ABSTRACT 
 
 
 
 
Title of Dissertation: THE LIGHT CAST BY SOMEONE ELSE?S 
LAMP: BECOMING ESOL TEACHERS.  
 Mary Natasha Suhanthie Motha, Ph. D. 2004 
 
Dissertation Directed By: Dr. Jeremy N. Price, Department of Curriculum 
and Instruction  
 
 
This study was an in-depth exploration of the year-long journey of four first-year ESOL 
teachers who were women. The researcher asked about meanings of knowledge, 
pedagogy, and identity in the context of becoming a language teacher and sought to 
understand how beginning teachers? ideologies interact with their contexts. The teachers? 
naming and shaping of their own transformative pedagogies were complicated by the 
ways in which power and privilege manifested themselves in their schools and the ways 
in which ESOL students, language learning, and pedagogy came to be institutionally 
constructed. The teachers chose to neither adhere rigidly to their liberatory ideologies nor 
to submit to socializing influences. Rather, an ethic of caring towards students compelled 
them to find ways to integrate their commitments to social justice with sustainable 
pedagogies that supported students? long-term needs.  
This study was a critical feminist ethnography. Data sources included 
transcriptions of afternoon tea gatherings held every two or three weeks over the school 
year, classroom observations, interviews, and school and student artifacts.  
   
Part I explores the development of the teachers? meanings of English language 
teaching in a world in which English dominates politically. The ways in which 
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been interpreted are problematized, and 
the connections between grammar and social power are examined. Part II considers the 
teachers? negotiation of their roles in the shaping of their students? identities and 
positionalities, seeking to enrich understandings of how various dimensions of difference, 
particularly race, gender, and ethnicity, interact with a category that permeates all others 
in the realm of English language teaching, that is linguistic minority status. Part III 
examines the role the four teachers played in the discursive constructions of their 
professional identities and the ways in which they supported each others? critical 
consideration of socializing institutional forces.  
Two central constructs, becoming and belonging, underpinned the teachers? 
pedagogical processes and identity construction. These two constructs posed a challenge 
to traditionally accepted understandings of three intertwined themes: pedagogy, identity, 
and transformation.  The theoretical implications of this dissertation include a need for a 
redefinition of the ways in which power, identity, and transformation are conceptualized. 
 
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE LIGHT CAST BY SOMEONE ELSE?S LAMP: 
BECOMING ESOL TEACHERS 
 
 
 
By 
 
 
Mary Natasha Suhanthie Motha 
 
 
 
 
 
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 
of the requirements for the degree of 
Doctor of Philosophy 
2004 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisory Committee: 
Associate Professor Jeremy N. Price, Chair 
Associate Professor Emeritus William E. de Lorenzo  
Professor Francine Hultgren (Dean?s Representative) 
Professor Rebecca Oxford 
Associate Professor Linda Valli 
Associate Professor Shelley D. Wong 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
? Copyright by 
Mary Natasha Suhanthie Motha 
2004 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
For Alexandra, whose complex and gutsy foregrounding of uncomfortable themes made 
it impossible to ignore silences in which oppression is nurtured, 
For Jane, who kept my attention on student success and access within in the long-term 
project of transformative pedagogy, 
For Katie, whose deep understandings of the fluidity of difference helped me to connect 
to the epistemological hybridity of identity, and  
For Margaret, whose profoundly philosophical stance highlighted the connections among 
social justice, compassionate teaching, and ethical practice. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ii   
 
 
 
Acknowledgments 
 
I?d like to express my deep gratitude to my study partners on this journey, four awe-
inspiring and courageous women: Alexandra, Jane, Katie, and Margaret. They held their 
lamps up high so that I could see clearly by the light they cast. This dissertation is not 
only my work, it is also theirs, and I?m grateful to them for sharing it with me. I will 
forever treasure the memories of those cozy, intimate evenings together. 
I was blessed during this study to be surrounded by a dedicated and caring 
committee:  
Jeremy Price, my advisor and so much more, indefatigable guide, patient nurturer, and 
advocate?I continue to be struck by his commitment to this work and by the intensity 
and integrity of his mentorship; 
Shelley Wong, my adored friend and role model, ardent cheerleader, and loyal partner-in-
crime through thick and thin;  
Bill de Lorenzo, who believed in me even before I believed in myself, my first academic 
model of connected and caring pedagogy; 
Francine Hultgren, who refused me the refuge of safely masked methods and instead 
gently forced me to name, defend, and understand my processes; 
Rebecca Oxford, who gracefully agreed to share her scholarly wisdom in the eleventh 
hour; and 
iii   
 
Linda Valli, who artfully wove together piercingly critical questioning and warm, 
supportive encouragement. 
In this country, an estimated 40 to 50 percent of students who begin Ph.D. 
programs never finish them (Smallwood, 2004). By some estimates, the Ph.D. attrition 
rate is three or four times higher for women than men (Kastens, 2001). I pause here to 
acknowledge that the fact that I am not in those statistics is almost solely a testament to 
my support network. Jeremy Price continued to meet with me every fortnight for the 
many months after the birth of my baby when I was not writing. Many advisors would 
have given up and moved on to support other advisees. These meetings with Jeremy kept 
me connected and ensured that my ideas continued to percolate. Shelley Wong, too, kept 
me professionally connected by running up her long-distance phone bills to engage me in 
discussions that brought my work back to the surface of my consciousness, sharing with 
me her own experiences of balancing her family with her brilliant scholarship, placing 
numerous opportunities for professional participation in my path, and inspiring me to 
keep writing. All of my committee members maintained contact with me and kept me 
thinking about my work. I mention the importance of their support here in the hope that 
other faculty will recognize my experiences in those of their own students and hear me 
when I acknowledge that without this mentorship I am convinced that I would not have 
completed this work.  
Most importantly, I wish to convey my very deep and sincere thanks to my 
family:  
My first and most phenomenal teachers: Cecilia Motha, who has always demonstrated 
what it means to be a true scholar, and trailblazer Guy Motha, who unrelentingly insisted 
iv   
 
upon my belief that I could achieve anything. They have both made excruciatingly 
difficult choices so that their children could live the lives that we are, indeed, living. My 
deepest gratitude for investing more in my academic life than any parents in their right 
minds ought to; 
Nishan de Silva, who should be listed as dissertation co-author. I wish there were words 
that could express my appreciation. Thank you also for the title of this work; 
my remarkable katchaka sisters, Ayuska Motha and Sonali Motha, supportive travelling 
partners through childhood and beyond, 
Valerie Tourikian, my soul-sister, with whom I learned to theorize the world from my 
life, and 
Minola Motha de Silva, whose arrival heaped innumerable complicated layers of 
meaning onto the work I do and in doing so sweetened it for me.  
Epistemological exploration and discovery thrive in social interaction. This work 
was shaped by the insight of Sharon Teuben-Rowe, Carolyn Parker, Sharon Coursey, 
Leticia Panisett, Diane Leipzig, Rona Frederick, Donna Redmond Jones, Lucia Buie, 
Gloria Park, and Sherrie Carroll. I thank them for their support and camaraderie. I owe 
Sherrie a special debt of gratitude for her enthusiastic and careful reading of countless 
pages. All errors and omissions within this text are entirely her fault. Special thanks also 
for the support of the Sister Scholars, Rachel Grant, Angel Lin, Ryuko Kubota, Gertrude 
Tinker-Sachs, Stephanie Vandrick, Wendy Wang, and again Shelley Wong, who have 
been wonderfully encouraging both personally and professionally.  
I am grateful to the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of 
Maryland, College Park, for supporting this work with the 2001 Promising Researcher 
v   
 
Award. Thank you also to TESOL for its support of this study through the 2001 Ruth 
Crymes Award. 
I thank the children, teachers, parents, and school staff who are not named in this 
study. I have used pseudonyms for all names, including those of schools and counties, 
with the exception of my own name. Identifying information has sometimes also been 
changed, including school faculty?s subject matter expertise, teachers? and students? 
grade levels, and students? home countries and languages, in order to protect the 
multilingual children and the participants in this study. 
 
vi   
 
Table of Contents 
 
 
Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................iii 
 
Table of Contents.............................................................................................................. vii 
 
Chapter 1: Introduction....................................................................................................... 1 
A Deconstruction of Old Epistemologies ....................................................................... 1 
(Re)Framing Knowledge and Representation in the Making of a Study........................ 3 
Researcher Positionality.................................................................................................. 5 
Epistemological Grounding ............................................................................................ 8 
Katie Bach, Margaret Foulkes Chan, Jane Fitzpatrick, Alexandra Deutsch Lau ......... 17 
?I Honor Myself?: Alexandra Deutsch Lau.............................................................. 17 
?Trying to Figure Out Where I Belong?: Katie Bach............................................... 22 
?A Blossoming Peach Tree?: Margaret Foulkes Chan ............................................. 26 
?But Then Again, Teachers Have Lives!?: Jane Fitzpatrick..................................... 30 
Historical Context of Teaching Immigrant Children in the United States.................... 34 
Gender........................................................................................................................... 38 
Theorizing Identity........................................................................................................ 39 
Authenticity............................................................................................................... 41 
Relationship .............................................................................................................. 44 
Agency and Subjectivity........................................................................................... 45 
Identity and Image .................................................................................................... 49 
Otherness................................................................................................................... 50 
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 51 
Ideology and Style .................................................................................................... 52 
 
Chapter 2. Methodology ................................................................................................... 55 
Critical Feminist Ethnography...................................................................................... 55 
Feminist Ethnography................................................................................................... 58 
Critical Ethnography..................................................................................................... 61 
Knowledge Construction in Research........................................................................... 65 
Research Questions....................................................................................................... 66 
Study Partner Selection................................................................................................. 70 
Data Collection ............................................................................................................. 71 
The Afternoon Teas ...................................................................................................... 72 
Data Analysis................................................................................................................ 75 
Participant Voice and Representation....................................................................... 76 
Changing Understandings of Meanings of Practice.................................................. 78 
Proximity to Praxis ................................................................................................... 79 
Community and Relationship ................................................................................... 80 
Changing Nature of Research Question.................................................................... 83 
Complexities in Privileging the Afternoon Teas .......................................................... 84 
vii   
 
Power ............................................................................................................................ 85 
Power and Participation ............................................................................................ 85 
Power and Representation......................................................................................... 88 
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 88 
Ethics and Politics of Voice...................................................................................... 88 
Situating this Work in a Larger Landscape............................................................... 90 
 
Part I. Meanings of Language Teaching........................................................................... 91 
Introduction to Part I..................................................................................................... 91 
 
Chapter 3. Meanings of Language Pedagogy ................................................................... 93 
Introduction................................................................................................................... 93 
Sustenance of Student Voice: ?How Happy Are You??............................................... 98 
Depreciated Emphasis on Accuracy of Form: ?My Kids Are so Hung up on Spelling?
..................................................................................................................................... 101 
Appropriateness of Language Use: ?Those Are Very Dangerous Words?................. 106 
Appropriateness of Social Meanings: ......................................................................... 109 
?All the Girls Should Come to School and Kiss Me?................................................. 109 
Appropriate Register: ?Jesus Said: ?Shut Up??........................................................... 112 
Language Variations: ?It?s a Bit of a Different English? ........................................... 113 
What is Said: ?Is ?Hey? a Bad Word?? ....................................................................... 121 
Beyond Communicative Competence to Identity....................................................... 124 
Summary..................................................................................................................... 126 
 
Chapter 4. Grammar and Social Power........................................................................... 130 
Introduction................................................................................................................. 130 
Grammar Instruction................................................................................................... 135 
Katie: ?Power Comes Out in Your Knowledge of Grammar Structure?................ 136 
Alexandra: ?Grammar Slows Things Down? ......................................................... 141 
Margaret: ?The Bones of the Language?................................................................ 148 
Jane: ?A Necessary Evil?........................................................................................ 151 
Grammar and Authority.............................................................................................. 160 
Access Versus Transformation ................................................................................... 163 
Student Agency in Transformation............................................................................. 165 
?How It?s Said?: The Idealized Native Speaker ......................................................... 166 
?There is a Certain Way They Want You to Write?: Postponing Transformation..... 168 
Summary..................................................................................................................... 169 
 
Part II. Meanings of Student Identities, Positionalities, and Difference......................... 172 
Introduction to Part II.................................................................................................. 173 
 
Chapter 5. Pedagogies of Difference .............................................................................. 174 
Introduction................................................................................................................. 174 
Talking About Difference........................................................................................... 176 
Attending to Difference .............................................................................................. 181 
Constructing a Positive Image of Difference.............................................................. 182 
viii   
 
Legitimating Student Knowledge ........................................................................... 183 
Creating Connections Between Home and School ................................................. 188 
Challenging Negative Images of Difference............................................................... 192 
Tension between Drawing Attention to Difference and ......................................... 193 
Encouraging Student Knowledge ........................................................................... 193 
Cultural Pride Versus Agency in Self-Naming....................................................... 201 
Defining Immigrant, Defining American, and the Norm of ?Whiteness?.................. 214 
Tension Between Conformity and Cultural Difference.............................................. 225 
Construction of Stereotypes........................................................................................ 231 
Summary..................................................................................................................... 235 
 
Chapter 6. Negotiating Normative Bodily Practices....................................................... 238 
Introduction................................................................................................................. 238 
Negotiating Norms...................................................................................................... 244 
Separating Individuals from Their Bodies.................................................................. 247 
Esse as Percipi............................................................................................................. 251 
Summary..................................................................................................................... 254 
 
Chapter 7. Institutional Constructions of ESOL Identity................................................ 258 
Introduction................................................................................................................. 258 
Shame about ESOL..................................................................................................... 260 
Classroom Teachers Role in Construction of ESOL Identity..................................... 270 
Decentering the Center, Advocacy for the Periphery ................................................. 275 
?How Rich the Students Are in Knowing?................................................................. 278 
Parents? Role in Construction of ESOL Identity ........................................................ 281 
ESOL as Separate ....................................................................................................... 282 
?The More Language You Have The More Power You Have?.................................. 299 
Summary..................................................................................................................... 300 
 
PART III. Teacher Identity............................................................................................. 304 
 
Chapter 8. Making Practice, Shaping Identity................................................................ 304 
Introduction: Images and Identities ............................................................................ 304 
Positioning Practice, Practicing Positioning............................................................... 305 
Isolation of Teaching: ?A Cushion of Air Around You?............................................ 307 
Practicing their Practice: Fa?ades ............................................................................... 312 
Old-Timer Newcomer Interaction: ?Aren?t You Trained?? ....................................... 315 
?I?m Working on Changing the Reputation of ESOL?............................................... 322 
A Room of One?s Own ............................................................................................... 325 
Discursive Constructions of Identities: ?You Have to Know How to Say Things? ... 328 
Repertoire of Retorts: Katie........................................................................................ 330 
?Talking Out of My Butt?........................................................................................... 336 
Fragmented Identities.................................................................................................. 337 
?What Would You Say to Parents??........................................................................... 340 
?You Mouthy Upstart?: Alexandra............................................................................. 342 
?I Never have to Defend?: Jane .................................................................................. 344 
ix   
 
Summary..................................................................................................................... 346 
 
Chapter 9. Conclusion..................................................................................................... 352 
Introduction................................................................................................................. 352 
A Need for a Broader Definition of Pedagogy ........................................................... 353 
Becoming and Belonging in Identity Construction .................................................... 355 
Revisioning Transformation ....................................................................................... 357 
Longing to Belong in ESOL Teachers? Lives......................................................... 362 
Longing to Belong in ESOL Students? Lives ......................................................... 364 
Implications................................................................................................................. 366 
Further Research ......................................................................................................... 370 
Looking at the Light Cast by Someone Else?s Lamp ................................................. 372 
 
Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 374 
 
x   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
?The call for a recognition of cultural 
diversity, a rethinking of ways of knowing, a 
deconstruction of old epistemologies, and 
the concomitant demand that there be a 
transformation in our classrooms, in how we 
teach and what we teach, has been a 
necessary revolution?one that seeks to 
restore life to a corrupt and dying academy.?  
 
bell hooks, 1994, p.30 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
xi   
 
 
 
 
 
Chapter 1: Introduction 
A Deconstruction of Old Epistemologies 
I see a lot of things I would want to see done differently in all the classes, but I?m just a 
wing-floater, a newcomer, a novice, an upstart. What do I really know about the realities 
of teaching? 
       Alexandra 
 
I got the book ?Counting in Korea.?? On the cover, there?s a picture of a [boy in a] 
traditional Korean outfit. So all the kids looked at it and said [to Jin Dae], ?He looks like 
you!? So he looked at it and said: ?He?s stinky! Stinky boy.? And he pushed it away. 
       Margaret 
 
?The first semester I taught, I?d go home and say what I did today. I had this fa?ade. I 
didn?t like myself at all as a teacher. I thought I was the worst teacher.?  
       Katie 
 
?The way I?m teaching now is nothing like the way I would teach if there were no tests. 
Absolutely not. But I want these kids to graduate! I mean, it?s not fair of me to say I?m 
not going to do it that way. That?s not fair to the kids! 
       Jane 
 
The processes of becoming a language teacher are filled with contradictions and 
tangles. The quotes above represent a glimpse into the different ways that Alexandra, 
Katie, Jane, and Margaret made sense of these challenges as they walked through the 
complicated and somewhat chaotic terrain of everyday life as a first-year teacher. The 
four teachers? naming and shaping of their own transformative pedagogies were 
complicated by the ways in which power and privilege manifested themselves in their 
schools and by the ways in which ESOL students, language learning, and pedagogy came 
1   
 
 
to be institutionally constructed. Developing language teacher identity that is consistent 
with the mores and conventions of public schools is an important part of becoming a 
language teacher, but there is an elusive space between competently developing expertise 
within the culture of schooling and becoming unwittingly indoctrinated into it. In 
Singhalese, there is a phrase to describe the appropriation of knowledge that feels alien to 
the learner: wkQfy t<SfhkA myk n<kj, or ?looking at the light cast by someone else?s 
lamp.? The metaphor is ambiguous and captures a tension within the process of learning 
to teach; it can refer to compliant and prescribed learning, in which teachers are forced to 
gaze upon knowledge that someone else wants them to see, for instance sterile knowledge 
generated in universities and disseminated to novice teachers in public schools. Or it can 
refer to teachers seeking light through someone else?s gentle support and scaffolding?
mentors, students, each other. How can beginning teachers explore the third space 
between these two possible meanings and come to value their own experiences and 
voices, to embrace their own knowledge, to light their own lamps? What sources of light 
are meaningful in their lives? 
As the beginning ESOL teachers in this study positioned themselves in relation to 
the various forms of knowledge in their new contexts, they faced a double-edged 
challenge: in addition to responding to expectations, responsibilities, and trials inherent to 
being a teacher, they were in the process of becoming teachers, learning to teach and 
develop professional identities within an arena that marginalizes both beginning teachers 
and ESOL professionals. The territory that Margaret, Jane, Katie, and Alexandra lived 
within sometimes seemed fraught with difficulties, and the four teachers turned to each 
other for support as they cautiously sought out secure stepping stones in the quagmire 
2   
 
 
they were journeying through. There were many interconnected threads inherent in their 
processes of becoming a language teacher: the struggle to develop professional voices 
that would accord them legitimacy within their institutional contexts, their commitments 
to attend to the cultural and social positionalities of their young students, their efforts to 
combine students? access to authentic and usable language with a need to pass high-
stakes tests, and the evolution of their understandings about what it means to teach 
English in a world in which English dominates politically. In the context of their sense of 
caring and responsibility towards their students, their relationships with them, and their 
need to teach in a way that they felt good about, the four teachers sought to craft their 
practice.  
 (Re)Framing Knowledge and Representation in the Making of a Study 
This study was about five women coming together to share experiences and 
support each other?s educational practice. Four of the women, Margaret, Jane, Katie, and 
Alexandra, had recently graduated from a master?s program in TESOL. I was the fifth, a 
PhD student hoping to learn from them as part of my dissertation study. Once every two 
or three weeks, we gathered together in my home after school to sip tea and share our 
ideas about what it means to teach English in the context of U.S. public schooling. As I 
walked alongside them, I asked the question: What are meanings of knowledge, 
pedagogy, and identity in the context of becoming a language teacher? In embarking on 
this study, I sought to problematize the fundamental tensions and shifts surrounding the 
optimal conditions in which the four teachers learned to teach. 
At the beginning of the year, as the former coordinator of Jane, Alexandra, Katie, 
and Margaret?s student teaching experiences, I thought that the problem was clear. While 
3   
 
 
the beginning teachers I had watched graduating from our program over the years were 
typically passionate, idealistic, and in search of social justice, they were often quickly 
ground down and became overwhelmed. They left the profession at what appeared to be a 
high rate, and they frequently became jaded. I perceived them as betrayed by a public 
schooling system that attempted to socialize them into compliance. I found the patterns I 
had observed in our graduates to be reflected in the historical and contemporary literature 
on beginning teaching (Waller, 1932; Merton, 1975; Veenman, 1984; Blase, 1985; Kettle 
and Sellars, 1986; Etheridge, 1988), and this was the struggle that I wanted to document 
as I developed the framework for this study.  
However, what follows in this dissertation is not the story I set out to tell. As I 
listened to Jane, Katie, Margaret, and Alexandra, I began to see images emerging that 
were much more intricate and problematical than I?d anticipated. I saw teachers whose 
sense of ethical responsibility towards their students compelled them to find ways to 
integrate their investments in social justice with their need to develop sustainable 
pedagogies that supported their students? long-term success in a less-than-ideal world. As 
the school year closed, Alexandra summarized: ?Pick your battles so you don?t feel 
guilty, so you can go home at rest with yourself.? (Afternoon Tea, 06.19). What 
Alexandra framed as being ?at rest with yourself? is a concern for ethical practice.  
I came to understand the various slices of beginning ESOL teachers? lived 
experiences?for instance, professional identity construction; language learning; 
grammatical proficiency; constructions of race, linguistic minority status, ethnicity, and 
gender; social and cultural identity?as represented in simplistic, limited ways in most of 
the literature. As I watched and listened to the teachers, the images of ESOL learning that 
4   
 
 
I had gleaned from the literature appeared to me as more and more superficial and 
disembodied from the institutional structure of schools. I had read work addressing what 
teachers, particularly ESOL teachers, need to know and do in order to teach well (Breen, 
1987; Richards and Pennington, 1996; Johnson, 1996; Freeman and Johnson, 1998). I had 
also read work from transformative ideologies that raised critical issues, such as the gap 
between teacher preparation programs and teaching practice (Britzman, 1991), the 
marginalization of non-native English speakers (Braine, 1999) and ESOL students 
(Wong, 1999), the intersections of gender and language minority status (Vandrick, 1994; 
Frye, 1994), the ways in which schools reproduce inequities (Lin, 1999), and the 
reinforcement of and resistance to English language teaching as linguistic imperialism 
(Canagarajah, 1999). I perceived a gap between these two bodies of work, that is research 
on teacher knowledge and work on socially transformative pedagogy, and in particular 
noticed an absence of attention to the role that teacher-generated knowledge can play in 
integrating the two. Insufficient attention has been paid to the stories and lives of 
beginning ESOL teachers as they construct their practices and negotiate their versions of 
transformative praxis that were, for many, part of the impetus for their entering the 
profession.  
Researcher Positionality 
My desire to contribute to understandings of the connections between ESOL 
teachers? identities and their practices is rooted in my life. Our life histories and 
experiences, along with the emotions and investments that evolve from them, shape our 
thoughts and influence the ways in which we view the world. I take issue with those who 
perceive such subjectivity as weakening research. All researchers have personal leanings, 
5   
 
 
and it is important that we acknowledge these and make them transparent. I name my 
own here, as they are present and significant. 
 I am distressed by the ways in which the needs of different students in public 
schools are attended to unevenly and unjustly. I see the centrifugal effects that schools 
have on students? cultural identities, encouraging them towards a central core that seeks 
to stamp out languages other than English and ethnicities other than white
1
. I am appalled 
by the Governor of this state, Robert Ehrlich, who announced this May that: "Once you 
get into this multicultural crap, this bunk, that some folks are teaching in our college 
campuses and other places, you run into a problem," and I am outraged by the state?s 
former Governor Donald Schaefer, who claims: "I don't want to adjust to another 
language. This is the United States. I think they ought to adjust to us" (Mosk, 2004). I am 
offended by these words as an immigrant who did ?adjust.? I was born in Sri Lanka and 
immigrated at the age of 4 to Australia during the White Australia policy, which 
restricted ?non-European? immigration but made exclusions for certain nonwhites, 
including my father and his ?dependents.? I shamefacedly admit that it wasn?t long 
before I completely lost my Tamil and Singhalese (languages that had already been 
occupying a marginal and contested space in my family since the British colonization of 
Sri Lanka), identified as singularly ?Australian? when people asked me where I came 
from, and agreeably consented to being called Sue instead of Suhanthie. This 
disconnection from my heritage served no valid purpose, and I am invested in halting the 
perpetuation of those conditions within school walls that attracted me to a white English-
speaking identity. My experiences have influenced the ways in which I do research, for 
                                                 
1
 I choose to use lower-case initials when describing racial groups in order to avoid reifying social 
categories.  
6   
 
 
instance, no doubt affecting my receptivity to Korean-born Katie?s revelation that when 
she was a girl in an American school, she wanted to look like ?something else,? 
?something White.?  
I am dismayed by the marginalized status of ESOL teachers within schools. As 
the coordinator of student teaching for ESOL teacher candidates, I saw ESOL teachers 
denied classrooms, told that magnet program students had priority over ESOL students in 
the computer lab, and excluded from the textbook budget. I hear ESOL teachers 
complaining that they are not accorded the same professional legitimacy as teachers of 
other content areas. I believe that ESOL teachers? difficulty in carving out a legitimate 
space within school culture is a refraction of the absence of a rightful place for their 
language minority students to occupy within the national social fabric. I would like to see 
this imbalance redressed. 
 I believe that the needs of new teachers are not being attended to adequately, not 
through deliberate disregard, but as the result of insufficient knowledge about how to do 
so and of a limited understanding of what it means to know. I would like this study to 
contribute towards the filling of that need.  
I framed this study in part in reaction to the large number of studies of teaching in 
which teachers are condemned by researchers who enter their classrooms and criticize 
what they are doing. It was more relevant to and productive for my purposes to look at 
how Katie, Margaret, Jane, and Alexandra made sense of their worlds and developed 
their practice in their complicated and challenging political and institutional contexts. 
This work seeks to respond to Freire?s (1998) call for humanizing, for practices made 
through relationships among students, teachers, and knowledge in the larger context of 
7   
 
 
their social histories and in relation to the ways in which they think about learning. 
Beyond the ideas and theories that teachers discover during their preservice experience 
and interactions with professional colleagues, they are their own biographies. Teachers 
are not merely neutral emissaries of the school system, but rather are complex beings 
embedded in personal histories (Carter and Doyle, 1996). Researchers of influences on 
teaching have painted beginning teachers as either captive (Lortie, 1975) or impervious 
(Zeichner, 1990) to the conceptualizations of teaching they internalized during their years 
as students. These representations of teaching ignore the role that teachers? social and 
cultural histories play in complexifying this terrain by contextualizing and interacting 
with the abstract information they are exposed to during their coursework. I seek to 
connect you the reader to the teachers in a way that is humanizing and mindful of their 
whole lives. 
Epistemological Grounding 
The concept of identity anchored this study. Understanding identity construction 
was a pivotal piece of understanding the processes of becoming an ESOL teacher and 
developing a practice of teaching ESOL students. The notion of identity was important in 
relation to several key themes that became important in this study: authenticity, 
relationship, agency and subjectivity, image, and Otherness. These will be theorized in 
greater detail later in this chapter.  
Identity is complicated because it is situated within one?s own life history, in the 
context of relationships with others in and out of school, and within structures that tend to 
privilege some meanings over others. The making of identity is therefore neither a 
smooth nor unidirectional process; it is complicated, multilayered, and always in process. 
8   
 
 
I began to recognize the complexity of these various layers in the making of identity only 
towards the end of the study, and it was then that the following exchange became 
significant to me. It captures what, for me, was the crux of what I learned during the year 
of my dissertation study. While sipping tea on my living room floor, Katie was 
explaining that although she was reluctant to teach grammar directly, she believed that 
doing so was necessary to her students? success in the world beyond her classroom. She 
saw a heavy focus on form and grammatical accuracy as contributing to the sustenance of 
an unjust status quo. However, she simultaneously connected grammatical proficiency to 
the ability of her students to construct identities that legitimated their participation in the 
U.S. workforce, schools, and society: ?Because I think unconsciously, people associate 
intelligence with language.? I wondered how she could reconcile these two seemingly 
disparate perspectives and asked her: ?Is there a tension between teaching [students] what 
they need in the world and teaching them to conform?? Katie replied, unexpectedly: ?I 
don?t think there?s a tension.? As I considered this response in greater depth over time, I 
came to perceive Katie?s ability to integrate these two polar extremes as representative of 
an evolved and fertile philosophy, one that opened doors that had been previously 
invisible to me. Katie went on to explain:  
?There?s a movement to broaden people?s perspectives on language 
minority students, but it?s a slow process. But in the meantime, you can 
give them knowledge of the culture, knowledge of the culture to help them 
advance and, once they do, they themselves can contribute to the process 
of broadening people?s perspectives. So you?re helping to empower them 
to change the system. They?ll succeed in the system, but at the same time 
9   
 
 
they?ll be able to change it because they?ll know how to get inside. They 
say that the most effective way to change something is to get inside the 
structure and work from within.? 
Katie was talking about the tightrope walk between transformation (?chang[ing] the 
system) and access (?succeed[ing] in the system?). Pennycook (1999) has made reference 
to the conflict between transformation and access, that is between on one hand 
challenging practices that maintain social inequities (such as an arbitrary and meaningless 
focus on grammatical accuracy in ESOL classes) and on the other hand arming children 
with social tools of power (for instance, explicit knowledge about grammar) when these 
are not provided in the natural framework of their lives. In a similar vein, Delpit (1995) 
has described the tension between ?skills? and ?process? in writing, charging that as a 
result of an undue emphasis on writing process, educators have failed to equip minority 
students with necessary ?skills? and with the codes and rules necessary for participation 
in a culture of power. The intellectual contribution that Katie offered in this conversation 
was a challenge to the dichotomy between access and transformation, between skills and 
process. What Katie, theorizing from her pedagogical practice, taught me was that access 
is a form of transformation, and transformation is a form of access. I failed to recognize 
this at the time, maintaining my conceptualization of the two as mutually exclusive: 
Suhanthie: Audre Lorde says the master?s tools will never destroy the 
master?s house.  
Katie: I think you need both. I think you need people on the inside and outside 
railing the system. I think the radicals will get people to notice and the people 
on the inside can further that process inside. I think that they?re not mutually 
10   
 
 
exclusive ? One?s not necessarily better than the other. As long as it?s an 
ongoing process. (Afternoon Tea at Su?s, 06.19) 
Katie?s contextualizing experience and long-term perspective allowed her to perceive 
socially transformative change as an ongoing process rather than a finite goal: ?As long 
as it?s an ongoing process.? For Freire (1998), this ?unfinishedness? is an essential 
ingredient of conscientization, or the development of consciousness that has the power to 
transform reality (Freire, 1970). 
I had embarked on this study perceiving teaching towards conformity as 
preclusive of teaching towards transformation and, indeed, investing academically in the 
dichotomy between the two. I imagined that I would see my four study partners, all of 
whom were positioned in pursuit of social justice, trying to teach transformatively and 
then doing one of two things: succeeding or giving up. In numerous teacher socialization 
studies (Waller, 1932; Lortie, 1966; Merton, 1975; Veenman, 1984; Blase, 1985; 
Etheridge, 1988; and Kettle and Sellars, 1996) teachers were socialized into traditional 
pedagogies, framed as ?reflexive conservatism? by Lortie (1975) and ?rationalization? by 
Blase (1985). I feared that after a struggle to hold onto their ideas about teaching, Katie, 
Jane, Alexandra and Katie, like many teachers in these studies, would be discouraged and 
abandon the liberatory pedagogies that they had brought to their first year of teaching, in 
which case I hoped to focus on the factors that contributed to their becoming 
discouraged. However, I had also read Zeichner and Tabachnik (1985)?s data-based 
suggestion that passive conformity is not necessarily a part of new teacher induction and 
Power (1981) and Grossman?s (1988) studies in which teachers clung on to the liberatory 
ideologies that they had embraced during their coursework, even in the face of heavily 
11   
 
 
socializing influences. These studies gave me hope, and indeed led me to expect, that 
Jane, Margaret, Alexandra, and Katie would find it possible to ?teach against the grain? 
(Ng, 1995; Simon, 1992). If this were the case, I hoped to discover more about the factors 
that supported their ability to remain critical in the face of the conservative influences of 
public schooling. However, to my surprise, throughout the year of the study, I understood 
Katie and my other study partners, Alexandra, Jane, and Margaret, to slide towards 
neither end but rather to artfully and skillfully craft pedagogies that wove together these 
two elements that I had previously considered to be in conflict with each other: inciting 
social justice and responding to students? need to meet societal expectations beyond 
school walls. In order to respond to the social and professional needs they envisioned in 
their students? present and future lives, they felt bound to assist their young students in 
accessing the culture of power. However, they simultaneously saw themselves as 
engaged in a socially transformative project, and they pursued teaching practices that 
challenged oppression. Neither of these two intentions could be sublimated to the other, 
so Jane, Alexandra, Margaret, and Katie worked throughout the year to develop 
pedagogies that united the two. It is in the wide and messy space between the two 
extremities that this study is located. This dissertation is about four teachers figuring out 
what counts as responsible action and responsible teaching.  
What I hadn?t accounted for was the power of ethical practice. The teachers didn?t 
use the words ?ethics,? ?morality,? or ?integrity,? but they talked about their 
responsibilities towards their students, their caring for them, their relationships with 
them, and their need to teach in a way that they felt good about. During the year of the 
study, I saw four inspiring teachers who went into the public school system motivated by 
12   
 
 
a desire to improve their students? lives, to practice thoughtfully critical pedagogies, and 
to change the world. In examinations of how power is implicated in schools? 
constructions of knowledge, ethical practice is often left out of the discussion, as 
deplored by anthropologist Vine Deloria: ?Western civilization, unfortunately, does not 
link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes 
them equivalent.? (Black Elk et al, 2003) 
The teachers were marginalized by their positionality as first-year teachers, they 
sometimes deplored the absence of mentors they could turn to in their schools, some of 
them were isolated and struggled to find support. It could even be effectively argued that 
they were doomed to fail. They didn?t fail. I explored the ways they made sense of their 
worlds and their practice, crafting pedagogies that allowed them to act in ways that were 
courageous and morally defensible. Katie, Jane, Margaret, and Alexandra?s stories are 
not tales of wretched victims, and nor are they triumphant victory narratives. The 
teachers were expected to prepare their students for standardized tests, attend to their 
social development and psychological needs, maintain communication with their 
families, help them adapt to life in America, and carry out their administrative tasks. In 
addition to these responsibilities, the teachers had taken on the added pressure of being 
responsive to their students while making their schools and their world a better place. At 
the front of the teachers? minds were always the best interests of the children they taught. 
It was this ethic of caring and responsibility that inspired the teachers to explore 
the lush spaces between dichotomous competing interests and to break down polarities. 
One intention of this study was to document the obstacles facing liberatory teachers and 
their triumphs in the face of such obstacles. What I found was that there was actually a 
13   
 
 
fertile middle ground between obstacles and triumphs?the teachers were able to identify 
and develop pedagogies around alternatives to ?all? or ?nothing,? to ?resistance? or 
?compliance.? Bhabha (1994) writes of hybrid spaces, of the emergence of interstices?
the overlap and displacement of dimensions of difference, ?usually intoned as 
race/class/gender, etc. (p.2)??asking: ?How are subjects formed ?in-between?, or in 
excess of, the sum of the ?parts? of difference (p. 2)? I extend this metaphor to apply to 
the spaces between not only cultural identities, but between ideologies: for instance 
conformity and compliance, success and failure, transformation and access, skills and 
process, English and linguistic Other, obstacles and triumphs, theoretical and practical, 
femininity and masculinity. 
Bhabha writes of liminal spaces, stairwells connecting attics and basements. 
Liminal spaces are barely imperceptible spaces at the threshold of something exciting. 
Rather than appearing as narrow and rickety, as Bhabha sees them, these in-between 
spaces give me the impression, through the lens of this study, of cavernous abysses, and I 
see the spaces not as foreshadowing something exciting (Bhabha, 1994) but as actually 
being themselves exciting. Other theorists also direct researchers towards in-between 
spaces. Lather (2000) suggests that new concepts and understandings can be found in the 
?cracks,? created by the ?loss of mastery of the old concepts? (p. 284). Cixous (1976) 
connects the breaking down of centrifugal and binary processes with feminist practice: 
?Woman un-thinks
2
 the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels 
forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield? (p. 252). Similarly, Pagano (1991) 
associates the social construction and maintenance of a tendency towards poles with 
                                                 
2
 Note that the French for ?un-think,? d?-pense, when spelled without the hyphen (d?penser) means ?to 
spend.?  
14   
 
 
human evolution in an androcentric reality. She suggests that dichotomizing is a gendered 
way of thinking that results from a traditionally male orientation and a patriarchal history.  
However, criticizing oppositional binaries is not enough. Anzald?a (1987) writes 
of ?borderlands, la frontera? noting that in her experience, ?borders are set up to define 
the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them ? a borderland is a vague 
and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary? (p. 
25). She, like Bhabha, suggests that borders be conceptualized as ?los intersticios,? the 
spaces between the different worlds humans inhabit. Often, what are thought of as 
sharply delineated lines are actually vague and muddled open spaces, ?unnatural 
boundaries.? Meteorologists will report the exact moment of sunrise and sunset, but can 
you truly name the instant when day becomes night? Can you put your finger on the point 
in the sand where the earth ends and the ocean begins? Anzald?a associates these spaces 
with the promise of the future. It is not enough to criticize dichotomies, to hold up a 
megaphone and shout at Western, patriarchal conventions. Rather, the task at hand is to 
explore alternatives by excavating these intersticios: ?The new mestiza copes by 
developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguities.? (p. 101). In terms 
that poignantly evoke Freire?s notion of ?unfinishedness,? she says ?there is an 
exhilaration in being a participant in the further evolution of humankind, in being 
?worked? on.? (p. 38). This study is framed around contradictions, ?cracks? and 
?intersticios.? 
 Why explore the contradictions and cracks? For Katie, Jane, Margaret, and 
Alexandra, an ethic of caring towards their students made the exploration not only 
relevant, but necessary. To embrace one or the other of the poles that were offered to 
15   
 
 
them?teaching for liberation and social transformation on one hand, teaching students to 
conform academically and blend in socially on the other?would do their students a 
disservice. Their investments represent a departure from the ideals of teaching they had 
aspired to before they started teaching, from pedagogical representations of teachers 
swooping through impoverished schools in deux ex machina fashion, defying angry 
bigoted principals, converting the world-weary faculty, and rescuing pitiable immigrant 
kids from the sorry fate society had dealt them. Jane, Alexandra, Margaret, and Katie had 
neither prophets? robes nor machinas, and they needed to teach in ways that would be 
supported in their contexts, respectful of their fellow-faculty and administrators, and 
sustainable over the duration of their careers. In relating teaching challenges, the four 
teachers spoke often not only of their political commitments, but of their relationships 
with students, the commitments they felt towards individuals. Noddings (1983) makes a 
distinction between the Kantian notion of fidelity to abstract principles (such as, in the 
instance of this study, social transformation) and fidelity to people. Jane?s comment at the 
opening of this work makes me think of Noddings. She recognizes that teaching to 
standardized tests does not support students? acquisition of the language they need for 
their everyday lives and even contributes to the maintenance of an inequitable status quo 
(this dilemma is discussed in detail in Chapter 4), but she simultaneously recognizes that 
students will be at a disadvantage if they fail the tests. A keen sense of justice inspired 
her to find a middle ground: ??it?s not fair of me to say I?m not going to do it that way. 
It?s not fair to the kids!? She cares about her students and wants them to succeed. Kant 
believed that in order to be truly ethical, humans need to remain committed to their 
principles, even if their gut feelings changed in the context of a relationship. Noddings 
16   
 
 
diverged from Kant, proposing an alternative to his notion of fidelity to principle. She 
suggested that it is through our commitments to people that we develop an understanding 
of what it means to be ethical. There were times during the year of the study when I 
perceived that a blind commitment to large-scale social transformation would have 
required Jane, Katie, Margaret and Alexandra to be unresponsive to the immediacy of 
their students? needs, perhaps unethically so. Gilligan (1982), similarly, understands 
moral, ?different voices? to speak a language of care, stressing relationships and 
responsibilities, rather than rights and rules. She connects morality with responding to 
others in ways that provide care and are supportive of relationships. It was in the context 
of this sense of responsibility and caring that Katie, Jane, Alexandra, and Margaret began 
to explore what makes ethical teaching possible and what sustains its practice. So in the 
framework of relationships and caring, I introduce them to you now. I include 
information about their lives because I believe that there is much to be learned from 
knowledge that is contextual and embedded in relational concerns (Belenky et al, 1986), 
knowledge that reductionist and positivistic orientations to research have neglected by 
constructing research participants as nothing more than a list of relevant characteristics. 
Katie Bach, Margaret Foulkes Chan, Jane Fitzpatrick, Alexandra Deutsch Lau 
?I Honor Myself?: Alexandra Deutsch Lau 
I met the first of the four participants in the summer of 1997, when Alexandra 
breezed into my office seeking advising in preparation for her M.Ed in TESOL. She was 
34 then and 36 when our study began. A white American woman with a quietly self-
assured manner, she surprised me with her ability to remain composed while juggling 
17   
 
 
many duties simultaneously. As I grew to know her better, her immutability remained 
constant, and to this day she remains arguably the most unflappable person I know.  
She was a student in several classes that I taught throughout 1997 and 1998. I 
attended her wedding in May of 1998 and coordinated her student teaching experience 
during the fall of that year, conducting periodic observations and guiding biweekly 
meetings with the other student teachers. She worked exceedingly hard during all of the 
classroom experiences I shared with her, receiving As consistently and graduating in 
December of 1998. She was imperturbable in the face of many challenges: single 
motherhood of a young son with special needs, later a long-distance marriage to a pilot, 
and eventually care of a newborn daughter, all with a startlingly minimal disruption to 
her teaching schedule and academic pursuits. She projected an image of composure under 
the most chaotic of circumstances. The words used most often to describe Alexandra are 
?calm? and ?consistent,? both used by her cooperating teachers during her student 
teaching, and ?so organized,? according to a former professor. 
Alexandra taught at Robert Fulton Middle School in a linguistically and racially 
diverse suburb. During the year of the study, her school was composed of 6
th
 to 8
th
 
graders and had a total enrolment of 903 students. Ethnically, the county description of 
the students attending Alexandra?s school was: 3 ?American Indian/Alaskan natives?, 
141 ?Asian/Pacific Islanders?, 375 ?African American?, 227 ?White (not of Hispanic 
origin)?, and 157 ?Hispanic?. Of these, 37 percent received free or reduced meals, and 57 
(or 6.3 percent) were identified as having ?limited English proficiency.? 
A notable characteristic of Alexandra?s pedagogical discourse and her classroom 
was a desire to validate her students? respect for their own histories. The first time I 
18   
 
 
entered her classroom, at the beginning of the 1999-2000 school year, she had her 
?classroom motto? displayed on posterboard on her wall: 
?I honor my family.  
I honor my history.  
I honor myself.? (Field notes, 09.09) 
Throughout the year, her lessons sought personal relevance, a link between the material 
and the students, and connection to students? families and cultural histories. She nurtured 
students? pride in their heritage and discouraged assimilation. She believed that it was 
important to draw on students background knowledge, including experiential knowledge: 
?They have to have some reason to talk, some reason to communicate, a reason to put 
words together? (05.21). Her classes were characterized by an unusual degree of student 
autonomy. During some periods, the students actually ran the classes, providing 
corrections to each other and guiding the interaction themselves. She recounted to me 
with wry amusement and a touch of pride the school computer technician?s exclamation 
that she was ?the only teacher in the school who lets the kids teach the class.? (05.21) 
Alexandra?s life had offered her multicultural resources. For instance, she had 
spent a year teaching English in Japan, an experience that had inspired reflection about 
racism and diversity and in particular about the complexities of multiple dimensions of 
social location, such as gender and national origin. She noted that minority status and 
marginalization are not synonymous, commenting that even though she was 
discriminated against in Japan, she ?always wake[s] up white? (05.21) in a world that 
privileges whiteness. Shortly before this study began, she married Tac, a Vietnamese 
refugee and non-native English speaker. Being married to Tac heightened her awareness 
19   
 
 
of the perspective shifts associated with national difference: ? I think I got a very 
different perspective on life from listening to my husband. I got a different perspective on 
Vietnam than if I listened to Caucasian elders who only know of it from the war 
experience because he lived on the other side of it.? (05.21). She often connected her 
students? ordeals to the experiences of her husband, expressing respect for the hardships 
that Tac had passed through during his life as a refugee seeking sanctuary and as an 
immigrant in the United States.  
The daughter of educators, Alexandra was born in Texas and was ?raised? (05.21) 
by her father, who was in graduate school until she was approaching school age, while 
her mother worked as an elementary school teacher. The family then moved to Ottawa, 
where her father taught on a Native American reserve. Her mother eventually became a 
special education teacher and is currently politically active in the state teacher?s 
association. Alexandra lived with her mother and son during her graduate education and 
her first year-and-a-half of teaching and referred frequently to her mother during her 
discussions of her educational ideologies. Like her mother, Alexandra was committed to 
political awareness. I found her unusually knowledgeable about the relationships between 
local politics and schools, about legislation affecting her students, and about propositions 
and pending laws. She earned an undergraduate degree in Soviet and East European 
Studies and then spent several years working in the Resident Life Departments of several 
small colleges on the east coast, including a ?second-chance school, a school that 
accepted kids who didn?t have the sort of grades you normally need to get into college. 
That?s where I learned a lot about kids who are different and kids who don?t learn the 
same way I do.? (Interview, 05.21) 
20   
 
 
She returned to university and received a master?s degree in educational 
administration. In 1996, she adopted her three-year-old biological nephew, Francis, who 
was seven at the time of the study. When I asked her: ?What attracted you to teaching?? 
she responded instantly: ?Francis. When I got Francis, I began interacting with teachers 
(who weren?t my mother) and really enjoying what they were doing and seeing how they 
interacted with kids, or being critical of how they didn?t interact with my son. And I 
thought, maybe that?s what I want to do.? (Interview, 05.21) She also related her decision 
to a desire for social change, noting that her current position in higher education 
administration wasn?t allowing her to make an impact. I then asked: ?And why ESOL?? 
She said: ?It was either ESOL or special ed,? citing as reasons that these were high need 
areas, required teachers to be experts, and provided the opportunity to help other people 
understand how to teach kids with special needs. 
Alexandra?s ideas about teaching ESOL pivoted on an acute awareness of 
difference, from both the perspective of the Other and, self-consciously, of the dominant 
culture. Her childhood memories include a familiarity with alienation, and she believed 
that the experience of being different helped her to connect with her ESOL students. In 
second grade, she would go to school with her hair unbrushed and would be held in at 
recess while her teacher combed her hair. She described it as ?survival, just like it is for 
me and Francis. You know, ?You?re not naked, get on the bus?? (laughing). Like many of 
her students, she went to school without eating breakfast: ?Now that I?m a teacher, I 
know how important that is.? (05.25) She felt set apart from other students by her 
physicality: ?Being overweight made me different.? She was teased by other students for 
her inattentiveness in class. Other factors contributed to her sense of detachment from her 
21   
 
 
peers, including a first-grade eye injury that kept her home from school for a large part of 
the school year and later caused her to be held in during recesses. Yet, while her intimacy 
with feelings of difference was an important influence on her teacher identity, she 
recognized that as a woman of European heritage, she held a position of social prestige. 
She sought a redistribution of power through students? exploration of their own identities 
because ??it is only by doing this that we may be able to fully grasp the plurality of our 
community and the great dynamic between the roles we all play. Our culture simply 
depends on the ability to look critically at ourselves and others (for better or worse) 
because we evolve from that dialogue ... if we do not encourage an understanding of 
identity and accept the new patterns that students will create, we will subject them to an 
"American" definition of identity that may or may not suit their reality. ? (Webchat, 
04.13.1998) 
?Trying to Figure Out Where I Belong?: Katie Bach 
Katie Bach has written her own self-introduction, in which she connects her 
educational philosophy to her biography:  
?As a Korean-American woman adopted by American parents of Irish and German 
descent, multiethnic/ multicultural issues have always been an important part of my life. 
My two older sisters were born biologically to my parents, and a year after I came, my 
parents adopted another Korean child who became my younger sister. The differences in 
race and ethnicity between my family and my sister Martina and I have always been 
pointed out. Some were humorous experiences of polite confusion. For example, in 
school, I had some of the same teachers as my older sisters. They would ask me in a tone 
of uncertainty, ?You?re not related to Rachel and Elizabeth Bach, are you?? I would 
22   
 
 
proudly reply, ?Yes, they are my older sisters.? Other experiences were more difficult. In 
kindergarten I came home crying because another child had made fun of the shape of my 
eyes, and in middle school, I had been teased using racial slurs. These events gave me 
first hand experiences of racial and ethnic issues and helps me to understand the 
difficulties and experiences that many of my students face, even today. I continued my 
exploration of culture and ethnicity throughout my childhood. When I was in middle and 
high school, my family hosted several exchange students from Spain, the Netherlands, 
and Macedonia. I became quite close to my new ?sisters,? and learned much about their 
home cultures and languages. I also became particularly interested in learning Spanish. I 
loved the flow of the language, and the ability to communicate in another language. I 
studied Spanish in middle and high school, and visited a friend in Spain one summer 
where I had to communicate entirely in Spanish. Spanish eventually became one of my 
majors in college, (biology was the other), and I was able to study more in depth not only 
the language, but Latin American countries and cultural issues as well. In college, I also 
studied a semester in Zimbabwe. Like my students today, I had to survive and learn a 
completely new language, culture, and way of life. It was an incredible experience and 
helps me empathize with the feelings and frustrations of many of my ESOL students of 
living in a new culture and learning a new language. All of these experiences initiated a 
profound interest in language, culture, ethnicity, and identity. (I focused on these issues 
in my honors thesis in college and have continued to study them in working with the 
children in my classroom.) These experiences originally prompted me to enter the field of 
education, and more specifically, in becoming an ESOL (English for Speakers of Other 
Languages)/LEP (Limited English Proficient) teacher. As I wanted to combine culture 
23   
 
 
and language with teaching children, I volunteered at an elementary ESOL class and went 
back to graduate school. I earned a Masters in Education degree in TESOL (Teaching 
English to Speakers of Other Languages) and began teaching. Since then, I have 
thoroughly enjoyed my experiences teaching ESOL/LEP students. I am consistently 
impressed with my students? abilities to not only learn a new language, but to think and 
learn with the new language as their tool. I also highly respect the experiences and 
knowledge that they bring from their countries and circumstances of being in the United 
States. Many of them have overcome numerous obstacles to receive their education and 
continue to work through other difficulties to succeed.? 
Katie Bach had a split assignment between two schools close to each other, both 
among the wealthiest schools in the county. She spent 80 percent of her time at Seneca 
Brook Elementary School, and that was where I chose to collect data. Seneca Brook 
Elementary School had a total enrolment of 317 students, described ethnically by the 
county as: 0 ?American Indian/Alaskan Natives,? 45 ?Asian/Pacific Islanders?, 22 
?African American?, 209 ?White (not of Hispanic origin)? and 41 ?Hispanic.? The 
county considered 28 percent of the students to have ?limited English proficiency,? and 
13.9 percent were receiving free and reduced meals, significantly lower than the county?s 
22.5 percent average. 
An energetic, bubbly, and impassioned teacher, Katie sustained my interest in 
how bifurcated identities, particularly racial identities, shake hands with each other. 
Living a life steeped deeply in consciousness of the hybrid space (Bhabha, 1994) between 
ethnicities engendered powerful understandings of what it means to negotiate 
multiculturalism. Katie kept me connected to the fluidity of identity when my own 
24   
 
 
framings became rigid: ?? identity is never a stationary thing. It changes with our ideas, 
thoughts, experiences, etc. I'm still in the process of negotiating what my own identity is? 
and later: ?Anyway, I basically am still trying to figure out where I belong. I think my 
students are also. I am pretty comfortable with who I am and where I'm going, but ask me 
what my cultural identity is and it changes from situation to situation.? She also helped 
me to understand that while ethnicity does not define a person, it is a fundamental part of 
identity: 
?I still don't see myself as fully American or Korean or maybe even a 
meld of the two. Perhaps now, I just see myself as "Katie" and am trying 
to find my identity in who I am rather than what culture I associate with. 
However, (to contradict myself), I take pride in being "Asian." I didn't 
really until college and beyond. I am greatly interested in learning and am 
having fun in learning not only about Korean culture, but other Asian 
cultures as well.? 
 Katie had been deeply affected by her apprenticeship of observation. She 
frequently related stories about teachers from her past: an elementary teacher whose class 
she observed during the first semester of her master?s degree; a dedicated Asian-
American professor who helped Katie to develop understandings of the social realities of 
ESOL students? lives and supported her exploration of identity development, and a Latina 
professor from her undergrad who supported her honors thesis on a group of biracial 
Mexican-Americans who identified themselves as los pacucos. 
25   
 
 
?A Blossoming Peach Tree?: Margaret Foulkes Chan 
I think the purpose of schooling is to cultivate yourself so that you want to 
be with yourself so that you serve yourself and your community. Not only 
for others, but so that you can serve yourself. Schooling ideally should 
help you to clear your mind. I guess that?s why I think the spiritual side is 
important. Everything you?re learning or planning to do should also be 
guided, you should be aware of your intentions and the effects of your 
speeches and your actions and whatever you do.? (Webchat, 05.30) 
Like Freire (1987), Margaret believed that reading the world precedes reading the word, 
and she sought to strengthen for her students the connections between text and context. 
Her intent is not simply to teach letters and words, the learners must also be skillful and 
intrepid in their explorations of the American world surrounding them and their discovery 
of its strange words. She wrote: 
?I ask my students to look for art, clarity, purpose, kindness and vitality in 
themselves. Together we learn that the knowing of any subject matter 
should lead us to a knowing of how to be in this world. I celebrate 
digressions and yet hope, ultimately, to help my students distill 
themselves, recognize their essences.? (03.10) 
And the part of her students? world that Margaret inhabits is designed to be aesthetically 
pleasing, peaceful and comfortable, a place that surrounds them with calm and beauty 
and learning and lore. In her large, sunny classroom, an area with mats and a paper easel 
provides a place for reading morning messages and for storytelling and sharing. Towards 
the center of the room, small student desks are grouped together to form a single large 
26   
 
 
desk that students sit around. The far side of the classroom is a ?Writer?s Corner,? 
including a small library. Everything is labelled: light, desk, chalk, pencils. A tidy word 
wall (or is it a word-world wall?) creatively fashioned from posterboard and yarn flanks a 
wall. Students? names pop out: Ameera, Keoni, Brandon, Tabari alongside stone, zebra, 
soup. The students are present among the objects in their world. Near the windows, an 
area is set aside for computer use. On the opposite wall is a sign: Flower of the Week: 
Mum and underneath the sign, on the teacher?s desk, a vase of mauve and lemon 
chrysanthemums. There are always fresh flowers in this classroom. Margaret once sent 
me a poem written by Emily Dickinson: 
?By Chivalries as tiny, 
A Blossom or a Book, 
The seeds of smiles are planted- 
Which blossom in the dark.? 
Chivalries. I would never have thought of a blossom or a book as a chivalry, but there is 
an air of courtesy and thoughtfulness surrounding the colored petals and leaves of books 
that Margaret scatters around her. They are intended to bring life and color and three-
dimensionality to her teaching. 
?Everyone is a writer,? she once remarked. ?Everyone has something to share. Everyone 
has an experience that resonates with the experience of another human.? Margaret herself 
is a writer, and she encourages her small students to express themselves in writing. 
Indeed, writing was the emancipation of child-Margaret: ?Before I could write, I was 
very often a silent child, but being given pen, paper and the skills to use them allowed me 
to talk, really talk.? (Webchat, 02.05) 
27   
 
 
Beyond pen and paper and even lexical items, Margaret seeks to provide meaning 
and a social environment in which students can develop their understandings of the world 
around them: 
?And I can give a student so beautiful a concept and word as 
?tintinnabulation? (the sound of ringing bells) and this notion will always 
be in her heart. And I can give solace and support and perhaps a path, 
other ways of thought, to a student, and this will be meaningful. In 
Chinese, teachers are compared to blossoming peach trees ? the 
individual blooms their students.? (Webchat, 02.19.98) 
Philosophical Margaret grew up in the county that she, Alexandra, and Katie taught in 
during the study. She in fact attended the elementary school that Alexandra taught at 
during her first semester. While she described her neighborhood as ?homogenous 
ethnically, mostly caucasian,? (Margaret, Dinner, 05.30) many of her neighbors had 
international experience, which had been ?enriching? for her. This, coupled with her 
father?s busy international travel schedule, evinced in Margaret an interest in travelling 
herself when she grew older. She studied history at a college in the American midwest, 
noting that: ?I probably should have done English literature, but I loved my history 
professors, and I guess I felt that studying history, I could bring in anything.? (Margaret, 
Dinner, 05.30).  
Margaret?s school, Pewter Brook Elementary School, had a total enrollment of 
489 students, whom the county identified as: 2 ?American Indian/Alaskan Natives,? 29 
?Asian/Pacific Islanders,? 171 ?African Americans,? 223 White (not of Hispanic 
origin),? and 64 ?Hispanic.? Of these, 46 students (or 9.1 percent) were labeled ?limited 
28   
 
 
English proficient,? and 30.9 percent received free or reduced meals, a higher percentage 
than the county average of 22.5 percent. 
Before she started her master?s degree, she lived in China for two years teaching 
English. During the study she was in the process of exploring Buddhist philosophy. She 
married an engineer from Hong Kong who teaches Tai Chi. Her experience of migration 
allows her to connect with her students? lives in this strange land. She shares her stories 
with them. As the coordinator of her student teaching experience the year before the 
study, I had the opportunity to observe her as she taught a lesson built around a poem she 
had written. She was required to teach 25 new vocabulary items that period. She 
introduced them in the context of this poem: 
     Far from My World 
It is morning. 
I have stepped off the plane into a Chinese park. 
My mother?s house is far away. 
Here, the air smells of fried scallion cakes 
But when I close my eyes, 
I smell my grandmother?s sweet lemon tart. 
Nearby, a kind-eyed man holds his brother?s hand. 
The two approach me,  
Pointing to the front page of their newspaper, 
Asking me questions 
I do not understand, and squint my eyes at the letters. 
This is not my language. 
In my mind are beautiful English words, words easy to spell: 
Daffodil, gingerbread, butterfly, 
Here, I study and study Chinese words, words like pictures. 
How should I walk through this new world, this new language? 
Now, it is night and the picture changes again. 
I am in my Chinese neighborhood. 
Even the animals here are different. 
Bats fly high and low over children playing in the street. 
I wonder how I can learn to be in China, 
This place that is not my home. 
I have found deep beauty and kindness here, 
But my heart is still in my homeland, in America. 
In which country are the answers I am looking for? 
29   
 
 
(Lesson Plan, 04.27.1999) 
Margaret is calm. Her calmness is a characteristic that is often foregrounded when people 
describe her. The year before she started teaching at Pewter Brook Elementary School, 
her cooperating teacher at the elementary level described her as: ?calm, caring, kind, 
respectful, and artistic.? Her secondary-level cooperating teacher wrote that Margaret 
was: ?a calm in the storm,? ?a quiet and loving teacher? who ?makes students feel 
special.? 
The seminar paper she wrote for her master?s degree focused on her development 
of what she termed a pedagogy of compassion. She believes that children need a special 
kind of care, sometimes a nontraditional kind of care. She was affected by the work of 
Nel Noddings (1984), who suggests that our educational experiences should be 
undergirded by an ethic of caring and responsibility that develops from 
interconnectedness with others.  
?But Then Again, Teachers Have Lives!?: Jane Fitzpatrick 
Jane worked in James County, a different county from Alexandra, Margaret, and 
Katie, who all worked in neighboring Bennett County. Demographically, James County 
differed significantly from Bennett County. In James County, more than 86 percent of the 
students were ethnic minorities, while the majority of Bennett County?s student 
population was white. Students in James County were also poorer, with 39.2 percent 
receiving free or reduced meals, as opposed to 22.5 percent in Bennett County. 
Jane?s presence in the study was muted for several reasons, many of which are 
relevant to the story this study tells. During her busy first year of teaching, Jane worked 
as a waitress at night. Salaries in James County were significantly lower than in Bennett 
30   
 
 
County, and Jane?s salary was the lowest of the four teachers. She was also busy planning 
her wedding long-distance. She commented: ?I don?t know if my first year would have 
been easier if I didn?t have so much going on in my life,? and then added, astutely: ?But 
then again, teachers have lives!? (Jane, 05.07). She was present at fewer afternoon teas 
than the other teachers, missing more gatherings than she was able to attend. We chatted 
less frequently by phone and on e-mail than I did with the other three teachers. Katie, 
Margaret, and Alexandra had internet connections in their classrooms and an e-mail 
account provided by their county?s public school system, and while they were occupied 
(even overwhelmed) with their teaching responsibilities during the day, they had 
electronic access that Jane did not. Furthermore, I conducted fewer school interviews 
with Jane, partly because, in her overcrowded school, her classroom was used by another 
teacher during her planning period. We were therefore not able to talk in a relaxed yet 
private environment to the same extent as I was in the other three schools of the study. 
Yet, Jane was an important voice in the study, contributing perceptive insights and warm 
support, so I include her to the extent that I can. Because teaching is undervalued 
financially as well as socially, millions of teachers in this country supplement their 
salaries with second jobs at night and on weekends. This leaves them less space for 
reflection, for planning, for professional development, and for building supportive 
communities of colleagues. It also leaves them less time to participate in time-consuming 
research studies and to therefore be reflected in the body of research on teaching. 
Jane taught at George Washington High School, a large school with a total 
enrolment of 2,100 students, of whom 136 or 6.5 percent were identified by the county as 
having limited English proficiency (LEP). The school population was composed of 1 
31   
 
 
?American Indian or Alaskan Native,? 67 ?Asian/Pacific Islanders,? 1,480 ?African 
Americans,? 138 ?White (not Hispanic),? and 414 ?Hispanic.?  
Jane was energetic, commonsensical, and skilled in steering her way through what 
would otherwise have been a frenzied and muddled year. She combined an effervescent 
and light-hearted classroom demeanor with a sense of taking her job and her students 
seriously. She was analytical about what she needed to do to be successful. She worked 
in a school with a large ESOL department and therefore had many ESOL colleagues. One 
in particular, Penelope, was a supportive mentor, helping her to understand which rules 
should be followed and which broken, what administrative tasks were most urgent, and 
how to develop satisfying relationships with her students and their parents. She was 
particularly knowledgeable about her students? home lives, often making reference to 
their family situations or biographies. 
Despite the large community of ESOL professionals surrounding her, she defined 
her teaching practice as ?isolated,? probably because of the autonomous nature of her 
classes. She did not view this isolation in exclusively negative terms. She commented at 
the end of the study:  
?In some ways, working in isolation can be bad and in some ways?poor 
Margaret?I would look at her and think, oh God, I don?t have any of that 
pressure. In some ways, I never felt pressure from my department head or 
my principal or some of the other people breathing down my neck ? 
again, isolation can be very bad because you don?t have feedback, but on 
bad days when you clearly know they?re not getting it ? there?s no one 
making me defend.? (Jane, 05.07). 
32   
 
