The Cultural and Intercultural Identities of Transnational English Teachers: Two Case Studies from the Americas

The Cultural and Intercultural Identities of Transnational English Teachers: Two Case Studies from the Americas JULIA MENARD-WARWICK University of California, Davis Davis, California, United States This article presents case studies of two long-time English language teachers: a California English as a second language instructor originally from Brazil, and a Chilean English as a foreign language teacher who worked for many years in the United States before returning home Based on interview and classroom observation data, this research explores teachers’ perspectives on the connections between their transnational life experiences and their development of intercultural competence, how they define their own (inter)cultural identities; and how they approach cultural issues with their English language learners Although both women self-identify as bicultural, they were observed to have somewhat different approaches to teaching cultural issues: The California teacher emphasizes subjective comparisons between the many national cultures represented in her classroom, but the teacher in Chile focuses more on the cultural changes that she and her students have experienced as a result of globalization Whereas previous studies of teacher identity in TESOL have focused primarily on the dichotomy between native- and nonnative-English-speaking teachers, this article argues that the profession needs to put more value on the pedagogical resources that transnational and intercultural teachers bring to English language teaching I end with implications for educating intercultural teachers n recent years, many authors have discussed the dichotomy between the native-English-speaking teacher (NEST) and the nonnativeEnglish-speaking teacher (NNEST) in TESOL (e.g., Lazaraton, 2003; Nemtchinova, 2005; Pavlenko, 2003) A rough consensus is perhaps emerging that NNESTs have been unfairly discriminated against, that they provide good role models for English language learners (ELLs), but that they may lack knowledge about the target language and cultural norms Although it is not uncommon for authors to mention in passing that many TESOL professionals are “multilingual (and) interculturally I TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 42, No 4, December 2008 617 savvy” (Sparrow, 2000, p 750), little attention in the research literature has gone to such teachers—especially those who not fit neatly into the NEST/NNEST dichotomy Nevertheless, intercultural teachers have much to offer TESOL pedagogy Conversely, teachers with limited experience of other cultures, no matter their native language, will need special guidance in teacher education programs in order to successfully teach interculturality (Kramsch, 2005) What’s needed are teachers whose life experiences have led them to intercultural competence and who “just as importantly have a meta-cognitive awareness of their competence” (Byram, 1997, p 20) This article provides case studies of two such teachers, Ruby,1 originally from Brazil but a long-time adult English as a second language (ESL) teacher in California, and Paloma, a university-level Chilean English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher who spent 20 years in the United States Interculturality (Byram, 1997; Kramsch, 2005), that is, seeing cultural issues from multiple perspectives, should not be viewed as synonymous with transnationality (Kumaravadivelu, 2008; Risager, 2007), that is, having significant interests or experiences that cross nation-state boundaries I refer to these teachers as transnational, however, because their accounts emphasize the importance for their intercultural identity development of having lived long-term in two different national contexts Thus, these interpretive case studies explore three questions from the perspectives of these two teachers: How have their transnational life experiences helped them to develop intercultural competence and a meta-awareness of this competence? How they define their own (inter)cultural identities? How they approach (inter)cultural issues with their students? The article concludes with a call for incorporating similar subjective explorations of cultural and intercultural experiences into teacher education programs so as to facilitate new teachers’ awareness of cultural complexities in the second language (L2) classroom CULTURE AND INTERCULTURALITY IN L2 EDUCATION In the 1990s, U.S professional organizations collaborated on national standards for foreign language (FL) learning, with one goal being that students gain knowledge and understanding of other cultures (Phillips, 2003) Specifically, the framework requires students to analyze relationships between the practices, perspectives, and products of the cultures studied Culture in these standards is undefined but can be inferred to mean a group of people (e.g., a nation) sharing practices (e.g., greet1 618 Names are pseudonyms TESOL QUARTERLY ings), perspectives (attitudes, values), and products (books, foods, etc.) However, culture can also refer to the shared practices, perspectives, and products themselves Clearly, groups of people (from nations to garage bands) tend to share practices and perspectives that to some extent differ from those shared by other groups However, there has been a recent shift from the stable, normative view of culture implied by the national standards toward seeing cultures as heterogeneous, dynamic, loosely bounded, and subjectively experienced (Kramsch, 1998) Atkinson (1999) proposed a “revised” view of culture in TESOL in which learners are seen as individuals-in-context with “multiple, contradictory, and dynamic” (p 643) identities However, Atkinson’s proposal was critiqued for not taking account of power relations (Siegal, 2000) or the specificities of educational contexts (Sparrow, 2000) Moreover, as Kubota (1999) writes, representations of culture in TESOL (e.g., that Japanese students value harmony) need to be problematized as discursive constructions often imposed by politically and economically privileged groups Similarly, Harklau (1999) argues for problematizing cultural content in order to “facilitate students’ explorations of culture from their own varied individual backgrounds” (p 126) Meanwhile, European economic integration and heightened global tensions between the West and Islam have led to growing emphasis in language pedagogy on dialogue across national and ethnic boundaries leading to interculturality (Byram, 1997; Wesche, 2004), defined as “an awareness and a respect of difference, as well as the socioaffective capacity to see oneself through the eyes of others” (Kramsch, 2005, p 553) According to Byram (2003), interculturality is not the same as biculturality, the capacity to function in two distinct cultural groups, but biculturality may facilitate interculturality Similarly, intercultural experiences, that is, interactions across cultural boundaries, can facilitate interculturality but should not be seen as synonymous with it Along with knowledge of one’s own and other cultures, interculturality involves attitudes of curiosity and openness, skills in interpretation and mediation, and a critical awareness of conflicting value systems (Byram, 1997) However, survey research inspired by Byram’s work and conducted with European FL teachers found