Intercultural education in everyday practice

While there is substantive work in intercultural education, especially that which proposes intellectual or conceptual road maps for pedagogic interculturalism and, more specifically for the classroom, there is a need to surface the complexity of everyday intercultural classroom practices. This article reflects on some Singapore students’ responses to materials designed to help them engage critically with intercultural issues. These responses can be categorized into three types of tajectories: reifying, critical and conflicted. Reifying practices basically mean that students essentialize individuals, communities and countries despite (and perhaps because of) the intercultural approach to the teaching of communication. Critical trajectories, on the other hand, showcase students’ ability to identify stereotypes and provide much more nuanced characterizations of individuals and countries. Conflicted trajectories, however, seem to be the most dominant classroom practice: these are attempts of students to be critical but, in practice, their criticality is enmeshed in reifying tendencies. In other words, ‘criticality’ as it is envisioned is always incomplete on the ground. Thus, we need micro-lenses in interculturalism and intercultural education to help us critically reflect on and surface essentialisms, tensions and struggles in everyday classroom practice.     

Unequal Englishes in the Philippines

In this paper, we show how the notion of unequal Englishes can be deployed as an alternative way of accounting for the global spread of English. Through our data, we show how call‐center agents in the Philippines espouse conflicting ideologies in the workplace that invoke unequal Englishes. On the one hand, they espouse ideologies of privilege by seeing themselves as being able to exploit the resources of English in the call‐center workplace, thus celebrating themselves as proficient users of the language. On the other hand, they also espouse ideologies of delegitimization borne out of pressures to subscribe to American Standard English and the belief in the inherent superiority of ‘native speaker’ Englishes and their varieties. By mobilizing the paper towards unpacking inequalities of Englishes as invoked in the statements of call‐center agents, we hope to contribute to critically engaged discussions of the role of English in the world today.     

Entanglements of colonialism,social class,and Unequal Englishes

Recent work in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language education has called for the “return” of class in the critical examination of the role of language in society and education under the organizing logic of capitalist globalization. Nevertheless, while the restoration of class as a core aspect of sociolinguistic analysis is much welcome, it has also come with its own ideological erasures: the disappearance of colonialism and coloniality. Thus, this paper aims to, first, tackle the general erasure of class in intellectual movements in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades, then second, demonstrate how such erasure in fact involves the decoupling of class and colonialism through the example of the politics of Englishes in the Philippines, before introducing the concept of colonially induced Unequal Englishes (Tupas, 2015; Tupas & Salonga, 2016) as a way to address directly such politics.