Amol Padwad joins us to explain “decentering” in ELT. Amol tells us about the problem with language teaching having a “center” and how this can cause voices and ideas to be suppressed.
Ross Thorburn: Hi everyone, welcome back to TEFL Training Institute podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn and this week we're talking about decentering in English language teaching. My guest for this week's episode is Amol Padwad. Amol is director at the Center for English Language Education at Ambedkar University in Delhi.
In the episode, Amol tells us about first of all what decentering is, what counts as being the center of the language teaching world and what are some problems with that. We talk about some concepts and people that are unfairly on the peripheries of language teaching. Enjoy the episode.
Ross: Amol, thank you for joining us. To begin with, what is decentering? What does it mean and where does the concept come from?
Amol Padwad: Well, actually, the roots of this term may be traced back to post‑structuralism and even postmodernism.
In simple words, it means removing something from a central position but it's a very complex notion as you will easily agree. As I understand, it refers to countering any hegemony tendency which comes in form of dominance or influence of a center.
For the purpose of decentering, I would call a center to be any entity which claims to have exclusive ownership of roots or expertise or right solutions and then ends up dominating or suppressing alternative sources of expertise or knowledge or solutions.
For example, a particular entity is saying that, "I know everything." Or "We have the final best possible solutions for any problem and if you want, you must use them. Other solutions are not good." Then, I would call that centering tendency.
When I say this, I think I must also clarify that I am not suggesting a center as a problem per say. In fact, I believe that centers exist to offer some stability to any structure. The center is not a problem, centering is a problem. What is the difference?
Center is an entity, but if that center behaves in a particular way, a way that disregards or disrespects alternatives or the others, that tries to create domination hegemony, that tries to claim exclusive ownership of a particular truth or knowledge or something, then that is a centering tendency.
Any center harboring those tendencies will be a problem. Decentering is against the centering tendencies.
Ross: Great. Just to be clear, are we talking here about the center as in being the center of the English teaching world or we're talking more about the center of the English speaking world or are we talking about both?
Amol: Eventually both, but at the moment all the current decentering, thinking and initiative that is underway and it was initiated by the Hornby Trust in the UK. Hornby Trust was set up by A.S. Hornby especially with the purpose of spending all the money and the resources he has handed out to the trust.
For the third weekend, I'm using a slightly loaded term here, but what he meant was he spent all his life working in those countries and learnt a lot from there. Even Oxford dictionary was an outcome of his work there.
He argued in the trust document that whatever he earned working in those communities should go back to those communities and that's why Hornby Trust is supporting this initiative. At the moment, the focus is on English language teaching world, the ELT world.
In this world, the most prominent, most visible, most easily identifiable center is the West or what Adrian Holiday call the BANA countries, Britain, Australia and North America. That is the most easily identifiable center. In the decentering initiative, we take a more complex and nuanced view.
We assume that globally this may be the center but there are also lots of local centers. There are centers everywhere and decentering has to deal with all centers and all centering practices wherever they happen.
Ross: Do you want to give us some examples of this then Amol? I think the first thing that crossed my mind when I heard this was the idea of sending so‑called native speakers to different parts of the world as "experts" in inverted commas, as being one being symptom of centering, is that right? If it is right, then what are some other examples?
Amol: Absolutely. I think that was the most dominant and visible example of centering. We have hundreds of examples of this experts of native speakers all over the world. In many cases, their only qualification was being a native speaker.
Even then, they ended up in the roles of expert teachers on English language teaching. Robert Philipson has written a lot in his linguistic imperialism on this whole phenomenon. That's one example. There are several other examples.
When you find white peoples or people from the West as typically favored, preferred primary speakers or when they are typically preferred as consultants for any project in any country in the world or when they are typically invited as external evaluators, as research advisors, as curriculum material designers.
Everywhere you find examples of this centering tendencies. Then there are similar parallel examples within the country also at the local level because I must remind that centering is not necessarily limited to the West. That's a prominent example, but we are concerned with centering anywhere.
We are proceeding with the assumption that decentering must counter centering at any level, at the global or at the country level. I can quote one very interesting example.
In 1990s in some states in India, there were massive teacher training project which aimed at training primary teachers for a new textbook and therefore load the typical favorite cascade model. There would be a small group of state trainers who we call master trainers.
Those master trainers would train a handful of trainers and then those trainers would eventually train the primary teachers. The master trainers would be university professors and the trainers would be secondary teachers and the trainees would be primary teachers.
Why this hierarchy? How do university professors having never entered a primary classroom, having absolutely no idea of what a primary textbook is, and what teaching young learners means, be the master trainers at the highest level in the hierarchy?
Why they should not be brought down to the second level of hierarchy while the secondary teachers should come in? These are all very evident examples of centering at the local level.
