Dismantling the hegemonic ontology and legitimizing new subjectivities in English language teaching

• In Event: Decolonizing and Resisting Hegemony in English Language Teaching and Learning

Proposal

This paper explores the entanglements of coloniality, capitalism, race, gender, class, labor, and affect in language education, specifically in the context of transnational commercial English language teaching (ELT). This industry continues to grow and expand in East and Southeast Asia thanks to the insatiable demand for low-cost English education. Private educational institutions and quasi-educational businesses based in Mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam are continually trying to meet this demand by taking advantage of the Philippines’ low-cost labor-export economy, highly deregulated education sector, and enormous English-bilingual labor force. These private institutions and businesses outsource their labor to thousands of Filipino online freelance workers, often hiring them on precarious contracts to teach English courses (e.g., Conversational English and Business English) via their online/digital gig platforms. These spaces, I argue, not only render them vulnerable to labour exploitation, discrimination, and harassment, but also limit their capacity to protest against unfavorable work conditions.

Inspired by Enrique Dussel’s (2013) ethics of liberation, the primary aim of this study is two-fold: to encounter and affirm the alterity/exteriority of the Other, and identify the reasons for their societal exclusion and negation. The Other in this case refers to the online freelance Filipino English teacher – victim of a profit-driven colonial-capitalist private education sector that continues to commodify them as a cheap, low-cost alternative to the white Anglo-American native English-speaking teacher. I argue that the ongoing commodification of the Filipino English teacher is facilitated by the increasing privatization and soft digitalization of the education sector, aggressive marketization of low-cost teaching labour, and the problem of (de-)professionalization in ELT practice. I develop this argument by drawing on decolonial critiques (Aníbal Quijano, 2000; Ramón Grosfoguel, 2011), decolonial-femme critiques (Macarena Gómez-Barris, 2017), and post-structuralist feminist critiques (Kathi Weeks, 2007; Patricia Chong, 2009) of capitalism, labour, and affect. I see ELT practice in particular as a potentially extractive activity that relies on idealized notions of race, nationality, social class, and gender to transform human capital, labour, and affect – all at once – into a cost-efficient commodity.

Drawing on Susan Gal and Judith Irvine’s (2019 [2000]) semiotic theory of social differentiation, this study focuses on the semiotic processes that help create and perpetuate language-minoritizing discursive marketing and de-professionalizing practices in online/digital ELT platforms. I draw empirical evidence of these semiotic processes from two datasets: a multimodal corpus of online marketing and publicity materials obtained from 37 different ELT platforms, and semi-structured interviews with 50 Filipinos who work as online freelance English teachers for at least one of the 37 ELT platforms. The empirical data suggest that the alterity/exteriority of the Other is shaped by public discourses and workplace practices that essentialize and naturalize Filipino non-native English-speaking teachers and white Anglo-American native English-speaking teachers as ‘apparent natural oppositions’ (Tommaso Milani, 2010) of each other. This dialectical contrast, I argue, reifies conditions of the Filipino laborer’s societal exclusion and negation, evidenced by their lower wages, precarious working conditions, and experiences of discrimination and harassment from employers, parents, and students.

However, this study also argues that the alterity/exteriority of the Filipino English teacher offers us a ‘vantage point’ (Gal & Irvine, 2019) for developing new horizons of transcendence and imagining “global decolonial utopian alternatives” (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 31) beyond colonialist, nationalist, Eurocentric/Anglo-American-centric fundamentalist, and Third World fundamentalist binary ways of thinking. It is in the alterity/exteriority of the Filipino English teacher that they are able to resist their ‘complete instrumentalization’ (Dussel, 2013) within the colonial-capitalist education system. I believe that it is within spaces outside the hegemonic ontology of education that we can uncover possible avenues for contestation, resistance, defiance, and even protest in education work. It is my hope that by identifying and affirming the alterity/exteriority of the Filipino English teacher that we can develop a culture of semiotic ideological critique that is premised on a stronger normative political, critical-ethical understanding of the Other. This is my answer to recent calls by Ofelia García et al. (2017) “open up spaces for the legitimization of new subjectivities” (p. 6) in educational research and practice.

Author

• Rowland Anthony Imperial, Department of Education, University of Oxford