|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
THE ADFL Bulletin solicited responses to Dorothy James's article “Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?” published in the Spring 1997 Bulletin (vol. 28, no. 3). Nineteen responses were included in the Winter 1998 Bulletin (vol. 29, no.2). We publish here five additional responses to James's account of a leadership crisis in the field of foreign languages and literatures and conclude the Forum with a reply from James.
THOSE of us whose primary professional interests lie at the intersection of adult foreign language acquisition at the college level and its curricular, pedagogical, and administrative consequences as predicated by the American educational context have long known Dorothy James's vision and voice to be characterized by breadth, undaunted integrity, caring and sustained engagement, and deep wisdom. The article to which we have been asked to respond gives us one more reason for holding her in such high esteem. For the last fifteen years or so, many of us have witnessed her qualities at a distance through her insightful writings. Those who also know her up close—pursuing her duties in her chosen places of work (the German Department at Hunter College, the graduate school of the mammoth City University of New York), participating in a range of regional and national professional organizations, and undertaking a wide variety of initiatives and roles—cannot help but be in awe at the way she has transformed vision and voice into remarkable accomplishments on the ground, usually hard-won but always achieved with grace and impeccable, if uncompromising, style.
Thus my contribution is a “response” only in the narrow sense, inasmuch as I accept her invitation to grapple with some of the deeply troubling issues on which she, in characteristic fashion, shines a revealing spotlight. To state my position right at the beginning: I agree with James's broad assessment of the current situation. Furthermore, I generally share her guarded optimism about the possibility for change, although history would certainly warrant skepticism that the possibility would become a sustained reality in the foreign language field. Of course, all of us have yet to work out the particulars of both an analysis of, and action to deal with, the issues we face. I take it to be the purpose of this forum to further that process.
Not surprisingly, we find in James's article a network of implicit questions about our professional conduct, punctuated by the following stark questions: “Who is minding the store? … Why is this happening now? … Will it [the effort to re-create and sustain a curriculum] cut into our research agenda? … You can't [ask colleagues to take on the necessary tasks]? Well, perhaps the time has come when you must” (6, 8, 10). In posing them, James offers an expansive view of our current dilemmas, culminating in her passionate call for less deferential conduct that might even contemplate action that bypasses those who, in the past, have minded the store. Such a course could become necessary to ensure that the profession as a whole retains the hope of safeguarding its heritage for posterity. But she also urges us to engage in coordinated efforts that explicitly use the mechanisms available through our professional organizations. Finally, she invites us to reach out boldly to one another, in order to secure the future of humanistic higher education in the United States.
For me, James's metaphor of the store, which is woven throughout the piece, brought to mind at least three possible sites and associated meanings. I use them here to channel my own deliberations: the foreign language department as the “store” where we conduct business; a less localized formation of our professional identity as a “store-house” for who we are; and our professional organizations, most specifically the MLA, as a place where we to negotiate, manifest, and institutionalize our public “storefront.”
As the title of her article indicates, James exposes the need for more daring leadership at all levels. I fully concur with that assessment and have repeatedly urged greater attentiveness to leadership questions. But in order to specify the kind of leadership we need, we might profit from looking a bit more at the “store” itself. I do so under the three related rubrics I mentioned: by focusing on leadership issues in foreign language departments—issues that I chose, for purposes of this discussion, to interpret as the challenge for new curricular and pedagogical thinking; by offering some thoughts about the work those who consider themselves scholars in foreign languages and literatures must address if our professional identity is to be vibrant and viable; and by suggesting some changes our profession might need to undergo in its organizational conduct in order to support such a shift.
Beginning with the foreign language department as our place of business, as it were, we need to ascertain the nature of the “goods” that define its center. No matter how we choose to deal with both their tangible and intangible aspects, James urges us to understand them in terms of our curricula and our teaching. It is in our curricula that we conceptualize, design, shape, and adjust our various goods. It is there and not in individual courses, even those with outstanding content and delivery, that our goods are assembled, have their motivation, and are most advantageously packaged. Here they are also delivered and sold. Ultimately, we hope, our students will take from our curricula, as the sum of their educational experience with us, a rich understanding of the uniqueness of what we have contributed to their formation: preparing them for making discerning choices in a range of circumstances.
I realize that students, just like us, tend not to think in curricular terms; they, too, speak of individual teachers and the courses that touched them. But that does not reduce or invalidate the importance of the curricular frame of reference, since the possibility that individual courses will resonate depends largely on the wholeness of their curricular context—whether we as faculty members or they as students realize that or not. Also, readers may find my intentionally provocative use of the language of the marketplace dismaying. If they recoil from a conveyor belt construal of education and learning and reject simplistic formulas for judging performance and outcomes, I share their distaste. However, that we justly perceive that our work, and education in general, is being forced—by a corporate-legalistic, production, and even marketing model of education—to adopt a set of negative values and procedures does not detract from the fact that our “business” is, indeed, the formation of learners. Because of its complexity, the task of redefining the curriculum cannot be accomplished without a fortuitous constellation of vision and competent, steady leadership from the department head, along with broad institutional support and cooperation, knowledge, and wisdom on the part of faculty members (see Byrnes, “Constructing Curricula”).
Surprisingly enough, revamping curricula seems high on the agenda of many departments these days, and it is beginning to receive urgent attention by professional organizations (see Byrnes, “The Future of German in American Education,” which identifies the need for curricular change, particularly at the college level, as a primary task of the field). But we should look carefully at the comprehensiveness of this discussion and at the depth at which it is taking place. Is it merely a first recognition and halting willingness to act on the realization that a curriculum is not an aggregation of individual courses and that, at a minimum, all faculty members should know the goals and outcomes of individual courses, so that, together, they can work toward a more coherent learning program for all their students? Is curricular discussion limited to the language component, or does it encompass the entire under-graduate program, perhaps even the graduate program? Does it, with appropriate institutional modification, consider, as well, precollegiate education in foreign languages or education in other institutional settings, such as junior colleges? Does the discussion stay in safe territory or with safe people, so as not to disturb the fragile collegiality of the department, or does it dare to ask the unsettling questions of what constitutes knowledge in our field and what are the educational goals we can reasonably attain in our respective educational settings?
You may take this series of questions as an instance of considerable naïveté, as though we had not all witnessed with distress, and in some cases learned bitter personal lessons from, the curriculum wars of the last few years. Indeed, we have or should have. But, particularly unfortunate episodes aside, there are some encouraging lessons to be learned from those wars. While a war may well not be winnable on the editorial pages of our national news-papers, maybe not even in our own professional publications and our professional gatherings, it is, with care, patience, and a cooperative stance, winnable in our respective institutions—arguably the only place where it really must be won. For, despite the formidable nature of the questions when they are posed in the abstract, their solutions lie in the concrete action of departments. Such action is both mercifully and maddeningly steeped in contextualized realities that need not and cannot follow the demands of ideological purity of persuasion. That is not to say that important educational issues are not urgently in need of clarification through joint deliberations by an entire departmental faculty. But it is to say that, on the one hand, the goal of “a genuinely high-level, multiple-option education in foreign languages” that would aim to “open the doors to the highest levels of literacy for our students” is not so remote as not to be considered seriously in every department. On the other hand, “having one faculty that will work with language in a cultural-literary context,” as James (8) urges on us, is probably not going to come about except by a thorough curriculum discussion. Similarly, the rethinking of pedagogies and the necessary envisioning of classrooms as public professional spaces rather than as private enclaves are probably best begun within curricular rethinking. In other words, while it would be foolhardy to underestimate the tasks of jointly constructing a curriculum and of focusing on appropriate pedagogies for language and literature teaching and learning to advanced levels of literacy, the task requires, perhaps more than anything, competent leadership.
By way of reminding us of factors that detract from our efforts to unite the entire faculties of foreign language departments, James correctly refers to the underlying causes of devolution and loss, whether such detrimental developments are found in the administration of departments or in the construction of curricula. Loss of intellectual integrity, restructuring, retrenchment, outsourcing, even the closing of entire departments demonstrate most tellingly the language-versus-literature split, as well as the split between foreign language and cultures and foreign cultures study in English. But underneath the split lie other demons, such as the orality-versus-literacy dichotomy in regard to intellectual probity; the notion of a single, unitary orality and a single, unitary literacy, a peculiar and generally hidden native-language bias even in the most committed foreign language departments; and the insistence on a single norm versus a multiple, contextualized functionalism, a multiple literacy.
Beyond our discipline-specific issues, we must deal with the more general questions of the role of the learner and, by extension, the nature of learning, surely the heart of the matter. To return to my more provocative market terminology: after all, our “goods” have to be “sold,” and they are sold in the classroom through the pedagogies we apply, an area in which we have generally displayed an inattentiveness that is matched only by our curricular tiptoeing. If we wish to have and to hold these customers, then James's reminder about the changed market, a fact that is much talked about even as its real repercussions elude us, is surely on target. Here, as elsewhere, the pithy slogan applies: It's the economy, stupid.
I have, in another setting, summarized the dilemma of foreign language departments with the following questions: “How pluralistic can we be in order to reflect our changed intellectual and sociopolitical contexts, how centered must we be in order to be able to uphold the intellectual merits of the learning and teaching that takes place within foreign language departments?” (“Centered Pluralism”). There are many ways in which these questions can be addressed, but the answers will need to reflect institutional context and will require us to avoid dichotomies. However, necessary adjustments and compromises notwithstanding, I believe there is one area that applies uniquely to us as academic foreign language departments, one area in which we have compromised and continue to compromise at our greatest peril. It is the need to find a coherent, intellectually grounded focus for our curricula, a focus that spans the three missions that have traditionally resided in language departments: language teaching, literary studies, and cultural studies. These missions have become increasingly disjointed from each other. Among our worst-kept secrets in that the bifurcation of our curricula into language courses and content courses can with impunity be read as the separation of rote learning and skill acquisition from engagement with intellectual content, the consequent disbarment of the former, and the need to prove that the latter is, in fact, being pursued at the appropriate level. All other valid reasons aside, that open secret surely contributes to an administrative climate that makes the decision to separate language teaching and learning from the remainder of the department's work a viable option in the first place.
Other structural shifts and diverse alliances across campuses threaten to dissipate the unique intellectual contributions foreign language departments make to institutions of higher education. This happens when departments essentially renounce two criterial features of their intellectual lives, in scholarship, teaching, and service—their foreignness and their foreign language boundedness. In the light of recent developments, it is high time for an earnest search to restore those traits by beginning a concerted effort within the MLA to make available to the membership some of the fundamental insights that the past two decades of classroom-based second language acquisition research have produced. Maybe, in the past, a knowledge of how second languages are learned could remain the idiosyncratic interest of the occasional philologist. Maybe it was also largely ornamental, since precollegiate instruction could be assumed to bring students to a sufficient level of second language knowledge to enable them to cope, more or less successfully, in college. However, scientific knowledge of how languages are learned no longer is a luxury for contemporary literary or cultural studies faculty members who take seriously their intellectual contributions as foreign studies scholars or as colleagues in a department.
Unless we attend to this educational effort with urgency and commitment, our unique contribution to the education of young people may rapidly become buried under structural realities that dangerously reduce our options, perhaps even eliminate them.
We have, of course, attempted to overcome needless dichotomies. At the simplest level, we have urged scholars to take on more administrative tasks and professional leadership roles. We have worked toward a redefinition of scholarship or, more broadly, the work of the faculty (e.g., the Boyer report). A number of our colleagues have expended energy and insight into examining “the ways in which faculty work has been defined, evaluated, and rewarded in fields encompassed by the MLA” (MLA Commission 161). But, alas, the report's proposal for making intellectual work and academic and professional citizenship primary components of faculty work has mostly gone unnoticed in the professional discussion. Could it be that because such considerations were located under the (largely superfluous) category of service, the discussion was doomed right from the beginning? A similar nonresponse seems to be the wholly undeserved fate of the cultural studies project, energetic and insightful proposals by Russell Berman and Jeffrey Peck notwithstanding, as well as of the foreign language Standards project. Again, one is tempered to ask just why it is that the foreign language Standards project caused scarcely a ripple in the discussion of collegiate professionalism, when the English and History Standards not only stirred us to raise our voices in righteous indignation but also aroused the national media, though assuredly they had different intentions.
While I hope I have been able to argue the need for comprehensive curricular thinking as an intellectual-educational practice that will define our “business,” the issued may well be decided for us by the resources we can find in our professional organizations to support these efforts. I believe we can find resources, though doing so will require that certain voices be heard over others. Such inclusiveness applies to all the disciplinary areas assembled under our common roof, not only the two major groups that James refers to as the “forum” leaders and the “work-shop” leaders.
While James distinguishes those paired terms from the literature-versus-language split (or, for that matter, from the scholarship-versus-teaching dichotomy), one cannot help but conclude that here, as elsewhere, separate does not, because it cannot, mean “equal.” With the benefit of hindsight, that realization might cause us to reevaluate the wisdom of the separate creation of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, with the explicit blessing of the MLA. Closer to home, we might look at the conduct of the organization as it exists, specifically how the ADFL and the ADE are integrated into the MLA's planning- and decision-making processes, particularly in the Executive Council.
It surely cannot be coincidence that calls for steps to enable us to come to our senses, as it were, are being voiced by someone who has been as intimately involved with the work of the ADFL as James has—or, looking at it from the other side, that these calls are not issued by members of the English profession or, even higher up in the pecking order, by members of the MLA's Executive Council. True—and this is to the great credit of its organizational leadership—the ADFL arm of the MLA has, in the most recent past, shown remarkable willingness and ability to put the issues on the table. The ADFL has, of course, been particularly successful with its own constituency, but it has also begun the influence such an important venue as the national convention. At the same time (judging from the discourse at major forums at the 1997 annual convention on a topic as central as the job market and its relationship to our conduct as departments, particularly our curricular conduct, the profession as a whole—and, most shockingly, its senior professoriat and its organizational leadership—is either ignorant of the issues, unwilling to speak to them, or both. Yes, occasionally one hears the lone angry, accusing voice raised against the professional leadership, in departments, in the senior faculty ranks, and in our professional organizations, but, by and large, not even that level of engagement (or is it understanding?) is mustered. Most tellingly, when criticisms surface, they come from the least empowered—faculty members who hold a bewildering array of adjunct positions and, of course, from graduate students. Or periodic rumblings are made by senior faculty members about changes being called for, but, in general, life is too good and the rumbles stay at a safe distance or exhaust themselves in self-serving defiance against the pragmatists of this world, that is, the administrators, who shall not overcome the intellectually superior positions of the humanists, that is, the literature faculty.
In other words, before we believe that our salvation resided in enlightened “workshop leaders”—who, moreover, are now given the larger task of reforming an entire professional culture—we need to ask ourselves where their expertise, commitment, and numbers are supposed to come from and how, if these resources should miraculously materialize, they are to be sustained for what, undoubtedly, is the long haul. As many of us—not least Dorothy James herself—can attest, there is no shortage of opportunities for frustrations, and there is a sense of having been abandoned.
In the past, the MLA creatively and energetically supported intensive leadership institutes for foreign language supervisors, to enable them to face their multiple challenges. Perhaps the time has come when creativity and energy should be expended in establishing departmental leadership institutes that go well beyond the laudable benefits the ADFL seminars have offered their participants.
Another question worth asking is whether the current governance of the organization most advantageously reflects our deepest professional needs. Does language-specific representation continue to be the key consideration for Executive Council membership, or might other concerns merit higher priority? Might we not argue that native and nonnative language issues, in their diverse configurations, require appropriate representation; that institutional interests have to be given a voice alongside regional ones; that literacies of various kinds, like literature, must be taken seriously; that genuine professional accomplishments should be judged alongside scholarly work; that governance issues, as they arise in ADE and ADFL discussions, have to be afforded a distinct, permanent place in Executive Council deliberations; that recognition should be made of the not-always-positive effects, on conference programming and attendance, of the demands of the job market.
These suggestions are but a few of a much larger array of actions the MLA as a professional organization might want to consider. But rather than offer this observation only as an acknowledgment of my own limited views, perhaps I will also offer it as a kind of nondeferential challenge and suggest that a comprehensive assessment of its organizational structure, in preparation for long-range strategic planning and restructuring, would be an appropriate activity for the MLA—precisely because, as an organization, the MLA is probably constitutionally and intellectually loathe to contemplate either of these actions that are so familiar to us from the corporate world. Even so, we could all stand to gain from such a daring approach, inasmuch as it just might help prepare the kind of leadership that would be ready, and able, to mind our store.
Heidi Byrnes
Georgetown University
Boyer, Ernest. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Washington: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990.
Byrnes, Heidi. “Centered Pluralism: The Challenge for Collegiate Foreign Language Curricula.” ADFL Summer Seminar East, Washington, 12–15 June 1997.
———. “Constructing Curricula in Collegiate Foreign Language Departments.” Learning Foreign and Second Languages: Perspectives in Research and Scholarship. Ed. Byrnes. New York: MLA, forthcoming.
———. “The Future of German in American Education.” Unterrichtspraxis 29.2 (1996): 251–59.
———. “Governing Language Departments: Is Form Function?” ADFL Bulletin 29.1 (1997): 7–12. [Show Article]
MLA Commission on Professional Service. “Making Faculty Work Visible: Reinterpreting Professional Service, Teaching, and Research in the Fields of Language and Literature.” Profession 96. New York: MLA, 1996. 161–216.
THE TITLE of Dorothy James's thoughtful and insightful essay—“Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?”—reflects what I view to be two of the major problems in higher education today. The first part of the title suggests an avoidance, a conscious neglect by some faculty members of their obligation to their department and, by extension, to their college or university. The second part suggests the commercial and industrial models that have been proposed as valid models for the way colleges and universities should operate and run their business. According to this model, students are customers, and, because they pay, they are entitled to satisfaction from the wares and services we provide. We must be truthful in our advertising, ensuring that our (merchandise) catalogs (= college bulletins) are accurate in their descriptions of our products (= classes), and so on. While the TQM (total quality management) approach may produce some benefits in higher education (and the production of reliable course catalogs is an excellent example), it generally reduces the intellectual endeavor to a calculated game in which there appear to be few real winners except, of course, those generally well compensated consulting firms that are hired to provide advice on managing the academic enterprise.