 
 (The isolation of teaching is discussed in detail in Chapter 8). As a high school 
teacher, one of Jane?s greatest challenges was negotiating the maze of standardized tests 
which, it seemed, guided her instruction to a greater extent than the other three teachers. 
She was frustrated by the tests, noting that they were poor measures of what they 
purported to assess and did not help her students learn language. However, they were 
necessary in order for students to graduate.  
 Jane was born and raised in Bennett County. She had become interested in 
working with children when she moved in with her sister and brother-in-law to help them 
care for her niece. Her interest in teaching ESOL was stimulated by her fianc??s mother, 
who herself was an ESOL teacher. She had spent 5 weeks in Spain and defined herself as 
primarily monolingual. Jane keenly felt an invisible norm of whiteness and Americanness 
in her social identity and deplored what she experienced as cultural neutrality. A year 
before she started teaching, she commented on her sense of an absence of culture in her 
life: 
I know even for myself, I have always longed to feel culture more 
strongly. I was always jealous of those with an accent, or those who had 
living relatives they could visit in other countries, or those who without 
blinking an eye could define "what are you." I have chosen to define 
myself as Irish, but I don't feel strongly connected to that as I've seen 
many of the ESOL kids strongly connected to their heritage. (Webchat, 
04.23) 
The four teachers? life histories and positionalities differed from each others? on 
many levels, however they share many similarities?they form a cohort in their 
33   
 
 
commitment to social justice and ethic of caring; three grew up in Bennett 
County; three are white and native-English speaking and the fourth, Katie, grew 
up in a white native English-speaking family; and they have similar socio-cultural 
locations. They also shared similar challenges and experiences during their first 
years of teaching.  
Historical Context of Teaching Immigrant Children in the United States 
In order to understand the sense that Jane, Margaret, Katie, and Alexandra made 
of their practice, it is necessary to consider the historical context that they and other 
language teachers in the United States practice within. From immigrant education to 
Americanization studies to ESOL and multicultural education, educators have been aware 
that immigrant children had distinctive needs for almost as long as there have been 
immigrant children in America. There has, however, been little consensus about how to 
teach children who are crossing cultural borders. Current understandings of teaching 
linguistic minority children are complex and contradictory. Over the years, the institution 
of schooling within the U.S. has occasionally sought to recognize the value of 
multilingualism and multiculturalism but has, paradoxically, worked at the same time to 
anglicize and Americanize its young students. 
A cursory glance over the past two centuries of literature that relates to the 
teaching of immigrant children shows the process of negotiating culture usually viewed 
in terms of a meeting or even collision between two whole, static entities. In this study, I 
move away from that image, seeking instead to delve into the hybrid space (Bhabha, 
1994) or fronteras (Anzald?a, 1999) in which amorphous and indefinable cultures 
coexist. 
34   
 
 
Prior to the 1880s, most immigrants were white and from Western European 
countries with somewhat homogenous political, economic, and social practices, primarily 
the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. After 1880, however, the majority 
came from the Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and the Balkans (Hartmann, 
1948). A larger proportion of these ?new immigrants? spoke a first language other than 
English, and the cultural boundaries between recent and established immigrants were less 
porous. Initial attempts to specifically address the educational needs of immigrant 
children began to gain prominence at the beginning of the twentieth century.  
 Investigations into ?school failure? that spun a deficit construction of immigrant 
children began to proliferate in the first decade of last century (Wade, 1903; Richman, 
1904). For instance, in 1913, the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Education 
held a conference on Education of the Immigrant, at which the Superintendent of schools 
for New York City described the immigrant children in the city?s schools as ?defective,? 
?diseased,? and ?illiterate? concluding that: ?the very first essential step is to prevent the 
immigration of any child who has not the normal powers of a child or is affected by 
disease.? (Maxwell, 1913, p. 19).  
 In 1916, the Bureau of Naturalization of the Immigration and Naturalization 
Service (INS) had established classes in English and citizenship, but America?s 
participation in World War I slowed the expansion of this effort (Atzmon, 1958). The 
National Origins Act of 1924 legalized INS discrimination on the basis of national origin 
and heightened anti-immigrant sentiment. However, in the decade that followed, the 
notion of cultural pluralism, in which independent cultures co-exist side by side, gained 
popularity (Atzmon, 1958). World War II and the isolationalist policies that followed it 
35   
 
 
affected immigration policies and social sentiments, resulting in an emphasis on a 
?melting pot? orientation to schooling immigrant children. There is, however, evidence of 
a rise in interest in ?intergroup education? and in the early versions of ethnic studies 
during the 1940s and 1950s (Banks, 1995), both of which have deeply influenced the 
development of current day multicultural education.  
The 1957 launch of the Russian satellite, Sputnik, led to the National Defense 
Education Act of 1958, which provided for, inter alia, foreign language education and 
ESOL. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s influenced multicultural 
education initially by inspiring renewed interest in (1) ethnic studies, particularly 
African-American studies, (2) multicultural education, and (3) multiethnic education, an 
offshoot of ethnic studies that sought to bring about systemic changes in the school 
system in the interests of equality (Banks, 1995). 
 The most significant recent legislative document for language minority children 
was Lau vs. Nichols, a 1974 Supreme Court decision that ruled:  
?The failure of San Francisco school system to provide English language 
instruction to approximately 1,800 students of Chinese ancestry who do 
not speak English, or to provide them with other adequate instructional 
procedures, denies them a meaningful opportunity to participate in the 
public educational program and thus violates 601 of the Civil Rights Act 
of 1964, which bans discrimination based on ?on the grounds of race, 
color, or national origin,? in ?any program or activity receiving Federal 
financial assistance,? and the implementing regulations of the Department 
of Health, Education, and Welfare.? (pp. 565-569) 
36   
 
 
This ruling acknowledged that identical education does not constitute equal education 
and firmly places the onus on the shoulders of the school districts to take affirmative 
steps to overcome educational barriers faced by non-English speakers. 
The ESOL Curriculum Guide from the following year for James County, the 
county that study partner Jane Fitzpatrick taught in, opens with a fairly disparaging 
representation of ESOL students, defining an ESOL student as: ?? any non-English 
speaking student whose command of English is insufficient for them to function 
adequately in the classroom,? (p. 1) later going on to explain that: ?In addition to their 
linguistic needs, ESOL students face many problems in adjusting to a new culture.? 
Despite its negative overtones, the document does acknowledge the role of home cultures 
and languages: 
?We do not encourage the learning of English and American culture with 
the intention of abandoning the foreign students? own language and 
culture. Ideally, they should become bi-lingual and bi-cultural.? (p. 1) 
Since then numerous studies have indicated quite clearly that supplementing a child?s 
first language while she is acquiring the second language leads to greater proficiency in 
both languages (Wong-Fillmore, 1983). Despite lip service to the value of bilingualism in 
many educational arenas, an increasing number of initiatives and propositions to 
discourage multilingual students? connections to their first languages have proliferated 
lately. In particular, California residents voted in 1998 to essentially outlaw bilingual 
education and allow their young bilingual students only one year of ESOL services 
before they are forced to ?sink or swim,? in a direct violation of Lau vs. Nichols. A 
similar proposal, Proposition 203 was passed in Arizona in 2000. English-Only and 
37   
 
 
English First propositions seeking to restrict ?foreign? language use, most notably to 
outlaw government employees (including teachers) from speaking in a language other 
than English while on the job, have passed in 23 states. 
Current meanings of teaching language minority children continue to be 
multilayered and conflicting. Within the context of an institutional history that has, on 
one hand, frequently viewed immigrant children from a deficit perspective and focused 
on eradicating first cultures and languages but has, simultaneously, created spaces to 
recognize the value of multilingualism and the resources that immigrants bring, Katie, 
Jane, Margaret, and Alexandra developed their craft. They worked to build pedagogies 
that allowed them to nurture their children?s senses of self. They supported their young 
students? struggles to figure out what it means to be an immigrant becoming American 
and to reconcile the acquisition of English with their relationship with their first 
languages in a world in which English dominates.  
Gender 
The fact that the four teachers were all women was relevant to this study in 
several ways. It affected the ways in which certain constructs came to be understood, for 
instance rapport, relationship, authority, and voice. It affected our interactions with each 
other at the afternoon teas. The teachers themselves commented at the end of the school 
year that the tenor of the afternoon teas would have been completely different if a man 
had been present: ?I don?t think I would have been as comfortable.? (Alexandra, 05.07) 
I expected that this dissertation would include a chapter focusing on gender in 
some form. Indeed, I wrote several drafts of that chapter. However, while gender is 
visible throughout, and sometimes I name it as such, I eventually chose not to label it 
38   
 
 
specifically because everything is gendered. The themes and incidents that I tried to 
accumulate into one chapter cut across all and refused to be forced into one restricted 
space. I took this to be a good thing. Treating issues of gender as separate contributes to 
the construction of female as non-normative, as Other. When gender is made separate, it 
runs the danger of becoming marginalized.  
Theorizing Identity 
?The move away from singularities of ?class? or ?gender? as primary 
conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of 
the subject positions?of race, gender, generation, institutional location, 
geopolitical locale, sexual orientation?that inhabit any claim to identity 
in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and politically 
crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial 
subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are 
produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ?in-between? 
spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood?singular 
or communal?that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of 
collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of a society 
itself.  
 It is in the emergence of interstices?the overlap and displacement 
of domains of difference?that the intersubjective and collective 
experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are 
negotiated. (Bhabha, 1994, pp. 1-2) 
 
The concept of identity was the bedrock of this study. Understanding identity 
construction was a pivotal piece of understanding the processes of becoming an ESOL 
teacher and the practice of teaching ESOL students. The notion of identity therefore 
warrants momentary pause and discussion. In this section I will briefly theorize identity 
in relation to several key themes that became important in this study: authenticity, 
relationship, agency and subjectivity, image, and Otherness. 
What constitutes identity? Who determines who a person is? Is there an authentic 
Self in each person, waiting to be uncovered? Are humans created by their relationships? 
39   
 
 
By their experiences? Is identity biologically influenced? Predetermined? What degree of 
consciousness is applied to the construction of identity? Theories about the nature and 
development of identities abound and will be delved into here in order to provide a 
framework on which to develop our understandings of becoming teachers and teaching 
ESOL. 
Weber (2001) sees identity in terms of social categories: ?At the individual level, 
race, class, gender, and sexuality are fundamental sources of identity formation for all of 
us: how we see ourselves and who we think we are? (p. 97). Indeed, when I think about 
identity, it is most frequently in terms of these basic social categories listed by Weber. 
Social categories are a cornerstone in Tajfel?s (1978) understandings of self. The theorist 
believes that identity is derived from group membership. He suggests that it is human 
nature to categorize and claims that by placing oneself and others into groups, and then 
assessing the various groups in ways that cast one?s own group positively, humans attain 
a sense of prestige. Tajfel?s analysis, while helpful in developing a framework that 
highlights a human proclivity toward classifying, is inadequate for our purposes because 
it minimizes the role of power and ignores the possibility of multiple group membership, 
both of which were fundamental to the understandings of identity offered by the present 
study. Categories were also important for Thesen (1997), but she conceptualized them in 
more nebulous terms. She saw identity not within rigid categories but in the interactional 
space surrounding them. She defines identity as: ?the dynamic social interaction between 
the fixed identity categories that are applied to social groupings (such as race, gender, 
ethnicity, language, and other, more subtle representations that are activated in certain 
discourse settings) and the way individuals think of themselves as they move through the 
40   
 
 
different discourses in which these categories are salient.? (p. 488). Like Weber, Tajfel, 
and Thesen, Norton (1997) offers a definition of identity that is overwhelmingly 
relational. Norton, however, does not assign categorization the same degree of 
importance but rather focuses on relationship: ?how people understand their relationship 
to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how people 
understand their possibilities for the future? (Norton, 1997, p. 410). For Norton, there is 
no identity in isolation. Who a person is stems from her relationship to others and her 
position in the world.  
A question then naturally follows: what part of who we are comes from within, 
and what part is socially mediated? Like many other psychologists, Wetherell (2003) 
believes that all identity is rooted in the id, the part of the human personality which, 
according to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, contains the basic, primitive instincts of the 
body and is oblivious to the external world. According to Wetherell, the id is mediated 
and altered discursively but contains the essence of identity. This viewpoint stands in 
stark contrast to that of many scholars (Deleuze, 1968; Fairclough, 1992; Pennycook, 
1996; Kress, 1989; Foucault, 1981; Lather, 1991) who examine the construction of 
identity through discourse in social interaction. Bridging both of these perspectives, Alice 
Walker eloquently combines the inner being and the outer world to  depict identity as 
??an internal flower expressed externally.?  
Authenticity 
The notion of an authentic self, a real self, is one that is deeply embedded in the 
American social fabric. The classic children?s story The Velveteen Rabbit embraces the 
idea that everybody has a real self that can come into being only when they are loved. 
41   
 
 
When sleep deprivation makes me cranky, I say: ?I?m not myself,? as though I have a 
different, more genuine identity that is simply concealed at that (this) moment. I recently 
saw a movie about domestic violence in which a battered wife, squinting through a black 
eye, declared: ?This isn?t who I am really. I?m not a woman whose husband hits her.? 
These conceptualizations of identity all depict the process of identity formation as a quest 
for a essential self that exists somewhere out there but is simply hidden or missing at this 
particular moment. The current study, conversely, is grounded in an understanding of 
identity that repudiates this notion of a static, inherent, authentic self. The assumption of 
a real self raises ontological implications that parallel the assumption of an absolute 
Truth. A belief in a single true self restricts and limits the notion of multiplicity of 
identities and the possibility of fragmented, continually constructed and reconstructed 
identities. Alexandra, in fact valued the freedom and flexibility afforded to her by 
?differentiated identities?: 
I also often think that my identity is differentiated in that I am a teacher, a 
mother, a woman, a housekeeper, a landscaper, and non-church goer. My 
identity is fragile or "complete" (to my satisfaction) depending on what 
role my being is engaged in. (Alexandra, E-mail, 05.03) 
Alexandra?s embracing of her various roles is reminiscent of Lorde?s (1984) notion of 
?different ingredients?: 
?As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different  
ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual 
freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to 
pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful 
42   
 
 
whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of myself. But this is a 
destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of 
energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, 
openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back 
and forth freely through all my different selves.? (Lorde, 1984, p. 120-
121) 
For Katie, recognition of the dynamic nature of identity construction was an essential part 
of teaching immigrant and bicultural students:  
I also think that this must be accomplished by guiding the students to think 
for themselves, to see ALL cultural options as positive and fluid, and 
"identity" itself as a constantly changing, evolving "entity" (for lack of a 
better word). (Katie, E-mail, 04.25) 
Both of these teachers complicated ideas about identity by acknowledging the possibility 
of change and contradiction. This is not to say that identities are capricious or unanchored 
to a person?s character or experiences, but rather that: 
?Identities are marked by the multiplicity of subject positions that 
constitute the subject. Hence identity is neither fixed nor singular; rather it 
is a constantly changing relational multiplicity. But during the course of 
this flux identities do assume specific patterns, as in a kaleidoscope, 
against particular sets of personal, social, and historical circumstances. 
(Brah, 1996, p. 123) 
43   
 
 
Relationship 
The contextual nature of identity development was important in this study and 
echoed social understandings of identity that have prevailed in recent literature. For 
instance, Norton?s relational framing of identity resonated with McKay and Wong?s 
(1996), which promoted a ?contextualist perspective? highlighting the formation of 
students? identities in relationship with each other and their worlds. In Hunter?s (1997) 
study, fourth-grader Roberto negotiated multiple competing discourses and investments, 
variously seeking to match identities legitimated by his teacher, his classmates, the 
dominant school culture, and his home-oriented life. Looking at Roberto?s life, Hunter 
describes identity ?as creative of and created by responses to social forces.? (p. 604). For 
Lave and Wenger (1991), identities can exist only in relation to their social communities. 
The authors emphasize the development of human minds in social situations, and the 
relationship between the production of knowledgeable identities and the production of 
communities of practice. Fanon (1968), in fact, inextricably coupled acknowledgement 
by others with existence itself. He believed that: ?Man is human only to the extent to 
which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. 
As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, the other will remain the 
theme of his actions. It is on that other being, on recognition by the other being, that his 
own human worth and reality depend. It is the other being in whom the meaning of his 
life is condensed.? (p. 216-217) 
For Fanon, as for The Velveteen Rabbit author Margery Williams, we exist only 
with recognition by another. While Fanon is conscious of the influence of racial power on 
recognition and reality, hooks (2002) highlights the role of gender within our male-
44   
 
 
centered world, characterizing females as: ?[s]chooled to believe that we find ourselves 
in relation with others ? For as females in patriarchal culture, we cannot determine our 
self-worth. Our value, our worth, and whether or not we can be loved are always 
determined by someone else.? (p. xv) 
An essential element of identity in poststructuralist terms is difference. Derrida 
(1976) sees identity as a transient and unstable effect of difference, meaning that as 
relationships of socially specific difference change, so identity will change. My own 
understanding of identity embraces connectedness to others. Much of ?who one is? is 
modulated according to ?with whom one is in relation? currently. I am different when in 
relation with, for instance, a group of prospective employers across an interview table, 
my best friend after she?s been on a bad date, my baby daughter in the middle of the 
night, a telemarketer who has caught me when I?m pressed for time. All of these people 
might experience me quite differently, might describe me in widely different words. The 
same phoneme uttered by different people is not the same phoneme, says de Saussure 
(1969). Similarly, an individual?s identity will not be experienced as identical by any two 
other people or groups of people, which attests to the fluidity of the construct.  
Agency and Subjectivity 
Neither the notion of an authentic, pure, and legitimate self waiting to be discovered in 
every human nor the idea of a self shaped passively by the social environment leave room 
for agency or subjectivity in the active construction of identity. Every decision, word, and 
action not only reveals identity but actually produces it. Identity is shaped as it is lived. I 
turn first to a writer who has been enlightening in helping me to understand the 
relationship, Margaret Foulkes Chan, who wrote: 
45   
 
 
Perhaps "identity" (a marriage of what we are and what we choose to be) 
can be likened to "path" or "way" in the world, and therefore a work of 
both discovery and creation. I believe in fate and self-determination both. 
And so I am Foulkes, but also Chan; Scots Presbyterian/Gypsy, but 
Buddhist. Sometimes I wonder if there is any falseness in creating parts of 
myself. Could any part of me be Chinese? Is it not "academic" to believe 
in past lives and their influences? I wonder to what degree I shape myself 
as a reflection of and in contrast to the ways of my family.  
And how much is in my control?  
And wherein lie the causes, the effects? 
(Margaret, Webchat, 05.02) 
Margaret brought together the notions of authentic self and agency, suggesting that 
identity be conceptualized as a ?marriage? of both. This understanding of identity as a 
blend of discovery and creation, rather than as one or the other, creates space for students 
and teachers to be shaped by their environments while at the same time taking an active 
role in constituting themselves. While Margaret believed in destiny, she also 
conceptualized herself as choosing who she is, creating parts of herself and then 
wondering if they bear falseness. 
Closely related to the concept of agency is the authority to define oneself. Indeed 
Weber?s (2001) interpretation of identity as ?how we see ourselves and who we think we 
are? (p. 97) begs questions about the relationship between ?who we think we are? and 
?who we are? and the about who has the authority to determine whether the two are 
synonymous. Like Margaret, Alexandra was protective of her students? agency in identity 
46   
 
 
construction. When I made reference to ?her constructions of her students? identities? 
(Suhanthie, E-mail, 05.02), she was quick to correct me, decentering her own 
interpretations in order to endorse the subjectivities of her students: 
?I guess I would say that they are my "mis-constructions" or "mal-
constructions" of my student's identities. It is awkward to say that I 
construct their identities because it is only my perception and 
misperception of their identities. What we have to do is encourage our 
students to express their true identities as they develop and grow into their 
own understanding of self and relationship to the world around them. I 
need to listen and observe with different ears and eyes. (Alexandra, E-
Mail, 05.02)  
The passage reveals a representation of identity that makes space for both authenticity 
(?their true identities?) and agency, evidenced in her disavowal of her own 
understandings of students? identities in favor of privileging her students? constructions 
and articulations of their own identities as they develop. Alexandra was similarly 
attentive to the relational aspect of identity construction: 
As for identity, I think we are also "formed" or "malformed" by the 
expectations of those around us. I don't think that identity is devoid of 
choice, but there is so much involved. I think that identity is wrapped up in 
what we imagine, dream, experience and avoid experiencing. It is what we 
learn through trial and error as much as what we read and learn in formal 
ways. (Alexandra, E-mail, 05.03) 
47   
 
 
For Alexandra, agency in the process of identity construction happens under the influence 
of others, relationally. She connects identity to future vision and to experience. The 
connection between identity and the future echoes Bonny Norton?s work on ?imagined 
communities.? Norton (2002) posits that humans build identities that are not only 
connected to others they are in interaction with, but also in relation to the community 
they imagine themselves belonging to in the future.  
The importance of agency in identity construction becomes visible when teachers 
negotiate the line between providing guidance to their students and abusing their teacher 
power by bulldozing them towards a certain identity or identification. Katie walked this 
line when she sought to discourage a student?s denial of his ethnic heritage: 
There is tension between my desire to respect my students? power to 
construct their own cultural identities and my desire for them to 
experience a sense of pride in their native culture. However, I think that 
tension can be negotiated. In order for children/students to fully 
understand, develop, and establish their identities, I think that they should 
know at least where their families come from and the culture they were 
born or raised into.? (Katie, E-mail, 04.25) 
Katie?s concern about allowing students the freedom to determine their own relationships 
with their heritages rang familiar. It echoed a thought she had written on a class webchat 
a year earlier: 
Our job is not to "make" the child express her heritage, but to create the 
space for it and encourage her to take part. If she doesn't feel comfortable, 
she doesn't. That is something she will have to work it out on her own. We 
48   
 
 
as teachers should be there as a support and resource and create a "safe" 
multicultural environment. (Katie, Webchat, 04.27)  
Long before she entered the classroom, Katie was solidifying a philosophy that privileged 
her students? autonomy and power in their self-identification. For this teacher, 
encouraging pride in her students? cultural heritage presented the danger of toe-treading 
on their agency to define their Selves, although she perceived this challenge to be 
surmountable. 
Identity and Image 
The distinction between identity and image is blurred. If identity is ?who I am,? 
then image is ?who I present to others.? James Baldwin (1972) likened identity to 
nakedness and image to robes, emphasizing the importance of being sensitive to the line 
between the two: 
Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the 
nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a 
little like the robes of the desert, through which one?s nakedness can 
always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one?s nakedness is 
all that gives one the power to change one?s robes.  
Baldwin sees changing images, or robes, to be related to identities and suggests that 
?one?s nakedness? should always be discernable. The image a person presents publicly 
must find its root in some part of that person, her context, and her experiences. The 
teachers in this study and their students had occasion to construct images in response to 
the demands of their social contexts, sometimes focusing to a great extent on the images 
they presented. However, the mere fact that they consciously chose images they did not 
49   
 
 
condone does not mean that these images were disembodied from their identities.  
Identities and images are complicated in that they are not smooth, complementary, or 
coherent. In fact, contradiction, incoherence, and muti-layered meanings may better name 
the constructs of identity and image.  Identity and image and should not be conceived as 
divorced from each other. As images are constructed and presented, they become part of 
a person?s identity and cannot be considered as a detached fabrication. The terrain 
between image and identity is theorized in greater detail in Chapter 8.  
Otherness 
Much of identity is defined in relation to a loudly silent norm: white, male, able-
bodied, heterosexual, middle-class. To the degree that individuals deviate from the norm, 
they are Other. The relationship between norm and Other is invariably hierarchical, with 
the perceived norm topping the hierarchy and the Other falling lower on the totem pole. 
However, the polar positioning of norm and Other are themselves reproductive of the 
categories. Mohanty (1991) suggests a deconstruction of the dominant as ??the implicit 
referent, i.e., the yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural Others? (p. 55) as 
part of the quest to complicate the existing binary between norm and Other. The 
construction of Otherness presumes distinct, tidily delineated categories: 
?Identity ? supposes that a clear dividing line can be made between I and 
not-I, he and she; between depth and surface, or vertical and horizontal 
identity; between us here and them over there. (Minh-ha, 1990, p. 371).  
That dividing line is, of course, intangible and even somewhat quixotic. We all belong to 
multiple groups and may therefore be simultaneously in dominant and subordinate 
groups. For instance, I am at the same time of color and able-bodied. Furthermore, the 
50   
 
 
status of those groups is not consistently powerful. While women are an oppressed group 
in general social terms, sometimes I might be attributed greater credibility (perhaps 
erroneously) when I speak about sexism because I am female. Talking about norms and 
Others is a complex endeavor. It is important that we acknowledge the commonalities 
that are grounded in shared experience, but discussing these shared experiences without 
universalizing poses a perpetual challenge. 
Conclusion 
I separate the story that follows into three parts: meanings of teaching language, 
meanings of students? positionalities and identities, and meanings of becoming ESOL 
teachers. In Part I, I introduce the meanings that Jane, Margaret, Alexandra, and Katie 
make of teaching language. I describe some of the tenets that became important as the 
teachers defined themselves in relation to their work, such as sustenance of student voice, 
accuracy of form, discursive constructions of student identity, and language variation 
hierarchies. Part I also includes an in-depth examination of the role of grammar in 
language teaching, which was useful in helping me to understand meanings of autonomy, 
authority, social power, and knowledge. Part II is about how the four teachers grappled 
with their roles in the shaping of their students? identities and positionalities. In it, I seek 
to broaden the category of linguistic difference and to provide a richer account of other 
dimensions of difference, such as race, national identity, and gender differences, by 
including their role in a dimension that has traditionally been neglected, that is language 
minority status. Part III looks to the role that the teachers were playing in the discursive 
construction of their professional identities, examining the space between their practices 
51   
 
 
and their positionings, between their images and their identities, and between their 
contexts and their lives. 
These three parts represent the strands within which I understood the teacher?s 
experiences. They are not cohesive, in fact you may sometimes perceive them, as you 
read, to be jarringly disconnected. However, my intention was not to represent a perfect 
world in which I caulk in gaps and sand over bumps. The work that follows is not 
intended to capture an entire reality, but rather my representation, and it is shaped by my 
understandings of what is means to know, which in turn have been shaped by the time I 
have spent with Alexandra, Katie, Jane, and Margaret. I have come to understand the 
process of knowing to be fragmented and changeable and always on the verge of 
changing again. It was therefore more meaningful for me to represent the fragments of 
the story in the way that I saw them rather than seeking to create the appearance of a 
cohesiveness that was not evident to me. Knowing and identity are closely related. Like 
knowing, human identities are fragmented and sometimes contradictory. I therefore did 
not seek to create cohesion out of the teachers? and my own multiple identities, but rather 
I foregrounded the slices that were helpful to this discussion. 
Ideology and Style 
In terms of ideology and style, I tried to avoid a heavy reliance on the passive 
voice, recognizing that its frequent usage in academic language contributes to the illusion 
of an absolute and objective representation of knowledge, obscuring the role the 
researcher plays in interpreting findings. For instance, claiming that ?these themes 
emerged? rather than ?I saw these themes emerging? speciously implies that these are 
themes that would have been visible to any researcher. I use the first person throughout 
52   
 
 
this work (for instance: ?I will discuss these ideas next? rather than ?These ideas will be 
discussed next?) because I believe that the historical reluctance to use the first person in 
academic writing has served to construct the deceptive appearance of detachment and 
consequently of objectivity. 
When I use the terms ?ESOL pedagogy? and ?language pedagogy,? I include 
more than merely the transmission of information about functional language use and 
grammar. I seek to broaden constructs of ESOL pedagogy by extending understandings 
of this term to include the making of meanings, identities, and ideologies within 
language. This means that I am interested in all ESOL classroom interactions, and not 
only those that revolve explicitly around language instruction in its narrowest sense. For 
this reason, while it could be argued that many of the events that I describe may have 
transpired just as readily in a math classroom, a music classroom, or a social studies 
classroom, what makes them relevant to this discussion is not a connection to a limited 
and technical understanding of language learning as simply transmittal of grammar and 
vocabulary; rather they are relevant because they occurred in the rich and corporeal 
context of an ESOL classroom. All language learning involves learning about identity, 
power, and knowledge.  
 
 
 
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54   
 
 
 
 
 
Chapter 2. Methodology 
We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Shall be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. 
T.S. Eliot 
Critical Feminist Ethnography 
Eliot?s (1942) musings about exploration and familiar terrain bring to my mind 
the parallels between ethnographic research and exploration. As I set out on this voyage, I 
embraced Oran?s (1998) conceptualization of qualitative researchers as having no maps, 
just the tools necessary for making a map while journeying. I positioned myself to be 
flexible and allowed myself to deviate from paths if I found them unhelpful in the 
exploration of the terrain I was interested in.  
At the end of my exploring, looking backwards at the map that I have drawn, I 
name the processes that have guided me: I present this work as a critical feminist 
ethnography. I believe that the integration of feminist methods, critical research, and 
ethnography offers rich possibilities for generating knowledge and understanding. My 
intent is to challenge and broaden current understandings of what it means to do critical 
work, feminist work, and ethnographic work by exploring the interstices (Bhabha, 1994) 
among the three. This study is ethnographic in that it is ?a qualitative research process 
55   
 
 
and product whose aim is cultural interpretation? (p. 5., Graue, in press). My exploration 
was guided by a research question deeply embedded in the context of cultural 
interpretation: ?What are meanings of knowledge, pedagogy, and identity in the context 
of becoming a language teacher?? However, my methods depart from traditional 
ethnography in many ways. I have been troubled throughout the study by methodological 
questions that related to power, representation, and relationship in ethnography. My 
misgivings stem primarily from dissatisfaction with the ways in which ethnography has 
historically positioned researchers in relation to participants, described by Behar (1996) 
in this way: ?Somehow, out of [the] legacy, born of European colonial impulse to know 
others in order to lambast them, better manage them, or exalt them, anthropologists have 
made an intellectual cornucopia.? (p. 4). In a world in which the researched has 
traditionally been a cultural Other, preserving a strongly delineated boundary between 
researcher and researched serves to reproduce the power imbalance between the two. In 
traditional ethnography, the researcher is positioned as a consumer of participants? 
experiences, using them for her own purposes.  
I moved away from traditional ethnography in several ways. Most notably, during 
my data analysis, I made methodological decisions designed to foreground transcriptions 
of regular afternoon tea gatherings in my home over all other data sources, including 
observations and field notes. This practice stands in direct contradiction to guidelines 
offered by several leading theorists in research methodology. For instance, Spradley 
(1980) suggests that ethnography should rely primarily on observational field notes. 
LeCompte and Preissle (1993) believe that ethnographic research strategies are 
?empirical and naturalistic. Participant and nonparticipant observation are used to acquire 
56   
 
 
firsthand, sensory accounts of phenomena as they occur in real-world settings, and 
investigators take care to avoid purposeful manipulation of variables in the study? (p. 3). 
I moved some distance away from these guidelines; the afternoon teas were situated in 
my home rather than in a setting that occurred naturally and independently of me, and my 
presence and input influenced the course of the study. I will discuss my role in the study 
in relation to the construct of neutrality later in this chapter. 
My understandings were guided by a number of feminist and critical researchers, 
including Behar (1996), Fine (1992), Wong (forthcoming), Reinharz, 1992, and Britzman 
(1991). My deviations from traditional ethnographic methods included the following. I 
used constant comparative methodology, coding and identifying important themes within 
the afternoon tea data, and then introducing the data from other sources only in relation to 
the themes that emerged from the afternoon tea data, which I believe to be more closely 
connected to the voices of the participants, the power of community, the epistemological 
intent of research as praxis, and the changing nature of my research questions. I will 
discuss the methodological implications of afternoon teas for this study in greater detail 
later in this chapter. I have chosen to move away from traditional ethnographic guidelines 
because I believe that ethnography?s historical commitment to observational methods of 
data collection has actually sustained ethnographers? tendency to embrace unrealistic 
(and often undesirable) ideals of neutrality and to obscure the political nature of all 
research, particularly cultural research. In relying on observation field notes, which are 
the interpretation of the researcher, ethnographers venerate an ideal of naturalism that is 
misleading and convince themselves that it is possible to make a neutral record of what is 
going on. I sought an approach that differed from this stance, agreeing with Roman and 
57   
 
 
Apple?s (1990) charge that ?naturalistic ethnography constitutes an extension rather than 
a break from positivism?(p.48). Reinharz (1992) has understood ethnography to include 
?long periods of researcher participation in the life of the interviewee? (p. 18), but I did 
not focus on walking alongside participants in order to observe and record their lives. 
Rather, I favored methodology in which participants related and recounted their lives to 
me through their own lens. 
Feminist Ethnography 
?When a subject is controversial?and any question about sex is that?one 
cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold 
whatever opinion one does hold.? 
(Woolf, 1929, p. 4, quoted in Gilligan, 1987) 
Although I read A Room of One?s Own in my younger years, it was only more 
recently and through Carol Gilligan that Woolf?s words became richly meaningful to me. 
Gilligan used this quote to connect feminist thought with ontology. I embrace the idea 
that no research presents a single, limited, Truth. Instead, I seek to provide liberal 
contextual information to show how I developed my understandings of the people and 
terrain I was exploring. Neither educational scholars nor feminists agree about what it 
means to do feminist research, and I find the absence of an absolute definition a 
comfortable space to work in. I will not attempt to contribute or suggest a prescriptive 
definition, heeding Reinharz?s (1992) counsel: ?Instead of orthodoxy, feminist research 
practices must be recognized as a plurality? (p. 4). In this section, I will explore how I 
came to understand the meanings of feminist research methods in the context of this 
study. 
58   
 
 
Reinharz links methodology to identity, suggesting that that feminist research is 
research conducted by feminists or those who consider themselves to be part of ?the 
women?s movement.? For me, this means, for example, that I have an interest in 
challenging oppressive practices, advocating for social justice, representing participants 
ethically, and embracing the constructs of relationship and connectedness. Villenas 
(2000) draws our attention to Behar?s (1995) discussion of breasts in anthropology in 
order to highlight the tensions facing women ethnographers studying other women. Behar 
noted metaphorically that bare breasts usually belong to Other women, women being 
observed, women under that objectifying tool of power, the gaze (Sartre, 1957), while the 
breasts of female anthropologists remain concealed. She comments that in hiding their 
breasts from view, female anthropologists can come to believe that their breasts are not 
important, and they can be seduced into embracing constructs that are more typically 
associated with masculinity (for example, detachment, objectivity, and power-neutrality), 
thus reinforcing invisible norm of maleness. I wanted to heed Cixous? (1976) caution to 
all women who write about other women: ??don?t denigrate woman, don?t make of her 
what men have made of you.? (p. 252). Particularly in the context of a history of 
?teacher-bashing? research (McLaren, 2000) conducted by academicians on women 
teachers, it became important that I represent Katie, Jane, Alexandra, and Margaret?s 
practice in a way that was respectful of them and simultaneously genuine.  
The contributions of feminist theorists helped me to think about how 
transformative research is related to participant relationship and voice. Michelle Fine 
(1992) describes three possible stances that researchers can take: ventriloquy, voice, and 
activism. I think of ventriloquy as the most traditional form, in it the researcher-author 
59   
 
 
pursues objectivity at its purest, claiming to be invisible, neutral, and objective. Fine tells 
us that ventriloquy ??can be found in all research narratives in which researchers? 
privileges and interests are camouflaged? (p. 214). A ventriloquist researcher would 
present herself as having no political agenda or underlying ideology. This claim is 
problematic because all researchers have beliefs and leanings about their research, and 
even the most objectively projected statistical study is making a political statement in 
support of a quest for objectivity and an absolute Truth. In Fine?s ventriloquy, ?The 
author tells Truth, has no gender, race, class, or stance. A condition of truth-telling is 
anonymity? (p. 214).  
 Her second category, voices, is more troubling for me because I find myself easily 
seduced by the idea that I can benevolently create a place for the silenced voices (and 
therefore knowledge) of beginning ESOL teachers. Fine cautions us that this stance is ?a 
subtler form of ventriloquism? and that in adopting it, while ?appear[ing] to let the 
?Other? speak, just under the covers of those marginal, if now ?liberated? voices, we hide? 
(p. 215). I chose to privilege one data source over all others, the afternoon teas, because it 
was the data source that I believed to be closest to the teachers? voices. In doing so, I find 
myself flirting with the lines that bound the category that Fine names ?voices?. When I 
select interview excerpts or snippets from field notes and edit them, what I choose to 
include or exclude is integrally linked to my research intent and my identity. To present 
the voices of the four teachers as untouched by my own ideas and leanings would be 
prevarication. My challenge, then, is to organize the representations of the teachers so 
that I achieve a degree of candor in locating myself as a researcher in relation to them. 
60   
 
 
The afternoon teas, in particular, have both supported and complicated my attempts to 
strip ventriloquism from study partners? voices.  
The researcher stance that I seek to embrace is Fine?s third category, activism, 
referred to in her later work (1994) as activist feminist research. Activism ?seeks to 
unearth, disrupt, and transform existing ideological and/or institutional arrangements? (p. 
220). Whether or not the researcher chooses to share her stance, all research is positioned 
in relation to existing institutional arrangements, even research that claims to be neutral. 
Some researchers seek to reinforce institutional power, and others, including activist 
researchers, seek change and disruption. However, a desire for change in itself does not 
define an activist researcher. Rather, activist researchers are characterized by their 
acceptance of the ?deep responsibility to assess critically and continually our own, as 
well as informants?, changing opinions? (p. 41). Two elements are important in this 
abstraction, one being the insertion of the researcher?s opinions into the study and the 
other being the value of change over time. To see ourselves and participants as evolving 
beings, and not merely convenient snapshots, liberates us from a static conceptualization 
of learning and becoming. Throughout the study I make reference to my changing 
conceptualization of my research and to the study partners? evolving pedagogies and 
identities. My intention in foregrounding these changes is not to represent the teachers or 
myself as inconsistent, but rather to highlight what I perceive as our development. 
Critical Ethnography 
The researcher role and relationship with participants are less straightforward in 
critical ethnography than traditional ethnography, and indeed the definition of ?critical 
ethnography? is nebulous in nature. Few efforts have been made to develop a 
61   
 
 
methodology for critical ethnography, and those only relatively recently in terms of 
anthropological history (Carsprecken, 1996; Thomas, 1993).  
 I extend Reinharz? connection between researcher identity and feminist 
methodology to apply to critical ethnography. To me, prescribing a critical method is a 
paradoxical and even ironic project because the imposition of a prevailing definition 
subscribed to by the majority silences marginal perspectives and contributions. For me, 
the critical nature of a study is primarily an identity issue?this work is critical because I 
am the one conducting it, and I am motivated by issues that relate to how power 
circulates socially. I am concerned with racism, the oppression of language minority 
students, the assimilationist orientation of immigrant children?s schooling, sexism, the 
marginalization of ESOL teachers within schooling, linguicism, and the disempowerment 
of beginning teachers. Scholars who have associated critical ethnography with concerns 
about power and oppression include Thomas (1983), who defined critical ethnography as 
?conventional ethnography with a critical purpose,? going on to explain that critical 
ethnography ought to apply: ?a subversive world view to the conventional logic of 
cultural inquiry.? For Trueba (1999), critical ethnography stresses the notion that all 
education is intrinsically political, and that consequently critical ethnography must 
advocate for the oppressed. Carspecken (1996), too, is concerned with oppression, telling 
us that critical ethnographers: ?? have both witnessed and directly experienced forms of 
oppression. We do not like them. We want to change them. Much of our research 
attempts to clarify how and where oppression works? (p. 7). For Dippo and Simon 
(1982), the project of critical ethnography challenges us to address the question: ?How 
does one provide the details of concrete social relations in a manner which renders them 
62   
 
 
familiar and sensible yet simultaneously calls their take-for-granted character into 
question?? (p. 4).  
However, this work departs from some traditions of critical ethnography. In 
particular, Trueba and Bartolome (2000) charge critical ethnographers with advocating 
for the oppressed by accelerating both their conscientization (Freire, 1970) and that of 
their oppressors. I disagree with the unidirectional implication of this intent. While I 
brought my own conceptual frames to the study, I was not in a better position to 
accelerate my study partners? conscientization than they were mine. Indeed, they 
effectively supported the development of my own conscientization through both their 
familiarity with the study terrain and their positioning, ability, and willingness to analyze 
the nature of their own oppression within their contexts. In turning a critical eye to the 
systems of oppression in their own worlds, Jane, Katie, Alexandra, Margaret, and I 
supported each other?s evolving understandings of our marginalization and socialization 
as ESOL professionals, as female teachers, and as beginning educators. I believe that, as 
women of color, Katie and I sustained each other?s consciousness of how race and gender 
interact within our lives as second language educators. Assuming that a researcher is in a 
position to accelerate a participants? conscientization runs the danger of reinforcing a 
researcher-researched hierarchy by assuming that the researcher is more knowledgeable 
and even more enlightened than participants.  
My work also represents a departure from the teachings of Carspecken (1996), 
who wrote specifically about critical ethnography and offers a step-by-step guide for 
conducting critical qualitative research. Carsprecken emphasized the importance of 
methodological rigor and attention to validity. What he defines as attention to validity?
63   
 
 
he provides as examples multiple recording devices, multiple observers, and reduced 
Hawthorne effects?was absent in my study. I don?t see these as overlooked but rather 
just not valuable in helping me to answer the questions I was asking. I was a poster child 
for Hawthorne effects. I am certain that my participation in the afternoon teas swayed the 
flow of the conversation, that my questions were at times leading, and that my 
relationship with study partners affected the identities they constructed while speaking 
with me.  
I use the term critical ethnography as distinguished from naturalistic ethnography 
to separate it from the neutrality-seeking tendencies of the latter, in which the researcher 
purports to observe a culture without altering it by her presence. The quest for objectivity 
in naturalistic inquiry is a by-product of more traditional forms of research and in fact 
reinforces and perpetuates the connections between ethnography and positivism (Roman 
and Apple, 1990). This is not to say that I threw caution to the wind. Rather, I 
acknowledge that by merely walking into a classroom I changed its climate. By turning 
on a tape-recorder or taking notes, I affected teachers? actions. By asking certain 
questions, I led teachers to think differently. This did not prevent me from walking into a 
classroom, taking field notes, turning on a tape-recorder, asking a thought-provoking 
question. Rather, my challenge was to be mindful of my actions and their consequences 
and straightforward and transparent in my accounts of events. For instance, in the 
conversation I described in the Introduction (page 26), my assertion that ?the master?s 
tools will never destroy the master?s house? held the potential to sway Katie away from 
her contention that dominant norms can be appropriated and redirected to support self-
empowerment. Throughout this dissertation, I make a point of including my words or 
64   
 
 
actions when their consequences (or potential consequences) are visible, as they were in 
this instance. In decentering the observational data but nonetheless situating this study in 
ethnographic terrain, I hope to challenge and extend definitions of ethnography and of 
critical ethnography by encouraging methodological experimentation that creates space 
for participant voice and authorship. 
As I was preparing my dissertation proposal, I mentioned to a faculty member my 
desire to see Alexandra, Jane, Katie and Margaret succeed professionally. The professor 
encouraged me to step back and reconsider my position in order to determine which role 
was most important to me: activist or voyeur. I was troubled then by the inherent 
assumption that the two are mutually exclusive because it seemed to extend to a battle 
between values and neutrality (Apple, 1996), a friction that I considered unnecessary. 
Few of my actions and decisions do not have a value orientation, I thought, and I would 
venture that the same could be said for most researchers. The assumption that reifying 
neutrality improves research is unsubstantiated, but the issue continues to rear its rather 
intimidating head in the lives of researchers fresh to the profession, like me?and even to 
veteran researchers. Throughout the course of the study, I found myself frequently in the 
position of deciding between roles: researcher or mentor, researcher or activist, 
researcher or friend. I?ve attempted to document these tensions throughout my account of 
the study. 
Knowledge Construction in Research  
At the heart of the researcher-researched dichotomy lies the relationship between 
knowledge and power. Research is the quest for knowledge, and the conceptualization of 
the researcher-researched relationship in any study helps to frame what counts as 
65   
 
 
knowledge, what knowledge is of most worth, and who gets to decide. The 
methodological intent of this study was to hear and understand teachers? voices and to 
explore teacher knowledge embedded in practice. I sought not only to present my 
meanings of Katie, Jane, Alexandra, and Margaret?s lives, but to explore how they 
thought about their lives and the lives they lived alongside. This goal took me on a 
complicated journey, one that called into question my ideas about the relationships 
among data, theory, and self; the possibilities of emancipatory research; representation 
and voice; objectivity and objectification; power; humanity and the nature of being 
human; praxis; connection and community; context and situatedness; validity; agency; 
and the politics of telling other people?s stories.  
Research Questions 
As I explored the space occupied by teacher knowledge in the literature, I found it 
to be obscured from view, hidden away in a dusty and barely accessible, poky basement 
room. I knew that I wanted to develop study methods that did not ignore that basement 
room. To this end, I pursued a dialogic, reflective approach in which my study partners 
and I interacted to generate knowledge and understanding together. I did not want this 
study to focus on how I wished Jane, Margaret, Katie, and Alexandra would teach, but 
rather I wanted to explore how the knowledge they constructed from their experiences 
could inform current understandings of learning and teaching.  
I situated this study within the complex work of research as praxis, that is 
research situated at the complicated crossroads of theory and practice, informed by and 
embedded in life, action, and practice (Freire, 1970; Lather, 1991). In doing so I faced the 
task of developing research questions that helped me to find a space for my openness in 
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inquiry within the inherent partiality of my emancipatory orientation. My biases and 
leanings were unmistakably present, but I needed to find a way to ensure that I 
continually acknowledged them without allowing them to become an orthodoxy. In order 
to be truly exploratory, I needed to probe the connections between theory and data 
without viewing them either consciously or unwittingly in the conventionally sanctioned 
order of first theory (in the form of a research hypothesis), followed by (and supported by 
or refuted by) data, as is standard process in positivistic orientations. This task was 
complicated because I had specific ideas about how schools support social injustices and 
was invested in seeing traditional models of teaching transformed, and I needed to be 
sure that these preconceived notions of how schools should change did not serve silently 
as an unwritten research hypothesis. In situating myself in relation to the study, I pursued 
a fine balance between intrusive heavy-handedness and neutral invisibility: I did not want 
to frame this study as a hierarchical and even elitist intervention in which I, as a 
researcher, purported to know what Jane, Margaret, Katie, and Alexandra needed to do to 
teach well. Nor did I seek to witness my study partners? experiences and appropriate 
them for my own purposes as a detached and analytical observer. I faced the challenge, 
then, of asking questions that positioned me to neither direct nor exploit.  
Wong?s (1994, 1995, 1996, 1997) extensive work on critical dialogic approaches 
to teaching, researching, and learning was influential in the framing of the research 
questions. Wong (1994)?s critical dialogic approaches draw from theoretical sources as 
diverse as Socrates and Confucius, Paolo Freire and Mao Zedong, Lev Vygotsky, and 
Mikhail Bakhtin. Wong?s work led me to Socrates? model of maieutic inquiry, in which 
wisdom is the humble assumption of one?s own ignorance. Maieutic inquiry diverges 
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from hierarchical understandings of the researcher role that have come to be accepted 
within most Western academia. Historically in the United States, researchers created 
knowledge in experimental settings and provided their findings to administrators, who 
used the information to influence and even control teachers? classroom instruction. The 
institutional dichotomy between research and teaching is made all the more disturbing 
when viewed in terms of the inequitable relationship that men and women have to power 
as it relates to knowledge within educational institutions, with researchers being 
traditionally male, while teachers even today are predominantly female. Critical dialogic 
approaches serve to challenge the teacher-researcher power structure stubbornly enduring 
despite more recent recognition of its shortcomings (Gitlin, 1991; Fine, 1992; Lather, 
1991; Wong, forthcoming; Motha, 2002) by listening to the teachers as experienced, 
knowledgeable practitioners. Absent the hierarchy, the possibility arises for inquiry that 
is truly dialogic, in which learning is a two-way street. 
Wong?s approaches underpin the framing of my research questions. Rather than 
defining desirable practice a priori and asking whether beginning teachers achieve it (as 
would be expected in a study in which theory and data are viewed in traditional 
sequential relation), I ask questions about the meanings the study partners make of the 
process of becoming teachers. In this study therefore, theory does not lead, but is 
produced within. Wexler (1982) has criticized the dichotomy between empirical research 
and emancipatory pedagogy, but Lather (1991) notes the absence of strategies to integrate 
the two. Methodologically, this study seeks to address that gap. My research questions 
therefore needed to capture my intent in a manner that was careful and thoughtful. I 
asked: 
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What are meanings of knowledge, pedagogy, and identity in the context of becoming a 
language teacher? 
My three subquestions were: 
1. What meanings of teaching language are crafted by beginning ESOL teachers? 
2. How do first-year ESOL teachers come to understand and attend to students? 
identities? 
3. What is the nature of the teachers? emerging identities? 
My research questions have evolved considerably. The question in my proposal was: 
?What kind of pedagogy do first-year ESOL teachers craft as they attend to the cultural 
lives of their children?? I abandoned the last clause as redundant with the realization that 
everything that teachers do, whether by omission or by design, attends to the cultural 
lives of their students. This is particularly true of language teachers because language and 
culture cannot be understood separately from each other. I then turned my attention to the 
other peg of the question: pedagogical matters. Over the course of the year of data 
collection, I began to perceive the project of first-year teaching as less about learning to 
teach language and more about becoming a language teacher. This distinction, while 
subtle, is important because the revised wording represents a shift in focus from 
pedagogy to identity and more specifically from the identity of pedagogy to the pedagogy 
of identity. This study was not so much about how the teachers taught as about how they 
were becoming language teachers. Pedagogy and identity are, of course, interrelated, and 
the teachers? pedagogical lives were integrally linked to who they became as teachers. 
However, as my relationships with the teachers deepened, the piece I chose to foreground 
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shifted from what they did to whom they became and shifted the practical focus from 
classroom observations to contexts that included the teachers? voices in community.  
Study Partner Selection 
Alexandra, Jane, Katie, and Margaret were recent graduates of the M.Ed in 
TESOL program at a large, Research I, land-grant institution in the Mid-Atlantic. I chose 
to work with four teachers because fewer than four would have reduced the richness of 
variation among study partners and would have limited opportunities for comparing 
individual threads such as biography and context. Studying more than four would have 
required a sacrifice in depth. 
I selected study partners who would represent a range of meanings in order to 
develop a deep understanding of identity formation and in particular, of the process of 
becoming a language teacher. A random sample would have been desirable only if I had 
been seeking population validity and intended to generalize claims to anyone beyond the 
teachers I selected. More useful to my goals was purposeful sampling, in which study 
partners are selected because they are appropriate for the purposes of the study (Gall, 
Borg, & Gall, 1996). Of the program graduates that year, nine students took full-time 
positions in the local public schools. I selected four of these whom I believed had 
particular strengths in ?attending to the cultural lives of students,? by which I meant the 
following (at the time that I selected study partners): they had indicated that they valued 
cultural diversity, were interested in maintaining children?s connections to their home 
cultures, were invested in students? explorations of their own cultural biographies, and 
considered social identity development to be inherent to ESOL learning. The four 
teachers I invited agreed to participate. Choosing study partners whose philosophies 
70   
 
 
approximated my own created both limitations and benefits. It limited the range of 
perspectives that I had access to, but at the same time it helped to minimize the 
ideological difference between the teachers and me. Other graduates that year were 
similarly oriented, but in order to provide the most resonant picture of beginning 
teaching, I sought both commonalities and differences among study partners. The 
particular combination of Alexandra, Jane, Katie, and Margaret represented a nice range 
of grade-levels (Katie and Margaret taught elementary school, Alexandra middle, and 
Jane high school); of experience (Jane and Margaret were in their first semester of 
teaching, Katie and Alexandra in their second); and of counties (Alexandra, Margaret, 
and Katie worked in the county that is the largest employer of our graduates, while Jane 
worked in a county with fewer resources and in which the majority of the population was 
of color). All four teachers had lived in a non-English speaking country, as was typical of 
graduates of the program. Katie was the only graduate of color that year, and eight of the 
nine graduates were women.  
Data Collection 
This was a year-long study in order to allow me to explore deeply and to capture 
variation across time. I recognized that I could not tell an entire story. Rather, I sought 
various lenses that would allow me to view some of the many parts of the process of 
becoming an ESOL teacher. Each data source offered a different perspective. 
? Afternoon tea transcripts (every 2 to 3 weeks). I had initially planned the study to 
revolve around classroom observations supported by interviews. The afternoon 
teas were the very definition of serendipity. They were not even a thought in my 
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research proposal, but by the end of the study I considered them by far my most 
significant source, with the other sources existing only to support this one. 
? For each teacher, approximately 2 hours every two weeks of classroom 
observation from October to December, then approximately 2 hours every 3 or 4 
weeks from January to March, observing for example teacher actions, patterns of 
communication, classroom discourse, student participation, and physical 
environment. 
? Informal, unstructured interviews (dialogues) before the school year began, after 
school ended, and periodically over the course of the year. These were situated in 
the lives of the teachers and therefore took place in the context of teachers? day-
to-day work.  
? Informal, unstructured, unscheduled interviews with students in the classes, other 
teachers and faculty, administrators, principals, etc. 
? Materials, curricula, lesson plans, school documents, textbooks, students? work. 
? E-Mails exchanged between study partners and myself. 
? Phone conversations between study partners and myself. 
Although these were not gathered for the purposes of this study, I refer sometimes to 
historical events and documents: the teachers? master?s-level seminar papers, student 
teaching evaluations, papers, e-mails, and electronic discussions that took place in the 
context of our relationship before the study began. 
The Afternoon Teas 
Because the afternoon teas were important not only in supporting the five of us as 
a community and in supporting the teachers? practice, but also from a methodological 
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perspective, I pause to discuss them here. This study was initially designed as a collection 
of four cases. I intended to explore the experiences of four individual beginning ESOL 
teachers during their first year of teaching, following the portraits with cross-case 
analysis (Yin, 1984). Drawing from the traditions of critical ethnography, I anticipated 
that the primary data sources would be observations and interviews. However, as the 
study began to unfold, an unanticipated element surfaced, the element of community. The 
teachers indicated an interest in meeting with each other regularly in an effort to build an 
academic and support network for themselves. First Alexandra, then Katie expressed a 
desire to spend time with their peers, and the suggestion was later supported by Margaret 
and Jane. They were seeking support from each other out of personal need, but in doing 
so they were claiming a space within the study. 
Imagining something reminiscent of the kitchen table conversations of the early 
feminist movement, I offered my home, which was a geographical midpoint among the 
four schools. And so began the afternoon teas, which we held usually every two or three 
weeks throughout the 1999-2000 school year. The five of us would sit on my family 
room floor, clustered around the coffee table, drinking strong tea and munching 
cucumber sandwiches, scones, and Sri Lankan mas paan. We gathered together in the 
afternoon after the last school bell rang, sometimes rushing off to prepare lessons or put 
children to bed, more often talking late into the night. By the second semester of the 
study, the afternoon teas had grown into dinners, although we always drank tea as we 
chatted.  
 The afternoon teas transformed the study. I was no longer exploring four cases of 
individual teachers but rather was now studying one group of four teachers, a community 
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of teachers who came together and developed their meanings of teaching in a 
socioculturally fertile context. As I became increasingly appreciative of the constructs 
supported by the afternoon teas, such as connection, legitimation of participant voice, 
community, and the sociocultural nature of identity construction, I simultaneously began 
to see the numerous shortcomings of observations and field notes, which had initially 
formed the methodological backbone of the study, and of one-on-one interviews, which 
lacked the richness of community. On many occasions, I sat in teachers? classrooms and 
recorded what I believed I was observing, only to learn with greater probing during a 
lunch break that my interpretations were inconsistent with the teacher?s because I had 
missed the confrontation in the previous day?s class, I didn?t understand the history with 
the student involved, I hadn?t been privy to a hurried and whispered conversation in the 
staff room that morning, or I didn?t know about the phone conversation between the 
teacher and a parent the previous week. The value of a humanizing (Freire, 1998) 
contextualization became apparent to me as the classroom observations began to appear 
to be disconnected from the teachers? voices and constructions of meanings. I began to 
revisit my questions about what I was hoping to learn in the study.  
At the same time, my understandings of classroom practice were changing (I talk 
in detail about my changing understandings of practice in Chapter 8). As I conducted 
classroom observations, I became increasingly aware of just how much teachers? realities 
and discourses are structured by the complex worlds they inhabit beyond the classroom, 
and how limited classroom observations are in connecting to those worlds. The 
conception of practice as confined to classroom walls began to appear superficial and 
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even na?ve, and the limits of classroom observations as a data source became more 
evident. I turned my attention to the afternoon teas. 
Data Analysis 
In response to Harding?s call to rectify the androcentrism of research (1987) and 
Reinharz?s (1992) suggestion that a feminist perspective on data analysis includes 
flexibility and creativity in format, I took steps designed to accentuate the qualities that I 
believed were well represented by the afternoon tea data, including study partner voice 
and power and a respect for the researcher-study partner connection. I made 
modifications to commonly used qualitative research methods. I used constant 
comparative methodology (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) as is popular in qualitative data 
analysis, coding all data by hand as a matter of personal preference. I started with line-
by-line analysis because it is likely to be most generative (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). 
However, I took a step that was designed to privilege the afternoon tea transcriptions. I 
first coded the data from the afternoon teas only. I then introduced other data only in 
relation to the themes that emerged from the afternoon tea data. This step was intended to 
establish the centrality of the teachers? voices. I considered the afternoon tea data to form 
the basis of the study and have tried to avoid presenting observational data without 
overlaying the lens of the teacher?s perspective.  
The decision to privilege the afternoon tea data came about for multiple reasons 
and had several outcomes. I will explain my decision in the context of five threads: 
1. My desire to support the legitimacy of participant voice; 
2. My changing understandings of meanings of practice; 
3. The proximity that the afternoon teas gave me to praxis; 
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4. My increasing respect for the methodological and psychological power of 
?community? as it evolved in the context of the afternoon teas; and 
5. The changing nature of my research question. 
I will discuss each of these in detail next. 
Participant Voice and Representation 
As I worked with my various transcriptions and field notes, it became apparent to 
me that different data sources afforded me different perspectives, and that the different 
sources were unequally related to knowledge and to power. I found myself becoming 
increasingly uncomfortable with and unable to escape the objectifying nature of 
observations and field notes, and I began to realize that a pivotal site for the teachers? 
construction of meanings was their voices, rather than my record of observations. The 
afternoon teas in particular allowed me intimacy with study partners? voices. 
Observations are informative and very real in a positivistic sense, but they?re experienced 
through the eyes of the observer or researcher. I believe that there was something about 
the afternoon teas that helped me to disrupt the researcher-researched hierarchy by 
creating a distinctive space especially for teachers? voices and in this way increasing the 
degree of authorship and authority in how their teaching was interpreted. In order to be 
positioned to tell about their teaching lives, they had to actually take themselves through 
a reflective process and make deliberate choices about how to present the events they 
described. Privileging the afternoon tea transcripts over other sources of data meant that 
the teachers chose which stories to tell and were active in the construction and 
(re)presentation of their professional identities. It was the teachers? interpretations 
undergirding this study. I was therefore working not only with my interpretations of what 
76   
 
 
the teachers did, but with the teachers? own retellings of what they did. For me, the 
afternoon teas were a marvelous educational research tool because they allowed teachers 
to be the authors of their own experiences, a departure from a format in which researchers 
wrote teachers? lives.  
At the same time, privileging the data from afternoon teas brought to the surface 
complicated questions about ?accuracy?, which I initially perceived to present a 
challenge to validity. My concerns began to surface during the very first afternoon tea. 
Throughout the year, there were times when I would sit in a classroom or at a parent-
teacher conference and observe an incident, then listen to it recounted at the next 
afternoon tea. Teachers? retellings were not always consistent with my field notes. 
Sometimes these inconsistencies were minor, as in the time that a teacher remembered a 
name as ?Andrew,? although I had recorded it as ?Anthony.? At other times the 
differences were more significant. At first I was concerned, that little positivistic voice in 
my mind kept asking: ?What of the incidents I hear about but do not observe? Are they 
valid data? What if the teacher remembered incorrectly? Misheard?? That voice will 
never move out of my head, and in many ways it serves me well, keeping me questioning 
and reflecting on many of the cornerstones of qualitative research, but it is a voice that 
privileges my interpretation of events over that of study partners, and hence legitimates 
the historically embedded power imbalance between the researched and the researcher.  
Triangulation has been suggested as a way of increasing validity in qualitative 
research (Wolcott, 1990). In this study, triangulation would have been quite possible. I 
could have compared the stories told by the four teachers with my own observations, the 
interviews with the teachers, and interviews with students and other teachers. However, 
77   
 
 
triangulation serves our purposes only when we are seeking certain forms of knowledge, 
usually those that are considered to be more objective and less connected to individual, 
personal experience. Throughout the year, it served me to repeatedly revisit the question: 
What is the purpose of my research? I was less interested in whether study partners told 
the Truth and more concerned with how they made meaning of their classroom events. I 
was not interested in other people?s interpretations of the study partners? experiences.  
I would argue that shifting my emphasis from observations to afternoon teas 
helped me to better capture what I was trying to understand, that is the meanings that the 
study partners made of their experiences. Because all of the stories told at the afternoon 
teas represented study partners? meaning-making, they were all valid, and were 
consequently all connected to ?truth? (Motha, 2002). 
Changing Understandings of Meanings of Practice 
As the study began, my focus was on meanings of teaching, and I imagined that 
much of the teachers? discussions about their first year of work would revolve around 
what went on within their classroom walls. However, in the context of the afternoon teas, 
it soon became apparent to me that the teachers? practice was not constructed only by 
what they did in the classroom, it was about how they thought about what they did. The 
teachers were active in making meaning of their practice in many different contexts: in 
their classrooms; in their discussions with other adults?that is faculty, administrators, 
other teachers, and parents; at the afternoon teas with each other; at home with their 
partners; and at social gatherings with colleagues and also friends who were not teaching 
professionals. For instance, Katie linked her ideas about social groupings within schools 
to a discussion with her ultimate frisbee team members (Afternoon tea, 11.15). Margaret 
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told us about how she developed her ideas about language acquisition with her father at a 
family dinner (Afternoon tea, 06.19). As I became increasingly aware of the limitations 
of a definition of practice as confined to classroom walls, I began to see the inadequacies 
of a data source that was similarly confined to classroom walls, such as observations and 
field notes.  
Proximity to Praxis 
A central benefit of the afternoon teas was that they offered a fertile site for 
studying the praxis of beginning teaching, that is the space where theory and practice 
intertwined. Beginning teaching is a fascinating area because historically, in traditionally 
framed teacher education programs, it was the meeting place of theoretical knowledge 
amassed in academic institutions and the practical world of classroom teaching. 
Exploring the first year of teaching as a study site can therefore allow us an in-depth view 
into the meanings that teachers make of theory, practice, and the supposed area in 
between the two (it is difficult, and perhaps not even useful, to disentangle theory and 
practice). The afternoon teas permitted me greater intimacy with this terrain between 
knowledge and action because they became a site that nurtured the teachers? critical 
reflection on their practice, which Freire (1998) identifies as crucial to praxis: ?Critical 
reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. 
Otherwise, theory becomes simply ?blah, blah, blah,? and practice, pure activism? (p. 30) 
 
