ABSTRACT
In recent years the language teaching profession has witnessed a number of articles, chapters, books, and presentations on the moral, spiritual, and critical nature of language pedagogy. We language teachers and teacher educators are reminded that we are all driven by personal convictions-whether religious or philosophical-about what this world should look like, how its people should behave, how its governments should control that behavior, and how its inhabitants should be partners in the stewardship of the planet. We are exhorted to “embody in our teaching a vision of a better and more humane life” (Giroux and McLaren, 1989, p. xiii). Or, as Pennycook stated it, “the crucial issue here is to turn classrooms into places where the accepted canons of knowledge can be challenged and questioned” (1994, p. 298; see also Pennycook, 1999; Edge, 2003). Questions about moral and religious imperatives of teachers have been raised for a number of decades. In the 1960s, Postman and Weingartner (1969) shook some educational foundations with their bestseller, Teaching as a Subversive Activity. In their stinging critique of the American educational establishment, they challenged teachers to enable their students to create change in social, economic, and political systems, to cut through burgeoning bureaucracies (which, they noted, are repositories of conventional assumptions and standard practices), and to release us from the stranglehold of the communications media, which was (and is still) creating its own version of censorship. While the charge to teachers to stimulate critical thinking among our learners is undoubtedly universally embraced, Postman and Weingartner’s notion of teachers as “subversive” covert agents raises more than some eyebrows. And then Richard Robison notes in his chapter that the “ethics of truthfulness” for English language teachers poses further moral dilemmas today. David Smith reminds us in his chapter that in the same decade of the 1960s, Edward Anthony (1963, p. 64) referred to an “approach” to language teaching as “a point of view, a philosophy, an article of faith.” In the 1970s, the early seeds of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) were sown (Savignon, 1972), with its assumptions about the roles of learners and teacher, power and authority in the classroom, and the value of student opinion, voice, and identity. Ryuko Kubota’s chapter aptly demonstrates cross-cultural dilemmas in practicing CLT. Our ostensibly harmless references to the “gospel according to CLT,” may have more than a grain of truth in them.