As is evident, these prefatory remarks do not directly pertain to James's fine essay; which puts a number of issue into their proper context. My response to her essay deals with some of the points she raises but will focus on my almost thirty years of experience in a department of French and Italian at a large state university (which also ranks among the top research institutions in the country). This experience has convinced me of the merits of a unified language, literature, and civilization or culture curriculum, with faculty members actively involved in teaching at all levels—from elementary language classes to graduate seminars in literature. This is, of course, the only arrangement I have known personally, and while my view might be different had I been employed in another institution with different traditions, I rather doubt that it would be.
In what follows, I use certain personal perceptions as the basis for broader observations on the state of academia today. In higher education we have witnessed many changes over the past decade or so, changes that have tended, in my view, to diminish the cohesive quality of the programs, and the loss may be seen, in part, as a consequence of the attitude suggested in the first half of James's title—“Bypassing the Traditional Leadership.” By this I mean that departmental loyalty and service—while once uncontestable—are no longer among the givens of the profession. Indeed, some colleagues—generally younger, and active researchers—seem to view their teaching, even at the upper levels, as a drain on their time for research; they appear to have assumed the role of academic entrepreneurs or academic free agents who will go to the highest bidder or pursue their particular goals irrespective of those of the department. I am not talking about academic stars here, but about the next generation of potential stars, whose desire has been kindled by these examples. What has been lost—and what is perhaps unrecoverable—is the sense of working together toward common goals whose realization benefits all. This raises the question of leadership in a department, whether a rotating chair elected by the faculty (for a term of, say, three years) or a head (who serves indefinitely but always at the pleasure of the dean) is to be preferred. The best sort of departmental leader would, in my view, be a combination of the two. Elected by the departmental faculty with the approval of the dean, this person would be a sort of enlightened Machiavellian prince whose personal goals would also be the universal goals of the department and who would not hesitate to act appropriately and energetically to achieve them. Such a leader would have both the rhetorical skills and the authority to govern efficiently and beneficently, allowing students and faculty members to grow and prosper.
A fully integrated program of language, literature, and civilization should be the goal of all departments, for it appears that such a program represents the best way for effective communication to take place, for faculty members to understand and appreciate what junior colleagues, adjunct staff, and teaching assistants are really doing, and for students to see what being a member of the profession entails. I am afraid that graduate students in schools where language and literature programs are separate may not—through no fault of their own—receive the preparation necessary to meet the professional challenges they will encounter in their career and may not become the sort of contributing and cooperating faculty members the profession needs at this crucial juncture. Departments of language and literature must have stars, but the stars should remember that their greatness is intricately tied to the reputation of their department and university, a reputation that they may enhance but that ultimately depends on a wide variety of factors.
As faculty members, we are often our own worst enemies, for we fail to communicate, to our students and college administrators, and to the general public, the importance of what we do. Once we learn to communicate this basic message and order our programs in a coherent manner, our colleagues and students should respond with the necessary enthusiasm to ensure the long-term survival of our eminently humane disciplines.
One of the great battles of the past—which is, unfortunately, still being waged in numerous universities today—concerns the place of language instruction and applied linguistics in the curriculum and, more important, the role of those faculty colleagues whose research and departmental responsibilities lie in these areas. It is, I believe, fair to say that, for whatever reason, our colleagues in “literature” seem to discount the contributions of the “language and pedagogy” faculty members and to view them as second-class citizens in the academic polis. It would also be fair to say that some of those colleagues whose interests lie in theory and cultural studies are equally dismissive of their colleagues who practice more traditional historical or critical methodologies. The results of these attitudes are destructive, for they undermine the mutually beneficial, cooperative atmosphere that should prevail in a department or a program. Academic programs, like towns, cities, states, and nations, are political organisms that depend, for their well-being, on the positive contributions of their constituents. It is often humorously noted—but for that reason no less true—that only in academia have so many done so much for so little, have so many battles been fought by so many people for so little gain. Indeed, this has been the case in institutions of higher learning for the past decade, particularly with regard to salary “increases” (i.e., salary decreases in terms of real dollars and buying power).
Since a good offense is the best defense, beleaguered language departments may find that a united front is the best strategy under current economic conditions. In the first place, there is strength in numbers, but only when there is a consensus among the members of the academic unit on goals and the means to achieve them. (An aside: I would certainly not propose the amalgamation of discrete units into an amorphous “department of languages and literatures,” for the smaller units in such an amalgamation often get an unfair portion of the budget, and the battles among the larger units undermine the enterprise.)
In the second place, there is the irrefutable fact of logic that a program (whether French, or Italian, or German, or whatever) should necessarily have all the language, literature, and culture components under its own roof, as it were. Progression through coherently defined stages of the program should guarantee the proper and complete preparation of students. Other academic areas, particularly the sciences, are organized in such a way that students, after exposure to the fundamentals, take a series of increasingly specialized but related courses.
In the third place and aligned with the second, the ineluctable logic of a unified program not only demonstrates the coherence of the discipline in some abstract way; it exemplifies its rationale to college administrators, review and governing boards, state legislators, and the general public. No less important, a cohesive structure provides an invaluable working model for students and particularly for those who will pursue a career in education, for they will be able to observe firsthand how properly conceived academic units should function. They will carry this experience forward in their careers and thus provide a powerful example for the next generation of scholars.
A number of years ago, a colleague in a scientifically oriented field asked me in all seriousness what we (i.e., language and literature professors) do in our upper-level and graduate courses in Italian; he posed his question as follows: “Do you just translate the harder sentences?” This question, although it sounds ridiculous, contains a certain basic truth: there is a basic core of knowledge that orders and unites the area, and we in language and literature are all engaged in the interpretive enterprise. We do “translate harder sentences,” by “translating” the language of the texts we work with into modes and forms of thought that are understandable and meaningful. And if we are conscientious in our minding of the proverbial store, we will not bypass the traditional forms of leadership. Rather, we will provide a coherent and ordered curriculum for our students and ultimately for ourselves.
Christopher Kleinhenz
University of Wisconsin, Madison
DOROTHY JAMES has written a provocative article on an old problem: the links between teaching language and teaching literature, culture, and civilization. She recommends that chairs of language and literature departments should tell faculty specialists in literature and cultural history to go and teach language. James makes this recommendation in the honest belief that something in the stores is in danger and that literature colleagues who teach language will significantly contribute to its salvation. She is also making this recommendation as a manager, as someone who is “minding a store” that, she feels, has its foundations in the teaching of languages and not of literature, and she would like to return to the basics. Even though James believes strongly in the connection between the two, she submits that the foundation and the future of the store are in the hands of those who teach languages and who discuss methods of teaching and ways to link language and literature, but … (as a graduate students and TA at Columbia University put it): “We are talking about literature teaching, but they are not here.” James goes on to clarify: “The people present were practically all teaching lower-level language courses part-time, and hardly anyone with an established professorial position was there. (Most language program coordinators at Columbia do not have professorial rank)” (10). Why were they not there? Well, perhaps, because they were not involved in planning , and they are expected to teach something that is imposed on them. Learning a “foreign language” should be not an end in itself but a means to cross-cultural understanding and transculturation. This is the point of no return; there is no return to the basics.
With this picture in mind, James makes the following comment and recommendation: “How often have I heard chairs say, ‘Well, I can't ask Professor So-and-So to do such-and-such.’' You can't? Well, perhaps the time has come when you must. Perhaps the time has come for your individual voice to be stronger and less deferential in your own setting and for the collective voice of ADFL to be stronger and less deferential in the wide setting of the MLA” (10). It is not my intention to take a position vis-à-vis the challenge James makes or to take sides in any disputes between ADFL and the MLA. As current chair of a department of Romance studies (not of languages and literatures), I won't ask professors of literature in my department to teach language. I would not teach the subject myself, unless I could do so in the way that I outline below. And although I am sympathetic to the problem James is framing, I do not believe in her solutions. Before asking professors of literature to teach language. I would invite everyone, including directors of language teaching and professors of literature, to rethink the ways we have been “minding” the store and to ask what it means to teach foreign languages and cultures in an increasingly transnational world. I am concerned more with remodeling the store than with who is minding the one we have now.