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Community and Relationship 
?All knowledge is constructed and the knower is an intimate part of the 
known.? 
(Belenky et al., 1996, p.137) 
The afternoon teas allowed me to be intimate with participants? voices, but then 
again so did the interviews. A further ingredient that made the afternoon teas such a rich 
data source was the element of community, which helped to move my exploration beyond 
understandings of individual identity in isolation to the richness and complexity of how 
identities construct each other. Although I was also present and a participant at the 
afternoon teas, each teacher was engaging not with just one researcher, but with four 
other educators. In terms of representation, the presence and validation of multiple voices 
in community helped me to experiment with degrees of authorship and authority in voice. 
Community became important, not only emotionally but also methodologically, because 
power is integrally related to intimacy and relationship. 
Relationship came to be a dominant theme in this study?s methodological 
framework. Mari Matsuda (1993) notes that group identity, like individual identity, has 
nebulous beginnings: ?its potential exists long before consciousness catches up with it. It 
is often only upon backward reflection that some kind of beginning is acknowledged? (p. 
3). Our group identity had its genesis several years earlier, in the summer of 1997, when I 
met the first of the study partners, Alexandra, when she wandered into my office in 
search of advising. I met Katie that fall when she and Alexandra enrolled in a research 
methods class I co-taught, and Jane and Margaret the semester after that. The study 
partners were similarly closely connected to each other when I began my study in the fall 
80   
 
 
of 1999. Each teacher had taken at least two classes with each of the others. Each had 
been in at least one class that I co-taught. I was familiar with their teaching, having 
served as coordinator of all four teachers? student teaching experiences, conducting 
observations, meeting with cooperating teachers, meeting with the teachers every two 
weeks, and exchanging dialogue journals. I was also familiar with the research of 
Alexandra, Katie, and Margaret, having supported their master?s theses. We had 
developed friendships before the study began, socialized out of school, faced professional 
doubts together. We had attended each others? weddings and met each others? families.  
My history and intimacy with Jane, Katie, Margaret, and Alexandra affected the 
way I structured the study and the methodological choices and changes I made 
throughout. Because I was in relation with the four women, I cared about their teaching 
practice and their personal lives, about how I represented them, and about what they 
thought of me and my work. As I wrote and rewrote their stories, I struggled incessantly 
with the daunting challenge of telling their stories in a way that had integrity. I 
recognized that there was no one single and absolute Truth to be told and that my truth 
would be only a rendering, but this knowledge did not absolve me of the responsibility of 
telling stories in a way that was candid and compatible with my truth and yet did not 
represent them negatively. I wanted to tell stories in a way that didn?t exploit or break 
faith with them. My dilemma centered around the question: ?How do women make other 
women the subjects of their gaze without objectifying them and ultimately betraying 
them?? (Behar, 1996, p. 28). Now, as I tie together the final threads of this work, I 
recognize that I haven?t answered this question, nor am I satisfied with my 
representations of Jane, Katie, Margaret, and Alexandra. However, I share my processes 
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and offer my thoughts in order to extend the exploration of subjective research that does 
not objectify.  
I set out to study a world I was already in and women I was already in relation 
with, and I was therefore not neutral to the four teachers. As the coordinator of their 
practica, I feel that I have journeyed with the study partners through more than merely 
theoretical or practical challenges. Laughter and tears have profound effects on research. 
On one hand, my history with study partners may make me less open to the negative in 
their experiences, but in this case I believe that the advantages of personal connection 
outweigh the drawbacks. I am guided by Noddings? (1983) ethic of caring. She writes of 
replacing the Kantian notion of fidelity to principle with a fidelity and responsibility to 
people, to individuals. I cannot claim to be objective or neutral to the study partners 
because we are connected. Connection has been given a bad rap. Gilligan (1982) suggests 
that connection, traditionally viewed as a pollutant in research, actually furthers our 
humanness by stimulating our recognition of responsibility for each other. She deplores 
situations in which: ?the interconnections of the web are dissolved by the hierarchical 
ordering of relationships, when nets are portrayed as dangerous entrapments, impeding 
flight rather than protecting against fall? (p. 49). In a complex, context-dependent study, 
connection can also help us to paint a richer landscape. 
The question of how much a researcher may be affected by her own personal 
reactions to her study is one that has been argued throughout history, but more hotly in 
recent decades. The supposition that objectivity is desirable is predicated upon the 
existence of both an absolute Truth and a path that leads if not directly to it, at least 
within a stone?s throw of it. The form of knowledge pursued in this study was neither 
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detached nor objective. Rather, I sought meaning jointly constructed by the study partners 
and me, and now with you, the reader. The dynamic between objectivity and subjectivity 
has been conceived as a balance with a finite degree of give: If you add to objectivity, it 
must be subtracting from subjectivity. Harding (1987) has suggested that the converse is 
in fact true. She called for a rethinking of objectivity and encouraged researchers to make 
explicit their subjectivity and leanings because ?introducing this ?subjective? element into 
the analysis in fact increases the objectivity of the research and decreases the 
?objectivism? which hides this kind of evidence from the public? (p. 14). An alternative to 
the positivistic reification of objectivity is Haraway?s (1991) concept of situated 
knowledge, which casts all knowledge as partial and situated within context rather than 
abstractly objective.  
Changing Nature of Research Question 
As my research question changed, so did my assessment of which data sources I 
considered valuable. My original research question asked about pedagogy: ?What kind of 
pedagogy do beginning ESOL teachers craft as they attend to the cultural lives of their 
children?? The question underplayed the significance of identity in the teachers? lives, 
and as time passed, identity became increasingly central to uncovering meanings of 
teachers? experiences because the focus shifted from learning to teach language to 
becoming a language teacher. As I foregrounded who the teachers became over what they 
did, I turned my attention from observations to the afternoon teas.  
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Complexities in Privileging the Afternoon Teas 
The decision to privilege the afternoon tea data resulted in some sacrifices. For 
instance in forgoing my focus on an in-depth analysis of classroom life, I also 
relinquished the opportunity to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how 
teachers? realities are linked to their classrooms. This is not to say that I saw events 
within classroom walls as unimportant?on the contrary, I believe that teaching practice 
should be studied further. However, the decision to look beyond the classroom afforded 
me a deeper exploration of issues of identity, brought me closer to the teachers and their 
voices, and allowed me later on to make methodological decisions nourished by 
connectedness and relation, both of which were cornerstones of the study?s framing.  
 However, regardless of the steps I took to disrupt the traditional structures of 
power in educational research, and regardless of what I hope is an elevated presence of 
the teachers? voices in what follows, I urge the reader to be mindful of the context of this 
study: this is my interpretation of what I saw. I wrote it sitting alone at my computer. 
Spivak (1990) says that: ?We cannot but narrate, but when a narrative is constructed, 
something is left out? (p.18-19). Even when you read a teacher?s words quoted directly, 
remember that I chose when to include teachers? voices and also when to exclude them. 
This is not a collaborative work (Giroux, 1988; for an example see Lin, Grant, Kubota, 
Motha, Tinker-Sacks, Vandrick, and Wong, 2004); nor educative research (Gitlin, 1990); 
nor action research (Brown and Jones, 2001). I do not claim to present the teachers? 
perspectives. This work can be viewed only as my adulterated and personal version of 
reality. This is not reality, just the temporary account that I?ve managed to stretch and 
trim over this particular textual surface at this particular moment. 
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Power 
Alexandra, Jane, Katie and Margaret participated in the study voluntarily and 
knew they could withdraw at any time. Nonetheless, like all researchers (those who admit 
it and those who don?t), I was positioned within a complicated power dynamic. My study 
partners are all former students, and I supervised their student teaching practica and 
supported their seminar papers. It would be na?ve to imagine that the power imbalance 
redressed itself once they graduated. Furthermore, I continue to occasionally provide 
references, write letters of recommendation, and initiate or coordinate professional 
opportunities for them. The nature of our relationships preceding the study had the 
potential to add to the intimacy and richness of the study, but also placed me in a position 
to potentially dominate, exploit, or take advantage of my study partners. Added to this 
was a further layer of hierarchy, the historically established power imbalance between 
researcher and researched. I found a need to take explicit and deliberate steps to ensure 
that the study partners were protected. My two greatest concerns surrounded participation 
and representation, which I will discuss in greater detail now. 
Power and Participation 
I was asking much of Alexandra, Jane, Katie, and Margaret. My initial request 
was for their permission to observe and interview them regularly over a year. Later, their 
participation included the afternoon teas and e-mail exchanges and phone conversations. 
At first, I phoned each teacher the day before I intended to come to her school. Within the 
first two weeks, Alexandra, Jane, and Katie all separately invited me to come without 
notice, and I did so from then on.  
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 The afternoon teas presented a more significant complication because they 
required the teachers to drive to my home after a long day at school and give up their 
afternoons and later, as the afternoon teas extended in length, their evenings. I made it 
clear that they could participate as much or as little as they wanted to and could attend 
afternoon teas if they were helpful to them but were not required to do so. I needed the 
teachers to look forward to and welcome the afternoon teas without feeling that these 
functioned as meetings, obligations, or an inconvenience. I wanted them to feel 
comfortable, happy, well-fed, relaxed, and nurtured while in my home.  
However, I was mindful of Lisa Delpit?s (1991) caution that those who wield 
power are less conscious of it, so I took these steps. I specifically told the four study 
partners that they should consider the afternoon teas to be a place for them, rather than 
me, and that they should never feel compelled to attend on my account. All four were 
kind and wanted to see me succeed professionally, so I explicitly voiced my concerns 
about their support for my research interfering with their own personal needs. I told them 
to feel free to ignore e-mails if they didn?t have the time or energy to respond and tried to 
reiterate this idea periodically when I e-mailed. I never had a preplanned agenda and tried 
(often unsuccessfully) to avoid initiating topics of discussion except in response to 
previous comments. I did this to ensure that the discussion centered on topics that sprang 
from teachers? own needs rather than from my agenda. I am by nature not a 
clockwatcher, so it was easy for me to be unconcerned about promptness. After the first 
couple of afternoon teas, I was vague about a starting time and teachers simply came 
when they were ready to leave school. The result was a gap of sometimes two hours 
86   
 
 
between the first and last arrival, but it also meant that the teachers didn?t have the added 
stress of feeling rushed. 
While none of these steps could have neutralized the researcher-researched 
imbalance, they were designed to help the study partners to feel comfortable saying no, 
ignoring requests, or bowing out of afternoon teas. Jane, who worked a second job as a 
waitress and was busy planning her wedding in the middle of the demands of first-year 
teaching, missed more afternoon teas than she attended, and as much as I missed her 
voice, her valuable perspectives, and her company, I was pleased that she felt 
comfortable limiting her participation to the extent that was convenient for her. I don?t 
believe that I was completely successful: at the end of the year of the study, I asked her 
whether I could meet with her and ask her questions to ?fill in some gaps.? Her profuse 
apologies for missing so many afternoon teas led me to believe that, possibly because of 
the thoughtless way I worded my question, she did feel somewhat obligated to me. 
 One afternoon tea conversation led me to believe that at least one of the other 
study partners did not feel overly pressured to participate. In a discussion of why the 
afternoon teas were successful for her, Margaret shared: ?I don?t know how much is the 
collection of personalities. I was thinking as I drove over today, I was like: ?Oh my God, 
I?m over an hour late[er than I expected to be]? ? I would have been tense being that late 
to another setting ? it?s very gentle coming here ? if [someone] with a different 
personality were in the group, they might be asking: ?What is our purpose? What are we 
accomplishing?? Although I trust there?s a very large purpose. But some personalities 
might want to see the purpose accomplished within a certain amount of time and they 
might have to know: ?What have we come to?? But I know it?s a very large purpose.? 
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(Afternoon Tea, 06.19). It is my hope that the teachers? view of the afternoon teas as 
gentle place of support for them might have given them the sense that they could 
construct their identities with a decreased sense of playing a role for me, the researcher. 
Power and Representation 
Weedon (1999) cautions: ?it is important not to speak on behalf of others in ways 
which silence them and obscure real material differences? (p. 109). However, an 
inevitable tension arises when anyone tells someone else?s story, and the framing of a 
research method affects participants? agency and voice within a study. I pursued 
methodology that addressed this tension in several ways. My most significant effort was 
in foregrounding the afternoon tea transcriptions in my data analysis methods. 
Additionally, throughout, I made it clear that the teachers could veto any piece of 
information I wanted to include. Sometimes a teacher would ask me not to transcribe a 
particular story or comment, and sometimes I was asked to turn off the tape-recorder for a 
brief period. I always complied with these requests. None of the teachers asked for 
anonymity, but I have chosen to use pseudonyms for their privacy and also for the 
protection of their peers, colleagues, administrators, families, significant others, and, 
most of all, their young students. 
Conclusion 
Ethics and Politics of Voice 
The quest for understanding is endless, and we will never know everything, but it 
does not logically follow that we should therefore resign ourselves to knowing nothing. 
The methodological lesson I learned from this study is that there is no perfect method, 
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and there isn?t even a right method. Patti Lather (2003) calls on us to face the non-
innocence of our work. In doing so I?m compelled to acknowledge that I embarked on 
this study reifying method, believing that if I could only find the ?right? way to gather 
and analyze, my representations of my study partners would do them justice. Dale 
Spender (1985) cautions that there is ?no one truth, no one authority, no objective method 
which leads to the production of true knowledge.? (p. 5). What I?m learning to accept is 
that this work is still me telling someone else?s story.  
There are many stories within these pages that I am not telling, some because I 
choose not to tell them, some because they?re not mine to tell (for instance, those that 
study partners asked me not to transcribe), and some because I don?t know them (for 
instance, the many stories the study partners didn?t tell me). I implore you the reader to 
be aware that these stories exist, interwoven around those that I am telling. The stories 
presented here are simply snapshots taken from a long and complicated year in the lives 
of Margaret, Jane, Alexandra, and Katie, and are not intended to represent that entire 
year. Because I believe that human identities are fragmented and sometimes 
contradictory, I did not seek to create cohesion out of these multiple identities, but rather 
to foreground the slices that were relevant to this discussion. Voices are rich, complex, 
and paradoxical and therefore difficult to code. The incompleteness of my representation 
does not make it less valuable. All knowledge is partial (Haraway, 1991), and the human 
condition is unfinished (Freire, 1998). One lesson that I learned from Katie, Margaret, 
Ann, and most of all Alexandra was about accepting that I can?t always be in control, 
which is exactly what I seek to do as I lead you into my study. 
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Situating this Work in a Larger Landscape 
?It is in our incompleteness, of which we are aware, that education as a 
permanent process is grounded. Women and men are capable of being 
educated only to the extent that they are capable of seeing themselves as 
unfinished. Education does not make us educable. It is our awareness of 
being unfinished that makes us educable. And the same awareness in 
which we are inserted makes us eternal seekers. Eternal because of hope. 
Hope is not just a question of grit or courage. It?s an ontological 
dimension of our human condition.? (Freire, 1998, p. 58) 
 
Freire wrote of the unfinishedness of the human condition. This concept is 
liberating. Recognizing the unfinished nature of all research frees me to view this work as 
part of a larger ongoing research process. The methodology I explored through this study 
may not be for all researchers, all studies, or all questions. The process of experimenting 
with and even challenging orthodoxies in research methods was generative, but I don?t 
consider the methods I ultimately used to be final or complete. Nor do I consider them to 
stand in isolation: I view this study?s methodology as a step on the unfinished human 
journey of ever-evolving understandings of knowledge. I embrace Freire?s connection 
between unfinishedness and scholarly community: ?I like being human because I am 
involved with others in making history out of possibility? (p. 54). 
 
 
 
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Part I. Meanings of Language Teaching 
Introduction to Part I 
 
Part I serves as an introduction to the ways in which the four teachers made sense 
of the process of becoming language teachers. In it, I describe some of the tenets that 
were important in the meanings of teaching language constructed by the teachers and 
discuss each. These tenets, which I understood to underpin their pedagogical practice, 
include sustenance of students? voices, depreciated emphasis on accuracy of form, 
guidance about what discourses are contextually appropriate or even permissible, 
negotiation through the maze of language variation hierarchies, authenticity of language 
use, political implications of learning English, and connections between identity and 
language use. Each of these ideas was considered significant to language learning by at 
least two of the teachers, but the teachers practiced in institutions that did not always 
echo or support their concerns. The resulting mismatch often left the teachers struggling 
to integrate their own ideals about language learning with societal and institutional 
expectations for their students. While they wanted to develop practices that promoted 
social justice, they were caring teachers, motivated by integrity to their young students? 
lives and needs beyond the classroom. In this chapter I explore the teachers? 
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understandings of language teaching and then describe the pedagogies that they 
developed as they worked to unite their pedagogical visions with their ethical 
commitments to their students? aspirations and the pressures and expectations of their 
schooling contexts.  
Additionally in Part I, I will provide an in-depth analysis of the role of grammar 
in language teaching because the teachers? negotiations of a place for direct grammar 
instruction in ESOL classrooms were important in helping me to understand how the 
teachers constructed the intersection among pedagogy, language, and knowledge.  
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Chapter 3. Meanings of Language Pedagogy 
?It makes me so mad because that?s what you do, you train them to take 
the question, find it in the text, answer it, and write it down. And then 
when you try to get them thinking and relating and deeply understanding, 
comparing to their life and that kind of thing ? arrgghhh!? (Jane, 
Afternoon tea, 12.06) 
Introduction 
The frustration that Jane expressed in this quote was one of the many emotions 
that she, Alexandra, Katie, and Margaret experienced as they tried to reconcile competing 
meanings of language teaching, among them the representation of learning English 
supported by their schooling contexts, the theoretical grounding laid down in their 
graduate coursework, and their own emerging understandings of their students? learning. 
The teachers? M.Ed coursework had centered heavily around theories of communicative 
competence, which has been the dominant paradigm in language teaching for the past two 
decades. However, all four teachers had also taken one or two courses that supported 
their critical questioning about the larger social and global context of the teaching and 
learning of English. To varying degrees, the teachers were deliberately conscious of how 
power operates in classroom contexts. For instance, during afternoon teas, they spoke of 
inequitable patterns of classroom participation in relation to gender, language identity, 
race, and ESOL status. The teachers were critically contemplative of the paths well-worn 
by the language teachers who preceded them. Before exploring the meanings of ESOL 
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teaching crafted by the teachers in this study, I will briefly describe the historical terrain 
of language pedagogy that they were stepping into. 
Historically, until the early 1900s, to teach language was to teach about language 
by teaching grammar and translation (Richard-Amato, 1988). The ability to use language 
was less important than knowing how it was put together. As behaviorism became rooted 
in this country?s educational systems in the 1950s, the goals of language teachers shifted 
to revolve around the drills, memorized dialogues, and chains of repetition of the audio-
lingual method (Lado, 1977). Language theorists believed that if common, high-
frequency dialogues and phrases were repeated and reinforced often enough, they would 
become second nature and learners would become speakers. At the height of 
audiolingualism?s popularity, Chomsky (1965) launched a critique on Skinner?s stimulus-
response based orientation towards learning, proposing instead a perspective on grammar 
that reified a native speaker?s intuition of what counts as grammatically accurate. 
Chomsky made a distinction between competence, which he defined rather narrowly as a 
speaker-hearer?s underlying mental representation of grammatical rules, and 
performance, the external evidence of that competence. To Chomsky, the important 
element in competence was native speaker ability to distinguish grammatically correct 
from incorrect structure. Chomsky?s emphasis became an important foundation for the 
subsequent theoretical pendulum swing in the early 1980s to communicative approaches.  
Theories of communicative competence (Hymes, 1971) were crucial in 
redirecting the vision of language professionals towards a conceptualization of language 
as dynamic, living, and arising from social interaction. Communicative language teaching 
(CLT) (Littlewood, 1981) represented a significant departure from the mindless repetition 
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of audiolingualism as language teachers focused their attention on the concept of 
communication. The questions being asked no longer related to students? knowledge of 
grammar and syntax, but to whether they could be understood and whether they could 
communicate. Theories of communicative competence went beyond grammatical 
competence to include the ?psycholinguistic? and ?sociolinguistic? contexts of language 
learning, defined in an individual, classroom-based rather than larger societal sense 
(Mesthrie et al, 2000; Gleason and Ratner, 1997). Communicative competence was 
assumed to include several forms of competence (Canale and Swain, 1980), including 
grammatical competence, discourse competence (cohesion and coherence of 
communication), sociolinguistic competence (appropriateness of interaction), and 
strategic competence (strategies for compensating for failed communication). Savignon 
(1983) in fact pointed out that a speaker can be communicatively competent without 
grammatical competence, stimulating recognition of the secondary role that grammar 
plays in communication. This perspective shift from form and fluency to meaning-
making and communication was important, but theories of communicative competence as 
they are currently conceptualized do not adequately address the complexity of language 
learning. They overlook the ways in which purposes for language learning and mode of 
acquisition are inextricably linked to larger issues of language ownership and usage in the 
context of the relationship among language, power, and identity.  
Embedded in any culture and its discursive practices are rules about what counts 
as truth. In order for an assumption to become a regime of truth (Foucault, 1977), it must 
be accepted as fact by the community it exists within. Through an uncritical emphasis on 
the communicative competence paradigm over the past twenty years, the community of 
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language professionals has naturalized an ideology that contributes to the construction of 
NNES as deficit in several ways. For instance, while dialogue between native speakers is 
a collaborative process in which both speakers are jointly responsible for communication, 
focusing on NNES?s ?communicative competence? (or absence thereof) places the onus 
for the success of the dialogue or conversation firmly onto the shoulders of the NNES 
with the supposition that it is the responsibility of the non-native speaker to be 
competent, to make herself understood. This assumption simultaneously stems from and 
reinforces a construction of NNES as deficient, as needing to remediate inadequate 
communicative ability, and this construction furthermore contributes to an understanding 
of native speaker as normative. These current perspectives of teaching English sustain 
teachers? disregard of the integral role that social power plays in any discursive 
interaction and erroneously assume all speakers in dialogue to be equal with each other. 
Communication cannot be equitable when it is between people who have different 
degrees of ownership over English (Pennycook, 2001). In the context of English-
language learning the assumption of equality is particularly inaccurate because the 
dominant global status of English, and consequently speakers of English, necessarily 
places NNESs into a subordinate position (Canagarajah, 1999; Brutt-Griffler, 2000). The 
preoccupation of TESOL professionals? with communicative competence has supported a 
representation of language as passive and ideology-free, and of language learning within 
an individual framework, divorced from the larger political and social context in which it 
actually takes place. Furthermore, in venerating the concept of ?competence,? language 
professionals have embraced a product-oriented pedagogy that values the end, 
competence, over the processes in which discourse is constructed. Despite their support 
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for growing awareness of the social nature of language learning, theories of 
communicative competence have contributed to the deficit construction of non-native 
English speakers in several ways, and as a result the subjectivity of this ideology has 
become obscured. The construct of communicative competence as an individual, 
narrowly construed outcome of language learning has become a regime of truth within 
language teaching, ironically leading to communicative incompetence and deskilling by 
subscribing to a limited and normative definition of what it means to be competent. This 
framework has unwittingly marginalized issues of power, privilege, and sociopolitical 
domination in language learning.  
This historical context differed sharply from the stances that Alexandra, Jane, 
Katie, and Margaret demonstrated and discussed. They all revealed broad understandings 
of language teaching as dynamic and socially situated, as extending beyond the 
transmission of information about rules governing language use and, furthermore, beyond 
teaching students to simply make themselves understood. The teachers? pedagogy 
illuminated for me several key tenets that moved the teachers? pedagogy beyond 
communicative competence. These tenets, which are important themes throughout this 
work, include sustenance of students? voices, depreciated emphasis on accuracy of form, 
guidance about what discourses are contextually appropriate or even permissible, 
negotiation through the maze of language variation hierarchies, authenticity of language 
use, political implications of learning English, and connections between identity and 
language use. The teachers? ideologies had much in common with each other?s, but the 
four women also represented four divergent and often even contrasting philosophies and 
styles. Throughout this study, I present my understandings of the teachers? individual 
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pedagogies, but I will also highlight elements and ideas that the teachers have in common 
and those that are jointly constructed in collaborative environments, such as the afternoon 
teas.  
Sustenance of Student Voice: ?How Happy Are You?? 
Many elements of language teaching were significant for the teachers. One in 
particular was the sustenance of student voice. ?Voice? has been described by Maher and 
Tetreault (2001) as ?the awakening of students? own responses, of their ability to speak 
for themselves, to bring their own questions and perspectives to the material? (pp. 18-19). 
Maher and Tetreault viewed voice as connoting: ?the connection of one?s education to 
one?s personal experience? (pp. 18-19). The following conversation at an afternoon tea is 
a representative example of Margaret?s investment in the development of her students? 
voices. 
Margaret: I spend a lot of time with my first graders. Sometimes they?ll be 
very irascible, they?ll come in all full of their emotions and they can?t 
work. We started this thing with the very beginners, I write up a little letter 
to them: ?How are you?? and they all go down the line, ?Fine, fine, fine, 
fine, fine.? And I look at them and I go: ?Are you happy?? And they look 
at each other, and they all say ?Happy, happy,? all different ways. So then 
I ask, ?How happy are you?? And they say, ?I?m this happy, I?m this 
happy? (indicating quantity with hands). And so, even though they don?t 
have the vocabulary. I thought that was an interesting way to communicate 
with their hands ? 
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Suhanthie: Yeah, that totally makes sense, you can show with your 
hands? 
Margaret: Just to kind of check in with them, even though they don?t have 
all those words. I just feel that kind of tending to that kind of helps out. 
(Margaret, Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
Margaret?s primary pedagogical concern in this exchange is not with language 
acquisition in a narrow sense of grammar or accuracy of usage, with meeting the 
demands of the curriculum, or even with expanding students? vocabulary range. Nor is 
her focus on communicative competence. Rather, her questions and scaffolding are 
designed to help her students to express to her how happy they are, an approach that 
attends to their voices and connects classroom learning to students? capacity for 
expressing their experience. To nurture their voices, Margaret attends to her students? 
whole selves, listening to their voices, connecting to their hearts and happiness, and 
encouraging them to use their bodies and physicality when words are not readily 
available. At first glance, her pedagogy seems to fall into Canale and Swain?s (1980) 
category of strategic competence. However, Margaret?s focus delves deeper than simply 
helping her students to make themselves understood and becoming communicatively 
competent because she is concerned with the content (and not merely comprehensibility) 
of what they say and how what they say allows them to share their experience.  
The sustenance of voice illuminates Margaret?s meanings of teaching because 
voice and knowledge are firmly interconnected. Tarule (1996) wrote about how, 
following the publication of Women?s Ways of Knowing (1986), she and her co-authors, 
Belenky, Clinchy, and Goldberger, were frequently questioned about how to help 
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silenced students to participate in discussions. Tarule connected this question to 
transformative practice because it asked how members of traditionally marginalized 
groups could see themselves as having something worth saying. She writes about the 
relationships between epistemological development and the nature of voice. Margaret?s 
preoccupation was not with the form or comprehensibility of students? speech, but with 
the value of what her non-native English speaking first graders had to share as they spoke 
for themselves and expressed knowledge of themselves. Margaret?s pedagogy 
underscored the potential of voice as ?an indispensible act of knowing and thinking? 
(Tarule, 1996, p. 276). What Margaret names ?tending? is concern about students? whole 
selves, not only their linguistic output in the narrowest sense of the term. 
 Katie?s meanings of language teaching also included encouraging her students to 
value their own knowledge and voice. She told us about one student, Leena, who was 
insistent in her belief in a ?right? answer accessed through the teacher:  
I have one student, Leena, from Pakistan. She [has been identified for 
special education services]. She?s culturally isolated, she has only one 
other friend, who?s also from Pakistan. This kind of thinking is very hard 
for her. Even when she expresses an opinion, it?s in the form of a question, 
like: ?Is that right?? So I have to reinforce it: ?Yeah, that?s great, there?s 
no right or wrong, it?s an opinion.? (Katie, Afternoon tea, 01.24) 
In this and many other instances, Katie tried to guide her students away from a 
preoccupation with correct form or acceptable responses to teachers? expectations and 
towards a valuing of their own ideas and thoughts. For her, language teaching was not 
exclusively about sleuthing out and then providing expected responses, but rather about 
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supporting students? ability to think for and express themselves. For a student who was 
?culturally isolated? and questioning of her own opinions, Katie?s support of voice can 
nurture much more than Leena?s ability to communicate, it can support her social and 
psychological development. When Katie and Margaret taught, they demonstrated an 
understanding of language as a social system in which meaning is central (Kress, 2001), 
rather than as an autonomous communication system, the development of which was 
complete before their students started speaking it.  
Depreciated Emphasis on Accuracy of Form: ?My Kids Are so Hung up on Spelling? 
Related to supporting students? voices was delegitimizing binary opposites, 
including the notion of knowledge as either right or wrong. The construction of 
knowledge as absolute was endemic in the teachers? contexts. Katie, Jane, and Margaret 
all sensed pressure from their students to focus on accuracy, and their students? desires 
were upheld by other influences, such as parents and standardized tests: 
Katie: My kids are so hung up on spelling. I always try to tell them, ?Spell 
it the best way you can,? like I want to see how much they can do on their 
own. I tell them even if they have to make up a spelling, because I want to 
see their inventive spelling, so I can see? And then I can tell them, ?This 
is how we write it in English,? but they won?t do it. I?ll be like, ?Spell it 
the best way you can,? and they?ll be like, ?No, you spell it.? They really 
want to get it right!  
Margaret: Yes! 
Katie: I?ve been working on them to free up their mind a bit and let their 
ideas flow a bit. 
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For Katie, a focus on form detracts from students? free flow of ideas and inhibits their 
incentive to attempt to draw from their own knowledge. Her students turned to her in 
search of information about spelling. As a form of knowledge, spelling has certain 
characteristics: its correctness is arbitrarily determined, and it is absolute in that partially 
correct spellings are typically considered to be incorrect. It is constructed outside the 
learner and disconnected from students? lives, a perspective that has been referred to as 
?received knowing? (Belenky et al, 1986). Katie responds to her students? requests by 
downplaying the importance of accuracy in spelling and focusing instead on the process 
of discovery. By accepting the value of partially correct answers, she constructs her 
students as knowers to her and, more importantly, to themselves. Margaret questioned 
Katie: 
Margaret: That?s something I?ve been wanting to ask people about, 
inventive spelling and how to ? you see it posted on the wall. Sometimes 
I?ll sit and say ?Mmmmhmmm?, like I won?t say it?s right, but I don?t say 
it?s wrong, I say ?Keep going.? But if they ever ask is it right, the moment 
of truth. I say ?Looks good,? I try to be truthful and keep them going. I?m 
not sure what other people do. Usually, my little ones don?t ask if it?s 
right, but if they do I don?t know what to say ? usually they?re okay if 
they?re sounding it out and I?m saying ?Okay,? but if they do ask is that 
the right way. 
Katie: I would pick one thing, one word that?s used very often or 
something, and I?d say: ?You?re doing a good job sounding it out! Let?s 
look at this word, and I?ll show you how we spell it in English.? 
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The preceeding exchange is one of many examples of how the teachers negotiate the 
stretch between their own epistemological values and those supported by their teaching 
contexts. Within the framework of teaching this form of knowledge, Katie and Margaret 
explore what it means to take their students seriously as knowers and to encourage them 
to view themselves as knowers. The pedagogical knowledge blossoming in this exchange 
arose as Margaret and Katie worked together in dialogue to critique existing authoritarian 
and detached forms of knowledge and to replace them with knowledge that allows 
students to ?free up? their minds and ?develop their ideas.? It was in dialogue together 
that Katie and Margaret were able to question established ideas about what should be 
taught and why. Neither of the teachers was attempting to withhold information about 
accurate spelling, they were simply trying to devise ways of teaching that allowed space 
for more than a single mode of learning, such as active student knowledge construction as 
well as transmission of detached information about spelling. For example, Katie?s 
suggestion included both encouraging students to make guesses about spellings and 
choosing one word to tell the child: ?This is how we spell it in English.? Margaret 
expressed concern about parents? support of inventive spelling: 
Margaret: What would you say to parents if they saw it posted on the wall. 
Suhanthie: Would you post it on the wall? 
Katie: Yes. I would explain it to parents that the main idea of writing is to 
get your ideas out and that from that flow of ideas you develop lessons and 
bring out specific points. And explain to them that it?s a developmental 
process ? not with so much educational jargon. The most important point 
in writing is getting your ideas down. Let them know that you?re teaching 
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them simultaneously conventions of print and spelling and punctuation 
and all of that stuff. At the same time you?re trying to get them to develop 
their ideas because that?s the harder part of writing. That?s how I would 
explain it. And most parents go ?Okay.? 
Suhanthie: Do they go ?Okay?? 
Katie: Most of them do, Usually, I?ll say, ?Do you have questions?? or I?ll 
say, ?Does that make sense to you?? And they?ll say ?Okay? or they?ll say 
?But I don?t understand this part.? I try to get them to reiterate to me or I?ll 
repeat in a different way. 
 Some students? high regard for the accuracy of spelling reflected the investments 
of their parents. Beyond challenging students? ideas of what knowledge is of worth, 
Margaret was concerned about how parents would react. Katie offered ways of respecting 
and addressing parents? concerns. She suggested that teachers explain the developmental 
nature of learning to parents in order to advocate for the maintenance of students? ideas 
and at the same time reassure parents that forms of traditionally valued knowledge were 
not being neglected: ?Let them know that you?re teaching them simultaneously 
conventions of print and spelling and punctuation ?? but also that: ?? you?re trying to 
get them to develop their ideas ?? 
Like elementary school teachers Katie and Margaret, Jane questioned the forms of 
knowledge that were being valued in her high school context and developed approaches 
for teaching in a way that had integrity towards her students and simultaneously to her 
ideologies. Her students were preparing for a series of high-stakes tests administered 
throughout the school year:  
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I?m the only English they?re getting, I?ve got my level 2s now and I don?t 
know where to even begin with them. You?re talking about first-grade 
level?periods, capital letters?forget the grammar work! Simple ?I am 
tall,? they need. With the reading, they can answer directly from the story, 
but if you do any kinds of questions that aren?t keyed in directly from the 
story ? which is all the preparation they need for the reading test! It 
makes me so mad because that?s what you do, you train them to take the 
question, find it in the text, answer it, and write it down. And then when 
you try to get them thinking and relating and deeply understanding, 
comparing to their life and that kind of thing ? arrgghhh! ? It?s just that 
sense that I?m getting from you [Margaret] of that overwhelming I am not 
prepared for this. (Jane, Afternoon tea, 12.06) 
Jane?s meanings of language teaching related to ?thinking and relating and deeply 
understanding, comparing to their life and that kind of thing.? However, the teacher was 
not able to teach language in a way that is meaningful for her because her students had to 
pass the standardized tests in order to graduate, and to her the tests celebrated forms of 
knowledge that were less mindful of and relevant to students? lives. Information that was 
important in order to pass the tests included punctuation and keyed answers from reading 
texts. Jane felt unprepared to practice the pedagogy supported by the tests, but her sense 
of responsibility towards her students compelled her to develop methods that allowed her 
to be responsive at once to her own ethics and her students? futures. Her strategies will be 
discussed in further detail in the next chapter. For Jane, language teaching was connected 
105   
 
 
to more than simply language use but extended to meaning making, thoughtfulness, and 
connection to students? lives.  
Appropriateness of Language Use: ?Those Are Very Dangerous Words? 
Besides the sustenance of student voice, another element of language learning that 
was important to the teachers relates to what language is permissible?what can be said 
and what cannot be said in a given context. In particular, Katie, Alexandra, and Margaret 
connected permissible speech to cultural mores, which played an important role in 
language learning. Katie told us about one student, Noah, whom she sensed needed 
guidance in learning to use language responsibly. She was concerned about his use of 
disproportionately strong, sometimes threatening language but wanted to support his 
expression of his emotions and avoid silencing him. She told us:  
Noah has a lot of emotional issues ? . [He]?s very manipulative. He says 
things all the time about how he?s going to blow up the school. This is the 
way he expresses himself. Part of it is that the TV programs he watches 
are very violent, and this is where he learns his English. He knows that it?s 
something serious, he doesn?t really grasp just how serious it is. I say to 
him: ?Noah, we have to find a different way to say that. Those are very 
dangerous words, they?re very scary for people to hear, you could get into 
a lot of trouble saying them. Especially now.? He tells people, ?I?m going 
to shoot blah, blah, blah.? In [his home country] I think he was exposed to 
violence, but I think it comes from TV, all the expressions he uses are 
from American TV. I ask him every day, how are you, he says, ?I?m bored 
and disgusted?, except he says boring and disgusting. He?s got a very 
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violent way of expressing himself. I told the ESOL counselor, but the 
ESOL counselor says he scares her. He?s in 2
nd
 grade. She says, ?Noah 
scares me. He?s so manipulative.? I said, ?Yes, he?s manipulative, but you 
address it. That?s your job.?  
While Noah may have known the definitions of the individual words he selected, he 
needed his teachers? guidance in recognizing what they meant within the context he 
uttered them in. This represents an expansive and mature definition of vocabulary, 
extending beyond basic translations and rewordings of lexical items to deep questions 
about what it truly means to know a word. An important part of Katie?s mission was to 
teach her students the meanings of their language in living use. In the context of rising 
school violence and national fears about terrorism, the teacher aimed to teach her students 
to use language responsibly and to choose words befitting their situations and emotions. 
Jane hypothesized about Noah?s ability to express himself in ways that are considered 
more socially appropriate: 
Jane: Maybe he only has extremes where he can?t talk about loneliness 
and can only go to hate. 
Katie: I say: ?Don?t say these words, you can say ?I?m very angry,? but 
don?t say you?re going to break up the school.? We reported it to the 
principal. This is the [same] little kid, he was in class, he was crying, he 
was like: ?I?m going to move out of this country and I?m going to kill 
myself and then you?ll be sorry.? So then Sarah the counselor and I went 
to his house. She was like, ?Well, he can?t say things like that!? 
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Jane: The scary thing is if you say that to him, he might stop saying it, but 
he?s still going to keep feeling it. (Afternoon tea, 03.21) 
For Katie, part of knowing a language is understanding how powerful words are in a 
given context. English language learners can choose the language they use, but Katie is 
concerned with what it truly means to be in a position to choose language. Sustaining 
those possibilities of choice includes supporting students? acquisition of the language, but 
also their understandings of what the language means to their audience. Katie represents a 
dialogic interpretation of language, one in which language is jointly constructed by Noah 
and his audience, and she seeks to support Noah?s developing understanding of language 
as a ?historically shaped resource? (Wetherell, Taylor, and Yates, 2001) as it is 
?populated?overpopulated?by the intentions of others? (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 294).  
Katie negotiated a difficult line. She needed to encourage Noah away from 
making violent statements without causing him to feel silenced. Theories of 
communicative competence have extended language teachers? focus on accurate form to 
include the teaching of appropriateness of language use and register. While this intention 
helps language learners to adopt a pleasing and suitable identity within U.S. schools, I 
believe that it has been interpreted to err on the side of indoctrination, neglecting student 
voice and alternative forms of expression. The fact that a school context encourages a 
student to present herself in a certain way does not necessarily mean that the identity 
being adopted is in the best interests of the child.  
Theories of communicative competence can encourage teachers to socialize 
young ESOL students into passive silence and conformity under the guise of teaching 
them appropriate speech. Katie sought a pedagogy that supported Noah?s acquisition of 
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suitable language within his school context without neglecting the expression of his 
emotions. She assumed that he did not actually intend to blow up the school (making a 
report to the principal about the threat in case her assumption was incorrect), and she 
wanted to help him to express his frustration and disappointment in a more constructive 
way. For Katie and Jane, teaching Noah acceptable speech was insufficient; they were 
also concerned with reducing his sense of alienation by helping him to communicate his 
message in a way that was permissible within a school context that had no tolerance for 
bomb threats. The teachers wanted to help Noah to carve out a third space between the 
identity he was constructing for himself and the one that would have long-term viability 
within school walls. They wanted to ensure that the identity appropriate for the school 
context was also in Noah?s best interests. 
This incident with Noah raised a larger concern about appropriateness of social 
meanings, which was a significant part of the four teachers? discussions during the year. 
In many ways, the teachers? ideas about language teaching included not only teaching 
students what to say but also helping them to understand the meanings of language and 
how to use it. 
Appropriateness of Social Meanings:  
?All the Girls Should Come to School and Kiss Me? 
A part of language teaching related to appropriateness of language use was 
appropriateness of social meanings. For Alexandra, as for Katie, language teaching 
included teaching students about what speech is appropriate in the U.S. school 
environment and, by extension, in U.S. society. This was complicated because both 
middle school teaching and ESOL teaching necessarily (by design or by omission) 
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develop students? understandings about appropriate expectations. Alexandra faced the 
challenge of teaching her male middle-school student, Carl, about cultural values and 
expectations within a U.S. social context: 
We had a test in which you had to write about a problem at school or in 
his neighborhood and what you would do to make it better. And he wrote 
to make sexual harassment okay. ?All the girls should come to school and 
kiss me.? And it was just disgusting, and for his age kind of pathetic. So I 
showed him his grade based on the grammar, and I said, ?Let?s talk about 
the content. It?s not appropriate for you to say sexual harassment is okay. 
The angle you could express your opinion from, it?s natural that boys 
chase girls and we shouldn?t get in trouble for doing what was natural.? 
(Alexandra, Afternoon tea, 01.24) 
Alexandra believed that as a language teacher, she was responsible for responding to both 
the form and the social meanings of Carl?s test, indicating a conceptualization of 
language that includes both linguistic and social practice. Her strategy was to give him a 
grade based on his grammatical competence (part of communicative competence) and 
another that addressed the content of the paper. It is impossible to know whether Carl was 
writing inappropriately because he was young, because he was a cultural newcomer, or 
because he wanted to antagonize his teacher, since his identities as youth, immigrant, and 
rabble-rouser were inseparable one from the other. However, Alexandra believed that 
part of being a language teacher was teaching students about acceptable speech. She told 
him explicitly that it was inappropriate for him to say that sexual harassment was okay. 
She offered him an alternative and more ambiguous phrase: ?It?s natural that boys chase 
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girls,? which might have the same meaning for him, but is likely to be less offensive to 
his listener.  
 Alexandra?s suggestion brings to light a further challenge facing language 
teachers, that is how to address the distinction between what is constructed socially and 
what is a ?natural? part of human gendered identity. Is it natural that boys chase girls, or 
is sexual harassment a behavior that is learned and socially propagated within schools? 
Sexual harassment has the effect of perpetuating male sexual dominance and 
underscoring heteronormativity. As teachers pass through their daily routines, they are 
called upon to make value-laden on-the-spot decisions about how to frame problematic 
behaviors and positionings with their students. 
All teaching is political, whether teachers acknowledge it, as did Alexandra and 
her three peers, or whether they seek to suppress its subjective nature. As they teach the 
cultural and social values of students? new communities, teachers therefore walk on 
delicate ground because they must make decisions about whether to teach the ruling ideas 
of the society they believe themselves to be representing. In telling Carl of the negative 
connotations of the loaded term ?sexual harassment,? Alexandra was teaching him 
language, but she was also teaching him that beyond the linguistic, the actual act of 
sexual harassment is not socially acceptable. Foucault (1979) problematized the 
distinction between language and practice, noting that the one cannot be isolated from the 
other because in discourse, knowledge is actually produced. As teachers teach language, 
they teach ideology and in fact regulate social conduct in practice (Foucault, 1980). 
Teaching can therefore not be viewed apart from the ethical culture that it is practiced 
within. 
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Teachers? discursive guidance influences the ways in which things can be talked 
about and consequently governs the ways in which ideas are put into practice. As 
Alexandra is telling Carl that it is not appropriate for him to say that sexual harassment is 
okay, she is also telegraphing that the practice of sexual harassment is not permissible. 
Inherent in Alexandra?s language teaching is a lesson on morality. In teaching against 
sexual harassment, she is teaching about social justice and ethical living. This interaction 
takes place on the shaky middle ground between regulating conduct and embracing 
humanist caring in pedagogy.  
Appropriate Register: ?Jesus Said: ?Shut Up?? 
A further thread that appeared to be important to the teachers was appropriateness 
of register. Rather than teaching a student Katie?s own version of appropriate norms, the 
teacher relied on the teaching power of the classroom community. Katie discouraged the 
phrase ?shut up? in her class: 
We had had a discussion about other ways of asking someone to be quiet 
and how ?shut up? was very rude. Personally, I don?t like it, which I think 
was from my Mom because she didn?t let us say ?shut up?. (Afternoon tea, 
06.19) 
The use of the phrase ?shut up? had surfaced in one of Katie?s classes earlier in the year. 
When a newcomer student who had recently joined her class told a fellow classmate to 
?shut up? in the midst of a group activity, his peers responded instantly. 
Maria: Ms. Bach, Jesus said ?Shut up?! 
Katie: Okay, so what can you tell Jesus it?s better to say than ?shut up??  
Several students: Be quiet, please be quiet. 
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Katie: Well, instead of telling me, why don?t you tell him??  
Maria: (shaking head) Jesus, no shut up. Say please be quiet. 
Jesus nodded his head. (Observation, 04.15) 
Rather than correcting or reprimanding Jesus, Katie relied on his peers. The discourse 
community of this class had embraced the discursive conventions and were teaching and 
initiating their new peer, who indicated complicity. The success of students? entrance into 
a larger community, such as the school community, is affected by the discourses they 
acquire in the ESOL classroom. Throughout the years, all of the teachers encouraged 
their students to teach each other language, not only grammatically but also 
socioculturally as a discourse community embracing linguistic norms. 
Language Variations: ?It?s a Bit of a Different English? 
In addition to appropriate meanings of language, appropriate forms and variations 
of language were also a significant strand of the teachers? understandings of the 
development of voice and identity. In the four linguistically and racially diverse schools 
in this study, and particularly in Jane and Alexandra?s schools, several forms of English 
were commonly spoken. Alexandra expressed support for her students? fluency in 
multiple English dialects and even resisted teaching ?standard English.? Alexandra?s 
representation of ?standard English? differed from the definition ascribed to by the other 
three teachers, she constructed standard English as a formal, infrequently used, and 
grammatically pristine language that most people could not access. She recognized that in 
the school context, students were being exposed to and acquiring different varieties of 
English: ?So you?re picking black vernacular up quicker than you are Mrs. Lau?s 
English.? (Afternoon tea, 06.19). She appreciated the value of adeptly using multiple 
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dialects in a variety of settings: ?What does this mean, why do you say it differently?? 
Furthermore, she advocated explicitly teaching students about the relationship between 
language choices and social contexts: ?You have to teach them that there?s different 
settings that you?re going to use Black vernacular and you?re not going to use it. I feel 
sorry for these kids because they?re learning three different languages and they all sound 
like English.? Alexandra?s objection to the teaching of standard English within school 
walls stemmed primarily from its disconnection with the lives of her students:  
If one of the outcomes is to speak standard American English, then that?s a 
different language than we speak around here. You?d have to have 
teachers who could speak standard American English, which I couldn?t 
even know. I don?t think I ever end a sentence with a preposition. Just 
things that come out of the Midwest that I recognize when I hear them, but 
I don?t know what it is. (Alexandra, Afternoon tea, 06.19) 
For Alexandra, Standard English is not the language ?we speak around here,? not the 
commonly spoken language of the people. It is a language that she, a bright and 
resourceful woman with two graduate degrees, ?couldn?t even know.? In Alexandra?s 
view, standard English was not representative of language as it is truly used in her 
students? communities. Rather, the teacher valued ESOL classes that teach students the 
language of their everyday lives.  
Language teachers? decisions about how to position themselves in relation to the 
teaching of language varieties have significant political implications (Wolfram, Temple 
Adger, and Christian, 1999). Bakhtin (1981) wrote of the conflict between centripetal 
forces, which produce authoritarian, dogmatic discourses designed to exclude and 
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dominate, and centrifugal forces, which support the natural diversity of language use. 
Teaching and acknowledging only standard English, which nurtures centripetal forces, 
would have the effect of deprecating students who speak nonstandard English and of 
reinforcing the supremacy of standard English. Teachers? support of diverse varieties, 
registers, and ways of using language serves to whittle away at the power of centripetal 
forces and to move students? conceptualizations away from the idea of one legitimate 
language. This is not merely a pedagogical stance, but an epistemological one; it creates 
space for the possibility of multiple simultaneously correct language variations and the 
legitimacy of more than one perspective and attendant truth. However, to single-
mindedly embrace centrifugal forces, turning a blind eye to the social norms that 
acknowledge one form of English as ?good? English, is to ignore the social needs of 
students who need access to legitimated forms of language that will allow them to 
succeed (Pennycook, 1998). Rather, the teachers, to varying degrees, sought to expand 
their students? repertoires of forms of communication that were effective. 
 Beyond supporting multiple varieties of English, Alexandra actively taught the 
students to associate different variations of English with different settings, indicating a 
conception of language teaching that was respectful of social use and appropriateness of 
context. 
Jane, too, taught African American vernacular English (AAVE): 
Jane: Yeah, I?ve taught the difference between dog and dawg.  
Suhanthie: Dog and dog? 
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Jane: Like dog, D-O-G, is that sitting right there (indicating her puppy, 
Duff) and dawg, D-A-W-G, is like your friend. I thought it was just so 
ironic, here?s me teaching the language of the kids. 
Suhanthie: Do you tell them specifically about language variations? 
Jane: I just say it?s slang. It?s just a popular word for your friend. (Jane, 
Dinner at her house, 06.25) 
In teaching AAVE from her position of teacher-authority, Jane promoted its validity to 
her students. She identified it as ?slang,? a term that can carry negative connotations?the 
second entry in Webster?s Third International Dictionary (Gove, 1976) describes slang as 
?vulgar or inferior??but Jane also used the word ?popular,? which is positively nuanced, 
thereby promoting a conception of slang as approved and as a language of people. 
Wolfram, Temple Adger, and Christian (1999) have theorized the distinction between 
slang and language variations. They note that while the term ?slang? can convey several 
possible meanings, including jargon, informality, and nonstandard English (including 
derogatory references to AAVE), linguists restrict the use of ?slang? to refer to language 
in informal use. They draw attention to the social purposes of slang: ?Despite its 
reputation as linguistically marginal, slang shows complex and interesting sociolinguistic 
properties? (p. 67). Language variations can help to support the boundaries between 
various social (for instance, age, racial, and cultural) groups, so that in legitimating 
AAVE, Jane was supporting the legitimacy of ?African-American? as a cultural group 
and helping to provide potential access to that group.  
Other forms of English spoken in the four schools came under the umbrella term 
?World English.? Jane, Alexandra, Katie, and Margaret had received conflicting 
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messages about World Englishes from multiple sources throughout their graduate 
coursework and in their professional environments. A guest speaker in one of their 
classes used ?World English? synonymously with ?pidgin English,? and local public 
school ESOL offices used the term ?World English? to refer to many of their students 
who were proficient in a limited number of nonstandard forms of English. Language 
hierarchies had been supported to some degree in some of their classes but specifically 
deconstructed in historical context in other classes. 
I suggest that the factor that relegates a language to ?World English? status is not 
degree of language variation, but race, as evidenced by the blurry area between the 
county?s definition of World Englishes and other forms of English that also differ 
structurally and prosodically from the governing American standard (such as Scottish 
English). The students who were referred to as World English speaking students during 
this study were all ethnically South Asian or black and came from African, Caribbean, or 
South Asian countries. Countries in Kachru?s (1988) ?outer circle? include Ghana, 
Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, 
Philippines, Pakistan, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. Speakers of English in these ?norm-
developing? (Kachru, 1992) countries speak forms of English that are locally established 
and standardized, but are not typically the first languages of the citizens and are not 
legitimated globally. Dominant standards in outer-circle countries and around the world 
are dictated by the English spoken by the ?inner circle? of countries, that is the United 
Kingdom, the Unites States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, where the population 
majorities are white.
3
 Native English speakers from Jamaica (which is not included in 
                                                 
3
 A third category, the ?expanding circle? includes countries in which English is learned as a foreign or 
international language. 
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Kachru?s 1988 model) were classified as World English speakers in this study?s public 
schools, but Jamaica does not fit smoothly into any of Kachru?s categories because most 
Jamaican citizens speak a form of English as their first language. I suggest that race is the 
most significant factor keeping many language variations, including Jamaican English, 
from amassing the same linguistic power as British, American, and Australian English. 
Jamaican English is categorized as a ?World English? because the country?s population is 
predominantly black. Katie, Margaret, Ann, and Alexandra?s ?World-English? speaking 
students spoke Englishes that were not validated by their school system, and they had 
been placed in ESOL classes in order to ensure that their English was quickly coaxed into 
anglicization. Brutt-Griffler (2002) notes that: ?The center-driven narrative of English 
language spread writes people residing outside the West out of their central role in the 
spread of English and their place in making the language we call English.? (p. viii). I 
believe that the scope of the ?center-driven narrative? extends far beyond ?people 
residing outside the West? to reach people living in the West?if they are not White.  
The placement of World English speakers into ESOL in the first place presented a 
fundamental social challenge to the teachers. Within the cultures of all four schools, 
ESOL was socially constructed as deficit (for further explanation of the construction of 
ESOL in these four schools, see Chapter 7), with ESOL students perceived as unable to 
speak English rather than in a more positive framing of ?bicultural/lingual? or 
?multicultural/lingual.? Jane, who taught World-English-speaking students from Jamaica, 
Ghana, and Sierra Leone, wanted to legitimate multiple forms of English, including 
World Englishes. However, her efforts were hampered by the mere placement of World 
English speakers into ESOL classes, since the policy communicated to the school 
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community at large that these students were not native speakers of English. It follows that 
World English speakers can lay no rightful claim to English. In failing to sanction World 
English as a legitimate form of English, the school system was refracting a history of 
colonialism and the persistent colonialism of the larger society in which the school is 
situated. 
Jane?s students questioned the presence of native-English speaking peers in their 
ESOL classes. The teacher described the tension she grappled with as she tried to offer 
her students an explanation without underscoring the racism and linguicism undergirding 
the placement policy: ?World English is tough, and it?s tough for a couple of reasons.? Of 
one student in particular, Terrell, Jane said: ?So it?s almost like they?re putting him down, 
like ?Why are you in this class??? She went on to explain: 
So I say, ?Well it?s an English, it?s a bit of a different English, and we?re 
working on the writing skills.? Some of the kids really don?t understand 
why they?re in the class. It?s almost like, ?What are you, dumb? Why are 
you in here?? I know why he?s there, I know the writing structures are 
different, and what needs to be focused on is the reading and writing. 
(Jane, Dinner at her house, 06.25) 
Jane framed the distinction between World Englishes and standard English as primarily 
significant in their written rather than spoken forms. She sought to explain in a way that 
did not contribute to the stigmatization of World English. In presenting the linguistic 
differences as a gap between speaking proficiency and reading and writing skills, she 
implies that World Englishes in their spoken form pose no complication within the school 
context, but that writing structures in, for instance, Granadian and Jamaican vernacular 
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English are sufficiently different to necessitate support to World English speaking 
students. 
Jane: Some of the words he uses I have to have him clarify because I don?t 
know what he means. Yeah, it would probably be an issue of standard 
versus nonstandard English. Trying to help him communicate more. 
Sometimes I understand what he means, but ?Structure, too, I?m thinking 
that some of my kids are from Sierra Leone, and the structure is so 
different. And organization too. 
Suhanthie: Is that because they?re speaking a different form of English? 
Jane: You mean, could it just be their education? Could be. It could be 
where they?re coming from and what they?ve worked on and what they 
haven?t. (06.25) 
While Jane sought to challenge the school?s deficit construction of World English, 
she also wanted to support the ability of Terrell and his peers to communicate with the 
English speakers in his new community. The school?s placement of World English 
speakers in ESOL made it impossible for her to present World English as anything but a 
form of language that was unsanctioned by the school without openly criticizing the 
school?s policy in front of the students. However, she sought to mitigate the stigma by 
emphasizing the distinction between spoken and written World Englishes and implying 
that students were in ESOL in order to acquire written academic forms only, thus 
legitimating at least the spoken forms of World Englishes.  
A further complication was presented by the indistinct lines among interrupted 
education, World English, and ESOL. Students whose education had been interrupted, 
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usually because of war, were often placed in ESOL regardless of their first language, and 
they were labeled ?World English speakers.? ESOL teachers therefore needed to have 
expertise in supporting emergent literacy development embedded in their professional 
knowledge of second language acquisition and related pedagogy. Referring to students 
whose education had been interrupted as ?World English speakers? reinforced the false 
construction of World English speakers as students without formal schooling. 
In making decisions about how to situate nonstandard forms of English within 
their classroom contexts, the teachers were thoughtful about the global positionality of 
English. For Katie, Jane, Alexandra, and Margaret to have helped their students to 
become communicatively competent without regard for the positioning of their first 
languages in the larger political global context would have implied their uncritical 
adaptation to standard forms of English. This would have had the ancillary effect of 
delegitimizing their languages and consequently their selves. Instead, the teachers crafted 
pedagogies that encouraged the development of their students? communicative 
competence while simultaneously challenging irrational language hierarchies. 
What is Said: ?Is ?Hey? a Bad Word?? 
The teachers? discussions of the legitimacy of language are significant. However, 
we cannot separate what can be said, that is permitted language, from what is said, that is 
native speaker speech. For Margaret, ?what is said? was a guiding principle in language 
teaching. Margaret was motivated to teach not the language sanctioned by her teaching 
texts, standardized tests, or ?grammar bibles,? but the language of actual everyday usage. 
She told us that as a language learner in China, she appreciated the praise she received 
when her language mirrored native speech: 
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Being a language learner ? praise, I try to remember how that feels, 
praise. I think that also comes back to what people really say. Because I 
hated it when I learned an expression in a book and people would smile 
and say ?We don?t really say that? or if I said something that was really 
local and people would say ?Where did you learn that?! That?s exactly 
how you say it.? I remember my students in China were very concerned 
with register, especially because they were taking it for business 
purposes? My kids now, we work on that in a more limited way. I use 
humor, I?ll say: ?Oh, would you kindly give me that.? (Dinner with 
Suhanthie, 05.30) 
She tried to support her students? familiarity with a range of registers. Her 
memories of her own emotions as a second language learner were a guiding force 
in the development of her pedagogy. What Margaret described is a teaching 
practice that has been referred to by Price and Osborne (2000) as ?humanizing 
pedagogy,? in which ??the whole person develops (not just a facet of a person) 
and they do so as their relationships with others evolve and enlarge? (pp. 27-28). I 
asked her why ?what is said? was important, and she shared:  
Margaret: Just today, [Jose], a student who?s actually really fluent 
verbally, he came to class today and I was working on reading with them 
one-on-one. And he said: ?Is ?hey? a bad word? Because somebody told 
me it was a bad word.? And I said: ?Well, it depends on who you use it 
with. For instance, if my sister were on the other side of the street and I 
wanted to get her attention, I?d definitely use ?hey.? But if my teacher 
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were at the end of the hallway, or the principal, I definitely wouldn?t use 
?hey?. I think it?s good to know that the registers exist and to be able to 
choose for yourself, to know how to make a situation go more smoothly.? 
(Margaret, Dinner with Suhanthie, 05.30) 
Similarly, she made a connection between empowerment and students? ability to 
use phrases that ?other people say?: 
I think my students feel so empowered when they learn something that 
they know other people say. For example, getting off the phone by saying: 
?Well, let me let you go.? I think I never even realized how I?d gotten off 
the phone ? Sometimes I think you can do it unwittingly but just get the 
pattern in your head. (Margaret, Interview, 05.30) 
Margaret seeks for her students the ability to develop a sociolinguistic competence that 
approximates that of native speakers. She wants them to be able to position themselves as 
a native speaker might be positioned. Margaret?s focus was on her students? ability to 
choose. She was concerned with more than Jose?s ability to assemble words together into 
a comprehensible form. She was invested in his capacity to use language appropriately 
for the context, about his ability to ?make a situation go more smoothly? as an 
empowered and agentive participant in a conversation. Saussure (1967) made the 
distinction between langue and parole, with langue referring to simply the arbitrary 
system of a language, and parole to discourse as social action. This dichotomy has been 
the subject of much critique, but it is useful in illustrating the distinction between two 
potential pedagogical orientations?the first seeking to simply transmit information about 
language as a detached system, and the other, a pedagogy like Margaret?s, supporting the 
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possibility of linguistic choices that originate in an assessment of the social situation the 
student finds herself in. This is a much deeper conceptualization of teaching than 
communicative competence. Margaret was engaged not merely in socializing her students 
to produce socially appropriate speech, but in their capacity to ?choose for yourself.? She 
wanted her students to make themselves heard, not simply by knowing the right words 
and knowing how to weave them together, but also by understanding ?how to make a 
situation go more smoothly? if they choose to. This returns us to the issue of voice. 
Gannet (1992) has described ?coming to voice? as ??a central epistemological metaphor 
for intellectual development? (p. 178). Coming to voice is particularly significant for 
language minority students who speak from the margins of school culture, who must 
often struggle to be heard and legitimized, and for whom education and its attendant 
socializing influences are synonymous with the suppression of voice.  
Beyond Communicative Competence to Identity 
All four of the teachers believed that in teaching language, they were supporting 
students? development beyond communicative competence to the construction of identity 
through language use. For instance, Katie valued the ability of her students to construct 
identities of intelligent and good employees and recognized that a way to contribute to 
this identity was to develop proficient speech (Afternoon tea, 06.19). Throughout the 
year, Alexandra noted several examples of the relationship between language use and 
identity. For instance, at an afternoon tea, Katie told of a friend?s surprising language 
choices: 
I had a friend who was from Sweden. When I first met her, everything was 
like ?Fuck, shit,? she?d be like: ?Oh, that?s fucking great,? but she?d say it 
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like normal conversation, and I was thinking, should I explain that ? in 
conversation, it?s not considered a good thing to use all those words in that 
fashion ? In every sentence, she?d have the f-word, the s-word, that a-
word ? Well, I met her again later and it was gone, she wasn?t swearing 
anymore. I wondered if someone had explained it to her or if she noticed 
that other people weren?t using those words. 
Alexandra responded: 
That?s why the language you use expresses who you are ? the language 
she chooses gives you some clue as to who she is as a person and what her 
experiences have been. 
She continued, in reference to an earlier conversation, to connect linguistic choices to 
cultural identity and then to the difficulties associated with developing a national 
curriculum: 
You refusing to use the n-word, we know that you?ve lived in the United 
States and there?s a different connotation for you. That?s another reason 
we can?t have standardized curricula. That?s part of the social and human 
construct of language, why it can?t be this mathematical formula. 
(Alexandra, Afternoon tea, 06.19) 
The connections between language and identity represent a conception of 
language teaching that involves a broader charge than simply helping students to become 
communicatively competent. For Katie, Jane, Margaret, and Alexandra, teaching 
language meant helping students to become the humans they aspired to be with regard for 
the positioning of their individual identities in the larger world.  
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Summary 
The pedagogies crafted by Margaret, Jane, Katie, and Alexandra demonstrated 
that aspiring to communicative competence is not enough. In order for understandings of 
language teaching to evolve appropriately, language professionals need to consider the 
relationship between language learning and social power in the classroom and in the 
broader political context. All agents in the social worlds of ESOL students?teachers, 
parents, students, administrators, school systems, and teacher educators?should be 
aware of how language teaching methods position students and contribute to the shaping 
of their identities, and they should be conscious of the ways in which supporting the 
global domination of English underscores the subordinate status of NNESs.  
The teachers? meanings of teaching language highlight the nature of voice and its 
relationship to knowledge. An emphasis on voice can assist teachers in supporting 
students? capacity to connect their classroom learning to their personal experience and 
can communicate to ESOL students that their experiences are worth sharing. Coming to 
voice is particularly significant for language minority students who speak from the 
margins of school culture, who must often struggle to be heard and legitimized, and for 
whom education and its attendant socializing influences are coterminous with the 
suppression of voice. The potential for ESOL students to come to voice cannot be 
reached unless teachers venture into the terrain beyond communicative language 
teaching. 
The teaching practices and experiences of Alexandra, Jane, Katie, and Margaret 
helped me to see how the concept of communicative competence, while important and 
valuable in its original context, has evolved into a regime of truth that needs to be 
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critiqued, reconceptualized, and expanded. The work that the four teachers were engaged 
in was complicated, and it pushed up against established boundaries and understandings. 
If English language teaching is to improve the lives and realities of ESOL students, 
ESOL professionals must continue to explore pedagogical possibilities that attend not 
only to whether students can be understood, but to the development of their voices, 
identities, and positionalities within their worlds. Such a charge is complex and elusive, 
but it is my hope that in demonstrating the ways in which four teachers accepted and 
grappled with the challenge, this study has taken a first step in the direction of extending 
our understandings of the possibilities available to language professionals. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Chapter 4. Grammar and Social Power 
?I don?t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.? 
- Liza Dolittle, Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw 
Introduction 
Liza Dolittle?s understanding of grammar was conceptually disconnected from the 
genteel and privileged identity she sought to construct, but without grammatically pristine 
language, she stood little chance of belonging to the community she hard targeted. For 
parallel reasons, teaching grammar was a theme that Margaret, Alexandra, Katie, and 
Jane discussed with some frequency as they developed their pedagogies over the course 
of their first year of teaching. Their discussions revolved around which language forms 
and discourses were considered ?correct? and the ways in which they managed the 
contradictions inherent in the process of responding to their students? simultaneous 
grammatical, communicative, and social needs. An examination of how teachers viewed 
the relationship between grammar and power provides a window into their various 
thinking about and meanings of language learning and teaching within their students? 
worlds. 
The four teachers operated in different contexts, and the needs of their students 
therefore varied. However, all four verbalized resistance to or discomfort with the direct 
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teaching of grammar. For instance, Margaret expressed a preference for allowing children 
to discover linguistic conventions and rules through natural language usage rather than 
through direct teaching (Margaret, Afternoon tea, 06.19). Alexandra believed that 
?grammar slows things down? and ?when you teach grammar, you?re teaching [language] 
in a segmented way? (Alexandra, Afternoon tea, 06.19). Katie told us: ?I don?t like 
teaching isolated grammar? (Katie, Afternoon tea, 06.19), and Jane simply said: ?I don?t 
like teaching grammar. I don?t like teaching it!? (Jane, Dinner at her house, 06.25). All 
four sought ways of teaching language that embraced a tighter connection to their 
students? lives than grammar-based methods. However, I will explain in this chapter that 
the four teachers were operating in worlds that supported, usually implicitly, technical 
constructions of language learning as grammatical learning. As they developed their ideas 
about teaching, they sought pedagogies that were steeped simultaneously in integrity to 
their student-centered ideologies, which did not embrace the direct teaching of grammar, 
and in fidelity to their students? future lives and needs for formal grammatical 
knowledge. I will provide examples of their various approaches to the dilemmas they 
encountered as they negotiated a role for grammatical teaching in their daily practice. 
The assumption that there exists one correct English grammar is an example of 
what Foucault (1977) has termed a regime of truth. Embedded in any culture and its 
discursive practices are rules about what counts as truth. In order for an assumption to 
become a regime of truth, it must be accepted as fact by the community it exists within. 
For instance, it could be argued that the assumed incorrectness of ?I be going to the 
store? is a regime of truth: the sentence is likely comprehensible to all English speakers 
but considered correct only within some minority communities. The supposition of its 
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incorrectness within society writ large has become so inherent that it is unquestioned and 
unquestionable, and as a result its arbitrariness is no longer visible. To resist teaching 
direct grammar would be to challenge a regime of truth, that is, the assumption that the 
dominant and standard form of English is most valuable. However, confronting this 
regime of truth presents a complication for even the most idealistic and transformative of 
teachers; Foucault tells us that a whole community, and not a single person, must 
participate in order for regimes of truth to be altered. Challenging the supremacy of 
correct standard grammatical forms is therefore not a straightforward and facile choice 
available to teachers. All four of the teachers expressed awareness of the connections 
between their ESOL classrooms and the social pressures beyond their classrooms and 
described structural limitations to their abilities to teach in ways that challenged the 
supremacy of nonstandard forms of English. This chapter is about how they made sense 
of those incongruities. 
The direct teaching of grammar in foreign language instruction has historical 
roots that date back as far as language teaching itself. Until the early twentieth century, 
grammar instruction was the most commonly practiced form of language teaching in the 
United States (Omaggio, 1989), and an explicit focus on grammar is visible in classrooms 
across the world today. In the United States, the most popular grammar textbooks focus 
on grammar principles with teaching suggestions and exercises (Celce-Murcia and 
Larsen-Freeman, 1999; Deakins, Parry, and Viscount, 1994; Azar, 2002) using grammar 
as a point of departure in language learning. Some of these texts present grammar as an 
essential code to be cracked, some as a route toward the liberation of foreign students 
fettered by their native cultures. For instance, the introduction to a best-selling grammar 
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book claims: ?Some cultures virtually train their children to be passive in the classroom, 
but Tapestry weans them from passivity by providing exceptionally high interest 
materials.? (Deakins, Parry, and Viscount, 1994, p. vii). Another assures readers that: 
?Students who complete the lessons in this text will be well-equipped to express 
themselves accurately and appropriately in all types of communication situations? 
(Pollock, 1997). Yet another links information about grammatical parts of speech to 
power and effective communication: ?All the kinds of words we use?nouns, verbs, 
adjectives, adverbs, etc.?are explained and used in exercises of increasing 
difficulty?The ability to use language correctly is a very powerful tool. The purpose of 
this book is to help you write and speak better, so that you, too, will be able to 
communicate effectively with the world around you.? (Pulaski, 1982, p. 5). Grammar has 
historically been offered as a passe-partout to mainstream culture. 
Research into the teaching of grammar in second language education has focused 
to date on developing new ways of teaching grammar (Liu and Masters, forthcoming) and 
fresh approaches to ?drilling? and ?correcting? the ?same grammatical structures over 
and over again? (Meloni, 2000/ 2001). What current research on grammar has neglected 
is attention to the relationship between grammatical instruction and social power in and 
out of the classroom. Bourdieu is helpful in connecting grammar to power. He draws 
attention to the arbitrary nature of sanctioned speech (for instance, why do we say feet 
instead of foots? Why do we use whom as an object?). He (1982) believes that ?correct 
usage? or ?legitimated language? (p. 61) owes its prestige to grammarians, who 
categorize official usage, and teachers, who enforce and reinforce its propriety through 
correction and instruction. Legitimate language is continuously protected by speakers 
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who possess command of the highbrow rules, including teachers. He contends that 
?[w]hat creates the power of words ?, a power capable of maintaining or subverting the 
social order, is the belief in the legitimacy of words and of those who utter them. And 
words alone cannot create this belief.? (p. 170) Language that has been legitimated by 
those in power remains sanctioned only if that legitimacy is continuously recreated by, 
for instance, repeated correction and instruction by an English teacher. None of 
Alexandra, Katie, Jane, and Margaret held a belief in the legitimacy or supremacy of 
?correct? grammar, and all four sought a departure from the direct grammar teaching 
practiced by their teacher-predecessors. However, they taught in school systems and 
indeed a society that valued, for a variety of reasons, grammatically proficient speech and 
grammatically accurate writing. The four teachers truly cared about their students, and 
part of this caring included concern about their students? capacity to present themselves 
as proficient or to pass high-stakes tests that relied on explicit knowledge about grammar. 
Katie, Jane, and Margaret felt compelled to provide grammatical guidance, concerned 
that if they challenged the legitimacy of ?correct usage? by refusing to support 
grammatical rules, their students would be less likely to become proficient in legitimated 
language and would not master the code of power. Language teachers face a special 
dilemma in negotiating the line between inciting social justice and reinforcing the code of 
the culture as they develop their ideologies. 
Although each teacher articulated a philosophy that are more tightly connected to 
either teaching grammatical conventions or protesting against them, none is committed 
exclusively to one or the other. Pennycook?s (1999) framing of the dilemma faced by 
language teachers is attentive to the dangers of reinforcing legitimate language but also 
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respectful of the limitations of teachers? contexts. He asks questions about access in 
relation to transformation. He perceives the two as potentially in opposition to each other; 
teachers whose focus is on transforming social order can fail to equip less privileged 
students with access to cultural (including linguistic) tools of power, while exclusive 
concern about access to these tools fails to challenge inequitable distribution of resources 
and encourage social justice. While Pennycook?s access/transformation dualism provides 
a helpful scaffolding within which to conceptualize pedagogy concerning grammar, it, 
too, is not sufficiently three-dimensional and doesn?t allow us to capture some of the 
complexities that teachers bring to the binary. In this chapter, I will explain how the four 
teachers crafted pedagogies that deviated from the polarity of the access/transformation 
conceptualization to offer language researchers and teachers evolved and fertile 
pedagogies that knit together access and transformation. 
This chapter discusses the perspectives of the four language teachers and seeks to 
develop a more complex and fluid understanding of how knowledge, pedagogy, and 
identity play out in the context of the relationship between grammar and power. 
Grammar Instruction 
Although grammar was a topic of discussion throughout the year, during an 
afternoon tea on the last day of the school year, the teachers focused specifically on their 
ideas about the place of grammar in language instruction. Unless otherwise noted, these 
conversations about grammar took place at an afternoon tea on June 19.  
While the teachers were all, to varying degrees, reluctant to directly teach grammar, 
Katie, Margaret, and Jane all supported instruction about grammar for a variety of 
reasons and in a variety of contexts. Katie recognized that students? mastery of 
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grammatical conventions allowed them to construct proficient identities and therefore 
access a degree of status and subsequent power. Margaret perceived grammar as the 
?bones? of language and supported the development of her students? understandings 
about the rules governing language use. Jane identified two situations in which she 
supported grammatical instruction: to connect to students whose learning styles and 
histories had accustomed them to grammar-based teaching, and to prepare her students 
for grammar-focused standardized testing. At the end of the year, she made reference to a 
third purpose served by grammatical instruction, the construction of a proficient speaker 
identity. Alexandra, in contrast to the other three teachers, did not support grammatical 
instruction, believing that it served to detract from authentic language learning and 
inhibited students? communication with their peers. However, although she didn?t teach 
grammar directly, she believed that her students acquired natural and comprehensible 
language proficiency through opportunities to practice language in use. 
A dominant conception of grammar in language teaching would be quite narrow, 
limited perhaps to morphology (word forms) and syntax (the relationships among words) 
only. All four teachers defined grammar more broadly than this. Their definitions were 
closely related to each others?, but not always identical, and I will discuss those 
differences in meaning as I explore philosophical differences among the teachers.  
Katie: ?Power Comes Out in Your Knowledge of Grammar Structure? 
For Katie, grammatical competence was one component of culture, and teaching 
culture was part of an ESOL teacher?s responsibilities: ?You can give students 
knowledge of the culture to help them advance.? While she expressed great discomfort 
with the teaching of grammar in isolation, she supported an explicit focus on grammar 
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within context, perceiving grammatical mastery as a tool to access power. She believed 
that grammatically appropriate speech was one way to lend legitimacy to discourse and 
increased the likelihood that the speaker would be heard. For Katie, ?grammar? went 
beyond merely an explicit focus on grammatical rules; her definition extended to 
grammar in actual use and even included the ability to distinguish which discourse forms 
are appropriate for which situation (register) and the ability to use language to convey the 
speaker?s intended meanings (pragmatic competence). For instance, she refers to a 
speaker?s ability to indicate politeness or to be demanding as being evidenced in 
?grammatical structure,? indicating a broad conceptualization of grammar. 
For Katie, the connection between grammar and power related to identity, with 
grammatical accuracy providing to students the tools they needed to construct an identity 
that could procure power. She explained that ?grammar?s a way to access yourself to 
power because the way language is structured people will see you in a certain way and if 
you can have access to the language, then you can have the power that comes with the 
language.? In the eyes of this teacher, language was not merely connected to power, it 
was situated within identity. She provided an example: ?So for instance, if you go into a 
job interview wearing a nice suit and you sit down and go ?Me four years school? and 
start talking in broken English, their perception of you will be very different than if you 
went in and said: ?I went to school and I have taken this many classes.?? Just as Katie saw 
a ?nice suit? as a marker of an identity of power, she associated the social ignominy of 
?broken English? with the identity of one who operates outside the culture of power and 
was concerned about the ability of her students to escape its associated stigmatization.  
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Katie believed that accurate language use was not an indication of intelligence or 
even education, and she was critical of general tendencies to associate developing 
English proficiency with lower intelligence: ?I think unconsciously, people associate 
intelligence with language. If you know how to speak a language very well, you?re very 
intelligent.? Her assertion is well supported; others, including Lindeman (2003), have 
found ideologies about nonnative English speakers to assume lesser intelligence, 
particularly for certain linguistic groups. Katie recognized that regardless of how she 
valued grammar in her classroom, students would eventually be facing native-English 
speakers who held positions of power. She recognized that in order for her students to 
overcome potential employers? stereotypes, non-Native English speakers must learn to 
speak ?well?. ?That?s why I think grammar is helpful. Because it?ll get you from one 
point, where people see you as uneducated even though you may be very educated, to the 
next point, which is, this person has a good command of the language.? She blames the 
injustice and inaccuracy of the controlling images of non-native English speakers on 
those who accept these images, but she recognizes that she has no control over these 
misperceptions. Responsibility for how non-native English speakers are perceived 
therefore falls not on ?people? who unquestioningly accept stereotypes but on the non-
native English-speakers themselves: ?That?s a problem we have with ESOL students?
even though you?re very bright, your English isn?t very good, so people think you?re not 
all there.? Here, she referred not to a problem with people who accept stereotypes 
unquestioningly, but to ?a problem we have with ESOL students.? In developing 
strategies to help to work around societal stereotypes and assumptions, which she had 
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very limited influence over, Katie focused on what she could contribute to, that is her 
students? grammatical proficiency. 
 
