BOOK REVIEW—Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching: Creating Responsible and Ethical Anti-Racist Practice

Review by Carrie S. Larson, doctoral student, Educational Leadership and Curriculum and Instruction, Portland State University

Book Details: Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching: Creating Responsible and Ethical Anti-Racist Practice by Suhanthie Motha. New York: Teachers College Press, 2014. 113 pp., $39.95.

Suhanthie Motha’s book Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching: Creating Responsible and Ethical Anti-Racist Practice (2014) explores the ways in which teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) is deeply intertwined with race, racism, colonialism, linguicism, assimilation, and Whiteness. She disputes the meta-narrative that teaching English is neutral. The reader is invited to grapple alongside her and her former students, first-year ESOL teachers, as they share troubling experiences, as well as creative resistance, to the institutional racism and marginalization they encounter during their first year teaching. Motha’s goal for Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching is to create a space for ESOL educators to learn from, discuss, and reflect on their own teaching practice and to find ways to counter the effects of racism and colonialism in their classrooms and schools.

From the prologue, the reader is drawn into an intimate conversation with Motha as she points out her own assumptions and meandering learning-path as she conducted the year-long critical ethnography that led to this book. Ultimately, she models one of the objectives of Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching, which was to become a more ethical and reflective practitioner. Her writing style is personal, self-reflective, and intensely technical. Each chapter is dedicated to a theme that emerged from the afternoon teas she held with her four former students, every two or three weeks over the course of a year. In addition, she interviewed them individually, observed their classrooms, and talked with their students, administrators, and other teachers.

Early in the text, Motha guides the readers to examine what she terms Empire, which she explains includes such things as the unintentional empowering of some while disempowering others and unpacking whose knowledge is privileged and whose is dismissed. In the same way she hopes the reader will thoughtfully consider their own practice, she passionately dissects her own research for ethical issues of power structures, colonialism, validity, and truth. For that reason, she foregrounds the words and stories of the four ESOL teachers, which direct each chapter.

Using short quotes from the four ESOL teachers, Alexandra, Jane, Katie and Margaret, Motha illuminates challenges facing ESOL teachers. As a former ESOL teacher myself, I was immediately drawn in by Motha’s questions and commentary. Questions that had been silenced in my teaching experiences were suddenly front and center, like: Have you contemplated how to fully value a student’s home language and culture while teaching them the “right” way to speak English? Have you felt like students were racially segregated, but really felt your ESOL room was a refuge and a safe learning space? Are you worried about bringing up race? Have you found yourself wondering about the “achievement gap” for language learners? She keeps asking, refusing to be silenced, and inviting the reader to understand that, “This book is for you” (p. 2). It is in these liminal spaces that Motha lingers. Guided by a global historical perspective of colonization and the spread of the English Empire, she illuminates how ESOL practices became what they are today and questions how to transform it into a more ethical, anti-racist, responsible place.

Regarding stereotypes and native English speakers, Motha details the privilege and economic benefits attributed to native English fluency and the simultaneous devaluation of non-native English speakers. Motha often juxtaposes the common, layperson’s narrative with a detailed, research-based counter-narrative. For example, the common narrative in US schools is that students should strive for native-like English proficiency in order to escape poverty, get better jobs, and have greater opportunities. The counter-narrative identifies the flaws in this assumption, drawing attention to the very few situations in which one needs to “pass” with native-like fluency, such as an undercover spy, she muses. The examples are woven together, one leading to the next, illustrating the complexities the author and the teachers encountered. Motha acknowledges the importance of English as a global language while questioning the power it wields to segregate and marginalize along racial lines. She hopes the stories from her study and the analysis will move educators to become conscious of the ways race and empire are involved with teaching English.

To shed light on how racism can operate in schools through English teaching, Motha takes us back in time to better understand the history of how the English language was spread through colonialism. She distinguishes between the colonialism of the past and the legacy still present, which some call coloniality, to identify the roots of English dominance and “Western” power. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Pennycook and Wilinsky, she offers several ways to conceptualize periods in history that forcefully imposed English and empire around the world.

After explaining the historical connections of colonialism and empire to English language teaching, Motha draws on several researchers’ work to demonstrate how present-day language and culture are hybrids. This idea of language and cultural hybridity, or the ways in which cultures and languages from around the world have influenced each other to the point nothing is pure, are picked up later in the book when Motha discusses what version of English schools choose to teach. The ideas of linguistic and cultural hybridity are discussed to show, again, the inheritance of empire, and to show that the concept of one “correct English” is left over from centuries of Imperialist domination. Motha suggests including literature from authors using code-meshing or plurilingualism to promote the resources with which students come to school.

By showing the history of the spread of the English language and its multiple forms, she refutes the common view of Standard English instruction as race-neutral. The validity of using race as a biological category is questioned, just as is Standard English, after considering the global movement and cultural and linguistic influence people have had on each other. However, she points out that in the ESOL classroom, those distinctions are alive and well. In her study, Motha observes students in ESOL classes from non-white English speaking countries are still considered English Language Learners. Their first language is listed as World English. Using stories and observations from her ESOL teachers’ classrooms, she demonstrates the interrelated nature of race, language, and culture by interrogating Whiteness, multiculturalism, and colorblind racism. Motha’s goal is to keep bringing the reader back to these hard places. Each chapter concludes with discussion questions to stimulate readers to identify areas that we, as educators, policymakers, teacher leaders, anyone in contact with students who speak other languages, may unknowingly be complicit in a racist system.

Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching is not an instructional manual, nor does it wrap up each chapter with how the reader should think and act. Instead, it highlights four ESOL classrooms, their teachers, students, administrators, and buildings, to encourage everyone in education to critically consider the current status of teaching and learning in ESOL classrooms. Motha’s work provides the tools to start making changes to become more conscious and reflective educators, to refuse silence and expose racism.

Carrie Larson is a doctoral student in Educational Leadership and Curriculum and Instruction at Portland State University and a Graduate Assistant for the Bilingual Teacher Pathway Program. A long-time bilingual Spanish/English speaker, she has taught ESOL and Language Arts in K-8 public school settings as well as Spanish as a Foreign Language in college settings. Her evolving research centers on educational equity for bilingual learners and bilingual teacher preparation.