Introduction to the Special Issue on Critical Language Pedagogy

1. Introduction

Readers of the journal Education Sciences will be broadly aware that within educational research as a whole, a position exists that analyzes educational issues and researches questions from an overall contextual perspective that locates them in respect to values such as equity, liberty, and social justice. In general, to the extent that a holistic position is taken in educational research, so too can a scholar or investigator consider societal factors as having a bearing on the specifics of an inquiry. Equally, if operating in one of the subfields of education, as when a study on the sociology of education is necessarily supported by a particular social theory, that theory may be, on the one hand, functional—that is, based on an understanding or belief that societies are functioning to the general benefit of their members. On the other hand, it may be critical or oriented to conflict—that is, starting from the observation that, all too often, societies are not functional, and do not benefit their members as a whole, or certain groups (or classes). Additionally, this applies to most, perhaps all, aspects of educational research, whether located in social subareas such as the sociology of education, the economics of education, the social psychology of education, assessment and evaluation, not to mention curriculum theory, though it may be less evident in fields such as instructional psychology or educational psychology, which have historically not shown much interest either in holistic perspectives or critical views. However, it is certainly very evident in areas that take an oppositional stance directly, as in antiracist education, feminist education studies, and the one closest to the present issue, critical pedagogy.

As we drop down into further subdivisions of education, greater levels of specialization and narrower foci mean that specialists in one area may not be aware of others. Critical pedagogy, as the most famous version of radical education, well-established for more than 50 years now following the work of Paulo Freire and many others, has spawned a range of its own specialisms reflecting both differential sites of oppression, such as gender, race, and class, as well as curricular areas, such as mathematics, social studies, language arts, and, the focus of the present issue, second languages (by which we also refer to heritage and additional languages). These areas naturally have established their own favored journals, but it is important for education as a whole to see some of these details. Thus, it is valuable for specialists to seek out opportunities to present their work outside of their most well-known outlets, and as the editor of this Special Issue, I was very pleased to be approached by the officers of Education Sciences. This Special Issue presents the work of a range of young scholars and a range of representative issues and areas in critical language pedagogy. By doing so in an open source journal, we hope to make our work maximally accessible, as befits an area (critical language pedagogy) with a strong egalitarian, democratic ethos.

2. Locating the Area of Critical Language Pedagogy

One way to present critical language pedagogy is to say that it arises out of a disciplinary meeting, or interface, between critical pedagogy and the field of second language studies, also known as applied linguistics. Critical pedagogy itself was of course always extremely interested in language. Freire was not only a philosopher of education, he was also a teacher of first language literacy to adults, and when his work first surfaced in English, American scholars located him in the field of adult education as a literacy specialist. Like critical pedagogy, applied linguistics (sometimes defined as the application of linguistic ideas to practical problems in society, in practice particularly those of second language teaching) is an outgrowth of complex social forces in the post-World War Two period, though as almost the counter-image of critical pedagogy, as a field it is a product of the developed Anglo-American world and English-based colonial power.

Ironically, both critical pedagogy and applied linguistics shared in and benefited from the easy large-scale flows of English-using, imperial-language-using scholars, across national and international boundaries and spaces in the 1960s. International students seeking a space for personal development (but with limited academic English skills) under the focus of neo-colonialism and capitalism approached the United States and the United Kingdom in some cases supported by funds intended to strengthen international bonds to the favor of the receiving country (e.g., those of the Fulbright Program or the Ford Foundation), and as a result, intensive English programs developed and upon them was built the academic discipline reflecting the special features of (mostly) adult second language learning.

A smaller flow went, in some sense, in the opposite direction, as this was a time of US-supported coups in much of Central and South America, and following what we now call “regime change”, exiled scholars and activists such as Paulo Freire, Augustus Boal (and others [1]) moved in the other direction, also as in Freire’s case capitalizing on the availability of funds in US higher education (resources at Harvard University for his early stay in the US) and the more international operation of the World Council of Churches, eventually allowing him to find a home in exile in Switzerland, and a well-supported point of access to publishing in English. His work found eager readers in the decades of social and political turmoil, from the late 1960s on through the 1970s and early 1980s, by which point it had had its name changed (from radical pedagogy to critical pedagogy) and had found its second language, English, not only in its forms of publication but in the teachers who took up these ideas from first language literacy and made them work for second languages.

A handful of teachers in the US adult immigrant field—that is, the area in applied linguistics closest to Freire’s work—picked up on his ideas as early as 1972 (e.g., Nina Wallerstein), and had practical publications in print by the early 1980s [2]. One or two scholarly analyses were carried out in dissertation form and emerged as journal articles in the same period of time [3]. Somewhat separately, one or two education academics in Canada (e.g., Roger Simon) brought Freirean ideas to the attention of developing young applied linguists there, and in due course, by the turn of the 1990s we saw the beginnings of critical applied linguistics [4], which conceptually could be said to encompass critical language teaching, although the practical tradition in this area preceded the development of the wider, more theoretical and disciplinary tradition.

