Language, neoliberalism, and the commodification of pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Although it has revealed the material conditions under which language education programmes are implemented worldwide, research on neoliberalism and language commodification has not yet adequately centred pedagogy. Thus, processes commodifying ‘objects’ other than language as product go unnoticed in educational settings. Drawing on a four-year ethnography in Hong Kong, this article details the processes whereby social actors formulated pedagogy as a ‘commodity register’ to create distinction, index normative roles and desirable social personae. It also shows how some actors concurrently constructed pedagogy as a resource for advancing ethnic-group activist concerns, leading to unpredicted tensions and forms of inequality.

目前关于新自由主义和语言商品化的研究揭示了在全球实施语言教育的物质条件, 却尚未充分地探讨过教学法。因此, 语言之外的其他‘对象’发生商品化的过程在教育情景中被忽略了。本文基于在香港为期四年的民族志, 详细展现了社会行动者将教学法建构为一个‘商品登记簿’的进程, 从而制造区隔、建立规范性角色和理想的社会人形象。本文也揭示了部分行动者如何同时将教学法建构为推进族群激进主义关注的资源, 由此导致了意料之外的张力和不平等形式。

KEYWORDS:

• Language
• neoliberalism
• commodification
• pedagogy
• discourse
• Hong Kong

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Carlos Soto is Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. His recent publications focus on documenting and interrogating his development of a critical education practices while working in Hong Kong schools serving students from South Asian heritage communities. He continues working directly on education projects with primary and secondary school students and is preparing a book on developing a critical pedagogy in the context of neoliberal reforms, to be published by Routledge.

Miguel Pérez-Milans is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. He is author of the book Urban Schools and English Language Education in Late Modern China: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography (Routledge Critical Series in Multilingualism, 2013). He has also edited monographs in the form of special issues: Multilingual Discursive Practices and Processes of Social Change in Globalizing Institutional Spaces (International Journal of Multilingualism 11[4], 2014), Language Education Policy in Late Modernity: Insights from Situated Approaches (Language Policy 14[2], 2015), and Reflexivity in Late Modernity: Accounts from Linguistic Ethnographies of Youth (AILA Review 29[1], 2016).

ORCID

Carlos Soto http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2043-3500

Miguel Pérez-Milans http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6421-5180

Notes

1 All names in this article, aside from author names, are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Hong Kong's Seed Funding Programme for Basic Research.