that most perceived culture in terms of knowledge about target language nations, and few promoted intercultural competence (Sercu, 2006) Other recent scholarship on cultural pedagogies in language teaching (Kumaravadivelu, 2008; Risager, 2007) situates this work within the current context of globalization Without denying the importance of national and ethnic identities, these authors emphasize the need for language educators to move away from a simplistic equation of nation– culture–language (as in the teachers surveyed by Sercu, 2006) to what THE IDENTITIES OF TRANSNATIONAL ENGLISH TEACHERS 619 Risager calls a transnational paradigm, based on an awareness of linguistic and cultural complexity in a globalized world where practices and perspectives (as well as individuals) often cross national borders In this global context, both authors advocate a focus on the “the complexity of an individual’s cultural growth” (Kumaravadivelu, 2008, p 6) within language education TEACHER IDENTITIES This emphasis on complexity is in keeping with recent views of identity in L2 education (e.g., Norton, 2000) as “often contradictory, and subject to change across time and place” (Morgan, 2004, p 172) However, it is primarily learners whose identities have been theorized in this way Although ESL teachers’ racial and gender identities have been profiled in recent years (e.g., Lin et al., 2004), the NNEST/NEST dichotomy remains the most prevalent way of theorizing teacher identity in TESOL This scholarship represents a commendable attempt to get away from the “colonial legacy” of the “native speaker fallacy” (Morgan, 2004, p 172), but teachers’ cultural, intercultural, national, and transnational identities remain undertheorized Research on teachers has often portrayed them as prototypically monocultural Although Alsup (2006) convincingly outlines teacher identity development as a process which “incorporates personal subjectivities in to the professional/cultural expectations of what it means to be a ‘teacher’” (p 27), all her research participants were young white people preparing to teach high school English primarily to other young white people Indeed, much of the TESOL literature that concerns teachers’ cultural identities connects the limitations of their backgrounds to their difficulties in addressing culture in the L2 classroom Duff and Uchida (1997) profile four English teachers in Japan, whose “sociocultural perceptions and identities” (p 473), along with institutional constraints, led them to make classroom choices about addressing cultural issues that were often at odds with the beliefs they stated in interviews In a U.S context, Harklau (1999) observed ESL instructors who were experienced in working with international students but unequipped to handle the more intense cultural identity issues faced by Generation 1.5 immigrant students Finally, Lazaraton (2003) emphasizes a lack of cultural knowledge in chronicling NNESTs’ attempts to answer ESL student questions In contrast to the rather bleak picture of teacher identity drawn by TESOL researchers, scholars of bilingual education detail teachers’ pedagogical resources, indexing the importance of “identity as peda620 TESOL QUARTERLY gogy” (Morgan, 2004, p 178) Through biographical case studies, Galindo and Olgn (1996), Weisman (2001), and Monzó and Rueda (2003) note the gifts bilingual teachers bring to the socialization of language minority children As Weisman explains, such teachers are “vital role models who can offer their students the opportunity to imagine possibilities for their future that not negate their cultural worldview” (p 222) Moreover, bicultural “teachers bring worldviews shaped by the sociocultural and historical contexts of their lives” (Monzó & Rueda, p 72), which enable them to address the linguistic, ideological, and social concerns of students from diverse communities However, before teachers’ identities can become resources for pedagogy, “critical reflection (on) life experiences” may be needed (Galindo & Olguín, p 33; cf Pavlenko, 2003) Such biographical reflection facilitates not only bicultural and/or intercultural competence, but additionally a metaawareness of this competence that can be shared with learners (Byram, 1997) Some authors note biculturality or interculturality as an asset of NNESTs: For example, Nemtchinova (2005) mentions that NNES teacher trainees’ “study of language and culture other than their own enables them to make explicit cross-cultural comparisons and contrasts and to weave these observations into their teaching” (p 254) Although this example shows how teachers incorporate personal subjectivities into their professional identities (Alsup, 2006), little research has been conducted on the bicultural or intercultural identities of second and foreign language teachers or how such identities might influence pedagogy METHODOLOGY This article comes from a larger qualitative study, conducted between 2004 and 2006, at a small university in Chile and several California adult ESL programs Through multiple case studies of English language teachers in both educational contexts, this project has explored teachers’ perspectives on their own cultural identities and how these identities affect their approaches to teaching culture in the language classroom Recognizing the complexity of teachers’ pedagogical decision making, which is necessarily based on an interrelationship between institutional and biographical factors (Duff & Uchida, 1997), I cannot argue for a straightforward causal link between the particularities of teachers’ transnational experiences and the ways they approach cultural pedagogies Instead, my work is interpretive, focused on the links that teachers see between their experiences, their identities, their teaching practices, and THE IDENTITIES OF TRANSNATIONAL ENGLISH TEACHERS 621 especially the approaches to teaching culture that I observed in their classrooms (Watson-Gegeo, 1988) Indeed, because the research interview itself is a site where speakers can “do discursive work to address dilemmas and resolve contradictions in order to construct coherent identity” (Taylor, 2003, p 194), to some extent my research questions co-constructed their conceptualizations of these links Rather than presenting an objective account of how particular experiences result in particular pedagogies, this article recounts my interpretive exploration of these complex issues with two intercultural, transnational English teachers In this exploration, I define culture as shared understandings and practices within groups of people, while noting that these “shared” understandings and practices are inevitably subjective, heterogeneous, and dynamic (Kramsch, 1998); I define identity as a negotiation between how one sees oneself and how one is seen by others (Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2001) Since interculturality involves distancing oneself from one’s own cultural viewpoint in order to explore the perspectives of others (Byram, 1997; Kramsch, 2005), an intercultural identity is thus a negotiated investment in seeing the world through multiple cultural lenses DATA COLLECTION I observed and audiotaped the classes of three Chilean English teachers and five California ESL instructors, spending hours in each classroom over several weeks Immediately after each observation, I wrote ethnographic field notes I also conducted audiotaped