?Language and power are very connected. I finally believe that,? said Katie. Her 
use of the word ?finally? is telling, indicating a reluctant and almost resigned acceptance 
of a relationship that she had hoped to repudiate. She provided an example: ?Especially 
in the way that you get people to do things, it comes out in your grammar. If you want to 
be polite, you say ?please.? If you?re demanding, you say: ?Get me whatever.?? She noted 
the social power to be gained through pragmatic competence, for instance an ability to 
indicate politeness: ?The power comes out in your knowledge of grammar structure.? 
This represents a deeper step; knowledge about how to use the language empowers the 
speaker, but furthermore enables the speaker to assert her power with language. 
Katie wanted to teach in a way that supported two processes that both contributed 
to social change?the first a growing societal awareness of the inaccurate nature of 
stereotypes about immigrants (Pennycook?s ?transformation?), and the second English 
language learners? entry into the culture of power in order to challenge those stereotypes 
(?access?). As is evident from the following quote, I initially perceived these two as 
incompatible with each other and asked Katie whether she had difficulty finding a 
balance between ?teaching her students what they need in the world and teaching them to 
conform.? This dualism was not present for Katie: ?I don?t think there?s a tension.? She 
saw a gradual change in the publicly perceived images of English language learners and 
saw students themselves as potential advocates for themselves. She explained why access 
and transformation could coexist:  
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?There?s a movement to broaden people?s perspectives on language and 
minority students, but it?s a slow process. But in the meantime, you can 
give them knowledge of the culture, knowledge of the culture to help them 
advance and, once they do, they themselves can contribute to the process 
of broadening people?s perspectives. So you?re helping to empower them 
to change the system. They?ll succeed in the system, but at the same time 
they?ll be able to change it because they?ll know how to get inside. They 
say that the most effective way to change something is to get inside the 
structure and work from within.? 
I offered in response: ?But, you know, Audre Lorde says the master?s tools will never 
destroy the master?s house.? Katie?s perception was less black-and-white, and she voiced 
disagreement: ?I think you need both.? She believed that social change came through a 
concerted effort between ?people on the inside and outside railing the system,? with the 
?radicals? on the outside attracting attention to injustice and ?people on the inside? 
furthering the process from within. She believed that ?They?re not mutually exclusive? 
and moreover that: ??one?s not necessarily better than the other.?  
Katie has re-cast the access/transformation dichotomy with the important 
observation that access is a form of transformation, and transformation is a form of 
access because ?the most effective way to change something is to get inside the structure 
and work from within.? Katie?s discussions of cultures of power reveal a clearly 
delineated distinction between insiders and outsiders, with proficiency within the culture 
of power enabling social mobility and social change. The borders of the ?culture? of 
power are firmly established. English language learners occupy space outside this culture 
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of power, and their ability to construct and present appropriate identities is related to their 
ability to enter the ?culture?. In her discussion of the perceived correlation between 
English proficiency and intelligence, Katie referred to native English speakers, future 
employers, and those within the culture of power as a collective ?people? whose 
impressions of non-native English speakers played an important role in her students? 
futures: ?I think unconsciously, people associate intelligence with language,? ?? your 
English isn?t very good, so people think you?re not all there?,? ?[P]eople see you as 
uneducated even though you may be very educated,? and ??the way language is 
structured people will see you in a certain way.? Her language choices revealed her 
vision; she was motivated by a desire for her students who were currently outside the 
culture of power to gain entry, and she believed that the identities they forged to present 
to ?people? were instrumental in their access to insider status. Lisa Delpit (1988) has 
endorsed teaching codes of power. Delpit tells us that to neglect teaching the linguistics 
of the culture of power is to underscore the outsider status of minority groups, 
reaffirming difference and perpetuating marginalization. An essential ingredient in the 
construction of appropriate identities was ?knowledge of the culture,? which can be 
provided by ESOL teachers in the form of, inter alia, grammatical competence. For Katie, 
language teaching had the potential to be a political act. 
Alexandra: ?Grammar Slows Things Down? 
Alexandra also perceived grammar teaching as connected to liberatory teaching. 
However, in direct contrast to Katie, she refused to teach grammar directly. I interpreted 
her pedagogical choice as an act of resistance. Alexandra believed that an explicit focus 
on grammar was artificial, detracted from language learning, and reinforced inequitable 
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and arbitrary notions of which language was most legitimate. Her meanings of grammar 
were more specific than were Katie?s and centered exclusively on the rules governing 
language use. For instance, most of the examples of grammatical knowledge that she 
provided referred to tense shifts.  
Alexandra perceived a tension between natural language use and grammatical 
instruction. She believed that ?grammar slows things down. Because I think the kids are 
using the language.? One example she provided of grammatical instruction was teaching 
one tense at a time, and she believed that this focus drew students away from the less 
contrived, ?fluid?, mixed-tense usage of everyday conversation: ?If you sit there and say, 
we?re going to use the present tense today ? but they?re using present, past, and future 
all day.? She drew the conclusion that ?...when you teach grammar, you?re teaching 
[language] in a segmented way.? To focus exclusively on one facet of language is 
artificial, ?segmented.? Embedded in Alexandra?s philosophy was a belief in the 
acquisition of language through its use. She expected that students ?are going to pick up 
the difference between ?he? and ?him? just by using it? and should not be distracted or 
confused by a grammatical focus. For Alexandra, therefore, teaching grammar directly 
not only detracts from her transformative goals because it reinforces dominant norms, but 
it does not support the language learning that her students need 
 Another tension that made itself evident in Alexandra?s discourse was the 
distinction between accuracy and communication, which she saw in opposition to each 
other. She spoke of an ?expectancy,? noting that ?when we?re sitting around talking 
about what we?re going to do this weekend, they expect it to be in the future tense. So 
even if it doesn?t come out in the future tense, they understand it in the future tense.? The 
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use of the correct tense was less important than the listener?s ability to comprehend the 
message. Rather than teaching tense changes directly, she relied on literature to 
contextualize and provide natural modelling ?because in literature you can mix tenses and 
still understand the content of what you?re reading.?  
Canale and Swain (1980) understood communicative competence to comprise 
four components, (1) grammatical competence, which includes knowledge about the 
basic principles of language use, what Alexandra refers to as ?grammar,? (2) discourse 
competence, which concerns adeptness in combining grammar and meaning to create 
continuous text, (3) sociolinguistic competence, or producing and understanding 
language in relation to its context, and (4) strategic competence, the ability to navigate 
and compensate for language gaps, both verbally and nonverbally. In saying: ?So even if 
it doesn?t come out in the future tense, they understand it in the future tense,? Alexandra 
was making a distinction between grammatical competence and sociolinguistic 
competence and privileging the latter over the former to the exclusion of the former. 
Katie, on the other hand, viewed grammatical competence as a stepping stone toward 
sociolinguistic and discourse competence. For her, having control over the grammar 
resulted in more dexterous constructions of meaning. 
Like Katie, Alexandra was concerned about the ability of her students to discern 
among appropriate registers and particularly to know the difference between informal and 
formal registers. However, while Katie?s primary goal for her students appeared to be 
competence in mastering the dominant discourse and hence constructing an identity of 
power, Alexandra?s concern was with her students? ability to converse with their peers. 
She suggested that ?grammar doesn?t help you speak to your peers in middle school.? In 
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her desire to legitimate colloquial and nonstandard language, Alexandra enacts a 
decentering strategy, refusing to teach the dominant code. Both Alexandra and Katie 
were caring teachers motivated by their students? needs. Katie considered the primary 
need of her elementary-level students to become empowered within broader society, 
while Alexandra noted that for her students ?when you?re in middle school ? what?s 
most important [is] speaking to your peers and being part of.? A character in John 
Farrow?s 1955 film The Sea Chase said: ?A ship may belong to her captain, but the 
lifeboats belong to the crew.? For Alexandra, regardless of which language form was 
socially dominant and was affirmed by most, it was the lifeboat, the living language-in-
use, that had currency and relevance in the everyday lives of her students and that had 
longevity apart from the ship. By determining that grammar interferes with language 
learning and rejecting legitimated language, Alexandra avoided reinforcing arbitrarily 
defined identities of power. And conversely, when Katie sanctioned legitimated 
language, her students were more likely to learn the forms of language that are granted 
social legitimacy and might therefore have greater access to the culture of power. The 
two teachers have chosen different approaches to reconciling their pedagogical ideals 
with the realities of their students? needs in a socially inequitable world.  
Alexandra perceived a conflict between learning formal English and vernacular 
English and believed that one needed to take priority over the other. Despite this apparent 
conflict, she articulated a desire for her students to be able to master different dialects at 
the same time, stating that in teaching grammar, ?you lose the code-switching 
capabilities.? The term code-switching refers to the simultaneous use of two or more 
languages in one single interaction between two bilingual speakers. An example would 
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be the sentence: ?J?ai d?j? vu that movie,? which begins in French and then switches to 
English with no interactional markers of the language shift (Gumperz, 1982). What 
Alexandra is saying is that direct grammar teaching not only fails to contribute to 
language acquisition, but that it actually interferes with students? abilities to move among 
languages or language variations.  
In discussing the value (or lack thereof) of an explicit focus on grammar, 
Alexandra told us of a colleague?s grammar-based final exam that was disconnected from 
students? realities. She deplored the teacher?s lack of caring and consideration for his 
students? needs: ?All it was xeroxed grammar exercises, and the grammar exercises 
would ask: ?Please put the following verbs in the past ? past ? perfect ?? whatever, I 
don?t even know what these things are because I don?t do it that way. So, it comes across, 
when you don?t care.? She associated this artificial grammar-based assessment with a 
lack of caring. While she went out of her way to connect her lessons and her assessments 
to students? lives, her colleague structured his teaching and testing around grammatical 
concepts that had no basis in his students? lives. Furthermore, she explained to us that she 
is not familiar with tense names because this knowledge is not related to authentic use of 
English, which brings us to an interesting point. Most language teachers are indeed 
familiar with tense names. I contend that when Alexandra explained that she didn?t know 
them, she was describing resistance, and not ignorance. To say that she did not know 
tense names would be a gross oversimplification of her knowledge as a teacher. A 
superficial reading of her teaching might suggest that she did not teach grammar because 
she needed to obscure the fact that she did not know grammar. However, her teacher 
education and academic context did indeed equip her to know grammar. A formal 
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grammar class was included in her master?s coursework. In it, she learned not only 
methods of teaching grammar but also the basic grammatical principles of the English 
language. She was exposed to whatever terminology would have been unfamiliar to her at 
that point. She was required to buy grammar textbooks and usage guidelines during her 
graduate coursework, and she still owned these during the study. Additional resources 
were available through her school and the ESOL office. What is relevant is that although 
technical knowledge about grammar has been placed directly in her path and around her, 
she had chosen not to memorize tense names and other forms of explicitly grammatical 
knowledge, which implies a deliberate refusal to invest heavily in memorized rules about 
grammar within her language classroom. If Alexandra truly did not know tense names, it 
was because for her, they were not a part of language learning. She noted that 
transmitting information about grammar is of limited utility because this information is 
available to her at any moment: ?I can look it up in my grammar bible, but I don?t bother 
because I focus on authentic use.? She again called our attention to the distinction 
between knowledge about grammar and knowledge of language: ?To me it doesn?t matter 
what it?s called, [students] just need to know how to use it. And [my colleague] thinks if 
they know what it?s called, they?ll know how to use it, which I don?t agree with.? 
Learning language does not have the same meaning as knowing tense names. 
Among the four teachers, the greatest proponent of transformation over access in 
the teaching of grammar was Alexandra. Alexandra was guided by the concept of 
language in use?not native speaker use, but use by her ESOL students in their everyday 
lives and interactions. She employed a decentering strategy in order to show her students 
how much she valued their language. She expressed a desire to recognize all language 
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varieties and to equip students to navigate among them, for instance saying: ?You have to 
teach them that there?s different settings that you?re going to use black vernacular and 
you?re not going to use it.? However, she privileged the acquisition of colloquial 
language over the socially legitimated formal language: ?What?s most important is 
speaking with your peers and being part of.? For Alexandra, the colloquial language of 
school culture is constructed oppositionally to grammatically accurate language. For 
Alexandra, ?grammar? was associated with formal English, so she didn?t teach it. The 
strategy that Alexandra has chosen, decentering, is important because she used her 
position of authority within the classroom to challenge the status quo by not only 
legitimating vernacular speech but also delegitimating standard speech. 
Like the other three teachers, Alexandra expressed a philosophy that does not fall 
neatly on the transformation/access spectrum, but rather included more complex 
elements. While her focus is transformative and she is concerned with access, it is not 
Katie?s access to dominant culture of power but rather access to the social peer groups 
and communities of practice of other students. While she did not advocate direct 
grammar teaching, she, like Margaret, valued students? ability to absorb rules about 
grammar in a natural context. However, while Margaret was pleased to see students? 
directly correcting each other, Alexandra advocated less direct acquisition of knowledge 
through, for instance, literature. 
The tension between ensuring that minority students are explicitly taught to enter 
the culture and challenging the arbitrary codes that affirm linguistic values is consistently 
present for ESOL teachers, but all four of the teachers find strategies to accommodate 
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their philosophies and move the skirmish beyond a black-and-white choice between 
transformation and access. 
Margaret: ?The Bones of the Language? 
?To teach grammar means to give bones to the language,? said Margaret. 
Margaret, who taught elementary-aged students but had past experience teaching adults, 
made a distinction between the language-learning needs of a child and those of an adult 
and saw grammar functioning differently in the classroom according to her students? 
ages. She believed that while explicit grammatical instruction might be appropriate for 
adults, other forms of teaching would be more suitable for children. She indicated a 
preference for allowing children to discover grammatical rules themselves, for learning 
through hearing each other, and for peer correction. As she discussed language, it became 
apparent that ?grammar,? for Margaret, referred to the rules governing language forms 
and usage. For instance, an example she gave when discussing ?grammar? was the 
distinction between the third-person object him and the third-person subject he. Form was 
referred to in connection to grammar, specifically ?repetition of patterns and recognition 
of patterns.? Margaret?s definition of grammar also included appropriateness of speech, 
?what is said and what is not.? Margaret?s definition was similar to Katie?s in that it 
extended to grammar in use and not merely an explicit focus on rules. Both Katie and 
Margaret also consider register as part of grammatical competence, which represents an 
understanding of grammar that is slightly broader than Alexandra?s and Jane?s 
definitions.  
During the course of the study, Margaret was contemplative and sometimes 
unresolved about the role of grammar instruction in her classroom. ?I haven?t done very 
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much explicit teaching of grammar,? she shared with Alexandra, Katie, Jane and me. I 
asked her: ?Are you glad that you haven?t?? and she replied: ?I guess so, but I want to 
explore ways to give the kids more of a handle on what is said and what is not said.? 
While she, like Alexandra and Jane, associated direct grammar teaching with 
authoritative and directive teaching, she was simultaneously concerned about providing 
sufficient information about language use, a recasting of the tension that Katie discussed 
between teaching the codes of power and teaching conformity. While Katie believed that 
explicitly teaching the codes of power placed students in a position to construct powerful 
identities, Margaret was concerned about presenting herself as the sole source of 
knowledge. She negotiated this difficulty by relying on the social nature of learning and 
on sources of knowledge for her students other than herself, for instance each other: ?A 
lot of it they discover for themselves, by hearing the other kids. Like in the first grade, I?ll 
have kids correct each other. I have one girl, An-Lin, she says ?Him go. Him like this.? 
And the others will say ?Not him go, he go!?? She herself refrained from direct 
correction, noting that because her students were child learners, they were less in need of 
explicit instruction than adults would be: ?But I haven?t done as much purposeful 
modelling. My adult students would get very frustrated if I didn?t do more direct 
grammar. They?d say: ?I know I can?t talk like that person, and you have to give me the 
way to talk like that person.? I think that an adult has a different way to anticipate what?s 
coming in a language, in relation to their own language. If I were in a language class, I 
would need some explicit instruction.?  
Margaret?s metaphor of bones indicates a conception of grammar underlying 
language and providing support for words. Margaret believed that knowledge of the rules 
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of language use is a necessary part of English learning, regardless of how that knowledge 
is obtained. She likened language to math: 
?I was just talking to my family in Pig Latin last night, and I ? explained 
it to my husband. I said, okay, it?s very mathematical. It?s like multiplying 
every word by a common variable. The way my dad and I perceive it, it?s 
just like math.? 
She valued knowledge of the formula, the grammar: 
?And if I were learning Turkish, I would want the math of the language 
laid out first. Like, just the syntax, the mathematical relationship of certain 
words explained before I started embellishing and exploring.? 
Alexandra disagreed with Margaret?s conceptualization of grammar as a mathematical 
formula. She believed that ?the language that you use expresses who you are? and serves 
as an indicator of who a speaker is and what her experiences have been. ?That?s part of 
the social and human construct of language, why it can?t be this mathematical formula.?  
Margaret valued teaching the form of language as an alternative to teaching 
grammar. She referred to Kenneth Koch?s books:  
He?ll just give a pattern like: ?I used to, but now?? and then do lovely 
poems, like ?I used to be a cloud but now I?m the water on your cheeks? 
and just have fun with it so you don?t have to present it as a grammar 
lesson, you can present it as a form, and everyone does one on that pattern, 
but you?re getting down that: ?I used to, but now?? And I think that the 
recognition of patterns and repetition of patterns is there.? (Margaret, 
Interview, 05.30). 
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She values students? ability to grasp the grammatical patterns in language through their 
use. Her ideas about language acquisition and particularly grammatical acquisition are 
consistent with Gee?s (1993) suggestion that ?humans simply do not acquire a repertoire 
of language forms and functions by being explicitly presented with paradigmatic 
instances of them?Rather, it is the other way around. They (subconsciously) induce 
patterns and paradigms from actual practice and experience with a broad range of cases.? 
(p. 270). Rather than teaching simply the form ?I used to,? Margaret sought to introduce 
Koch?s poetry and to allow that particular structural form to be acquired passively, as the 
students experimented with their own compositions. In this way, while the teacher 
perceives language function as akin to a mathematical formula, she aims to teach it in a 
naturally occurring context. 
While Margaret valued her students? access to information about grammatical usage, she 
also strove to teach authentic, living language. She challenged not the actual legitimacy 
of grammatical knowledge, but rather its source by supplanting herself as the primary 
reference and embracing instead peer teaching and discovery principles. 
Jane: ?A Necessary Evil? 
Jane, who taught high school students, characterized grammar as ?a necessary 
evil? (Dinner at Jane?s house, 06.25) and taught direct grammar reluctantly: 
Jane: I don?t like teaching grammar. I don?t like teaching it. 
Suhanthie: Because ? 
Jane: Okay, I have a lot of kids that ask me ?why?? And I find it very 
difficult to explain why without saying ?just because?. (Dinner at Jane?s 
house, 06.25) 
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She took issue with the irrational nature of grammatical rules, and, like Alexandra, she 
believed that grammar holds back language learning: 
I think it?s bogging them down if you?re focusing on ?is? and ?are? and 
?present progressive.? (Dinner at Jane?s house, 06.25) 
Like Margaret, Alexandra, and Katie, however, Jane felt an ethical responsibility towards 
her students. She was therefore unable to justify withholding direct grammar instruction 
when she recognized its potential to enhance their learning and life opportunities. She 
cited three instances in which direct grammar instruction was appropriate. While Jane 
didn?t believe in the inherent usefulness of grammar instruction in second language 
acquisition, she saw grammar instruction as appropriate in response to contexts that 
celebrated specific knowledge about grammar. She took an instrumentalist orientation, 
supporting a focus on grammatical accuracy (1) to meet the learning styles of students 
who were accustomed to grammar-based teaching methods, (2) to prepare them for high-
stakes standardized testing that relied on grammatical knowledge and (3) in the 
negotiation of competent speaker identities. Like Alexandra, Jane viewed ?explicit 
grammar teaching? as support for and conformity to grammatical rules, a more specific 
definition than Katie?s or Margaret?s. She cited as examples of grammar teaching the use 
of ?grammatical terms? (Afternoon tea, 06.21), the distinction between ?singular and 
plural? (Afternoon tea, 06.21), ?question formation? (Dinner at Jane?s house, 06.25), and 
?modals? (Dinner at Jane?s house, 06.25). 
Rather than teaching her students what she believed they needed to be taught, 
Jane sought a connection between her teaching and their learning styles. Many of her 
students had studied English in their home countries, often in grammar-focused contexts, 
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and were comfortable learning grammar directly. At an afternoon tea on 03.21, she 
explained her pedagogy as an adjustment to her students? ?learning styles,? explaining 
that: ?I don?t do a lot of explicit grammar teaching, but I think that some kids really miss 
that and really want it.? Her intention was to teach grammar as suggested by the 
curriculum: ?in the curriculum, grammar is supposed to be integrated.? She strove to 
teach grammar only in the context of editing students? written work, but she found herself 
frequently responding to their specific questions about grammar and grammatical 
terminology when she wanted ?to get them into process writing and work on things based 
on what they?re doing wrong.? She noted that although it contradicted her philosophy of 
second language learning, ?some of them do well with: ?This is the rule, practice it.? 
Some of them like that.? Similarly, at the end of the year, she expressed her sense of a 
conflict between providing an enjoyable learning experience and responding to students? 
requests for grammatical instruction. 
Some of the kids love it. That?s a whole other thing I struggle with 
because here I am thinking we?re doing all of these fun things and much 
more of what I like with the reading and the literature and the writing and 
the speaking activities, and then I have kids who are like: ?We don?t do 
enough grammar.? I mean, we have the Azar series, which is so traditional 
in my view, and some of the kids love it, they crave it, they really want it, 
I don?t know if it?s structure or familiarity, I mean if they?re coming in at 
level 2, they?ve already been learning it. (Jane, Dinner at her house, 
06.25). 
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She linked her philosophy to Vygotskian (1978) theory. Her point of departure is what 
students can do independently, and her goal for them is assisted performance of 
grammatical use in context: ?I was thinking about how my philosophy was almost a 
Vygotskian model, allowing them to show you what they need.? She valued the notion of 
teaching that focused on the students: ?I guess some direct teaching is good, but I guess I 
had this idea of this teacher who will motivate their students and guide them, who will 
say: ?What do you think about X?? and figure things out.? 
Jane?s second reason for teaching grammar directly was to prepare students for 
high-stakes standardized testing. When she was teaching to the test, she used technical 
grammar terminology and encouraged students to know grammatical rules. For instance, 
she distributed a list of verbs whose past tense is irregularly conjugated and added this 
list, in poster form, to her classroom wall. Her class on 11.07 began with the following 
warm-up:  
?Warm Up 
Write a sentence in the past tense using these verbs: 
write 
forget 
go 
be? 
(Field Notes, 11.07) 
However, Jane was not simply conforming to a traditional teaching style in grudging 
response to the requirements of this functional writing test, a requisite for graduation. She 
made a point of telling her students that the knowledge they were acquiring was 
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specifically for the test, making the distinction between real learning and learning for the 
test: 
Jane: Why are we talking so much about the past tense? We?re doing a lot 
of past tense, but why? 
Ignacio: The writing test. 
Jane: Right! The writing test. We?re doing this for a reason ? There is a 
certain way they want you to answer the questions. There is a certain way 
they want you to write in order to pass the writing test. Most of your 
writing will be in the past tense, and they look for that, to make sure you 
are writing in the past tense. (Observation, 11.07) 
Her teaching focused not on meaning-making, communicative competence, or language 
in use, but rather on efficiently and expediently ensuring that students would be able to 
produce the type of writing that the test valued. 
Jane: Who has a sentence? 
Ricardo: I write a letter last time for my brother. 
Jane (writing the sentence on blackboard): So ? write becomes? 
Students: Wrote. 
Jane: Wrote. Okay. Forget? 
Luis: I never forgot my homework. 
Jane (writing on blackboard): Good. 
(Observation, 11.07) 
She told me later that her teaching style for test preparation differed from her beliefs 
about how language should be learned: 
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?The way I?m teaching now is nothing like the way I would teach if there 
were no test. Absolutely not.? (Interview, 11.07) 
While she regretted the effect the test was having on her teaching, she was comfortable 
with her pedagogical choice which she saw as necessary within an ethic of caring and 
responsibility. She recognized that grammatical knowledge had a valuable meaning in the 
lives of her high-school students and was crucial to their success, and she felt a 
responsibility to support them: ?I want these kids to graduate. I mean, it?s not fair of me 
to say I?m not going to do it that way. That?s not fair to the kids.? (Interview, 11.07) 
 She was aware of the broader advantages of studying for tests that relied on 
grammatical knowledge and uses the word ?justify? in support of her teaching of 
grammar. Her word choice appears to illustrate a general regret regarding direct grammar 
teaching (although it is unfortunately equally possible that familiarity with my orientation 
and ideologies made her feel the need to explain or ?justify? her teaching to me), and she 
made a point of letting her students know that this focus on grammar was simply in 
deference to the test.  
?That?s another way I justify it, how it?s test-taking skills. That can help 
them throughout high school and if they go on to college.? (Jane, Dinner 
at her house, 06.25). 
 Jane, like Katie, had concerns about identity construction and in particular about 
her students? abilities to project the appearance of proficiency. This provided her third 
reason for directly teaching grammar. She perceived the ?fossilization? of errors as an 
impediment to the construction of a competent speaker identity, and she believed that it 
was a problem that could be redressed by the direct teaching of grammar: 
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I think [grammar is] necessary because the kids sometimes tend to 
fossilize some of their mistakes, and I understand them, but part of my 
goal is to get them to a level where everybody can understand them and 
perceive them as being proficient in English. I think they?re looked down 
on if they make grammatical errors. (Dinner at Jane?s house, 06.25). 
She made a distinction between her grammatical standards and those that she believed are 
expected of students beyond her ESOL classroom: 
And it doesn?t bother me a bit if they make grammatical errors, and I don?t 
most of the time correct them, but I would like them to be able to know it 
and then choose whether to use it. (Afternoon tea, 03.21) 
On a personal level, Jane was unconcerned with nonstandard or incorrect grammar. 
However, she constructed empowerment as having enough knowledge to make a choice 
between forms considered correct and incorrect. The language that she believes was 
important communicatively was not the same language necessary in the negotiation of 
students? own identities:  
Question formation, certain points just immediately grab someone as an 
error. Modals like may I, can I, could I, I don?t think those are necessarily 
important at this stage. But if the kid continues to make the same mistake 
over and over, I think it just limits them. (Dinner at Jane?s house, 06.25) 
Her concerns with students being ?looked down on? and ?just limit[ed]? related not to 
students? communicative abilities but to their identities. Another concern of Jane?s was 
the contextualization of grammatical instruction: 
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Suhanthie: Would you ever stand up and teach a grammar lesson without 
the context of a kid making an error? 
Jane: Yes, but only that feeds from something else we?ve done. If it?s in a 
story and it?s a teachable moment, like if there?s a bunch of pronouns in a 
story we?re doing, then I might pull them out and have them work with 
them. (Dinner at Jane?s house, 06.25) 
Like Alexandra, she avoided teaching grammar that lacked connection to the lives of 
students, telling me later during the same conversation that: ?It?s very rare that I will take 
out the grammar book and do a chapter.? She saw the acquisition of knowledge about 
form as developmental, as part of the process of self-improvement for all people, not only 
non-native English speakers. She consequently offered grammar in the context of editing: 
I do a lot of editing, which I think is a skill. Yeah, I?m focusing on 
grammar but I?m also focusing on writing and editing which is something 
that we all have to do forever. I just keep telling them nobody writes 
perfectly the first time, there?s always a way to improve your writing in a 
second draft. And we look for mistakes. I think that?s valuable, finding 
your own mistakes in whatever language, looking over what you have 
written and seeing if you can make it better ? Or I have them peer edit 
where we work on vocabulary, they have to come up with a sentence for 
the vocabulary word, they put it on the board and as a class we look at it 
and we edit it. That?s where in my mind I?m doing grammar. (Dinner at 
Jane?s house, 06.25) 
158   
 
 
Even when Jane directly taught grammar, she framed her instruction as the improvement 
of writing, rather than the teaching of grammar, and furthermore moved away from a 
deficit construction of second-language learning by casting editing as something 
important for everybody?s writing, regardless of language proficiency.  
 In response to Alexandra?s reluctance to teach grammar, Jane focused on the 
?necessary? rather than the ?evil?: 
?What if your grammar is so poor in English that it?s not communicative? 
What if the teaching of the grammar makes another kid able to understand 
her? Then are you doing a disservice to them later? When they leave your 
classroom, where that?s acceptable, and then they go to the next 
classroom? Orally I think it?s fine, I think the teacher?s going to accept 
whatever the kid says as long as they?re getting the content. But in writing, 
there?s such a push for writing across the curriculum that if you don?t 
teach them at least the rules ? and then they can choose. Because I think 
they?re going to pick up the vernacular just by being in the halls and being 
in the lunchroom and hearing it and watching it on TV.? (Dinner at Jane?s 
house, 06.25)  
 To Jane, the fact that standard English was sanctioned meant that it ought to be 
taught in order for students to be successful. Both Katie and Jane were aware that the 
success of their students involved a certain degree of compliance with a dominant 
conception of success, one that included a legitimization of forms of knowledge that the 
teacher appreciated not as valuable knowledge but as a means to an end. They both 
believed that to challenge social acceptance of these forms of knowledge by refusing to 
159   
 
 
teach them, and hence legitimate them, would be an injustice to their students, 
disempowering them and hindering them on their path towards success in their American 
lives. 
 The teachers all practiced in contexts that accorded a greater degree of legitimacy 
to the teaching of grammar than the teachers themselves embraced, and all expressed a 
need to adequately integrate teaching language in a way that had integrity with a caring 
and ethically motivated desire to prepare their students for real-life success. The degree to 
which the teachers embraced direct grammar teaching varied according to the teaching 
context and identities of the teacher and the students. 
Grammar and Authority 
A discussion among Katie, Jane, and me touched on issues of authority and 
connection in relation to grammar and accuracy. Katie described a lesson she taught on a 
verb tense. The first day, she taught the concept directly, and the next day she re-taught it 
in a less direct and more inductive format.  
I had a little crisis ? well, not a crisis, just a reflection, I guess ? For this 
new curriculum, we have to teach the present perfect. It?s taught through 
content. So we?re studying the rainforest, people have cut trees. It started 
in the past, it continues through the present, so it?s present perfect. I did 
model the language, but I just taught it and let it come out.  
Katie went on to describe the lesson, in which she drew a timeline illustrating the past, 
present, and future, and ?had the students give me examples of something that they 
started and something that they finished that?s over and done with and drew that on the 
160   
 
 
timeline,? color-coding their sentences in relation to a biography of a scientist who 
worked in a rainforest. She told us: 
I guess it was okay because they got to manipulate sentences and words, 
but I wasn?t very satisfied with it. 
Suhanthie: You thought you were too directive? 
Katie: Yeah.  
Jane complicated the link between authority and the absolute nature of grammar 
by placing it within the framework of culturally tinted learning styles: 
Jane: I don?t know, I wouldn?t beat yourself up over that. Some kids really 
want that. I mean, if you?re coming from how to deal with learning styles. 
I don?t do a lot of explicit grammar teaching, but I think that some kids 
really miss that and really want it. Like they want to know, is that plural or 
singular, and they will use grammatical terms, where I want to get them 
into process writing and work on things based on what they?re doing 
wrong. But some of them do well with, this is the rule, practice it. Some of 
them like that. 
Katie: I find myself saying a lot, this is what we?re going to do today 
instead of just doing it and then saying look, what we just did was ?. I 
found myself doing a lot today we?re going to, instead of approaching it a 
different way and having them work the language a bit and then pointing it 
out. Because I think that would get them to think, I want the students to be 
able to construct their language, use the language in situations and then 
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maybe pick out points that I can focus on. I think it?s that I don?t want to 
directly teach it off the bat. I think it?s very boring. 
Katie sensed that grammar teaching was pulling her into a transmission-oriented 
teaching style that failed to allow space for student knowledge and knowledge co-
construction, but Jane pointed out the importance of specificity and clarity for 
linguistic minority students:  
Jane: What about for the kids who find it confusing unless you tell them 
today this is what we?re going to focus on, almost like a guide for some 
kids versus why are we doing this. In high school, they always want a 
reason for what they?re doing. I was thinking about how my philosophy 
was almost a Vygotskian model, allowing them to show you what they 
need. In the curriculum, grammar is supposed to be integrated. I guess 
some direct teaching is good, but I guess I had this idea of this teacher 
who will motivate their students and guide them, say what do you think 
about X figure things out. (Afternoon tea, 03.21) 
In the course of this conversation, direct grammar teaching was constructed as directive. 
Katie was pursuing a pedagogy that was open and relied on discovery principles, 
primarily because her experience on the first day of the more directive format was that it 
was ?boring.? Jane noticed that some of her high school students were actually reassured 
by teaching styles that were compatible with their own, in this case, more traditional 
styles. Jane refers to students using grammatical terms, asking whether words are plural 
or singular, and seeking to practice rules. Jane?s point is important. There is a stark 
epistemological difference between the absolute nature of a grammar lesson and open-
162   
 
 
endedness of a lesson that revolves around students? lives rather than around a body of 
concrete information to be learned. One values categorical and definite constructions of 
knowledge, the other more equivocal and subjective forms. For some students, there is 
something comforting in the consistent availability of right answers and wrong answers. 
It underscores teachers? authority, since the teacher then (usually) has the answers, but it 
eliminates a certain degree of intellectual chaos and the possibility of questions with no 
answers. Informing students about the upcoming format of the class, similarly, can be 
construed either as directive or as informative. Katie felt that she was guiding her 
students with too heavy a hand rather than allowing the class to evolve naturally from 
students? interests, but Jane pointed out that, for some students, being warned of what is 
to come next can provide a sense of security.  
This conversation illustrates the unfeasibility of the teachers developing liberatory 
ideas about teaching language devoid of direct grammar instruction. To do so would be to 
ignore the needs, interests, learning styles, and realities of their students, a pedagogy 
which in itself would not be liberatory. The teachers? pursuit of pedagogies that allowed 
knowledge co-generated by teachers and students while still creating space for teachers to 
be clear and specific is an example of a collision and subsequent conciliation of 
transformation and access. 
Access Versus Transformation 
Katie, Margaret, Jane, and Alexandra challenged the bifurcation of transformation 
and access, exploring instead pedagogies that united the two. For these four teachers, to 
neglect to provide access to information about how the ?culture of power? (Katie, 
Afternoon Tea, 06.19) operates was to deny students the chance to advance or learn. For 
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Katie, grammatical proficiency was ?a way to access yourself to power? in order to 
construct and present an identity associated with social power. Margaret?s definition of 
grammar extended beyond an explicit focus on rules to include register. She expressed a 
desire to ?give kids more of a handle on what is said and what is not.? Her motivation to 
?give kids? linguistic facility, to ?allow them to discover,? and to comply with requests to 
?give me the way to talk like that person? all reflect concerns about access. Jane, too, saw 
an exclusive commitment to social transformation within her teaching context as 
injustice: ?It?s not fair of me to say I?m not going to do it that way. That?s not fair to the 
kids.? (Jane, Interview, 11.07). In Jane?s eyes, if she had refused to affirm the value of 
decontextualized knowledge about grammar, she would have been robbing her students 
of the probability of passing the tests required for graduation. Alexandra sensed that her 
middle-schoolers? most pressing need was to belong. She refused to sanction the 
dominant discourse by teaching it and expressed concern that her students be able to 
navigate not the culture of power, but their peer cultures, noting that: ?grammar doesn?t 
help you to speak to your peers in middle school.? Hammond and Macken-Horarick 
(1999) have examined the challenges presented by mainstream literacy programs that 
include explicit teaching of genres (cultural tools within key curriculum subjects, an 
example of which is grammar). They note that: ??although the teaching of key genres 
may help some individuals gain access to the discourses, texts, and genres that have 
accrued cultural capital, such teaching does nothing to change the power structures that 
privilege these and that give rise to inequality in the first place.? (p. 530). This 
conceptualization of language teaching in binary terms is insufficient for our discussion. 
Two questions are raised: Does direct grammatical instruction imply abandonment of 
164   
 
 
transformative pedagogies? And conversely, does a commitment to transformation deny 
students access to cultures of power? These questions will be discussed next. 
Student Agency in Transformation 
The answers to the questions lie within the pedagogy of the four teachers, and 
specifically in the terrain between access and transformation. The access/transformation 
dualism provides a helpful scaffolding within which to conceptualize pedagogy 
concerning grammar, but it doesn?t allow us to capture some of the complexities that the 
teachers bring to the binary. For instance, Katie was not single-mindedly committed to 
access, she saw it as the first step towards transformation: ?There?s a movement to 
broaden people?s perspectives on language minority students, but it?s a slow process ? 
once they [advance] themselves, they themselves can contribute to the process of 
broadening people?s perspectives.? Like Hammond and Macken-Horarik (1999), who 
believe that ESL students ?cannot be expected to run before they can walk,? Katie saw 
the mastery of tools of power as a necessary precursor to transformation. What the 
access/transformation dualism pays insufficient attention to is student agency, which to 
Katie was key. She saw her commitment to access as an investment in potential student 
agency. However, further attention needs to be paid to how that agency develops over 
time. Katie devoted her energies to assisting her elementary-school-aged ESOL students 
to construct grammatically proficient identities, but she did not do so uncritically. Rather, 
she was disparaging of erroneous stereotypes about language minority students, in 
particular the unfair perception of a relationship between English proficiency and 
intelligence later in their lives. 
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?How It?s Said?: The Idealized Native Speaker 
Margaret was committed to providing access to information about grammar and 
language usage, however, she did not do so in a way that encouraged students to blindly 
adopt the prescriptive form of knowledge revered by grammarians. Rather, she privileged 
the descriptive language of everyday usage. For instance, she told of a sign she made for 
her classroom: ?So I put up a sign, but I put it up as ?Nobody is perfect.? Then I 
remembered hearing in one of Carolyn Graham?s talks, she said that you shouldn?t teach 
anything how it?s not said, even just for the function of grammar. Nobody says: ?Nobody 
is perfect.? You always say it with the contraction. So I took it down and put a new sign 
up with the contraction ? I think my students feel so empowered when they learn 
something that they know other people say? (Margaret, Interview, 05.30). On one hand, 
Margaret spoke of ?how it?s said,? which she immediately juxtaposed with, on the other 
hand, ?grammar.? She accepts Carolyn Graham?s contention that ?how it?s said? is more 
important than ?the function of grammar.? For Margaret, the two are not natural 
companions and may even exclude each other. Her goal was not grammatical purity but a 
native-speaker sound. Her ideas about ?what is said and what is not? revealed an 
understanding of a commonly used register that serves as a desirable goal for ESOL 
students.  
The notion of a monolithic native speaker has been problematized by Cook 
(1999), who has called into question both the nature of and the validity of the native 
speaker as the sole ?appropriate model? (p. 185) for non-native English speakers: ?The 
prominence of the native speaker in language teaching has obscured the distinctive nature 
of the successful second-language user and created an unattainable goal for L2 learners.? 
166   
 
 
Cook suggests that acceptance of native speech as ideal establishes a deficiency 
perception of non-native speech, positing that in favoring access to native-like speech as 
a goal in second language acquisition, teachers and students glorify the ability of an 
immigrant to sound American and to suppress the foreign element of her speech. Cook is 
critical of this approach because doing so has the power to underscore the stigma of 
difference. However, Margaret developed a pedagogy that responded to the desires, 
needs, and ?imagined communities? (Norton, 2000) of her students. Her terminology 
?how it?s said? is not necessarily synonymous with ?native-speaker like? because the 
vaguer description allows the possibility of ?how it?s said? by any community, including 
the bilingual community at Pewter Brook Elementary School. Her terminology chips 
away at the artificial division between ?native? and ?non-native.? Her strategy has the 
potential to rely on the conception of common speech as a more authentic alternative to 
the grammatically pristine speech historically reified in language classrooms. Margaret?s 
students found it ?empowering? to be able to say English phrases that ?they know other 
people say.? Because she was a caring and responsive teacher, a pedagogical style that 
made sense to Margaret needed to be cognizant of what made her students feel 
empowered.  
 Alexandra, who valued authenticity of speech, questioned the dominance of 
standard English in relation to what counts as native speech. Alexandra questioned the 
conception of a single, pre-cast native speaker and its contribution to an essentialist 
rendering of the native speaker. There is not one type of native speech. Alexandra spoke 
of the simultaneous existence of three language varieties in her classroom, formal 
English, colloquial English, and African-American vernacular English (Afternoon tea, 
167   
 
 
06.19). Which of these best represents ?what is said and what is not?? Accepting the 
concept of an idealized native speaker, rather than multiple images of English speakers, 
would inevitably necessitate a decision about what counts as the native speaker. If we 
delved further, we would likely find even more varieties in all of the classrooms, 
depending on students? other dimensions of difference such as geographic origin, gender, 
and class.  
?There is a Certain Way They Want You to Write?: Postponing Transformation 
When Jane taught grammar in order to meet students? learning styles, she did so 
with the assurance that she would incrementally decrease her attention to direct grammar 
instruction in order to eventually address grammar in the correction of student texts only. 
She was deferring her pedagogical ideals temporarily and could envision a point when 
she would teach in a manner consistent with her philosophy. However, when she taught 
to the standardized tests, she did so with the acknowledgement that she was suspending 
her philosophy of teaching indefinitely, perhaps permanently, in the face of a pressing 
need: graduation. Deleuze (1977) notes that: ?No theory can develop without eventually 
encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall.? (p. 206). Jane?s 
liberatory philosophy had struck the wall of practice and the teacher was faced with a 
choice. She was contending with an additional challenge, her students had immigrated at 
a later age than those of the other three teachers and needed to therefore achieve a higher 
level of competence in English in order to be considered proficient, than would, say, a 
second-grade student. They also had a much shorter period in which to adjust to their new 
settings and fulfill the requirements for graduation. Rather than choosing among raising 
levels of consciousness, legitimating alternative discourses, and ensuring that her students 
168   
 
 
graduate, she developed an approach that allowed her to integrate the three. On a 
superficial level, she seemed to be teaching contingently until the ideal setting presented 
itself and allowed her to teach in tune with her ideals. However, part of pedagogy is a 
response to context. If we believe that a teaching philosophy cannot be divorced from the 
environment it is practiced in, we must examine not only how she would like to teach, but 
how she does teach.  
Again, the simplicity of the access/transformation binary shrouds the teacher?s 
intent. What counts as discourse or language in Jane?s classroom was grammatically 
correct, so she felt coerced into teaching direct grammar. This, however, does not mean 
that Jane was agreeable to access to the exclusion of transformation. She enacted a 
philosophy that was responsive to her ethical commitment to her students, and she 
mitigated her legitimation of grammatical accuracy by telling students: ?There is a certain 
way they want you write in order to pass the test,? making a clear distinction between 
writing in general and writing for the test. She avoided using words such as ?wrong? and 
?right.? Jane wanted her students to graduate, but she also wanted to emphasize that the 
qualities valued by the test are not universally valued.  
Summary 
Alexandra, Margaret, Katie, and Jane sought to develop pedagogies that were 
respectful of their students? humanity and supportive of their lives beyond the classroom. 
The four were intentional and thoughtful practitioners teaching for social justice. Part of 
the development of their pedagogies was discovering a balance between pedagogy that 
supported transformation and accountability to their students. Freire (1998) tells us that: 
??coherent democratic authority recognizes the ethical basis of our presence in the 
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world and necessarily recognizes that it is not possible to live ethically without freedom 
and that there is no such thing as freedom without risk? (p. 87). The decisions that the 
four teachers make are steeped in ethical responsibility to their students and, 
simultaneously, to their own ideals. While the strategies that Katie, Jane, Alexandra, and 
Margaret have arrived upon are not perfectly comfortable for them, they represent the 
most caring, most ethical balance that the four teachers are able to negotiate within their 
contexts.  
 
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Part II. Meanings of Student Identities,  
Positionalities, and Difference 
Where I?m From 
I am from the dreams of my country. 
I am from the volcano. 
I am from the cana dulce. 
I am from the farms with rice. 
I am from strong coffee. 
I am from las pupusas. 
I am from baseball. 
I am from Sami Sosa. 
I am from beautiful dresses, barot saya. 
I am from fritada with tortilla de papa. 
I am from half of the world. 
I am from ?El Patrimono Nacional de la Humanidad?. 
I am from the land of lakes and volcanoes. 
I am from rice and beef. 
I am from La Paz. 
I am from the rice field, fruit, the fish in the river. 
I am from the little country with five volcanoes. 
I am from the smaller place in America. 
I am from rice, milk, egg, corn, cheese, chicken, meat. 
I am from nature. 
I am from banana and yuca. 
I am from merengue and bachata. 
I am from the people who are real soccer players. 
I am from where you can see the stars and dream with them. 
I am from the fishing place. 
I am from old Cora books. 
~A collaborative effort of Margaret Foulkes Chan?s ESOL I class ~ 
 
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Introduction to Part II 
Part II, ?Meanings of Student Identities, Positionalities, and Difference? is about 
how Alexandra, Margaret, Katie, and Jane grappled with their role in the making of 
students? identities. Language teachers may be unaware of the ways in which they 
inevitably contribute towards the shaping of their students? identities, but Alexandra, 
Katie, Jane, and Margaret recognized the embeddedness of discursive practice in 
pedagogy and were mindful of the production of identities and positionalities implied in 
the generation of language. Their awareness stems from the informed, thoughtful, and 
analytical lenses they apply to the social dimensions of their teaching and their 
attentiveness to the active presence of their ideologies their classrooms. As Canagarajah 
(1999) puts it: ?In the postmodern world, education has lost its innocence.? (p. 3)  
Being conscious of their power in their classrooms did not mitigate the tensions 
inherent in that power, nor did it provide answers to their questions about how to 
negotiate the terrain between responding to their students? various needs and challenging 
an inequitable status quo. However, their discussions around the topic afford us a window 
into the complexity of language and learning in the making of ESOL student identities. 
As I develop an account of their pedagogies, I highlight the numerous contradictions 
within and across the various dominant discourses of their contexts, their social worlds, 
and their academic histories. 
 
