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. There have been very few attempts, however, to explore the ways in which these norms and their underlying structures and behaviors play out in the practices of languages teaching. Through interrogating teachers’ conversations about their daily experience and practice, we discovered that some languages—and the teachers who spoke or taught them—were understood differently from others. These differences were produced and reproduced in complex interactions between race, class, education and Western hegemony, marking some languages and languages teachers as being more prestigious and knowledgeable than others. We argue that, in the transnational contexts of Australian schools, these discussions are framed within discourses that are raced, neo-colonial and neoliberal. They appear to be wrought within a world of dissolving national, linguistic and cultural boundaries that is experienced as unsettling and disempowering. Moreover, the languages teachers identities are shaped by the normative terms and conditions of an understanding of languages and languages education that remains rooted in parochial, monolingual and pecuniary perspectives. If we are to reorientate approaches to languages education, and develop a more sustainable and socially just approach in Australia’s multicultural schools, these conversations—and the norms and behaviors that frame them—need to be better understood.
References
Arber, R. (2008). Race, ethnicity and education in globalized times. Dordrecht: Springer.
Arber, R. (2010). English education for international students in local schools: Practices of inclusion and discourses of exclusion. English: Teaching and Learning, 34, 21–45.
Arber, R. (2012). Encountering an-other: Culture and curriculum and inclusive pedagogies. In Z. Bekerman & T. Geisen (Eds.), International handbook of migration, minorities, and education: Understanding cultural and social differences in processes of learning (pp. 461–479). New York: Springer.
Arber, R. (2014). The exhilaration of being not at home: Tourist teachers and the negotiation of identity, difference and belonging. In R. Arber, J. Blackmore, & A. Vongalis-Macrow (Eds.), Mobile teachers, teacher identity and international schooling (pp. 63–78). Rotterdam: Springer.
Aronin, L. (2012). Multilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Australian Curriculum (2017a). V8.3 Curriculum F–10. Languages: Introduction. www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/languages/introduction
Australian Curriculum (2017b). V8.3 Curriculum F–10. Languages: Rationale. www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/languages/rationale
Bourdieu, P. (1999). Weight of the world: Social suffering in contemporary society. London: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P. (2007). The bachelors’ ball: The crisis of peasant society in Béarn. London: Polity Press.
Butler, J. (2006). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2010). Multilingual norms. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang AG.
Department of Education and Early Childhood development (DEECD) (2011). Victorian Government’s Vision for Languages Education. www.eduweb.vic.gov.au/edulibrary/public/commrel/about/languageseducation.pdf
Dyer, R. (1997). White. London: Routledge.
Dyer, R. (2005). The matter of whiteness in white privilege: Essential readings: The other side of racism. Rothenberg: Worth Publishing.
Garcia, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gee, J. (2011). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. Milton Park: Routledge.
Gorter, D. (Ed.). (2006). Linguistic landscape. A new approach to multilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Hall, S. (1996). Introduction: Who needs identity? In S. Hall & P. D. Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity (pp. 1–8). London: Sage.
Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Sage.
Hélot, C. (2012). Linguistic landscapes, multilingualism and social change. Frankfurt: Peter Lang AG.
hooks, B. (1991). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. London: Turnaround.
hooks, B. (1992). Black looks. Race and representation. Boston: South End Press.
hooks, B. (2000). Feminism is for everybody. Passionate politics. Cambridge: South End Press.
Kramsch, C., & Jessner, U. (Eds.). (2015). The multilingual challenge: Cross-disciplinary perspectives. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Lather, P. (2013). Methodology-21: What do we do in the afterward? Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 634–645.
May, S. (Ed.). (2014). The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and bilingual education. New York: Routledge.
Neilsen, R., Arber, R., & Weinmann, M. (2017). Re-imagining Asian religious identity: Towards a critical pedagogy of religion and race in Australian schools. Education Sciences, 7(2), 49. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci7020049.
Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice: An introduction to applied sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spivak, G. C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason: Towards a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Weedon, C. (1997). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Weinmann, M. (2015). Asia engagement beyond binaries and boundaries: Towards a re-theorisation of Asia, community and curriculum. In C. Halse (Ed.), Asia literate schooling in the Asian century (pp. 182–196). Abingdon: Routledge.
Young, R. (1990). White mythologies: Writing history and the west. London: Routledge.
Young, R. (1995). Colonial desire: Hybridity in theory, culture and race. London: Routledge.
Young, R. (2001). Postcolonialism: An historical introduction. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Weinmann, M., Arber, R. Orientating multilingualism: navigating languages teacher identities. Curric Perspect 37, 173–179 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-017-0028-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-017-0028-4