interviews with the eight observed instructors, regarding their history of FL study and use, their experiences as English teachers, their cross-cultural experiences, and their perspectives on culture in language teaching I conducted follow-up interviews to get their perspectives on the cultural issues from the class observations Interviews lasted from to hours I recruited California participants through personal contacts; all were teaching intermediate to advanced ESL classes, which focused on L2 skills (e.g., reading) but which also allowed time for open-ended discussions The U.S./Chile Binational Fulbright Commission arranged for me to conduct research at the Chilean university On arrival, I received permission from the instructors of the most advanced general English courses to observe their classes and to interview them These classes were comparable in level and subject matter to the classes observed in California I focused on intermediate to advanced classes assuming that students’ greater linguistic competence would allow more discussion of cultural topics Participants knew I was interested in issues of cultural identity and how teachers talked about culture in the classroom 622 TESOL QUARTERLY Though this was not the basis on which I selected them, all the participating teachers had significant intercultural experiences, such as sojourns abroad or intercultural marriages However, Paloma and Ruby were the two who by far had spent the longest time living abroad and were the only ones who self-identified as bicultural As an AngloAmerican English teacher who has taught and conducted research in Latin America as well as in U.S Latino communities, I have always found interculturality (to the extent I can accomplish it) to be a significant resource for my work Therefore, I am interested in exploring the perspectives of truly transnational English teachers who have become immersed in cultural contexts other than their own to the point where they consider themselves bicultural.2 Both Paloma and Ruby were teaching advanced general English classes when I observed them, Paloma to university students preparing to become English teachers and Ruby to a mixed-nationality class of immigrants at an adult school in an uppermiddle-class California community.3 DATA ANALYSIS Having decided to write a comparative case study of Paloma and Ruby, I conducted a thematic analysis of their interview and classroom data using NVivo (QSR International, 2006) qualitative data analysis software Prevalent themes included politics, students, and gender Additionally, I coded the classroom data for types of activities, e.g., responding to texts and sharing opinions However, since my research questions concerned connections between cultural identities and pedagogies, I needed to operationalize a definition of culture that could be applied to different types of data across research contexts Although the national standards approach to culture discussed earlier (Phillips, 2003) is simplistic, for this very reason it served as the basis of a workable coding system: I coded data as having cultural content when it concerned practices, perspectives, and resulting products that are shared among groups of people For example, in the data from Ruby’s class, tattooing is a practice shared by fashionable youth worldwide, which results in a product (body art) and arguably exemplifies values of individual freedom and selfexpression Though it could be argued that linguistic forms are cultural, While I recognize that living transnationally is neither necessary nor sufficient for the development of interculturality, it is nevertheless one significant means to this end Likewise, although biculturality is not synonymous with interculturality, these should be seen as mutually facilitative California adult schools offer government-funded, free ESL classes Ruby’s adult school offers general English classes at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels, and multilevel classes for immigrant parents THE IDENTITIES OF TRANSNATIONAL ENGLISH TEACHERS 623 I excluded most form-focused activities, for example, vocabulary exercises, from my cultural coding.4 Data coded for cultural content was given subcodes as to whether it concerned practices, products, or perspectives I also coded cultural data for approaches toward culture taken by participants Ruby’s most common approach was cultural comparison (Byram, 1997): discussion of how the practices or perspectives of one group (she focused primarily on national groups) differ from those of another group Paloma also used this approach, but more often focused on cultural change in Chile: discussion of how contemporary practices and perspectives compare with those in the past The Transnational Life Histories section consists of chronologically arranged interview data thematically related to major life events: education, marriage, emigration, long-term employment, and current activities The (Inter)cultural Identities section is a synthesis of data coded for cultural identity, defined as participant’s sense of belonging or not belonging to particular groups based on his or her history and participation in particular practices and systems of meaning Finally, I selected classroom data that exemplified trends in teaching culture that I observed I had not coded for interculturality (Kramsch, 2005; Byram, 1997) because identifying its presence within data excerpts requires particularly high levels of inference Thus, in my analysis of classroom data, I point to evidence of interculturality within typical activities in the two classrooms In presenting this analysis, I know that the hours I spent in Ruby’s and Paloma’s classes may not be representative of their teaching practice and that my presence may have affected the approaches they took during my observations.5 Moreover, the life narratives in this article should not be seen as transparent representations of factual information, but rather as the tellers’ perspectives on past events in relation to the context of telling (Ochs & Capps, 1996; Taylor, 2003) Nevertheless, in triangulating interview and classroom data (Watson-Gegeo, 1988), I found enough congruence to draw interpretive conclusions about participants’ perspectives on their own intercultural experiences and how these experiences affect their teaching TRANSNATIONAL LIFE HISTORIES Teacher identities are multiple, complex, contradictory, and subject to change over time and place (Morgan, 2004) These complexities and 624 In a few cases, cultural and linguistic content was inextricably interwoven Ruby told me that she actually talked about culture to her students more when I was not there TESOL QUARTERLY contradictions may shift and realign within discursive interactions but are also constructed long-term across personal and social histories In their 1997 study of EFL teachers, Duff and Uchida found that particular cultural identities became foregrounded in classrooms due to biographical as well as institutional factors Thus, I present accounts of my participants’ life histories to contextualize my later discussion of their (inter)cultural identities and teaching practices Ruby Born in Brazil in the 1950s, Ruby was a middle child in a family whose fortunes fluctuated over the years of her childhood The complexities of her language development trajectory make it difficult to label her as either a native or a nonnative speaker