Comfortable Rut

Why are you moving to/living in Beijing? This is a question that we have been asked more than any other over the last four months. I’ve thought a lot about this – seeing how the countless subway/taxi rides provide ample time for thinking – and even I am confused about my answer. One answer would be to further our careers, specifically my husband’s. As a language teacher this is very valuable experience for me and with his desire to work in business we felt this would be as good a place to start as any. International business experience is invaluable and Mandarin is becoming more desirable in business every year. Although this seems like reason enough to come, I don’t think this is really why we’re here.

My final answer would be that we are here in China because we were too comfortable in our lives at home. I don’t mean comfortable in a cozy way, I mean comfortable in a lazy way. We needed growing, stretching, and learning opportunities – because I believe that without such we will only move backwards. We had fantastic lives back home, we gave up a lot to come here, and sometimes I’ve found myself questioning why. However, I must remember the way growing experiences make me feel and I like that feeling a lot. I enjoy being stretched and I appreciate challenges. Weird, I know. Things were a little too easy for us at home and we needed a little challenge. I don’t want to be too comfortable because if I am that means I’m probably not paying enough attention to those around me and my place in the world.

No, I don’t think that you need to move to the other side of the world to grow. Of course not. There are countless ways that we can keep progressing intellectually and spiritually, I just think that we should never stop looking for opportunities to do so. And if we do find ourselves in a comfortable rut, we gotta do something to get moving!

My Positionality

Spring semester 2011 I took a class from Dr. Cinthya Saavedra at Utah State University to finish my Masters degree. I wish that I would have taken this class years ago. This course made me want to learn, think, share, and grow and never stop doing so. This course opened my eyes to who I am and how I view the world around me and my place in it - my positionality.

The following is my final paper for the course and I would like to share it to introduce the type of things I plan on discussing here on this blog:

"If this final paper is intended to be an honest dialogue, then I need to be honest about how I felt about this last semester in TEAL 6710. I loved it. I loved everything about this class and the journey I have taken with my classmates and instructor. I have loved the language used, respect shown, boundaries challenged, and walls taken down. I enjoy people pushing on my walls and helping me determine why I even had them up in the first place. This last semester I have made connections and relationships with others and with myself that have helped me to remove more than just a few of my bricks. As McIntosh encourages, I have attempted to unpack my invisible knapsack and untangle much of how I view the world and my place in it. Initially I didn’t exactly understand what positionality meant, but I have come to consider it in my every thought, word, and action.

We have tackled many tough topics in this class. Some have been harder for me than others, and some are topics that I feel I am already radically open to and aware of. One subject in particular that struck me at the very beginning of this class was our and Hall’s discussion of “The West and the Rest.” I find it strange that regardless of my lifelong education on geography, it wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized “the East” isn’t to the east of me at all and that the East vs. West construct we use today has nothing to do with geography. As Hall explained, the terms East and West refer to an idea or standard of living rather than to a direction. Besides the East vs. the West, this reading made me critically examine the binary of the West vs. the Rest. I am from the West, so what does that make me? Does that make me a person that “the Rest” compare themselves to? Does that entitle me to something? Others from the West may think so, and I may have thought so before without realizing it, but I don’t want to think or live that way now. I don’t want the world to be the Rest and I don’t want to be the West. I want to be Whitney and I want to know others for who they are, where they come from, and what they value. I feel like there is so much more to me than the West and I feel I owe it to those around me to see them for more than the Rest.

Culture is another topic that I feel I already had a grasp on but have come to better understand throughout this semester. When I lived in China 4 years ago I went there for the Big C – the Great Wall, chopsticks, rice, and people I thought were funny. My words, actions, mind, and heart were changed through my experience and I came to appreciate and understand the people there. All that it takes for me is to meet an individual from a background different than my own, and I have a capacity to love and appreciate them for who they are and where they come from. As Reagan suggests, I have attempted to develop a critical definition of what culture is to me. It definitely is a 'week-off" word that is bigger than a definition, but simply put I think that I view culture as what makes a person who they are. For a long time I didn’t think I had a culture – my race, religion, hometown, hair, everything, didn’t seem interesting enough to me to be considered a culture. I learned a lot about what my culture meant to me when it was challenged by many of my classmates last year. In our program I became a minority because I am a Mormon who grew up in Utah. My classmates and instructor made countless comments about the Mormon culture and how ridiculous the people here are – regardless of the fact that our class was titled, “Teaching Culture.” We always used respect when discussing the Middle East because of our classmate from Libya. Everyone valued China and Buddhism because of our Chinese classmate. But no one recognized value in my way of life or showed respect for what makes me who I am. This experience taught me that I do have culture. There are many specific things that create who I am as a person and all of those things deserve respect and equality just as much as a culture from the other side of the world – whether you agree with it or not. We may not agree with another culture's decisions or ways of life, but that gives us no right to disrespect or discredit what makes them who they are. I will remember this experience forever. It was good for me, it challenged me, it stretched me, and it taught me a very valuable lesson that I will reciprocate towards my students and those around me. Culture is much more than what the tourists see – culture is what makes someone who they are and no one has the right to question that of another person.

