1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Language, Power and Development
The Significance of Doing What Comes UNnaturally
Continued, from part one
'Adaptive Multiculturalism' for Dominant Children and Adults
Anthropologist Joan Metge, writing primarily about her home country of Aotearoa/New Zealand, defines a multicultural society as one
in which both the State and the majority of citizens profess a positive attitude [to cultural diversity] in which a variety of ethnic groups live together, sharing equal access to power, wealth and knowledge, and in which a majority of individuals are reasonably competent in at least one culture other than their own (draft ms, 1983).
US anthropologist Catherine Bateson, writing from her extensive experience living in Iran, Israel, and the Philippines, distinguishes between "identity multiculturalism" and "adaptive multicultural ism":
The term multiculturalism is used to refer to at least two different but complementary strategies: one that supports individuals in their own ethnic or racial identities [identity multiculturalism] and one that enhances everyone's capacity to adapt by offering exposure to a variety of other traditions [adaptive multiculturalism]...[The first, identity multiculturalism] makes good sense as a place to start...Adaptive multiculturalism has more to say about learning through a lifetime, in a continuing process of encountering difference...Traditional liberal education was identity-based for the privileged and identity-threatening for others (1994, 167-171; emphasis in the original).
Bilingual programs like those for Puerto Rican children in New York, and immersion programs like those for Maori children in Aotearoa/New Zealand develop healthy bilingualism and bi-culturalism in non-dominant children. They help to lessen language shift to English mono-linguals among immigrants and to retard language loss among indigenous peoples. In these ways, they develop identity multiculturalism in non-dominant groups while also contributing to the linguistic diversity of the whole society. But they have one critical weakness: like that school in Florence, Italy, such programs leave the dominant group unchanged and their monolingual and mono-cultural identity unchallenged.
Remember again that intentional community in Israel. There, Israeli and Palestinian children go to school together, with the language of instruction divided between the two languages. Each group learns the language and culture of the other, and each group of young learners has native-speaking peers. They gain an additional identity as bilingual and bi-cultural citizens without losing their primary identity as Israelis or Palestinians.
In the US, such programs are referred to as "two-way bilingual education." One recent national survey (Christian, 1994) found 169 such schools across the country, almost all covering the entire primary school years. 155 provide two-way Spanish/English education, in 14 others, English time-shares with Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese and French as media of instruction.
Typically, the goals of such schools are students who: develop high levels of proficiency in both first and second languages; perform well in academic areas in both languages; and demonstrate positive cross-cultural attitudes and behaviours.
Some individual two-way programs have been described and evaluated. Canadian Wallace Lambert, well-known for his longitudinal research on the French immersion programs, has been following the progress of the children in one Spanish/English program, Amigos ("Friends") outside Boston (Cazabon, Lambert & Hall, 1993). In her Georgetown University doctoral thesis, Freeman (1993) provides a more detailed picture of the Oyster Spanish/English school in Washington, DC that has been thriving for more than 20 years.
The result in all successful two-way programs is the acquisition by children in both groups of additive bilingualism and adaptive multiculturalism. As Freeman concludes from her study of the Oyster School, language planning in a two-way bilingual program is inherently "identity planning" as well, for both majority and minority, dominant and non-dominant, students:
The Oyster bilingual program can best be understood as language plan within an identity plan that aims to provide equal educational opportunities to its linguistically and culturally diverse student population by socializing its language minority and language majority students into seeing themselves and each other as equal (Freeman, 1994, p. 12).
Two-way programs can seem UNnatural because of the careful control of language use within the school and of the cultural content of the curriculum. Such control is necessary to achieve and maintain equity for the non-dominant language and culture against the power inherent in the status of the dominant language and culture in the wider society. Without such control, learning opportunities for both groups will be lost.
Such schools can make an especially important contribution to the kind of active harmony envisioned in The Oasis of Peace. The contrast to that school in Florence, Italy is striking. In Florence, the problem to be solved was located entirely in the language deficit of the immigrant Chinese students. In the Oyster School and other two-way programs, additive bilingualism and adaptive multiculturalism is the goal for all students.
The success of such programs can be explained more theoretically by years of research on attitude change. Positive inter-group attitudes are increased by equal status communication between groups in the pursuit of common goals (summarized in Sayers, 1994). In two-way schools like Oyster, that communication happens in face-to-face interaction. Electronic communication now adds a new medium that can supplement face-to-face communication with equally instant communication among groups anywhere in the world.
As more and more schools are obtaining not only computers in classrooms but modems and telephone lines, teachers are expanding our vision of what school-to-school communication can contribute. The most significant are not exchanges of individual pen pals letters but class-to-class collaborations, high-tech versions of a 65-year-old idea for postal exchanges among classrooms developed by French educator Celestin Freinet.
Many such collaborations are now ongoing in US schools. For example, "Orillas" (in full, De Orilla a Orilla, "From Shore to Shore") is a multinational Spanish/English bilingual computer-based collaborative teaching network (Brown, 1993). Typical cross-classroom and cross-cultural projects have included student journalism for a bi-group newspaper; comparative investigations such as community surveys or science projects; and compendia of children's folklore. Sayers (1994) documents the positive effect of one such collaboration between classrooms in Puerto Rico and the US on the attitudes toward Spanish of the non-Spanish speaking US children (Sayers, 1994). One explanation of the positive attitudinal change is the value of bilingualism to the project as a whole.
