Martyn Rawson teaches English at the Christian Morgenstern School in Hamburg and on the Masters Programme of the Freie Hochschule Stuttgart. He is also an honorary professor at National Tsinghua University Taiwan. He has written widely on Waldorf education, most recently Steiner Waldorf Pedagogy in Schools. A critical introduction published by Routledge.

Email: martynrawson@icloud.com

 

Abstract

This article explores how teaching and learning English as a second language can contribute to the self-formation of young people, in particular when the texts and media they engage with in the language help to socialize them in a multicultural world, to enable them to learn the skills to analyse and understand literature from other cultures and particularly when the subject matter interrupts them offers them opportunities to step up and take a position and exercise their agency. This is all part of the identity work that comes with the developmental tasks they face as emergent young adults. Postcolonial literature can offer a field in which themes are encountered that summons the young person to take responsibility for her thoughts, feelings and actions. The other language becomes a medium for transformation.

 

Developmental tasks

From the perspective of Waldorf education, teaching another language is not only a utilitarian activity but should contribute to the self-formation and individuation of the student (Rawson, 2021). The educational philosopher Gert Biesta (2021) argues that it is analytically helpful to recognize that all schools have three domains of educational purpose: socialisation, qualification and subjectification (‘translated’ here as becoming a subject). In all three domains, the core task of education is the call to self-activity. Fulfilling these tasks is no easy undertaking in a late modern context in which traditional cultural and gender identities and social roles have become fluid and fragmented or have dissolved altogether (Bauman, 2007) and young people have to develop the ability to construct ongoing coherent and stable identities (Hurrelmann and Bauer, 2018). As Ole Dreier (2008) has shown, young people have to continuously position themselves and take stances across different social practices through their daily lives; in the family, in their peer-group, on the street, in school etc. Young people who belong to minority groups also have to contend with being negatively positioned by other, powerful actors, such as the police and even school teachers. Even young people who belong to (often white) majorities, also have to navigate their way through complex and shifting family constellations, disadvantaged socio-economic status, challenging peer-group pressure, social media influence and so on. Being a youth and becoming a young adult was never so complicated.

 

Socialisation

Learning other languages and learning about the cultures that speak them is particularly important in supporting this process of becoming interculturally literate. The very fact of learning another language through immersion and participation in classroom practices not only provides a basis for learning another language (see Rawson, 2022) but also in developing a sense of tolerance for ambiguity - anyone who has not experienced being uncertain about what is being said and of being limited to saying what one can say rather than what one wants to say - can empathize more easily with others in this situation in real life. However, once a certain level of reading competence has been achieved, literature (and image and film) offers us a medium to enter other worlds, described by people using other languages. Whether this is the experience of migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, unemployment, corruption, and violence to enter the United States (where these conditions also exist but where there is at least a possibility of getting out of the poverty trap), or whether it is the stories of migrants from the Maghreb in the Banlieues of Paris, or Syrian, Afghan or Ukrainian refugees and numerous complex and risk-burdened situations around the world - literature can offer us other perspectives. Having other perspectives helps us to establish our own stance, and to recognize that having multiple ways of seeing, is always richer in terms of our own identity work. 

 

Qualification

The task of enabling young people to become qualified, means more than just offering paper qualifications. It means enabling them to learn the skills they need to participate in the economy and civil society to their full potential. Being multi-culturally qualified means understanding what culture is and what it isn’t. We have obviously moved on from the Robinson Crusoe school of intercultural relations – ‘me boss Robinson, you Friday, you servant Friday, first you learn English’. But many still suffer from the illusion that there are such things as cultures with fixed boundaries defined by set racial characteristics, cultural characteristics and mentality. As Kwame Anthony Appiah (2018) has shown in his book The Lies That Bind, identity is often based on collective identities which often reflect the prejudices of others and historical lies and misunderstandings. Stuart Hall (2017) has shown that identities based on essentialized notions of race, ethnicity and nation are by nature oppressive. This applies to all cultures and not only hybrid cultures of migration groups or ‘translated subjects`. As Hans Hunfeld (1998) points out in his aptly titled book Die Normalität des Fremden (the normalness of the other), it is an illusion to imagine we can truly understand the other because to do so would be a colonial gesture, akin to Robinson Crusoe’s. He cites Wittgenstein’s view that if a lion could speak, we still couldn’t understand him. But we can humbly try by keeping quiet and listening.

