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ANALYSIS: It’s ‘not just about teaching grammar, vocabulary’ … but also ‘promoting equality, peace and justice’
Imagine you’re a student in Japan wanting to learn English. You sign up for a class, and in comes Professor Reiko Yoshihara.
The next thing you know, she’s yammering about … feminism.
Because according to Nihon University’s Yoshihara, teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is “not just [about] teach[ing] grammar, vocabulary, and linguistic information.”
It’s also about “promot[ing] equality, peace, justice, freedom, and human rights among all people.”
(EFL differs from ESL, English as a Second Language, in that students learn English in school but don’t use it much anywhere else.)
“To educate our students to become socially responsible world citizens, addressing gender issues is as important as global issues of ethnic conflict, social inequality and injustice, and environmental destruction,” Yoshihara wrote in 2019.
“In this sense, feminist teaching is placed under the umbrella of global education, human rights education, and humane education.”
Yoshihara’s most recent work, “Becoming a Feminist EFL Instructor: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Feminist Pedagogy in Japanese University EFL Classes,” utilizes her own “feminist autoethnography” (see here for a translation of that) to “examine the complex relationship between a feminist identity and classroom practices by examining [her] lived experience through discussions of Japan’s foreign language education policies, language interactions within academic communities, and critical self-reflexivity.”
Yoshihara’s full paper costs $42 to download; thankfully, an intrepid reader provided it to yours truly at no charge. The paper’s abstract reads in part:
I employed a post-structural feminist theory of identity and scrutinized the (re)constructing process of teacher identity. Through analyzing the data, I foregrounded my lived experience of teaching gender-related topics in university EFL classes and divided my developing feminist EFL teacher identity into three parts: (1) struggles and difficulties of teaching gender topics in EFL classes, (2) “breakthrough” moments that helped overcome struggles and difficulties, and (3) interrogating internalized homophobia. The analysis revealed that my feminist EFL teacher identity was constituting, contesting, and evolving through the influence of sociocultural and political contexts, discursive interactions within academic communities, and critical self-reflectivity.
Interestingly, in another paper from late last year, Yoshihara noted her research on Japanese EFL teachers “suggested that the instructors’ perceptions and institutional constraints had an impact on their teaching choices.”
The teachers also “felt undervalued, marginalized, and excluded in their universities because of being EFL professionals, rather than their gender identities.”
This sure looks like they’re whining because the “institutional constraints” of their job require them to act “professional” and actually teach the subject — English — rather than pontificating about some aspect of feminism and gender identity.
Heaven forbid.
If you can take it, here’s a 2017 word-salad interview with Yoshihara regarding her book “The Socially Responsible Feminist EFL Classroom.”
UPDATE: Link to Yoshihara’s full paper was added.
MORE: Teach foreign languages the right way … and don’t force all students to take one