of English, NEST or NNEST Her father had moved to Brazil from the United States as a young man, and her mother had come from England as a child Both were bilingual in English and Portuguese and spoke both languages at home in Ruby’s early childhood Her father was initially successful in business, but later the business failed After her parents divorced when she was five, Ruby describes her family life as “spinning in chaos.” Mostly she lived with her mother, who used only Portuguese at home after the divorce; in this way Ruby lost her early proficiency in English After her mother remarried, Ruby at 13 temporarily joined her father in Holland, where she relearned some English This European sojourn interrupted her Portuguese-language schooling, and she ended up behind her age group when she returned to Brazil At 17, needing to earn money, Ruby dropped out of high school and began using her English skills as a freelance tour guide The next year she got a job teaching at a private English school because although she “didn’t speak that well at all,” she “did speak without an accent.” Outside of class, Ruby spent time with expatriate English teachers, who urged her to continue her education; with her “staunch capitalist” but now impoverished family; and with a “very left-leaning” boyfriend, critical of the military regime in Brazil An invitation to move to New York and live with her uncle offered her a way out of these contradictions, through what she now sees as a rather naïve embrace of the “American Dream.” She remembers telling her students, “I’m gonna be zipping around in this convertible Mercedes and isn’t life great.” In New York, she finished high school, took junior college classes, and regained a native-like proficiency in English In her mid twenties, she moved to California, got a degree in agronomy, and met her husband Matt, a university lecturer They married and had two daughters Ruby initially planned to be a full-time mother but was offered an evening job THE IDENTITIES OF TRANSNATIONAL ENGLISH TEACHERS 625 teaching ESL at the local adult school When her daughters started school, she was able to change to a morning class “That class was a little higher level and I didn’t know the grammar at all I was getting all mixed up so I decided that if I was going to teach English, I needed to go back to school.” Ruby earned a master’s degree in TESOL and continued teaching Both her daughters have now finished high school and recently spent months in Brazil to improve their Portuguese Along with teaching English, Ruby organizes local Latin American music festivals, as well as Brazilian community gatherings: “Any information we have of any event that has to with Brazil we just send it to everybody on (our) Yahoo group So it’s pretty fun, I’m really happy about it.” Paloma Born in the 1940s, Paloma was the youngest child in a Spanishspeaking middle-class family in the Chilean city where she now lives Having acquired English initially through academic study in Chile, she describes her English-language proficiency after many years in the United States as “near-native.”6 Though she particularly enjoyed studying French in high school, “for some reason I always told my mom that I wanted to be a teacher of English,” so she enrolled in the English teaching program at the local university She married her boyfriend Javier right after graduation in December 1970, and then learned that she had been accepted for a Fulbright grant to earn a MATESOL degree in the United States Deciding to go with her, Javier “was a wonderful husband (he) sold everything he could, he took money, and he cleaned dorms.” Javier got his master’s degree in literature at the same university where Paloma studied TESOL Returning to Chile in 1973, they found the country enduring severe shortages of consumer goods in the final days of Allende’s socialist presidency The coup and military dictatorship soon followed Though they had initially supported Allende, the fact that they had spent most of his presidency abroad meant they were able to keep their jobs while colleagues viewed as leftist fled into exile “But things turned out very, very bad and then we just devoted ourselves to working.” They taught English at the university in their hometown under military rule until 1985, when Javier was accepted into a doctoral program at a U.S university and Paloma found a job as coordinator of teaching 626 Thus, in terms of the debate in the field, Paloma could be described as an NNEST although she herself did not use this precise term in describing herself TESOL QUARTERLY assistants in the Spanish department Over the next decade and a half, Javier finished his doctorate and taught Spanish literature, while Paloma got a second masters in Spanish and continued to coordinate teaching assistants.7 Their son, nine at the time of the move, acculturated to life in the United States and for the most part abandoned Spanish In the late 1990s, Javier lost his U.S teaching job and received an offer to teach English literature at their former university in Chile The country had returned to democracy in 1990, and he wanted to return At the time, Paloma was just starting a doctoral program in education, so she tried staying in the United States alone but found it too hard on their marriage Returning to Chile in 2003 without finishing her doctorate, she began teaching English part-time at the same university Although transitioning back to Chile was difficult for Paloma, it eventually brought new opportunities to promote cultural awareness Paloma felt lost in her native land until a friend invited her to attend a leadership diploma program As a project for the program, Paloma started an exchange program for Chilean English teachers to spend a month in the United States, living with Spanish teachers and assisting in their classes Two years later, when I interviewed her, she was excited about the results of this cultural immersion project, as a life-changing experience for Chilean teachers She described one participant saying, “Now I believe I can things Now I trust myself that I can bring change.” (INTER)CULTURAL IDENTITIES In my interviews with language teachers, probably the most challenging question I asked was “How would you define your own cultural identity?” A number of teachers stumbled over this question or asked me to define cultural identity first However, perhaps because they had a more explicit metacognitive awareness of their bicultural status (Byram, 1997, 2003), Paloma and Ruby answered readily, although with laughter In this section I look at how they represent themselves as women who have lived and identified with different cultural groups Although national identities may lose relevance in an age of globalization (Kumaravadivelu, 2008; Risager, 2007) and should not be equated with cultural identities (Kramsch, 1998, 2005), it may also be true that living in two different nation states actually reinforces the salience of national identities When powerful experiences of cultural difference come as a result of crossing national boundaries, it is easy for national labels to stand in as cultural Due to bias against NNESTs, Javier and Paloma taught Spanish rather than English in the United States THE IDENTITIES OF TRANSNATIONAL ENGLISH TEACHERS 627 labels, as they often when Ruby and Paloma articulate their metacognitive awareness of their intercultural histories (Byram, 