Orientating Multilingualism: Navigating Language Teacher Identities

• In Event: Education for Cultural Diversity: Changing Policy and Curriculum Priorities in Volatile International Contexts

Abstract

The impact of conversations about language, multilingualism and multiculturalism in Western education contexts—and their impact on student and teacher interaction—has been frequently remarked upon. However, limited research has been undertaken to date to explore the ways in which these norms and their underlying structures and behaviors play out in the practices of languages teaching.
The data that frames our study was taken from a larger research which explored recent changes to Australian policy and its impact on teacher experience and practice. Analysis of the teachers’ conversations about these policies and their daily experience and practice in relation to languages education, made visible the ways in which languages—and the teachers who spoke or taught them—were understood.
The theoretical frame for the study is premised by the seminal understanding that the reflective and multidimensional conditions of language provide both the means by which we understand and speak about the social world in which we act and in which ‘meaning is produced and exchanged’, and the principle means through which our everyday lives are performed and experienced (Hall, 1996: 2). In Bourdieu’s (2007) terms, the habitus—that is, the common sense and shared ways of understanding and behaving developed within the everyday conditions and practices of institutional life—is mediated by the rules and structures of these institutions. The embodied and normative conditions of identity are negotiated and mediated within the frame of language and culture as a multidimensional and reflexive construct defining and shaping normativity and difference as it is described as whiteness (Dyer, 2005); identity and belonging (Arber, 2014), multilingualism (Aronin, 2012; May, 2014; Norton, 2013; Weinmann, 2015) postcolonialism (Spivak, 1999), feminism (Butler, 2006), and race (hooks, 2000).
Generated during one of the interview sessions, the narrative by two lead teachers in Languages in two Melbourne secondary schools, was analysed. The first step explored the themes that emerged as teachers described their everyday practices and the implementation of language curriculum and practice. The methodological tools of Critical Discourse Analysis were then used to interrogate the tropes that articulate commonplace understandings framing their experiences, in particular, the terms and conditions of Otherness, and of a monolingual and monocultural economy of self. These differences were (re)produced in complex interaction between race, class, education and Western hegemony, marking some languages and Languages teachers as being more prestigious and knowledgeable than others.

In the transnational contexts of Australian schools, these discussions are framed within raced, neo-colonial and neoliberal discourses wrought within a world of dissolving national, linguistic and cultural boundaries. Moreover, the Language teachers’ identity is shaped by the normative terms and conditions of an understanding of languages and Languages education that remains rooted in parochial, monolingual and pecuniary perspectives. Our study is part of a reconstitution within the field to reconceptualise how the reflexivity and complementarity of linguistic, semiotic, embodied and material resources plays out in multicultural and multilingual activities, and how its implications for the production and reproduction of identity and difference might be more deeply interrogated.

Authors

• Michiko Weinmann, Deakin University

• Ruth Eileen Arber, Deakin University