Opening Small Doors
My role for these kids is to open doors ... And whether they go through them is always their choice. But that's the teaching technique ... They're small doors that we open—to allow them to open the bigger doors ... As teachers [that's] what we have to do, whether we're educators, parents, we open small doors.
[Leslie Edgars, Interview, February 1997]
Leslie Edgars has worked as an educator for 28 years. She began her career in inner city Philadelphia in the United States at a bilingual (English/Spanish) school. Ms. Edgars' teacher training from Temple University included only 3 months of practice teaching, but she says she was fortunate to have as a practice teaching supervisor a woman who had worked in the infancy schools in England. Leslie's supervisor and her husband had worked in several schools, both in England and North America, which promoted open classrooms, team teaching, and learning activity centers. She and Leslie visited "free schools" in New York City, which were also based on these pedagogies and encouraged students to work on individual tasks tailored to their individual needs.
Upon moving to Toronto, Ms. Edgars says that she was fortunate to find work in a school like Northside, which allowed her to continue working collaboratively with students as a facilitator and mentor.
As can be seen in the aforementioned quote, Leslie Edgars is a teacher who wants to open small doors for her students so that they can open the bigger doors for themselves. Doors can be understood as metaphors for insights into life and identity issues. When Ms. Edgars' students start opening doors, they are able to shed light on the social, political, and identity issues that impact on their everyday lives. As explained by educational theorists, Carmen Luke and Allan Luke, diasporic identity is not stable, or fixed, or predictable. It is always in a state of change and flux. At the heart of this state of change is the way people find themselves needing to work with "place-bound discourses," such as the anti-immigrant discourse of "Hong Kong, Canada," that mark their difference in particular ways.1 After reading Evelyn's journal entries, Ms. Edgars recognized that Evelyn needed to work through the uneasiness and discomfort she felt about being marked as an immigrant from Hong Kong even though she had been born in Canada and could not read or write in Cantonese, her own dialect of Chinese. As mentioned earlier, Leslie suggested that Evelyn learn to write in Chinese so she could work on a painting that expressed her strong feelings about using the language. Such a suggestion was typical of Ms. Edgars' belief that it is helpful to learners be able to communicate ideas and feelings in both images and words.
As Evelyn began working with her classmate, Peter, she began to remember childhood experiences of learning to write in Chinese. These memories and critical comments from some of her classmates made her feel uneasy and uncomfortable. The feelings were so strong that she wished that she had only learned English or Cantonese as a child. Growing up monolingual would have meant that she would have been able to speak in a way that would have prevented people from "poking fun" at her pronunciation (in either English or Cantonese). It would also have meant that she would have been able to write Chinese "properly." In thinking about how and why people learn to value some varieties of language (like mainstream/standard English or Chinese) and not others (like Cantonese English or English Cantonese), Rosina Lippi-Green's model of the language subordination process is very helpful.2 The model Lippi-Green presents grew out of her analysis of public commentary on English language use and language communities. She found that people learn to value a particular variety of language over another through the following processes and practices:
*language is mystified;
You can never hope to comprehend the difficulties and complexities of your mother tongue without expert guidance.
*authority is claimed;
Talk like me/us. We know what we are doing because we have studied language, because we write well.
*Misinformation is generated;
That usage you are so attached to is inaccurate. The variant I prefer is superior on historical, aesthetic, or logical grounds.
*non-mainstream language is trivialized;
Look how cute, how homey, how funny.
*conformers are held up as positive examples;
See what you can accomplish if you only try, how far you can get if you see the light.
*explicit promises are made;
Employers will take you seriously; doors will open.
*threats are made;
No one important will take you seriously; doors will close.
