Ethics and teacher practices in linguistic minority classrooms

Abstract

This paper draws on a theoretical framework informed by the philosopher of ethics Emmanuel Levinas to examine pedagogical responsibility for minority language students in elementary school classrooms. After making the case that ethics is extant in the literature around minority languages and mainstream education, the paper elaborates the Levinasian-informed ethical framework and suggests a point of analysis for examining pedagogical practices in minority language classrooms, namely, the extent to which teacher practices break with the sameness of a dominant language formal learning context and open to the alterity of minority languages. This point of analysis guides the interpretation of findings of an empirical inquiry into the pedagogical practices of eight teachers in their publicly-funded, mainstream Anglophone school. A corpus of in-depth interviews with and extended observations of the teachers in their teaching contexts reveals five core pedagogically relevant phenomena into which ethics can be read. The article concludes with an ethics-informed litmus test for present and possible educational practices in linguistic minority classrooms.

Keywords:

• minority languages
• ethics
• Levinas
• responsibility
• pedagogy

Notes

1. The fact that participants were not explicitly told that the issue of ethics was central to the study is itself a potentially ethical issue. However, my decision was not made without due deliberation. After discussing the matter with research colleagues who were familiar with the study, I decided that introducing the topic of ethics would prove unnecessarily cumbersome, and perhaps even intimidating, to teachers who were not familiar with the formal concept of ethics and its specific connotation in a Levinasian-inspired framework. Indeed, an extended discussion around Levinasian-ethics may have redirected the teachers’ attention away from their day-to-day teaching and on to their impressions of the interpretive framework informing my reading of their teaching practices. In this sense, a naturalistic snapshot of the teachers’ typical practices may have been lost.

2. This rethinking of a dominant language such as English, however, should not be confused with ignoring English-language literacy skills. In Anglophone Canada, for instance, it could be argued that English-language literacy is crucial for linguistic minority parents and their children. On this matter, Norton Peirce's (1995) notion of investment in a target language and in a social identity that enables access to the wider society is very much to the point.