropriate assessment instruments and measures;
better quality control, which can influence tenure and promotion decisions;
the coordination of teacher training across language departments;
common stands on what is considered the heart or nature of language acquisition;
easier day-to-day coordination, which is particularly important at large state institutions; and
the ability to work in coordination with outside systems, such as K—12 programs or state foreign language offices.
Given the past state of affairs such advantages can easily outweigh the putative claims of the indispensability of language studies to a humanistic education that provided the justification for previous governance arrangements, particularly when a capable person directs the language center.
But let us look at repercussions beyond the language instructional component, for which the major danger is reduction to service status, something that, from the institutional standpoint, is actually advantageous since the majority of faculty members teaching language would not then hold ordinary faculty status. Even more serious in my estimation are the repercussions for the literature and culture components: once they are cut off from their foreign language inheritance they risk eventually losing a compelling intellectual identity and thus their place in the academy. For example, the literature component may increasingly have to ally itself with either a comparative literature unit or an English department to get intellectual sustenance. It may engage more and more in abstract theorizing rather than in the hermeneutics of the foreign language text. Both the literature and the cultural studies faculties may have to seek refuge in the elusive entity known as the institution's core curriculum, which frequently incorporates writing or diversity requirements. In addition, cultural studies is likely to establish more links with anthropology and sociology. These can, of course, be highly appropriate, indeed highly desirable, but they are questionable if they come about as default solutions intended to maintain a minimum level of enrollment. They will tend to further universalist and generalist trends rather than generate the culture- and language-specific insights that they could foster in a foreign language department. The literature and culture components will have difficulty cohering, or, at least, their coherence will not be the unique one that the foreign language, properly understood, might have given them.
I return to the question posed in my title: is form function? Most surely that equation does not hold in a simple and straightforward sense, for one can imagine a variety of administrative entities that might fulfill a variety of perfectly valid goals for foreign language studies. Or, to come at the question from the other side, little in the disparate, if not competing, functions of foreign language departments necessitates the current structural environment. On the contrary, as long as we cannot conceptualize our missions in an intellectually well-motivated fashion, accounting for all our disparate missions, we can lay little claim to a unified structural environment, especially since that governance arrangement is deeply inequitable and ineffectual and, in the institution's view, increasingly financially unjustifiable.
We might in a last act of denial wish to dismiss overly gloomy forecasts. After all, the current arrangement has institutional inertia in its favor. But to do so we would have to misread thoroughly a number of major pressures. The recent initiative by the AATG, titled “The Future of German in American Education” (Byrnes), well identifies these pressures, looking far beyond the concerns of the German profession alone, and concludes that the inability of foreign language departments to adjust to a changing environment has been particularly destructive in the last few years. Because of a host of external and internal developments, foreign language and literature departments are beleaguered. Even as enrollments surge in some languages (numerically particularly in Spanish but on a percentage basis also in Arabic and Chinese), departments seem to be losing their centers as units of governance and losing their vitality as organizations with any sort of encompassing identity.
These are serious issues that will require much thoughtfulness, leadership ability, and cooperation among faculty members. Most important, the issues demand to be addressed through an intellectually valid focus for foreign language studies that can unite departments wherever they reside within the institutional structure. To rephrase the dilemma Swaffar points out, what special knowledge or intellectual value can foreign language studies alone offer the academy? What contributions to the education of the citizenry can we make that are difficult, perhaps even impossible, to produce elsewhere on campus? Only when we have seriously ventured to answer these questions can we return to connecting function and form, that is, to consider how much one structural environment or another facilitates or hinders our attaining the unique goals of foreign language studies.
Do we know where are going? I am not sure. But perhaps it is already helpful to know our past somewhat better. I am reminded of the pivotal line from a famous German short story by Wolfgang Borchert, “Die Küchenuhr,” spoken by the protagonist, who has lost his entire family and all his worldly possessions save a kitchen clock in a war. But through that wrenching experience he has gained a deep appreciation of the redemptiveness of the everyday personal relationships that he once took for granted: “Now I know it was real paradise.” Do we know where we should be going? I believe enough knowledge exists for us to chart a successful path. Are we willing to follow that path? Our past experience probably justifies no more than cautious optimism. A positive answer would, therefore, be a great gift for all of us.
The author is Professor of German at Georgetown University. This article is based on her presentation at the 1996 MLA convention in Washington, DC.
Berman, Russell A. “Reform and Continuity: Graduate Education toward a Foreign Cultural Literacy.” ADFL Bulletin 27.3 (1996): 40–46. [Show Article]
Byrnes, Heidi. “Constructing Curricula in Collegiate Foreign Language Departments.” Learning Foreign and Second Languages: Perspectives in Research and Scholarship . Ed. Heidi Byrnes. New York: MLA, forthcoming.
———. “The Future of German in American Education.” Die Unterrichtspraxis 29 (1996): 251–59.
Massy, William E, Andrea K. Wilger, and Carol Colbeck. “Overcoming ‘Hollowed’ Collegiality.” Change July-Aug. 1994: 10–20.
MLA Commission on Professional Service. “Making Faculty Work Visible: Reinterpreting Professional Service, Teaching, and Research in the Fields of Language and Literature.” Profession 1996. New York: MLA, 1996. 161–216.
Seeba, Hinrich C. “Cultural versus Linguistic Competence? Bilingualism, Language in Exile, and the Future of German Studies.” German Quarterly 69 (1996): 401–13.
Swaffar, Janet. “Using Foreign Languages to Learn: Rethinking the College Foreign Language Curriculum.” Reflecting on Proficiency from the Classroom Perspective . Ed. June K. Phillips. Lincolnwood: Natl. Textbook, 1993. 55–86.
The Teaching of Literature . Spec. issue of PMLA 112 (1997): 1–184.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