 

Becoming a subject (subjectification)

Fostering the process of becoming a subject, is about providing opportunities in which the person can become the subject of his or her own life (Biesta 2021). It is about evoking and or challenging the learner's agency. However, it is not about the educational ‘production‘ of the subject, because it is not about the subject being turned into a 'thing-being-produced-by-intervention-from-outside'- but about bringing the subject-ness of the child or young person 'into play' so to speak; helping the child or young person not to forget the possibility of their existence as subject". (Ibid., p.47).

Becoming a subject cannot be taught; it can only take place in events or encounters in which the person is confronted with something or someone, and the result of the encounter cannot simply be fitted into their existing schema. Such an event may be an encounter with another person or culture, a historical narrative, a work of art or a natural phenomenon. It is in the nature of such an encounter that it cannot be ignored or easily forgotten, even though it may be rejected or repressed. Such events are a kind of pedagogy of interruption (Biesta, 2019).

Biesta links this process of interruption to the quality of adulthood (grown-up-ness) and to being able to take responsibility for our desires. Biesta argues that grown-up-ness is not a suppression of desires, but a process through which our desires receive a reality check, so to speak, by asking the question whether what we desire is, in fact, desirable for our own lives and the lives we live with others. Such a question - and this is educationally important - always poses itself as an interruption of our desires. Such an interruption partly manifests itself through the experience of resistance, and we could even say that when we encounter resistance, we not only encounter the world but, at the very same time, we encounter the desires we have in relation to the world. When we encounter resistance, we could say that the world is trying to tell us something - and perhaps we could even say that the world is trying to teach us something (Biesta, 2019).

In discussing the meaning of becoming a subject, Biesta distances himself from the psychological interpretations implicit in the concepts of personality and individuation, which imply explanations of why someone acts and how they are cultivated in a particular culture: 

it is one thing to become an individual through one's interaction with 'culture' in the widest sense possible - the process of cultivation - yet still another to exist as subject in relation to one's individuality, in relation to and with everything one has gained, learned, acquired and with how one has developed.

 

Identity work

Etymologically the word identity suggests “sameness, oneness, state of being the same” ( www.etymonline.com/word/identity). Although this word is used in sociology and psychology to refer to how people see themselves, the actual activity that young people do is becoming. Identity really means who I am in a particular place and social position, which is why it is best thought of in the plural form, or even better as a process across time and space. Thus, we can speak of ongoing identity work or production; the ongoing bringing forth, the making, the poiesis of making something useful and meaningful. It is a process of answering the questions: Who am I? How do I see myself? What do I identify with? How do others position me? How do I position myself in relation to others? Becoming a subject means engaging not so much with the question: who am I? but rather with the question: how am I? Thus, the question of subject-ness is of a different order to identity work, which is ongoing and immediate.

Hurrelmann and Bauer’s (2018) account of productive reality processing provides us with a model for understanding the developmental tasks that a young person faces. As they explain, young people in adolescence are constantly confronted with new situations in which developmental tasks have to be mastered. They summarise the developmental tasks of adolescence as follows: 

“in adolescence, the change in physical shape has to be accepted, a gender identity has to be developed, school performance has to be strengthened and a detachment from parents has to be initiated. Furthermore, it is a matter of entering into relationships with peers and later also intimate couple relationships, of acting economically and learning to deal with consumption and what social media constantly offer, of building up one's own value system as well as political capacity to act” (2018, p. 107).

By successfully accomplishing these tasks, young people construct an identity that mediates between their social identities on the one hand and external realities and their personal identities and internal reality on the other. We can thus speak of young people being involved in a continuous process of constructing and re-constructing coherent and stable identities and that their subjective experiences play an important role in this process. Since the process of identification and positioning is more or less continuous through social practices, as young people take up positions and are positioned by other people and institutions (Dreier, 2011), it is probably best to view this as a dynamic process.

 

The tasks of youth education

Waldorf youth education also understands this process as a transformation through self-activity. "The formation of ego-identity is based on the individual's own performance, which takes place in a living balancing act between personal and social expectations; that is, between self-image and external image" (Zech, 2017, p. 281). Zech goes on to say that the identification process today is not limited to traditional forms, but is fed by a variety of different sources, including hybrid lifeworlds and subcultures. Zygmund Bauman (2008) goes further by claiming that every young person is forced to be a life-artist and juggler who constructs his or her identity from a seemingly endless range of consumerist offerings.

The unique process of adolescent development reveals something of what Jan Göschel (2012) calls the biographical myth of the individual. This is based on the idea that, every human biography is a life story with its own individual narrative structure. The myth of a story is its narrative core, to which the meaning of all actions goes back and from which the meaning of the individual elements of the narrated events derive (2012, pp. 22-23).

