The July/August 2024 issue of Modern English Teacher carried a number of articles around the themes of diversity, equity and inclusion. Much of this was uncontroversial. It should go without saying that teachers and institutions should do everything they can to ensure that their classrooms are welcoming places where students are treated respectfully. What requires some critical rejoinder, however, is that which was left unsaid, the questions that were not asked, and the problems with issues of ELT and inclusion that were not posed. What follows is an attempt to address precisely that.
Valender Unlu (2024:9), in her summation of inclusion and diversity in ELT, asks some pertinent questions. Her challenge for us to ask ‘What are we doing to ensure that we are fully inclusive and diverse in our everyday practices?’ deserves serious reflection. On the list of proposals to address such issues, she urges ELT to ‘Nurture and give opportunities to those who are excluded’. This would seem to raise two questions worth examining further: why is there a global ELT industry, and just who is excluded from it?
The ELT industry exists due to English being successfully promoted as the lingua franca of corporate-led globalisation. Perhaps no one has expressed the appeal of this idea better than the Indian educationalist Braj Kachru (1990:1). In his 1986 book The Alchemy of English he talks of the linguistic ‘power’ of the language and compares English proficiency to ‘possessing the fabled Aladdin’s lamp’. It is not clear here how this linguistic ‘power’ compares or relates to more tangible forms of power. Are all those who speak English similarly ‘empowered’? If so, is it the speaking of English that empowers them, or is that merely one more marker of a pre-existing privilege?
Driving the industry has been the extraordinary growth in recent years of English-medium instruction, the international school sector and the mobility of international students. All of these have been encouraged by the global marketisation of learning, with far-reaching implications for the social purpose of education, democratic accountability and equality of access. Here, lurking behind the ubiquitous talk of value-driven commitments and diversity, is a practice where English is tacitly understood as an indicator of positional status and strategic advantage connected to wealth, a global cosmopolitanism of the transnational elite, deliberately distancing themselves from the majority who have not received their invites to the party. Such ‘global citizens’ are certainly the least economically diverse group you might ever encounter, with international school enrolment made up of the most economically privileged minority of the non-English speaking population where they operate.
Helen Gao, writing in the New York Times in 2014, described the lengths wealthy parents will go to in China in order to leverage education and English as social advantage.
Chang Qing, a friend and mother of a 16-year-old girl, has been preparing her daughter, Xiaoshuang, for America since the girl was a toddler … Now, her daughter speaks impeccable English and attends a private academy in Beijing where annual tuition is around $24,000. Ms Chang believes that nothing short of an Ivy League education will suffice.
– Helen Gao (2014)
Is there any contradiction here between this reality of an increasingly economically polarised world and the supposed commitment to diversity and inclusion? As Walter Benn Michaels observes in his book The Trouble with Diversity (2007):
Greater indifference to inequality and ideology is happily accompanied by greater attachment to identity … since a world of people who are different from us looks more appealing than a world of people who are poorer than us or a world of people who think our fundamental beliefs are deeply mistaken.
– Walter Benn Michaels (2007:156)
Reflecting on this brought to mind an episode of The Simpsons, when Homer takes his family Christmas shopping to an upscale mall in Springfield, with a sign at the entrance which reads ‘Our prices discriminate because we can’t’. And yet this rather glaring contradiction did not find its way into any of the articles on diversity and inclusion that appeared in MET. Perhaps a clue as to why can be found in the other word in this trilogy, that being ‘equity’. Indeed, Varender Unlu (op cit., p 11) mentions this word repeatedly, writing that ‘Policies and practices should aim to promote equity and inclusion by addressing systemic issues’ and ‘English language schools can create a more inclusive and equitable work environment for staff and set a positive example for students’, and that ‘it is our responsibility to pass on a more equitable and fairer world to the next generation of teachers’(ibid).
This all sounds good, of course, but the choice of the word ‘equity’ over ‘equality’ is significant. While a focus on equality encourages us to address a range of factors affecting inclusion, including economic disadvantage, policies based around equity are more narrowly targeted, seeking primarily to include more diverse representations within existing structures of inequality. This can help us understand why such ideas have been so eagerly taken up throughout the corporate business world.
In 1992, Robert Phillipson published his landmark case against the global ELT industry, called simply enough Linguistic Imperialism. A central issue he raised was that ELT had long been isolated from the social sciences, and consequently subjected to extraordinarily little critical analysis. The problem is that social science is now almost completely dominated by questions of identity, systematically sidelining economics and social class. This tends to take the existence of economic inequality for granted, leaving only the politics of subjecthood.
This presents us with something of a paradox. It is now more common to counterpose the rampant ‘native-speakerism’ and Anglo-centrism noted within ELT with an emphasis on respect for the ‘people of the great majority’. The problem for the commercial ELT industry, despite its more ‘inclusive’ stance, is that the great majority are never really considered, as they are economically excluded from accessing its services.
A different sort of ELT provision is possible, and has briefly existed in the past. Policies and approaches were pushed through in the late 1960s and early 1970s in many Western countries, which drew upon more genuinely inclusive and egalitarian philosophies, often coupling an attempt to match help with English to social need, recognising and respecting languages other than English.
Unfortunately, funding cuts, austerity and the encroach of the market have steadily undermined this. It has been replaced by an ever-expanding commercial ELT sector, framed not as a service but as an export industry, deliberately targeted towards the aspirational upper-middle-class and economic elites of the developing world.
Yes, discriminatory practices are rife within ELT. But while homogenisation may be critiqued in terms of race and gender, we should ask why there is such a glaring omission when it comes to that dreaded unmentionable: economic inequality. How can ELT be ‘fully inclusive’ if that remains the case?