1997) However, it remains crucial to note that in other contexts, national identities may not be at all salient Therefore, though national and cultural identities may be emically conflated by the participants in this study (WatsonGegeo, 1988), they should be kept theoretically distinct Ruby When I asked Ruby about her cultural identity, she immediately laughed, and said, “Split Definitely split I feel like a hybrid of some sort, you know I think at this point I’m probably more American than Brazilian.” At times she has felt alienated from other Brazilians because of being married to an American and of having lived, in some ways, a “gringo” life even in Brazil Though not particularly close to her father, she had picked up some of his values, especially pride in knowing practical skills like gardening, which middle-class Brazilians disparage: “I’m very American that way.” At the same time, Ruby saw her own communication style as very Brazilian, based on context and body language and often leading to misunderstandings with her more literal-minded North American husband She prioritized passing on Brazilian values to her daughters, like the importance of socializing with friends and family To this end, she had actively reclaimed her Brazilian identity during her daughters’ childhood Although the Portuguese she knew best was “rebellious teen Portuguese” with “a lot of cuss words,” she began singing to them the children’s songs she remembered Indeed, it was through music that she reconnected with her heritage, after meeting a Brazilian musician who was looking for a vocalist: “Next thing I know, it’s been 10 years, and we’ve been singing together ever since.” This involvement in music led to her work with the Latin American cultural organizations described earlier Paloma Like Ruby, Paloma laughed when I asked about her cultural identity Still laughing, she replied, “My cultural identity Um, I was born white, Catholic, I went to the States, they told me that I’m not white, I’m Hispanic I am not a majority, but a minority.” Despite being racialized in this way (Kubota & Lin, 2006), Paloma felt that her level of education brought her some acceptance in the white community When colleagues called her “near-native,” she would respond, “Thank you for 628 TESOL QUARTERLY saying ‘near’ because if you say ‘native,’ I am not, and I will never be.” Nevertheless, she appreciated being called “near-native” in recognition of everything she had gained and suffered in the United States She eventually got used to the way North Americans tended to prioritize strict time schedules over human relationships, but found her greatest challenge was raising “a bicultural kid sometimes I’m talking to him, I sound like a person from (Chile) and he responds as an American.” Eventually, however, she realized “I belong to both cultures.” She spoke of metaphorical “umbilical cords” connecting her to Chile but also to the United States At the same time, her years abroad heightened her awareness of how much Chile had changed while she was away, in both positive and negative ways Therefore, one of her goals for teaching has been to help her students reflect on the value of traditional practices now being lost to globalization TEACHING INTERCULTURALITY Sercu (2006) states that it is now commonplace in Europe to speak of the intercultural dimension of language learning and to expect teachers to incorporate this in their classes However, her survey findings indicate that incorporating the intercultural dimension is still difficult for many teachers (cf Duff & Uchida, 1997; Harklau, 1999; Lazaraton, 2003) Teachers who have experienced and reflected on cultural differences are perhaps best equipped to help language learners understand them However, appropriate pedagogical responses to students’ confrontation with cultural otherness will take different forms depending on the local context The contrasts between Paloma’s and Ruby’s approaches illustrate possible ways that cultural pedagogies might arise not only from biographical identities, but also from institutional settings (Duff & Uchida, 1997) Ruby Ruby said that for many years she taught culture “incidentally, only if a question (came) up.” In so doing, she drew on her own background, sometimes thinking through issues in Portuguese so she could identify students’ sources of confusion with English concepts In recent years, however, she said she was influenced by an article she had read on the cultural orientation framework (Buckley, 2000), which presents a model for understanding cultural assumptions and values, for example, individualism versus collectivism Although she found this article useful for THE IDENTITIES OF TRANSNATIONAL ENGLISH TEACHERS 629 understanding differences between herself and her “very American” husband, she discovered in classroom discussions that her students didn’t fall into the neat national patterns the article predicted Nevertheless, she continued to use the article’s concepts to illustrate values and assumptions that underlie cultural behaviors In her classroom I observed discussions of tattoos, eating contests, political dissent, and punishment for children In each case she would relate specific issues, such as eating contests, to more general themes such as affluence and waste After introducing the topic with a formfocused exercise, she would direct students to talk in groups about how this issue is regarded in “your countries,” and then report back to the class She asked students to share personal experiences, and she shared experiences of her own For example, in connecting eating contests to issues of affluence and waste, she mentioned being shocked as a child when her “American cousins” staged a “food fight” during their visit to Brazil When students from the same country disagreed, she encouraged both to share their ideas, in this way emphasizing the heterogeneous nature of cultural practices (Kramsch, 1998) Thus, in my analysis, cultural comparison, contrasting national cultures from subjective perspectives, was Ruby’s principle orientation to teaching culture I illustrate this with excerpts from the classroom discussion of tattoos (audiotaped May 11, 2005) Ruby began with a pronunciation exercise based on a poem about the topic, followed by small group discussion As groups reported back to the class, most agreed that tattoos were more prevalent in the United States than in their countries However, two women from Argentina disagreed on whether tattoos were common there, with the younger woman arguing, “It’s like a fashion in Argentina (we have to go)8 to have tattoos.” However, she added that she used to work at McDonald’s, “and if you have tattoos, you can’t work there.” Ruby asked the class if this would be true at McDonald’s in the United States When several expressed uncertainty, she gave her own opinion: “I would guess you can work at McDonald’s with a tattoo, in fact I would guess probably many people have tattoos who work there.” When she asked students why they thought there were more tattoos in the United States than in their countries, several replied, “America is more free More freedom.” Ruby then told her own tattoo story, to the accompaniment of student laughter, about taking her daughters when they were younger to a birthday party at an urban public swimming pool In her story, she seems to be drawing on her identity as a long-term resident of the United States who