I do not know what changes should be introduced in remodeling the store, because that is a collective decision to be made by faculty members in departments of foreign languages. What I intend to do here is to enumerate some of the developments that require us to rethink a part of the profession (teaching “foreign” languages and cultures) that is still playing by the rules of a rapidly vanishing world. Briefly (I explain the point in the following pages), I suspect that most of us (professors of “foreign languages and literatures”) assume that what we do has to be based on a given national language, its literature, and the culture to which both belong. This assumption originated, in part, from the MLA itself, which was founded in 1883, precisely when many European nations were formalizing and consolidating their “national languages” (see Hobsbawn) and the United States was becoming a strong decolonized country, opening its doors to European immigration and extending the western frontier that Frederick Jackson Turner celebrated in 1892 in his classic essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”
In 1997 we are in a very different situation. The events of the past thirty years force us to wonder what, indeed, national languages are good for in a transnational world. James in a professor of German, and therefore German languages and literatures constitute her main example. It is necessary to remember, however, the importance of German (and the study of German) to the MLA, which was founded during, and to an extent grew out of, the academic struggle between classic erudition (Greek and Latin) and the radicalism of the emerging (national) modern languages. With its strong philological and hermeneutic background, German Romanticism fostered the genetic approach to languages, which sought to trace the dissemination of the great family of Teutonic languages. When the genetic approach was combined with the theories of social Darwinism so prevalent during the final decades of the nineteenth century, the idea emerged of a central locus from which all languages evolved. The study of language, at that point, concerned itself not so much with the teaching of “foreign” languages as with the philological investigation, in order to understand the root and the variations of a given national language and to link these roots to the racial characteristics of a people. If was even supposed that a natural link existed between the “Teutonic soul” and democracy. While Greek and Latin languages and literatures were the manifestation of the pre-Christian and Christian worlds, the modern world belonged to a new linguistic and racial configuration of national languages through which the national soul could be apprehended and taught. “Foreign languages and literatures” meant, I suspect, something quite different at the end of the nineteenth century from what it means at the end of the twentieth.
When did the situation begin to change and the Modern Language Association become more and more involved in “teaching foreign languages” as the concept is understood today and as it is very well summarized in James's article? I would submit that the situation started to change in the late 1950s, and one of the major causes of the change was the leading role that the United States began to enjoy after the Second World War. In the United States Department of Defense, “foreign languages” were intrinsically conceptualized in terms of the First, Second (Communist), and Third Worlds. Consequently, grants became available and students were encouraged to learn foreign languages and cultures for national security. Not only did interest in the Soviet Union increase, but programs or departments of Asian languages and literatures emerged and prospered. At the time the MLA was founded, Asian languages were the languages necessary for the comparative study of civilization, which, as Edward Said taught us, was mainly a European concern. After the 1960s, they also became Third World languages and a concern mainly of the United States. When the links between the interests of the United States government and those of American universities began to grow in this context “foreign” languages were related not so much to literary studies as to the social sciences. “Comparative area studies” is, I submit, a child born in this era, and “foreign” language was relocated from the centrality of the “First World” to the “Second” and “Third World (foreign) Languages” (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Swahili, etc.). The fall of the Second World has somehow diminished the interest in Russian (according to recent statistics published by the MLA), but the new global world order has brought to the foreground some significant alternatives, such as, for instance, English as a “foreign language” in the former British colonies (New Zealand, Australia, Jamaica, etc.) and Spanish as a “national minority” language (but not a “foreign” language) in the United States. Curiously enough, we are witnessing today an interesting discussion, in the United States academe, as area studies are rethought, and “foreign languages” specialists are mostly absent from this debate. What is going on, since “areas” are defined primarily in terms of foreign languages and cultures?
I would like now to reflect on what it may mean to teach Spanish, at the end of the twentieth century and in the context outlined in the preceding two paragraphs. I will explain with this example what I meant before when I asked what national languages are good for in a transnational world. And I will conclude by making a more explicit connection between these stories and the problem formulated by James. I am not trying to determine who is minding the store; rather, I am asking what kind of store we are minding and what changes are possible in order to make the store relevant to the conditions we are experiencing and can anticipate for our students in the next thirty years (just to put a temporal frame on our reflections and not to leave them floating in the indeterminacy of the twenty-first century).
During the first decades of the MLA (perhaps until the late 1940s, as a result of exiles after the Spanish civil war), Spanish literature and culture did not have a prominent role in the foreign languages' academic domain. It is easy to understand why: if Milton and Shakespeare were considered just worthy of the attentions of serious scholars, and Browning slightly less worthy, what would you expect the academic mainstream to say about scholarly devotion to Cervantes or Gongora or Quevedo or Galdos? Castilian languages and Spanish issues experienced a surge in the 1920s but, again, out of the MLA circuit. It was the Bolton school in California, and Herbert Bolton himself, that formulated in American history the question of the Spanish-North American border, thereby displacing the issues raised by Turner surrounding the frontier. While Turner was looking west, so to speak, and Bolton was looking south, a whole new game was being played at the crossroads of languages, cultures, and civilization: Spanish was no longer just the Spanish of the Golden Age, no longer just a language that, although marginal to the heart of Europe since the seventeenth century, was still a European language. The Spanish culture that Bolton studied was the Hispanic American one, the Mexican; and the view that Bolton spread about Mexican civilization was hardly conducive to placing Spanish language at the core of the MLA!
Spanish suffered its first demotion in the seventeenth century, as I said, when Amsterdam displaced Castile as the center of international trade, and French, English, and German became the languages of philosophy, sciences, and scholarship. Spanish was demoted a second time when it became the language of the “south” and, after the 1960s, a major language of the Third World. The third demotion of Spanish took place after 1968, when Chicanos and Chicanas began to assert themselves as members of a distinctive cultural formation in the United States. Thus, in its third demotion, Spanish, paradoxically, is becoming a minor national language rather than a foreign language in the United States.
But, some readers may ask, what are these stories for, if, after all, Spanish is Spanish all over the place and Spanish grammar is really what counts and students are here to learn to speak, write, and read Spanish? Students have to learn the subjunctive and the differences between ser and estar , and they should know that faxear is not a Spanish verb. They don't need to know all that stuff about the frontier and the Third World! Let me explain why I'm bringing these seemingly unrelated issues to the foreground.
One reason is the preservation of the purity of the language, to shield the grammar and other basics from change. Now who would be interested in preserving the language, and where and why? One answer is that the purity of the language is linked to the official national discourse in the language itself. The Real Academia de la Lengua, for instance, the king of Spain, the secretary of education in Spain and in other Castilian-speaking countries may have a stake in defending this position, as events at the recent meeting in Zacatecas, Mexico, demonstrated. Even more striking has been the negative reaction to Gabriel García Márquez's advocacy of a flexible, creative use of the language, a language open to transcultural influences—those of English and those of Latino and Latina speakers of Spanish in the United States. Not surprisingly, García Márquez was punished and ignored by the protectors of the language's purity, although they never mentioned the hidden supposition behind their defense. But, of course, the purity of Spanish could be defended from a different, less official stance: opposition to the planetary invasion of English and the English-only tendency of globalization. This position could have been taken, for instance, by respectable professors of Spanish language and literature, and not only by representatives of the government.
The other reason is so that we can start thinking from the perspective of languaging instead of language (see Becker). While language implies an object to be possessed, languaging takes us to people's interactions. Of course, languaging does not support “proficiency” and the “performative” approach to language. Proficiency and performativity are approaches to languages , not to languaging . That is, proficiency and performativity do not question the basic unity and purity of the language. Instead of the grammar, they emphasize interaction within a given language. But both are in the same epistemological boat.
When I say languaging , I am underlining the enactment beyond the grammatical limits and purity of a “language,” in its historical changes, in its relation to power. Think, for instance, how could you teach Spanish (Castilian), now, and ignore the historical relation to Catalan, Vasque, and Galician? And When I say “historical,” I do not mean to imply that, on the one hand, we have present-day Castilian, which has a form and a structure, and that on the other, there is the history of that language. No, what I am saying is that the languages are what they are because of the history they have had, and languaging carriers the weight of that history at every moment. Thus Spanish in Spain is not the same as Spanish in the Andes (Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador), where it coexisted, for five hundred years, with Aymara and Quechua. Similarly, Spanish in the United States has been coexisting with English, but it has also coexisted for centuries with the languages of central Mexico, like Nahuatl, as Chicano writers remind us constantly.
What I am suggesting, with these examples, is that remodeling the store implies a move from a language-centered approach (competence, proficiency, or what have you) to a languaging approach, one that leads to transcultural conversations. As the examples suggest, we live in a world with increasingly multicultural linguistic interactions (e.g., languaging). As a result of migrations and diasporas, on the one hand, massive numbers of speakers of national languages flee from their homelands; on the other hand, techno-globalism and the mass media are straining the integrity of national languages by bombarding international channels of communication with a variety of “foreign” languages, primarily those of the strongest and wealthiest countries.
Clearly, Chinese and Spanish have a structure. But the structure imposed by those who described (or prescribed) Chinese and Spanish grammar is quite different from the structure one can enact, or improsive, just by speaking the tongue, without necessarily knowing the grammar—that is, the written grammar, the structure by which people learn how to speak the language! Perhaps the need, therefore, is not to defend or preserve the purity of Spanish by insisting on an unchanging grammar but, as García Márquez suggested, to enrich the language by encouraging the practices of languaging and transculturation. There is no question of the power that exists at the intersection of languages and the determination of how languaging takes place. That power, of course, resides in the history of the language, a history that makes—as I have said—a given language what it is and determines what role it occupies in languaging games.
