Minority EFL Teachers on Shared-Life Education in Conflict-Ridden Contexts: A Voice From the Margins

• In Event: Activist Pedagogy, Critical-Democratic Citizenship, and Shared Education in Divided Societies: International Perspectives and Next Practices

Abstract

The paper addresses how the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in conflict-ridden contexts offers a unique discursive terrain for minority teachers to negotiate conflicts and advance a justice-oriented dialogue. Scholarship in foreign language education accentuate the transformative role language pedagogies must play in advancing intercultural competences (e.g. Kumaravadivelu, 2008, 2016). Yet, EFL discourses still reproduce Anglo-centric hegemonies and essentialist binaries such as Self/Other, Native/Nonnative, or Western/Nonwestern (Awayed-Bishara, 2020). Drawing upon Santos’ (2014) notion of the abyssal line and Stroud’s (2018) theorization of linguistic citizenship, I critically examine how non-hegemonic understandings and knowledge could offer new epistemic spaces for increasing the commitment of EFL pedagogies to transformative politics. While on the hegemonic side of the abyssal line lie the culture, values, languages, and knowledge of metropolitan societies (i.e. Global North), on the other side of the line lie those of colonial/marginal societies (i.e. Global South). Crossing to post-abyssal lines requires that the South talks back. To examine how minority teachers who work in majority-based contexts use English to speak back to hegemonic (language) educational policies, I focus on their linguistic citizenship, or what they “do with and around language(s) in order to position themselves agentively, and to craft new emergent subjectivities of political speakerhood” (Stroud, 2018, p. 4) different than those prescribed by the state.
Towards this end, I cast the spotlight on Israel where the educational system is almost entirely separate for the Jewish majority and the Palestinian-Arab minority. While English teachers are generally employed in the schooling system that matches their ethnic affiliation (Jews in Jewish schools/Arabs in Arabic schools), more Arab teachers have been recently employed in Jewish schools. Cognizant of the caveats that could stem out of this new arrangement, I argue that it could potentially inspire educational solutions for the manifold forms of shared life within the Israeli educational context. I will present a case study with Mona (pseudonym) while reporting on her one year experience as a Palestinian-Arab EFL teacher in a mainstream non-religious Jewish elementary school in the Haifa District. Through a detailed critical analysis of interviews I held with her at different stages of this year, I will show how minority teachers use English to speak back to hegemonic and discriminatory practices that aim to maintain their subaltern subjectivities.
Through presenting excerpts from the data analysis, I will show how Mona’s linguistic acts entailed a resistance of hegemonic attempts that aimed to construct her as inferior both as a minority member and as a non-native speaker English teacher. I will conclude by situating her acts of speaking back to imposed educational subjectivities in EFL contexts within the transformative conception of linguistic citizenship that seeks to remedy some forms of misrecognition. I will also conclude by showing how counterhegemonic acts could contribute to blurring the boarders of the abyssal line through bringing voices from the margins into a productive, more just dialogue with hegemonic voices.

Author

• Muzna Awayed-Bishara, Tel Aviv University