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Chapter 5. Pedagogies of Difference 
Introduction 
The processes of student identity construction in ESOL classrooms were intricate 
and complicated. Much of identity is constructed through discourse and, as was made 
patently evident in the study, meanings of language and positionality are inextricable one 
from the other. In a world in which English has immense linguistic power and in a 
country in which English is supreme, the language minority status of ESOL students 
usually places them in a subordinate discursive position. The intersections of language 
minority status with national identity, gender, race, class, and other dimensions of 
difference therefore provide rich terrain for understanding how identities are formed in 
and out of classrooms. Consequently, as researchers examine the ways in which teachers 
teach language, they are simultaneously scrutinizing the multiple ways in which identity 
is represented and, implicitly if not knowingly, constructed in classrooms. As crossroads 
of multiple cultural and linguistic identities, ESOL classrooms allow a special 
perspective: they are sites in which divergent and mutable meanings of identity meet and 
are negotiated. I drew from Alexandra, Katie, Margaret, and Jane?s perspectives and 
practices and sought to develop an understanding of how knowledge, pedagogy, and 
power are played out as students? identities are negotiated and constructed. Doing so 
helped me to develop a broader account of the category of linguistic difference. The 
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study enriched my understandings of gender, ethnic, racial, and class identities by 
including the role of one dimension that is often neglected in the larger educational 
research community, that is linguistic difference, which permeates all other categories of 
difference within realm of English language teaching.  
It is within social institutions, and in particular the institution of schooling, that 
meanings of difference are created, supported, challenged, or all too often overlooked. 
Just as schools are instrumental in the production of meanings of difference, they 
contribute to the shaping of individuals? teachers, students, and others? whose 
expectations either confirm, refute, or confound those meanings of difference (Weedon, 
1999). In this chapter, I look at what difference meant for the teachers in this study and 
examine how their understandings of difference made themselves present in their 
classrooms and schools. How are meanings of difference, and in particular cultural, 
racial, gender, and linguistic difference, constructed in the classroom? I make a 
distinction between social constructions of difference, such as race, class, and gender and 
sexuality, which will be discussed in this chapter, and constructions that are particular to 
institutions of schooling, in particular the school constructions of ESOL, which will be 
discussed in Chapter 7.  
 Many years ago, I read Valerie Ooka Pang?s (1988) description of very young 
first-grade students who arrived in her classroom already highly sensitized to racial 
differences. She explored the sociocultural interpretations of those differences. I 
remember that piece because the degree to which her tiny students were racially aware 
was perplexing to me at the time. However, throughout the year of this study, that was 
one element that never ceased to surprise me: not so much the sensitization to difference?
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because after all even infants internalize messages about gender, ethnicity, and other 
forms of difference?but the comprehensible meanings that young children gave to 
difference and the transparency of these meanings to the social world they lived in. 
During the course of the study, at a social gathering in my home with several people 
including Margaret and Alexandra, a university faculty member pointed out that ?just as 
genderization begins very young, so does the racialization of people. The sorting out of 
people, the whole hierarchy. And kids notice things at a very young age. My brother at 
age 5 noticed that all of the women taking the bus into our neighborhood were black, they 
were cleaning ladies coming in.? (Conversation, 12.14). Many incidents over the year of 
the study revealed the children in the four classrooms to be acutely aware of categories of 
difference and to be operating with internalized and often stereotyping messages that 
were recognizably derived from their environments. The teachers used a variety of 
approaches to negotiate these constructions of difference. In this chapter, I will explore 
the ways in which the teachers? conceptualizations and perceptions of difference 
manifested themselves in their teaching. The pedagogical acts of teachers who seek to 
teach transformatively are a rich site in which to explore the ways in which identity, 
gender, and language pedagogy interact. 
Talking About Difference 
Before I explore the ways in which difference was discursively produced in the 
four classrooms, I will probe the ways in which the subject was sometimes avoided 
because silences surrounding difference can potentially have an even more powerful 
effect than actual open discussion of difference. Bhabha (1998) believes that humans 
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have arrived at a period of history during which silences surrounding race and gender are 
ripe to be filled: 
?In matters of race and gender, it is now possible and necessary, as it 
seemed never to have been before, to speak about these matters without 
the barriers, the silences, the embarrassing gaps in discourse.? (p. 21) 
In order to overcome these silences, it is important to examine the ways in which they are 
constructed and maintained. Talking about difference is less straightforward than it would 
appear. Like the proverbial elephant in the room, difference is often visible and 
unmistakable, but in many instances it is unmentionable. Over the year of the study, 
silences played a significant role in the discursive fabric of the four teachers? classrooms 
and of the afternoon teas, but because these silences refracted societal silences around 
difference, they were sometimes not immediately noticeable to me. Unconscious but 
concerted efforts to preserve silences surrounding difference shed light on the social 
meanings assigned to difference.  
Beyond classroom discourse and in discussions with colleagues, administrators, 
and even each other, discussion of difference occupied a complicated space in the 
teachers? lives. The fear of offending and the fear of saying something inappropriate 
often serve to silence. Using an example from a discussion of race during one afternoon 
tea, I will explain here how this silence can contribute to the erosion of social justice. 
Katie related a story to us at an afternoon tea. She told us of a conversation between 
Geraldine, a first-grade teacher, and Garry Macclesfield, a fifth-grade teacher. 
Katie: Yesterday in the lunchroom [two teachers] were talking about a 
student who?s obviously struggling in class, and Geraldine said that she 
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could spot from a mile off that he has a learning disability, and Mr. 
Macclesfield?s first question was, ?Well is he black?? 
[Gasps from the other tea-drinkers] 
Suhanthie: Oh my God, what did you say? 
Katie: Geraldine just very calmly said: ?Well, that has nothing to do with 
it? ? I was like, oh my God. This teacher should not be teaching! 
(Afternoon tea, 06.19) 
Geraldine?s response: ?Well, that has nothing to do with it,? struck me at the time as a 
suitable response, but much retrospective reflection has persuaded me that something 
about that stance made us complicit in the sustenance of an inequitable status quo. Let me 
explain: Mr. Macclesfield asked: ?Is he black?? which offended us because embedded in 
the question is an assumed correlation between black boys and learning disabilities, an 
assumption that a student with a learning disability is more likely to be a black boy. We 
were offended because not all boys with learning disabilities are black and not all black 
boys have learning disabilities. Geraldine?s response: ?Well, that has nothing to do with 
it? was designed to silence Mr. Macclesfield and to tell him that his question did not 
merit a response. But we missed an important point: there is indeed an overrepresentation 
of black boys in classes of students with learning disabilities. Everyone at the afternoon 
tea was aware of this fact. We had all read studies about black boys being tested for all 
forms of special needs disproportionately, labelled as learning disabled more often than 
their peers who were not black or not male, and placed in special education classes in 
higher numbers than their classmates. We were fairly sure that these statistics were the 
reason that Garry asked his question. However, no one mentioned the statistics when 
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Garry made his comment, and none of us mentioned it when Katie told the story at the 
afternoon tea.  
Every time the topic of difference is avoided, important issues of difference (such 
as this one) become more unmentionable and remain unresolved. Because the subject was 
unmentionable, nobody spoke with Mr. Macclesfield about why such a large number of 
black boys have learning disabilities. It then follows that silencing discourse about racial 
difference also stymies discussions about power difference and therefore about the fact 
that black boys are overidentified as learning disabled because they are more likely to be 
singled out for testing, because they are more likely to be poor, because they are more 
likely to experience cultural disconnects with their teachers, because they are less likely 
to have access to economic and social resources, and numerous other reasons that relate 
not only to racial difference but to power difference.  
I did not choose this example to illustrate the enormity of our oversight, nor 
because it was an unusual event, but because I believe that it was ordinary and 
representative of so many everyday interactions in U.S. schools in which race is 
inadvertently obscured. Frankenberg (1993) tells us that ?color evasion actually involves 
a selective engagement with difference, rather than no engagement at all? (p. 143), and in 
this incident, our unwitting refusal to allow racial difference to be named had a silencing 
rather than neutralizing effect. 
The ESOL teachers were not in agreement with each other about the necessity of 
discussing difference with their students, and even individual teachers? ideas changed 
with their experiences over time. No one consistent pedagogical representation can 
therefore be made. For instance, Alexandra?s ideas about teacher-initiation of talk about 
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difference shifted over time. During the semester before the study started, she made a 
sharp distinction between exploring identity, which she advocated, and creating 
dissonance, which she warned against: 
How this plays out in the classroom is very complicated in how we 
approach our students and their different ways of understanding and 
expressing themselves. I do feel, however, that facilitating the exploration 
of self/group identity with the students is part of our job. Students are 
naturally going through this search anyway as a natural part of growing 
up, but being a newcomer in a strange environment may be too much to 
bear alone. I think it is important that the teacher allow a free exploration 
through journal writing and student generated topic discussions and 
writing experiences. I would recommend not "creating" dissonance for our 
students (talking about racial tension for example) ? they will find their 
own ("I don't have anyone to talk to."). (Webchat, 04.15.99) 
For some, the dissonance that often accompanies exploration of identity is an inherent 
part of the search. Not so for preservice Alexandra. Before she started teaching, 
Alexandra recognized identity and belonging as pressing issues for recent immigrants. 
However, like most ESOL teachers, she wanted her students to feel comfortable, and she 
accepted the widespread societal perception that discussion of racial tension necessarily 
implied discomfort. The balance is delicate: the teacher assumed that if racial tension 
were discussed openly, it would have to be acknowledged and given a space. She also 
assumed that if it were ignored, its presence would be minimized. At this stage of her 
professional life, it was conceivable, and even desirable, to Alexandra for ESOL students 
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to explore identity without discussing racial tension. In this way, Alexandra was making 
decisions about which topics were permissable on the basis of the levels of short-term 
comfort she expected her students to experience. Over the course of the school year, 
however, Alexandra?s ideas changed considerably. The contrast is starkly visible in this 
comment that she made one year later, in which she identified herself as willing to 
discuss race to a degree that was unusual within her school context: 
The teachers talk to me about racism. Some teachers see my willingness to 
talk about subjects that most people don?t talk about or that white 
mainstream people don?t like to talk about. (Afternoon tea, 04.10) 
As Alexandra navigated the racial tensions within her school context, she came to 
value open discussion of race. She no longer conceptualized racial discussions separately 
form explorations of identity, and she was no longer vested in avoiding dissonance but 
rather constructed herself as willing to talk about difficult subjects.  
Attending to Difference 
?We have all been programmed to respond to the human differences 
between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of 
three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is 
dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.? 
Audre Lorde (1984, p.115) 
Ideas about difference are repeatedly, continually, and inevitably constructed 
around teachers and students within school walls but also in the world beyond the school, 
with students receiving multiple messages about what difference means. Among the four 
teachers, the meanings of attending to difference in the lives of linguistic minority 
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students took the form of a variety of positions and strategies, including most notably 
attempts to cast difference in a positive light. The teachers challenged constructions of 
difference that they believed caused their students ?to see and fear (?) the different? 
(Margaret, E-mail, 04.25) or compelled them ?to begin a new identity that is easier for 
[the mainstream] to understand? (Alexandra, E-mail, 04.26). At times, however, these 
intentions appeared to be in conflict with other pedagogical ideals, and the resulting 
struggles warrant deeper probing. 
Constructing a Positive Image of Difference 
Throughout their preservice coursework and teacher preparation, the four teachers 
had been influenced by theorists and ideologies that presented difference positively and 
encouraged teachers to value the home cultures of their future students. This ideological 
underpinning was evident in their classroom practice and in their afternoon tea 
discourses. For instance, they had read and made reference to Moll?s (1991) work on 
funds of knowledge, which advocates that teachers view students? home communities as 
a pedagogical resource. They had studied Serpell?s (1997) suggestions for creating 
connections between home and school literacy practices. They had read Hunger of 
Memory (Rodriguez, 1982) and had discussed the dangers of seeking to uproot one 
culture and replace it with another. Two overriding themes in the construction of 
difference in the four classrooms in this study were (1) valuing the knowledge students 
brought to the classroom and (2) reinforcing students? connections to their home cultures. 
I describe and provide examples of Alexandra, Katie, Jane, and Margaret?s pursuit of 
these two ends and then go on to explain that these strategies were not facile fixes. The 
literature supporting teachers attending to diversity can encourage teachers to believe that 
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indiscriminately honoring students? knowledge is a simple strategy they can use to 
counter the tendency of Americans schools to suppress ESOL students? perspectives. 
However, the assumption that all aspects of a minority culture should and can be 
uncritically absorbed into U.S. culture is a liberal multicultural assumption that celebrates 
difference for difference?s sake. Such an approach exoticizes ESOL students and their 
histories and ignores the complexity, hybridity, and value-laden nature of ?culture.? 
Similarly, an important and popular theme in the literature on multicultural education is 
the support of connections between home cultures and school cultures. The strategy is 
important in challenging fixed and normative definitions of U.S. culture, making learning 
relevant, and creating space for ESOL students? voices, but it is not a straightforward 
solution. It can lead teachers to make assumptions about what constitutes a home culture, 
to universalize cultures and identities, and to ignore students? agency to self-define. The 
teachers in this study struggled not to fall into these traps without relinquishing the vision 
of classrooms that wove meaningful connections between classroom lives and home 
lives, and school knowledge and personal knowledge.  
Legitimating Student Knowledge 
The teachers? discourses indicated that they were in agreement that affirming 
student knowledge was an important part of teaching. Particularly during the afternoon 
teas, they collaboratively developed understandings of desirable teaching practices, and 
endorsing the knowledge that students brought to class figured prominently in the 
construction of what it means to teach well. For instance, Margaret noticed that the 
content of one mainstream class she plugged into had the potential to draw from students? 
background knowledge, but that the structure of the lesson didn?t provide students with 
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the opportunity to share. Margaret was tactfully critical of that absence of opportunity. It 
was a third-grade class on plants, and Margaret was sitting in the back of the classroom 
with the ESOL students, helping them to understand a video on plants being shown by 
the classroom teacher. Beside her sat Carmen from El Salvador. Margaret told us: 
In the books and the videos, all the plants they showed in this lesson were 
plants from this [the Mid-Atlantic] region. Carmen was whispering in my 
ear: ?In El Salvador, they have flowers like cactus.? She was describing 
the flower all in detail, and I thought: ?Oh, that should be in the video!?  
Margaret was mindful of the special knowledge her students brought and reflective about 
why different students have acquired different forms of knowledge: 
My kids, it?s just because they?ve been doing plants. They have more 
knowledge than I did a couple years ago about how things grow. I think 
because some of my kids were in more rural areas. Like, they?re like: ?Oh 
yeah, the flower comes and then the fruit comes.? And I just found that out 
this summer! Like, they?d see the picture of a painting of a pumpkin patch, 
and they?d be like: ?Yeah, after that falls off then comes the pumpkin.?  
Katie agreed with her: ?There?s so much rich knowledge that they?re not allowed to 
share. Not that they?re not allowed, there?s just no opportunity.? Both teachers saw 
chances to share background knowledge as valuable part of classroom procedure. 
However, incorporating this knowledge was not so simple. Katie perceived an actual 
conflict between student knowledge and teacher knowledge:  
That?s one of the questions that I have about the curriculum that I?m 
piloting, I don?t think it allows enough room for self-expression. Like the 
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first unit, yes, the new beginnings. With all of the material that you?re 
supposed to learn with this new curriculum, it seems that they?re trading it 
in for knowledge that the kids can bring. (Katie, Afternoon tea, 01.24)  
In this instance, Katie experienced a clear contest between school knowledge and student 
knowledge with little leeway to negotiate a space that accommodated both. Bhabha?s 
construct of third space is a useful framework in helping me to understand the challenge 
before her. ?Third space? in Bhabha?s sense is the terrain between the identities of Self 
and Other, which I conceptualize in this instance as home and school. This concept of 
third space challenges the ?fixity? of ways in which knowledge is coded (for instance, 
school knowledge and student knowledge) and offers the possibility of a fluid and 
ongoing reconstruction of identity. Katie was not seeking to replace school knowledge 
with student knowledge, but rather to nurture the possibility of hybridity, of a space that 
accommodated both. Therefore, exploring the factors that made this space so inaccessible 
highlights the ways in which certain representations of knowledge are made visible and 
others are smothered. Much of Katie?s challenge was presented by the orientation of her 
county?s new ESOL curriculum. Because it was being piloted that year, Katie was not 
permitted to deviate from it for any reason. She was instructed to follow the curriculum to 
the letter and was therefore not free to be guided by the individual needs of her students, 
the variable nature of classroom events, or the relevance of the material to the moment. 
The curriculum presented an objective for every class and a lesson plan that detailed 
activities and explicitly listed the information that students were to know by the end of 
the lesson. The transmission-oriented focus encouraged a parallel teaching style, and 
Katie found herself struggling to resist teaching as though unidirectionally transferring 
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facts. The curriculum allowed Katie little room to weave together school knowledge and 
student knowledge but actually required her to make a choice between the two. Her 
challenge was therefore spawned not by the clash between two forms of knowledge, but 
rather by the one-way pedagogical ideology undergirding her curriculum. A significant 
drawback of transmission-based teaching, termed banking education by Freire (1970), is 
its repression of student knowledge. Katie was disapproving of the curriculum?s failure to 
support her desire to legitimate student knowledge. 
Similarly, Alexandra was outraged at school administrators? implication that 
ESOL students? knowledge was not valuable. She related an incident to us indignantly: 
This general call went out asking teachers for names of students they felt 
could tutor. I sent a list of ESOL kids. And they were like, what can they 
tutor?  
She made a point of responding to the administrators:  
I was like, they can tutor ESOL and they can tutor their native language. 
(Alexandra, Conversation, 01.26) 
It was not only the school administrators and the ideology of the curriculum that 
compelled the teachers away from valuing student knowledge: sometimes students 
themselves devalued their own contributions, and it took a conscious effort on the part of 
the teachers to ensure that they affirmed the knowledge that their students brought. Katie 
explained her students? reluctance to share from their lives and experiences, and she 
described her strategy for encouraging their voices:  
I have to structure my questions in a way to draw from them, and even 
then it?s very hard. I have to ask little smaller questions to lead up to the 
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big question. I don?t always like to do that because everyone thinks 
differently. (Afternoon tea, 01.24) 
It took a critical examination of pedagogical interaction and a conscious and 
strategic effort in order for Katie to teach in a way that created space for her 
students? knowledge. 
 The teachers referred to broad definitions of ?culture,? going beyond the 
limited yet popular conception of culture as connected only to national origin or 
race. They viewed students? nationalities and ethnicities as intersecting in 
complicated ways with their other dimensions of difference. For instance, in the 
context of literature, Margaret considered multiculturalism to include many social 
categories, including homelessness and mental illness: 
When I was doing student teaching, I did a couple of books about 
Appalachia. Even though those are about caucasian students in the 
US, I felt that those are multicultural. Something real. An author 
writing from or about something that is very real and specific ? 
Like Kaye Gibbons, a little girl?s taken in by a foster family and 
she takes on the name Foster. I felt it really let you in to her family 
and her world, and there?s something multicultural about it. 
Certain things that aren?t always called a culture I feel are a 
culture. Like mental illness. If it invites the reader into something 
they didn?t know before. Like the Paperbag Princess lets you in on 
women?s culture. (Margaret, Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
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Alexandra?s understandings of her students? cultural identities were similarly 
broad. Her concern for supporting connections between students? experiences out 
of school and in the classroom extended beyond connections based on ethnic 
group identification, as evidenced by her criteria for text selection. For instance, 
of Sharon Creech?s Walks Two Moons, she said: 
?It?s a book about girl who?s in her teens and her mother has left ...The 
girl lost her mother, alot of my kids are separated from their parents ... 
There?s a girl in the book who imagines things about people based on how 
they look, that?s an issue in middle school. So it brings up some of their 
background knowledge.? (Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
Alexandra sought to make connections to students? identities beyond merely 
national identity. For her, identity included other factors, such as family 
configuration and age. 
Creating Connections Between Home and School  
Another way in which teachers sought to steer the direction in which difference 
was constructed within their classroom walls was in nurturing the connection between 
home and school. For instance, Alexandra perceived the incorporation of students? home 
knowledge into her classroom lessons as a step towards connecting students? home lives 
and school lives. In a unit on food, her school curriculum required that students be taught 
about what constituted healthful food. In order to make connections with students? home 
lives, she asked them to bring in a recipe from their family?s recipe book. The class then 
broke down the recipe and discussed whether ingredients in the recipe were healthy or 
unhealthy. When one student explained that ?We don?t have a recipe book, my Mom 
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always just does this, does that,? Alexandra found another avenue to create space for 
home knowledge and responded: ?Ask your Mom [for the recipe], and write down what 
your mother tells you.? (Field Notes, 11.08). Later in the year, Alexandra specifically 
described this strategy as a technique that she used to strengthen the connection between 
home and school. I was talking with Alexandra and another faculty member about home-
school connections. I told the faculty member of Katie?s desire to visit students? homes 
and of our conclusion that home visits might be unrealistic for overwhelmed first-year 
teachers. Alexandra made the suggestion:  
?You can put things into your homework assignments that ask for that 
home-school connection. Like, in a project, I asked them to get an oral 
rendition of a traditional legend and I?ve asked them to bring that back to 
the classroom.? (Alexandra, Conversation, 01.26) 
Margaret similarly tried to underscore the relevance of school life to home life. 
She told us of her student, Gloria, whose schooling had been interrupted and whose 
literacy in her first language was limited:  
I was talking to her in the corner of the classroom, and I asked what she 
did this weekend. She said: ?We went to the park?, and I said: ?What did 
you do there?? and she said: ?We lay down.? I said: ?You lay down?!? 
She said: ?Every time we go to the park, my Mom lies down and looks at 
the clouds.? And there?s a scene in The House on Mango Street, Sandra 
Cisneros, there?s one scene where they?re looking at clouds, and there?s 
another where they?re just laying on their backs eating jelly beans. So I 
told her about that, and now she wants to read it. 
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Katie was supportive of Margaret?s ability to relate academic learning to Gloria?s life:  
You make such good connections with your students. (Afternoon tea, 
11.01) 
 From the first day of the school year, Alexandra made a special place in her 
classroom for students? family lives by posting a class ?mantra? on the wall:  
I honor my family 
I honor my history 
I honor my self. 
(Field notes, 09.09) 
Within the first few weeks of class she had also made mobiles that displayed 
photographs of students with their families. She believed that drawing in background 
knowledge provided students with a motivation to engage:  
?They have to have some reason to talk, some reason to communicate, a reason to 
put words together.? 
Alexandra sought to support students? abilities to express themselves by ensuring 
that a motivation for expression exists. She also encouraged children to talk about their 
home cultures and share the wisdom and values that they brought to the classroom. This 
discussion of a Cheyenne folk tale illuminates for us the complexity of talking about 
culture: 
?The biggest discussion has been about how in the cheyenne culture, 
children?s spirits are free ... So this little girl says, ?Mum, I?m only 8 years 
old, but I have this vision that I belong with this other family, so I?m 
going.? And the Mum says, ?Well, bless you, and bless your journey.? 
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And the Korean boys raise their hand and say ?No way!? And the 
Taiwanese boy raises his hand and says ?No way! My parents make every 
decision for me. If I were to say I wanted to do this, they would say no, sit 
down and shut up and do your homework.? And the same in the 
Vietnamese culture. But it was interesting, I have a boy from Spain who?s 
very quiet in the class, and he was explaining how there?s some similarity 
but mostly differences. But why we follow our parents is because they?re 
older and wiser and we should respect them. Which is interesting because 
my social stereotype is this is how the Asians feel. But since these kids 
have one foot in each culture, I think they?re leaning this way, which is 
towards the American culture. I just thought it was an interesting ? And 
then the girl from Guatemala was saying how similar her culture is to the 
Cheyenne culture, and how children are free. And hers is all based on 
religion. (Alexandra, Afternoon tea, 01.24)  
Attempting to legitimate home culture knowledge was not a simple strategy for 
the teachers. It posed many new problems, not the least of which is the question of what 
counts as a specific culture. Alexandra struggled with this tension by, for instance, 
describing what Taiwanese boy and the Korean boy said but not generalizing the 
assumptions to all Taiwanese or all Koreans. Nonetheless, the difficulty of talking about 
home cultures without universalizing is palpable in this and many other incidents. 
Seeking to legitimate home culture knowledge can encourage teachers to develop or 
represent limited and simplistic understandings of cultures, for instance to associate 
certain traits with certain cultures. In seeking to draw on students? home cultures, it was 
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difficult for the teachers to escape clich?d definitions of what it means to be a member of 
a given culture. A further problem presented by attempts to value home cultures was the 
notion of legitimating practices of a given ?culture? simply because they were 
representative of that culture and not because they warranted legitimacy. For instance, the 
practice of allowing children the choice move in with a family other than their own, as 
was the case in the Cheyenne folk tale, is a practice that many educators might hesitate to 
legitimate too enthusiastically, particularly with impressionable teenagers who 
romanticize the idea of running away from home. Similarly, other practices that support 
racism or gender oppression may be associated with individual and specific cultures, but 
it may not serve students well to see these legitimated in their classes. 
Challenging Negative Images of Difference 
Legitimating student knowledge and supporting connections between students 
lives? in school and out of school were both strategies that the teachers believed to be 
helpful in their attempts to cast difference in a positive light. Another way of guiding the 
construction of difference in their classrooms was to challenge negative depictions of 
difference. In their attempts to challenge negative images of difference, the teachers 
encountered several tensions, including: (1) a tension between encouraging student 
knowledge and hesitating to draw attention to difference and (2) a tension between 
supporting ethnic pride and a wish to respect student agency to self-identify. 
As was apparent in the preceding example, any discussion of cultural identity runs 
the danger of disintegrating into essentializing discourses because it is difficult to talk 
about culture without veering towards generalizations and hence, categories.
 
Labels 
therefore carry inferences. When we label a culture, we assign it a signification, a 
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meaning. In navigating these tensions, the teachers sought to develop pedagogies that 
were respectful of students? individual strengths and simultaneously of their heritage. 
Tension between Drawing Attention to Difference and  
Encouraging Student Knowledge 
As they began their first year of teaching, the teachers began to face a subtle 
tension between supporting the inclusion of home cultures in the development of their 
students? identities and drawing unwanted attention to students? cultural and ethnic 
difference. While the teachers? previous coursework and the ideologies they articulated 
during the afternoon teas all provided for increased interest in students? cultures and 
home lives, other factors clashed with this intention. For instance, a stigma was 
associated with certain types of difference, so that the teachers? attempts to draw attention 
to difference might have the effect of embarrassing their students. 
Alexandra expressed a reluctance to assign a specific cultural association to an 
individual student, giving the example of a girl from India, Sanobar. In particular, she 
disapproved of the practice of singling out students as representatives of a particular 
culture: 
?We were talking about mendi the other day. The kids draw on their 
hands, so I suggested: ?Why don?t you use mendi? Can anyone tell us 
about mendi?? And the Indian girl raised her hand and said: ?I can tell you 
about mendi.? And she was very happy to tell everyone about it. She was 
able to contribute, but I didn?t ask her specifically to contribute.? 
(Alexandra, Afternoon tea, 01.24) 
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Alexandra sought to create a space in which students could share information 
specific to their individual cultural history, but she hoped to do so without 
attracting attention to ethnic difference. The sheer might of normative power is 
illustrated clearly in this example. The social stigma associated with cultures that 
are different from the dominant culture (and particularly cultures in which the 
majority of the population is not white), is so potent that to even single out an 
Indian student as more likely to know about mendi is to risk shaming her. This 
places teachers such as Alexandra in an awkward position. To ignore difference, 
pretending that students? races and national identities are homogenous, may make 
students more comfortable in the short term but does nothing to challenge the 
stigma of difference and in fact underscores dominant constructions of identity. 
However, Alexandra?s responsibility was not only to a global desire for 
transformation, but also towards her individual student, Sanobar. As a caring 
teacher, she was unwilling to risk betraying and stigmatizing her pupils. Her 
strategy of asking the class in general about culturally specific information 
provided Alexandra with a way to integrate her desire to create space for students? 
culturally specific knowledge and her reluctance to betray Sanobar by pointing 
out her difference. The relationship between difference and identity was important 
in this study. Constructing difference necessarily implies constructing norms (to 
be different-from). The effect of the construction of difference on identity is 
explained by Minh-Ha (1989) in this way: ?Difference ? is that which 
undermines the very idea if identity, deferring to infinity the layers whose totality 
forms ?I?? (Minh-Ha, 1989, p. 96). In Min-Ha?s opinion, identity is eroded by the 
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concept of difference. She quotes the Editorial Collective of Questions 
Feministes, led by Simone de Beauvoir: ?The very theme of difference, whatever 
the differences are represented to be, is useful to the oppressing group ? to 
demand the right to Difference without analyzing its social character is to give 
back the enemy an effective weapon.? (quoted in Minh-Ha, 1989, p.101). While 
Jane, Alexandra, Margaret, and Katie sought to avoid ?giv[ing] back the enemy 
an effective weapon? by underscoring difference, they also needed to support the 
facets of their students? identity that did not represent the dominant image, their 
?difference,? in an effort to avoid ignoring and smothering their cultural and 
linguistic identities. 
Rather than embracing the stance referred to by Valli (1991) as ?color-blindness? 
and by Frankenberg (1993) as ?color-evasion,? Katie endeavored to recognize her 
students? difference and then to put a positive spin on the whole business of being 
different. This involved both challenging negative constructions of difference and 
actively seizing opportunities to cast difference in a positive light. In her own experience 
as a woman of color, difference was inescapable and impossible to disregard because of 
reminders by others. She told us that: 
?Sometimes I forget that I?m Asian, but it?s always brought back to me, the 
difference is always pointed out to me.?  
She experienced consciousness of her racial difference as problematic:  
?Sometimes it?s a bad thing because my racial appearance shouldn?t have 
an effect on what?s going on, but in my idea it does.? 
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Katie briefly struggled with discourses that cast color-evasion as appealing and 
synonymous with anti-racism before conceding that difference cannot and should not be 
ignored. She turned her attention to how this difference should be addressed.  
Sometimes I wonder if my students feel the same way. Their difference 
from other students is constantly being pointed out and they?re going to 
feel the same way I did. So I?d rather have them feel positive ? 
reinforcing the fact that being bilingual and bicultural is very special and 
very unique and very important. And reinforcing that and having it seen as 
an asset rather than having this nagging, almost fear ? nagging thought 
about what this person is thinking of me, am I going to be the subject of 
gossip. (Katie, Afternoon tea, 11.01)  
Katie believed that in view of the fact that racial difference will not be ignored by 
the rest of the school population, ESOL students will experience their racial 
difference as alienating if a special effort is not made to highlight its advantages. 
Like Alexandra, Katie tried not to single out children by drawing attention to their 
home cultures, but for an opposite reason from Alexandra. She sensed that her 
students were less concerned with the stigma of difference and more vulnerable to 
the isolation of not finding a culture to belong to. She sought to be sensitive to 
students who might experience a sense of disconnect with the culture of their 
heritage: 
?I?m thinking of the students who were born here but are in ESOL because 
Spanish is their native language. You know cultures are very fluid, and 
when there are two cultures in a country, there?s some influence. I?m very 
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conscious not to pinpoint one person. You know, I?ll say: ?Has anyone had 
this type of experience?? And if not we?ll go on.? (Katie, Afternoon tea, 
11.01)  
Like Alexandra, Katie refrained from singling out students on the basis of their ethnicity, 
but while Alexandra wanted to insulate her students from the shame they might associate 
with their first culture, Katie was concerned about the possible shame of ignorance about 
their heritage culture. The constructions of difference in Katie?s classroom are tightly 
connected to her own cultural identity and meanings of difference. She explained that her 
pedagogy was informed by her life experiences as a Korean-born child adopted during 
infancy by a German-American father and an Irish-American mother. As a child, Katie 
had limited knowledge of Korean culture and was uncomfortable, even embarrassed, 
about her lack of awareness about Korea. 
"I?ve had teachers do that to me in elementary school: ?Katie, what they 
do in Korea?? And I?ve been like, ?I don?t know. I grew up here.? And all 
of a sudden I feel ashamed that I don?t know anything about Korea!? 
(Katie, Meeting, 11.01) 
Katie had a further reason for wanting her students to self-define. She placed a 
high value on respecting students? constructions of their own cultural identities.  
?Teachers are very well meaning [? but ?] they?re making the 
assumption that so-and-so is Japanese, but they haven?t taken the time to 
find out if they were born in Japan, the circumstances of their journey 
here. ? That?s as bad as not allowing the child to share their experience 
? I think the opportunity needs to be there for ESOL children to share 
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what they know and share their experiences, but not to purposely single 
them out.? (Katie, Meeting, 03.21) 
A common theme in teaching for diversity, particularly in liberal multiculturalist models 
of teacher education, is the teaching of abstract information about specific cultural groups 
in a ?heroes and holidays? approach (Banks, 1993). Melnick and Zeichner (1997) 
characterize this ideology as a ?culture-specific,? as opposed to ?culture-general? 
approach to teaching. Culture-specific approaches prepare teachers to teach specific 
cultural groups in particular contexts, such as rural Mexican immigrants to suburban 
Pennsylvania. The result is a superficial, stereotyped, and possibly inaccurate conception 
of the target group, which increases the likelihood of teachers who see a Japanese face 
and assume a common experience among all of their Japanese students. Teacher 
preparation that focuses on culture-general approaches seeks to support the development 
of teachers who are more likely to be successful in any context that includes interactions 
across cultures. Rather than seeking to generalize and universalize cultural groups, 
culture-general approaches seek to identify the various cognitive approaches that mediate 
cross-cultural understanding. Wong (forthcoming) believes that cross-cultural 
understanding is insufficient, advising that it must be accompanied by a structural 
analysis of power. She suggests that rather than focusing on discrete and abstract 
?cultural? information, teachers should be teaching all children ?about the ways in which 
racial, ethnic, and religious minority cultures have been oppressed and have struggled for 
their humanity, for example, the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, the internment of Japanese 
Americans in the U.S. during WWII, and the heroic struggle of the schoolchildren in 
Soweto, South Africa, against apartheid?(p. 36).  
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Like Alexandra, Katie was reluctant to ascribe a culture to a student, but her 
motivation was to create space for the different possible meanings of ethnicity, for 
instance ?Japanese,? that a student might embrace or reject. This discussion reveals Katie 
as thoughtful about the complications raised when teachers help students to connect with 
their home cultures, and in particular the tendency towards universalizing cultures. She 
linked her pedagogical practice in part to her empathy. She spent many years 
experimenting with and exploring the many facets of her cultural self and continues to 
embrace a culturally fluid identity: 
?You can?t always know what a child is experiencing ? You can presume 
that my heritage is Korean, but what if I don?t identify with that? Teachers 
do this, you know: ?Katie, we?re going to read a book about Korea and 
you should be able to identify with this.?? (Katie, Meeting, 11.01) 
Katie believed that the majority of her elementary-school-aged students were 
psychologically connected to the countries of their heritage: 
?Some children don?t see themselves as American. Some of them don?t 
identify with a culture. But some students are very heavily identified with 
their native culture. They?ll take special interest in finding out other 
students? countries, especially if they?re the same. Like Leo, when he met 
Jae Ling, he was like: ?You?re Chinese? I?m Chinese!? I?d say most of my 
students are very proud of their culture.? (Katie, Afternoon tea, 11.01)  
She also gave the example of a student whose classroom teacher discouraged the use of 
Spanish in his class: 
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He just sends Diego out for ESOL. And Diego speaks a lot of English, he 
won?t speak any Spanish at all. If I speak Spanish to him to clarify, he just 
says, ?okay, okay?. Everything?s in English, he wants to hang out with his 
English-speaking friends.? (Katie, Afternoon tea, 10.11) 
Katie made a connection between the teachers? diffidence towards Spanish and 
the student?s reluctance to speak his native language with his ESOL teacher, a 
fluent Spanish speaker. She assumed that the boy had constructed his linguistic 
difference negatively. She also noted a more complex identity dynamic in the case 
of a boy who identified with his language, French, but not with his home country, 
Cameroon. 
The same thing with Frank. Frank likes things in French, he associates 
with his language, but not with his culture. He?s from Cameroon. He 
wants to be American so he plays American games, video games, watches 
American television shows. A lot of my students will say: ?In my country, 
blah, blah, blah? but he never does. I think a lot of these fifth-graders are 
into these computer games, and that?s something he can do, so it?s 
something he can buy into. I think Frank uses the games as a way to fit in. 
He?s very into fitting in. He won?t do anything that will keep him apart 
from other people.  
At such a young age, Frank interpreted his Cameroonian heritage as affording him no 
status or privilege, but he was connected to his linguistic identity. The history of 
Cameroon is a history of oppression, colonization, and enslavement. Like the historical 
constructions of racism that spawned them, modern day racialized discourses spin many 
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African countries in a negative light and contribute to unattractive stereotypes of Africans 
and African Americans (Rushton, 2000). Frank, being well-connected to popular culture, 
had likely been exposed to unflattering images of blacks through television and other 
forms of media. Katie suggested that Frank never laid claim to his Cameroonian heritage 
because he wanted to ignore traits that accented his difference from his classmates. 
However, his pride in his connection with the French language suggests that he welcomes 
difference if he believes it elevates him. Although he was only in fifth grade, he appeared 
to have deduced that French, a language associated with white colonization, prestige, and 
civilization, was connected with social power. 
Cultural Pride Versus Agency in Self-Naming  
As Alexandra, Margaret, Katie, and Jane sought to teach in ways that supported 
their students? first cultures and lives beyond school walls, they faced a challenge. They 
had to strike a balance between their desire to push for a society that appropriately 
celebrated the merits of its young immigrant children and, conversely, their 
acknowledgement of the established stigma of difference and the need to respect 
students? agency to self-define. The teachers developed pedagogies that mingled activism 
with caring accountability to their students. 
?Where are you from?? a professor once asked a peer of mine in a class that 
related to cross-cultural communication.  
?New York,? responded the student, whom I later learned had immigrated to New 
York from Taiwan. 
?And your family, where are they from??  
?I?m American,? replied the student, adamantly. 
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This student, like many immigrants, tried to leave his ethnicity at the immigration 
counter, and this professor, like many teachers, wanted the reassurance of knowing where 
his student came from. Was the student?s refusal to share this information induced by 
shame of his Taiwanese culture, of his difference? Did the professor want to know where 
he came from in order to pigeonhole him, to place him into a cultural category? The 
notion of national identity has the power to place people into categories. Tajifel (1981) 
believes that humans observe each other?s behavior and language use during social 
interaction in order to categorize ourselves and each other. He also suggests that in 
learning this classification scheme, we learn to appraise the value that corresponds to 
each human category. In the light of these human tendencies, how do teachers support 
pride in their students? first cultures while still respecting students? agency in selecting 
and experimenting with their cultural identities? As they strove to instill in their students 
a pride in their first cultures, the teachers in this study were forced to make decisions 
between validating first cultures and encouraging agency in cultural identity 
development.  
There were times when the teachers clearly supported students? independence and 
agency in constructing their cultural identities. For instance, when her students seemed to 
dance on a hyphen between their first and second cultures, Katie expressed a desire to 
allow them the space to explore independently. She told the story of a student who had 
two names, her American name Jessica and her Chinese name Ten Ying. Katie asked her 
which name she preferred, and the student expressed a preference for Ten Ying. 
However, when Katie referred to her as Ten Ying a few days later, she replied: ?No, 
Jessica.? Katie did not challenge this choice, but responded: ?Okay, Jessica.? Rather than 
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using one name consistently or even encouraging Jessica to choose one name, Katie 
decided to follow the preference that Jessica herself modelled: ?I alternate. Sometimes I 
call her Jessica, sometimes I call her Ten Ying.? (Katie, Afternoon tea, 11.01). Katie 
acknowledged the dynamic nature of self-identification and the mutability of the 
processes of being and becoming. Charles Taylor (1989) writes: ?The issue of our 
condition can never be exhausted for us by what we are, because we are always also 
changing and becoming.? (p.47). Katie sought to support this process of changing and 
becoming and to allow the possibility of multiple identities.  
There is power involved in choosing labels for oneself, and power is relinquished 
when a label is forced onto someone: ?Whereas self-naming can be an affirmative act, 
labeling and categorization are forms of subjection to the power of others? (Weedon, 
1999, p.46). Similarly, for Katie to label Ten Ying had the potential to be an act of 
subjection, whereas for Ten Ying to choose the same label for herself was empowerment.  
However, encouraging students to self-name did not always work in their favor. 
The teachers were making complicated pedagogical moves that appeared to be 
productive, but examining students? responses sometimes revealed the teachers? 
pedagogical acts to be fused with tremendous tensions within power relations. Self 
naming, for instance, can serve students but can also inadvertently work against students 
by reinforcing marginalization. All of the teachers cited examples of students who chose 
to assimilate, to identify as American to the exclusion of their heritage culture, to cast 
aside their first languages. For the teachers to coerce their students into accepting the 
labels chosen by the teachers themselves might be considered a tyrannical abuse of 
power. If an immigrant ESOL student chooses to identify as American, does her teacher 
203   
 
 
have the authority to decide what constitutes the student?s authentic self? Even this 
notion of an authentic self is an artificial construct, assuming an unrealistic and naive 
compartmentalized tidiness in identity. 
From the teachers? pedagogies arose recognition that for ESOL students, 
accepting just one label is not an option. ESOL students are necessarily multicultural by 
virtue of their experience. To assign a label onto them would be an easy but falsely one-
dimensional solution. Instead, the teachers? demonstrated a belief in their students? ability 
to negotiate their multiple identities and a faith in their agency to manage competing 
discourses, languages, and cultures. The teachers helped students overstep the simplistic 
American-Other dichotomy by giving rise to the possibility of cultural complexity, what 
Katie termed ?hybrid? identities: 
It was in college that I really started to think that maybe I could try to 
make like a hybrid. After I did my thesis, I concluded that I was my own 
unique culture, I wasn?t American, I wasn?t Korean, I was kind of a meld 
of the two. (Katie, Afternoon tea, 03.21) 
Katie made a distinction between coercing students to connect with their heritage and 
creating an environment in which students can safely own multicultural identities: 
I think that it is important to create a multicultural atmosphere giving 
voice and space to all cultures and ethnicities. Perhaps in this way, the 
child may come to not only recognize her ethnic heritage, but to respond 
to it, learn from it, and begin to take pride in it. Our job is not to "make" 
the child express her heritage, but to create the space for it and encourage 
her to take part. If she doesn't feel comfortable, she doesn't. That is 
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something she will have to work it out on her own. We as teachers should 
be there as a support and resource and create a "safe" multicultural 
environment. (Katie, Webchat, 04.27) 
Katie?s rejection of the dichotomy between first culture and second culture was 
representative of an evolved ideology. Rather than viewing her students as 
passively waiting for authoritative direction towards one culture or another, she 
sees them as agents able to negotiate and use to their advantage their multiple 
identities. 
When exercised by a teacher, authoritative direction is not always obvious. 
Margaret identified a relationship between the name used by a classroom teacher and the 
students? subsequent appropriation of the new name: 
?I have these two brothers, Jin Dae and Jin Yung who are from Korea. My 
neighbors across the street are Korean. Right when the two boys came to 
the school, I went to my neighbors and made sure I pronounced the name 
properly and I went to the classroom teachers and said ?This is how you 
pronounce it?. And the first-grade teacher started calling him ?Yin? and I 
kept saying Jin, but she kept calling him Yin. So in ESOL, I would call 
him Jin. And he flew into a rage and said: ?No, it?s Yin? ... I think it?s 
because that?s what his classroom teacher says, so he wants to be called 
Yin, like that?s his American name.? (Margaret, Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
The classroom teacher, who carries authority and with whom the student spends most of 
his time in school, called him ?Yin,? and he adopted that name for himself. This could be 
interpreted as a gesture to please his classroom teacher, as deference to authority, or as an 
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assimilative break from his own history. Names can carry inferences and identities, and 
losing hold of a name has the power to make a person lose parts of themselves. 
Margaret?s story brought to my mind Gifts of Passage, a story that resonates loudly with 
my own childhood experience, in which Santha Rau (1961) describes how on her first 
day of class in America, her teacher declared that her name would be Cynthia. Rau 
accepted the name silently and went on to describe the prejudice and discomfort she 
faced in her new American life, poignantly ending her narrative with: ??it all happened 
to a little girl named Cynthia, and I never was really very interested in her? (p. 676). 
Margaret didn?t know why Jin was accepting the new name used by his teacher, but she 
chose to be respectful of his choice and to call him by the new name he had chosen. 
 However, agency was not always the most important trait to nurture as the 
teachers observed their students develop. There were times during the year when the 
teachers chose to challenge the stigma associated with being culturally different, 
particularly those that students internalized themselves and those planted by students? 
families. I watched, intrigued, as Hyung-Taik?s father approached Alexandra at the Back 
to School Night, an opportunity for parents and teachers to meet one evening during the 
first week of school. 
Parent: I would like my son English name. 
Alexandra: Oh. 
Parent: He wants that. 
Alexandra: He does? 
Parent: Yes, he calls himself Tony. 
Alexandra: Okay. 
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Parent: Tony is okay name? 
Alexandra (pausing): Anthony is the long name. Tony is the short name 
for Anthony. 
Parent: The name Hyung-Taik is confusing. 
Alexandra: Do you think so? 
Parent: Yes. 
Alexandra: Okay. 
(Alexandra, Back to School Night, 09.09) 
Alexandra saw Hyung-Taik?s name as representative of his cultural identity and his 
choice in self-identification as a choice about assimilation. Parents, as significant social 
actors in a child?s life, are a force that can encourage students to assimilate or resist. In 
Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez (1982) writes of his absorption into dominant 
culture. His parents encouraged a clear delineation between his public and private selves, 
which translated into his Mexican and American selves, with no middle ground. When 
Rodriguez reached his thirties, his mother reinforced the wisdom of this partition: ?Do 
not punish yourself for having to give up our culture in order to ?make it? as you say. 
Think of all the wonderful achievements you have obtained? (p.178), implying that 
Richard?s Mexicanness and his achievements were mutually exclusive. The stance 
adopted by Hyung-Taik?s father and Rodriguez?s mother can appear quite logical. If we 
believe that assimilation implies social success, it is only natural for us to encourage 
children to conform. However, if teachers support the choices of children who are 
conforming to the wishes of the parents, whose agency is being reinforced, that of the 
child or of the parents? Should teachers present an alternative perspective or respect the 
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choices of the child?s family? At the Back to School Night, Alexandra indicated 
agreement in the crowded classroom full of parents and students, but she later addressed 
the issue during class: 
Alexandra: Are you Tony or Hyung-Taik today? 
Hyung-Taik: Tony.  
Alexandra: But Hyung-Taik is the name that your mother and father gave 
you. Your Mom calls you Hyung-Taik, why do you want to be called 
Tony? Tony?s an Italian name, why do you want to be called Tony? 
(Alexandra, Field Notes, 10.20) 
I asked her about the incident later, and she explained:  
?You know, I asked him why he wanted to be called Tony, and I gave him 
a wrinkle of my nose. He just sort of shook his head and he never brought 
it up again. Now the students call him Hyung-Taik.? (Alexandra, 
Afternoon tea, 04.10) 
The wrinkle of her nose was intended to indicate disapproval of his choice of the 
name Tony. Remembering her earlier resolve to refrain from drawing attention to 
her students? cultural differences, I asked her why she encouraged the student to 
embrace a Korean name. She explained:  
?When the change is in an ESOL class, because the name is part of the 
mainstream culture, it is almost like saying that the mainstream will not 
accept you unless you begin a new identity that is easier for "it" to 
understand.? (Alexandra, E-mail, 04.26) 
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When Alexandra made the choice to influence Hyung-Taik towards his Korean 
heritage, she was responding directly to mitigate the forces that constructed his 
difference in a negative light. Jane had expressed support for this position earlier, 
reminding us that the culture of the parents is not always identical to the culture of 
the student whose experiences have been different: 
It is important to remember when advocating for our students to take not 
only the culture of the parents into account, but also the idioculture of the 
student, and what he or she values. (Webchat 06.08.98).  
Although Jane and Alexandra wanted to see their students having the freedom to 
define their cultural selves, they were positioned to discourage them from assenting to 
Americanization. Similarly, Margaret became concerned when she observed what she 
suspected might be a child?s rejection of his first culture: 
So I got the book Counting in Korea ? On the cover, there?s a picture of 
a [boy wearing a] traditional Korean outfit. All the kids looked at it and 
said: ?He looks like you.? So he looked at it and said: ?He?s stinky! Stinky 
boy.? And he pushed it away. So I just said: ?Oh no, he?s handsome, look 
at him!?  
(Margaret, Meeting, 11.01) 
I asked her later why her response was to describe the boy on the book cover as 
?handsome?. She explained: 
?I told my student the boy was handsome because I assumed that he was 
noticing and regretting his difference from his peers. He and his brother 
are the only Asian boys in the kindergarten/first grades. My young charges 
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are so quick (as are their elders) to see and fear (?) the different. 
(Margaret, E-mail, 04-25) 
Margaret was unsure of whether she was interpreting the student?s reaction correctly, but 
she was sufficiently concerned to voice her contest of what might have been shame or 
aversion to Korean identity. She connected her pedagogical reaction to her life: 
A dear friend of mine from Cambodia moved here when she was seven.  
There was a time when she colored her face with a white crayon, stretched 
her face before the mirror, wanting to look differently. To not like what 
you inherently and beautifully are is dangerous, scary to me. I assumed the 
beginnings (incorrectly?) of this in my student.? (Margaret, E-mail, 04-25) 
Her perturbation was intensified by her life experiences, she had become more 
familiar with and disturbed by the process of internalized shame through observation of 
her childhood friend. While she had supported Jun?s choice of the name Yung, she 
challenged her student?s insult of the boy in traditional Korean garb. 
I noticed that when Katie talked about students negotiating the boundaries 
between their cultures she, like many ESOL professionals, spoke of "their" (heritage) 
culture versus "American" culture. At the time of the study, I saw first and second 
cultures as disparate from and even in conflict with each other, and in the context of that 
conceptualization I asked Katie whether her word choice had the potential to validate 
students? ownership over their heritage culture more than American culture. Katie saw 
greater middle ground between first and second cultures. She replied that she valued 
students? familiarity with their first cultures insofar as having an adequate understanding 
of their cultures placed them in a position to define themselves, rather than being coerced 
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into assimilation. More importantly, she explicitly challenged my binary construction of 
first and second cultures: 
?I think that tension can be negotiated. In order for children/students to 
fully understand, develop, and establish their identities, I think that they 
should know at least where their families come from and the culture they 
were born or raised into ?Whether the children reject their families' 
cultural heritage or incorporate it into their identity is up to them. But I 
think that the students should know what their options are first.? (Katie, E-
mail, 04.25) 
Katie saw her position not as discouraging agency but as supporting informed 
decisionmaking. For Katie, true freedom to construct a cultural identity can be reached 
only when a child has knowledge and understanding of her history and when she lives in 
an environment that legitimates multiple cultures: 
I also think that this must be accomplished by guiding the students to think 
for themselves, to see ALL cultural options as positive and fluid, and 
"identity" itself as a constantly changing, evolving "entity" (for lack of a 
better word). 
While I was unable to see first and second culture as anything but fixed during this 
conversation, Katie?s emphasis was on hybridity, on the fluidity and constantly changing 
nature of identity. The teachers highlighted the importance of an emphasis on home 
culture identification in the process of nurturing fluidity and developing multicultural 
identities. Canagarajah (1999), too, notes the importance of a connection with home 
cultures in the process of becoming multicultural, making the link to effective acquisition 
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of additional cultures and literacies: ?Research in language acquisition and cognitive 
development confirms that a thorough grounding in one?s first language and culture 
enhances the ability to acquire other languages, literacies, and knowledge.? (p. 2). While 
his emphasis is on linguistic choice, he also makes reference to the important role of 
grounding in first culture.  
A glance at the pedagogy of the four teachers revealed them to be integrating 
complex forces and ideas in order to develop pedagogies that were respectful of their 
students? social needs. The teachers do, indeed, influence their students towards 
identification with their home cultures, but it would be overly superficial to examine this 
ideal without also taking into account the terrain the students stand on. The teachers 
understood the school environment to be biased towards assimilation and the unduly 
heavy social pressure toward conformity as encouraging their students to lean in that 
direction. They developed teaching practices that encouraged home culture identification 
in order to neutralize the pressure on students? to make cultural difference invisible. 
Alexandra counteracted the coercion to assimilate applied by Hyung-Taik?s father. 
Margaret wanted to wipe away the veil of undesirability that she perceived her student 
had ascribed to the boy on the cover of Counting in Korea. And Katie wanted to ensure 
that her students acquired adequate knowledge about their first cultures before making 
decisions about whether to reject them. ESOL teachers are required to achieve a difficult 
balance. Underscoring students? home cultures telegraphs messages that can accentuate 
cultural difference and keep students positioned as Other and as separate from 
?mainstream American culture.? However, an absence of attention to students? home 
cultures in a world that values conformity to dominant images encourages students to 
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assimilate. Alexandra saw acceptance of Americanization as a type of default option in 
her students? lives: 
? if we do not encourage an understanding of identity and accept the new 
patterns that students will create, we will subject them to an "American" 
definition of identity that may or may not suit their reality. (Webchat, 
04.13) 
She considered ESOL teachers to be responsible for encouraging critical questioning for 
the sake of their students but also because individuals? quests for identity contribute to 
the progress of ?culture? at large: 
When there is dissonance, the individual will seek an understanding of the 
self in order to strengthen themselves within that context. I honestly 
believe that our cultures would not survive without dissonance. It is 
through questioning and exploring that we either confirm our perspective 
or change it to one that is better suited to the context. And the more we 
question and redefine for ourselves, the more we "own" our collective 
destinies. (Webchat, 04.13) 
While the possibility of hybrid identities is an important element in moving 
beyond the dichotomy between static representations of ?home culture? and ?new 
culture,? there is something to be said for an intimate and comfortable knowledge 
of one?s roots. When I was in my late teens, I read Koori (aboriginal) author Ruby 
Langford?s Don?t Take Your Love to Town. In this work, she described the 
concept of a b?longin? place. Everybody has a b?longin? place somewhere on this 
earth, a geographical point to which they are inextricably linked. In the context of 
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my own nomadic personal history, I found this idea compelling and reassuring. It 
is only when we really know our (perhaps metaphorical) b?longin? place that we 
are in a position to embrace the diversity surrounding us. Canagarajah (1999) tells 
us that: ?The very fact that we are ever rooted in the primary community of 
socialization is what enables us to appropriate other languages (and cultures) 
more effectively? (p. 2). Rather than discounting the possibility of multiplicity, 
encouraging students to know about where they come from actually increases 
their ability to navigate among multiple cultures. 
Defining Immigrant, Defining American, and the Norm of ?Whiteness? 
Beyond attending to the individual ethnicities and nationalities within the 
definitions of cultural identity available to their students, the teachers were faced with the 
task of helping students to understand what it means to be an immigrant. The varied 
definitions of ?American? became salient because they were frequently juxtaposed with 
constructions of ?immigrant.? That juxtaposition in itself is problematic as it establishes 
?American? as normative and the term ?immigrant? as necessarily deviant from standard. 
The teachers? pedagogy was interesting because they sought not only to help students to 
understand meanings of ?immigrant? but also encouraged them to be critical of 
mainstream and accepted meanings. This distinction is important because it represents the 
difference between students on one hand being devoured by a new culture and on the 
other actually becoming a part of it and contributing to its change. 
Katie problematized the definition of ?immigrant? and questioned the historical 
understanding of an ESOL student as one who has crossed national boundaries. The new 
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ESOL curriculum she was piloting sought to connect to students? migratory experiences, 
but many of her elementary school students were born in the United States: 
?Something interesting about ? the new curriculum ? the first unit is 
about new beginnings, like starting over in a new country or a new school 
or whatever. And this has become an issue because a couple of my 
students were born in the United States ? We read this book called How 
Many Days to America. It?s about this African family that fled to America. 
It?s realistic fiction. Some students were like, ?Well my uncle had to do 
that,? and they could relate. But some students are like, ?Well, I was born 
here, and I don?t remember coming to America.? (Katie, Meeting, 11.01) 
The county curriculum quite logically presents an immigrant as someone who has 
immigrated. Katie noted the variety of meanings associated with the word ?immigrant.? 
Even the process of migrating cannot be assumed for all immigrants; second-generation 
immigrants have usually not migrated themselves but are often part of immigrant 
communities. A countywide curriculum that assumes one common immigrant experience 
presents a challenge to teachers and serves as a reminder of the conflict between the 
needs of diverse school populations and the intention to use one curriculum to reach them 
all. 
For Alexandra, deconstructing the label ?immigrant? and problematizing what it 
means to be an immigrant is one way to confront the inferences associated with the label: 
?I?m also trying to convince these kids that in some place in history we?re 
all immigrants to this country except for the natives. And so the real 
American folk tale is a Cheyenne folk tale. I talk to them about how 
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important it is to respect the natives. Some of them actually are coming 
from cultures in which they are native but it?s not their country anymore.? 
(Alexandra, Interview, 01.24) 
This analysis allows us a window onto Alexandra?s conceptualization of 
American and immigrant. For Alexandra, ?real American? was native American, 
for instance Cheyenne, and sat in contrast to ?immigrant,? including those who 
immigrated on the Mayflower. She saw a real American folk tale as one 
untouched by the influence of immigration, one that is ?native.? Alexandra?s was 
calling into question the colonial construction of ?American,? which legitimates 
the Americanness of white invaders and treats as invisible (or less-than-human) 
the native American women and men who lived here before they arrived. 
However, her desire to encourage respect for Native American folklore evokes a 
complicated tension. If ?real American? is antonymous with ?immigrant,? then 
her immigrant students are not authentically American, and their children will be 
less American than the children of someone born and bred in this country. 
Connecting length of American ancestral history with authenticity therefore 
actually has the potential to construct the Americanness of more recent 
immigrants as spurious. In this discussion, Alexandra is also struggling to discuss 
cheyenne culture while resisting sweeping generalizations about either Cheyenne 
culture or ?the natives.? 
 Another complication was the connection between authenticity and 
identity. In discussions of ?real natives,? ?real Americans,? and ?real cheyennes,? 
the question of realness is academic or theoretical only. Minh-Ha (1989) 
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deprecates the legitimacy of the concept of ?real? when applied to a cultural 
group: ?The real, nothing else than a code of representation, does not (cannot) 
coincide with the lived or the performed? (itals in orig.) (p. 94). She quotes Vine 
Deloria exclaiming: ?Not even Indians can relate themselves to this type of 
creature who, to anthropologists, is the ?real? Indian.? (p. 94) The daunting task 
that lay before Alexandra was to dislodge representations of white as normative 
without typecasting other groups. 
I will illustrate that both Margaret and Alexandra struggled with the socially 
embedded association between whiteness and neutrality. The two teachers addressed this 
connection in different ways, with Margaret challenging it and Alexandra tentatively 
accepting it but seeking to challenge the hierarchy that privileged white authority. 
At Alexandra?s suggestion, the faculty at her school were toying with the idea of 
introducing a class in multicultural literature. Alexandra saw herself as an inappropriate 
choice to teach the class because she was white and therefore ?not multicultural.? She 
told us about a conversation she had had with an African-American administrator:  
I said to her, ?Who am I to teach this course?? and my ideal would be just 
to coordinate parents coming and discussing a piece of literature with the 
kids. (Alexandra, Conversation, 01.26) 
I asked her why she thought she, a well-read and well-travelled teacher, lacked the 
qualifications to teach the class, and she responded: 
?I might do the reading strategies, I might do the work around it, but the 
actual discussion is not coming out of a white face. I feel really inadequate 
saying to people, think of it in terms of this, when that?s not my 
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experience with my very narrow view of the world.? (Alexandra, 
Conversation, 01.26) 
Alexandra?s situation is fraught with complexities. The first concern about a 
multicultural literature class is that if it is marked as multicultural, it assumes that 
unmarked literature classes are somehow not multicultural. It sets mainstream and 
multicultural classes in opposition to each other, thereby excusing literature 
classes that are not multicultural from including diverse voices. It then follows 
that authors highlighted in a multicultural literature class will be those excluded 
from mainstream classes, that is authors from oppressed cultures. And it similarly 
follows that the mainstream literature classes offered are not multicultural. 
In leaving the teaching of the class to those from oppressed cultures 
(assumed to be nonwhites), Alexandra is challenging the troubling tradition of 
allowing white authorities to present nonwhite perspectives, a practice that has 
been challenged by theorists including Lisa Delpit. Delpit?s (1988) article, 
appropriately titled ?The Silenced Dialogue,? quotes the poignant words of a 
black principal: 
?[The professor] asks for more examples of what I?m talking about, and he 
looks and nods while I give them to him. Then he says that?s just my 
experiences. It doesn?t really apply to most Black people. It becomes futile 
because they think they know everything about everybody.? (p. 281) 
Delpit?s work highlights the perils associated with Alexandra?s ?white face? 
presenting minority perspectives. The situation is complex: on one hand, using the 
terms ?minority voices? and ?multicultural voices? as synonymous underscores 
218   
 
 
the construction of white as normative by juxtaposing it against multiculturalism. 
If ?white? and ?multicultural? are opposite, then ?white? cannot be a component 
of ?multicultural.? When white is accepted as the norm, nonwhite can only 
become Other, and normative standards of whiteness become ?the yardstick by 
which to encode and represent cultural Others? (Mohanty 1991 p. 55). Alexandra 
pursues an anti-racist pedagogy and in this instance is thinking critically about 
racism as she relates this incident. She is working in terrain that is messy because 
it is mired by the legacy of colonial discourse. Frankenberg (1993) warns us that: 
?one effect of colonial discourse is the production of an unmarked, apparently 
autonomous white/Western self, in contrast with the marked, Other racial and 
cultural categories with which the racially and culturally dominant category is co-
constructed.? (p. 17) On the other hand, Alexandra?s thoughtful consciousness 
about the power ascribed to her race led her to an effective decentering strategy. 
There is no simple answer to this dilemma, but Alexandra has managed to 
integrate both sides of the tension into an uneasy solution: she agreed to 
participate in the course development and even teaching, but would acquiesce to 
teaching only such material as reading strategies and would leave the actual 
discussion to someone whose face was not white. 
In addition to conceptualizing white as counter to multicultural, Alexandra made 
an effort to present white and American as separate. When her students were selecting 
folk tales to read, she said:  
I gave them a couple of choices, but I really encouraged the Native 
American perspectives because I think that unfortunately the American 
219   
 
 
folk tales are very me, rather than what America really is, they?re very 
white America and they?re not representative of America at all. 
(Alexandra, Afternoon tea, 01.24) 
According to Alexandra?s categorizations, America is well represented by Native 
American perspectives. Her contention links back to her claim that ?Native American 
perspectives? are more legitimately American than ?white American perspectives.? 
Alexandra is aware of the weight of white privilege and eager to discount its authority, 
but she faces the task of balancing her desire to redistribute power with a limited 
definition of the category ?American.? At the same time, in saying that white Americans 
(who make up the majority of the American population) are not representative of 
America, but that Native Americans (who are a small minority of the population) are 
representative of America, she made an important statement: she rejected the notion that 
larger groups carry greater representative power and affirmed the value of minority 
perspectives.  
 In their discussions of the literature they chose to read with their ESOL students, 
the teachers explored their understandings of multiculturalism. For instance, Katie 
questioned whether some of the materials touted as multicultural were masking abstruse 
messages about racial and ethnic norms: 
I really want to make it a true multicultural library, but a lot of the 
multicultural books are not about their culture. It?s about a person who 
looks different in American culture. Some books, the people in it may be 
from another culture or may have the appearance of another culture, but 
the lesson or the storyline or whatever is American culture. Like that book, 
220   
 
 
Jamaica?s Find, they classify that as multicultural. It?s about this little girl 
who comes to a new school. She makes a friend, she does some things, it?s 
about an American child. Her name is Jamaica and she?s black. It?s 
nothing about black culture, but it?s classified as multicultural. I mean, 
they?re stories about American people, but they?re basically just painting 
them. (Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
One practice that contributes to the normalization of dominant culture is to color 
caucasian characters to resemble racial minorities and to then name them multicultural, 
contributing to an understanding of racial difference as relating simply to color and not at 
all to culture. This practice pays lip service to multiculturalism without actually 
transforming and sends messages about how people of color should be by contributing to 
a culturally homogenous metanarrative. Sarup (1991) in fact suggests that some liberal 
multicultural practices are the instrument of capitalist government and were introduced to 
diffuse minority resistance. 
 Katie expressed similar concerns about the dominance of Anglo culture being 
infused under the guise of bilingual literature:  
Sometimes in the catalogue, they?ll say this is bilingual, but it?s just 
American stories translated into Spanish but it doesn?t really speak to the 
culture of the students who are learning. It?s American stories written by 
an American author translated into Spanish. So a child with American 
background knowledge will understand these books more readily than a 
child who doesn?t. ?Coz I think they?re saying it?s bilingual and therefore 
it?s bicultural. (Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
221   
 
 
The literary practice Katie described is a form of linguistic tokenism, purporting to 
support the development of multilingualism and, consequently, multiculturalism, when in 
actuality it surreptitiously suppresses a variety of Spanish-speaking cultures by falsely 
implying that they are represented. 
Furthermore, the teacher expressed concern with the practice of translating 
American books into Spanish and presenting them as multicultural because this overtly 
disregards the background knowledge of the native Spanish speaking children. It 
contributes to the loss of their cultural resources and results in their exclusion from the 
discourse if they are not able to connect with the material: 
And I know that with the readers, some readers are totally irrelevant to a 
Spanish-speaking child?s experience. I?ll read it, but it?ll have no meaning 
to them. For example, there?s a little reader about Halloween, or 
Halloween costumes, and if the child doesn?t celebrate Halloween, it has 
no relevance. 
Suhanthie: Or what if the child celebrates Halloween, but not in the 
American context? Like going trick-or-treating as opposed to going to the 
cemetery? 
Katie: Yeah, the experiences are different, and translating doesn?t mean 
that it?s going to speak to the child?s experience. As we know, the readers 
all try to draw on the child?s background knowledge, but that?s an 
American child?s background knowledge. (Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
Presenting as ?bilingual? or ?multicultural? material that was actually generated by and 
representative of members of Anglo culture has the effect of reinforcing normative 
222   
 
 
constructs of all culture as Anglo and is dismissive of the presence of immigrant students 
within American culture. 
Margaret also discussed the complicated associations among the terms 
?Anglo,? ?American?, and ?neutrality?. She conceptualized ?neutral? in 
opposition to ?specific? and ?meaningful? and later equated ?neutrality? with 
?culturelessness.? She disengages the terms Anglo and neutral from each other: 
[I]t's hard for me to realize that although I am Anglo, my family and their 
heritage is specific and meaningful.?  
And then describes the ways in which being Anglo does not, for her, mean being 
cultureless: 
?Alexandra asks what it means, culture. For me, culture is my mom 
making popovers in cold weather as her mother did. It's my grandmother's 
childhood diaries at the bottom of the Chinese cherrywood trunk. And it's 
the poems my grandfather still remembers. It's the piano etudes my father 
has played all my life. And the soft blanket forts my sister and I would 
make on rainy days... And now my culture also includes things and ways 
Chinese that my husband has shown me. (Margaret, Webchat, 04.21) 
For Margaret, Anglo is not neutral because she had multiple cultural experiences that 
were not neutral. The difference between the two teachers? conceptualizations is 
interesting because the similarities in their life histories were noticeable: both were white 
American teachers who grew up in neighborhoods they defined as primarily white. Both 
had taught English for at least a year in an East Asian country, and both were married to 
East Asian men. They had both attended public schools near their current homes, in fact 
223   
 
 
as a child Margaret had attended the elementary school at which Alexandra student-
taught.  
 Jane, too, experienced her Anglo heritage to be less marked than the immigrant 
cultures she observed around her: ?I know even for myself, I have always longed to feel 
culture more strongly? (Webchat, Jane, 04.23). She perceived cultural difference, 
whether acquired through identity or experience, to be desirable: ?I was always jealous of 
those with an accent, or those who had living relatives they could visit in other countries, 
or those who without blinking an eye could define ?what are you??? (Webchat, Jane, 
04.23). While she knew where her ethnic roots lay, they were not satisfying because they 
didn?t provide the element she considered to be important, connection: ?I have chosen to 
define myself as Irish, but I don't feel strongly connected to that as I've seen many of the 
ESOL kids strongly connected to their heritage? (Webchat, Jane, 04.23). Although she 
doesn?t specifically describe American culture as unmarked, Jane?s linguistic choices 
indicate that she positions ?culture? in opposition to ?America?. Her conceptualization of 
culture includes accent, meaning an accent that is not American, and relatives in other 
countries, meaning countries other than America. 
 This returns us to the binary American/Other thinking that pervaded the four 
schools in the study. The teachers were concerned when their young students chose to 
identify as American to the exclusion of their ?home cultures? or when they chose 
anglicized names over the names that had been given to them at birth. They sought to 
encourage students? linguistic and cultural connections to their histories as grounding for 
their appropriation of second languages and cultures. However, a tension exists between 
encouraging students to take pride in their home cultures, downplaying their students? 
224   
 
 
connections with dominant (read ?American?) culture, and being proprietary about what 
it means to be American. The question that then arises relates to the definition of 
American. To discourage ESOL students from identifying as American is to underscore 
limited definitions of ?American,? to imply that a student can only be American if they 
look like the dominant group, have exited ESOL, have become fluent English speakers. 
This assumption accepts ideologies that constitute ?American? as white, monolingual, 
and culturally static and rejects more fluid understandings that rewrite and reconstitute 
?American? in more socially just and encompassing terms, with ESOL students 
belonging and being American by mere virtue of their presence here.  
Tension Between Conformity and Cultural Difference 
The subject of teachers? struggles to address the tension between cultural 
difference and conformity with peers drifted frequently into the afternoon tea 
conversations. Katie noted a difference between her elementary-level students and those 
she had student-taught the previous year at the middle-school level. She observed that the 
longer students remain in this country and in schools, the greater the focus they place on 
conformity, to the exclusion of a celebration of their differences: 
?And very rarely have I seen [elementary-school aged] students who are 
proud that they?re American. It?s always with their culture. Which I think 
is interesting because with older students, like when they get to high 
school, eventually there comes a need for some students to be as American 
as possible. And I don?t see that with my [elementary-level] students.? 
(Katie, Meeting, 11.01) 
225   
 