Now, a reader may ask, how all we perform in the classroom? And that is my point: I will ask language directors and faculty members in literary studies and theory, in my department, to discuss the teaching of “foreign languages” in the context of the present world and the future university. I will eventually include graduate students. I will suggest that TA training be done not only by experts in language teaching but also by experts in literature, culture, and theory, with a critical perspective on language. TAs, on the one side, would pursue their graduate studies and, on the other, explore, with experts in language teaching and in cultural studies, ways to change our appreciation, and presentation, of foreign languages. Colleagues in literature and literary theory or cultural studies, as well as language directors, would not necessarily have to teach language courses: they should design and direct them. In other words, they must constantly remodel the store. In such a scenario, I would do my best to persuade literature faculty members in my department to engage in a creative, critical, and radical transformation, by moving from instruction in (national) foreign language to intercultural languaging and interethnic conversations for a transnational world.
Learning Spanish (or French or German, for that matter) does not consist only in going from the subjunctive to a major work of literature. That is one way to learn a language, and it has certainly been the dominant one. This model is based on the national perspective on language, literature, and culture. There are alternatives, and I think they point to the future. First, the Asian and African Languages Department at Duke University has developed a way of teaching language together with cultural critique and cross-cultural understanding. The department has been so innovative in its approach that one of the outside reviewers of the program has observed that its Asian languages and literatures project has turned orientalism upside down. Second, as the remodeling of the store progresses, study abroad becomes an essential issue. What a student can learn during the fourth semester of a language is important, but a semester abroad could become a requirement not only for foreign language majors but also for most students in the arts and sciences as well as in the professional schools. But again, remodeling the store means changing the perspective on study-abroad programs.
Duke in the Andes, housed in Latin American studies at Duke and based in La Paz, Bolivia, is a new concept of the study-abroad program; it is intended to promote learning and understanding of foreign languages in cultures—languages as languaging , not as a linguistic structure. Duke in the Andes emphasizes transnational linguistic and cultural regions rather than national languages and cultures. In the Andes, as I noted earlier, Spanish coexisted with Aymara and Quechua for five hundred years. Students in the Duke program have the opportunity to learn Aymara and Quechua, and those who don't will learn, from direct exposure, that although Spanish language in the Andes may have the same grammar as Spanish in Catalunya or Madrid, the two languages have important differences. For what is the point in teaching students the abstract grammar of the language, when that language is constantly being changed by people who actually speak it—in the various regions of Spain, in the former colonial regions (like the Andes), or in the regions configured as a new form of colonialism and created, in part, by market demands (like Latino and Latina Spanish in the United States).
In Duke in the Andes, languages (mainly Spanish but also Aymara and Quechua) are learned at the same time that the cultural history is learned. The program is based on a series of core courses or core seminars—one, for example, is Colonialism, Ethnicity, and Gender in Post-revolutionary Bolivia; another is The Articulation of Cultures in the Bolivian Andes. All students are required to take at least two of the core courses, which are taught by first-rank professors and intellectuals; Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui (sociologist) and Rossana Barragan (historian) teach the first one, and Javier Sanjines (literature and cultural studies) teaches the second. We are in the process of implementing other core seminars, such as Colonial Art and Textile in the Andes, which will focus on the admixture of Spanish and Andes iconology and on textiles, a major writing and artistic device for the Aymara and Quechua cultures. A second core seminar, Aymara Intellectuals, will examine the emergence of a new type of scholarship and leaders of social movements; it will be taught by intellectuals and scholars whose native tongue is Aymara, who have learned Spanish as a second language, and who currently operate in both languages in order to address different audiences: the bilingual indigenous population and the monolingual middle class and government officers who, in general, are proficient only in Spanish. I imagine that scholars who teach and work with North Africans, with speakers of Caribbean French or of English in postpartition India, with communities of Native Americans, or—in a different configuration—with Chinese and Japanese in Southeast Asia would have comparable bilingual and bicultural backgrounds and face comparable situations on the job. In all such cases, I submit, the essential interaction is no longer between languages and literature but between languages and cultural studies (I am assuming that literature is a part of both language and culture and not a separate, privileged target).
Taking into account the Andes example, I repeat that I will not ask faculty members in literature, literary theory, and cultural studies to teach languages. I will ask them to work on remodeling the store. What I would be happy to attempt is to involve assistant, associate, the full professors in the planning of languaging teaching and in teaching graduate students how to teach language and culture at the undergraduate level. Now, please do not get me wrong. Two solutions exist, and I can go with either of them. What I do not like is the way James proposes to combine the two. Let's try one of the following scenarios:
Scenario 1 would be the status quo: a language director prepares TAs to teach the first four semesters of a second language, and literature professors begin to teach after the fourth semester, bringing together language and culture of civilization. At Duke, at least, and in Romance studies, this system works perfectly well. In scenario 2, language program directors and faculty members in literature or culture would jointly prepare graduate students to teach foreign languages and cultures. After that first step, whether a faculty member in literature or literary theory or a director of the language program teaches one of the first four semesters becomes secondary. What is crucial is that the language director and the faculty members in literature and culture work together to plan and train graduate students to teach foreign languages and cultures—not that these senior colleagues teach the courses.
Now, scenario 2 raises some issues crucial in rethinking the teaching of foreign languages and literatures in a transnational world. Translation and transculturation are, at this point, vital concepts to be considered in planning any move from a “foreign” to a “plurilingual and transcultural” education. If, in its narrow sense, translation refers to the conversion from one language (speech and writing) to another, transculturation underlines the fact that speech and writing are not isolated from all other forms of social interaction and communication—from video and cinema to food and clothing, from politics and economics to religion and sexuality. In the world as we know it today—and as Western society has known it for several centuries—the question is not just one of cultural relativism and (in more recent times) tourist exotica but one of power and domination embodied in languages and cultural forms. To learn a foreign language, literature, and culture should be, from the beginning, to learn languaging and sociohistorical transculturation and power relations embedded in languages. I am speaking, of course, as a scholar whose main topic of research is colonialism from the sixteenth century to today, whose area of expertise is Latin America and the Caribbean, where Spanish is a Third World language, and whose interests include Hispanics and Latinos and Latinas in this country.
Academia's primary responsibility, it seems to me, is undergraduate education. What has to be examined is the contribution plurilingual and transcultural education would make to it. What is, indeed, a major in Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and so on at the end of the twentieth century? And what would we like the major to be in the future? Plurilingual and transcultural education corresponds to a world order in which the “national” (on which the “foreign” is based) coexists with the “transnational” (on which plurilingualism and transculturalism are based). There is an urgent need to remodel the store in a transcultural perspective. The “foreign” is no longer “out there,” and the “national” is no longer “down here.” The idea of the “foreign” is losing its place in a cosmopolitan, transnational, and transcultural world. And with it, “language” is being replaced by the emphasis on (pluri)-languaging (see Mignolo).
Walter Mignolo
Duke University
Becker, A. “A Short Essay on Languaging.” Reflexivity: Knowing as Systemic Social Construction. Ed. F. Steier. London: Sage, 1991. 230.
Hobsbawn, E. J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Mignolo, Walter. “Bi-languaging Love: National Identifications and Cultures of Scholarship in a Transnational World.” Text and Nation. Ed. P. C. Pfeiffer and L. Garci-Moreno. Columbia: Camden, 1996, 123–41.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt, c. 1923. 1–38.
THE following remarks, though not merely anecdotal, are written with reference to a particular, privileged institutional setting for second language teaching and learning: a private university (Stanford) and a department whose language and literature programs are pretty healthy (Spanish and Portuguese). In what follows, I propose to assume one point and argue four. The point assumed is one over which disagreement is unlikely:
It is critical for language, literature, and culture programs to support each other, and the involvement of literature faculty members in language programs is essential to that support.
The points to be discussed are these:
Discussion:
The defense of the autonomous, one-language, one-department model should not be allowed to obscure cooperative strategies to maintain and strengthen the teaching of languages and literatures in colleges and universities.
Three years ago, after a year of brutally contentious negotiations, six languages and literature departments at the university where I work linked together to form a new entity called the Division of Literature, Cultures, and Languages. The departments (Slavic studies, Asian languages, German studies, Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian, and comparative literature) retained departmental status. Budgets, billers, curriculum, and so on remained autonomous and independent. Administrative functions were consolidated, however, and appointments and promotions became subject to review by the divisional Executive Committee before proceeding to the decanal level. Fellowship allotments were reduced to create a pool of fellowships for which departments were to compete. Discretionary money was consolidated into a single fund to be disbursed by the Executive Committee (EC). The EC consisted of the six departments chairs plus two at-large representatives and later the director of the Language Center.
The university swore (and swears) that the new arrangement saved no money and was not intended to—ever. The reorganization was intended to make the departments run better through the introduction of specialized staff assignments; to foster scholarly and curricular collaboration; to enable the departments to assert themselves as a group in the university; and to ensure that consistent standards were applied in appointments and promotions. The six departments together, it was pointed out, formed a body of faculty about the same size as history, English, or psychology.
Opponents of the new structure saw the specter of a watered-down department of modern languages (it is true that the idea had been under consideration and had supporters). They deplored the loss of autonomous, the imposition of competition among the departments, the addition of a new layer of review in appointments and promotions by people “outside the field.”