The biographical myth is a narrative that gives meaning to each individual‘s life and development. Each young person can express their own biographical myth indirectly in the way they engage with experiences that are important to them. In school contexts, this can take the form of projects, portfolios and presentations of all kinds, in which students explore and articulate what is personally meaningful to them in a particular area, especially what they consider biographically significant. This is undoubtedly less the case with standardised school assignments with explicit expectations of results.

 

Postcolonialism as a teaching topic

Postcolonial literature and texts encompass a range of issues that go beyond colonial history in the narrow sense. These include injustice and social justice, discrimination of all kinds, racism, oppression, political activism, identity and emancipation, inclusion and exclusion. Undoubtedly, these are relevant to young people.

In English classes, there is considerably more freedom as far as content is concerned than in other subjects such as history, literature in the main language of instruction, or geography, which many people may not think of as having a postcolonial dimension, but as Edward Said in his book Orientalism (1978) made clear, the production of hierarchical spaces such as West, East, North and South have cultural and postcolonial dimensions, including the polarities of urban spaces as civilization and nature as non- or uncivilized spaces. Foreign language lessons (and the othering word foreign urgently needs decolonizing) in Steiner/Waldorf education have considerably more freedom in having no particular syllabus other than learning the language and thus can address  topics other subjects may avoid or exclude, particularly through literature. Language opens doors to notions of culture and hybridity (including in-between-ness) and culturally inscribed boundaries between cultures that Homi Bhabha (1994) described.

In recent years at my school, a three-week epoch (90 minutes each day) has been taught on postcolonial short stories, for which there is a wealth of material (see the list of recommended literature below, which is only a start!). Apart from looking at the original text sources, which are always the starting point, students are encouraged to discuss, research and reflect on what aspects of these themes are important to them. Individual responses vary greatly, and students with migration and refugee backgrounds have very different biographical interests in these topics. For this reason, the role of the teacher is to provide access to the works, formulate a set of tasks, provide feedback, but otherwise stand back.

These postcolonial themes raise interesting questions of identity, especially for students with a migrant background or those who are non-white or non-Christian. Those who were born as second generation migrants in Germany may experience hybrid identities. For students from white European backgrounds, it is in some ways more difficult to situate their cultural identity than their gender or lifestyle, and they may need to be challenged to position themselves or put themselves in the shoes of others. In a class of mixed ethnic and religious backgrounds that the author recently experienced, there seemed to be complex hierarchies between students from Turkish or Middle Eastern and Muslim backgrounds and students from Asian or African (mostly Christian) backgrounds. The process could be described as a cautious and tentative mutual exploration of identities.

The level of becoming a subject is often only reached pedagogically when the individual is either confronted with a crisis or when the content they are dealing with is shocking and unjust (e.g. the death of George Floyd or the news of the use of pepper spray against a child who was attacked by the police while ‘breaking into’ his parents' house). A reading such as excerpts from Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks or Pettina Gappa's Elergy for Easterly can also have this effect. Postcolonial literature that itself raises questions of Westernised modernisation versus traditions, such as Chinua Achebe's Dead Mens' Path, also raises challenging questions of identity and positioning for readers. Anger alone is not necessarily a sign of becoming a subject, but the full awareness of the significance of such events can trigger a strong inner motive in a young person.

 

Postcolonial literature as interruption

Literature, poetry, film and image can provide young people with opportunities for interruption from the familiar and from social and cultural certainties. For white students in the majority the confrontation with post-colonial literature can be a shocking discovery, for students of colour or from minority backgrounds, it can provide moments of recognition of black and minority voices and identification. Confronted by the facts of racism and slavery, young people may experience feelings of guilt and irritation, “Ok, I get it, but it’s not my fault” (e.g. white males), or anger and self-righteousness (among the rest). This can lead to further polarization. Literature, however, can offer a more nuanced and aesthetic access to such themes, not least when a Gadamerian hermeneutic approach is used.

This can start with the students ‘downloading’ their prior assumptions, knowledge and prejudices as the starting horizon for their engagement. The next step is an empathic analysis. This means putting the narrative content into your own words, whilst walking a mile in the author’s metaphorical shoes, without further judgement or comment (what happens? where and when is this located? Who does what to whom and why?). The third step is exploring the wider content, the author’s biography, analysing what effects the text prompts in us as readers, how the author uses literary devices to keep us interested and finally, a reflection on how engaging with this text has modified or even caused major shifts in our existing horizon – the Gadamerian fusion of horizons. Such a hermeneutic approach enables the students to appreciate the text in an aesthetic sense, which includes opening ourselves to it and being willing to be changed by it.