is not yet fully acculturated In so doing, her identity becomes 630 ( ) indicates transcriptionist doubt; [ ] indicates paralinguistic behavior or explanatory information; italics indicates emphasis TESOL QUARTERLY pedagogy (Morgan, 2004) as she humorously models for her students the intercultural attitude (Byram, 1997) that one can be a life-long cultural learner in United States, developing new understandings of U.S practices and values without fully embracing them (Weisman, 2001) She ends by noting the inadvisability of generalizing based on a single experience: I was completely shocked Because there, you could see everybody’s tattoos because everybody was wearing a bathing suit and I don’t know if it was that particular place or what, but I would say, I think 70% of the people had tattoos I mean, everyone I looked at had a tattoo, but I’m not saying that 70% of American people have tattoos maybe it was just that one day at that pool [laughing] Ruby next returned to the issue of employment discrimination, asking whether a U.S employer could refuse a job to someone with a tattoo Students initially chorused, “No!” but when Ruby asked “Why not?” she received more nuanced replies: It would depend on the position, the image of the organization, and whether the tattoo was visible Several students gave examples of employers asking about (hidden) tattoos during interviews in their countries When Ruby responded, “My feeling is that in America people would consider this private information,” she seemed to be again drawing pedagogically on her intercultural identity (Morgan, 2004) as a long-time resident who can see “America” from both inside and outside perspectives This approach affirmed the possibility of alternate cultural worldviews (Weisman, 2001) and opened space for several students to implicitly argue against the posited “American” preoccupation with privacy by pointing out health concerns related to blood-borne diseases Thus, they were developing critical cultural awareness (Byram, 1997) through the juxtaposition of opposing values There was a discussion of blood-testing practices around the world, before the class returned to the idea of tattoos as a fashion statement Based on a student comment, Ruby drew a tentative conclusion: “So you’re saying that people are more concerned about standing out as different, they want to make a mark They want to show their individuality more, and you think that’s where this is coming from.” Thus, this discussion included the most common features of cultural pedagogy in Ruby’s classroom: encouraging students to make general remarks about “your countries” and also about personal experiences, Ruby’s sharing of her own experiences (in both the United States and Brazil), and the relation of a small issue (tattoos) from a text used in a form-focused exercise to more general cultural concerns (privacy, individuality, employment discrimination) This discussion also implicitly touched on other important issues: First, in addressing employment discrimination against individuals with tattoos, students noted the influence THE IDENTITIES OF TRANSNATIONAL ENGLISH TEACHERS 631 of societal power structures on cultural practices; second, the focus on tattoos as a contemporary fashion statement illustrated the dynamic transnational nature of many cultural practices (Risager, 2007) rather than seeing culture as simply tradition Ironically, when I asked Ruby about this interaction in an interview, she said this was a “good cultural issue” but expressed insecurity that perhaps she did not know enough about issues of privacy and individualism in American culture “for a teacher to be discussing and trying to tell students” about them Paloma For Paloma, teaching culture is connected to a larger goal of social transformation through education She stated in interviews and while teaching that she saw good teachers as “agents of change.” As mentioned earlier, in taking Chilean educators to visit U.S schools, Paloma perceived that awareness of other cultures empowered teachers to implement new educational practices In her own case, studying multiculturalism in the United States had led her to value diversity in Chile, especially the local indigenous cultures, and she now had “an agenda to expose students to these beliefs.”9 However, at times she simply worked to prepare her students for transformations in education outside their control At the end of my interviews, I mentioned that change seemed to be a theme in all her classes She laughed and said, “The idea about adjusting to new times so it surfaces, huh?” She saw her experience of living abroad as key to her commitment to discussing these issues with her students As she explained in a follow-up e-mail, “I was away from Chile for 18 years I came back in 2003 with a very objective set of mind to see things that my fellow Chileans did not see.” Paloma usually connected her class activities to a central theme, extending one theme over several lessons Although this was officially a class on English rather than teaching methodology, her students were soon to be full-time teachers in local schools, so pedagogy was one theme she included The other two themes I observed were the changing family and terrorism (the latter requested by students) Like Ruby, Paloma introduced cultural issues through short readings Generally, the class went from reading comprehension exercises to sharing opinions about the ideas presented Unlike Ruby, Paloma rarely asked her students to compare different countries, but rather to contrast Chile’s past and present Because contemporary cultural trends in Chile are widely seen as 632 Some Chilean teachers have come to similar commitments through contact with the Pan-Andean indigenous education movement in South America, but Paloma attributes her interest in multiculturalism to her education in the United States TESOL QUARTERLY wholesale adoptions of so-called global culture (Kumaravadivelu, 2008; Moulián, 1997), interculturality in this context can involve comparing today’s globalized culture (to some extent borrowed from Englishspeaking countries) with older Chilean practices and values Thus, I describe Paloma’s approach as focused on cultural change, emphasizing the dynamic nature of cultural practices and values (Kramsch, 1998) Paloma introduced the following discussion by talking about how students had performed in their recent oral presentations She had brought in an article titled “30 Second Success” (Demarais, 2004) to suggest ideas to help students improve their public speaking skills and ultimately their teaching She began by assigning a student, Casandra, to read the first paragraph aloud, which was on eye contact and body language Another student read the next passage, which directed readers to “Smile even when you aren’t in the mood,” adding, “We actually encourage our clients to fake it.” Paloma opened this issue for discussion: How you feel with that? Mmmm? So, good Pepsodent and start smiling [Students laughed] I see three faces that are absolutely serious and I know what that means What you think about faking? [Students laughed] Because that’s a value Some of you may say, “I am sorry, I don’t feel like smiling and I will not it.” (Audiotaped July 5, 2005) As subsequent turns showed, Paloma was correct in assuming that many students disagreed with the value of fake smiling although they were initially hesitant to voice this