So what happened? On the administrative end, the new structure produced a noticeable erosion of what has traditionally been called chair's support. Gone are the days of secretaries standing by while chairs open the mail. Gone, even, are the days of secretaries doing the chair's filing or producing a letter at the drop of a hat. Gone are the days of the skilled, underemployed departmental administrator who takes initiatives, tracks programming, keeps the chair abreast of what is going on. On the positive side, the new central staff is more highly skilled than ever, many tasks are carried out more smoothly and reliably, and centralized staff members feel they are part of a team. They work very hard. A by-product of the centralization has been equalizing of resources across the six departments. When departments were administered separately, unjustified inequities between them could not come to light. From an institutional perspective, the hope that the divisional structure would enable the departments to assert themselves more effectively in the university was immediately realized. For over ten years, departments had been lobbying individually, and in vain, to change a university requirement that all dissertations be written in English. When the Executive Committee took up the issue as a group, however, much greater expertise, political clout, empirical argument, and institutional savvy were brought to bear, and the change was quickly approved. The same year, a presidential commission on undergraduate education recommended strengthening the university's language requirement, a reform that had to be debated and approved by the faculty senate. Again the divisional structure created institutional clout to back the change, and it was approved. Perhaps more important was the collective will generated around the issue—far more than a strategic alliance between departments.
Collective will did not coalesce, however, around decanal proposals to mount faculty searchers at the divisional level. Despite sincere efforts to agree on sharing billet resources, chairs tended to feel compelled to put departmental needs first—particularly in departments that had lost billets in a recent around of budget cuts. Efforts to generate division-level curricular innovations—a world literature major, for instance, or a co-taught methodology course for majors—also have not succeeded so far. In short, the new structure has not yet facilitated consensus around intellectual or curricular agendas.
One of the most tangible benefits of the new structure was oddly unexpected: the simple opportunity to swap information and ideas. The biweekly EC meetings provided the context for chairs to exchange notes on all kinds of matters—undergraduate majors and minors, processes for evaluating lecturers or for admitting graduate students, enrollment statistics, the running of language programs, the ways each departments had developed to meet its obligations and distribute its resources. Meetings often revealed that department problems were shared and provided a context for brainstorming about solutions. Each department's good ideas and successes could be imitated by others. Chairs also come to understand the particularities of other departments and their own. Tendencies for the bigger departments to dominate the smaller ones seem to be at least offset by the tendency for bigger departments heroically to come to their defense.
The obligation to review each other's appointment and promotions was easily the most burdensome imposition of the new structure and, from the dean's point of view, the most important. The executive Committee's track record will surely be no better or no worse than that of any other such body, and truly bad department decisions will indeed be overruled. One clear benefit, for which the deans are thankful, has been a strengthening of the quality of the dossiers that are forwarded to the decanal level. In small departments, individual chairs accumulate very little experience at handling appointments and promotions. The combined expertise of six chairs has proved a great resource for identifying problems, anticipating questions, and suggesting improvements. A long-standing perception that appointments in the language departments were traditionally weaker than those in other departments has a chance of being eroded. Even so, negative judgements inevitably create bitterness and mistrust and seem to complicate possibilities of developing shared scholarly or curricular agendas.
So far, my aim has been to suggest that the defense of the autonomous, one-language, one-department model should not be allowed to obscure collaborative strategies to enhance the teaching of languages and literatures in colleges and universities. When one hears of languages “disappearing” from campuses—Arabic, Polish, Swahili, Korean—one wonders whether anyone was there to defend them other than the individual, often low-level specialists who taught them. The big languages have a vested interest in defending the small ones and can be very effective in doing so if the right organization structures are present. Collective, interdepartmental efforts can go far in preventing, indeed thwarting, moves toward service status.
I turn now the implications the new divisional structure at my university had for language instruction. As part of the division initiative, the deans created the Language Center and authorized a national search for its director, who would sit on the division's Executive Committee. Language instruction would continue to “live” in the individual departments, but the Language Center would be responsible for ensuring the quality of language instruction and for working with departments that needed to improved theirs. The promise of a language center had been a serious factor in securing senate approval of the strengthened language requirement. Some faculty members saw the center as an unnecessary waste of resources; others—including those with research interests in language acquisition—were delighted. Many (as the lang-lit split would predict) were indifferent. Language teachers were apprehensive.
So what happened?
The impact of the Language Center was most strongly felt by language teachers and language program directors. The powers and responsibilities that were transferred to the center were mainly those of program directors, not department chairs. Literature and culture faculty members had traditionally played no role in the language programs, and efforts to encourage them to do so were usually opposed by language program directors on the grounds that the instructions lacked expertise. In the process of the transfer, it became clear that in departments with large languages programs, individual program directors had been controlling budgets considerably larger than those under the purview of the faculty, and, in may respects, with considerably less accountability. It became clear, too, that no systematic approach had ever existed for such matters as evaluating the work of language teachers, training TAs, conducting searches, and so on. The school simply had never bothered to develop policies with respect to language education, a situation for which responsibility (or blame) lies at the level of the deans, not departments and certainly not individual coordinators or teachers. The Language Center brought the ad hoc era to an end.
While TA budgets remained with individual departments, all other language-teaching funds were transferred to the center, into a single budget administered by its director. With administrative resources that had once been distributed among the departments, the center took on the responsibility for scheduling languages classes, processing course evaluations, determining class size, initiating hiring and evaluation processes, and appointing languages program coordinators.
The impact of the Language Center has been dramatic. One immediate effect was a (at times excruciating) redistribution of resources, notably from departments in which language enrollments and class sizes had been eroding, into those (notably Spanish) in which both had been growing. All the departments benefited, however, from the Language Center's ability to secure a real institutional commitment to second language learning as a key aspect of undergraduate education and to turn that commitment into policies. The charge involves new opportunities and new pressures. Because of the center, departments will be able, and expected, to hire personnel trained in language acquisition. Language teachers will find support for professional development, research, and curricular innovation. Their work will undergo regular review. Tools for outreach to the undergraduate population have multiplied, and the pressure to do outreach has increased. The training and progress of TAs will receive systematic attention and evaluation, and students will go on the market with a teaching portfolio in hand. In my two years as chair of Spanish and Portuguese, the language program has taken more of my time and attention than anything else, but it has also been the place where the most interesting and constructive change has been going on.
What does any of this have to do with the literature and culture programs, however? In some respects nothing, and this is next point.
The interest of language programs and of literature programs do not always coincide and should not be expected to. Efforts to make the two coincide are misguided if they curb the ability of each to develop and thrive in the university.
In my view, there are my points at which the interests of language programs and literature and culture programs diverge, and it is mistake to try to eliminate or ignore the divergences in the name of integration. It is customary, for instance, to deplore the expansion of teaching in English at the expense of teaching in the second language. But are language programs inevitably harmed by this shift and do they necessarily benefit from its prevention? In my department two years ago, the literature faculty agreed that each of us would develop at least one undergraduate course in English, to be given every year or every other year. Our aim was to boost our enrollments and to become more of an intellectual presence on the campus. We also agreed that up to two courses taken in English could count toward the major, so that students could start work on their major while still finishing language training. Otherwise, students often had to wait until their junior year to enter the thematic courses taught by senior faculty members. Some of us began teaching large undergraduate lecture courses that fulfill distribution requirements; others developed courses for a new freshman and sophomore seminar program.
As far as I can tell, these initiatives have been successful. The courses taught in English have attracted a new student body and given us a stronger profile in undergraduate humanities education. Average enrollments in literature and culture courses in the department are the same as those in language courses.
Has the language-based side of our curriculum been harmed? It does not seem so. The number of majors rose last year by 75%; enrollment in second-year Spanish (i.e., students who have fulfilled the language requirement and are continuing for other reasons) rose by over 40%. The bottom line; while it may not be directly in the interests of language programs for departments to expand curriculum in English, such expansion does not obviously work against the interests of language programs. And even if it did, conflicting interests must be balanced off.
The argument works in the other direction as well. Many language programs have strong incentives, for instance, to develop courses in language for professional purposes (business, law, medicine). Literature faculty members readily regard such projects with hostility or indifference, but—to repeat the argument—language programs would be insane not to try them. Do such specialized language courses harm the literature curriculum? Not likely, and certainly not necessarily. Our department last year put out the word that if any fifteen students wanted a language class and committed themselves to sign up for it, we would do our best to offer the course. In no time, a group of bilingual premed students showed up, and the result was a highly successful two-quarter class that will now become part of our regular curriculum. None of those students was likely to appear anywhere else in our program; now some of them will become Spanish minors.
The much-needed professionalization and upgrading of language teaching may increase, rather than decrease, the distance between language and literature teaching and research. Efforts to integrate departments must take this into account.
Eliminating the hierarchical relationship between language and literature teaching is by no means a simple undertaking. It will always be true, I think, that first- and second-year language courses feed into third- and fourth-year culture courses given in the second language. This progressive relationships can be balanced off by developing, on the one hand, third- and fourth-year language courses—syntax and phonology, translation, dialectology, language acquisition theory—and, on the other, first- and second- year courses in literature and culture given all or partly in English. Neither of these, however, will eliminate the position of the language lecturer who has twice the load and half the salary of tenured faculty members. Arguments for equality and integration easily overlook an important irony: the professionalization or specialization of language teaching in a department easily broadens rather than narrows the distance between language and literature programs and personnel. Language teachers will not necessarily be displaced literature students who regard literature as the higher calling toward which language teaching is directed. Indeed, they may have little knowledge or interest in literature and will (should!) have research agendas defined by one or another branch of linguistics.