*nonconformers are vilified or marginalized;
See how willfully stupid, arrogant, unknowing, uninformed, and/or devi ant and unrepresentative these speakers are.3
Of the eight practices Lippi-Green has identified, two seem particularly relevant to thinking about Evelyn's feelings of uneasiness around learning to write Chinese characters: claiming/giving mainstream language authority and trivializing non-mainstream language. At the very beginning, when she attempted to follow Peter's brush stroke, Evelyn felt that he was uneasy because she wasn't following his strokes "properly." As well, a number of students watching her initial attempts to follow Peter's brush strokes told Evelyn that she wasn't "doing it right." Here Evelyn and her audience gave Peter's brush strokes authority. Evelyn absorbed Peter's (perceived) uneasiness because she was not writing like him—a person who learned to write characters in Hong Kong, a person who wrote well. When some of her classmates poked fun at her first attempts to draw Chinese characters, Evelyn was reminded of the times other people from Hong Kong had poked fun at the variety of Chinese she spoke and of the times that English-speakers had poked fun at the variety of English she spoke. Here Evelyn's use of non-mainstream language— both Chinese and English—was being trivialized.
Although Evelyn experienced feelings of discomfort as she began to learn how to write Chinese characters, she also experienced some excitement, as her classmates become interested in her art project. Their interest helped her connect to positive feelings associated with writing Chinese. As she says in a final reflection piece that I asked her to write at the end of school year,
I was delighted and relieved that they were excited to help and teach. Although some of them criticized my character strokes, it didn't matter. I was the center of attention. And I really, really enjoyed it.
[Final Reflection, Tackling the Fine Art of Chinese Brush Writing, July 31, 1997]
Evelyn's delight with the recognition she received from her classmates mitigated the discomfort she felt when people criticized her brush strokes. Even though her first attempts at drawing characters were trivialized, Evelyn herself was not "vilified" or "marginalized" as a nonconformer. This was something she had been anticipating.
The first word was shaky. In fact, the first column was shaky. I braced myself for all the nasty comments that would burst out of the mouth of the students. But there wasn't any. I was surprised. The second column was less intimidating. As the columns progressed, I became more confident ... The strokes were more powerful and expressive.
[Final Reflection, Tackling the Fine Art of Chinese Brush Writing, July 31, 1997]
Evelyn's use of the words "less intimidating," and "more powerful" in this reflection asks us to think about her work in terms of power. Jim Cummins tells us that the process by which students and teachers negotiate identities in classroom and school interactions can play a major role in determining how students feel about themselves and how they feel about others. In her interactions with Evelyn around her journal entries, Leslie Edgars opened a small door and provided Evelyn with a space to do some identity work by learning to write Chinese characters from a classmate from Hong Kong. As Cindy Lam and I have argued, in a school and a city that was struggling with the use of Cantonese in public spaces, this work can be seen as a pedagogical project that challenges both coercive relations of power underlying standard English ideology and traditional roles of authority in the classroom.4 Outside Ms. Edgars' art classroom, there was debate in the student newspaper around the publication of bilingual Chinese-English advertisements, the use of Cantonese at the students' annual talent night, and the use of Cantonese at a karaoke event scheduled during Spirit Week. Inside Ms. Edgar's art classroom, Evelyn Yeung learned to write in Chinese characters, using both Cantonese and English, so she could express her feelings about being a Canadian-born, Chinese woman living in "Hong Kong, Canada." Importantly, the students' use of Cantonese to complete the project required Ms. Edgars to negotiate a new identity for herself as a teacher in her classroom. Not able to understand the Cantonese the students are using while they assisted Evelyn in learning to write Chinese characters, Ms. Edgars had to ask the students to translate what they were saying into English so that she could enter their dialogue. Having to ask students to translate their words shifted traditional relations of authority in Ms. Edgars' classroom: She had to request and be given permission to enter her students' conversations.
I've always dialogued with the kids but you can't do that around here if, if they are speaking Cantonese ... So you have to engage more with the students ... [Y]ou almost have to bring up a chair and kind of just sit there and say, "Okay I'm here now and you, I, I don't understand what you're talking about. So either you have to teach me your language or let's talk, let's find a place where we can talk because this is my job and I need to know what you're doing. So can I come in?"
[Interview, February 13,1997]
Returning the ethnographic gaze back on Evelyn, there are a number of questions we can raise: What was Evelyn able to do with the collaborative space she was provided with in Ms. Edgars' classroom? What kind of impact did her artwork have on how she felt about others and how she felt about herself? In answering these questions, I return to the excerpts from Evelyn's last written reflection.
1 See C. Luke and A. Luke (1999).
2 See Lippi-Green (1997).
3 See Lippi-Green (1997, pp. 67-69).
4 See Goldstein and Lam (1998).
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