Finally, Casandra said: Probably if I am working as a salesclerk, I should smile all the time, but in our own cases, we think that when we are in front of a teacher that is always smiling, we (feel that they are faking), and that makes us feel uncomfortable (Audiotaped July 5, 2005) Casandra went on to explain at some length that once she began teaching, she hoped her students wouldn’t expect her to be happy all the time Antonio then raised a larger issue: I think that we will focus on the social context in which occurs this situation Here it says “we actually encourage our clients.” So it (tells) you that in business you have to forget your emotional moods and perhaps be smiling every time, but it is different when you are with your friends or with your professors (Audiotaped July 5, 2005) Paloma’s response drew on her own changing identity as a teacher (Morgan, 2004): I come from that model, in the past, that in education you not have “clients.” And today, that’s all there is to it! Everything is selling a good product, selling a good education, with a methodology And also, we become clients I become a client of [textbook publisher] if I am a good THE IDENTITIES OF TRANSNATIONAL ENGLISH TEACHERS 633 professor, and you are my students It’s interesting that in our mind we have no concept for that A client is only—for business (Audiotaped July 5, 2005) As in the discussion of employment discrimination in Ruby’s class, this interaction has a subtext as to how societal power structures can compel or limit new cultural practices Although neither Antonio nor Paloma says the word neoliberalism, the management of education “like a business” is part of the current economic model in Chile, as in many other parts of the world (Holborow, 2006); indeed, students at this university had recently gone on strike to protest the privatization of student loans Moreover, the social solidarity that Antonio invokes is widely seen as a traditional Chilean value now being lost to neoliberalism (Moulián, 1997) Paloma picks up these implications of Antonio’s remarks, implying that she is willing to entertain her students’ regrets for lost solidarity As in Ruby’s class, critical cultural awareness (Byram, 1997) appears through the juxtaposition of different value systems Although Paloma’s time abroad was not explicitly thematized in this interaction, I contend that her multifaceted view of educational change had been facilitated by her teaching experiences in different sociocultural and historical contexts It was her ability to see the issue from divergent perspectives that allowed her to understand and address her students’ concerns (Monzó & Rueda, 2003), while still giving them a realistic picture of the current educational climate When I interviewed her about this exchange, she expressed ambivalence about these business-oriented values but said she had to prepare her students for the future, “otherwise they are going to suffer in the schools.” DISCUSSION In this section, I review how these teachers’ transnational life experiences helped them to develop intercultural competence and a metaawareness of this competence, how they defined their own (inter)cultural identities, and how they approached (inter)cultural issues with their students I then relate these findings to questions of identity raised in the L2 teaching literature Like many L2 teachers, Ruby and Paloma were “multilingual (and) interculturally savvy” (Sparrow, 2000, p 750) Aside from brief European sojourns, Ruby spent her first two decades in Brazil, and the next three in the United States; Paloma spent two decades of her adult life in the United States before returning home to a globalized, neoliberal Chile very different from the insular dictatorship she had left Both women had spent years negotiating cultural issues with colleagues, students, and 634 TESOL QUARTERLY family members—at times finding ways to adapt, at other times choosing not to Ruby had figured out the cultural patterns in her miscommunications with her husband Matt, and Paloma had learned to schedule time in advance if she wanted to talk with North American friends As their different identities interacted within their daily lives (Wing, 2000), interculturality became central to their way of living Both women defined their cultural identities as split, hybrid, mixed: Indeed, Paloma metaphorically saw herself as having two umbilical cords, one tied to her Chilean hometown and the other to the U.S college town where she had spent two decades Their approaches to teaching reflected not only their biographical experiences but also their institutional contexts (Duff & Uchida, 1997) As an ESL instructor for immigrants from many countries, Ruby frequently used a strategy of cultural comparison, inviting her students to recount personal experiences with particular issues in their homelands Although this approach has been critiqued as essentializing differences between nations while denying differences within nations (Harklau, 1999; Kubota, 1999), this is not what tended to happen in Ruby’s class, as students from the same countries often disagreed with each other, while finding commonality with students of other nationalities—as in Risager’s (2007) transnational paradigm Additionally, Ruby stressed the importance of defining, when possible, the assumptions that underlie cultural behaviors (Buckley, 2000), because doing this had helped her communicate with her North American husband Likewise, Paloma’s Chilean students occasionally made cultural comparisons between Chile and English-speaking countries, and Paloma encouraged them in this However, more common were comparisons between traditional Chilean practices and rapidly shifting, globalized practices Thus, Paloma’s principal orientation to teaching culture was exploring cultural change: indeed, being an “agent of change” is key to her teacher identity Based on her own transnational experiences, she believed that awareness of other cultures can empower teachers to adopt new educational practices but also to hold onto valued traditions Thus, Paloma and Ruby had brought their intercultural identities into their classrooms (Morgan, 2004) Moreover, their experiences provided resources for addressing students’ linguistic, ideological, and cultural concerns (Monzó & Rueda, 2003) However, these sorts of identity resources have been little addressed in the TESOL literature, which has tended to dichotomize teacher identity as either NEST or NNEST, a dichotomy that doesn’t address the kinds of resources that intercultural teachers like Paloma and Ruby bring to their teaching In sharing their personal histories of understanding and adapting to multiple cultural frameworks and thus modeling intercultural identities, they can open up THE IDENTITIES OF TRANSNATIONAL ENGLISH TEACHERS 635 identity options not previously imagined by their students (Morgan, 2004; Weisman, 2001) Nevertheless, despite their impressive skills and experience, I cannot contend that Paloma and Ruby have found all-encompassing solutions to the problems of intercultural pedagogy For example, although neither is naïve about how power operates in their societies, their pedagogies not explicitly address how privilege is implicated in cultural representations (Harklau, 1999; Kubota, 1999) Rather than praise or critique these teachers, my aim in sketching connections between their identities and their pedagogies is