Reading Bourdieu and Freire in Authoritarian Contexts: Implications for Teachers’ and Students’ Empowerment

• In Event: Freire in Focus: Exploring Power and Pedagogy Through Language, Methodologies, Identity, and Sustainability

Abstract

This study uses English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks as a context for deepening the conceptualizations of Global Citizenship Education in North Africa, mainly in Algeria. As a new educational model, GCE advocates for the need to cultivate global citizenship; it implies global interconnectedness, solidarity, and commitment to the common good beyond the national borders (Torres, 2015; Torres & Bosio, 2020).
Algeria, among other Maghrebi countries, opted for the expansion of EFL education due to its worldwide dominance as the language of science and technology. Although English came to impose itself at the international level as a hegemonic language (Zughoul, 2003), its “anonymity” (Woolard, 2016) as a language that is not forced by any former colonial power contributed to its prosperity in the Algerian context compared to the French language. However, the hegemonic nature of English language in the periphery in the age of globalization could be also perceived as an act of “symbolic violence” (Passeron & Bourdieu, 1970). It is associated with a strong imposition of meanings, in this case a foreign code, which is driven by economic or political motives (Canagarajah, 1999), and in turn has resulted in the marginalization of local languages, namely Tamazight and Algerian Arabic
The dominance of EFL also poses a challenge pertaining to the cultural content of the curriculum taught in national contexts with public institutions that prescribe the “official knowledge” (Apple, 2014). Using Guilherme’s (2007) words, it gives rise to the challenge of tailoring the teaching of EFL in a way to avoid “ethnocentric” nationalistic approach and “ethno-cleansing” Eurocentric approach towards an unbiased “ethno-decentring” approach for the cultivation of global citizens (p.80).
Using EFL standardized textbooks that are published from 2016 through 2019 and used around junior high public schools in Algeria, this paper seeks to address the following questions: (1) What are the dominant ideologies that are communicated through texts and images of Algerian junior high EFL textbooks? (2) In what ways, if any, do texts and images of Algerian junior high EFL textbooks contribute to fostering global citizenship identity?
This study is guided by Freire’s concept of “praxis”, i.e., “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (1970, p.51). Therefore, using Freire’s critical theory as a theoretical framework, I draw on the different tools that are offered by Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Semiotics Theory, and Multimodality to unveil the different ideologies embedded in the content of the EFL textbooks. The Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis that is used in this study is based on the functional model developed by Halliday (1978) in the field of linguistics, namely the ideational metafunction of language that deals with the content and the interpersonal metafunction of language that is about social relationships. The study will derive from the tools developed by different critical scholars to accommodate the analysis of different linguistic forms and visual structures of the textbooks (e.g., Machin & Mayr, 2012; Leeuwen, 2012; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006).

Author

• Fadhila Hadjeris, University of California - Los Angeles