 
Katie noted the influence of desire for peer acceptance over time. As students? 
time in this country lengthens, their willingness to associate themselves with their first 
culture dwindles. Furthermore, younger students are less susceptible to pressure to 
conform than middle-schoolers and teenagers. The dominant mores of middle- and high-
schoolers celebrate conformity: 
Katie: With elementary school, it?s a little tough. When they first come in, 
they?ll completely identify with the culture that they came from. I have 
this Korean student, Jennifer, she?s completely into Korean things. And 
Tarkan who?s completely into Turkish things. And John, he?s completely 
into Turkish things. So when they first come here, they?re into their own 
culture as they discover how to survive in the US. Then as time goes on, 
for the newcomers, they want to fit in to the Americans, but they still hold 
on.  
(Katie, Meeting, 03.21) 
Katie speaks with personal understanding. When she was a child, she was profoundly 
affected by her peer relations: 
Katie: When I was younger, I just tried to fit in. 
Suhanthie: Where did you get that from? 
Katie: I don?t know, I think because I was teased. 
Suhanthie: When were you teased? 
Katie: In Kindergarten. I remember it. My Mom told me how when I was 
little I came home from school and I was really upset because this other 
kid was making fun of my eyes. She said I was really upset. You know 
226   
 
 
how little kids do that thing [pulling at outside corners of eyes] and they 
say ?Chinese, Japanese?, I think that he was doing that and it was driving 
me crazy. I think I just didn?t want to be Korean because it was cool to be 
something else.  
Suhanthie: Something white?  
Katie: Something white. 
It was admittedly my loaded questioning that led Katie to the topic of race. 
However, her story shows us how her classmate?s teasing about difference led directly to 
her belief that ?Korean? and ?cool? were mutually exclusive and to her desire to be 
something other than Korean. The teasing of her classmates helped her to construct 
Korean features as somehow defective or inferior. Her personal experience heightened 
her sensitivity to the factors that compelled her students to want to assimilate. 
Katie expressed concern about the powerful influence that teachers have on their 
students. She noted with some distress that one classroom teacher?s conceptualization of 
the position of ESOL students in the school was incongruent with her own. The teacher 
advocated segregating ESOL students until they achieved a desired level of English-
language fluency, noting that: ?They don?t even belong here.? (Katie, Meeting, 10.11). 
Katie became concerned about the effect that the teacher?s views were having on a 
student?s relationship with his heritage: 
?[The classroom teacher doesn?t] recognize culture in their classrooms. In 
the classroom, he totally ignores the fact that his students are multicultural 
or have special needs.? (Katie, Meeting, 10.11) 
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Teachers carry tremendous power in the ESOL classroom, benefiting from the 
firmly entrenched student-teacher power imbalance. They have closer proximity 
to insider status in the dominant culture, regardless of their ethnic origin, because 
they inevitably have more knowledge about America than their recently arrived 
young students. Recognition of classroom teachers? ability to sway the 
development of students? cultural self-concepts, for better or worse, surfaced 
periodically among the teachers. 
Alexandra believed that teachers have a responsibility to support the maintenance 
of non-American names. 
?I get angry when teachers Americanize children?s names. When the 
teacher does it, I think it?s just a slap in the face. Like there?s this girl from 
Hong Kong ? and her teacher kept calling her Chris. She?d never 
respond. And I?d walk over and say Christina, let?s go, and she?s come. So 
the child was trying to tell her teacher, that?s not my name.? (Alexandra, 
E-mail, 04.26) 
Alexandra, Margaret, and Katie all noted students adopting American names for 
themselves and expressed disapproval of the practice and curiosity about the factors that 
prompted the changes.  
In a seemingly unrelated conversation about place names, Alexandra one again 
made the connection between naming conventions and power:  
Even my level 1 students ask me, who named all of this, which is an issue 
of power ? Somebody in that class asks, if it?s called this in the book, 
why is it called Northern Colorado? Who calls it Northern Colorado? I had 
228   
 
 
to look it up, so I?m learning too. I never knew we called it America after 
Amerigo Vespucci, and that anything under exploration is called an 
America. And it?s the West Indies because they were looking for India and 
they were travelling West. And then they asked, ?Why is it the 
Mississippi, why wasn?t that name changed?? (Interview with Alexandra, 
01.26) 
Fairclough (1995) has claimed that language learners can only challenge 
oppression if the relationship between language and power is explicit to them. In 
his work Critical Discourse Analysis, he outlines suggested teaching methods that 
highlight this connection. Ironically, in Alexandra?s classroom, as in Jane?s, it 
was the students who stimulated their teachers? awareness of the ways in which 
power relations are implicated in language. 
Events in Alexandra?s classrooms emphasized for her the ever-changing nature of 
culture and more importantly positionalities. For instance, to be a black man in one 
county has a different meaning from being a black man in another, and understandings of 
identity become entangled further with the process of migration. Two young black men, 
whom Alexandra said had occupied positions of prestige and power in their home 
countries of Ghana and Jamaica, moved into a very different place as black men in 
American society. Because an individual?s societal power wavers with her environment, 
border crossing requires re-learning about social positionality. Alexandra sensed a 
responsibility to communicate with the boys about race and oppression in U.S. society. 
However, she extended the discussion to attend to the complexity of her students? 
229   
 
 
identities; she provided the opportunity for students to examine the ways in which their 
experiences and self-perceptions change with migration. (Alexandra, Interview, 01.26). 
Katie was critical of ideologies that force students to make choices between one 
?culture? or the other, oblivious to the multicultural and rapidly hybridizing state of the 
world, what Canagarajah (1999) refers to as ?the creative processes of linguistic 
mediation, interaction, and fusion that take place in social life.? (p. 3). Katie had been 
deeply affected by a class on cultural identity taught by a latina scholar that she had taken 
as an undergraduate student. As a first-year teacher, Katie deplored the absence of 
attention to multicultural experience in the world surrounding her students. She noted a 
societal unease with the notion of cultural hybridity and advocated for a place for people 
to be comfortable without having to ascribe to a specific culture: 
I discussed in my [honors] thesis how in America there seems to be a need 
to associate a person with one particular culture or maybe two particular 
cultures. And the identity crisis seems to come when the person doesn?t fit 
into one or the other category. And then the person has to decide, are you 
black or are you white? So I peg that as one of the things that make people 
go through cultural identity crisis. You know, checking the box. Some 
people will say I?m this, and that works for them, and some people will 
meld the two, and some people will do their own thing. (Katie, Meeting, 
03.21) 
The teachers in this study wanted their students to experience a sense of 
belonging in their new communities without feeling ashamed of and compelled to 
relinquish the parts of their selves that made them different.  
230   
 
 
Construction of Stereotypes 
Alexandra?s black and hispanic male students saw themselves painted in ugly 
hues in their social order, in the grand metanarratives of the world. She, like other 
teachers who wrestle with stereotypes in the lives of their students, had to make decisions 
about whether or not to acknowledge these controlling images. She related her 
discussions with two black students, Gamma and Rafe, and one Latino, William. Gamma 
in particular posed classroom management challenges: 
Alexandra: But every now and again I try to get him to see how intelligent 
he is but he has to show that, and unfortunately he has to show that more 
than others because he?s battling this thing in the United States where 
black boys are not seen as intelligent. 
Suhanthie: That was actually addressed aloud? That a black student has to 
work harder because of racism? 
Alexandra: He has to know what he?s doing. Like if he wants to show how 
intelligent he is, he has to show it. He can?t be playing the stereotype one 
moment and then going against the stereotype the next minute. We talk 
about, if you want people to think you?re intelligent, act intelligently. 
William was saying that everybody?s unfair to hispanic boys too, and I 
said, I recognize that, and that?s why I want you to show how intelligent 
you are. They do that all the time, they say, fine, I won?t do it because it?s 
easier not to do the work. And they make me angry when they do that 
because they even do it in my class. I think the consistency with which I 
231   
 
 
I?ve been giving them my perspective that you have to work on these 
things, that that?s the only thing that?s going to level everything out. 
In their new worlds, Gamma, Rafe, and William, and saw black and Latino boys 
represented as lazy and unintelligent. Alexandra hoped that the three boys could 
demonstrate to the world the incorrectness of these stereotypes. Stereotypes are a form of 
hegemony, they contribute to metanarratives that sustain the existing social order. 
Gramsci described ?hegemony? as the dominance of ideological norms of the ruling class 
over the subordinate class (in this case, immigrants and racial minorities) through 
intellectual persuasion. Those who are the subject of stereotypes, for instance immigrants, 
often respond in reaction to stereotypes by either fulfilling them or constructing 
themselves oppositionally to them. Teachers need to be cautious as they tread around 
stereotypes, since in concretizing them?for instance in supporting the notion that black 
and Latino boys need to prove themselves more than other students?teachers risk 
underscoring the established social order by making these stereotypes and norms appear 
natural. Alexandra used a strategy I term disarming, that is she presented the stereotype 
to the boys, assuming that they would absorb it elsewhere if not through her, and she 
positioned them, indeed defied them, to challenge the stereotype. Alexandra perceived a 
conflict between her intention to create authentic classrooms and her desire for social 
justice. She recognized that the assumed association between race and intelligence is 
unfair and that the stereotype of unintelligent blacks (and in the case of William, 
unintelligent Latinos) has served to oppress racial minorities. However, the teacher saw 
racism and racist stereotypes as a reality in the new lives that Gamma, Rafe, and William 
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were living, and she believed that learning to deal with them was part of their adjustment 
to life in the United States.  
For Alexandra, ?playing the stereotype? was equivalent to becoming discouraged 
by these higher standards and ceasing to make an effort, a reaction that Gramsci would 
classify as resistance, an unconscious display of discontent, as opposed to agency, which 
he sees as explicit political opposition with the intention of inducing social change. 
Resistance without agency can serve to reinforce hegemonic practice, as was the case 
with Gamma, Rafe, and William. In becoming discouraged and refusing to participate in 
their academic contexts, the three boys opened themselves to school failure, thus 
fortifying the stereotype. Alexandra encouraged her students to move from resistance to 
agency by evading norms, urging them to: ?[s]how how intelligent you are.?  
According to Bhabha (1994), the third space is a site for challenging fixed 
categories of identity, and fixity must be challenged because it sustains stereotypes. 
Bhabha (2001) in fact claims that the stereotype is a form of knowledge that relies on 
being ?anxiously repeated? (p. 370) for its perpetuation. 
A Latino in Jane?s class voiced a similar concern about the place occupied by 
?hispanic kids? in the grand metanarrative: 
The school newspaper came out last week. This one kid flipped through it 
and said: ?Ms. Fitzpatrick, this paper is racist!? I said: ?Okay, why?? and 
he said: ?Forget it? like he thought I was going to yell at him. I said: ?No, 
no, no, I pretty much agree with you, but I want to hear why you think 
that.? And he said: ?It doesn?t reflect anything about the hispanic kids, it?s 
all about the American black kids and their music.? I said: ?Okay, I agree, 
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now what are you going to do about it?? You have to find these small 
pieces and let them be able to do something with it. I said: ?Who are the 
kids who write for the paper? Do you write for the paper? Do your friends 
write for the paper?? He said: ?No. I should complain.? I said: ?Do you 
want to write a letter to the editor?? He hesitated. I said: ?Jorge, if you 
want to write a letter, I?ll edit it, I?ll help you with the grammar changes.? 
And I said: ?You and your friends need to be represented on that paper. 
You can?t sit back and complain about it. That?s the first step, realizing 
there?s a problem ? but you can?t stop there.? 
When Jane heard her student?s critical analysis of his own representation (or lack thereof) 
in his larger school culture, she moved quickly to encourage his reticent expression and 
his equally hesitant agency in affecting change. For Jane, it is not enough for her students 
to merely adapt to life in the United States. She wants them to become a part of the 
composition of life in this country and consequently part of movements for 
transformation. Both Alexandra and Jane were encouraging their students to be critical of 
stereotypes by highlighting the area between the incontrovertible existence of the 
stereotypes and the students? agency to challenge them. In this instance, Alexandra 
highlighted the reality of stereotypes while Jane encouraged students to change the reality 
by challenging the stereotypes. However, there were times when Alexandra, too, 
challenged the grand metanarrative being presented to her students. In a fairly parallel 
incident, she discussed the importance of students being able to see their countries on a 
map:  
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I have a Ukrainian student now. We couldn?t even find the outline of his country 
on the map. So I asked the [appropriate staff member] for a new map. I mean, I 
have students whose relatives have died over the establishment of these countries! 
This man said: ?The countries change every day, just change it on the map with a 
marker.? ? I wanted to say: ?Don?t you see how important it is to see your own 
country? Are you crazy? You?re really stupid.? I wanted to him understand why I 
need a new map ? I said: ?That?s a really interesting response? and I ducked into 
the bathroom to get a hold of myself. (Alexandra, Conversation, 01.26) 
Alexandra?s solution to the quandary was to provide her students with a 
copy of a Newsweek map that showed all countries that had become independent 
since 1945.  
Teachers face a paradox: while our understandings of social identity development 
indicate that much is to be gained from the resources we bring with our first cultures and 
languages (Moll, 1992), teachers work within a society that continues to privilege 
dominant culture and stigmatize certain constructions of difference. Like Alexandra, Jane 
was concerned about meanings of race constructed within her school walls. Alexandra?s 
boys were considering the ways in which negative racial stereotypes affected their school 
lives. Jane?s students complained not about the negativity of racial stereotypes but about 
their transparency in the school culture. They simply didn?t see themselves in the school 
newspaper. 
Summary 
As Alexandra, Margaret, Katie, and Jane reflected upon and struggled with the 
role they played in the construction of their students? identities and positionalities, they 
235   
 
 
raised questions that problematized the dominant discourses of the literature surrounding 
teaching language minority students. For instance, seeking to strengthen students? 
connections to their home cultures had the potential to encourage stereotyping and 
wakened the possibility of unintentionally reinforcing hegemonic constructs of culture. 
While the teachers indicated that it was important to connect home and school cultures, 
they also agreed that they needed to do so without universalizing ?culture.? Highlighting 
difference for the sake of difference can lead to exoticizing students and their histories 
and can ignore the complexity and subjective nature of culture. Blindly legitimating all 
student knowledge can give rise to the possibility of valuing knowledge that is not 
desirable for the teachers or the class. The teachers? pedagogy indicated that the principle 
of making connections, while helpful in creating a space for home culture identification, 
was simply insufficient. Similarly, encouraging self-naming was supportive of students? 
agency, but it can create the possibility of students choosing assimilationist or self-
oppressive identifications, and furthermore could potentially encourage limited and 
monocultural interpretations of identity. 
 The teachers did not seek to reject these strategies, but rather to use them 
thoughtfully. They sought to find a balance between seeking, for instance, valuing home 
cultures and supporting students agency to self-define. The study highlighted awareness 
of the failure of ESOL curricula to challenge the ?fixity? (Bhabha, 1994) of ways in 
which knowledge is coded. Curricula should be flexible. The intention is not to replace 
school knowledge with student knowledge but rather to redefine knowledge in a way that 
accommodates both in the context of a fluid and ongoing reconstruction of identity. The 
importance of moving beyond fixed and limited definitions of culture, the ?holy trinity? 
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(ref.?) of race, class and gender, became apparent, with teachers considering cultures as 
disparate as mental illness, foster families, and life in Appalachia.  
 The teachers explored ways to make space for student knowledge without 
reinforcing the stigma associated with difference. They discussed the need for multiple 
labels, identifications, and identities. An element that became visible was the ways in 
which norms are constructed, for instance norms of whiteness. The importance of 
questioning associations between white and neutrality surfaced, as did the necessity of 
examining how stereotypes are constructed and sustained. In reading over the 
transcriptions, I came to develop an understanding of how difference is discussed and the 
importance of overcoming silences that allow discrimination to exist. 
Teachers? positionality towards their students? contributes to the shaping of 
students? identities. Canagarajah makes the distinction between a reproduction 
orientation, in which ?subjects are passive [and] lack agency to manage linguistic and 
ideological conflicts to their best advantage? (p. 2) and resistance perspectives, in which 
?students have agency to think critically and work out ideological alternatives that favor 
their own empowerment.? (p. 2). For teachers, negotiating the line between supporting 
students? home cultures and gatekeeping around what counts as American culture was 
murky; for students, a fine line existed between surrendering to dominant culture and 
appropriating it as a tool in their own destinies. 
 
 
 
 
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Chapter 6. Negotiating Normative Bodily Practices 
Introduction 
?The Body, the most visible difference between men and women, the only one to offer a 
secure ground for those who seek the permanent, the feminine ?nature? and ?essence? 
remains thereby the safest basis for racist and sexist ideologies.? (Trinh, 1989, p. 100) 
 
?She has a beautiful nose, but it's not like Barbie's. It's pointy and it sticks out. And she 
has beautiful cheeks but her face is round, not long.? 
(Alexandra, Afternoon tea, 11.04) 
 
Examining normative ideals of physicality in the context of gendered 
constructions helped me to understand the ways in which the teachers, and in particular 
Alexandra and Katie, understood the relationship among pedagogy, gendered identity, 
and power. This theme became important to me because it drew my attention to 
important but almost imperceptible silences that were not evident in the afternoon tea 
transcriptions or in my field notes.  
During the course of the study, my own intense discomfort with classroom 
references to female students? physicality prompted me to ask questions about my own 
discursive habits and the practices of the sociocultural communities I had belonged to. In 
particular, as Alexandra?s verbalized her consciousness of dominant norms of female, I 
began to notice that physical appearance, particularly female physical appearance, was 
for the most part unmentionable. Gender is one of the lenses with which physicality is 
238   
 
 
almost always viewed, and because messages about female beauty are a constant in my 
life, as they were in the lives of the teachers and their ESOL students, I feared that 
allowing a discursive space for female bodies would reinforce oppressive norms of 
beauty. However, Trinh (1989) reminds us that it is separating women from their bodies 
that contributes to their construction as sexless or even masculine: ?Women must ? not 
let themselves be driven away from their bodies. Must thoroughly rethink their bodies to 
re-appropriate femininity. Must not however exalt the body, not favor any of its parts 
formerly forbidden? (p. 36). To strike an appropriate balance between ?re-appropriat[ing] 
femininity? and ?exalt[ing] the body? is a tall order for classroom teachers seeking to 
teach for social justice. While physicality was not a dominant theme for all of the 
teachers, the seemingly minor interactions among some teachers and students in the 
course of their daily interaction had a summative value that merits further exploration. 
Bourdieu (2001) rather deterministically suggests that the presence of bodily 
norms ensures that women remain on a permanent quest for the unachievable: 
?Continuously under the gaze of others, women are condemned constantly to experience 
the discrepancy between the real body to which they are bound and the ideal body 
towards which they endlessly strive.? (p.67). Because identity is relational, with humans 
constructing their gendered nature only in relation to other femininities and masculinities, 
the teachers in the study faced the daunting challenge of guiding their young female and 
male students as they tried decide how to position themselves in relation to normative 
definitions of female beauty. It was Alexandra and Katie who spoke of how troubled they 
were by the oppressive nature of the norms of beauty being presented to their young 
female students. Both had misgivings about pervasive societal perceptions of their female 
239   
 
 
students? external appearances. However their concerns led them to different pedagogical 
intents from each other: Katie downplayed female appearance, while Alexandra sought a 
revision of the definition of ?beauty? offered by society at large. This chapter 
problematizes the meaning of the place that the body occupies pedagogically. I compare 
the different approaches taken by Alexandra and Katie to explore the complex 
relationship among the physical body, language pedagogy, and socially constructed 
understandings of beauty.  
As I began to think and read about the relationship among gender, language, and 
physicality, I found little in the literature to help me think through the pedagogical 
decisions that the teachers were having to make. Studies of language and gender to date 
have been important in highlighting how males and females use language differently 
(Lakoff, 1975; West and Zimmerman, 1983; Pica et al., 1991; Oxford, 1995), how 
linguistic practices contribute to?or counteract?oppression (Cameron, 1990), the 
relationship between multilingualism and gender (Gal, 1978; Pavlenko et al, 2001), how 
language learning is connected to gendered access to the public world (Goldstein, 1997; 
Kouritzan, 1999; Norton, 2000); and how discourse shapes and is shaped by gender 
(Sunderland and Litosseliti, 2002). However, within the context of language pedagogy, 
the physical body and normative bodily practices have been notably absent from 
discussions of gender identity. Over the past two decades, sociologists, educational 
theorists, and scholars from other fields, influenced by postmodernism and feminist 
theory, have begun to challenge the conceptualization of humans as bodiless minds in 
interaction with each other and instead are examining how the body carries meanings that 
are crowded with social and historical relevance. Educators are examining the location of 
240   
 
 
the body within school walls and, conversely, asking about the place schooling occupies 
within the body and the social meanings that schools and other institutions have inscribed 
upon the body. Nonetheless, examination of the body has yet to gain currency within the 
context of language learning. 
Exploration of specific, local knowledges, referred to by Foucault (1978) as 
subject knowledges, have focused attention inwards to the local, the immediate, and the 
personal, stimulating an interest in exploring that very local site, the body. Foucault?s 
(1981) concern about bodies revolved around power in relation to social control of the 
body and sexuality. In 1984, Turner challenged the mind-body dualism of Cartesian 
thought and encouraged sociologists to consider the ways in which the body is socially 
constructed. Educators including hooks (1994) and Grumet (1998) theorized the social 
meanings written on the body and examined ways to invite the body into learning spaces. 
In the 1990s feminist theorists, many of whom had previously worked tirelessly to 
construct female bodies as transparent, allowed the body to materialize and began to look 
at its relationship with identity. The discourses surrounding the admittance of the body 
into the theoretical arena are tentative and tinged with fear that essentialism will increase 
within all branches of feminism, that women will be once again reduced to their physical 
selves. Butler (1990) shifts our focus from the actual gendered biological body to the way 
the body is made to be gendered by the acts it performs in the construction of identity. 
For Butler, there is no biologically based sex, only socially constructed gender. Her 
notion of performativity conceives the various acts that humans perform as inscribing the 
body with gender. Like Butler, Grosz (1994) critiques mind-body dualisms, calling 
241   
 
 
instead for "embodied subjectivity" and "psychic corporeality," but unlike Butler she 
claims that gender is inevitably biologically rooted and predetermined.  
In schools and classrooms, meanings of gender are not passed cleanly and 
unidirectionally from teachers to students but rather are co-constructed within 
communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1998) through social interactions in the 
classroom as ??individuals produce themselves (or are produced) as ?gendered? by 
habitually engaging in the social practices of a speech community that are symbolically 
and practically associated with masculinities or femininities or some combination 
thereof? (Erlich, 2001, p. 120). The extent to which the students accept or reject new 
identities or even new constructions of gender is part of the negotiation of identities in 
ESOL classrooms. However, it would be na?ve and even misleading to ignore power 
relations within classrooms (Morgan, 1998). Although teachers do not single-handedly 
define gender for their students, they have pedagogical power because teachers? 
dominance in the classroom is socially legitimated (Bourdieu, 1982). The negotiation of 
identities is therefore not carried out in a neutral context. For ESOL teachers, 
acknowledging the body is not a simple undertaking in the light of all of its attendant 
baggage. Recognizing female students? bodies is particularly complicated because once 
females are associated with their bodies, that connection can become indivisible, and they 
can become trapped in the realm of the body (Gallup, 1988). 
Negotiating a place for the body in the ESOL classroom was intricate work. The 
topic of students? physical appearance surfaced repeatedly during the year and was 
evident in a variety of contexts. In the afternoon tea discussions it appeared always, 
without exception, in reference to standards of beauty for female students. In theory, a 
242   
 
 
discussion of gendered pedagogies should explore constructions of masculinity and 
constructions of femininity, asking what does it mean to be male? What does it mean to 
be female? What does it mean to be both or neither, accessing a range of masculinities 
and femininities? However, in this analysis, I discuss the gendered body only in relation 
to female identity because the connection between gendered bodies and male identity was 
absent from the afternoon tea conversations. While it is indisputable that masculine 
identity (in relation to forms of femininity) was being constructed in the classroom, I had 
made the methodological decision to privilege the afternoon tea transcriptions and to 
introduce data from other sources only when I could do so in the context of the teachers? 
voices. Connections between masculinity and the body will therefore not be discussed 
here, but their absence is important and will be addressed further later in this chapter. 
Fashioning meanings of gender in this study proved to be a complex and dynamic 
process because Alexandra and Katie both sought to teach transformatively, and their 
critical perspectives contributed to the identities that their students formed. The teachers 
therefore undertook a two-pronged task: (1) guiding students? social understandings of 
what they considered to be normative constructions of femininity and masculinity within 
their new home communities and, simultaneously, (2) challenging those normative 
constructions. This discussion centers not around actual normative constructions of 
gender, the meanings of which defy definition because they are so subjective and fluid, 
but rather around what the teachers? believe to be normative constructions. Alexandra and 
Katie were analytical about the relationship between beauty and meanings of gender. 
Because physical appearance is often the first impression a person presents, it is tightly 
connected to identity and in particular gender identity. However, the relationship between 
243   
 
 
identity and the body is unclear because meanings of being a woman or being a man, 
which dictate how we present our physical selves, are ambiguous. For Katie and 
Alexandra, part of being a woman is the quest to conform to socially determined 
standards of beauty. Within this theme, I explore three major issues: (1) negotiating 
normative constructions of beauty, (2) separating individuals from their bodies in order to 
resist objectification, and (3) the constitution of women as percipi ?being-perceived? 
(Bourdieu, 2001). 
Negotiating Norms 
Alexandra and Katie carried with them images of essentialized constructions of 
gender, and they were uncomfortable with the dehumanizing nature of these images. 
Consequently, when situations arose that reproduced those images, they challenged them, 
although in contrasting ways from each other. Katie tried to avoid mention of the 
physical appearance of the girls in her classroom, while Alexandra deliberately referred 
to her female students? bodies in the context of challenging narrow definitions of beauty. 
Alexandra worked consistently and analytically to identify and then critique 
normative standards of beauty. In talking about her young female students, she frequently 
mentioned their beauty, drawing specific attention to differences between what she 
herself termed ?beautiful? and what she perceived to be mainstream conceptions of 
beauty. For instance, of one student, she said: 
She has a beautiful nose, but it's not like Barbie's. It's pointy and it sticks 
out. And she has beautiful cheeks but her face is round, not long. 
(Afternoon tea, 11.04) 
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She used the word ?but? to separate her description of the students? physical 
characteristics from what she considered to be dominant ideas about beauty, indicating a 
gap between the two. In describing another student, she told me: 
? the girl I was talking about from Senegal. She has very beautiful one-
toned skin and it's just very beautiful, it's such smooth color, you know? 
? Her face is all one tone, and when she smiles ... it's just ... she's 
beautiful. She's just a little bit rough around the edges, you know? She 
talks too tough, and she wants to beat everyone up, you know? But she's 
so beautiful. (Conversation at school, 11.04) 
Alexandra noted how the student?s gender performance differed from that which would 
be a part of beauty, an acceptable and ?beautiful? performance of feminine beauty.    
The teacher perceived long faces and Barbie?s nose as conventionally beautiful. A 
pointy nose that sticks out, a round face, talking too tough, wanting to beat everyone up, 
and being rough around the edges, while not inconsistent with Alexandra?s construction 
of beauty, were in direct contradiction with what this teacher perceived as a normative 
definition of beauty. As she highlighted the distinction between her ideas and those of 
society, she was constructing herself as a teacher who embraced multiple-layered, 
heteroglossic (Bahktin, 1981), and hybrid definitions of beauty (Wong, 2003), forms of 
beauty that did not conform to the mainstream. She sought revised definitions of beauty 
for her students because she wanted to challenge the idea ?that middle-school-age kids ? 
still want to be the magazine beautiful.?  
 Alexandra displayed a vigilant consciousness of the power of norms in the 
making of meanings of gendered bodily practices and worked to reinforce the gap 
245   
 
 
between social norms and her own standards. Foucault (1978) believed that the practices 
of ?disciplinary power,? an alluring and potent form of social control, are harbored in 
regulatory institutions including schools and are practiced not only by representatives of 
these institutions (including teachers) but by individuals passing through their prosaic 
daily routines. Disciplinary power derives its effectiveness by attracting humans to 
certain desires, norms, and identities. For instance, the continued popularity of Mattel?s 
Barbie doll among parents and girls is an example of a way in which disciplinary power 
exerts itself, repeatedly underscoring the desirability of the doll?s physical appearance as 
a bodily ideal. Teachers and school culture contribute to the shaping and reshaping of 
appropriate bodily norms, but individual teachers can choose to produce or subvert 
disciplinary power. Alexandra?s position was complex. She was clearly critical of Barbie 
dolls, suggesting that the dolls contributed to a grand metanarrative that constructed 
whiteness as normative, and she explicitly sought to stimulate her students to be critical 
of Barbie?s whiteness: 
And the girls were like, well, I don't know, I like Barbie. I've always 
played with Barbie. And I was like well how does it feel when you don't 
see a black Barbie? When you don't see a Bangladeshi Barbie?  
She was pleased to note the girls indicating that they were developing broader notions 
about beauty and in particular ideas about beauty that included their racial selves: ??So 
the girls were like ?yeah, yeah, I am beautiful,?? and she perceived this change as the first 
step: ?It was really just a beginning. It was just saying I think you're beautiful, everybody 
else should think you're beautiful.? (Alexandra, Interview, 11.04).  
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Alexandra seeks to create possibilities for multiple meanings and interpretations 
of beauty. Her argument was complicated because it initially seems to challenge the myth 
of white beauty (Wolfe, 1992) without denouncing other systems of oppression, for 
instance the doll?s unrealistic bodily proportions. However, I interpreted this discussion 
as one step within an incremental, concerted approach to the many-layered task of 
critiquing multiple norms of beauty around her. For instance, at other times during the 
year, Alexandra expressed concern about her female students? attempts to become 
unreasonably thin. Early during the school year, upon learning that some young women 
in her class were on extreme diets, she planned a unit on food that included a section on 
?talking about food and what is healthy and unhealthy? (Alexandra, Interview, 10.07). 
She invited a counselor to talk to the female students in one class when she suspected that 
one might have an eating disorder (Alexandra, Interview, 05.02). In this way, she sought 
to discourage the girls? attempts to conform to normative standards of beauty, including 
those pertaining to race and physical size.  
Separating Individuals from Their Bodies 
Like Alexandra, Katie was concerned about her students feeling pressure to 
conform to media-controlled definitions of female beauty. However, Katie?s approach 
differed significantly from Alexandra?s: she took exception to the value structures of 
students who placed too great an emphasis upon appearance. While Alexandra believed 
that the definition of ?beautiful? should be broadened to include a greater variety of 
bodies, Katie sought to teach her girls to appreciate themselves apart from their physical 
attractiveness, their bodies. In class one day, the students were discussing their career 
goals: 
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Katie: Jennifer, what do you want to be when you grow up? 
Jennifer: A doctor. No, a supermodel. 
Katie: Are you sure you want to be a supermodel? 
Jennifer nods. 
Katie: You know, you?re certainly pretty enough to be a supermodel, but 
is there any other ambition that you have?  
Jennifer: Maybe a doctor. No, a supermodel.  
Katie: Maybe it?ll change when you get older. 
(Field Notes, 03.21) 
We discussed the incident with the other teachers at an afternoon tea, and Katie shared:  
?This one girl, Jennifer, she?s so bright, and she said that when she grows 
up, she wants to be a supermodel ? I didn?t want to impose my beliefs on 
her, saying you can be so much more than a supermodel!? (Afternoon tea, 
06.19).  
Katie perceived supermodelling as unsuitable for an intelligent girl. She was conscious of 
the authority associated with her teacher-status and hesitant to abuse it, but she was 
similarly reluctant to support Jennifer?s choice. Alexandra felt that imposing in this 
instance was justified, responding: ?That?s one I don?t mind saying.? At this point, 
Alexandra was supporting Katie?s criticism of modelling. Katie explained that while she 
had questioned Jennifer?s choice, she hadn?t sought to direct her away from it because 
she concluded that the sixth-grader?s ambitions would evolve as she grew up: ?? 
Because I know it?ll change.? While not directly dissuading her from modelling, she 
248   
 
 
stimulated her to think about alternatives. I asked Katie: ?Why don?t you want her to be a 
supermodel?? and she replied: 
?Because I don?t think it takes brains to be a supermodel, and I think it 
places too much emphasis on a woman?s looks. And I think she has a lot 
more talent and brains to be more ambitious than that. I just think she can 
be so much more than her looks. I want her to feel like she can do so much 
more than just be a pretty face.?  
Katie believed that talent and brains were more valuable than appearance. 
Alexandra noted that although it doesn?t take ?brains to be a supermodel,? intelligence 
and modelling are not mutually exclusive: ?You might need brains to survive it, though. 
It?s a hard life.? Katie elucidated on why she objected to her girl students aspiring to be 
models: ?Modelling kind of emphasizes the whole idea that women are valued for their 
beauty, and once other people think you?re not so beautiful anymore, even if you are, it 
just seems very sad for me.? The teacher challenged what she perceived to be a social 
tendency to value women?s physical appearance to the exclusion of other qualities, and 
she specifically critiqued the fleeting nature of this value system. As she had done 
throughout the earlier part of the school year, Alexandra valued appreciation of female 
physical appearance but objected to the narrow confines of the traditional definition of 
beauty. She expressed a preference for redefining and broadening society?s definition of 
beauty to include multiple definitions rather than minimizing the importance of physical 
beauty:  
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?Just to give you some hope, I think that?s changing. I mean, supermodels 
are being demographed at age 50 now and pregnant and things that are not 
traditionally thought of as beautiful.?  
Katie, however, believed that an disproportionate emphasis on physical beauty 
would detract students from focusing on what she perceived to be more important facets 
of their selves: ?Well, I also wanted her to recognize the importance of inner beauty and 
not just external beauty, and how inner beauty is so much more important.? For 
Alexandra, physical beauty was a valuable attribute that needed a more all-inclusive 
definition, whereas Katie believed that physical beauty was simply overvalued socially.  
Separating the girl from the body provides a sense that she can be appreciated 
apart from her physicality. However, the tendency toward ?disembodiment? has been 
criticized. Jackson and Scott (2001) have called for the body to be socially situated and 
socially mediated. Realistically speaking, it is bodies that classify humans at first glance 
by conveying sex, age range, race, and other loaded social markers, so it may not have 
been practical to imagine that Jennifer could be conceptualized apart from her physical 
appearance. The situation that Katie faced was messy: she objected to modelling because 
it disassociates individuals from their bodies and then values the bodies, which results in 
their objectification. Katie didn?t challenge the disassociation itself but rather reinforced 
it and sought to instead value the individual apart from her physicality. 
Establishing body and mind as independent from each other creates a new 
tension: if an individual can be conceptualized apart from her body, then conceptualizing 
the body apart from the individual is a natural progression. Disembodied minds create the 
possibility of mindless bodies including, for instance, models, slaves, and prostitutes. 
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Conversely, acknowledging the physical body implies the possibility and even necessity 
of disciplining the physical body into conformity, a necessity that Katie was loathe to 
underscore. 
Esse as Percipi 
?Masculine domination, which constitutes women as symbolic objects 
whose being [esse] is a being-perceived [percipi], has the effect of keeping 
them in a permanent state of bodily insecurity, or more precisely of 
symbolic dependence. They exist first and through the gaze of others, that 
is as welcoming, attractive, and available objects.? [itals in original] 
(Bourdieu, 2001, p. 66) 
What responsibilities do teachers have towards their male students as they 
grapple with the location of female beauty in relation to gender identity? ESOL 
teachers face the daunting task of finding the middle ground between teaching 
male students to critique normative standards of beauty and appearing to seek 
their male students? approval for nonstandard forms of beauty. The relationship 
between body and identity is ambiguous because identity is an essentially social 
concept. Who one is evolves in relation to others. To a limited extent, every 
human is objectified by the gaze of others, but similarly every human is 
constructed by the gaze of others. However, the normalization of certain female 
bodies (but not others) particularly underscores the percipi (being perceived) 
status of women. For instance, Alexandra sought a revision of her female 
students? self-concepts, emphasizing that their beauty, while unconventional, was 
nonetheless beauty. However, she wanted to teach all students, and not only girls, 
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to think critically about media-generated images of beauty. As such she wanted 
her male students to rewrite their definitions of beauty and to see the female 
students as beautiful: 
? ? the boys were just kind of taking it in. I like the co-ed setting because 
the boys are all after the girls, but I think that discussion, I'm hoping, is 
making the boys see the girls differently.? (Interview, 11.04) 
Because the boys had sexual interest in the girls, Alexandra was concerned about how 
they defined female beauty in general. She therefore specifically focused on their 
assessment of the appearance of these female students. It was important to Alexandra that 
the boys see these particular girls as beautiful.  
Similarly, later on during the school year, when Alexandra became aware that her 
female students were skipping meals and developing unhealthy eating habits in order to 
lose weight, she invited a counselor to speak to all of the girls in her class in her absence 
and then continued the discussion during class time. She told me:  
But when they came back the next day, we talked about it in a co-ed 
setting. And I thought it was very interesting because the boys were 
listening. (Alexandra, Interview, 05.04) 
This concern about the boys is a challenging problem for teachers who seek to 
raise the consciousness of all of their students, not only their girls, without privileging the 
opinions of the boys. This tension draws on what Simone de Beauvoir (1949) described 
as the distinction between the objective self and the subjective self. De Beauvoir believed 
that when girls reach puberty, they cease being the subjects of their own lives and 
become instead the objects of others?, they ?stop being and start seeming? (p. 370). 
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Whereas once girls lived their lives for themselves, after puberty, they live under the gaze 
of others and are focused not on how they are but on how they appear to others. De 
Beauvoir?s delineation may be excessively stark, but it captures the ways in which a 
preoccupation with the gaze of others keeps young females focused on their image and 
therefore dependent on others, in this case on their male peers. Teachers like Alexandra 
seek to negotiate complicated terrain. They want to help all students to recognize and 
challenge the power of normative ideals of beauty. They strive to encourage their males 
to be critical of social norms but they must do so without appearing to seek approval for 
the appearance of their female classmates and thus contributing to the objectification of 
their girls. 
In a conversation about appropriate dress, Alexandra asked her class why some 
girls wore revealing clothing. A male student responded:  
?Because it looks good.?  
?Why do you like it?? 
?Because she looks naked when she?s wearing clothes like that.? 
Alexandra nodded at him but didn?t respond. (Field notes, 10.12) 
When I asked Alexandra about this exchange, and she told me: 
?They were being totally honest ? I asked the girls later, how do you feel 
when they say things like that? The girls were like, it doesn?t matter to me, 
I don?t like them.? (Conversation during planning period, 10.12) 
In the context of a strong historical taboo on discussion of physicality and its connection 
to sexuality, my initial reaction to this incident was that the boy was speaking 
inappropriately. Alexandra was concerned about how the young women would be 
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affected by the male students? attitude towards revealing clothes. This account revealed 
Alexandra?s female students as indicating that they could be influenced by the young 
men?s opinions only if they ?liked? the men. However, while the girls claimed to be 
ambivalent towards both the boys and their opinions of revealing attire, Alexandra made 
a connection between the boy?s endorsement of sexually revealing clothes and the young 
women?s investment in attaining these standards:  
Because you know some girls go into the bathroom and change into 
clothes their parents wouldn?t approve of. And then change back at 
seventh period before they get back on the bus. (Alexandra, Interview, 
10.12) 
Alexandra believed that whether or not the girls ?like[d]? the boys, the boys? 
reaffirmation of dominant standards of beauty had an influence on the girls, since most 
individuals want to present bodily appearances of which others approve. Furthermore, it 
is important not to ignore the role of power in this dynamic: the boys? power to contribute 
to the construction of standards of beauty is highly legitimated because males, for the 
most part, are constructed as the primary consumers of female beauty. 
Summary 
?I am really asking whether women cannot begin, at last, to think through 
the body, to connect what has been so cruelly disorganized (italics in 
original).? (Adrienne Rich, 1976, p. 284) 
Alexandra, Katie, Margaret, and Jane faced the challenge of finding a way to 
invite female students? physical bodies into their classrooms without also creating space 
for them to be objectified. Rich calls for thinking and physicality to be brought back 
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together, referring to their division as ?cruel.? The split is indeed unnatural, but it has 
served a purpose over the years. Critically thinking teachers and educators have (usually 
unconsciously) supported the evolution of mind and body apart from each other because 
the body?s ostensible invisibility has promised to give greater visibility to intellectual 
selves, liberating girls from a focus on their outer appearance. Reuniting mind and body 
is more difficult than it sounds. It is not possible to simply pick up a needle and thread 
and effortlessly stitch the two back together again, since their separation served a purpose 
in the first place: concepts of beauty keep women positioned as consumable, and the 
detachment of body from mind was one way to thwart that positioning.  
The fact that I saw no data connecting gendered bodies to the construction of male 
identity is important. Male identity was indisputably being constructed in the ESOL 
classrooms, but its connection to male students? physical bodies was never the explicit 
topic of discussion at the afternoon teas. Male bodies were simply never discussed. 
Although representations of the male body have certainly been transformed in recent 
years by more objectified and sexualized media representations of male physicality, the 
association of women with their bodies and men with their minds has been pervasive for 
much longer. Bourdieu, in fact, claims that the female experience of the body is of the 
?body-for-others, constantly exposed to the objectification performed by the gaze and 
discourse of others? (p. 63). The implications of the binary are different for men and 
women, and Gallup explains that it is simultaneously harder and easier for men: ?Harder 
because men have their masculine identity to gain by being estranged from their bodies 
and dominating the bodies of others. Easier because men are more able to venture into the 
realm of the body without being trapped there.? (Gallup, 1988, p.7) 
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Both Alexandra and Katie were caring and felt a responsibility towards their 
students. Both sought to teach in ways that simultaneously responded to their students? 
social needs and rejected restrictive social messages about gender. One teacher sought to 
minimize the conceptual space occupied by the physical body in the classroom, the other 
to guide the body into the conversation. 
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257   
 
 
 
 
Chapter 7. Institutional Constructions of ESOL Identity 
?Some of the central ideologies of current English Language Teaching 
have their origins in the cultural constructions of colonialism. The 
colonial constructions of Self and the Other, of the ?TE? and the ?SOL? of 
ESOL remain in many domains of ELT [English Language Teaching].?  
(p. 2, Pennycook, 1998) 
Introduction 
Pennycook draws attention to the historical context of English language teaching 
and the legacy that colonialism has imbued into every ESOL classroom. Katie, Jane, 
Alexandra, and Margaret?s pedagogical processes cannot be considered apart from the 
historical social construction of English speakers and English learners within the United 
States and globally, which has a powerful effect on how the school category of ESOL is 
constructed. This chapter explores the teachers? perceptions of how ESOL student 
identity is made within their schools and how the American, native-English speaking 
teachers negotiate the role that they themselves play in molding the meanings of ESOL 
within their school cultures.  
At the beginning of the school year, the teachers noticed that students in the upper 
elementary grades, the middle school, and the high school were ashamed of their ESOL 
student status. They cited numerous examples of students trying to hide their relationship 
with the ESOL department and perceiving the end of their need for ESOL services as a 
desirable victory because it freed them from the stigma of ESOL. Crossing borders 
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usually implies a radical adjustment to societal location and status and therefore social 
identity, and for students arriving in this country, one of the first of those adjustments 
comes with their placement in ESOL classes and their consequent adaptation to the 
identity associated with being an ESOL student. Being in ESOL carries social meanings 
within the culture of American schools, meanings that immigrant students are called upon 
to adjust to. The fact that ESOL was constructed as deficient was not exclusive to the 
four schools in the study. ESOL programs across the United States occupy an inferior 
status in schools? pecking orders (Olsen, 1997). To understand the evolution of the 
inferior status of ESOL within schools, we need to examine it in relation to its larger 
context because the relationships among ESOL, schools, and identity are imbued in 
ideology, an ideology that is constructed collaboratively by all who participate in the 
making of a culture. ESOL did not become subordinate by chance, it was made to 
become subordinate by a legacy that extends beyond the four schools of the study and 
even beyond language learning in the United States. The ideology that constructs ESOL 
is connected to the historical terrain of the construction of non-native English speaker 
identity and of the dominance of English world-wide.  
Pennycook (1998) connected ideologies underpinning modern-day ESOL 
teaching with the backwash of colonialism and with colonial constructions of Self and 
Other. Despite the binary social construction of ESOL/nonESOL, Alexandra, Jane, Katie, 
and Margaret seemed to develop rich and complicated pedagogies that moved away from 
the conceptualization of students as passive and oppressed and teachers as liberating 
benefactors. They asked critical questions about meanings of ESOL, challenged separatist 
practices within their school systems, and supported their students? attempts to challenge 
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hegemonic representations of ESOL. The teachers? various practices were necessarily 
contradictory because there were so many contradictions within their circumstances. 
According to the four teachers, ESOL was constructed as deficient, with only 
occasional exceptions, by most of the students and many of the teachers and parents they 
interacted with. The superiority is crucial to the maintenance of the status quo: ESOL 
students? difference was supported by the school constructions of ESOL, but it was the 
type of difference referred to by Trinh (1989) as: ??the very kind of colonized anthropo-
logized difference the master has always granted his subordinates? (p. 101). This is a 
difference without authority, a benevolently conferred and exoticized difference, and a 
difference that bore a deep stain of stigma.  
Part of the construction of ESOL as deficient included its construction as separate 
from the dominant school culture. The four ESOL teachers themselves explicitly 
condemned the inferior perception of ESOL student identity and constructed pedagogies 
that integrated their responsibility toward their students with their desire to reframe 
institutional meanings of ESOL. The ways in which ESOL came to be produced as 
subordinate and the ways in which the teachers and sometimes students challenged this 
framing will be scrutinized in this chapter. 
Shame about ESOL 
Alexandra described the role played in stigmatizing ESOL by students who were 
not in ESOL classes. A short hallway separated her classroom from its door, meaning that 
someone standing in the doorway could not be seen from the classroom. She often left the 
door ajar in order to ventilate the classroom. Students would ?pass the door and shout: 
?You can?t speak English? into the classroom and play with the light switch at the door? 
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(Afternoon tea, 04.10). Alexandra was able to catch one of these students on one 
occasion and reported him: ?I caught a guy one time, and he got into all kinds of trouble, 
so that was good.? 
?How often does this happen?? I asked. 
?At least once or twice a week.? 
She encouraged her advanced-level students to discuss these incidents during class time, 
and she related their responses: 
?Some of them just shrug it off: ?It?s ignorance, it?s their problem?.? However, she added 
that the students were nonetheless not indifferent to the harassment: ?These are kids that 
do take it personally.? She perceived a relationship between the taunting of non-ESOL 
peers and the ESOL students? shame of their ESOL standing, adding: ?They pull the 
shades in the windows so that no one across the courtyard can see them because everyone 
knows [this classroom] is ESOL? (Afternoon tea, 04.10). In drawing the shades and 
hiding their presence in the classroom, the students are acknowledging the subordinate 
status of ESOL within the school and are also affirming?even perpetuating?it. The 
teacher herself was placed in a difficult position. She cared about her students? comfort 
levels and wanted them to associate a sense of safety with their ESOL classroom. If she 
agreed to the drawing of the shades, she could potentially reinforce the portrayal of her 
classroom as shameful and interrupt her attempts to transform the image of ESOL within 
the school. However, forcing the students to open them would have blindly ignored that 
the perception of ESOL held by the larger school culture differed from her own. 
Alexandra negotiated the terrain between her responsibility towards her students and her 
desire for transformative practice. She faced competing representations of ESOL: the 
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schoolwide understanding of ESOL students as inferior, and her individual construction 
of ESOL students as ?bilingual and talented? (E-mail, 11.10). To stubbornly open the 
classroom blinds would be to assume that her own understandings of ESOL were the only 
possible meanings of ESOL available to the school community and would have 
disrespectfully left her students open to ridicule. The teacher chose what was in the best 
interests of the students at the moment. 
 However, there were times when Alexandra questioned her students? choices to 
reinforce oppressive and discriminatory norms. For instance, she told us of a student?s 
self-directed linguicism: 
One of my students who?s Chinese started making fun of his own 
language. The Korean student was asking him how to pronounce 
something in Chinese, and started mimicking some of the kids who make 
fun of his language. I said: ?Why are you making fun of your language?? I 
don?t mean to tell him he?s stupid, but I?m sure it gives him a little bit of 
shame, that I bring it out that way. He?s picked on an awful lot. His accent 
is very heavy. People say to me all the time, how can you understand him? 
(Interview, 05.21) 
She felt that in that situation, within the safety of the ESOL classroom, running the risk of 
embarrassing the student was justified. 
Alexandra?s students were on a continual quest to move from their ESOL classes 
to the English class for native English speakers. One student refused to participate in 
ESOL and even distanced himself by asking to sit in the hallway: 
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He said he wanted to sit in the hallway in the class. So I said: ?You?re fine 
to sit in the hallway.? So he sat in the hallway through the period. It 
wasn?t anything he needed to participate in, his ability level is pretty high. 
I held him after class. I said ?Why don?t you want to be in the class?? ?I 
don?t need ESOL.? ?You might not need ESOL, and we?re going to find 
that out really quickly if you do what I ask. You?ll be in the regular 
English class as soon as your ability shows me. But you?re not showing 
me your ability right now.? (Alexandra, Conversation during planning 
period, 09.11) 
If she were to be overzealous about challenging negative constructions of ESOL, 
Alexandra could have chided the student for his recalcitrance, demanded that he 
participate, and been forceful about her rejection of the inferior image of ESOL. Instead, 
she chose to respect his concerns and explain the swiftest way for him to exit ESOL, 
indicating a caring for her students? happiness. She explained some other motivations the 
students had for exiting ESOL. 
?Some of them really want to be there and learn. Well, they may not want 
to be in ESOL, but they want to do what they?re told to do because that?s 
an ethic that they have. Some of them don?t want to be there because it?s 
too hard and they?re afraid to admit it. And some of them don?t want to be 
here because it?s too easy and they?re mad that they didn?t get the exit 
from the testing last spring.? (Alexandra, Conversation during planning 
period, 09.11) 
And a month later: 
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I have students who are also in a regular English class. And they have the 
belief that what they?re doing in that class is English, so they feel like why 
come to this class, it?s remedial. Instead of seeing it as ?How can you 
improve on what you?re doing in your English class?? Some students just 
want to be with their friends who have already exited ESOL. Or it might 
be their misunderstanding that if they can speak English, then they are 
able to read and write it as well. (Alexandra, Interview, 10.07) 
The construction of ESOL as inferior was not spawned by students but rather reflected 
broader societal influences, including an understanding of NNES as deficient and as only 
remediated once native-like proficiency has been achieved, which for many high-school 
students never occurs. This construction of ESOL was sustained beyond school walls and 
contributed to by NESs and NNESs. For instance, Alexandra described her twin students? 
understandings of ESOL as antithetical to ?macho,? an understanding constructed 
collaboratively with their parents: 
 
Alexandra: I have a set of twins. Their parents came to family night and 
asked why their sons were still in ESOL ? they?re not ready for regular 
English, but they want to be in it. They?re very into being the men. They 
just want to be macho, they?re very into being macho ? well, as macho as 
a 12-year-old can be. They want to be tough, they want to show that they 
can deal with all these hard-edged classes. 
Suhanthie: And ESOL is not macho? ESOL is handholding? 
Alexandra: Well, it can?t be anything but when there are only 15 kids in 
the class, and in the regular English class there are 32 or 35. But if they 
264   
 
 
were all doing their work, just doing it and showing me what they know, I 
might have a different perspective on what it is they do know. But all 
they?re showing me now is that they don?t know enough to be in a regular 
English class because they?re not willing to do the exercises that are 
prescribed by the curriculum, no matter how creatively I put a twist on 
them. (Alexandra, Conversation during planning period, 10.07)  
In this instance, the gendered construction of ESOL as handholding contradicted 
the ?macho? nature of the identity the twins wanted to embrace. For the two 
students, being ?men? implied functioning without the support or scaffolding 
related to ESOL, being ?tough,? and being competent to attend ?hard-edged 
classes,? so that receiving ESOL services was constructed, for them, as in conflict 
with being ?men.? This quest for an identity of adult masculinity was reinforced 
by their parents, who wanted to see their boys exiting from ESOL. The incident 
highlights the interesting ways in which individuals construct school subjects. In 
this case, ESOL was constructed as babyish and also oppositional to ?macho.? 
The twins? parents appeared to be concerned less about the content of the class 
and more about the identities that ESOL implied, since the class the twins? were 
registered in were makers of their identities within and even out of school. This 
exchange allows a glimpse onto how meanings of ESOL can be created and 
maintained within linguistic minority communities. This construction of a 
desirable male identity as tough and rejecting of support has several ancillary 
effects. One result is the construction of female as dependent and unable to deal 
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with mainstream classes, the other is the construction of ESOL as appropriate for 
students who lack toughness and independence, which is a deficit representation.  
In her quest to provide her more proficient students with the support they needed, 
Alexandra established a ?bridge class,? a transitional class between ESOL and 
mainstream English classes. She didn?t form the bridge class for the specific purpose of 
combating shame about ESOL, but it was, for this teacher, a happy and welcome 
consequence. Alexandra?s students typically clamored to take the ESOL exit test and 
move to the regular English classes:  
Alexandra: Some of them were upset that they either weren?t tested because it 
wasn?t their turn to be tested or because they didn?t get the score they thought 
they?d get.  
Suhanthie: Why are they so keen to get out of ESOL? 
Alexandra: Because of the stigma. (Afternoon tea, 04.10) 
However, with the establishment of the bridge class, the teacher noted that while leaving 
ESOL services had traditionally been a desirable goal, the students were now happy to 
stay in the bridge class:  
?So it?s getting to be a status symbol to be in the bridge class, even though 
the bridge class is still ESOL. It?s so funny, I like how it?s made a turn of 
events because the kids wanted to be out of ESOL so badly, but now that 
there?s a bridge class, they want to stay in it. It?s like a cocoon, it?s like a 
soft transition. They?re all taking English anyway, but it?s like a soft 
transition to being totally without services.?  
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Alexandra perceived the bridge class as a way for students to obtain the language support 
they needed without the associated stigma. Her happiness about the effect of the bridge 
class represents yet another example of the unsteady tightrope the teachers walked 
between reinforcing and challenging the accepted conception of ESOL within the school. 
On one hand, the bridge class allowed students to save face by releasing them from 
ESOL status. It was also important in blurring the distinction between ESOL and 
nonESOL, between English speaker and non-English speaker, which blurs the ?fixity? of 
the categories and allows space for inter- and intra-group membership. On the other hand, 
it reinforces the stigma of ESOL by acknowledging the undesirability of ESOL and 
providing them an escape from it. The reason that the bridge class was preferable to 
ESOL was that it moves students a step away from ESOL and its intrinsic disgrace. Some 
students even applied the stigma to the bridge class, which comprised only former ESOL 
students and was taught by an ESOL teacher: 
Even some of the World English speakers who have tested out make fun 
of some of the ones who are in the class, they walk by the classroom and 
go ah, you?re in that English class. They?re very aware of levels and 
immediately want to go to the next level.  
The students were eager to emphasize their own detachment from the class and its 
lowly status within the school culture. 
Margaret, too, noticed that when she joined the school community, some of her 
students were ashamed of their enrollment in ESOL classes. She told us about one fourth-
grade student who ignored her when he was outside the classroom unless the hallway was 
empty: ?If no one else is in the hall, he?s very happy to see me. It?s like something out of 
267   
 
 
a movie. [If other students are present] he doesn?t want anyone to see him!? When class 
was over, he would surreptitiously look through the doorway, and if he saw other 
students in the hall, he would hang back and wait in the classroom. Margaret would 
explicitly dispute his shame, telling him: ?You know, you?re bilingual and this is great. 
You?re so talented!? 
Margaret was troubled by her students? reluctance to be associated with ESOL. 
She noted that this trend started with her third grade and carried through the higher 
grades at her school. She wanted to challenge the tendency: ?I?m trying to think of things 
to do.? One creative example sparked a noticeable change. She kept dialogue journals 
with the three ESOL students in one third-grade class. On days that she picked students 
up for ESOL, she would stand silently at the classroom door until her students saw her, 
gathered their pencils and books, and moved quietly to the door to walk to the ESOL 
classroom with her. On Fridays, when she taught in an inclusion format in their regular 
classroom, she would collect the journals. She responded over the weekend and returned 
the journals the following week. As she collected journals one Friday (12.03, Field 
notes), the students who were not in ESOL asked her: ?What?s the journal thing??  
?We write letters back and forth,? she explained. 
?Can I have one?? asked a native-English-speaking boy. 
?Me too?? clamoured another student. 
?Me too?? 
?Well, I?ll have to see about that,? replied Margaret. 
The following semester, she told me that the dialogue journals had become a tool in her 
quest to elevate the status of ESOL within the third-grade class: 
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So I have three ESOL kids in that class but 15 dialogue journals. And it?s 
really good because I?m always wondering, how do I explain ESOL, and I 
usually only have one sound-byte to explain ESOL [when I?m picking 
them up from their classroom], but now kids are asking in the journals! 
Margaret used an inclusion format twice a week and pull-out on the other three 
days. On the days that she went to collect her three ESOL students, an obvious change 
had come over the class. Her presence evoked great interest among other class members, 
and the native English speaking students would ask to attend ESOL, calling out ?Pick 
me!? and ?Can I come?? On one occasion, a boy who was not in ESOL tried to persuade 
Margaret to take him and instead leave one of his non-native English speaking peers, 
asking: ?Why can?t we go with you? Why? Why?? and then telling her: ?Mrs. Chan, Juan 
speaks perfect English, why is he in your group?? (Afternoon tea, 04.10) 
Using a fairly simple and serendipitously discovered format, Margaret had managed to 
change the status of ESOL within her tiny microcosm of society. 
A pervasive shame about subscribing to the category of ESOL student was 
omnipresent in all schools of the study, and this shame was repeatedly reinscribed by 
many participants in the school community, including ESOL students themselves, 
students who had exited ESOL, native English speaking students, classroom teachers, and 
parents. However, the teachers developed innovative strategies on a number of levels?
including curricular, interactional, pedagogical levels?to counteract or at least diminish 
the stigma of ESOL status. 
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Classroom Teachers Role in Construction of ESOL Identity 
Katie and Margaret both noted the role of teachers in shaping students? and other 
teachers? understandings about ESOL. Margaret was surprised to hear some teachers 
openly express reluctance to work with ESOL students: 
?They had three teams for each grade level, and all the ESOL students were on 
one of those teams. And the staff were like: ?Next year I don?t want to be on the 
ESOL team.? From teachers who I thought were pretty open-minded!? 
Suhanthie: Like who? 
Margaret: Like one teacher who was a contributor to the [county curriculum 
revised to reflect diversity training].  
Suhanthie: Why didn?t she want to be on the ESOL team? 
Margaret: I think it stretched her too much to try to differentiate. (Afternoon tea, 
11.01) 
To be unwilling to work to meet the special needs of second language speakers implies 
that ESOL students require an unreasonable or unjustifiable level of effort. It suggests 
that ESOL students require but don?t deserve special attention.  
One fifth-grade teacher at Katie?s school held exclusionary views about the 
participation of immigrants in U.S. society. Within classroom walls, he supported 
segregation of ESOL students and was opposed to inclusion-model classes. Katie arrived 
at one afternoon tea upset about a comment that Mr. Mecclesfield had made during a 
conversation with a special education teacher: ?And he said, ?Well [ESOL students] don?t 
even belong [in the United States] anyway?? (Afternoon tea, 11.01). Katie was 
particularly distressed about the subconscious messages that might be telegraphed to his 
270   
 
 
young students through his teaching: ?Those were his words! He?s teaching them, and not 
only that, this attitude ? is going to be conveyed through his teaching. Kids are pretty 
smart, they can pick up on what a teacher feels through his nonverbal signals.? 
Katie was concerned not only about ESOL students internalizing negative ideas about 
their own status, but also about non-ESOL students absorbing jingoism towards ESOL 
students. In expressing his ideas and thereby acting upon the identities of his young 
students, Mr. Macclesfield was shaping meanings of ESOL for the entire school 
community through the kids he interacted with. Katie made a direct link between veiled 
bigotry and the fostering of prejudice against ESOL students within the school culture: 
?And they wonder why it?s so hard to combat racism, combat intolerance. 
It?s because these attitudes are being conveyed to the other students. Not 
only are [ESOL] kids being marginalized, but the attitude?s being 
conveyed to the other students that having an attitude like you don?t 
belong here is okay. This man is in a very powerful position with children. 
Children are very impressionable.? (Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
Katie faced a difficult task. She wanted to alter the status of ESOL at her school 
by provoking the teachers to question their assumptions about immigrants. She had a 
limited amount of time, was aware of the difficulty for teachers to find the time to read 
anything extraneous, and was afraid of appearing to lecture or preach. Given these 
constraints, her first step was to ask for two minutes at the end of a staff meeting. She 
read an article from the New York Times that simply tells a story about the author?s 
discovery of his own prejudices about immigrants. She offered no synopsis or conclusion 
but merely read the story, telling us at an afternoon tea later that day: ?I think people need 
271   
 
 
time to process it. I said, ?I?m not going to say too much about it?? (Afternoon tea, 12.06). 
She was unsure about whether she had achieved what she had set out to do, but she 
planned to continue to offer reflection-stimulators such as this one: 
I want to start a little ESOL corner. With ? thought-provoking stories like 
this one. I want to share them with everyone, but if I photocopy them and 
put them in mailboxes, they won?t read them because teachers get a lot of 
mail. So I was thinking I?d have like two minutes at the staff meetings 
every month and pick out a story or a piece. And not have any discussion 
about it, just hand out a copy and read it aloud, like at the end. I?d just be 
like, this is a story from the ESOL corner. And then if they want to talk 
about it they can, but it?s more personal. So there?s no risk to them at all, 
they just listen and if you want to talk to other people you can.  
Margaret: I like that. 
Katie: It?s relevant for not only the ESOL population ? you know ? 
children who live in the homeless population, children with special needs. 
It intersects everything. (Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
Alexandra had opened her school year with a similar approach. She believed that within 
her school walls, the construction of ESOL student identity left teachers unappreciative 
of, and even uninformed about, the hardships that her students faced within their family 
lives. She wanted to highlight these ?family strifes,? presenting ESOL students as having 
faced dramatic struggles in order to immigrate. At the first staff meeting of the year, 
faculty were discussing the challenges of African American families but appeared to be 
oblivious to the hardships of some immigrant families. Alexandra was particularly 
272   
 
 
concerned that attention to the needs of diverse learners would neglect ESOL students in 
favor of other minority groups: ?Why are they only talking about African American 
children?? she asked. She asked the presenter for three minutes at the end of the meeting. 
She then directed an activity that led her fellow teachers through a ?thought process,? 
asking them to list the three things they thought they would always do, the three people 
they loved the most, and the three achievements they were most proud of: 
?And then I told them the scenario, the rebels are knocking on your door, 
you?ve gone for your visa, and the visa officer says you can have it next 
week but you have to give me one thing from each column. The rebels are 
knocking on your door and they?ve taken your daughter and your wife is 
screaming. You go back to the visa office and they say, okay, you can 
have your visa next week but say but you have to give me one more thing 
from each column. Then they come for your son ? the whole dramatic 
story that you?re running from something.?  
Alexandra wanted to emphasize the struggle that is part of the journey to this country for 
some ESOL students: ?It?s not a picnic coming to this country. Why does an African 
male, who is somebody of status in Africa, choose to come to the US and have no status 
whatsoever? Why would you do that to your son?? She conducted this activity ?to help 
the teachers understand the family strifes [ESOL students] are going through. They had 
totally forgotten the ESOL families. I got a standing ovation. Everybody was like, they?d 
lost their PhD, their beautiful house in the country, their father, their mother.? She 
believed that ?just taking them through that process? helped the teachers to ?imagin[e] 
losing all of those things. (Alexandra, Interview, 01.26). Alexandra, like many other 
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ESOL teachers, wanted to challenge the invisibility of non-native English speaking 
students within attempts to pay attention to the needs of diverse students.  
 In drawing attention to the needs of her ESOL students, Alexandra once again 
faces the challenge of representing, within a short period of time, the experiences of 
ESOL students without universalizing ?The ESOL Student Experience.? The method she 
chose, an imaginative role-playing activity, enabled other teachers to glimpse alternative 
perspectives and perhaps even access some degree of empathy without Alexandra 
needing to specifically name a given experience as representative of all students. The 
tension is nonetheless visible and possibly inevitable, but Alexandra has chosen a 
strategy designed to mitigate it. 
 Alexandra?s experience brings up another frequent theme in ESOL teaching, that 
is the sense that minority groups are competing against each other for limited resources. 
In schools that are grudging about paying attention to minority groups and in contexts 
that esteem the construct of competition (tightly associated with Western and patriarchal 
ways of thinking), it is not surprising for minorities and their advocates to develop the 
impression that the resources available are finite, that giving to one group implies taking 
from another. Wong (forthcoming) in fact refers to this experience as ?historic discursive 
patterns of divide and rule,? which she characterizes as ?one of the key features of 
colonialism.? She points out that oppressed people have historically been compared to 
each other, pitted against each other, and used to police each other in order to sustain 
racism and to contribute to divisions between former slaves and colonized subjects in 
modern contexts. Historic patterns of divide and rule extend beyond racial minorities 
competing for resources. This colonial legacy seeks to keep other oppressed groups 
274   
 
 
invested in the construct of hierarchy by encouraging them to police each other. For 
instance, classroom teachers, who are socially undervalued (Biklen, 1994, Acker, 1984), 
are encouraged to use their teacher-authority to police and reinforce norms of whiteness, 
native English speech, and standard English in their classrooms. 
Decentering the Center, Advocacy for the Periphery 
Part of being an ESOL teacher was being critically mindful of the periphery-
center relationship that ESOL departments have with the larger school culture. For 
instance, as the five of us discussed the idea of a single standardized national curriculum, 
we connected our discomfort to the potential marginalization of students who do not 
represent the center, in particular, ESOL students. Furthermore, even discussion of a 
standardized national ESOL curriculum was unsettling because ESOL students are not 
homogenous, and a curriculum that seeks to globally attend to their needs necessarily 
creates a hypothetical ?standard? ESOL student. In this discussion, our ideas evolved as 
they encountered each others? opinions. Katie was the first to arrive at one afternoon tea 
on June 19th, and she told me of a discussion with an ESOL colleague, Tracy, who 
believed that a national ESOL curriculum was essential to maintaining ?high standards? 
for learning. Katie initially expressed tentative support: 
I agree with it as long as people are creative in their teaching and are 
going to modify their teaching to suit their students? needs. (Afternoon tea, 
06.19) 
I expressed my own concern about the ability of a national curriculum to attend to the 
needs of diverse students: 
275   
 