One important way to mediate the lang-lit split is to appoint linguists to faculty positions in language departments.
Successful integration of language, literature, and culture programming requires the appointment of linguists to faculty positions in language departments, a model abandoned in many universities with the rise of linguistics departments in the 1970s. It will be the task of these linguists to integrate their fields into the curricular and research agendas of the department and to create the interface between language and literature programming. Will the result be that billets are taken away from literature programs? Maybe. Probably.
There surely exists no foolproof way to make literature faculty members care about language programs. As every chair knows, it is very difficult to make faculty members do anything at all. All you have are tricks. Here are a few of mine: every faculty meeting can include reports from and on the language programs; faculty opinion can be sought on language program decisions; a faculty member can be appointed as language-literature liaison and assigned such tasks as arranging for faculty members to visit language classes; a faculty committee can be created to oversee policy and personnel matters in language programs; language teachers can be incorporated into departmental speaker series or conferences. What is needed is what is always needed: institutional resources, creative leadership, and a few people willing to put in the time.
Mary Louise Pratt
Stanford University
FOREIGN language departments at the end of the millennium require serious reassessment and change—not, however, with the intent of eradicating their fundamental practice of teaching two disciplines, language and literature. Instead, we should be devising pathways to accommodate these two disciplines as positive codependents in a context meaningful to students. In addition, faculty members who have had the experiences of being teacher and scholar as well as chair not only assume the professional responsibility of providing service but, above all, glean a level of understanding and empathy that will enhance communication in the department. In looking to the curriculum's future, departments exploring innovative teaching venues will find that interaction with culturally related disciplines will lead to course offerings that can enrich their own programs and attract more students on all levels. In other words, instead of splitting into camps—teachers of labor-intensive language and literature courses who often become career administrators and the privileged class of literary “stars”—faculty members in foreign language departments who band together to extend their sphere of operations will create a cohesive academic unit and broaden the scope of the curriculum in the department and across the university. In doing so, they will stimulate dialogue with other programs in the university and especially with the central administration. At the same time, such departments can encourage faculty members to reexamine and perhaps revise established procedures, so that department members share the responsibilities of teaching language and literature and serve as chairs for designated periods of time. In this way, everyone will have a role in the “minding of the store” because everyone will have a stake in defending the store's curricular goods.
Change is indeed necessary, but not the change of “devolution” 1 that threatens our disciplinary core, language and literature. After all, doesn't our profession wisely recognize the inherent relationship of language and literature as two interdependent disciplines? If we already value the interplay of these two on an ideological plane, why can we not, on the professional plane, strengthen their fragile relationship—a relationship that, regrettably, has been fractured by faculty members who have been pursuing disparate agendas? All for one and one for all must be our professional agenda if we do not wish to be gobbled up by the conglomerate thinking that can surface on university campuses. As my experience as a teacher of both Portuguese language and Luso-Brazilian literature for the past twenty-eight years and my service as chair for eleven years reflect, I have always been an advocate for one faculty that teaches both language and literature, while it simultaneously expands its curricular offerings—or, as Dorothy James argues in her cogent article, “one faculty that will work with literature in a cultural-literary context and open the doors to the highest levels of literacy for our students” (8). 2
The following commentary strongly supports James's arguments that our profession will be under serious threat if we continue tacitly to condone the division of language and literature teaching into separate spheres, or the increasing fissures between the two, that ultimately place the responsibility of minding the store in the hands of a restive body of colleagues. However, my remarks focus principally on some of the strategies and coordination that will enable all faculty members to participate in foreign language instruction as well as to maintain a research agenda while taking their administrative turns at minding the store. I also address, albeit briefly, the important role of the chair and the feasibility of his or her ongoing contribution to the teaching and the scholarship of language and literature.
First of all, to achieve the goals I've enumerated, the teaching of “language in a cultural-literary context” warrants clarification and a reasonable solution. From my viewpoint, the concept not only signifies teaching, in language and literature courses, an understanding of the target culture and its dynamics but also recognizes and honors language (in this case, a foreign language) as a medium of instruction 3 in the acquisition of knowledge and not merely as a linguistic end in itself. The medium becomes the message, and it is the dynamic combination of language and literature, in a content-charged curriculum, that motivates students on all levels. Therefore we cannot split language from literature or other culturally related courses; their connection reflects our firm belief that the teaching of culture and literature, transmitted through a foreign language, leads to experiences of profound understanding and cross-cultural sensibility. This basic concept of the role of foreign language and its instruction not only merits reinforcement—it should also be sustained as our professional creed.
In the development of a cultural-literary context, foreign language departments, manifesting a willingness to negotiate with other fields and departments, will be able to guarantee their longevity, because they will no longer be operating as isolated and vulnerable units. We can achieve interdisciplinary focus by complementing a student's program of study with FLAC courses (but using language and literature as the significant departmental core) or by establishing joint appointments across disciplines. In either case, foreign language departments of the twenty-first century can maintain their professional identity if they are open to new curricular networks that enhance their mission, and allow them to preserve their integrity, and help them broaden their offerings in the foreign language. Positive, collective readjustments in foreign language programming will enable these departments to adapt to the challenges created by the everchanging gestalt of students and society. In fact, foreign language departments may even consider a “studies” format, with language and literature as the nucleus of a program that also includes interdisciplinary courses taught in the foreign language. This stance would reinforce the language and literature connection, alongside the expansion of literary and content-oriented courses taught in the foreign language. We should be working more closely with FLAC programs instead of seeing them as a threat. This approach reflects my own experience as a professor of foreign language and literature in an interdisciplinary unit that operates under the rubric Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.
The single most valuable concept I have learned since the late 1960s, from my experience training public school teachers for multicultural programs, is that a foreign language can be used as a medium of instruction to teach anything, that it is a bridge to cognitive and affective objectives, and that courses whose only goals are linguistic proficiency do not relate, as we all know too well, to the lives of our students and to cultural life in general. A department that honors this concept and practices the policy of having one faculty teach language and literature creates a more equitable division of responsibilities. Furthermore, this type of teaching program affords undergraduates early contact with accomplished senior faculty members, thereby turning students on to the excitement of scholars who have substantial material to teach. Above all, this early exposure to the senior members acknowledges the importance of language and consequently bestows on foreign language instruction and on lower-level language-oriented literature courses the respect they sorely deserve. Students' respect is transferred eventually to all faculty members who appreciate the labor-intensiveness of teaching introductory courses in language and literature.
When foreign language instruction is viewed as an integral part of a curriculum in which stylistics courses for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students are regularly offered, then all members of the department can appreciate the investment involved in the development of proficiency in the target language. In the event that senior “stars” are not trained in beginning foreign language instruction, they certainly can teach intermediate or upper-level language courses in composition and stylistics, as well as introductory literature where speaking and writing are given high priority.
Departmental discussions on the methods and materials for teaching such courses on the undergraduate level can afford all faculty members the opportunity to participate in a team-effort venture that can enhance professional know-how, faculty relations, and camaraderie. For example, in an introduction to Brazilian literature, one of the class activities may involve an updated version of a brief explication de texte, a discussion of narrative form, or an interpretation of a protagonist's point of view, activities that can also engage students in grammatical or syntactical exercises. Students may have to alter the verb tenses in paragraph, thereby reinforcing linguistic skills in the context of literary analysis. Discussion may revolve around the choice of tenses used by a specific narrator or how point of view reflects a gender-driven perspective evident in the language employed in one of the novel's discourses. As in immersion classes, content-obligatory and content-compatible language experiences are developed for the systematic integration of language and content. Moreover, with proper guidance, senior faculty members can be “trained”—or, rather, “oriented”—to teach such methods and materials.
In a department in which one faculty teaches two disciplines, the chair's role is significant because he or she must encourage faculty members to participate in the solution instead of viewing individual colleagues as stumbling blocks to change. The chair must keep the faculty informed at all times of the departmental needs and the process of change. Setting the tone for excellence in teaching and scholarship can occur only if all faculty members are kept abreast of a department's activities and plans. This stance is crucial for good communication. Furthermore, senior members can be asked, or “invited,” to contribute to the teaching of the undergraduate curriculum if all departmental members actively reassess and rearrange their own teaching assignments. The chair's ability to mediate, stimulate, empathize, and reward, if only with verbal strokes, is also vital in devising a plan for new teaching assignments. The other key to success centers on the faculty as a team working for one specific, overall objective or a series of goals that will create a language, literature, and cultural context in which the curriculum drives students to understand better a particular culture and its expression.
