Teaching with the Flow: Fixity and fluidity in education

In this paper I suggest that as educators we need to understand that the spaces and cultures our students inhabit are to be found not so much in predefinitions of cultural background or in studies of classrooms as cultural spaces as in the transcultural flows with which our students engage. Thus, my argument is not only that, as Singh and Doherty (2004 Singh, P and Doherty, C. 2004. Global cultural flows and pedagogic dilemmas: Teaching in the global university contact zone. TESOL Quarterly, 38(1): 9–42.  ) suggest, the flow of “international” students turns many classrooms into “global education contact zones” (p. 11), but also that the global flows of English and popular culture turn classrooms in many parts of the world into spaces of transcultural contact. Students can no longer be understood as located in a bounded time and space in and around their classrooms but rather are participants in a much broader set of transcultural practices. Taking the global culture of hip-hop as an example, with a particular focus on hip-hop in parts of East and Southeast Asia, I argue that with English increasingly becoming the medium of global transcultural exchange, we need to understand the relations between English, popular culture, education and identity, or the ways in which global Englishes become a shifting means of transcultural identity formation. What I want to suggest here, then, is that in order to be attentive to the politics of location in the global context, we need a pedagogy of flow.     

Teaching English as a Missionary Language

Surveying the massive current project of teaching English as a missionary language, this article raises concerns about the scale and cultural politics of this work, as well as issues of trust and disclosure, and the implicit support it provides for furthering the global spread of English. We discuss various responses to this work, from the Christian evangelical and Christian service positions, to the liberal agnostic, secular humanistic and critical pedagogical. Unless we engage in debate over the various moral projects tied up with English language teaching, we argue, educators will be unable to establish the grounds for our choices between missionary, liberal or critical projects.