Ross: I'm so glad that you brought up young learners there. I think young learners must be something like what, 90 percent of the people out there who are learning English as a second or as a foreign language.
If that's the case, then it must also be true that the vast majority of teachers are teaching young learners and yet it definitely feels like the center of language teaching is adults as opposed to kids which I really still believe just makes very little sense at all.
Amol: That's true. There are of course lots of books specifically for pushing on young learners. I agree with you in the sense that especially when it comes to talking about teacher development and teacher training, it is usually assumed that we are addressing teachers who are teaching adults.
Lots of theories and formulations and practices and strategies and techniques are suggested for teachers who would later go on and teach adults. In that sense, young learners become marginal, peripheral in this whole discourse on teacher development. If young learners are peripheral, their teachers are also marginalized.
In most states in India, primary teachers anyway struggle for their identity when it comes to ELT because primary teachers are not teachers of English alone. If they are not teachers of English alone they teach all other subjects, it is often forgotten that they also teach English.
They are not treated as English teachers whenever discussions around ELT happens. This struggle for identity and other important aspect of their marginalization in the ELT world I suppose.
Ross: Up until now, I guess we've been talking about the problems of centering, can you tell us about some initiatives to counter centering.
Amol: In my view, the first very essential and crucial stage is raising awareness about centering because a lot of centering might be happening subconsciously, unintentionally. Being subconscious or unintentional doesn't take away a possible harm that might result from centering.
Being aware of that, the way gender sensitization was considered absolutely crucial for gender parity. In the same way I believe that awareness sensitization about centering possibility is absolutely crucial to reach a state where there would be no centering. That's first trend. There are lots of examples of that as well.
Secondly, an important trend is being conscious of and promoting alternative expertise, especially local expertise and knowledge so that we are not led to believe that we have to depend on knowledge or resources coming from the center whether that center is the West or some high‑profile university professor.
There are interesting practices which try to promote. Though I can say not with absolute confidence, but I strongly believe that those practices have been unintentional. The people who initiate those practices may not be aware that they are countering a centering trend.
One example is of a journal in Argentina. The FAAPI association has a journal. One of the mandate for all possible submission is that the references must include a certain number of local research publications.
The person submitting must show an awareness of what research is happening in Argentina. In my own state where I used to work previous in Maharashtra, one university has a mandatory provision for all of the PhD students to include a subsection on Indian research in the literature review as a mandate.
I believe that these are small but important range which make people look at other sources, not depend on the Western sources. Thirdly, I think an important trend is to develop criticality about ideas and resources which come from the center.
We should not fall into a trap of either blindly accepting them or straightforward complete dismissal. We should not fall for both the trend. We should critically evaluate them for their relevancy, for their appropriateness, for the utility to our own context, pick up whatever is useful for us and adopt it.
In that sense, I think developing the capability to adopt is a very important skill and strategy to be developing teachers, especially in those context where things are imposed from above.
If teachers can critically evaluate and if they can't escape from the textbook, they at least learn how to adopt that textbook. I think that would be a very powerful decentering trend.
Ross: Finally, Amol you mentioned the idea at the beginning of centering involving some people being suppressed, do you want to tell us a bit about that? Who are the people that you think get suppressed or whose voices get suppressed in language teaching?
Amol: I can give examples from some interesting research studies some of the teacher participants did in what we call teacher research initiative AINET association of English teachers of which I am the secretary. Our association runs a yearlong cycle of teacher research. We have teachers inside their classrooms.
In the second and the third round of that cycle, teachers conducted studies on issues like why children cheat in the examination or why teachers help students cheat in the examination, why parents of most students do not help them in doing homework.
Now the very fact that these came up as concerns of the teachers and the fact that these issues never appear in any so‑called standard research literature, is an indication that what so‑called established research considers worthwhile of exploration and validates it, legitimizes it, is a totally different from what teachers at the ground level find worthwhile exploring and wants to explore.
I'm not negating the value of the academic research that happens in the established normative standardized form, but those kinds of studies which appear in Western journals and publication or which are validated even within the country by university PhD degrees.
If that knowledge is only the acknowledged knowledge and what the teacher finds from one classroom study while teachers are helping students cheat in the examination, that knowledge, the practitioner knowledge is completely neglected, suppressed.
That is what I am referring to when you asked me about some knowledge being alternative expertise or knowledge being suppressed. Practitioner expertise, local wisdom is suppressed in this kind of hegemony.
Ross: One more time everyone, that was Amol Padwad. For more from Amol, checkout the link to his University of Ambedkar website that's in the show notes and also on our website which is www.tefltraininginstitute.com.
On there, you'll find podcasts, videos, a link to our YouTube channel which you should checkout, information about teacher training courses like the Trinity Diploma and TESOL and a link to help support the podcast by buying us a coffee. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.