SLTC Lecture 6 (2025)

Week 6

What makes the TESOL curriculum political?

Dr. Dario Luis Banegas

Index

TEACHER AGENCY

POLITICS

SOCIAL JUSTICE

IDEOLOGY

CURRICULAR J

POLICY

Why is education political?

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and in TESOL?

What is ideology? (macro)

"For Althusser, ideology refers to the set of unconsciously held beliefs and assumptions by which individuals rationalize and are reconciled to the socio-economic, political, and cultural status quo. These beliefs are not consciously arrived at but are continually being embedded in individuals from a very early age." (Ortaçtepe Hart, 2023, p. 5)

power

beliefs

values

hegemony

past

Policies Curriculum

identity

diversity

laws

future

Policy & TESOL curriculum

Policy as text (Ball, 1993; Spolsky, 2004) A constitutional clause, a law, a verbal statement. The intended/official curriculum. Policy as discourse (Ball, 1993) A set of beliefs and ideologies. The (un)intended & hidden curriculum. Policy as practice (Bonacina-Pugh, 2012, 2024) A set of implicit rules/norms of interaction, an implicit understanding of what is appropriate or not. The enacted & hidden curriculum.

Teacher agency

“teachers’ capacity to plan and direct change through regulated actions…” (Banegas & Gerlach, 2021, p. 3).

Social Justice

The development of a counter-hegemonic curriculum that recognises systemic injustices and guarantees equitable access to the oppressed and marginalised.

Curricular justice

(Mills et al., 2022)

1) Social justice language education 2) Social justice in language education

Strategies that situate social justice at the centre of a language curriculum

(Ortaçtepe Hart, 2023, p. 53)

3 cases as examples

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Thanks

References

Ball, S. (1993). What is policy? Texts, trajectories and toolboxes. Discourse: Studies in The Cultural Politics of Education, 13, 10-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630930130203 Banegas, D. L., & Gerlach, D. (2021). Critical language teacher education: A duoethnography of teacher educators’ identities and agency. System, 98, 102474. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2021.102474 Blume, C. (2021). Inclusive digital games in the transcultural communicative classroom. ELT Journal, 75(2), 181–192. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccaa084 Bonacina-Pugh, F. (2012). Researching 'practiced language policies': Insights from conversation analysis. Language Policy, 11, 213-234. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-012-9243-x Bonacina-Pugh, F. (Ed.). (2024). Language policy as practice: Advancing the empirical turn in language policy research. Palgrave. Graves, K. (2016). Language curriculum design: Possibilities and realities. In G. Hall (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of English language teaching (pp. 79–93). Routledge. Kelly, A. V. (2009). The curriculum: Theory and practice (6th ed.). Sage. López-Gopar, M.E. & Perez Nava, D.I.(2023), One morning at a public elementary school in Mexico: A decolonial/critical perspective of ELT. TESOL Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3264 Mambu, J. E. (2022). Co-constructing a critical ELT curriculum: A case study in an Indonesian-based English language teacher education program. TESOL Journal, e667. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.667 Mills, M., Riddle, S., McGregor, G., & Howell, A. (2022). Towards an understanding of curricular justice and democratic schooling. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 54(3), 345-356. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2021.1977262 Mirhosseini, S.-A. (2018). Issues of ideology in English language education worldwide: An overview. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 26(1), 19-33. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2017.1318415 Mortenson, L. (2022). Integrating social justice-oriented content into English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instruction: A case study. English for Specific Purposes, 65, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2021.08.002 Ortaçtepe Hart, D. (2023). Social justice and the language classroom: Reflection, action, and transformation. Edinburgh University Press. Rose, H., Syrbe, M., Montakantiwong, A., & Funada, N. (2020). Global TESOL for the 21st century teaching English in a changing world. Multilingual Matters. Spolsky, B. (2004). Language policy. Cambridge University Press. Tikly, L., & Barrett, A. M. (2011). Social justice, capabilities and the quality of education in low-income countries. International Journal of Educational Development, 31(1), 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2010.06.001 Wicaksono, R. (2020). Native and non-native speakers of English in TESOL. In C. Hall & R. Wicaksono (Eds.), Ontologies of English: Conceptualising the language for learning, teaching, and assessment (pp. 80-98). Cambridge University Press.

• Education has the capacity to transform our reality, our world.
• But the "politics" refers to the ideological forces and discourses behind the shapes and forms of that transformation (or perpetuation of dominant discourses)

•Proposes an inclusive EFL curriculum through online games. •Games that question heteronormativity. •Games with LGBT characters. (Blume, 2021)

"Metaphorically speaking, social justice is a verb as much as a noun. As a noun, it refers to a set of individual, social, and cultural values that include but are not limited to agency, advocacy, caring, democracy, fairness, equity, diversity, ethics, respect, dignity, recognition, inclusion, and worth. As a verb, social justice is the transformation of these values into political, social, economic, cultural, and environmental strategies and tactics that will challenge, chip away at, and perhaps even eventually demolish existing heteropatriarchal, racist, and capitalist ideologies and hegemonic power relations (Bell, 2016)." (Ortaçtepe Hart, 2023, p. 4)

Tikly and Barrett’s (2011) propose a set of three interlinked principles of social justice in education based on Fraser (2009): (1) inclusion (redistribution of resources, access to quality education), (2) relevance (recognition, meaningful learning outcomes for all learners), (3) democracy (participation in curriculum development, advocacy, activism).

(Banegas, forthcoming)

"During oral presentation rehearsals, a lot of the negotiation occurred in Spanish, which shows how the second author acted out her agency (as previously discussed) in promoting decolonizing pedagogies that make room for the students’ full linguistic repertoire. Furthermore, the second author accommodated not only the students’ first language but also their life realities. Deeply caring about and fully knowing her students, she allowed the students to present “different” types of families during their oral presentations, as the typical family comprised of “mom, dad, brother and sister” was the exception in her class." (López-Gopar & Pérez Nava, 2023, p. 11)

- Use of teaching materials that address racial inequities in the US-Imbue social justice pedagogy in an academic writing discourse - Dismantle oppression & create frames of action (Mortenson, 2022)