Techniques such as enacting scenes, dramatizing prose, creative writing prompted by the original text, relocating the setting into a more familiar location, writing articles addressing the themes in the piece, composing lyrics to a song or rap and so on, can further encourage both agency and engaging with the themes.

 

Conclusion

The act of reading and talking about literature in another language is already an interruption of normal linguistic procedures and identity work. The content, context, characters, crises and challenges in a classic work, such as Dead Men’s Paths by Chinua Achebe, can prompt young people to take positions (spiritual tradition versus modernity) and inspire them to acts of creativity, perhaps more than the kind of texts that are often used for foreign language learning. Of course, a great short story without this theme, such as “Water” by Fred Leeborn, can do something similar, but the intercultural issue of other-ness is not prominent. However, I feel we have a responsibility to introduce young people to the whole question of postcolonialism and the English lesson seems the place to do it.

 

References

Appiah, K. A. (2019). Lies That Bind. Creed, Country, Colour, Class, Culture. Profile Books.

Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid Times: Living in an age of Uncertainty. Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2008). The Art of Life. Polity.

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge.

Biesta , G. J. J. (2019). What is the Educational Task? Arousing desire for wanting to exist in the world in a grown-up way. Pedagogia y Saberes, 50, 51-61.

Biesta , G. J. J. (2021). World-Centred Education. A view for the present. Routledge.

Dreier, O. (2011). Personality and conduct of everyday life. Nordic Psychology, 63(2), 4-23.

Göschel, J. C. (2012). Der biographische Mythos als pädagogisches Leitbild: Transdisziplinäre Förderplanung auf Grundlage der Kinderkonferenz in der anthroposophischen Heilpädagogik (Biographical myth as pedagogical leading thought: Transdisciplinary learning support on the basis of the child study process in anthroposophical curative education). Verlag am Goetheanum Athena.

Hall, S. (2017). The Fateful Triangle: Race Ethnicity nation. Harvard University Press.

Hunfeld, H. (1996). Die Normalität des Fremden. Heidrun Popp.

Hurrelmann , K., & Bauer , H. P. (2018). Socialisation during the Life Course. Routledge.

Rawson, M. (2021). Steiner Waldorf Pedagogy in Schools . A critical introduction. Routledge.

Rawson, M. (2022). L2 teaching and learning in Waldorf schools- why performative? Scenario: Journal for Performative Teaching, Learning, Research, XII(2).

Said, E. W. (1979/2003). Orientalism. Random House.

Zech, M. M. (2017). Anthroposophische Jugendpädagogik und die Herausforderungen des früher 21. Jahrhunderts. In A. Wiehl  & M. M. Zech (Eds.), Jugendpädagogik in der Waldorfschule. Studienbuch (pp. 277-316).

 

 

References to reading literature referred to in the text

Chinua Achebe (2005/1953) Dead Man’s Path. In Butzko, E. & Pongartz, S. Caught between

Cultures. Klett.

Aravand Adiga. (2008) The White Tiger. Atlantic Books..

Assia Djebar (1999) Women of Algiers in their Appartment. CARAF Books

Bernadine Evaristo. (2019) Girl, Woman, Other. Penguin.

Reni Eddo-Lodge. (2018) Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race. Bloomsbury.

Petina Gappa An Elegy for Easterly. (2009). Faber.

Romesh Gunesekera. (1992) Storm Petrel. In Monkfish Moon, Granta

Yaa Gyasi (2016) Homegoing. Penquin.

Hanif Kureishi. (2005) My Son the Fanatic. In Butzko, E. & Pongartz, S. Caught between Cultures. Klett.

Ellis Ayitey Lomey & Ezekial Mphahlele (eds) (1969) Modern African Stories. Faber.

Fred Leeborn  (1992) Water in Flash Fiction 72 Very Short Stories. (Eds )Thomas et al.

W.W. Norton and Company. pp. 157-158.

Ben Okri. (1995) Birds of Heaven. Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o. (2005/1972) A meeting in the dark . In Butzko, E. & Pongartz, S. Caught between Cultures. Klett.

Trevor Noah. (2016) Born a crime. Piegel and Grau.

Anuradha Roy. (2011) The Folded Earth. Hachette.

Salman Rushdie. (2005) Good advice is rarer than rubies. In Butzko, E. & Pongartz, S. Caught between Cultures. Klett.

Nikesh Shukla. (2007) The Good Immigrant: 21 writers on race in contemporary Britain. Unbound.

Zadie Smith. (1981) Martha Martha. Granta 81.

Vikas Swarup. (2005) Slumdog Millionaire Black Swan.

Amos Tutuola. (1954) My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Faber.

 

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