In his discussion of this work Sayers highlights an important contemporary controversy on the conditions for most enduring attitude change. There is general agreement on the important of equal-status contact, but less agreement on whether the content of that contact matters. Should heightened awareness of similarities among individuals be emphasized through more personalized interactions (such as pen pals)? Or does that increase the perception that "Some of my best friends are..." while leaving unchanged more general attitudes? Instead, will interactions that heighten, rather than mask, the salience of group membership (as do the computer-mediated classroom projects) lead to more enduring attitude change that will generalize more broadly beyond the immediate encounters (Sayers, 1994, p. 324)? While the question is raised with respect to these school-based efforts toward "active harmony", the answer will have implications for efforts outside schools as well.
School Adults Must Learn what comes UNnaturally Too
It is not only children who must change if adaptive multiculturalism is to be a reality. New forms of communication and collaboration are needed among adults in all workplaces, including schools. (In his talk at this conference, Pieter Batelaan discusses strategies [for example, Cohen, 1986] for achieving such new forms among students.)
One unusually wise and sociolinguistically sophisticated manual for achieving such new forms of adult communication is Team teaching in Aboriginal schools in the Northern Territory (Northern Territory Dept. of Education, 1986). As Beth Graham, now retired but then a Senior Education Officer in the Bilingual Unit, says in her Introduction:
This is a book primarily for non-Aboriginal teachers who may be involved in team-teaching in Aboriginal schools in the Northern Territory. Aboriginal teachers may also find it helpful (p. 1).
The book focuses on the need for "learning together" among the adults, and on specific strategies to help that happen. Frankly acknowledged are the difficulties in doing so, divided as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal teachers are by ethnicity, native language, professional credentials, cultural ways of acting and speaking, and status in the larger society.
To convey a glimpse of the book's recommendations, appended to this paper are two pages from the book that list some "new behaviours": first, for non-Aboriginal teachers, so that they will indeed listen to their Aboriginal colleagues; and then some complementary "new behaviours" for Aboriginal teachers, so that they will speak up and even disagree.
In all my examples, members of the dominant groupand I include myself heremust learn and change even more than members of non-dominant groups. We must learn to speak and act in what may seem initially as UNnatural. And we must accept the necessity to create structures in which the UNnatural will become more natural over time. Only in such conditions can the power of language contribute to more equitable distribution of power in schools and in our larger societies.
Finally, the Dangers of Failing
Speakers at this conference were asked to be "positive" in our presentations. I have tried to do so not just in response to that request but because analysing failure is never as interesting as analysing success.
But multilingual and multicultural success is fragile, and the threat of failure never far away. Remember one last time that wall art about Niter and Brimstone. Examples of that prediction are too easy to find.One is Sarajevo. No city had more reason to be proud of its multicultural spirit. In a new book, Sarajevo daily, a war correspondent has documented that gallant city and its daily newspaper under siege (Gjelten, 1995). The newspaper, Oslobodjenjie, which published every single day throughout the siege, deliberately had a multi-ethnic staff. Because the peoples of Sarajevo speak a common language but write in two alphabets, the paper had an unusual, and very UNnatural, printing policy:
The articles on page one were all printed in Cyrillic script. Latin lettering was used on the page two stories, and the alternation continued through the paper. The next day it would be reversed, with the front page in Latin. The style, which dated from the paper's founding, mostly had to do with politics. Sarajevans were so accustomed to reading both scripts that they didn't even notice the difference as they went from one story to the next. By alternating between the alphabet used by the Serbs and the one preferred by the Croats, Oslobodjennje was showing perfect even handedness toward both sides, and that was what counted (p. 46).
The war began in Sarajevo in April, 1992. When it finally stops, rebuilding the physical city will be much easier and quicker than reconstructing its multicultural heart.
In those countries now safe from war and siege, a widening gap between rich and poor can exacerbate, and even create, inter-atomic strife. In the US, recent California history is a case in point. With visible increases in immigration and palpable decreases in real wages, voters were susceptible to politicians' construction of scapegoats. The result in November, 1994 was the passage, by a vote of 59% to 41%, of referendum Proposition 187, denying welfare, non-emergency medical services and education to illegal immigrants. The new California law is not being enforced while it is contested in the courts. But animosity toward an "alien invasion", as the ballot was worded, and by extension toward legal immigrants as well, is inflamed. Next year, the same politicians promise a referendum to annul all programs of affirmative action on behalf of citizens of colour and women, and predictions are that it too will win an easy majority.
I end on these negative notes not to negate the positive efforts I have described, but to suggest the close ties between issues of "language, power and development" in education and all the other areas of national and international policy being addressed at this conference.
References
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Cazabon, M., Lambert, W.E. & Hall, G. (1993). Two-way bilingual education: A progress report on the Amigos Program. Santa Cruz: University of California, National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning. Research Rpt: 7.
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