362 pages
ISBN 0 521 53522 0
List price: $31

The current debates over language teaching and learning that manage to make their way into mainstream media in the United States are largely limited in scope. The English-only movement has been effective in promoting its message to abolish bilingual education services in public schools, insisting that native language instruction doesn't work and is unpatriotic. In typical conservative fashion, such claims are based on no sound theory or body of research. More liberal educators and researchers have been counter attacking, focusing their empirical and pedagogical attention on issues of cognitive development and self esteem. For example, they’ve been working to detail how cultures process and develop language and literacy differently and how students adjust affectively when their identities are affirmed—important and well-documented concerns, for sure. 

However, what is largely missing from such political positions on language and literacy education and from discussions about what’s best for linguistic-minority students, and is strikingly absent from the conservative perspective that blames progressive programs like bilingual education and whole language  for students’ low academic achievement, is a recognition of the actual conditions of public schools and an analysis of how those conditions impede students’ growth and academic success. That is, there is little mention of the grossly unequal funding of public schools that relies primarily on property taxes, or the ways in which racism and other abusive ideologies play a much more significant role in students' achievements than the language of instruction.

A major task of progressive educators and community activists is to better inform the public about how schools and advocates of current language policies are failing the nation’s linguistic-minority students, and more importantly, what we can do about it. Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning is a great resource for moving in this direction as it helps communities, students, and educators—from a global perspective that includes research and practice in Hong Kong, Australia, South Africa, Israel, the UK, Canada, Sri Lanka, and the U.S.—better understand “themselves, their social surroundings, their histories, and their possibilities for the future” (p. 1). Not to be confused with what's traditionally thought of as higher order thinking skills, critical in this sense implies that students and teachers are able to understand, analyze, pose questions about, and affect the sociopolitical and economic realities that shape our lives. As the editors state in the book’s introduction, “All the chapters in this volume share this aim—that is, to consider how, in diverse sites of language education, practices might be better modified, changed, developed, or abandoned in efforts to support learners, learning, and social change” (p. 2).

This edited volume is made up of four sections. The first, “Reconceptualizing Second Language Education,” explores the historical development and implications of critical pedagogy; traces the emergence of  such teaching and learning philosophies from  anti-fascist, feminist, anti-racist thinking; and, demonstrates how such critical approaches connect to and can challenge cultural and linguistic disempowerment.

Section two, “Challenging Identities,” explores the intersection of culture, identity, and power. Rather than just providing a pedagogy of identity affirmation, as is typical of liberal models of multicultural education, these chapters reveal ways to assist students in actively dissecting how racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination function. In this way, they are better equipped to confront the unequal relations of power throughout society that relegate them economically and politically to the margins.

Section three, “Researching Critical Practices,” addresses how innovative approaches to teaching language can help inform critical pedagogical practices in the everyday classroom and how research can help or hinder such developments.

Section four, “Educating Teachers for Change,” illustrates how teacher education programs can be structured to help apprentice teachers into self-actualization and political awareness, scaffolding students as they learn to conduct critical inquiry and realize their own agency through action research within their schools and local communities.

Contrary to the President’s comment “When I picked the Secretary of Education, I wasn’t interested in a theorist” (George W. Bush, White House ceremony honoring the 2002 National Teacher of the Year), the authors in this edited volume emphasize that teachers shouldn’t be mere practitioners who are trained to jump when they are told to jump, or technicians whose only purpose in the ESL classroom is to implement prescribed, teacher-proof materials for teaching grammar, vocabulary, functional literacy, and standardized academic knowledge. Rather, educators should be encouraged to theorize the world around them in order to actively participate in making informed, critical and ethical decisions about what’s best for their students and actively model how to be deep thinkers, meaning makers, and more effective agents of change. Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning reveals the successes and failures of such approaches to participatory democratic education and is a necessary read for anyone who wishes to take a step in that direction.

Suggested Reading and Resources:

Richard-Amato, Patricia (2003). Making it Happen: From Interactive to Participatory Language Teaching. New York: Longman.

Wallerstein, Nina (1982). Language and Culture in Conflict: Problem-Posing in the ESL Classroom. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Wallace, Michael J. (1998). Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Christensen, L. (2000). Reading, Writing and Rising Up: Teaching about Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools.