Reimagining Students
by Michael Rabbidge - Materials Writer
I know my students, I see them every day in class, they tell me about their lives. Or so I imagine they do.
But what does it really mean to know a student?
Identity is hard to pin down and seeing someone as a ‘student’ is a limited view of that person to say the least.
How we see each other is dynamic in every way possible, as not only do the people we see change from minute to minute, but so do we.
Identity has often been presented as a rather static construct in language teaching, although recent twists and turns in second language acquisition (SLA) research and English Language Teaching (ELT) now present understandings that incorporate sociocultural understandings of identity, which allow for a reimagining of identity that embraces the complexity that was often ignored.
Take ‘language learners’ as an example. Until recently language learners were often assigned negative identity markers such ‘non-native speaker’. This essentially assigned them a ‘non-identity’. The baggage associated with such non-identity markers often positions learners in a state of continuous flux as they strive to achieve the illusionary ‘native speaker standard’.
Now, thanks to critical turns in SLA, we are provided with more inclusive identity options for language students (Grosjean, 2013), such as ‘emerging bilingual’ (García & Wei, 2014). This is possible due to bilingualism being reimagined as something that is not beholden to the dominant discourses of monolingualism which have riddled ELT and SLA over previous decades.
This is but one example that highlights the capacity for dynamic and positive change when it comes to identity and knowing our students.
Knowing our students come from countries and cultures vastly different to our own does not mean knowing our students. Knowing how they behave in class, or react to assignments, or participate in assigned activities does not mean knowing them either.
Quite often teachers focus, or are forced to focus, on curricula issues at the expense of letting their students develop their own voice in the learning process. This in turn forces teachers to only view their students in relation to expected outcomes of a lesson, making it difficult to ‘know’ their students in any genuine capacity.
Encouraging student voice means letting students take control of the learning process, either in small ways via reimagining how activities can be done, or larger measures, such as long-term projects which allow for more show casing of student learning. The act of learning a new language is transformative in nature, with new identity options forming as part of the process. It is the responsibility of teachers to ensure this transformative process is a positive one.
García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: language, bilingualism and education. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Grosjean, F. (2013). Bilingualism: A short introduction. In F. Grosjean & P. Li (Eds.), The psycholinguistics of bilingualism Chicester, UK: Blackwell Publishing