This semester I have thoroughly enjoyed our readings from Hooks and Freire on critical and engaged pedagogy. I don’t think that critical pedagogy takes much more effort, but simply requires conscious effort. It will take conscious decisions for me to employ critical methods in my classroom but I also think that my students will be conscious of what is happening and will appreciate the growth and environment we will create. I am not the classroom authority. While in the classroom I am a member of a team of people working to untangle our views of the world through language learning. I am eager to apply this mindset to my language teaching and determine how to use words to understand the world.

A group of topics I have had quite the wrestling match with are linguistic hegemony, colonization, and white/English supremacy. As Kincheleo describes, many indigenous pre-modern societies were ridiculed, belittled, disrespected, and destroyed by modern influence. Native Americans are a prime example of a culture which was functioning not only beautifully, but independently, and was forced to change their ways to conform to modernity. We have discussed many examples in class of cultures which no longer exist in their raw form because they have conformed to the colonizers and lost much of their cultural integrity. Along these same lines is the spread of language learning and English dominance. I know that I have mentioned this topic in class, but it is something I have given much thought over the course of this semester. I made the decision to be a language teacher because of the incredible experience I had learning a second language and the doors it has opened for me – not because I want to spread the linguistic hegemony of the English language. Learning to communicate with another person accounts for a large portion of what it takes to learn who they are. That’s why I enjoy speaking Chinese so much – when I can communicate with a person in their native language I learn so much about how they see the world and how the world sees them. I want to be a language teacher because if English is the language someone has chosen to learn, then I want to assist them as effectively as possible in accomplishing this goal. I’m not teaching English to spread the dominance of “the West” or to diminish the culture of my students. I don’t plan on ever changing that mindset but I think it’s important that I know this about myself and will make further teaching decisions based on this foundation.

The last thing that I want is to be a colonizer. Again, I know I have mentioned this in class before, but I feel that the example of my choice of employment illustrates how I feel about being an English teacher for foreign students. Right now in China you can find a job teaching English if you’re from America and can breathe. I took advantage of an opportunity to be this kind of language teacher 4 years ago and after completing that semester and seeing how Chinese people view learning English I knew that I never wanted to teach that way again. One of my biggest pet peeves is when some Engineering student, with no background in teaching or culture education, tells me that they’re going to teach English so they can travel around China. This is linguistic hegemony and colonization. People who hire those types of teachers are looking to be colonized and have lost sight of the magic of language learning and the power of education. They view language learning as a button to be pressed that will take them to success and these are not the kind of students I want to teach. I have filtered through hundreds of jobs like these so that I could find what I was looking for – a formal education setting that valued my background in second language acquisition and the quality of education their students were receiving. I am going to China in the fall to teach at a university in Beijing and I feel comfortable with the circumstance because of the motivation for learning. I am not saying that only students at universities should learn a second language – of course not – but I think that language learners should be more critical of who they are asking to teach them and language teachers should be critical of those asking to be taught. Anyone looking to travel around China should not be teaching English at all. They are depending on their white dominance and English supremacy to get them somewhere in China and the most frustrating part is that it will. It will get them somewhere, they will see what they want to see, and their students will be reciting Eminem lyrics (YouTube: Chinese Slim Shady).

Again, I have truly enjoyed the opportunity I have had to examine and re-examine the ways I view the world and what makes me who I am. Because this class has been a journey, it is a journey that I plan on continuing. Dr. Saavedra should plan on hearing from me again in the future because I do not plan on stopping the development and discussion of the world and my place in it."

Thank you