to draw attention to general connections between cultural identities and pedagogies (Monzó & Rueda, 2003; Morgan, 2004; Weisman, 2001) Above all, I encourage educators to reflect on their own (inter)cultural experiences and identities, and re-examine their approaches to teaching culture in light of those reflections (Morgan, 2004) IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION Like the research interview, the teacher education classroom can be a site where speakers “address dilemmas and resolve contradictions in order to construct coherent identity” (Taylor, 2003, p 194) Through discussions and written assignments, new teachers can learn to “incorporate their personal subjectivities” into their teaching practice (Alsup, 2006, p.27; cf Morgan, 2004) Such reflection is indeed key to contemporary theorizing on language and culture pedagogy, which emphasizes developing a metacognitive-awareness (Byram, 1997) of the complex transnational and (inter)cultural trajectories of language learners and teachers (Harklau, 1999; Kumaravadivelu, 2008; Risager, 2007) Thus, an aim of this paper is to encourage TESOL educators to require student reflection and sharing on their own cultural trajectories as preparation for their future work as language teachers From this perspective, teachers (like Paloma and Ruby) who can comprehend and articulate their own (inter)cultural journeys should be able to help their L2 students likewise Moreover, like my conversations with Paloma and Ruby, such classroom explorations will necessarily be interpretive and subjective, focused on “teachers’ own ways of theorising about their practice (which) tend to be narrative in form (and thus traditionally) undervalued in academic settings” (Morgan, 2004, p 177) Rather than establishing deterministic cause-and-effect relationships between having a certain cultural identity and practicing a certain kind of cultural pedagogy, teacher educators can help novice L2 teachers identify the cultural resources and constraints that arise from their personal and social his636 TESOL QUARTERLY tories and then decide how to incorporate this self-understanding into their teaching In my explorations of these questions with my own TESOL students, I have found it important to ask students to share specific experiences and to be explicit in interpreting how these experiences can inform teaching As students interact in this way with TESOL classmates, they find that their collective cultural experiences are far more complex than any one student’s individual experience Learning interculturality from each other, they gain a richer understanding of how to explore in L2 classrooms the variety of cultural differences that inevitably arise, while avoiding simplistic stereotyping (Kumaravadivelu, 2008) Clearly, such classroom reflection is particularly enriched by the insights of prospective teachers who have already immersed themselves for significant amounts of time in unfamiliar cultural settings, whether as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa or as a Chinese international student at a U.S university Although this experience will often be transnational, it may involve other varieties of multicultural encounters: The insider/outsider perspective on U.S cultural practices that Ruby gained transnationally is also common to many who grow up in U.S minority communities (e.g., Anzaldúa, 1999) Certainly, novice educators should be encouraged to further develop interculturality outside the classroom, whether in another country or another neighborhood However, even teachers with minimal intercultural experience can develop metacognitive awareness (Byram, 1997) of their own social and cultural identities Autobiographical reflection (Galindo & Olguín, 1996; Pavlenko, 2003) can help them recapture personal experiences with Otherness and being othered themselves— experiences that inevitably occur, even in fairly homogeneous communities Such experiences may be based on social categories such as age, sexuality, (dis)ability—but may also involve membership in cultural or subcultural groups: from an Italian-American extended family to a loose affiliation of hip-hop fans or surfers As new teachers compare the subjective experiences that have shaped them, they can begin to “distance [themselves] from [their] own cultural assumptions and see [themselves] as possessing a learned culture” (Wesche, 2004, p 279) They can also examine how power relations between groups in their own communities affect cultural practices However, to prepare prospective teachers for classroom diversity, and to help them learn skills of cultural analysis that they can pass on to their students, autobiographical reflection may not be enough Texts exemplifying a broad range of human experience can bring students beyond a focus on their own experiences Such texts could include multicultural memoirs (e.g., Anzaldúa, 1999) or films such as Travellers and Magicians (Thomas & Norbu, 2003), which depicts the dilemmas of a young BhuTHE IDENTITIES OF TRANSNATIONAL ENGLISH TEACHERS 637 tanese man who dreams of moving to the United States Dialogue with and around such texts can “create a special space and time at the boundaries between two views of the world [leading to] a sudden grasp of difference” (Kramsch, 1993, p 30) A teacher who has thought deeply about Anzaldúa’s manifesto “I Am My Language” is less likely to devalue students’ first language identities and more likely to strive toward biculturality for herself and her students In all such activities, teacher educators should reject static, uniform notions of national or ethnic cultures (Kramsch, 1998), elucidate power relations between different groups (Kubota, 1999), juxtapose divergent value systems (Byram, 1997), and facilitate explorations of culture based on the diversity of students’ backgrounds (Harklau, 1999) Transnational experiences, such as those described in this article, are clearly valuable for developing intercultural identities—a qualification for teaching that needs to be more appreciated in TESOL However, I cannot contend that living for decades on another continent is necessary for developing appropriate cultural pedagogies In the long run, it will be more important for the TESOL profession to develop a metacognitive awareness of the cultural resources that every teacher and student brings to the classroom (Kumaravadivelu, 2008) This is an awareness that all of us, regardless of cultural or linguistic background, can strive to cultivate ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was funded by the U.S./Chile Binational Fulbright Commission and by a grant from University of California, Davis I thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments shaped my revisions, and all the Californian and Chilean teachers who participated in my study THE AUTHOR Julia Menard-Warwick is an assistant professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of California, Davis, United States Her research focuses on questions of identity in L2 learning and teaching Previously, she taught ESL for 10 years at a community college in Washington state REFERENCES Alsup, J (2006) Teacher identity discourses: Negotiating personal and professional spaces Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Anzaldúa, G (1999) Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza (2nd ed.) 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