One strategy for meeting this challenge is to design courses and seminars that will engage students in comprehending aspects of the big picture of a given culture and society. Although this approach simulates the foreign languages across the curriculum project, which has had some success at Brown, the longevity of such offerings can be secured only if the foreign language department itself fosters or cosponsors such courses. In my department, for example, the senior seminar for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students addresses the need for in-depth study of a problem or situation by examining issues of Brazilian or Portuguese national identity primarily in a cultural, historical, and sociological context, with readings in these fields in the Portuguese language. Conducted totally in Portuguese for students proficient in the language (most students have had basic language and literature courses and the equivalent of one semester of study abroad), the seminar may change its topic as well as its instructor—whose field may be history, literature, or the social sciences. A literature-trained faculty member has taught this seminar in Portuguese from a sociocultural viewpoint, using significant readings, not necessarily from literature, but from history and the social sciences. Joint appointments with history and other fields or members of an interdisciplinary advisory board provide a pool of foreign-language-proficient professors from which to select a different instructor each year to teach the seminar. While such courses serve as a culminating experience for undergraduates and a teaching challenge for all faculty members, these advanced offerings have been preceded by lower-level courses taught by senior faculty members who team-teach in Intensive Portuguese as well as Writing and Speaking Portuguese (intermediate level).
In reevaluating the undergraduate curriculum, a department should consider an alternative, and efficient, sequence of language courses that will include more content-oriented classes, to instill in students the confidence and excitement of thinking and working in the foreign language. Of course, there is no single way to approach this resequencing issue, since each university or department is unique. Our experience in Portuguese at Brown University required us to restructure in order to maximize the skills and energies of a small faculty. This reality led to the establishment of an intensive language course of nine hours a week, covering two semesters in one and team-taught by senior faculty members and one graduate student, using the Natural Approach; exercises contained substantial cultural content, and students read a modern Portuguese novel. Instead of following this course with what would be comparable to a 3 or 4 level, the department decided to create one course of four hours (three of regular instruction, plus one for small-group tutorials) that would review grammar and would require weekly compositions based on students' responses to an exploration of Brazilian culture through theater and film. These courses have been taught for twenty-five years by junior or senior faculty members, with the assistance of a graduate student. In this resequencing structure, the next courses are introductions to modern Brazilian and Portuguese literatures, taught by junior or senior faculty members or by a graduate student under the new mentoring program, in which graduate students team-teach with faculty members. After taking these basic courses, students enroll in more-advanced literature courses conducted in Portuguese or in social science courses such as Afro-Brazilian Polity, Modern Brazilian History, Cultural Politics of Hybridity in Modern Brazilian Fiction, or The Afro-Luso-Brazilian Triangle. These courses are either conducted in the foreign language or provide readings in Portuguese for those who are proficient. In a word, content, content! All these upper-level courses are successful and draw larger numbers than expected because they engage students in provocative, incisive discussions and problem-solving activities through some form of foreign language reading and expression.
Another feature of the department's teaching program is its contribution to the undergraduate curriculum across the university in the form of literature and other humanities courses, such as intellectual history, offered in English translation. While eighty percent of the courses in the department are conducted in the Portuguese language, over the years each faculty member has offered, usually on an annual basis, at least one course taught in translation, as a service to the university and as a means of exposing students to our field of study. These courses usually draw larger enrollments, and consequently the chair uses these figures as a negotiating point with central administration when the issue of enrollments is raised. In other words, smaller classes and seminars can be justified if the department is making a contribution to undergraduate academic life by offering at least one course that attracts a wider spectrum of students. Whether these courses ultimately draw students to concentrate in a department's program of study is not as important as the role the courses play in the university. The practice does not at all imply a departmental move toward teaching more courses in English translation. 4 Rather, the significant issue here is the recognition of the department as an active and regular contributor to the undergraduate curriculum.
If a department adheres to the concept of the foreign language medium as the message and to the goal of one faculty to teach all courses, then that department is also fostering good pedagogy. Moreover, if this practice is viewed as a faculty's professional responsibility, then the department will want to pass this legacy on to its graduate students as they train to be teachers as well as scholars. In a department's graduate program, both the study of literature and foreign language pedagogy have to be afforded serious attention, especially since job seekers are usually hired for their teaching experience as well as their literary research and publications. For example, graduate programs that focus on problem-solving or literary strategies, techniques, and approaches rather than on literary periodization or genre studies prepare students to be both scholars and teachers; they spark innovative thinking and generate ideas about pedagogy. Organizing a seminar to provide maximum linguistic practice and literary discussion for graduate students (or advanced undergraduates) is an art that warrants replication and dissemination. Language at this stage becomes a natural tool for instruction, communication, and analysis, similar to immersion classes in national and international bilingual schools in which instruction in various subjects is offered in two languages. Consequently, graduate programs that feature seminars and courses conducted in the foreign language and stress the professional responsibility of all faculty members in undergraduate foreign language instruction will prepare their students for the increasingly competitive market. Training graduate students to value foreign language instruction can also be reinforced if they team-teach in a mentoring format. 5 As a significant step in solidifying the practice of having all faculty members teach both language and literature, a mentoring program enhances faculty and student relations: the two groups share the responsibility of promoting good teaching by sharpening their pedagogical skills in the process of creating intellectually challenging classes. This practice can also stimulate healthy camaraderie among students instead of competition, especially if the department emphasizes the team approach to a variety of department situations and activities. Good faculty-student relations are key to fostering an intellectually sound, dynamic atmosphere.
What implications does this dual teaching responsibility have for scholarship and publication? Realistically, the research agenda for faculty members who participate fully in teaching both language and literature may have to be altered somewhat, possibly resulting in some reduction in quality time for scholarship. However, if such a policy is instituted, it has to be endorsed by the chair and the central administration—thereby challenging what might be the university's boastful declaration of supporting both teaching and scholarship. Perhaps there will be one less article, monograph, or even book, but at the same time the shared responsibility of teaching will strengthen the quality of the curriculum, as well as the department's academic identity. Such a policy does not signify the elimination of scholarship and publication; it merely shifts some of the professional expectations toward teaching. In my department, scholarship still represents the highest priority, but not at the expense of good teaching and some ongoing grantsmanship. And for those who become chairpersons for two cycles, it may mean that the next book will take just a little bit longer to complete.
Unless we adjust our view of the profession more along this line of thinking, we cannot hope to maintain our integrity as the field for the study of language and literature. In short, we have to recement the foundation of our profession.
One important strategy in working toward this objective is to elect or train chairs who champion this vision in their roles as mediator, teacher, and scholar. Beyond the readings recommended by Reed Anderson in his article on the changing role of the department chair (13), I firmly believe that a forum for chairs should be instituted, where they can discuss their concerns while receiving orientation on efficient management practices. A deft chairperson-manager who has a collective vision as well as good people skills will, in turn, receive departmental support for the goals all the faculty members have set. Furthermore, chairpersons who want to make a substantial contribution must be ready to commit to at least two three-year cycles. Chairs can be successful as administrators and as teachers and scholars if they possess strong organizational skills that will enable them to secure pockets of time for their research. Moreover, the chair's success, as well as the department's, depends on continually setting concrete goals in conjunction with the faculty.
Strategies for better communication, for team efforts, and for innovative programming must be devised, with the aim of having the department stand behind a diversified curriculum in which all faculty members will teach both language and literature in a cultural or interdisciplinary context. When all the members mind the store, when student, faculty, and department development is nurtured by all, we can offer education in those higher levels of foreign language literacy, literary study, and culturally oriented knowledge that students demand and hope to achieve. To meet this demand, our profession must expand the vision of foreign language instruction and literary study so that we will be able to respond effectively to the challenges of the twenty-first century.
Nelson H. Vieira
Brown University
1 This term was used by Dorothy James in her account of a talk given by David Maxwell at the Foreign Languages across the Curriculum Conference in fall 1996 (James 7).
2 The emphasis in this quote is mine and underscores the need for a less traditional approach when cooperating with other departments in the humanities as well as those in the social sciences.
3 One of the first articulations of this concept and terminology appeared in the Bilingual Education Program, Title VII, Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. It is included in Boyer and Anderson 12. For an insightful article on content in foreign language instruction, see Snow, Met, and Genesee.
4 This statement represents a response to a comment, made by James in her article, arguing that separate language programs and centers will be the result of “expanding the content of programs beyond the literary into cultural studies or interdisciplinary studies of various kinds and increasingly doing the teaching in English” (7). I disagree that this expansion necessarily has to threaten the teaching of literature or that it will result in many more courses being taught in English, much to the detriment of foreign language instruction. Teaching literature as well as culturally related and content-oriented courses in the foreign language does not automatically translate into the elimination or destruction of literary studies. Rather, it suggests that literary studies must become a significant part of an interdisciplinary context—not a watered-down component of literary instruction but one that will allow itself to be coordinated with other disciplines into a meaningful program.
5 For an explanation of these terms, see Snow, Met, and Genesee 211.
Anderson, Reed. “Ex Cathedra? The Changing Role of the Department Chair.” ADFL Bulletin 28.3 (1997): 12–17. [Show Article]
Boyer, Mildred, and Theodore Anderson. Bilingual Schooling in the United States. Vol. 1. Austin: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 1970.
Snow, marguerite Ann, Myriam Met, and Fred Genesee. “A Conceptual Framework for the Integration of Language and Content in Second/Foreign Language Instruction.” TESOL Quarterly 23.2 (1989): 201–17.
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
