ON IDENTITY AND PEDAGOGY

Ibrahim's article Becoming Black: Rap and Hip-Hop, Race, Gender, identity, and the Politics of ESL Learning (1999) offers an empirical example of the idea of transgressing (Pennycook 2009) in ESL Learning. Starting with the ideas that "learning is neither aimless nor neutral, nor it is free of the politics of identity" (1999: 365) and that " learning it is an engagement of one's identity,a  fulfillment of personal needs and desires" (1999: 366),  teachers of ESL should promote the learning of a particular type of English taking into account the context in which it is carried out and the students' needs. Students are human beings whose culture is embedded in a society which often imposes standards that show unbalanced power relationships. As Ibrahim states, "we are imagined, constructed and treated" (1999: 349) as something by an already existing hegemonic discourse, and so are students. From my point of view, teachers should challenge this "social imaginary" by means of a transgressive approach towards ESL teaching, mostly, because the process of "becoming" that students undergo , in other words, the process of "building on peoples' conceptions (1999: 354) is a way of transgressing itself (if we understand transgression as expanding the limits of thought). According to Ibrahim, "choosing the margin is simultaneously an act of investment, an expression of desire, and a deliberate counterhegemonic undertaking" ( 1999: 365) and rap " is an act of resistance" (1999: 365-366). Therefore, if we think about language and the self as inseparable entities (though we may find them not hierarchically equal), the language we learn will be a great part of our identity and vice versa. Enabling students to develop their own linguistic choices is an act of social justice as it will create balanced relationships between different social groups which no longer would have to feel like they are in the margins of society.
In fact, a critical approach towards language pedagogy is what Alim proposes (2007) in order to fight the current approachs that support to the maintenance of the "cultural tension" between several social groups, only allowing those who have "cleaned their language" to self-fulfillment, mostly in terms of economic growth.
A critical perspective towards multicularism in the classroom is intimately related to Pennycook's idea of transculturation. A new understanding of culture is neccessary in order to successfully promote critical language pedagogies. In the first place, culture is no longer understood as a concept that conveys fixed and very well established ideas about a particular community. As Pennycook states (2009), it is about "critiquing traditional notions of culture for their unificatory principles of social homogenization (...), ethnic consolidation (...) and intercultural delimitation (...)". From my personal experience, as far as language education is concerned this perspective towards culture is plausible in a multicultural classroom in a context of a country where there is one official language, as it may happen in the USA. However, I wonder how to create policies that legally convey this meaning in schools located in regions where two languages are co-official and one of them has a higher status than the other one. I am thinking about Catalonia, for instance. In this region in the North-East of Spain, both Catalan and Spanish are official languages and people tend to think about themselves as being more involved in one of the two main cultures there: either they considered themselves to be more Spanish than Catalan or the other way round. They are politically nationalistic (either Spanish or Catalan) and they do not believe in the idea of culture as a hybrid space where both can be integrated. Kids, at schools, often fight the " two-race binary" idea (McConaghy 2000) because the atmosphere in which they grow up promotes it. They often have to choose one language, which will determine their future good or bad command of the two languages.
My question is, how do we implement the translocal perspective towards culture in this type of context so that people can act in accordance with it in their daily lives?

Globalization and World Englishes

Pennycook’s idea of globalization as a form of resistance is a key point in order to understand the diversity of world Englishes. Globalization is also a representation of plurality, which promotes “local diversity by human contact across cultural boundaries” (Kubota 2002). Therefore, in globalization there is a place for “change, adaptation, reformulation” , in Pennycook’s words, there is a place for “wordliness” (2007). According to Kubota, there are several processes involved in globalization: increased local diversity, increased emphasis on English and increased linguistic and cultural nationalism ( Kubota 2002 in Pennycook 2009).

Globalization, thus enable us to transgress pre-existing knowledge and to explore “the boundaries of thought” (Pennycook 2009). In Pennycook’s opinion, both Fanon and Foulcault’s theories apply to its “Transgressive theory” in the sense that they both promote new frames of thought (2009).  One of the concepts of this Transgressive theory is translation because it enables us to look for meanings as an interpretative task across cultures. Writing, as a skill, shows negotiation of meaning as well. According to Bolton, transcultural writers represent the idea of WE when writing in English (2010).

As I have previously mentioned, this perspective on globalization should be the start point for teachers of English for speaker of other languages as it is the targeted element of one of the processes described by Kubota.  Matsuda, P.  and Matsuda, A. (2010) state that the majority of users of English have learned it as an additional language, not as their native language. Therefore, they claim that linguistic as well as functional varieties of English should be taken into account when teaching the language. They also propose several principles for teachers to have in mind: teach the dominant language forms and functions as well as the non-dominant ones, make it clear for learner to distinguish between what works in English and what leads to errors, teach the rhetoric strategies according to the context in which they linguistic exchange takes place and also help them be aware of the fact that there are power issues which will place them under a lower status than a native speaker has.