 
I also worry ? I mean, there are many different students, is it possible to 
have one textbook or one curriculum that responds to them all? 
Katie offered further information and in the process began to express some reservations: 
Tracy was saying that ESOL students all need to know the same things 
around the country, I guess about the language. I don?t know, something is 
not sitting right with me with having a national thing. 
When Alexandra and Margaret arrived a little later, Katie brought up the subject again: 
Katie: Before you arrived, I was telling Su about a conversation I had with 
Tracy at Jump Street Elementary School. Our discussion was about 
standards across the nation. She was saying she wanted every ESOL 
student to know what their goals were and have [the same] textbook. 
Margaret: Like a national curriculum? 
Katie: Like a national curriculum. I told her I had a problem with 
standards.  
In relating her thoughts, Katie?s perspective shifted a little from an initial, if tentative, 
support for a national curriculum to a clear conflict. Alexandra supported the part of 
Katie that expressed reservations, pointing out that different students have different 
needs, particularly depending on their geographic location. Alexandra?s ideas about 
national curricula were clear and defined. She perceived a national curriculum to be in 
opposition to attending to the diverse needs of ESOL students: 
If I didn?t listen to what my kids wanted to learn, they wouldn?t have 
wanted to learn. But if I were teaching ESOL in Missouri, Huck Finn 
would make sense. But I?m not teaching ESOL in Missouri, I?m teaching 
276   
 
 
it on the Murray River. It makes a difference. I don?t think that 
Huckleberry Finn works on the Murray River. If you?re talking about 
standards in which everyone comes out speaking the same language at the 
end, I think that?s an impossible idea for ESOL. I know I couldn?t teach 
under those circumstances. I don?t think neighborhood schools are the 
same or have the same needs. 
It was important to Alexandra that she ?listen to what my kids wanted to learn,? and she 
saw a national curriculum as interfering with her ability to do so. A fundamental principle 
of Alexandra?s language teaching is personal relevance for students, and she believes that 
no one curriculum can be personally relevant for every student in every class in the 
country. A national curriculum that is aimed at all students inevitably treats students 
monolithically, and in doing so contributes to the construction of a norm. In seeking to 
address the elements that the majority of students have in common, a national curriculum 
cannot help but have a centralizing effect, neglecting the multiplicity of identities 
represented in the national ESOL population. 
Margaret wondered whether the variously socially constructed meanings of 
language learning fluctuated across national borders. She remembered that in China, 
language learning was conceptualized and assessed in more lexical terms than in the 
United States. 
I wonder how much it has to do with the nature of English. When I was in 
China, there was such a concept as how many characters you should 
know, like they all knew how many thousand characters you had to know 
to read this newspaper or that newspaper. And they?d ask me, ?How many 
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English words do you have to know to read the New York Times?? And 
I?d say, ?I don?t know, a lot probably.? They?d ask, ?How many words do 
you know?? I have more of a sense of the grammar, but I don?t have it 
tiered, like you would approach the language this way, with these words 
first and these characters first and then these. That would make it much 
easier to standardize a teaching approach.  
Margaret observed that in her Chinese experience, language acquisition was expressed in 
quantitative terms according to knowledge of characters. For Margaret, the more abstract 
conceptualization of English, which is considered in terms of less definable qualities such 
as proficiency and fluency, makes language teaching less conducive to standardization. 
Margaret?s story illustrates the subjective nature of representations of language learning, 
with different groups internalizing different understandings of language that vary with 
context.  
?How Rich the Students Are in Knowing? 
A large part of ESOL teaching was advocating to classroom teachers on behalf of 
ESOL students. Margaret conceptualized this work as supporting classroom teachers ?so 
they can see the kids succeed,? suggesting that ESOL teachers could contribute by 
making the possibility of students succeeding explicitly visible for those teachers who 
might otherwise not see it. The teachers were sometimes frustrated when they worked 
with classroom teachers who indicated, either explicitly or through their actions, that they 
believed that ESOL students were not able to succeed. Some of the ESOL teachers in this 
study took specific and intentional steps to alter representations of ESOL within the 
school. Margaret described some of her efforts:  
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I think I?ve been focusing a lot on ? so many different hats you have to 
take, and one hat that I?ve decided to take is to do extra things so they can 
see the kids succeeding. For example, in third grade and all my kids in the 
upper grades are having a hard time spelling words. So I?ve started 
spelling journals. Their teacher on Friday gives me their lists for them and 
then we do all these activities, like little sentences with their names using 
the words, or cutout the letters from catalogues and fit them in. Part of it is 
doing little things for the teachers so they see me not only as showing 
them different ways to be with the kids but somebody who?s also 
softening things for them because I know they?re stressed that they don?t 
know what to do, especially with the beginners. 
Margaret was sympathetic towards the classroom teachers and took it upon 
herself to increase the visibility of ESOL students? success. For Alexandra, 
teachers have a responsibility to envision every student succeeding. The 
perception that success is incompatible with the lives and experiences of ESOL 
students could be interpreted as the innocent oversight of overburdened classroom 
teachers too busy to look beyond the surface. Alternately, it could be viewed as a 
hegemonic representation of ESOL teachers and ESOL students spawned by the 
classroom teachers? desire to underscore their supremacy as legitimate teachers 
and the superior worthiness of their native-English-speaking students?. Alexandra 
was angered by classroom teachers who failed to see and support their students? 
achievement:  
Alexandra: You?re so sensitive. I get angry that they don?t try. 
279   
 
 
Margaret: Well, it?s hard because they have more years of teaching than 
me, and they sometimes they say things that do make me angry. I think a 
lot of our training ? I don?t realize it?s a different way of knowing or 
seeing things. I think that?s natural, that?s the way it is, that?s what you 
should do, can?t you see that? Like one teacher came up to me, this is 
beginning second grade, and she said they are not passing their spelling 
tests, I?m very concerned. (Margaret, Afternoon tea, 05.07) 
She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a list of words: 
oat 
boat 
coat 
float 
goat 
throat 
any 
could 
should 
She explained that she was dissatisfied with the classroom teacher?s lesson.  
Margaret: For beginning second graders but with no visuals, so I think they?re just 
memorizing them. 
Alexandra: But are they working on the phoneme? Are they working on oa? 
Margaret: A little. It didn?t make me upset because she?s a very gentle person. But 
I just think a lot of teachers don?t have the perspective of having learned a second 
280   
 
 
language. The phoneme is important, I think, but they?re out of context. I said 
have you shown them pictures of any of these words? Or brought in any of them? 
And she said no. And I said I?m sure they don?t know what an oat is. You should 
bring in some oats ? I want the classroom teachers to believe in how rich the 
kids are in knowing.(Afternoon tea, 05.05) 
Margaret saw one of her ?hats? as making visible the potential and valuable knowledge 
held by ESOL students so that classroom teachers can believe in their abilities. Rather 
than simply criticizing teachers who failed to reach ESOL kids, Margaret sought to 
support teachers? ability to see their students succeed. The result of this strategy would be 
that the classroom teacher would be able to have a vision of an ESOL student succeeding, 
Margaret would be viewed as an effective ESOL teacher, and the ESOL student would be 
attended to. Margaret took a positively nuanced and activist position. Teaching lists of 
lexical items out of context was counter to what she had learned about the importance of 
teaching language in context, but rather than looking down on the teacher for it, she 
explored ways to help the teacher contextualize and made specific suggestions: ?You 
should bring in some oats.? By taking on some of the extra responsibility, she helped 
classroom teachers to see ?how rich the kids are in knowing.?  
Parents? Role in Construction of ESOL Identity 
The entire communities of the four schools in the study contributed to meanings 
of ESOL, including not only staff and students but also parents of ESOL and non-ESOL 
students. Margaret sought to challenge dominant conceptions of ESOL by forming 
relationships with nonESOL students. She spent spare periods and lunchtimes with native 
English speaking students who had asked to spend time with her and even agreed to 
281   
 
 
exchange homework assignments with some. She used these opportunities to share 
information about and demystify ESOL. However, one native English speaking student 
whom she befriended was the son of the PTA president: 
?His mother came up to me and said: ?Is something wrong with 
Patrick? ? He doesn?t need special services.?? (Afternoon tea, 
04.10) 
Margaret responded ?no? and explained that the boy had requested special time 
with her. The deficit orientation of ESOL was so engrained within the school 
culture that even the PTA president perceived students needing ESOL as having 
something ?wrong? with them 
ESOL as Separate 
In all four schools in this study, ESOL was repeatedly and insistently constructed 
as separate within the school culture. The tendency to both enforce the segregation of 
ESOL students and to underscore the actual construct of ESOL as separate played an 
important role in the conceptualization of ESOL as inferior and shameful. It is important 
to note that simply constructing as separate alone does not automatically cause ESOL to 
be understood as inferior. Other school categories are conceptualized as separate without 
becoming inferior, for instance gifted and talented programs. ESOL is constructed as 
separate because of the inferior status of non-native English speakers, and constructing it 
as separate merely reinforces its inferiority. Alexandra?s students made a clear distinction 
between language proficiency and segregation, experiencing pride in the former but 
feeling marginalized by the latter. They easily discussed the benefits of having two 
languages: 
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Rafael: You can call someone a garbage can in front of his face and he doesn?t 
even know it. 
Sofia: You can have a personal [conversation]. 
Claudia: You can talk about boys that don?t speak Spanish. (Field notes, 11.11) 
In reference to this discussion, Alexandra told me: ?They realize that it?s great to be 
bilingual, to be able to speak Spanish. But some of them just don?t like being separated.? 
(Afternoon tea, 11.15) 
Historically, across this country ESOL students were placed in separate classes 
and didn?t interact with their English-speaking peers until they had achieved a degree of 
English fluency and, parenthetically, of assimilation. Like many schools across the 
English-speaking world, the public school systems in both of these counties had separate 
ESOL ?centers? in the 1970s, schools that were attended by only ESOL students. 
Segregating ESOL students from their English-speaking peers is detrimental to all 
students for many reasons. It underscores difference within a system that perceives 
divergence from the norm as inferior. It limits ESOL students? access to English language 
experience. It deprives dominant-group students of interaction with the knowledge and 
experiences of new immigrants. And it is a poorly veiled form of tracking that keeps 
ESOL students isolated and then legitimates the resultant hierarchy. 
 In 1981, a federal court ruling, Castaneda v. Pickard, determined that the 
segregation of limited English proficiency students was permissible only when "the 
benefits which would accrue to LEP students by remedying language barriers which 
impede their ability to realize their academic potential in an English language educational 
institution may outweigh the adverse effects of such segregation.? The ruling 
283   
 
 
acknowledged that segregation presented potentially ?adverse? consequences and placed 
some limitations on the unnecessary exclusion of ESOL students from mainstream 
classrooms. Despite these federal protections, the teachers in the study still noted both 
flagrant and covert resistance to the inclusion of ESOL students. As noted earlier, a fifth-
grade teacher at Katie?s school, Harry Macclesfield, would have preferred not to teach 
ESOL students and openly supported segregation. Katie told us of a conversation she had 
with Mr. Macclesfield and a 6
th
 grade teacher: 
They were talking about having sheltered classes to transition the children 
into the mainstream. And Harry?s like, ?Well I?ve been saying that for 
years. Just put these kids in their separate class. Have a separate program 
for them!? He didn?t want them mainstreamed at all, just put them in a 
corner somewhere and keep them very segregated. (Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
ESOL students were also kept separate in more covert ways. Alexandra noted that 
classroom teachers? popular practice of withholding a grade for ESOL students inhibited 
their motivation. Furthermore, because it establishes separate expectations and 
requirements for the ESOL students, it sets them apart from the other students and 
amounts to a subtle policy of exclusion: 
A lot of teachers there have a habit of giving the ESOL kids no grade. I 
think that undercuts their desire to progress, their self-esteem in the 
classroom, their feeling of: ?Why should I bother?? They get things back 
with no comments because the teacher thinks: ?If I write something 
they?re not going to understand it.? Well, if you write something, they?re 
284   
 
 
gonna want to read it, so the motivation is there to read it (Phone 
conversation, 01.26) 
Neglecting to assign a grade to ESOL students? work can be interpreted as a reasonable 
accommodation, but it might also appear as dismissive and as signaling to students that 
their work doesn?t matter. Furthermore, the stark disparity between expectations for 
ESOL students and for the rest of the school population contributes to the construction of 
ESOL identity as Other.  
Alexandra also noticed that some ESOL students were receiving high grades for 
sitting silently in class. Her classroom teachers would tell Alexandra: ?Oh, she?s very 
good, she just sits there and does her work? (Phone conversation, 01.26). Alexandra was 
dubious:  
Is she really doing her work is my question or is she just not being a 
problem in class? Because she?s not an outstanding student by any means 
because she doesn?t understanding anything. She can?t be earning an A for 
anything but behavior. She can?t understand the role of the Catholic 
church in medieval Europe because she doesn?t even know what ?role? 
means. 
Rewarding ESOL students for being silent in class discourages their participation (and 
hence language development) and encourages them to remain on the margins of the class. 
Furthermore, it contributes to the construction of an outsider ESOL identity and 
diminishes the degree to which ESOL students belong to the classroom community. 
Teachers of linguistic minority students face tension. It is unfair to grade them in the 
same way as their English-speaking peers, but it is simultaneously unfair to keep them 
285   
 
 
separate. The tension points to the problematic nature of the traditional grading systems 
revered in public schools. The most popular grading systems establish one global 
standard, are embedded in a competitive hierarchy , assume uniformity of experience, 
and encourage homogeneity in learning. It discourages teachers from leaving room for 
complexity of experience instead of always trying to simplify it so that such experience 
can fit on a grade scale or percentile.  
Similarly, Katie noted the attempts of some classroom teachers to bar ESOL 
students from entering into the classroom conversation until their rate of speech was 
sufficiently fluent to ensure that their participation would not slow down the pace of 
instruction: ??[s]ome teachers will put them in a corner and say, ?Okay I?m not going to 
let you participate until you can learn enough English to participate? (Afternoon tea, 
01.24). One teacher at this school consistently had the ESOL students play on the 
computer while she taught the rest of the class, and Katie told us about the exclusionary 
tactics of a 4
th
 grade teacher, Rosemary: 
Katie: [Rosemary] complains to Sheila [the speech teacher], she went to 
ask her for some stuff to give to this new student from Pakistan. She?s 
complaining to Sheila that I don?t provide enough worksheets for her to 
give to Sima. So Rosemary said, you know I really need some work for 
Sima. So I said well what are you doing with her? So I went up there and 
other teachers told me that what?s happened is Sima gets stuck in the 
corner on the computer or on her own with worksheets. So I said, you 
know I?m not going to give you any more work sheets, I think we should 
plan in the morning and talk about how to modify instruction. So we met 
286   
 
 
one morning and after that she?s always too busy! So I don?t know what to 
do, so this poor girl?s just sitting there! And she?s always complaining 
about her, like: ?Sima doesn?t even know her colors yet.? I?m like, the 
poor girl?s been here like a month and a half. She?s like, ?I think she has a 
learning disability.? I?m like ?I think it?s too early to tell? and she?s like 
she doesn?t do her work and she falls asleep and she refuses to do any of 
the work. She frustrates me.  
The use of worksheets kept Sima isolated and her focus diverted from her classroom 
peers. It closed her off from the language learning that could result from her interaction 
with more fluent speakers of English, and it similarly deprived the other students in the 
class from her perspectives and her ability to influence the shape of the class?s learning. 
Even having Sima silently observe was too much for Rosemary: 
They had a career day, some of the presentations were really good, they 
were very interactive. So I left my kids in there so they could benefit from 
the different presentations. So I went in there to drop off the report cards 
and she was like: ?Can you take Sima out, Sima?s not getting anything out 
of it.? and I?m like: ?How do you know?? so I was just like: ?No, I?m 
going to leave her here.? 
Alexandra: And what does taking her out solve? (Afternoon tea, 05.07) 
On some level, Rosemary sought to limit Sima?s access to English language practice, 
exposure, and interaction. Both Katie and Alexandra were watchful for and critical of 
unofficial tracking and segregationist practices and advocated for their students in order 
to ensure fair access to classroom interaction. In these classrooms in both Alexandra?s 
287   
 
 
and Katie?s schools, ESOL interacted with gender to keep the student out of the path of 
classroom events?the absence of scaffolding and criticism has been associated with 
gender inequity in classroom interaction. For instance, the teachers in Sadker and 
Sadker?s (1994) large-scale study gave boys constructive criticism, remediation, 
feedback, and help while their most common response to girls was acceptance, an 
?okay,? a response that fosters neither further effort nor student achievement. 
At Alexandra?s school, the ESOL department had been so isolated from the 
mainstream school culture that Alexandra wasn?t informed about a schoolwide 
International Night. 
 Alexandra: At my school, they had an International Night. I didn?t even know 
about it ? Why wouldn?t you include ESOL? Hello?!!!  
Suhanthie: Who could be more international? 
Alexandra: And it?s a nice way to bring those families into the school.  
A distinction was made between forced segregation of ESOL students and pride 
in group identification. In some instances, the ESOL students, particularly those more 
recently arrived, implied that their constructions of ESOL identity were preferable to 
non-ESOL identity. Some of Alexandra?s students welcomed the line separating them 
from the students who were not in ESOL classes because they saw non-ESOL students as 
disrespectful of authority, particularly of parents and teachers (Afternoon tea, 01.24). 
Alexandra sensed a degree of pride about being in ESOL from these students, whom she 
characterized as ?probably com[ing] from more traditional forms of schooling where you 
sit down and shut up and listen to the teacher.? Rather than feeling excluded from the 
mainstream school culture, ?those kids are less bothered by feeling separate from the 
288   
 
 
crazy kids in the school.? Alexandra described their attitude as implying that: ?I don?t 
want to be part of that group because they?re loud and obnoxious and get into a lot of 
trouble with their parents and they?re always getting yelled at by the teachers.? Margaret 
noted the same pattern in her elementary-school-aged children: ?I see that even in 
kindergarten, they?ll tell me, we?re the ones that sit and listen and they?re the ones that 
are too noisy.? (Afternoon tea, 01.24). 
Katie emphasized the importance of distinguishing between separation enforced 
by dominant group members and separation initiated by minorities seeking solidarity. She 
perceived the former as exclusionary and the latter as preservation of group identity 
within the larger school culture, making the distinction between ?celebrating? and 
?isolating? themselves: 
? when people talk about the cafeteria, you know all the hispanic 
students sit here, and people says that hurts the school, but maybe that?s a 
way for them to find strength and to find their own identity and be 
comfortable in an area where they speak Spanish and celebrate themselves 
for who they are rather than seeing them as isolating themselves. You 
know, one single voice is a lot weaker than ten. (Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
In thinking about ESOL identity, Katie complexifies the interchangeable use of 
the terms ?ESOL? and ?immigrant? within school walls. She notes the incorrectness of 
the construction of an ESOL identity that assumes all ESOL students to be immigrants. 
She provided us with an example. The new ESOL curriculum she was piloting sought to 
connect to students? migratory experiences:  
289   
 
 
?Something interesting about ? the new curriculum ? the first unit is 
about new beginnings, like starting over in a new country ? We read this 
book called How Many Days to America. It?s about this African family 
that fled to America. It?s realistic fiction. (Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
In both counties included in the study during the relevant academic year, the most 
popular country of birth for the elementary-aged ESOL students was, surpringly, 
the United States. American-born students made up the largest group in Katie?s 
classroom. The new curriculum, which sought to draw students? life experiences 
into the ESOL classroom, assumed erroneously that students were first-generation 
immigrants. 
Some students were like, ?Well my uncle had to do that,? and they could 
relate. But some students are like, ?Well, I was born here, and I don?t 
remember coming to America.? (Afternoon tea , 11.01) 
The teacher noted the role played by county curriculum developers in constructing ESOL 
identity as synonymous with immigrant identity. She problematizes the definition of 
?immigrant? and questions the historical understanding of an ESOL student as one who 
has crossed national boundaries. This is an important line of questioning for several 
reasons. It acknowledges the fluid nature of immigration and identity in a globalized 
world in which travel is more accessible, people are increasingly nomadic, and notions of 
national identity are more elusive. Additionally, in interrupting the development of 
normative understandings of various categories (in this case, the socially constructed 
category of ESOL), Katie highlighted the possibility of multiple meanings of various 
290   
 
 
categories of difference and the importance of turning a critical eye towards assumptions 
about difference.  
Margaret believed that the status of ESOL could be improved upon if the 
knowledge of the ESOL students were validated: ?I want the classroom teachers to 
believe in how rich the kids are in knowing.? This teacher also found other ways to 
promote a positive image of ESOL. One step was to ?talk up? other ESOL professionals, 
such as a bilingual counselor and the parent specialist. When she sensed that an ESOL 
professional, Enrique, was being underappreciated by a classroom teacher, she tried to 
encourage interaction between the two so that the teacher would know Enrique better and 
develop respect for him.: 
And also for example Enrique Alvarez, do you know him? He?s one of the 
ESOL bilingual counselors. He came to work with one of my 4
th
 grade 
students who?s having a hard time. The 4
th
 grade teacher, she said, ?Oh 
yes, he was at Mossy Valley. I don?t think he does much.? I think he also 
sensed that from her, that she didn?t have respect for what he was doing, 
so I think he kept her at a distance too, he didn?t really try to tell her what 
he was doing.  
Margaret worked to improve the teacher?s perception of Enrique: 
I said, ?Oh he does this and that with Garry.? And then once we had a staff 
party that the parents put together for us and he happened to be there so he 
came and sat at our table and we started talking about Garry and those two 
started talking. So I left them and I guess they talked for like half an hour. 
And then I noticed she started asking him for advice, she was like: ?I 
291   
 
 
started Garry on a contract and he?s not really responding, he?s like hot 
and cold.? And he was like, ?Well that?s the way it?s going to be, he?s 
going to slip, he?s going to be up and then slip back. You just have to be 
with him and be very consistent.? And then she?d come back and say, 
?You?re right, he slipped, then he came up a little higher.? And now when 
I see her, she says, ?That Enrique, he?s great, he?s doing such great things 
with Roger.? 
Margaret took similar steps to enhance the image of the parent specialist: 
?The same, Olga Thompson, our parent specialist, I?ll talk her up. She 
came and sat in on [a meeting to assess a student for special education 
services] and afterwards all the teachers were like, oh she?s great.? 
Margaret?s multi-pronged approach to elevating the status of ESOL students in the eyes 
of the other students and the regard for ESOL professionals by other school staff is part 
of this teacher?s quiet but consistent struggle to push against the established conceptions 
of what it means to be in ESOL that she found in the school culture when she started 
teaching. Alexandra found herself in a similar situation: 
At both the schools that I?ve worked for, I?ve struggled with the reputation 
of ESOL. That really bothers me a lot, because I step into a reputation 
rather than being allowed to build my own and I have to undo before I can 
build for myself. That?s really hard. It?s been a lot easier at (the middle 
school level) than at (the elementary school level) because at (elementary 
school) you?re taking kids out of their class, so the teacher sees you 
292   
 
 
differently than if you?re a teacher with your own class, not that you?re a 
real teacher. I find it harder to be in a pull-out program. 
She went on to explain how her assistance with students? homework served as an entr?e 
for her to both support classroom teachers and to communicate and model 
accommodations and scaffolding for ESOL students: 
? Another way that I?ve known that the advocacy is working is that the 
kids will ask me for help with their homework. I?ll write notes on it 
showing where the kid is needing some assistance from their teacher, ?coz 
I?m not a math teacher or a science teacher. And I?ve even sent back 
materials with the teacher that has the same content, but at a lower level. I 
just put a sticky on it saying if you have any other ESOL students, they 
really want to do the homework, but they can?t read what you?ve given 
them, try this. So just giving them materials if I happen to find them. But 
it?s hard because you?re always like planning. It?s exhausting. But I think 
it?s building the reputation of the program. 
Suhanthie: Of the ESOL program? 
Alexandra: Yeah. 
Although she was exhausted by the level of attention she needed to give her work, she 
felt that the investment was worthwhile because it was improving the position of ESOL 
within the larger school context. 
 Katie associated the investment of some classroom teachers in excluding ESOL 
students with their inability to understand the challenges of learning a new language. The 
white privilege of a fifth-grade teacher at her school was so invisible to that teacher that 
293   
 
 
he was unable to conceptualize a life in which White and American was not the norm and 
was not his privilege: 
Katie: Some teachers don?t realize how much a kid can pull through or 
how difficult it is to learn not only a new language but a new culture. 
Harry is a tall white male, he?s in power. He doesn?t have to think about 
struggle or having people judge you because if you don?t live up to the 
standard, then it?s your fault. He doesn?t see the strength in the ESOL 
students, he thinks they should go to ESOL and come back to the 
classroom fully integrated, fully American, speaking English perfectly. 
Alexandra: We have teachers from other countries who aren?t patient with 
their kids. 
 For Katie and Alexandra, an important part of teaching marginalized students was 
the ability to adopt their perspective or at least to recognize that dominant perspectives 
might not seamlessly become an immediate part of their lived realities. 
 As Katie supported her colleague?s attempts to teach her ESOL students, she 
advocated for attending to students? whole selves and not only their linguistic 
proficiency: 
Katie: Ms. O?Donnell came up to me, all in a panic: ?I have a new ESOL 
student!? I was like, ?First of all, don?t panic!? (laughter). She can?t speak 
any English or write English letters. But then when I got her, she could 
write English sentences, she knew basic vocabulary.  
Suhanthie: Oh, is this Julia? (referring to a student I?d seen during an 
observation that day) 
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Katie: Yeah! 
Suhanthie: She was totally proficient? she knew her colors, she knew her 
adjectives, like she knew happy, sad.  
Katie: Her listening comprehension is excellent. She knew a whole lot 
more than the teacher thought. Rosemarie [O?Donnell] was like, she 
doesn?t understand a thing in class. So I?m like, how do you know she 
doesn?t understand a thing? Actually, she knows quite a bit of English. 
She has a very quiet personality, and that has an effect on how much 
language she produces. (Afternoon Tea, 11.15) 
Katie was aware that the initial, superficial assessment of a student?s English proficiency 
may be affected by any number of factors, including students? individual style, 
personality, and response to their new school environment. Furthermore, teachers? 
impressions of how much language a student comprehends are based primarily on the 
student?s output, which is unlikely to correspond directly to her level of understanding. 
Katie recognized this, but Rosemarie O?Donnell, who was managing a large class of 
students with a variety of learning needs, did not. Her interpretation of what students 
could do depended entirely on what she chose to look at. As the teacher, she had 
significant power in the classroom. On some level, her judgment that Julia didn?t 
understand anything in class effectively kept Julia on the periphery of the class: 
Katie: I said, what do you do in class? Do you include her? Rosemarie was 
like, she sits with students who talk to her! I said, that?s good because 
that?ll help her to socialize and feel like part of the class. And then I asked 
her about accommodations, what she does with materials to accommodate 
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her. She said that usually she doesn?t do anything, and then Julia sits there 
and draws pictures. I said, you can give her work to do and modify it. She 
said, I don?t know, she doesn?t understand a thing, and then she walked 
out of the door. 
Alexandra: I hear that all the time. When I say ?modify,? the 
conversation?s over. (Afternoon Tea, 11.15) 
Katie?s concern for Julia extended beyond a narrow definition of language learning to 
include respect for Julia?s social self and her ability to mingle and connect with her peers. 
Alexandra noted that for teachers teaching towards a hypothetical norm or center, 
modifying instruction for those on the periphery constitutes an extra burden, one that is 
sometimes considered too heavy to lift. However, when teachers view an ESOL student?s 
need for accommodations as something they can either choose to provide for or ignore, 
they are constructing accommodations not as a right but as a privilege. As teachers 
present their ideas, they let us see what they believe is normative. The dominant 
construction of ESOL students? needs was that they exceeded what could be realistically 
provided by an overburdened classroom teachers. Two months later, Katie met a newly 
arrived student who actually did not know any English: 
I have a new student, she?s from Colombia at Carroll Hills [Elementary 
School]. This is the first time they?ve had a student come in who doesn?t 
speak ANY English. Her classroom teacher, who is a great teacher, she 
was like, ?I don?t know what to do.? And I said, ?Make her feel 
comfortable, the most important thing in the first few months is to make 
her feel comfortable, get her into the routine, include her in everything that 
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you can.? She was like: ?Okay, I can do that.? So this little girl is very 
lucky because some teachers will put them in a corner and say, ?Okay I?m 
not going to let you participate until you can learn enough English to 
participate.? (Afternoon tea, 01.24) 
Katie?s understandings of students? language learning needs is broad. Rather than 
focusing on, for instance, the alphabet or verb conjugations or even vocabulary lists, 
Katie suggests strategies that are designed to attend to students? social identities and 
emotional well-being. 
Margaret told us the following story. It exemplifies her resolve to question 
institutional structures that did not serve her students well, and even to work her way into 
these systems in her pursuit of reform: 
We were given a list identifying the GT (gifted and talented) kids, so of 
course I started combing through looking for my kids. This one kid, 
Esmeralda, she?s having a really hard time reading, but she?s very bright 
and inquisitive ? There was an asterisk next to her name, and it said yes. 
So it came up in a meeting, and this one teacher was saying: ?Can you 
believe Esmeralda is GT? She can?t even read and write.? So I went down 
to the chairperson of the committee and asked her to explain all of this 
data to me. She said Esmeralda wouldn?t have been recommended for GT 
testing on the basis of her scores, but that she was parent referred. So I just 
started seeing all of the ramifications of parent awareness of the referral 
process. And I thought: ?Hmmm. I wonder how you get on the GT 
committee. This sounds like a committee I should be on.? And I asked the 
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chairperson: ?Can I be on this committee?? and she said: ?Yes.? 
(Margaret, Afternoon tea, 03.21) 
A recurring theme among the teachers was their structural analysis of access. The 
underrepresentation of ESOL students in magnet and GT programs is no revelation?a 
well-worn groove runs from ESOL classrooms to those of the less ?academic? subjects 
(Valenzuela, 1999), but Margaret?s sociological scrutiny of systemic barriers to the GT 
program is, for her, a way to make a difference for not only one child but on a policy 
level. Margaret was effective in keeping her antenna up so that when she saw structural 
organization that ought to be challenged, she recognized it as such. All four of the 
teachers continually developed an ongoing structural analysis of discrimination and 
power, which allowed them to position themselves appropriately in the places that 
allowed them to generate change. 
 In another example of subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 1999), the 
administrators at Alexandra?s school encouraged her to provide her students with only a 
cursory sweep of the material that native English-speaking students would be covering: 
It?s a multiage group and they have the state curriculum. They were like: 
?You don?t even need to bother with the curriculum, just teach them map 
skills.? Marguerita asked: ?Why do people in this country think they?re the 
only Americans?? She?s from El Salvador, I think. I was like, why do I 
have to teach them map skills, why can?t I teach them the higher order 
skills? 
Whether or not the intention was to disadvantage ESOL students by making only a 
perfunctory education available to them, the effect of this unofficial policy would have 
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been to underscore the message that ESOL students either do not deserve or are incapable 
of benefiting from the same quality and depth of education as their native English-
speaking peers.  
?The More Language You Have The More Power You Have?  
The relationship between ESOL and bilingual identity is situated along a slippery 
spectrum of power. When Alexandra talked to her students about their bilingualism, she 
drew explicit and immediate connections to the power that bilingualism afforded them:  
Alexandra: I always talk to my kids about how much power they have 
because they have language and the more language you have the more 
power you have. 
Suhanthie: When you say ?more language? are you referring to English 
proficiency? 
Alexandra: No, I meant because they?re bilingual. Like when they use 
Spanish and keep people outside of their group away by only using 
Spanish. And how they completely took over international night last night 
even though they were only invited at the last minute. They came in and 
they were the dancers, they got the crowd going because they could get up 
and tell their stories in Spanish with so much feeling and so much flower 
in the language that kids who are learning Spanish in school just don?t 
have.  
Alexandra challenged the deficit perspective of ESOL, replacing it with the term 
?bilingualism? and its association with power. She sought to impress upon her students 
the benefits of having more than one language. She cites several forms of power?the 
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power to exclude others, the power to ?[get] the crowd going,? the power to ?tell their 
stories in Spanish with so much feeling and so much flower.? Alexandra offered her 
students a redefinition of their ESOL status, emphasizing the power of their bilingualism 
and reconstructing the dominant orientation?s embedded focus on lack of English 
language proficiency. Simply using a word that is positively nuanced, ?bilingualism,? 
instead of ?ESOL? with all its connotations of inadequacy, offers a subtle shift in how 
that category is conceptualized. She was simultaneously supporting their awareness of the 
political and social implications of their language use, referred to as critical bilingualism 
by Walsh (1991): ?the ability to not just speak two languages, but to be conscious of the 
sociocultural, political, and ideological contexts in which languages (and therefore 
speakers) are positioned and function, and the multiple meanings that are fostered in 
each.? (p. 127).  
Summary 
The stigma of ESOL across all four schools of the study both resulted from and 
contributed to its construction as deficit. ESOL students clamored to exit ESOL because 
they were embarrassed to be associated with the category. The deficit construction of 
ESOL was connected to the likelihood of school failure among ESOL students. Students 
who were in ESOL were excluded from participating in class, were denied resources, 
were assumed to be less able than they actually were, and were absent from the grand 
metanarative offered within school walls. Ironically, while multilingualism, the reason 
for students? placement in ESOL, itself is an asset, the ways in which ESOL is 
constructed as a school category establishes conditions for school failure among ESOL 
students. 
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In the literature on schooling, much attention is paid to developing communities. 
However, in the schools in this study, some voices were often not audible in the school 
communities, most notable the voices of ESOL students. In his defining work 
Orientalism, Said (1978) outlined multiple discursive ways in which colonized people are 
dehumanized. The parallels between orientalism as a discourse and the construction of 
ESOL as a discourse, also steeped in the legacy of colonialism, are striking. The deficit 
construction of ESOL is tightly linked to the deficit construction of NNES. In this larger 
social and political context, the teachers faced a significant challenge. They needed to 
challenge the negative understandings of ESOL that were pervasive in their schools by 
also challenging the global construction of speakers of languages other than English. 
They needed to do so in a way that did not stigmatize their students and indeed that 
included their students as agents. 
What Said?s colonized/colonizer dichotomy paid insufficient attention to is the 
heteroglossic nature of oppressed subjectivity?even if ESOL students are constructed as 
oppressed, no one is exclusively oppressed or oppressor in all dimensions of difference, 
and it is within the complexity of these layers of variation that alternative 
conceptualizations can be conceived. More importantly, Said?s framing did not allow for 
the role of self-determination among both ESOL students, conceptualized (simplistically) 
as they are as colonized, and ESOL teachers in their complex dual roles of colonized and 
colonizers. Through their teaching, Katie, Jane, Margaret, and Alexandra challenged the 
Self-Other construction of native and nonnative English speaking ESOL students and 
demonstrated a belief in the agency of their students. They encouraged them to act on 
their own behalves by, for instance, writing to the school newspaper to critique the 
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invisibility of linguistic minority students and the invisible norm of whiteness. Said has 
suggested that first step towards dehumanizing the Other is the reduction of the Other to a 
few images or words. Price and Osborne?s (2000) conceptions of humanizing pedagogies 
offer an alternative construction, one in which students are humanized through a fleshing 
out of their identities and a contextualization of their environments. Rather than 
submitting to the Self and Other constructions available to their students, Katie, Jane, 
Margaret, and Jane excavated the third space in which students could explore and interact 
with the dominant discourses, disabling the discourses and leaving the students free to 
explore alternative subject positions. 
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PART III. Teacher Identity 
Chapter 8. Making Practice, Shaping Identity 
Introduction: Images and Identities 
Before I started learning from the lives that Katie, Jane, Alexandra, and Margaret 
were sharing with each other and with me, I understood an ?image? to be something like 
a mask, or perhaps a knight?s armour, fixed and distinguishable, disguising and 
concealing the fleshed human inside. After listening to them for over a year, however, the 
term ?image? calls to mind the fluidity of body painting, with ambiguous delineations 
between what is and what is observable. Within this framing, the interpretation of 
?identity? offered by the Shakespearean character Jacques in As You Like It seems overly 
simplistic: "All the world?s a stage, and all the men and women merely players." Jane, 
Margaret, Katie and Alexandra were not merely actors, slipping into costumes and giving 
themselves over to dramatic creativity. Over the course of the year, the distinction 
between ?image? and ?identity? became more blurred to me. At the beginning of the year, 
it seemed that the teachers felt compelled to offer a public representation of themselves 
that was detached from who they ?truly? were. Often, the afternoon tea discussion 
centered on how to construct an appropriate identity in the context of interactions with 
other adults. As time wore on, I began to perceive the space between ?image? and 
?identity? to become progressively murkier. In theory, images are generally understood to 
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not be necessarily real, they are constructed for the consumption of others, while 
identities are assumedly more closely aligned with the part of a person that is authentic, 
genuine. However, this understanding is problematic because the conception of a ?real? 
self, an authentic self that lurks under images publicly presented, is fundamentally na?ve. 
The nature of human agency is too potent to allow for one ?real? self; humans are in a 
constant process of constructing, revising, and revisioning their identities. The notion of a 
single authentic self echoes an ideology that universalizes people and experiences. This 
notion suggests an absolute and unchanging Truth that discounts the power of individual 
agency in the shaping of identity. I propose instead the conception of identity on a 
spectrum that stretches, as Margaret suggested, from discovery to creation, ?a marriage of 
what we are and who we choose to be.? (Margaret, Webchat, 04.21) Rather than thinking 
of identity as something to be uncovered or revealed, I looked to the role that the teachers 
were playing in actually constructing their professional images and began to perceive the 
images they crafted not as ruses hiding their selves but rather as constituent of the 
teachers? identities. The primary instrument they wielded in the creation of their identities 
was language. As the teachers circulated through their multiple contexts, rehearsing, 
representing, experimenting, and becoming, they relied on their critical understandings of 
linguistic practices to discursively construct themselves. 
Positioning Practice, Practicing Positioning 
One of the central issues in Katie, Jane, Margaret, and Alexandra?s processes of 
becoming ESOL teachers was the relationship between their teaching identities within 
their classrooms and larger institutional interpretations of their classroom practice. How 
did they construct their teaching practice in the context of ideologies of teaching that 
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were omnipresent in the schools, particularly in relation to their interactions with other 
adults in the school? The teachers seemed to be struggling to reconcile competing 
meanings of practice within their teaching environments: they were caught between a 
narrow institutional definition of practice as simply teachers? technical and behavioral 
actions in the classroom and a broader understanding of practice as produced in multiple 
contexts, as always in the making, and as inseparable from teacher?s intellectual 
consciousness and identities in and out of schools. This chapter explores the ways in 
which the teachers made sense of the terrain between these two incongruous definitions 
of practice in relation to the making of their ESOL teaching identities. 
Because the focus of the study was on meanings of teaching, I imagined that 
much of the teachers? discussions about their first year of work would revolve around 
what went on within their classroom walls. However during the afternoon teas, it soon 
became apparent that the teachers? practice was not constructed only by what they did in 
the classroom. Rather, Katie, Margaret, Jane, and Alexandra were active in making 
meaning of their practice in many different contexts: in their classrooms; in their 
discussions with other adults?that is faculty, administrators, other teachers, and parents; 
at the afternoon teas with each other; at home with their partners; at social gatherings 
with colleagues; and also with friends who were not teaching professionals. For instance, 
Katie told us of a conversation she?d had with her friend, Bill, to whom she showed a 
poem that her students had written. She told us: ?He was like ?Wow, this is really good.? I 
was like, ?I know, they?re a bunch of freethinkers.? And he was like, ?Freethinkers in 
school?! My teachers never encouraged me to be freethinkers.? And I was thinking, I 
want my kids to be freethinkers.? (Afternoon tea, 06.19). Although she was engaged in a 
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conversation that was not on school grounds, let alone in her classroom, and with a friend 
who was not a teaching professional, she was making teacher identity and developing her 
philosophy and her practice. In another example, Alexandra was making decisions about 
whether to support a child?s choice to adopt an anglicized name, and she said: ?Now that 
I am pregnant I feel even more strongly about the power behind giving a child a name. It 
is wrapped up with your hopes for your child. I learned through my husband and my 
[master?s thesis] research the symbolism behind name giving in some Asian cultures. It 
often shows belonging in a family (where you belong). There is security in a name. It 
shows your relationship to others? (E-Mail, 04.26). Alexandra was developing her 
practice in interaction with me, in relation to her pregnancy, her husband, and her past 
experiences as a researcher. It became apparent to me that a broader conceptualization of 
?practice? was necessary, one that was not confined to classroom walls.  
Why is it important to think about how practice is defined? While meanings of 
practice are constructed in different sites, some sites are more influential than others. 
Meanings of practice are not socially constructed within neutral environments, they are 
constructed within a set of power relations within institutions and relationships that 
privileges certain representations of teaching over others while situating beginning 
teachers and ESOL teachers on the margins. In order to understand why some images of 
teaching persevere in school culture and some are submerged, it is important to examine 
how these ideas are positioned within power relations. 
Isolation of Teaching: ?A Cushion of Air Around You? 
Like many beginning teachers (Lortie, 1975), Katie, Margaret, and Jane expressed 
a sense of privacy surrounding their teaching and an appreciation of the space offered by 
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the isolation of teaching alone. Margaret, for instance, appreciated the order that came 
with solitude, telling us that: ?I think for me the isolation is good. Like being alone in that 
room and having a space to organize.? (Afternoon Tea, 11.01). Katie explained that she 
perceived acculturation into the culture of schooling to include ?teaching people to work 
the system, but work it in a way that you can be free to do your own thing.? Margaret 
agreed that: ?It almost kicks up a cushion of air around you.? Even when she wasn?t 
teaching, Margaret felt crowded by the repeated intrusion of another teacher into her 
space: ?A teacher who comes to eat lunch in my room, I?m so used to being alone in my 
room. I don?t want her to come. I?m not used to having anybody there. It makes me 
nervous.? (Afternoon Tea, 11.15). Jane, too, noted that isolation relieved some of the 
pressure to appear a certain way. At the end of the school year, she commented: ?In some 
ways, working in isolation can be bad and in some ways?poor Margaret?I would look 
at her and think, oh God, I don?t have any of that pressure. In some ways, I never felt 
pressure from my department head or my principal or some of the other people breathing 
down my neck.? (Jane, Interview, 05.07).  
What did privacy represent to Katie, Margaret, and Jane? Katie and Margaret?s 
metaphors of space and freedom indicated that these two teachers found the time alone to 
be liberating and perhaps nourishing, but, as Jane noted, the isolation of teaching can 
pose difficulties because it requires teachers to forgo support they could be getting from 
colleagues in their school building. Jane was explicitly aware of this dilemma: ?Again, 
isolation can be very bad because you don?t have feedback, but on bad days when you 
clearly know they?re not getting it ? there?s no one making me defend.? (Jane, 05.07). 
Because Katie and Margaret were the only new teachers at their schools, all of their 
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colleagues were more experienced than them. Katie?s discussion of the inclusion model 
of ESOL, in which ESOL teachers teach alongside classroom teachers in integrated 
classrooms, is revelatory of what it means to her to teach cooperatively: ?When a teacher 
walks in the room, they?re making judgments, sometimes unconsciously making 
observations about you? (Afternoon Tea, 11.01). Katie?s consciousness of judgment as 
she is viewed by more experienced teachers draws attention to the power behind the 
?gaze? (Sartre, 1957), which has been understood to be a tool of power because it 
objectifies?the observer wields power, and a person is subjugated by merely being 
looked at (Lacan, 1994). In Katie?s situation, observers held power that extended beyond 
their looker status, they were situated within a power relation that assigned Katie a 
subordinate status as both an ESOL teacher and a beginning teacher.  
Undergirding Katie?s response to the gaze was an irony: ?Sometimes I like it, I try 
to teach my class as if someone were watching me so I can be more alert.? Although she 
didn?t refer to it in this exchange, Katie had a highly developed consciousness of the 
relationship between self-perception and social perception. Months before the study 
began, she wrote: ?Our identity is shaped not only what we think of ourselves but in how 
we perceive how others view us. What we attribute to our own identity reflects/includes 
what others have attributed to us. We can either accept, reject, modify these attributes to 
fit our own image.? (Webchat, 04.13). There is a difference between being seen and 
seeing oneself seen (Copjec, 1994): the former refers to the power of the gaze imposed by 
the person watching Katie, the latter is self-imposed by Katie. The self-imposed gaze can 
lead teachers to fashion themselves in the image of what the (hypothetical) watcher 
desires. If teachers make a habit of always shaping themselves into what others want 
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them to be, they run the risk of losing touch with the distinction between what they want 
for themselves and what others desire of them. The area between the identities desired by 
the teachers and the identities that the teachers believe are desired of them by those who 
hold professional power over them consequently becomes indistinguishable. 
Furthermore, Katie?s sense of being watched has gendered meanings in a world that has 
historically evolved as patriarchal, in which ?? men act and women appear. Men look at 
women. Women watch themselves being looked at.? (Berger, 1972, p. 45). Gender is 
always salient as humans formulate our representations the world, and it is relevant in a 
school setting for many reasons, among them the fact that historically most teachers 
(those being watched) have been women, and most watchers, that is school officials and 
university researchers, have been men. 
Katie?s response could be read as compliance, resistance, or some construct 
between the two. It could be understood as Katie passively constructing her identity in 
Lacanian fashion and reframing her desires in the shadow of what she believes is desired 
of her. However, Katie was not simply an inert pawn in her own acculturation. Nor does 
she position herself to resist the gaze by ignoring its power. Rather, I believe that Katie 
was exploring the middle ground between compliance and resistance, harnessing the gaze 
and redirecting it for her own purposes, using it to sustain her practice. The 
conceptualization of the gaze as singularly oppressive blindly ignores Katie?s powerful 
role in constructing her audience. Katie?s imaginings of being watched are not equivalent 
to actually being watched because it was Katie who created her hypothetical watcher, and 
Katie who chose the criteria to ascribe to this watcher. As a result, the practice she 
consequently crafted was not a conscious display adapted for an audience, but rather a 
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search for affirmation and an effort to identify ways to support her developing practice. 
As the creator of the audience, she was positioned to provide herself with the support she 
was seeking. However, constructing her own imaginary watcher was not an 
uncomplicated act of liberation because her imaginings were rooted in a world that 
privileges certain representations of teaching, including teaching practices that don?t 
coincide with those that Katie embraced, and her construction of her watcher could not be 
oblivious of these values. 
Britzman has criticized the traditional view of teaching as an isolated activity, 
noting that: ?[i]ndividualizing the social basis of teaching dissolves the social context and 
dismisses the social meanings that constitute experience as lived. These forces are 
displaced by the autonomy and very real isolation of the teacher in the current school 
structure? (Britzman, 1991, pp. 237-8). It could be argued that, throughout history, 
teachers seeking to protect themselves from evaluative eyes have upheld the isolation of 
teaching, reconceptualizing it in more positively nuanced terms as ?autonomy?. The 
legacy of the isolation of teaching establishes a contradiction between collaboration and 
autonomy, primarily because of the inequitable power relationship between beginning 
teachers and those watching them. The teachers in this study identified little or no space 
within school walls in which they could embrace less solitary forms of teaching that 
would allow them to exchange support with other teaching professionals because the 
potential for judgment from someone more established seemed inescapable. The 
dominant images that Katie, Jane, Alexandra, and Margaret felt called upon to produce as 
they passed through their first year of practice, and their acute consciousness of these 
images, contributed to their acculturation into a culture of teaching. However, the 
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teachers were not passively indoctrinated but rather found other contexts in which to 
develop their practices and sustain the ideologies that they sensed were not embraced in 
their respective cultures of schooling. That is, they practiced with each other, at afternoon 
teas, and at home with their friends and families. They constructed the isolation of their 
classrooms as offering them privacy, and privacy for the teachers meant a space in which 
to become teachers. It gave them the opportunity to rehearse their practice and afforded 
them the luxury of unfinishedness (Freire, 1998) in a schooling context that they believed 
expected them to be finished, to be teachers. Katie, Jane, Margaret, and Alexandra?s 
experiences raise questions about how teachers can challenge the engrained indivisibility 
of collaboration and evaluation and build for themselves autonomous teaching contexts 
without relinquishing access to the potential support of collaborative experiences.  
Practicing their Practice: Fa?ades 
For each teacher, certain images associated with beginning teaching appeared to 
dominate at certain times, and each teacher worked on the development of her own 
professional identity in relation to these dominant images she pictured. The ways in 
which the teachers approached their construction of their teaching selves differed. 
Alexandra, Katie, and Margaret often sensed certain expectations from the staff at their 
schools, and they described their efforts to construct themselves in opposition to expected 
images. Jane, the only high school teacher, conversely felt that her novice-teacher status 
allowed her the freedom to be herself for the most part, although she, too, experienced 
areas in which she was not comfortable presenting herself openly. 
Alexandra, Katie, and Margaret frequently visualized their professional selves 
relationally and even oppositionally to the teaching identities that they believed were 
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expected of them, referred to by Katie as a fa?ade (Afternoon tea, 12.06). The form of the 
necessary fa?ade varied among the teachers. Cues from administrators, other teachers, 
parents, and even students motivated Katie and Margaret to construct professional 
identities that they believed were more ?expert? than the two teachers actually believed 
themselves to be. Alexandra, who was 36 at the time of the study and had two master?s 
degrees, one in educational administration and one in TESOL, had a different experience. 
She felt pressured to be mindful of her subordinate place as a first-year teacher in the 
school?s pecking order and to therefore present herself as less knowledgeable than she 
actually was. To an extent, the afternoon teas served as a forum in which teachers 
experimented, rehearsed, and actively and consciously constructed their teacher identities 
with each other?s assistance, a space in which to ?practice? their practice. The 
experimentation they were comfortable engaging in as we sat on my family room floor 
sipping tea was quite different from the possibilities they perceived to be available to 
them with school faculty, administrators, and students. They sensed that the images of 
teaching reinforced in schools differed significantly from those supported as they chatted 
with each other around the coffee table in my family room. Furthermore, power 
circulated differently within the school building than in the afternoon tea setting, and the 
teacher?s perceptions of how power was institutionalized within schools affected their 
willingness to assume certain identities in certain contexts.  
Katie, a second-semester teacher, began the year of the study with an already 
established sense of presenting a false image. At one afternoon tea she told us about her 
feelings the previous semester:  
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The first semester I taught, I?d go home and say what did I do today. I had 
this fa?ade. I didn?t like myself at all as a teacher. I thought I was the 
worst teacher. I?d tell Su, my poor kids, I didn?t know what was going on 
and I thought the principal hated me and I didn?t know what I was doing 
? I?d go home, I?d think I was a bad teacher. (Katie, Afternoon tea, 
11.01) 
Her sense of being called upon to present a fa?ade continued into her second semester. In 
the context of conversations with other teachers or administrators, she sometimes felt the 
need to appear more professional: 
?That?s when you pull the professional fa?ade. My boyfriend Chris told 
me if you don?t know the answer you do the pause. Hmmm. Well, let me 
think about that. ? (Katie, Afternoon tea, 12.06) 
Over the year, Katie devoted a great deal of thought to school situations in which 
she didn?t have ?answers?. The identity of a novice teacher in the process of 
learning to teach was not usually present in this teacher?s discussion of the range 
of identities available to her and her first year peers, and she identified little if any 
space for not-knowing. In her experience, knowledge arising from her practice 
was not highly valued, and she did not believe that she was in a position to 
negotiate space for the process of becoming a teacher, of learning to teach. Katie 
sensed that, within her public school system, first-year teachers were expected to 
graduate from their programs and start teaching, with the assumption that they 
have achieved mastery over a complete and fixed body of material that is 
necessary in order to teach. Katie repeatedly indicated that she believed that a 
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teaching self who did not have ?answers? was not valued within school walls. The 
school culture she witnessed embraced a conception of knowledge as absolute, as 
either acquired or not acquired, and as detached from the knower and her practice. 
The teachers sensed that they were receiving cues from administrators, other 
teachers, and even students about the images they were expected to present. Sometimes 
these cues were helpful, for instance when administrators provided specific guidance 
about their expectations, but sometimes they engendered confusion and frustration, such 
as when parents expected the ESOL teachers to place a greater emphasis on grammar. 
Furthermore, these messages were not equally audible?some came from positions of 
greater power than others. For instance, the teachers were compelled to hear instructions 
from a principal more than a request from a kindergartener because the principal typically 
carried more power in a school context than a kindergarten-aged student. The teachers 
discussed their interpretations of these cues and worked together to make meaning of the 
process of professional identity construction that they were engaged in.  
Old-Timer Newcomer Interaction: ?Aren?t You Trained?? 
A significant event in Margaret?s identity development transpired as the school 
year opened. Margaret sought to establish a connection with a fourth-grade boy, Roger. 
An exchange that she had with Roger?s classroom teacher, Phyllis, left her feeling that 
she was being perceived as less expert than she should be: 
In terms of classroom teachers there's one little fourth grader I?m working 
with, Roger. His teacher, Phyllis, kept coming to me to talk about Roger. 
He was the first one I started seeing. So I was building rapport, a 
relationship with him, but she came up to me after meeting and she said: 
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?Roger needs more help. What are you doing?? I?d really only seen him 
twice thus far, so I was telling her that basically I was trying to build 
rapport with him so he?d trust me, and that kind of unhinged her and I 
didn't have anything that I had done with him that I could give her. So 
basically she started questioning my training. She was like: ?Aren?t you 
trained?? She asked all of these questions until I started crying. (Margaret, 
Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
Margaret opened the school year believing that the first step in building a teaching 
relationship with Roger was establishing a rapport. This orientation was consistent with 
the pedagogical identity the teacher had been crafting over the course of her preservice 
work. She sought to practice what she had referred to earlier in the year as ?connected 
teaching? and in her master?s thesis as ?a pedagogy of compassion.? She had expressed 
admiration for Nel Noddings? (1984) work on the importance of caring in teaching. 
During the two years before the study began, I had perceived caring and compassion as 
central in Margaret?s ideas about teaching and in her classroom practice. As I continued 
to learn from Margaret I heard her express reservations about the public school system 
that stemmed from its failure to attend to children?s ?spirits? and ?souls.?  
The preceding interaction was similar to many others over the course of the year. 
It was useful in helping me to understand what gets learned as beginning teachers interact 
with what Lave and Wenger (1991) refer to as ?old-timers?. A central question here 
concerns ?intersubjectivity,? defined by Wertsch (1998) as ?the degree to which 
interlocutors in a communicative situation share a perspective? (p. 111-112). To what 
degree did Margaret and Phyllis share their understandings of teaching? Margaret said 
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that she was trying to build a rapport with the student, and Phyllis? response was: ?Aren?t 
you trained?? Implicit in her response was the message that all trained teachers share a 
common understanding or common level of ?accomplishment?, that is, training. Phyllis 
intimated that Margaret?s primary focus on developing a rapport with Roger was not 
characteristic of the first steps taken by ?trained? teachers. Therefore, a metanarrative 
about what it means to teach was being constructed and possibly even imposed in this 
exchange and Margaret?s approaches did not comply with this metanarrative. I frame the 
metanarrative as imposed (rather than merely constructed) because the dialogue was not 
taking place within an equitable power relationship?Margaret commands less authority 
within the institution of schooling both as a beginning teacher and as the school?s sole 
ESOL teacher in a world that marginalizes the field of TESOL and stratifies teachers 
according to years of experience and credentials. Her first-year status subtracts credibility 
from what she says. 
What did Margaret do with this message? She was not na?ve, and she had an 
understanding of how schools work, so she quickly realized that her approach would not 
be legitimated by the more experienced teacher. She interpreted Phyllis as being 
interested in more product-oriented schooling that was not mindful of the place of 
relationship and process, and she perceived that in order to construct a more acceptable 
identity, she had to display what she thought would be accepted as a product of her 
teaching, in other words, evidence that Roger had done some work. She was unable to do 
this, however, telling us regretfully: ?I didn't have anything that I had done with him that 
I could give her.?  
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At first glance, this incident might have implied that Margaret had been socialized 
into models of pedagogy that were disconnected from her students, but what ensued was 
a much more dialogic construction of meanings of pedagogy. Although Margaret sensed 
that she had failed to present the image Phyllis sought, she did not unquestioningly accept 
the old-timer?s meaning of teaching as her own, but rather entered into a negotiation and 
coauthoring of meaning of teaching. She continued her project of developing a rapport 
with Roger, all the while communicating with Phyllis. Over time, Phyllis? perception of 
Margaret?s teaching changed. As she saw Roger making progress, she appeared to 
become more accepting of Margaret?s methods: 
But now that I have a relationship with her that she respects me more, it?s 
strange. I think she was very worried about how he was doing and she was 
pushing that on to me. I think she sees that he's happy to come to me, and 
his behavior changes when he comes back from ESOL. And she?s come to 
me and she?s said: ?Yes, it's important that you build a relationship with 
him first.? (Margaret, Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
The catalyst for change was not Margaret?s persuasive discursive powers but 
rather her actions in the classroom. Phyllis changed her beliefs because she saw Roger 
making progress. This is important because it demonstrates how practice can be 
convincing even when words are not. In this example, Margaret?s role extended beyond 
that of simply an observer ingesting the new knowledge about how to teach, or of even 
being pushed towards traditional forms of teaching. She was actually participating in and 
acting upon the culture that she was entering by, for instance, influencing Phyllis? 
understandings of teaching. The literature on beginning teaching is replete with stories of 
318   
 
 
teachers who enter the schools with clearly articulated progressive philosophies of 
teaching only to be socialized into the more established and traditional ways (Waller, 
1932; Lortie, 1975; Blase, 1985; Veenman, 1984; Merton, 1975; Kettle and Sellars, 
1996). This was not the case with Margaret, who played a much more interactive role in 
the formation of the community she had entered. She was not simply absorbed into the 
community as a passive consumer of school culture but was actually active in shaping the 
community as she entered it. Although she was concerned about how she appeared to 
Roger?s teacher, the following discussion suggests that she had not changed her ideas 
about the value of connection in teaching: 
Suhanthie: Do you think that that's typical? Building a rapport being part 
of teaching? 
Margaret: I wonder if it?s hard always being a classroom teacher. Like 
wanting to, but never really having the chance to work one-on-one, in such 
precious time you really just want to do the curriculum and fix things. And 
stay on top of things. I wonder whether a classroom teacher just has a very 
different sense of time. (Margaret, Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
Embedded in Margaret?s response is the assumption that all teachers value building a 
rapport (?? like wanting to??) but that classroom teachers simply lack time: (??never 
really having the chance??). Later on that afternoon, Margaret described the messages 
and expectations being telegraphed to her by her colleagues: 
The teachers do want me to tell them what I?m doing. I get the sense that 
the ESOL teachers should be an expert in something and they want the 
teacher to be well-grounded in what she does and they want to be able to 
319   
 
 
come to her for advice and with questions. That must be partially their 
experience with other ESOL teachers. 
Although Margaret has specific ideas about how she wants to teach, she?s entering a 
community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1998) in which assumptions about what ESOL 
teachers should be doing are already in place. When the classroom teachers were 
themselves newcomers, their experiences with other ESOL teachers served as their 
situated learning about their community of practice. The practices that they learned then 
translate now into expectations for Margaret, who derives an image of a professional and 
expert teacher through her interactions with the classroom teachers surrounding her. 
Margaret infers that casting the appropriate identity includes reporting to the classroom 
teachers, ?tell[ing] them what I?m doing,? being available for advice and questions, and 
displaying visible expertise.  
 Margaret was also concerned about her colleagues? perception of her as not 
dedicated to her job. During the first few weeks of the school year, Margaret had a split 
assignment between a middle school and an elementary school. While her hours were 
divided, she sensed that the faculty at her elementary school were perceiving her to be 
uncommitted: 
Margaret: I think I felt a little bit judged in the beginning, that I think that 
it was because I wasn't there enough. I think that they felt that I just wasn't 
pulling my weight. I felt a little bit of coldness from some people. 
Suhanthie: And that was because you were in the middle school? 
Margaret: Yes. They didn't see me and maybe they felt that I was just 
blowing off. They didn't understand. And I probably misinterpreted it 
320   
 
 
anyway. But I feel like a lot of teachers, they just really value hard work 
for the kids, so even if they're coming from a different perspective they 
just want to know I?m working the same hours that they are and I care 
about the kids. A lot of people working late hours. Coming in really early. 
(Margaret, Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
Margaret sensed that she was being assessed not on her teaching ability but on her 
dedication, which was judged according to how often her colleagues saw her. In 
this discussion, Margaret appeared to be more concerned with how she appeared 
to her colleagues than with learning how to teach. She was deeply affected by her 
perception of a disapproving ?they.? Rising ESOL enrollment early in the school 
year allowed her to be placed full-time at her elementary school, and she noted an 
improvement in her relations with her colleagues at that point: 
Margaret: But now ? my colleagues are so helpful. 
Suhanthie: More so than at the beginning? 
Margaret: Yes. 
Suhanthie: Because now they think you?re working? 
Margaret: Yes. (Margaret, Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
As Margaret wove together the multiple messages within her school context that would 
provide her with an institutional representation of good teaching practice, one criterion 
was physical presence. Because teachers can close their doors and teach in isolation, 
inaudible to those who pass by their doors, the one of few indicators of teaching quality 
available to passers-by is presence. Margaret deduced that visibility was a significant part 
of being a good teacher in that particular school. 
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?I?m Working on Changing the Reputation of ESOL?  
Katie, Margaret, and Alexandra experienced a distinction between the 
representations of ESOL teachers they sensed were constructed in their school contexts 
and the identities that they considered fitting for themselves. Katie, Margaret, and 
Alexandra believed that ESOL professionals were devalued within their school contexts, 
and that these understandings reflected and contributed to broader societal values that 
deprecated ESOL students and English language learners, their needs, and their 
contributions. The construction of ESOL teachers and students as marginal was not, 
however, invariable, and the gaps within the contradictions were illuminating. The 
constructions of ESOL teaching they interpreted in their schools were connected to 
deprofessionalization, the perception of ESOL teaching as an ?easier? job, and 
characterization of ESOL teachers as ?flaky.? In contrast, the teachers themselves saw 
ESOL teaching to potentially provide a venue for professional fulfillment, social 
activism, and ethical action. 
 A factor that contributed to the deficit construction of ESOL teachers? identities 
was the perception of their teaching responsibilities. Katie was annoyed and puzzled by 
the perception of other faculty and staff that ESOL teachers didn?t have genuine teaching 
responsibilities: 
I don?t know why mainstream classroom teachers think I have all this 
time. Or even the secretaries. They?re like: ?Are you with kids right now?? 
and I?m like: ?What do you think I do all day?? ? When they want me to 
translate or they want me to help with another ESOL student. You don?t 
ask the classroom teacher if they?re with kids! I don?t have any scheduled 
322   
 
 
planning time, my planning is all before and after school. (Katie, 
Afternoon tea, 11.01) 
ESOL teaching was also characterized as ?easy? by classroom teachers. Margaret noticed 
classroom teachers around her envying her autonomy and small class sizes: 
Margaret: I think classroom teachers think it?s easier to be a specialist, like 
if being a classroom teacher is too much, being a reading specialist or 
ESOL teacher is a good alternative ? When I was at Jump Street 
[Elementary School, as a student teacher], Agnes? ESOL colleague told 
me that classroom teachers come up to her and say they want to be ESOL 
teachers. For all the wrong reasons. She recommends for those teachers to 
find another experience ? travel, live a year, get involved in the 
communities and lives of kids they?d be working with. 
Suhanthie: What are ?the wrong reasons?? 
Margaret: From the outside at least, it appears that you have less work and 
fewer responsibilities as an ESOL teacher.  
The smaller class size and lower visibility of ESOL teaching contributed to its 
interpretation as an easier assignment than mainstream classroom teaching. 
Margaret noted that this perception was not absolutely false: ?On the other hand, I 
wouldn?t want to be a classroom teacher.? 
Alexandra believed that the faculty at her school saw the ESOL staff as ?flaky? 
and the specialists in general as a little isolationist. 
Alexandra: I?m working on changing the reputation of ESOL. 
Unfortunately, we have a reputation of being pretty flaky people. 
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Suhanthie: The teachers? 
Alexandra: Yes, the ESOL teachers. I guess the person before me was 
fine, they liked her, they like Richard, they just think they?re pretty flaky. 
Suhanthie: What do you mean by flaky? 
Alexandra: I guess my impression has been that they never really reach 
out to the faculty, they never get in there and see themselves as a full 
faculty member. And I think specialists can do that, they can tend to keep 
themselves away from everybody else, but then they?re not really doing 
what they need to do. 
Alexandra, too, acknowledged that the general perception of ESOL teachers is not 
completely divorced from reality. However, Alexandra has touched upon an important 
element in identity construction, that is the contribution that the ESOL teacher can play in 
its dialogic nature. ESOL teacher identity is not constructed solely from the outside, by 
the rest of the school community. Rather, teachers play a role in shaping the image 
perceived by the rest of the school community. While Alexandra pointed out that ESOL 
teachers have an undesirable reputation and are perceived to be marginal and separate, 
she also draws attention to the ESOL teachers? agency in the construction of their 
identities. She noted what she believed to be lasting effects of her predecessors? 
disinclination to see themselves as full faculty members. This realization is important 
because it highlights the potential for Alexandra to change her image through her own 
agency. 
324   
 