It is not my intent to probe the history of ideas of critical language pedagogy here, as opposed to mainly setting the scene for education-oriented readers less familiar with second language studies [5]. The broad picture is that, over the last 30 years, a close-knit skein of lines of practical and theoretical work associated with terms such as critical language pedagogy, critical literacy, critical applied linguistics, critical language awareness, feminist language pedagogy (among others) have progressed, steading increasing in size, depth, and breadth, since that time, moving from an initial narrow focus on English to other languages, and from a primary concern with class or a general understanding of oppression and marginalization, to more specific foci such as gender, race, and sexual identity and their intersections.

Of course, this work is marginal (almost by definition) to the mainstream, just as critical pedagogy as a field is too. Despite 30 years of development in connection to second languages, or 50 if we consider critical pedagogy (or indeed, 200 years, if we consider the history of radical pedagogy), precisely because the analyses of society and of what it means to be a human being which underlie these traditions, run contrary to those of mainstream society, which is to say, dominant forces in the world as a whole over these periods (which we could these days refer to using a term such as “the global North”), so this work will always struggle to be heard. Many education scholars will simply never have heard of it (and might dismiss it if they had), and many second language studies specialists will not have found reference to it in their training programs or may have felt it irrelevant to their circumstances and their values if they had. With comparatively few opportunities to try out their ideas in practice, critically minded second language teacher-researchers work with little or no grant-funded support, usually cannot command large sample sizes for quantitative studies, and are rarely able to devote the years necessary for ethnographic work. However, work accumulates, albeit slowly. One of the most encouraging features of the work in critical second language pedagogy as I have seen it grow in the last 20 years is its appearance in cultures and regions where it was not visible at all before: West Asia, Northwest Asia, and East and Southeast Asia. On the other hand, it remains to be seen whether the early, somewhat favorable conditions it encountered in South Africa will enable the variant there (critical language awareness) to continue; the lack of use of the term in continental Europe is a puzzle (with exceptions in Portugal and Germany: [6,7]), and though publications reflecting its South American home regularly emerge from, e.g., Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina, it is not less marginal there than anywhere else, I suspect. The material conditions of resource availability and political constraint are not necessarily trumped by the power of ideas and the affective forces of enthusiasm around the world, which is to say, as scholars and thinkers, we need pessimism of the intellect as well as optimism of the will.

3. The Articles Themselves

With optimism in place, I hope readers will proceed (willingly) to the contributions presented in this collection. The sequence of articles begins with consciousness and ends with action. This, I believe, is broadly consistent with Freire’s way of thinking, though of course a praxis that involves a cyclical interaction between action and thought is most desirable. We begin with Leal’s depiction of aspects of the development of critical consciousness among second language teachers [8]. A feminist consciousness then grounds the study of feminist language pedagogy, as presented by Cannizzo [9]. A slight shift of focus, to language itself, takes us to Siqueira’s consideration of English as a Lingua Franca [10] (which follows from critical language pedagogy’s emphasis on critiquing the content of instruction itself), and somewhat relatedly, Parba’s study of the role played by critical vocabulary in critical language teaching [11]. Both Cannizzo and Parba are also very much concerned with the classroom, and this is matched by the two papers focusing on classroom activities under the heading of tasks (Crookes and Ziegler [12]; Farias and da Silva, [13]). The first of these two asks about the engagement of critical language pedagogy with one other important tradition in second language curriculum (associated with the term “task”); the second shows how this may play out in materials and the classroom. We then step up to the level of (critical) language teacher education, an obvious necessity if critical language pedagogy is to maintain itself and expand, with West’s depiction of the challenges faced by critically minded language teachers [14]. Additionally, we finish with action, the always-desired outcome (rarely documented) of critical language pedagogy, with Haüsler’s account of small-scale actions pursued by her second language teachers-in-development [15]. For the final paper itself, I asked contributors to each write a few personal words in the conclusion and these are bound up together in the final short “envoi”. This last piece reflects the collaborative nature of what the authors of the papers did to put it together.

I extend my appreciation to the contributors to this Special Issue for their patient and dedicated work. We all read and commented on each other’s work, constituting ourselves briefly as an educational collective in opposition to individualistic conceptions of scholarly work, as these papers were developed. This was an attempt to not only talk (or write) the talk but walk the critical walk while developing the radical ideas. I also thank the editors and reviewers of Education Sciences for this opportunity to reach a world audience, many of the less resourced of whom might not, but for the power of open access, have a chance to be apprised of this work.