Contesting the violence of Tylerism: toward a cosmopolitan approach to the curriculum of second language teacher education

ABSTRACT

While the field of second language teacher education (SLTE) has expanded noticeably over the past decade, little attention has been paid to specific approaches to its curriculum. Taking a hidden-curriculum approach, I show that the curriculum of SLTE is focused predominantly on the content, method and assessment of teaching, which I describe as Tylerism. Moreover, the curriculum remains largely silent about such social concerns as the spread of violence. I argue that this silence itself serves as a frame of violence. In order to re-imagine the SLTE curriculum, I propose three principles drawn from rooted cosmopolitanism.

KEYWORDS:

• Violence
• curriculum
• SLTE
• cosmopolitanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. I use second language education to refer to the teaching and learning of English as a second, foreign or additional language.

2. Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

3. “Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch 2008, 103).