 
A Room of One?s Own 
The concept of a ?real teacher? surfaced periodically over the course of the school 
year. Teachers sometimes sensed that at a result of their ESOL status, they were 
considered to be less legitimate or less ?real? than other faculty in the school. In both her 
current position at Robert Fulton Middle School and at her previous post at an elementary 
school, Alexandra felt that ESOL was not adequately valued, but the pull-out format of 
the elementary school setting placed her in a particularly deprofessionalized position: 
It?s been a lot easier at Robert Fulton Middle School than at Stone Spring 
[Elementary School] because at Stone Spring you?re taking kids out of 
their class, so the teacher sees you differently than if you?re a teacher with 
your own class, not that you?re a real teacher. I find it harder to be in a 
pull-out program. 
At the middle school level, ESOL classes, like all other subjects, were scheduled by the 
administrative school staff. At the elementary school level, however, ESOL teachers were 
required to coordinate each individual ESOL student?s classes with the students? 
classroom teacher. Practically speaking, this meant that at the middle and high school 
levels, students file into their ESOL classes as part of a scheduled period change during 
which all students were moving from one classroom to another so that going to ESOL fit 
naturally into the flow of the day?s schedule. Conversely, elementary level ESOL 
teachers would appear at the door of a classroom and retrieve their students, who were 
usually involved in another lesson. Elementary-level students? departure for their ESOL 
class was therefore more disruptive, more visible, and more separate from the activities 
325   
 
 
of their classmates. Alexandra sensed that this ?separatedness? model robbed elementary 
level teachers of some legitimacy. 
All of the teachers were keenly aware of the tenuous hold that many local ESOL 
teachers had on their classrooms. They all knew of ESOL teachers who had been the first 
to lose their classrooms in overcrowded schools, to be relegated to a portable, a stuffy 
basement, a nook in the cafeteria, or a mobile cart. When they had gone through their 
student teaching semester the year before, Margaret?s cooperating teacher had been 
without a classroom, and she had spent the beginning of every 30-minute class period 
roaming the hallways looking for the quiet corner of a corridor in which to teach her 
classes. A self-contained classroom?a ?room of one?s own? (Woolf, 1929) and its 
associations with creative space and the intellectual autonomy to develop a craft, be it 
writing or teaching?served as a symbol of legitimacy within Alexandra?s school culture, 
as it did in Margaret?s. Margaret had the choice of pulling students out of their classes 
and walking them back to her own classroom for instruction or ?plugging in? to a self-
contained classroom that mixed English language learners and native English Speaking 
students. She was savvy about challenging the representation of an ESOL teacher as 
teaching infrequently or not deserving of a classroom. She favored ?pull-out? over ?plug-
in? or inclusion models of teaching ESOL, so that her own classroom would not be left 
vacant:  
Something else about inclusion. Some of my classes are really far apart. 
Sometimes classroom teachers are like, you can use my room during that 
time. But I have to be careful because I don?t want it to be seen that my 
room is often empty because I might lose that room. We?re supposed to be 
326   
 
 
quiet in the halls, but I try to get a little instruction in the hall. My room is 
not assured for next year. (Afternoon tea, 01.24) 
She had expressed a similar sense of vulnerability at the beginning of the school 
year, asking us to: 
Say a little prayer for me. My room is being coveted.? (Afternoon tea, 
11.15) 
Alexandra, Margaret, and Katie expressed a preference for pull-out over inclusion models 
of teaching, not because they were pedagogically favorable but because in the teachers? 
experience, pull-out formats added legitimacy to their teaching and preserved their 
classrooms. The consequences are problematic. A pull-out format can support the 
development of an ESOL community, create a safe haven for ESOL students, support the 
development of bilingual identity, and allow teachers to tailor their pedagogy to English 
language learners. However, pull-out models of ESOL keeps ESOL students excluded 
from mainstream environments. Inclusion formats can support ESOL students? emotional 
and social selves by immersing them in contexts in which they are able to socialize and 
belong, and they can support their bilingualism by affording them access to linguistically 
diverse peers, including those who speak English proficiently. In terms of identity, 
inclusion models of ESOL smudge the artificially distinct line between ESOL and 
nonESOL students. The separation of these two groups, inherent to a pull-out format, 
underscores the binary distinction between them and reinforces the stigma of difference 
of the group that doesn?t represent the socially dominant norm, that is ESOL students.  
 Because the teachers? always-dubious legitimacy as professionals is judged in part 
by their visibility in their classrooms and affirmed in part by their assignment to a 
327   
 
 
classroom, they are necessarily engaged in a constant struggle between needs of their 
students and construction of their own professionalism. When they chose to ?plug-in? to 
mainstream classes, they paid potential price in status and jeopardized their claim to their 
classrooms. 
Discursive Constructions of Identities: ?You Have to Know How to Say Things? 
In exploring the terrain between who they believed themselves to be becoming 
and the sometimes artificial images they felt called upon to present, the teachers 
discussed at length the ways in which identities can be produced discursively. Katie was 
explicit in expounding upon the relationship: 
I do think you have to know how to say things. It?s all how you present it to the 
teachers or to the faculty. You can do what you want, then cite a name or cite a 
study. Or you can pick out a philosophy and say, this is why I?m doing it, even 
though your purpose may be something completely different. You can front it that 
way. It?s kind of deceitful, but you tell people what they want to hear so that you 
can do your work. (Afternoon Tea, 11.15) 
What Katie described is survival. She was advising her peers about what they needed to 
do to stay afloat during their first year. Margaret arrived at one afternoon tea dejected and 
discouraged and contemplating an alternate career. She told us that she had had a bad day 
and dissolved into tears, saying: ?I don?t want to be a teacher.? (Margaret, Afternoon tea, 
12.06). Hugs and tissues were produced, and we pressed her for more details of her day.  
Margaret: I think a lot of things built up. I had an observation with my 
instructional specialist. I picked the group who were the hardest to teach. They 
were under the tables! 
328   
 
 
Jane: Did you get to talk to her after? 
Margaret: After, she said it?s not the worst lesson I?ve ever seen! It?s also not the 
best one. 
She told us about the lesson, offering an analysis of what could have been improved on, 
and concluded with: ?I don?t want to be a teacher anymore.? 
Jane: Do you really mean teaching or just that age level? 
Margaret: I just want to write. 
Jane: Oh, I don?t believe you. 
Margaret: I guess I don?t feel prepared for all the reading, I don?t know how to 
teach reading. I?m with all these early education teachers who?ve all had so much 
training in teaching reading. 
Jane: But you?re not their primary reading teacher. 
Margaret: But with the [new reading program]? 
At this point, Katie offered her perspective, referring to a tenet of the second language 
acquisition theory that supports a focus on spoken language before written language: 
Katie: What I do with my [new reading program] students, my beginners, I 
basically work on developing oral language ? We could plan to meet or 
something, over the weekend, if that would be helpful to you. It?s hard, [the new 
reading program] is hard ? (12.06) 
Katie perceived herself as part of a community with Jane, Alexandra, and Margaret, and 
she was comfortable sharing her expertise with them. However, the teachers experienced 
that same sense of shared community as absent from their teaching contexts, and none of 
them believed that it was fostered it in their schools or counties. Visualizing teachers as a 
329   
 
 
community of practice (Wenger, 1998) and conceiving the process of constructing 
professional identities as a fascinating form of situated learning has been helpful to me in 
understanding how Margaret and Katie became teachers. Margaret had joined the 
community of teaching practice and was learning at the periphery. The teaching 
community she was a ?newcomer? (Lave and Wenger, 1991) to, including her 
instructional specialist and students? parents, are ?old-timers.? As she figured out how 
she should be with them, she was engaged in "legitimate peripheral participation," ?a way 
to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, 
identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice.? The process of 
becoming a full participant shapes meanings of learning and of language. ?This social 
process, includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills.? (Lave and 
Wenger, 1991, p. 29). Whether Katie qualified as an old-timer is questionable, since she 
had entered the public school system only one semester before Margaret. However, she 
had acquired a degree of competency in the community of practice and had moved closer 
to its center than had Margaret at this point of the school year. She was more 
knowledgeable about the ?shared repertoire of communal resources? (Wenger, 1999), 
including the discursive resources such as styles, vocabulary, tools, and symbols, and 
offered to share the knowledge she had culled with Margaret. 
Repertoire of Retorts: Katie 
Katie offered Margaret what she referred to as ?retorts? from her repertoire of 
responses designed to contribute to an expert image:  
I can send you things also of what to say to administrators when you?re not sure 
what to say: ?Well, I?m working on a lot of oral L development because the [new 
330   
 
 
reading program] training emphasized that a good reader will have to have to 
have good oral development before they can read. (Katie, Afternoon tea, 12.06) 
Over the course of this afternoon tea and many others during the year of the study, Katie 
offered Margaret and the other teachers similar suggestions of words and phrases to 
explain pedagogical choices: 
Oooh, Vygotsky model or oooh BICS and CALP. If you?re ever at a loss for 
something, pull out BICS and CALP. It sounds good, you know. They?re like, that 
doesn?t answer my question, but thank you. (Afternoon Tea, 12.06) 
And: 
That?s something you can say, develop oral L. Another thing to say is: ?I do a lot 
of hands-on activities to promote interaction between the children and myself to 
practice their language.? (Katie, Afternoon tea, 12.06) 
An important element of Katie?s suggestion is that it is not intended to educate or inform 
the listener, but rather to construct the teacher?s identity as knowledgeable. Katie?s 
concern was not about the fact that it ?doesn?t answer [the] question? but about its 
appearing to be an acceptable and appropriate response from an expert teacher. Jane and 
Margaret regretfully expressed that they were not taking running records
4
 on their 
students: 
Margaret: Are you doing running records on all your children? 
Jane: Yes, oh, yes! 
Suhanthie: Are you really?! (surprised) 
Jane: No (laughing)!!! That sounds great in theory, but who has the time? 
                                                 
4
 ?Running records,? a reading assessment system developed by Marie Clay, can be used to determine the 
development of students? oral reading fluency and word identification skills and strategies. 
331   
 
 
Katie offered Margaret and Jane the following response to hypothetical questions about 
why they were not taking running records: 
Another basic thing you can say is: ?I would prefer to work on comprehension 
with them and developing their background knowledge, and taking a running 
record is not indicative of what they can read. 
Another suggestion was: 
You can say ?At this point, I think it?s more important for them to gain meaning. 
I?m going to integrate sight words into helping them develop meaning and helping 
them develop background knowledge.? That?s a big thing, background 
knowledge. 
The actual reason that Jane was not conducting running records on all of her students is 
that the process was time-consuming and would require her to set aside a little time to 
regularly assess each of her many students individually. However, Katie sensed that the 
response ?Who has the time?? would construct the overworked first-year teachers as 
inadequate or inept and therefore offered a retort that released the teachers from the slog 
of running records while maintaining their expert identity. 
 Katie depicts understanding local (school) culture and gaining entry and 
legitimacy in the community as something akin to a process of code-breaking. She not 
only offers words to be appropriated and quoted by her fellow-teachers, but she gives 
them specific and explicit information about how to crack the code in order to make up 
their own responses. She referred the other teachers back to their days as a graduate 
students for theory with which to defend their practice. 
332   
 
 
Katie: The [M.Ed in TESOL] program gave me a lot of stuff that I could say to 
other people to back up what I?m doing. The reason I?m doing this is because 
blah, blah, blah. The research said blah, blah, blah ? Teachers frantically come to 
you and say this person?s been here for 3 months and he can?t speak English, I 
think we should EMT them. Or he?s a fluent speaker, why isn?t he getting the 
academics. Then you can say something like. ?Well, there?s BICS and CALP, 
BICS only takes 3 years to develop, CALP takes longer, 5-7 years.? Then you can 
go on to say these are some things you can do to help them acquire the language. 
(Afternoon Tea, 11.15) 
Again in reference to not taking running records, Katie suggested that teachers 
say: ?I don?t believe in running records because they don?t check for comprehension.? 
She went on to advise her peers that: ?All you have to do is decode and all you have to 
say is: ?I don?t believe in it.?? She offered a formula: decode the demand and preface 
your explanation with the claim that you don?t believe in what is being suggested. In this 
way, not taking running records appears as a philosophical orientation rather than an act 
of omission or negligence and contributes to the construction of a more expert identity. In 
the sometimes unsympathetic context of first-year teaching, finding the appropriate 
words could overshadow the actual practice that the words were about. 
Katie indicates that entering the culture of schooling requires more than simply 
applying the theories they had learned in graduate school to their practice within school 
walls. Rather, learning how to talk is one of the most crucial steps in legitimate peripheral 
participation. ?[T]he purpose is not to learn from talk as a substitute for legitimate 
peripheral participation; it is to learn to talk as a key to legitimate peripheral 
333   
 
 
participation.? (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p. 108-109). In the context of the afternoon teas, 
the four teachers were not so much referencing their experiences within schools in order 
to learn how to teach or even to learn about the culture of schooling. Rather they were 
learning how to master the discourses of schooling so that they could enter the culture 
and legitimate their participation in it. The distinction that Katie makes between what 
teachers know and how they speak raises an important point, one addressed by Lave and 
Wenger (1991): ?Issues about language ? may well have more to do with legitimacy of 
participation and with access to peripherality than they do with knowledge transmission 
(p. 105).? The focus of Katie?s step-by-step guidance was to legitimate the presence of 
the four teachers within the school community, and this focus eclipsed concerns for 
learning how to teach. Lave and Wenger (1991) wrote about the linguistic practice that 
accompanies a community of practice. ?Legitimate peripheral participation in such 
linguistic practice is a form of learning, but does not imply that newcomers actually learn 
the actual practice the language is supposed to be about.? (p. 108). Katie?s coaching 
about how to talk was certainly a form of learning that served to increase the legitimacy 
of her peers? participation in their communities of practice, but learning to talk is only 
one part of the actual ?practice.? Of lesser concern during the afternoon teas was what 
happened to the teachers in their classrooms when they were alone with students behind 
closed doors, which underscores their preoccupation with professional identity 
construction over pedagogical concerns in their teaching lives. It seemed that the notion 
of ?belonging? to the culture of schooling was more important than the notion of 
?becoming? a teacher. The established hierarchy they practiced within meant that as they 
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developed their own images of practice, they needed to be mindful of the representations 
of practice sustained by those who held power in their schools contexts.  
The afternoon teas served not only as a source of support and camaraderie for the 
teachers, they served a secondary purpose, which was as a place in which to master the 
discourses of the community of practice and to develop their evolving professional 
identities. While Lave and Wenger (1991) believe that the context of situated learning is 
usually unintentional rather than deliberate, the dialogue between Katie and Margaret 
constructs as painfully intentional the process of "legitimate peripheral participation."  
The teachers positioned themselves between the two representations of teaching 
that they were caught between, ?being? and ?becoming.? I use ?being? to refer an 
unbearably light, overly simplistic understanding of teaching identity as complete and 
fixed from the moment that teachers take up their positions. ?Becoming? is a process-
oriented understanding of teaching that views teachers as always in the process of 
?becoming? and that constructs practice in relation to teachers? whole lives and identities. 
The teachers did not conform to the expectations imposed by the ?being? model of 
teaching. Nor did they believe themselves to be in a position to openly embrace a 
representation of teaching as ?becoming.? They knew that to appear ?unfinished? could 
equate to appearing ignorant, untrained, or ineffectual to those positioned to wield power 
within the schools, such as administrators and other faculty. Rather, they hid behind one 
to sustain the other, that is, they hid behind fixed and traditional interpretations of 
teaching practice in order to create space in which to sustain their practice. 
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?Talking Out of My Butt? 
An interesting element of Katie?s afternoon tea discourse is that as she was 
offering Margaret and her fellow teachers support, she periodically delegitimated her own 
advice and portrayed herself as less than knowledgeable. For example, the word ?fa?ade? 
carries an association of insincerity. Also in the following two examples, Katie presents 
herself as pretending to be an expert: 
Suhanthie: Is it the jargon that?s giving you credibility? 
Katie: I think it?s the way I?m presenting myself. 
Margaret: It seems like you can do it with great assurance. 
Katie: Yeah, I just present myself like I know what I?m doing even if I 
don?t. 
At another afternoon tea, she told us: 
? My first year when people asked me what to do, I would BS and make 
things up. It sounds horrible, but that?s how I survived, talking out of my 
butt pretty much. (Katie, Afternoon tea, 12.06) 
It is interesting to note that what Katie refers to as ?BS? and ?talking out of my butt? 
would not be defined as either by many teachers. The concepts that she advocates, a 
focus on meaning making over decoding, the importance of tapping into background 
knowledge, the challenges particular to English language learners who are not able to rely 
on a literacy framework, all have currency in second language learning and other 
educational theories. The ways in which Katie ?recruits? different aspects of her self 
depending on her various ?coordinations? (Gee, 1997, p. xiii) provides a clear illustration 
of how identity changes operate in relation to inconstant meanings, situations, and 
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investments. While she constructs an expert identity at her school, in the context of the 
afternoon teas Katie positions herself as having limited knowledge, as being unseasoned 
in educational practice, and as being proficient only in discursive identity construction. 
One possible interpretation is that Katie believes that she has wisdom to offer but is 
reluctant to appear arrogant or to overtly assume the role of expert. Furthermore, to 
identify herself as an old-timer could serve to weaken the connection between herself and 
the other teachers, bound together by their novice status in the institution of schooling.  
Fragmented Identities 
When Katie discussed the construction of the identity she presented to her school 
colleagues, she spoke in terms of image, as opposed to identity construction. Her concern 
was primarily with how she ?sounded?: 
I also wanted other ESOL teachers in the school because I was fresh out of 
the program, so everything I told them I hadn?t tried out myself. In order 
to establish my credibility I had you sound like I knew what I was talking 
about. (Katie, Afternoon tea, 01.24) 
However, the terrain between Katie?s ?retorts? (variously referred to as ?BS? and ?talking 
out of my butt?) and her pedagogical philosophy is nebulous. In the following excerpt of 
an afternoon tea transcription, the teacher initially sets out to suggest some ?retorts? 
designed to contribute to establishing a fa?ade. Halfway through the conversation, the 
voice that was initially part of the fa?ade appears to become authentically Katie?s: 
Katie: E-mail me all the questions people ask you and I?ll come up with 
retorts for all of them. Running records? I have a great one. ?Well, it?s not 
really advantageous to take a running record on the ESOL student at this 
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point. An ESOL child, especially a beginning ESOL child, has to 
restructure, who hasn?t been exposed to literacy before has no framework 
within to work. So it?s going to be doubly hard because they?re not only 
learning the language, they?re learning the literacy framework. So taking a 
running record is not going to be very effective for them.?  
Jane: Joelene [an instructor in their master?s-level methods class] gave us 
that multiple choice test, it was all in a made-up language, but we were 
able to get it all right because we knew -ing, you know it?s a verb, that 
must be C.  
Katie: You?re using those strategies because you know you have that 
literacy framework, but little kids have no framework to work within. And 
native English speakers have their language to work within. It?s difficult to 
teach reading for that very reason because native-English kids have that 
framework of oral language, natural language. So they know it?s I see a 
bus, because that sounds natural, but nonnative speakers might say, I see 
bus because that sounds natural to them. (Katie, Afternoon tea, 12.06) 
She begins the discussion in ?fa?ade? mode but by the end is actually explaining and 
standing behind her ?BS?. A similar pattern is evident in the following example:  
I can send you things also of what to say to administrators when you?re 
not sure what to say: ?Well, I?m working on a lot of oral L development 
because the [new reading program] training emphasized that a good reader 
will have to have to have good oral development before they can read. I?m 
trying to give them the background knowledge they will need to know in 
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order to understand what they?re reading.? Like this little boy Brad, he can 
read beautifully, he can decode, but he doesn?t understand a damn word he 
says. I ask him, I say: ?What does that mean?? ?I don?t know.? ?Well, let?s 
do it again. Let?s do the rereading strategies.? (Katie, Afternoon tea, 12.06) 
Katie started the discussion offering a retort from her repertoire of responses, but in the 
middle of her explanation became passionate about and frustrated by a system of teaching 
reading that ignored the importance of meaning-making in the reading life of her young 
student. By the time she?d reached the end of her story, she was no longer BS-ing. 
These two snippets capture nicely the fluidity of the whole notion of identity. de 
Beauvoir (1949) speaks of the difference between subjective selves, the identities that 
people live for themselves, and objective selves, the images constructed for the gaze (or 
consumption) of others, in other words, fa?ades. I suggest that this distinction is overly 
simplistic because ?who one is? evolves in relation to others, so humans are created and 
discovered?and even become?through the gaze of others because humans live out 
multiple identities in their various communities. As Katie conceptualizes these sometimes 
cohesive individual fragments of identity, I suspect that the permeable nature of the 
interchangeable voices speaks to the ambiguity of identity.  
Similarly, despite Katie?s enthusiastic attempts to spin images of competency for 
herself and her fellow tea-drinkers, the apparent firmness of her perspectives was 
ruptured by one comment at the afternoon tea on December 6
th
. It represented such a 
departure from the overall direction of her guidance that it warrants mention:  
Or be honest, you know, ?I?m not sure. I?ll contact so and so and 
find out for you.? For me it was my instructional specialist. ?Okay, 
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what do I do now?? ?Oh, that was due, I?m sorry can I have an 
extension?? I?ve had to do that a few times. Your best reason, I 
apologize, ?I didn?t know, I?m still learning the system.? Then 
mark it down so you won?t forget next time. (Katie, Afternoon 
Tea, 12.06) 
Later on over the course of that same afternoon tea, Katie told us that she was sometimes 
open with colleagues when she didn?t have answers: 
Sometimes I just tell them, I don?t know. (Katie, Afternoon Tea, 12.06) 
Identity is dynamic and teachers? responses to situations are as mutable as the contexts 
themselves, so my goal is not to try to weave a cohesive identity from the snapshots that I 
glimpsed over the course of the year but rather to understand both the consistencies and 
the contradictions. One possible explanation is that Katie recognized the occasional 
necessity of confessing to not knowing as a last resort. Another possibility is that Katie, 
who made this comment on the heels of her 1-year teaching anniversary, had begun to 
carve out a space for not-knowing in her practice.  
?What Would You Say to Parents?? 
There were times when the teachers made a specific distinction between their 
teaching philosophy and practice on one hand and the image they sought to present on the 
other. A third element to be considered is the image being perceived, which may not 
always match the image they seek to project. This is significant because it highlights the 
disjuncture between what teachers believe to be dominant representations of good 
practice and what parents, administrators, and classroom teachers believe is good 
practice. In an ideal world, good teachers would look like good teachers to the outside 
340   
 
 
world, but in practice this is not necessarily the case. Margaret, for instance, solicited 
advice from her fellow tea-drinkers about how to support her students? ability to spell 
inventively: ?That?s something I?ve been wanting to ask people about, inventive spelling 
and ? if they ever ask is it right ? I try to be truthful and keep them going. I?m not sure 
what other people do.? (Margaret, Afternoon tea, 01.24). Katie provided guidance, and 
once she understood how inventive spelling should fit into her teaching practice, she 
turned her concern from how to teach well to how to appear to teach well.  
Margaret: What would you say to parents if they saw it posted on the 
wall? 
Suhanthie: Would you post it on the wall? 
Katie: Yes. I would explain it to parents that the main idea of writing is to 
get your ideas out and that from that flow of ideas you develop lessons and 
bring out specific points. And explain to them that it?s a developmental 
process ? not with so much educational jargon ? That?s how I would 
explain it. And most parents go ?okay.? 
Suhanthie: Do they go ?okay?? 
Katie: Most of them do. 
Margaret separated her questions about how to teach from her concern with constructing 
the image of a competent teacher to present to her students? parents. The distinction she 
made highlights the gap between the identities the teachers aspire to and the images that 
they believe are sanctioned in the eyes of the parents of their young students. On another 
day, as Margaret was feeling self-doubting, I asked her about the distinction between her 
pedagogy and professional identity construction: 
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Suhanthie: Do you feel a lack of confidence about your teaching or about 
your ability to talk to administration? 
Margaret: Both, I think. 
Suhanthie: It?s not just because you don?t know the jargon? 
Margaret: No, I also don?t know what goes under the jargon. 
In this instance, the distinction between practice and image was not as clear-cut.  
To conceive of inventive spelling as developmental, relinquishing concern with 
the end product of ?correct? spelling, allows room for students to be in the process of 
learning to spell. Similarly, to allow beginning teachers (and indeed all teachers) to 
develop their practice within the process of learning to teach contradicts the static nature 
of the distinction between becoming a teacher and being a teacher.  
?You Mouthy Upstart?: Alexandra 
Unlike Katie and Margaret, Alexandra felt the need to appear less competent than 
she actually was. Her ability to advocate for her students and herself was muffled by her 
first-year teacher status. She was reluctant to make suggestions for fear of appearing 
pushy: 
It?s been a big part of this year, as a first-year teacher dealing with 
advocacy and being a first-year teacher all at the same time, it?s really 
hard sticking ? whatever part of your body out there for people to say, 
well who are you, you young upstart? I mean, they don?t call me young. 
You mouthy upstart. Why do you think that you know better than these 
experienced teachers and administrators. (Afternoon tea, 04.10) 
I asked, ?How do you know that people are thinking that?? and Alexandra replied: 
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I don?t necessarily know it, but I know when they are understanding me 
and believing me because they?ll move quicker on what I?m saying. 
(Afternoon tea, 04.10) 
She went on to give an example, one of many over the course of the year, when 
administrators indicated a trust in her judgment. In this discussion, she gave the example 
of a time when she questioned a more senior teacher?s assessment of students? readiness 
to advance to the next level. Her supervisor did not take action, but the guidance 
counselor did, which indicated to Alexandra that the guidance counselor respected her 
professional opinion despite her lack of experience. Her supervisor, however, did not 
respond to her concern in this instance and several others, which Alexandra interpreted as 
a lack of confidence in her assessment of the students? levels of proficiency. 
The pressure to take on a humble novice-teacher image had been with her since 
she began teaching. During her first semester of teaching (the semester before the study 
began), she e-mailed me:  
?I see a lot of things I would want to see done differently in all the classes, 
but I?m just a wing-floater, a newcomer, a novice, an upstart. What do I 
really know about the realities of teaching?? 
The image of an arrogant upstart served a silencing function. The fear of appearing 
mouthy had the potential to socialize Alexandra into silence. Belenky et al (1986) suggest 
that women?s socialization begins in silence and that women are taught to suppress their 
own voices and dismiss their own needs. It took a conscious effort for Alexandra to resist 
her acculturation and the oppressive function of the ?upstart? image.  
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?I Never have to Defend?: Jane 
Jane, the high school teacher, had an experience that differed significantly from 
those the other three teachers. She was never called upon to explain herself and rarely felt 
the need to defend herself. She told us: ?I don?t have to tell anyone at any time what I?m 
doing.? In fact, she felt that her status as beginning teacher gave her permission to be 
uninformed and to seek assistance: ?I usually take the other way, I?m the new teacher and 
I need help here.? (Jane, Afternoon tea, 12.06). When Katie implied that she had to work 
consciously to attain a degree of professional credibility, Jane expressed surprise: 
Katie: The [M.Ed in TESOL] program gave me a lot of stuff that I could 
say to other people to back up what I?m doing. The reason I?m doing this 
is because blah, blah, blah. The research said blah, blah, blah. 
Jane: Do you really find yourself defending? I never have to defend. No 
one ever asks what I did today. (Afternoon tea, 12.06) 
Jane did, however, feel the need to justify her teaching in other, non-dialogic and 
indirect ways. She sensed a pressure to teach in a way that supported 
grammatical development because this would appear as evidence of her teaching 
to the department head, Laura, who also taught the next level of ESOL: 
Jane: And then they?re off to Laura next year, and she?s gonna be like: 
?What the hell were you doing with them last year?? There?s that pressure 
where I want them to be here. Am I getting them there or we doing time? I 
know they?re benefiting just being in a supportive place for 1.5 hours a 
day, but ?? (Jane, Afternoon tea, 12.06) 
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Jane believed that the emotional support of her classroom benefited her students, but she 
was nonetheless concerned about their acquisition of grammatical knowledge and about 
whether this acquisition evidenced itself in the standardized test scores of her students:  
Jane: I never felt pressured to have to defend or get through a book or turn 
in lesson plans. 
Suhanthie: But you had the pressure of the standardized tests, right? ? If 
you had had a high failure rate, would it have reflected badly on you?  
Jane: You know, that?s funny. I still haven?t gotten a clear answer on 
whether the scores are broken down by teacher or not. I think that?s 
something Laura probably put in my head at the beginning and I don?t 
even know if it?s true. I don?t know if they would even know. I think if 
someone wanted to look it up that way they could. Well, Laura would 
totally boast. That?s how she would claim that she had to teach ESOL 3. 
Because I kinda wanted to teach ESOL 3, and she said: ?Well, my test 
scores are so high, and the principal wants me to keep teaching it because 
I have such a high pass rate.? Like they have an 85 percent pass rate which 
is incredible for ESOL 2 because at [a neighboring high school] they don?t 
even let their ESOL 2s take the test.? Paula [another teacher] would say ?I 
make sure he puts on my evaluation my pass rate? so maybe I misread it 
but it always felt like something I had to do. After the writing test Laura 
broke it down by teacher. (Jane, Dinner at her house, 06.25) 
At other times of the school year, Jane made similar references to the reflection of 
students? standardized test scores on her teaching ability. The pressure of a high pass rate 
345   
 
 
may have been artificially constructed by the department head, but it did serve the 
purpose of channeling Jane?s energies towards teaching to the grammar-based test. While 
Jane was at relative peace with her lack of teaching experience, she practiced in an 
environment that placed a high value on knowledge of grammar, and she was troubled by 
what she believed was her insufficient knowledge about formal grammar and its 
reflection on her image as a teacher. 
Jane: I feel that way when I sit with other ESOL teachers and it?s just 
grammar, grammar, grammar. I mean, I don?t even know the terms. I feel 
so overwhelmed by that. I have that sense of, God I?m not prepared to do 
that! 
Jane sensed that to appear to be a competent language teacher in her context, she needed 
to appear to be more knowledgeable about formal grammatical knowledge. 
Summary 
?My presence in the world is not so much of someone who is adapting to 
something ?external,? but of someone who is inserted as if belonging 
essentially to it. It?s the position of one who struggles to become the 
subject and the maker of history and not simply a passive, disconnected 
object.? (Freire, 1998, p.55) 
Lave and Wenger?s (1998) theories about communities of practice, like many other 
language socialization theories, assume the goal of language socialization to be 
acquisition and even mastery of the norms of the new culture. However, what language 
socialization theories have neglected is an eye to the possibility of a bidirectional 
blending of newcomers and oldtimers, as opposed to an absorption of newcomers into 
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oldtimer culture, of teachers ?belonging essentially? to the worlds they are entering and 
acting upon.  
Studies of teaching have historically presented the process of becoming a teacher 
as emanating solely from the interactions that teachers have with their contexts (Waller, 
1932, Lortie, 1975). These studies looked at relations of power within the context of 
school relationships as knowledge about teaching is produced. Katie, Margaret, Jane, and 
Alexandra illuminated for me that the shaping of practice is actually larger and more 
complicated than past studies have represented it to be. The teachers? descriptions of the 
incidents that contributed to their practice impelled me to broaden my understandings of 
practice to extend beyond what teachers do. Katie, Margaret, Alexandra, and Jane arrived 
at their consciousness through the social process they shared not only with individuals in 
their teaching environments, but with each other at the afternoon teas, with their families, 
their friends. Shades of identity are not limited to the specific contexts in which they are 
practiced, and human identity is not composed of individual and compact brick-like 
elements?teacher, friend, patient, spouse, mentor, parent, son, customer?stacked neatly 
together upon each other and mortared together to build a solid, bounded whole. In a 
similar illustration of this concept, when Price (2000) studied young black male students? 
understandings of success, he found his participants to be making student identity both in 
and out of their classrooms, in the hallways, with their friends and families, at 
MacDonalds. The professional identities that humans develop are often not limited to 
their professional environment but are complexly interwoven into whole, constantly 
changing person. I began to perceive teaching acts as only a part, albeit a significant part, 
of the larger project in which Katie, Jane, Margaret, and Alexandra were engaged, that is 
347   
 
 
the process of becoming language teachers. I came to understand practice as not just 
about tools and actions but also about ideology. 
Exploring the development of the teachers? professional identities highlights the 
crucial role that language plays in shaping the relationship among power, identity, and 
pedagogy. The teachers used language critically and analytically to change their 
perspectives and to challenge and transform the representations of practice offered by 
their teaching contexts. They focused on supporting each others? abilities to use language 
proficiently in their identity construction and sometimes even privileged their discursive 
practice over their pedagogical practice. They used language to change themselves, adjust 
their perspectives, and alter their contexts. 
It is important to note that this critical attention to language had been supported in 
the teachers? graduate coursework, and that the teachers themselves specifically linked 
their language awareness to their teacher preparation, in particular one psycholinguistics 
class and two assignments from that class. The connection is important in illustrating how 
a specific focus on the relationship between identity and language in teacher education 
has the potential to support in-service teachers? developing practice. In the 
psycholinguistics course, they had all read theorists who connected linguistic practice and 
power, including Sadker and Sadker (1994), Fairclough (1992), Luke (1986), and 
Matsuda (1991). For one critical discourse assignment, they worked in groups to analyze 
a tape of one student?s class with an eye towards unearthing power relations embedded 
within classroom interaction. Margaret, Katie, and Alexandra had worked together on this 
assignment, analyzing a class taught by Margaret. For the other assignment, they looked 
348   
 
 
at the linguistic and graphic representations in textbooks, analyzing messages telegraphed 
within the frame of social power relations. 
During the year of the study, all four teachers made reference to the effect of the 
psycholinguistics class on their heightened awareness of inequitably distributed social 
power, usually in relation to language. Alexandra, in particular, was deeply affected by 
the class. At a social gathering halfway through the year of the study, Alexandra said to 
the professor who had taught the class:  
?It?s kind of like a near-death experience, you saw the light, forever 
believe. Once you realize what you?re dealing with, you can?t turn back. 
Once you realize what you?ve come through, through the textbooks you 
had us analyze? 
You?ve given us this burden. I accept the burden. But I can see 
how there would be many teachers who are well-meaning, who ? this is a 
lot to think about, to process. If you don?t want to or don?t have a 
predisposition, if you honestly don?t recognize the need to constantly 
process all of these things that you see in terms of critical discourse 
analysis ? seeing everything through that lens makes you want to react, 
makes you want to respond and help or try to make a difference. We?re 
just up against this enormous challenge. (Dinner, Alexandra, 01.26) 
Alexandra acknowledged the lasting effect of her eye-opening experience with critical 
discourse analysis on her later philosophy and practice.  
The afternoon teas provided Katie, Alexandra, Margaret, and Jane a context in 
which to rehearse their performances, a space in which to experiment with their identities 
349   
 
 
and practices. In some instances, the curtain never rose. However, what was important 
was not the images they?d crafted but the character development, the actual process of 
fleshing out identities, sliding arms and legs snugly and deeply into the skins they were 
preparing to don. Several forms of support for their identity development were absent in 
their school contexts but present in the afternoon tea setting: acknowledgement of the 
?unfinishedness? (Freire, 1998) of identity, collaborative sustenance of practice rather 
than isolation and autonomy, permission to present tentative identities rather than fixed 
?facades,? and a space for not-knowing and for ?becoming? over ?being?.  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
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351   
 
 
 
 
Chapter 9. Conclusion 
Introduction 
In embarking on this study, I sought to problematize the fundamental tensions and 
shifts surrounding the meanings of optimal conditions in which Jane, Margaret, 
Alexandra, and Katie learned to teach. Several constructs were clearly absent in their 
institutional contexts but present in the afternoon tea setting, including acknowledgement 
of the ?unfinishedness? (Freire, 1998) of identity, collaborative sustenance of practice 
rather than isolation and autonomy, permission to present tentative identities rather than 
fixed ?facades,? and a space for not-knowing and for ?becoming? over ?being.? These 
constructs were helpful in supporting their practice. In order to examine meanings of 
pedagogy in the context of the lives and experiences of the four teachers, I set my study 
in the terrain between how Katie, Jane, Margaret, and Alexandra taught and how they 
thought about their teaching. This setting became fertile as the study unfolded and as I 
began to see how it nurtured the relationship between practice (what they did) and theory 
(how they thought about what they did), a relationship that came to life in the context of 
the afternoon tea conversations. Throughout my analysis, I considered the sense that the 
teachers were making of schooling during their first year of practice and the intrinsic 
politics these meanings gave rise to. 
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Some important themes in teaching ESOL and beginning teaching were fleshed 
out in this account of Alexandra, Katie, Jane, and Margaret?s lives. In this final chapter, I 
build upon my analysis in the previous chapters to focus in on two central constructs that 
coursed through the veins of this study. These were becoming and belonging. 
Conceptually, becoming connects identity?s past to its present, while belonging connects 
individuals? identities to their communities. I perceive these two constructs to cut 
horizontally across all chapters and to pose a challenge to widely accepted 
understandings of three intertwined themes: pedagogy, identity, and transformation. This 
study argues for embracing a broader definition of pedagogy, for revisioning the ways in 
which we understand identity, and for pushing against the boundaries of what counts as 
transformative practice. In this concluding chapter, I will elucidate on each of these 
themes. 
A Need for a Broader Definition of Pedagogy 
Through my analysis of the teachers? meanings of their work, my understandings 
of pedagogy widened to extend beyond what teachers do as they are teaching. As I sat 
beside the teachers, chatting with them and hearing them reflecting on their lives, I began 
to see the necessity of conceptualizing pedagogy in much broader and more complex 
terms than I had at the study?s beginning. While pedagogy is certainly about teachers 
interacting with their students in their classrooms, it cannot be viewed apart from the 
social and historical context that it is practiced in, the biographies of those who practice 
it, and the larger context of the relationship among power, identity, and culture. In 
examining pedagogy in these wider terms, I came to understand pedagogical practice as 
integrally linked to ethics, to relationship, and to identity.  
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This broader construct of pedagogy stands in contrast to traditional definitions, 
which have been understood in terms of technical and behavioral expectations. I found 
myself wavering between two representations of pedagogy. One was a limited view of 
pedagogical practice as static, theoretical, pre-packaged, and ready to be served up when 
new teachers finish their pre-service experiences and enter their classrooms; the other, 
which Katie, Jane, Margaret, and Alexandra were in pursuit of, was conceptual, fluid, and 
influenced by relationship and identity. It is important for educators to be thoughtful and 
critical about how pedagogy is defined because while meanings of pedagogy are 
constructed in different sites, these sites are situated within a set of power relations that 
privileges certain representations of pedagogy over others. Ideas about what makes 
pedagogy need to be examined within the context of their power relations in order to 
understand why some images of pedagogy persevere in school culture and some are 
submerged. Adopting a broader understanding of pedagogy that reaches beyond simply 
practice within classroom walls extends our vision beyond only action to include thought, 
context, and identity, thus challenging the historically engrained dichotomy between 
thought and action. Conceptualizing pedagogy as only a theoretical or practical construct 
is inadequate because embedded in theory is practice, and embedded in practice is theory. 
In the past, limited conceptualizations have framed pedagogy in terms of either teachers? 
actions (practice) or researchers? analysis (theory). These definitions of pedagogy seem to 
be inadequate and reinforce the historical power differential between teachers (usually 
women) and educational researchers (mostly men) and between theory and practice. This 
study highlighted for me the need for a definition of pedagogy that is mindful of the 
dialectical relationship between thought and action. 
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Becoming and Belonging in Identity Construction 
?To be human is to belong. Belonging is a circle that embraces everything: 
if we reject it, we damage our nature. The word ?belonging? holds together 
the two fundamental aspects of life: Being and Longing, the being of our 
Longing and the longing of our Being.? (O?Donohue, 1999, p. 2) 
O?Donohue tells us that belonging, being, and longing are inextricable from each 
other and from our humanness. The construct of belonging links our longing to our 
identities. The construct of becoming is similarly implicated in the construction of 
identity(ies) as fluid, multiple, and ever-changing because it is through longing to belong 
that we become. The process of becoming, or identity construction, is an integral site in 
which what we do (action) becomes connected to what we think (theory). When 
pedagogy is conceived of in terms of who we become, it therefore brings together 
thought and action. In the schools in this study, ESOL teachers? and ESOL students? 
identities were subject to a regime of truth that defined what counted as being a teacher 
and, in a parallel vein, what counted as being in ESOL. Historically in this country and 
more specifically in this study, beginning teachers have been viewed from a deficit 
perspective. Being in the process of becoming a teacher has translated to having an 
incomplete teacher identity. This understanding of becoming fails to allow room for the 
process of becoming an ESOL teacher as an experience in and of itself. Some of the 
teachers complained that they were expected to graduate from their M.Ed program and be 
teachers, with no space for actually learning to teach, for becoming. 
The relationship between being and becoming was central to the study. The 
afternoon teas provided Katie, Alexandra, Margaret, and Jane a context in which to 
355   
 
 
rehearse their performances, a space in which to experiment with their identities and 
practices. The acts they rehearsed during the afternoon teas were rarely ?performed? on 
school grounds, but developing their ideas and identities was important in their processes 
of becoming ESOL teachers. In the context of the afternoon teas, they could become 
rather than merely be, a distinction that liberated them to conceptualize identity as fluid 
and flexible. At the afternoon teas, they allowed each other to be ?unfinished? (Freire, 
1998), to view teaching in collaborative rather than isolated and autonomous terms, to 
present tentative identities rather than fixed ?facades,? to explore in community, to 
scaffold each other, to safely experiment, and to not-know. Exploring the development of 
the teachers? professional identities highlights the crucial role that language can play in 
shaping the relationship among power, identity, and pedagogy. The teachers used 
language critically and analytically to change their perspectives and to challenge and 
transform the representations of practice offered by their teaching contexts. They focused 
on supporting each others? abilities to use language proficiently in their identity 
construction and sometimes even privileged their discursive practice over their 
pedagogical practice. They used language to change themselves, adjust their perspectives, 
and alter their contexts. 
Just as becoming an ESOL teacher is viewed from a deficit perspective, so is 
becoming a mainstream student. ESOL status is viewed in remedial terms, with ESOL 
classes positioned to remedy non-native English speaker (NNES) status and help ESOL 
students to achieve the sought-after status of exiting ESOL. ESOL is always viewed in 
developmental terms because dominant representations of the school category of ESOL, 
integrally linked to the social category of NNES, is constructed only from a deficit 
356   
 
 
perspective. In the context of power relations between native speakers and language 
minorities, no space exists for being an ESOL student, an immigrant, and an NNES 
except in the context of becoming non-ESOL, American, and English-speaking in a way 
that approximates idealized ?native? English as closely as possible. Ironically, becoming 
non-ESOL often implies becoming monolingual. In order for a legitimate space to be 
carved out for the process of becoming to occupy, educators need to revision and 
consider understandings of becoming in the context of the power relations surrounding 
linguistic minority status. 
Revisioning Transformation 
There is a need for educators for social justice to push against the commonly 
accepted boundaries of what counts as transformation in order to problematize the 
hegemony (Price, 2004) of solitary and universally embraced representations. In this 
study, the connections among transformation, an ethic of caring, and identity are 
highlighted in Jane, Katie, Margaret, and Alexandra?s experiences. For many decades, 
transformation was understood in terms of action, framed as resistance to unjust or 
inequitable structures and practices. The ways in which power and privilege manifested 
themselves and the ways in which ESOL students, language learning, and pedagogy were 
constructed in the schools in this study complicated the teachers? naming and shaping of 
their own transformative practices. The representations of transformation carved out in 
the four teachers? practices were more complex and contextual than traditional definitions 
of transformation would imply and were inseparable from ethics and identity.  
One form of transformation that needs to be explored further is actually nested in 
the third space between access and transformation. The strategy of supporting students? 
357   
 
 
access to power so that they can later become transformative agents in their own lives 
and the lives of others is itself an insufficiently recognized form of transformation. For 
instance, teaching standard English with an explicit problematization of its arbitrary 
nature equips students to simultaneously succeed and transform. 
ESOL classes were originally established to enhance the lives of language 
minority students, but it is difficult for them to accomplish their purpose given the deficit 
meaning of the category ESOL and the way the category manifests itself in the culture 
and structure of schools. In the context of the schools in this study, to enhance the lives of 
language minority students through ESOL classes was synonymous with helping them to 
exit ESOL and become mainstream. The question that then arises is: Who is the self at 
the center of ESOL identity? The definition of ESOL student is rife with embedded 
contradictions, so discovering what transformation means necessarily implies learning 
how to manage all these contradictions inherent in teaching ESOL students, which, for 
the four teachers, was a dilemma entrenched in a framework of ethics and identity. 
The teachers were all motivated by a desire to see institutions, particularly the 
institution of schooling, become fairer, more just, and more equitable. This was, for all 
four, an ethical positioning in which they understood the pursuit of transformation to be 
largely about ethical practice. An overriding theme in the project of transformative first-
year teaching was crafting a pedagogy steeped in ethical responsibility to their students 
and, simultaneously, to their own ideals. While the strategies that Katie, Jane, Alexandra, 
and Margaret have arrived upon are not perfectly comfortable for them, they represent the 
most caring, most ethical balance that the four teachers are able to negotiate within their 
contexts and therefore are their representations of transformation. For instance, drawing 
358   
 
 
on students? home cultures connects students? lives to their learning and challenges 
monocultural definitions of knowledge, thus representing, in theory, epistemological 
transformation. However, all four teachers were practicing in contexts in which, to 
varying degrees, cultural difference could be shameful. This highlighted for me that 
transformation cannot be conceptualized apart from the intricacies of the context it is 
practiced within. 
Just as ethics were implicated in transformation, so was identity. Teachers? 
positionality towards their students contributes to the shaping of identities. While I have 
highlighted commonalities among the teachers? representations of transformation, this 
study simultaneously made it patently obvious that transformation looks different 
depending on who is practicing it. For instance, Alexandra?s version of transformation 
included drawing attention to dominant images of what girls? bodies should look like. 
Katie, conversely, steered clear of conversations about female physicality in order to 
avoid underscoring connections between girls? bodies and their value. Both teachers were 
practicing pedagogy designed to transform media-generated images of female beauty, but 
their transformative approaches looked radically different. Despite their dissimilar 
appearances, both pedagogical leanings were designed to challenge an inequitable status 
quo.  
Foucault (1978) writes about the ?specific intellectual? as one who has two tasks: 
the first is to identify and describe cracks in the dominant systems of thinking and doing, 
and the second is to extend and develop alternative systems that exist and even function 
within the established context of political struggles. Foucault does not suggest throwing 
out the old systems and replacing them with new. Beyond being unrealistic in this study, 
359   
 
 
this all-or-nothing strategy creates a dualism in which the old system in its entirety is 
understood to be evil and the new alternative system is exclusively good. In this third 
space between the old and the new is the quixotism of teachers building a utopian world 
in which they have all necessary resources and support and in which their students 
emerge from uncomplicated, shiny, happy histories. In view of the actual worlds they 
lived in, Margaret, Jane, Katie, and Alexandra carved out meanings of transformation that 
included responsibility to their students, caring, and justice. These helped them to forge 
conceptualizations of identity that extended beyond ?oppressed linguistic minority? or 
?successfully assimilated,? supporting the excavation of a hybrid space between these 
two poles. This practice of challenging dichotomies extends beyond supporting identity 
development to provoke epistemological change because it offers the possibility of 
knowledge that arises from within the cracks of what we already know. A similar 
example is the teachers? embracing of the value of partial answers, which breaks down 
polar definitions of knowledge and allows students to discover for themselves so that 
they become active in the generation of their own knowledge. Canagarajah makes the 
distinction between a reproduction orientation, in which ?subjects are passive [and] lack 
agency to manage linguistic and ideological conflicts to their best advantage? (p. 2) and 
resistance perspectives, in which ?students have agency to think critically and work out 
ideological alternatives that favor their own empowerment.? (p. 2). Rather than handing 
students answers, the teachers created space for the meeting of students? knowledge and 
school culture, a site that gave shelter to the construct of becoming. For the teachers, 
respecting unfinishedness and creating space for their students? processes of becoming (a 
360   
 
 
space that was, ironically, elusive in their own practices) was rooted in ethical 
commitment.  
While this study has helped me to problematize the systems currently in place, it 
has not offered clear-cut transformative alternatives to traditional pedagogies. It has 
simply allowed me to work within the deterritorialized terrain (St. Pierre and Pillow, 
2000) between what is and what could be. For instance, for the teachers, negotiating the 
line between supporting students? home cultures and gatekeeping around what counts as 
American culture was murky; for students, a fine line existed between surrendering to 
dominant culture and appropriating it as a tool in their own destinies. Rather than offering 
prescriptive solution, the teachers? practices represent what Price and Osborne (2000) 
name humanizing pedagogies. Humanizing pedagogies offer constructions of pedagogy 
in which students? identities are fleshed out and their environments contextualized. 
Rather than submitting to the Self and Other constructions available to their students, 
Katie, Jane, Margaret, and Jane helped their students to identify a hybrid space in which 
students could explore and interact with the dominant discourses, disabling the discourses 
and leaving the students free to explore alternative subject positions. In this way, 
transformation was motivated by concerns for ethics and identity. 
Tranformative practice was similarly connected to belonging. As the teachers 
entered into and acted upon the culture of schooling, they changed its nature. For 
instance, as Margaret entered into her school culture, embracing her ideas about 
pedagogies of compassion, she changed her colleague Phyllis? ideas about what it means 
to teach. The process of belonging helped her to be transformative. The need to belong is 
a fundamental part of being human. The primary project being undertaken by both 
361   
 
 
beginning ESOL teachers and their students is the quest for mastery of a new culture in 
order to belong to it. However, aching to belong can quickly translate to assimilation or 
indoctrination, and finding a balance between the two requires access to several key 
ingredients: discursive expertise, critical positioning towards power inequalities, and a 
strong affinity with and legitimation of one?s Self. This study addressed two large 
questions that relate to belonging: how can beginning teachers come to belong to their 
school communities without losing touch with their ideals and ideologies? And how can 
ESOL students come to belong to their new communities without relinquishing parts of 
themselves? Language played a significant role in the answers to these two questions, 
which will be explored next. 
Longing to Belong in ESOL Teachers? Lives 
The teachers used a critical consciousness of language to assist them in their quest 
to belong. Within the context of the afternoon teas, they developed strategies and 
discourses that might secure their admission into the communities of practice that they 
were entering, all the while seeking support from each other to maintain the ideologies 
they could ?go home at rest with? (Alexandra, Afternoon tea, 06.19). They sought for 
themselves, as for their students, ways to truly belong to communities instead of being 
neutrally absorbed into them, ways to construct identities that were not simply pleasing 
and appropriate in the community they were seeking to enter, but rather that allowed 
them full participation and agency without relinquishing slices of their ideals and their 
selves. 
The concept of community is current and popular within the discourses 
surrounding teaching, but what does it mean? Within all four school ?communities? of 
362   
 
 
this study, ESOL teachers? and ESOL students? voices were marginalized. ESOL 
students were taunted for their ESOL status, excluded from participation in school events, 
not represented in their school newspapers or on social studies maps, and left out of 
International Night celebrations. They were invisible within some of the representations 
of community operating within the walls of their school buildings by virtue of their 
ESOL identity. The teachers, too, were often isolated. Britzman criticized the traditional 
view of teaching as a secluded activity, noting that: ?[i]ndividualizing the social basis of 
teaching dissolves the social context and dismisses the social meanings that constitute 
experience as lived. These forces are displaced by the autonomy and very real isolation of 
the teacher in the current school structure? (Britzman, 1991, pp. 237-8). The tension 
between isolation and autonomy in teaching complicated the teachers? access to 
professional support, begging questions about the ways in which schools can build 
community among teachers through, for instance, supportive peer observations, 
collaborative teaching, and coteaching. The mentorship programs in place for the four 
teachers were unequivocally paltry, with some of the teachers in this study speaking with 
their assigned mentors only once. Because good models of mentorship are scarce, there 
was a need for meanings of effective mentorship practices to be addressed. Jane 
suggested that each beginning teacher might need a community of mentors, so that a 
variety of people are available for teachers to turn to, depending on the challenge being 
faced?a mentor with an ESOL specialization, a mentor who can competently negotiate 
administrative tasks, a mentor with expertise in a specific grade level, a mentor from a 
different school. (Jane, Dinner at her house, 05.07).  
363   
 
 
Longing to Belong in ESOL Students? Lives 
For the students learning to belong, one strategy that addressed this dilemma was for their 
teachers to support the development of voice as they taught language. A meaning of 
language teaching that emerged from this study moved beyond simply teaching students 
to communicate in a way that is pleasing and appropriate to the community they are 
seeking to belong to. Rather, the teachers sought to teach in a way that supported 
students? capacity to connect classroom learning to personal experience, underscoring 
that ESOL students? experiences are worth sharing. Belonging extends beyond merely 
being subsumed into a culture, it includes full participation complete with all resources 
students bring. Belonging to certain communities can sometimes require students to 
relinquish slices of their identity, for instance their languages or language variations that 
are associated with less social power. One way to challenge this inequity was for teachers 
to question the legitimacy of the forms of speech sanctioned in educational institutions 
and to scaffold students? recognition of the arbitrary nature of spellings and grammatical 
form. This is not to say that it was advisable to withhold information about grammar, 
since students might have needed it in order to succeed in a society that legitimates this 
knowledge, but that it is possible for teachers to teach grammar and form without 
naturalizing their validity.  
The stigma of ESOL across all four schools of the study both resulted from and 
contributed to its construction as deficit. ESOL students clamored to exit ESOL because 
they were embarrassed to be associated with the category. Their reactions illustrate how 
belonging is not only about relationship, it extends to identity. The students in this study 
did not simply want to belong?if this were the case, they would have been content to 
364   
 
 
belong to the ESOL communities in their schools. The processes of becoming and 
belonging cannot be viewed apart from the meanings of school categories in the context 
of power. The school categories were situated within a hierarchy that privileged exiting 
from ESOL, so it followed naturally that ESOL students wanted to belong to the more 
prestigious category of ?non-ESOL? students. Norton?s (2002) notion of ?imagined 
communities? highlights the power of an imagined sense of belonging, the vision of a 
future self situated within a desired community, to support ESOL students? and teachers? 
investments in their identity construction. However, examining imagined communities in 
the context of complicated power relations within the institution of schooling raises 
questions about the indistinct line between an imagined community and a regime of truth 
(Carroll, Motha, and Price, 2004). 
The deficit construction of ESOL was connected to the likelihood of school 
failure among ESOL students. Students who were in ESOL were excluded from 
participating in class, were denied resources, were assumed to be less able than they 
actually were, and were absent from the grand metanarative offered within school walls. 
Ironically, while multilingualism, the reason for students? placement in ESOL, itself is an 
asset, the ways in which ESOL is constructed as a deficit school category establishes 
conditions for school failure among ESOL students.  
The issues of belonging and community hearken to the category ?World English? 
and the identity of ?World English speaker.? The study raised questions in my mind 
about policies regarding the placement of ?World English? speakers across the United 
States. Assigning students of color who speak English language variations to ESOL 
classes while mainstreaming white nonstandard English speakers contributes to both 
365   
 
 
linguicism and racism. Policies that authoritatively exclude or anglicize nonstandard 
varieties of English amount to racism and language discrimination. The connections 
between belonging and linguistic practice were an important part of teachers? and 
students? identity constructions. 
Implications 
This study did not set out to tell complete stories. I simply used various lenses to 
view different parts of the process. What I offer here is consequently neither an account 
of passive socialization into compliance nor a ?perfect counter-hegemonic story? 
(Villenas, 1998). However, some general areas of theoretical interest that became 
apparent merit discussion. I do not separate the implications for this study into disparate 
categories, such as teaching, teacher education, curriculum, policy, and research, because 
I?d like to avoid fortifying the artificial partitions among these categories. Examining 
them separately can contribute to reinforcing their hierarchical ordering and can ignore 
the rich resources offered by, for instance, teachers as curriculum developers and teachers 
as policy makers. 
Many constructs were absent within school walls but apparent in the afternoon tea 
setting: acceptance for the fluidity of identity, collaborative sustenance of practice rather 
than isolation and autonomy, permission to present tentative identities rather than fixed 
?facades,? and a space for not-knowing and for ?becoming? over ?being.? Rather than 
suggesting that first-year teachers have regular tea parties in order to access these 
constructs, or even that they be involved in programs that remove them from their school 
context to one in which experimentation and uncertainty are acceptable, I propose that 
attention be paid to how schools can change to make space for those missing constructs, 
366   
 
 
how social and professional networks that sustain beginning teachers can be created in 
order to allow the institution of schooling to function as a cohesive learning community. I 
suggest a need for change in teacher education, public school systems, first-year support, 
and professional development in order to provide the type of support that Alexandra, 
Katie, Jane, and Margaret identified as important but lacking in their institutional 
settings. 
The connection between discourse and practice in the process of becoming ESOL 
teachers is important in illustrating how a specific focus on the relationship between 
identity and language in teacher education has the potential to support in-service 
teachers? developing practice, their ?becoming.? The study suggests the potential 
usefulness of a focus in first-year and ongoing professional development on discursive 
practice, on knowing ?how to say things? (Katie, Afternoon Tea, 11.15) to ensure that 
teachers are able to access the ?shared repertoire of communal resources,? including 
discursive resources (Lave and Wenger, 1999). 
The connections between the teaching of English and the development of ESOL 
students? voices, positionalities, and identities became conspicuous in this study. In 
watching and listening to Jane, Alexandra, Margaret, and Katie, I came to understand the 
limitations of communicative competence as a motivating ideal in the pedagogy of ESOL 
teachers. The concept of communicative competence, while important and valuable in its 
original context, has evolved into a regime of truth that needs to be critiqued, 
reconceptualized, and expanded upon. 
The teachers explored ways to make space for student knowledge without 
reinforcing the stigma associated with difference. They discussed the need for multiple 
367   
 
 
labels, identifications, and identities. An element that became visible was the ways in 
which norms are constructed, for instance norms of whiteness, native English-speaker 
status, and maleness. The importance of questioning associations between dominant 
categories and neutrality surfaced, as did the necessity of examining how stereotypes are 
constructed and sustained. In listening to transcriptions, I came to develop an 
understanding of how difference is discussed and the importance of overcoming silences 
that allow discrimination to exist. The study highlighted awareness of the failure of 
ESOL curricula to challenge the ?fixity? (Bhabha, 1994) of ways in which knowledge is 
coded. Some curricula in this study were insufficiently flexible to accommodate both 
school and student definitions of knowledge in the context of a fluid and ongoing 
reconstruction of identity. The importance of moving beyond fixed and limited 
definitions of culture, the ?holy trinity? (Delrosso, 2000) of race, class and gender, 
became apparent, with teachers considering cultures as disparate as mental illness, foster 
families, and life in Appalachia and paying attention to the ways in which multiple 
categories of difference intersect. 
This need for understandings of knowledge that allow fluidity between school 
knowledge and home or student knowledge is particularly important in the light of a 
current trend towards curriculum that is ?teacher-proof? and unidirectional. The 
transmission-based orientation of curriculum being adopted around the country creates no 
space in which teachers can weave students? identities and knowledge together with their 
current contexts. For instance, the Open Court curriculum being adopted by almost every 
school in the LA County Unified District includes heavily phoneme-based scripted 
lessons and school officials hired to circulate and ensure that teachers do not deviate from 
368   
 
 
the script (Ulanoff, 2004). Under these circumstances, teachers cannot be guided by 
students? needs, interests, and experiences and are forced to teach in ways that are 
disconnected from their students? and indeed their own lives. 
The teachers? deliberate intentions to make connections between students and 
learning prompted questions about the paradigms of language teaching that dominate 
language teaching. The study suggested a need for TESOL methods classes to sustain a 
critical eye towards the construct of methods (Pennycook, 2001) and for grammar classes 
to include a focus on the pedagogy of teaching language instead of merely on grammar. 
As TESOL teacher candidates, learning to connect students and learning was a more 
relevant focus than learning than to merely transmit language as an autonomous system 
disconnected from students. 
The dominant discourses in the multicultural literature surrounding teaching 
minority students do indeed embrace connections. However, Alexandra, Margaret, Katie, 
and Jane?s experiences during the year of the study complicated the meanings of these 
connections as they reflected upon and struggled with the role they played in the 
construction of their students? identities and positionalities. For instance, seeking to 
strengthen students? connections to their home cultures had the potential to encourage 
stereotyping and wakened the possibility of unintentionally reinforcing hegemonic 
constructs of culture. The teachers explored ways to connect home and school cultures 
without universalizing ?culture? or ignoring the complexity and subjective nature of 
culture. Similarly, encouraging self-naming was supportive of students? agency, but it can 
create the possibility of students choosing assimilationist or self-oppressive 
identifications, and furthermore could potentially encourage limited and monocultural 
369   
 
 
interpretations of identity. The teachers did not seek to reject the value these strategies 
but explored ways of using them thoughtfully.  
Further Research 
This study raised a number of questions in my mind: 
? What would pedagogy look like if it connected students? thoughts to their 
learning? 
Just as pedagogical practice cannot be viewed apart from teachers? theorizing, lives, and 
contexts, it should not be viewed apart from learners? biographies, identities, and 
thoughts. Pedagogy is a dialogic process, not simply delivered by teachers but co-
constructed between teachers and students. An important part of ESOL learning is 
therefore the theoretical processes that students go through. Pedagogy is not just about 
how ESOL students learn, but how they think about how they learn, and an understanding 
of this dialectic would support the processes of learning.  
? What would this broadened understanding of pedagogy look like if it made 
connections between students? and teachers? perspectives of pedagogy? 
Students? learning does not take place in isolation any more than teachers? learning does. 
Examining these perspectives in a dialogic framework offer possibilities for a more 
complete understanding of learning processes. 
? How is an ethic of caring implicated in pedagogy?  
Insufficient attention has been paid to the ethical aspects of pedagogy. With teaching 
evolving in a technocratic, mechanical, paternalistic framework, the ways in which social 
justice connects to caring and responsibility towards students have been neglected. 
? What is the relationship among grammar, identity, and social transformation?  
370   
 
 
Grammar has been viewed as an autonomous, neutral body of knowledge, but the ways in 
which grammar is situated and taught in ESOL classrooms profoundly affects students? 
identities and positionalities. I see a need for further research that examined grammar not 
only in terms of limited definitions of learning and acquisition, but in the context of 
identity development and power. 
? How can ?coming to voice? (Hill Collins, 2000; Tarule, 1996) be a project of the 
ESOL curriculum? 
The ESOL curricula in this study failed to create spaces for students? experiences and 
perspectives. Without attention to the identities that ESOL students? bring to their classes, 
the voices that they develop cannot be their own. 
? How is race connected to linguistic minority status?  
Work at the intersection of research on anti-racism and research on language minority 
identity is sparse. This terrain merits further exploration because much of linguistic 
discrimination is rooted in racism. How can ESOL classrooms equip students with a 
critical consciousness of racism, sexism, and other forces of discrimination? 
? How can teachers challenge silences in which oppression is nurtured without 
reinscribing discriminatory speech? 
There were many subjects during the year of the study that were difficult to talk about to 
fear of sounding discriminatory. For instance, it was sometimes difficult to challenge 
stereotypes about black boys or to critique dominant norms of female beauty without 
highlighting and potentially legitimating these. In order for us to challenge 
discrimination, we need to find ways to talk about it. 
371   
 
 
? How can teachers support the fluidity of identity in a world that conceptualized 
identity in static terms? 
Although the teachers in this study had sophisticated understandings of the hybrid nature 
identity, many educators in the larger institution of schooling view dimensions of 
difference, particularly national and cultural difference, in dichotomous terms. In addition 
to learning to challenge these conceptualizations, attention needs to be paid to ways of 
supporting those teachers who defy dichotomous thinking in the context of institutions 
that do not.  
? How can schools challenge the deeply engrained negative constructions of ESOL 
within a world that views NNESs negatively?  
The negative connotations associated globally with NNES must be critiqued by society at 
large. This study calls for further exploration of ways in which ESOL teachers acting at 
the individual level can contribute to this process.  
Looking at the Light Cast by Someone Else?s Lamp 
We have a reached a point in history when looking at the light cast by someone else?s 
lamp can have dire consequences. Increasingly high-stakes testing, standardized learning 
goals, and banking-model curricula compel ESOL teachers to teach in ways that snuff out 
students? lights and limit the space available to connect students? lives with their learning. 
Teachers? own perspectives and experiences are divorced from their pedagogies, and the 
heavily socializing influences of the institution of schooling limit the range of legitimate 
definitions of transformation, pedagogy, and identity. ESOL teachers seek to develop 
teaching identities that do not unwittingly erase their selves. If English language teaching 
is to improve the lives and realities of ESOL students and teachers, ESOL educators must 
372   
 
 
continue to explore the pedagogical possibilities between resisting oppressive forces 
towards assimilation and helping ESOL students to craft pleasing but self-erasing 
identities. 
ESOL students? identities are in similar peril. Rising racialized and gendered anti-
immigrant sentiment feed their fear of being different and of deviating from a white, 
English-speaking American norm. The pressure to assimilate extinguishes some lamps 
while forcing students to gaze at others. The effects of the Homeland Security Act and 
the USA Patriot Act redefine what counts as light by limiting the range of acceptable 
identities. The various anti-bilingual education propositions and English Only initiatives 
around the country contribute to the shroud of shame spread over multilingualism and 
over immigrants? connections with their first languages. 
 ESOL teachers face the daunting challenge of allowing the light cast by others? 
lamps to illuminate their paths while still tending the flame in their own lamps. 
Furthermore, they seek the same for their students. Such a charge is complex and elusive, 
but it is my hope that in demonstrating the ways in which four teachers accepted and 
grappled with the challenge, this study has taken a step towards extending our 
understandings of the possibilities available to language professionals. 
 
373   
 
 
 
 
 
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